Heart of Stone (28 page)

“I don't know. But word is that he was always falling for some new girl. He was a romantic.”

“So what does this crush have to do with any of this?”

“Jerry was quite the ladies' man,” said Herbie. “Like I said, she's an older woman.”

“Seventeen? Eighteen? How old was she?” I asked.

“Try thirty,” said Herbie. “And I heard he met her at Tom's Lakeside Motel.”

Herbie didn't know the woman's name, but he assured me that his information was accurate and that Jerry had been obsessed with her until quite recently. Until he met Emily Grierson, in fact. Fadge thought it was normal for a boy to have a crush on an older woman. I knew that more than one teenage boy had entertained impure thoughts about me, including Herbie with the smart mouth. And I remembered Simon teasing Isaac about his infatuation with my aunt Lena when he was about Jerry's age.

I intended to follow up on the lead, even if I had little expectation of success. I doubted Tom Waller of the Lakeside Motel would remember a young boy meeting an older woman. If the two had trysted there, they certainly would have done it on the QT. But Tom might well remember an earlier visit by Gayle Morton—a visit before the previous Thursday—and I was going to ask him.

“You don't think it might have been Gayle Morton, do you?” I asked Fadge as we drove toward the village. “She's staying at the Lakeside Motel after all.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Pretty big coincidence, though.”

I drove on in silence for a stretch then pulled over to the side of the road.

“What is it?” asked Fadge.

“We've been wondering why Karl Merkleson came to Prospector Lake. It's strange that he didn't even contact his own friends. Then he left his motel once his wife arrived to win him back.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So what if things happened the other way around?”

“How do you mean?”

“What if Gayle Morton flew here to meet someone, and Karl followed
her
?”

“But how would Gayle Morton have known that kid? When would she have met him?”

I pondered it as my Dodge's engine growled quietly. Then I released the brake and slipped away from the shoulder.

“So what's your next step?” he asked.

“I'm going to find out if Gayle Morton had ever been to Prospector Lake before last Thursday. I need to see her plane ticket.”

“How are you going to manage that?”

I glanced at him as we headed up Route 15. “First stop, the Lakeside Motel.”

“And then?”

“Let's see if Chief Terwilliger can't get that plane ticket from Gayle Morton.”

“You again? Are you trying to sell me insurance?” asked Tom Waller with a wink.

“No, nothing like that,” I said, flashing my brightest smile at him. Shameless. But who could blame me? I could hardly resist his sunburned belly, which was two sizes too large for his mustard-stained T-shirt.

I had asked Fadge to wait in the car in case his presence intimidated Tom and discouraged him from talking. I suspected the innkeeper might be susceptible to charm, and I intended to sprinkle some sugar liberally, if necessary, to get what I wanted.

“My boss is angry with me,” I said. “He made me drive all the way back up here because I forgot to verify something.”

“He did? That doesn't seem right. A pretty little thing like you? I would never get angry with you. Why don't you come work for me?”

“Really, Mr. Waller. How you go on.”

“So how can I help you today, miss?”

“My boss wants me to verify Miss Pierce's previous visit to your motel,” I said. “Would that be possible?”

“I'd be happy to check for you, hon. But I don't remember her ever staying here before. Do you have an idea of when that might have been?”

If she'd come to the lake and met Jerry Kaufman, it couldn't have been earlier than July 30. I remembered that as move-in day from the schedule of activities posted in the Bear Lodge at Camp Orpheus. And, realistically, she would have had to return to Los Angeles before the previous Tuesday if she'd hopped back on a plane Wednesday or Thursday to fly to Albany.

“It would be from late July to August twelfth or thirteenth,” I said.

He opened the register and flipped back some pages. Then he licked his thumb and turned a few more. Squinting to see better, he twisted his head to the right in an effort to force his aging lenses to focus. Yes, I thought, I'll surely find you devastatingly handsome, provided you don't wear eyeglasses. He ran a finger over the names, licked his thumb anew, then looked up at me.

“I'm afraid I can't find her name here,” he said.

“What about Morton?” I asked. “Anyone by that name?”

He hunted some more, his eyes scanning the page, even pausing as he dug deep to extract a bit of underwear pinched between the folds of his posterior.

“Nope,” he said. “But I can check with her. She's still here. Chief Terwilliger asked her and her father to stay a few days more.”

“That won't be necessary,” I said. “I'll just tell my boss she hasn't been here before.”

“Any luck?” asked Fadge.

“No, not for me. But Tom Waller stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said, thinking that a far too revolting a joke for me to attempt, even if Fadge would have appreciated it. “Let's go see Terwilliger.”

“So you think this Gayle Morton was here earlier this summer?” the chief asked me. He was leaning back in his chair, picking the last of his lunch out of his teeth with a paperclip he'd untwisted expressly for the task.

“Might have been,” I said. “It occurred to me that perhaps we were looking at the Morton marriage backward. What if the shoe had been on the other foot?”

“How do you mean?”

“What if
Gayle
was the one contemplating divorce, and Karl came to Prospector Lake to win
her
back?”

“And this boy, Jerrold Kaufman, knew her?” he asked.

“I can't say that. I just think it bears looking into.”

“And you and your friend here,” he began, indicating Fadge with a nod, “believe she might have been corrupting a minor at Tom's Lakeside Motel?”

“That's a possibility we'd like to confirm or eliminate from consideration, yes.”

He thought it over, a process aided by folding his grubby hands, minus half a forefinger, over his belly and staring at the ceiling. Fadge threw me a look that communicated a mix of derision and disbelief. Eventually Terwilliger reached his decision.

“I'll ask to see her plane ticket,” he said. “I think it's unlikely, but she has been a little squirrelly about this whole thing. It wouldn't surprise me if she gave her husband a little shove of encouragement for his jump off the high dive.”

“And the kid?”

He nodded. “Sure. Why not? Find a teenage boy who's feeling his oats. It wouldn't be hard to seduce him as part of her plan. Then push him off the cliff, too.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But how would Jerry fit into the plan? Why not just lure the husband to the cliff and do the needful? Why complicate things with the teenager?”

“Simple,” said Fadge, speaking for the first time. “In order to get the husband to follow her across the country to the lake, she needed to create a threat to their marriage. Enter the patsy: that poor kid.”

“Your friend may be onto something,” said Terwilliger. “Makes sense to me.”

“Maybe,” I said, unconvinced. “But we would need to understand why she came here of all places. If she'd been thinking murder, she could have done the same somewhere in California. Maybe a mountain resort. She's an attractive woman, certainly up to the task of seducing red-blooded men. Why come to his childhood vacation spot?”

Neither Fadge nor Terwilliger had an answer for that. At length the chief said the first order of business was to get a hold of Gayle Morton's ticket and see if it matched up with her arrival story.

“Will you get a warrant?” I asked.

Terwilliger pshawed. “Things don't work that way up here. She'll show it to me. Don't worry about that.”

My film was ready. Fadge and I stopped to pick it up at Philby's and, happily, ran into no Blanchards this time. I climbed into my car and handed the envelope to Fadge.

“Let's have a look,” he said, going straight for the color slides. “Do you have one of those magnifiers?”

“It's called a loupe,” I said, fishing the one I always carried out of my camera kit.

Fadge ignored the vocabulary lesson and examined the slides one by one, grunting and clearing his throat from time to time.

“What do you see?” I asked.

He took the slide away from his eye and looked at me. “What do you mean? You know what's in these pictures.”

“Yes, but I'm always hoping there's something more. Tell me what
you
see.”

“A nice, sunny morning,” he said, squinting into the loupe again. “Some rocks and the outlines of two bodies. Oh, and my shadow's in this one. Man, I need to go on a diet.”