Nothing but Gossip (11 page)

Paul Decker, Wyoming’s most famous, most successful, and most expensive defense attorney, placed his black cowboy hat with its hand-hammered silver-medallion hatband on the edge of the table and brushed the brim lovingly with his fingers. His longish gray hair fell toward his face, making him look like Wyatt Earp himself. He regarded me affectionately with blue-gray eyes. Paul and I did a lot of work together, generally on the same side.

“Ask away,” he said affably. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”

I took my regular chair at the head of the table and examined McGee’s sneer for a second before beginning. He was so ridiculously arrogant and contemptuous, I forced myself to swallow every word I wanted to say and jammed respectful calm into my brain like a dentist cramming cotton packing into an open filling on a giant molar. “I want to ask you again with your attorney present, Mr. McGee: Where were you when Alma Gilhooly was shot?”

“Whoa!” Paul held up his hand. “What does that have to do with the price of rawhide? My client’s here in regard to elephant tusks that belonged to Ms. Gilhooly, but if you’re wanting to question him about
her murder, well, that’s a whole different bucket of oats.”

Paul believed that his cowboy colloquialisms endeared him to clients, judges, and juries, and he was always testing new ones outside the courtroom. Some worked better than others.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Decker,” I said. “I thought you understood. The elephant tusks are a done deal: He had them. I caught him. I arrested him. And he’ll go to trial and explain how he came to be in possession of international contraband. And then he’ll either pay a lot of money or do a lot of time. What I’m interested in is who attempted to murder Alma Rutherford Gilhooly night before last.”

“And you suspect Mr. McGee?”

“At the moment, the field is wide open. Yesterday, Mr. McGee denied being at the party, but I believe he was, and I’d like to give him an opportunity to search his memory again and possibly correct his story. Maybe he saw something that could be helpful.”

McGee glanced at Paul and clenched his teeth, which made his bony jaw tighten and ripple. He clenched and unclenched his fist as well. But, to me, the Great White Hunter’s handsomeness must have existed only in the context of his work. With him sitting in my little jail, lacking admirers, his chiseled features appeared sharp and cruel. Slightly counterfeit and scummy. Paul gave him the green light to answer.

“I was in the sun-room with everyone else,” he said. “I heard the shot the same time everyone else did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me the truth in the first place?”

“Because there is some serious bad blood between Alma and me and a number of legitimate reasons why I should want to kill her. But I didn’t.”

“Do you remember who you were talking to?”

“Some woman. I don’t remember her name.”

“Mercedes Rutherford?”

“Alma’s sister?” Kennedy shook his head. “I didn’t even know she was there.”

“When I saw Mercedes at the party, sir, she excused herself to go tell you something. Are you saying you never saw her?”

“I said I didn’t know she was there.” Kennedy clearly did not like being questioned by a woman and kept looking to his attorney for some assistance, for Paul to call a halt. But I wasn’t doing anything irregular—Paul and I both knew the rules—other than being female, and in charge, which I imagined was a whole new experience for him.

“Mr. McGee, did you rendezvous with Mercedes Rutherford and Johnny Bourbon in a powder room for a quick assignation?”

“What?” Kennedy jumped to his feet, making Dwight tighten up a little and squint a little harder at his prisoner from where he’d stationed himself importantly at the door. Great, I thought, all we needed was for Dwight to start shooting. He’d kill all of us.

“What do you take me for? Some bloody homosexual? Of course I wasn’t in the bathroom with her and that slippery quack. Jesus, Lord, makes my skin crawl just to imagine such a thing.” Kennedy walked around the small room hugging himself. “Lord. You’re a terrible woman.”

It had been a shot in the dark, but not an unreasonable one, in my opinion. “Tell me about your relationship with Alma.”

“Not much to tell, not much relationship left after she screwed me. Financially.” He grabbed the chair back with both hands and leaned over it toward me. “Let me tell you, Miss Bennett, Alma is a completely
psychotic bitch. Totally mad. Everything’s dandy as long as you play by her rules, but she is always moving the goal line and not letting anyone know. I’m not at all surprised someone gunned her down—could even have been the Russians. Maybe she ended up screwing them, too. But it sure as hell wasn’t me. I wouldn’t miss with the first shot. Whoever shot her didn’t know what he was doing.”

“What about her relationship with Wade?”

Kennedy shrugged and sat back down. “Not much there as far as I could tell. Whenever they came to Africa, he always found an excuse to leave after the first couple of days—always some business emergency. Never even came out into the bush. He’d just leave her there with me and take off. She’d complete the safari, usually three or four weeks. I’ve always found him to be a little soft.”

I flipped back and forth through my notes. “What do you know about her and Johnny Bourbon?”

“Nothing, except he was her next big project after she left me holding the bag.”

“Senator Fletcher?”

“Seems a nice-enough chap.”

“Do you own stock in Rutherford Oil?”

“A little.” He looked at me and knew that wasn’t enough of an answer. “Alma gave me some shares a few years ago. I don’t enjoy a major position, if that’s what you mean.”

I turned to Paul. “Don’t let your client leave town, Mr. Decker.”

Y
ou just missed him,” Linda said when I got back to the office.

“Who?”

“Robert Redford. He came up here to apologize for his security guard.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. Her face was so rosy with excitement it matched her fingernails. “I can’t believe you missed him. God. He is so handsome. And so
nice
. God.”

“Well, where’d he go?”

Linda shrugged. “Just down the stairs. Maybe he’s still out there. In the parking lot or something.”

Well, shoot.

“Track down Elias and tell him to meet me at the hospital,” I said over my shoulder as I thudded down the stairs as coolly as I could. I know Robert Redford is a bleeding-heart, left-wing-liberal do-gooder and needs to lighten up a little, but, jeez, he’d just been in my office looking for me, wanting to apologize. I had some
great ideas for him about what to do with his Sundance Institute. He was gone, of course. So was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s security guard cousin.

The drive into town was easy, so pleasant now that Labor Day was behind us and every ham-and-egger with a mother-in-law and minivan had gone back home to Nebraska or wherever it is those people come from. The sky was so high, it was almost navy blue at the top.

I pulled into one of the “Authorized Parking Only” spaces by the emergency entrance at Christ & St. Luke’s Hospital and noticed I’d parked next to Jack Lewis’s white Crown Victoria. I found him standing outside Alma’s cubicle in intensive care, leaning against the counter that surrounded the personnel station in the center of the unit, holding a cup of cold coffee and staring into space. A uniformed officer stood by smartly, extra smartly now that his big boss was here. Through the half-open glass door, I could see Wade’s hands clinging to the bed rail as though he were strangling a golf club. His eyes were scooped-out holes, nothing but divots.

“Hey, Jack,” I said. “Been here long? You look a little sleep-deprived.”

He grinned. “Just got here. And I am sleep-deprived because I’ve got a bunch of interdepartmental warfare going on. Driving me nuts. It takes all my energy and has nothing to do with catching criminals.”

“Life’s tough at the top.”

“You look a little hung over.”

I groaned. “Don’t tell me. I need to look good today. I’m meeting my in-laws at noon. I need to look fabulous.”

“Getting married’s tough duty. Especially with all the upper-class bullshit you’re trotting out. I can’t pick
up the paper without reading about some hinky-dinky little tea party or other for you and Prince Charming.”

“He is my Prince Charming, too.”

“Poor bastard,” Jack said. He turned his red-rimmed eyes on me. “He have any idea how tough it is being married to a cop? Even a fancy private dick like you?”

“I’m thinking he thinks it’s going to be nice to be married to me.” A tiny gurgle of fear stirred in my stomach like the first bubble in a pot that has just begun to simmer and, unattended, will soon reach a full boil. An old familiar feeling that I might not make the cut, that Richard would jettison me like an empty McDonald’s bag on a country highway because I got too involved with my work and didn’t save enough for him. I was terrified that I hadn’t really found the balance I thought I’d found. Maybe this was all fake. “I’m not exactly down in the trenches anymore, like you.”

“Doesn’t make any difference, Lilly. You’re as addicted to the dangerous chase as I am. As you ever were. Oh, well.” He shrugged and dropped the empty cup into a wastebasket. “It’s none of my goddamn business. You got anything on this case?”

I looked through the glass at Alma. She lay completely flat on the stretcher-like bed under icy fluorescent lights. Tubes, cables, cords, and monitors everywhere, her head bandaged like a golf ball, face swollen beyond recognition. Only a sheet covered her torso from her chest to her knees. She looked cold and bloated and her skin was gray. How could she possibly be holding on?

I shook my head. It was the truth. I didn’t have anything. I had a lot of stuff that could turn into something, but at the moment it was all conjecture. “Nothing but lots of ideas,” I answered. “But I think in
the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the small stuff will start to rattle through the funnel.”

“That guy.” Jack indicated Wade with his eyes. “Your client.”

“Yeah? What about him?”

“Guilty as hell.”

I couldn’t disagree, but I didn’t say anything. He was, after all, my client. He said he’d been in Montana and the airline confirmed it, and he said he’d hired me to find the truth, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that all roads would lead to him. But why?

“I just can’t figure out how he did it, is all,” Jack admitted.

Me, either. I looked at my watch and wondered where Elias was; maybe he’d have some news.

Jack glanced in at Wade, who had moved to the sink and was holding a cold washcloth over his face, struggling to stay awake. “You checked out his alibi, right?”

“Yes. He was on a plane. Commercial. They know him and they saw him.”

We both stood there and watched him, full of our own private theories and thoughts.

Down at the far end of the hall, a bell dinged, the elevator door rolled open, and Elias strolled off, hands deep in his pockets. He stopped and stared and smiled compassionately into each cubicle, and I’m sure the family members who stared back with their tired, frightened eyes thought he was a doctor, just bringing them a whisper of understanding as he went on his rounds.

“Jeez,” he said under his breath when he reached us. “What’s wrong with that guy?” He indicated over his shoulder with his thumb. “Have you seen all that equipment? I was watching his monitor, and his heart’s
hardly going at all. I think they ought to pull the curtains and give them all a little privacy.”

“Most people don’t stand and stare at them the way you do,” I said.

“Heart-lung transplant,” Jack told us with an authoritative weariness that sounded as if he came across heart-lung transplants every day and found them tiresome. “Just did it yesterday. Took ’em fourteen hours. It’ll be touch and go like this for two weeks. Guy looks to me like he’s going to crater any second.”

“Man,” Elias said. “Rough.” He let the moment pass and said to me, “You should have waited. You know I’m supposed to stay b-y … y-o-u-r … s-i-d-e until the wedding,” he sang and then turned to Jack. “Family’s afraid she’ll miss a few events.”

“Good idea to keep an eye on her, she could bolt. I know the type. I’d better get back to work.” Jack fitted the gray Stetson firmly on his head. “I just came up to the hospital to interview a prisoner and thought I’d stop and see if there was any change in Mrs. Gilhooly. Oh, Lilly, you were right about the boot prints, nothing special to help narrow anything down. So far this is a go-nowhere case. Let me know if there’s anything you need.” He shook hands with Elias. “Glad I ran into you.”

We watched him step into the elevator and give the man who was already on board his tough-guy look. His macho shoulder-shake that said, You wanna fight? You wanna fight? Go ahead. I dare you. Typical Small Man Complex.

“What did you find out about Jim Dixon?” I asked Elias once the doors had closed.

“Nothing. Wild-goose chase. It was booze. His blood alcohol was point-four-oh. That’s why he didn’t get killed—too relaxed.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it matters. I think the accident was a coincidence and got us rabbited off in the wrong direction. I think the shooting was directly related to the Rutherford Oil proxy fight. The politics surrounding this Russian deal are unbelievable, definitely the kind of stakes people kill over.” I looked at my watch. “Let’s go see Mercedes.”

Elias looked at
his
watch. “Listen to me,” he said. “It’s almost ten. I swore on my life that I’d have you at Richard’s office at eleven forty-five, and by God I will even if I have to smack you on the head and drag you in by the heels of your little Italian pumps.”

“Fair enough. We’ve got plenty of time.”

T
he Rutherford Oil Building was one of the few sky-scrapers in downtown Roundup that I liked. Although it was nothing more than a big glass-and-steel box, it had been designed by a local guy no one had heard of before or since, and, to me, it had always represented the Westerner’s nature: clean, upright, no hidden surfaces, tricks, or agendas. It was what you saw, pure and simple. Unlike most of the other florid piles that dipped and looped and shot off in all different directions like a bunch of architecturally defective sparklers built by Easterners on holiday.