Tucker Peak (14 page)

I stretched out next to her, propped up on one elbow. “I’ve worried about losing you, too.”

She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Why?”

“Remember when I was accused of stealing that jewelry and that jerk from the attorney general’s office tried to hang me? He described me to the court as an over-the-hill flatfoot trying to compensate for living with an attractive, younger, upwardly mobile woman he was worried would leave him behind.”

Gail reached out and squeezed my hand. “Oh, Joe. None of that was true. The man was an idiot. He’s not even a lawyer any more, he was proven so wrong.”

“Maybe so, but it hurt. You are all of those things.”

“But you aren’t compensating for it.”

“I joined VBI.”

Her mouth half opened in astonishment.

“I love what I’m doing now, too,” I explained further. “But part of the reason I took the job was to earn your respect.”

She rolled over and hugged me. “My God, Joe. How could you think I didn’t respect you? You’re the love of a lifetime. Christ, what a screwy idea.”

I kissed her. “No, it’s not. And it worked out beautifully. You’ve found something to do that really floats your boat, and I got the kick in the pants I should’ve given myself years ago. We’ve never been a conventional couple. Why should that change now?”

“So, you’re okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you don’t mind living apart?”

“Sometimes,” I answered her honestly, “but it’s got its up sides, too.”

She smiled at me then. “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

“Being with you now, stretched out on a motel bed.”

She chuckled and her hand traveled across my chest. “What’re your plans for the rest of the evening?” she asked softly.

I kissed the corner of her mouth. “I have a meeting with Sammie later. But I’ve got an hour at least.”

She reached up and touched my bearded cheek. “So I can play with this?”

“You rented the room.”

· · ·

A little more than an hour later, I was crossing Tucker Peak’s employee parking lot, moving from one halo of light to another, the first fat flakes of a long-anticipated storm barely starting to drift by like albino moths, indecisive and tired.

“Joe?”

It was a man’s voice, quiet, vaguely familiar, belonging to a shadow that stepped out from behind a parked car some ten feet ahead of me. The light being directly overhead at this point, his face was shaded in the darkness cast by his baseball cap. His hands, however, were in plain sight and empty.

I stopped and tried to sound innocent first, although I suspected it would be useless. “Who?”

He stepped nearer, still speaking very softly. “It’s Win Johnston. You okay to talk?”

I glanced around, both relieved and surprised. It looked like we were alone. “For a minute.” Win was a private investigator, an ex-cop, and a friend. But I could only guess that his appearing from behind a car in the dark of night was going to cost me some peace of mind in the midst of an already complicated case.

“I thought I saw you a couple of days ago, but I guessed you were undercover. Your heroics on the chairlift clinched it, though. Nice beard. How’ve you been?”

We shook hands and stood closely together, almost whispering. “Okay. You working on something here?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“What can you tell me?”

Unlike in the movies, such a question of a good PI was well within the rules. Cops weren’t fond of the profession, that much was true, but the antagonisms, at least in a rural place like Vermont, weren’t played up. Win had been a state trooper, had retired in good standing, and was self-employed now because it kept him in the game without forcing him to kowtow to too many bosses. I trusted his integrity and had even worked with him in the past, since PIs could often do things and go places we couldn’t.

“Checking up on an employee, seeing if he’s aboveboard.”

“Oh, oh,” I said. “Sounds like embezzling.”

He quickly held up a hand. “No, no. It’s much vaguer than that.”

“But still interesting to someone with a big problem and a lot of money,” I suggested, “like maybe the resort brass?”

His vanity prompted him to admit half an answer. “I’m not cheap.”

“So, it’s serious.”

He wobbled his head from side to side. “Could be. I haven’t found anything yet.”

“I don’t guess you’d tell me the target.”

“Sorry.”

“Would it have anything to do with that chair breaking loose?”

“Is that why you’re here?” he asked.

I considered being as coy as he was but didn’t see the point. “No. That came out of the blue. We’re here on a string of condo rip-offs.”

He looked surprised. “You were just working on that killing in Brattleboro. Is there a connection?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I reminded him.

He took my own evasion in stride. “About the chair? I don’t know. A contact at the Tramway Board told me it was tampered with. But it’s a puzzle piece I haven’t been able to place yet.”

“No… me neither. Win, do me a favor, okay? Keep me in the loop as much as possible. There’re a couple of things going on here, and to answer your question, I don’t know if they connect or not, but you already know one woman’s dead and another was almost killed. I realize you have confidences to protect, but pay extra attention, all right?”

“Sure, Joe. What’s your cover name again? Max something?”

“Lambert. And Sammie Martens is a ski instructor named Greta Novak—bottle-blonde.”

He laughed gently. “Some name. I saw her, I think. Looked like she was having a ball. Didn’t recognize her. She’s very attractive.”

“And very serious, as always.”

He shook my hand again. “Keep your head down, Joe… Max. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.”

He turned away, passed between two SUVs, and was gone, leaving me to wonder what else might fall into my lap.

· · ·

Sammie was waiting for me where we’d met the night before, checking her watch as I walked up.

“I thought we’d have to scrub this,” she said.

“Sorry. Ran into Win Johnston in the parking lot. He’s working here, too, looking into an employee. I’m guessing one of the management types, given his standard rate, but he wouldn’t fess up. The interesting thing is that he’s bothered by the chair sabotage, meaning it might play a role in what he’s investigating.”

“An employee trying to do in the company?”

“He doesn’t know, says it doesn’t fit, but it makes more sense than the TPL doing it. I asked him to keep an eye open.”

“You trust him?” Sammie knew Win only to say hi and shared the common police prejudice against his profession.

“To report anything outright criminal? Absolutely,” I told her. “He’s proved himself enough times. Plus, he thinks you’re very good looking.”

“I think he needs to lose weight.”

I left it at that. “I also had a private chat with Roger Betts this afternoon.”

She gave me a surprised look. “How’d that happen?”

“He’s worried some of his folks might be getting a little overenthusiastic.”

“As in screwing around with chairlifts?”

“That was the implication, although I told him that, pretty predictably, more people are blaming the TPL for that than the resort, which makes the whole point of the exercise a little weird. Still, after you and I are done, I’m going to call Lester and have him compare notes with Snuffy’s office. They’ve been building files on the protesters since this started. Could be they have a candidate we should look at more carefully.”

Sammie suddenly shivered and then checked the time. “Why did you want to meet? Lester made it sound important.”

“We think your Richie Lane might be Marty’s contact man. His real name’s Robert Lanier, and he has a king-size rap sheet.”

“Shit,” she spat out. “I knew it. Slimy bastard.”

“Maybe, but that’s all we know. We could pull him in and sweat him, but I’m betting he knows the rules enough to just sit us out and then vanish. I’d prefer to keep an eye on him instead, nail him for something crooked if we’re lucky, and then use that to open him up, or maybe follow him till he leads us to the ever elusive Marty Gagnon.”

“Shouldn’t be hard to catch him dirty. He aspires to do something criminal every night. It’s in his blood.”

You know where he is?”

“Right now? No idea, but I bet he started out at the nightclub, ‘cruisin’ for a lonely lady,’ as he puts it. That’s his daily routine—brags about it every morning. Some of the other instructors told me he might as well be a wall fixture over there.”

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll put a twenty-four-hour tail on him. I’ll have Spinney figure out a schedule. If you’re right about his habits, we should have something on him pretty quick.”

“Great,” she said, “it won’t be too soon.”

I SMELLED HIM BEFORE I RECOGNIZED WHO IT
was—that all-enveloping body odor.

“Max, wake up.”

Fred’s face was hovering over mine. “Max, wake up. They want everybody on the mountain—fast.”

I swung my legs out of bed. “Why?”

“Something about water pumps. We’re supposed to meet outside Mountain Ops dressed for weather… and it’s snowing like crazy.”

The scene was out of some Russian movie: a huge, mingling, nighttime crowd of heavily clothed people standing before a tall, dour building, bracketed by bright lights that made the endless swirl of wild falling snow shimmer like a phosphorescent dust storm. Facing them from the deck of a Bombardier, using a bullhorn like a commissar, Linda Bettina was barking out orders.

“People, we’ve had a power outage in the pump room and a water main break,” she announced. “Everyone has to get on the mountain to contain the spill and drain the pipes before they freeze. Report to your department managers and do what they tell you, on the double. Remember, if this mountain goes down, we’re all out of work.”

She then listed the managers and their locations as they stood in various spots around the equipment yard.

As best I could in my insulated coveralls and heavy boots, I jogged to where I was supposed to be and found my boss directing teams toward a large gathering of grooming machines, four-wheelers with chains, and snowmobiles. I ended up in a group of five men on the open back deck of a groomer, speeding up the mountain in the pitch darkness, our assignment to be dropped off, one by one, at a series of snowmaking hydrants and to open up the drain cocks.

We held on for our lives. The decking was slippery steel diamond plate, the side rails only a foot high and hard to grasp, and the groomer’s broad, thrashing caterpillar treads—completely exposed and flashing by with the speed of commercial meat grinders—were as mesmerizing as two cobras, especially whenever the driver hit a mogul or a dip and sent us scrambling to keep our balance.

It was a long night. The storm was unrelenting, the snow cutting off all vision, muffling communications, covering familiar landmarks, and reducing the world in which we worked—mostly soaked in freezing, spraying water—to tiny, frigid capsules of frantic energy. But slowly, pipeline by pipeline, hydrant by hydrant, often using propane torches to thaw what we had to, we all covered the mountain in roaming squads, carried back and forth by screaming, whining, or deep-throated machines driven by people who seemed to know where they were going by feel alone.

By the time the snow-clotted gray veil around us began to take on the dull glow of early dawn, we were told the worst of the crisis had passed and that those of us not specifically assigned to mountain maintenance could leave the line.

We convened in the large room of the base lodge, ironically around the scale model of a perfect, pristine resort of the future, to be fed hot coffee and breakfast by a haggard-looking kitchen crew before the first customers showed up for a day’s recreation. It was there I noticed Linda Bettina ducking into a small side office, and I followed her in before she could close the door.

She seemed remarkably chipper for someone who’d just orchestrated a near-military campaign, waving me cheerfully to a seat and slamming the door.

“God,” she said, collapsing into a chair, still dressed for the outside and still encrusted with melting ice and snow. “What a night.”

She had a large mug of coffee cradled between her hands. “Thanks for your help.”

I smiled quizzically. “I’m not complaining, but I didn’t know we had a choice.”

She laughed. “Yeah, well… We try to make that part of the contract a little hard to figure out.” She suddenly leaned forward, her eyes bright. “But be straight—didn’t you have a ball tonight? Christ, it must be like being in combat.”

I thought back to my very real knowledge of that experience and nodded. “It’s very close.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, no shit. Glad I didn’t put my foot in it. Didn’t know you were a vet.”

“Long time ago.”

She slouched back into her chair and rested her head against its cushion. “Jesus. I am glad it’s over, though.”

“You want to be alone?” I asked, hesitating.

“No, no. Park yourself. I gotta admit, while I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, it’s times like this that make me think there’s hope left for the ski business.”

“Ain’t what it used to be?”

She turned somber then, closing her eyes briefly and letting her face relax into a mask of exhaustion. “Not even close. It’s all about money now, and taking care of number one. The employees just want a job, the managers just want to survive, the corporate heads and stockholders just want a profit, and the guests just want everything now, in perfect order and for cheap—or else. Nobody remembers that it used to be about skiing.” She shook her head and revived somewhat. “And then you get a night like this, when everyone clicks, and it tells me that just maybe I’ll stick it out for another year.”

“What happened tonight, anyway?”

“Power went out,” she said vaguely. “Happens once in a blue moon, but when it does, watch out.”

“You don’t have backup generators?”

“Yeah… well. I guess Murphy was lurking this time. They went out, too. That was a first for me.”

“A little unlikely, isn’t it? On top of a blown water main? That’s a pile-on.”