Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (4 page)

Back in her office after a visit to the one-hour photo shop, Queenie stood in front of a large poster distributed free by the Gaines dog food company. It showed colored drawings of 150 recognized breeds of dogs, complete with characteristics, average weight, and known colorings.

The two photographs taken by the Clark brothers revealed a large body swathed in shadow and laying in a hole that presumably was intended to be its grave. But Queenie had never seen a head like that. She didn’t know the breed. She scanned the Gaines chart for a few minutes, then buzzed through to the Sheriff’s Office. Doug Larsen answered. He was patrol director of the day.

“Doug, I need your keen eye and razor-sharp powers of deduction.”

When Larsen arrived, Queenie showed him the Clark brothers’ photographs. “Pick out the breed on the chart.”

“What’s the prize?”

“The warm feeling of having helped a fellow law-enforcement officer. Just do it, buddy.”

Doug studied the chart for a few minutes. “Scottish deerhound?”

“That’s what I think too,” Queenie said triumphantly.

The last of the Roaring Fork Valley veterinarians whom she called said yes, he had given a rabies booster to a male deerhound maybe three or four years ago. No, he didn’t know any other deerhounds in the valley—he seemed to remember discussing that very fact with the owner, whom the file card listed as Mr. Henry Lovell Sr. of Springhill, over in Gunnison County. The dog’s name was Geronimo. If still alive, he’d be nine years old.

Queenie had been to Springhill only once, about ten years ago, on a summer hike with friends. They didn’t encourage visitors up there on the back range, and there was little reason to go unless you had business with the marble quarry. Only a few families lived up there, with a fair amount of inbreeding over the generations, or so it was assumed. There were rumors of idiots.

Queenie got the number from Information and tapped it out. A woman answered. The connection seemed a little blurred, as if it were an overseas call. Queenie identified herself and explained that she was trying to locate a Mr. Henry Lovell Sr.

The woman said, “Mr. Lovell is deceased.”

“I’m sorry. With whom am I speaking?”

“Jane Lovell. Henry was my father-in-law. His son, Henry Lovell Jr.—Hank—is my husband.”

“Mrs. Lovell, did your late father-in-law have a Scottish deerhound named Geronimo?”

With just a slight hesitation, Jane said, “Yes, he did.”

“And did that dog disappear recently?” When Jane didn’t reply, Queenie asked, “Were you taking care of it? After your father-in-law passed away?”

“No, I wasn’t taking care of it,” Jane said, and paused again for a long time. Weird woman, Queenie thought. Then Jane resumed: “I just came home for lunch, and I need to get back to the office. I’m a dental assistant and we’ve got an emergency today. Perhaps you’d better talk to my husband about this.”

“I’m sorry to tell you the dog’s been found dead,” Queenie said. “I’m trying to locate whoever was taking care of it.”

“I’m not sure who that was.”

Jane Lovell didn’t sound at all upset about the dog’s death. Maybe dental emergencies did that to you, Queenie decided.

“Mrs. Lovell, when was it that your father-in-law passed away? “

“In August.”

“And he was a widower?”

“Well, not for long. My mother-in-law passed away too. Shortly before he did.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” Queenie said, “but that’s common, isn’t it? That’s what happened with my uncle and aunt down in Sarasota, Florida, last year. She was so dependent on him.” She sighed. “And you don’t know who cared for the dog after your mother-in-law died?”

“My husband will be home for supper. Could you call back then?”

“Can I reach him now at work?”

Jane gave her the number. Queenie thanked her and hung up. Without waiting even a second so that Jane Lovell could get through before she did, she punched out the number.

“Quarry. Hank Lovell here.”

Queenie identified herself, then launched into her speech about the finding of Geronimo.

“Yes, we were concerned,” Hank Lovell said quietly. “We didn’t know what had happened.”

“You mean
you
were caring for the dog?”

“That’s right. We have two other dogs. Two Anita’s.”

“Your wife … well, never mind. Did Geronimo run away, Mr. Lovell?”

“Disappeared. Around September. But don’t hold me to that. I haven’t got a good memory for dates.” Hank Lovell laughed pleasantly.

“Did you report the animal missing, sir?”

“No, that seemed premature. We thought he’d come back.”

“I’m sure sorry to give y’all the news this way,” Queenie said.

“It clears up a mystery. I appreciate it. Darn shame.”

He’s not asking me how the dog died, Queenie realized. And he’s definitely not grieving. Henry Jr. was not at all nervous or hesitant like his wife, who hadn’t known who was caring for the dog. Queenie waited a beat or two, listening to the crackling silence on the line.

“Mr. Lovell, if there’s anything at all you want to know, just call me here at Animal Control in Aspen.”

Queenie sat at her desk for a long while, once again studying the photos of Geronimo. It was only then that she noticed, at the lower left-hand edge of one of the photos, something that glinted dully in the shadows. She’d missed it before because she’d been studying only the dog. Queenie opened the desk drawer and took out a magnifying glass.

A partially dirt-covered silver object lay there in the grave. A box, she thought. Maybe a pillbox.

Chapter 3
A Lawyer in Love

IN HIS MID-THIRTIES Dennis had met Alma Bennett, a model from a small town in Virginia, a beautiful young woman much courted and admired in the New York fast lane, and one who relied on the unceasing approval of men and the comfort of cocaine. Dennis was smitten, however, and focused only on her vulnerability and need for nurturing—the knight-errant who had ridden down from Watkins Glen would save her life and sanity. She seemed to respond, to accept his caring. They married, had two children, and then one summer afternoon a tired Dennis came home to Westport from court and found Brian, his two-year-old son, wandering toward the highway a block from the house. He carried the boy home and found Alma passed out on the living room couch with a straw and a mirror and some white powder spilled on the wood of the coffee table. With the aid of a middle-aged gemütlich German housekeeper and a married sister living nearby in Greenwich, Dennis began raising the children while Alma shuttled in and out of expensive drug programs and the beds of cocaine dealers. She’s the mother of my kids, Dennis kept telling himself. I care for her, I have to help her. For two years he tried and failed. Later he wondered how he could have been so quixotic and so stupid.

After the divorce, Alma moved back to Virginia and married a man seven years younger than she. She wrote to Dennis: “Nobody here knows I had children and I want to keep it that way. I was never interested in being a mother, and they’re better off with you anyway.” It took Dennis a while to get over that, and telling the children was the hardest task of his life. A year later Alma’s heart failed; the autopsy showed it to be almost double its normal size.

In his private life Dennis had brief affairs, but he balked at involvement. He had been brought up to believe that you persevered at commitments and didn’t quit until they lowered you into the grave. You could forgive yourself for making a mistake once. In his moral scheme of things a second failure would be unacceptable.

The incorporated township of Springhill nestled at 9,000 feet amid dense forests of blue spruce. Creeks seemed to flow everywhere. Dennis visited there with Sophie on the last evening of his vacation, two days after their first dinner at a restaurant in Carbondale. During those two intervening days he fretted; he wandered about Aspen, wondering what change he was undergoing.

Years ago a wise person said to him, “Before you get involved with the daughter, know the mother. The daughter may grow to be like her.” Alma’s mother had been an alcoholic and a chain-smoker. Dennis in love had ignored the wise person’s advice. Older, and bearing the scars of that failed marriage, at Sophie’s parents’ dinner table he paid close attention to her mother. Bibsy Henderson’s calmness and slightly wry turn of speech were comparable to Sophie’s. When the discussion veered to politics and Scott Henderson thumped the dinner table to punctuate his views on Bill Clinton and gun control, Bibsy said to Dennis, “My husband sometimes believes he can make a fact out of an opinion by raising his voice.”

But even as she spoke, she was lightly stroking the back of Scott’s hand, and Scott smiled apologetically in response.

Bibsy reminded Dennis of his own mother back in Watkins Glen. He couldn’t think of a higher compliment. “Why ‘Bibsy’?”

“It’s Beatrice. When I was a kid I couldn’t pronounce that.”

Dennis liked Scott too. To a friend in New York he described Sophie’s father as “a talky Gary Cooper. Arms like an oak tree. He can outhike you and outchop you and probably out-arm-wrestle you. For a man of sixty-five, which is what I guess he is, he’s in amazing shape.”

After that first February meeting on the bumps of Aspen Mountain, Dennis could not push Sophie from his thoughts, day or night. He had not made love to her but already he felt possessed. His fears were not realized; she had told him there was no other man in her life. He flew back to Colorado two weeks later, leaving his children with his sister in Greenwich. Sophie picked him up at Aspen airport. Dennis tossed his ski bag and suitcase in the back of her Blazer and she bore him up and away to the village of Springhill.

The drive wound through the icebound valley of the Crystal River, past herds of unmoving horses who looked to Dennis like black cutouts pasted on white cardboard. The evening was cold and the river glistened in the setting sun. Layers of snowy mountains fell away in all directions. Where avalanches had poured from the crests and smashed paths to the valley floor, rows of mature aspen trees were broken like matchsticks.

“I love the aspens,” Sophie said. “See the black spots against that pure gray of the bark? When I was a girl I thought those spots were eyes, looking at me. Protecting me.”

“From what?”

“From whatever might do harm.”

Above the town of Marble the narrow road was freshly plowed. This was the only way into the town of Springhill, and the only way out. Sophie’s home, on the far edge of town, was a high-beamed pine cabin built in the heyday of mining in the nineteenth century. The Roaring Fork Valley had prospered after silver was found in 1877, but a scant sixteen years later, to protect the nation’s gold reserves, President Cleveland demonetized silver. Most western Colorado mines and business enterprises became bankrupt; coal mining and marble quarrying saved the valley from blending back into the wilderness.

And then, during Christmas week in 1936, a group of skiers were carried in a four-horse sleigh to the top of Little Annie Basin above the little town of Aspen, to float down from there on wooden skis through the deepest, lightest powder they had ever known. The valley’s economic and social revival began immediately. Not even World War II could stop it—the Tenth Mountain Division, the army’s crack ski troops, trained and partied in the Roaring Fork Valley. Many came back after the war to make their home and their fortune.

Sophie and Dennis drove along the snowplowed main street of Springhill, past the Volunteer Fire Department, the little gymnasium, the funeral parlor, and the violet-colored wooden bank that looked like part of a Western movie set. Above the bank, Sophie told him, Edward Brophy had his dental office. On the far edge of town, off Quarry Road on forty acres of woods and rolling meadow, they came to Sophie’s log house. The house and land had been a gift from her parents. Sophie had rebuilt the old miner’s cabin, adding a second story, a kitchen with Mexican tile, and a greenhouse. Spanned by a wooden footbridge, a creek wound through the property. Aspens and spruce grew in a glade. Deer drank from the creek and sometimes browsed on the edge of the glade.

Sophie lit lamps. The light was warm; the cabin had a hint of an enchanted place in a forest. A Swiss cuckoo clock ticked in the living room. An old dark brown violin case stood propped against the coffee table.

“You play it?”

“Since I was a child. My great-grandmother taught me. Shall I?”

“Later, yes. Not now.” Dennis sank into the pillows of the living room sofa. Sitting next to him, Sophie touched his hands. He kissed her for what seemed half an hour: it was only five minutes. Her hands were so cool, and they seemed fragile. It made him want to protect her from whatever might do harm.

“Do you want to make love?” Sophie asked.

“Of course I do,” Dennis said.

Taking his hand, she led him upstairs.

Moonlight shone into the bedroom. From afar Dennis heard water singing over rocks. When she took off her clothes he saw that she was more lovely than he had imagined.

In the morning she said, “It’s been two years since I was with a man. And that was very brief. I was starting to think I’d be an old maid.”

“How could that be? A woman as lovely as you?”

“I don’t go out. And I’m not easy to please. Listen to what I have to say. The sex was wonderful. I’m sure it will get even better. But I don’t want to be just a sweet diversion—your Colorado girlfriend. If that’s what it is, or will become, be honest and tell me. We’ll both get over it.”

Dennis didn’t want to make promises he wasn’t sure he could keep.

He knew she was more than a diversion but he was afraid to admit, so quickly, how much more he already dreamed of. He was silent, but the way Sophie smiled at him and touched his cheek with cool fingers made him feel she had read his mind.

For a week they stayed cocooned in the rumpled bed. Sometimes it was two o’clock in the afternoon before they padded downstairs to throw open the door to the refrigerator. Other days they reached the ski slopes of nearby Snowmass Mountain at the crack of noon.

Together they skied the Hanging Glades. Dennis heard the quick rush of her breath when she dug her edges hard on the turns, the dry
swish
of both their pairs of skis schussing the last long steep glide to the bottom; and he heard the beating of his heart when he simply looked at her.