Double Shot (25 page)

For a moment, the women were stunned, as they seemed to think their leader was stalking out of the meeting. But Priscilla stopped abruptly, smiled nervously at her colleagues-in-gardening, and tapped the first illustration with her pointer.
“Root systems!” she gargled. The committeewomen frowned. Priscilla began lecturing apprehensively on the different trees’ adaptability to rugged climate, sunshine, and shade. I tiptoes away with my last load and pushed into the kitchen. We would rinse the dishes as quietly as . . . no, I would not think of mice, not after what had happened on Tuesday. Boyd and I began scraping the plates and gently running water over them. I thanked him again for helping me out, and he waved this away.
“You can’t imagine all I’ve learned today,” he replied solemnly. “If I didn’t before, I now have a genuine fear of, and respect for, the opposite sex.”
”Right.”
When Boyd and I had finished stacking the rinsed dishes and I was brewing a fresh carafe of coffee, Marla slid into the kitchen.
“From all committees, good Lord, deliver us,” she announced, raising her hands in a gesture of prayer. All the feathers on her suit quivered. “Is there back door out of here?”
“I thought you didn’t want to turn your back on this committee.” I finished drying the last cup. “You were afraid they’d talk about you during even the teeniest absence.”
Marla exhaled. “I didn’t bank on Priscilla doing a presentation on composting. Two of the women are asleep, and the rest are yawning. I figured it was safe to leave.” She tilted her head coquettishly and batted her eyelashes at Boyd. “Why, Sergeant! You did an admirable job out there, and survived to tell the tale.”
For the first time since I’d known him, I saw Sergeant Boyd blush. “Well, thank you, Mrs. Korman.”
She poured two glasses of orange juice, handed me one, and held up her glass as a toast. “To Sergeant Boyd, for surviving his first women’s committee meeting.” We raised our glasses and sipped as Boyd’s cheeks turned even darker. “Now, Sergeant Boyd,” Marla went on, “one more thing. Could you keep an eye on the ladies out there, pretty please? I need to have a heart-to-heart with my girlfriend here, and we need to be warned if they start talking about us. Or if they want more food, God forbid.”
Boyd nodded and mumbled that it would be no problem. Before he was even out the kitchen door, Marla started talking.
“What’s this about the Vikarioses?” she demanded. “Mr. and Mrs. Family Values had a child out of wedlock?”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t what I was hearing. Priscilla said the Vikarioses had a bastard grandchild. But she also said John Richard owed a couple mil to creditors, so I don’t know how reliable her sources are.”
“Neither do I, but I’m going to start digging.”
I sighed. “So, what were you able to find out about Courtney MacEwan?” Ever so quietly, I began to load the dirty plates into the club’s commercial dishwasher.
“All right,” Marla began. “The way Courtney tells it, she and John Richard were going to get married before the end of the year. He just needed some money. Also, he was starting a new business and was wondering if Courtney would be willing to ‘help him out with it.’ “
I groaned. “Why do I feel as if I know where this is going?”
Marla put her hand on her chest. “You haven’t heard it all. Courtney was designing a big new house for the two of them in Flicker Ridge. She even promised to get new boobs for him.”
“Marla, don’t.”
Marla sipped her drink and rattled the ice cubes. “This is to let you know her motivation. She was so in love with him, not only was she ready to have surgery, but as we know, she also loaned him that hundred thousand bucks after they hooked up. She also rented him the Tudor house, ostensibly so that you wouldn’t scream about him living with another woman when Arch came to visit. Really, of course . . .”
I said, “Yes, yes, she was naïve.”
“Courtney had given him a lot of money, which probably meant he saw her as getting controlling.” Marla paused and raised her eyebrows. “And by the way, the Jerk said, he couldn’t actually marry her anytime soon. Are we not surprised at this, either?”
“He wanted his freedom. He wanted to examine his options,” I said dully. “See if he could trade up, so to speak.”
“So to speak. Depends on how you look at a stripper who’s ten years younger than Courtney.” She did a little dance around the kitchen. “Okay. Remember the Mountain Journal of . . . of . . . Friday, the sixth of May?”
I slid in a dirty dish and paused. “Was that the one with the picture of John Richard sponsoring the golf tournament? Twenty-five thou to charity and you’re suddenly back in the bosom of society?”
“Oh, darling, don’t talk abut the bosom of society, talk about Courtney and her upcoming boobs and her money, and Cecelia’s column from that same issue, which precipitated the breakup. Do you not remember it? What local tennis-playing merry widow is living with an ex-con? Could that be where the ex-con, an infamous local doctor, is getting the wherewithal to squeeze back into everyone’s good graces and have them forget about the past? Are we as willing to forgive and forget a crime against a woman? Courtney drenched herself in champagne cocktails and sobbed to me all about this at the club last night. She blames you and Cecelia for what happened to them. Although she ought to blame the Jerk, as usual,” she muttered.
“I saw the column,” I admitted. “I take it the Jerk objected to being gossiped about?”
“Courtney had been staying at the Tudor house, and only left when you brought Arch over. But the Jerk kicked her out the morning after the column was published,” Marla said. “He said between dealing with you and the Arch-visitation issue, and facing negative publicity, they were through.”
“Whoops.” I wanted to feel sorry for Courtney, but couldn’t. She had certainly proved to me that she was a bitch.
“Okay.” Marla put down her iced tea and poured herself a cup of coffee from our drip machine on the counter. “What the Jerk said to Courtney was that they were officially broken up. Over. Kaput.” Marla gestured with the coffee and slopped half of it onto the counter. “After the breakup, Courtney sobbed how over John Richard had said it should be. She should not call. Not write. No e-mail! And Courtney cried, oh, God, she cried.” Marla blinked and drank a bit more coffee. “She demanded her hundred K back, but not that day. And guess what happened when Courtney went to her lawyer to get her money back?”
I said, “I can’t imagine.”
“The Jerk told his lawyer Courtney’s cash wasn’t a loan, it was a gift.”
“Pretty big gift.”
Marla smirked. “No kidding.” My friend’s tone turned serious. “Goldy, do you think Courtney could have shot him?”
I stopped loading the dishwasher and shook my head. “I don’t know. When she came in here, she was furious. You have to suspect anyone with a temper like that.” I remembered one of the places John Richard had been shot: the genitals. “I know Courtney’s alibi is about as solid as carbon dioxide. In and out of a crowded bake sale five minutes away? But if she were ever caught, the negative publicity from Cecelia Brisbane would be nothing compared to being convicted of homicide.”
“Let me ask you this, then.” Marla picked up her purse. “Do you think Courtney would hire someone to kill the Jerk?”
“She’s got the money, certainly>”
“Yeah. And the motive.”
Something in Marla’s tone made my skin turn to gooseflesh. “Why? Do you know something? What have you heard?”
Marla chewed the inside of her cheek. “I haven’t heard a word. But I did see something unusual when I arrived this morning. I walked around to the club service entrance, because I thought we could visit before the breakfast. You weren’t there, but guess who was? That food inspector you hate so much — “
“Roger Mannis?” I interrupted, stunned. “A guy who looks like a weasel with an ax for a chin?”
“The same. And sitting in the passenger seat of the van, handing him an envelope, was Courtney MacEwan.”
   
* * *
Marla said she hadn’t seen anything else. She hugged me and took off, while I fought the knot in my stomach.
After checking that the committee meeting was finally on track, I asked Boyd back into the kitchen. I shared what id’ heard from Marla, and my questions. How much had Courtney resented me for supposedly breaking up her affair with John Richard? Could Mannis have been the one who’d attacked me outside the Roundhouse? He would certainly know about sabotage, or he could have tutored Courtney in what to do. And then perhaps Roger, or Courtney, had driven over to John Richard’s house and shot him.
“Could be,” Boyd mused. “You always have to be open to theories.”
“Do you think I should say anything to Reilly and Blackridge? They’ve been really hostile to me.”
“Let me do it.” Boyd nodded decisively. “They know I’m here guarding you, and I can say one of the women saw Ms. MacEwan give Mannis an envelope. Then it’ll be up to them. You probably don’t want them knowing you’ve got this information, anyway.”
Plus, I thought, I sure didn’t want Courtney MacEwan to know I had eve more reasons to suspect her. That woman was dangerous.
An hour later, the committeewomen began to wrap up their meeting. Boyd and I were in the last stages of cleaning up from their breakfast, Priscilla Throckbottom did not give me an extra gratuity for Boyd, despite his hard work. I would do it myself, I resolved, when he departed from the Roundhouse this afternoon. And he was going to be there, he’d insisted. He’d informed me he was sticking with me until Julian and Liz arrived to help with the picnic. Ordinarily I would have bristled at being chaperoned, but I really did not want to go back into the Roundhouse alone, thank you very much.
At the end of the meeting, two things surprised me. First of all, the women actually did agree to do something. Lot purchases of trees were to be had at half price at Aspen Meadow Nursery, this week only. With their many donations an the success of the bake sale, PosteriTREE was buying sixteen dozen blue spruce, twenty dozen aspen trees, and fifty dozen lodgepole pines. They were going to organize volunteers to plant them in the burned areas of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. Since the canyon fire had just jumped over to the preserve, the women thought a replanting scheme would be a worthy goal. I didn’t know what volunteers would be willing to work for these women, but no one was asking me.
Tipping the emotional scales over to misery was the second surprise: the sight of Ginger Vikarios sobbing in her battered Taurus. The meeting had not yet ended when I’d finished cleaning and slipped out the service entrance with the trash. The food inspector’s van was gone, of course, but I did spot a desolate Ginger when I rounded the corner to the club’s Dumpster. Her flyaway orange hair was bent over the steering wheel; her body heaved with sobs. I tossed the trash into the Dumpster and headed in her direction to see what was wrong, to comfort her, something. But she heard my footsteps on the gravel and glanced up. Startled and gasping, she turned the key, pushed the old car into gear, and took off.
When Boyd and I finally finished, we were dismayed to see that two Cadillacs had been carelessly parked in such a way as to block the service lot exit. Cursing under my breath, I climbed into my van and revved the engine. With Boyd guiding me, I did a sixteen-point turn to get around the Caddies. Chuckling, Boyd hoisted himself into the passenger seat and we took off. As we drove toward the tennis courts, we both say Courtney MacEwan racing toward us. Oh, hell, I thought. Not again.
Courtney was wearing a skimpy white tennis dress that showed off her muscled arms and long legs. But she also had those strong arms raised, and each of her hands clutched her signature pink tennis balls. She did not look happy.
“You bitch!” she screamed at me. “You wrecked my life!” Before she could go on, she caught a glimpse of Boyd and clamped her mouth shut.
I gunned the engine to get up onto the club’s main road. As we whizzed past Courtney, she gave me a hostile stare. I pressed the accelerator to go even faster. “That woman is a piece of work,” Boyd commented, his voice amused.
   
* * *
Boyd reminded me not to speed, so I carefully slowed the van to make the turnoff to the lake. I needed to check on the tent setup, use my new keys to get through the Roundhouse’s reinforced kitchen door, and generally make sure that everything was proceeding well for the next event. I certainly hoped Courtney MacEwan had not been invited to Nan Watkins’s picnic.
After the mess at the club, the Roundhouse was a positively serene spot. The tent was up. Boyd gently took my new keys, opened the Roundhouse, and thoroughly checked the premises. He declared them clear.
We had just begun to haul out the boxes for the picnic event when my eyes caught on a sheriff’s-department tow truck on the far side of the lake. It was the exact spot where I’d see Trudy’s son, Eddie, fishing with his pals earlier in the day. My heart turned over.
I remembered when Arch was nine and had come to the lake to fish by himself, because John Richard would never take him. I hadn’t found him for hours and was sure he had drowned. I shook my head and walked even faster up the path to the kitchen door.
“Mr. . . . Sergeant . . . “ I couldn’t get the words out.
“What is it, Goldy?” Boyd asked calmly. He stopped unloading his box and came over to me. “Talk slowly.” He nodded encouragingly. “Tell me.”
“Lake,” I said. “Here. Come!”
He accompanied me outside, and I pointed to the truck, which was now flashing its lights and backing up to the bank. With the truck reversing, I could now see two sheriff’s-department vehicles and a state trooper’s gray sedan near it.”
“Oh, God!” I wailed.
“Goldy,” Boyd said calmly. “Tell me what you think it is.”
“Eddie!” I gasped. “Eddie from next door. Please. Call and find out.”
Boyd told me to stay where I was, then unhooked his radio and walked ten paces away from me. His radio crackled as he talked into it.
I thought I was going to be ill. I was suddenly excruciatingly worried about Arch. About Eddie. About everything. I told Boyd I was going over to where the sheriff’s-department cars were parked and see if Eddie was okay. Boyd relocked the Roundhouse and hustled along behind me. I pressed the buttons for Tom’s cell phone and resumed trotting toward the far side of the lake.
Tom, happy to hear from me, said Arch had had one shaky period on the way to the giant pool. Tom had taken an exit off the interstate and found a church where he knew the pastor. The pastor had listened to and comforted Arch while Tom and Julian had waited patiently. The three boys had spent the morning riding man-made tsunamis in the wave pool. After that, they’d had banana splits, and then it had begun to rain, hard. Denver’s weather could be entirely different from ours, no question. Anyway, Arch and Todd had decided to go back to the Druckmans’, and Julian was on his way to the Roundhouse. I asked Tom if Arch had mentioned the non-golf lessons with John Richard.