Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (17 page)

“‘What do I do now?' she says. ‘He thinks he's in love with me.'

“Peachy says, ‘You're the psychologist,' and they're talking, standing outside with the birds starting up and Peachy remembers I told him to call back and he puts me on speaker. Knowing what you told me about the bodies, I tell Peachy to call the sheriff and that's when I called the club and left you the message.”

“Where are they now?”

“Peachy? He had to float some sports on a half hour's shut-eye. I got no idea where the cougar's licking her paws, probably still at the ranch.” While they were talking, Stranahan was helping Sam load the driftboat onto the trailer.

“Did I do good or what, Kimosabe?” Sam said as he wound up the winch and set the chock.

“You did. Thanks. You'll get your reward in heaven.”

Sam clasped a callused hand on Stranahan's shoulder, so hard it tingled. “All this touchy-feely stuff's making me teary.” He was smiling, a silver-capped incisor glinting in the sun. He heaved his bulk into the cab of his truck, the springs creaking as the truck canted under his weight. “Keep me in the loop.” He jerked his thumb up.

Stranahan dug his fingers into his bruised shoulder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Simian Man

“I
was wondering if you'd show,” Harold Little Feather said. “Your buddy Meslik fill you in?”

Stranahan nodded. “He told me what he heard from Peachy Morris. Sam likes to exaggerate, but it sounds like a hell of a story even if half of it's true.” He lifted his eyes to take in the sprawl of the Double D, the ridges that backdropped the ranch, Hollowtop Mountain forming a pyramid under the evening sky. He walked up where the sheriff was polishing the hood of the Cherokee with her elbows. She had her chin in her hands and didn't look up.

Little Feather inclined his head toward the row of peeled log guest cabins. “Mountain chic. Each cabin's named for a tree. The fishing guide came off the river 'bout a half hour ago. He went to park his rig down at his cabin. It's around the back. Called Limber Pine. He told us the man is still with the woman in Mountain Maple. That's the one catty-corner from the lodge. The woman is trying to sweet-talk him into joining us. Peachy will give us the word when she does.”

“We're waiting,” Ettinger said. “You can help us wait.” She lifted her chin from her hands and drummed her fingers on the metal.

“White women oughtn't do that,” Little Feather said. “It hurts the ears.”

Ettinger blushed.

“I'm just kidding, Martha. You and I both know you got the rhythm.”

Ettinger blushed a deeper red.

“Very funny. You two have any bright ideas how we approach this? The gentleman's in an emotionally delicate condition. He's become attached to this Harriet person. I'm inclined to think he might see another woman as an intruder, that maybe he'd rather talk to a man.”

“Have Harold feel him out,” Stranahan said. “This guy's an anthropologist. He'll like it that Harold's Indian. Plus he has a cast on his arm and can play the ‘I was mauled by a grizzly' card. It's a conversation starter.”

“Harold?” Ettinger raised her eyebrows. “Sean might have a point.”

“Worth a try,” Harold said.

While they waited, Ettinger recited the details of the story she'd heard over the phone from Peachy Morris. Most of it aligned closely, if not as colorfully, with the version Sean had heard from Sam.

Little Feather listened with his arms crossed. He nodded sagely when she got to the Viagra search.

“Woman sounds like an angel of mercy,” he said. “Man can use a little mercy loving from time to time.”

“Or a tramp.” Martha scowled.

“Here comes Peachy,” Stranahan said.

Peachy Morris was boyish-looking with lobster hands from rowing his boat under a boiling sun. He wore jeans low on his hips, a cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up over ropy forearms. His smile was warm, but his eyes looked tired.

“Ma'am, sir. I'm sorry to make your acquaintance under these circumstances.” He acknowledged Sean with a slight nod. “Stranny.” He wiped back a strand of lank blond hair from his forehead. His face carried the sweat sheen of someone who'd been awake for forty-eight hours.

He said, “Mr. Kauffeld says he'll talk to you, but he wants to have Harriet with him.”

“Kauffeld?”

“His name's Melvin Kauffeld. He told us to call him Mel.”

“I'll go see him,” Harold said.

Ettinger turned to Morris. “This guy Kauffeld met at the retreat, what did he look like? Did he describe him?” She glanced at Stranahan when Peachy didn't answer at once. They were both thinking the same name: Weldon Crawford.

“I guess we didn't ask him,” Peachy said.

“He had to have said something. Age. Build. Maybe a guy who has what looks like a boil on his neck. Nothing?”

“Only that he looked fit, not like most of them there. We mostly just listened. Or I did. Harriet drew him out. She said he needed a sounding board. He felt like he couldn't breathe and she thought if he got it off his chest it would be a release.”

“A release,” Martha said. She raised her eyebrows, an ironic smile playing on her lips. “I suppose you could call it that.”

Morris looked levelly at her. “Harriet's a fine person. Mel has a gun. He might have pulled the trigger on himself if she hadn't been with him last night.”

“Uh-huh,” Ettinger said.

“What kind of gun?” Stranahan asked.

“Model 99 Savage. The stock's a piece of firewood, but the bore's shiny. He asked me to take it. I locked it in my cabin.”

They were digesting this news when Harold whistled from the door of the cabin. He waved them over.

“He says he's willing to talk to all of us,” he said in a low voice. “He's not who you'd expect and he might be putting on an act, it's hard to tell. I had a few words with the woman first. I believe her when she says she believes him.”

“And what? I'm supposed to believe you that you believe her that she believes him?”

“Martha, I'm just saying listen to the man and don't roll your eyes. Like you're doing now, don't do that.”

Stranahan saw Peachy Morris regarding Harold and Ettinger with bemusement. Peachy glanced sidelong at Stranahan. “Those two ought to get a room,” he said.

•   •   •

T
he first thing that struck Stranahan about Melvin Kauffeld, who insisted on serving tea while they made themselves comfortable around the wrought iron table on the porch of the cabin, was his voice. It was a barrister's instrument, a rich baritone with a lot of authority behind it, not a voice that Stranahan would have thought for a man who'd cried a river over the past couple days. That the voice was the most arresting aspect of the man was all the more remarkable because his face was utterly singular. Peachy had told Sam that he looked like a chimp, and the simian resemblance was extraordinary, but if Stranahan had to pick an ape for comparison he would have chosen a male orangutan. Old, with moist brown eyes that had seen the end of the world coming and knew there was nothing to be done to save it. For all that it was a handsome face, the face of tribal chiefs of ages past, and not really sad so much as thoughtful.

“I'll say right off I'm not going to be pressing charges,” Kauffeld said. “If that's what you're hoping for I won't do it, nor do I see what charges could possibly be brought. We had a gentleman's agreement, which I broke. I won't accept that Wade is anything but who he said he was.”

“Who was that?” Harold asked. He would continue to take the lead as long as it earned results.

“A fellow traveler, I suppose. As we learned at the retreat, we're on a journey that most people never realize they have the opportunity to take. Most people let others make choices for them when they become gravely ill. The final breath is a formality; the essence of the human being has already ignobly departed the scene. It isn't the way either Wade or I wanted to go. We wanted to die with dignity, ‘Death with Honor' as he put it, with our minds sharp and our hearts beating with adrenaline. When I started up the trail, I was more alive than I had been since 'Nam. I had every intention of following through and meeting my destiny.”

“Then why didn't you?”

“For that very reason. I felt alive. You must understand how a diagnosis like mine affects a person. When a doctor tells you you have a few months and how it's going to end, you walk out of the room a changed man. I lost my nerve, I lost my hope, I lost grip of my soul. I could no longer work up any zest for life. I'm ashamed of the person I became. It wasn't until I met Wade that I started to
feel
again. I got up that trail to where I could see the mountain and realized that if I went any farther, I risked losing that sense of being alive. I sat down on a log and thought about it. What was the point of getting myself killed, or killing Wade—because it could have gone down either way up there—when for the first time in two years I was really enjoying living? Enjoying it so much I was afraid of dying. And fear of death, that is
really
living, let me tell you.”

Stranahan saw Martha regarding Kauffeld skeptically. Kauffeld saw it, too.

He said, “You can find a contradiction in this if you want to, but you'd have to have lived in my skin to understand. I still want to die with all my marbles. But I may have a few months left before having to make that choice again. Today, tonight, tomorrow, I want to live with every cell of my being. I realized that as I walked off the mountain and then yesterday, yesterday when I met Harriet . . .”

He shook his head. “I got so high on that boat I felt like I was flying over the river and I got so low I felt like I was on the stones on the bottom. These wonderful people”—he had to collect himself—“this good woman . . .” He squeezed Harriet's hand. He caught his breath and shook his head again. He couldn't find his voice.

Stranahan shifted his eyes to Harriet Langhor. After introducing herself in the cabin—she had a slight but recognizable German accent—she had taken the chair by Kauffeld's side and had sat quietly but for her gray-blue eyes, which were intensely alive and darted from person to person. She had loose curls of light brown hair, an angular body with long legs and broad shoulders, and strong facial features—sculpted cheekbones under a prominent brow, deep eye sockets, a square chin. Her nose was hooked like a hawk's talon, with a knuckle in the middle. Altogether it was a vital, handsome face without being pretty in any conventional way. Sam's description of her as a cougar licking her paws, Stranahan thought, wasn't far off the mark.

Harold's voice was quiet. “Mr. Kauffeld, I won't pretend that any of us here know what you've been through. I understand it's hard not to be emotional, but this is a murder investigation. We have to know everything that happened since you first met this man. It's important that we take your statement. You can add to it later, but this way we won't have to put you through the pain of going through the story again at the department. In fact, you probably won't have to go into town at all. You can stay right here. Just tell us what happened in your own words. If you want, I can clear the porch so it's just you and me, and Harriet of course.”

Harriet pressed her fingers into Kauffeld's arm. He lifted his head from his chest. He looked at her as if she were the only person in the world. She nodded. After a few seconds, he nodded back at her and then turned to Harold and forced a smile.

Harold pressed a button on his Olympus pocket recorder. “This is Deputy Harold Little Feather of the Hyalite County Sheriff's Department. It's seven-fifteen p.m., July the . . .” He checked the date on his watch and finished the formalities.

For a long minute there was only the sound of Willow Creek talking to itself down the hill. Then Melvin Kauffeld began to speak.

He said he'd met Wade on the second day of the five-day retreat at the university's Limnology Station on Burt Lake. The station was a barracks-style camp consisting of a lodge, Quonset laboratories where freshwater aquatic sciences were taught, and a couple dozen tent cabins reserved for graduate students during the summer session. The retreat was hosted by an organization called Living at Last, based in Oakland, California. There were morning workshops on coping with terminal illness, daily excursions to Mackinac Bridge and other places of interest on the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula, plus one-on-one consultations with the doctor who headed the program. But the value of the retreat was bringing terminal patients together to share stories and lend each other psychological support. Kauffeld had not met Wade in a rowboat, as Sam had said, but during a day trip to Petoskey on Lake Michigan, which included a stop at a gabled house where the famous author Ernest Hemingway had stayed in the fall of 1919. The facilitator from Living at Last who drove the van to Petoskey had read aloud a passage from a Hemingway short story, “The Killers,” which mentioned the house.

It was when they were walking back to the van that Kauffeld heard footsteps behind him. The man following him introduced himself. Kauffeld said they probably would have met sooner or later simply because they walked faster than the others. He described Wade as being a little less than medium height, but fit-looking with short brown hair and a ruddy face. Like a man who worked outdoors, he said. Maybe forty, maybe fifty. It was hard to tell if the lines on his face were from age or just mapped by weather. He did notice a demarcation line on his forehead where a hat had rested, white skin above, tan below. As they walked together, Wade said it seemed rather odd to him that they had stopped at a Hemingway site. If he was not mistaken, Hemingway had ended his own life by wrapping a toe around the triggers of a double shotgun and blowing his head off. “I don't reckon these so-called facilitators consider suicide an acceptable end to our journey, do you?” he'd said. Kauffeld remembered the word “reckon,” thinking the man might have been from the West. He said the irony was not lost on him, either.

“What do you think about suicide?” Wade had said.

“I don't know what I think,” Kauffeld told him, “but I'm pondering the question.”

“Aren't we all?”

It was the next afternoon, when they rowed out onto the lake to fish, that Wade had brought up the concept of “Death with Honor.” He said that he'd been a hunter all his life and that nothing else matched it for the adrenaline rush. If it was all the same to God, he'd rather die with blood pumping in his veins than a morphine drip. He didn't think he could pull the trigger on himself, the state of mind that accompanied putting a gun to your heart, the darkness of the soul, no thank you to that. He'd much rather go out on the horn of a rhino, but as they were hard to come by in Montana he'd settle for dying in the heat of battle. Preferably at the hand of a brother in arms who knew the score and wanted the same way out for himself. He'd looked at Kauffeld in a frank manner.

“Maybe that person is you,” he said.