Murder on High (24 page)

Charlotte was hoping that Pyle would provide them with the next trail marker now. He had certainly set the stage. Sitting on Tracey’s desk was a plateful of crackers and cheese, and three mugs of steaming hot coffee.

“Did I ever tell you what a valuable employee you are?” said Tracey as he picked up his coffee mug.

“Not nearly often enough, Chief,” said Pyle.

Charlotte picked up her mug gratefully. It had been a long day, and she welcomed the lift the caffeine would bring.

“Okay, Pyle,” said Tracey, once they were settled in. “What have you got?”

“Two things. Both concerning the weapon.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you remember asking me to check with sporting goods stores to see if any clerks had noticed anyone who looked suspicious buying a pistol crossbow, or anyone who didn’t look like the typical crossbow customer?”

Tracey nodded.

“I got a bite from a store in Augusta. They remembered one guy very clearly. The clerk said he had a crew cut, a plaid tie, thick eyeglasses. He remembered that the guy had paid with a credit card, and even found the credit card receipt for me. Guess who he was?”

Tracey grinned. “He wouldn’t have anything to do with the state medical examiner’s office, would he?”

“Henry Clough himself,” said Pyle. “I have to admit that he doesn’t look like your usual crossbow customer. Otherwise, we struck out there.”

So much for trail markers, thought Charlotte.

“I thought you said you had something,” Tracey teased.

“I do. It’s about Jeanne Ouellette. She attended Orono on a scholarship,” he said. “Graduated in 1954. Guess what kind of scholarship it was?”

“You’re making me play a lot of guessing games,” Tracey said impatiently.

“An
archery
scholarship.”

“You’re joking!”

Pyle smiled and held up his hand. “I swear it’s the God’s honest truth. She was the women’s state archery champion for seven years running. Three years in high school and four in college.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned,” said Tracey.

“It makes sense,” said Pyle. “Old Town is known for its archery program. Old Town archers always win the state meets. Its archery program and its canoes. It’s the city’s Indian heritage, I guess.”

“I knew about the canoes, of course,” said Tracey. “But not about the archery. Is it still true, I wonder?”

“I expect so. It was when I went to Old Town High. I think my archery coach is still there. His name was Pete Roy. Take a look at these,” he added, passing Tracey some papers. “They sent them over from the
Penobscot Times
.”

Charlotte stood up to look. They were copies of old newspaper articles about the young Jeanne’s archery achievements. One showed her in a Robin Hood-style hat shooting out the flame of a candle; another showed her shattering an aspirin tablet at twenty-five paces.

“Look at this one, Chief,” said Pyle. “She’s shooting the arrow through a phonograph record that’s been tossed into the air.”

“And it isn’t a forty-five, either,” said Tracey, referring to the big spindle holes in the old records.

The fact that Jeanne had been an archery champion sounded promising, but Charlotte suspected it was one of those chimerical leads that would evaporate under scrutiny. For one thing, her archery achievements had taken place over thirty years ago, and Charlotte doubted she had kept up her skills. For another, there was the matter of the camp. How would she have known about it? And, even if she had, getting there and back would have been a grueling trek for a woman of her age. From what Keith had said, it would be hard enough for a skilled woodsman who was a former long-distance runner.

“Do you think she did it, Chief?” Pyle asked earnestly. “It doesn’t look good for her, does it?”

“Nope, it doesn’t,” Tracey agreed, but not enthusiastically. He was obviously entertaining doubts of a similar nature to Charlotte’s.

“It’s gonna hurt her dad real bad if she turns out to be the murderer.”

“Let’s not go jumping to conclusions,” said Tracey.

“You know her father?” asked Charlotte, who was always fascinated by the way people in small towns all seemed to be connected.

“Yep,” Pyle said. “He lives down to the Bickmore Manor, the senior citizens apartment house on South Main. He’s buddies with my grandfather. They play gin rummy together. I often see Miss Ouellette there when I visit him.”

Tracey cleared his throat. “Getting back to the subject …”

Pyle returned his attention to his boss.

“I want you to contact this guy Roy at the high school, and find out if he knows anything about crossbows. Or if he knows of anyone who
does
know something about crossbows. We want to find out where this weapon might have come from.”

Pyle nodded.

“Have you got the addresses for the hikers who were signed out to the various peaks on Katahdin yet?”

“I’m still working on it. It takes a while to get addresses for that many people from the state motor vehicle agencies. I’ve got the names from the registers at all three campgrounds. There were eleven signed out for Hamlin Peak, twenty-two for Pamola, and twenty-four for Baxter.”

“Fifty-seven in all,” said Tracey. “That’s a manageable number. I want you to interview every one of them. Most of them will be from Maine anyway. How many were signed out for the Knife Edge?”

“I forget exactly. Twenty-something.”

Tracey nodded. “You’re going to ask them if they saw Mrs. Richards. And then you’re going to ask them if they saw Miss Ouellette. If they think they might have seen either one of them, get them to look at a photo.”

“Right,” said Pyle, rising to leave.

“And don’t forget to check the times.”

Pyle nodded.

In the excitement of the stakeout at Chimney Pond and the subsequent discovery of the grave at the retreat center, the fact that Charlotte would be leaving for California in less than forty-eight hours had temporarily escaped her attention. Now that she was back in Bridge Harbor, however, she found herself overwhelmed by all the things she had to accomplish before she left. At the top of her list was a call to Ron Polito to set up an appointment. Another item that had temporarily slipped her mind was his odd statement that he had a murder suspect in mind for her. Who on earth could it be? She would have dismissed such an unlikely statement had it come from anyone else, but she knew better than to take anything that Ron said lightly.

By now, it was nearly six in California, but Charlotte suspected that Ron’s dedicated secretary would still be at her desk, as indeed she was. When Charlotte asked for an appointment, the secretary told her that Ron had ordered her not to disturb him, but that she knew he would make an exception to see Charlotte. He was staying at a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont Hotel.

The bungalows on the grounds of the Chateau Marmont were where Hollywood went when it wanted to hole up and get some work done, or get out of the public eye. They were the Camp David of Hollywood. “He’s going to be there through the end of the week,” his secretary said. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone where he is, except for you and a couple of others.”

The legendary hideaway on Sunset Boulevard was one place in Hollywood where Charlotte had always felt right at home. It had been an instant success when it was built in 1929, and it was where Charlotte had set up housekeeping when she came to Hollywood ten years later. Its suites, which were equipped with kitchens, were large, homey, and self-sufficient. She had also spent quite a bit of time there in the fifties. One of the Marmont’s features was an elevator in the basement garage, which meant that the guests didn’t have to pass the front desk to get to their rooms—a great advantage in a town in which privacy was hard to come by. “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont,” was the famous advice of the chief of her studio to his stable of stars, and Charlotte had gotten into plenty there, most of it with a cowboy actor by the name of Linc Crawford. It was, in fact, where Linc had died, in 1957. In a sixth-floor suite, on April twenty-sixth, of a heart attack. Charlotte hadn’t set foot in the place since. In fact, she had been going out of her way to avoid even driving by it for thirty-three years.

But maybe it was time to confront those old memories, and in doing so, lay them to rest. For someone who was supposed to be working on the chapter of her life in which the Marmont had played such a big role, there couldn’t be a better—or a worse—place to visit.

Charlotte’s taxi pulled up to the ersatz Loire Valley chateau at the end of Sunset Strip at three on Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps the Marmont had always appealed to her because of its incongruity: the cream-colored stucco monstrosity seemed to rise out of the tattoo parlors and rock and roll clubs of the Strip with the same gloomy magnificence as the Potala Palace rising out of the slums of Lhasa. But it actually felt more like a citadel than a palace. And indeed, that’s what it was: an oasis of Old World civility in a desert of southern California sleaze. Part of its charm, however, had always been that it hadn’t totally escaped the influence of its surroundings. Despite its grandiosity, its ambience had always been a little down-at-the heel. Even more so in recent years, when even people who preferred their hotels on the seedy side complained about the faulty plumbing, fraying upholstery, and peeling paint. In fact, the Marmont had been about to cross the subtle line between funky and finished when it was pulled back from the brink by a New York hotelier who promised to fix it up without tampering with its faded Sunset Boulevard glamor. Charlotte hoped so. Despite the fact that she hadn’t set foot in it in years, she felt the kind of fondness for the Marmont that one feels for an old friend with whom one has shared the good times, and the bad. Their careers had paralleled one another’s: the onset of the venerable old hotel’s bad times had corresponded with that of Charlotte’s own; likewise, the hotel’s career and her own were now in the ascendant. Like the Marmont, Charlotte herself had come to be viewed as something of an architectural monument to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Over the years, a few of the bungalows on the grounds of the hotel had been sold off to private owners, and Ron Polito had owned one of these for as long as Charlotte could remember. Though he sometimes used it for work, as he was apparently now doing, it had more often been employed as a safe house for clients who found it advantageous to make themselves temporarily scarce. Charlotte herself had stayed in Ron’s bungalow in the aftermath of her highly publicized divorce from her third husband in the forties. Thus she had no trouble finding it again. Like the Marmont’s other bungalows, it was tucked into the hillside overlooking the smog-shrouded city, with its own private garden and its own private entrance and car port.

As she approached the front door, she paused simply to smell. If the aroma could have been bottled, it would have had a base of eucalyptus, and high notes of jasmine, honeysuckle, and old roses. The smell was overpowering in its lushness and seductiveness, and a far cry from the fresh, clean, almost clinical smell of the Maine woods. A bougainvillea vine thick with carmine blooms hung romantically over the edge of the roof above the door. No wonder so many people—herself among them—had been tempted to misbehave at the Marmont!

It was Ron himself who answered the door, and she tried to conceal her shock at the sight of him. The years had been good to her—she still looked much as she had forty years ago (thanks to a good complexion)—and, although she knew it was illogical, she expected the same to be true of others, especially in Hollywood, where cultivation of a youthful appearance was a pursuit on which so much time and money were expended. Thus, she was always surprised to meet someone who hadn’t aged gracefully.

It wasn’t so much that he looked that different. He still had the face of a basset hound, with long, fleshy jowls and sad brown eyes, from which hung deep folds of skin. But he had lost his imposing physical presence. A tall man with broad shoulders, he had once shared with many of the stars he represented the ability to take up even more space in the eye of the beholder than he occupied in physical fact. But he was now a star that had imploded upon itself—passive and shrunken, its brilliance dimmed.

Clearly delighted at her visit, he greeted her warmly and ushered her into the living room, which hadn’t changed in forty years. The mismatched lamps and the rattan furniture, with its gray and magenta floral-patterned upholstery, unleashed a flood of memories, chief among them her humiliation at having been stupid enough to marry a man like her third husband.

“The last time I was here was just after I announced that I was divorcing Gary,” she said as she took off her jacket.

“I remember,” he said. “Hasn’t changed much, has it?”

She looked around at the room, which was scattered with legal papers, but otherwise looked exactly the same. “No,” she agreed.

“I was going to redecorate, but when I mentioned it to one of my clients, he begged me not to,” he said. “Before I knew it, I was besieged with phone calls from clients urging me not to touch a thing.” He shrugged. “So I didn’t. I guess this place holds a lot of memories for a lot of people.”

“If walls could talk …”

He smiled. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to one of the rattan chairs in front of a fireplace in which a wood fire was burning away despite outdoor temperatures in the sixties. “Can I get you a drink? You drink Manhattans—straight up, if I remember right.”

“Of course you remember right. Some things never change. Your memory and Chateau Marmont being two of them.”

He smiled again. “Nice to see you, Charlotte. Did I say that already?”

Charlotte smiled back. “Make it a double,” she said. Her nerves were frazzled from the trip. Her plans to recover from the frenetic pace of the preceding days with an in-flight snooze had been foiled by the combination of a garrulous agent for a seatmate and an unexpected layover in Chicago.

Moments later, they were comfortably ensconced in the rattan armchairs in front of the fireplace, a bowl of salted peanuts nestled among the legal papers on the coffee table between them.