Nothing but Gossip (23 page)

“Great,” I said. “Why all but one?”

“One of the flight attendants didn’t check in at the crew office, and they’re trying to track her down now.” She reached up and tucked an errant lock of hair back into the curly pile. I realized she looked completely exhausted. “Oh, and Mercedes called and wants to see you. She’s at home. Do you think she did it? I do.”

“I think she may be involved. I’m just not totally sure who else is, whether it’s Duke Fletcher or Wade or Johnny Bourbon. Or all three.”

“Duke Fletcher would never do such a thing.” Linda was incensed.

“I wouldn’t like to think so. If you’re looking for me,” I said, putting on my dark glasses, “I’ll be down at Buck’s.”

*  *  *

“Redford’s mad at you,” Buck said once I’d sat down across from him and accepted a cup of regular coffee and a banana-nut muffin from Ecstasy, who had plucked her eyebrow in honor of the movie company. She now actually had two: one two inches long, the other three. She had also put on socks. They weren’t particularly clean, but they were there, and they were cleaner than her feet.

“Why?”

“Stood him up.”

“Oh, you mean because my brother got shot and I’m getting married? And because I never accepted his invitation in the first place? Tell him to get over it.” I laughed and sipped the strong brew. I’ll say this for poor old Ec, she sure could make a fine cup of coffee. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having Robert Redford always moping around me. He’s such a whiner.”

“Speaking of your brother, I went to see him the other night after you all had left. Few hours after his surgery.” Buck rolled his empty cup back and forth between his bear-paw hands. His eyes overflowed with tears that streamed down into his beard. “Scared the shit out of me. He’s too tough of an old bull to be laid up like that, all helpless. We already did all that shit in ’Nam. He doesn’t need to do it again.” Buck ran his arm across his face. “I told him good-bye. I love that old bastard so much. I hope when you catch that son of a bitch that killed him you’ll bring him by here so I can kick the shit out of him.”

I reached over and put my hand on his. “He’s fine, Buck. He’s coming home this morning.”

The look on his face was worth a million dollars. I’d given him a shiny red bike on Christmas morning. He didn’t want to look as if it was true, because it was too good to be. His chin quivered and his eyes sparkled.

“You serious?”

“I am.”

“Praise God.” Buck buried his face in his hands and burst into tears. “Oh, Lord, I’m so happy. I didn’t know what I was going to do without him. I haven’t slept in two days.” He pulled a large handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose and wiped his wet cheeks. “You serious?” he asked again.

“He’s going to be fine. Linda’s on her way to get him now.”

“You aren’t shittin’ me, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Hey, Ec,” he yelled. “Bring me a double. Elias’s comin’ home.”

Buck tossed off the shot, slammed the glass on the wooden table, and stared out the window for a minute without speaking. “Well,” he finally said. “Tomorrow’s the day. You can still bolt.”

“I’m not going to bolt, Buck. I want to get married. Are you going to show up at the rehearsal dinner tonight? You did accept, and there are place cards.”

“Who am I sitting with?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’ll do it if I can sit with Elias and Linda.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I’m not sure Elias will be able to make it.”

“I’ll escort Linda, then. I’ve bought a new tuxedo and all. Valentino. Pretty damn sharp. You ought to invite Redford, too. He’s pretty upset.”

Oh, for Heaven’s sake.

The squeal of the saloon’s swinging doors filled the empty bar, followed by the unmistakably solid footfall of good boots.

“Will you look who’s here,” Buck said.

J
ohnny and Shanna Bourbon.

Sunlight filtered through her hair like Helena Bonham-Carter’s in some arty Tuscan movie.

Buck, in spite of his bulk, jumped to his feet—he was so happy he was flapping around like an angel—and pulled over a couple of chairs. “Let’s get some coffee over here for our guests, Ecstasy.”

“Heavy on the cream and sugar, if you please, sister,” Johnny called across to the bar, where you could hear the china rattling. When Ecstasy reached the table, her hands were shaking so badly, she tipped over one of the cups.

“It’s all right, Ec,” Buck said to his sister-in-law. He mopped up the mess while Ecstasy stood stock-still, knotting and unknotting her apron in her bony hands, gawking at the Bourbons. “She watches your show every afternoon,” Buck explained to them, “and even though we’ve had Robert Redford and his crew around here for a week, you’re a much bigger deal than he is in Bennett’s Fort.”

“Well, God bless you, honey,” Johnny said to her, and I saw her smile for the first time in my life. “Is there anything I can do for you? Any trouble in your life I can help you with?”

Ecstasy shook her head, too happy to speak.

“This is a surprise,” I said. “It must seem like the middle of the night to you.”

Shanna nodded and sipped her coffee. She wore large dark glasses and tight, tight jeans. “Johnny thought it was too important to call in about, so here we are.”

“What’s too important?”

Johnny leaned his elbows on his knees and turned his white cowboy hat around and around in his hands. “After our services yesterday, when I went down to meet with the audience and pray with them, a young woman came to me. She’s a regular member of our congregation, but I’d never talked to her before.” He glanced at his wife with imploring eyes.

Shanna cleared her throat and turned in her seat, studiously ignoring him.

“It’s God’s truth, honey.” Johnny was full of repentance today. “I don’t know this girl. She waited until everyone was gone and then, while Shanna was getting set up, she told me she wanted to talk to me privately.”

Johnny shot his attention over Shanna’s way again, but her eyes remained hidden behind the glasses. I sensed this was probably an old, familiar tune. She drummed her fingers on the side of her cup. Her nails were filed sharper than arrowheads.

“Stewardess,” she said.

“She’s a flight attendant, Shanna. Flight attendant. Anyhow, that’s the whole point. She flies for Frontier Airlines, and she said she’d seen the picture of Alma
and Wade in the paper announcing that Alma had died, and explaining how and all. Anyhow, she said she’d been working the flight from Billings to Roundup that night and the man who said he was Wade Gilhooly … wasn’t.”

I thought my stomach would jump out of my body. “Who did she think it was?”

“Didn’t know.”

“What’s her name?” I said. “I want to talk to her.”

“Well, that’s sort of the problem.” Johnny turned his hat in the other direction. “She wants to remain anonymous. Won’t talk to anyone but me.” He paused and shot his eyes back at his wife. “As her pastor and all.”

“In private, if you can stand it,” Shanna jeered. “She’s camped out in Johnny’s office. Says she wants the sanctuary of the church until all this is over because she’s afraid if she identifies the man who did it, he’ll come after her. Well, let me tell you something.” She took Johnny’s cheeks in her fingers, pinched them hard, and talked right into his face. “I’m sick of all this adulterous fornication. We’re changing our ways, and if she tries to as much as peek into my man’s pants, she’ll be
praying
it’s the murderer who’s coming after her instead of me.” She let go of Johnny as if he were a head of lettuce. There were big red blotches on his cheeks. “And, brother, you can take that to the bank.”

Shanna’s anger had generated a furnacelike energy field. The air around her and Johnny sizzled like an explosion from the sun, and I let it diffuse for a moment or two before I said anything.

“If I give you some pictures,” I asked Johnny, “will you show them to her? See if she’ll ID him that way?”

“Sure. I think that’d be all right. Don’t you, sugar?” he asked Shanna.

“I suppose that’ll be fine.”

Johnny rubbed his face and looked at his wife and prayed the lightning wouldn’t come back and strike him again today.

I
wracked my brain as I drove into town to Mercedes’s house. I didn’t even notice that there was not a cloud in the sky. My pager went off. It looked like Elias’s number at the hospital. I tried it. Busy. I checked the office voice mail as I charged down the interstate.

There was a message from Linda saying to call Elias, that it was urgent. I tried him again. Still busy.

The Frontier Airlines flight attendant who was camped out in Johnny Bourbon’s office had saved me a trip to the airport, but she hadn’t answered the question: Who had been on the plane?

Was it Duke? While Wade did the shooting and Mercedes made sure the coast was clear? Were they all in it together? There was certainly motive enough, and the fact that Mercedes frequently hightailed it up to Billings to be with Wade and Duke whenever Alma was out of town certainly could imply conspiracy. Why did Mercedes want to see me? We couldn’t possibly be getting back to the Russians. Or could we?

Mercedes never moved out of her family’s house
next door to my parents’, and as I pulled through the gates into her driveway, I could see that, even though her father and stepmother were now gone and she lived there alone, she had changed little about the Federal mansion. The same yellow-silk drapes still hung straight down inside the windows that were as big as doors, the same wrought-iron benches still flanked the front door, and the bell still chimed the same three notes when I pushed it.

I waited what seemed an unusually long time and then heard the sound of strain and wrestling on the other side of the door before it unstuck and flew open, almost flattening a butler so small he looked like a bug. He was practically colorless. His sparse hair, his skin, his eyes behind clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, all blended together in a sort of soulless shade of pale. The only color about him was his suit, and it was gray. He wasn’t particularly old and he wasn’t particularly young.

“Good morning, Miss Bennett,” he said in a vaguely British accent. “Madam is expecting you in the lounge.”

Lounge?

“Do you know the way?” He shouldered the complaining door shut. “I must see to this,” he muttered and then fought it open again and examined the jamb. “Excuse me.” He was talking to me again. “I thought this was repaired. Now, do you know the way?”

“No,” I answered. “I don’t believe I do.”

“Then I’ll be happy to direct you.”

I followed him up the stairs, past a solid floor-to-ceiling parade of oil portraits of relatives—most of them purchased—in a backwash of constant chatter about the lovely weather and how perfect it would be
for my wedding tomorrow. “Madam is so looking forward to it.”

“Me, too.”

At the landing, he led me to what had been Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford’s private domain. When I was growing up, Alma’s parents’ bedroom had been one of those majestic places we all feel a little uncomfortable entering because it’s not our own parents’ bedroom and it seems a little improper to be going into someone else’s, a little too familiar, maybe even a little disloyal. Consequently, I’d never been in any Rutherford bedroom before except Alma’s bitter-apple-green wedding cake.

He knocked on the closed door and then opened it slightly. “Miss Bennett’s here, Miss Rutherford,” he called and stepped aside to let me pass. “I’ll bring the coffee straightaway.”

The room was magnificent—what a realtor today would call a stunning Master Suite—large windows and a set of French doors to the balcony all open to let in the cool morning breeze. Outside, beyond the balcony, the formal gardens were exquisitely laid out. Originally designed by the first Mrs. Rutherford, Mercedes’s English mother—who must have been astonished to find herself so unbelievably rich from oil profits, but in Wyoming nevertheless—they exploded in a riot of summer’s last roses, interspersed with wide swaths of budding yellow chrysanthemums. A fire crackled in the hearth beneath an ornately carved, old French marble mantel.

Mercedes was nowhere to be seen.

The door to the dressing room—which I now assumed to be what he had referred to as “the lounge”—stood ajar.

“Mercedes,” I called. It sounded as though water were running in her bathroom. “It’s me, Lilly.”

No answer. I called again. Nothing but quiet and the sound of water running slowly, uninterrupted, into a sink, not too loud to hear over. I pushed the door slowly.

The doorbell rang in the distant downstairs.

“Mercedes,” I called louder, and then I saw her. She lay on the floor as if she were asleep on her side. Her hair fanned across her face, and her legs and arms were in a comfortably half-bent position. “Mercedes?” I knelt beside her and pushed the hair back.

A brightly colored Hermès scarf had been garroted around her neck with a hairbrush. Her face was swollen into a grotesque purple basketball, eyes bulging slightly, lips black. Her tongue had begun to swell and protrude, but her skin was still warm and vital to the touch. Then I heard a noise outside the open dressing-room window. A thud, a
whumph
in the garden. Someone had just jumped from the balcony.

This is the sort of choice police officers face every day: save the life or catch the killer? Always save the life. I loosened the garrote, pulled my phone out of my pocket, punched in 911, gave them the news, then jerked Mercedes over onto her back and began to massage her neck gently, hoping to open her airway. Then I pinched her nose closed with my fingers, sealed my mouth over hers, and began to blow.

It was a minute or two—who knows? a lifetime—before the butler strolled in with a coffee tray, which he placed slowly and deliberately on a small table beside the chaise.

“Do you know how to do CPR?” I said.

“Yes, I do.” The man was unflappable.

“Well then, get to work. The police and an ambulance are on their way.”

I prepared to hand Mercedes over to him, but at that
moment she began to fight for breath through her damaged windpipe. The sound was as beautiful as it was ghastly. The garish flush on her face faded slowly as blood trapped by the closed jugular vein began to return to her heart. I had gotten there just in time. One more minute and she would have been too dead, the oxygen deprivation to her brain too great. Strangulation/asphyxiation is one of the fastest ways to die, particularly with a garrote. Long-drawn-out strangulation struggles between killers and their victims in movies are Hollywood devices—unless the killer is totally inept—because, in reality, unconsciousness comes within ten to fifteen seconds and severe brain damage occurs within four minutes.