Nothing but Gossip (4 page)

“No,” I said, and I didn’t. I didn’t have anything else to do, since it wasn’t time to go home yet, which is what I really wanted to do. I settled into a deep-cushioned, carnation-pink velvet chair.

“I went over to see him today and he had a new secretary who didn’t know who I was, or at least she pretended not to know, and she made me wait.” Alma flinched as though she’d suffered a body blow, and then
she began to bawl. “Stupid little wop bitch. Lord, it was so humiliating. She doesn’t even speak English, for chrissakes. And then when I finally got in to see him he was very grand, very full of himself. I reminded him of his promise to leave Shanna and said if he didn’t, I was going to cut off all my funding.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He said it wouldn’t make much difference,” she choked out between sobs. “His donations were way back up and growing. He said he could make it up in six months or less. I can’t even believe they came here tonight. Talk about mean.” Alma blew her nose loudly. “Stupid, goddamn bastard.” She looked at me. Tears had smeared her mascara into a black mask. “You can’t imagine how stupid I feel. I left behind such a good life and so many friends in Billings.”

“Mother told me you’d been miserable up there,” I said. “And couldn’t wait to get back to Roundup. Did Wade want to move down here?”

Alma laughed. “I know your mother cannot conceive of anyone being happy in Montana, but I was. Did Wade want to move down here?” She shrugged, pulled another tissue from her drawer, and began to blot her cheeks. “Who cares? He does what I tell him, he’s such a wienie. But I’d truly like to kill the little bastard for skipping out on this party. He only did it because we’re on separate sides and he’ll do anything he can to humiliate me. He knows how important this Russian deal is. I’ve worked like hell to try to put it together, and he and Mercedes, and unfortunately your father”—finally revealing the reason she’d wanted me to accompany her on this tour down memory lane—“are trying to break my back. But they won’t. I’m going to pull it off and to hell with them. Once I get Johnny wrapped up, I’ll have the votes and Rutherford Oil will
step up to play with the big boys—no more of this home-grown crap.”

Seemingly fully recovered, Alma addressed herself in the mirror. She looked up and caught my eye. “You might just want to tell your father there’s still time to join the winning side. What are you going to do with your shares?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t have enough to make a difference.”

“Well, whatever, Lilly. I hope we can be friends.”

“Of course,” I told her, standing up, smoothing invisible wrinkles from my new skirt, and thinking I wouldn’t be friends with this woman if she were the last person on earth. “I hope your Russian deal, whatever it is, works out, and I’m sorry about your problems with Johnny Bourbon. But if it makes you feel any better, I’ve humiliated myself in front of hundreds of men and lived to tell about it, and then gone right out and done it again.”

We both laughed.

“Why don’t you go on back to the party,” Alma dismissed me. “I’m just going to freshen up a little and I’ll be right along. Can you find your way?”

“No problem,” I said. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and would have climbed through the nearest smoke-filmed window if I’d had to.

The temperature outside had plunged into the thirties and the party had moved to the solarium. A fire roared in the large fireplace, and Les Fielding’s Combo played a cowboy lament quietly in the corner. An assemblage of fans, all men, surrounded Shanna Bourbon, but Johnny was nowhere in sight.

Mercedes, Alma’s half-sister, who had become chairman
and CEO of Rutherford Oil when their father died two years ago, was at the bar, talking to Richard and my parents, and I headed in their direction. She was as petite and elegant as Alma was gross and ungainly. Her shoulder-length blond hair was sleek and her face refined. She held a highball glass of what looked like Perrier and lime in her small, long-fingered hand.

“Lilly,” she greeted me warmly. “I hope we have a chance to catch up once I get this meeting behind me. It’s so lovely to see you. Please excuse me, there’s Kennedy and I need to grab him for a second.”

“What a thoroughly charming woman,” my mother said as Mercedes disappeared into the crowd. “It’s a pity you never knew her mother. A true English rose with a lovely accent and lovely skin and lovely, lovely manners. Such a tragedy she died so young.”

“What did she die of?”

Mother thought for a minute or so. “I don’t recall,” she said wistfully.

“I can’t believe Mercedes and Alma are sisters,” I said. “They might as well be from different planets. How come you were late?” I kissed her soft cheek. She was wearing one of her old black Chanel dinner suits and a long string of twelve-millimeter pearls.

“Your father refuses to accept the fact that there are now stoplights between here and home, and he never leaves enough time.”

“There shouldn’t even be anything out here,” my father grumbled. He was compact and wiry and wore only faded Levi’s from Johnson’s Western Store, or suits from his Savile Row tailor. Tonight it was a dark nailhead. He was also a thoroughly unreconstructed Western isolationist, a quality I’m proud to have inherited. “I’ll never forgive Tom Wallbank for selling this land.”

“He sold it fifty years ago,” Elias pointed out. The
vest of his gray, three-piece pinstripe stretched around his stomach like a Lycra bodysuit. The buttons appeared cocked to go off like bee-bees. He took a chili relleno from a passing waitress and popped it into his mouth.

“Doesn’t make any difference,” my father retorted. “Should still be rangeland. Nothing but a bunch of damn nouveau riche oil people out here anyway.”

“Well,” I ventured, “we’re sort of oil people.”

My father and brothers all frowned at me. “We drill on our own land,” my father said. “That’s the difference.”

When I was growing up, the Wind River Country Club and Country Estates had been built on a piece of the old Wallbank Ranch, which was then way south of Roundup. Now, of course, it’s practically downtown. My mother wouldn’t let me date boys whose parents were members of the Wind River club. We were strictly a Roundup Country Club family. The Old Club. Did it matter that when my great-grandfather had given the land and underwritten the creation and construction of the Roundup Country Club back before the turn of the century the Indians had probably been as riled up about it as my father was about the Wind River Club? Of course not. That was different.

“Where are our host and hostess?” Mother asked. “I would have thought they might have greeted us.” She was using her vegetable-peeler voice.

“Alma will be right back,” I said, “and Wade was called out of town.”

“I see. Well, I would say that’s no great loss to any of us.”

“You lay off Wade, Katharine,” my father said. “He’s a nice guy.”

“Did you happen to notice who’s here?” Mother
asked, completely ignoring him and rolling her eyes in Shanna Bourbon’s direction.

“Yes.” I smiled. “Have you been over to speak to them?”

“No. I was on my way, but then he disappeared. I intend to meet him, but your father doesn’t want me to. I’ve never met someone who’s ‘done time’ before.”

“He’s nothing but a crook and a charlatan,” my father grumbled. “And he’s sitting on the fence on this damn Siberian vote, still waiting for the best offer. Man’s got no moral compass. And did you get a load of the Russians? They all look like escaped convicts.” Between all the parties for Richard and me and now the Rutherford affair, he’d had his fill. All we could do was keep bringing the whiskey.

“Alma told me you still have time to join the winning team,” I told him.

“As usual, she doesn’t have any idea what she’s talking about.”

I vaguely heard what sounded like the faint pop of a firecracker, maybe two pops. Or maybe one was an echo. But I knew it wasn’t firecrackers. It was gunshots.

I
shoved my drink into Richard’s hand and pulled my little Glock .26 from my purse as I ran through the reception rooms and down the corridors, pausing at each corner to look and listen, but only silence came from Alma’s direction while the sounds of the party grew fainter behind me. When I reached her bedroom, I stopped again outside the door, tight against the wall, my ears straining for the slightest tip-off: a furtive footfall, a silent breath. Nothing presented itself except a scarcely audible, mournful New Orleans trumpet wail from the dressing-room sound system and the stale smell of old cigarette smoke.

“Alma?” I called.

No response.

“Alma? Are you all right?”

I crouched and spun into the bedroom, which appeared empty, and sidestepped my way over to the dressing room, where Alma slumped across the dressing table, a large, clean bullet wound in her right temple and an expression of complete openmouthed, wide-eyed
surprise on her face. Her hand clutched an old horn-gripped Colt .45 single-action Army revolver. The round appeared to have traveled at a forty-five-degree angle and exited through the upper-left quadrant of her skull, slamming a big, ragged chunk of it into the mirror. Bone fragments, brain matter, and blood drenched the pink silk tasseled lampshade. Blood poured from the exit wound and soaked into the delicate pink lace doily that covered the mirrored tabletop. Several crystal perfume bottles and atomizers had spilled or smashed, their contents turning the gelatinous muck into a slick as repulsive and macabre as the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill.

I stepped slowly across to her, careful to walk where there were no other footprints in the thick carpeting, and laid my fingers firmly on her neck. Her heart was still beating. She was alive.

As I shoved my weapon back into my purse and traded it for my cell phone, I looked at the door and saw a dozen shocked, bloodless faces staring back at me. Johnny Bourbon’s expression, that arctic stare, landed between my eyes over all the others, but I didn’t have time to give it a lot of thought.

“If there’s a doctor around, get him in here fast,” I yelled as I punched out 911, which answered instantly. “This is Marshal Bennett, give me District Three Dispatch. Now.”

“Yes, ma’am.” At least they knew who I was. That was major progress over a year ago.

“District Three, Sergeant Holly speaking.”

“Sergeant, this is Marshal Bennett. There’s been a shooting at Eighteen Sunset Drive in Wind River Estates. Looks like a suicide attempt, but she’s still breathing.

“We’re rolling, Marshal. What’s the nature of the injury?”

“Gunshot wound to the head.”

“Can you stanch the flow?”

There were four physicians at the party: internist, gynecologist, urologist, and plastic surgeon—talk about the aging of America, it used to be just the sports-medicine guy—all of whom had been frantically summoned.

The gynecologist, Leo Gregory, got there first and grabbed one of Alma’s raspberry-pink bath sheets as he loped across the room. He pressed the towel to the wound. Then he pulled Alma carefully into a sitting position so her head lolled back into the crook of his arm and lifted her gently onto the floor, where he knelt with her upper body reclined across his lap, cradling her like a baby, a tender pietà, keeping the bloody towel pressed tight. As he lifted her, the revolver slid off the table and tumbled to the floor beside her, landing silently in the thick taffeta folds of the dressing-table skirt.

“We have a doctor on the scene,” I said into the phone as the Preservation Hall Jazz Band swung into “Oh, When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” over the sound system.

“Ambulance is sixty seconds from your location.”

There was nothing to do but wait.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Patch me through to Jack Lewis.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Chief Lewis,” a voice barked seconds later, just as clipped and barky as Roundup’s chief of detectives was himself.

“Jack,” I said. “It’s Lilly. I’m out at Eighteen Sunset Drive in Wind River Estates, the Gilhooly residence. Mrs. Gilhooly appears to have attempted suicide.”

“So?” His voice carried the resentful attitude he always
had when it slipped his mind temporarily that I was constantly saving his ass and, I might add, making sure he got all the credit. “What’re you calling me for?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Jack,” I said under my breath. “I’m calling you because I don’t think it’s suicide. I think it’s attempted murder. I heard two shots and, co-incidentally, one of the big floor-to-ceiling mirrors in her dressing room is shattered, starting from what looks like a little tiny hole up in the corner. It wasn’t broken when I was in here ten minutes ago. And most people don’t shoot a practice round before they put the gun to their head. Just thought you’d like to know.” I slapped the phone closed.

I didn’t add that also, when people blow their brains out, their gun hand doesn’t land conveniently on the table or desktop or wherever, still gripping the weapon. The recoil generally throws the arm out and the weapon with it. Whoever did this to Alma had been watching too much television.

Moments later, we heard the sirens screaming in the distance. The pasty-faced guests watching through the bedroom door breathed a collective sigh of relief, like children rescued from a scary movie. I knew I had limited time to examine the rug before the booted paramedics rumbled across it with their heavy equipment, so I stepped backward, careful to retrace my footsteps, until I could see other footprints pressed into the thick carpeting. The almost iridescent green color made it tricky to pick them out. But, in addition to the tiny holes left by Alma’s sandals and my pumps and the impressions of Dr. Gregory’s loafers, I could see the distinctive prints of stirrup-heeled, pointed-toed cowboy boots: a two-inch-wide half-circle for the heel and about three quarters of the front sole. I knelt down and,
with my finger, drew a line in the pile down one side of the three visible prints, then boxed them in.

“Try to stay away from these prints,” I said to the paramedics in a loud voice as they rushed past me.

Alma was still breathing when they wheeled her off.