Nothing but Gossip (6 page)

“How ’bout you?” He took another bite of sausage. “How’s the wedding coming along?”

“Great. It still seems unreal.”

“Oh, it’ll be real enough all right. He slips that ring on your finger and you’re fucking trapped for life. Then it’ll cost you a fucking fortune to unload him. That’ll be enough reality for you.”

Buck obviously had had a bad marital experience.

“So I hear Alma Rutherford’s party got busted up last night when she blew her brains out.”

“Well, it wasn’t much of a party to begin with,” I said. “Have you seen Alma lately?”

Buck shook his grizzled head and lit a cigarette. “Nah. Not since her coming-out party. I was one of her escorts. She was a real load. It’s her sister Mercedes who can crank my engine. Talk about a babe. She could get me down the aisle with no problem.”

Neither of us had to say what the chances of that were.

“Alma didn’t try to commit suicide,” I told him. “Someone shot her.”

“No shit. Paper said it was attempted suicide, but what do they know? So what if the family owns it?”

He threw down another shot and was about to continue when the swinging doors blasted open and Linda burst into the room as if she’d been shot from a cannon, her face as wild and red as her hair. “You’d better get up there before I kill this guy,” she said breathlessly.

“What guy?”

“Wade Gilhooly.”

W
ade Gilhooly was much better-looking than I’d been led to expect by Mother’s highly pejorative description. Of course, it was hard to get the full effect of his charms, chained as he was to the chimney of the potbellied stove. It looked pretty uncomfortable to me, hugging the chimney and straddling the stove at the same time.

He was so berserk with anger, his face had turned such a deep shade of crimson, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if his eyes had flown from his head and geysers of steam shot from his ears and his tongue snapped in and out of his mouth like a window shade, except that Linda had gagged him with the Hermes scarf Richard had brought her from Paris.

“Hey, Wade,” I said. “Heard a lot about you. I guess you’re lucky Linda hasn’t gotten the fire going yet,” I joked, except that he wasn’t laughing. “Exactly what’s happening here?”

“Would you believe,” Linda said, her fists fired into her hips like bolts in a bridge, “I offered this … 
this … this
troglodyte
a cup of coffee, and when I went to hand it to him, he tried to feel me up?
Hey!
” she yelled at Wade, who had made an effort to speak. “You get any spit on my new scarf and I’ll rip your fuckin’ nuts off.”

Here’s the deal with Linda. We’re about the same age, but she’s a divorced ranch wife from over near Riverton, which means she’s so tough she could make a Marine drill sergeant weep in eight minutes flat. She was born and raised on a working ranch and then spent twenty-five years helping her husband run a big spread—until the day she found him in the hayloft with the neighbor’s daughter. Linda definitely does not take crap from anybody.

“Yup,” she told me one time, “I went back down the ladder, tossed my cigarette into a pile of hay, closed and locked the barn door, grabbed my best stuff, and took off for town.”

“Did they burn to death?” I asked.

“Hell, no. No such luck. They just put it out with the hose and went out the back.”

And she has all this wavy reddish-gray hair that she wears pulled up in a Gibson Girl sort of bun and thick glasses and a brain bigger than a Pentagon computer, and she is literally the kind of woman who, when a man pulls off her glasses to see how she looks, looks like a goddess.

“You stupid jerk,” she said, and kicked Wade in the ankle with the rounded tip of her no-nonsense, stacked-leather-heel Amalfi pump, left over from sorority rush when she attended Wyoming State in the sixties.

“Some people never learn.” I untied Wade’s two-hundred-dollar gag and tossed it on a chair, then grabbed the padlock keys from Linda’s desk and freed his hands. “Now, let’s start over. Why don’t you come
into my office and have a seat. Would you like another cup of coffee?”

It was hard to tell if Wade was blushing, but he shook himself out like a furious little leprechaun and had the grace to offer an embarrassed apology to Linda before picking up a silver-handled cane off the floor and following me slowly through the door into my sun-drenched office, where the wind sometimes blows straight through the glass.

“Please have a seat,” I told him. “I’ll be right with you.” I closed the office door and turned to Linda, aghast. “I cannot believe you chained an
invalid
, who is
half
your size, to the stove. Are you insane? He could sue us into oblivion.”

This was the first time I’d ever criticized Linda for anything, but I was really shocked.

“His legs may be gimped up, but there’s nothing wrong with his hands, believe me,” she said defensively. “It was like having eggbeaters come at me.”

“I don’t care. Next time, outrun him. Frontier justice is not a go around here, Linda. We do not chain up outlaws in the barn until the sheriff comes. You have a real problem, call Dwight.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. “I got a little carried away.”

“Don’t do it again. He could cream us for harassment.”

“I’m sorry. It never occurred to me.”

I stared at my closed office door for a moment, pulling myself together, then went to join Wade, who had taken a seat and was twirling the cane like a baton, a placid, sunny look on his face.

“I’m a little surprised you aren’t at the hospital with Alma,” I said, sitting down behind my flat-topped oak desk. About a dozen pink message slips lay stacked next
to the phone. “You could at least pretend you care a little, make a show of it. She did, after all, make you a rich man.”

“I’ve been at the hospital all night.” Wade crossed his legs. He had on a good-looking camel sport coat, a navy polo shirt, gabardine trousers, and soft Italian leather loafers. Now that he’d calmed down, although he looked pale and exhausted, with dark circles spreading beneath his eyes—I recalled Alma saying he’d had the flu for a month—he was extremely attractive. Freckles dotted his face, and bushy, sandy-red eyebrows topped his light-blue eyes. His nose looked like a boxer’s, as though it had been broken a couple of times. Sexy. From what I’d learned about him, it sounded like he was both a lover and a fighter. His hands were clean and nails well manicured. Wade was, in fact, handsome, elegant, and comfortably prosperous. What looked like an old burn scar rose jaggedly on his neck above his collar, and beneath the dark circles, the yellowing remains of a black eye smudged his cheekbone.

“Let me get one thing straight.” His color rose again like a crimson tide. “I’m sick of people saying I did this on Alma’s back. She didn’t make me rich. Her father provided the seed money.
I
made me rich. Gilhooly GMC Truck and Chevrolet is the largest dealer in the Rocky Mountain States, and Alma’s never even been through the door.
And
I paid her father back every penny. With interest.”

Linda brought in coffee, and Wade apologized to her again.

“I think I might have learned a lesson,” he said sheepishly.

“I think we both did. I’m sorry I chained you to the stove.” She smiled at him before closing the door, and I could tell he was thinking of grabbing her all over
again. And I knew she was thinking if he did, she’d throw him on the floor, hog-tie him, and beat him to death with his cane.

“What can I do for you?” I said. The top message on the stack was from a major client in Italy. The marchese was missing some more paintings, a Tiepolo this time. From his Venetian palazzo. I loved it when that happened.

“I know Alma isn’t expected to make it.” He blew on his coffee before taking a sip, and I noticed his hand shook slightly as he raised the cup to his lips. I wondered if he were suffering from more than flu. “And the fact is, she and I had one hell of a marriage and I’m going to be the number-one suspect and I want you on my team.”

“But I thought you were in Billings last night.”

“I was. But I want to be careful, so I’m hiring you, just so there’re no screw-ups.”

Wade leaned forward, resting his arms on the desk. His deep-set eyes stared out at me with an almost lupine ferocity, and I felt a gauntlet in there somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if it was a challenge or an invitation. It only felt dangerously dark and sensuous. “Alma and I went our separate ways years ago, and I won’t even begin to pretend I’m surprised this happened. She was a major pain in the butt, excuse my French, and there’re going to be a lot of people who say I was involved. But I wasn’t. And I figure with you working for me, you can keep me posted about what’s going on. Keep me out of it. Help find out who really did it.”

Short of having Jack Lewis call and beg me to head his investigative team, this was the sort of invitation and case I lived for. It had all the elements of homicide that interest me: people with more money than they could possibly need so they were killing for power. For
control. And when you get right down to it, murder is the ultimate exercise of power. I also knew it had been someone in Alma’s immediate circle, because in 95 percent of murders—that don’t involve armed robbery—the killer and victim know each other. Well.

Unfortunately, though, no matter how much I wanted to accept his offer, I knew it would be unprofessional. There was no way I could give this case the attention it deserved. I’d waited my whole life to think about my wedding gown and all the beautiful new things I was going to wear on my Burgundian honeymoon, and the fact that I was finally choosing, and being chosen, for life. I didn’t want to shortchange myself—personally or professionally—in the stretch.

I swallowed. Hard. “I’m really sorry. I wish I could help, but I can’t accept any new clients right now. There are a couple of people I can recommend for you, though.” I scribbled the names of two other investigators on a slip of notepaper and slid it across the desk to him like a doctor dispensing a prescription.

“Whatever your standard fee is, I’ll double it. You’re the best in the field, and you know Alma and all the people involved. If you don’t want to do it for me, do it for Alma.”

Alma? I thought. From what I’d seen of Alma the night before, I wouldn’t help her any more than I’d help Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein or any other genocidal maniac, but I did like the sound of a double fee.

Here’s how I feel about money: A lot of people think that if you’re born with a lot of money, you shouldn’t work. That you should just play golf or bridge or go deep-sea fishing or skiing or yachting or shopping all day. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who skis or yachts or plays golf or shops all day every
day? They have nothing to say that is of any interest to me. I’m interested in people who do things that make a difference, and they’re interested in me only if
I
do something that makes a difference, too. Also, I’ve always made certain that I could pay my own way no matter what my family bank account might say, because you just never know. Lots of people with much more money than the Bennett family have lost everything and had virtually no fall-back position. We Bennetts are workers. We take nothing for granted.

So, when Wade Gilhooly offered a double fee, it got my attention.

“Let me ask you a couple of questions,” I said, pushing the start button on the tape recorder on my desk. “And for the record, this is all going on tape.”

“Sort of like the Richard Nixon of investigators,” Wade joked.

“Nothing like that,” I said.

“Shoot.” Wade spread his palms, indicating he’d answer anything I could throw his way.

“Who do you think did it?”

“I have a few ideas. I tossed their names back and forth all night, and all of them make some sense. By that I mean, there could be plenty of motives, but I can’t see any of these people actually shooting her, trying to murder her. They aren’t that kind of people. Besides, deep down, she could be a nice gal.”

A nice gal who liked big-game hunting for trophies? I don’t think so.

“To me, Mr. Gilhooly,” I said, “someone who can look any animal, wild or tame, human or four-legged, in the eyes and then kill it, unless it’s in self-defense, is a cold-blooded killer. I know too many of those types, and none of them can even remotely be described as
nice gals. Let’s start at the top. Who’s your first possibility?”

“Johnny Bourbon,” Wade answered quickly. “I’d hate to think he’d do it—we’ve all been friends for so long—but I must admit that his was one of the first names that occurred to me last night. I think he and Alma had some big blow-up, but …” He stopped to look for the right words.

“But you think Alma should have been the one to do the shooting?”

“That’s what it sounded like to me. Sounded like he unloaded her, and that’s not the way it usually works with Alma.”

I nodded. I wrote Johnny Bourbon’s name at the top of a blank yellow legal pad. “And, how does it usually work?”

“Oh, you know. She’s usually the one who gets bored first, or they do something that makes her mad and she walks.” His voice was flat and expository, betraying virtually no emotion.

“Who else?” I asked, thinking I’d hate to have a marriage like the Gilhoolys’. They treated it as though it were nothing but a game.

“Did you meet Kennedy McGee at the party?”

“Kennedy McGee? No. But there were a number of guests I didn’t meet. Things fell apart pretty quickly after we got there.”

“I don’t know if he was there or not, but he’s the Great White Hunter who led our safaris for years and he usually attends the Rutherford Oil annual meeting. He’s not a major stockholder, but it’s a congenial group and he makes it a business stop. Alma broke his heart a few years back when she pulled her money out of a big resort he’d been trying to finance, and she felt he’d been stalking her ever since.”

“From Africa?”

“Well, the bottom’s pretty much fallen out of the big-game-hunting business, so he was over here a lot trying to put together groups of rich Americans for the resort. I hear it’s one of those places that’s so expensive and exclusive they practically bring the animals to your room. But do I think he was actually stalking Alma? No. Kennedy’s an okay guy, but Alma liked to live in her own world of intrigue. Most of it was made up.”