The Alpine Pursuit (19 page)

“An odd choice,” I remarked as my order arrived on the counter.

Milo frowned. “How so?”

“For one thing, the pay’s better in California,” I pointed out. “For another, Hans sounds like a city guy. Chicago, San Diego, the Bay Area.”

Milo seemed defensive. I suspected that like other Alpiners, he felt that any implied criticism of the town was incomprehensible. “What about Appleton, Wisconsin?”

“His first job,” I said. “He had to start somewhere.”

“Maybe he liked the outdoors,” Milo said.

“Oh?” I collected my white paper bag with its red barn logo. “Did he?”

Milo didn’t meet my gaze. “Well . . . Not that I know of. But he was a quiet guy. Maybe he didn’t talk about how he used his spare time. And,” he continued, now looking me in the eye, “he was buying property. He wanted some space. You couldn’t buy the Kruegers’ four acres near a big city for twice the price.”

I allowed that Milo was right. But Hans Berenger, Nature Lover, didn’t fit with my perception of the man. I paid up front and waited there for Milo to get his lunch. When we were outside, where a pale sun hung directly overhead, I asked if he knew how Hans’s wife had died.

“I put that question to Nat Cardenas,” the sheriff replied. “He said Hans didn’t like talking about it, even six or seven years since her death.”

“Did she have a name?”

Milo made a face. “Yeah, sure. What was it? Julia or Julie or something like that. Hans met her in graduate school. She was a marine biologist. I suppose that’s why they moved to San Diego. She’d be right by the ocean.”

“There’s marine life in the Great Lakes,” I noted dryly.

“What? Oh . . . right.”

We started across the street, which was now bare and dry. Reminders of the windstorm were everywhere. Two saplings that had been put into planters along Front Street lay uprooted on the sidewalk by the dry cleaner’s. A couple of letters on the Whistling Marmot Movie Theater were missing—
The Gladiator
now starred Russell C ow . Parker’s Pharmacy had lost its pestle-and-mortar sign.

Back in the newsroom, I mentioned these items to Vida for her “Scene Around” column. Of course she already had them.

By three-thirty, Leo had enough advertising—barely—to justify sixteen pages instead of our usual twelve. He’d talked Thyra’s son and daughter-in-law into paying for a quarter-page photo of the deceased in exchange for an obit of equal size.

Vida wasn’t happy about that. “A half page devoted to a woman who didn’t even live in Alpine? That’s ridiculous! I suppose I’ll have to write it.” An evil gleam suddenly showed in her gray eyes. “Well, why not?”

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered. “I’ve got my stories just about done.”

Vida scowled at Thyra’s photograph. “Look at this picture! It must have been taken in the twenties! Thyra has bee-sting lips.”

“Selling photo space is the new thing in obits,” Leo said. “They do it all the time in the met dailies. More often than not, the photo submitted is from the deceased’s earlier years. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t start charging, too. Thyra sets a precedent.”

“Wouldn’t you know it,” Vida muttered, sounding more like herself. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea to make local folks pay. It’ll create bad feelings. It’s almost like charging for having lived in Alpine. That’s certainly not right.”

Leo shrugged. “It was only a thought.”

I didn’t say that the decision was up to me, not Vida or Leo. Instead, I asked Leo if he’d gotten to know Hans while they lived in the same apartment building.

“I hardly ever saw him,” Leo replied as Vida handed him Thyra’s photo. “He seemed to leave early and come home late. I figured him for a workaholic. I don’t think I talked to him a half-dozen times.”

I considered Leo’s words. “What’s your rent, Leo? I’m not snooping. I’m trying to figure something out.”

Leo grinned. “Like my next raise?”

I grinned back. “Not exactly.”

“Three-seventy-five,” he said, then added with a straight face, “but that doesn’t include pool privileges.”

There was no pool at the venerable three-story apartment house on Pine Street. “Do you think Hans paid about the same?”

“Probably,” Leo replied. “He was on the third floor, above me. Those are all one-bedroom units like mine.”

“Do you know the asking price for the Krueger property?”

“Two hundred and ninety thousand,” Vida put in. She simpered a bit. “I checked it out with Doukas Realty.”

“They haven’t advertised the place in the
Advocate
,” Leo noted.

“The Kruegers only listed it with Doukas on Monday,” Vida said. “They were trying to sell it on their own, without spending money on brokers or advertising. Fuzzy’s cheap. I suspect his bid was so low that they decided to have a professional handle the sale now that Hans is out of the picture.”

Vida was probably right. “So how much did Hans make at the college?” I mused. “Forty, fifty grand?”

“Somewhere in there,” Leo said. “I seem to remember that when Cardenas was hired on he got seventy-five as president. That was several years ago, but the state legislature has been stingy with education.”

It was no wonder that Nat was considering other offers. “Fifty grand isn’t bad for a single person,” I remarked, “but where would Hans get the money to make a down payment on the Krueger property? A loan from the bank or the teachers’ credit union?”

“Down payment my foot,” Vida said. “The Kruegers want to cash out. They’re buying some fancy-pants condo near Phoenix.”

Leo rubbed the back of his head. “Wow.”

“Rita doesn’t have the money,” Vida went on. “The Patricellis have always been poor. Pete’s done fairly well with his pizza parlor, but I understand Rita had to settle a large sum on her ex-husband, who had an aversion to work.”

“Insurance,” Leo said. “Maybe Hans’s wife had a big insurance policy.”

Naturally, I thought back to Don. Boeing had been generous with its benefits in those days. “I wonder who Mrs. Berenger worked for,” I said. “Her employer might have had substantial benefits.”

Leo eyed me with suspicion. “You’re thinking Hans bumped off the wife to collect her big bucks insurance?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “I’m thinking that may be where he got the money to buy property here.”

“Could be,” Leo replied. “Even a six-figure policy wouldn’t get you much land in the Bay Area.”

Writing up Thyra’s obit took nearly half an hour. The funeral home in Snohomish had provided not only bare facts but some news clippings from the weekly
Tribune
as well. Thyra had had a finger in every possible pie, though the funeral director termed the SCC theater as “her crowning glory.” To placate Vida, I omitted that phrase.

Ironically, by four-thirty we seemed to be ahead of schedule for our five o’clock deadline. All I had to do was proofread Scott’s and Vida’s articles. I did some minor editing on Scott’s stories, but as usual I didn’t touch Vida’s section, except for a couple of minor typos. Vida’s conversion—
surrender
would have been more apt—to semimodernity had been to replace her battered upright with an electric typewriter. Finding replacement parts for her old Remington had become virtually impossible, so she’d been forced to abandon it. But she refused to make the complete leap into the computer age. I had to humor her, though her recalcitrance drove Kip crazy.

Everything was ready for Kip at ten to five. Vida, Scott, and Leo went home. I lingered, thumbing through the college handbook. The hierarchy seemed clear: President Cardenas, Dean of Students Berenger, Registrar Shawna Beresford-Hall, and then the division heads, including Clea Bhuj for Humanities. But what I was really looking for was some way of getting a private chat with Nat and Justine Cardenas.

The idea struck me at a few minutes after five, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. We had no follow-up on how the students, staff, and faculty reacted to a murder on campus. I rushed into the back shop to ask Kip how long he could hold a six-inch space open for me.

“We don’t have any space,” Kip said. “We’re jammed as it is. That half page for Mrs. Rasmussen filled whatever holes we had.”

I studied the layout, page by page. “Here,” I said, pointing to Vida’s feature on Darlene and Harvey Adcock’s trip to Palm Springs. “This can be cut. As usual, Vida has overwritten a travel story. Take out the last four grafs, starting where Darlene talks about coming home to all the snow last Wednesday and rambles on about preferring Alpine’s climate to the desert’s. Okay?”

Kit shrugged. “It’s okay by me, but Vida won’t like it. How soon can you get your new stuff in?”

“I’m not sure I can get it at all,” I admitted. “I’m going to call Nat and Justine right away.”

Justine answered in her cool, controlled voice. I apologized for not phoning sooner, for being negligent, for not acting with sensitivity, and for being alive in general.

Justine remained distant. “Nat got home only minutes ago. He’s exhausted. Couldn’t you make it some other time?”

I explained about our deadline. “It would be a disservice to the college to run the story next week. Your students and faculty need to heal. I’m sure Nat has spoken to them and done his best, but sometimes a public forum is more effective. It touches the entire community.”

The positive publicity angle apparently struck a chord with Justine. “Well . . . it
has
been a very difficult time. When did you want to stop by?”

“I can come now,” I said. “That way, I won’t interfere with your dinner hour.”

Justine agreed that would be best. Fifteen minutes later, I was at their pseudo-Colonial house in The Pines. To my surprise, a black wreath hung on the front door. Justine, wearing tweed slacks and what looked like an expensive black cashmere sweater, ushered me inside.

“Nat and I are having a cocktail,” she said. “It helps him unwind. Would you care for something?”

I was tempted but politely refused. I didn’t want to waste their time—or mine. Justine offered me an armchair with a muslin seat. The Queen Anne and Chippendale style of furnishings included both a highboy and a lowboy. I could picture Justine carefully choosing the pieces to reflect America’s Colonial era. It struck me that she had deliberately obliterated Nat’s Hispanic background. The result was sterile, as if nobody actually lived in the house, or at least in the living room. I’d have preferred a couple of piñatas hanging from the ceiling.

Nat looked properly academic in his dark blue shirt, gray sweater-vest, and black trousers. To add to the illusion, he put down a copy of Petrarch’s
Canzoniere
before rising to greet me.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. “Justine explained your mission. You’re right—it’s time and past time that I made a full public statement. I was still in shock when your Mr. Chamoud telephoned for my reaction Monday.”

The quote Scott had used stated that the college president “mourned the loss of an exceptionally able colleague who had made an indelible impression on Skykomish Community College students.”

Nat sat down again and I resumed my place in the uncomfortable armchair. “I made some notes before you arrived,” he continued, reaching for a tablet on a cherrywood end table next to the double settee that looked like two of my chairs glued together. I couldn’t imagine that the settee was very comfortable, either. There was no sofa. I wondered if Justine had chosen the furniture with yet another motive in mind—guests squirming in discomfort won’t stay long.

“ ‘I particularly regret,’ ” Nat began, reading from his notes, “ ‘that I was the instrument in Professor Berenger’s untimely death. No matter how innocent my actions may have been, I will bear the burden of guilt for the rest of my life.’ ” He glanced at me. “How does that sound so far?”

“Fine,” I said.

He went back to the notes. “ ‘It is possible that foul play was involved. However, I want to assure the college and the community that the campus is a safe haven. No student or parent should feel ill at ease about our academic environment. We are dedicated to excellence in education. However, we must remember that there are always areas in higher education that we can improve. The state legislature should keep in mind that the future of this country rests on the quality of teaching our young people. Even now, as the legislators meet in Olympia, I would urge them to consider not cuts but additional funding to the budgets for our two- and four-year institutions.’ ”

He put the tablet aside while I worked at keeping a receptive expression. At least Nat hadn’t suggested that we put up a billboard showing Hans’s bleeding body and urging the legislature to act before any more faculty members got shot to death in a student play.

“Do you want me to type this out?” Nat inquired, pointing to the tablet.

“No. No, that’s fine. I’m sure I can read your notes, especially after having heard you voice your thoughts so . . . eloquently.”

Nat sipped at his drink. “Good.” He reached over to the end table and tore off the top sheet. “It’s a single page only. I wanted to be brief.”

From my experience, most educators don’t know the meaning of
brief
unless they’re teaching law. Nat stood up to hand me the paper, which I felt was his way of dismissing me.

But I wasn’t done yet. In fact, the statement wasn’t really what I’d come for. It was only an excuse.

“There’s been some talk about a stranger showing up at the theater Friday night,” I said as Nat stood in front of me. “Did you see anyone you didn’t know?”

Nat shifted his stance but remained in place. “Is this the person that the police are looking for?”

“It might be,” I said, “but there’s no direct connection so far. The descriptions of the person who was at the play and the one who drove the stolen car into the river seem to match.”

“Hmm.” Nat ran a hand through his graying dark hair before finally returning to the settee. “I didn’t see him.” He turned to his wife. “Did you, Justine?”

“Of course not,” Justine asserted, fondling her cocktail glass. “I didn’t come backstage until after the play was over.”

Nat gave her a curious look. “Oh. I guess I . . .” He stopped and smiled affably. “I was thinking of the night before, at the rehearsal.”