The Alpine Advocate (13 page)

“It’s a walrus tusk,” I snapped. “Okay, then I won’t tell you about Phoebe Pratt eloping with Neeny Doukas.”

Milo’s sandy brows arched. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Never mind.” I would have hummed a bit if we hadn’t been sitting down to dinner. My mother had never allowed singing at the table. “If you don’t believe me, check it out. Clark County, Nevada. August of this year.”

To my satisfaction, Milo was hooked. “We will. Hell, Emma, this is a community property state. Neeny must have rewritten his will. If he hasn’t, everything will go to Phoebe should she outlive him.”

“Simon would make sure it didn’t,” I pointed out. “Assuming he knows they got married.”

Milo waved to a couple coming across the room. I didn’t know them. In fact, I only recognized four of our fellow diners, both younger couples who lived on the fringes of Alpine. The rest of the two dozen customers had probably come up from Monroe, or even Seattle and Everett. The Café de Flore’s reputation was growing beyond the boundary of Skykomish County.

“Whether or not Phoebe and Neeny eloped doesn’t help us with Mark’s murder,” Milo noted. “It’d be more likely that somebody would have knocked off Phoebe. Or even Neeny.”

I sipped my Beaujolais and tried to figure out the flaw in Milo’s argument. I couldn’t find one. I sighed. “What about Heather Bardeen?”

“Heather?” Milo looked puzzled. “She’d already broken up with Mark. Why would she want to bash his head in?”

“Maybe he done her wrong,” I said lightly.

“I’m sure he did. More than once. But so what? When did you last meet a twenty-year-old girl who went gaga over her lost honor?”

Milo had a point. Even if Heather was pregnant, she wasn’t likely to rush off to Icicle Creek and bust Mark’s head with a crowbar. I savored my last mouthful of beef and wondered if the bikers had really returned.

Milo’s plate was clean as a whistle, turnips and all. He took out a small spiral note pad with a ballpoint pen. “By the way, I’ll need a description of Chris for that APB.”

I grimaced, feeling like a traitor. But dissembling wouldn’t serve any purpose. The Doukases, Harvey Ad-cock, and a dozen other people could provide the information Milo needed.

“Twenty years old, five-eleven, about a hundred and fifty pounds, straight black hair worn just a little too long, black eyes, straight nose, slight dimple in chin, no distinguishing marks.” I hesitated, giving Milo time to finish writing. He was quick and looked up with approval. I went
on: “Faded blue jeans, maybe Levi’s, faded denim jacket, maybe ditto, Hard Rock Cafe—Honolulu T-shirt, Dodgers baseball cap, Reebok tennis shoes in white with black and green stripes. No, hold it.”

Milo looked up again, pen poised over the pad. “What?”

“He’d changed his T-shirt.” I shut my eyes, trying to picture Chris as I’d seen him last. “It was something about Hawaii—a cocktail, with
SUCK ’EM UP
! on it, I think. And … let me see … I can’t … Oh!” I put a hand to my mouth. “He wasn’t wearing that denim jacket. He’d loaned it to Mark. Chris had on Mark’s leather bomber jacket.”

Frowning, Milo flipped back through the pages of his note pad. “You’re right. Mark had on a denim jacket, J. C. Penney issue.” He regarded me very seriously. “Tell me more about the baseball cap.”

“More? What can I say? That it was autographed by Tommy Lasorda?” I gave Milo a perplexed look. He didn’t so much as flicker an eyelid. Then I saw Chris in my mind’s eye again, standing in front of the Monet. “Chris wasn’t wearing the cap when he came home. Is that what you mean?”

Milo nodded once and tapped the note pad with his pen. “Mark wore the cap. They found it next to his body. It’s got his blood and his hair on it.”

“Of course,” I said slowly. “It was raining. Mark borrowed both the cap and the denim jacket. Chris’s hair was wet when he came home. I remember that now.” Struck by a sudden thought, I leaned eagerly across the table. “Now reconsider your suspicions regarding Chris—if he’d killed Mark, wouldn’t he have taken back his own jacket?”

Milo looked at me as if I’d been sniffing Elmer’s Glue. “I’ve never said Chris murdered Mark,” he replied carefully. “What are you implying? First they swap clothes, then they try to kill each other? My sisters used to do that, but fortunately, nobody ever ended up dead.”

The waitress came for our dessert order, but for once I abstained and ordered a King Alfonse. Milo settled for the café’s version of burnt cream and a snifter of brandy.

There was something else about Chris and Mark and their jackets that bothered me, but my brain was numbed by the excellent meal. The fragmentary idea slipped away, and I changed the subject from violence to domesticity. “Where are your kids?” I asked Milo when the waitress had left.

“The youngest—Michelle—is living with Old Mulehide and her second husband, Peter the Snake, in Bellevue. Tanya is shacked up with some would-be sculptor in Seattle.” He shook his head. “She supports him, and he makes erasers out of Play-Doh. I don’t get it. My son, Brandon, is going to school in Oregon. Corvallis. He wants to be a vet.”

“At least he has a goal.”

Milo shrugged. “Of sorts. He wants to move to Kentucky and take care of million-dollar thoroughbreds. He’ll be lucky to come back to Alpine and unruffle the feathers of Vida’s canary.”

I sympathized, briefly. Furtively, I glanced over at Milo, who was immersed in his burnt cream. He was attractive in his way, with regular, if unremarkable features, tall, solid, smart enough. He even had a sense of humor. So why did I feel about as thrilled by his presence as if I’d been dining with Vida? The truth was, I’d hoped the evening might provide a springboard for future intimacies. Maybe it was Adam’s needling, or the thought of spending the night alone in the wake of a murder. Perhaps I was lonely and didn’t know it. But whatever had spurred me into wishing for some sparks to fly with Milo Dodge, the truth was that nothing was happening. I fervently hoped it was the same with Milo.

I didn’t get to find out. When we pulled up in front of my house half an hour later, Bill Blatt was waiting for the sheriff. Fuzzy Baugh had been rushed to Alpine Community Hospital with an apparent heart attack; he was listed in critical condition. Milo Dodge put the siren on and raced off toward Front Street, leaving me alone.

*   *   *

The last person I expected to see on my doorstep that night was Jennifer Doukas MacDuff. She knocked just before ten, about a half hour after I got home. Wearing another sack of a dress and with her long hair straggling over her shoulders, Jennifer was definitely waiflike. I took in a deep breath of fresh, pine-scented air and ushered her into the living room.

“Kent and I had a fight,” she said, collapsing onto the sofa. “Over you.”

“Me?” I had just changed into my bathrobe and was drinking a Pepsi. “Why?”

Jennifer slumped against the cushions, looking even more drab than usual by contrast with my emerald-green upholstery. “Kent thinks your story about the gold got Mark killed. He said you all but admitted it at my folks’ house. And he also thinks you’re hiding Chris Ramirez.” She gave me a plaintive look. “Are you?”

“No. Want some pop?”

Jennifer did and opted for 7-Up. I returned from the kitchen to find her in tears.

“What’s wrong? Are you crying for Mark?” I inquired gently, sitting next to her and putting the glass of soda on the coffee table.

Jennifer sobbed on but shook her head. “Mark was a jerk in a lot of ways,” she said between sniffs. “I’ll miss him, sure. But it’s Chris I feel most sorry for.”

“How come?” I shifted on the sofa while Jennifer tried to compose herself and sit up.

“I was the only one he’d make up to when he was little,” Jennifer said. “Aunt Margaret had me baby-sit a couple of times. That was just before Hector disappeared. I never understood that. I was only a kid, about ten, but I liked Uncle Hector. He wasn’t educated, but he was nice. He seemed to really like Aunt Margaret—and Chris, too. His running off has never made any sense to me. Maybe I was too young to take it all in.”

“Tell me about Hector.” It had occurred to me that in more ways than one, Hector Ramirez was the missing link
in the Doukas family history. “What did he do for a living?”

Jennifer reached for her pop and looked vague, which I realized was typical. “Labor stuff. Not logging, but construction, maybe. My father said he was lazy. Hector didn’t work all the time, but sort of off and on.”

“Construction’s like that,” I remarked. Vida had said Hector had come to Alpine to help put in a sewer line. It would follow that he’d try to get work as a manual laborer; it would also follow that Neeny Doukas would try to prevent his despised son-in-law from getting employment. “Maybe Hector left town to find another job and something happened to him.”

Lapping at her soda like a cat, Jennifer shook her head, the honey-blond hair swinging across her face. “If he had, wouldn’t somebody have notified Aunt Margaret? He must have had an I.D. Besides, he and Margaret did go away for a while, when they were first married. In fact, Chris was born in Seattle. But I guess she got homesick. Or else she thought the rest of the family would change their minds. They didn’t.”

“Was Hector an American or a Mexican National?” I asked.

Jennifer considered. “I think he was from Los Angeles. He had kind of an accent but not much.” She sat back, her shoulders hunched. The Doukas arrogance seemed to have been obliterated in Jennifer by Cecelia’s self-effacing nature. In some ways, it was a pity. I wondered how Jennifer faced up to Kent MacDuff.

I finished my Pepsi and realized that the rich food and red wine had given me heartburn. A bit guiltily, I thought of Fuzzy Baugh, lying in the intensive care unit at Alpine Community Hospital. If his heart attack had been severe, he would be moved to Everett or Seattle. Alpine’s medical facilities were limited.

I came back to the subject at hand. “Do you remember much about Hector’s disappearance?”

Jennifer fiddled with her hair and squirmed a bit. “Not
really. Margaret didn’t tell anybody at first. At least not the family. Then I guess she called the sheriff, but they didn’t start looking for him right away. Grandpa interfered, I think, and told Eeeny Moroni not to bother.”

Recalling that Vida had said there were rumors about Neeny paying Hector to hit the road, I decided to broach the topic. “Do you think your grandfather might have bribed Hector to leave town?”

Jennifer turned her pale blue eyes on me in astonishment. “Oh! I don’t …” She swallowed hard, blinked and put her chin on her fist. “Gosh, I don’t know. I never thought about it.” For a few moments, she apparently did just that. Then she gave a tentative shake of her head. “I can imagine Grandpa trying it, but honestly, I don’t see Hector going along with him. Like I said, Hector really loved Aunt Margaret and Chris.”

The living room was silent while we each reflected on the life and times of Hector Ramirez. I hadn’t built a fire, and there was a definite chill in the air. The wind was gentle tonight, a soft sigh in the trees that surrounded all but the front of my house. I heard a logging truck rumble down the street as someone came home, no doubt after a long stop at Mugs Ahoy or the Icicle Creek Tavern.

I was the first to break the silence. “I’m puzzled about Chris and Mark. Your brother borrowed Chris’s cap and jacket, yet Kent says they had a fight. That doesn’t make sense.”

Suddenly edgy, Jennifer avoided my gaze, hiding behind her veil of fair hair. “There was no fight,” she said in a mumble.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Is Kent trying to cause trouble or is he always so full of bunk?” My guess was both, but I waited with a smile for Jennifer’s reply.

She prefaced it with a deep sigh. “Oh, Kent can be such a pill! He doesn’t mean to be, but I think he feels he has to act like a big shot because he married into the Doukas family. It’s really very immature.”

“It sure is. It’s also harmful to people like Chris. It gave Sheriff Dodge the wrong impression. I’m very relieved to hear there was no quarrel.”

Jennifer seemed to be brooding over her husband’s faults. She looked up suddenly, pushing the long hair off her face. “I didn’t say there was no quarrel. I just said there wasn’t one between Chris and Mark.” She thrust out her small chin in a surprisingly pugnacious manner. “Kent and Mark got into it, just before Mark left. Having him go off and get killed is enough to make me cry for him, too.”

“Oh.” I took note of the uncharacteristic spark in her eyes. “Yes, I can understand that. What did they fight about?”

Her shoulders slumped again. “Kevin. Mark was mad because Kent’s brother had told your reporter about the gold. Except there wasn’t any, of course. Mark blamed Kent for having such a dopey brother.”

I’d meant to talk to Kevin but hadn’t gotten a chance. By the time he was out of school, I was knee-deep in phone calls and Fuzzy Baugh’s visit. Now it was too late to call a teenager who had to get up at seven in the morning. At least that’s the way it had worked at our house.

I wondered how far I could push Jennifer. I sensed that her anger—or in her case, anguish was a better word—with Kent might temporarily overcome her protective instincts. “Was it a serious quarrel?”

“Well, they didn’t hit each other this time. I heard some of it. They just yelled a lot, mostly about who had the stupidest relatives.” A flash of alarm crossed her face. “Don’t take this wrong, Ms. Lord—Mark and Kent were always on each other’s case. It was some kind of macho deal. But they weren’t enemies. They even partied together.”

The kind of partying Mark and Kent had done depressed me. I could envision raucous nights with a half-dozen kegs, stale nachos, and bad jokes, culminating in ghastly trips to the bathroom. By comparison, my bathrobe and a can of Pepsi didn’t look half so bad.

“But on that note, Mark left?” I asked innocently.

“I guess.” Jennifer looked glum.

“Then I gather your dad gave Chris a ride home?”

She drank more soda. “Yes. A few minutes later, we went home, too.”

“You didn’t see Chris again?”

“No.”

“You stayed home the rest of the evening?”