Dark Tort Part 4

"Yes, Dusty and Wink were friends. I saw Wink over at the Routts' house sometimes, and I know Dusty went to see her."

"And at the firm, were they friendly?"

"Sure."

"With each other and the lawyers, or just with each other?"

It was all I could do not to start laughing again. "When I serve breakfast, from Monday through Thursday? There's a dining room, with two big dining tables. The staff-Wink, Dusty, and Georgina, their paralegal who's now in Hawaii with the other attorneys-would always sit at the second table. They didn't really mix with the bigwigs."

"The bigwigs?"

"You know. The lawyers. I mean, the lawyers were okay, but-"

Britt poised his pen over his notebook. "Describe them to me. How'd you get hired by H&J in the first place?"

"I was referred by Brewster Motley. He's a friend of Richard Chenault, who's the head honcho. Brewster is a criminal attorney who-"

"Yeah, I know him," Britt interrupted. "Looks like a beach b.u.m, talks like Perry Mason. Did he get along with Ms. Routt?"

I frowned. "I don't even think they knew each other."

"Can you name the rest of the staff that's in Hawaii?" Britt tilted his baby face as I recited the names. In the fluorescent light of the interrogation room, his skin looked pale and clammy. "Describe Richard Chenault to me."

"Late fifties, combs his silver hair straight back, so he always looks like he just got out of a swimming pool. A strong guy, and proud of it. Does a lot of bodybuilding, I think."

"And the kind of work he was doing with Dusty?"

"I don't know exactly. Wills, estates, that kind of thing. That's what they do at H&J."

"Chenault easy to get along with?"

I smiled. "I wouldn't go that far. He is imperious. And he loves to play jokes on me." I told him about the gin in the coffee, the moths in the tablecloth, the green food coloring in the eggs.

"He just sounds like a ton of fun."

"He sort of is, really. He fell in love with a friend of mine, a doctor." I told him about K.D. and the alt.i.tude sickness. "They moved to a big house in Aspen Meadow and Richard bought a partnership in Hanrahan & Jule. But he had a little something on the side, and it wasn't asparagus. K.D. found out, and now they're getting divorced."

"Did Richard Chenault get along with his niece?"

"I'm telling you, everybody seemed to get along with Dusty. And really, because she was working so hard for Richard, it had gotten to be that I didn't see her a whole lot outside of the firm, except for our cooking lessons together."

Britt asked, "You live across the street from her family, right?"

"Yes."

"They get along? Any problems?"

"They all get along. No problems. Really, they're great. Sally, Dusty's mother, adores her, as do both her grandfather, who lives with them, and Dusty's little brother, Colin."

"Go on." When I gave him a quizzical look, he said, "Tell me more about her family."

"Dusty's father, Richard's brother, took a hike while Sally Routt was pregnant with Colin, Dusty's very little brother. He left her with nothing but debts, and hasn't been heard from since. Sally was forced out on the street, literally. One of the first things she did was to take back her maiden name, Routt. Sally's father, John, lives with them, because he was blinded in prison."

Britt's forehead furrowed. "Blinded in prison?"

"Back before rabbits were the guinea pigs for cosmetics companies, those companies tested their products on prisoners." Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. "John Routt was a guinea pig for a cosmetics company testing mascara, and the stuff blinded him. Dusty loves...loved her grandfather. He's one of the reasons she went to work for a cosmetics company after high school...she said she didn't want that to happen to anybody else. Naive, but sweet, which is the way Dusty was."

"So she went from a cosmetics company to a law firm? Just like that? Seems like an odd leap, for a young woman, anyway."

"No, she went to community college in between. It was her uncle who hired her to work for H&J."

"But why would she want to work in a law firm?"

I pressed my lips together and tried to remember exactly what Dusty had said about that particular leap. We'd been working on a breakfast pie at the time, a light-tasting but hearty concoction of blue cheese, eggs, and cream cheese, mellowed with sauteed shallot and chopped scallion. We'd just decided to call the dish Blue Cheesecake, when Dusty launched into a story about a family on our street suing a Colorado electric company. When a March blizzard dumped five feet of snow on our little burg, we'd lost power for a couple of days. But west of Aspen Meadow, the outage had lasted for five days, because some dummy at the power company had sent every one of their tractors over to the western slope. This family on our street had been particularly distraught, as their very independent eighty-year-old grandmother lived out in the area that didn't have power. Cell-phone service in the mountains is iffy at best, and the family hadn't been able to raise the grandmother or any of her neighbors. By the time the power company managed to bring a tractor over from Grand Junction and replace the fuse that had blown in the neighborhood, the grandmother had run out of firewood. She had frozen to death.

The family on our street had been unable to get the county attorney to charge the power company with negligent homicide. But they'd been determined to sue the power company in civil court for wrongful death. This had gotten Dusty interested in torts, and the law. She hadn't had the wherewithal to go to college, but she received a partial scholarship to a community college. After that, she was determined to become a paralegal, and maybe even eventually a lawyer. If the family whose grandmother had died was going to sue the power company, then maybe, Dusty reasoned, she could eventually help people like her grandfather, who had been treated so abominably by that cosmetics company, all those years ago. And then her uncle had shown up, and been willing to foot the bill and hire her, so Dusty had seen it as divine intervention.

All this I explained to Britt. He whistled.

"Sounds like a pretty extraordinary young woman."

"She was."

He asked, "What about Dusty's love life?"

I thought back, trying to remember what had been just out of reach when I'd first seen Vic a few hours ago. "A couple of months ago, Dusty told me about some problems she was having with her boyfriend. He's Vic Zaruski, the fellow who helped me tonight. I just happened to run into him when I was looking for a phone."

"Stop and tell me about that."

This I did, as Britt wrote. "Vic was very nice and helpful, and he seemed extremely broken up when he heard something had happened to Dusty." I went on to explain that I knew little of Vic, beyond a short but friendly chat I'd had with him one time when I'd brought a meal over to the Routts, and he'd been waiting for Dusty. He was going to a technical and vocational school somewhere outside of Denver, and he loved to play the piano. I did remember that he was particularly proud of his car, a vintage white Chrysler Sebring convertible that he kept in immaculate condition. This summer, I'd admired the way Vic glided that ultracool car into the Routts' driveway, when he came to pick up Dusty. I didn't know the details of the breakup, I only was aware that I hadn't seen the Sebring for a while. Still, what twenty-year-old woman didn't have romantic ups and downs?

"So, did Dusty have a current boyfriend?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe."

"Dusty told you all this stuff while you cooked together, but you don't know whether she had a boyfriend?"

"Wait a minute." She'd said she had something to tell me. And she'd promised to explain the new bracelet. My brain finally recalled what had been bothering me. "There might have been somebody, though she didn't exactly tell me about it."

"What do you mean?"

I bit my lip. I was so tired. And was it warm in this room, or was that my imagination? "I'm not sure," I said finally.

"Tell me anyway."

"When Dusty came last week for her cooking lesson, she was wearing a bracelet. It wasn't the kind of jewelry she could possibly afford."

"What do you mean?"

I shook my head. "It was a complex arrangement of opals and diamonds. I asked her about it, almost, you know, playfully. Anyway, she...glanced down at it and kind of frowned. Then she said she'd go take it off, she really shouldn't cook while she was wearing it. Then I said, 'Aren't you going to tell me about it?' And she said, 'How 'bout this? I'll wear it next week and explain it to you.'"

"Meaning what?"

"I don't know. Did you find a bracelet on her?"

"Did you, Mrs. Schulz?"

"No, I did not."

"Was she wearing it when you discovered her?"

"I don't remember."

Detective Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and half grinned. "What do you think was going on with this bracelet?"

"I thought I wasn't supposed to speculate."

"Exactly. So, in all your cooking lessons, Dusty Routt never mentioned a boyfriend. But once, you caught sight of a bracelet? And she said she had something important to tell you? Something important to tell you last night, to be exact, when she was going to explain the bracelet."

"That's correct."

Since I wasn't supposed to speculate, what I didn't tell Britt was that I had thought Dusty was kidding around one time when she had told me that her real motivation in learning to saute vegetables, steam fish, bake bread, and roast lamb was to attract a wealthy husband. This dream fellow would fall in love with her cooking, she reasoned, with a laugh and a shake of her newly highlighted hair. But it had felt so much like a joke that I'd never taken it seriously. And in all our time together, she'd never talked again about this inspiration for learning to cook. Maybe I'd inform Britt of this particular conversation at some point.

"Look," I said, "I have a ton of kitchen work to do for a big party tomorrow, if the party actually takes place. And I mean what I keep telling you, I really am exhausted. Do you have any idea when I could get back the kitchen equipment that I dropped in the H&J office?"

"We'll have your husband bring it to you."

"Thanks. Sorry about the mess I left in the reception area."

"Not your fault. A cleaning team will come in when we're done with the crime-scene a.n.a.lysis."

"Good." I rubbed my eyes. If there had been a bed there in that toasty-warm interrogation room, I think I would have lain down on it.

"Okay, Mrs. Schulz. Where will you be for the next couple of days? In case we need to talk to you some more."

I gave him our address, the Ellises' address, where I was supposed to be doing Donald Ellis's birthday party the next day, and the location of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Aspen Meadow, where I was catering Gus's christening on Sunday. Almost as an afterthought, I said, "I sure don't feel like going back to work after a friend of mine has died. I don't want to think about having to act happy when I see people."

"Oh, Mrs. Schulz," said Britt. "Tell me about it."

CHAPTER 4.

Tom was waiting for me in the department snack room. I blinked in the bright light of the pop and candy machines that lined the walls. In one, gla.s.sed-in shelves offered limp, plastic-wrapped sandwiches that looked like one of Arch's lab experiments. Several patrol officers, appearing even more exhausted than the sandwiches, sat talking at one of the small tables. Upon our entrance, they put down their foam coffee cups and surveyed us with hooded, curious eyes. Tom nodded to me and tilted his head, indicating the door. The less said in the department, he seemed to be saying, the better.

Fine by me.

"I was just bringing in the bread ingredients," I explained to him ten minutes later, once we were headed up the interstate, back toward Aspen Meadow. A blanket of clouds now obscured the moon, and the night was once again impenetrably dark. A chilly wind slapped the dark sedan and swirled up flakes of ice from the roadway. I went on: "When I went in, I tripped over her. It took me a few minutes to realize Dusty was just lying there...and that she wasn't moving."

Tom drew his mouth into a frown and concentrated on keeping the car from swerving out of the lane. "First tell me how you're doing. Then we'll get to Dusty." He flicked me a quick glance, which seemed to tell him I wasn't doing very well, as a matter of fact. He turned his eyes back to the road and held out his right arm. "Come here."

I leaned in to his embrace. My seat belt cinched my torso and I unbuckled it. What was he going to do, arrest me? I was numb, cold, unable to feel anything. The rea.s.suring way Tom tugged me into his warmth, the way his strong hand held on to my right shoulder...these were what I needed, and he knew it.

"Did you get somebody to go over there, to be with Sally?"

"I called Father Pete. I know he's recovering from that coronary, but I also knew he'd probably have another one if I didn't call him about this."

"Will I be able to see Sally when we get home?"

"Nope. You're a witness, and they're going to try to keep you apart."

"But she's my friend," I pleaded. "A neighbor, Tom. Please. I just feel responsible, dammit. I keep thinking, if I'd only arrived on time-"

"Stop. Look, let me see what I can do. Father Pete should be there, and our team is probably finishing up at the Routts' house. Then the victim-a.s.sistance people will go in, try to be helpful, that kind of thing."

I shuddered. I didn't want to picture the victim-a.s.sistance team, with their quilts and their counseling. Your daughter's just been killed, Mrs. Routt, you need anything from the grocery store? But I knew they would do better than that.

"I want to be there for Sally. Her family has been through too much."

Tom's hand tightened on my shoulder. "I'll talk to my people. Don't worry. Knowing you, you'll be there, Miss G."

I snuggled into Tom's side, closed my eyes, and thought about the Routts. I liked them. And I felt empathy for Sally, since I'd spent quite a few years as a single mom myself. But life had been much more challenging for her than it had been for me. When Colin's father had skipped, Sally had told me she'd been forced to patch together funds for food, clothing, and shelter from a variety of government agencies. Our parish, Saint Luke's Episcopal, had coordinated with Habitat for Humanity to chip in with materials, muscle, and weeks' worth of meals, coordinated by yours truly, to help build Sally, her father, Dusty, and little Colin a modest, two-story house across the street from us.

But there had been other disasters, like Dusty's pregnancy and loss of her scholarship. Dusty had told me she wanted the baby. She'd been excited. And then she'd miscarried. On and on it seemed to go for the Routts. Now gossip in town would center on how "the welfare people" were clearly unwilling or unable to break out of the pattern of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up their lives. Unfortunately, Dusty's murder would appear to be confirmation of this cruel judgment.

I opened my eyes. Had I slept? I thought so. What time was it? The dashboard clock said it was half past three. The road was now cloaked in a frigid fog that promised snow. Despite the icy slick that was glazing the roads, I wanted Tom to drive faster. I wanted to get home, take a shower, and get into bed. I wanted my dear warm husband to lie down beside me, wrap his arms around me, and tell me everything was going to be all right. Which, of course, it wasn't.

The sedan crested the hill and I pulled away from Tom. The dark cloud surrounding us obscured the mountains of the Continental Divide. There, the peaks had been iced with snow since the beginning of September, and I suspected they were now getting a fresh dumping.

"So," I asked Tom, "what are the cops doing at the Routts' house now? I mean, right this minute?"

Tom exhaled. "The usual. If the mother's not a suspect-"

I snorted and checked the rearview mirror. Pinp.r.i.c.ks of snow were tapping on the windshield. "Of course she's not a suspect."

"They'll ask if anyone else has rights to the house."

"What are you talking about?"

"Miss G. Let me finish. Our guys don't want anyone to be able to go into the Routts' house and plant things."

"Plant things?"

Tom's voice turned weary. "Put things in there that would tend to implicate someone else. Or indicate suicide."