High Country Fall

of the arrogance of privileged youth. Yes, he had almost killed me. All the same, he was still just a kid. Okay, a stupid kid. But he’d had a whole lifetime before him, time to learn, time to change. And now in the blink of an eye, all his time was up.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” I said shakily.

“Neither did you,” said George.

Our drinks came and they left me alone to deal with my thoughts while they talked of mutual acquaintances across the state, each getting a feel for the other by whom they admired or considered a showboater or thought was abusing his power.

Eventually, I came back to them and looked around the restaurant. It was neat and clean but decidedly downscale in appearance. The frozen margaritas were pleasantly tart, though, and the nachos supremo were wheat-flour nachos, not cornmeal. The clientele seemed to be mostly Mexican—day laborers, domestics, and hospital custodians—yet I did see several white doctors and nurses sprinkled around.

“How did a place like this slip under the zoning radar?” I asked.

“Dr. Ledwig,” George said. “He argued that if these people were going to come up here and work for us, they deserved a place they could relax in, a place they could afford. As you see, though, no garish neon outside, no calling attention to itself. He wasn’t that liberal.”

“I’m pretty sure Sunny Osborne killed him,” I said, licking a fleck of salt from my fingertip.

Underwood almost choked on his drink. “Huh?”

“I had plenty of time to think about things while I was sawing my way through that seat belt,” I told him. “What did the UPS driver tell you?”

“That the woman was driving a vanity plate with ‘SUN’ on it.”

“Sunny, right?”

His nod confirmed my theory. “Yeah. And tonight she admitted it.”

“She admitted killing Ledwig?”

“No. Just that she was there. Stopped by to see if Mrs. Ledwig wanted to play tennis and left him alive and well.”

I shook my head. “I really, seriously doubt that.”

“But you’re her alibi for Osborne’s death,” he protested.

“Yes.”

“Who’s Osborne?” asked Dwight. “And how did you get to be somebody’s alibi? I thought you said you weren’t going to get involved.”

“I’m not involved,” I said. “Not really. But people tell me things.”

He gave me a sardonic look. “Maybe if you didn’t go poking around, asking questions …”

George smiled and Dwight just shook his head. “Okay, tell me.”

Anything to take my mind off Jason Barringer. Together, George and I brought him up to speed on the two deaths.

“What you might not know,” I told George, “is that Ledwig called Norman Osborne the night before he was killed and warned Osborne that he wouldn’t stand by and let him do something that was legal but unethical.”

“Which was?”

“Ledwig and Osborne used to be tight, right?”

George popped a nacho in his mouth and nodded.

“Then sometime late in the summer, Osborne started avoiding him. At the same time, though, he decided to accept Bobby Ashe’s offer of a merger. In fact, he pushed it through so fast that the Ashes got a better slice than they expected, according to Joyce. They kept the merger so quiet that even Ledwig didn’t get wind of it till the day before he was killed, two days before the final papers were signed that would make the partnership a done deal. Bobby and Joyce had stopped by the Ledwig house, and she told me Bobby let it slip. Trish Ledwig says that as soon as the Ashes were gone, her dad called Osborne and said, ‘I can’t let you do this to them.’”

“Do what?” George asked. “The merger? Hell, that was good business for both of them.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. Not if Norman was going to stop being a rainmaker and become a drain on any partnership.” In my mind’s eye I saw again the tears in Sunny’s eyes when they sang together. Love had been there, yes, but also grief and pain.

“He was sick? I thought they both had physicals before the insurance company would write the policies.”

“They did. His trouble wasn’t physical. It was mental.”

“Oh, now, wait a minute. Norman Osborne was one of the sharpest, savviest—”

“Was, maybe, but that night at the party, he kept saying things that didn’t compute. He spoke about Ledwig as if they were still close friends, as if Ledwig was still alive. He referred to the senior center Ledwig was going to build because he’d forgotten that it was already built. He forgot my name and wrote it down on his notepad so he’d remember.”

George and Dwight were both looking skeptical.

“Carlyle Ledwig was a gerontologist who specialized in the aging process,” I said, carefully loading a nacho with guacamole. “He would have picked up on any symptoms long before anyone else except perhaps Sunny. I think that’s why Osborne started avoiding him and that’s why he rammed through the merger.”

“Okay,” George said, “but even if he was starting to lose it a little, Bobby Ashe wasn’t born yesterday. Why