hotel room with a grieving Guy Lewis, I saw no reason to tell him that. He didn't deserve it. And somewhere in the world there might be a Mrs. Martin Shore who didn't deserve it, either.
The phone rang, startling us both. I think Guy expected me to answer it. Instead, I picked it up off the nightstand and brought it to him. From hearing only one side of the conversation, I surmised that the fully repaired Miata had just been dropped off. The desk clerk wanted to know if Mr. Lewis wanted her to bring the keys up to his room or should she keep them down at the desk. He told her to keep them and that he'd be down to pick them up later, when his four o'clock appointment arrived.
'What appointment?' I asked, when he got off the phone.
'That detective, the one from Ashland. What's his name?'
'Fraymore,' I supplied. 'He's coming here?'
'Didn't I tell you? He still has some questions to ask.'
The last person I wanted to run into right then was Gordon Fraymore. If he found me in Guy Lewis' room, he'd be ripped, and rightfully so. Worried, I glanced at my watch. Three forty-five didn't leave much time. I stood up. 'I'd better be going,' I said.
'Fraymore asked about you, by the way,' Guy Lewis added.
'About me? How so?'
'He wanted to know how the two of us met. I told him about the Bentley. He seemed to get a real kick out of it.'
'I'll bet.'
'He also asked how we happened to hook up in Ashland. I didn't want to talk about the meeting, so I told him we met during the Green Show.'
By chance both Guy and I had told the same story. Two wrongs don't make a right, and two lies don't make the truth, either-especially not in a murder investigation when the detective already knows better. In homicide-cop mentality, Fraymore was busily adding up provable lies and stirring them into a bubbling vat of conspiracy.
'What did he say to that?'
'Nothing much.'
I was almost out the door, but mention of our meeting brought up another question in my mind. 'How was it that you and Daphne happened to be down here in the first place? Was it something you had planned for a long time?'
'Oh, no,' Lewis answered. 'It was completely spur of the moment, one of those surprise deals. Daphne sprang it on me just the first of last week, although she must have had the tickets earlier than that. I think she and Monica Davenport must have dreamed up the idea in order to get to spend some time together, although if I know Monica, she probably had an ulterior motive. She's just like Alex-always looking for a way to relieve a fellow of a little hard-earned cash.'
There were other things I wanted to know, other questions I wanted to ask, but I didn't want to risk hanging around any longer and running into Fraymore. If he drove up and caught sight of the Guard-red Porsche out in the parking lot, I was dead meat. There aren't that many 928s racing around in southern Oregon. Not only that, it was time to go catch my plane.
Guy Lewis followed me to the door. The food and talk had done him some good. His coloring was better. He seemed steadier on his feet. Outside the room, Guy surprised me by reaching out and grabbing me in a powerful, bearlike hug.
'I've been twelfth-stepped a couple of other times in my life,' he said. 'Some were real hassles. You know- guys coming over to preach in your face and set you on the straight and narrow. At least that's how it seemed at the time. You really listened to me today, Mr. Beaumont, and I want you to know it helped. It helped a lot. I appreciate it.'
I drove away from the Red Lion carrying a heavy load of J.P. Beaumont special-reserve guilt. I had gone on an intelligence gathering mission that Guy Lewis had understandably mistaken for a legitimate twelfth-step call.
He had told me a lot-far more than I deserved to know. And as I drove toward Medford's Jackson County Airport, I realized that-preserving the confidentiality of a meeting-I wouldn't be able to use any of it.
CHAPTER 15
For outlying towns in the Pacific Northwest-the isolated Pullmans, Wenatchees, and Walla Wallas-Horizon Air's busy fleet of small planes fills a very real need. In some markets around Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, those diminutive planes constitute pretty much the only air-travel game in town. Seeing Horizon's fleet of DeHavilland Dash 8's parked in tight clusters at Seattle's C-concourse and dwarfed by the much larger 747s and 767s, I'm always reminded of a swarm of hornets. But they do fly.
When the Medford-Portland-Seattle shuttle came in for a landing, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. The plane was one of the new Dash 8's. I couldn't believe my luck. At six-three and 185 pounds, I can ride in a Dash 8 in relative comfort. My good fortune lasted only as far as Portland. There, I was herded onto a sardine-can Metroliner for the rest of the trip to Walla Walla. An hour or so in a Metroliner puts a permanent crick in my neck and creases in both knees, but it beats walking. Just barely.
Summer comes late to the Northwest. In terms of heat, the end of June is only the very beginning of hot weather, but during this relatively dry year, fire season was already under way. We flew east along the Columbia River, maneuvering around an immense pillar of smoke that rose from an uncontained fire burning out of control in the Mount Hood Wilderness area.
No doubt some anonymous forest-service official was busy at his computer totaling up numbers and figuring out accountability, trying to decide if this particular blaze should end up on the 'natural' or 'man-caused' side of the forest-fire ledger. That was a moot question for the unfortunate animals who had once called that corner of old- growth forest home. Rather than cause, they worried about effect-about battling for bare survival and searching for some new place to live.
In a way, those poor hapless creatures were not unlike Guy Lewis. He, too, had been laid low by complicated events he could neither explain nor fathom. When trees disappear, the animals don't have the time or energy to investigate the cause of destruction. The same for Guy Lewis. Daphne was dead, murdered. Unlike many in his situation, the grieving widower apparently had little curiosity about who had killed her. Just like those ill-fated squirrels, deer, and other wildlife scrambling desperately to escape the raging inferno far below the moving shadow of my plane, he was too numb, too paralyzed, too traumatized, to think linearly.
I, on the other hand, like that fire-counting minion from forest-service officialdom, live in the accountability sector, the cause-and-blame sector, the let's-find-out-why-this-happened department. It's a mind-set, a way of life, that doesn't go away just because your calendar or Tony Freeman says you're on vacation. So I sat in the plane and tried to force what I had learned about the two murders into some kind of meaningful whole.
That didn't work very well. Nothing connected to this case turned out to be quite what I expected. My interview with Guy Lewis was a prime case in point. After hearing him talk openly in the N.A. meeting about his deteriorating second marriage, I was struck by the depth and obvious sincerity of his grief.
Maybe society had jokingly referred to Daphne as his trophy wife; maybe people had derided the king of chemical toilets for being a rich old fool-laughed at him because Daphne led him around by the gonads. But Guy Lewis' relationship with Daphne was no joke to him. He had cared for her deeply and still did. Even though she was dead, Guy was fully prepared to stand up for her-to defend her memory in public if necessary despite the posthumous disclosure of Daphne's none-too-savory past.
And the lady did have a past. That set me to wondering about Daphne herself, about whether or not Guy Lewis' feelings for her had been reciprocated. Daphne had divorced Martin Shore, yet she had somehow managed to keep him hanging around on the sidelines, an arrangement my mother would have referred to as having your cake and eating it, too.
What kind of tortuous, winding path had carried Daphne Lewis from the modeling-scam/porno-queen days of her presumably first marriage in Yakima to the position of sought-after society matron in well-heeled Seattle? There's a hell of a climb between those two extremes, and I'm not just talking about the Washington Cascades, either. How had Daphne managed to travel the distance from point A to point B, and what had she done in
