Tough Cookie

champagne by the case. At first she drank to console herself, then she drank to celebrate receiving ten and a half million dollars for the sale of her husband’s company. He’d been jailed briefly on drug charges, been warned out of the medical supply business, and had moved to Florida.

And then Eileen had met Jack. She’d told me he made her so happy she didn’t want booze. But with the death of Doug Portman, she seemed worried and morose. And drinking more than she should.

I asked Eileen, “What’s the bottom line here?”

“Arthur Wakefield,” Eileen replied promptly. She gestured at the newspaper article with her glass. “Arthur has not had an open conflict with Jack since Jack’s been working for me. But now with Portman suddenly dead, I’m afraid Arthur’ll try to use the local paper to stoke public opinion. Maybe he wants Jack out of town and my restaurant closed. Who knows?” Her voice turned bitter. “I believe Arthur killed Doug Portman yesterday, because he was so angry with him for granting Jack parole. Doug’s death is bound to bring all kinds of negative attention to Jack’s new life. I also believe,” she added, almost spitefully, “that Arthur knocked Jack out and killed his mother, so he could try to inherit her millions before she made Jack a beneficiary of her will. But she’d already changed her will, and Arthur has never recovered.”

I looked at Jack. He shrugged. He said, “That’s all I could think about when I was incarcerated. Who hit me over the head? Who pushed Fiona over the cliff? And why?”

I’d heard a lot of theories this morning, too many to keep straight. On the other hand, I’d seen Tom barely nod at one hypothesis about a crime, laugh at two more, discard a fourth, and jot down his own ideas about a fifth.

“What I don’t understand,” Jack continued quietly, “is all these stories I’ve been hearing from folks in town. Portman had a ton of cash on him when he died. Why?”

I sighed and shrugged. I didn’t want to tell them about my connection to Doug and the unconsummated sale of the skis. I finished my coffee and set the cup down on the saucer. “Thanks for the goodies. I’ll report to Tom everything you told me.”

I nodded to them and they smiled. From habit, I rose and put my dishes in the sink next to the dirty crystal glasses. When I turned back around, Eileen had clasped Jack’s hand in hers.

I let myself out.

CHAPTER 10

Moments later, I was lost in a condo maze. Despite the curving roadways’ fanciful names—Sweethearts’ Summit, Lynx Lane, Mogul Avenue, and Snowcone Court—all the houses were painted monotonous tones of gray or beige, and featured yards piled high with identical mountains of snow. I was baffled and frustrated, as I hadn’t yet mastered crucial details of driving the Rover, including how to signal. After fifteen minutes of winding around in search of Arthur’s condo, I whipped the Rover onto a new, unmarked roadway and searched for clues to my whereabouts.

Arthur had said he lived on Elk Path. Bouncing along the snow-pocked street, I saw signs for the Elk Ridge Nature Trail and Picnic Area, and followed them to a parking lot. I wound between day-skiers unloading equipment from the backs of sport-utility vehicles. A couple of fellows directing traffic did not understand my question, and said I was on Elk Path. Maybe the elk can find it just fine, but I’m having problems, I longed to retort, but didn’t.

It was nine o’clock. I wasn’t due at Arthur’s until ten. One sure way of finding any residence in Killdeer was to locate the street on the town map. It was a smaller version of Big Map, and it was conveniently located next to Cinda’s Cinnamon Stop. Come to think of it, I could get a quadruple-shot espresso there, too! A mind-clearing detour could help, especially since I’d just discovered all kinds of things about Arthur Wakefield that had never emerged in our five weeks of work together.

I parked in one of the gondola lots, trod carefully across the snowpack to the Killdeer map, and found Elk Path. I had missed a turnoff that I had mistaken for a driveway; Arthur’s house was less than five minutes away. I growled and headed for the back of a lengthy walk-up line at Cinda’s. If no one was allowed to ski until the cops finished their investigation, I couldn’t imagine what kind of boom was happening for the shopkeepers and restaurant folks at the base. From inside the shop, though, a waiter recognized me and waved. A moment later, he brought out a quadruple-shot espresso. “PBS lady, right? No charge.”

“Public television has great fans.” I thanked my benefactor, a diminutive fellow with gray eyes set in a freckled face topped with curly red hair. I wondered if this was Davey, but he wore no nametag. I sipped the dark, hot, life-giving stuff. Fantastic. “What’s your name? I want to tell Cinda how nice you were.”

“Ryan,” he said with a grin and a wink.

“Well, Ryan, is Cinda in?”

“Naw, she had a doctor’s appointment for her knee.”

“It’s flaring up again?”

“Yeah. Old boarding injuries never really heal. She lives with a lot of pain. That’s why she opened the shop,” he added helpfully. “She can wash down a painkiller with espresso and feel sorta normal in twenty minutes.”

I thanked Ryan again and moved off toward the Killdeer Art Gallery, where a floppy black-and-white ribbon bow tied on the door had caught my eye. Next to the bow was a calligraphy note.We’re open in honor of our dear departed critic, Doug Portman. Come in and see the artworks he honored as “Best of Killdeer” over the last five years.

When I peered into the gallery, I saw a fur-clad customer and what looked like a saleslady. I pushed through the door and tried to shed my nosy-caterer persona to take on the air of a short, female tycoon. A wealthy patron of the arts, just sipping her espresso …

The fur lady departed. In my backup quilted parka (my better one having been torn in my plummet down the hill) and black ski pants, it was pretty clear that I hadn’t done anything in the presence of a tycoon except serve barbecued ribs. After ten minutes of being ignored by the saleslady, I wandered down “Prize Row,” so indicated by another black-framed calligraphy note lauding the late Doug Portman.

I frowned at the twenty works displayed there. Maybe I was missing something, but I didn’t like them. Then again, what did I know? I stared at the paintings. Some commonsense inner critic was announcing that the work Doug Portman had liked ranged from imitative to mediocre to terrible. I walked past a bad-rip-off-of-Peter-Max acrylic-painted canvas of a racing skier exploding through a snowbank, a Monet-ish drizzly watercolor featuring a rain-soaked elk, and a Dutch-style still-life of a gun cabinet full of rifles. Finally, there was a slashing-brushstroke oil of a bucolic cabin in a daisy-strewn mountain meadow. Bor-ing, as Arch would say. Yet from the right corner of each frame dangled a sometimes-dusty “Best of Killdeer” blue ribbon or bright red ribbon declaring, “Honorable Mention.”

I finished my espresso and yearned for another. Failing that, I thought, eyeing the paintings, a shot of Arthur Wakefield’s Pepto-Bismol.

I yawned and took a third trip down prize row. All but three First Prizes and two Honorable Mentions were still for sale for sums in excess of a thousand dollars. Signs announced that the others were on loan. This left me with a question: If these prizewinners are so good, how come they haven’t sold?

But really, the problem was the pretensions of poor, dead Doug. His own paintings had been mediocre and derivative, and he’d believed they’d make him rich. How then could he judge what was good? I felt sorry for him, even in death.

When another five minutes elapsed and I still hadn’t been asked if I needed help, I meandered to the rear of the store to find a trash can for my paper coffee cup. Beside a water cooler, above the garbage receptacle, three collages hung on the wall. They were all by the same person, the artist whose collages I’d seen at the bistro and in Eileen’s home. For some reason, these works of art made me smile. “Spring Detritus” featured torn photographs of bright-white snow melting on churned-up soil, ski poles speared into patches of matted neon green grass, and dirty lilac mittens caught up in the teeth of a yellow snowcat. “Ski Patrol at Dusk” was crowded with images of ski runs in a blizzard, blurred inmotion images of athletic uniformed skiers, a snowmobile hauling a sled with an injured, faceless skier, and dark, forlorn-looking crossed skis, the signal for help.

Finally, there was “Celebrity on the Mountain.” Pieces of photographs showed hordes of burly guards speaking into walkie-talkies, a stand of metal microphones gleaming in the sunshine, a photograph of half of the