The Alpine Fury (27 page)

“I know, you’re a Scotch drinker. Like Milo.” I handed Leo his beverage of choice. He’d get two drinks before dinner and one glass of wine while we ate. I wasn’t going to send a hammered Leo driving down the hills of Alpine. He might end up with something worse than a sprained ankle.

The memory of his accident spurred me to ask a question that had been niggling at the back of my mind for almost two weeks. “Say, Leo, how did you get to work that Tuesday after you fell? Did you drive?”

Leo was in the process of lighting a cigarette. I was beginning to feel as if I were spending my life in a smoke-filled casino. “That Tuesday? Shit, I don’t remember.” He didn’t look at me as he shook the match into oblivion and tossed it in what was usually an immaculate marble ashtray.

It was useless to press the point. If Leo had been involved with Linda, it was none of my business. Unless, of course, he’d killed her. I choked on my bourbon.

Jumping off the sofa, Leo circumvented the coffee table and slapped me on the back. “Hey, what’s wrong, babe? Go down the wrong way?”

Spluttering, I nodded. “Ice,” I gasped. Leo’s hand lingered on my back. Shakily I pulled myself out of the chair. “Excuse me.” Racing off to the kitchen, I poured a glass of water. I didn’t really need it, but I had to escape Leo’s hands.

He was standing in the doorway, watching me with a
worried expression. “I should have learned the Heimlich maneuver,” he said. “Or is that only for chunks of beef?”

I gave him a quavery smile. “It’s not for ice,” I replied. “Ice melts. Beef doesn’t.”

We returned to the living room, decorously resuming our seats. “Tell me about the bank,” he said. “I don’t like the sound of it.”

Leo had me on the spot. Though not a newsman, he was a staff member. If I’d shipped Rick Erlandson off to confide in Ginny Burmeister, I could hardly keep secrets from my ad manager.

“It’s hard to explain because I don’t know all the facts,” I said, wrapping both hands around my bourbon glass. “It sounds as if Marv Petersen wanted to sell out to the Bank of Washington, or at least merge. BOW sent one of their auditors—Dan Ruggiero, the man we saw at the Venison Inn—to look over the books. He must have found something that queered the deal, because when I called BOW’s headquarters in Seattle, it was off. Now Milo is conducting an investigation, and rumors are flying all over town about missing funds and lost accounts. They’re not just picking on you, Leo. I could name half a dozen people who are having problems.”

Leo brandished his empty glass at me. Dinner preparations had been made before his arrival. The work with the wok would take less than ten minutes. I got Leo another Scotch and freshened my own drink.

“An embezzler, huh?” he remarked, taking a big sip. “Who? The list of suspects is pretty short.”

I agreed. “Denise is too dizzy, Rick is too honest, and Larry wouldn’t steal from the bank he’s about to take over. Marv, of course, wouldn’t need to, unless he’s a
secret gambler or sniffing coke, neither of which sounds right.”

“A woman,” Leo said. “Marv’s been married to that dumpy what’s’ername for about a hundred years, right? Some flashy broad in Everett could have him by the short hairs.”

My initial reaction was to disparage such an outlandish notion. But it wasn’t entirely incredible. Solid citizens such as Marv Petersen often were undone by wily temptresses. The thought made me smile.

“Let’s leave Marv out of it for now,” I suggested. “It’s more likely that Christie Johnston or Andy Cederberg is the culprit. Christie and her husband, Troy, are on their way out of town tomorrow. I have this feeling they may not be coming back.”

Leo frowned. “Christie? The cute brunette? Okay, I’ll buy her over that Cederberg guy. He wouldn’t have the guts.”

“Maybe not.” I wasn’t considering Andy too seriously myself. “You’re forgetting someone, though.” I watched Leo closely. “Linda Lindahl.”

Instead of leaping to Linda’s defense, Leo scratched his left ear. “Linda? She was the bookkeeper, right? Easy for her to juggle the figures.” He shrugged. “If she did, and it came out, that could be a motive for murder.”

“So it could.” My spirits plummeted. Until Leo spoke, I hadn’t made the connection between the supposed embezzlement and Linda’s murder. “You mean that someone killed her because she’d loused up the buyout?”

Leo gnawed on a forefinger. “It’s possible. The problem is that the person most likely to be furious is also Linda’s father. Dads don’t usually strangle their daughters—even if sometimes they feel like it.”

A scenario in which Marv Petersen killed Linda was not only unlikely, it was repugnant. I preferred the picture of Marv himself as the embezzler, keeping his Everett mistress in jewels and furs and hot little sports cars.

“Or,” Leo went on, following me into the kitchen, “Linda found out about the embezzlement. Maybe she blew the whistle and turned over whatever evidence she had to Dan Ruggiero. In which case, the crook had to shut her up.”

Turning up the heat on the wok, I poured out a measure of tempura sauce. “But it was too late by then. The Bank of Washington already knew.”

“Maybe they didn’t know
who.”
Leo passed his once-again empty glass under my nose.

Tossing green onions into the wok, I ignored his desire for a refill. Indeed, something Leo had said suddenly struck me: “That’s it! Linda had dinner in Sultan with Dan Ruggiero!”

“Oh?” Leo sounded skeptical. “When was that?”

“The Tuesday before she died. Somebody saw them.” I guarded my source from Leo. “This person recognized Linda later from her picture in the paper but didn’t get a good look at the man she was with. But he was wearing a suit. Who else would do that in this part of the world except a banker?”

Leo stared into his empty glass. “You might be right. Are you sure Linda wasn’t having dinner with Andy Cederberg? He dresses as conservatively as that Ruggiero guy.”

The onions, water chestnuts, green pepper, mushrooms, and prawns were sizzling happily. I threw in the yakisoba noodles. “So do Marv and Larry, if it comes to that. But why would Linda and Andy go to Sultan to
have dinner? They could speak privately any time at the bank.”

“That’s true.” Wistfully, Leo set his glass down on the counter. “It makes you think, though.”

Using a wooden paddle, I stirred the noodles in with the other ingredients. “About what?”

“About Andy. And Dan Ruggiero. They dress alike. From a distance, they look alike. Somebody tried to run Andy down by that park.” Leo moved closer to me, and I stiffened. But instead of pinching my backside, he pinched a prawn from the wok. “Maybe it wasn’t Andy they were trying to hit. Maybe it was Dan Ruggiero. Has your hotshot sheriff thought about that?”

The hotshot wasn’t home when I called after Leo and I finished dinner. He wasn’t at the office, either, according to Deputy Sam Heppner. Sam thought his boss was probably in Startup, paying a call on Honoria Whitman. I thought so, too. Maybe she was forcing him to listen to Gustav Mahler.

“I warned Milo not to let Christie Johnston leave town,” I grumbled. “He said he had no grounds to detain her. I thought he was talking about the murder. Maybe he was, but it seems to me that if he’s conducting an investigation of the bank, its employees shouldn’t be allowed to go out-of-state.”

From the sofa, Leo was giving me a cockeyed look. “You’ve zeroed in on Christie, huh, babe?”

Despite my resolutions, we were down to the dregs of the Chardonnay. Thus, my tongue was loosened. “Rick Erlandson mentioned Christie as the person who didn’t get a cosignature on a phone request for money-market funds. How do we know anybody actually made the request? Why couldn’t Christie sign for the transaction and make off with the money?”

Leo, who was looking as hazy as I felt, considered. “She could, I suppose. I’m the last one you should ask about banking crap. Half the time I never bothered to record the checks I wrote. Sometimes I didn’t even sign the damned things. I’m glad to be free from all that. Or am I? Free, that is.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the now full ashtray and leaned back on the sofa.

“It’ll get straightened out,” I murmured. “Eventually.”

“Yeah, sure. ‘Leo Loses Shirt in Bank Scam.’ I can see the headlines now. What size type are you going to use?”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Leo.” I grabbed the ashtray, intending to empty it in the garbage. Leo grabbed my leg.

“I like to wallow around in self-pity. Want to wallow with me?” His tone was wry, but his brown eyes were oddly disconcerting.

Abruptly I pulled free, spilling some of the cigarette butts. I didn’t dare bend over to retrieve them. “No, Leo, I don’t. And frankly, I don’t think you do, either. Let’s have some coffee.”

This time Leo didn’t follow me into the kitchen. But his voice did. “You hear about how I worked my ass off for fifteen years on a paper in the San Fernando Valley and got canned for falling down drunk in my wastebasket? You hear how my wife ran off with a goddamned guidance counselor? You hear how my kids hate me for forcing my wife to commit adultery? You hear how I lost my house and my good car and the boat I almost had paid for?”

“Shut up, Leo,” I called over the sound of water running into the coffeemaker. “I
have
heard all that. It’s sad, it’s true, but it’s over.” Returning to the living
room, I gave Leo a wide berth. “You’ve got a chance for a fresh start. Don’t blow it.”

Leo shook his head. “There’s no such animal. There’s just plugging along. The only fresh start we get is the day we’re born. After that, it’s all crap. And it just keeps coming. Did I ever tell you about the novel I wrote?”

God preserve me from advertising people who write novels, I thought. But as I returned to the living room, I gave him a faint smile, which he took for encouragement.

“It was four years ago, before all the rest of the shit hit. I’d been fine-tuning the book for a long time, and it was a great idea. A housewife in North Dakota is bored to the eyeballs with farm life, and along comes this beatnik artist. They fall in love, and have a mad, passionate affair that lasts about three days. Then off he goes, and she’s left with nothing but a portrait of herself in the buff, which she naturally can’t show her old man and the kiddies, not to mention the three other couples in their square-dance club. She spends the rest of her life mooning about the artist, and he does ditto as he goes off to Italy to paint morose pictures. My smart-as-a-whip wife told me it’d never sell, so I sat on it. You fill in the blanks.”

I tried not to smirk. “Dare I ask the title?”

“Cavalier.”
Leo was ironic. “It’s a double meaning. Cavalier is a real county in North Dakota. No bridges, though. Not in
my
book.”

Maybe Leo was fabricating his unpublished novel. If the story was true, I had to sympathize. “Bad timing,” I finally said. “If you could write one novel, you could write another.”

Leo curled his lip. “About what? A broken-down ad
man who moves to a small town and makes magic music with the beautiful but lonely publisher?”

“Try sci-fi,” I snapped. “Maybe a Western. Or,” I went on, less flippantly, “a logging saga. Four generations who lived off the woods.”

Leo was still contemptuous. “Hasn’t somebody already done that, too?”

“Maybe. But it’s the kind of story that has plenty of latitude.”

The coffee was done. I went to the kitchen, filled two mugs, and returned to the living room.

“I don’t know shit about logging,” Leo declared.

“This is the place to learn.” Having set Leo’s mug in front of him, I turned toward my armchair. But Leo had a firm grip on the hand that didn’t hold my coffee.

“Relax, babe. I’m not going to ravish you. Sit down, loosen up. You’re stiff as a two-by-four. How do you like that for timber talk?”

Maybe I should have been terrified. For all I knew, Leo Walsh had murdered Linda Lindahl. But Tom Cavanaugh had recommended Leo. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if Leo’s character were deeply flawed. On the other hand, Tom had married Sandra. So much for the love of my life’s perceptions about people.

Still, I resisted the urge to pour hot coffee on Leo. He was my ad manager, and I needed the revenue he brought in. Otherwise, I couldn’t brag about the paper’s solvency.

“Don’t complicate things, Leo,” I warned, trying to free my hand. “You’re nursing a grudge against your ex-wife. You don’t need to get mixed up with your employer. Our staff’s too small to handle an in-house romance.”

In the lamplight, Leo’s careworn face was a map of his tribulations: the furrows in the forehead, from beating
his brains out making money for somebody else; the deep grooves around his eyes, evidence of worry and frustration; the lines in his face and the sag of the jaw were marks of erosion caused by a wife who didn’t have enough love left to see her husband through the worst of times. Had the drinking come before or after? It didn’t matter. The result was the same.

“I’m not proposing marriage,” Leo said dryly. “I was thinking about a kiss and a cuddle. Hey, babe, do you like men or am I flushing out the wrong kind of bird?”

That did it. I threw the coffee, but not at Leo. The hot liquid splashed across the carpet, the coffee table, and the armchair. The mug bounced off the front door, just as a knock sounded on the other side.

I jumped. Leo let go. The mug rolled harmlessly toward the hall closet. Trying to compose myself, I went to the door.

“Well!” Vida was wearing a deerstalker and looking vexed. Her expression didn’t improve when she saw Leo on the sofa, coffee spilled all over the living room, and a deep flush on my face. “Well, well!” she repeated. “I didn’t realize you were entertaining.”

Leo spoke up before I did. “She’s not as entertaining as you’d think. But she’s sure clumsy. Don’t slip on the java, Duchess. Our boss had a little accident.”

Bristling, Vida closed the door behind her. The shrewd gray eyes took in the empty Chardonnay bottle and the highball glasses. But it was my high color that seemed to interest her most.

“Perhaps I should have called first,” Vida said stiffly. “But I had to drop Roger off at his parents’ house, so I stopped here on my way home.”