High Country Fall

CHAPTER 31

“I’m fine,” I kept telling them. “You probably are,” the medical technician agreed, “but until you get checked out thoroughly, you can’t be sure. You’ve got a contusion on the side of your head. There may be chipped bones. That arm could be fractured.”

“George!” I entreated.

He gave a heartless smile. “I’ll follow you down and see you at the hospital.”

Resigned, I lay back on the stretcher and let them strap me in.

“There’s a pair of scissors in that locker beside your head,” said one of the medics with a chuckle.

“You laugh,” I said darkly, “but I’d like to see you get out of a jammed seat belt without some.”

At the hospital, they made me strip off into one of those godawful gowns, and a doctor went over all my extremities, pushing and flexing and “This hurt? How about here?”

I was advised to put ice on my temple and left arm for the next seventy-two hours. They gave me an ointment for the belt burn on my neck and they bandaged the raw place on my finger where the key had rubbed it, otherwise, it was exactly as I’d thought: I was bruised and battered but unbroken.

“How long before this one goes away?” I asked, looking in the mirror at the side of my face. Every time I took the ice pack away and checked, the bruise seemed to be darker and was passing from purple to black even as we spoke.

“About three weeks,” said the doctor.

“What?”

“With a little luck, regular makeup will cover up the worst in about a week,” chirped the nurse.

Damn that Barringer! I could just imagine some of the things those courthouse smartmouths down in Dobbs were going to say when they saw me next.

Glumly, I went back to my cubicle and was half-dressed when I heard the nurse say, “Sir? Sir! You can’t come in here.”

“The hell I can’t,” someone snarled. “Deb’rah? You back there?”

I zipped up my slacks and poked my head out of the curtain. “Dwight?”

He strode down to my cubicle. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, stunned to see him here.

He gently turned my face and looked at the bruise. His own face was grim.

I pushed his hand away because I couldn’t meet his eyes. Not when I was feeling so uncertain about our future together, not when it was possible we would have no future. “It looks worse than it is.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said with the first trace of normality, “’cause it sure does look like hell.”

“I’m happy to see you, too,” I said tartly as I pulled on my jersey and slipped my feet into my sneakers. My voice sounded shrewish, even to me, with none of the easy banter that usually flowed between us. “What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t due up in Virginia till Saturday.”

“Underwood called me.”

“He did? When?”

“I don’t know. Around five-thirty?”

I looked at my watch. It was only a little after ten now. Amazing.

This wasn’t Jeff Gordon or Dale Jarrett. This was Dwight Bryant, a man who drives so slow that everyone says he’s going to get T-boned by a turtle someday, yet he had made the trip in less than five hours. “How many times did you get pulled?”

He gave a sheepish grin. “Only once. He was cool about it.”

I.e., no ticket.

He held my jacket for me and we walked out into the waiting room. To my surprise, George Underwood was still there.

“I need food and drink,” I told them both. “And not necessarily in that order.”

Five minutes later, we were in a booth in a little Mexican place on the far side of the hospital.

I was running on adrenaline between my harrowing evening, Dwight’s sudden appearance, and the conclusions I’d reached about Ledwig’s death. Most of all, though, I was still furious about my own near death. George kept putting me off whenever I asked, but as soon as we were seated, I said, “So what about Barringer? Did you arrest him yet?”

George looked at Dwight, who put his hand on mine and said gently, “He’s dead, shug.”

“What? How?”

The bottom fell out of my stomach as George told me about the dead buck they’d found and how it must have happened right after he ran me off the road. I felt my eyes fill up with tears. The waste of it. Yes, he had been full 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 didn’t he notice?”

“Because Sunny didn’t give him a chance.” I described to Dwight how Sunny Osborne suddenly—conveniently—became menopausal and had everyone convinced that she was so wigged out that she couldn’t stand to have Norman out of her sight. “She was driving Bobby and Joyce nuts with all her questions and writing things down and making them explain. Those questions weren’t for her own benefit, though, they were for his. She was turning herself into his backup memory. Just last night, Joyce said Bobby was getting fed up with the way Norman couldn’t seem to concentrate because of Sunny’s distractions. It was her distractions that covered up his growing inability to concentrate.”

“So when Ledwig found out about the merger, he would’ve tried to get Osborne to pull out before the Ashes got burned.”

“And they would have been burned bad. If it’s a standard policy, the partnership insurance they had on each other wouldn’t pay out for debilitating conditions, only for death. The Ashes would have had to front the buyout of his share of the partnership from their own pockets or else keep paying him a big part of their annual take as long as he lived. That could’ve been years. Osborne must have figured that this was the best way to protect what he’d acquired and secure his and Sunny’s future at the same time, a future that was nothing but a long and expensive descent into total senility.”

“Alzheimer’s?” asked Dwight.

“Or dementia.”

I spoke from experience, the experience of dealing with distraught adult children who came to me to seek a power of attorney for a parent when I was in private practice. Often, the parent seemed as clearheaded as ever. He could speak cogently about the running of his businesses down to the smallest detail. Then I’d ask him what year was it? Who was president? What did he have for breakfast? And he’d look at me blankly.

“I think that Ledwig threatened to tell the Ashes. I think Sunny went over there that day to try to persuade him to keep quiet for just two more days, and when he refused—”

“And he would refuse,” George said grimly, as if remembering his wife’s uncle.

“—then she smashed him with his own hammer and pushed him over the side.”

“But when did she kill Osborne?” asked George. “Everybody says— Hell! You said it yourself. She was playing her dulcimer right beside you when he went missing.”

Again I shook my head. “She could never have hurt him.”

“But—?”

“What you said before, bo,” said Dwight, who sometimes knows the way my mind works. “This Bobby guy. He wasn’t born yesterday.”

“The last time I noticed Norman Osborne,” I said, “he was standing at the bar talking to Bobby Ashe. He probably said something that gave the game away and all the pieces dropped into place for Bobby, just as they did for me, only in Bobby’s case, he was looking at probably two or three million out of pocket. It was a case of ‘If it were done, ’twere well it were done quickly.’”

“Huh?” George flicked a puzzled look at Dwight, who shrugged.

“Sorry. My former law partner used to quote Shakespeare all the time. Bobby must have realized he couldn’t afford to let Osborne’s condition become general knowledge or he’d be the first suspect in any murder case.”

“So he carpayed the damn diem.”

“Well, that’s one way to put it,” I said.