Tucker Peak

Chapter 10

I smelled him before I recognized who it was-that all-enveloping body odor.

“Max, wake up.”

Fred’s face was hovering over mine. “Max, wake up. They want everybody on the mountain-fast.”

I swung my legs out of bed. “Why?”

“Something about water pumps. We’re supposed to meet outside Mountain Ops dressed for weather… and it’s snowing like crazy.”

The scene was out of some Russian movie: a huge, mingling, nighttime crowd of heavily clothed people standing before a tall, dour building, bracketed by bright lights that made the endless swirl of wild falling snow shimmer like a phosphorescent dust storm. Facing them from the deck of a Bombardier, using a bullhorn like a commissar, Linda Bettina was barking out orders.

“People, we’ve had a power outage in the pump room and a water main break,” she announced. “Everyone has to get on the mountain to contain the spill and drain the pipes before they freeze. Report to your department managers and do what they tell you, on the double. Remember, if this mountain goes down, we’re all out of work.”

She then listed the managers and their locations as they stood in various spots around the equipment yard.

As best I could in my insulated coveralls and heavy boots, I jogged to where I was supposed to be and found my boss directing teams toward a large gathering of grooming machines, four-wheelers with chains, and snowmobiles. I ended up in a group of five men on the open back deck of a groomer, speeding up the mountain in the pitch darkness, our assignment to be dropped off, one by one, at a series of snowmaking hydrants and to open up the drain cocks.

We held on for our lives. The decking was slippery steel diamond plate, the side rails only a foot high and hard to grasp, and the groomer’s broad, thrashing caterpillar treads-completely exposed and flashing by with the speed of commercial meat grinders-were as mesmerizing as two cobras, especially whenever the driver hit a mogul or a dip and sent us scrambling to keep our balance.

It was a long night. The storm was unrelenting, the snow cutting off all vision, muffling communications, covering familiar landmarks, and reducing the world in which we worked-mostly soaked in freezing, spraying water-to tiny, frigid capsules of frantic energy. But slowly, pipeline by pipeline, hydrant by hydrant, often using propane torches to thaw what we had to, we all covered the mountain in roaming squads, carried back and forth by screaming, whining, or deep-throated machines driven by people who seemed to know where they were going by feel alone.

By the time the snow-clotted gray veil around us began to take on the dull glow of early dawn, we were told the worst of the crisis had passed and that those of us not specifically assigned to mountain maintenance could leave the line.

We convened in the large room of the base lodge, ironically around the scale model of a perfect, pristine resort of the future, to be fed hot coffee and breakfast by a haggard-looking kitchen crew before the first customers showed up for a day’s recreation. It was there I noticed Linda Bettina ducking into a small side office, and I followed her in before she could close the door.

She seemed remarkably chipper for someone who’d just orchestrated a near-military campaign, waving me cheerfully to a seat and slamming the door.

“God,” she said, collapsing into a chair, still dressed for the outside and still encrusted with melting ice and snow. “What a night.”

She had a large mug of coffee cradled between her hands. “Thanks for your help.”

I smiled quizzically. “I’m not complaining, but I didn’t know we had a choice.”

She laughed. “Yeah, well… We try to make that part of the contract a little hard to figure out.” She suddenly leaned forward, her eyes bright. “But be straight-didn’t you have a ball tonight? Christ, it must be like being in combat.”

I thought back to my very real knowledge of that experience and nodded. “It’s very close.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, no shit. Glad I didn’t put my foot in it. Didn’t know you were a vet.”

“Long time ago.”

She slouched back into her chair and rested her head against its cushion. “Jesus. I am glad it’s over, though.”

“You want to be alone?” I asked, hesitating.

“No, no. Park yourself. I gotta admit, while I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, it’s times like this that make me think there’s hope left for the ski business.”

“Ain’t what it used to be?”

She turned somber then, closing her eyes briefly and letting her face relax into a mask of exhaustion. “Not even close. It’s all about money now, and taking care of number one. The employees just want a job, the managers just want to survive, the corporate heads and stockholders just want a profit, and the guests just want everything now, in perfect order and for cheap-or else. Nobody remembers that it used to be about skiing.” She shook her head and revived somewhat. “And then you get a night like this, when everyone clicks, and it tells me that just maybe I’ll stick it out for another year.”

“What happened tonight, anyway?”

“Power went out,” she said vaguely. “Happens once in a blue moon, but when it does, watch out.”

“You don’t have backup generators?”

“Yeah… well. I guess Murphy was lurking this time. They went out, too. That was a first for me.”

“A little unlikely, isn’t it? On top of a blown water main? That’s a pile-on.”

She took a slow, thoughtful sip of coffee, watching me over the mug’s rim. “It’s a bad piece of timing. True enough,” she cautiously admitted.

“You find out why the pipe broke?”

“Yeah. I did.” This time her voice was flat and her eyes very steady.

“But you’re not at liberty to discuss it?”

She put the mug down and studied me for a moment. “I heard someone’s been asking a lot of questions around here lately. Would that be you, Max?”

“Linda,” I countered, “I’m a mechanically minded man, and a carpenter because I like the freedom, not because I’m an idiot. Something unusual and disastrous happens like it did today, right after a chair lets go for no reason; it seems like a no-brainer to wonder why. I had my nose right up against that chair mechanism, remember? There was nothing wrong with it an accident could explain.”

Now I was staring at her, as if she were wrong to hold out on me. She relented, dropping her eyes and muttering, “No. I suppose you’re right.”

“So, we’re talking similar events, then,” I suggested. “Someone screwing with the equipment.”

She passed a hand across her mouth and pulled at her chin. “Looks that way. But I’ll fire you if you repeat it.”

“I’m here to help,” I said truthfully. “Not add to your problems. Was the water main sabotaged?”

“I’ll be going onto the mountain when it gets lighter to find out. It’s pretty hard now to tell exactly what happened, but I think so. Lines usually break at junctures: a valve, a Y, a coupling. This one was midline, just where the spillage could take out the top of an entire trail. We’ll have to close it till we can recondition the surface. That’ll cost us a bundle in expenses and lost revenues both. Insurance only covers so much.”

I tried the same line Mike the mechanic had used on me earlier.“Makes sense if the TPL had something to do with it-hits you in your pocketbook while making an issue of water.”

She sighed. “Yeah. I thought about that. I’m not sure I buy it, though. Environmentalists are pretty vocal in Vermont, and God knows they have a lot of power. But that also means they’ve never had to turn violent to get their way. Why do it now? We jumped through all the regulatory hoops, and McNally is still putting up with their crap and holding meetings with them. I know the TPL said we lied to get those permits, but that’s a common complaint. We’re always accused of being in bed with the politicians… Don’t I wish.”

“You’re not going to tell me Tucker Peak volunteered every stat they had available, are you? Including the ones suggesting this water project wasn’t such a good idea?”

Her face clouded with anger. “We’re not the ones who make this a damn near-impossible process. TPL cooks the numbers and lobbies, too. You better believe it. You work for these people or something? Why’re you so goddamn interested?”

I cynically used my current heroic stature. “Maybe because I stopped a woman from bleeding to death. That makes the stakes pretty high.”

Linda Bettina stood up, her coffee forgotten in the wake of resurgent frustration. “Look, Max, I don’t have the answers you want. I don’t know who did what or why. All I know is that a business I used to love is looking more like a used-car lot and I can’t do anything about it. That doesn’t make us the devil incarnate, and it doesn’t mean the TPLs of the world automatically walk on water. It’s a screwed-up world filled with grubby people gouging out a place for themselves, and sometimes they’ll do it at any cost. If that makes me one of the bad guys in your book, then so be it. I’m just trying to do what they pay me to do the best way I know how.”

I also stood and laid a hand on her shoulder. “I wasn’t blaming you, Linda. You have the best rep of anyone here, better than Phil McNally’s. Even Bucky admits you’re pretty good-for a girl.”

She shook her head with a disgusted but genuine smile and took hold of the doorknob, preparing to return to work. “He’s such a woodchuck. I doubt he’d say that about me right now, shooting my mouth off to a total stranger. You never did tell me if you’re the one asking all those questions.”

I figured I owed her that much. “I’m not. It’s a private detective. He asked me a few things, too. I got the feeling he wasn’t getting anywhere fast.”

She absorbed that for a few seconds and then smiled again, opening the door. “Crazy business, Max, getting worse fast. We’re a huge, dysfunctional family, everybody dependent on Big Daddy, only he’s bipolar and hiring private eyes to investigate himself. I’d start looking for another job, if I were you. Something safer, maybe-like mine-sweeping.”

Later that day, after a few hours’ sleep, I was fitting hardwood panels into the side of the new information booth on the base lodge’s main floor-trying not to be stepped on by the lead-booted, canary-colored skiers who were stomping around in a seemingly aimless herd-when Sammie crouched beside me, pretending to adjust her boot buckle. “You got Richie from eight o’clock. He’ll be fixing himself up at the dorm for his nightly routine at the club. That work for you?”

“Yup.”

She moved on and left me amid the chattering, fashion-conscious crowd. The marketing department had worked overtime once more, stressing the triviality of the pipeline “leak,” as they were calling it, and the speed with which the closed trail would reopen. Also, the TPL protesters had all but faded from view (since McNally and their leaders were meeting behind closed doors) and the continuing snowfall had made the yellow snow but a recent memory, so Tucker Peak, for all its troubles, was for the moment looking no different from hundreds of other resorts just like it.

Nevertheless, with Bettina’s comment about a dysfunctional family fresh in my mind, I watched the resort’s guests with new insight. If Tucker Peak’s management was Big Daddy, confused and struggling to meet a payroll, cater to the public, and make a profit, then these people with cell phones, fancy clothes, and ever higher expectations were the symbiotic flip side of that equation: a needy, fickle source of revenue as unreliable in its loyalty as management was to its own employees. I was beginning to understand both the nostalgia and the frustration of Bettina, Bucky Arsenault, and the others I’d overheard lamenting the fate of the ski business in Vermont. They were caught between two complex forces, neither one of which they felt they could control any longer, but which, back when they were young and naïve, they had helped create. I sympathized with their befuddlement.

Because of my nap, I wrapped up work a little later than usual, grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen, and went to the dorm to change into clothes more befitting a nightclub.

Shortly before eight I stood by my second-floor window and waited for Richie Lane to appear crossing the parking lot from the base lodge-discreetly followed by Sammie-before going downstairs to take over the surveillance.

Sammie had been right about Lane’s attention to personal hygiene, which, given his plans for the evening, I supposed was a good thing. Better a slicked-hair Romeo smelling excessively of aftershave than my roommate Fred, if you were heading for a bar in search of company.

Nevertheless, it took him an hour and fifteen minutes before he reappeared in the hallway outside his room, shot his cuffs from under the sleeves of his fashionable parka, patted his hair gently and affectionately with both palms, and headed toward the nightclub.

The nightclub, predictably called the Tuckaway, was located across the access road from the base lodge, next to a three-tier garage, and at the foot of the road Willy and I had taken to reach William Manning’s condo. It was one story, again faux-Swiss in style but with no windows, and was one of the resort’s newer, and therefore less tattered, additions.

It was also the only clearly designated outlet for after-ski excesses, barring the base lodge’s conversation-pit-with-fireplace next to the cafeteria, which closed at ten in any case. The employees had the Butte, and the landed gentry had access to the condo party circuit, but for everyone else the Tuckaway was it.

It was an enormous, sprawling building. Even on slow days, after all, the mountain averaged several thousand skiers. Assuming most of them spread out across the countryside after hours to surrounding motels, inns, and village bars, that still left a standard crowd of hundreds to fill the Tuckaway.

In an effort to avoid the low-ceilinged airplane hangar look, the nightclub was divided into different levels and sections for light eating, heavy drinking, dancing, staring into space, and general conversation, which, given the ear-splitting noise, amounted to shouting, pantomime, and lip reading combined.

It was a scene, almost tribal in nature, that had never appealed to me, more given as I was, even as a child, to solitude, quiet, and reading.

On the other hand, I understood the attraction. As soon as I entered the place, discreetly on Richie’s heels, the throbbing, heated, olfactory atmosphere enveloped me like a cloak, stimulating some senses and dulling others, and I easily saw how inhibitions could be temporarily cast aside and new identities assumed. The energy and darkness encouraged boldness and anonymity, and it was clear from the expressions all around me how seductive that could be.

It was certainly familiar ground to Richie Lane. Hanging his parka on a peg by the door, he launched into the crowd like a penguin into the sea, sliding by and around obstacles with ease and pleasure, chatting, laughing, gliding his hands along shoulders, forearms, waists, and occasionally lower. He kissed women on the cheek or, more rarely, lightly on the lips, he gave manly handshakes to the men, sometimes accompanied by slaps on the back, and through it all, he watched, like a raptor in disguise.

It was a curious thing to witness, and as Sammie had commented earlier, viscerally repellent. In this man’s presence, all these happy faces, especially the women’s, began to seem vulnerable and frail, like children’s at a party being hosted by a covert sexual deviate.

I wasn’t sure of his game right off. He appeared to be merely cruising, checking the stock for any changes from the night before. Eventually, however, after a couple of hours, I noticed him returning to the same “lonely lady” with increasing frequency, having presumably pumped her for enough information in earlier fly-bys to qualify her for his attentions.

From then on, it became a study in carnivorous stalking. From my vantage point at a small table high and to the back of the room, I looked down on them as from a deer blind and watched as he slowly turned up the intimacy. Touching shoulders, chair-to-chair, then squeezing a hand now and then to emphasize highlights in his conversation, Richie gradually merged with his quarry, stroking her thigh with his open hand, her breast with the backs of his fingertips, and finally kissing her, long and deep, at around the sixth drink.

Not that similar activity wasn’t occurring all around us, probably much of it equally calculated. But my focus was on this man, and I was left with the impression, largely from the deft and practiced way he pretended to drink more than he had, that he was after more than a roll in the hay.

A little after midnight, they rose to their feet, she paid the tab, and they walked outside, she with a marked unsteadiness. Laughing, pawing each other, pausing frequently to kiss, they slowly worked their way to the second level of the garage and ended up next to a dark, late-model Mercedes station wagon. There, as the woman fumbled with her keys and I memorized the out-of-state registration, Richie gave her a fast kiss, murmured something in her ear, and began walking quickly down to the far end of the garage.

Confused, I quietly followed, keeping cars and concrete support posts between us as visual barriers, noticing over my shoulder that the woman had slipped into the Mercedes’ passenger seat.

Richie reached the back of the garage and vanished into the stairwell. As soon as he was out of sight, I jogged to the doorway and listened for which way he’d gone. It was up.

I tried to imagine what he was doing. Fetching something from another car? Meeting up with someone else? Taking the scenic route on the way to dumping his date? As I climbed the stairs after him, I couldn’t conjure up anything that made sense.

On the top floor, the double row of cars stretched out with showroom precision under a low ceiling, gleaming in the harsh, monochromatic fluorescent lighting like polished boulders beneath the sea, their rooftop ski racks sparkling like silver.

But there was no Richie Lane. He’d disappeared.

I stopped in my tracks, listening, suddenly tense. There was nothing. Wishing I was carrying a gun, I began to walk quietly down the central corridor, mentally kicking myself both for being lured up here and for not turning back as I knew I should. Caution dictated staying with the woman and awaiting Richie’s return. But curiosity, and perhaps arrogance, had gotten the better of me.

As Richie had known it would.

“Don’t move a muscle.”

I froze in place, except for spreading my arms out to show I had no weapon.

I heard Richie come out from behind the car that had been shielding him and approach me from the rear. A hard, round object jabbed me viciously in the back, making me stagger forward.

“Get on your knees.”

I thought back to his rap sheet. A violent man, mostly against women, a sexual predator, and an occasional thief. He hadn’t killed anyone that we knew of. I willed myself to take comfort in that.

I hoped my voice didn’t betray my nervousness. “You better think this through, Richie. Or Robert, to use your real name. I’m a cop.”

“Cute. Do what I said.”

Consciously controlling my breathing, I lowered myself to my knees. The cold concrete bit through the fabric of my pants as my mind began to race. I’d considered this kind of scenario before, as I guessed every cop had. You hope you’ll keep cool, stay in control, maybe even talk the other guy into surrendering… At the very least, you pray you won’t totally fall apart. I had no idea how well I was faring.

“Where’s your badge, then?” His free hand began patting me down.

“I’m undercover. I’m not carrying any identification.”

“That’s convenient. I know who you are anyhow, and believe me, you’re not doin’ me like you did Marty. I’m not that stupid, in case you didn’t notice.”

Gripped by real fear now, I began speaking in a rush. “You got it wrong. My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m a special agent with the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. We’re looking for Marty. We didn’t know he was dead. But that doesn’t matter. We’re after the same people you’re afraid of. If you know who they are, we can nail them for you. You can go back to walking around without looking over your shoulder.”

“Right. This where I give you my gun so you can blow my brains out? Maybe make it look like suicide? How dumb do you think I am?”

I couldn’t believe the irony of it-to be executed as a hitman. “Not dumb, Richie, but plenty scared. We were thinking you killed Jorja Duval to find out where Marty was, but I guess that’s not what happened, right? They knocked her off, looking for you and Marty both. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything.

“They cut her throat, Richie-almost took her head off. Why’re they after you? What did you and Marty steal, anyway?”

“We didn’t steal anything,” he said stubbornly.

I couldn’t believe he was still pitching his own innocence, especially given the circumstances. “Maybe you didn’t personally,” I tried conceding. “But you set it up so Marty could. You were his spotter, finding rich targets like that woman downstairs, checking out their houses and getting some action on the side. He’d call you on the first-floor locker room pay phone a few days before every hit. You did that eight times. Think about it, Richie. We know all that. That’s why we were tailing you. If we were the people you’re so afraid of, you’d be dead already.”

“Fuck you,” he said, his voice revealing his own frustration. “First you say you thought I killed the girl, now you say I’m a sitting duck for the guys that did. You don’t even have the number right on the break-ins. You’re just jerking me around, and I’m getting sick of it.”

I opened my mouth to answer him but was stopped by a blinding flash of searing pain in my head. I didn’t even see the floor as I bounced off it with my face.