Tucker Peak

Chapter 7

Two weeks later, near midnight, I stepped outside the One Bar that catered almost exclusively to Tucker Peak employees. It was on the highway feeding the access road, two miles from Lifton, located in a no-man’s-land among a small cluster of commercial buildings that survived like mollusks on the hull of a ship: a general store, a gas station, a ski equipment and rental place, a motel, and a couple of nondescript storage buildings. The bar was named the Butte, either out of some Far West nostalgia or by someone who couldn’t spell. I’d been coming here almost nightly since being hired as a carpenter the week before, eavesdropping, striking up friendships, and sporting the new hair color and beard I’d been growing since my meeting with Allard.

I breathed in the hard freezing night air to cleanse my lungs of the smoke and stench I’d just left, the blackness around me as silent as a tomb in comparison with the din of the bar.

I began walking toward the gas station a hundred yards down the road. There wasn’t much light, just the sign ahead of me and the muted neon of the Butte. Both stores were closed and dark, and the motel didn’t brag much. I almost needed a flashlight to see.

About halfway to the station, I paused by one of the storage buildings, looked around carefully, slipped into the shadow, and then walked quietly down the rutted alleyway to the back. I heard a metallic click ahead of me and the sound of a van door sliding open.

A soft voice called out, “Joe?”

“Yeah.” A pinpoint of light appeared in the utter gloom, guiding me to a parked van. “Nice bush you got going,” Lester Spinney said, moving out of the way and letting me inside. The warmth that greeted me was welcome, even after so short a walk. “You look like a young Ernest Hemingway.”

Lester slid the door shut and hit a switch on the wall. The interior was suddenly washed with the glow from a battery-powered safelight, much like a darkroom’s, barely bright enough to reveal Willy and Sammie also sitting there, waiting.

The van’s windows were opaque, and a curtain separated the back from the driver’s compartment.

I found a seat and removed my coat. “You been here long?”

“Half the goddamn night,” Willy complained.

“Twenty minutes,” Lester said.

This was the first meeting we’d had as a group since Sammie and I had gone undercover. As far as I knew, nothing had occurred as a result of our digging, but I’d wanted to compare notes anyhow. Sammie and I had taken advantage of Tucker Peak’s tenement-style employee housing to immerse ourselves in the local culture and put our time to the best use, but the tradeoff had been a news blackout from the outside.

“What’ve we got on the Jorja Duval killing?” was the first thing I wanted to know.

Willy shook his head disgustedly. “Zip.”

Lester was more generous. “The autopsy didn’t give us much more than what we saw, including the bruising on her arms and shoulders that suggests she was manhandled just prior to death. The crime lab guys went through all the trace evidence they collected and figure it came from about two dozen different people, which, given that place, probably amounts to two weeks’ worth of renters.”

“I think she talked,” Willy interjected. “That’s why she wasn’t beat up worse and why she was killed.”

“Could be,” I agreed, struck by the irony of options.

“Marty’s still making like Casper, of course,” Lester resumed, “probably lurking around till the dust settles. His car and apartment have been minor gold mines, though. Klesczewski and his bunch are having a field day. Turns out Tucker Peak wasn’t an exclusive target. Marty’s been ripping off cars and homes all over Bratt for over a year. Weird part is, he kept most of the stuff, which makes you wonder why he bothered stealing it in the first place. Ron’s backtracking from the loot to whatever owners he can find, but it’s still not leading him anywhere.”

“What about the burglaries here?” Sammie asked. She was wearing faded jeans and an old pair of boots, but with her red ski instructor’s parka and freshly dyed blonde hair, she was looking quite exotic. She knew it, too. She’d taken the name Greta Novak for her cover-a double Hollywood homage. I’d settled for the far more mundane Max Lambert, which I’d made up out of thin air.

Spinney pursed his lips. “We got the Manning stuff, of course. And we found a storage unit Marty rents. That’s where he kept most of it, and where Ron’s having his second Christmas for the year, but there were only a few pieces from Tucker Peak. No explanation for the discrepancy. Maybe Marty’s inside man kept most of what they stole. I reinterviewed Don Matthews, and he confirmed that Marty usually took his time before fencing his goods, so that might fit. In any case, Willy and I’re thinking our best bet is going to be sticking to Tucker Peak and working things from this end with you guys. Ron’ll feed us anything useful if and when he finds it.”

“Which is doubtful,” Willy added. He and Ron hadn’t gotten along when they’d both been detectives, being so different in nature as to be classified separate species. His comment just now was as clear an indicator as any of Willy’s turmoiled outlook on life; with no one else I knew could a person as decent, hard-working, and self-effacing as Ron Klesczewski evoke and maintain such rancor.

Spinney paid no attention. “What we’re doing now is taking all the burglaries we think Marty pulled on the mountain and breaking each one into its component parts: timing, location, day of the week, season, weather, target, MO, items stolen, follow-up police data, and victim background. We’re also checking into who was insured and who wasn’t, and for how much, and the patterns of custodial visits, mail deliveries, service calls, and the rest.”

“How many houses are we talking about?”

“Eight,” Willy answered. He looked at Sammie. “What’ve you been up to besides catching rays?”

Having been hired after me just a few days ago, Sammie was already sporting a noticeable tan. I realized that her striking appearance was getting under Willy’s skin-never a hard reach at the best of times.

“Mostly just figuring out who’s who and what’s what.” She returned Willy’s stare. “Joining the ski instructors turned out to be a lucky choice. They have a fuller run of the place than almost anyone, including going to the nightclub. Everybody’s happy to see them coming except the ski patrollers and the snowmaking and maintenance bunch. The first because of some weird rivalry thing, and the second because they treat everybody like shit. So, once I get past being the new guy, I should have a pretty good vantage point.”

“Carpenters have the same leeway,” I added. “We don’t do the social circuit, but we’re almost invisible so long as we’re carrying tools. We’re also loaned out to the condo management division to do repairs outside the lodge and summit buildings, so I might be able to gain access there if we need it.”

“Any ideas yet on who we can trust and who we can’t?” Lester asked.

“I bet Linda Bettina’ll pan out in the long run,” Sammie suggested. “Everyone thinks pretty highly of her.”

“Oh, hell, Sam,” Willy growled. “They just want to get into her pants. It’s a Wonder Woman fetish.”

Sammie shook her head and said, mostly to herself, “You’re such an asshole.”

“She’s been a big help to me, checking employee records,” Spinney volunteered, which earned him a silent, dark look from Willy.

“How’s that going, by the way?” I asked. “I’ve been loitering around that phone during shift break, but so far it’s been a dead end. Either Marty and his contact are spooked and laying low, or they’ve got another way of keeping in touch.”

Lester didn’t look happy. “I hate to admit it, but the best thing might be if they hit another condo while we’re here. There’re up to twelve hundred employees on this mountain during the peak season, Joe, running the gamut from dropout lawyers to trailer trash that had criminal records in the womb. They come from just down the road and from overseas, and some of them lie about their names. Bettina hasn’t held anything back, but their records’re almost useless. She says that for the money they pay the lower ranks especially, they don’t make much effort checking under the hood.” He smiled and added ruefully, “I mean, you two got jobs there, right? How careful can they be?”

“Doesn’t that bite them in the butt sometimes?” Sammie asked.

“More now than in the old days,” Spinney admitted. “But they’re between a rock and a hard place. Recently, they’ve been putting up with whatever screwy behavior they’re handed just to keep the place going. And they don’t make a big deal about it when they do get bit, since it might give the resort a bad name. Pretty ironic that you get a bunch of pampered rich folks being catered to by potential crooks, all because you’re paying so poorly you don’t want to ask questions you don’t want answered.”

“Sounds like poetic justice to me,” Willy said.

I returned to the original inquiry. “It still doesn’t hurt to assume for now that Marty’s contact is someone local, or at least someone he knows from the past. Did you compare all the names we’ve collected from Marty’s background to the employee records here?”

Lester nodded. “Yup. And got nothin’ yet. Still, Marty Gagnon’s no Einstein, and I’ll bet money his contact’s not, either. They probably started ripping off condos ’cause it seemed like a good idea at the time. We just need to connect the right two dots and hope one or the other sticks his head out of the bushes.”

Spinney paused, as if reflecting on his own words, and then asked, “What about the protesters? They something to factor in?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered him. “At least not yet. So far, all they’ve done is sit in the road, surround the ticket booth, and hang a banner from the ski lift towline in the middle of the night, which I thought was pretty creative.”

“No one’s been busted yet?” Spinney asked.

“One or two who went too far, but the resort’s still playing nice. From what we heard, McNally, the CEO, is trying to work out a compromise. That’s good for us, though. Snuffy’s deputies are out in force every day, straining at the leash-you and Willy asking questions and checking backgrounds are fitting right in.”

“I don’t see why McNally’s dicking around with those people,” Willy said. “They’re a pain in the ass.”

“He probably thinks they’d be a bigger pain if he let Snuffy have his way,” I suggested. “It would just make for bigger headlines.”

There was a slight lull in the conversation, which I ended by grabbing my coat and awkwardly putting it back on in the van’s tight confines. “Okay, I guess that’s it. Lester, how soon before you think you’ll have some names Sammie and I can zero in on?”

“Maybe a couple of days.”

“Then we’ll do this again in forty-eight hours, unless something breaks before then.” I looked over at Sammie. “You drive down here?”

She nodded.

“I'll walk you to your car.”

My tone of voice made it clear that this wasn't merely a suggestion-and that nobody else was invited.

Outside, back in the cold and the darkness, we both watched the departing van lumber up the gloomy alley toward the road. Its brake lights flared briefly at the road’s edge, and then it vanished with a sudden burst of acceleration, leaving behind a plume of exhaust that lingered like a ghost in the soft glow from the gas station sign down the street.

“You fitting in all right?” I asked Sammie in the sudden silence.

“Yeah. It was easier than I thought. I figured they’d all be Olympic dropouts: super hotshots that would pick me out in a New York minute. Turns out they’re too busy trying to get laid to care if I know a ski from a pole. A third of them are amazingly shitty instructors-hate the people they’re supposed to be teaching. So I’m looking pretty good, and the instructing’s kind of fun.” She smiled at me suddenly. “If the money were better, I’d think about doing it full time.”

“Right. I believe that. You pick up anything interesting yet?”

“Not really. I meant what I said in the van. There is one guy, though-Richie Lane-a real predator. Put the moves on me right off, took the hint, and moved on, like a shark checking out bait. I watched him with a class yesterday. He had his hands all over the women but talked up the guys, too. Has a fancy watch, expensive clothes, drives a ’Vette, although an old one. Could be he’s just a gigolo-he basically lives in the nightclub-but he might be up to something more. Wouldn’t be the first time a thief got inside information through a little pillow talk.”

“We can tell Lester to put him under the microscope.”

We were walking down the same path the van had taken earlier, and now paused in the last of the alleyway’s deep shadow.

“It’s none of my business except for how it affects the job,” I said finally, “but how’re things between you and Willy?”

She stayed staring out at the empty road, looking suddenly small, thin, and vulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she and I had discussed such a personal subject. There was a father/daughter element to our friendship that encouraged it, and which I used occasionally to check on her well-being. Having been abandoned by her real father at an early age hadn’t done her later dealings with men much good.

“They’re okay.”

“He’s not easy to get along with,” I prompted.

“No,” she admitted.

“Meaning you’re having some problems?”

She looked at me then. “Not really, which I guess is good news. I don’t know why, but when it’s just the two of us, it’s incredibly easy. He’s peaceful and quiet and supportive-and funny, if you can believe it. But outside of that, he’s like Jekyll… or Hyde… whoever the monster was, and that’s when all of a sudden I get the shit end of the stick. Makes it kind of tough to adjust, you know?”

“So there was nothing to the sun-tanning crack?”

Her expression showed her doubt. “Ever since I went undercover, dyed my hair, he’s been a little weird.”

“Jealous?”

She nodded. “Probably. Fits some of the other comments he’s made.”

“You’re an attractive woman, Sam, and you’re strutting your stuff right now: tight jeans, nice tan, ski instructor reputation. All of a sudden, you’re not one of the guys toting a gun and busting bad guys. It’s the first time he’s seen you out of context-probably makes him feel vulnerable. I doubt he considers himself a chick magnet, so he’s totally amazed that you two have become so close-”

She stuck her lower lip out thoughtfully. “It’s too bad.”

“You going to do something about it?”

She suddenly smiled and spoke more confidently. “Nope. He’ll just have to get with the program. I put up with his crap. He can put up with some of mine.”

I patted her shoulder, satisfied for now that her emotions weren’t threatening her job. At the moment, hers was hardly the most dangerous of undercover assignments, but as a friend and a boss, I’d have been remiss not to inquire. “Good. Keep me up to date. You better go first.” I nodded toward her Jeep, parked in the gas station lot.

She hesitated briefly. “You don’t need to worry. You know that, right?”

Got it,” I told her, primarily to keep her happy.

She checked up and down the road and then jogged into the light toward her vehicle, her blonde hair suddenly glowing in the night. Willy Kunkle was a lucky man, I thought-which only made me more confident that I was right about what was bugging him.

It was past one in the morning when I parked outside the maintenance shed out of sight of the base lodge behind a strategically planted screen of evergreens. This was where the tourists weren’t supposed to wander-a floodlighted enclosure of oil-stained packed snow and scattered equipment ranging from snowmobiles to grooming machines to bits and pieces of chairlift paraphernalia, all looking like a dented, scarred, and rusting factory graveyard.

As I crossed toward the shed, hoping to fish casually for information from the night creatures inside, I heard the distinct combination of rattling, roaring, and the high-pitched whine of an approaching big groomer. I stopped and watched an enormous Bombardier round the corner, its lights and oversize flashing caterpillar tracks making it look like a mechanical bug from a futuristic nightmare.

Engine still running, the vehicle stopped outside the building’s double bay doors, and a large, heavy, wild-haired man dressed in filthy insulated coveralls and a mustache the size of a horse’s tail emerged from the cab above the tracks and swung down onto the ground.

“Hey, Max,” he called over to me, using my cover name. “They throw you out of the Butte?”

Bucky Arsenault was one of the chief groomers, a veteran of twenty years or more whom I’d only met a couple of times, and then only briefly, the night and day shifts having different hours and different cultures.

“Threw myself out,” I answered him. “Not my kind of crowd.”

He nodded. “Know what you mean. I don’t even go there no more. What’re ya doin’ up here?”

I shrugged. “Too early to hit the hay. Thought I’d shoot the shit a little with whoever’s in there.”

Bucky looked at me doubtfully. “You know those guys?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t want to. Trust me. Bunch of teenage, dope-smoking losers, if you ask me. You don’t seem the type.” He hesitated a moment and then said, “How soon you want to go to bed? Got a few more hours in you?”

“Sure.”

He jerked a thumb at his noisy rig. “Climb in, then. I’ll show you the real mountain. I just gotta grab something from inside. Won’t take me a minute.”

The Bombardier’s cab was surprisingly new and modern, given Tucker Peak’s overall shabbiness. Seated in a comfortable, upholstered chair, surrounded by sound-deadening glass and faced with a console and steering mechanism reminiscent of a spaceship, I was forced to take the intergalactic metaphor even further when Bucky drove us out of the compound, up the nearest slope like a rocket gathering speed, and straight into the black void of night. Pressed back in my seat, watching the moonscape of contoured snow unfold before the groomer’s powerful lights, I was surprised by how utterly foreign it all looked, how unlike the familiar, placid web of trails I’d observed the first time I’d driven over the access road and seen the mountain spread out before me.

Crawling across the same geography at night as though in a heated cocoon, I found the impression completely different. The ground was misleadingly at odds with my perception of it, looking flat in places where our machine would lurch into a depression or suddenly attack an incline. Trees, chairlift towers, and spindly snowmaking water hydrants-tall and thin like metallic storks surrounded by nests of heavy collision-dampening bumpers-all sprang out of the blackness like colorless specters and vanished with equal suddenness. And through it all, like an electronic conscience rambling about whatever came to mind, the radio on the dash muttered barely audible, nonstop scraps of dialogue.

“Rumor has it you were here before the mountain was,” I said to him, not as loudly as I would have thought necessary, given the roar of the engine outside the cab.

He laughed. “Feels that way.”

“Must’ve seen a lot of changes.”

“Oh, yeah.” He reached under his seat, pulled out a Styrofoam cup and delicately spat a glob of tobacco juice into it. “Started out, we’d groom with homemade tillers pulled by anything that’d work: caterpillars, tractors, whatever. Dangerous and stupid, I guess, and more hassle than it was worth, if you ask me, but it gave the mountain bragging rights and brought in skiers.”

“Bragging about a groomed mountain, you mean?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s always something: the grooming, the number of trails, the snowmaking percentage, the extra-attentive employees. Now it’s fast quads for chairs, slope-side condos, and a lot more non-skiing stuff. That’s why they built the nightclub and’re shootin’ for a golf course and that hotel, lucky for you.”

“I don’t mind the work,” I said.

“Well, you’ll always get it at a mountain resort, all the way to when they declare bankruptcy. Just how the business works. It’s like building a house of cards-you only stop going when the whole thing falls down.”

An artificial snowstorm sprang into our lights without warning, sparkling like a meteor shower. Underneath it was a fresh mound of sugary snow as tall as a house. Bucky stopped his machine shy of the actual downpour. He keyed the mike and exchanged a few quiet words with someone. Almost instantly, the snow stopped and a bundled-up, apelike creature in a hard hat and wearing several white reflectors sewed to his clothing appeared on a snowmobile-a “sled” to its users-and careened recklessly in our direction, coming to a halt beside Bucky’s door.

He opened it up to the cold night air and waited for the man to clamber up onto the treads beside him. Wind and noise filled the small cabin.

“Thought you were supposed to be done up here,” Bucky said.

Only by the cab’s interior light could I see that the white reflective tape on the snowmaker’s uniform was actually bright yellow, yet another illusion created by the Bombardier’s harsh lighting.

“Don’t get your shorts in a twist,” he answered. “You can have at it right now. Goddamn cheap-piece-of-shit nozzle froze up on me. Screwed up my schedule all to hell. It ain’t as much as the boss wanted, but she can fuck herself if she can figure out how.”

Bucky laughed. “Linda’s the best boss you’ll ever have, man or woman. You just don’t know what you’re doing out here.”

The man swatted him on the arm. “Fuck you and this bucket of bolts. Some of us’re doing men’s work out here, not running a taxi service. Who’s your fare?”

Arsenault didn’t even look at me. “Lambert-carpenter-new guy. I’m showing him the scenery from the best seat in the house.”

The snowmaker leaned across and spoke to me directly. “Anytime you want to get away from this bunch of pussies, let me know. You won’t know mountain work till you spend a night with us.”

I gave him a thumbs-up. “You got a deal.”

The man jumped down, fired his sled up, and raced away. Moments later, dragging a snow gun still attached to its length of hose, which whipped back and forth like a lassoed anaconda, both man and machine slithered into the night, the sound of his machine’s high scream drowned out by the Bombardier’s steady rumble.

Bucky dropped the wide plow ahead of us and began the complex task of spreading out the enormous pile of artificial snow, talking all the while.

“Very crude bunch, snowmakers. You might want to watch out before you accept that invitation.”

I studied his profile, unable to read his expression under the huge mustache, and then decided to take a chance. “Isn’t that where you started out?”

He laughed. “We were all gentlemen back then. Never used such language.”

“Oh, right. I really believe that.”

“Yeah,” he conceded, laughing. “I’m too old to make snow now, but I did love it. Almost makes you feel like God.”

I let a moment’s silence elapse before asking him, “You said the resort’s doing more and more non-skiing stuff. Any resentment there from the employees-against all the fat cats moving in with their toys and money?”

He cut me a quick look. “You writing a book?”

I realized my mistake. “Maybe just talking about myself,” I said to cover. “I been out of work for months. I come in here, see all the fancy cars, condos, and cash being kicked around. Kind of pissed me off.”

Again, it was the wrong choice of words. His expression displayed a deepening suspicion. I began thinking I was more tired than I’d thought.

“What d’ya want?” he asked me. “You’re gettin’ some of it. I pick up a communist or something?”

I ducked in another direction, feeling increasingly off balance. “Shit, no. But I heard cops were asking about a bunch of burglaries-talk they might’ve been inside jobs. Made me wonder what was up.”

Luckily, he followed my lead and got me out of trouble. His voice became sad and his demeanor philosophical. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded. “Shouldn’t be so sensitive. Old guy like me lives in the past too much.” He waved a hand at the void around us. “All this used to be about skiing, and maybe breaking even, if you didn’t pay yourself much. I don’t know where you’re from originally, but I was born in New Jersey. Came up here as a kid whenever I could, did anything they asked me just so I could ski. We were all like that-ski bums working for peanuts and day passes. You ate, slept, skied, got laid if you were lucky, worked when you had to, and skied again as soon as you could.”

He shook his head, repeating, “But you’re right. That’s all gone and buried. Now it’s a rat race like any other, maybe worse since this is a one-company town, like the lumber camps a hundred years ago. I heard about those burglaries-made me sick. That’s why I snapped at you just now, all that bullshit about us against them. But that’s the way it really is. I’m just kidding myself-maybe some of the employees are ripping off the condos.” He paused before adding, “Everything’s gotten upside down, like with those protesters that’ve been in our face the last few days. We used to be the ones wearing the white hat-good for the economy, good for unemployment. Back then, people knew that cutting ski trails opened up a more diversified environment. All sorts of animals started campin’ out here because of that combination of slope and forest. Now we’re just nature killers.”

Throughout all this, we’d been crisscrossing the wide trail, spreading the proud snowmaker’s artificial product as if it had suddenly appeared from heaven. The ironies and contradictions of Bucky’s dilemma were just as palpable and confusing.

“Not that I think they’re totally off base,” he added as if I’d challenged him. “It’s gone way beyond cutting down a few trees. I can’t say the TPL, or whatever, are wrong about using water the way we do. It looks okay to us, but what do we know? Or care? We’re not talking skiing anymore. It’s just about money.”

He abruptly stopped his machine and twisted around in his seat to stare at me. “I changed my mind. You’re not a writer. You’re a goddamn shrink. How’d you get me to say all this shit, anyhow? I was a happy man before I met you.”

I looked at him, slightly at a loss. He was right about my being subversive, after all, even if he had my profession wrong. It made me feel like I’d robbed him of something irreplaceable.

Happily, he then reached across and punched my shoulder. “Lucky thing I don’t give a good goddamn, huh?” And he burst out laughing.

But I wasn’t so sure. What he had laid out in his rambling, curiously effective way had struck me as a parable for many of society’s ills, far beyond this small, struggling commercial enclave. And his final ambiguity about what it all meant and where it might be heading struck a deep, resounding chord.