Diane Davidson - Tough Cookie

I got the distinct feeling that that was not all she knew. But I said only, “Rorry is pregnant now. Do you know if she’s seeing someone?”

“Man, you don’t quit, do you? I don’t know anything about Rorry Bullock’s social life. She doesn’t confide in me.” She took a bite of salad and regarded me warily over her fork. “The gallery called and told me you were in this morning. You turned your nose up at their show and went straight to my stuff. Now all of a sudden you’re my biggest fan, pumping me with questions about my career, Doug Portman, and Nate and Rorry Bullock. Why?”

The waitress reappeared. I ordered a double espresso and a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Boots declined anything.

“I just wanted to find out more about Doug Portman. That’s all. Asking about Rorry popped into my head when you mentioned Nate. Honest.”

“And why do you want to know about Portman?”

I sighed. “I told you that already. If you don’t want to believe me, don’t.”

Again she tilted her chin back in appraisal. “How do you take to criticism? I find myself wondering what you thought of the first two sentences under your photo in the Killdeer paper? ‘Some call her the corpulent Queen of Cream. But this caterer is one tough cookie’?”

I shook my head. The Killdeer paper was not part of my regular reading material, I was happy to say. Which was probably a good thing, since discussing it filled Boots’s voice with vitriol. How she must have hated Doug Portman, with his uncomplimentary critiques. I replied tentatively, “I’d say I’m a tad shy of corpulent—”

“I know why you wanted to have lunch with me,” Boots interrupted. “You don’t care about my work. Or the artists’ association. And you certainly don’t give a damn about Nate Bullock. You think I killed that son-of-a-bitch know-nothing wannabe critic, Doug Portman.”

“Did you?”

“No. But I wish I had. Am I a suspect?”

“No, you’re paranoid. I’m higher up on the list of suspects than you are.”

“Were you there when he died, Goldy?”

“No.”

“Then why is the sheriff’s department asking you about his so-called suspicious death?” She grinned maliciously. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking a question or two.”

“My ex-husband is in jail. Doug was a member of the state parole board. I was skiing with him. It looks peculiar.”

My dessert arrived and we fell silent. When the waitress left, Boots demanded, “Why do the cops even think it’s a suspicious death in the first place?”

I sipped my espresso. I couldn’t tell her about the medical patches and the threat, couldn’t tell her about the mysterious closure of the run, or the blood all over the snow. “I don’t know exactly.”

Boots pursed her lovely lips. Then she said, “Baloney.”

I shrugged. The anger in her was making me nervous.

She stood, snatched up her jacket, and flipped her blond hair over her shoulders. “Go to hell, tough cookie.”

CHAPTER 12

W ell! Let’s do lunch any ol’ time .

I finished the brownie, sipped my espresso, and reflected on Boots’s news that my crime-solving exploits had been written up in the local paper. How had I missed that? The waitress returned and told me the blond lady had thrown a fifty-dollar bill at her. I told her to keep the change.

I got directions to Mountain Man Wines, where the manager said he would happily deliver the rest of Arthur’s bottled invites. By the time I got to Big Map, a light snow had begun to fall. Pink-cheeked skiers, their boot buckles clanking, headed past me, bound for lunch after a brisk morning on the slopes. And speaking of food, not only had my meeting with Boots Faraday been less than perfect, I had to assess my first day as a personal chef as a failure. Arthur had not given me a check, had not signed a contract, had only given me a vague list of foods I could put together for his wine-tasting buffet.

He was going to call, though, and wanted me to do the buffet Monday. Wonderful.

I passed a line of skiers waiting for the gondola. I clambered up to the bottom of Base View Run, where skiers and snowboarders had to stop to take off their equipment before heading back to the gondola or across the footbridge. At the far left of the run’s end stood Big Map, a fifteen-by-eight-foot plastic-covered diagram of the ski area. Arch was not there.

I wiggled my toes to keep warm. As the bottom of a run is a precarious place to spend any time just standing around, I worked my way through the snow to get closer to the map. To my right, hooting, calling skiers and snowboarders produced waves of snow as they made sudden hockey stops and stepped out of their bindings. Children, fat as doughboys in their brightly colored down jackets, wheeled this way and that, searching for parents from whom they’d become separated on the hill. Occasionally an out-of-control skier or snowboarder would biff—slang for crash— into one of the kids and send him sprawling. Two ski patrol members standing near the map called warnings, helped the children up, and yanked the tickets of particularly reckless skiers and boarders.

Arch knew where to find me, so I didn’t waste time trying to spot him among the hordes descending the last leg of the run. I turned to the map and ran my fingers along Widowmaker and Jitterbug Run. My eyes inexorably turned to Hot-Rodder, where Doug Portman had died. With all the stamping around done by the patrol as they tried to rescue Doug, there couldn’t have been much of a crime scene left for the police and Forest Service to investigate.

My eyes wandered over the diagram to Elk Valley, where Nate Bullock had died three years ago. Nate wanted to make extra money. Doing what? I really can’t say… . Striped red lines indicated both the valley and the ridge above it as out-of-bounds for skiing. Just to the west of Elk Valley lay a green-dotted area labeled Area III Expansion . On the map, I retraced my route this morning along the main road and then to the parking lot by the Elk Ridge Nature Trail. If I had come out the other side of the parking lot the first time, I could have found Arthur’s condo without a hitch. Speaking of directions …

Near me a ski patroller was carefully buckling yellow straps around a transport sled. I called a greeting down and received an answering smile from the patroller, a young woman with a thin, tanned face.

“I don’t want to interrupt you,” I began.

“You’re not. Have you lost somebody? Do you need help?”

I told her I was just waiting for my son. “But I do have a couple of questions about the map, if you don’t mind.” I introduced myself and said that yesterday I’d done a fund-raiser for Nate Bullock up at the bistro.

“Yeah,” the patroller said mournfully, “I knew Nate. Everybody did.” Her genuine sadness seemed a contrast to Rorry’s bitter words from yesterday: I’m not sad. Just puzzled . And then there had been Boots’s angry comment: Don’t get me started on Rorry .

I turned back to the map. “What I can’t figure out is why a high-country-wise person like Nate would go into a dangerous area like that.”

She shrugged. “There hadn’t been a slide there in thirty years. Nate probably thought he’d be okay.”

I glanced at the slope. “Rorry Bullock, Nate’s widow? She’s an old friend of mine.”

The patrolwoman put her hands on her knees, sprang up agilely, and brushed snow from her legs. She was about my height, with dark blond hair poking from beneath her red hat. She moved with a graceful, unconscious athleticism, and as usual at the ski resort, I felt horridly uncoordinated and chubby. But not corpulent. At least, I hoped not.