Dark Tort

Chapter 2-3

Donald Ellis and Alonzo Claggett, meanwhile, shook their heads as they spoke to two other policemen. Richard Chenault, his voice subdued and his face stricken, talked to a third cop.

Two more cops were leaning in to stare at the area in front of Dusty’s old Honda. I squinted at the Civic. Dusty had been fond of telling me that she left her car, a donation from a St. Luke’s parishioner, as far from the office building as possible, to get a bit of extra exercise walking to the law firm. Once summer was over, she’d started working out at the rec center with Alonzo. Then they’d drive separately over to H&J. At the office, she changed into whatever suit she was wearing at the office that day. I sighed.

So, what was going on with Dusty’s Civic? It was parked right under a streetlight. Dusty had been as meticulous about the appearance of that little car as she was of her own person. But the paint job was a wreck, and the rear lights had been … what? Smashed? I got out of the patrol car, motioned to a nearby cop, and pointed to the car. In a garbled voice, I informed him it was Dusty’s, and that it had been vandalized.

He nodded, then looked at me sympathetically. “She was a friend of yours, this girl?” I nodded. “For long?”

“A few years.”

The cop closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows, as in, Too bad. He told me the detectives would want to talk to me after a bit, and I shouldn’t go anywhere. Then he walked away.

I swallowed and watched him. Why hadn’t he asked more about Dusty? I knew what questions I’d face once the detectives arrived. The same ones I’d gotten from Officer Nelson. And then there were the questions that were important to me, questions the cops were very unlikely to ask.

Why was Dusty so special to you? Because I still thought of her as a high-school kid. Because she and her low-income family lived in a Habitat for Humanity house, just down the street from us, and people in town still made fun of them. Because until her uncle Richard, who didn’t believe in handouts, had agreed to pay off her student loans for community college, foot the bill for her paralegal training, and hire her, she’d never seemed to have a bit of luck.

She’d been a scholarship student at Elk Park Prep. Julian Teller, my part-time assistant and our occasional boarder, had been a classmate of Dusty’s at EPP. He, too, had been a scholarship student, and he and Dusty had been boyfriend-girlfriend for a while. He said Dusty had been smart … not just bright, but brilliant. And then she’d been expelled from Elk Park Prep because she’d become pregnant … not by Julian.

That spring, I’d been dealing full-time with the Jerk, who, even though we were divorced, managed to make my life miserable. I had taken meals over when Dusty had miscarried, but the Routts hadn’t offered any details of the misbegotten pregnancy. Nor had I asked any. I did know that Dusty had managed to get her GED after the Elk Park Prep meltdown. The next time I’d come in close contact with her, she’d been working at a cosmetics counter at a department store.

“Those bastard Routt children,” the mean-spirited had snorted. “We wonder if Dusty is selling those free samples she gets.”

Dusty had taken everything in stride. She’d worked her way up to being a highly compensated cosmetics associate before being lured away to a full-service spa. When the spa had gone belly-up, she’d enrolled in community college. Sometime later, she’d told me about her uncle, previously unknown to the family, getting altitude sickness on his way back from an attorneys’ conference in Vail. Dusty’s mother, Sally Routt, may not have known about Richard, but he had known about her, and he’d called his sister-in-law and begged for help, having just vomited all over his rental car. Not sure of the cause of Richard’s distress, Sally and Dusty had rushed him down to the Southwest Hospital ER, where he’d ended up mewling and puking in his doctor’s arms, and that doctor had been K.D.

Richard’s recovery had been near miraculous, and he had proceeded to sweep K.D. off her feet. He’d sold his partnership in a Los Angeles firm and opened his own office in Aspen Meadow. A year ago, he and K.D. had bought their big place in Flicker Ridge, and Richard had offered to pay off Dusty’s loans, give her a job, and pay for her training.

Maybe Richard had seen it as an investment in having his very own paralegal, with on-the-job training in estate law, to boot. Perhaps his guilt at having so much in the material-goods department had finally begun gnawing at him. I had no way of knowing, because between a polite, solicitous manner with clients and staff, occasional bursts of regal temper, and showing a nutty tendency to pull practical jokes, King Richard was pretty hard to read. Dusty hadn’t complained about him to me, in any event. Nor had she lauded him. She’d only laughed her wonderful tinkling giggle and called her uncle “the King.”

In any event, Dusty had confided to me that now she was working to build a career, a real life, as she put it. She was going to push to quit her humble surroundings. She was moving, moving, moving, as she put it, moving up in the world!

I stared at the bustling parking lot. Cops were turning away bystanders. Other law enforcement folks began to unroll yellow crime-scene tape around the imposing stone-and-wood entry to Hanrahan & Jule. Donald and Alonzo appeared to be pestering the cops with questions, but their curiosity was met with a grim silence. Was I imagining it, or was the officer in charge wearing a happy smirk as he asserted his authority over the attorneys? I did not have time to contemplate this question, because a detective ordered a sergeant to whisk me down to the department for questioning.