Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller Read online

  THE

  SPRING

  CLIFFORD

  IRVING

  *****

  Author’s Note

  THE LANGUAGE USED at times by some of the characters in The Spring is not a fantasy. It is a variant of Boontling, an authentic American English jargon—a lingo, or synthetic slang—developed around 1890 by settlers in the Anderson Valley of California’s Mendocino County and later transplanted to a remote area of Colorado’s Elk Mountains, where it metamorphosed into what is called Springling. Although the language appears to be slowly dying out, some Boontling is spoken in Boonville, California (where there is a café called Horn of Zeese, which means cup of coffee). The Colorado variant, if you have a keen ear, can still be heard southwest of Aspen near Springhill and the ghost town of Crystal City.

  I am grateful to many people in Colorado for help in my research. Among them: Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis; Deputy Sheriff Ann Stephenson; Emergency Management Coordinator Steve Crockett; Aspen defense attorney Mac Myers, Steve Ayers, coroner; Dr. Robert Christensen, forensic odontologist; Safety Officer Duchess McCay; Tom Dunlop of the Environmental Health Department; County Manager Reid Haughey; David Williams of the Tenth Mountain Division Hut System; Hank Charneskey of the Miners Building; Brooks Hollern; and Lila J. Lee, director of the Mendocino County Historical Society.

  C.I.

  Bonnieux, France

  this edition

  is dedicated

  to the memory of Lou Schreiber

  Prologue:

  Events at Pearl Pass

  Base camp for the searchers was at 9,600 feet, near Lead King Basin in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. They were an older married couple, a young man and a young woman. At dawn the air was cool, sweet with the scent of pine, and the older man, the leader, slipped into his backpack and adjusted a Beretta semiautomatic shotgun into a safari sling. He was ninety-four years old, with white hair and a long face as powerful as if it had been carved in brown oak. Once six feet five inches tall, in the last decade he had shrunk a good two inches. He looked to be in his sixties, but he had the vitality and strength of a man much younger.

  He led the way, and the two men and two women set out briskly along the North Fork of the Crystal River. They hiked eastward on a pack trail that curled like a thin worm through the dark green heart of Colorado’s White River National Forest. Above them a turkey vulture turned slow circles in a sky that altered quickly from silver to a bright, rich blue.

  The younger man was armed with a graphite bow, an electronic scope sight, and steel broadhead arrows. The women were unarmed. The foursome were looking for a couple they knew well, a man and a woman named Henry and Susan Lovell.

  At noon they were close to 11,000 feet, southwest of Pearl Pass. The leader checked his watch; it monitored altitude, barometric pressure, and temperature.

  The August temperature had risen to eighty degrees Fahrenheit. “Let’s get into the shade,” the bowman suggested. “And it might be a good time to eat lunch.”

  The leader shook his head. “Chew on a protein bar, young fella. We have to keep moving.”

  In the shadowed parts of the mountain peaks, snowbanks lasted far into the summer. The searchers stuffed chunks of last spring’s snow into their hats and pushed the crowns up to let air flow around their heads. They were at home in the high country; all four had been born less than thirty miles away in the mountain hamlet of Springhill. During the winter they skied cross-country or snowshoed over trails that Ute Indians had carved out of wilderness. In summer they hiked or mountain biked along the same trails. On either side of the trails the world was still wilderness.

  The leader’s wife would turn ninety-two the following day. She was a quiet woman, still attractive and shapely, with cool gray eyes and a sense of tranquility that flowed with her like an aura. No one from outside the enclave of Springhill would have dreamed that she was older than her mid-sixties.

  At 12,500 feet, in alpine tundra, the pack trail trickled out at a small saddle in a spur ridge descending from the peaks west of Pearl Pass. The hikers slowed the pace every twenty minutes in order to drink from their water bottles. The wind moaned in their faces, and at five o’clock the temperature dropped to sixty degrees. After sundown it would skid into the forties or lower. ‘

  The old leader had been noting signs along the trail that the others hadn’t seen. “We’re close,” he said. “I think we can camp here.”

  “Are you hungry?” his wife asked.

  “I could eat a mule raw and the tail off a dead skunk,” he said, easing his long body down onto a fallen tree trunk.

  Elk had browsed here among the few mountain maples, their musk still lingering faintly in pockets of brush. “This is the time of day I love most,” his wife said. Sitting on the fallen spruce, she put on a woolen sweater. From her backpack she pried open a little silver pillbox that she had bought on the rue de Rennes in Paris more than thirty years ago. She selected an enteric aspirin and a calcium channel blocker, swallowing the pills with cold water from her bottle.

  Her husband dropped a bony hand on her shoulder. “Tired, sweetheart?”

  “My legs,” she said. “Time catches up with you no matter what you do.” She regarded him affectionately, but her gray eyes were less calm than usual.

  “Could have been worse. They could have gone clear up to Wyoming.” For a moment the old man sniffed the wind; he was working things out, measuring possibilities. “I think they’ll listen to reason. We’ll harp. Henry Lovell and I go a long way back. An old horse for a hard pike, that’s what they say.”

  In the midst of unpacking his camping tools, he looked up and saw the expression of concern on his wife’s face. “Sweetheart,” he said, “it’s something that has to be done.”

  “I know. It’s just that I don’t particularly want to do it. You and Henry are such old friends. Susie and I were close. Tomorrow’s my borndy. It’s not my idea of a good way to celebrate.”

  Susan Lovell had been the bookkeeper at the Springhill marble quarry until her eyesight worsened. In his heyday Henry Lovell had been a master carpenter. He had built cedar bookcases for the searchers when they married, and years later a pine cabinet for their television set. He and the man who now hunted for him had fought side by side in the fire of 1924 when the Black Queen coal mine had been put out of action for a year. Henry had been a hunter too; at the age of one hundred he was still a fair marksman.

  When he looked into his wife’s troubled eyes, the old searcher’s brow furrowed. “You’re not trying to tell me you won’t do it?”

  “You’ll harp,” she said, “and you’ll work it out with Henry. I know you will. That’s the codgy way to do things.”

  “We’ll sand through the varnish, get down to the wood.” He smiled; he was an educated man, but aside from the lingo that was peculiar to their town he liked to use the old colloquialisms of the semiliterate men who had settled these mountains. It made him feel anchored to the earth and connected to his forebears.

  For supper they cooked lemon chicken and wild rice, using a flat boulder to support the gas stove. In an outback oven the older woman baked brownies. The leader had brought a bottle of ‘90 Chateau Pommard from his wine cellar, hoping that it wouldn’t be shaken up during the hike. They ate in cordial silence. The old couple and the two younger people had little to say to one another; they were merely united in their purpose, which was to track down Susan and Henry Lovell wherever they had vanished in this wilderness.

  An hour before darkness the men set out to scout the trail
ahead. In the slanting shadows every heel mark of their quarry could still be seen. So silent were they in their passage over the earth that a pair of cow elk ambled along the next ridge, drifting in and out of sight, not hearing or seeing them. The older man walked with his legs slightly bowed to prevent his pants legs swishing against each other. His grandparents had come West from Pennsylvania just after the Civil War. He had learned trail lore from his father, a man born in Springhill. Until the year he died at the age of one hundred, his father had never missed a hunting season. He had used a Winchester rifle manufactured in Missouri only a few years after the Confederacy surrendered.

  A dog barked nearby, as hoarse as a chain saw cutting soft pine, and the searchers dropped immediately into a crouch. A horned lark flapped away in the darkness. The two cow elk vanished—a rustling of brush, then silence.

  “That’s Henry Lovell’s haireem,” the young man whispered. “You figure he smells us?”

  “Does a ten-foot chicken lay a big egg?” the old man said. “But we’re upwind. The dog is smart, but not smart enough to tell Henry who it is he smells. Could just as well be that pair of elk.”

  In twenty minutes, after the two men had zigzagged up some switchbacks and moved downwind through the forest behind a meadow of blue columbine, the dog stopped barking.

  Soundless goshawks sped high above. The old man, a little tired now, took out his Warsaw Pact military binoculars, the kind that East German border guards had used a decade ago along the Berlin Wall. Peering through the brush, he spotted a bright blue nylon range tent on the edge of the meadow. White-haired Henry Lovell stood to one side of the tent, petting his dog. The air was so clear, crisp, and dry that the watchers sniffed the aroma of pipe tobacco lifted by the evening wind. A pastoral scene, one to cherish. An idle wish drifted into the old man’s mind: to paint watercolors. He had never done it. But he had six years left to him. Time enough.

  Five minutes later the watchers withdrew without even the cracking of a twig, and began the journey back to the women at their campsite.

  In the cold starlit blackness at three o’clock in the morning, the leader woke ten minutes before his quartz alarm clock was due to beep. He woke the others. He wished his wife a happy birthday and in the candlelit darkness she offered him a wan smile and a light kiss on the cheek. The message was clear: in her life there had been happier birthdays than this one. But they were doing what had to be done. Wedging a couple of flashlights between rocks, he prepared coffee and hot buttery oatmeal.

  In the starlight the younger woman came up to him and stood scuffing her boots in the dirt. “I’ve come with you,” she said softly, “because I’m part of the community and you all made me feel I had to do it. I don’t want to go any farther.”

  Sighing, the old man said, “I think you should come along. There’s such a thing as moral force and persuasion, and it’s reenforced by numbers.”

  “I know that, but I don’t want to be part of this moral force and persuasion.”

  He mulled that over awhile, then smiled pleasantly. “You do whatever melts your butter.” He turned away.

  Leaving the younger woman behind to clean up the campsite, he and his wife and the bowman set out through the darkness along the trail leading to the wildflower meadow. This time they took the extra twenty minutes to work their way downwind. They reached the campsite at a quarter to five, half an hour before dawn. A breeze slipped through the long needles of the lodgepole pines, bringing the scent of unseen flowers.

  A band of silver light appeared over the Continental Divide. The hunters were in place. At a few minutes past five there was enough light to see the outlines of the Lovells’ blue nylon tent a hundred feet away. The old man frowned. From the spot they had chosen the previous evening he had thought the tent would be closer.

  The bowman peered into the early gloom, distressed by their mistake. They were beyond his best range. The muscles bunched and rippled beneath his hunting jacket. “And where’s the damned haireem?” he whispered.

  The old man, bent to one knee with his shotgun upright, laid a gloved palm on the bowman’s arm. Silently he tried to communicate a sense of calm and harmony. The dog might be somewhere out in the forest hunting, or in the tent with Henry and Susan Lovell, asleep at their feet.

  When he felt his young companion relax, he picked a small rock out of the nearly frozen turf and lobbed it backhand into the meadow, ten yards this side of the tent. The rock struck softly in a patch of columbine.

  The big brown dog came snuffling around from the other side of the tent and trotted to where the rock had landed. In the gathering light it pawed at the earth. Now it was about twenty-five yards away, its flank quartering away from the men in the forest. The old man nodded. The bowman nocked a broadhead arrow, lifted the black graphite bow and, quickly, with almost no apparent effort, came to full draw. There was no sound, just the movement of air. He delivered the arrow broadside in a flat trajectory at 250 feet per second, a double-lung-and-heart shot. The dog staggered, thudded to the turf, thrashed twice, twitched a few seconds—then was still. No cry came from him that the watchers could hear.

  They moved at a quick and silent woodsman’s trot through the meadow toward the tent. The old man’s wife walked behind them. She was still unarmed, but in her backpack she carried syringes full of poison sufficient to kill a bull elk.

  Stepping through the flap into the semidarkness of the tent, the old man made out two prone figures cocooned in sleeping bags. He snapped the switch on his flashlight, playing the beam first over Susie Lovell’s gray hair, and then down to the fine wrinkles of her face. She was still asleep, gently snoring.

  In his down sleeping bag Henry Lovell raised his head and began to blink in confusion. One hand clawed for the rifle he had placed by the side of the bag next to a box of Kleenex.

  “Don’t do that, Henry,” the older visitor said—quietly, but loud enough to be heard.

  Henry’s hand instead plucked a Kleenex from the box, and he blew his nose. At that sound, Susie Lovell woke. She propped herself up on her elbows, immediately put on her metal-rimmed eyeglasses, and adjusted her eyes to the light and her mind to the situation. She said, in a sad, gravelly voice, “Well, hello. What a surprise. Why didn’t Geronimo bark?”

  “I’m sorry,” the bowman said. “He never knew what hit him.” But there was more pride in his voice than sympathy. He couldn’t control it, and the others heard it.

  Susie Lovell said angrily, “You had to do that?”

  “We thought it was necessary,” the old man replied. “If we barged in on you at dawn or even daylight, and your haireem barked up a storm, you might figure this was the Alamo and you were Mr. and Mrs. Davy Crockett.” His glance rested for a moment on Henry Lovell’s Remington 30-30, which still lay next to the Kleenex box.

  “That would serve no purpose,” he added.

  Reaching out to squeeze his wife’s hand, Henry Lovell said, “Susie, it doesn’t matter now.”

  The old hunter nodded agreement, although he realized the statement was said out of kindness and wasn’t true. If the dog were alive they could have taken it back to Springhill. Someone in town would have been glad to see him through his canine golden years.

  Susie Lovell began to cry almost noiselessly. Henry put an arm around her, trying to offer comfort. “They’ll let us have some time,” he said softly. Then he looked up with eyes that were grave and resigned. “How did you find us?”

  The hunter looked away. That was something he was not willing to discuss. He sat down cross-legged on the floor of the tent, still a supple man, although at ninety-four the lotus position was beyond his capability.

  “Let’s harp,” he said. “It will help us all.”

  Before that could happen, he heard from outside the sound of footsteps in crackling brush, a light cry of confusion, and then women’s voices. From a distance his wife said something he couldn’t understand, but she sounded relieved. He glanced up as the tent flaps parted. Mo
re light flowed in, and with it the scent of alpine clover and perfume. He saw a visitor who had appeared out of the wilderness.

  His face broke apart into a warm, lined smile. “How about that. I didn’t think you’d make it in time. Welcome, honey.”

  Chapter 1

  The Woman on the Mountain

  IN THE WINTER OF 1993, Dennis Conway, a New York criminal trial lawyer, flew to Colorado for a week of skiing. He rented a small condo at the edge of the slopes of Aspen Mountain. In the early mornings, after he waxed and burred his skis, he worked on an opening statement for the bank fraud trial he was handling back in Manhattan. In the evenings he began to reread Joseph Conrad and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Now and then he drank a few beers at Little Annie’s Eating House with a pair of old ski pals who lived nearby in the Roaring Fork Valley.

  Dennis was a fairly tall, solidly built man with dark eyes and a gray- flecked beard that he often forgot to trim. Twenty-five years ago he had been on the Dartmouth ski team, but each year of city living took its toll: it was always a little bit harder to adjust to the altitude and get back into skiing shape. A Vietcong mortar fragment had given him a permanent ache in one knee. A calf muscle kept cramping when he dug in his edges for sharp turns. But the fourth day out he said to hell with it and tackled the double-black-diamond runs of the Dumps.

  These runs, angling steeply between some aspen groves, were full of ungroomed moguls. Today they were almost empty of skiers: on Short Snort, the run he chose, he noticed only one other, a woman. It had snowed heavily the night before, leaving six inches of fresh powder. The mountain was silent, and the dry cold air in Dennis’s lungs felt rare and fine. Not a cloud in the sky, and on the whiteness below him as he shot down the bump run he heard his snow spray billowing behind and the sound of his edges carving through the turns. He let out a whoop of joy. This is great. This is the best.