Sam who was about to go to trial.
“Edie, hon. It’s Marjorie. Can we talk?” She winked at him.
“Alan and I decided you and I should get together and talk. Let’s have dinner tonight. Suggest someplace where the tables are far enough apart so we can have a private conversation.” She paused listening while Alan sipped his drink.
“It has to be in town, within walking distance. We have a car, but I’d rather not drive it tonight.”
Alan sipped. His drink was smooth and he approved. There’s something about sipping good scotch in a cool and quiet bar, or almost anyplace else, for that matter, that makes a man’s day more serene and peaceful. He really didn’t know why that was. He did wonder why Marjorie told Edie they wanted to meet her in a public place.
“Okay, hon. Got it. Book a table for eight o’clock and I’ll see you there.” She closed the device and turned to her smiling companion, drink in hand.
“I thought we decided we’d stay incognito for the first couple of days until we got a handle on things,” he said.
“I know. I just suddenly felt like Edie was getting upset. You know her husband never wanted anything to do with Sam. He’d written off Sam as a bad kid. A trouble-maker.”
“Step-fathers can sometimes be like that.” Alan examined his observation and decided he was slipping a little. Edie Black’s husband was apparently not in the picture. As Marjorie had explained, he was not in any picture for about a year. No communication since he’d stomped out of the house one morning and driven off. Authorities later discovered his truck miles away in Boise. He was not. He’d not been seen or heard from since.
Marjorie and Alan drank and had murmured conversation at that bar for the better part of an hour. During that time they altered their original plan. Lockem was not anxious to meet Marjorie’s cousin or Sam, her son, the accused, just yet, so Marjorie agreed to have dinner on her own with Edie. Alan had never met the woman so he’d be dining in the same club but at a different table. The arrangement would allow him to observe and make some judgments without being tagged yet as a part of the defense. He wanted to see if he could discover any attitudes, any vibes. Alan Lockem paid attention to body language.
He also wanted to observe Edie Black in a social situation. Were some folks avoiding her, for instance? Small towns are often like that when violence happens. Divisions quickly form for and against victim and perpetrator. Did Sam Black deliberately, or in a fit of anger, shoot Jack Ketchum in the chest, from across that canyon, thereby causing the instant death of the said Jack Ketchum? Finding an impartial jury in the county might be a problem. That would be a later consideration if Sam went to trial. Their role was to keep that from ever happening.
Ketchum had been a rancher and small-time developer. His family roots ran deep in the area and he appeared to have a few distant relatives around. He’d run a number of successful modest projects around the county, but then he discovered he owned a piece of mountainside property with gorgeous views of the lake and mountains on the eastern side. The piece was located just at the edge of the north town line. It looked ideal in the hot real estate atmosphere for building three or four big homes. They’d each have about twelve acres. There was only one problem. Turned out the guy had no legal access to his piece of the property. No easement for a road through adjoining property. To develop the piece, he’d have to buy access from a couple of the surrounding landowners and build an access road.
Ketchum, being a sort of bluff, abrupt, independent cuss, did what a lot of people like that do. He acted first, apparently planning to say he was sorry later, if anybody objected. In the dark of a night the previous year he’d driven across two adjoining properties he didn’t own with trucks hauling earth-moving equipment which he proceeded to unload. Then, about three in the morning, according to police reports Alan had already seen, he took the controls of his biggest dozer and bladed a twelve-foot-wide swath through the underbrush, whacking off a couple of medium sized trees in the bargain. Now he had a crude road, access of a sort, to his property. But it ran across other people’s property.
Apparently he figured nobody would oppose him after he did all the damage he could. He was wrong. Dead wrong, as it turned out. Lawsuits became the talk of the town. What’s more, townspeople generally chose up sides. A surprising number of folks sided with Ketchum. This state is big on individual rights and minimal government interference. Rumor had it a number of separatist groups had set up semi-permanent camps out in some of the more remote areas of the national parks, or on private land, some up near the Canadian border, waiting for the right moment to revolt against Washington or maybe against the queen. Lockem didn’t know about that and he hoped they weren’t getting into conflict with any of the separatist groups in the county.
The mountain homeowners’ association, folks with property adjacent to Ketchum’s, not only objected to the road he bulldozed across private land, they didn’t like what they heard about his plans for building several large palatial homes. Cutting trees, blocking the vistas. The stories, according to Edie, Marjorie’s cousin, made some people mad, especially after Ketchum’s bulldozer ploy. They got together at Edie’s and hired a lawyer. Filed a lawsuit.
This information all came by way of Edie, with copies of some newspaper stories and the legal documents. Was the information complete? Unbiased? Answers to those questions were of first priority.
This all happened before Ketchum got shot and before Edie’s son was arrested for the crime, as Marjorie had informed her companion back in Minneapolis before they had emplaned for Idaho.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” Marjorie said. “I want some time to get ready for dinner.”
* * * *
The place Edie had chosen was unprepossessing. A sprawling one-story building on the western edge of town and set back against one side of Carson’s Mountain, it had a big unpaved parking lot in front. A discreet orange neon sign said it was JACK’S PLACE. The lot was about half filled with cars and trucks when Marjorie and Lockem got there fifteen minutes before their rendezvous with Edie Black.
“I’ll go sit at the bar and have a drink until Edie gets here,” Marjorie said. She bussed Lockem lightly on the cheek so as not to muss her makeup and slid out of the car.
He watched her make her way to the door and disappear inside. Ten minutes later he hadn’t seen anyone who remotely looked like the pictures he’d studied of Marjorie’s cousin enter the place. He locked the car and strolled casually inside. It was even bigger and darker than he expected. It was the kind of supper club that aimed to serve those who wanted some private time together in an intimate setting. It would have good food, high prices and no sense of pressure to eat and get out. There were no windows of course, and the walls were hung with tapestries and large paintings of outdoor scenes, which could have been Idaho or California or South America, for all Lockem knew, not being much of a geographer. The building had the look of a place that started life as a modest cinder-block building and then grew with multiple expansions in a sort of haphazard unplanned non-pattern. As a result hallways and cul de sacs and evidence of doors appeared, any of which might have been randomly inserted between the decorations. It was the kind of place that could hide a lot of secrets.
A long bar stretched from the front wall all the way back to another wall that had several doors in it, some leading to a kitchen, judging by the traffic, and others that remained closed. Lockem strolled to the bar and took a stool. The bartender gave him the requested whiskey and he turned slowly on the stool, glass in hand to survey the room again.
He hadn’t spotted her when he first entered, but now he saw Marjorie seated at a table near the parking lot wall and deep into the room. She was still alone. A noisy group of two couples bounced into the place and then a lone woman. She had a superficial resemblance to Marjorie, but he would have had to study her to be sure, and staring at her while she crossed the room would have drawn attention, exactly what they didn’t want. Marjorie sat facing away from the room. Lockem knew that would allow her to hear the conversation more clearly, although it made her more vulnerable.
Lockem saw that Marjorie stood up and turned to wave at the woman who had entered. That settled it. He watched Edie Black reach out and embrace Marjorie and then settle in the other chair at the table. He hoped she’d sit facing out, but she didn’t, opting instead to sit next to Marjorie. In seconds, the two women were deep in conversation. Lockem pulled what looked like a Blackberry but wasn’t from the pocket of his sport coat and glanced at the screen. The green flicker that indicated sound recording was reassuring. He didn’t really expect to hear any startling facts from this encounter, but he’d learned early on that it never hurts to have records. Even sketchy notes were often helpful.