Bright Young Women(66)

Carl nodded, a look on his face that told me he understood what I hadn’t said. He went over to the closet and thrust his arms into the only shirt he’d brought, hooked the strap of my bag over his shoulder, and then escorted me back to my room.



* * *




The next morning, we piled into the car and headed for the bank. Tina was more than game to wave a brick of bills at one of the prison employees, entice them to tell us what they knew. Before dropping Carl off at The Stew Pot, we strategized an approach—we’d go in and ask to speak to Sheriff Wright, who would no doubt keep us waiting out of spite, providing ample opportunity to slip a note to one of the guards.

“What do we do if the sheriff agrees to speak to us, though?” I asked.

“I very much doubt that will happen,” Tina scoffed.

“No, but it’s good to be prepared, just in case.” Carl had glanced back at me and smiled supportively. It was a clear, cold day, the bracing morning sun turning his hazel eyes jewel-toned. I smiled back and quickly looked away before Tina picked up on anything.

“My advice?” Carl said. “I’d appeal to the sheriff’s narrative that The Defendant was a force beyond anyone’s control.”

In the years that followed, I would locate back editions of the Aspen Star Bulletin and read Sheriff Wright’s gun-strapping, cigar-chomping interview, and realize how right Carl had been. How good he was at all of this.

He’s one slippery snake, the sheriff had said, thumbs hooked in his suspenders, a hint of a smile on his face, but I’m the gardening shovel that’ll chop him off at the head.

Sometimes I think it was machismo that killed Denise.



* * *




As we made the turn into the prison’s muddy drive, Tina slammed on the brakes.

“Did you see who that was?” she said excitedly, spinning the wheel while the seat belt cut into my throat. She stepped on the gas and peeled up alongside the truck that was exiting as we were pulling in; she tapped on the horn and motioned for the driver to roll down his window and told me to roll mine down too. I poked my head out to see that the driver was the blond guard who had schlepped Gerald out of the makeshift visitors’ room yesterday. I vaguely remembered Gerald calling him Sammy.

Sammy regarded us through his open window with an impatient scowl. What? he looked like he wanted to groan. What do you want?

“We were here yesterday,” Tina said, unbuckling her seat belt and leaning across me. “Visiting Gerald Stevens?”

Sammy sighed in a beleaguered way. He had purple shadows beneath his eyes. Perhaps he had just come off the night shift.

“We were hoping,” Tina said, wearing her most feminine and helpless expression, “that we could buy you a coffee and talk to you, just for a few minutes.”

Sammy’s eyes slid toward the low stone station in his rearview mirror. “What about?”

“We want to know the details of The Defendant’s escape,” Tina said. “From someone who was there.”

“I can’t help you,” he said, and began to roll up his window.

“I think he killed my friend,” I called out at the same time Tina said, “I’ll pay you three thousand in cash.”

Sammy froze, the window just below nose level. He glanced at the station in his rearview mirror once more. Then, robotically stiff, as though someone inside could possibly read his lips, “Wait five minutes. Then meet me at Dinah’s on Eighty-two.”



* * *




Dinah’s was one of those diners with a rotating pie display. When we walked in, the guard was sitting at a booth polishing off a slice of cherry.

“If this comes back to me,” he said when we sat, “I’ll tell the sheriff you stole something from the jail and set it up to make it look real bad for you.”

“Understood,” Tina said. The deal was struck, simple as that.

Sammy thumbed a crumb from the corner of his mouth and looked out over the parking lot, inspecting a Toyota pickup as it chewed up the slush and the grit. He waited until the driver climbed out before deciding he didn’t know him.

“You have to understand,” Sammy said, continuing to monitor the comings and goings of the parking lot, “that the guy never should have been in Colorado to begin with.” He sighed and went all the way back to the beginning.

In March 1976, The Defendant was in Utah, serving a fifteen-year sentence for the kidnapping of Anne Biers from a shopping mall. Prosecutors there were working to tie him to the murder of another Utah woman, a girl, really—seventeen-year-old Barbara Kent, who disappeared after leaving a high school play to pick up her younger brother, mere hours after Anne Biers had escaped her abductor. Investigators had discovered a key in the school parking lot where Kent was last seen that fit the handcuffs used on Biers. The case was strong, but the Colorado DA couldn’t be bothered with anything approaching justice. His name was Frank Tucker, but Sammy told us that everyone around here had taken to calling him Tucker the Fucker after what happened.

Sammy pushed his cleaned plate to the side so that he could periodically jab the table with his pointer finger to punctuate the more outrageous parts of his story. “So the guy escapes again, and everyone is in an uproar, wanting to know how we could have let this happen. The sheriff points the finger at Tucker, saying it’s his fault, that Colorado wasn’t ready for him. And we weren’t.”