“Yup.” I glanced at the year stamped under his name tag, identifying that he’d become a cop five years earlier. “Did we ever meet? I’m sorry I don’t remember.”
“Nope. You want to come on back?”
He led the way into a narrow, dark hallway, at the end of which was a large room used for everything from lunch breaks to staff meetings to general storage. We sat around a long folding table, Newell on one side, Sammie and I on the other. Given his body language, I felt like launching into a speech about how our two countries were destined to become friends, but I didn’t think he’d see the humor. It made me wonder if he thought we might be following up on the accusation that he’d been in on the burglaries.
“What can I help you with?” he asked.
“We heard you work at Tucker Peak,” Sammie said.
He frowned. “Not anymore. I quit.”
I spoke up then, beating Sammie to it, wanting to set a softer, more conciliatory tone. “Sorry to hear that. Snuffy Dawson’s asked us to do a little digging around for him there. We were hoping you could give us the lay of the land. Who’s who, how the politics work,a stuff like that.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, and I realized my instincts had been right. “That’s all?”
“That’s it,” I told him honestly. “Snuffy mentioned Manning’s allegation early on. He also said it was a crock. That was good enough for me.”
A silence fell among us, which Sammie filled encouragingly, having taken my cue. “So, can you help us out?”
He hesitated, and I could tell he was debating whether or not to tell us to pound sand-since this visit was clearly unofficial-or give us the assistance that all cops were supposed to give colleagues without a second’s thought but often did only grudgingly.
Happily, he opted for the second, while maintaining his deadpan expression. “Ask away. I can’t guarantee how much good I’ll be, though. I was mostly outside, on patrol. A lot went on I don’t know anything about.”
“That’s okay,” I told him. “We’re just looking for an overview, enough to give us a jump start, maybe.”
Despite harbored suspicions, he finally opened up. “All right. Stop me if I’m going where you don’t want to go. If you’re talking flow chart, there’s a top man, the CEO, which used to be just ‘general manager’ till somebody figured CEO sounds better. That’s Phil McNally. He works with a CFO named Conan Gorenstein, if you can believe that-a mousy little guy nobody sees much. Then there’s a mountain manager. She’s a hot ticket named Linda Bettina. The only female mountain manager in the business, far as I know-good people, pretty tough, and not so into the women’s lib thing that she can’t yuk it up with the boys.”
He was watching Sammie when he said this, presumably hoping for a reaction. She stuck to taking notes.
Disappointed, he continued, “After that, it spreads out. You have a food and beverage manager, a personnel manager, marketing manager… brass hats like that, and each of them has a bunch of people under them that swells or fades depending on the season.”
“Anyone run the CEO?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. There’s a board of directors. They’re basically invisible except when they use their gold passes to cut to the head of a lift line. I don’t know when they meet or what they do, but none of us ever heard about them. It was all the CEO or CFO on down, and for the operational types mostly Linda and the individual department managers.”
“What’s McNally like?” Sammie asked, not looking up from her notes.
“He cruises around like the captain of the Love Boat, trying to make everybody feel good-just the opposite of Gorenstein. No one who works there has much time for him, since he didn’t really know anything except how to dress good and play politics, but I guess they needed all of that they could stand.”
“Why?”
“I worked other mountains when I was younger, mostly as a garage mechanic. That’s actually how I started at Tucker, before the security job opened up. The pressure’s about the same everywhere, but some are run well, with the employees taken care of and the equipment kept up, and others are pretty fly-by-night. Like Tucker. So McNally had to sound and look happier than maybe he was. He’s a good enough shit. I mean, I liked the guy, ’cause I knew he was in a jam. He never showed it, though. Always acted glad to see you-and remembered names, too.”
“I heard they were getting ready to spend a fortune,” I said. “Really fix it up.”
Newell looked unimpressed. “Yeah, well, whatever. It would take a fortune just to bring the dump up to code, if you ask me… Not that you are.”
“What about the resort generally? The nightclub and condos, the owners versus the day skiers, the full-timers and the seasonal workers. What’s it like as a society?”
He paused thoughtfully before answering, “It’s a company town-lives and dies with the resort. That makes it like a soap opera, with everybody angling for position and every clubby little group pissing on the other. And there’s a real pecking order. The lifties-that’s the lift operators-they’re probably at the bottom of the heap. Some of them, especially the loaders who just make sure people get seated without killing themselves, they’re barely conscious half the time. Long hair, tattoos, body piercing, into drugs. Not all of ’em, of course, but a bunch.
“At the other extreme, not counting the management types, the ski patrol, and the instructors, you got the snowmakers. They have as many misfits, but they’re big on the job, you know? They get off on making snow, like it was an art form. And they see themselves as Navy SEALs or something-the elite. They tear around on snowmobiles like Harley riders, strut their stuff, pretty much keep to themselves as a group. If ever some employees get into a bar fight or have a run-in with the police, they’re probably snowmakers.”
He’d loosened up during all this, his face relaxing and his hands becoming more expressive. There was something about being part of this culture that clearly captured his imagination. Cops tend to find comfort in a regulated world with rules and parameters and clearly defined social structures, but they’re also tribal by nature. It sounded like Tucker Peak and its brethren offered a perfect mixture of both.
“From what I’ve heard,” he continued, “the mountain’s more like a traveling circus as far as personalities go. People are real loyal to it, even with the shitty pay. They come back year after year-guys like home builders and roofers and others who can’t do their regular work in the winter. And some of the instructors and snowmakers are like gypsies-when we got our summer up here, it’s winter in Australia or New Zealand or South America, south of the equator, so they go and work for resorts down there, skiing year ’round.”
He paused, staring at the tabletop. “’Course, that’s all changing, too. Money’s tight, management’s looking for cheap labor. A lot of the older hands have moved on to better mountains. I got sick of all the deadheads they were hiring, who basically sign up to ski for free and fuck up the equipment. Real foolish, if you ask me. That’s why I quit.” He looked suddenly belligerent. “Not ’cause of that prick Manning.”
“Were you aware of much criminal activity going on?” I asked, blandly ignoring the reference.
He smiled broadly for the first time. “I don’t guess I’m the best one to answer that. Everyone knew I was a cop, or that I wanted to be one in the early days. So they didn’t brag much around me. But look at what you got-bunch of bums, basically, wandering from place to place, leading a hard life with weird hours. You’re going to get some criminals mixed in, and some dopers, guaranteed. Hell, I used to get high just walking through the locker room at shift change, the air was so full of dope.”
“But nothing like a ring.”
He laughed. “Too organized-those people’re way too flaky for that. Anything’s possible, I guess, but I don’t see it. A few tickets would be ripped off, or a till would go light at the end of the day, but I don’t see a gang operating there. I said it was like a separate world, but a small one, too: Everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”