“You’re saying Gordon wasn’t in Reno that day?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” She bit a fingernail. “I lied to you about something else, too.”
I waited.
“You know how I told you Gordon and Chad were like two peas in a pod?”
I nodded.
“Well, they weren’t. Gordon hated Chad. Hated the way his sister made him hire him, hated him for who he was, the ex-con. He was always riding Chad, calling him lazy, a good-for-nothing criminal, how it was such a big waste, having to pay him even minimum wage.”
“Why would you lie to me about something like that?”
“Gordon’s my boss. I was just trying to be loyal, I guess.”
“How did Chad react to all of that, when Gordon rode him?”
“Chad? All he tried to do was make Gordon happy. If what they said in the paper was true, that Chad went up to that plane to steal stuff, I could definitely see him asking Gordon to go with him, to try and please Gordon, because Gordon, he’d be all over something like that, knowing Gordon. He’s definitely into making a fast buck if he can. And he’s not beyond breaking the law to do it, either.”
I asked her if she was aware of any business dealings Gordon Priest might’ve had with any newcomers living in the Lake Tahoe area. She started to say that she didn’t know, then abruptly reversed herself.
“He gets a lot of calls from this one guy, now that I think of it.” Again, Marlene glanced over her shoulder. “Talk about a crazy accent. I can barely understand the guy. Gordon always shuts his office door whenever he calls. He won’t ever tell me his name. He just tells me to tell Gordon that it’s his ‘friend’ calling.”
“What kind of accent?”
“I couldn’t tell you. Arab, maybe. I don’t really know. Foreign. That’s all I know.”
“Iranian?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you told the sheriff’s department all this?”
“I was kind of hoping you might be able to tell them for me.”
Marlene said she was afraid that if Priest found out she’d informed on him, she’d lose her job. Better that investigators find out about him from someone else, she said. Then, if they wanted, they could come to her for confirmation.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
She checked her wristwatch. “I better be getting back. Got a flight landing in about ten minutes.” Then she looked up at me, her eyes pooling. “Her father’s flying in to take your lady back to Las Vegas.”
Private jets don’t interest me. They never have. I’ll never be able to afford one, not in this life, which is why they all essentially look the same to me. But I easily recognized Gil Carlisle’s airplane as it touched down. The gleaming white Dassault Falcon flaunted the Carlisle family coat of arms on its vertical stabilizer — a black knight’s helmet above a yellow medieval shield embossed with a red cross. You’ve gotta have some major cojones to flaunt that much unvarnished ego.
I got out of my truck and leaned against a low chain-link fence as the jet swung smartly off the runway, taxiing to a stop in front of Summit Aviation Services. The door folded open and my former father-in-law, Gil Carlisle, bounded down the stairs, followed by his legal advisor, Miles Zambelli, both striding toward me.
“What are you doing here, Logan?” Carlisle said. He was wearing python-skin cowboy boots, a tan felt Stetson, carefully creased old-guy jeans, a white turtle neck and shearling coat. He looked like a bloated Marlboro Man.
“I came to say good-bye to your daughter.”
“Haven’t you done enough damage already?”
“I didn’t kill Savannah, Gil.”
“I have something for you,” the smug, Harvard-educated Zambelli said. He dug into his stylishly distressed, $700 leather shoulder bag and removed an official-looking sheet of paper. “It’s a restraining order, signed by the honorable Ronald Jablonsky of Clark County, Nevada. You can read it later.”
He thrust the paper at me across the fence.
“Restraining me from what?”
“From participating in any funereal arrangements, or attending any graveside, chapel, or any other memorial service held in conjunction with the demise of Ms. Savannah Carlisle.”
I wadded the paper and tossed it in his face.
“That’s battery,” Zambelli said, pointing an accusatory finger at me.
“Bullshit is more like it.”
He picked up the crumpled restraining order, slipped it back in his man purse, and said, “You’ve been duly warned.”
My issues with Zambelli were long-standing. He’d taken advantage of Savannah, enjoying a one-night stand with her after we’d divorced, for which her father apparently had forgiven him. I wasn’t nearly so benevolent, but I knew that my impulse to forcibly remove the carotid artery from Zambelli’s neck was nothing more than misdirected wrath. My fight was not with him or my former father-in-law. It was with Crocodile Dundee, the man who’d murdered Savannah.
“You have to leave,” Carlisle said. “Now.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I said so.”
“We’re not in Texas, Gil, and I’m not your son-in-law anymore. So I think I’ll stay right here for the time being if it’s all the same to you.”
His face was turning red. “I can have you arrested.”
“I don’t think you can, actually.”
A rolling, chain-driven security gate clanked open about thirty meters to my left, and a black hearse drove slowly onto the tarmac toward Carlisle’s jet. He and Zambelli turned to watch it. The breath caught in my throat.
Marlene emerged from the offices of Summit Aviation and began walking toward the airplane, followed moments later by her boss, Gordon Priest.
It was time, I decided, to have a little chat with him.
I hopped the fence.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” Carlisle yelled after me. “Logan!”
The hearse backed up to the jet. Two mortuary employees got out dressed in black. I ignored them, as I did Carlisle and Zambelli, hustling to catch up with me. Priest must’ve sensed me sprinting toward him from behind because he turned when he saw me and stopped in midstride.
“Mr. Logan,” Marlene said with feigned surprise, like we hadn’t spoken minutes earlier at the grocery store down the road.
I ignored her as well and focused on Gordon Priest.
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
His mouth was parted slightly, his eyes shifty, unwilling to meet my own. A muscle above his left cheekbone twitched. The fear in his lumpy face was unmistakable.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
I glanced briefly at the mortuary workers as they removed Savannah’s casket from the hearse, an inexpensive metal box that I knew Carlisle would exchange as soon as he got home for a far gaudier one befitting his obscene wealth and taste for the ostentatious. Had Savannah wanted to be buried in grand style or cremated? To my recollection, we’d never even talked about it. The lump in my throat felt as big as a baseball.
With Zambelli in trail, Carlisle came trotting up, out of breath.
“Who are you?” he demanded to know of Priest.
Priest told him.
“This is my personal attorney,” Carlisle said, pointing at Zambelli, “and I guarantee you, he will sue your ass off and you will lose a shitload of money unless you have this ‘gentleman,’ and I use the term loosely,”—referring to me—“removed from the grounds of this airport forthwith.”
Priest ignored him and told me, adamantly, that he’d had absolutely nothing to do with Savannah’s death or that of his nephew. He said he was only too happy to cooperate with sheriff’s investigators. I looked over at Marlene. She was staring nervously at the ground.