Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

“How did you know Beth had been in touch with Leo via the Internet?” I asked as she dressed and I read the Rocky Mountain News in bed.

“I didn’t,” she said. “It was a bluff. And she fell for it.”

Beth had given away something, amid a conversation that seemed to be leavened with lies, shadings. If she wouldn’t cooperate, we were stuck. I could go to the Denver cops and begin the process of wrapping her up as a material witness. But there was no time. There was a time deficit. I was a time debtor, and foreclosure was imminent. A week had gone by since Peralta’s shooting. It seemed like a year.

I had my own errand. I drove the three miles through plowed streets to Cherry Creek, where the self-help and sexuality section of the Tattered Cover bookstore held several paperback copies of The Sex Instructions and More Sex Instructions, by Jonathan Ledger. I sat on a bench and leafed through with only mild embarrassment. Hey, I was a kid of the ’70s, I had no inhibitions.

Like the other sexuality books of the time, Ledger’s books used the trappings of science and liberation to tear down bourgeois hangups and have a grand old time talking about screwing. More than most, however, his books were notable for their frankness and explicit photographs. These were good-looking models in clinical settings, though, not the drugged, flawed, fleshy convivialists at Camelback Falls. Written before the age of AIDS, Ledger’s books were evangelical tomes for promiscuity-one chapter was entitled “The Pathology of Faithfulness”-and doing what felt good.

I snapped shut the book as a little girl skipped by. On the back was a photo of Ledger, cropped so you could see only his dramatic black brows and sharply chiseled face rather than the wispy white hair hanging on around his bald pate. “Jonathan Ledger was a researcher, teacher, and lecturer on human sexuality,” the type read. “He was born in Utah into a large Mormon family, but broke away from the church as a teenager. Ledger received his Ph.D. in psychology from Princeton, where he conducted pioneering research on female sexuality. As an author, his books spent a total of 87 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. He died in 1984.”

I opened the book again and flipped through the photos. Three sets of lovers, attractive sexual artists, demonstrating various positions and flavors. I noticed that the couples didn’t stay together. To get Ledger’s deeper point of pleasure across, the men and women played musical chairs in different pictures. It would have all been very naughty and forbidden in 1975. Now, it just seemed banal. When I thought of the photos from Camelback Falls-more pioneering research? — it seemed kind of pathetic.

Now I didn’t feel deprived. When I was living through those years, I felt like I was missing the greatest party in the history of the world. I could hear my neighbors screwing on the other side of the walls. I could get the sex stories from my friends, male and female. I was so out of it. Now, I didn’t miss that past. Now I reveled in the positions and flavors with Lindsey, a woman who loved with enough freshness and sometimes awkwardness that I didn’t feel as if she had practiced on dozens of men before me, with the burnout and scars to go along with it. Maybe that was naive on my part. But whether we made love or just fucked, sex with Lindsey always felt new, and always felt like home.

I looked at the photo of Ledger again. “Tell me something, Jonathan,” I said aloud, oblivious to the people around me. Ledger stared at me like a backwoods preacher out to save my soul.

I opened the front pages. A list of his other works. No dedication page. I flipped forward, where it would tell me the copyright dates, the printing history, the ISBN number. The business of publishing. The stuff nobody ever reads.

Then I saw it.

Chapter Twenty-six

It was full dark by 5 P.M. If you looked west, you could see the snowy peaks of the Front Range shimmering in the fading sunlight that had finally broken through the cloudbanks. But in downtown Denver, the snow was churned brown and gray by the traffic, and the streetlights sparkled like dream crystal.

Lindsey was moored to her laptop, so I walked along the 16th Street Mall, all the way down to Larimer Square. The office crowd lingered in warm bars, and snugly dressed young couples shopped and strolled. In a taphouse near Coors Field, I fortified myself with a MacCallen, neat. The jukebox played Sinatra, “One for My Baby.” I found myself missing Lindsey, even though she was only half a mile away. And missing Peralta: his capricious temper, his impossible demands, his quirkiness, but all somehow wrapped up in a package that made us feel safe and centered. There was one for Dr. Sharon to expound on.

Safe and centered. In the honest darkness of the bar, I recalled Lindsey’s words that morning.

“I thought we were

the good guys.”

She had said it with a simple sadness as she played with my chest hair, molded against me and warm in the rumpled bedclothes.

“Every cop I ever knew wanted to do good,” she had said. “Why else would you put up with the bullshit? The same group of hopeless cases you deal with over and over, when you’re on patrol. The harassment from the lawyers and the politicians. I always thought, no matter what, at least we’re the good guys.”

I had said something forgettable and she had laid her head on my chest, listening to my heart. After a long time, she had said, “I got a call the other day from Yahoo. Can you believe it? They wanted me to talk to them about consulting on security.” Then she had gone back to monitoring my heart. Finally: “I would have said no. But this time-Dave, don’t hate me-I said I wanted to think about it.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” she had said. Quietly: “We wouldn’t have to move. Unless you wanted to live in San Francisco. Maybe go back to teaching and writing. Be safe.”

That’s where we had left it. When the last precious drops of single malt were gone from the glass, I walked three blocks to the red brick warehouse that held Beth Proudfoot’s gallery.

I was mortally afraid of falling on ice. It’s not like you got ice balance growing up in Arizona, and I never gained it in the years I lived in cold places. I had already had two near spills, which were almost worse than just going ahead and falling on my ass. So I walked down Blake Street like a little old man, listening like a Minnesota ice fisherman to the ground crunching under my shoes. The giving texture of the snow made a welcome echo. The hard surface of ice was a single note snap that made me wary. My slow pace made it easy for me to gaze into the broad, clean windows of the bright gallery and see the stocky man standing just outside.

He was all arm muscles and thick neck, warmed only by a light black windbreaker. He had a low center of gravity, but stood lightly, bouncing on the balls of his feet, looking at nothing in particular. Beyond him, the gallery was deserted. A purple neon sign glowed in the window in signature script: “Beth Proudfoot.” I felt my abdomen tighten.

“It’s closed,” he said in a slow, heavy voice.

“Why?” I asked.

He stared at me, surprised to be asked a question. His eyes were hazel concrete.

“Closed,” he said, more quietly. “Move on.” Then he held out a meaty hand toward my chest, almost, but not quite, touching me.

Quicker than he could react, I stepped forward, brought my arms across his forearm and knelt down. It was a neat move I learned years ago in the academy. He grunted and fell to the pavement.