Four of Clubs: Murder in the High Sierra Read online

  Four of Clubs

  Murder in the High Sierra

  David Downie

  Copyright 2022 David Downie

  This book is published by Seine, Tiber & Bay

  Advance Praise for Four of Clubs

  “Sinewy and pungent, with a fabulous start. What a potent ride! The twists and turns and uncertainties keep you guessing throughout and the depth of emotion at the final denouement is a gut wrencher. Four of Clubs is a very complex story. The relationships are troubling, heart-felt, ambivalent. I loved the light and shade. It is fascinating the way the author unwinds the red herrings and the dead ends, truths and lies, and as a reader you are constantly trying to piece together what is real and what is not.”—James Burstall, CEO, Argonon, a television and film media company

  “Featuring a terrifying premise, a beautiful but lethal locale, and a web of erotic entanglements spanning generations and countries, David Downie’s Four of Clubs casts a spinetingling spell. The depictions of sexual transgressions here remind me of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, while the explorations of memory and its deceptions recall Julian Barnes’ A Sense of an Ending — but the verve and the nerve and the surprises are all fresh. I couldn’t put it down.”—Rose Solari, co-founder of Alan Squire Publishing, author of The Last Girl (poetry) and A Secret Woman (a novel)

  “Spectacular! Clever, polished and sophisticated. Kept me turning the pages. I think I am in love with Serena.”—Lawrence Furnival, architect, cybersecurity expert and IT professional

  “Four of Clubs takes place in the physical landscape of the rocky and steep Sierra of California, but as it unfolds with questions of revenge, love, murder, suicide and incest, finds itself nearer the psychological terrain of ancient Greek myth. The author of this deep, mysterious and surprising book is David Downie. But I wonder if the real author is not Zeus. Zeus has written a page-turner.”—Joanna Biggar, author of That Paris Year and Melanie’s Song

  DISCLAIMER

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For J. R. S., a friend better than a brother, and my beloved A. M. H., the finest wife and partner anyone could imagine, with a special mention for P. A. T., because hope springs eternal.

  With huge thanks to the angelic L. F. for his generosity and constant encouragement; to laser-eyed first reader and cover critic A. S. (aided by A. D. C.); to my agent and friend A. F. M. for shooting from the hip; and to the intrepid manuscript readers and endorsers of this project, K. S., P. R., J.P., J. B. one, R. S. and J. B. two, who helped in the process of trimming, honing and polishing Four of Clubs.

  Special thanks for detailed advice on criminal matters, search and seizure procedures, and inquests, to attorney A. Wyckliff Nisbet of Friday, Eldredge & Clark.

  By the Same Author

  Un’altra Parigi

  The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam

  Enchanted Liguria

  La Tour de l’Immonde (fiction)

  Cooking the Roman Way

  Paris City of Night (fiction)

  Food Wine Rome

  Food Wine Genoa & the Italian Riviera

  Food Wine Burgundy

  Quiet Corners of Rome

  Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light

  Paris to the Pyrenees

  A Passion for Paris

  A Taste of Paris

  The Gardener of Eden (fiction)

  Red Riviera (fiction)

  Roman Roulette (fiction)

  Four of Clubs

  One woman. Three men. The High Sierra. Love, lust, betrayal and revenge.

  Was her death an accident—or murder? What about his? And then his—the second man off the cliff?

  The last man standing is Ed Dobbs. He’s no detective. But Ed is going to find the truth, even if it kills him….

  “One of the most dangerous classes in the world is the drifting and friendless woman…. she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others.”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax

  “Um!—but men do disappear,” remarked Neale. “What I'm hoping is that there'll eventually—and quickly—be some explanation of this disappearance.”—J. S. Fletcher, The Chestermarke Instinct

  Contents

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Part Three

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  About the Author

  Part One

  One

  Leaving my backpack and watercolors drying in the sun, I scrambled up the chute. It was a few minutes past four. Napping had made me stiff, groggy. I was cold. I’d overslept. They hadn’t phoned or pinged or come back to get me. I glanced up. The sun was still high. But it was getting late.

  In the High Sierra, timing is all.

  The timing was off.

  Between the sharp-edged rocks lining the chute, the branches of the foxtail pines seemed thicker and more tangled than before. They made a sappy, sticky, scented green tunnel of spikes and snags. The seventy-degree tilt winded me. That and my acrophobia are what brought on the dizziness.

  At the top, swaying, catching my breath, I kept my eyes on the ground, feeling to find the familiar tree trunks. I pulled on the safety rope, holding it tight with both hands.

  I knew Pete would have knotted the long blue Kevlar rope around the two thickest pines where the trail crossed the ridge. He’d done that every year for the last forty years.

  Sliding my hands along, I raised my eyes and glanced north ten feet to the rock pyramid. Something wasn’t right. Instead of hanging loose around them, the rope ran taut over the cliff. They were nowhere to be seen.

  “God dammit,” I cursed. “We’re too old for this crap.” I listened for their laughter. They had played this trick on me before, years ago. They had let themselves down onto the ledge, using the rope, knowing I wouldn’t be able to see them unless I leaned over. Leaning over would make me pass out or throw up. They knew that too.

  Enraged, I jerked the rope. It burned my palms. Something heavy dangled on the end. I could tell. I broke into a sweat.

  Shutting my eyes, I tried to decide whether to pull harder or phone for help. The silence wrapped itself around everything—the trees, boulders, cliff, sky and clouds. Straining, I could hear the wind gusting through the rocks. A red tail hawk screeched, sounding like a mockingbird.

  Surveying the clifftop, I spotted two half-eaten sandwiches. I stared at them. I could not take my eyes off them. One was salami with butter and pickles on a sourdough baguette. The other was smoked ham with iceberg lettuce and mayo on rye. I could see the bite marks. I could see how the mayo had oo
zed onto the rough granite where the two of them always sat.

  The pair of crystal wineglasses Pete had carried in bubble wrap were shattered. One was splattered with red. But the wine was white. The bottle sat upright a few feet away in a patch of snow, half empty. Chateau Grillet. Pete said it was his favorite. A single bottle cost $450.

  It seemed crazy to obsess about the sandwiches and wine. But I did. Because we always got the same sandwiches from the deli at the resort, year in, year out, for forty years. The ritual commanded it. Now they and the insanely expensive Chateau Grillet were the only signs of Pete Johnson and Don McCoy and their screwy, unknowable lives.

  Thinking of the two of them made me think of her. It always did. Before I could stop myself, I shouted her name.

  “Serena!”

  Fear took hold of me. I knew Serena could not hear or see or smell anyone or anything. She’d been dead for decades. She was why we were here. I knew Pete and Don couldn’t hear me either. Because they were dead too. I bellowed out their names anyway, until the bellows turned to sobs.

  Startled, a raven swooped out of the trees and hopped across the boulders. Its wings showed iridescent feathers splayed in the breeze. The raven eyed the sandwiches. Then it eyed me and the rope, cocking its head. I shouted, scrabbling to pick up a rock. The raven hopped down to the ledge and flew off with a mocking cry. The silence returned.

  My mind grappled with numbers and dates, trying to find something to hold onto. I knew the exact altitude. The clifftop was at 9,823 feet above sea level. Today was August 15, it was 4:19 p.m. The air temperature was somewhere in the low 40s.

  Sweat ran down my back. It prickled on my sunburned, lobster-colored forearms. Gooseflesh spread up and across my scalp. Feeling short of breath, I started to reel up the rope. I am a tall and unusually strong man, even at my age. But the load was too heavy. I sobbed again, louder this time, and the sobs made me stumble, the gravel slipping sideways from under my boots.

  Skittering toward the cliff edge, I hit my head then my shoulder and knee, landing on the ledge below the brink.

  Two

  Did I say just now that the east-facing clifftop was where the two of them always sat? If so, I would like to amend my statement. I should have said the three of them.

  There was Pete Johnson, alias Johnson Wax, The Johnson, For Pete’s Sake! Or Zee-Zee, and there was Don McCoy, better known as the Donk, Donkey Don Quixote, The Third, or Harry Lime, alias the Real McCoy.

  During our summer of love and winter of tears, when we were in our early twenties, forty years back, there was also Serena. We called her Rara Avis, Latin for the rarest of birds. Sometimes we called her Serenissima, the Queen of Hearts. But hearts were not her suit. She never told me why but always said her favorite card was the lowly four of clubs. Maybe because we were a foursome, a club of four?

  “Cut for partners,” Pete and Don would bark each time we sat down to play cribbage or poker or Gin rummy, meaning every day after running the ski lifts or working a shift on Ski Patrol.

  Unlike me, the three of them were fearless. They didn’t suffer from acrophobia. They were reckless and foolhardy and shameless and extravagant and sometimes downright stupid, though I would guess each had a genius-level IQ. They had always been wild, from the time we were kids growing up on the streets of the East Bay, a million miles from San Francisco, our Emerald City by the Sea.

  For reasons I never understood, unless it was their way of ditching me, the three of them, then the two of them, knowing I couldn’t follow because of my vertigo, left me behind on the sunny southside of the ridge on a wide flat boulder they called Chicken Rock. That’s where I always sat and painted my watercolors.

  After Serena died, Don and Pete took to starting the club ritual without me, on the northside, their legs dangling over, sharing that view, the scary, shady, cold, dark and dangerous view off cliffs falling a thousand feet into Rattlesnake Valley, the killer view that swept out over the whole bleak, burned-out, beetle-blighted East Sierra Wilderness.

  At nearly 10,000 feet, even at the height of summer the evenings can be cold. I’d spent enough time in the Sierras to know it was only a few degrees above freezing when I fell onto the ledge. I sat there, trembling, for two or three hours, maybe more. The tremble came from the cold. It also came from grief. For a while, I forgot where I was and what had happened. I forgot the pain. I must have passed out more than once. The safety rope was still in my hands. The cliff fell away below me.

  Staring down into the funnel, I started to think about the rock pyramid and what would happen to it and our club and the ritual if the three of us died, joining Serena. Three plus one made four. We were a club of four, three of us dead and one alive though soon all four would be gone unless someone came for me soon.

  Pete and Don and I had built the pyramid on Christmas Day. We’d piled up razor-sharp chunks of gray granite, ruining our ski gloves and cutting our hands, our blood mixing with the snow and mud. If we hadn’t already been blood brothers, we would have been from that day forward.

  The rock pile marked the site where the incident had occurred a day earlier, on Christmas Eve, 1980. I was about to say “accident” but I’m less sure than ever an accident took Serena away.

  Shaking my head to clear the mental fog, I could see mist rising from Rattlesnake Valley as the light began to fade. I heard a helicopter racing the sunset winds. The sirens of the sheriff’s four-by-fours screamed and wailed somewhere below. The air was thin. It was the air of a morgue. The county morgue on the Nevada side where I’d seen Serena’s dried up body when they found it all those years ago, after seven years of sun and snow.

  Floodlights swept over my face. Somehow, I had made an emergency call. Somehow, I had told them where we were. Somehow, they had understood and were hovering in a copter, unable to land. Over the wop-wop-wop of the rotor I could hear the ambulances tearing up the fire trail through the firs and manzanita.

  In the darkness, behind closed eyelids, the last hours played themselves on a loop. The whopping of the copter and the shriek of the sirens grew louder in my mind. Then the searchlights made halos in the fog. They’d done that on Christmas Eve. My breath had turned to snowflakes. I was back forty years, watching the avalanche, watching her body tumble then fly.

  Opening my eyes, I saw it was not Serena and snow overhead but the white soundproof ceiling of the hospital room. The next thing I saw was the chiseled, windburned face of the sheriff staring down at me.

  Three

  They wanted to know how it was an injured senior citizen with vertigo had lowered himself from the clifftop onto the ledge and not fallen the rest of the way down.

  They wanted to know when Don and Pete had gone over the edge and why.

  They wanted to know if the two of them had argued or fought or slipped, if they were suicidal, homicidal or inebriated or high on drugs.

  They wondered if I had seen anyone else up there who might’ve pushed them off or if I had reason to murder them myself or help fake a disappearance and death.

  They wanted to know why the sandwiches were half eaten and the wine half finished, why I’d waited so long after lunch before calling 911, and why I’d left my sweatshirt, sweatpants and windbreaker on the southside of the ridge, on the boulder, so that I’d sat for four hours in 33 degrees Fahrenheit in a freezing wind wearing shirt sleeves and shorts and had nearly died of hypothermia as a consequence.

  The cold had probably helped with one thing, the medical examiner standing next to the sheriff speculated out loud. Cold kept down the swelling from my separated right shoulder and dislocated right knee. It might also have made me think less about my concussion and cerebral contusions.

  Above all they wanted to know why I was carrying a four of clubs in my wallet and why Don and Pete carried the same card.

  Ditto the faded, scuffed and fluff-edged photo of a young woman, a beautiful young woman with long chestnut hair. The same photo in all three wallets? Was she some kind of guru?

/>   They asked me through a fog as thick as the August fog of San Francisco what the pyramid of stones was about and how it was we knew that strange, cursed spot. They wanted to know many things and so did I.

  Three days had gone by. Don’s body had not been recovered. The helicopter crews had tried multiple times and given up. Medics and police officers in hanging harnesses had lowered themselves from the skids, dangling over the base of the cliff, inches away from what looked like a corpse.

  One medic had found a long blue-and-red windbreaker, a blue fleece, one hiking boot, size eleven and a half, unlaced halfway down, and an old pair of Vuarnet alpine sunglasses that must have been down there for decades. That was it, other than some parts of a wrecked smartphone, no SIM card.

  The windbreaker, fleece and boot were practically new, said the sheriff. The boot was scuffed. The clothes were ripped and shredded and splashed with blood, so much blood that it was still wet inside the pockets of the windbreaker when they brought it in.

  So far, that was most of what they had of Don McCoy, disappeared, presumed dead, Caucasian, male, aged sixty-three, married, father of four, CEO of his own offshore service-sector companies, current US address unknown, resident of the Bahamas. If I could provide some clarity, it would be helpful.

  The body must have bounced and rolled down the cliff then into the funnel below, falling from there into the wet, lightless gulley at the bottom of Rattlesnake Valley. If so, it was unlikely anyone would recover it.

  Getting me out plus Pete’s corpse was plenty tricky, the sheriff had remarked, talking to me in what passed for a soothing, matter-of-fact voice, as if I were a child and not fifteen or twenty years his senior. The edge of the cliff was cracked and unstable, he said. The ledge where they found me was worse. They knew I was still alive but didn’t know how to get me up without causing an avalanche. They said I would not let go of the rope, that it was frayed and my fingers seemed frozen onto it. Eventually they lassoed me and winched me up. I remember hearing one voice shouting, “We’re all going down if the guy doesn’t let go!”