Peak Season for Murder Read online

  Back at the truck, I sat for a moment, looking at the shard of red glass, wondering if Ken was right. Had someone bought Brownie the wine? Highly unlikely, I concluded. Finally, I put the glass shard in the cup holder.

  As I was turning the truck around, I heard Ken shout at me to stop.

  He came up to my window and stood there with his burly arms crossed over his chest, “I guess it’s okay since he’s dead.” He was breathing hard from running. “Brownie once told me his family was from around here.”

  “Door County?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he snapped at me. “‘Around here,’ that’s all he said.”

  “Nothing else?” I bit my lower lip in frustration.

  “What did I just say?”

  Just then an expensive metallic blue foreign sports car approached the gated entry to the Marshalls Point Estates. The driver, a silver-haired woman with a heavily made-up face and disapproving scowl, stopped and stared at us.

  When she didn’t key in her entry code and continued to stare, Ken shouted, “Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer, you old hag.”

  She huffed, keyed in her code and drove through the gate, sending up an angry cloud of gravel and dirt.

  “You have to control yourself, Ken,” I said calmly, though I wanted to scream at him. “That woman could report you to the homeowners’ association.”

  He stepped back from the truck, putting his hands on his hips. “Let her report me.”

  “Didn’t you say you’re worried they might kick you off your land?”

  “She was giving me a dirty look. And I don’t like that.”

  “Listen, if you want me to find Brownie’s family, you’re going to have to do something for me.” It was the only bargaining chip I had.

  “Like what?”

  “Like get control of your temper.”

  “You just find Brownie’s family. I’m not promising anything.”

  Driving west on Route ZZ toward Highway 42, I scanned the burnt fields. Corn drooped, wild grass yellowed and dust devils swirled in the vacant breeze. The land looked as spent as I felt. My meeting with Ken had drained me, and the day had just begun.

  I pondered Ken’s revelation that Brownie’s family was from around here. What did around here mean? Door County? Green Bay? Northern Wisconsin? And were his family all dead as Brownie claimed, or was he saying as far as he was concerned they were dead? If some of his family were still “around here,”

  wouldn’t they have tried to find him, especially if they’d seen the human-interest article in the Gazette I’d written about the men’s bequest from the conservancy?

  His dog tags gave his name as Lawrence Browning. Why did he flip his first and last name? If I were going to erase my identity, I’d totally change my name, not flip the first and last name. Was that his way of staying in touch with his former self? Maybe his appearance after years of alcohol abuse made him unrecognizable and flipping his name had scrambled his identity enough to keep him hidden. Or maybe he was dead to them as well.

  The rocky shoals of family, I mused bitterly, thinking about my father and our estrangement. How after my mother’s death and my moving to Door County, he’d cut me out of his life. Another female who’d let him down.

  I picked up the red shard, disappointment rising in me again. Brownie Lawrence had fallen off the wagon and his years of chronic substance abuse had finally caught up with him, more than likely causing or contributing to his death. Ken’s staunch conviction that someone had bought that wine for him was sad and pathetic. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that Brownie had started drinking again. Because if he did, then what hope was there for him?

  Ken’s words of protest echoed in my mind. “If Brownie had started drinking again, it woulda been bourbon.”

  Okay, enough, I cautioned myself, putting the shard back in the cup holder.

  As I neared Highway 42, I groaned aloud. Cars were lined up as far back as Dara’s Upscale Resale Shop. Peak season was in full bloom, and with it came crowded roads, long waits at restaurants and hordes of tourists.

  My fingers tapping the steering wheel, I pulled up behind a massive black SUV with four mountain bikes strapped to the roof like deer carcasses. It was 10:20 and I had forty minutes to drive to the Bayside Theater in Fish Creek. My heart fluttered, thinking about my eleven o’clock interview with Nate Ryan, Hollywood’s infamous bad boy.

  Rather than fret, I flipped open my notebook and started going over my interview questions. Should I start with his drug abuse, or the downward spiral of his film career, or his reputation with women? I figured he’d appreciate my gonzo approach. He’d probably had his share of journalists kissing up to him. Besides, I stank at kissing up.

  The only caveat his publicist Nicki Baker had given me was no questions about his ex-wife Nina Cass, the theater’s current owner/actress. I could live with that. Though their marriage had ended years ago, I guess he was still sensitive about the rumors he’d physically abused her.

  The Nate Ryan interview would give my feature article on the Bayside Theater—America’s oldest professional residential summer theater—the cache it needed. Jake felt the article had legs, and he’d suggested I pitch it to the Chicago Reporter on spec.

  Suddenly a horn blast startled me. I looked up, glaring at the impatient out-of-state driver behind me. I waited a minute or two before inching ever so slowly forward, letting him know he couldn’t intimidate me. Tourists. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

  Once on 42, I took the first left at the top of the hill onto Highway 57, avoiding the heavy tourist traffic. As I pushed down on the gas pedal, the wine shard started to rattle in the cup holder like a nagging thought. I grabbed it and shoved it in my bag.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I stood outside Nate Ryan’s upstairs apartment door fuming. It was 11:35 a.m. and Nate wasn’t here. Beads of sweat like little bubbles of anger made their slow tedious way down my face, legs and arms, snaking beneath my clothes. And a headache was building behind my eyes like an approaching storm.

  Out of frustration, I stabbed at the doorbell again, listened to it echo through the apartment, then knocked on the red wooden door, this time with the force of my anger. Nothing. Where was he? Had he forgotten about the interview? Well, he is Nate Ryan, I told myself. Then countered with, so what?

  I dug out my cell phone and called his publicist Nicki Baker, not sure if I could keep my temper in check. After my unsettling encounter with Ken, I was looking to lash out at someone—not my best trait, I admit. But very satisfying sometimes.

  As I listened to Nicki’s phone ring and ring, I thought, at least I’d had the forethought to schedule my interview with ballerina-turned-actress Gwen Shaw at one p.m. But there’d be no time to dash home, let Salinger, my Shetland sheepdog, out and grab a quick bite to eat.

  The call went to voice mail and Nicki’s perky voice said, “Nicki Baker. Leave a message.” I closed the phone and debated whether to take off. After all, I’d waited thirty-five minutes. But then again, this interview was too important. So what if my head was pounding and my stomach grumbling. He had until noon, and then I was outta here.

  My phone jangled and without looking I answered, thinking it was Nicki.

  “I thought you were going to call me back.” Tom’s familiar accusatory tone brought me up short.

  “I’m in the middle of something right now.” My estranged husband, Tom Girard, was the last person I wanted to talk to right now.

  “Did you get me a ticket or not, Leigh?”

  After over a year of no communication, Tom had phoned me last night from Sturgeon Bay, saying he needed to see me in person, today.

  I’d asked him if anyone had died.

  When he’d said no rather brusquely, I told him I was busy. Though I was curious to know why he was here, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of my interest.

  “Look, I came all this way.” His annoyed impatience with me was al
l too familiar.

  He wasn’t getting off that easily. “I’ve got interviews all afternoon and then I’m seeing a play at the Bayside Theater. How about tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ve been calling you all week and you’ve ignored my calls.”

  I had been ignoring his calls. I was going to call him back when I was good and ready. Whenever that was.

  He’d insisted on my getting him a ticket. In the sixteen years of our marriage, I could count on one hand the plays we’d attended together and all of them under duress.

  “Yes, I got you a ticket,” I answered petulantly. “Be at the box office around seven forty-five.”

  “I don’t know why you have to make everything so difficult,” he chided.

  Without replying, I shut the phone. His remark hit me hard, reminding me why I’d left him. My getting cancer had made things so difficult for him.

  Feeling reckless, I walked back to Nate Ryan’s door and tried the doorknob, expecting resistance. To my surprise, it turned. I kept my hand on the doorknob and looked around. The four-unit apartment was secluded in a grouping of tall pine trees. No one would see me. I inched the door open and was instantly hit with a familiar scent, the sweet odor of marijuana.

  All the blinds were shut, but in the gloom I saw a large sofa, two side chairs, a coffee table holding two goblets and a wine bottle. Clothes were strewn about the place. Was that a bra flung over a chair?

  Wow, I thought, sniffing to make sure of what I smelled. Yup, that was marijuana. So much for Nate’s rehab. Just as I was about to step inside, I heard footsteps coming up the bark chip path. Quickly I shut the door and jumped back onto the wooden walkway, colliding with a pitchfork. As I grabbed for it, it went tumbling over the railing.

  “Hey,” someone shouted from below. I peered over the railing and saw Nate Ryan rubbing the side of his head and looking up at me.

  “Sorry,” I managed to say without laughing. Good start, Leigh, injure the famous movie star.

  He picked up the pitchfork and bounded up the stairs. He was dressed in a black V-neck t-shirt, faded blue jeans and black sneakers, no socks. As he walked toward me, I was struck by his rugged handsomeness and his lack of height. The handsomeness wasn’t a surprise; his shortness was.

  “Hope you’re not a critic,” he smiled, placing the pitchfork next to the door.

  “Leigh Girard, I’m the reporter for the Door County Gazette. Nicki Baker set up our interview for eleven.” My words came out too harshly in my effort not to appear star struck, which I clearly was. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” I added by way of an apology.

  “Just a flesh wound,” he joked. “Usually women wait until after they get to know me before they hurl things at me.”

  He pushed open the door and gestured me inside. “Your photo doesn’t do you justice.”

  I could feel his eyes roving over my body as I walked past him into the living room, my nose prickling with that sweet marijuana scent. “Thank you. Nor does yours.” I felt like I was in high school flirting with the popular boy. Get a grip, Leigh, I told myself, heading for the sofa, a tweedy blend of blues and browns that would hide all sweat stains I might leave behind.

  He shut the door and started opening windows. “Stuffy in here.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that.” I said, taking in the motel-like atmosphere of the messy room. Beside the tweedy sofa, there were two blue club chairs draped with clothes, an oval coffee table with a glass top, wall-to-wall brown looped carpet, a small, dated TV, and several small side tables, also glass-topped. On the wall opposite the sofa was a Door County painting of a barn lost in soft shades of grays and greens, a bluebird in the foreground. If it wasn’t titled Summer’s End, it should have been.

  “Want something to drink?” He picked up the two dirty goblets and the wine bottle from the table. I could see red wine dregs on the bottom of both goblets.

  “Water’s fine,” I said.

  He walked around the breakfast bar into the small kitchen, put the two goblets in the sink, and returned with two glasses of tap water. “I’m out of bottled water,” he apologized, handing me a glass. He eased himself down next to me, a little too close for my comfort.

  “So let’s get to it,” he said, leaning toward me.

  This close, I noticed crinkling around the corners of his mouth and eyes, a slight looseness of his skin, some gray hairs near his temples. At forty-nine and after years of drug abuse, he teetered on the edge of his handsomeness—still there in the symmetry of his face, his bone structure, his charisma; but I could see in a few more years where the lines would set and deepen, the skin sag, the hair lose its blondish luster, and he’d be just another washed-up, over-the-hill actor paying character parts. Even plastic surgery could only do so much; and then there were the younger actors waiting in the wings for their chance at stardom.

  I opened my notebook, clicked my pen and leaned away from him, determined not to be swayed. That seemed to amuse him. He tilted his head and focused that smile on me, the one he used in his much-publicized mug shot. I remember thinking when I saw it, “Does this guy ever take a bad photo?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask about the drugs?” He brushed his reddish blond hair off his forehead, a boyish gesture, rampant with vulnerability.

  “The drugs?” For a moment, I thought he meant the marijuana I’d smelled. “Oh, I was saving that for last.” I smiled back. Though the drugs were one of the opening questions, I didn’t want him to know that.

  “When all my defenses are down?”

  “Does that ever happen?”

  He stared at me with those lake blue eyes, that when I’d seen him in his first film, Tiger Mountain, I thought were like an early-morning summer sky full of promise.

  “More than you think.” His legs were crossed and his one foot began bouncing up and down.

  “Okay, tell me about the drugs.” That he wanted to talk about the drugs first meant he had an agenda. I was curious to see what that agenda was.

  “Let’s put it this way. Success, money, it all happened too fast, and I couldn’t handle it. Look, I went from doing summer stock like the Bayside Theater, a few TV commercials, and suddenly I’m box office. I was young and stupid. But I paid for my sins, literally. What I spent on cocaine . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t even know what I spent on cocaine, Vicodin, heroin. I was an equal opportunity user. But I’m a changed man.” He clinked his glass against mine, lifted it in a toast and took a sip. “Live fast and die young was my motto.”

  Ryan wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I’d read a recent interview he did for some obscure magazine in which he’d said the exact same thing. Ryan was trying to make a comeback, and the Bayside Theater was his first step on his road back.

  “You know, in my bad-boy days, right now I’d be thinking of ways to seduce you. You’re my type: pretty, smart and resistant. If you lean much farther away you’ll fall off the couch.”

  A flash of heat shot up my spine to my face as I glanced away, my eyes falling on the black lacy bra thrown over the chair.

  “Sorry, that was rude. See? I am trying to reform.” He took another sip of water. “No matter what glass I put it in, this stuff tastes like shit.”

  I could feel myself curve toward him as if he were a magnetic field and I were the magnet. He wore his beauty like a handicap, something to be overcome. Beauty and vulnerability were a dangerous combination. The beauty I could resist; his vulnerability was proving difficult. I kept wanting to soothe him—for what, I couldn’t imagine.

  He put the glass down. “So what other dirty little secrets can we talk about?”

  “Well, actually I wanted to know how you feel about coming back to the Bayside Theater, where you got your start.”

  “Purely selfish on my part. I need to prove that I can work again, that I’m bankable, as Nicki would say when she’s delivering one of her lectures about behaving myself. So when Nina contacted me about coming back for the sixty-fifth annive
rsary celebration, I decided what the hell. I told her, I’d come back if they did The Merchant ofVenice and I played Shylock.”

  That was the first I’d heard that Ryan had selected the play. Usually the artistic director and the executive producer selected the plays. Alex Webber was the theater’s artistic director and coowner. The other co-owner was Nina Cass, Ryan’s ex-wife.

  “Were they planning on performing The Merchant ofVenice?”

  “What do you think? Nothing like a pound of flesh to inspire summer theater-goers.” Again that smile. “But I also came back because of Nina. You know about the campaign to raise money to rebuild the theater.”

  I shook my head yes. The theater had launched a major funding campaign in May.

  “Well, she’s desperate to raise money for the rebuilding. She told me they’re charging some ridiculous amount for my opening night performance. It’s the least I could do after what I put her through in our marriage. But I never hit her. I don’t care what you read. I don’t hit women.”

  He was suddenly agitated, slightly flushed. He was so adamant, I doubted him.

  “I saw that you performed with another Bayside Theater alumni, Julian Finch, who’s cast as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice.” I’d combed through the fifthieth anniversary program for background information about the theater. The program gave a listing of plays and cast members spanning those first fifty years. Ryan and Finch’s paths crossed twenty-five years ago in two BT productions, Twelfth Night and A Streetcar Named Desire.

  “Great guy, great stage actor. I learned a lot from him.”

  That was amazingly uninformative.

  “Like what?” I pursued, sensing his reticence.

  He paused for a moment. “I learned how not to act. Sometimes you have to just read the lines, no motivation, no killing your parents to feel something. Just say the damn lines and they’ll take over for you. For example, ‘If you cut me, do I not bleed?’ See how the words do the job. I don’t have to shout. It’s all there in the words. And if I use the same tone and intonation and say, ‘Leigh, you’re the most fascinating woman I’ve met in a long while.’You see how I didn’t have to act?”