Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries) Page 17

  Weber: Can you be more specific?

  Eliasson: Oh hell, Cleome thought he really cared, but he didn’t. But the worst part was that tattoo.

  Weber: A tattoo. The one on Oberley?

  Eliasson: No, Cleome’s. Something about a lost night in Vegas, and she woke up with a sore bottom from a trip to the tattoo parlor she could not recall. It’s hard to forget a guy when you’ve got his love name etched across your left glute. On top of everything she had to find her own way home. So that’s the long and the short of it, and she was hurt and all that, but she wouldn’t swat a mosquito if it was biting her, so if Oberley was murdered, then somebody else did it. What else can I help you with, sir?

  Weber: You know, Maryann, it’s kind of a giveaway that you’re calling me “sir.” Is there something you’re nervous about?

  Eliasson: Is there something you’d prefer I call you? You rank me, and—

  Weber: Let’s talk about Fritz Calder, the trip leader.

  Eliasson: Yes, sir. Yes, he was the alternate leader of that trip and the permit holder couldn’t make it for some reason, so he was it.

  Weber: Do you recall anything about his manner around Oberley?

  Eliasson: Let me think. Well, Oberley sort of arrived right in the middle of checkin, and I’d say that Calder was sort of annoyed.

  Weber: Sort of? How about very.

  Eliasson: Well, I remember that Calder had this rock hammer, and by the time Wink was done being a pain in the ass, Calder was banging it against his opposite palm in a way that sort of sent a message.

  Weber: A rock hammer? You’re sure of that? Not a different sort of hammer?

  Eliasson: Yes, I’m sure. I took some geology in college myself, and I remember those things. They’re like a regular hammer you’d use for building something, except that the metal head on them goes to a square face on one end and a wedge on the other. If it’s a hard-rock hammer it goes to a point, but this was a soft-rock hammer, like you’d use on sedimentary rocks, so it had the wedge. They’re mean-looking things, and heavy.

  Weber: What was he doing with the hammer?

  Eliasson: He just had it in his hand when he first came up to me.

  Weber: Then why did he have it? The hammer.

  Eliasson: I have no idea, except sometimes people have them on the river. They make a good camp tool. Maybe he’d been using it while rigging his raft.

  Weber: Please describe the man.

  Eliasson: Like I said, he’s a big guy, really tall, but he didn’t look like the kind of guy who would carry that kind of hammer, if you know what I mean. Geologists tend to be sort of nerdy guys, usually unshaven. They have beards, and they dress like they don’t know what they look like. This guy was sleeker than that, and he had more the Eagle Scout look to him, less nerdy and more country club.

  Weber: You found him [pause] presentable.

  Eliasson: Yeah. Yes. Um, a good-looking man. Authoritative yet [pause] well, attractive is the word. Like he doesn’t know quite how good-looking he is. But getting back to Oberley’s arrival, the jerk all but missed checkin. He was undependable.

  Weber: Did there seem to be bad feeling between them beyond that?

  Eliasson: I couldn’t say, sir.

  Weber: Maryann, enough with the ‘sir.’

  Eliasson: Gerald, sir, whatever you want me to call you; I don’t know. I just didn’t get that big a take on it. I’ll admit that the minute I saw Oberley I just wanted to get my job done and get out of there. The man is—was—trouble. Okay, now I’ve said too much, I suppose, but there it is. It’s on the jungle telegraph that he was murdered, and I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised. Cleome’s a close friend of mine and I was ready to yank his entrails out over the way he treated her, leaving her in the lurch with his name tattooed all over her [pause] posterior. But she didn’t kill him. You know that because she was right there with you on the South Rim, not down on the river wherever it was this thing happened, and I am damned sure I don’t know a single other thing about what happened down there, except it was good riddance.

  Weber: Okay then.

  Eliasson: Yeah.

  Weber: Do you have anything else to add?

  Eliasson: Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.

  Weber: Thank you for your candor, Maryann.

  Eliasson: Whatever you say. Sir.

  Weber: Now I have one more request. Can you make Whitmore by tonight?

  Eliasson: I’ve got a patrol raft, so I probably could, as long as I don’t screw up in Lava Falls.

  Weber: Oh. Right. Lava Falls. Are you alone?

  Eliasson: No, I’ve got the botanist with me, Susanne McCoy.

  Weber: Well then, please get yourselves down to Whitmore. The Calder party launched from Lower Cove an hour or so ago. They’re either going to hit Whitmore tonight or stop somewhere short of that. Either way, this is what I want you to do: Do not let them progress past Whitmore.

  Eliasson: Roger that. May I ask why, sir?

  Weber: Because I want to talk to them directly, before they scatter from Diamond Creek, and I can get to Whitmore. I’ll need confirmation from you of the time they expect to be at Whitmore, and I’ll need transit across the river.

  Eliasson: Roger that. See you there.

  End of transmission.

  APRIL 12–13: GOING DOWNHILL

  I’ve been told that the first two rules of plumbing are that shit runs downhill and Friday’s payday. Those two rules seemed to apply the next morning as we prepared to launch. It wasn’t a Friday, but it might as well have been, because Wink was paying for his little sins of opportunism, and everything sure was stinking and going downhill for him, and accelerating as it went. I guess that if you mess with enough people for long enough you’ll eventually find one who will seek revenge, and that is what had happened. Julianne had sought revenge and she had used my mineral hammer to deliver it.

  This is what happened: As she walked past the place where Fritz and I were setting up our tent on her way to cross back over the river, she picked up my trusty old rock hammer and took it with her. Fritz had brought it up from our raft to drive in the tent stakes, and when he couldn’t find it when he was done tightening the guy lines he figured that I had already taken it back to the raft. In fact, I found it by the boats in the morning, not in the raft but underneath it, in the shallows of the river right beside the bow, getting rusty.

  This is what she did with that hammer: She waded into the river to where Wink’s dory was moored, leaned down below the waterline on the starboard side where no one could see what she was doing, and gave that rotting dory a couple of good whacks with it, enough to punch a hole into the forward bilge about the size of a silver dollar. The holes were big enough that Wink’s jury-rigged pump would not have been able to keep up with the leak. If the pump had still been running. The pump was not working, however, because she crippled that, too. She accomplished this by reaching in through the hole and tearing the wiring right out of the pump and taking it with her, or at least, it could not be found anywhere around the camp or the boats. I guess that by riding in that boat for parts of nine days she had gotten to know it pretty well. I guess also that Wink should have shown her a little more respect, but the cheese had already slid off the cracker on that score, so we all just sort of stood there and kept our mouths shut and watched as Wink assessed the damage.

  He was, understandably, quite upset. He did not notice the sabotage right away, because the boat was moored in the shallows and the river level had dropped a lot during the night, putting the dory and all of the rafts down on their bottoms on the riverbed. We had extended the mooring lines as far as they would go when we tied them up the evening before, but it had not occurred to anyone to move Wink’s boat for him, which again was symptomatic of the degree to which Wink’s shit was running downhill.

  The rest of us were ready to launch. “Can it be fixed?” asked Fritz.

  “Oh, sure, it can be fixed,” said Wink. “You think these things never sma
ck any rocks?”

  “Okay then,” said Fritz, “what needs to be done? The rest of us are ready to go, and time’s a-wasting.”

  “Then you just get in your rafts and head on down the river,” Wink growled. “I was running this river on my own before you ever even came here as a passenger. You just help me get this thing up out of the water and I’ll fix it and catch up later.”

  “No you won’t. We will help you fix it.”

  Wink stood up and glared at Fritz. “Like now you’re the big hero,” he said, finally confronting authority to its face.

  Fritz stared at the man but said nothing. He wasn’t going to rise to that bait. Fritz was a team player, the permit regulations said we had to keep together, and for better or for worse, Wink was on his team and he wasn’t going to leave without him. The Winks of the world just didn’t understand that kind of ethic, even when it stared them in the face.

  Fritz said, “Okay then, let’s get this thing unloaded so we can hoist it out of the water,” and he leaned toward the forward hatch to pull it open.

  Wink dove for the hatch and slammed his hands down on it. “You leave that be!” he roared. As abruptly he backed off the offensive and added, suddenly all charming, “There’s hardly anything in there anyway, just my sleeping bag and clothes, so it weighs nothing. I can just lift the bow right out of the water, see?” He squatted and lifted, grunting to the point where I wondered if he was risking a hernia. After noisily letting go its suction on the bottom of the river, the bow came up.

  Once the dory was beached it was decided that the kayaks and the other rafts should deploy a half mile down the river to Shinumo Creek, which had a lovely waterfall under which they all could swim. The Rasmussens offered to stay, but once it was clear that Wink would be able to patch his wounded nautical pride, Fritz sent them along, too, asking that they take me and Brendan with them. Brendan happily climbed into their raft, as did Glenda, who smiled cheerily, grabbed her day bag out of the dory, and told Wink, “You wouldn’t want me to miss Shinumo Falls, I’m sure.”

  I didn’t think it was smart to leave Fritz and Wink alone together, so I stayed. It took Wink an hour and a half to patch that hole, and while I wished I could be swimming in the creek at Shinumo with the others, it was rather fascinating to see how the patch job was accomplished. Wink applied two new slices of plywood to the hole—one inside and one outside—and held them together with rubber gaskets, some caulking, and a wing nut. The result was rough and crude, but it more or less kept out the water and after a little bailing the dory was once again floatable.

  Wink launched the dory and climbed into it, and we followed him down to the mouth of Shinumo Creek, watching his waterline carefully, making certain that his patch was holding.

  After beginning the short hike up to the falls just in time to find the others coming back, we all climbed into the various factions of our flotilla and continued down the river. Wink was again alone, Glenda having decided that it was a good morning to work on her skills rowing a raft. She had sweet-talked the Rasmussens into letting her row theirs.

  We didn’t get as far as we had hoped that day, but along with watching Wink bail, a good time was had by all. Hakatai Mattes got to row a raft through a rapid that bore his name, or rather, a rapid that had been named for the same person or feature in the canyon as he had, and he purred all the way through it, a real cool cat.

  On our raft, Brendan was making a big day of it, rowing both Hakatai and Waltenberg Rapids, and any other riffles he could point our bow into. We made a lovely stop at Elves Chasm, where we found maidenhair ferns that grew there in the shade, cooled by the mists of water that splattered down over the rocks. All direct sunlight having by then long since left the Inner Gorge, we made camp a mile or so farther along at a site named Below Elves.

  The next day, we were moving right along making miles, when we entered Dubendorff Rapid and things again went poorly for Wink. He had just bailed as much water as he could out of the cockpit of the dory, but as he was also taking on water in the forward compartment, he was riding a little low. Dubendorff is not a giant rapid—only a 5 to 8 out of 10, depending on the amount of water that’s running over it, and only a fifteen-foot drop—but it’s a messy one, with funny turns and lots of rocks gnashing at the sky.

  Wink stared down into the tongue of water that welled up over the upper end of the rock garden, adjusted his stance on the water with a couple of quick dips of the oar, bringing the stern around to address the current so that he could ferry across the rapid to a place where the whole thing took that turn, and then started to pull with both oars, hard. He made the first part of the rapid fine but wallowed into that hole, broached, filled the boat to its gunwales with muddy brown water, and then, having lost headway, slammed sideways into that rock. I saw his head snap sideways. It looked ugly, and it was.

  All three kayaks were needed to tow the wounded boat into the shallows, and after one look at the hole made by that rock, we knew we’d be there for the night. An area of plywood the size of a dinner plate had turned to mush, delaminating into shreds.

  I shot a look at Fritz, who shook his head, and said, “Okay, everybody, let’s get on down there and have some dinner.”

  We all set up camp while Wink worked on the dory, rumbling about under his hatches for additional pieces of plywood and rubber big enough to make the patch. We had a nice dinner of macaroni and cheese, and I played a few rounds of Boggle with Nancy and Molly while Brendan did his math homework and most of the rest of the party swapped lies over beers around the campfire, and once again Glenda Fittle received Wink in her tent as the stars glittered across the darkness of the night.

  Notes of Gerald Weber, Chief Ranger

  Investigation into death of George Oberley

  April 19, 3:00 P.M.

  Notes RE: Fritz Calder of Salt Lake City, UT:

  Ran search on Calder through law enforcement network. No priors.

  Ran search through Google:

  Owner/operator of an air charter company out of SLC. Phoned base of operations, no answer, left message on answering machine. Web page lists him as former USN, veteran jet pilot, served over Iraq, decorated. NB: PTSD?

  Checked list of other passengers on Calder’s trip, ran them through Google. Three show up as geologists:

  Molly Chang. Teaches at U of U. No record with law enforcement.

  Donald Rasmussen, a paleontologist from Colorado. Clean record.

  Emily Bradstreet Hansen. Utah Geological Survey, Geologic Information & Outreach Program. Title: Geologist, Public Inquiries, FORENSICS. Phoned office number for Emily Hansen, was informed that she assists law enforcement agencies with murder and other investigations that require analysis of geologic materials, and Hansen is on leave for three weeks rafting the canyon with her husband FRITZ CALDER.

  NB: Calder has access to hammer and ways to cover evidence. I don’t believe in coincidences.

  APRIL 14–15: CIRCLING THE DRAIN

  Early the next morning, to everyone’s amazement, Wink again had the dory up and floating, and we launched and rowed on downriver, passing through the narrowest point of the river, a place where only seventy-six feet separates one rock wall from the other.

  We made a stop to hike up the side canyon where Deer Creek enters the Colorado River from the right bank. The strata there formed lovely horizontal ribs of brown sandstone, and after chuffing up a series of switchbacks that led up the debris slope from the beach, we turned up into the narrow, twisting slot canyon the creek had cut. Light bounced and filtered down from the sky above, giving the chasm a gentle warmth.

  Brendan asked, “What rock layer is this, Em?”

  “This is Tapeats Sandstone again.”

  “How’d we get back into that? I thought the river was cutting down into older and older rock.”

  “It was, but this whole plateau is humped up in the middle, and there are faults here and there that drop a section of the rock down, so that here the Colorado River is c
arving through a younger part again.” I tried to make a diagram by bending one elbow up and holding the other arm across it straight but it looked ridiculous. “I’ll draw you a picture when we get back to the river,” I said.

  We caught up with Don and Jerry Rasmussen, who were examining a particular layer of the sandstone. When he saw that Brendan was interested, Don pointed at a network of squiggly shapes in the rock and said, “Trace fossils. These are burrowing traces made by worms when this rock was still soft sediment.”

  “Cool,” said Brendan.

  We made camp that night at a place aptly called the Keyhole. Concerned that we weren’t making sufficient distance, Fritz got us up and moving early the next morning. We hadn’t gone far before Wink snagged yet another rock, again slowing our progress to a crawl. We made an early lunch, and watched the ravens that hopped along the riverbank. Fragments of conversation held outside Wink’s earshot told me that Fritz was not the only one who was beginning to feel hampered by the deterioration of the dory.

  Mungo was the most outspoken. “I say we just sink the thing,” he grumbled.

  “Then we’d have to have him in one of the rafts,” said Nancy.

  “Children,” Jerry warned, shaking an index finger at them.

  Nancy said, “Hell, something’s gotta give here. I’ve worked with plywood enough to know that when you leave a boat like that sitting on a trailer for a couple of years—how long is it he’s been in New Jersey?—and then you put it back in the water, there are molds that grow in between the laminations. It is not good wood anymore, if it ever was. You saw what it looked like after that big rock in Dubendorff! Like shredded wheat! And now he’s got patches on his patches.”

  We all talked in circles for a while, accomplishing nothing. What I didn’t say was that my biggest concern was Fritz. Having drawn the line in the sand the two men had descended into a cold war at Cremation Camp, and Wink was not one to surrender if he had an ounce of fight left in him. He seemed almost to be baiting Fritz, giving him dirty looks and even taking little jumps toward Brendan, as if showing that he might still try to throw the kid with his jujitsu or karate or whatever it was, or just push him into the river.