DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL
By Michael Conniff
Copyright © 2005-2006
All Rights Reserved

Chapter Seven
Requiem For A Sweetheart

The United flight came into the valley and cut through the wisps of a single cloud on the way to Sardy Field at Aspen/Pitkin County Airport. Down below I could see the small planes and private jets that sat there like a collection of very expensive toys.

I was flying into Aspen dressed up in my black suit, something that would probably never happen again in my lifetime. I looked like an undertaker, but there was nothing wrong with that because I was hitting the ground just in time for Sam Albright’s funeral at the Aspen Chapel. The Aspen Chapel was this incredible brick building sitting on top of a hill where the roundabout outside Aspen splits off into Highlands, Castle Creek, and Aspen proper past Cemetery Lane. It’s the church people go to when they’re sick and tired of church, so you have Jews there and Methodists and Catholics and Unitarians and Buddhists and so on and so forth all under one roof. It was beautiful inside, too, with a high ceiling and stained glass – but not so high that you felt God was out of reach.

Sam had taken me here but she had also taken me to all kinds of churches, even to St. Mary’s downtown, the Catholic one where I still knew all the hymns by heart. Sam said she was church shopping, but when I asked her what she was shopping for she said it was like a dress, that she would know when she found it. The way she said it was beautiful, and when we walked into Aspen Chapel one morning I knew this was it, because all of the mythology and the icons had been stripped away until you had the church equivalent of a blank slate, where each worshipper could kneel or not, where everyone could feel whatever their soul would let them.

Even I liked to pray in Aspen Chapel—to use those muscles—and when Sam fell to her knees in there something profound was happening to her, something I couldn’t see happening to her in St. Mary’s or at any of the other churches in town.

I had all the time in the world to think about Sam and the chapel because the hop-and-a-skip from the airport to the roundabout was backed up with no motion in sight. I could see the spire of the chapel but if I didn’t do something drastic I was going to miss the whole service. So I pulled off 82 to the side of the road as far as I could. When other people saw what I was doing they did the same and in a moment or two we were pilgrims on a real pilgrimage to lay the person we all loved to rest.

Jimmy was waiting for me at the door, his face even more sheet-white than usual, the way people who only come out at night can get in the light of day. He looked like he hadn’t slept since he heard about Sam, and the bags beneath his eyes were dark enough to match the point of his goatee. When Jimmy pulled me off to the side it made me think about how the only thing I knew about Jimmy was that he was from Jersey, he loved to tango, and he used to do voiceovers for the bad guys in cartoons with a voice that sounded deep enough to be gravel mixed in a cement-mixer. I could see Sam’s coffin at the front of the room.

“Baggie,” Jimmy said. “I need a minute.”

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” I said.

“She was a good kid.”

“The best.”

“She was like my sister,” Jimmy said.

“A lot of people felt that way. Sam brought that out in people.”

“There’s something you got to do, Baggie. For Sam.”

“Anything.”

“The eulogy,” Jimmy said. “You’re giving the eulogy.”

“Me?”

“She wanted you, kid. It’s in her will.”

“I can’t do that.”

“No choice, kid.” Jimmy took me by the bicep and took me inside to the front pew. “She fucking loved you.”

There was no way I could say no to Sam. I thought of the audience like I would a jury of her peers, and when I stood up I had to convince them of what they already knew: that Sam had lived a good life filled with great people, that her beauty was both without and within – and now, withal, within us – that nothing, not even murder, would ever change that.

People were crying and I could see handkerchiefs going to work everywhere I looked. In a chapel built for a couple hundred tops there was at least double that, with people pinned to the walls all the way to the front. Some of the men wore badly tied ties, and some of the women wore skirts, and you could see these were people from a mountain town who didn’t get dressed up but had to now for all the wrong reasons. There were speakers outside so a few hundred more could listen to the service. I was coming to the end of my eulogy when Dominic Picatti and two of his deputy dogs pushed their way through the entrance and waited in the back of the chapel. I could see that he was so hot that his meatball face was overcooked, but I looked him in the eye like I had never seen him before in my life.

“How do you measure a person’s life?” I said. “How do you measure the likes of Sam Albright, a life cut short when she was still so young and so kind? One way for us to measure a life is to look around us, to look on either side and behind you.”

I could see people swiveling their necks to look at their neighbors.

“Sam was a humble person. She lived a humble life. But she touched all of us in a way we will never ever forget. And she brought us together here today to celebrate her life and to see all the ways that she touched us. We love you, Sam, and we’ll never forget you. God bless you.”

Everyone was crying now, even Jimmy. Everyone but me, because in the beautiful comfort of the Aspen Chapel I still had a date with the devil. People came up to me after to thank me, to hug me, mostly people I had never seen before in my life. But I kept my eyes on the back of the church, where Sheriff Dominic Picatti was waiting with his two sworn thugs. We both waited until there was no one in the church except us and what was left of Sam in the coffin. I was not going anywhere until he played his hand.

“I made it as clear as I could, Bagdikian.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I told you not to go anywhere. I told you that you were a suspect.”

“I had some business to take care of in New York. Didn’t I tell you?”

Picatti plus two start to move down the center aisle to where I am waiting at the front. There is no Crucifix in the church, no statues, nothing like that, but with Sam still in the room this still feels sacrilegious.

“I went to see some people who wanted her killed.”

“Why would they want that?”

“Because of me.”

“Really? Because of you? The choir boy who can do no wrong?”

Picatti comes right up to my face except he’s so tall I’m actually staring at biggest, fattest Adam’s apple I’ve ever seen.

“You know you have an extremely large Adam’s apple even for a man your size. You look like you swallowed a human being whole and didn’t get the whole thing down.”

“Fuck you, Bagdikian. Tell me what you know.”

“I found out what I already knew. That they killed Sam to get at me.”

“A waitress at Jimmy’s? Why would they do that? Why would they bother?”

“It’s their of saying stay away from the O’Kell case. It’s their way of saying there’s somebody else that I love that they’re going to kill if I make a move.”

“What’s her name.?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re making me cry, Bagdikian. Boo. Boo-hoo.”

Sheriff Dominic Picatti turns to the other two.

“Read him his rights,” he says. “And then tow his car.”

Dominic Picatti had this idea that if the people elected him – and if they elected him over and over the way they had – then he had the right to decide what the will of the people should be. He made a huge deal about not arresting people for possession of drugs. If you smoked a joint in Pitkin County, you might or might not get busted but probably not. Hard drugs? As long as you kept it to yourself and did no dealing, then you were in good hands. Harder drugs? No problem – and it made no difference that the dealer who sold the crack might be the same one supplying the schoolyard.

It made no difference to Pitkin County Sheriff Dominic Picatti because he was the law. Case closed.

But it made a difference to me. In my brand-new and extremely comfortable Pitkin County Jail cell I now had all the time in the world to ponder the implications of a Sheriff who selectively enforced the law as he saw it. They all do that, of course, but Picatti did it publicly and proudly. His leniency made all the magazine writers make him out to be Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp and all the great lawmen of the Old West, but with this New Age twist. It made me think of Rod Steiger and “In The Heat of the Night,” that movie about racism and the old white sheriff in the South in a time of segregation. Back then, after the Supreme Court ruled separate but equal was not equal any more, and that integration should occur with “all deliberate speed,” there was many a Southern sheriff – white men who called black men “boy” – who insisted that they were the law. Like it or not, things were going to stay the way they had always been.

After all, the sheriffs said, we’ve been elected.

I looked around the cell. I had been in and out of jails whenever I was trying cases, but here I was, arrested-cuffed-fingerprinted for the first time in my life, and this cell might as well have been a Comfort Inn. I had an AM/FM alarm clock with a place to put a CD, and a chenille La-Z-boy where I was thinking these very thoughts. There was small and tasteful wooden desk with a Tensor light that was hot to the touch and gave off a soft round glow, and a wooden chair with a tall back that matched the desk. The walls of the cell were wallpapered with a bright rose pattern instead of plain old cement. Without the jail door there would have been no way to know this was a jail.

Welcome to Aspen, I thought.

I had time on my hands to play the drug argument out in my head. The message from Picatti to his public is that drugs were not so bad. Sure – he would enforce the law and bust people if he were forced into it, but he would just as soon look the other way and focus on “real crime” wherever he could find it, like at Sam’s funeral.

I cranked the La-Z-Boy back a notch and started thinking about what might be a better example than drugs.

Aha! Euthanasia.

What if Sheriff Dominic Picatti declared that henceforth he would not be enforcing the laws, state and federal, prohibiting euthanasia? What if he said Dr. Death had finally found a home for his brand of “death with dignity.” Would there not be a flood of lemmings coming to the county looking to commit suicide on their own terms? Does society want to leave that decision in the hands of Sheriff Dominic Picatti – or one of those racist sheriffs in the Old South?

Or is it more complicated than that?

Now I’m really starting to enjoy this, arguing my case in front of a jury, maybe some of the people from Pitkin County who came to Sam’s funeral.

Abortion.

Another aha moment!

The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade but our favorite Sheriff decides that abortion should be legal, and so he lets the world know that henceforth – and the overturn of Roe v. Wade notwithstanding – those who perform abortions in Pitkin County will not be prosecuted.

“You got a visitor.”

“Aha!” I said.

One of the thugs was standing at the jail door with someone who looked vaguely familiar.

“Skip Taylor,” he said. “Aspen Free Press. Wanted to ask you a few.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” I said.

“I don’t like to interrupt people from the further contemplation of their navel. But it’s my job.”

I knew Skip Taylor from his bylines in the paper but I had never seen him live and in color. His face was older than his body. It was redder than it should have been and the lines were spiderwebs forming ten years early in the strangest corners of his mouth and eyes and nose. In a paper that never took anything very seriously he acted as if cops and courts were life and death. The one chink that I could see was that he loved Dominic Picatti. I got the impression from his stories that Skip Taylor and Bat Masterson were good old boys, the best of friends.

“You sure you’re safe in here with me?” I said.

“I’m willing to take the chance.”

The thug swung the door shut, locked it, and walked away.

“Shoot,” I said.

“I’m hearing things. I’m hearing there’s no way in hell you did this. No motive.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everyone and their sister. Jimmy. Donovan at Jimmy’s. People who went to the funeral. A cast of thousands. I’m not a betting man any more but I’m betting you loved her.”

“I’m not going there,” I said.

“Not to put to fine a point on it,” Skip Taylor said. “But who done it? And why?”

I did my imitation of Charles Evans going blank.

“You know, don’t you?” Skip Taylor said. “I know you know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Hell you don’t, Bagdikian. I read your book on the O’Kells. I Googled your ass and I used to watch you on Court TV. I know you. I know not much gets by you.”

“That was television. This is real life. That’s a distinction with a difference.”

“You know who done it. And my guess is you know why.”

“You can guess all you want.”

“Go to be the O’Kells.” Skip Taylor was even better than I thought. “That’s what I’m saying. All the money in the world. Everything getting stirred up again back East is what I hear. That’s what I’m hearing from a buddy at the New York Post.”

Blank.

“I’m going to walk out of here now on the count of three.” He banged on the jail door for the guard. “If I’m barking up the wrong tree, you stop me now, stop me dead in my tracks – or I keep going wherever it goes, including right up your ass. One.”

The guard came and opened the door.

“Two.”

Skip Taylor stepped outside the door.

“Three.”

“Be careful out there,” I said.