“So when did you get out of the love nest racquet and start prying into open and shut  gunshot cases?” he asked with a sly grin.

“You're side calls it suicide?”

“Guess I'm on the suicide of the street.” He laughed too hard at the lousy joke.

‘There was no note?”

“You don't need a Hall Pass from the Principal.”

“You can tell me one thing. Anything worth a second look in the evidence sweep? You know. Cigar  ashes?  Matchbook cover from La Club Whatever? Stray hair?”

McCrea shook his head. “I already asked those questions.”

I was wondering if he'd listened to the answers, but I said thanks and turned to leave. He stopped me at the door. “Oh, the evidence team did find a whole .22 bullet. Must have fallen and rolled under the couch. Who knows when? Didn't have anything to do with the death weapon. That was a .38 he must have stashed somewhere.  Anyway, we checked and the deceased also owned a licensed .22
pistol.” McCrea couldn't resist a parting shot. “You ought to take on a real murder. You could bust the case of attempted bodily harm to the brown  rat—you know, Gorgeous George. Look good in the newspapers. On your resume.”  He laughed again. Even louder. I knew my work was cut out.

Recalling Jim McCrea's favorite position, I propped my feet on my own desk and wondered: who'd want to try to kill the town's lovable old rascal, Gorgeous George?  The phone rang.

On the line was Mrs. Montgomery DePaul,  Sandra, she'd said to call her as she left my office the other day. “Mr. Cico?”

“Not much progress, I'm sorry to say.  Downtown Headquarters likes to wrap up its cases without breaking a sweat. The coroner and Lt. McCrea are singing from the same page--suicide.”

“Remember, you ask me on the first day at your office if I knew anyone who might want my husband dead. I've thought about it. He's been to court with lots of negligence cases over the years. I suppose anyone of a dozen losing defendants could want revenge. But there's a particular case he was working on this month.”

“Okay, I'm listening.”

“Well, it's the owner of the Freedom Ski Lodge, which just opened the end of last year.   He's being sued for millions--way beyond insurance-- by a young widow of a skier who died on the slopes January 2nd, just after the resort opened. It's known that the Lodge owner has visited my husband, presumably trying to wiggle out of the law suit, ”

Sandra DePaul explained that Montgomery DePaul  had taken the case because it had merit and he had uncovered some possibly incriminating evidence a few days before his death. This was man and wife chit-chat, nothing official, but it caught my ear. A young skier, named Eric Sanders, had strayed off the main trail and plummeted over a rocky embankment. Just before he died in the hospital,
he said something to his wife about “a hole in the fence” at the point he plunged. Words to the effect that “there was a gap in the fence there.”

Her memory on the matter was pretty good. Attorney DePaul searched out skiers who were there the same day,  January 2nd. Unfortunately, no eyewitnesses. But one skier recalled taking group digital pictures of his skiing party. Then a bit of luck. One angle showed the fence, and far in the background a flaw or something that could have been a hole. DePaul had the photo blown up, and, sure enough, a grainy shot showed a gap.

DePaul later scouted out the fence and found it totally intact. Since it was pretty new, anyway, there was difficulty singling out any one section that had been repaired. But he hadn't stopped there. Below at the foot of the embankment where the skier died, DePaul recovered a segment of wood. This came from a section where the fence company, like many fence companies, had imprinted its name -- sort of advertising. Flashing his lawyer credentials, DePaul had bluffed the fence company supervisor into checking his records. And, bingo, there was a completed order for a hurry-up fence repair on January 3rd, after a construction back hoe bumped into it hard the day before.

At one point I broke into Sandra DePaul's narrative. “What about the official investigation of the fatality. Didn't the fence hole come into play?”

“No, death was ruled accidental,” she said. “A skier going off the trail on his own and managing to kill himself. Nobody looked for a hole as far as I know. You should also know my husband noticed somebody  following him shortly after he found that fence piece.”

Of course, the whole thing smelled like a roadkill skunk. I sounded out my thoughts:  A protective fence--probably required by state regulations. Springs a gaping hole. Unlucky skier off-course slides through it. Before you can say agony of defeat, fence appears, mysteriously intact.

I picked up the conversation. “But now we have a blowup, showing the hole, plus an unsworn statement from the fence company. Suspect circumstances, if nothing else. I think I have an idea. But working it out's going to take some finagling with our esteemed police department.”

I cajoled Jim McCrea into joining me for an off-duty beer at the Pinewood Bar and Grille.

“Well, here we are,” he said after we slid into the worn booth.

”I've got a hunch.”

He snickered. “That's right, you P.I.s live on hunches. Oughta get a bumper sticker. ‘Will hunch for lunch'.”  The snicker erupted into a laugh.

I ignored the lame joke. “Look, I know Headquarters has ruled the skier's death an accident. Remember the unfired 22 bullet you found in   Montgomery 's office?”

“Yeah.”

“You also kept the .22 slug retrieved from the burrow after the attempt on Gorgeous George?”

“With the Mayor and Council on the warpath. You betcha.”

“Do me a favor, will you?

“Why should I do that?”

“Look, I get paid no matter how the hunch turns out. But if the hunch is right you could drape yourself in glory. Solving the murder of a prominent attorney.”

I laid out what I had in mind. McCrae would fire the .22 bullet the evidence team found, using DePaul's .22, then compare the muzzle scoring side by side with the .22 slug that almost sent Gorgeous George to Groundhog Paradise.

Jim McCrea called me the next morning.  “Okay, they don't match.”

“Which means the .22 shell found in DePaul's office belongs to somebody
else.”

“And you aim to find out,” he said. “You better not withhold anything relevant.”

“I aim to unfold not withhold. I'll be back in touch.”

 Plows had cleared the roads to Freedom Lodge and the three-day old snow glistened with a frosty cap. I rehearsed a little strategy, even though I wasn't sure who or what I would be dealing with. I pulled in and parked in a plowed lot, next to a dozen or so cars with ski racks. The recent snow was the first significant fall of the winter. Until then, ski business had been punk, even with the manmade base.

I opened the Lodge's massive oak door, guarded on each side by moose heads. A first-floor flunky sent me up the steps. I paused for a look at a glass-enclosed handgun collection,  outside the office of the owner,  Grover Johnson, a short, overweight man with a dead-fish handshake, which he managed from his desk without getting up. He was downing the last of a fast-food burger.

“They phoned me from downstairs, saying this was something about insurance,” he said. “I already talked to one insurance snoop about the accident. This new snow's the best thing that's happened all winter. Now, all this insurance talk crap.”

I made amends for interrupting his lunch. He waved off what was obviously an unexpected annoyance, knocking over a saltshaker, but quickly pinching some grains, which he tossed over his left shoulder.

“Well, you know we have to be careful with claims these days. Folks likely to make up any wild story to collect.”

“Don't I know it. Here, me, an honest businessman being sued because some amateur on the slope wanders off the trail and gets himself killed. Somehow managed to get over or around our legal, required safety fence. Nobody knows how. Musta been hot-dogging.”

For a while I let him ramble and bemoan the fate of ski lodge owners these days. When I got up to leave, he sensed no special threat from me, and walked by my side down the steps, and to the door leading out.

“Whoops!” he exclaimed, stooping, no easy move with his girth.  “See a penny, pick it up. All the day it brings you luck.”

I retraced Attorney DePaul's steps to the fence construction company, only to learn the repair order was conveniently missing. On the way out, I got a tip from an unnamed worker that the back hoe operator was working at a site about ten miles away. Nearly half an hour into the trip on Route 37, my rearview picked up a black sedan, standing out like a sore thumb against the side road's packed white snow. The driver was closing on me fast, and in few seconds, he was along side, swerving suddenly into my left rear fender. The impact nudged me toward an embankment, but I yanked the wheel straight with sweating palms, and fought off the skid. Maybe this was his first Olympic Road-Kill Event,
because the sedan did a 180 followed by a back dive over the embankment.

I called McCrea on my cell phone, reported the incident, and headed for the back hoe operator's construction site. This time he was jockeying a plow to clear a construction space. At first he played dumb, which wasn't a hard act, but when I calculated the possible years in stir for joining a conspiracy, his memory recovered. Yes, he'd bumped into the fence on the day in question, but he had nothing to do with the repair job and only heard about the fatal accident a couple of days later.

I found McCrea this time with his feet flat on the floor and actually frowning over some case report. I dropped the blowup of the snapshot on his desk .

He looked at the picture, then at me.

“So,” he said.

“That shows a hole in the Freedom Lodge fence, taken on the day of the skier's death. Montgomery DePaul, your so-called suicide, knew about the miracle next-day fence repair, and took the lawsuit, because the skier on his deathbed had gasped out something about a gap. Only somebody objected and wasn't over ruled, so DePaul never got the jury's ear. And I think I know who.”

McCrea leaned forward.

“The Freedom Lodge's owner, Grover Johnson, has a .22. I noticed it under a glass cover at the lodge. You've got enough to subpoena Johnson--who by the way has visited Montgomery 's building. Take a gander at the gun in his collection.  Odd's are the Mayor and Council will back a subpoena. After all, Gorgeous George escape death from a .22 slug by a whisker. Willful attempt on the town's prize cash mammal is surely a crime. Do a replay of the ballistic test. Never know what you might find.”

Next day McCrea phoned. “You're right. The slug from Gorgeous Gorge's burrow matches a test slug from Grover Johnson's subpoenaed pistol.”

“And the bullet found earlier under the couch in DePaul's office?”

“Yeah, matches that, too.”

“Must have toted along the  .22 he used to try to waste Gorgeous George when he set up the suicide scene. Somehow dropped a bullet in DePaul's office. Goodenough to ask Grover Johnson to explain how the shell got there. Oh, by the way, I found a witness willing to state he noticed Johnson in the lobby of DePaul's office on the day in question.” I hadn't but McCrea didn't need to know that.”

McCrea asked how I'd latched on to the Johnson-Gorgeous George connection.

“'Twas superstition that nearly killed the beast, not hate. Johnson was fanatically superstitious. The big snow the other day saved the season. Johnson knew the forecast for Groundhog Day was for clouds. He simply couldn't take the chance of Gorgeous George not seeing his shadow and cheating him out of six more weeks of winter.”

Oh, the so-called suicide. At Headquarters the matching .22 slugfest prompted a second probe of DePaul's office, a sweep that produced evidence of heel marks showing that he'd been shot with a stolen .38  somewhere else and his body dragged to the desk chair. The mysterious .38 served as the main prop in the phony suicide plot. My luck notched up when the klutzy hitman on Route 27--no Mario
Andretti--recovered and told Lt. Jim McCrea he wasn't taking  “no rap to save Grover Johnson's greedy hide.”

As a rule mysterious characters don't pop up to help my cases. But take ‘em as you find ‘em I say. McCrea booked Johnson. I bowed deeply in reverence to a fat check from a vindicated  Sandra DePaul.

Oh, I almost forgot. Groundhog Day turned out to be clear and sunny.