Free Tucker Peak by Archer Mayor Page B

he was debating whether or not to tell us to pound sand—since this visit was clearly unofficial—or give us the assistance that all cops were supposed to give colleagues without a second’s thought but often did only grudgingly.
    Happily, he opted for the second, while maintaining his deadpan expression. “Ask away. I can’t guarantee how much good I’ll be, though. I was mostly outside, on patrol. A lot went on I don’t know anything about.”
    “That’s okay,” I told him. “We’re just looking for an overview, enough to give us a jump start, maybe.”
    Despite harbored suspicions, he finally opened up. “All right. Stop me if I’m going where you don’t want to go. If you’re talking flow chart, there’s a top man, the CEO, which used to be just ‘general manager’ till somebody figured CEO sounds better. That’s Phil McNally. He works with a CFO named Conan Gorenstein, if you can believe that—a mousy little guy nobody sees much. Then there’s a mountain manager. She’s a hot ticket named Linda Bettina. The only female mountain manager in the business, far as I know—good people, pretty tough, and not so into the women’s lib thing that she can’t yuk it up with the boys.”
    He was watching Sammie when he said this, presumably hoping for a reaction. She stuck to taking notes.
    Disappointed, he continued, “After that, it spreads out. You have a food and beverage manager, a personnel manager, marketing manager… brass hats like that, and each of them has a bunch of people under them that swells or fades depending on the season.”
    “Anyone run the CEO?” I asked.
    “Oh, yeah. There’s a board of directors. They’re basically invisible except when they use their gold passes to cut to the head of a lift line. I don’t know when they meet or what they do, but none of us ever heard about them. It was all the CEO or CFO on down, and for the operational types mostly Linda and the individual department managers.”
    “What’s McNally like?” Sammie asked, not looking up from her notes.
    “He cruises around like the captain of the Love Boat, trying to make everybody feel good—just the opposite of Gorenstein. No one who works there has much time for him, since he didn’t really know anything except how to dress good and play politics, but I guess they needed all of that they could stand.”
    “Why?”
    “I worked other mountains when I was younger, mostly as a garage mechanic. That’s actually how I started at Tucker, before the security job opened up. The pressure’s about the same everywhere, but some are run well, with the employees taken care of and the equipment kept up, and others are pretty fly-by-night. Like Tucker. So McNally had to sound and look happier than maybe he was. He’s a good enough shit. I mean, I liked the guy, ’cause I knew he was in a jam. He never showed it, though. Always acted glad to see you—and remembered names, too.”
    “I heard they were getting ready to spend a fortune,” I said. “Really fix it up.”
    Newell looked unimpressed. “Yeah, well, whatever. It would take a fortune just to bring the dump up to code, if you ask me… Not that you are.”
    “What about the resort generally? The nightclub and condos, the owners versus the day skiers, the full-timers and the seasonal workers. What’s it like as a society?”
    He paused thoughtfully before answering, “It’s a company town—lives and dies with the resort. That makes it like a soap opera, with everybody angling for position and every clubby little group pissing on the other. And there’s a real pecking order. The lifties—that’s the lift operators—they’re probably at the bottom of the heap. Some of them, especially the loaders who just make sure people get seated without killing themselves, they’re barely conscious half the time. Long hair, tattoos, body piercing, into drugs. Not all of ’em, of course, but a bunch.
    “At the other extreme, not counting the management