The bear did it. I always told Duke that he'd regret the day that he taught the bear to play cassino. Of course, being the animal lover he was, he felt that he was improving bear culture locally and in posterity by teaching the bear how to play cards. I argued the issue wasn't teaching the bear to play cards. It was that the bear was such a sore loser at poker, you could see the mean streak a mile wide coming out of that cavernous mouth every time Duke out-cassino'd the bear, sweeping the cards off the table and laughing to himself in the fog of amphetamines and booze. Then the bear'd roar and take another shot of pernod. Now pernod as we know it isn't real pernod, tho I hear that some smart frog has resurrected the original formula passed down from some pathologically insane booze soaked ancestor (or so they said at the time, even tho it was probably only a variation of 19th century "vapours" that they used to create a myth for the faint hearted.)
The bear was working on the restoration of the original blend when he wasn't playing cards with Duke, who just couldn't seem to get behind the idea of a still on his property that wasn't making vodka or gin. This was a source of tension between the two, but Duke knew better than to argue with a bear who was determined to become the best pernod distiller in Colorado. I hear it had something to do with his long range retirement, but I suppose we'll never know the backstory now that the bear has disappeared.
The bear just never learned to hold his liquor, even tho he probably does better than 90 percent of the drinkers hanging out waiting to get lucky with the local who has no compunction about cheating on the snowmobile mechanic who happens to be her 5th or 10th husband. And the local supermarket just won't cut it in Aspen as a meat market, so she is often seen trolling the bar at the airport. Since there are too many elbows at the store, I hear she hopes that the security alarm will go off as a result of touristas picking up too much gunpowder on their skis since it means she has a better than average chance to score. Dialing for dollars and jumping on the blue light special means you never have to go down because the red light just came on.
The bear couldn't understand why they wouldn't serve him drinks when he went to town with Duke. In fact, they seemed to get nervous and annoyed when they'd amble in together. I always thought it was because they were prejudiced against people with hairy bodies drinking with those who wait for powder while they obsess on who's wearing the latest style. Pounding the powder takes on a whole different meaning when you're not on the streets of a city, even though touristas seem to have a better time than the uptight local traction master sculptures waiting for a filthy rich European to put them out of their misery of waiting for whatever aircraft can get them out, which sometimes is a long time due to pilots not wanting to go in and out when the weather's bad. But who wants to be bused in and out of Aspen? The drivers won't take the bears, and the touristas don't want to blow their cover by appearing uncool. So Duke and the bear would drink at the airport bar because the bartenders there knew they couldn't afford to be prejudiced against people with an excess of hair on their lower and upper bodies and faces who want to get pounded at any hour of the day.
The bear always got nervous and irritable when the security bells went off, mainly as a result of a severe annoyance with the matronly security guard's shrill voice which when laughing sounded like a cross between a mule braying and a rooster crowing, both of which the bear hated, the former just because he doesn't like mules and the latter because he likes to sleep in after a hard night or month at cards with Duke. It was just such a marathon that they were coming off of when the fatal gunshot took away the vox populi, or at least vox barger-wenner of yesteryore.
The bear, being a bear, got used to the games lasting for days on end during the long winter nights, but never got used to being spiked with reds. That was how Duke maintained his edge over the bear. Yeah, it would all start well enough, but then Duke would lose track of which pills were what and just down a whole handful to start the game, and of course the bear didn't want to appear unsocial so he'd go along with whatever was on the table, which as you know could be anything.
The bear really annoyed Duke the first time he tried to eat a pistola instead of the granola that Duke kept out for the local freeze-dried hippie chicks that would wander up trying to get an autograph to sell or merely to get laid by a famous journalist. They tended to stay away when Duke and the bear had one of their cassino marathons, due to the uncertainty of who was eating what and how far into the fog they both were. The locals were really attracted to the smell of sweet air that hovered around the house like a cloud of Oaxacan angels, but never knew what kind of mood the bear would be in, and with so many guns, who wanted to take the chance that the bear wouldn't be pissed off because Duke swept the table of cards one too many times for the bear's liking?
The bear also couldn't deal with the black mollies. Oh, he'd tried them when he was younger, but kept having a hard time figuring out why things kept going in and out of focus. What he never knew was that Duke knew that the bear was a better card player than he was and wanted to take the edge off his game, so Duke would add an orange barrel along with whatever red, white, or blue pill seemed appropriate for the holiday (since he knew that the bear was very patriotic and insisted on observing all appropriate federal and local holidays) and that somewhat leveled the playing field.
The bear and Duke had been at it for about a week before the gunshot heard `round the world. Every so often you could hear groans coming from the vicinity of the house that could have been the bear being a very sore loser or just one of the locals having a fling outside in the woods. Of course, Duke was a pretty complex dude, so it could have been him having a fling with the bear, or a local who stayed undercover because she knew the bear could be very jealous when it came to cards. There were even rumors among those who knew him that Duke had a suicide pact with the bear in case Duke ever became incapacitated and couldn't play cards anymore. In Aspen there's no such thing as "suicide by cop," so you have to make your suicide pacts wherever you can.
The bear knew how to keep secrets. There were things that Duke insisted the bear could never repeat, not even to local reporters who swore to keep it secret, at least for a day or two. And they knew not to push the bear too far, since they never were sure if he was on a cocktail. Blackbirds made the bear very paranoid and irritable, not a good combination if you're a reporter trying to get a secret out of an armed bear high on whatever. Once the bear repeated something to Duke in the airport bar that was heard by a local in the process of getting laid, and Duke swore right then and there that the local wasn't having much fun even when the alarm bells went off and that it was time for a week-long card game and disappeared into the snow storm with the bear.
The bear was familiar with all the local gossip columnists, and was a great source of local color to fill the local rag with column inches of drivel about the locals. That made the bear very popular of course, but only when the Sun was shining, since when it wasn't Duke and the bear would hole up for one of their legendary card games and gossips approached at substantial risk to their bodies, lungs, and 12-step programs. At last report, though, the bear wasn't talking about Duke's death, at least not until he met with Duke's mouthpiece to make sure all the Iraqi state secrets were secured under lock and key along with the formula for pernod. I'm sure he also raided the stash to keep the local cops from having a good time, and the black crows of Aspen wouldn't dare come near the place to pick the bones if the bear was around, since he hated the black crows more than he hated to lose at cards to Duke.
The bear and Duke had so many agreements that it was hard for anyone to know what was really going on, since they didn't scribble much on cocktail napkins after that fateful day at the airport bar. Because Duke demanded absolute secrecy from the bear, he knew he could tell him anything, and as long as the card games continued, his secrets were out of the reach of the locals looking for the newest gossip about who was groping who at the supermarket or airport bar and security wagon. It was precisely this kind of agreement that opens the possibility that Duke and the bear conspired to keep the legend alive, even after that last, fateful card game.
The bear wasn't great at handling revolvers, even tho he figured out rifles and semiautomatics pretty quick. To me it seems that we can get to the heart of who was smoking who and what if we examine the prints on the bullet to find the tiny grooves usually found only in Slim Whitman's voice as it creates Martian explosions. Then and only then can we assume the bear did not have something to do with Duke's death. Until then, my money's on the bear.
The bear did it.