The Voxlightner Scandal

by Don Travis

  “Can you tell me the date and time of her death?” I asked the sergeant.

  “Hold on. Have to pull the file.”

  A few minutes later he was back on the line. “Saturday, December 11. It probably happened after midnight, but the report reads Saturday. Nobody found her until later Sunday morning. Folks spotted the wreck on the way to church.”

  “She died immediately?”

  “On the spot. Broke her neck. Wasn’t a bad accident. Just enough to do the job.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “Nothing suspicious, so there wasn’t one.”

  “Will you send me whatever you can for the record?”

  “What did you say you was investigating?”

  “A murder up here tying back into the company she worked for.”

  “Guess she didn’t have nothing to do with that,” the officer said with an apparent attempt at humor.

  “No but what happened up here might have something to do with her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’d take another look at the accident,” I said before closing the call.

  WATT MOORE rescued my day by phoning around four. After discussing the looming financial disaster facing the nation, he apologized for the delay in getting back to me. But he delivered gold—metaphorically speaking. “Sorry it took so long, BJ, but it required a good deal of effort to wade through everything and find what caught Belhaven’s eye. The figures you gave me match readings for three months in 2003 at a residence at 2551 Georgia Street NE.”

  “Whose residence was it?”

  “The account holder was a woman by the name of Sadie Burke. Spelled B-u-r-k-e.”

  “You know anything about her?”

  “Nothing except…. Well, I’ll be damned. She listed herself as a secretary at the old Voxlightner Precious Metals Recovery Corp. Looks like Pierce might have come up with a clue, after all.”

  “I’d say so. Do you know who owns the house on Georgia?”

  “Sorry, can’t help you.”

  “Don’t worry, you already have. I can take it from here. Thanks, Watt.”

  By the time we closed the office an hour later, Hazel had not only located the current owner of the property on Georgia, but we also knew he had nothing to do with the scandal. He was a professor at UNM who’d moved to Albuquerque from Texas last year. Hazel learned the owner of the home from early 2003 through mid-2010 was an outfit called LMZ, a local real estate investment company. A REIT.

  I dictated notes for the file while Hazel went about looking for Sadie Burke. Shortly before I snapped off my office light and prepared to go home, she stuck her head in the door.

  “No luck finding Sadie Burke. The closest I can come is a fictional character in a book. I’ll take another pass at it tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.”

  Chapter 8

  PAUL AND I managed to get in a round of golf early Saturday morning at the North Valley Country Club, and it seemed like old times. The cloud I’d sensed between us dissipated in the hot sun. The club was blessed with a number of trees to provide shade, most of which I’d kissed with at least one white-dimpled ball.

  We returned home after the round to the tragic news twenty-two Navy SEALs died in Afghanistan that day when their Chinook was shot out of the sky by insurgents. Some of them were part of SEAL Team Six that took down Osama bin Laden the previous May. Lord rest their souls.

  On Sunday we dressed in our best casual clothes and attended services at the nondenominational Temple of Our Lord on High. We’d discovered the church last year when its minister, Bishop Justin Gregory, helped a friend caught up in the sex trafficking trade. The good bishop guided a great young man named Jazz Penrod through the difficult withdrawal from the crack cocaine his kidnappers hooked him on. Since that time I’d regularly supported the congregation with my tithes and occasionally my presence. Today my imagination ran away with me again. Paul seemed to sit a little farther from me in the pew than he usually did. He had never been able to totally expunge an unjustified jealousy toward the fetching Jazz.

  BLACK MONDAY hit the stock market on August 8, 2011. The Dow Jones tumbled over 700 points after Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating from AAA to AA+ because of reluctance of Congress to address the nation’s credit limit problem. The action was the first time our rating took such a hit. Predictably the markets tumbled, exceeding the loss of the previous Friday. I had a little trouble dragging my mind back to matters at hand.

  Roy Guerra wanted us to drive down to Socorro to interview Dr. Damon Herrera, the man who oversaw the fire assays for VPMR, but when Paul agreed to accompany him, I opted to pursue the Georgia Street lead.

  I ran by the office to clear my desk—Hazel always had something for me to sign—before heading to LMZ on San Pedro NE. The manager of the REIT was a man named Theodore Donaldson, a retired real estate broker, who got bored playing bridge and stepped in to manage an office for a group of investors who knew nothing about real estate. He claimed it was like herding cats but reckoned the mental agility required to deal with the group kept him from going stale. He had been a golfing partner of my dad’s in years past. In my book he was one of the good guys on this earth.

  “BJ,” he boomed when I walked through the door.

  “Ted, you old dog. Are you still kicking?”

  “Kicking and biting.”

  After ten minutes of reliving golf shots—and my folks—we got down to business. “Ted, how far do your records go back? And how good are they?”

  “Back to when we started twelve years ago, and better than most. Why?”

  After I explained what I needed, he turned to a computer terminal on his desk and started his search, leaving me to examine my surroundings. The LMZ office was small, probably just Ted’s cubbyhole and what looked to be a conference room behind a glass wall at the end of the room. The presence of only two file cabinets told me his records were automated, but a line of heavy black binders on a shelf to the right of his desk looked as if they held official documents. I wondered if there was one for each piece of property held by the trust.

  Soon enough he found a file he wanted, grunted to himself, and retrieved one of the black binders. A few minutes later he adjusted his glasses and glanced at me.

  “The trust bought the property, a two-bedroom stucco, in August of 1999. Good producer. Kept it rented until we sold it to a UNM prof in August of last year. Got a good price. Now let’s see, you were interested in the first half of 2003.”

  “I understand you leased it to a woman named Sadie Burke during that period.”

  My statement brought a frown and a reexamination of something on the computer file. “The property was rented to some fellow named William Stark from March thru August 2003 on a six-month lease. He sublet it to the Burke woman.”

  “How long was the sublease?”

  “May and June.”

  “Wonder why she didn’t lease it herself?” I asked.

  “Could be a number of reasons. This Stark fellow might have gone out of town for a spell but was coming back. She might not have needed a place long enough to sign a lease, and it was cheaper to sign a sublease with Stark. Month-to-month rentals are higher than leases, you know.”

  “Could they have lived there together?”

  Ted scratched his chin over that one. “Coulda, but it would be a mighty strange arrangement, a fellow and his girl signing leases back and forth.”

  “What can you tell me about Stark?” I asked.

  Ted fiddled with his glasses again and poked a few buttons on the machine. “Not much on the application. Seems he was a construction worker. There you go. That’s probably the answer right there. Went out of town on a job and found a way to cover his rent while he was gone.”

  “Do you remember him?” I asked.

  “That was before I came to work here. I’m an investor but didn’t have anything to do with running the office until later.” He punched another button. “Look
s like another fellow subleased it from Stark after the Burke woman moved out. A fellow named Adam Stanton rented it for July and August 2003. Not much on him.”

  I collected what information I could on Stark and Stanton, including social security numbers and references. On the way back to the office, I puzzled over why the names Stark and Stanton sounded vaguely familiar. Neither name had shown up in the Voxlightner file before.

  I handed over the information to Hazel when I got back to the office. She hadn’t heard anything from Paul. But before I even got Stark’s and Stanton’s references called, she stuck her head in my door.

  “Something’s fishy. The social security numbers don’t match.”

  “Which number?”

  “Neither one of them.”

  The references turned out to be phony as well.

  A little bell went off in my head. I googled both names and instantly understood why they seemed familiar. William Stark—or more likely Willie Stark—and Adam Stanton were characters in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the King’s Men, based loosely on the life and death of the Kingfish, Governor Huey P. Long of Louisiana. Someone owned both a sense of history and humor.

  I CONTACTED my old riding partner at APD and asked Gene to see if he could get the Chillicothe authorities to look into Thelma Rider’s bank account. I was willing to bet they’d find regular payments from some source. She, or someone she knew, used her residence to fire assay some material. And somehow whatever they produced influenced the results of the School of Mines assays of the VPMR samples. So far as I was concerned, this answered Paul’s question of whether or not the company would have survived on its own. If I was right and the test results were skewed by introducing outside material, the answer was no. Looting the company had been the goal all along.

  This reasoning pointed a finger directly at Dr. Walther Stabler, but did it necessarily mean Barron Voxlightner was one of the conspirators? It’s possible that wasn’t the case at all. If so, then logic argued Barron was really dead, not just legally dead.

  My poking around in the trash pile of history told me the prime mover behind VPMR was Wick Pillsner, not Barron Voxlightner. He brought Stabler to Albuquerque, put him together with Barron and his investors, and induced old man Voxlightner to invest, thereby lending his considerable reputation to the venture.

  Yet it was hard to see how Wick had prospered from the scam. He traded his sweat for stock, a considerable amount, but it turned to ashes like everyone else’s. His reputation took a hit. Even so he stayed where he was and worked for years to overcome the humiliation and rebuild his business. Today he was a successful entrepreneur and well-respected among Albuquerqueans. How did he survive such a blow to his business solar plexus? By stealing the money, killing Voxlightner and Stabler, and pinning it on them?

  I called Gene back and talked him into taking a look into Wick’s bank accounts as well. Why did I call him for these sorts of things? So he and Detective Guerra could put their heads together and figure out probable cause, tying it into the APD investigation of the murder of John Pierce Belhaven.

  Because the jump in electrical usage in the spring of 2003 at 2551 Georgia NE was Pierce Belhaven’s lynchpin to solving the old scam, I decided to visit the address. A middle-aged woman losing the battle to keep her hair blonde, answered my ring and listened to my spiel but said she’d feel more comfortable acceding to my request if her husband were home. I agreed to come back around six and took my leave. Already halfway there I aimed the nose of the Impala for home and arrived in time to see Detective Guerra’s departmental Ford pull away from the curb.

  My one true love got pumped when I told him what I’d learned about the Georgia Street address. He needed the uptick because he considered his trip to Socorro a bust. Dr. Herrera was as reluctant to talk about old times as most of the people we’d encountered, but he was adamant nobody could have fiddled with the tests. He’d taken the time and effort to pull up the test results for VPMR and make copies. Herrera also reviewed the security procedures practiced at the time, and Paul agreed they seemed adequate.

  Once Paul rushed through the telling, he turned back to the results of my day. “So how do we run down Willie Stark and his henchman, Adam Stanton?”

  “As I recall the book, Stanton was Stark’s nemesis, not his henchman. I believe Dr. Stanton assassinated the governor in the halls of the capitol for disgracing the doctor’s sister.”

  “And it was based on a real dude?” Paul asked.

  “The author took his inspiration from the life of Huey P. Long, a real-life governor of Louisiana in the 1930s. Long was quite a character, just like Warren’s Willie Stark. Long served out his term as governor even after he was elected to the US Senate.”

  “Vince,” Paul said, “your penchant for history is showing. But Louisiana?”

  “If Long hadn’t been assassinated in 1935, he might have given Franklin Roosevelt a run for his money in the ’36 presidential election.”

  “So how do we figure out who our Stark and Stanton really are?”

  “Follow the money. Somebody real, not characters in a book, paid rent on the house on Georgia.” I smashed a fist against my chair arm. “Son of a bitch!”

  “What is it?” Paul asked, his eyes as round as washers.

  “Sadie Burke.”

  “The woman who sublet on Georgia Street?”

  “I should have remembered when Hazel told me all she could find was a fictional Sadie Burke.”

  “Don’t tell me. She’s out of All the King’s Men too.”

  “Exactly. Now I’m curious. Do you remember Wick Pillsner telling us the night Voxlightner and Stabler disappeared, he stopped by the office and found that Barron had discovered some phony accounts?”

  “Several, he said.”

  “I want to take a look at those records. Maybe some other Robert Penn Warren characters show up.”

  PROFESSOR DIGGS, the present owner of the home on Georgia Street, generously allowed Paul and me to go through his home later in the day. Once he understood why we were interested, he became curious over the details of a scam that took place in his home before he arrived in Albuquerque.

  “That might explain the 220-volt wiring in the garage,” he said, leading us into the attached area. Sure enough there were several 220-volt outlets. “And maybe you can tell me what this gizmo is,” he added as he pulled down a receding ladder concealed in the ceiling. He took a few steps up, grasped something in the storage area, and handed it down to Paul.

  I didn’t know what the rusted, rectangular piece of metal was, but it looked as if it had been exposed to considerable heat. It resembled an outsized grate to an electric grill. After examining the item for a few minutes, I used my handkerchief to lift the thing and prop it against the wall. The professor agreed not to touch it again until Detective Guerra could pick it up. Diggs admitted he and his wife both handled the piece of metal and agreed to fingerprinting for elimination purposes. Paul would need to do the same.

  Declining a cup of coffee or tea from the now-friendly homeowners, we returned home. That Paul was pleased with what we’d accomplished today became clear when he allowed Pedro to prowl. Even so, something seemed different.

  “Paul…?”

  “I’m worn out, Vince. Can we talk tomorrow?”

  Chapter 9

  BUT WE didn’t talk the next morning. Paul left early for another conference with the Journal editor, and Gene got permission for Roy Guerra and me to visit the local FBI headquarters to go over the VPMR accounting ledgers still in their custody. These had been referenced in the FBI reports I’d already seen, but I wanted a chance to review the financial transactions myself. We ended up examining a stack of records in a stark, uncomfortable little room I figured was used to grill suspects.

  Neither Roy nor I were accountants, but after tracing a couple of invoices through the books, I understood the system Richard Quintana had set up for the company was pretty traditional. It had so
me fail-safe and backup procedures, but what humans can invent, humans can circumvent. The first thing I noticed was that many of the invoices were presented by “Sadie Burke” and given the final okay by Thelma Rider. Burke habitually used blue ink; Rider, green. I took a closer look at the handwriting. Was it the same? Close, but I couldn’t be certain. I surreptitiously slipped an invoice for servicing the company’s water cooler into my pocket. Gloria McInnes down at K-Y Labs could do a handwriting analysis for me. As a double-check, I filched three more minor invoices for comparison purposes.

  Armed with a list of characters from All the King’s Men Hazel had prepared, I soon found some of the phony invoices. A $10,000 invoice to Sugar Boy Equipment Rentals was undoubtedly named after the faithful, stuttering Willie Stark bodyguard identified only as Sugar Boy. The A. Stanton Equipment Company was probably named after Anne Stanton, Stark’s sometime mistress and sister of his killer. The Stanton invoice for $125,000 was countersigned by Jack Hightower, the general manager. This gave me pause for a moment until I thought of my own office procedure. I okayed anything Hazel put before me. A man busy organizing the transportation of five million tons of tailings, locating and building a processing plant, and overseeing a horde of other chores likely relied on his office manager in a similar manner. Irwin Services and Littlepaugh Industrial Chemicals were suspect as well, since they were also characters out of Warren’s book.

  THE NEXT morning Gene phoned to say the APD lab confirmed the rusted piece of metal found in the attic on Georgia Street was from an electric furnace, probably accidentally left behind when the device was dismantled and removed from the premises. Aside from the professor’s and Paul’s, two other sets of fingerprints were identifiable, and a third was smudged so badly it was of no value. The identifiable prints were Dr. Walther Stabler’s and Thelma Rider’s. So far as I was concerned, we’d located the residence of Thelma and identified her as the mythic Sadie Burke. This raised the question of why Hightower or anyone else working in the office at VPMR failed to notice an employee who logged in invoices was never around.