I stepped forward. “You want to solve this crime, right?”
He nodded.
“Us too. Why not think of this ghost as a witness? If you went with us and you talked to her, you’d be interrogating the chief witness. Ain’t that doing your job too?”
“Well … I reckon it might be.”
Harry threw his two cents into the ring. “Look, son, we don’t want you to get into trouble, but Kandy is right. This is a matter of a woman’s soul. She’s got to unburden her soul or else she’ll never get to pass on to heaven. I mean, do you want to risk being the person who answers to that on that other side? I sure wouldn’t want to risk that kind of damnation.”
“Damnation???” That got Devon’s attention. “I dunno. I never heard of anything like this in Sunday school.”
Veenie asked what church he was raised in.
“Methodist,” he said. “My mama’s people were Methodists.”
Veenie said, “I been to all the churches, and I can tell you this here could be a mortal sin in every single one of them, except maybe the Holy Rollers. Heck, when they start yacking in tongues, no one knows what they’re talking about. Most of them don’t know either.”
Devon was close to breaking down. We were all older than him. And we had him confused. That meant we had the advantage.
I could tell he was about to give in and let us have the séance when a pickup truck, lights flashing, slid into the yard and parked tight to the porch. Boots got out of the driver’s side. It was his truck, with one of those portable roof cherries slapped on top. He used his truck like this when on official business if Devon had the squad car.
And Boots wasn’t alone. The passenger side door popped open. Melvin Beal slid out. His white hair was all neat, plastered to his head. He wasn’t dressed in a turtleneck and patent leather loafers, like a southern mama’s boy, though. He was wearing a black windbreaker, white button-down shirt, and black creased trousers. The words “US Treasury, Enforcement,” were stitched across his jacket.
“Uh-oh,” said Veenie. “It’s the Feds.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
We ended up in jail.
“You can’t keep us here!” cried Veenie. “I’m old. I got those Miranda rights, the constitutional right not to get myself into trouble. I got a bad heart. I feel like I might fall over. I might die.” She clutched at her heart and twirled around in circles. When that didn’t get her any response she fell backward onto a cot and panted like Puddles.
No one paid her any mind.
We were huddled together on some iron benches in the holding cell in the Pawpaw County jail. Me, Veenie, Kandy, Harry, and Dode. The cell did double-duty as the local drunk tank. That night we were in there with Chigger Shelton. He’d tied one on at Pokey’s, and Pokey had carried him over for a sleepover. He was a tiny, dark-skinned guy, no bigger ’round than a bobby pin. He was so nearsighted his red, plastic glasses, which were held together with silver duct tape, made his brown eyes bug out. He was rolled up in a gray blanket like a roly-poly bug. Every now and then he’d sit up and mumble. He’d take wild swats at something around his ears and the back of his head. Then he’d roll up like a bug again.
Veenie wanted to tell him about the ghosts and how he she was being manhandled by the law, but he wasn’t having any part of it. He stuck his fingers in his ears.
Melvin approached the cell, carrying a ring of keys. “Sorry to lock all you folks up like this, but we need to determine what you all know, and this was the best way I could think of for getting you all to calm down and talk to us.”
He took me and Veenie first and led us into the back room where they kept the cleaning supplies, then over to the break room. When Veenie whined about having a dry throat and maybe fainting, he gave us paper cups of cold water from the cooler. He motioned to the break table and rolled a mop bucket out of the way so we could all squeeze in around the table.
“Now, ladies, tell me what you know.” He had a pen and pad poised on his knee.
“Nothing,” I said. “Like, I don’t even know why you brought us here. I thought you sold liquor for a living.”
“Did. Used to work with alcohol and firearms. I’m with the Treasury Department now. We do asset recovery. I was sent here by the Louisville Office of Recovery. We believe that you and Mrs. Goens may have some very valuable assets that belong to the United States Government. My job is to recover those assets.”
Veenie popped up in her chair. “It’s the gold, ain’t it? Jedidiah buried gold out at that mansion, didn’t he? Tarnation, I knew there was a treasure. I just knew it.”
Melvin blinked, but his face stayed blank. “Is there a treasure?”
I eyed Melvin. “Don’t you know?”
“We know that you and Mrs. Goens have been fencing stolen federal property around town.”
Veenie’s face fell. “We have?”
I asked Veenie what she knew about these allegations.
She shrugged. “I swear on my mama’s grave, the only stolen loot I’ve touched is Junior’s Harley. And that was just to get the thing back from whoever snatched it to begin with. You mean Junior’s bike? I mean, he bought that bike fair and square off Sammy Spray over in Salem. It’s got papers and all. If it belongs to the government, I’ll smack Junior for being stupid enough to buy it and he’ll apologize and give it back.”
Melvin scraped back his chair and stood. “Look, ladies, if you come clean, there might be a finder’s fee. I might be able to get a deal for you.”
I was starting to feel like we were in some deep doo-doo. The Feds. Felony possession of US Government property. And there I sat, as clueless as Puddles bouncing off brick walls. I was pretty sure this was not about Junior’s stolen Harley or the murder of Alta Iona a hundred years ago.
“Could you help us out? Tell us exactly what stolen property we’ve been passing around town?”
Melvin reached over and shook out a manila envelope. A plastic bag thumped out on the table. “This, for starters.”
I picked up the bag and worried it between my fingers until I could see through the plastic clearly. It was a large golden dollar coin. There were two eagles on one side. Ms. Liberty was on the other side. It was inscribed “1861” and “Confederate States of America.”
“We’ve never seen that,” I said. I pushed it back toward Melvin.
Veenie stood on tiptoe, yanked off her glasses, and bent down to inspect the coin. “Uh-oh.”
“Veenie?” I said.
“I might have seen that before. Once. Maybe. Not saying I did. Not saying I didn’t.” She looked a little panicked.
She swerved her head to face Melvin. “I don’t see too well. You can’t send a blind old lady to jail.”
I looked at Melvin. “Could you excuse us for a moment, please?”
Melvin plucked his cane from where it was hooked on the table edge and ambled back out into the main office and holding cell area. He shut the door gently behind him.
Veenie chewed on her little fingernail. “I seen that coin before, I think.”
“Where?”
“In Dode’s money jar.”
“You mean the moldy money you took to the bank to cash in for Dode’s retainer?”
“Uh-huh. There were a couple of funny coins in there. But the coin counter in the bank lobby took them okay. That one he showed us I kind of remember because it said it’s a Confederate coin, and well, they lost the war, so I figured it was a joke. A dummy coin. I put it in the counter hoping to mooch an extra dollar off that old tightwad, Avonelle Apple. She must have called the Feds. Turned us in. She never did have much of a sense of humor.”
I inspected the coin. In the bottom left, where the mint mark showed on modern coins, there was a “D - Dahlonega, Georgia” strike mark. To my knowledge there was no “Dahlonega” mint in the United States. No mint in Georgia ever, that I knew of.
“1861 would have been near the end of the Civil War. Veenie, I think that coin is for real.”
I fired up the Internet browser on my cell phone and searched for keywords related to the coin’s date and description. “Holy Jesus!” I said. “Lord Almighty!”
“What?” Veenie was on her toes, straining to see over my shoulder.
“That is a Confederate Double Eagle coin. One of an uncirculated batch that was minted by the Confederate government just as the war was near over. Only coins ever minted in Georgia. A shipment of them were robbed off a train in rural Georgia after being confiscated by the Union Army and routed north to the Union Treasury for a meltdown.”
“You mean it’s real?”
“Real and worth …” I couldn’t say that big a number out loud. It stuck to the roof of my mouth. I pointed to the estimated valuation on the phone screen. That coin was worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Veenie screamed and dropped the coin bag. The coin spilled out and rolled under the pop machine. “Oh shit!” said Veenie. She danced around like she had to go to the bathroom. She dropped to her knees, mashed the side of her head to the cement floor, and tried to see under the pop machine.
“Can’t see it,” she said. She tried, unsuccessfully, to slip her fat fingers under the pop machine. She drew her hand back and stared at her dirty, sticky fingernails.
“Veenie?”
“Yeah?”
“Were there more of those coins?”
“I dunno. I didn’t look at every single coin, Ruby Jane. Cleaned them a little. Dumped them into the wide, metal mouth of that coin machine in the lobby. I remember that one because it got stuck. And it was all pinky-gold in color. I remember thinking what a hoot it would be to see Avonelle’s face when she saw we’d given her a slug coin from a country that don’t even exist.”
“Where you think Dode got that coin?”
“Jeepers. Dode must have found the treasure. Out on his farm. Threw it in with his emergency coin bank for safekeeping.”
The door creaked open. Melvin came back in. Kandy was with him. She waved our way. Her gypsy bracelets clattered like castanets.
“Got to tinkle,” she said. “Won’t take me but a minute. Go right ahead with your talking gals. I’ll turn on the water, so you don’t hear me making my business.”
Melvin showed her to the bathroom. It was back behind the break room wall and pop machine. He stood there in the hallway, his hands behind his back, waiting for her to finish her business. He had taken off his jacket and was wearing a shoulder holster.
I told Melvin how we came to have the one coin. I explained to him our theory that Dode must have found that piece of lost gold and that we got it innocently by accident when he gave us his money jars.
“How much was there in that batch of stolen Confederate coins?” I asked.
Melvin checked his pocket watch. He shook his head at how long Kandy was taking. “One hundred coins, never circulated. Only forty ever showed up. Down in Mexico, a couple of months after Jedidiah left town. Back then, the Treasury agents tracked Jedidiah as far as Mexico City. It was him and his men who robbed that train in Georgia. He came up to Knobby Waters under a new name and used some of the gold melted down to set himself up to look like a big shot. When the agents finally found him, he used the flood as an excuse to run again. Because of the flood, we don’t think he could get back to where he had hidden most of the gold.”
“The rest of the original Confederate gold is missing?
“Missing since the train robbery. Never circulated. I’m with cold cases. We wait for coins like this to show up. Track down the owners. Some people steal these kinds of coins, keep them hidden for decades. Once they show up in the money stream, we hunt down the origin. Trace them back to the original thief. Like in this case.”
Melvin put his ear to the bathroom door. His face collapsed into a frown. He knocked at the door. No answer.
“Oh, dang it!” He backed up and kicked at the door with his tasseled loafers. It swung open. The bathroom was empty. The window was wide open, and there was no sign of Kandy.
“Gosh darn!” he said. “Can’t believe she gave me the slip.”
Veenie stared at the empty bathroom. “Why’d she run?”
Boots Gibson strolled into the break room and answered that question. “She’s a con artist. Wanted in six states for fraud. Travels around swindling old folks by putting on ghost séances.”
Boots had a tiny handheld projector smaller than a cell phone and some files under his arm. He sat them down on the table. He showed us some black and white photos. “This look like your ghost?”
Veenie nodded. “Yep, that’s Alta.”
“Ain’t Alta,” said Boots. “It’s just some generic ghost film she projects onto walls out of the tiny hole in this pocket projector. Found it on her when we booked her into the cell. One set of images is male. One is female. She pulled the same con two weeks ago over in a small town outside St. Louis. Got this old lady believing her husband was back as a spirit telling her to donate all her money to some church. Kandy was the minister of that church, of course.”
I stared at Boots.
He stared back.
He whispered into my ear. “You ought to return my calls, woman,” he said. “I might just know a thing or two.”
“I’m all ears. What else do you know?”
“Plenty.”
“Like.”
“I’ll tell you over dinner tomorrow night.”
“I’m not going on any date. Not at my age.”
“It’s not a date. It’s a fish fry. I caught most of the fish. Least you could do is come eat some of it. Seven o’clock. Boat and Gun Club.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“This is blackmail,” I said. “Extortion. Sexual exploitation.”
“This here is a free dinner,” said Boots. “Shut your yapper. Eat up, Ruby Jane.”
We were at the White River Boat and Gun Club. It was the annual Boy Scout fish fry, about as romantic as it got for weekend dates in Pawpaw County, unless you got invited to the Steinkamp’s fall Pig Poke, Beer Garden, and Sauerkraut Extravaganza, or Ma and Peepaw Horton’s annual Chickenlandia BBQ chicken benefit for the old folks out at Leisure Hills.
I wasn’t complaining, at least not about the food.
Pard Beesley was wearing his triangular Boy Scout troop leader hat and bibbed BBQ apron. He was hand-dipping catfish fillets in a beer cornmeal batter and expertly tossing them into an oil barrel fry pit. The fire leapt and the pot sizzled. He had his walker fitted with a row of canvas pockets and hooks. He had different spatulas and seasoning jars dangling in close reach off the contraption. The air smelled like sweet fried fish and hush puppies. The air was damp enough for a sweater. Crickets chirped above the sizzle of the fryer.
Puddles the wiener dog was under Pard’s walker, catching hush puppy bits that fell his way. After a while, he was so tired of snapping at the air that he fell over. He was snoring in the sand under the fryer pit when Bet found him. She scooped him up and tucked him into the cloth baby carrier she had strapped to her chest.
“Have some taters,” said Boots. He spooned heaps of crisp tater tots and onions onto my paper plate and tossed on a couple of fat slabs of corn bread with butter pats.
I did not resist.
He grabbed a pair of Budweiser beers out of the ice tub and popped the tops while holding both cans in one of his big, hammy, red hands. He offered me one fizzing can.
We scooched onto a seat at a picnic table on the screened-in porch next to Harry. Harry was sitting alone, with his hat pulled over his eyes, sulking. Melvin and the Feds had confiscated Dode’s money jars. We no longer had any retainer. We were out a few hundred dollars with no new cases in sight, and Kandy had left him high and dry, taking his home stereo system, TV, microwave, and laptop computer. She’d also cleaned out his liquor cabinet, the good stuff anyway. He was left with little more than his moustache and a bottle of Mad Dog to suck on.
“Cheer up,” I said to Harry. “Not like Kandy was the love of your life.”
“Maybe not, but she was good company.” He sniffled a little then chewed on the crisp tip of a battered fish. “We’re dead broke, you know.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve been there before. Something will turn up.”
“What?” Harry moaned, “A missing herd of cats?”
Boots polished off his first fish sandwich and shoveled back a couple of spoonful’s of tater tots smothered in ketchup and fried onions. “You all could go for the bail bounty.”
“On Kandy?”
“Gosh, no. On Darnell.” Boots attacked a second sandwich, this one piled high with cold slaw and mustard.
My mouth fell open. “You want to tell us more about that?”
“Oh sure,” he mumbled as he poked some loose cold slaw into the corner of his mouth. “I tried to tell you all this, but you never returned my calls.”
I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. “Darn it, Boots. I’m talking to you now. What’s the deal with Darnell?”
“He’s the one who’s been living in that Gremlin. Stole it over in Washington County.”
“No kidding.”
“It’s a crime, Ruby Jane. I don’t kid about that. And just for the record, he’s the one who stole Junior’s Harley. Got a long record. Everything he touches sticks to him like toffee.”
Harry was sitting up now, fiddling with the rim of his hat. “What’s his bounty?”
“Couple of thousand, if you bring him in over in Washington County.”
“You’d let that happen?” I asked.
“I’m not on quota here, Ruby Jane. Makes no difference to me who brings him in, but you’d have to find him.”
“How you know he stole that Gremlin and Junior’s hog?”
“Pooter. I picked him up and shook the spit out of him until he squealed. Don’t know if Darnell is still in county. The Feds busting your séance probably spooked him.”
“Why would he care about the séance and the Feds? He didn’t commit a federal crime.”
“Not so sure about that.”
Ghost Busting Mystery Page 14