Call Me Joe

by Steven J Patrick

  She seemed to shrink two sizes within her clothes.

  “What would you know about it, you dumb hick?” she murmured. “You’re just some thug who beats people up in bars…only I hear your luck ran out, didn’t it, Aaron? I hear some old guy put you in Spokane General.”

  “Old guy?” I sputtered.

  “Some old tourist,” Jane leered. “Looked like somebody’s grandpa, was what I heard. ‘Samatter, Aaron? Over the hill at 20?”

  I shot a poisonous glance at Jack and Aaron, both of whom were nearly quivering with suppressed laughter. Jack managed to recover a bit but Aaron finally lost it and started to giggle.

  “That would be my grandpa, right there,” he chuckled, pointing to me.

  “I could do it again, y’know,” I growled.

  “You beat him up?” Jane asked, mouth agape. “So…and now you two are…working together?”

  “It’s a guy thing,” Jack smiled.

  “I don’t care about the 4 bil,” I hissed. “I will kick your ass.”

  That sent Jack and Aaron both into gales of laughter. I fumed silently, reflecting upon my career choices, my character judgment, and my life and how far off track it seemed to have gone.

  “Jane,” I continued, “I bet, if I go to your parents and ask about that money, they’ll throw me right out of their house. Whaddaya think?”

  “Of course they would,” she laughed flatly.

  “Now, seeing as I don’t give a shit if they’re pissed off, I just go investigate them and I bet I can get financials on them by close of the business day. I also bet your dad will take exactly two seconds from the time he slams the door behind me to call you up and ream your ass sideways about where that money really came from. So, that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to your parents and Art and Sera and the Newspaper and repeat everything I just asked you—right after I talk to Clay. If you told the truth, all you’ll suffer is a little embarrassment. If not, I’d guess life as you know it is pretty much over.”

  “You can’t do that!” she shouted. “You’ll ruin everything.”

  Jack started to speak but I shot him a glance.

  Jane had begun to pace and wring her hands. I’d seen that point many times at which the person snaps and begins to realize that the game is over. I knew the whole thing had been derailed too often by breaking that spell and I wanted to give Jane all the space she needed to crumble.

  “You’ll never understand,” she hissed. “Never. This sort of thing could never happen to someone like you! Get out! Get out of my house!”

  “No,” I smiled, settling into a leather wingback, “I think I’ll just sit right here and watch you freak out.”

  “I’ll call the police!” she screamed.

  “Good,” I nodded. “We’ll tell them about the money and the vote fraud. I’ll tell them about your shoplifting and tax evasion, too.”

  “What?” she sputtered. “I don’t shoplift!”

  “Well, you know people like me,” I laughed. “Us lower classes can’t tell the truth.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she wailed.

  “Because you’re an empty-headed, manipulative, deceitful little tramp who doesn’t deserve a break,” Jack said calmly. “You had one good chance to get out of this gracefully and you decided to lie your way out of it. This is what’s coming to you. You have no one to blame but yourself.”

  “Damnit,” I snapped. “I don’t have time for this. I have a maniac with a gun to find. I’m going to talk to her husband and parents, call the paper, and have Adam Fletcher picked up for vote fraud. Let her go down. I did what I could.”

  We turned to leave. I was betting Jane would cave now, if she caved at all. But we reached the door and walked out, leaving it wide open behind us.

  “She behind us?” I asked Aaron.

  “Nope,” he grinned. “Woman’s a pisser, ain’t she?”

  “Now we sit for a while and see who comes and goes.”

  “Good plan, Mr. Psychology,” Jack chuckled.

  “Fuck you,” I observed.

  I’d done this sort of thing a few times but nobody ever bailed as fast as Jane Wright. I was barely settled in the seat and opening my Coke when she came tearing out of the house, dived into the Mercedes Coupe, and blasted off out her drive.

  I followed openly, watching her glance in her rearview mirror as we bombed along Division Avenue toward downtown Spokane. She tried losing us three times and I finally left her just on the west end of the Gonzaga Campus.

  “She’s getting away,” Aaron observed mildly, “or thinks she is, anyway. Must not know about that cul-de-sac, huh?”

  “Guess not,” I smiled.

  “Hi, I’m Larry and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl,” Jack sighed.

  We rolled into the cul-de-sac and spotted Jane’s Mercedes parked at the curb in front of a modernistic, two-story office building at the very end of the circle.

  I pulled the Cherokee into a walled parking lot next to a three-story brick building that looked to be empty. I adjusted the side mirror so that I could see the entrance and Jane’s car and slouched back in the seat.

  “Aaron,” I said, “when she comes back, take the Cherokee and follow her until she stops again. Try to find out who she’s seeing. If she goes to the bank, call me and I’ll hustle up a cab or send Jack back to get me, if it’s close. Just don’t let her leave the bank. Flat a couple of her tires if you have to. We gotta wrap this up.”

  Janie came back out a few moments later, trailed by a pleasant-looking guy with wire-rim glasses, Hush Puppies, and, impossibly, a green cardigan.

  “She’s sleeping with Ward Cleaver, too?” Jack muttered.

  “What?” Aaron called out.

  “Leave it to Beaver?” I tried.

  “Leave what?” he asked.

  “Good lord,” Jack chuckled.

  “An old T.V. show,” I explained. “don’t worry about it. We’re just commenting that the guy seems like a mismatch for Jane.”

  “Looks like fuckin’ Ozzie Nelson,” Aaron snorted.

  Jack and I stared at each other and then at Aaron.

  “What?” Aaron sighed. “Jeez, old guys.”

  The cardigan guy appeared to be pleading with Jane, getting nowhere, as Jane paced the building’s terrace like a caged leopard. Finally, he pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and appeared to wail. I was fascinated. Actual wailing is less common than you might think. Jane buttonholed him quickly, whispered something in his ear, and then ran off to her car. The cardigan guy watched as she sped off down the street.

  I jumped out of the car and tossed Aaron the keys. He climbed in and tore off after Jane.

  The sign out front of the building said “Macklin Geological Associates and Assay.” An idea popped into my head and I circled the building, to the employee parking lot. There were only six cars, one was a gleaming new Land Rover, the swan in a gaggle of ugly duckling Nissans, Geos, and Hondas.

  It was just a guess but I didn’t see a high-maintenance babe like Janie Wright catting around in a ‘94 Camry.

  The Rover was unlocked, so I crouched down by the passenger-side door and waited, my knees issuing a faint protest.

  Fortunately, it was maybe 45 seconds before I heard footsteps and then felt the Rover vibrate as he yanked on the driver’s side door.

  I waited until the engine fired up and then climbed in.

  “Hi,” I smiled as unthreateningly as I could. “Here’s what I suggest you do. First, no matter what else you do, do not try to get out of the car. After that, just do what you were going to do anyway, and don’t get creative because we both know what that was.”

  “Who…who are you?” the man rasped. He had a soft, scratchy voice, kinda like the 60’s pop poet Rod McKuen, but with a faint southern lilt that I placed somewhere in southern Mississippi or Alabama.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot one suggestion. Don’t ask questions,” I said mildly. “If you do that for me, nothi
ng bad’s gonna happen and you might even get out of this without talking to the cops.”

  “You’re not a cop?” he said, an edge creeping into his voice.

  I reached over beneath his seat and extracted an older model .45 pistol that would probably still leave a very respectable hole in you at a range of up to 15 feet. I slid it into the map slot on my door and then snatched the cell phone out of the right-hand pocket of his cardigan.

  “Aren’t you burning up?” I winced. “It’s gotta be 85 out here.”

  “I work in a lab,” he said tightly. “We kept it cool for some of the chemicals. Am I being kidnapped here?”

  “Weren’t you headed up to that plot number 23, on the Columbia, by Kettle Falls?” I asked.

  “How did you…” he began.

  “Okay, here’s a little private eye 101,” I smiled. “That’s what I do, by the way. I’m a private investigator working on the project that Jane and her husband are involved with. You know her husband, Dr. Wright?”

  “I’ve met him,” he answered, with a definite edge in his voice.

  “Okay, see, I find out that Jane has been depositing small chunks of cash into a bank account for at least four years. I ask her about it and she gives me a story that, to the untrained eye, would seem plausible but, to an over-educated type like me, reeks of week-old mackerel. Even if Jane is a fiscal moron, her parents aren’t and they’re not going to let her gut a trust account the way she claims to have done. But money doesn’t appear from out of thin air. I think she was generating it in small amounts so she could fly under the radar—or foolishly thinks she could—from some source outside her folks, who would find out, or her husband, who presumably reads his bank statement and would notice even sooner if 5 to 9 thousand dollar hunks went missing. If he’s got people who handle that for him, they’d find any hanky-panky almost immediately.”

  “You just thinking out loud, now?” he muttered. “Do I have to be here for this?”

  “So impatient,” I sighed. “In case you’re wondering, I do know Spokane and I certainly hope you’re planning to get over there and take that next left toward Colville. If not, we’re gonna have a problem.”

  He snorted with frustration and swung over to the turn lane.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “back to P.I. 101. See, I confront Jane with the money, her affair out in L.A., her boyfriend in Colville… Oh, did you know about those?”

  “No,” he growled, “and I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t believe that a gal who was cheating on her old man with you would screw around on you with a young stud? Hmmm…interesting,” I nodded. “So…I confront ol’ Jane, really rattle her cage, blow the lid off a whole load of stuff she sure didn’t want revealed. Then, I go sit in my car, outside her house and not one minute later, she runs screamin’ out and comes straight to you. Curious, huh? Then I read the sign and I get a look at you, who—pardon me—look about as romantically plausible with Janie as a sock puppet, and I start thinking, ‘okay, why else would she be schtupping this dork?’ And then it came to me: geologist, assay, an obsessive interest in a piece of land… Why, maybe there’s something on that land that ol’ Jane needs some dorky, middle-aged-crazy geologist to get to. Maybe something under that land? Something she found when she was palling around with the twins all those years ago, but knew she’d never own because she could never buy the land…or so she thought.”

  “She gets involved in this project and I just bet, even though I haven’t checked, that she could give a rat’s ass about the glories of nature. I’ll bet her interest was getting regular access to that land. How’m I doin’?”

  “Jesus,” he sighed.”

  “I thought so,” I smiled. “So, I’m going to make an educated guess. How does Madame Einstein imagine that she’s going to get oil out of that land without anybody noticing?”

  “Well, nice to know you’re not as smart as I was beginning to think,” he sneered, “so fuck you.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said quietly. “So how’s she going to mine the gold?”

  He blanched visibly and glanced at me with a mixture of fear and realization in his eyes that made me want to cut him a break.

  Not that I was going to.

  Bingo, I thought.

  He hooked a right into the parking lot of a K-Mart and threw it into park. He leaned forward and rested his forehead on his hands, where they gripped the wheel. He took several deep breaths and his shoulders shook a bit. I waited, growing ever more edgy.

  “She screwed you,” I said softly, “and not in the way you wanted.”

  “What was I thinking?” he murmured. “I must have been out of my mind. She gave me one-third of the money but it wasn’t about that. Not for me. Almost all of it is in trust for my kids. All I wanted was her. Her, a married woman. I even knew this would happen one day. I’d find out there was somebody else, it’d be over, and I’d be lost for a while. I…I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

  “You were lonely. I’ve been there, man,” I said quietly. “She’s a world-class looker. Of course you fell hard. Don’t beat yourself up. Even if you can’t see it now, you’re gonna survive. You’re probably even going to fall in love again…and maybe this time it won’t be with a snake. I feel for you, I do. But I have a job to do and your only way out is to help me unravel this. You in?”

  He was quiet for a minute or more and then sat up, wiped his face with the sleeve of the cardigan, and put the truck back in gear.

  “My name’s Jeff Truesdale,” he sighed.

  “Truman North,” I smiled. “Call me Tru.”

  “I’m in,” he said steadily.

  “Glad to hear it,” I nodded.

  The story unfolded as we rolled out 395 to Kettle Falls. Aaron called to report that Jane was at her parent’s house and had gone out with her mom. I asked them to meet me in Colville at 4:30 and rang off.

  According to Jeff, it was pretty simple. She and the twins found shiny rocks in a couple of shallow caves, back when they were in grade school. One of the twins looked them up in her World Book and declared them fool’s gold or malachite. Jane stored the stones in a cigar box and stuck it on the back of her closet shelf. She had planned to use some of the pieces for custom-made jewelry, someday, and found it when she was preparing to go to L.A. She looked in the yellow pages under “Jewelry Manufacturers” and wound up with Jeff, who had been setting odd stones he found in his land surveys into jewelry settings as a lucrative sideline since grad school.

  Jeff knew instantly that the beautiful young woman standing in his workshop was, in fact, holding well over eighteen pounds of real gold. After quickly realizing that there was no way he could casually try to buy the box for what he had in the bank, he told her what she had and asked where she got it. She made no attempt to be cagy. He listened and answered her questions and managed to steer the discussion until she suggested that he go in with her, do the assays, do the geological studies that would find the rest of it, and split the proceeds. He readily agreed. He was three months divorced and being bled dry by alimony payments.

  They had to mine it late at night and as quietly as possible. Most times, it was just him but, sometimes, she was there, too. In a cave, by lantern light, with wine, sleeping bags. Soon they were doing more than sleeping. And soon, the money became secondary, for him.

  He had deposited a little over $2 million, in three Swiss and Caribbean banks. According to the geology, the gold, which shouldn’t have been there at all, might be a vein that extended throughout the hill and maybe even the region. It could also be one more nugget the size of a tennis ball. No way to know but to dig, and they couldn’t dig, not if they wanted to keep the cash.

  Jane told him the land belonged to the Colvilles. It was what everybody thought. When Aaron told her about Joe, it was like a bomb going off in their plan. They were no longer operating in a comfy legal grey area. Now, they were just stealing a guy’s gold.

  He argued for stop
ping, letting the money lie for a year or two. Janie wanted whatever was there. She tried to find Joe; even hiked up to his house, but he was never home. They spent an entire weekend and extracted nearly 18 ounces. They could see more but couldn’t dig it out with the tools on hand.

  We pulled the Rover up to the locked gate at the river entrance to Joe’s property. We scaled the fence and hiked about 500 yards up a steep hill, pulling ourselves up with roots, rocks, and tree branches. On a shelf about the size of a folding card table, Jeff stopped and fished a mini mag-lite out of his pocket.

  The cave was not even 15 feet deep. Jeff played the mag-lite’s beam over the floor. Half a dozen warm yellow gleams burst into life.

  “Is that…,” I began.

  “Uh-huh,” he nodded, “embedded in solid rock. No way to extract it efficiently without major equipment.”

  He knelt at the back and trained the beam on a basketball-size hole in the wall. A dirty yellow band about two inches wide gleamed dully back at us.

  “It extends to both sides,” Jeff sighed. “No way to know. But, as a geologist, I can assure you that there’s a lot of gold in this hill; probably the largest strike since California in 1849.”

  He took out a leatherman and dug the blade of a saw tool into the gold. He worked it around for a full 30 seconds and finally dislodged a chunk the size of a small grape.

  “Souvenir,” he sighed. “Get your own assay. It’s real.”

  We sat on the lip of the shelf and enjoyed the shade.

  “So,” Jeff murmured, “what happens now?”

  “Now,” I mused, “now, I have to make very short work of Janie Wright because I have to make some sort of headway on a sniper case in Europe that…”

  “The Pembroke Properties thing,” he nodded, catching my look of surprise. “I read the online edition of the London Times every day. You’re buying that thing about the three murders being connected to Jane’s resort.”

  “Not buying it at retail, really,” I shrugged, “but I need to rule it out, at least. Jane sure thought it was connected.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “She wouldn’t say, exactly,” Jeff said slowly, remembering, “but she seemed really definite about it. Said she overheard a phone conversation—somebody talking to the sniper. Said it was supposed to stop the project. I…I guess I sorta didn’t believe it because…well, funny as it sounds to say it, Jane thinks of herself as this Machiavellian figure. When I asked her, for example, what would happen when the A.T.V. trails went in—they’re going to cut within 300 yards of this cave—and there were people out here, she just laughed and said she had rigged it so that we had at least a few more months to move what we could by hand. It didn’t occur to me until later that it probably just meant she knew the work schedules and the trail wouldn’t be cut ‘til later.”