Tahoe Killshot

by Todd Borg

I lay there, tense and stressed, wishing I were with Street.

  I broke camp at the first hint of dawn.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Spot and I hiked down to the lake for a morning drink, then headed back up toward the car. I left the bike hidden in the woods.

  A woman and two children noticed me unwrapping the Karmann Ghia. Her kids were fixated on Spot. I envisioned the men hunting me eating at the same McDonald’s as the kids. If the men heard the kids talking about the huge, spotted dog, a few questions would give the men a starting point to search for me.

  It was a risk I couldn’t avoid.

  Spot and I drove north up the east shore. Glennie had told me about Eduardo Valdez, the banker who’d fallen from the sky. His bank, Fidelity Trust and Security, was in Incline Village. I found a shady parking place on the back side, left Spot in the Karmann Ghia and walked around to the front door.

  The receptionist forced a smile and said, “Good morning, sir. How may I help you?” She was a big, tall blonde with a jaw and brow so heavy I’d have thought her a transvestite if her voice weren’t so high and delicate.

  I pulled out my wallet and showed her my license. “My name’s Owen McKenna. I’m investigating a matter that may connect with the death of Eduardo Valdez. May I speak to someone who worked with him?”

  Her eyes got wide. “I suppose you could talk to Mr. Lamb.” She glanced over toward an empty desk in the corner. “He’s a loan officer, too. But he’s out. Would you like to make an appointment?”

  “I’m not sure what my schedule will be, so maybe I’ll just stop back later?” I thanked her and left.

  The other person Glennie told me about was Monica Lakeman, who died falling down a flight of stairs. I drove to Truckee and found Lakeman Property Management in the historic downtown area. There was a sign with a picture of a cabin and pine trees and Lake Tahoe in the background.

  The door was locked. Cupping my hands around my eyes, I peered in through the little windowpanes. The lights were off. I recalled that Glennie had said that everything was being sold and given to charity.

  I went to the Truckee Chamber of Commerce. Inside, a cheerful woman was quoting statistics about the area to a caller on the phone. When she was done with her glowing report, I was ready to move to Truckee myself.

  “Yes, sir,” she said after she hung up.

  I introduced myself and explained that I was inquiring about Monica Lakeman’s death.

  Her face became very serious. “Mr. McKenna, I’m sure you are very wrong to even consider that her death wasn’t an accident. Wouldn’t that suggest that Monica was involved in something illegal?”

  “Not at all. Was Monica married?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Then perhaps Monica had a lover?”

  “Oh, no, I’m certain that she didn’t. I’m not a busy-body, but I happen to know that Monica hasn’t been involved with anyone for many years.”

  “Maybe Monica had a passion that someone else took exception to.”

  The woman was shaking her head. “Monica wasn’t the passionate type. She had a simple life. She took care of her properties. Ran her business. Served on our Board of Directors.”

  “The properties she managed,” I said. “I understand that most were vacation homes that she rented out when the owners weren’t in the area?”

  “Yes.”

  “She also owned some herself?”

  “Yes, I believe she owned three houses. One here in Truckee and two near Tahoe City. One was just across the highway from the lake. It has a great view. She could have retired on that house alone.”

  “Was that the house where she fell?”

  The woman closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes.”

  “Can you think of anyone who disliked Monica or had a strong disagreement with her?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Did Monica ever take an unpopular position in her role on the chamber’s Board of Directors?”

  Another shake.

  “Let me know if you think of anything else?” I handed her my card.

  The woman nodded. She was obviously upset by my questions. I thanked her and left.

  I drove down Interstate 80, through the canyon and into Reno where I found the Washoe County Jail.

  After showing my ID, explaining my purpose and offering both Mallory and Diamond for referral, they let me in to see Tom Johnson, the man who drove over Eduardo Valdez on the Mt. Rose Highway.

  He sat alone on a wooden bench in a jail cell. His feet were pulled up, heels on the edge of the bench, hands locked around his bent knees. His chin rested on his right knee, his eyes to the wall.

  “Man here to see you, Johnson,” the deputy sheriff on duty said.

  Tom Johnson swung his head around and looked at me. He was skinny, and his eyes drooped.

  The deputy opened the cell, let me inside and locked it behind me. “I’ll be right here in the hallway,” he said. “Holler when you want out.”

  I nodded at him and he moved away.

  I sat down on the bench three feet away from the prisoner. He watched me, then turned and looked back at the wall.

  “I’m Owen McKenna. I’m looking into a matter that concerns Eduardo Valdez. I’d like to ask you a few questions if I may.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. His throat needed clearing.

  “You hit him with your car,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me about it?”

  It was a long time before he spoke. “I ran him over. I’m sorry, if it makes any difference. I guess I pretty much screwed myself. I did the twelve step thing for a long time, but things changed on me. Now I’ve killed a man, and I can never take that back.”

  “How did it happen?” I said.

  “What’s to tell? I was driving up the Mt. Rose Highway. It was late at night, about one in the morning. I’d had maybe eight or nine beers at Finnegan’s. I know, I know. You don’t need to give me the lecture. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mr. Valdez, too. I can’t turn back the clock. No one will ever know how sorry I am. But I guess that doesn’t matter.” He stopped and took a deep breath.

  “They assigned me a lawyer,” he continued. “Mr. Bronfman. I don’t know if he’s any good. Awfully young. But it’s not like I can call up Johnnie Cochran. I’m a meat cutter at a local market. We’re not unionized. I’m doing great if I can just make the rent. But it doesn’t matter how good my lawyer is. I deserve whatever is coming to me.”

  “How was it that you hit Valdez?”

  Johnson was facing the wall. “It was dark and... He was in the road.”

  “What do you mean, in the road?”

  Johnson turned and looked at me. “In the road. Is that a problem?”

  “I’ve heard that you claimed he fell out of the sky.”

  The man turned away from me and stared at the wall.

  “Were you drunk when you said that?” I said.

  “Yes. No. What does it matter?”

  I stood up, walked a few steps away. “Did you make that up about him falling out of the sky?”

  “Yeah, sure. I made it up.”

  I turned back to him, grabbed his shirt with both hands, yanked him up to his feet, then raised him into the air. He trembled as his shirt bit into his armpits. “Tell me the truth,” I said.

  “Okay! No! I didn’t make it up.”

  I lowered him down.

  He sat on the bench and rubbed his armpits. “He fell out of the sky.”

  “Give me some details.”

  Johnson sighed. “Up where the highway starts doing all those switchbacks. I came around a sharp curve. The highway is dark, so it’s hard to see. I was leaning forward, concentrating on the painted lines. I was about halfway through this tight curve when he fell out of the sky.” Johnson was breathing hard. “It was terrible. I saw him for a split second in my headlights before he hit. His eyes were open. Maybe he was already dead. I’ve heard that happens, eyes staying
open after you die. But maybe he was still alive. I don’t know. Then he hit the pavement and...” Tom Johnson stopped speaking. He panted and swallowed and went silent.

  “What happened?” I said.

  It took him some time before he spoke. “He bounced.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just like I said. He hit the road, and his body bounced. He came back up to about the level of my headlights when I hit him. My bumper slammed him back down onto the road. I tried to stop. But I was slow on the brakes. My wheels went over him.” Johnson stopped talking. A tremor shook his body.

  “You think you might have imagined this whole thing?” I said. “Falling out of the sky?”

  “Look, I understand if you don’t believe me. I know it sounds ridiculous. But that’s what happened.”

  “You’ve been a drinker a long time?” I said.

  “Yes. I was sober a long time, too.”

  “Gotten picked up for drunk driving before?”

  He nodded again. “Twice. Fifteen years ago. I did my time and stayed sober until a month ago. Then my girl left me. Rita and me were together over four years. All of a sudden, she’s involved with a guy who owns a lawn care company. He has a lot more money than I’ll ever have. Maybe it isn’t the money. But I can’t help thinking he’s buying her stuff she’d never get from me. I heard they went to Hawaii. I know Rita’s never been there before. It hurts pretty bad.”

  “So you started drinking.”

  “Yeah. Only friend I’ve got.”

  “How many times have you hallucinated before?”

  Johnson was staring at the floor. He shook his head. “Never.”

  “But you’ve passed out before. A guy who drinks himself to oblivion usually sees things.”

  He was still shaking his head. “I’m not that kind of a drunk. I probably average a twelve-pack a day, but I don’t pass out in the gutter. I go to bed like anyone else.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “I’ve never hallucinated.”

  I leaned against the wall, hands in my pockets. “Give me a better idea about where this happened.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  The Mt. Rose Highway departs at the south edge of Reno and climbs up the slope toward the mountains on the north side of Tahoe. Diamond’s Karmann Ghia held 37 mph with the gas pedal floored as we climbed at a steep angle up past where we’d previously turned off to find Tyrone Handkins sitting in Tony Nova’s hot tub.

  The desert ends near the famous Montreaux links. Microclimates don’t get more obvious. It’s as if somebody drew a line in the dirt, planted sagebrush on one side and Jeffrey pine on the other.

  I followed Tom Johnson’s instructions until I came to the switchback where I believed he’d run over Eduardo Valdez. I was somewhere over 7000 feet of elevation. Slide Mountain and the slopes of the Mt. Rose ski area towered above me. There was a faint rubber mark on the pavement. I pulled over and got out.

  A truck went by, its engine and gears whining as it went up the long incline. After it passed, the road was empty. I walked into the middle of the asphalt and looked around.

  To the east side of the highway the world dropped away in a steep canyon that stretched 2000 feet down to the Washoe Valley and the broad splash of Washoe Lake. To the west, the mountain rose up at a sharp angle. The slope was forested and had two huge boulders projecting through the trees. But the boulders were too far back from the highway for a man to jump off and hit the road.

  I spent a few moments considering Tom Johnson’s story. After years of questioning suspects as a homicide detective in San Francisco, I’d developed a sixth sense about their stories. Many times I’d heard outlandish tales, and I’d learned to distinguish which ones had a possibility of truth. If a guy says he found the drugs or gun or money lying in the street, you know he is probably lying. But if a reasonable-sounding guy says the man he ran over fell out of the sky, the very fact that it is so implausible makes you think no one would make it up, and you begin to suspect that somewhere in his addled brain is a germ of truth.

  But when I again looked up at the slope above me, I realized there was no way Eduardo Valdez could have fallen in front of Johnson’s car unless he’d been dropped from a plane.

  I thought about the Cessna flying above me on the South Shore and then later on the East Shore. If the plane belonged to the killers, they could well have dropped Eduardo Valdez from the sky. But it seemed too incredible to think that, in all the vastness of the landscape, he would end up under Tom Johnson’s wheels.

  I got back in the Orange Flame and continued up the highway, over the pass and down to Incline Village.

  The big blond receptionist at Fidelity Trust and Security pretended that she didn’t recognize me. I said that I was here to see Lamb who was in full view over at the corner desk.

  “Oh, yes! Of course!” She picked up the phone and pushed a button. We both heard the buzz of his phone from across the room. Lamb picked up his phone and they spoke in soft tones. They hung up. “He said he’d be happy to see you. You can just walk over.” She pointed toward his desk.

  “Thank you.” I walked over to where Lamb sat at a large wooden desk. The desk had a blotter that was printed with a Green Bay Packers logo. Next to the blotter was a large pigskin paperweight. Miniature golden goal posts were stuck into the football, one on each end. The crosspiece on the left goalpost was a gold pen, the crosspiece on the right, a gold pencil. Near Lamb’s elbow was a Vince Lombardi coffee cup.

  Lamb stood up to greet me. “Morning,” he said in an airy voice. He shook my hand. “Al Lamb.” He had a Band-Aid on the crest of his forehead. At six-three or so, he wasn’t as tall as me, but he probably outweighed my 215 by 85 pounds. He was pink and thick from his ears to his nose to his lips to his neck and all parts south. His hand on mine felt like a boxing glove. His chest was the size of my washing machine. There were 120-foot-tall Jeffrey pines near my cabin whose trunks weren’t any bigger than his thighs.

  “Owen McKenna,” I said.

  He didn’t smile as we shook. He gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk and we both sat down. We considered each other for a moment.

  It is an automatic, alpha-male thing that women and smaller men don’t do or understand. The process is encoded in our genes, a social mechanism that served us well back when we were hunters and gatherers. Everyone in the tribe benefited from a mutual understanding of which guy was numero uno, the guy who held the trump card when it came to giving orders or bedding the women.

  Then again, maybe it was just stupid, testosterone bullshit. Probably, the same skinny geeks who start the Microsofts of today were romping the girls in the caves while the beefcakes were out butting heads.

  Either way, Lamb and I came to a nearly instant, unspoken understanding. I might be taller, but he had alpha tattooed on his balls.

  “I’m an investigator looking into a situation that may have something to do with the death of your colleague, Eduardo Valdez. I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about him?”

  Lamb’s eyes lost their friendliness. He spoke slowly, his airy voice like Marlon Brando’s in The Godfather. “What’s to tell? Guy worked with me. Guy died. It was a real shame.”

  “A real shame, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “What? It’s a problem I think it’s a shame when a guy dies?”

  “You call Eduardo ‘guy,’” I said. “That your pet name for him?”

  Lamb shook his head. “You’re a guy, too. Tonight I’ll tell my buddies, ‘Guy came in the bank today. Guy with a thing about names.’ You never used the word guy?”

  “Most people who worked with someone who died wouldn’t. They’d say, ‘I was so sorry about what happened. Eddy Valdez was my best bud. He and I were like twins, we were so close.’”

  Lamb looked at me. “Yeah, right, me and a Mexican best friends.”

  “Eduardo was a Mex?” I said. “And they let him work in a bank?”

  “Go figure,” Lamb said, his face unchanged.
“We’ve got all those gardens, but they give him a desk.”

  “Any idea why someone would want to kill him?”

  Lamb snorted. “It was an accident. He was hit by a drunk driver. Or don’t you read the police report before you start investigating?” He said the word investigating with a sneer.

  “The driver said he couldn’t avoid hitting your colleague. Said Eduardo fell out of the sky in front of his car.”

  Lamb didn’t smile, didn’t respond.

  I said, “So I thought maybe Eduardo got pushed in front of the car. A drunk could sort of expand on that, don’t you think?”

  Lamb didn’t speak.

  “You ever hear anything that would suggest that Eduardo was in trouble? He ever say something revealing?”

  “Revealing? What’s that, detective speak?”

  “Yeah. Did he?”

  “No,” Lamb said.

  “He didn’t say, ‘Golly, Al, I’m worried someone might drop me out of the sky in front of a car?’”

  Lamb’s eyes were getting smaller which made his other features look even thicker. He pushed on his lips with the eraser end of a wooden pencil. I once saw a cow that was mouthing a fence post. They had similar lips.

  “You want to open an account?” Lamb said. “Otherwise, get out of the bank.”

  I stood up and turned to leave. “Later, amigo.”

  I had an hour before the bank closed. Spot and I waited. Five minutes after closing, Lamb came out and got into a Buick. He pulled out of the lot and turned left. I followed as Lamb made more turns and climbed up into one of the rich neighborhoods above Incline Village. Lucky for me, Diamond’s Orange Flame was invisible. Lamb never seemed to notice me tailgating him.

  We crawled around sharp switch-backs and came to two expensive houses that were side-by-side. Lamb turned in at the second one. The drive was made of red brick laid in an elaborate floral design. The house was stone and cedar shakes and had a little garden just out from the front entry. There was a sculpture in the garden, a full-sized bronze of a quarterback throwing a pass. I wasn’t sure what the house would cost, but it would require an income about eight hundred times larger than the salary of a banker. Maybe there was a rich, young woman in the picture who ran a mutual fund and was attracted to an alpha male with bovine lips.