Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  Meanwhile, Coach Wally Buford had decided to use some of his line of credit for investment purposes. “We need to grow our money,” he told wife Judy. “That’s how Dinkle got rich. He invested his money and it grew.” His wife was no fan of Dinkle and pointed out that conniving had likely produced a much higher rate of return than investing for the old gunrunner. Coach Wally was undeterred and made an appointment with Dinkle to ask for advice. While waiting in the old man’s study, he snooped around. There were the usual things a man with big money and a need to appear dignified might have: a massive desk, a couple of deep leather chairs, a huge globe, and lots of unread books by Greek and Roman philosophers. Two handwritten letters had been carefully framed and hung near the fireplace.

  “Those are letters written by George Washington himself,” Dinkle told Coach Wally after joining him in the study. “I bought them both for a hundred dollars. Together, they’re worth at least two thousand now.”

  “Who are they written to…them letters?” the coach asked.

  “One is to a stable owner in Philadelphia,” Dinkle reported. “Something about buying a horse. The other one is to Washington’s overseer at Mount Vernon, instructing him to switch their crop from tobacco to grains.”

  “Wow,” Coach Wally said, adding an appreciative whistle that had less to do with his admiration for the impressive majuscules, minuscules, and flourishes of Washington’s signature than Dinkle’s claim of a twenty-fold return on investment. Once home the coach made an announcement to his wife. “Rare documents are as precious as diamonds these days,” he said. “I’m gonna find me some rare documents to buy.”

  It turned out that rare documents were even tougher to come across than monkeys, but Coach Wally finally established a dialogue with a pawnbroker in Reno who claimed to have letters exchanged between legendary frontiersman Kit Carson and Sioux chief Sitting Bull of Little Big Horn fame. The fellow was willing to part with the letters for one thousand dollars. Judy Buford was skeptical, her suspicion warranted as any historian worth his salt can tell you that Sitting Bull and Kit Carson were both illiterate, neither able to differentiate the English alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  “Could Sitting Bull read and write?” she asked. “Could Kit Carson, for that matter?”

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” Coach Wally scolded her. “These are really rare documents. In a few years they’ll be worth at least fifty times what we’re paying. Now this fellow in Reno, he’s a little reluctant to hand them over as he’d planned to auction them off to the highest bidder, but he likes me, and since I’m a newcomer to rare document collecting and all, he figures to cut me a break.”

  Judy was unconvinced but believed it worth a thousand dollars to see her husband look stupid and eat crow at some point down the line. She conceded without further argument and a delighted Coach Wally cut a check to the rare documents man in Reno. A few days later a parcel was hand-delivered to the Buford residence. Inside was a velvet pouch that held two manila envelopes. One of them contained the Carson letter:

  Dear Chief Sitting Bull,

  I trust this day finds you hale and hearty and send my deepest regards. I write to encourage you to give yourself over to the local fort. They’ll treat you square and that way I won’t have to hunt you down and put a bullet in you.

  Sincerely,

  Kit Carson

  The second letter was Sitting Bull’s reply:

  Dear Carson,

  Me hope you well and send regard back. Me can’t give up. Great Father tell Sitting Bull to stay in Badlands. Me put arrow in eye you come here, so don’t.

  Sincerely,

  Sitting Bull

  Coach Wally immediately invited his football players over to see the letters. They went home and told their parents who then told their friends, and before long, there was a line of people at the Buford door hankering to get a look at a couple of honest-to-God rare documents. Coach Wally was proud of his new acquisitions and happily accommodated the thrill-seekers, letting people gander willy-nilly until Milton Garwood suggested that pawing over rare documents could reduce their value by contaminating them with spit or dirty fingerprints. Moreover, he wondered if a rare document’s luster might be diminished by too much exposure. “The more people see stuff like this, the less interested they are in seeing it again,” Milton opined. “If it were me, I’d put them in a vault. Rich fellas all have vaults big enough to hold their paintings and jewelry and statues and rare documents and whatnot along with a gold-plated easy chair and a wet bar. Some of them never sell any of it. They just go inside their vaults once in a while and look over their crap and drink brandy. But the ones that wanna sell get a lot more if not too many folks have seen whatever it is they’re selling. Now I’m no rare documents man, mind you, but I’m betting you can get more money for one of them letters if less eyeballs have crossed paths with it.”

  Coach Wally ordinarily was about as interested in being told what to do as Milton Garwood was, but he thought a vault for his rare documents was a grand idea. He went straight to the Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogs, quickly discovering that their pickings were as slim for bank vaults as they had been for rare documents and monkeys. Both listed safes of various sizes. However, neither retailer sold a vault that would hold a gold-plated easy chair and wet bar, items Coach Wally had to admit might come in handy if several hours were needed to soak up whatever satisfaction a rare document had to offer. He asked Mr. Johns where they’d found the vault at his branch of the Sonoma State Bank. Mr. Johns gave him the name of a company in Oakland and Coach Wally immediately drove over.

  The salesman at Alameda Safes & Security hadn’t previously entertained a request for a bank vault, other than from a bank, and pointed out that such an item would likely be too large to fit into the Buford residence, particularly in latter’s present state of furniture and doodad gluttony. “You really just need a vault door on your house,” the salesman told Coach Wally. “You could put one in front and one in back. Throw some bars on your windows, and she-bang…you’re as secure as the Bank of London.”

  It turned out that converting the Buford residence into the Bank of London would cost just over twelve hundred dollars, but Coach Wally had only $1154.89 remaining in his line of credit. A bit of haggling ensued and the salesman was eventually satisfied with $857.00 plus the two Blue Vermont Marble tombstones the coach had purchased from the Bras & Mattos Monument Company. “Who needs ‘em?” Coach Wally told people. “By the time me and Judy are ready to kick the bucket, my rare documents will have made us even richer than the ambergris did. Hell, I’ll buy us a whole damned mausoleum and still have enough left over to put an eternal flame in front or maybe even a water feature.”

  It had been around two months since the arrival of the Buford’s jeweled commode, the buzz surrounding it having diminished to a hum, and so the coach and his wife were pleased when folks gathered on the sidewalk outside their residence to watch the installers from Alameda Safes & Security replace Coach Wally’s thin wooden doors with a pair of dense iron ones. The faces of the vault doors each had a numbered combination dial and a polished brass turn-handle resembling a small ship’s wheel. To prevent the Bufords from being locked in, an operating dial and handle were on the inside as well. The workers set the locks so the same combination would open both the front and back doors and then installed thick iron bars on the windows of the house. By four o’clock they were on their way back to Oakland, leaving behind an edifice that amused onlookers had already dubbed “Fort Buford.”

  Chapter Nineteen:

  I meet a real actor and learn about sex

  It was nearing Labor Day of 1934. Summer was almost over. The time rapidly approached when Dinkle would spring his mousetrap—and we would spring ours—and the old bastard had yet to suspect that the cheese he sniffed was bait. The game was afoot. And, amazingly, it seemed to those of us who comprised the Amb
ergrisians that we might actually pull it off. Mr. Judson recommended that Everson Dexter arrive on the Tuesday following Labor Day.

  “He could stay with Mrs. Judson and me,” he offered during one of our after-midnight meetings, “but it might be less suspicious if he were at the Kittiwake.”

  “I’ve already set aside a room,” Fiona said.

  “Fine,” Miss Lizzie said. “That’s settled. Once he’s checked in, Mister Dexter can retrieve a sample of ambergris from the boathouse and use my laboratory for his assay.” She went on, even though it was unnecessary. We all knew the plan and had gone over it so many times the steps were as committed to memory as the Pledge of Allegiance. Dexter would muck about Miss Lizzie’s lab, occupying the better part of an afternoon in order to convince folks he was as analytical as an analyst from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation ought to be. He would deliver the fake good news to everyone at a town meeting the next day and then exit stage left on his way back to San Francisco and the footlights of a legitimate theater. “The less time he spends in Tesoro, the lower the chances someone will peg him as a charlatan,” C. Herbert Judson reasoned.

  Everson Dexter was not our imposter’s real name nor was the name “Leslie Carrington” listed under his picture on theater playbills. His real name was Harold Lester Huffaker, and he was not from New York City, as asserted in the biography he provided to producers; rather, Hal Huffaker hailed from Delphic Oracle, Nebraska, a small place at the confluence of the Platte, Missouri, and Loup River Valleys. I don’t know who came up with “Everson Dexter.” Probably the actor himself. Actors are drawn to names no one would ever use, disdaining “Bill” or “Joe” in favor of “Cary” or “Randolph” or “Everson Dexter.” Even now, that name seems like a blaring foghorn to me, a name Dinkle should have thought as thin as the rest of our pretender’s backstory.

  I have become more jaded about fame and celebrity as I age, but at ten years old, I was quite excited by the prospect of meeting a real actor. The rest of Tesoro was excited, too, albeit for a different reason, anticipating that the representative of an exalted eastern company like the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation was certain to make their reaches equal to their grasps. In Scene I of our play, Mr. and Mrs. Judson were to travel to San Francisco where, supposedly, they would meet Mr. Dexter’s train from Philadelphia and then show him a night on the town, driving to Tesoro the following morning. Mr. and Mrs. Judson, indeed, had a night on the town in the wonderful City by the Bay, afterward staying at the elegant Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. However, Dexter was neither on a train from Philadelphia nor in their company, instead acquitting himself as “Mr. Grantham” in the closing night performance of The Bishop Misbehaves at the Victoria. The next morning he exited his somewhat dowdy Mission Street hotel, hopped into the Judson’s Chrysler Imperial town car, and they headed for Tesoro.

  I had a picture in my head of Mr. Everson Dexter as someone like Clark Gable. James only recently had taken Ma and Alex and me to see the wildly popular It Happened One Night in San Rafael. In the movie Claudette Colbert played a runaway heiress with Gable as the cynical reporter who goes on the road with her. The square-jawed actor was everything I thought a real man should be: wide-shouldered, voice tinged with gravel, a wisecrack always at the ready, hat pushed back on his head in that I-don’t-give-a-damn way a lot of women seem to love. However, the Everson Dexter who stepped out of C. Herbert Judson’s Chrysler was more like Miss Colbert than Mr. Gable.

  He was handsome—I had to give him that—but not the hacksaw sort of handsome I’d expected. Rather, Everson Dexter was nearly as beautiful as Fiona Littleleaf and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson, his features utterly proportional, his skin flawless, his wavy brown hair flecked with blond highlights and tousled in a way that made it seem simultaneously perfect and careless. Watching him glide as gracefully as a dancer from the car to the front door of the Kittiwake Inn, I was struck by the contrast between he and Clark Gable. Gable was a warship, Dexter a Yankee Clipper; Gable a stained undershirt, Dexter a velvet smoking jacket. Watching Gable onscreen, one could almost smell the tobacco and whiskey and sweat, whereas Everson Dexter seemed like a fellow who never perspired.

  His appearance in Tesoro had an immediate effect. Dexter checked into his room at the Kittiwake Inn as planned, but upon entering the main parlor, was greeted by the single largest horde of gussied-up women Tesoro had ever gathered together in one spot.

  “Well,” he said, displaying a smile likely capable of separating most in the room from their undergarments, “if only I had a glass slipper.”

  There was a good deal of lady-like tittering after that and then Judy Buford stood and recited the poem “How Do I Love Thee?” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, followed by an invitation from Milton Garwood’s wife for Dexter to come have a look at Mr. Sprinkles. This provoked an avalanche of invitations that might well have ended with some clawing and handbag-swinging had Mr. and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson not reminded everyone of their guest’s foreordained mandate to carry out the business of making them all rich.

  “Ah, duty calls…sadly, I will confess,” Dexter told them with a slight bow that made a good many of the women in the room weak-kneed. Then he and the Judsons were off to the boathouse to meet the rest of the Ambergrisians and raise the curtain on Scene II: The Fake Analysis.

  At the boathouse Mrs. Judson waited on the dock while the remaining Ambergrisians followed Everson Dexter inside. The night guard, Angus MacCallum, had kept the seaward doors open all night, closing them and securing the padlock at dawn, but the stench remained more than robust, almost instantly transforming Everson Dexter’s flawless tan from bronze to gray. Fortunately, Miss Lizzie had a jar of her camphor-sandalwood ointment at the ready. She smeared a dab under his nose, afterward passing the jar around, and Dexter’s color slowly improved until he was merely ashen.

  “How long do we have to stay in here?” he asked, his nose so wrinkled with disgust that his nostrils nearly turned into dimples.

  “A few minutes,” Miss Lizzie answered. “Enough time for you to take a sample. I see you have your case. Open it.”

  Dexter had brought along a doctor’s bag filled with test tubes, vials of variously colored liquids, cotton swabs, glass pipettes, an eyedropper, a scoopula, and a small mortar and pestle—all of it provided by Miss Lizzie. He opened the bag but then hesitated, staring at the laboratory equipment as if the items were symbols in the runic alphabet.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  Miss Lizzie took over. The dinosaur egg that was our only true ambergris remained in an orange crate a few feet away. She used the scoopula to scrape off a bit of the hard, whitish material and transferred it to a test tube. She then capped the tube with a rubber stopper.

  “Take this,” she said to Dexter. “We’ll go back to my lab to finish.”

  Upon re-emergence from the boathouse a sizable crowd awaited us. They perked up at the sight of Miss Lizzie and me and our fellow Ambergrisians, then began to instinctively cheer and clap when Dexter appeared, something that instantaneously eased his biliousness—applause for a ham actor apparently equivalent to smelling salts for a cock-eyed boxer. To his credit he resisted the temptation to bow, merely lifting a hand to acknowledge the adoration flung his way, afterward pasting on a dignified expression as he strode up the gangplank to the road above the boathouse. Except for James, who took over the guard duty, we then walked to Miss Lizzie’s with Dexter leading the way, with the rest of the crowd trailing. The day was already warm and the men removed their jackets as we hiked along the road while many of the women dabbed at their underarms with handkerchiefs. As I had suspected might be the case, Everson Dexter did not sweat at all.

  Back at Miss Lizzie’s, our imposter improvised a bit. After climbing the steps to the porch, he turned to the crowd.

  “Good citizens of Tesoro,” he began in a voice resonant, theatrical, and decidedly un-analyst-like. “I shall need several hours to co
mplete my assay. However, rest assured I shall provide a report to you as expeditiously as possible.”

  This earned Dexter another round of applause, and with his craving for approbation not yet sated, he was about to stray even further from the script when Miss Lizzie took one arm and Fiona the other, pulling our analyst off-stage before he could lift the backdrop from our little drama and thus reveal an alarming lack of any substantive ambergris in the wings. Mr. Johns and C. Herbert Judson stayed outside where they attempted to disperse the crowd. I followed Dexter inside, keeping a close eye on him, as his first glimpse of Fiona that morning had elicited a predatory expression. Unfortunately, as the day wore on, I discovered that Fiona had a predatory look of her own.

  The details of Everson Dexter’s actions in Miss Lizzie’s lab are unimportant. Had he been a real chemical analyst, his expertise would have been far beyond what I can convey, given my fourth-grade education at the time and my present lack of enthusiasm for anything requiring familiarity with the periodic table. But then, he wasn’t a chemical analyst at all, was he? Hence, adding a red liquid to the ambergris shavings Miss Lizzie had dropped into one of his test tubes and then pouring the red liquid into a green one followed by a yellow one—the whole mess afterward heated up over a Bunsen burner—was really just a basket of actor’s tricks.

  I concede that he was a good actor. Donning a white knee-length coat and horn-rimmed glasses, he carried out his activities with cool professionalism, punctuating each step with, “Ah, yes,” or “Hmmm,” or “By Jove, this looks promising.” The day was warm and Miss Lizzie had the window sashes up—the sills all around, as well as the open doorway to her small laboratory, populated by as many eyes and ears as could find space. Dexter’s dramatics served our scheme well and not a single person in town evidenced suspicion that the envoy from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation was as phony as a carnival fortune-teller.