“Greenbrier Crematory, Billings, Montana, for services rendered, August twelve, 1969 …”
“Two days after Laddie died and two days before her funeral,” Dr. Cowper said.
“You don’t think …?”
“Why else would it be in her mortuary file?
“A filing error? Her name isn’t on it.”
“Unlikely. The dates fit too perfectly. And this town doesn’t seem big enough to have a confusing traffic jam at the funeral home.”
“Okay, so what if Laddie were cremated? It doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. It just means you came out here on a wild-goose chase.”
“Maybe not. Did you say Bell Cockins was a good reporter?”
“No,” Morgan asserted. “I said he was the best.”
Dr. Cowper read from The Bullet’s front-page story about Laddie’s funeral.
“Listen to this: ‘Eight pallbearers lifted her casket off the horse-drawn caisson beside the crypt and, after some strain, lowered it into the vault.’
“Okay. What’s your point?”
“C’mon, a caisson? Eight pallbearers? Eight strained pallbearers? At first, I just figured maybe Laddie had put on some matronly weight, but now … if she was cremated, what made that box so heavy?”
Morgan said nothing. The siren song of Laddie’s mystery was too seductive. He grasped for logical explanations, but his mind was vacant.
“I don’t know, Doc. But I suppose you have a hypothesis.”
“Promise you won’t laugh?”
“No. But go ahead.”
Dr. Cowper spread his hands over the pile of papers in front of him and formed his words carefully.
“What if … Laddie truly was Etta Place? What if … some part of her myth was actually true? What if … all this was an elaborate scheme to keep a secret, not reveal it?”
“And you see evidence of that in all these papers?”
Dr. Cowper pursed his lips.
“Hey, it’s just a theory, okay? Science works the same way your buddies here buy pickup trucks: We find a theory we like, drive it hard, rip out the oil pan, burn up the engine, toss out the girlfriend, add a gunrack … then go buy a new theory.”
“Science … like a rock.”
“Well, my point is, theories are disposable, but they can get you where you want to go.”
“Yeah, but they’re supposed to be educated guesses, not frothy fantasies.”
“All right,” Dr. Cowper said defensively, “I’m educated and it’s a guess. Satisfied?”
Morgan shook his head. “I can’t win. What’s your grand theory?”
Before Dr. Cowper could begin, Suzie arrived at their table.
“What’ll it be?” she asked.
“What’s today’s special?” Dr. Cowper asked.
Suzie whiffed the fatty air. “Smells like chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and one-hour green beans.”
The anthropologist wrinkled his nose.
“I’ll just have a salad. Oil and vinegar on the side.”
“I’ll have the special,” Morgan said, handing Suzie the gravy-stained menus as she flew to the next lunch order.
“Think Mexican,” Dr. Cowper said.
“Not for lunch,” Morgan answered. “Too heavy. Makes me fart.”
“No, no,” Dr. Cowper waved him off. “My theory, think Mexican.”
“Jesus, Doc …”
“Okay, hang with me for a few minutes. Keep an open mind. I’m kinda thinking out loud here.”
Morgan checked his watch. “You’ve got til lunch arrives.”
“Matt, my bug guy? Last summer, the Mexican government hired him to excavate some sites on a ranch in Chihuahua. Ever hear of Doroteo Arango?”
“No, should I?”
“You probably know him better as Pancho Villa. Anyway, Matt was hired to poke around in a small family cemetery on Villa’s ranch for a cache of stolen silver.”
“Find it?”
“Nah, but that’s what’s interesting. Seems that in 1913, Villa’s rebels robbed a Wells Fargo train of a thousand bars of near-pure silver bullion, worth well over a million dollars at the time.”
Morgan stirred his tea.
“Is this train going someplace, Doc?”
“Yeah, just chill, my anal retentive friend. Wells Fargo didn’t waste a minute alerting the authorities, and soon there was no way Villa was going to be able to unload the silver for cash-money. So there he is, sitting on a magnificent treasure that’s worth nothing to him. Zip.”
“Doc ….”
“So Wells Fargo brokers a deal with Villa. In exchange for a quarter-million in pesos from the mining companies who owned the bullion, Villa agrees to return the silver and to stop robbing Wells Fargo shipments. The ransom fuels Villa’s Revolution, the mining companies recover their precious metal, and Wells Fargo has bought protection. Everybody’s happy. No harm, no foul.”
“Tell me this has a point.”
“Well, when the exchange happens, Villa only gives back two-thirds of the silver. He tells Wells Fargo that his merry men stole the rest: Almost three hundred bars of pure silver, worth about $300,000 at the time.”
“Sounds about par for the course with a bunch of hungry renegades. But how do you know all this?”
“In 1999, some researchers at Berkeley found all the correspondence in Wells Fargo’s archives. At the time of the robbery, Wells Fargo refused to publicly acknowledge the ransom for fear it’d look like they were helping the bad-guys. They also worried about copycats. The internal papers were buried for almost ninety years. The Mexicans now say the silver wasn’t pilfered by Villa’s men, but that he kept it. It never turned up.”
“Well, it’s a jim-dandy story, Doc, but I don’t see what it has to do with Laddie.”
“What if the rumors about Butch and Sundance and Etta riding with Pancho Villa were true? What if they masterminded the Wells Fargo train robbery? After all, trains and banks were their specialty …”
“And their cut just happened to be 300 bars of silver?”
“Hey, they were professionals. Villa was a thug. One-third of the heist as a fee? Most lawyers charge more.”
“And how much is it worth today?”
“Over a million, easy,” Cowper smiled.
“Just for yucks, Doc, how long a shot is this?”
“Define long.”
“A million-to-one?”
“Well, okay, even a million-to-one pays off once every million times.”
“Don’t look now, but your theory has a flat.”
“Enlighten me.”
“The silver itself. They could have melted it down and sold it off piecemeal. They sure as hell wouldn’t sit on it forever. A sombrero is a cute souvenir from a Mexican vacation, not a half-million dollars worth of silver bullion.”
“Unless they couldn’t unload it. Maybe it was still too hot. Maybe they couldn’t get a good price. Maybe they lost it. Maybe they got separated.”
“You need to stop sniffing formaldehyde, Doc.”
“Hey, it’s possible. Not probable maybe, but possible.”
“You think that Laddie Granbouche, aka Etta Place, ended up with it all? You think what she couldn’t spend was buried with her? And now you think we’re on the trail of a missing treasure?”
Dr. Cowper looked sheepish.
“Who knows?”
“We don’t. You’re dreaming.”
“A lack of knowledge is temporary, my friend. A lack of dreams is forever.”
“So how do we gain knowledge, Master Yoda?”
“We dream.”
“That’s it? Just fantasize until we’re smart, huh? If that were the case, I’d have been a genius when I was thirteen and had a crush on Debbie Mahaffey.”
“OK, well, maybe it takes a little more.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, not much,” Dr. Cowper said. “Just an open mind, some cotton swabs, a flashlight, a few drops of nitric acid, and an atomic abso
rption device. That’s all.”
Whether it was the lateness of lunch or just a bad chemistry-class flashback, Morgan’s stomach clenched.
“By the way,” Dr. Cowper added, “you know what La Plata means?”
Morgan shook his head. “The name of Laddie’s ranch? I don’t have a clue.”
Dr. Cowper smiled.
“La plata is Spanish for ‘the silver.’”
After midnight, a dog barked as Morgan and Dr. Cowper crept down the alley behind McWayne and Son Funeral Home. As usual, the mortician’s door was unlocked.
“He stuck the coffin in his display room after we lifted John Doe out,” Dr. Cowper whispered.
Morgan didn’t relish the idea of walking around a funeral home in the dark, much less the prospect of opening strange doors there.
“God, I still hate the smell of ether,” Dr. Cowper said, his nose crinkled like foil. “You take that side of the hall.”
After poking his head in a few dark visitation rooms and jiggling a few locked doors, Dr. Cowper found the casket repository on his own. Laddie’s old coffin was still on the gurney, pushed to one side among the shiny, floor-model caskets. How odd, Morgan thought, that Carter McWayne didn’t display the cheaper cardboard boxes that a family could buy for cremating a loved one.
Morgan held the flashlight while Dr. Cowper opened the coffin. He swabbed several surfaces of the unlined interior with Claire’s borrowed Q-tips, placing each in its own plastic sandwich bag. He labeled the location on each baggie with a black marker. When he finished, he closed the lid and the two men left the way they came, quietly down the back alley.
This time, the dog didn’t bark.
On Wednesday morning, press day, the first Bullet was for Sheriff Highlander Goldsmith.
The ink was still damp on the entwined stories of John Doe and Laddie Granbouche. Morgan snatched the new edition off the conveyor belt before stuffers bundled the papers for the post office. It would be Morgan’s declaration of independence … or his arrest warrant.
Either way, he’d deliver it himself.
The sheriff’s dispatcher said Goldsmith hadn’t checked in yet this morning and was likely still at home, so Morgan planned a social call.
Unlike the old days, when the sheriff lived in or behind the jail and his wife cooked meals for inmates, Highlander Goldsmith was a bachelor and lived on the far edge of town. His spacious ranch villa sat on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Black Thunder River and Little Poison Creek. The stone-and-cedar homestead had once been the main house for a sprawling cattle ranch, but the surrounding land had long ago been subdivided into twenty-acre “ranchettes” where accountants and lawyers could drive big trucks, wear cowboy boots and play at animal husbandry without the hardships of real agriculture. Cowboy posers, every one, Morgan thought.
The county graveled Goldsmith’s long drive every year, a perk the commissioners rationalized as an aid to public safety, but the county graveled the commissioners’ driveways, too. Grade A, government-approved pea-sized pebbles crunched under the Escort’s tires as Morgan turned off the pavement at Goldsmith’s cottonwood-lined lane. It was marked by an ornate, black ranch portal that arched over the road, with a lawman’s star welded to its apex.
The sheriff’s white Bronco was parked next to the house. An overfed blue heeler yipped nervously as Morgan stopped near the sheriff’s front porch, but nobody came out to shush him.
“Relax, Cujo,” he said as he knocked on the front door. The dog barked more insistently, although from a safe distance. Funny how some dogs assumed the personalities of their owners, he mused.
He knocked again.
The porch was a narrow, open-air walkway, lined with flagstone. Weeds poked up through bark mulch around the pavers and snaked their tendrils as far as they would reach. A breadloaf-sized UPS package, its brown wrap weathered, was beneath a spidery ragosa rose bush, unpruned for at least a season. Above Morgan, a strand of Christmas lights looped across the portico to the porch light, sagging in the June heat like rural electric wires in an ice storm.
Morgan pounded on the sheriff’s big wooden door again. Chips of brown paint fluttered onto the unworn welcome mat.
When Morgan left Winchester for college at Northwestern University in Chicago in the fall of 1975, he hauled one suitcase and a dream to become a newspaperman. His father, a hardware store owner, had hoped he’d pursue a more practical career, so Morgan took a few architecture classes to please him. But at the time, after the fall of Nixon and Vietnam, changing the world seemed like a reasonable design, even for a kid from an end-of-the-road Wyoming town where nothing, including the architecture, had changed in a hundred years. Still, the study of building design had added an abstract element to his perceptive skills: Morgan saw human frailties and virtues reflected in the walls that surrounded the lives he covered.
In High Goldsmith’s house, he saw a country manor with the heart of a homesteader’s shack, a place that had not so much been built as evolved season after season. A room would be added here in years when the beef brought top dollar, a pantry there when it looked like a hard winter ahead. With each new growth spurt, stones would be brought from the river below for the walls.
But it was not High Goldsmith’s house. He owned it, sure enough, but everyone knew it as Vernie Kilpatrick’s place. When Vernie died a few years before, without any heirs, the sheriff auctioned off most of the land to pay her property taxes, holding back the main house for himself. He paid a decent price, but it was still wrong. It was only fitting that it had not yet become his in the community’s conscience.
Still no answer. Morgan wandered to the side of the house, trailed at a secure distance by the suspicious blue heeler. The kitchen windows were open, and Morgan called inside, but no answer.
The back storm door was propped open with a rusted pipe, although it seemed ridiculous: the screen had long ago been shredded by the anxious little whelp. Morgan stepped inside.
“High, you here?”
Nothing.
Mindful that this jumpy sheriff carried a gun, Morgan stepped carefully into the breakfast nook and hollered again, a little louder.
“High, it’s Jeff Morgan. I came to surrender. You gonna arrest me or what?”
The refrigerator purred, but there was no sign of Highlander Goldsmith. Some dirty dishes languished in the sink. A revolver lay on the kitchen table, its cylinder out, amid a clutter of blackened patches and cleaning rods. Morgan could smell the gun oil.
“Extra, extra,” he said loudly. “Read all about it: Headless corpse found in unlikely spot … a cemetery.”
The living room was spare, but in order. Magazines were scattered across the redwood burl coffee table, a blanket draped over one arm of the leather sofa. The VCR blinked perpetual midnight.
“Goddammit, High. What does a guy have to do to get arrested around here?”
Goldsmith’s nervous little dog suddenly dashed through the room, his unclipped nails clattering on the hardwood floor as he careened down a dark hallway. He leapt against a bedroom door and as it slowly swung open, slipped inside.
Morgan plucked his notebook from his shirt pocket and sat down to write a note to Goldsmith. Something glib. Something unthreatening but firm. Something that would twist the DCI agents’ tails without being a rant. Something, of course, that pointedly wouldn’t mention lost silver or Pancho Villa or breaking into the funeral home in the dead of night.
As he pondered the wording, he glanced down the hall where the dog had disappeared, likely cowering beneath a bed, Morgan guessed. The back-bedroom door had yawned wide on its arthritic hinges, and a shaft of sunlight spilled into the hallway.
Through the bedroom window, across the lane, Morgan saw High Goldsmith’s brilliant red horse barn bathed in morning light. From where he sat it would have been possible to see right through the barn itself, since two thick-paned windows aligned perfectly with the sheriff’s back-bedroom and the sofa where he sat.
But a
peculiar shadow blocked Morgan’s view of the new summer pastures beyond the barn.
It might have been a saddle or an oiled duster hanging from a stable rafter, except for the distinct silhouette of a dead man’s hand.
CHAPTER FIVE
Highlander Goldsmith died naked, all white and trussed up like a raw turkey.
Except for the red teddy.
Morgan found him hanging by his neck, dangling from a rope attached to the raised bucket of his John Deere Model 410E, the gentleman-farmer’s distinctive green, diesel-powered backhoe tractor. He was suspended cross-legged, neither sitting nor standing, by a canvas safety harness strapped around his neck and grafted to a rope tied to the shovel. Goldsmith had wrapped a terry-cloth towel around the strap to protect the fragile skin of his neck.
The tractor had run itself out of gas, and the hydraulics were slowly relaxing.
A length of white PVC tubing was duct-taped to the backhoe’s hydraulic control lever in the driver’s cubicle. A broom stick was taped to the other end of the pipe, tucked under Goldsmith’s buttocks. His slightest movement would easily raise or lower the shovel; up, he could pinch his own airway, and down, he could relax his noose … as long as he could stand on his feet.
His dead hands splayed out from his sides like Frankenstein’s monster, already blackening with the blood curdled in them. His tongue was swollen, his eyes half-open. His feet coiled beneath him, lifeless toes scrawling grotesque pinwheels in the barn’s hard-packed manure. The filmy red nightie around his chest fluttered in the soft morning breeze that drifted through the open barn door.
The ambulance arrived first, after Morgan called 911.
Then came Undersheriff Willis Luckett, Goldsmith’s second-in-command whose main job for the past six years had been to oversee the jail menu and promulgate daily memoranda to the department’s ten jailers, dispatchers and deputies.
Carter McWayne was next, in his tricked-out black hearse, first in his role as Perry County Coroner and second as the funeral director. Such built-in efficiency left him more time for eating. In fact, the spot of egg yolk on his tie suggested he’d been called from breakfast.
And right behind McWayne, the officious DCI agents Eric Halstead and Scott Pickard rolled up in their sleek Crown Vic. They wasted no time commandeering the crime scene from Willis Luckett, who seemed genuinely relieved to be marginalized.
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 7