The Next Cool Place

by Dave Balcom

  I called Rick first, and his wife answered. She said Rick was in Lake Lucy on business and took the message.

  Then I called Albright.

  “Hey, can you take about four people for a walk in the woods on Wednesday, show them some morels and have them back to Pendleton in time to clean up and change for dinner at Raphael’s at six?”

  “Sure, for you. Will Chef Rob feed them their mushrooms?”

  “I’ll check, but I’m expecting you to join us for dinner as well.”

  “Oh. Well, I admire Raphael’s food, but you know, the Rainbow is more my speed.”

  “Man doesn’t live by fried chicken alone, my friend, even the Rainbow’s chicken – please do this. I haven’t mentioned you by name, but I’d really like to impress these folks, and you’re as close as we have to a celebrity who doesn’t ride a horse or bull.”

  “Sure, I’ll do it. Have them here at the house about eight, and make sure they’re wearing waterproof footwear and raingear. It’s about forty-five outside right now up where we’ll be hunting, so they should bring layers.”

  “They’re all pretty outdoorsy in an Orvis kind of way. But they don’t arrive anywhere by eight in the morning. They’ll see you about ten, give or take.”

  I laughed at that. “I hope they make up in portfolio what they lack in punctuality.”

  “Oh, they do. They do. Thanks.”

  Then I called Jan, but there was no answer at home. I called the paper, and McGee, the receptionist, told me Jan was out. “I’m actually not sure where she is, but I think she’s working on the story you caused. I’ll tell her you called.”

  I had just hung up when my phone rang. It was Sgt. Fish.

  “Mr. Stanton, John Fish here. Gotta minute?”

  I love proper phone manners, and warmed to him immediately. “Sure, what’s up?”

  “After our talk on Saturday, I started talking with my captain, and he suggested I talk to the commander of detectives in Lansing, and he freed up our local investigator so on Sunday we went to Mineral Valley. As you might suspect, we pretty much hit a dead end, but a couple of things were weird, and I thought about it and decided I should give you a heads up.

  “First, tell me why Richard Santiago’s name raised your hackles.”

  So I told him the whole story about the drug rip off back in the ’70s and how I’d been told the deal was arranged with a pusher called “Ricardo” and how Charlotte had been the one pointing a gun at my friends, according to them.

  “So why do you ask?”

  “Saturday, I went to the Santiago compound. There were eight vehicles in that place, mostly SUVs but one big black Lincoln Town Car. I was met at the gate by a very cold character who was far from impressed by my uniform or my badge. I was told that Mr. Santiago was unavailable, but if I came back on Monday, after nine, he would be there to see me.

  “I was there this morning at nine, and the place was completely closed up. Everyone was gone. The windows were shuttered, the works. I shimmied over the fence and even the water was turned off. It appears it’s closed for the season.

  “When I returned to my car, I had a phone message waiting. It was a guy named Willis Crocker…”

  “Santiago’s attorney.”

  “That’s what he said. You know of him, too?”

  “Only what Google told me.”

  “Huh. Well, this Crocker guy wanted to know my supervisor’s name and number. He explained Mr. Santiago was a busy, important man, and wasn’t going to be harassed by some country cop.”

  “Harassed?”

  “That was his word, I might have paraphrased the rest.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Not exactly. I told this to the detective, Miles Lawton, and he decided to review the interviews from Sunday. You know Mike Robertson?”

  “You mean Big Mike? Sure I stayed…”

  “No, the other one.”

  “No, I knew there was one, but I didn’t meet him.”

  “That would be because you were too busy doing healthy things like walking in the woods. If you’d spent some time in the Copper Kettle, drinkin’ and shootin’ pool, you’d have met Little Mike.”

  “And I’ll bet he was real friendly with Mickey.”

  “Birds of a feather. Mickey was about the only guy in this neck of the woods who stood a chance on a pool table with Mike, especially when he’s thirsty, and he’s always thirsty.”

  “So you guys interviewed Little Mike, and he hot foots it out to the compound to report that you’re re-opening an investigation into Mickey’s death and the folks at the compound book? Is that what happened?”

  “Not quite, but close. Seems one of the security folks from the compound came into town for a little liquid recreation, and Mike told him. The guy bolted out of there like a big ass bird, we’re told.”

  “A stork, maybe?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. What kind of line you do you have on Mr. Santiago?”

  “We’re checking on him down state. The people at Schaeffer’s have only seen him at what they described as business dinners. They say he’s very serious, very quiet, and just acts rich, whatever that means.”

  “Any sign of Mrs. Buchanan?”

  “Nope, she’s gone. Nobody’s seen her since the night you saw her at the restaurant bar.”

  “I saw her the next day at Mickey’s old place. She was there with two guys.” I explained my little walk in the woods, identified Ron and Ray. I remembered the gun.

  “I’ll go out to that cottage; I didn’t know that was his place. It used to be the Millers, from Saginaw.”

  That gave me an idea, but I didn’t follow up with Fish.

  After we hung up, I called the newspaper again. There was still no sign of Jan, so I asked for Patty Patterson.

  “Mr. Stanton, what’s up?”

  “Patty, you ever spend any time in the court house going through property transfers, deed searches, and stuff like that?”

  “Not in a long time, thank God. That stuff is real boring.”

  “It can be, but you know how to translate the stamps to determine the sale price of the property?”

  “You mean the tax stamps? Yah, I do, but it’s been a long time. Why do you ask?”

  “You know the police are looking into Mickey Buchanan again, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t slept a wink since they stormed into town Saturday afternoon and started interviewing everyone again. It’s our lead story for this week, and I’m all over it. You call with an angle?”

  “Maybe a sidebar. You might find it interesting to look up and see how much property has been bought by Mickey, Richard Santiago, Charlotte Davis, Willis Crocker or an outfit called Next Cool Place, LLC.”

  “We know Mickey bought a bunch. And that Next Cool Place outfit is developing Penny Point. There’s almost a whole section, six hundred and forty acres in that project, and they might own another couple hundred upstream, I’m not sure.”

  “I think the interesting part may be the timing of the purchases as well as who was doing the buying. Also, it would be cool to know how much they were spending for cedar swamp land.”

  My phone went off about six that evening. I was sacrificing some barnyard fowl to the fire gods. If there’s a worse grill chef in captivity, I’ve yet to meet him.

  “Rick Edmonds here, Jim. I just finished from doing some research with Darrin Reese in Lake Lucy.”

  “Reese is in Lake Lucy?”

  “Yeah, made a big score in some land deal a few years ago and bought the bar down by the lake. Became into his own best customer.”

  “What took you there?”

  “You did.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I had calls, a flurry of ’em; first from Charlotte Buchanan, then Kathy White, then a lawyer by the name of…”

  “Willis Crocker?”

  “That’s it. And they all called looking for your home address. Now I can understand Kathy wanting it, but I would ha
ve thought she kept it.”

  “I kinda lost the Christmas card habit, you know? She quit sending cards my way, too.”

  “Well, I told Kathy and Charlotte I had no idea of where you lived other than it was near Pendleton, Oregon, but up in the mountains. But when the lawyer called, I kinda became curious, you know?

  “So I pretended to be looking it up in my address book and tried to make some small talk, but he was real standoffish, you know. All business. So I asked him what he was looking for, and he said it had something to do with a possible libel claim.

  “Anyway, I finally told him I guess I didn’t have it, but if he’d give me a number, I’d find it and call him back. He hung up.”

  “So where did Reese come in?”

  “I started to thinking about you, Mickey, me, and then I started remembering the stories we told last Saturday, and I remembered you asking if Reese had been part of the rip off, and so I went to ask him.”

  “Really?”

  “Jim, you gotta know Darrin and I go back a long ways, farther and closer than you and me or even Mickey and me. I just had to ask.”

  “He denied it, of course.”

  “Not actually. No, he never did deny it. He asked me why I wanted to ask such a dumb ass question, you remember how he was? Well, he’s still just like that, but buzzed all the time. So I told him about your coming down, and how all the questions of where you live had started coming from Charlotte and even Kathy.

  “Then, I mentioned Crocker’s name, and I thought Reese was suddenly sober. His head snapped around and he repeated the name like it was the boogie man, you know?

  “I asked him if he knew Crocker, and he just sat there for the longest time without a word, then he said the damndest thing before going into his office and locking the door without so much as a fuck you very much! Never saw Reese so spooked.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Those are people who can scare Jim Stanton and walk away from it.’ You know what he meant by that?”

  I sat there a second, thinking. “Rick, you were talking about Crocker, but he answered about ‘those people?’”

  “Yup, that’s right. What does it mean?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m glad you called me.”

  I diverted him to talking about the party, and how great it was to see all the people from so long ago, and then we promised to keep in touch before we hung up.

  “That’ll do as a warning,” I thought, “until an outright threat comes along.”

  Then I proceeded around the house planting telltales and setting up my own long-remembered alarm systems.

  “We might be having company, Punch. Ya never know.”

  19

  Tuesday was one of those rare clear spring days in the foothills, when the Columbia basin’s weather intrudes on the squally weather of the mountains. It’s a little hint of what’s to come with summer.

  Punch seemed to be bursting with energy, and bounced around me all day long as I did yard work and seasonal work on the house, getting screens up and storm windows down.

  The house was built in the 1960s as a summer home. Its best feature was a three-season porch facing west, exposing the broad valley that first greeted pioneers on the Oregon Trail. You can still see wheel ruts in places along the trail’s path.

  At two stories, this house was very compact, only a little more than 1,500 square feet.

  The downstairs consisted of the kitchen, a dining room with no wall between it and the kitchen, and a living room full of overstuffed chairs and floor lamps – a knock off of a reading room in some gentleman’s club. There was a television in the room, but I couldn’t remember if it worked or not.

  Between the kitchen and the two-car garage there was a stairway to an unfinished basement and room that contained washer, dryer, pantry and a closet that Sandy had called our “mud room.” The master bedroom and bathroom completed the downstairs.

  Upstairs there were two more bedrooms and a bathroom that joined them. Both bedrooms had dormer windows that overlooked the valley. One of the rooms was made up for guests; the other was where I worked.

  There was a trap door you pulled down from the ceiling in the second room to a finished attic.

  The phone rang four times while I was inside during the day, but there was never anyone there, so I figured whoever was calling was keeping tabs on me.

  The house also had some charm in the kitchen/dining area, a large expanse of cupboards and counters and a breakfast area, all windows looking out on two sides of the house, north and south and a pair of glass French doors leading to the porch.

  We went to bed at dark, and I listened to the sounds of my neighborhood. There is not much traffic. The road peters out about a quarter mile past the Nelsons, and there’s a dead-end sign up near the paved road. Few people wander down this road, but it does happen.

  There are no street lights, and after I moved in, I disabled the big mercury vapor yard light that had given our place all the ambience of suburbia every night. Soon after, Jack turned his off as well.

  “It’s a lot more like living in the country without that night light,” he noted for my amusement.

  While police will tell you that the best deterrent to rural crime is a bright light, most people living in the Blue Mountains rely on their neighbors and their close friends such as those Smith and Wesson fellas.

  20

  The mushroom hunt on Wednesday went off without a hitch. My four guests pulled up, as directed, towing Albright’s trailer and two four-wheel ATVs.

  The Jacobsons, Milt and Debbie, were in their 60s. Both trim, fit, and tanned. They were dressed well, but their clothes, especially their shoes, were appropriate for the outing. They gave me a good feeling. The Stewarts, Sean and Becky, were mid-30s. Becky was the Jacobsons’ only child. They too were trim, fit, and dressed appropriately.

  I took them into the mountains. We 4-wheeled up about 2,000 feet from the end of the road to just below the tree line. While at my house the lilacs were in full bloom and the larch were all leafed out, up there, it was two weeks behind, and the big gray morels had just popped.

  We picked for about two hours, and then made our way back to my house about 4. We had soft drinks while we processed our catch.

  This was all new to them, and they were excited to take their mushrooms to Raphael’s for dinner.

  I took a handful and put them in a sauté pan with just a little butter and olive oil and fried them up.

  I gave each of them a toothpick. They each sampled three or four of the crisp little bites.

  “If you still feel this good at dinner, then you can eat these,” I told them. “But we do this little ritual every year, just to make sure we haven’t developed an allergy since last season. As good as they are, if you’re allergic they can be a problem.”

  I assured them I’d be along at about 6.

  The message machine on my phone was beeping again. There were six calls. The first three were hang ups. The fourth was Jan asking that I call her ASAP. Five and six were also hang ups.

  I was getting a bit edgy about the calls. It struck me that someone was keeping tabs on my coming and going.

  I called Jan, and she answered on the first ring.

  “I was starting to worry about you,” she said. “Every time I call it’s either busy or its your machine.”

  “How often did you call?”

  “I don’t know, about an hour apart or so.”

  “I’m here now, what’s up?”

  “When I first heard you were directing my reporter on how to pursue the local angles on Mickey’s death, I was a bit put out, but when Patty and I considered the local legends about Mickey and the compound, we decided this might be worth investigating next week. I would hate to ignore your instincts if they happened to be right on.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Local legend has it Mickey owns more than six hundred acres on the south side of Copper Creek. It runs just about two and
a half miles upstream from his house on the creek. The end of his property runs into the national forest, and the USFS owns all the north side of the creek.

  “The Creek Road easement is either on the boundary of that property or in it, according to the locals, so the land is pretty well locked up for the benefit of the developers.”

  She then went on to describe the land at the junction of Copper Creek and the Big Manistee, again according to café coffee experts, as belonging to three different owners: Richard Santiago; Frank Santiago and Charlotte Davis.

  “They bought one piece of that land in nineteen eighty-two, and the other two in eighty-eight.”

  “How much land?”

  “Local memory is that Frank owns twenty-five acres; the other two own forty acres each. And while Frank paid about a hundred thousand for his land; the forties each cost only about twenty-five thousand.”

  “What was the big difference?”

  “Well, Frank bought back when Shell Oil had been paying big money for oil and gas rights, and everyone became real proud of their cedar swamps.”

  “Really? When was that?”

  “Oh, in the nineteen seventies they invented a process for taking sulfur out of natural gas at the well head. They had always known that there was a great deal of oil and natural gas up here, but there was so much sulfur in it, they couldn’t pump it out in the pipelines.”

  “Then came the OPEC embargo, right?”

  “No, then came this technology. Shell had been up here doing seismic tests for years…”

  “I remember that, when I first came home from the service. I’d be fishing on the Boardman River and out of nowhere there’d be this big boom. I thought it was sound barrier booms.”

  She laughed. “They used the detonations to map these pinnacles under the ground, and they could tap into the top of those formations and find oil and gas. It was a real boom economy for a while.”

  “How much of that hit Mineral Valley?”

  “Very little, but then in nineteen eighty-one Shell hit a big well in the Pigeon River country and things pretty much dried up down here.”