“I don’t like hanging around dead people.”
“Is that why you drank your breakfast?” he asked. “You know, you’re beginning to smell like a private eye.”
I said nothing.
“I may want to talk to you again,” he said.
“I’ll rush right home and sit by the phone.”
Before I left, the body people arrived—a man-and-wife team. They were independents, contracted by the city, a special form of waste removal. The husband unrolled a rubber sheet the color of old blood, then he and the little woman laid Fontaine on it, wrapped him up, and hauled him onto their collapsible gurney. I followed them outside. They dumped the bag of trash that used to be Lloyd Fontaine into the rear of their station wagon and took off for the morgue. A cop car trailed behind.
I climbed in the Olds and drove to my office, Fontaine’s manila envelope on the seat beside me.
3
I TRIED TO SHAKE the feeling that I was responsible for Lloyd Fontaine’s death. I couldn’t. Guilt, with fur sleek and claws sharp and appetite whetted, had pounced squarely on my back, making me hunch my shoulders and scrunch my neck. I couldn’t escape it now any more than I could when I’d been a child.
“You should feel guilty, Jacob,” my Catholic mother, God rest her soul, used to say. “You do wrong and God gives you guilt to remind you about it. If He didn’t, everyone would be stepping on everyone’s toes and no one would be saying they were sorry. We’d all have to wear combat boots. Guilt keeps us in soft shoes.”
Soft shoes or not, Fontaine had asked for my help last night and I’d turned him down for no reason other than that he was a burned-out lush who irritated the hell out of me. If I’d gone along, I probably could have saved him. Of course, I might have found myself tied up in his other chair.
I parked in the street and went upstairs to my office.
I’m on the second floor of a two-story building on Broadway. Street level is storefronts—liquor store; pawnshop; cafe; and the Zodiac Bookstore, which caters to literati fond of interstellar philosophies and satanic trivia. Upstairs with me was a dentist, who I wouldn’t let clean my socket wrenches, let alone my teeth; a vacancy; and Acme, Inc. I didn’t know what kind of business Acme was. I’d never seen the guy who ran it, but I’d often heard him—he was always on the phone. He was on it now as I walked past his door.
“… are the goddamn handles, Murray? You ship me twelve thousand and not one with a handle. What do you think, my customers have suction cups for fingers? You have killed me with this shipment, Murray, killed. I am dead. At least my casket will have goddamn handles. …”
Fontaine’s stale cigarette smoke still permeated my office. His story had sounded unbelievable when he’d sat in here telling it to me. But his death made it more convincing.
I opened a window, then dumped the contents of his envelope on my desk: clippings, photographs, notebook. I’d glanced through this stuff before. It didn’t look like much to die for. Apparently, though, it was enough for someone to kill for.
I thumbed through the spiral notebook. It was filled with pencil scribbles in an indecipherable hand, possibly in code. I could make nothing out of it.
There were five photographs. Four of them were eight-by-ten black-and-whites that showed two men arguing by an old car. I could see now that one was a civilian and one was a cop. There was a passenger in the car, mostly hidden by the doorpost. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The fifth photo was actually thirty-six separate pictures—a contact sheet of thirty-five-millimeter prints. But it was so overexposed that the individual prints were difficult to make out. Most of them appeared to show a two-story house in increasing stages of consumption by fire. The cop and the angry guy and the passenger in the car were featured in the last six shots on the contact sheet, four of which I had as blowups. My guess was the blowups of the other two frames had been in Fontaine’s jacket when he’d left my office yesterday. I wondered if he’d also had the negatives.
I flipped over the photographs. On the back of each there was a faded red stamp:
The GAZETTE
—
H. R. Witherspoon
The newspaper clippings, most of which were from the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, dealt with the robbery twenty years ago of Lochemont Jewelers.
On that fine spring morning four men—Ed Teague, Rueben Archuleta, Robert Knox, and Buddy Meacham—entered the store before business hours. Charles Soames, the store manager, had shut off the alarm and unlocked the door. The robbers were armed with pistols and shotguns and had little trouble convincing everyone present to do exactly what they asked. Everyone, that is, except a store guard, who drew his gun and was immediately, though not fatally, gunned down. Little eight-year-old Emily Sue Ott was not so fortunate, being hit with a stray bullet and killed instantly. The others present in the store—Emily Sue’s grandmother, who represented the Colorado State Historical Society and who had intended to give Emily Sue a “privileged look” at a piece of history; Trenton Lochemont, Sr., owner of the store; his son, Trenton, Jr.; and five store employees—were bound and gagged.
The men got away with a satchelful of gems and a museum-piece necklace rumored to have belonged once to Baby Doe Tabor, second wife of legendary silver king Horace Tabor. The choker consisted of ninety-eight half-carat diamonds supporting a central stone—a forty-six-carat ruby whose color, one reporter wrote, resembled freshly spilled blood.
After the robbery the gang left the city and drove to a shack in the mountains near Idaho Springs, where apparently they planned to divvy up the jewels. But Ed Teague decided to turn his shotgun on Robert Knox and Buddy Meacham, slaughtering them both. He tried for Soames, too, but the store manager got away and ran into the hills.
The next day the police found the bodies of Knox and Meacham—and, in a motel room in Idaho Springs, the body of Ed Teague, shot twice through the head with a small-caliber weapon. In the room with Teague was a twelve-gauge shotgun covered with his prints.
Rueben Archuleta and the satchel of jewels were never seen again.
Four days after the robbery, Charles Soames staggered out of the trees onto the highway about eight miles from Idaho Springs and the murder shack. He was in shock and suffering from exposure and partial amnesia. As he gradually regained his senses, he claimed innocence. He said Teague had forced him to cooperate in the robbery by threatening to kill him and every living member of his family: daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law.
No one believed him. Because of his participation in the robbery, Soames stood trial for the felony murder of Emily Sue Ott. A jury found him guilty, and Soames got life.
I went through the clippings again and examined the grainy news photos—pictures of Teague and Meacham and Knox in life and in death, police mug shots of Rueben Archuleta, photos of Soames and the jewelry store and the murder shack, and a photo of the Baby Doe necklace behind the heavy glass of a museum display case.
I stuffed it all into Fontaine’s manila envelope.
Everyone believed that Rueben Archuleta had gotten away with the jewels. Everyone but Lloyd Fontaine and whoever had shot him twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon—the same method used on Ed Teague. I wondered if that was more than a coincidence. The only person I knew to ask was Charles Soames.
I looked him up in the phone book. No Soames. Well shit, no one said it would be easy.
Then I called the National Insurance Company, Fontaine’s old employer, and asked to speak to whoever was in charge of paying reward money for the return of stolen property. It was possible they’d kept tabs on Soames. The receptionist said the person I wanted was Mr. Carr, but he was in a meeting. She took my name and number, and I took Fontaine’s packet home.
Vaz and his wife, Sophia, had the apartment below mine. They’d had it for over twenty years, ever since they’d fled the Soviet Union via Greenland, where Vaz had been playing in an international chess tournament. He’d been in a tough match against anoth
er Russian grand master and the game had been adjourned until the following day. While the other Russian and his seconds were hunched over an analysis board seeking a possible checkmate, Vaz and his mate checked into the American embassy, seeking asylum.
I knocked and Vaz answered.
“Jacob, come in, come in.”
He was a barrel-chested, heavy-shouldered, large-headed man with legs spindly enough for an end table. He waved me inside. I squeezed into the apartment and stood at the very edge of Sophia’s collection. That woman liked furniture.
“I am making coffee,” Vaz said. “You want?”
“Sure.”
He led me through the maze of bureaus and buffets, chairs and credenzas, davenports and dinettes, and into the kitchen. There was slightly more room to breathe in here, but when Vaz opened the cupboard, I feared an avalanche of saucers and cups, platters and plates. Vaz poured coffee from a heavy silver pot, and I placed the manila envelope on the table between us.
“The man who gave me this was murdered last night,” I said, watching Vaz’s eyes widen under furry brows. “The killer’s identity could be in here.”
“Shouldn’t you give this to the police?”
“Probably,” I said.
Vaz scowled at me.
“The police are conducting their investigation,” I said, “and I’m conducting mine. They’ve got their resources, and I’ve got that envelope.”
“I see. I think. The man who was murdered, then, he was a good friend of yours?”
“No.”
Vaz looked at me sideways, then shook his head and dumped out the contents of the envelope. While he pawed through them, I told him all I knew about Lloyd Fontaine, which wasn’t much. His eyebrows rose up like startled gerbils when I got to the part about the Lochemont jewels.
“Five million, you say?”
“Give or take a diamond ring.”
“Then you are looking for more than a murderer.”
Who, me? Why would I look for a fortune in jewels when all it could bring was a life of ease and good times? Who in his right mind would want that?
“Mainly a murderer,” I said.
“I see, mainly.” He paged through Fontaine’s spiral notebook. “A journal of some kind,” he said to himself. “These numbers at the tops of the pages appear to be dates. The last one here, nine-fifteen, would be yesterday, September fifteenth.” He pushed the notebook aside. “There may be answers in here, Jacob, if anyone could read them.”
“So it is a code?”
Vaz nodded. “You can see that each ‘word’ has five letters, some perhaps four—his scribbling makes it difficult to be certain. This sort of letter grouping is one method used to make code-breaking more difficult. But who can read this—this mess that passes for a man’s handwriting?”
“I was hoping you’d give it a shot.”
“Bah.” He pushed the journal farther away from him, as if it might contain something contagious. “I am not a cryptographer.”
“But it’s like a puzzle, right? I mean, you’re good at chess, so I thought—”
“Chess is not a puzzle, Jacob,” he said, offended. “It is an art, a science.”
“Sorry. But the mental challenge of—”
“It could take weeks, even months to figure out.”
“Even so—”
“And if he used a code wheel or some other device, it could take years, if I could do it at all.”
I nodded. Vaz eyed the journal.
“You’re probably right,” I said with a mock sigh of resignation and began shoving the photos and news clippings back in the envelope. “I was expecting the impossible.” Sigh.
“Who said impossible?” He pulled the journal toward him, then scowled at me. He had the eyebrows for it. “You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist this.”
“I didn’t, honest.”
“Bah.”
“Okay, I hoped.”
Later, when I tried again to reach Mr. Carr at National Insurance, he was still in a meeting, so I took the only remaining course of action, namely, spending the afternoon and most of the evening in a sports bar in the shadow of the Colfax viaduct, tossing back draws and watching the Mets take a doubleheader from the Expos.
On the way home, I swung by the office to see if Mr. Carr had left a message on my machine. When I walked past Acme, Inc., I could hear my neighbor still chewing out Murray’s ass on the phone.
The moment I unlocked my door, I knew something was wrong.
It might have been an odor or a pressure on my eardrums or a sixth sense; whatever, I could tell someone was in my office. Not that knowing about it did me much good. Before I could react, I got smacked in the head.
I staggered around and swung at shadows and got hit again and managed to fall into the guy and hang on for all I was worth, which at the moment wasn’t much. If I’d been spending more of my time in running shoes instead of on barstools, I might have been equal to this guy. As it was, we waltzed around the room with me draped on him like a drunken dance partner. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but I could tell that he was wearing a leather jacket, soft and new-smelling, and that he was a bit smaller than me, but wiry and quick, and that he was trying like hell to hit me with something steel-hard. I took a few blows on the shoulder and tried to run him into the wall, but he twisted out of my grasp and smacked me a good one over the ear, ending the dance and sitting me down on the floor. When he stepped back, pale light from the street fell across his arm and his weapon—a Beretta, probably a nine-millimeter. I wasn’t sure whether to beg him not to shoot or just to start praying to my guardian angel. My angel spoke up first.
“Goddammit, Murray!” he shouted. “Don’t tell me that!”
The guy looked over his shoulder at the open doorway and showed me his silhouette. Nice features, but troubled. He was thinking that if he shot me, he might also have to shoot Mr. Acme and whoever else might be in there with him. That was too much shooting, so he just reached down and smacked me good-bye with the barrel of his gun. Then he ran out the door. And not a moment too soon for his sake, because I was starting to get pissed off.
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Death on the Rocks (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 1) Page 22