by Joseph Flynn
The door behind them opened. The funeral home wasn’t supposed to be open to the public for another three hours. But the aptly named Mr. Greevey, already garbed and coifed even nicer than Walt, was admitting a well-dressed middle-aged African-American woman to the room.
She walked down the aisle between the rows of padded folding chairs. She dabbed both her cheeks with a lace-edged handkerchief. She was crying in far greater volume than Keely had been. Ron and Keely stepped forward to greet her.
The chief had never met her, but he said, “Esther? You got here in a hurry.”
“Mayor Steadman sent his plane for me. May I?”
The two cops stood aside and let Esther Gadwell approach the casket.
To their surprise, she started to laugh quietly. After a moment, she turned to look at Ron and Keely. She wiped away the last of her tears and said, “The poor man’s dead and gone, and I never saw him looking so fine.”
“He’s been surprising a lot of people lately,” Ron said.
The three of them sat in the front row of chairs, Esther recounting some of the days she’d spent with Walt as he recovered from his stroke. She told them, “Oh, my, he and I had some terrible arguments about black people and white people. One time, I even threatened to drown him in his bathtub. He wouldn’t let me take a damp washcloth to him for a week after that.”
Being cops, Ron and Keely found that hilarious.
Esther was relieved they didn’t take things the wrong way.
“Toward the end, though, we both got past a lot of foolishness. I shook his hand when we said goodbye in Los Angeles, the night before he came up here. You want a surprise? I about fell over when your daddy leaned in and kissed my cheek.”
“He always knew a good woman when he saw one,” Ron said.
Esther smiled, and her eyes started to fill again.
Mr. Greevey reentered the room. He made his way to Ron and said with a quiet tone that belied his message, “Sergeant Stanley needs to speak with you. He says it’s urgent.”
Before Ron could apologize to Esther, she took his hand and said, “You go on now, the two of you. I’ve spent many an hour sitting alone with this man. One more time … that’ll be just what I need.”
Ron and Keely both kissed Esther’s cheek and left.
John Tall Wolf called his counterpart with the FBI, Abra Benjamin.
“Glad I caught you before you went out.” Benjamin was still in her room at the Hilton. “Would you mind doing a computer search on Jacob Burkett?”
“This is something you can’t do?” she asked.
“I could, but it would be easier for you. I’ll be working another angle, and what you might find out is likely to bring more credit to you in the final accounting of this case.”
“An appeal to self-interest then. You are a silver-tongued devil, Tall Wolf.”
“The best kind to be. So you’ll help?”
“How could I say no?”
She listened to what her federal colleague had to say. He wanted her to check Jacob Burkett’s federal tax returns for the past ten years. The IRS was supposed to keep returns strictly private. Richard Nixon, of course, had both perused the returns of his political enemies and had them audited. Those misdeeds were noted in Article 2 of his impeachment proceedings. So things hadn’t worked out so well for him. But post 9/11, aided by the vast reach of the Patriot Act, and given a substantial suspicion of an individual’s participation in an act of terrorism, access to IRS returns had become less problematic.
More so for the Federal Bureau of Investigation than the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Benjamin knew that and now had a better understanding of Tall Wolf’s request.
Even so, she asked, “The point of this exercise is?”
“Twofold. Mr. Burkett is the plaintiff in a civil suit in which he claims to have offered a nine-figure sum for a parcel of land. He might be ever so thrifty but I don’t see how he could manage that on a state employee’s salary.”
Benjamin laughed. “No, neither do I.”
“But Mr. Burkett has an outside source of income, a very substantial income.” He told Benjamin that Burkett had discovered more than one large nugget of gold.
Benjamin said, “This is for real?”
“What you found in Helios Sideris’ safe-deposit box was but a crumb.”
“Christ.”
“Gitche Manitou,” Tall Wolf replied. Before she could ask what he meant, he continued, “I have a confidential informant who says he knows Burkett has accumulated a large amount of gold. Now, if Burkett hasn’t reported that on any of his tax returns, and is using it to finance acts of domestic terrorism —”
“We’ve got him dead bang on tax evasion, and might be able to get him to cop to the terrorism, too. Talk about a big arrest.”
“Worth doing a little online snooping?” Tall Wolf asked.
“Yeah, it is,” Benjamin said. Ever suspicious, though, she asked, “So what’s the angle you’ll be working?”
“Well, I’m fresh out of animal entrails, so I want to see if I can find out what makes Burkett tick. Why he’s doing what he’s doing. How he’s going to react when we bring out a net to throw over him.”
Benjamin was silent for a moment.
“My guess is he won’t go peacefully,” she said.
Jake Burkett asked Ron Ketchum, “Are you going to harass me full time? I can’t even go fishing without getting stopped?”
“I thought you were going to work.”
“I decided to take a vacation day. That all right with you?”
Ron had a question of his own. “You’re not Catholic by any chance, are you?”
“No. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“I was going to tell you confession is good for the soul. That’s something you still might want to consider.”
The chief was sure he was about to hear a “fuck you,” but there were ten cops watching Burkett at the moment, and none of them was smiling.
Burkett contented himself with another question, “Can I go now?”
“Be sure to take care of that trailer hitch of yours,” Ron said.
Sergeant Stanley, no doubt from years of watching people haul boats, campers and who knew what else up mountain roads, had made a good guess. The cops’ reason for stopping Burkett had been entirely legitimate.
“Yeah, you can go,” the chief added.
“You going to have your patrol boats watching me?”
“Might put up a helicopter, too.”
The PD and the county medical evac people shared one.
Burkett abandoned self-restraint. “Ah, fuck all of you.”
He waited a moment and when he wasn’t arrested got back in his Land Rover and towed his boat off in the direction of Lake Adeline. Ron directed two cars to follow Burkett and called Sergeant Stanley to have two lake patrol boats follow Burkett closely.
He was tempted to go with them. He didn’t want to let the man out of his sight. But more than that he wanted to talk with Tall Wolf and Benjamin to see if either of them might come up with a solid reason to put the man in a jail cell.
Still, he felt it’d be a mistake not to have a higher authority watch Burkett.
Ron took out his cell phone and called Oliver Gosden. He said, “Your offer of help still stand? You willing to get to work right now?”
“Tell me where you want me and I’m out the door in two minutes.”
Oliver was eager to get back in the game.
Ron told him to get down to the police dock, without running anyone over en route.
He also instructed Oliver to put on his Kevlar.
An order he relayed to all the other cops watching Burkett.
The man hadn’t had a weapon in his car or boat.
But Ron’s gut said this was no time to take chances.
Sergeant Casimir Stanley was loath to leave police headquarters any time he should have been at his post. But when Marjorie Fitzroy called and told him t
he security people at the Renaissance were detaining someone he should come and arrest the sergeant made an exception. He left his assistant, Officer Amity Bettencourt, sitting at the big desk.
He paid her the compliment of not looking back even once as he departed.
Marjorie met him at the front entrance of the hotel. As they walked to the security office, she told her beau, “I followed up on your request, Caz.”
Of course she had, he thought. That was both her job and her nature.
“I spoke to the head of housekeeping and a dozen women on her staff. We all got together in the staff locker room. I kept a discreet eye on everyone and an ear cocked to the whispers circulating in the room. I overheard one very pretty young woman named Carmen mention the words un pedazo de oro grande to a friend.”
“You speak Spanish?” Sergeant Stanley asked.
Marjorie nodded. “I spent two college semesters in Spain.”
He’d never heard that before, but he asked, “So what was it Carmen said?”
“That a guy who’d been flirting with her tried to improve his chances by showing her a big piece of gold. The guy works —worked, as of now — for hotel security as an electronics technician.”
Marjorie opened the door to the security department.
Sergeant Stanley saw a frightened young man sitting on a chair. Not bound. But watched closely by two large, unsmiling guys who probably wrestled grizzlies in their free time.
“Axel Larsen,” Marjorie said, introducing the former hotel staffer.
Sergeant Stanley grabbed a chair, positioned it opposite Axel and sat down.
He told the two bruisers, “I’ll take it from here, fellas. Thanks.”
If anything, Axel looked more frightened than ever.
Confronting a cop can do that to a person with a guilty conscience.
Tears started to form in Axel’s eyes, but the sergeant wagged a finger.
“There’ll be plenty of time for that later, if you decide not to help yourself.”
“How can I —”
The sergeant held up a hand.
“Before we get to that, I’m going to advise you of your rights and then you can tell me if you feel like talking.”
Sergeant Stanley gave Axel his Miranda warning.
“I want to talk, if it’ll help me,” Axel said.
“Go ahead,” the sergeant said. “Don’t leave anything out.”
“A guy came up to me in the employee parking lot. He handed me a chunk of gold.”
Marjorie offered said chunk to Sergeant Stanley.
Being a consummate pro, she’d put it in a plastic bag.
“Continue,” the sergeant said.
“The guy said that it was for me.” Axel’s eyes darted to the gold that had been briefly his. “All I had to do was listen to him. Then he told me about another, bigger piece of gold. I could have that, too. He said it was here in the hotel and gave me a room number. He said I’d have to get the gold without anyone knowing or the hotel would take it away from me.”
“And you thought that was a good idea?” Sergeant Stanley asked.
Axel nodded glumly.
“Do you have a criminal record?”
“No.”
Sergeant Stanley looked at the piece of gold in the bag he held. It was about the size of a tennis ball. Not as big as the one he and Agent Benjamin had found at the bank. But the damn thing still had the power to grab your imagination and make you tingle.
“Did you get a good look at the man who gave you this gold?”
“I did, but he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap.”
Of course, he was, the sergeant thought.
“Did he seem at all familiar, like you might have seen his face before?”
“Not really.”
“You tampered with the video footage of the room where you were directed to go?”
With more than a little reluctance, Axel said, “Yeah.”
“Did you find more gold?”
Axel shook his head.
“Why didn’t you straighten up the room before you left?”
“Why should I? That’s housekeeping’s job.”
Sergeant Stanley sighed. The young fool had technical skills but no guile at all. The only reason he had no criminal record, if he hadn’t lied about that, was that he’d never been sufficiently tempted before now.
Axel asked Marjorie, “Is there any way I can keep my job?”
“No.”
Turning to Sergeant Stanley, Axel said, “Can I really help myself with the police?”
The sergeant looked doubtful.
Grasping for some shred of hope, Axel said, “Did I tell you about the car I saw? The one the guy who gave me the gold got into?”
The sergeant repressed a laugh. “No, you forgot to mention that.”
“It was a Land Rover.”
The same type of car Jake Burkett drove, the sergeant thought.
“You get the plate number?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m good with numbers.”
Axel repeated the license plate number off the top of his head.
Sergeant Stanley punched them into his smart phone and …
Bingo. Jacob Burkett.
John Tall Wolf needed to look no farther than the digitized files of the Goldstrike Prospector to find a serial history of the Burkett family in town. They’d been among the first dozen settlers to put down roots in the area. They’d been taken by the natural beauty and reckoned correctly that a good many settlers headed to California would pass their way and need food, water, clothing, guns, medicine, veterinary help and other necessities of frontier life. The only thing the original twelve, as the settler families called themselves, refused to provide was sinful pleasures of the flesh.
If you wanted commercial sex, you’d have to look for it elsewhere.
The driving force behind that streak of Puritanism was Tyler Burkett.
Through the intervening one hundred and sixty-three years, the number of Burketts living in and around Goldstrike waxed and waned. Fortunes in timber, land and the early bottling of lake water came and went.
Tall Wolf was struck by the idea that one of Burkett’s ancestors, a fellow named Norris, had hit upon the idea of selling the water of Lake Adeline. He’d used the proceeds from selling a tract of land — well, hell, if Tall Wolf’s guess was right, Norris Burkett had sold the land where the fabled gold mine was located — to start his business.
Not that Norris had known he’d sold off a gold mine, of course.
But Tall Wolf was sure Jacob Burkett, through who knew how much effort, had made the connection. Irony wouldn’t have it any other way. Must have been a galling discovery. Tall Wolf continued scanning newspaper records to find out what happened to Norris Burkett’s bottled water scheme.
He used the money from the land sale to pay everyone in town one hundred dollars for the right to have the exclusive franchise, in perpetuity, to bottle and sell the water of Lake Adeline. An online calculator told Tall Wolf that one hundred dollars in 1850 would be the equivalent of nearly three thousand dollars in 2013. A plebiscite of all the adults in Goldstrike voted unanimously to grant Norris his exclusive franchise.
In the fashion of his time, Norris Burkett sold his bottled water as a miracle elixir that would cure everything from acne to broken hearts. People didn’t complain when promised results failed to occur because he asked only a nickel a bottle and provided better water than most people could find locally.
Norris was canny enough not to bank all the nickels he was collecting in town. Might give other people the idea they could bootleg Lake Adeline water. Still, they could see Norris’s big house, fine clothes and beautiful horses. The pretty French wife he brought in all the way from Paris, too. Life was good for Norris Burkett.
Until perpetuity expired twenty years later.
With a population that had quadrupled to over eight hundred, the newcomers asked what was in it for them to allow one rich man to bottle as much
of Lake Adeline as he wanted. The way things were set up, the rabble rousers exclaimed, he could drain the whole damn lake for his enrichment.
A new vote of the town council on Norris Burkett’s franchise was demanded.
Burkett’s monopoly was revoked by a landslide majority, the vote of the early settlers be damned. Norris expressed his pique by burning his house to the ground.
Tall Wolf found that very interesting.
By the time alarmed townspeople put the blaze out, just barely avoiding a forest fire, the outraged millionaire was gone. He’d moved to where his money resided, San Francisco. It was noted later — yet more irony — that he perished in a house fire caused by the great earthquake of 1906 that destroyed much of the city.
Skimming through more recent years, Tall Wolf saw how the extended Burkett family both prospered and suffered. Many left town in the misery of the Great Depression. Others went off to fight in wars large and small. Several of the soldiers not claimed by death in combat found spouses and opportunities elsewhere.
Hometown proud, the Prospector noted the successes of sons and daughters who’d moved far from the Sierra Nevada. It also mourned tragedies that happened far away. Marianne Burkett, Oxford scholar, perished along with eleven others in a train derailment in the English Midlands on her way to a music festival in Edinburgh. Her mother, Arleen, never got over the loss. She often lost focus on the most mundane aspects of life. She stumbled getting onto a descending escalator in a San Francisco department store, fell and broke her neck.
She’d been shopping for a new suit for her husband.
Jake Burkett wore it to her funeral.
Buried his wife in the plot next to their daughter.
That had been twenty-five years ago.
Tall Wolf guessed that was when Burkett had started looking for gold.
On a hunch, the special agent pulled up the town’s phone directory.
Jake was the only Burkett listed. Maybe the end of the family line in town.
Deputy Chief Oliver Gosden commanded all three of the town’s lake patrol boats as they kept watch over the fishing trip of Jake Burkett. Oliver stood next to Officer Dennehy as he piloted the lead boat. Officer Cardozo sat at the stern of the craft cradling a scoped M-4 rifle.