The Gold Coin

by Eddy Rogers

  ©2018 Eddy Rogers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses

  permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN: 978-1-54394-149-4 (print)

  ISBN: 978-1-54394-150-0 (ebook)

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Epilogue

  My novel, a sequel to The Lucky Strike, is a work of fiction and is not autobiographical. However, some personalities and events in the book are similar to people and events that I have encountered over the years, with the names and events altered. John Mariner, the main character, and his friend Larry Wagner, characters in this novel and in my prequel, The Wrong Choices, are figments of my imagination.

  This book is dedicated to my three faithful editors, Pat, Rachel and Laurel. They have been of great help in suggesting changes and corrections, although any remaining errors are of my own doing. Enjoy!

  Eddy Rogers

  August 2018

  1

  John Mariner sat dozing in his lounge chair under the gazebo above his big pond, “tanque” in Texanese. “Life’s good,” he thought to himself. His cell phone rang.

  “Hey, John, long time no see. Saw your name in the paper today.”

  “Larry! Good to hear your voice. Don’t tell me that word of the Longstreet murder has gotten all the way to Houston.”

  “Sure has. Believe it or not, a decade has passed since we solved those suicides and murders in Houston,” Larry Wagner said. “You’ve gotta give me background on Longstreet. Pretty much all the paper said was that she was rich, alone and killed in the dark of night up there on her ranch in her bedroom. No suspects. It’s got my juices flowing. Retirement’s driving me crazy. I’ve been idle since 2012, but for chuckles I’ve kept my law enforcement certification current and signed on as a part-time private investigator for Crowe and Cassidy.”

  Larry had been a good friend of mine when I lived in Houston, a senior HPD detective. He’d been mentored by my dad, who’d also been an HPD detective. We’d teamed up to solve a riddle involving four people who had died under mysterious circumstances, two of which were clients, presumed to be suicides that turned out to be murders. When I moved to Blanco County seven years ago, we lost touch.

  “So how did you get involved in another murder?” Wagner asked.

  “The new sheriff, Bob Hauffler, called me. He’d been the chief deputy for the previous sheriff, Joe Garza, for years. Joe was sheriff when the Lucky Strike killings went down. He retired just last month. Bob called Monday morning a week ago with the smartass greeting, ‘Hey John, you gotta be a snakebit lawyer for sure. Lost another client.’ I said ‘What are you talking about?’ and he told me that Betty Longstreet had been murdered. He knew that I’d handled her purchase of the Lucky Strike ranch.

  “It’ll take a while to do a brain dump on Longstreet, but I can give you the highlights. As the newspaper indicated, the murder’s frustrating the police. Too many suspects. Betty Longstreet Johnson grew up the daughter of a mega-wealthy Houston oil baron, Byron Longstreet, the youngest of his three children. The others, two sons, joined the business, BAL Resources. Over the years, Betty accumulated a lot of wealth, as did her father and brothers. The family successfully rode the cycles of the energy industry — one of the few — precisely selling assets at the peak and buying in again at the trough. Their oil and gas holdings multiplied many times over as fractional drilling — “fracking” — became a mainstay in Texas.

  “Betty led a volatile life, however. She got married at twenty, had two sons, then divorced, calling her husband an unproductive n’er-do-well. Betty, gorgeous, lithe, and young, drew men like flies. Tall for a female at five ten, she had engaging grey eyes, light brown hair, and a figure men die for. She worked out often. Her social life hit the society pages regularly, and not always in nice terms. She had a number of prominent boyfriends until she settled on Carroll Johnson. Her antics over time cooled her relationships with her father and brothers.

  “Johnson’s another whole story. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, rich people are different from you and me. Johnson’s a wealthy investment banker. He works for an energy-oriented regional investment banking firm, rounding up money for people like Byron Longstreet. He’s the model of an investment banker — tall, dark and handsome, as they say. Hollywood good looks and always, at least in Houston, dressed to the hilt. Bright blue eyes. Nothing in common with the likes of us.”

  “Sounds like quite a pair. Can’t see them fitting in up there,” Larry said.

  “Betty and Carroll appeared be a normal, happy, high-society couple, even though he emanated from Chicago and she grew up in Midland during her father’s wildcatting days in the Permian Basin. About four years ago, Betty decided to buy the Lucky Strike. You and I talked about the ranch when all that happened. The ranch and main ranch house are magnificent. She thought the thousand-acre working ranch near Blanco could be purchased at a deep discount because of the killings that happened in the mansion, but Carroll couldn’t get enthused about staying at a remote ranch in sparsely populated Blanco County. She tried to convince him that he could work from San Antonio, almost fifty miles away, but Carroll preferred the busy pace that that his Houston lifestyle offered. Even so, in late 2012, Betty used her own money — ten million — to buy the Lucky Strike from Gerald Alexander’s estate.

  “The crown jewel of the property is an eight thousand square foot hacienda, or rather mansion, on the top of a hill overlooking the Blanco valley. Betty had seen my name in the paper when the Alexander killings happened, noted my involvement, and when she decided to buy the ranch, she hired me to do the legal work.

  “As you’d expect, the estate sold the place at a low price because few people want to buy a place where people have been murdered. As you well know, Miles Richter, Alexander’s henchman, shot Alexander in his own living room after an ugly confrontation over who was responsible for killing my client, Charles Davis. I was there for that and ended up shooting Richter before he killed me too, after he’d turned his pistol on Alexander and then me.

  “Back to Betty. She spent more and more time at the ranch after she bought it, which she renamed the Longstreet Land and Cattle Company Ranch. Carroll, however, commuted every other weekend between Houston and Blanco and continued his investment banking thing in Houston during the week, leaving Betty alone much of the time except for the people who kept up the place. Two weeks ago, Thursday, the twenty-third of October, Betty didn’t follow her usual mid-morning routine of calling down for coffee in her bedroom. Concerned, the maid found her in her bed, sprawled face down in her expensive silk nightgown, a bullet in the back of her head. No one but Betty is at the mansion at night. No signs of forced entry. No fingerprints. Nothing missing except for her cell phone and some gold. I’ll explain that in a minute. The windows and doors are all Andersen brand, double-lock fixtures, so no one could have forced entry without leaving some tell-tale signs. The sheriff’s deputies found the French doors to an outside porch unlocked when they got to the murder scene. The gutters had some scuff marks, but the forensics guys couldn’t tell whether the marks were recent or not. They could have been made earlier, for instanc
e when the ranch employees were trimming trees away from the house.

  “Carroll Johnson came up here right after they told him about Betty. He called and asked me to handle the probate, since I knew the ranch and knew Betty personally. He seemed quite emotional on the phone, but in a distant way. Hard to describe. Given the amount of money involved, I jumped at the chance despite the murder.”

  “Hell, John. That’s one for the books. Being rich doesn’t exempt you from violence. Remember my HPD homicide motto? Murders involve either greed or perverted love. I betcha one of the people who stood to inherit something killed her.”

  “The cops have multiple suspects, but none stand out so far. My job’s not to figure out who did it, but to get Betty’s money to the right place. I’d love to see you, Larry. Seems like forever since I saw you last. We’ve got a guest bedroom, and you can bring your wife up with you. You can help me unravel the murder. Carroll’s the executor, but he lives in Houston so I have to do all the dirty work. I’ve got to make sure that the killer doesn’t get any of her money. As you know, anyone involved in a murder is automatically disqualified from benefitting from the victim’s estate.”

  “We shoulda kept up better,” said Larry. “My wife, Helga, passed two years ago. That’s another reason I’m bored. And lonely. No companionship.”

  “Sorry to hear, Larry. When can you come up?”

  “Got nothin’ on my dance card here. Mind if I come up tomorrow?”

  “Sure, come on.” I felt sorry for Larry. Until I got involved with Carla, I was all alone. Lonely, rather. Loneliness is different than being alone.

  •••

  As sheriff of Blanco County, Bob Hauffler headed up the murder investigation. The Texas Rangers and the FBI lent help where they could with forensics and lab work. I called Bob to find out if anything new had popped up that could help me.

  “Nope, nothing new except one thing. You know, Betty had two ranch hands managing the cattle on the ranch. They’ve done a pretty good job keeping the brush and cedar down over that thousand acres. Their names are Gus and Jake. Gus Binion even has a college degree, in English, from Kentucky Tech. They live in one of the eastern barns Alexander was using to grow pot. Fixed it up a bit, but still not a party palace. Just the essentials. The striking thing about their abode is the number of empty Milwaukee Best beer cans piled up behind the barn where Betty couldn’t see them. Anyway, as the two of them were checking the outer game fences yesterday, they came to a ten-square-foot piece of fence that had been cut. Someone carved out a section of the twelve-foot high game fence, starting at eight feet high and then across for eight feet, and down one side. They said the cut part had been bent back and then put back. I don’t know what that means, but there it is.”

  “Sounds like a way for a four-wheel ATV to get into the property. Think it’s associated with the murder?”

  “Who knows? Too many frickin’ poachers and hunters around here looking for deer and feral hogs, trespassing on other people’s properties. The game warden and I get complaints every week. Then again, it may have been the way in and out for the murderer. The entrance gate’s pretty awesome, not anything that a stranger could get through.”

  “So who’s made it onto your suspect list at this point,” I asked.

  “It’s pretty long, actually. The most logical suspect is her husband, Carroll, but he appears to have an airtight alibi that he was in Houston. He could have found someone else to do it. Then there’s Jake and Gus, but they don’t seem likely. Betty Johnson had two kids by her early first marriage. The younger one, Paul Scranton, lives in the other long barn Alexander built. Scranton’s customized it. He’s an artist and seems to be living the life of Riley. The older one, Frank, is nowhere to be found, and Gus told us that he’s a druggie, he thinks homeless, living in Atlanta. That Scranton doesn’t keep in touch. We’re trying to find him. Next, we have the Reverend Charles Blaise. Betty goes to an evangelical cowboy Bible church south of town where Blaise presides as the pastor. Both Johnson and Gus say that she spent a lot of time with Blaise. She told each of them several times that she gave the church a lot of money. Carroll thinks that Blaise is a charlatan, an Elmer Gantry wolf-in-sheep’s clothing kinda guy, but he doesn’t have anything specific to base that on. We have to check out all the possibilities.”

  Bob continued. “This could just be a robbery, but it had to involve someone close to Betty. Turns out she loved owning hard assets, that is, gold and diamonds. Mind you, she didn’t think that the economy would collapse; rather, she feared that, with all the debt owed around the globe, currencies would inflate big time at some point, like what happened in Germany in the 1930’s. Thankfully, Carroll thinks she kept the diamonds in a safety deposit box at the Blanco National Bank, so you and Carroll will have to get to that when he’s up here. The gold is another story. According to Carroll, she’d buy one ounce coins and ten ounce bars every several weeks from a wholesaler. He could access her accounts online. Over the past year, based on her payments to the wholesaler, she’d bought more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars of coins and bars. Carroll told us she’d keep the gold in a safe room that has always been a part of the house, accessible through a metal door behind her dresses in her big bedroom closet. When Carroll came to the ranch after the killing, he opened the safe room door —it wasn’t locked — and there was only one coin worth about twelve hundred dollars. Hard to think that a common thief would stumble on the safe room and the gold. Someone else, someone who knew how to get in and where the gold was, has to be involved. If the killer was there to rob her, he had to know in advance where she stored the gold. And why they’d leave anything doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can add to the mystery. I’ve got three different will provisions here, sent to me by my friend, Cloyd Baker at Brown and Cutsinger. The first one Betty executed right after she got married. That one, a fairly standard will, left everything to her boys. The second one Betty executed fifteen months ago and created specific bequests. That one leaves a substantial amount to Blaise and a nice sum to Gus, but not a lot. She also created a trust for the rest of it to be administered by her brothers for the boys. The third one, which she executed almost a year ago, revoked the previous codicils. That document’s odd, first leaving a tidy sum to Gus and then the rest, one-half to her husband and her son Paul in equal shares and the other half each to Blaise and his church, again in equal portions. Carroll thinks that counting the ranch, the diamonds, several trusts, and her other assets, we’re talking about an estate of twenty or thirty million.”

  “That’s enough dough to put all those beneficiaries and ex-beneficiaries on the suspect list,” Bob said. “Next thing for me to do is retrieve her emails and analyze them. She had automatic backups of her emails in the cloud. I’ll see what cell phone records we can find from her provider.”

  “I’ll help any way I can. Say, a long-time friend, Larry Wagner, is coming up for a visit. He was head detective for HPD before he retired four years ago. I’ll brief him and see what he thinks. He’s got good instincts. Let’s see if we can have lunch.”

  “Good. I’ll make you buy. Mexican food.”

  “Larry’s into barbeque. We’ll see what he thinks of the Old 300.”

  “Good. Let me know if you guys figure this out.”

  2

  The entire Longstreet story boggled my mind. Clearly out of my usual domain of wills, petty disputes, real estate purchases and divorces. I felt strangely disengaged from Betty’s murder. I didn’t know her as a person, and her lifestyle and wealth differed starkly from mine. I figured I’d concentrate on getting the money she had to the right people, the ones who weren’t involved in killing her. Just a lawyer doing his job. None of the beneficiaries seemed to be very stellar human beings. Besides, I had my own problems to worry about.

  I’d married Carla three years ago after we’d been together a while. Charles Davis, the guy
who Miles Richter killed for cheating Alexander, was Carla’s father. She had no one else but me left. I loved her as much for her beauty as for her intellect and personality. As tall as me at five ten, her bright hazel eyes always seemed to sparkle. Trim, athletic and feminine. An ideal mate. As we fell in love, we both wanted to get married. However, with her past male friends all breaking up with her without explanation and with my divorcing Mary after she made my life miserable by drinking too much, both of us worried that marriage would ruin an otherwise splendid relationship. Nonetheless we’d tied the knot quietly at the Johnson City court house right before we ran down to Puerto Vallarta for a quick honeymoon, then announced the knot had been tied to the world when we returned.

  Carla was now brooding. Her biological clock had started ticking loudly. At thirty-eight, she wanted to have at least one child. But at forty-nine, I had trouble thinking about having a baby in the house again after all these years. Brett and Amy, Mary’s and my children, were in their mid-twenties. I could see myself several years from now taking our child to nursery school, with the teachers thinking that the kid’s grandfather had delivered him or her to school. I knew that all Carla wanted was for me to say yes. I felt trapped, but I couldn’t do anything about that. Saying no would certainly harm our otherwise blissful relationship, so that evening, when I came home from work, I told Carla we should start trying for a baby. She was ecstatic.

  “I expected you to say no.”

  “Well, I love you and have warmed to the idea. The bad news is that once you’re pregnant you’ll have to be a teetotaler.”

  “I can live with that. Tonight, let’s celebrate.”

  And I received reward enough for my decision that evening.

  •••

  The mind works in strange ways. My head was spinning with everything going on. First the Longstreet estate, addressing both the murder and attending to the million mundane details that come with a substantial and complicated estate. Then the possibility of becoming a father again after more than twenty-five years. Both happy and anxious, I felt oddly inadequate on both scores. To add to that, Larry on his way to visit. I needed to get him set up with things to do so that I could get some work done.