The Gold Coin

by Eddy Rogers

  The Longstreet estate and my search for the rightful heirs had to take priority. I had to get a handle on everything that Betty owned for the probate inventory. Carroll Johnson showed no enthusiasm for his role as executor, so he didn’t push me to get matters settled quickly. On the other hand, he didn’t want to put out much effort as executor. Johnson must have reasoned that I was waiting to determine the rightful heirs until the police figured out who murdered her. What I’d do if the murderer wasn’t caught troubled me.

  Larry arrived the next day. To complicate matters, Carla had volunteered to help Jenna Capp, her friend and the only tax accountant in town. Although Carla was still a CPA, she was a bit rusty on taxes, but Jenna was desperate and promised to check her work. October’s tax return filing season for individuals who’ve filed for extensions and for businesses whose fiscal year ends on June 30. Carla agreed to work on the simpler returns, spending forty hours a week poring over numbers. Just two weeks of that, so I couldn’t count on her to help me with Larry or the Longstreet estate.

  Tuesday began pleasantly enough with lunch at the Old 300 with Bob Hauffler and Larry. Blanco’s a small town. Most everyone knows everyone else. The restaurant patrons, both the ones who knew Bob or me as well as the strangers, observed us with curiosity. Perhaps seeing the sheriff in full regalia and me, a lawyer and the city attorney in coat and tie, sitting with a stranger dressed casually, meant that something important was afoot. We talked in hushed tones over the din of everyone else talking. Bob and Larry took an immediate liking to each other and soon began telling each other war stories that had happened to them as peace officers. I enjoyed the stories, particularly one involving a drunk ex-convict running away from the Blanco cops after a traffic stop at a hundred miles an hour. After a short pursuit, the guy left the highway and catapulted over a fence into a herd of cattle, almost killing himself. Involved a lot of blood — both cattle and human — and destruction.

  We finally got down to the Longstreet matter. “You know,” I said, “the lady who comes to clean our house once a week always arrives with the latest town gossip for Carla. I’ll bet the women who keep Betty’s house know who’s come and gone, and what each one’s like.”

  “Good idea,” said Bob. “We’ll interview them first. We should go to them.”

  Larry piped up. “I speak Spanish if they aren’t fluent in English. Mind if I come along?”

  “Not at all,” said Bob. “First I’ve gotta call Carroll Johnson and make sure he’s okay with our going to the house and interviewing everyone.”

  Then Bob surprised us. “Frankly, I’m short-handed. We’re not set up to do deep investigations. Larry, I just got in a six inch stack of emails from Betty’s computer that one of my deputies printed out. Do you have some time to look them over and separate the wheat from the chaff?”

  Larry leapt at the opportunity. At seventy, he didn’t cotton to hikes, fishing or wine tours. “I’d be happy to do that for you. For an old gumshoe like me, the job’ll be the same as oldsters do with crossword puzzles or solitaire. It sure beats the PI work I’ve been doing in Houston documenting human infidelity.”

  Bob thought for a moment. “I can’t let the documents go out of headquarters in Johnson City, but if you’ll come up there, I can deputize you and let you go to town. Anything that might give us a clue to who did Betty in and why needs to be flagged. If you do find something, it could break this case wide open. Right now we’re stymied.”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow at nine. Thanks.”

  That evening we ate at the East Main Grill in Johnson City. For seventy miles along 281 between Bulverde and Marble Falls, there’s not one white tablecloth place to eat. Nonetheless, Larry attested that the food was as good in the hill country as in Houston. After we got home, Larry was at peace in one of the bedrooms, snoring loudly. I sure did enjoy my constant effort to get Carla pregnant, knowing that there would be a time I would have to be celibate.

  •••

  Good to his word, Larry arrived at the sheriff’s office in Johnson City promptly at nine. He left our house before eight so that he could stop at El Charro for breakfast tacos, a treat not available in Houston. I didn’t hear from him all day but looked forward to a de-briefing when he returned for dinner.

  “That sure was an interesting day,” Larry said as he got out of his Buick SUV at our house that evening.

  The October weather made the gazebo an attraction. Nice and clear, the temperature in the mid-60’s. “Let’s go down to the gazebo and talk about the emails over some beer I got from the local brewery up the road.”

  Larry couldn’t wait to brief me as quickly as we sat down. “John, it’s like reading somebody’s diary, those emails. I’ll save the best till last. Bob’s already been updated. I talked him through the emails as I went and marked the significant ones. Lots of them are not important, but a few popped up that will help. She was ordering gold online, and each delivery order had a paid invoice attached. I marked each one, so somebody can total them up to see what she bought. Nothing indicated she ever sold any, but she was buying one ounce coins and ten ounce bars from a certified dealer named Standish Metals, usually twenty coins or five bars at a time. Must’ve had more than ten orders. What’s two hundred ounces times the price of gold?”

  “Hmmm. More than two hundred twenty-five thousand, if I remember the market right,” I said.

  “Quite enough to interest a thief. Does her husband know anything about the diamonds?”

  “Bob said that Johnson told him that the diamonds were a collection of antique jewelry from the nineteen-twenties, made by a French company named Van Cleef and Arpels. He said she bought them before they were married but doesn’t know how much they’re worth. Quite valuable, he said, since yellow diamonds are in demand these days. He thinks the diamonds are still in a safety deposit box at the bank.”

  Larry continued. “The next thing I looked for was emails relating to people coming into the property for repairs and that sort of thing. We should look at her calendar — I don’t know whether she had an old fashioned paper one or kept it on her computer. According to Bob, after she bought the Lucky Strike, instead of a having a live guard at the entrance gate as Alexander did, she put in a remote gate opener so that people wanting in could call the main house and someone from the house could just punch a button and the gate would open. The entry thing also had a keypad so you could enter a code to open the gate. Who knows who had that code. When she added the remote entry stuff, she had a wireless video added to the gate entrance in addition to the ones that Alexander had to monitor other parts of the ranch.”

  Larry shrugged his shoulders. “Lots to follow up on,” I said. “I wonder if the videotapes work at night and whether the tapes are stored for very long. Most of them are on a twenty-four-hour loop.”

  “The videos may or may not help. The emails mention people coming into the ranch and to the main house. They’re all service people . . . alarm system and HVAC. Must have been problems with the monitoring system and air conditioning. I’ll follow that If a poor repairman saw that wealth and then stumbled onto a bunch of gold bars, maybe he’d think about coming back to get it.”

  “One other thing we need to find out,” I said. “Did Betty give any social events at the main house, a house tour or a meeting? That would allow a visitor to case the house.”

  “Yeah. Nothing on that score. But those are not the big thing, John. Betty Longstreet didn’t like to be alone, it appears. You wouldn’t believe the number of emails between her and the preacher, Chuck Blaise. And the emails were very personal, not at all religious. Shit like ‘I miss you and want to be with you’ kind of emails. The emails from Blaise were reciprocal, but he was always complaining how he didn’t have any money to do the Lord’s work as well. I got the feeling that Blaise was manipulating her.”

  “Any emails between her and Gus and Jake?” I said.

&nbs
p; “Not many. I bet she texted them, but because the phone’s missing, we can’t tell what those were. Those aren’t backed up in the cloud. All we’ve seen in the emails are various instructions for projects and chores they were to take care of around the ranch when she wasn’t there. Must have done most of the ranch discussions face-to-face. There’re also emails with a guy named Matthew Middlecoff. Best I can tell, he was a friend of the family, and he has a ranch toward Stonewall. Seems whenever Carroll left to go back to Houston, she emailed Middlecoff and arranged to set up a visit with him.”

  “My mom always told me that no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. Hard to fathom all those male relationships.” There was a lot more to Betty than I thought.

  “You know my opinion,” Larry said. “After forty years on HPD and then my PI work recently, I have a low opinion of human beings. I’d bet that one of these guys is the culprit.”

  “Not Carroll Johnson?”

  “Oh yes, he might be the one. He could be the vengeful husband if Betty was running around, but he was in Houston. He’d have to have found someone to do her in, and I doubt he’d know where to start. A rich investment banker in Houston doesn’t associate with the lower class that does those things….”

  “Bob needs to interview the maids first to get the lay of the land, and then Gus and Blaise to find out what relationship each had with her. Also this Middlecoff guy. Jake too, but we should interview the maids at the house first. And Betty’s son, Paul. We need to give Bob a call.”

  “Yeah. I’d like to be a part of those interviews. Need to give each one of them a Miranda warning since any one of them might be the killer.”

  “Let’s see what Carla’s up to and get dinner. Enough shop talk for now.” We finished our beer and strolled back to the house.

  3

  As expected, Bob set up a meeting for Friday, two days later, with Gloria Sanchez and Rosa Morales, the two maids who took care of the Longstreet mansion. He made the appointment for eleven, figuring that having the interview then would give the women time to finish up their duties around the house. He told me that after he did that, he might as well interview Gus, Jake and Paul Scranton, so he told each of them he’d call them after he talked to Gloria and Rosa.

  “Two or three heads are better than one,” Hauffler told me over the phone. “You and your friend Larry should be at the meeting. The two of you could get a sense who’s telling the truth and who’s holding back.” We accepted the invite enthusiastically. Friday morning, Larry and I drove up to the magnificent ranch entrance. Not just a regular gate, but a huge stone arch, with large wooden doors the same height as the fifteen-foot game fence that enclosed the entire property. The entrance must have cost over a hundred thousand dollars. I entered the four-digit code that Hauffler had given me on the touchpad, in this case Betty’s birthdate — 1974. The road inside the ranch wound through big live oaks and around one of the many hills on the ranch. Familiar territory for me. I got goose bumps thinking about the time I almost got killed here after having gotten wrapped up in Alexander’s dirty business.

  Finally, after a half-mile drive, most of it on the ascent, the ranch house appeared at the top of the hill. In front of the building, a gated entrance to the massive two-story mansion led to a courtyard with a crushed granite circular drive. The gate to the courtyard opened automatically, and we drove in. A fountain at least twenty feet high stood in the middle of the circle. The main house was rectangular but joined midway along the long side by a circular, castle-like minaret that contained a winding staircase to the upper floor and Betty’s bedroom.

  Gloria greeted Larry and me at the front door. She smiled. Warm and friendly. Short, no more than five feet tall and a bit heavy-set for her age, which I figured was around twenty-eight. I wouldn’t call her pretty, but she did have a cute button nose on top of rather ordinary facial features. She had her dark black hair pulled back in a bun, and her dark brown eyes sparkled. As with many local Hispanics, she’d married early and had four children, all healthy and her pride and joy. I liked her.

  She led us to the kitchen area, where Bob had begun setting up a video recorder on a tripod. Rosa Morales observed the process. She looked like Gloria’s sister in a way, but taller, with dark brown hair and dark blue eyes. Like Gloria, also a bit heavy-set. She too appeared friendly and relaxed, more curious than anything. She and Gloria chatted in Spanish, not appreciating that Larry understood all they said.

  “Let’s get started,” Bob said. “Ladies, we can talk to both of you at the same time. We’re trying to figure out who killed Betty and why. I’m just recording this so that I don’t have to take notes and so that people back at the office can review it later if we need to. Is that okay with you?”

  The women enthusiastically said “Yes!” in unison. I don’t think they’d ever been interviewed by a peace officer, or for that matter, by anyone at all.

  “All right. First, which one of you found Betty when she was murdered?”

  Gloria piped up and said with a heavy accent. “I did. It was terrible. Every morning, when Miss Betty woke up, she would call me on my cell phone, and I would take coffee and sweet rolls to her. Her bedroom is very beautiful — you will see it — and she had a large television to watch the morning news. She had a desk with a computer that she would work at in the mornings. She almost always spent the whole morning in that bedroom. The police told us not to touch anything in the room, so we’ve left it as it was that day and locked the door so nobody else could get into the room. That terrible day, since Miss Betty had not called by ten, I began to be worried, so I decided to check on her quietly. I walked inside, and she was lying on the bed in a funny way. She was lying face down. I had never seen her that way. Then I saw the blood on her hair and called Mister Gus. He told me to call 911 and to leave everything alone. I did.”

  “Did anyone visit her the night before?” Bob looked intently at both women.

  Both Gloria and Rosa shook their heads and said no.

  “Okay. Who normally visited Betty, especially in her bedroom?”

  The two women looked at each other with worried faces and began talking to each other in Spanish. Oddly, they smiled as they talked.

  Larry leaned over and said, “They’re talking about what to tell us. I’ll tell them that they need to tell us everything, whether they think the information is important or not.”

  Then Larry said in Spanish, “Ladies, it’s important that we are told everything you know, whether it’s embarrassing or not and whether you think it’s important or not. We’ll figure that part out. Please tell us everything.” Gloria and Rosa were surprised that Larry understood and spoke Spanish, and replied that they understood. Both of them looked at each other and giggled.

  Gloria, obviously the leader, proceeded. “I guess it doesn’t matter now that Miss Betty has passed, but she had a number of visitors. Always in her bedroom. Mister Gus came every other morning, we guess to talk about the ranch, but he always stayed there two or three hours, into the lunch hour. Rosa and I are both married, and we know what goes on. We don’t think that the two of them just discussed ranch business. I found Miss Betty on Thursday morning, the twenty-third. I remember that Mister Gus had been there the day before, Wednesday. Another man, that minister, Reverend Blaise, visited Miss Betty often, also in the morning in her bedroom. Pastor Blaise came on Tuesday. I brought them coffee and sweet rolls whenever he visited, and they always sat at the round table next to the windows. Mister Gus and Pastor Blaise didn’t talk when I was in the room. Mister Gus wouldn’t look at me, but Pastor Blaise did. Not at me but at my body, you know? ”

  Interested, Bob continued to probe Gloria for more information. “Did you ever overhear any of their conversations? Did you ever hear them talking loudly?”

  “The kitchen is pretty far from where we could hear anything, but last Tuesday, when Pastor Blaise came to see Miss Betty, I was clea
ning the living room right below her bedroom. I heard them talking loudly, and then he came down from the bedroom on the circular staircase in a hurry and seemed upset. I don’t like that man. Whenever he was near me he looked at me the wrong way, you know, the way men look at women and their bodies. I noticed that his shirt was unbuttoned, and he had his collar in his hand and left in a hurry without saying goodbye. I asked Miss Betty if he was all right, and she just shrugged her shoulders and said that he’d gotten upset over a church matter but would get over it.” I figured that what bothered Gloria was a man of the cloth doing unsaintly things.

  “Is there anything else that you or Rosa can tell me that might help? For instance, who else came to the house the week before Betty’s death?”

  “Let me see. There was Gus and Pastor Blaise, as I’ve told you. An air conditioning guy was here but he was inside only a little while, in the kitchen. He was working on the outside part of the air conditioner.

  Rosa picked up. “There was the security service man. He was from Austin Security Company. His name was Harold. He looked mean and didn’t talk much. He said he came to check the alarm system to make sure it was working, so he went all over the house looking for the trouble. He came in the afternoon, the Monday before Miss Betty died.”

  “Do you think that he went into in her bedroom closet?”

  “Oh, yes,” Rosa said. “I go into Miss Betty’s closet to hang up her clean clothes once in a while, and I knew about the safe room . . . in fact Miss Betty told Gloria and me about it in case we needed to get away from somebody breaking in. Inside that little room there’s a big metal box on the wall that looks like the one outside that controls the electricity. It has a sticker from Austin Security on it, so I’m sure Harold was in there.”