The Gold Coin

by Eddy Rogers

  After exchanging the usual pleasantries old friend do, I launched in. “Ed,” I said, “I’ve got another assignment for you. I understand Larry’s been doing PI work for you off and on, and he’s already been digging around on the one I’ve got up here for entertainment. Our sheriff, Bob Hauffler, is a close friend, and I’m the executor of the estate of a wealthy woman named Betty Longstreet, who was murdered two months ago in her mansion here in Blanco County.”

  Ed laughed. “You don’t have to tell me anything more. I know all about it. Not from Larry, mind you. It’s been in the Houston Chronicle over and over again. The reading public loves to follow unsolved murders involving rich people.”

  “I can’t distribute any of the money until we find out who killed her. Our problem’s simple. All the beneficiaries have made the suspect list. I need you to do in-depth searches and records on each of them to see what makes each one tick. The prime suspect right now is Charles Blaise, who claims to be a minister, but his church just burned down, and we think he had an especially close relationship with Betty. Then there’s her husband Carroll Johnson, who’s been mentioned in the papers and lives in Houston. Finally, we need to have information on four minor characters, Gus Binion and Jake Saunders, the ranch managers; Paul Scranton, Betty’s son by a first marriage; and Matthew Middlecoff, a cousin of Carroll Johnson. Off the record, we think Betty had physical relationships with at least Blaise and Binion, and maybe Middlecoff. Scranton lives on the ranch and follows what might be called an alternative lifestyle. Rumor has it that he’s into drugs. I’ll send you as much data on each as we can find — social security numbers, previous addresses, and so on. I’d appreciate your getting this done quickly. I understand that with so many people to look up, the searches will take a while. Larry may be able to nose around HPD to see whether there’s any information on Johnson, and Betty for that matter.”

  “Sounds like you have your hands full. I’ll get my partner, Bill Cassidy, involved,” Ed said. “We’re getting a little long in the tooth, but we’ve kept up with technology. We can do a lot of this online now. We’ll check with HPD and, if it’s okay with you, we’ll chat with Hauffler to see if any of the candidates up there every got into trouble.”

  “Sure. I’ll give Bob a heads up. When you talk to him, tell him we’ll share any information we dig up with him.”

  “Thanks. I’ll tell Larry you called and brief him. This should take no more than ten days.”

  “Okay. Appreciate the help.” I felt a wave of relief knowing that Ed and Bill were on board.

  7

  Life around the house changed as soon as Carla found out she was pregnant. She started talking about redoing one of the bedrooms for the newcomer and looked forward to a sonogram telling her the sex of the kid so she could start with either blue or pink furnishings. Then she started mentioning birthing classes. I wasn’t ready for that. For Brett and Amy, my twenty-something kids, I made myself available in a waiting room while the births came — Mary didn’t want me in the room with her when that was going on. I have no idea why people think that the male in a marriage should be involved, as there’s nothing he can do but watch and pretend he’s being useful. Hearing suggestions that the family join in and take videos of the process turned me off. The birth of a child should be celebrated appropriately, but not while the birthing is going on.

  Nonetheless, I knew I had to play the game. Listen. Agree with most everything. Object only if the issue affects me directly in a bad way. Open the checkbook. Even go to birthing classes if absolutely required. The journey could make me feel young again.

  •••

  When Bob called to tell me he’d set up a second interview with Chuck Blaise, I jumped at his invitation to listen in. The interview was set for ten on Friday. I got to the sheriff’s headquarters early so that Blaise wouldn’t see me there. Bob put me in the observation room right away. Five minutes before ten, Blaise and Bob came into the interview room, along with one of Bob’s deputies, Charlie Becker. Blaise’s mode of dress made me wonder, since he had on the same clothes he had at his first interview, a light blue short-sleeve shirt with a round priestly collar, the same large silver cross around his neck, jeans, and ostrich leather boots. Blaise looked nervous. Bob started in.

  “Reverend Blaise, in our first interview, I read you the standard warning and we proceeded. Do you remember that warning?”

  “Sure do. Made me nervous.” Blaise’s self-confidence had returned.

  “I won’t go through the warning again, and you have the right not to have this interview at all, if you want.”

  “I’m okay to go ahead. If I didn’t go ahead, you’d think that I had something to hide, right?”

  “Not necessarily, but the main reason for us interviewing you again relates to your church burning down under suspicious circumstances. You understand.”

  “I do. I want to find out who did this to me. If it wasn’t enough to lose Betty and her financial support, the loss of our building is crushing.”

  Bob nodded. “Let’s start with your whereabouts last Wednesday.”

  Blaise leaned forward in his chair attentively. “I was at home preparing my sermon for the next Sunday. My sermons are Biblically based, so I have to do a lot of research relating to the Bible readings we do for our service. Takes most of a day. When I heard the sirens, I worried that it might be a parishioner, or worse yet, another crash on 281 where people were hurt. I called the Blanco police department and they told me my building was burning. I jumped in my car immediately.”

  “You know we can look at your credit card charges. Did you buy any gasoline or diesel fuel in the past week?

  Blaise thought. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t have anything other than my car, and it runs on gas. I haven’t gone very far in the past week. I can check.”

  “Is there insurance on your church building?” Bob was still suspicious of Blaise, although I felt he came across as open and truthful, frightened of the future without Betty and her money.

  “Yes, Betty made me make sure I got it. It’s replacement value insurance, but I think there’s a dollar limit on the furnishings. The face value is four hundred thousand, but I’m not sure what it will cost to rebuild. On top of that I’m in a bit of a crunch without Betty’s monetary support. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I know how Job felt.” Blaise looked at the floor.

  “One more question,” Bob said. “Do you own any firearms?”

  “My parishioners tell me I should have one for protection, but I have never owned one and wouldn’t know how to handle one, like loading, firing and cleaning it. I trust in the Lord to keep me safe.”

  As I watched Chuck Blaise through the mirror, I felt sorry for him in a way. He answered clearly, sincerely and simply. He was a man bereft. But Betty’s murder, followed by the insurance fire, made him suspect number one.

  Bob continued. “We’ve interviewed a number of people relating to Betty’s murder, and to put it mildly, she enjoyed close relationships with men. We know that something was going on the last time you were with Betty. The maids said your shirt was askew and you looked troubled. What was going on?”

  A flash of anger crossed Blaise’s face. “I don’t know what those women told you, but there’s more to the story. Could we turn that video thing off?”

  “Not going to happen,” Bob said.

  “Can we keep this confidential then?” Blaise said pleadingly.

  “This is part of a police investigation, so every bit of this is confidential and won’t be disclosed except to people involved in solving the crime and those who need to know. In a trial or litigation over her estate, what you say here might be admissible as evidence.”

  Blaise looked down, thinking, and then looked up. “Let me be frank with you. It will help your investigation. I loved Betty. We spent a lot of time together. I always fantasized that she would eventua
lly get divorced and we could get married. She evolved into the light of my life, and when she came nearer to God, I tried to believe that she was in a better place. I knew quite well that she and her husband had an open relationship and that both of them understood that the other might have physical relationships outside the marital bounds. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m one of them. Betty and I had both an emotional and a physical relationship. We knew that the relationship couldn’t go anywhere unless she divorced Carroll, but neither of them wanted to end it. That is, until recently.”

  He went on. “Betty became alienated from God. She read a lot and started reading a number of those modern tracts that claim that God is dead, that God never existed, and that everything can be explained in scientific terms. Over the past two months, we had deep discussions about God. As you know, I believe in God. It’s too hard for me not to. If there was a ‘big bang’, for instance, who started it and why? I can’t believe the universe just happened randomly. And this earthly island we live in even scientists agree is unique. Nothing else like it in the whole universe, its complexity in many ways remaining unexplained. The human body is a masterpiece of uniqueness. We humans, as complex as we are, didn’t happen randomly either.”

  “Let’s stay on point, Reverend,” Bob said gently. “No need for a theological debate right now. Tell me how you found out that the fire had started at the church.”

  “There’s nothing much more to tell you that I didn’t tell you when we were at the fire. The paper said that the fire was suspicious because of a gas can. Not me. I don’t own a gas can. Somebody else set fire to the building. I’ve gone over the members of our church in my head, as well as those who’ve left us, and none of those people popped up as so alienated from me or my church that they’d burn the place down. Sure, we have a few members who’ve been in serious trouble. Bruto Rivera for instance. Bruto’s spent time in prison for drug dealing and attempted murder, but he says he’s straight now running an auto repair business. He wouldn’t have any reason to torch our church building.”

  “Okay, back to your last visit with Betty.” I mused that Bob was not the kind of guy who wanted to hear theological ideas intermixed with reports of Betty’s adulterous engagements with a man of the cloth.

  “The day that the women keeping the house saw me running away from Betty was a bad day for me, all right. After we made love, Betty started another long theological discussion. Betty told me that she loved me and wanted to maintain our relationship, but that she was going to cease financial support of my church. To make me feel better, I suppose, she said that she’d continue sending me a check for two thousand a month, as she’d been doing for the past two years. I can’t tell you how upset I was. I felt like Betty was paying me for our relationship. We started to have words with each other, words that lovers shouldn’t say. That’s why I ran out and left, thinking that later we could talk again without anger.”

  Bob leaned back in his chair, digesting the story. Blaise’s litany seemed believable, but Bob had seen more bad people than me and continued his skepticism.

  “Did you kill Betty?”

  The question shocked Blaise, and again anger bioiled up in his face. “Absolutely not! She was my best friend. My lover. My soul mate. We were working through a down period. That’s true. Questioning God is not a sin. Many times the questioning periods lead to stronger beliefs. I just don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”

  Either Charles Blaise was a consummate actor or he was not the one who killed Betty, I thought. Bob wrapped up the interview with him, dismissed him, and came into my room.

  Bob let out a loud sigh. “The two main suspects here, Blaise and Johnson, both opened up when we questioned them, admitting to their rather strange and unconventional relationships with the victim. The facts point to both of them, but neither of them had any reason to kill her. Neither of them comes off as the sort of person who would sneak around in the dark of night and kill Betty in cold blood. On the other hand, if Betty was my wife, I’d be angry at the other relationships, and Blaise knew he and his church were threatened. People usually don’t have a conscious plan to kill. Premeditation is actually a pretty fuzzy term. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree with the two of them, however.

  “We still don’t know why the game fence was cut open. The killing might have been done by an outlier who wasn’t close to Betty, heard about her and her wealth, and came to the ranch looking for money or gold. I’ll have Deputy Becker go out to the ranch, check in with Gus and have him show us where the fence was broken into and see whether there are any tracks or disturbances in the vegetation.”

  “Seems like we’re still nowhere near figuring out who killed Betty,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I don’t think bringing the Texas Rangers in for help would move this along right now. I’ll complete the interviews and finish my investigation, and if we’re still stymied, I’ll call in for reinforcements. I’m hungry. Barbeque or Mexican?”

  “I guess Mexican. El Charro down the street?”

  Both of us avoided going over the Longstreet matter at lunch anymore, so we spent our time talking about the weather, the politics of the county and the city of Blanco, and the large number of retirees moving into our rural county, bringing change with them. I didn’t mention my impending fatherhood yet. Carla wanted to keep that confidential for a while. I needed to get that, as well as the Longstreet estate, off my mind for a while. Too bad El Charro didn’t serve beer, or lunch would have been longer. I migrated back to my office after saying my goodbyes to Hauffler, relaxed. I started on a will I was due to deliver to a client, but the beef fajita tacos made me sleepy. For the first time in a long time, I took a half-hour nap.

  8

  The next ten days were quiet. No new developments. Hauffler had tracked down Matthew Middlecoff, who volunteered to come to the sheriff’s office for an interview the next Monday morning.

  “I feel nauseated all the time,” Carla said. “Morning sickness, no doubt, but it gets better as the day goes on. The good news is that I’m not hungry, so I can avoid ballooning during our pregnancy.”

  “Our pregnancy?” I thought. As a male, I’d done my part, and the old man in me reacted to being a part of the whole process. I had to play along. Why did I have this attitude problem? I needed to be more kind and supportive, not resisting an impending change, a positive one, that I couldn’t alter.

  “This’ll make me into a high-end chef. Since you’re not hungry, I’ll take over the kitchen every other evening and give you every other night off.” My offer wasn’t motivated solely by altruism, since our dinners had become sparse and rather bland. A look of alarm surfaced on Carla’s face. Time to let that idea rest a while. I looked forward to Carla’s delicate condition ending soon. Not enjoying her food or having the ability to consume even one glass of wine didn’t put her in a particularly good frame of mind, but her excitement over a child made up for her down periods.

  I felt good getting out of the house Monday morning as I drove to Johnson City for the Middlecoff interview. The late December weather was clear and bright. High forties. I expected more stories regarding Betty’s male relationships, and I wasn’t to be disappointed.

  Like Betty’s other male friends, Matthew Middlecoff strolled into headquarters, relaxed and smiling. Tall, over six-four. Sandy brown hair, muscular, clean-shaven, forty-five or so. Standard hill country dress— Western shirt, starched blue jeans and a working man’s cowboy boots. He introduced himself to Bob and me, shaking our hands. “Good to meet you. I’m not sure I can help in any way, but here I am.”

  This time Bob let me sit in on the interview. He explained to Middlecoff that I was the executor of Betty’s estate and had to sort out who was going to get what. I made clear to him that he was not an heir, but explained that we needed to make sure none of the beneficiaries were involved in Betty’s murder. He nodded acknowledgment.

  B
ob started with his standard Miranda warning and explained the video recorder. Middlecoff reacted in the same way as the others, so Bob had to explain to him that everyone was a suspect until he figured out who had been involved in the murder.

  “Tell me a little about you, Matt.”

  “Not much to tell, really. I’m a second or third cousin of Carroll Johnson, on my father’s side. Like a lot of people up here in the hill country, I inherited a large ranch. I don’t have any siblings, and after college, I came back to the ranch. You guys are from here, and you know that cattle ranching’s at best a breakeven proposition, so I rent out the ranch during hunting season to deer hunters. They pay me a thousand per gun per weekend, so that little endeavor puts food on the table. Besides, I found that keeping up a two-thousand-acre ranch stressed my bank account and my abilities, so ten years ago I sold off all but five hundred acres. Thanks to Carroll, I found a money manager who’s conservative. The bottom line’s that I can live off the money I get from the ranch and the income I get off my investments.

  “By the way, if you’re wondering, I’m not close to Carroll. Even when we were younger, I only saw him at family reunions. Our great-grandparents were brother and sister. When Betty started looking around for property in the hill country, Carroll called me and introduced me to Betty. I liked her, and when she started traveling around, I showed her all the possibilities — Fredericksburg, Johnson City, Wimberley, Blanco, and Stonewall. We became friends, and as you know, she decided on the Blanco-Johnson City area because of the hills and oak trees. I got her in touch with an agent in Blanco, and the rest is history.”

  Bob honed in. “Tell me more about your relationship with Betty.”

  “That’s kind of embarrassing, really. A year or so after Betty bought the Lucky Strike ranch, she looked for other things to do. Sitting around all day in a house must get pretty boring. Betty loved visiting the wineries between Johnson City and Fredericksburg, so she invited me along, saying she didn’t enjoy tasting wines alone. That’s when our relationship got more serious. A year or eighteen months ago we started getting physical, you know, hugging and kissing, whenever we were touring wineries. Betty told me that she and Carroll had an open relationship that allowed both of them to have relationships with others. Sounded odd to me. Everyone I know is pretty much monogamous up here, but then again that subject isn’t something people talk openly about. One day we ended up at my place and started up a sexual relationship. We both knew the relationship wouldn’t be going anywhere. We stayed good friends, with side benefits. I never thought it would end this way.”