The Evil That Men Do Page 14

  “Well, you didn’t come to the Bureau of Mines to hear about me, now, did you?”

  I got right to the point. “Miss Raskin’s father gave me these papers. They say she owned a one-fifth interest in the Lucky U gold mine. The family would like to know its worth.” I handed him the papers across the desk. He took them, retrieved a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, and began reading.

  “Your friend doesn’t own anything. This is a lease agreement for mineral rights.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “that’s right. She was entitled to one fifth of any profits earned by the mine.”

  “Have you shown this to a lawyer?”

  “The family has their own attorney. I was hired to find out what her share’s worth.”

  “Well now, miss, it ain’t worth anything to her heirs. This agreement says plain as day that if one of them dies, the others divvy up.”

  “My client may dispute the validity of this contract, depending on whether it’s worth disputing. Can you tell me anything at all about this mine?”

  “Please wait here a moment.” He disappeared down the hall. I looked around for something to read. The office was barren except for a large, detailed geological map of the local area on one wall. I walked over and perused it.

  He returned about five minutes later with a sheaf of ancient-looking papers. “Here’s your mine, miss, your Lucky U mine.” He got behind his desk and spread out the papers. “Registered in 1870. It was part of a mineral survey by the Bureau of Land Management. It had some gold in it that the Churoks extracted over the years. Looks like it turned unprofitable around the end of the war.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “No,” he chuckled, “World War II. That’s what we oldies mean by ‘The War.’”

  “Oh, it always meant Vietnam when I was a soldier. But anyway, you’re talking about, what, fifty some years ago. How can you tell when it stopped producing?”

  “The Churoks quit paying their fees in ’48, which means they quit working it, and if they quit working it, it must’ve been unprofitable. They’re not dumb.”

  “Could today’s technology make it profitable?”

  “Possibly. Companies get more out of low-grade ore than they used to, but there has to be something there to begin with. Can’t make a silk shirt from a pig’s rump,” he said, smiling and showing me his gold bridgework.

  “Can you tell from the mineral survey whether it’s likely to have any worth today?”

  “Nope. Don’t know what they took out.”

  “Suppose one of the five wanted to assess the mine’s worth. What would they do?”

  “They wouldn’t come here, miss. They’d hire an assayer, up there,”—he gestured north—“probably Mojave Analytical Geochemistry Laboratory out o’ Makrui, assuming they’re still in business. They’d grind up some tailings and analyze them. That’d give a pretty good idea of what’s left.”

  “Tailings?”

  “Leftovers from the last time the mine was worked. They’re easy to find, easy to assay.”

  “If there was an assay recently, you wouldn’t know?”

  “That’s right. Why should I know? Now if the government does a mineral survey, that’s public record. But you pay for an assay, it’s business between you and the lab. People are secretive about gold. Always have been.”

  I rose to leave. “Thank you, Mr. Wagner.” I reached over to shake hands with him. “I can find my way out.” I started to leave.

  “Miss, don’t waste your time with the lab. They’ll clam up, won’t tell you a thing. Best to find a neighbor. Find someone living near the mine. They’ll know. ’Specially the Indians. Find some old coot like me, and give him a pretty smile.”

  He said this matter-of-factly, not lecherously. I practiced a pretty smile on him, thanked him again, and left.

  I could kill two birds with one trip. I called Tommy back and asked if I could come round and meet Melanie that afternoon. He invited me to do so.

  Makrui is the largest “city” on the Churok reservation, population 9,818. The man from Texaco directed me to the assayer’s place of business. It was a small, clapboarded house with peeling white paint, two blocks off the main road. A hand-stenciled lawn sign identified the Mojave Analytical Geochemistry Laboratories. At the front door, a placard frayed at the edges invited me to enter without knocking. As I did, a bell chimed and a waft of chemical smells assailed my nostrils. A middle-aged man in a stain-covered white lab coat emerged from the back. I got the distinct impression this was a one-person operation, and I was looking at that person.

  For this scene the script called for me to be in the employ of Troy Stanton’s family. I put the question simply. “Did Mr. Stanton ask the lab to do an assay of ore from the Lucky U mine?” I thought he would go through the motions of searching a file drawer but he just stood there, expressionless.

  “I can’t answer that. We have the same kind of relation with our clients as a doctor or lawyer—veerrrry confidential.”

  “Please,” I said, “Mr. Stanton is dead. His death is suspicious but the cops aren’t helping because they don’t see a motive. His family is distraught. They hired me out of desperation. I need to know if his share of the mine is worth killing for, that’s all. If we wait for a court order, the trail, if there is a trail, will be ice-cold. Couldn’t you just tell me whether he hired you? No one will ever know I was here. Look, you just have to say. Nothing in writing. You can search me for a wire if you’d like.” I accompanied my offer by raising my T-shirt to just below my breast and turning in a circle, exposing three hundred and sixty degrees of bare, wireless midriff.

  He was struggling with himself. For the coup de grâce I reached into my purse and pulled out two new one-hundred-dollar bills, the ones with Franklin off-center, and laid them on the counter between us, smoothing them flat with my fingers. I went outside, put my handbag in the car, and returned empty-handed. The money was gone.

  “I’ll deny I ever said this. He was here. We did an assay. The results were impressive, to say the least. I suspect men have been killed for a lot less than a fifth of the Lucky U.”

  Chapter 15

  Mind you, I’m assuming the ore he brought in was from the Lucky U, like he said. I don’t verify where the samples come from. I just do the analysis. New extraction processes could squeeze a worthwhile amount of gold out of a mine with those tailings.

  “Like how much?”

  “Could be fifty, sixty thousand, maybe more.”

  “What’s so great about that? Who would risk a murder charge for an increased share of fifty thousand dollars?” Actually, I knew of people murdered for the change in their pocket, but my murders were not that kind.

  He gave me a funny look. “Ounces.” There must have been a lull because he repeated the word more emphatically. “Ounces!”

  I was trying to get my brain around the numbers. Gold was around $300 an ounce, and I supposed 50,000 ounces. I counted six zeros on my fingers, in front of which I put three times five and came up with fifteen million dollars. It sounded like the Lucky U owners were into some real money.

  “I’ve known scams in my day,” he said, talking as I calculated. “Person’ll seed a worthless mine with good ore. If they’re clever about it, and if the buyer is simple or too cheap to hire a consultant…” He paused to let me draw my own conclusions.

  “Let me get this straight. Troy Stanton brought you good samples.”

  He nodded.

  “And said they were from his mine, the Lucky U.”

  “Right.”

  “And maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t.”

  “Right again.”

  “And you have no way of knowing.”

  “Three rights and you’re out.” He pointed an umpire’s fist ’n’ thumb at the door.

  “One more question.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll ask it anyway. How come you remember him? You didn’t have time to look it up.”

  This ev
oked a smile. “It’s the name, miss, it’s his name. Adios!”

  I pondered that as I walked back to my car. Stanton, Stanton. Was it Stanton’s Mill near Sacramento that touched off the ’49 gold rush? No, that was Sutter’s Mill. A moment later it hit. Duh. It’s the Troy part. Gold is measured in troy weight. A guy named Troy with a gold mine would stick in the memory of an assayer.

  I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting Melanie at Tommy’s place. I used the time to update the files on my laptop. My abbreviated interview with the crabby assayer left one important question unanswered: when did he meet Troy? I had the impression it had been recently, surely in the past year. His recollection was too effortless for it to have been longer ago.

  I thought about the legitimacy of the samples. If they were phony, what could be the point? The partners were all too poor to buy Troy out at some exorbitant cost. The notion that the five of them, two students, two religious zealots and a Churok priest would conspire to sell a phony mine was beyond the pale.

  Assuming the assay was legit, a number of possibilities opened up. Someone wanted the mine and had no qualms about murdering its owners. I wondered frivolously who inherited the mine if all the owners hanged themselves. Not so frivolous was the thought that one of the owners was the killer. Back to the inscrutable Tommy, again. Good Tommy or bad Tommy? Had I been lured up here to be eliminated for knowing too much? Tommy had only suggested I talk to Melanie. Would he figure that I’d want a face-to-face talk? Was Melanie truly there? Did she even exist?

  I considered returning to Santa Barbara. I could make up any number of excuses and talk to Melanie, if there was a Melanie, over the phone. Then I thought of the danger Lucy might be in, then of Charles. Surely if they—the anonymous ominous they—had it in for me, they’d have to get Charles, too. There was no turning back.

  I backed up my files to a diskette and hand-wrote a letter to Charles explaining the latest turn of events. I wanted my investigation documented in case something happened to me. I drove to the post office where I purchased a mailing envelope into which I stuffed both diskette and letter. I sent it to him care of the medical examiner’s office, noting wryly that I didn’t know the home address of the man I’d been sleeping with for the past few days.

  I slid my hand into my bag and hefted the semi, drawing comfort from the baby Glock’s perfect fit to my hand. I didn’t intend to lock my gun in the glove compartment, on or off the reservation.

  I found Tommy’s place easily. An oak tree painted on the mailbox at the foot of his driveway was apropos of his name, and distinguished his property from his neighbor’s. A green Chevette parked by the house next to Tommy’s pickup truck lent credence to Melanie’s presence. As I pulled forward in the driveway the canine chorus assailed my ears. The big black Lab, Izzie, was absent, probably in the house with Tommy and his guest, presumably Melanie. I drew near the house, and remembering my lesson from the visit of the previous week, stayed in my car.

  Tommy appeared on the porch almost immediately, smiling and beckoning. He ordered the dogs to hush and they went silent and let me pass unmolested save for a few furtive sniffs. Tommy greeted me with his characteristic dignity, shaking my hand gently and asking after Charles. Izzie nosed my crotch familiarly, and I hoped he wouldn’t sniff my handbag with as much enthusiasm, and thus draw attention to the loaded gun. I felt foolish about the semi, anyway. Tommy might just as easily tear my head off as shake my hand.

  When we entered the house a woman stood up and came forward. “I’m Melanie,” she said, extending a small right hand and gripping mine firmly. I took the moment to fix her in my memory. She was shorter than me by several inches, small-boned, fine-featured, with penetrating, ebony eyes. Hair so black it shone was pulled back in a ponytail and smelled faintly of a minty shampoo. She was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and cowboy boots. Her fingers had rings of various sizes, colors, and shapes, most of them of Native American design. Her ears were multiply pierced with more Indian jewelry.

  “I’m Dagny Jamison. Nice to meet you.” I smiled and remained silent. I liked this style of communication where one didn’t plunge pell-mell into a jumble of words. It gave a person time to observe, to organize one’s thoughts. We sat, Melanie and I on the long sofa, Tommy in his usual easy chair.

  “Tommy told me about Judy,” Melanie took up after a few seconds. “It’s unspeakably tragic.”

  I nodded and said, “Tommy said you had a premonition that something was wrong.”

  “Mmm, premonition might be too strong a word. I go through phases of having dark thoughts and horrid dreams. Often they correspond to something bad in my life. It started when I was a child with the assassination of President Kennedy. For weeks after his death I’d dream of him. Always he was pursued by wild animals or evil spirits, and he was always defenseless, always defeated.”

  “That seems natural enough,” I said. “I had a few weird days and nights myself after the calamity of my generation, the Challenger disaster one terrible January day. I was sixteen. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on board, the schoolteacher, and how she could be anyone: me, my mother, one of my own teachers. But anyway, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “When I was in the Peace Corps,” continued Melanie, “I had a nightmare about owls—a Churok symbol of death—disemboweling a lamb and eating the viscera. It depressed me all the next day. We were in a small Indian village in the Yucatan, pretty much cut off. That’s when the news of my mother’s passing reached me.”

  “Do you have these spells often?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing. I rarely do. Maybe once every two or three years. Half the time something bad’s happened. An aunt dies; a friend’s crippled in an accident. It’s always after the fact, though. That’s why I don’t think of them as premonitions. I call Tommy when I have these feelings. He helps me find the source if he can, and shows me how to soothe my spirit.”

  “Would you mind telling me why you called him this time?”

  “I’d been feeling bad for a week. My dreams were similar to those when my mother died. I finally called Tommy and he told me something dreadful had happened. He told me about your investigation. I’d like to share some thoughts I’ve kept to myself for a long time, except for Tommy.” She looked into his face as she said this.

  Tommy walked over to Melanie, knelt, and engulfed her little hand in both of his. “Are you still sure, Mulakaniya-mo, or should you let this matter rest? What can be gained, opening this old wound?”

  “It’s connected, somehow. The forbidden writing, my mother’s passing, now the deaths of a young woman and a young man. We Churoks, we could not, cannot, look into this matter. It’s too close to us. In the forest you see only the individual trees, but the forest itself is a whole, living organism.”

  Tommy looked glum. I was thinking to myself, Excuse me, but would someone please tell me what we’re talking about here? But if I’d learned anything from my dealings with the Churoks, it was to keep my mouth shut and wait.

  Melanie continued, in an aside to Tommy, “And I like this woman, this Dagny and her strange name. She has rauki haranttia. The Anglos call it street smarts. I trust her, even though I don’t believe she trusts us entirely.”

  I tried to remain expressionless and not think of my loaded weapon.

  “I trust Dagny, too,” Tommy said. “Tell her. Tell her everything you remember.”

  I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. “Please tell me anything you think may bear on the deaths of these two students. I promise you, if it doesn’t have to do with laws being broken, you can trust my discretion.”

  Melanie said, “There are broken laws, but not your laws. We Churoks believe in our oral tradition. We don’t want certain things written down, even though Professor Akrich taught us to write our language. That’s because we believe this knowledge was spoken to our ancestors by our gods, who instructed them to remember, and to teach their children as they’d been taught.”

  “
Tommy explained some of this to me when I was here last week.”

  “My mother, Starry Night, the Huruku before Tommy, believed the time had come to record our knowledge in a more permanent way than the human memory. Of course she could read and write English, but the English alphabet doesn’t fit the Churok language. Professor Akrich taught her to write Churok using a special phonetic alphabet that he devised. He then encouraged her to write down what she knew. He had a great influence on her and much opportunity to persuade her, because he more or less lived with us for the years that he was a student.”

  Melanie withdrew her hand from Tommy’s and he returned to his chair. She leaned forward, speaking even more earnestly.

  “Starting when I was about twelve, my mother wrote every night. She wanted to write an encyclopedia of Churok knowledge. She swore me to secrecy when she told me what she was doing. She wrote about plants, animals, medicine, history, art, literature, and engineering. All was word-for-word from our sacred oral rituals. Never had they been written down in an orderly, systematic way, though the students like Judy would hear, memorize, and write down pieces of them. We didn’t always like that, but we tolerated it.”

  “Engineering?” I asked, when Melanie paused to take a breath.

  “Of course that’s not what we call it. It’s how to take down a large tree, or build a house or canoe. Anyway, she wrote a page every night in her careful, neat script, using the new alphabet she learned from Professor Akrich. I wasn’t that interested in reading it. You know how teenagers are. But the stacks of paper grew as I grew. She kept them in notebooks in a bookcase in the back of her bedroom closet—seven notebooks for the seven subjects, each appropriately labeled.”

  “I wish I had known,” interjected Tommy, his glumness unabated.

  “You couldn’t be allowed to know. You, and the others, were committed to memorizing the rituals. It was the Churok way. My mother wanted to preserve our culture unchanged, and at the same time she prophesied its change. Saturated by the materialism of America, how much longer would the youths of our tribe dedicate themselves to years of learning with little reward? For less effort they could become accountants or lawyers.”