An Eye for Gold Read online

“Yeah, something like that. Don said she was going nuts doing catch-and-release for some kind of study, getting bitten staring into their little mouths. You can get sick doing that. Hanta virus, as a for instance.” She made a face to show her nursely disapproval. “So she must have gotten the numbers she was looking for, huh? And she blew the whistle, and in ride the Mounties, right?”

  I thought carefully how to answer her question. The last thing I wanted was to get jammed into the position of having to tell this woman that a death had occurred on her husband’s job site. It would then occur to her that his disappearance might be a bit more out of die ordinary than a casual stroll off the map. That he might be involved in Pat Gilmore’s death, or dead himself, his body not yet found. “Yeah, something like that, I guess. I don’t know much about who’s accusing whom of what. Did he mention a BLM agent named Stephen Giles?”

  Gretchen searched her memory. “Stephen . . . Oh yes, I remember that name. Don was really upset about him for some reason.”

  “Was he slowing the project down or something?”

  “No, that wasn’t the impression I got. I’m not sure he said. Just that he didn’t like him. Don said he was going down to Reno to meet with him, because he didn’t want him coming out to the field.”

  I smiled ruefully. “I can see him feeling that way.” I fitted this bit of information in with my previous understanding of MacCallum. “I hear your husband’s a fairly jolly sort.”

  “Jolly?”

  “You know, laughs a lot.”

  “Oh yes. Anything ironical will crack him up.”

  “BLM agents don’t strike him as ironical?”

  She made a swatting gesture with one hand. “What’s so ironical about working for a living?”

  I shrugged. She hadn’t met Stephen Giles.

  “So your husband has an office here in the house,” I said. “Mind if I take a squint?” I knew from long exposure to men in the workplace that seeing the office was often seeing the man. Tidy ones often went with pinched minds, and messy ones meant anything from depressive sloth to creative genius, depending on the type of mess.

  Gretchen thought for a moment. “Well, I guess that would be okay. His work is proprietary, of course, so let me first take a pass through there and make sure he didn’t leave out anything critical. I mean, as an FBI consultant, you can of course get a search warrant and all that if you have to, but being a geologist you understand about proprietary interests.”

  “Sure.” Her calm was unshakable. That meant she was either trusting to a fault or absolutely certain that she and her husband had nothing to hide from anyone, anytime, anywhere, except of course the company’s secrets.

  She rose and moved to the far corner of the kitchen, opened a door, and stepped through it. “Yeah, come ahead. Looks like he locked up his files and took his current stuff with him, anyway.”

  I followed her into the garage, a deep two-bay unit which had been insulated with pink fiberglass and lined with book shelves. Having only one small window facing out onto the garden, it was dark, but Gretchen switched on a boom lamp over a drafting table that stood under that window, and the room warmed with light reflected from the table’s surface.

  I looked around the space. Loosely organized clutter radiated out from the drafting table, spilling onto the tops of oak file cabinets and into oak bookcases. The space felt very cozy and nestlike for a converted garage; the man had raised the floor across the back half of the area, setting heavy plywood sheets up on two-by-four stringers, and had covered the floor closest to his drafting table with a large oriental rug. It was beautiful. I bent and touched it. The knotting was exceedingly fine, and if I could believe the eye I had developed at my grandmother’s knee, it was silk. Putting the expense of such an artifact out of my mind momentarily as the anomaly it was, I rose and concentrated instead on the surface of the table, my eye drawn by its disordered sense of productivity. As was typical of a great number of geologists, he had eschewed a desk for this larger surface, which had a narrow rail across the front to prevent him from leaning onto an unrolled map and creasing it. It was a warm space, a contemplative space. Two large stereo speakers were stuffed into the adjacent bookcases, and the jewel cases to a number of CD’s were scattered among the pencils and abandoned scraps of paper. I took a squint at the CD’s. The man liked the blues.

  Over the table, against the wall, hung a sepia-toned photograph of a bunch of Wild West saloon gamblers eyeing each other suspiciously over a roulette wheel. I stared into it, trying to understand its significance.

  Seeing what had caught my eye, Gretchen spoke. “He likes to keep things in perspective,” she said.

  I cocked my head her way in question.

  “ ‘Life’s a crap-shoot,’ ” she said. “ ‘Never count your winnings ‘til you’ve left the table.’ That sort of stuff.”

  I smiled uncomfortably, wondering if the man who had stared into that picture had already cashed in his chips. His friend and colleague Pat Gilmore was dead, gone the same night he had disappeared. There had to be a connection.

  Avoiding Gretchen’s eyes, I peered into the next framed picture that hung over the table. It was a black and white flash photograph of two men standing in a cavern. They were dressed in what looked like oil skins, and were wearing boots, hard hats, and head lamps.

  “That’s Don touring a mine in Australia,” Gretchen said. “Don loves to run around in holes in the ground. It’s not for me. That’s him on the left;’

  “Who’s the other guy V

  “That’s Kyle Christie. They’ve worked together for years. Don does the lion’s share of working up the targets, but Kyle has better staying power where it comes to exploratory drilling. That can take months or years. Hundreds of holes. They have a kind of nasty joke about it: Don generates, Kyle penetrates.”

  “Must be a guy thing.” I leaned closer to get a look at MacCallum. He wore safety glasses which had caught the glare of the flash. With the hat and bulky suit, I could only surmise that he had a rather long nose. His companion was tall and rangy.

  “That picture doesn’t look much like him,” Gretchen said. “It must be over twenty years old. He’s gained some weight.” She was silent for a moment, and then said, in a tone of voice that sounded ever so subtly impatient, “But Kyle hasn’t changed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me. They’re good friends. It’s just that Kyle leans on Don so. If it weren’t for Don—”

  “Herd be out of a job?” I asked. It was an easy deduction. Unless I missed my guess, Gretchen was feeling impatience on her husband’s behalf. “Kind of like yin and yang, are they?”

  I turned and looked at Gretchen. She looked slightly sad. “Don’s very protective of his friends,” she said, and left it at that.

  “It isn’t just anyone who feels comfortable in mines,” I commented, getting back to the photograph.

  “Oh, Don loves them. He says he likes to be down inside the Earth and see something nobody else has seen. I always told him he’s just jealous of women, who get to create babies in their dark places.”

  I forced this concept out of my mind. I did not want to think about growing babies in my dark cavern. At the same time, hearing a woman speak of this most inward capacity with such directness and strength thrilled me.

  I continued around the office space, reading book titles at random, trying to take the essence of the man from the cocoon he had spun around himself. Books on mining history rested next to texts on mineralogy. Mineral specimens winked from sample bags stored in cardboard boxes along the bottoms of the bookcases. Another box stood full to overflowing with wine bottles. “Nice taste your husband has,” I said, noticing the labels.

  Gretchen laughed again. “Yeah, that’s Don’s little splurge. He’s always taken his bonuses in stock instead of cash. When Chittenden came on, he made those bonuses fat, giving him a part of the new limited partnership. When the stock went up he loosened up and bought himself some
of his favorite grape juice. That and good Scotch. Like I say . . .”

  “So Granville’s been kind to him?” I inquired, trying to make my question sound neutral and ho-hum, as if I were only making a polite reply to her statement.

  “He’s done pretty damned well. At least, on paper. But that’s why that picture over the drafting table is there. To keep things in perspective.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you see, when Don went to work for Granville, they were a penny stock on the Vancouver exchange. Then Don—well, Don and Kyle, technically—discovered the deposit that’s now the Gloriana Mine, and Chittenden came in and did a big promotion, and the stock went way up. Now the mine has even proven out, so you’d think they’d be doing marvelously, but in fact the stock is down. Why? Some foreign country or another came off the gold standard and started selling off their bullion. Don said that even though the price of gold is now up again a bit, the stocks have stayed down. When the price went down, a lot of people shifted their speculation from gold stocks to Internet stocks instead. He said the action’s moved on to another table.”

  I shook my head. “One day gold is money, the big hedge against inflation. The next day it’s just jewelry again.”

  “You got it. Two years ago, his stock was worth over a couple million dollars. Today, half that. You can’t take that kind of thing seriously.”

  My jaw plummeted into my shirt front. “A couple million! And you lose half that and it’s not a big deal!”

  Gretchen shook her head. “Men like Don believe in the rewards that come from what they create or find with then-talents, not in their skill at using capital to make capital. He tried selling a little bit of the stock and diversifying, but it made him terribly nervous. He couldn’t do it. So instead, he just stays in the game. Besides, if he didn’t work, he’d be bored, like I said. I know what you’re thinking, but he thinks of that stock like a pat oh the back. That’s why I still work. I want to make sure our kids go to college.”

  My head was spinning. I peered more closely at Gretchen, wondering if she’d been eating some of the sedatives she must handle at work. “But—”

  Gretchen was leaning against one of the bookcases. “I know it must sound nuts, but like I say, we’ve been together for a long time, and you just don’t take short-term changes seriously, if you’re smart. Sure, even on what Granville pays Don in salary, we could buy a bigger house and new cars, but if everything crashed again, then what? We’d be out on the street. Geology is a boom and bust business. He’s always telling me that whatever gets valuable, a geologist can find so much of it that it’s worth nothing next week.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said glumly. “We geologists are always working ourselves out of a job. I work in oil and gas. Or should I say, I did work in oil and gas until recently.”

  “Perfect example. You find so much oil we’re swimming in it, and the price drops. Or some Arab chieftain with fifteen Cadillacs starts a cartel and knocks the Americans out of the saddle one more time.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and some CEO with an MBA in bean counting comes in and gets paid big bucks for merging with some other company and firing three-quarters of the talent. Makes you wonder. But gold is supposed to be different,” I said. “It’s not just a commodity, it’s considered money, even if countries are going off the gold standard.”

  “Right, the big hedge against inflation. But what drives inflation? Don told me that the price of gold reflects how secure people are feeling in the capacities of their governments to maintain order and protect them from chaos. The record high came within months of when the Iranians took American hostages. It was a whole new world in which someone else suddenly held a wild card. The price crested eight hundred dollars an ounce.”

  I shook my head. “Isn’t there a little more to it than that?”

  “There must be. The government set the price at thirty-five from 1933 until 1968. The hundred years before that, they kept it at twenty. So you have to consider at least two factors; how secure people feel, and whether or not their government controls the price.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And where there are two variables you know about, there are at least two more you don’t”

  “Right But don’t ask me what they are. I’m just a nurse. I just do bed pans.” She laughed again, this time an ironical, so-what chuckle. “Right now, gold is down and its price is not controlled, so I’ll be an optimist and take it to mean that we’re in good times.”

  “Are we?” I realized that I didn’t know. Like MacCallum, I lived on the strength of my talents, and believed in them above anything a big, seemingly insensitive government might do for me. I abhorred fences, and saw them as things that needed to be jumped.

  Gretchen yawned. “This house is paid for. Our cars are paid for. The wine is his big splurge.” She followed my eye to the floor. “Yeah, and that rug. All else fails, it’ll pay for a year of our kids’ college.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Don won it in a card game with an Arab at a fly-in brothel called the Bronco Betty., It’s out in the desert north of Win nemucca. No, don’t get any ideas; men don’t just go to whore houses for the sex. The Bronco Betty has a bar a little like a night club, except that the girls will do a little more than show it to you, if you want. Eton stops in at the Bronco Betty now and then because the madam, Lefty, is a friend of his. She does a little speculating in mining properties. She used to own one of the mining claims that Chittenden’s limited partnership bought up.”

  “Did Don act as the go-between in that transaction?”

  “No, but he coached Chittenden. You see, Lefty has a taste for single malt Scotches, and Don got Chittenden to take her an especially nice one.”

  “What kind was that?” I asked, keeping the conversation going.

  “A twenty-five-year-old MacCallum, of course. Smooth as they come. I think he told her he owned the distillery.”

  “She believe that?” I asked, suddenly wondering if Gretchen was the one who was being fed a line. What if MacCallum was not on walkabout, but simply lying low somewhere because he’d just killed a wildlife biologist?

  “If she did, I don’t know how she can stay in business. But anyway, we’re getting off the story of the rug. Don was out there one night too drunk to drive back to town, and Lefty staked him to enough cash to get into a card game with some high rollers. A sort of left-handed thank you. He could have lost his shirt, but when he woke up in the morning, he was sleeping in the back of his vehicle with that rug folded up underneath him. He had a devil of a time getting it home on the plane. He told me it was a good thing he passed out when he did, as the next hand would have brought the stakes up to me versus the Arab’s jet. So no, I don’t worry about Don. Heaven and left-handed madams look after the Don MacCallums of the world.”

  “But this time—” I stopped myself.

  “Don’t worry about Don,” Gretchen said, easily reading the anxiety in my face. “That old sourdough hasn’t gotten up from the big poker table yet. And he’s still got a wild card up one sleeve or another.”

  Avoiding Gretchen’s eyes, I turned and stared at Don MacCallum’s drafting table, and studied the way the bright light from his boom lamp glared off its pale beige surface. It reminded me of the sun striking the desert floor. I had, for an instant, die notion that I was, as Peggy had suggested, an eagle, afraid to land. I was flying high over the parched landscape, witness to the stark leavings of a man’s disappearance, and now my vision filled with the smoke from the fires of his restless plunder of nature’s rare and fragile resources. And with this change in vision, I imagined his notes burning like so much sage brush, ignited to hide the evidence of a crime.

  22

  I SAID VERY LITTLE TO FAYE DURING THE FLIGHT back to Salt Lake City. I had her drop me at the garage where my truck was being repaired rather than at Ava’s, and waited until I saw her drive well out of sight before storming across to the pay phone near the sidewalk to place a cal
l.

  Tom Latimer answered on the second ring.

  My voice boiling with anger, I said, “Okay, Tom, I’ve got your information. But first, you are going to come clean with me. How in hell did you know where I was today?” Words spilled out of me, and I didn’t wait for an answer. “Was getting me to Denver some big game you and Faye cooked up so I could do some of your leg work for you? That was a nice woman you had me interrogate, and she loves her husband. Or is this hazing part of your recruitment crap? Or is that just some bullshit you’re dumping on Faye? She’s a nice person, you know, and she doesn’t need some old—” I stopped myself. Angry as I was, I did not want to throw dignity to the wind by taking shots at his age. “Have you thought of asking me if I want the damned job, or is it more fun to mess with me?”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the line, then Tom spoke in a very polite, very matter-of-fact tone of voice. “Em, I am sorry to have upset you. You are a very private person, but we do live in an open society. On a typical day, it does not take an operative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to figure out where you are. Since you ask, I knew where you were because I dropped by to see you this morning, and Ava informed me that you had left some time earlier with a tall young woman in a Porsche. Simple deduction suggested to me that you were with Faye. And, since I was privileged to know what she had planned for the day, I hoped you might assist me by talking to Ms. MacCallum. How did it go?”

  “No way, Tom. First you tell me about this recruitment shit”

  “Then you’re interested?”

  “I am not interested!”

  “Damn.”

  “Tom, you cut this out! You’ve been playing me like a prize trout I thought we were . . . that we had an understanding. I am a geologist. I am not a—”

  “Fine, Em. I’m sorry to—like you say—mess with you.” He sounded contrite, but now also angry.

  I stared into the phone, deflated. “That’s it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”