An Eye for Gold Read online

  “You bastard!” I hissed.

  The agent slapped a hand over his heart. “Ouch. Truth’s arrow pierces me at last” Suddenly he looked over toward the table where the young mother sat with her three children. “Here’s the test right here,” he said.

  The woman was struggling to tie her little boy’s shoes while she held the baby in her arms. A third, intermediate-aged child chose that moment to knock her juice off the table and begin to squall like she was dying. The woman’s eyes went round with desperation.

  Tom rose from our table and moved quickly to her aid. “Here,” he said soothingly, “Let me help you. I’ll hold the little one while you get the bigger ones straightened out” She looked uncertain for a moment, but then melted, gratefully gave up her baby, and bent to wrestle with the chaos her other two were inflicting on the universe.

  “Coo, coo, coo, coo,” Tom said to the baby, smiling sweetly into its pudding face. “Coo, coo, coo, coo.”

  The baby curled its lips with delight, astonished to find itself the object of anyone’s undivided attention.

  To me, Tom said, “C’mon over here, Emmy-girl. You gotta see this little sweetums. Come on, girl!”

  The harried mother glanced up anxiously at Tom, but he reassured her with a smile.

  I felt a similar brush of anxiety, but the difference between me and this woman was that I didn’t just suspect that he was putting us on, I was certain. I wanted to kick him for using her to get at me. At the same time, I’d known Tom just long enough to know that he never acted a part he didn’t at some depth live. The look of love he focussed on that little pudding-faced child was both tender and honest.

  I dragged myself to my feet resigning myself to finding out what he had up his sleeve this time. Hornswaggling me out to the back of nowhere to check out a little murder and corruption was one thing, but this particular side excursion had the look of raw manipulation, and if I smelled something sour, it probably wasn’t day-old diapers.

  Holding babies has never been my territory. Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I led with my nose and examined the infant like a museum visitor staring through a glass case. “Very nice,” I muttered.

  “Hands out of your pockets, girl,” Tom said boisterously, “you got a baby to hold! Come on, don’t be shy, this one’s a zinger.” Again the mother looked up, this time more confused than anxious. Tom gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Angling for a grandchild,” he told her.

  I shot him a look that said, You should be ashamed of yourself, and grudgingly readied my hands for the load.

  He passed me the kid. “Like this,” he instructed, rearranging my arms so that the child was more firmly against me. “Lean back a bit. Let gravity help you out. And here, get her head a bit higher. You got it. That’s it.” To the woman, he said, “Em’s my only child. Never had much practice at this.”

  Aromas of loaded, synthetic diaper and sticky baby suffused my nostrils, and I fought to suppress my gag reflex. Then, gathering my courage, I looked down into the gelatinous little face that now stared into my own. To my not very great surprise, I saw, staring back, just another human, small size, concerned yet curious. I might as well have picked up the waitress, or anyone else in the room, for all the maternal instinct I was feeling. As I continued to stare, the baby’s face began to mirror my own, its expression shifting slowly from uncertainty to worry and then outright horror. It began to wail. “Here,” I said, stuffing it back into Tom’s arms. “Your hot idea, you hold it” To the woman, who was probably a good six or seven years younger than I was, I said awkwardly, “Beg pardon, ma’am.” Then I stormed out through the lounge and lobby and out the door, ran across the parking lot and climbed into my truck. Hoping to escape. Hoping to outrun my own feelings. I didn’t even get my keys out of my pocket before I started crying.

  I crumpled onto the steering wheel, my head in my hands, wailing. My lips swelled, and my head grew thick as wool. My heart felt both heavy and empty, like an abandoned cast-iron pot.

  Moments passed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door at the front of the Red Lion open again, and after a while heard the soft, slow concussions of Tom’s shoes as he came across the warming pavement toward me. He stopped beside my door, not far off but not too close, being what I suppose for him was respectful. He knocked on the window.

  I rolled it down.

  “I’m a real shit” he commented.

  “Grade A.”

  “I like to excel at what I do.”

  “You outdid yourself this time.”

  “Wonderful. You’re not crying, are you?”

  “No.” My lips began to tremble again. I said, “Girls who don’t love babies never cry,” and began to sob. Tom said nothing, so I added, “I’m not really a woman, or even human, and worse yet I’m the last one to figure it out”

  He said nothing for quite a while, and then, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  I got out of the truck. We headed south toward the older buildings in town, and soon came to the railroad tracks, a sufficiently lonely place to say what we needed to say, and stopped. I straightened up and regarded the distant hills, all bald and dry in the lavender air of morning. “I didn’t feel a damned thing for that kid,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” he replied.

  I wheeled around toward him. “Oh, so now you’re my psychotherapist,” I spat. “Why don’t you just spell it out? I’m a weirdo with a talent and you’ve got the perfect sheltered workshop for me to curl up into. Is that what you do? Go around recruiting cripples? Do they perform better than normal people who get distracted by little things like childbearing and love lives? Huh? You want to see if my heart is dead, so you know I’ll make a fine field agent, all malleable and faithful as a dog, at least till I drive off the road some evening when some asshole plays something crooning on the radio and I finally just plain lose it?”

  He said nothing. He just stood there and took it. I found myself looking into the eyes of a man who was not guarding his soul, a man standing at the edge of a half-forgotten town, naked right down to his sorry little heart. He cleared his throat uncomfortably.

  “Make it good,” I said bitterly.

  “My wife used to talk like that,” he said.

  “You’re married?” I said, appalled.

  Ignoring my question, he said, “We met in college, and married as soon as we graduated, and I went to work. She used to keep me up late asking me if I wanted kids.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That I was too selfish. Yeah, too busy climbing the ladder at the Bureau, too busy doing what I liked to do in my free time, too busy thinking about a hundred other things. Then one day I realized something was missing, and I said, ‘How ‘bout it?’ and she said she’d get back to me.”

  “Real executive like.”

  “Yeah.”

  I expected next to hear the same enraging story I’d heard from half a dozen women friends in the oil business: She gives up baby-making for the guy, then, when she’s too old, he feels his own mortality coming and leaves her for a younger dish with a fertile womb. Perhaps that was where Faye was scheduled to come in. I said acidly, “But she was past menopause then, and—”

  “No,” he said. “It didn’t take me that long.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So what happened?”

  He said, “Then everything was different Thing was, she wasn’t a woman who wanted kids just to have kids. She wanted a relationship. People were people to her, not categories. She went to bed and had a dream that there was a little girl out there that needed her to find her, and she went to it like a woman possessed.”

  “So you have a daughter,” I said, my voice rocky. I added this information to the meager store of personal facts I knew about him.

  “No.”

  “No?” I felt like I was on a conveyor belt being drawn somewhere I didn’t want to go. “Why not?”

  “Because my wife is dead,” he answered.

  I stared at my feet
“I’m sorry.”

  “So aren’t we all,” he said softly. “She was a good woman.”

  I took a breath and looked away. I didn’t want to care about him just then.

  “She was killed by a sniper,” he said. “Standing at the kitchen window, three months pregnant, cooking me dinner.”

  My body suddenly felt like lead. “You don’t think—”

  “That that bullet was meant for me? Oh, yes. And whoever did that would have been kinder to kill me directly. Instead, he killed the best part of my life and left me alive to remember it.”

  We were standing side by side, both staring out at the mountains. There was nothing I could say, except that it was clear to me now why he felt that he had to help women like me and Faye get to a place where we were less vulnerable; but at that moment, that was not the thing to say at all. I put a hand over my face and rubbed it hard.

  Tom said, “I like my work. And I still like to do what I like to do in my free time.”

  I let things hang in the air for a while, then, as gently as I could, said, “Please come to your point. How does all this involve me?”

  “Make room for everything you are.”

  “Sure.” A train approached, the ground rumbling as its titanic weight concussed each grain of clinker between us.

  Tom stood with his hands in his pockets, once again the Tom I’d first gotten to know. He was taking a moment to do the thing he liked to do, and that was just to be.

  “You’ve been a shit to me,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I am sorry. I got you wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your pal Carlos Ortega there in Denver said you were contrary as hell; I took that to mean that if I wanted you to do something, I’d have to trick you into it. But you’re smarter than that”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Whatever. I am sorry. I just thought you’d be good. And even if you don’t want to be a detective, investigations keep finding you. You should at least be trained, so you don’t eventually get yourself killed.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And I’m arrogant. I wanted the annoyance of training you all to myself.”

  I smiled. “Thanks anyway.”

  “De nada”

  “Think you’ll marry Faye?” I asked, wiggling my eyebrows at him.

  He laughed. “No. She’ll probably get sick of me.”

  I laughed, too, in spite of myself.

  Tom reached out and tousled my hair.

  “So what do you need me to do?” Tasked. “I’m heading out into the Black Rock Desert first chance I get and stay out of the line of fire, but I guess I can run a few more errands for you before I leave.”

  “And when you get back to Salt Lake City, we’ll talk some more?”

  “Do I get a choicer’

  “Great,” Tom said. “First, I want your ideas on forensic tests for anyone who might have walked away from that mine shaft where they found Umberto Rodriguez. Geological traces you might expect to find in the shoes, that sort of thing.”

  I said. “That would be clays and such. That’s volcanic rock up there. A rhyolite, I think, by the look of it. Volcanics rot out to certain clays pretty fast, and it’s the clays that a person wouldn’t think to clean off of his shoes. At least not someone so ignorant as to have left oolitic sand and brine shrimp on Rodriguez’s shoes.”

  Tom grinned appreciatively.

  I shook my head, more at myself than at him. He had his ways of giving me strokes, and I had to admit that I liked getting them.

  We walked back to the parking lot at the Red Lion Inn and I pulled out my map atlas and spread it on the hood of my truck. “Near as I can figure from what the sheriffs were saying last night, this is where Rodriguez’s body was found. It’s not far off my route to the Black Rock. I’ll grab you some rock and soil samples if you like.”

  “No, I’ll have the boys out of Reno do it. It has to be done with proper chain-of-custody documentation to be admissable as evidence,” he said. “But I do need you to make one more stop on your way, if you would.”

  “All right. What is it?”

  “I need you to go see Shirley, that blind woman back in Lovelock. I had a few more questions for her, but it was clear she wasn’t going to talk to me. But I have a feeling she will talk to you.”

  33

  BEFORE I HEADED OUT TOWARD LOVELOCK, TOM OFfered me the use of a cell phone.

  “No way,” I said. “I don’t want you jingling me up any old time you want Besides, where I’m going, there are no cell phone repeaters, or if there are, I’m going to keep on going until there aren’t any.”

  Tom smiled. “I envy that Well then, my little mouse, if you won’t let me give you a jingle, then let’s put a bell on the cat. Here’s my cell phone number.” He got out a pen and wrote it down on one of his business cards. “call me on this number as soon as you’ve spoken with the lady. If you don’t get through to me, try Faye’s cell number. I’ll write that here, too.”

  “Sure thing, kitty.”

  “Jing-a-ling.” He waved good-bye.

  I aimed the truck toward Lovelock, and started off. I was short on sleep, but aside from that things were looking up. I figured to stop in at the blind woman’s house, chat her up, phone in my report to Tom, and move on. I could still be in the Black Rock Desert by noon. By nightfall, I would put Kyle Christie, Virgil Davis, John Steinhoff, Laurel Dietz, Donald MacCallum, and all the rest of the gang at Granville Resources out of my mind.

  But of course, that mind of mine got to drifting over the details of the case. As I rolled over the miles of asphalt ribbon, I did not meditate on Ray and his perhaps desperate proposal—it was beginning to occur to me that his timing had reflected outright fear that I would do what I had now done (leave)—but instead pondered the meetings with Stephen Giles, Umberto Rodriguez, “Auntie” the diamond lady, and even Rudolf the gold fanatic. My thoughts touched on Gretchen MacCallum and her peacefully chaotic kitchen, and I wondered if she was still as calm as on the day I had spoken with her.

  As I passed from the area of burned sage and desert soils into the untouched sweep of gray-green desert slopes, I decided that the case was a hopelessly snarled mess, and yet oddly miscellaneous. On the face of it, a mining company had set up a new mining facility and had bought up some old claims, hoping to find a second ore body so that they could achieve an economy of scale and continue production. The price of gold was declining, so continued operation required that the cost of production not exceed the value per ounce of the shining metal. Snags in permitting had occurred when it was discovered that a possibly endangered rodent lived in the new project area. The biologist tasked to survey the mice had reported them hale and hearty and identical to untold millions of mice over a ten-county area, and was found dead the night before the posse was due to haul her in for questioning. The BLM agent who had reported her to the FBI seemed weird and nervous, and had crashed his car and puked; hardly actionable offences, but, as Deputy Weebe might say, he bore watching. Beyond this, the geologist who had been prospecting for the new project had gone AWOL, and things seemed to be flying about a bit up at the Gloriana Mine. But all these events might mean very little and in fact be coincidental.

  These events had added up to a great big ignorable nothing, in fact, until Rodriguez was found obviously murdered. That had been one coincidence too many. It seemed odd that anyone would go to the trouble of bringing his corpse all the way back from Utah, but it made sense if it was done to cover the fact that Rodriguez had been in Utah, because that knowledge of that fact would point to his murderer. And what was he doing in Utah? Naturally, I got to wondering if Rodriguez knew Morgan Shumway. Could there be a connection there?

  There were more than a few moving parts to this case that I did not understand. I was in fact so unsure about the whole thing that I didn’t even know what questions to ask. And now that I thought about it, Tom had once again sent me to question a woman without giving me any specific guidance
regarding what to ask her. That realization quickly collided with an important question: How had Tom gotten involved with the case in the first place? Why not just Ian, the local operative? Was it standard operating procedure for the likes of Tom Latimer to fly clear across the Great Basin to investigate the neuralgic worries of a BLM agent?

  At Lovelock, I followed the first ramp off the highway and headed back to the blind woman’s house, half furious with Tom for having once again played me so expertly, and half downright impressed. He wasn’t just a Zen master, he was a master at sleight of hand. But I had reason to hope that Shirley knew something that would at least tell me in which hand he was hiding the missing piece, and I knew just how to use my irritation at Tom to get her to talk.

  “WHO’S THERE?” ASKED the blind woman. She stood just inside her screened door tipping her head this way and that, as if picking up a radio transmission that would tell her what I looked like.

  “My name is Em Hansen. I was here a few days ago with a couple of guys from the FBI,” I replied. “Um, they don’t know your last name, so I don’t know what to call you.”

  “call me Shirley,” she said. “Come on in, Em.”

  She led me in into her kitchen and touched a chair on which she wanted me to sit.

  “Coffee?” she inquired. “You seem a black, no sugar type tome.”

  “You are clairvoyant.” I was in fact suprised by her welcome, after the way she had hurried us out of her house the time before.

  “A big cup,” she said. “You seem tired.”

  “Thank you. And yes, I am tired.” I sat down and patted the long-haired cat that lay on the next chair. It narrowed its eyes at me, a cat’s way of saying it liked me.

  “I had a feeling you’d be back,” she said, cutting to the chase. “All on my own. I didn’t need Hermione to foretell this one.”

  Hermione. So that had been the Paiute shaman standing by Shirley’s gate the day before.

  Shirley said, “She said you were here yesterday, but didn’t come in.”