An Eye for Gold Read online

“I drove by. But I wasn’t trying to find you, really,” I said, taking care to keep my tone calm and matter-of-fact. I already disliked the way this conversation was going. I began to wonder if I should leave.

  Shirley laughed. “Hell no. We were trying to find you.” She cackled slightly and set a cup down in front of me. “And don’t he so frightened. We mean you no harm. Quite the contrary.”

  How did she know I was frightened? I peered hard at Shirley to make certain that she did not in fact have functioning eyes behind her ruined eyelids. She did not. I cleared my throat. “Well, we’ll get back to that, I’m sure,” I said, trying to hang onto my last shred of control over the conversation. “But first, you should know right up front that Tom Latimer sent me. He’s that guy I came with before. And I will report to him. And you have the right not to answer any and all questions.”

  “Okay then, Miss Hansen, why do you think you’re back?” She tipped back her head and brayed with laughter.

  “I’m back because things have heated up around the Patricia Gilmore case. Understand, the FBI was here not to investigate her death, but to look into her work. The thing is, now this other guy she worked with—Umberto Rodriguez—has also been found dead.” I waited to gauge Shirley’s response to this news.

  She pursed her scarred lips a moment, then smiled and said, “Good riddance.”

  “I had a feeling you might think that. I found him offensive, myself. I didn’t know Pat Gilmore, but I’m willing to bet she would have loved to watch him shoot out of this universe like a watermelon seed.”

  Shirley roared with laughter at this image. She said, “You have some anger there.”

  I brought myself up short. She had me off balance and talking too much, and was reading my feelings entirely too accurately. I decided to walk right into her attack, the best defense being a surprise offense of pure candor. “You’re right. I’ve worked with too many annoying men for too many years. I’m always on their playing field, and I don’t find that to be a level place. And you know, for years I thought it was just sexual discrimination, but then I realized that men crap on each other, too. It’s how they do business. Everything’s a big pecking order thing, a big paranoid job of who’s got power over whom, and when I met Rodriguez he one-upped me by making a big show of recognizing my gender. So am I angry? Yes. Because now I see that he couldn’t just do that alone; he needed the passive cultural complicity of the two men who were standing right next to me, and they can fuck themselves, too.”

  Shirley Cook thumped a hand on die table in her laughter, her ravaged face drawn back into a rictus grin. “Oh, that’s rich,” she howled. “Passive cultural complicity, that’s glorious.”

  I began to see why Tom thought she would talk to me and not him, but so far, I had done all the talking, and there was something about this woman that was bringing out every ounce of malice I held toward the male of the species. I did not like it one bit. She had me seeing only black in a full-color world.

  “Exactly,” she said. ‘If your friends weren’t playing the same game, Rodriguez’s behavior would mean nothing.”

  I forced myself to take several long, deep breaths. I said, “Something like that But the thing is, Rodriguez was murdered. So perhaps I should tell you why I’m really here.”

  With abundant sarcasm, she replied, “That would be helpful.”

  “I am not sure why I’m here.”

  She let out guffaw.

  I said, ‘Tom Latimer asked me to come talk to you, but he didn’t give me any direction. I could analyze that to death, but I won’t I’m just going to tell you that he’s been keeping me in the dark about certain aspects of this case, and that annoys me. Tom’s the only one that knows what the case is really about But it serves a purpose: it keeps old Emmy snapping at the bait.”

  Shirley continued to laugh. I was clearly making her day.

  I took a long suck at my coffee. “So what do you think? Is there something you know about Pat Gilmore, or about her work, or about her death, that I should know? You see? I don’t even know what questions to ask.”

  The cat had moved from my lap onto Shirley’s. She stroked it for a while, making me wait for an answer. “Patsy Gilmore had a hot temper. She made me look cool, and that’s a trick.”

  “Even hotter’n me?” I asked ironically.

  “Oh, yes. Patsy was a volcano. But she was good at her work. She knew her species and subspecies, no matter what Rodriguez might suggest And she knew how to go about a survey. She knew, for instance, to talk up the old-timers in the area, like an old squatter named Sam. He sent her around to talk to me.”

  “Do you mean the guy who lives up in Rosebud?”

  “Lived. Sam was a smart old weasel,” she said bitterly.

  “Was? Then he died?”

  ”Yes, last night”

  A wave of remorse washed over me. “I just met him yesterday. He’d taken a fall. I should have—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Shirley said forcefully. “He had a mess of cancer. He’d been hanging by a thread for months. He knew his time was coming, and about the last thing he wanted was to die in a bed all done up in funny pajamas with tubes coming in and out of him. It was quality of life that appealed to Sam, not quantity.”

  “Did a woman named Sally call to tell you? I mean, he wasn’t alone, was he?”

  “Nah. Folks like Sam are never alone. He was on a first-name basis with half the critters out there. And Hermione was with him.”

  “Oh, so Sally called her?”

  Shirley let out a cackle. “No one has to call Hermione. She smells things in the wind, if you know what I mean, but yeah, some woman called her and she went out there and did her bit with the smoke and eagle feathers and phoned me this morning to say that his ‘passage into the spirit world’ was a good one. Injun stuff. You understand?”

  “I suppose so. . . .”

  “Well, I don’t” she said sourly. “But don’t you go sending your FBI guys out there looking for his body. You won’t find it.”

  “Why not?”

  Shirley laughed sardonically. “Hermione gave him a Paiute send-off.”

  “What exactly does that entail? Do they hide their dead?’

  That brought Shirley up short. After a moment, she said softly, ‘They take them out into the desert and hide them so that grave robbers won’t dig them up for their belongings.”

  Something struck me. “Is that why Hermione wanted the mine moved? Does she have kin buried in an old adit up there?”

  Shirley shook her head, impressed with my guesses. “You’re quick, just like Hermione said.”

  “I’ve never met Hermione!” I squealed.

  “No, you haven’t met her in the sense you mean. But she knows about you.”

  “How long had Sam lived out there?” I asked, desperately trying to deflect the subject.

  ‘Ten, twelve years.”

  “And you say he was on a first-name basis with the animals, and that Pat Gilmore used to talk to him?”

  “He was a good observer. He saw a lot of things.”

  “What did he see?” I asked, staring into her empty sockets.

  Shirley aimed those sockets at me as if they had eyes, lending drama to her next words. “Well, to answer that question, I need to back up here a bit, and tell you a story.”

  She leaned back in her chair, preparing herself to tell her tale, working her audience by making it wait. “A long time ago, there was a girl, and she had a brother. This girl and this brother went hiking in the hills and found an old adit. They decided to play. Now, this brother, he was a bit impulsive, and when he found a stick of dynamite in that adit, he decided to wave it around a bit and tease his sister with it. It was very old dynamite, you see, and extremely unstable, and it went off just from the shaking.”

  My breath hissed as it came in through my teeth.

  “Yes. That brother was killed. That girl was me. You might divine from this that I am not particularly fond of mines.”
/>   I shook my head, oblivious that Shirley could not see me shake it.

  “Just so. Well, the years have gone by, and folks have pitied me, and I have lived in this community. I am an irascible old bitch. Don’t much care for company. I cannot truly live alone, and I know that, or I’d probably be out there in Rosebud or Scossa like the Sams of this world.”

  She paused to take a sip at her coffee, then continued. “So I must be practical. I must keep in mind that mining is the major economic support of this district, and so I do not bite the hand that feeds me. But I do have my opinions. I can remember what this place looked like, when I could see it. It was big, and wide open, and brown in high daylight and shades of grayish green and lavender when the sun touched low to the horizon. Yes, I can remember all that. And I remember what the animals were like who lived amongst the little bushes, all running around out there in the dark to avoid the birds of daytime, with their little trails that wind between the gray-green sagebrush, and the yellow rabbit brush, and the red paintbrush, and the tiny white phlox, and all the rest. And I remember the gray coyotes, and the flittering birds, and the tawny antelope, and all the insects that sprang up and Went splat against my father’s windshield. And the clouds, oh how I loved the shapes of the clouds. The mare’s tails that foretell a storm, and the big thunderheads of summertime, and the heat dancing above the ground that feeds them. I listen to them still, listen to their thunder, and the shock of silence when you’re all alone out there, not listening to this old refrigerator hum.”

  Her voice dropped down to a whisper. “I love this country. And if I can’t live out there like I’d like to, then I want to save it for the little animals.”

  I sat completely still, afraid to break her reverie.

  She took a deep breath and continued, her voice back at a normal level. “So I started me a little consciousness-raising group, and gathered together a few folks who feel like I do, but there aren’t that many. Had to link up with a few Indians over there at Pyramid Lake, and with folks from out of state. You have to be careful, but they can do you some good. You’re listening carefully now, I can tell.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. You see, the whole idea is to pay attention. Listen to the Earth, Hermione would say. Well, along comes Patsy Gilmore like a rogue buffalo, all stamping and snorting, but she’s a good girl and she’s willing to call things as she sees them. And she comes to me, and I tell her a few things, and she does herself a good job. Pat Gilmore was assigned by her company to study the little rodents that live out by the Kammas. She was supposed to add that to the EIR she was filing.”

  Was she about to tell me that Pat Gilmore had found the animals to be increasing their numbers, as Giles and Rodriguez had said? Or had she found something else, which they had not reported? I leaned toward her. “I was told that she found the mouse in question alive and well and increasing its range. Was that true?”

  “Oh, yes. That statement is true. As far as it goes.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s too bad you can’t go out there and talk to Sam. He’d have told you that three years ago, some bounty hunter went out there and shot all the coyotes in and around the Kammas. Now, if you snatch out the top predator from your food chain, what exactly do you think is going to happen?”

  “The rodents are going to breed until they run out of food.”

  “Exactly. Boom, mice by the millions. But that doesn’t mean the ecosystem is healthy. Too many mice in one small space with no one eating the sick ones, and disease runs right through them. And some of those diseases can get us humans, too. Hanta virus, for instance. Then you add the range fires we’ve been having, with all this cheat grass brought in by the cattle that shouldn’t have ever been here, and not only do the mice die because they don’t have anything to eat, but die coyotes can’t come back even if someone stops killing them. There’s nothing for the antelope, either. Or the birds. Seen many of them out there?”

  “Come to think of it, no. But I’m from Wyoming, where it’s less arid. I thought—”

  “You thought there were no seed-eaters because it’s a desert. That’s crap. The Paiutes lived on rabbits and birds out here, and on seeds. They harvested pine nuts until we cut down all their trees for fire wood, and they had a festival each year for marsh birds down on the lake that used to seasonally fill the Carson Sink before we diverted that water for irrigation. And what are we growing? Cantaloupes. Great use of the resource. We dried up Lake Winnemucca there next to Pyramid Lake—nothing there but a dry valley now—-and we had Pyramid Lake itself half gone before the Indians finally learned how to make us stop.”

  “I think I begin to get the picture.”

  “Twelve thousand years the Indians lived here before white man came. We called them primitive. Hell, I’d like to see any one of us go out there and last a day without a cooler full of food from the supermarket. And those Indians weren’t perfect but they got along without lying and cheating and shooting each other, either. And it’s amazing they’re still here, after they got their first dose of cholera. Some accounts will tell you that nine out of ten of the Paiutes died the first big emigrant year.”

  “But wait,” I said. “I can play devil’s advocate here. I read about the animals that lived here before the Indians came. Camels, cheetahs, mammoths. One theory says that they died not just from the change in climate, but also because the first humans killed the few that were left.”

  Shirley took a noisy suck at her coffee. “That is as it may be. Over there on the California coast you can go through the shell middens left by the coastal tribes, see what they were eating. They’d move into an area and hunt out all the abalone first then the next favorite, then the next, and eventually they’d end up with nothing but nasty little snails and move on. And while I don’t think for a minute that any mammoth could still make a go of it in modern-day Nevada, the first red men may have hastened their demise. Sure. But let’s look at what they were doing right. They had no guns, no metals, no wheels, no domesticated animals, and yet they got along. The Paiutes here were one of the least warlike of all the tribes. They lived humbly.”

  “Hunter-gatherers,” I said.

  “Right, they did not farm. When the cycles in nature supported it, they ate well. When cycles of cold or dryness came, they suffered. It was a simple justice. They had no need for digging holes in the ground,” she said, her lips drawn into an ugly sneer, “except to bury their dead.”

  “What is a Paiute burial like?” I asked softly, thinking of Sam.

  “Paiutes believe that you have to get rid of the body so the ghost won’t haunt you. So you take it away with all its belongings and put it where it can’t be found. They don’t want anyone digging it up for its goods, or the ghost will get loose again and there comes trouble.” She laughed. “I wonder if Hermione buried that filthy couch he had.”

  We were getting pretty far afield. “You were telling me about how Pat Gilmore understood the ecology,” I prompted. “And about what she was putting in her EIR.”

  “Yes. Patsy.” Her face fell.

  I waited in tense silence, hoping I had not cut off her garrulousness.

  At length, she cleared her throat and continued. “You were wondering what Patsy found out there, and I told you. And she was getting ready to write her report. She had all her documentation ready. Well, on the night she died, she phoned me.”

  I stayed quiet as a mouse. Here it was, the answer to the question I did not know to ask.

  “Yes, she phoned me from her office out by the mine. She said all hell was breaking loose. She said Rodriguez had been harassing her by trying to make her look like a lesbo, and he’d been calling her on the carpet with her superiors at Intermontane Biological. All that I knew; it had been going on for a while. But what I didn’t know was all the rest. About what was going on at Granville Resources, and at the Gloriana Mine.”

  I said, “You have my undivided attention.”

  �
�Well, now, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I kept my silence for a reason, and—”

  “You can’t stop there!”

  “Until I heard about that guy Rodriguez being murdered, I thought it best to keep my silence, but now . . .”

  ‘Now, Shirley!”

  Shirley cleared her throat and continued.

  “A thing you may not know is that such environmental posturing is all a bunch of crap the BLM puts on so citizens like you think they’re doing their job.”

  “What?”

  “This is true. Some of us call the BLM the ‘Bureau of Logging and Mining.’ Out here, their express purpose in life—their policy—is to promote mining. There has never, in the history of their governance, been a mining project turned down for environmental reasons.”

  “You’re telling me that environmental concerns are not, in fact, holding up Granville’s project?”

  “Exactly. Something funny is going on out there at Granville Resources.”

  “What?” I demanded to know.

  Shirley said, “Rodriguez was on the take.”

  This didn’t make sense. “Surely holding up the project wouldn’t earn him anything from Granville.”

  “Maybe I should say Rodriguez was on the make. He wanted that mouse listed as endangered, and he wanted to be the only one who could identify it. The expert. So’s folks would have to call him in if anyone in a three-state area had even the tiniest notion of digging a culvert, or blading a road, or any construction—a house, a school—that might impact the natural habitat of his pet subspecies.”

  “So if Pat—”

  “He wanted her out of that job. He wanted in. It was a slick little scheme he had.”

  I said, “But wait a minute, isn’t that a—”

  “A conflict of interest?” Shirley leaned back in her chair and sighed heavily. “Heavens, yes. But on the other hand, it did not run counter to my own interests, so . . . “ her voice lost its volume. “I kept my mouth shut. And I told Pat to do the same.”

  “Because her population numbers would have made the permitting possible?”

  “Yes, and because there was no way she should trust those men.” She laughed bitterly. “Seems I was right about that wasn’t I?”