01-A View to Die For (2012) Page 5

  “We decided to keep it a secret,” Megan continued. “We didn’t want people digging up our property looking for more treasure. Besides, we didn’t know if the gold was ours to keep. Some states have laws about lost treasure belonging to the State.”

  “Like that billion dollar sunken treasure in Florida,” I interjected. “Every government agency and half the people in Florida tried suing for that find. It was tied up in court for years.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Then Mike took a single coin to the local pawnbroker. The broker told him it was not worth much more than its gold content because of the condition and offered him fifteen-hundred for the coin. Mike thought the dealer was trying to rip him off and left after telling him where he could stick his fifteen-hundred.”

  “Didn’t he get another appraisal?”

  “I wouldn’t let him. I wasn’t happy when I found he went to the dealer. Someone might start asking questions.”

  “Good point,” I replied. “If they were part of a James’ stash, someone would probably claim them because Jesse must have robbed them from a train or something. How many coins did Mike find?”

  “An even dozen,” she said. “Mostly double eagles made after the war.”

  “That’s a hard tale to swallow, Sis. Wouldn’t someone have found them before now? I mean with all the people on this lake and after the show aired on TV, that cave would have been a magnet for every treasure hunter in the state.”

  “You can’t see the cave from the water because of the trees. Besides, the gold wasn’t in the cave. Maybe that’s why no one found it sooner. Mike found it when he made the trail. The coins were in a couple glass jars buried at the base of a big rock.” She stopped long enough to finish her glass of wine. She stared at her empty glass, “Not that it matters now.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She seemed to lose interest in her empty glass and looked up at me. She had the faraway look of an absentminded daydreamer. “The coins were stolen,” she answered when she came back from wherever her mind had been. “Whoever took them must have killed Mike. If you help me prove it, I can collect the insurance and save the house.”

  I suppressed an urge to laugh – not so much at the story of Jesse James and his gold, but at Megan’s naivety to think I could solve a murder mystery. Even Fred must have thought it was funny; he started to bark at me. But all he really wanted was another sip of beer. “What do you think, Freddie?” I asked, pouring the last of my beer on the deck. “Should I grow a wax mustache so I can look like Hercule Poirot?”

  Meg got up to leave, “I’m serious, Jake. Wait here and I’ll show you.” Fred saw Meg leave and followed her into the house. He must have thought she was going after more beer. I decided to follow the leader, too. I had seen a guest bathroom by the great-room on my earlier tour.

  By the time I returned to the deck, Meg and Fred were waiting. She had a printout in her hands of a digital picture. Mike was grinning like a school boy who had won a spelling bee. “What do you say now, Hercule?” she said, handing me the printout.

  “Is this from your printer?” I asked. The print was made by a defective printer. There was a line running through it exactly like the mysterious article someone had sent me.

  She ignored my question. “So will you help me now? I need you to hack into Mike’s computer and see who he was chatting with. He said he found a buyer for the coins online, and two days later, Mike is dead and the coins are gone. Whoever the buyer was must have killed him for the coins.” She began to cry.

  I never knew what to say or do when confronted with female emotions, so I didn’t push for an answer to the printer and waited for her to regain her composure. It only took six beers and two bottles of wine later to hear the rest of the story.

  After Bill took off with the business loan and the dock business went belly up, Mike began working on a demolition site to make a few bucks. The county had hired a firm from Kansas City to tear down the old museum after a wall had collapsed. It was the only job in town that paid anything because the construction firm was a union shop and paid union wages to any local help they hired. The wages didn’t come close to making the mortgage, but it did put food on the table.

  Mike started to come home later every night. He would hang out with the crew and its security guard at a local bar after work. Ron Nixon, the security guard, was an old friend of Mike’s. Ron had been bad news back in high school and had been in and out of trouble ever since. It wasn’t anything serious, at least he never got caught doing anything to put him in jail.

  “That place they hung out at should have been named the Pig’s Bed instead of the Pig’s Roast,” she said, opening another bottle of wine. “Almost every night, I could smell that pig Linda on him when he came home drunk.”

  “The waitress from the restaurant?” I asked.

  “Yeah. She works at the restaurant part-time. Her real job is a barmaid, or should I say, a barfly. Mike had been so depressed about losing his partner and business; I thought he was going to leave me for her. But then the job ended; his buddy, Ron, took a job at Tyson’s in Sedalia, and Mike went back to work on his path. That project kept his mind off his troubles and Linda.

  “Mike found the coins not long after that. You could see him change overnight. He even quit drinking for a while. Then his drinking started again after taking the coins to the pawn shop, and he found out they would barely catch up the house payments,” she said, pausing long enough to refill her drink.

  She continued after downing half a glass. “Amy had mentioned to me once that Hal collected rare coins, so I thought this would be a great way to get a second opinion on what they were worth.”

  “The nurse?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Amy and Hal are my neighbors, but I guess Mom must have told you that. She worships the ground Hal walks on. He makes me sick the way he’s always hitting on me.” Megan seemed to shudder in disgust. “I asked Amy if she thought Hal would mind taking a look at them. That same night Hal calls and asks Mike to read off the dates and mint marks, whatever that is.”

  “A mark on the coin that indicates where it’s made,” I answered. “Our mint back in Denver uses a D, San Francisco an S, etc.” I didn’t bother to go on; I could see she wasn’t really listening. “Maybe Hal stole the coins and not some mysterious online buyer.”

  “When Mike called, Hal was on his way to California. Otherwise, Mike would have taken the coins over to him instead of describing them on the phone,” she answered.

  “What did Hal say? Did he think they were worth anything?”

  “No. And he wasn’t interested in buying them either.”

  “Sounds like they weren’t collectable – like the pawn broker said. Even if Mike did find a buyer online, it doesn’t look like they would be worth killing for.”

  “Will you at least see who Mike was chatting with online? Please, Porky.”

  “Only if you tell me why you sent me a copy of that article about the old couple.”

  Megan looked at me like I had spoken in an obscure dialect. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I explained how the copy had arrived the day before I left Colorado, and how it had the same defect as the picture she had just showed me.

  “Well, I didn’t send it,” she said after I finished.

  “That leaves Mike or Kevin,” I said. “I can’t fathom why Kevin would send me it, so I have to assume it was Mike. I wonder what he was trying to tell me.”

  My sister simply shrugged. “I think the beer is making you paranoid. I doubt I have the only defective printer in the world. Besides, what frigging difference does it make? Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Guess I’ve got nothing better to do. What do you say, Fred? Do you want to go looking for treasure?” Fred looked at me when I mentioned his name. I swear he looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

  Fred woke me early the next morning. He could be like an alarm clock with his morning ritual. At first I didn’t wan
t to get up; I had stayed out on the deck long after my sister had gone to bed. My mind wouldn’t let me sleep. Her story of the coins and the discovery of the defective printer had erased the effects of the beer and kept me up most of the night. But I had a terrible itch to see the cave anyway, so this time it didn’t bother me to get up at the crack of dawn to let Fred out.

  Meg had said I shouldn’t go down there alone in case I fell. Neither lack of backup, nor calamine lotion, was going to stop that itch. Access to her dock on the water was by a hillside tram or by stairs from the middle deck; I preferred the tram. The stairs were more for a younger man in better shape than me. I had only gone halfway down the hill when I saw the cave. It wasn’t visible from the water or the top of the bluff.

  Hidden behind several tall cedar and oak trees was an overhang in the limestone bluff. A huge piece of rock, the size of a barn, had broken off ages ago and slid down the steep slope resting halfway between the cliff and the water. The effect was such that the small cave was completely concealed from any passing boat on the water. Only a rock climber, or mountain goat, could have reached the cave before the tram had been built. I had the luxury of stopping the tram midway down the hill, walking to the cave on the path Mike had made shortly before his demise. How Jesse James and his cohorts could have made it here over a hundred years ago is a mystery.

  Fred was waiting for me when I got off the tram. He had taken the stairs and beat me to the path. “Did your aunt send you down here to keep an eye on me, Freddie?” Fred answered with a bark. It could have been a yes or no – I still had a long way to go before I could understand dog language.

  “What do you think, Boy? Did Jesse James really hide his coins here?” This time, Fred answered by running ahead to the cave.

  It was conceivable that Jesse’s gang had hidden some of their stolen loot along the river. Lake of the Ozarks had been created during the depression of the thirties by damming the Osage River nearly one hundred miles downstream from Truman. At the time, it was the largest man-made reservoir in the world. But before the dam, the Osage ran from Kansas to the Missouri River by Jefferson City. As the Osage was the superhighway of mid-Missouri, Truman had been a booming town.

  Missouri was a Union state during the civil war, but someone forgot to tell the proud rebels of Truman and the rest of the Ozarks – including the James brothers. The brothers had been raised in Missouri and must have known the Osage River well. After the South lost the war, they returned to Missouri and continued their own private war against the local banks and trains. I figured the link to the James gang made the coins worth far more than the gold they were struck from. If the story could be verified, the coins would be worth a small fortune, maybe enough to kill for.

  The cave itself looked more like an Anasazi cliff dwelling than the dark hole I had envisioned. It was simply a very large, deep depression in the limestone bluff. Fred had managed to make it to the cave before me – in fact, several times before me. He would run ahead, turn around, and look at me as if to say, “Are you coming slowpoke?” then come back to see what was taking me so long.

  That’s when I saw the footprints. A cold chill came over me and stopped me dead in my own tracks. We were not alone. The prints had to be fresh because they were as deep and visible as mine and Fred’s. There were none of the telltale marks of boots or tennis shoes. The stranger must be wearing street or dress shoes; otherwise, the prints would have left grooves like my hiking boots.

  Fred stood at my side, panting, while I tried to listen for the intruder. “Quiet, boy,” I whispered. It did no good. I couldn’t hear anything besides Fred. Whoever had been here before us was gone now.

  I followed the footprints to the cave. Other than a still damp spot next to the wall of the cliff where someone had recently relieved himself, there wasn’t much else to see. There were no signs of digging or anything – just the spot on the wall and the ground. I went up to the wall and made my own contribution; not so much to mark my territory, but to gauge the height of the intruder. I figured he had to be less than six feet tall; his spot was several inches below mine. Of course, he could have been much more endowed than me; in which case, all bets on height assessment were off.

  When I made it to the top, Meg was standing at the deck-rail, petting Fred. Once again, he proved himself faster than the tram. “Looks like you’ve had visitors,” I said to my sister.

  Meg stopped petting Fred and looked back down toward her dock. Someone had started their boat. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  I just managed to catch a glimpse of the boat and its solitary driver speeding off. “Do you know anyone with a Tracker boat?”

  “Just about every fisherman on the lake,” she replied. “They like to fish around the docks – it’s where the crappie hide out.”

  “Something tells me whoever that was, they weren’t fishing for crappie,” I said, shaking my head back and forth. “Not unless you have a new species of walking crappie on this lake.”

  “What are you talking about, Porky?” she asked.

  We were interrupted by Megan’s phone. “I need to get that, Jake; it’s probably Kevin. He never came home last night.”

  The smell of fresh-brewed coffee coming from the kitchen made me follow my sister back into the house. She went in search of the ringing phone, and I headed for the coffee pot. Wireless phones are a great invention, but they’re a pain for someone like my sister, who leaves them in places where only a psychic could find them.

  I could hear her raise her voice from wherever she had found the phone. It was none of my business, so I went back outside with my coffee to watch the boats on the lake.

  “That was the mortgage company. I should have known Kevin would never call this early,” Megan said when she joined me back on the deck. “Now what’s this about walking crappies?”

  The sun was high enough to hurt my eyes, so I took a seat under the deck umbrella across from her. Then I told her about the signs of the intruder, but left out the part on how I measured the intruder’s height. “What’s really weird is there was no evidence of digging. You would think if word had gotten out about the coins, people would be swarming all over your hillside.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t looking for coins,” she said. “Maybe he just had to relieve himself, too.”

  I checked my crotch to see if I had a wet spot. “Maybe you’re right, but my money’s on the coins,” I said, realizing why Megan had made her remark. My jeans were indeed showing my age. That seemed to happen a lot lately when I drank too much the night before. I continued like nothing was wrong. “That’s quite a climb from your dock to the cave. Whoever was down there must have heard us up here and got out of there before Fred went down, or Fred would have been all over him. He was probably hiding at your dock until we left. Who else knew about the coins besides Hal and the guy online?”

  Megan seemed to be trying to replay a tape in her head. Her expression went blank for a moment before I could see her eyes return to mine. “Well, there’s the pawn broker for starters, and I would think the half the town by now,” she said. “God only knows who Hal and Amy have told.”

  “Did Mike tell the pawn broker about all the coins or just the one he had appraised?”

  “I told you, Porky,” she answered, looking annoyed. “He only took the one. We didn’t want anyone to know about the others.”

  “How about Kevin? Didn’t you say he helped with the path? Do you think Kevin and Taylor might have taken them?”

  I must have hit a nerve. Her voice raised a few decibels. “Kevin wouldn’t steal from me, Jake. We all know how you feel about him. But he is my son, and I’ll tell you right now, he would never take a dime without asking. You of all people should know better than to judge a book by its cover.”

  Like our mother, Megan always brought up my teenage exploits when she wanted to put me down. Before I could defend myself, we heard a vehicle coming down the driveway.

  “That’s Taylor’s truck. You can hear tha
t pile of junk a mile away,” she said without getting up. “Kevin must be right behind him.”

  Fred started barking when he heard the front door open. The boys had let themselves in and joined us on the deck. I didn’t think it was possible to find a kid freakier than Kevin, but I was wrong. Taylor made Kevin look angelic. His ear lobes were stretched to accommodate what looked like wind turbines, and they actually spun when the wind caught them just right. “Birds of a feather,” I thought.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kevin said, bending down to give her a hug while his friend went over to Fred. “Sorry I didn’t go to the jail to see you. That place gives me the creeps the way they stare at me.”

  “Hey, Uncle Martin, this is Taylor,” he said without waiting for his mother to respond to his lame excuse. But the hug was all Megan needed. Her mood changed instantly. It was good to see her smile again.

  “Hi,” Taylor said. He was giving Fred an ear massage, and Fred loved it. Fred started thumping his tail against the table so hard I thought he would knock it over. Maybe the kid wasn’t half bad after all.

  While I had been watching Taylor and Fred, Kevin had produced a cigarette from somewhere. “What the cops want, Uncle Martin?” he asked while lighting it.

  “Jake tells me that I’m still their prime suspect, and they think he’s my accomplice,” Meg answered for me, still beaming.

  “No shit,” Kevin replied while expelling a cloud of smoke at the same time. I expected him to ask why, but he quickly changed the subject. “Hey, Mom. Can I use the Jeep tonight? Me and Taylor want to drive over to Party Cove, and we need some cool wheels.”

  Megan’s smile faded. “Don’t you want to spend some time with us? I’ve barely seen you all week.”

  “Please, Mom. Becky’s only gonna be there tonight then she has to go back to school.”