Tahoe Skydrop (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 16)

by Todd Borg

  “Cute,” I repeated. “Not what your average man shoots for. What about charisma and charm?”

  “Hon, at my age, I’ve learned that the only things that matter are brains and a bank account. In lieu of those, I’ll take cute. And charisma and charm? They’re nice, but not for the long haul, and they sure don’t pay the bills. So we’re only left with cute.”

  “But we’re talking on the phone.”

  “Well, someday you might walk in here and get stuck waiting in the reception room while Mr. Bill swallows up another tech company. Then I’ll look at you and imagine what you’d be like if the odds were wrong and you actually had smarts and money.”

  “Got it,” I said. “I don’t want to disappoint you, but full disclosure would have me tell you that I don’t have money. As for smarts, the available evidence suggests that’s not assured, either. As for speaking to William Lindholm now or any time soon, you got odds on that?”

  “I’m in San Francisco at Mr. Bill’s office. Lucy said you’re in Truckee. It happens that Mr. Bill is in Truckee. So I could call him and ask him to give you a moment at Lucy’s request. Will that work for you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Hold on.”

  The phone clicked. I waited. Spot snoozed in the back seat. After a few minutes, he began snoring. I turned on the radio. Dialed up NPR. Heard a snippet of news, which, in the last few years, could cause a stroke from temporary high blood pressure.I turned off the radio and enjoyed the pleasure of my thoughts. Which wandered to what Street looked like in her running togs. Were I Shakespeare, I could bang out a sonnet. ‘My summer’s lease with Street hath all too short a date...’

  “Mr. Owen?” The husky voice was back.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Bill said he will be at his Truckee lodge for the next hour or so, and he will gladly grant you a moment.”

  “A moment?”

  “Well, if I were to venture well outside of my purview, I might suggest bringing a fifth of twelve-year-old Macallan single malt. That might buy you several moments.”

  “This is Truckee,” I said. “Craft beer country. Scotch, not so much.”

  “That you motivated Lucy to call me demonstrates your resourcefulness. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

  “And to what location would I deliver this single malt?”

  She rattled off an address. “If you drive out Donner Pass Road along the north shore of Donner Lake, you’ll find a poorly marked driveway that angles off to the right and climbs up to what looks more like a small inn in Banff than a vacation home in Truckee.”

  “Thanks very much, Evelyn.” I said.

  “Looking forward to looking at you - I mean, meeting you - someday,” she said and hung up.

  I found a liquor store, acquired the requested libation, and was parked in front of the Mr. Bill Inn twenty minutes later. The house before me definitely had antecedents that reached back to the Banff Springs Hotel. The place was constructed with big log timbers and had a steep copper roof that had long ago developed its green patina. The house was three floors high and had a turret on one end. There was a four-car garage with individual doors that featured beveled, etched glass.

  A black Volvo SUV was parked sideways in front of the garages. The black paint had been waxed and polished to a high sheen. The front entry of the house was a floor of slate under a large gable overhang. There was a double front door with each side four feet wide. The doors were made of carved wood that glistened with thick varnish. Each door had a large, beveled-glass window, acid-etched to depict bears playing in the forest.

  Spot rose from his slumber and stared at the house, his nose smudging the rear window. Maybe he sensed the unusual smells of money. Or maybe he wanted to frolic with the frosted bears.

  I rolled down the window so he could take in the sights and told him to be good.

  I got out, walked up three steps to the slate entry, and looked for a doorbell button or door knocker. The closest approximation was a little brass bear sculpture mounted on the wall to the left of the door. I fingered it and found that it was hinged. I lifted the bear to a standing position and heard what sounded like a bear growling inside the house. I turned to look at Spot and see if he was noticing the growl. But Spot wasn’t looking toward me. He probably thought that the electronic bear growl was pretty lame compared to his own full-throated roar.

  Spot turned toward the garage.

  I turned and saw a man in his sixties walking toward me. He had thick silver hair brushed up and back and a silver van dyke beard. He wore a smooth black leather jacket over a black T-shirt and black jeans. The look and style suggested a high net worth. Put the house and black Volvo in the picture, add some zeroes. Factor in a job called venture capitalist, add more zeroes.

  “Mr. Lindholm?” I said. “Owen McKenna.”

  Lindholm nodded, walked up, shook my outstretched hand. “Please call me Bill.”

  “Single malt delivery service, Bill,” I said as I reached out my left hand and presented the bottle.

  “Evelyn working her magic again?” he said.

  “If making me think that a single malt might buy me several moments of your time is magic? Yes.”

  “Ah. I pay her a lot. Good to know she’s producing a healthy ROI.”

  “And I’m happy to provide a small part of the return on investment in Evelyn,” I said.

  Lindholm gave me a slightly longer look. “Always reassuring to have a financially literate visitor,” he said.

  “Calling me financially literate would be excessive. I’ve seen money now and then, but mostly from a long distance.”

  Bill nodded. He held up the bottle. “Let’s go in and do a taste test, make sure this stuff is safe to drink.” He turned and looked at Spot hanging his giant head out the Jeep’s rear window. Spot was panting, giant tongue flopping.

  “Your Harlequin is a big boy. Look at that tongue. What’s his name?”

  “Take your pick. Spot. Your Largeness. Hey You. No. Stop That.”

  “When I was growing up in Scarsdale, New York, the neighbor lady had a large fenced lawn and a Harl Dane named Nancy,” he said. “The neighbor also had a problem with rabbits in her garden. So she made a rabbit trap by burying a garbage can in the ground so that the top of the can was level with the ground. Curious rabbits would jump down into the garbage can. But these rabbits could only jump up about two feet, not quite high enough to get out of the garbage can. After the lady drove off to work, Nancy would trot across the yard toward the garden. I knew that meant that some rabbit was making a commotion down in the bottom of the garbage can. Nancy would get down on the ground, reach way down into the garbage can, and lift out a rabbit. She’d hold it in her paws, lick it and mother it, and then eventually let it go. The rabbit, freshly cleaned, if a bit traumatized, would head back to the garden to collect some dinner. Later, the neighbor lady would come home and check her garden. Of course, she always noticed the amount of vegetables that had gone missing over the course of the day. So she’d check her rabbit trap, see that it was empty, and throw up her hands in disappointment. She never did figure it out.”

  Lindholm looked back at Spot. “Big carnivore like that, you’d think they’d eat a rabbit.”

  “Some smaller, less gentle breeds will eat a rabbit,” I said. “But a Dane just thinks a rabbit is a surrogate puppy. Or maybe a squeeze toy that makes an interesting noise if you compress it enough.”

  “Would your gentle boy like to come inside?”

  “I’m sure he’d love it.”

  I walked over and let Spot out of the Jeep. He ran around, nose to the ground, a look I’d seen when he was tracking an animal. I called him, and he took plenty of time to decide it was okay to abandon the wild for the human experience.

  I had him sit and shake hands with Bill Lindholm. When Spot lifted his paw and slapped it down onto Lindholm’s outstretched hands, I thought he’d knock the man to the ground.

  But Lindholm must have remembered the l
essons of Nancy. He braced himself, caught Spot’s paw with both hands, and gave it a hearty lift and shake.

  Lindholm turned and led us in through the front door. Spot looked around, sniffed the slate outside, then the polished oak inside, then turned to look at me.

  “What?” I said to him in a low voice. “You want Architectural Digest for your home, find a money man.”

  The entry expanded to a wider area that opened to the living room on the right and a hallway on the left. There were several pictures of military men in a jungle camp that appeared to date from the Viet Nam era. Perhaps one of them was Lindholm.

  There were lots of framed pictures of bicycle racing, several of them closeups of a man in a skin-tight royal blue outfit. The hair was black instead of silver gray, but the resemblance to Lindholm was obvious.

  “What’s the more challenging pursuit?” I asked. “Racing two-wheelers or investing in tech companies?”

  His answer was immediate. “Investing is both harder and less emotionally rewarding, and the competition is more cutthroat. But I’m better at it than I was at racing bicycles.”

  I was holding Spot’s collar. He pulled forward, his nose working hard, still tracking some animal.

  “It’s okay to let him go,” Lindholm said.

  “You’re sure? Nothing delicate that his tail can sweep off table tops?”

  “As long as he doesn’t mind a Bear Market, he’ll be fine.” Lindholm grinned.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  Lindholm looked over to a large leather chair in the corner of the living room. Taking up most of it was a giant orange cat. “That’s Bear Market. When I first got him, I didn’t think I could survive his imperious ways. I realized that dealing with his demands was good survival training for whatever calamity could strike in my day job.”

  Now I understood what Spot had been smelling outside. “You think a dog is safe around Bear Market?”

  “That’s funny. He’s a seventeen pound cat, and you’re worrying about your dog? What does he weigh?”

  “One seventy.”

  “So Bear Market is ten percent of your hound.”

  “A hound who would probably mother a rabbit,” I said. “Anyway, the bigger the dog’s nose, the bigger the target for the claws of a cat.”

  Lindholm made a dismissive wave of his arm through the air. “He’ll be fine.”

  I let Spot go. He trotted over toward Bear Market, slowing as he got close. Bear Market opened his eyes, stared at Spot, and decided, as most cats do with Great Danes, that there was no threat. He shut his eyes and appeared to sleep.

  Spot stood at a distance, his tail wagging in slow motion. He turned and looked at me. When I didn’t react, Spot turned back to the cat. He took one step forward, then stopped. Spot moved his head left and right, sniffing. His head was bigger than the giant cat. But he knew not to go any closer for the time being.

  “Come sit,” Lindholm said from over at his bar. “I know you have questions about Yardley LaMotte. But first, we’ll check out this whiskey you brought.”

  I turned away from Spot and walked over to where Lindholm stood at one end of the living room. Four small lights with hand-blown glass shades hung over a mahogany bar. Lindholm walked behind the bar and set out four shot glasses.

  “You may recall that back in the seventies, the wine world experienced an earthquake of sorts when one of the big, French, blind taste test competitions for wine was won by a California wine.”

  “I wasn’t around at the time, but I remember learning about it later. I think it was a Stag’s Leap cab. The French were astonished, right?”

  “Yes. Astonished, chagrined, and excited all at the same time. As was the rest of the world. Well, a few years ago, the same thing happened with single malt whiskey.”

  “You mean Scotch?”

  Lindholm made a little shake of his head. “People assume, wrongly, that the words ‘single malt’ refer only to Scotch. In fact the name Scotch only means whiskey produced in Scotland. But one can use malted barley to produce whiskey anywhere. If a distillery outside of Scotland makes a malt whiskey and doesn’t blend it into mediocrity, it is a single malt whiskey even though it can’t be called Scotch.”

  I understood where he was going. “Let me guess, a non-Scottish distiller of single malt whiskey won a blind taste test competition.”

  Lindholm’s eyes were wide, almost demonic. “Yes! It was very exciting.” He reached over to his bar, lifted up a bottle, and handed it to me. “A few years ago, the Best In Glass competition for single malt whiskey was won by Balcones Texas Single Malt Whiskey, an outfit in Waco, Texas.” Lindholm pronounced the distiller’s name as ‘Bal Cone Ease.’

  “Really. Were the taste testers from Texas?”

  “No!” Lindholm was grinning. “They were British! In Britain. As with the French winemakers in the seventies, the Scottish distilleries were taken aback, blindsided.”

  He opened the Macallan. “You take your medicine neat?”

  “Is there any other way?”

  Lindholm beamed. He poured a small amount of Macallan into two of the glasses. Then he poured some Balcones into the other two. He pushed two of the shots toward me. “The Macallan is on the left, Balcones on the right. As our palates are fresh, let’s try the Balcones first.”

  I glanced over at Spot. He was still standing in front of Bear Market, his nose stretched forward, sniffing. Maybe he’d moved a few inches closer. But he was being as careful as if he were reaching out toward a King Cobra. The cat still appeared asleep.

  I took a sip of the Balcones. My mouth felt an explosion of taste.

  Lindholm took a larger sip, closed his eyes, leaned his head back a bit, moved it in a slight rotation, swallowed, then audibly breathed out and then back in.

  “What do you think?” he said. His eyes were afire.

  “First, you should know that I’m no connoisseur. I like Scotch - I mean, single malt whiskey - but I don’t have the vocabulary to describe it. This has a very distinct flavor, strong, smoky, warm, fills the sinuses.”

  “Ah,” he said again. “You do have a vocabulary for whiskey. We don’t need to identify notes of oak and baked pears and chocolate to know what we like. Now try the Macallan.”

  We each took a sip.

  “Well?” he said.

  “To my naive sense, I’d say the Macallan is smoother and not as bold as the Balcones.”

  “Perfect. You can come drink whiskey with me anytime.” Lindholm looked at his watch, a large black timepiece that would go with his car. “Now, how can I help you?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Yardley LaMotte hired a helicopter to do some kind of digital scan in the mountains, and he never came back. The chopper was found this morning on a ranch near Markleeville in Alpine County.” I decided not to add that I’d witnessed the chopper pull two men off a mountain.

  “Evelyn told me he’d gone missing,” Lindholm said, “but she didn’t know about the chopper. How very strange.”

  I nodded.

  “What can I tell you about Yardley and his robotics business?”

  “First, what motivated you to invest in Tahoe Robotics?”

  “Same thing that drives all of my investments. I saw potential that wasn’t funded. I first met LaMotte at a VC conference, and his genius was manifest. I went in as an angel investor.”

  “What is a VC conference?”

  “A gathering where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs meet. This one was in San Francisco, and as always there was a strong focus on tech startups. The techies give the VCs their elevator pitches. It’s basically speed dating between people with ideas and people with the money to fund them. Yardley was clearly a force who wouldn’t be stopped. I saw money to be made.”

  “As an angel investor,” I said. “What is that?”

  “Typically, when a techie believes he or she has a hot idea, they need some initial funding before they can even start their business. So they ask family and friends
and maybe former professors. Stanford. Caltech. MIT. And they often get a few thousand to buy office supplies and a dotcom address to put up a starter website. But of course, they soon need much more. So think of angels as the first-round of serious investors, a source of funding that is one step up from family and friends. Angels will put in more money than family, and, like family, an angel will often invest before the business is even officially started. In fact, the business is often dead in the water until an angel investor comes along.”

  “So you were Yardley’s Nancy.”

  “What? Oh, of course! Yes, I’m a good Nancy, saving helpless critters from oblivion.”

  “Why are Nancies called angels?”

  Lindholm grinned. “There’s no set definition for that. But among my colleagues, we use the term angels to describe putting money into an idea that has nothing solid behind it. No product, no test marketing, no sales contracts, no employees, no evidence that the idea can actually be turned into anything. How could we be anything but angels? In contrast, if the company is already going and generating buzz and has a long line of customers waiting to buy, then we have a lot more to go on. When that happens, we approach those companies as traditional venture capitalists. And we will often put millions into them. But as an angel investor, I put my own money into the entrepreneur’s business.”

  “How is that different from a venture capitalist?”

  “Venture capitalists work from a large fund, pooled by many investors. The venture capitalist puts a lot more money into a company, typically several million. The absolute risk in dollars is large, but the risk to the individual venture capitalist is relatively small. It’s the reverse with an angel. The total money invested is small, but all of it is the angel’s personal money.”

  “How much is one of these small investments?”

  “In this case, I put one hundred thousand into Yardley’s Tahoe Robotics.”