The Sixth Mystery

by Lee Semsen

  Driscoll looked up from his computer. “That’s right, sir. Less than a quarter of it.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “From the acreage. It’s listed in the minutes.”

  “Ah,” said Inch. “Of course.” And after another pause: “How did you know the value of the land the commission didn’t purchase?”

  “I didn’t, sir. It was just a guess.”

  “Can you find out how much Cooper sold it for?”

  “Sure,” Driscoll said. “Give me a second.” According to the clock, the search took several hundred seconds, but Inch didn’t say anything about it. When Driscoll stopped typing and leaned back in his chair, he seemed puzzled and a little disappointed. “Only five hundred thousand, sir. The property wasn’t as valuable as I thought it was.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “Greenbriar Farms LLC,” said Driscoll.

  “Do they still own it?”

  “Easy enough to find out.” Driscoll hit a few keys, and then he did something that Inch had never heard him do before: he swore. “Excuse me, sir. They sold it six months later for twelve million to a developer from Santa Monica.”

  “I wonder if Mr. Cooper heard about that,” Inch said. “Can we find out who owns Greenbriar Farms?”

  Driscoll started typing again, but after half a minute shook his head. “No record in Washington, sir.”

  “Try Oregon,” said Inch.

  “Still nothing,” Driscoll said after another scant minute.

  “Arizona?”

  “Not so many Greenbriars in the southwest,” Driscoll said after another spate of typing. “But there is a Greenbriar Farms. Incorporated ten years ago in Phoenix. Post Office Box 32025 –”

  “Give me a name, Driscoll.”

  “If you insist, sir.” Driscoll raised an eyebrow. “Eugene Alderson.”

  The following article appeared on the front page of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin the next morning.

  Insider Trading

  by R.C. Robertson

  A ten-year-old case of alleged misconduct by former members of the county commission has been brought to light by the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office. Former commissioners Roderick Fowler, Eugene Alderson, and Edward Dubois have been implicated in a scheme to profit from the purchase and sale of land scheduled for commercial development.

  According to Sheriff Abraham Inch, the three men formed a dummy corporation in Phoenix, Arizona, where Mr. Alderson now lives, and through this corporation, Greenbriar Farms, paid Mr. William Cooper $5000 an acre for 100 acres of land located near Highway 12 west of town. Six months later this land was sold to a California developer for 12 million dollars, giving Greenbriar a profit of $11,500,000.

  Sheriff Inch and his deputy, James Driscoll, uncovered this wrongdoing during an investigation into the death of former sheriff Charles Evans, who was killed last week in his home near the State Line Road. Ten years ago, Sheriff Evans was looking into the purchase and sale of Mr. Cooper’s land when he was forced to resign by Messrs. Dubois, Fowler, and Alderson. Apparently Sheriff Evans did not pursue his investigation of the commissioners’ alleged misconduct because he, too, was implicated in the scheme – although Sheriff Inch does not believe that the former sheriff was a part of it. “There may have been others involved,” Inch said, “but Mr. Evans was not one of them. He was blackmailed into keeping quiet.”

  When asked if this decade-old scandal has anything to do with Mr. Evans’s murder, Sheriff Inch was noncommittal: “Mr. Driscoll and I have been proceeding on the assumption that the two are linked, but so far we have not found any evidence to support this theory. We are also considering the possibility that the suicide of William Cooper, which occurred shortly after the resale of his land, is connected with the alleged actions of the former county commissioners.”

  Because state law sets the statute of limitations for misconduct by elected officials at ten years, Mr. Alderson and Mr. Fowler will not be prosecuted for their alleged abuse of the public trust. Mr. Dubois, who died three years ago, is beyond the reach of the law.

  Mr. Fowler and Mr. Alderson were reached at their homes yesterday evening but refused to comment on the allegations. William Cooper, Jr. told the Union-Bulletin that he is contemplating legal action against the former commissioners to recover the money that, he believes, rightfully should have been paid to his father.

  Driscoll put down the paper and said to Inch, “Nice to see my name in print again. It’s been several months.”

  “It was a team effort,” said Inch. “You deserved to get credit for it.”

  “Thank you, sir. Now what do we do next?”

  “Go out and buy two – no; make it three – copies of today’s paper and send one to Fowler, one to Alderson, and one to that former county attorney in Spokane.”

  “The whole paper, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Inch. “Give them some context. Let them see how important it is, that it’s front-page news.”

  “It’s on the Union-Bulletin web site, sir. I can email it to them and they’ll get it faster.”

  “Do both.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Driscoll. “And then what?”

  “Then we’ll try to figure out if one of them murdered Charles Evans.”

  In spite of what he’d told Robbie Robertson the previous evening, Inch was no longer sure that the death of Charles Evans and the commissioners’ “misconduct” – Inch smiled humorlessly at the word, which seemed better suited to a playground shoving match than backroom political corruption – that the two were related. When he’d wakened this morning, he’d felt almost certain that there was no connection at all. He’d spent the next half-hour – dressing, making breakfast – trying to figure out where that feeling had come from. Then he’d read the paper and realized that it was the ten-year limit on crimes committed by public servants that Robbie had mentioned during yesterday’s interview.

  So the timing was wrong. If Charles Evans had told Fowler and Alderson that he’d decided to announce to the world that they had cheated William Cooper out of eleven and a half million dollars, and that he planned to make the announcement before July 15 so they could be charged and prosecuted, they would have had a compelling reason for killing him. After July 15 – after the statute of limitations had run out – the motive would have been much weaker. And who was the man Evans had confronted in the casino? That had occurred well before July 15, but it hadn’t been Fowler, not if Dennis Mack’s description was accurate, and it definitely hadn’t been Alderson….

  Inch was saved from further pointless ruminating by the ringing of the telephone. It was Roderick Fowler.

  “This is libelous, Inch!” Fowler yelled as soon as Inch had the phone to his ear.

  “Are you saying it isn’t true, Mr. Fowler?”

  “Of course it isn’t true!”

  “Oh, dear,” Inch said. “Do you think Mr. Robertson should have tossed in a few more ‘allegeds’?”

  “And you sent it to my business email! My secretary read it!”

  Inch covered the telephone with his hand. “He says you sent it to his business email and his secretary read it.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Tell him to publish his personal email address and I’ll send a copy to his home.”

  Inch repeated Driscoll’s statement into the phone and added that they’d already put a copy of the paper in the U.S. Mail so maybe it wouldn’t be necessary after all.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this, Inch!”

  Now there’s an original threat, Inch thought. He said to Driscoll, this time without covering the phone, “He says we haven’t heard the last of this.”

  Driscoll let out a snort. “Maybe you ought to tell him the one about the sticks and stones.”

  Inch said into the phone, “My deputy says –”

  “I heard him,” Fowler said. “I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “Then you’d better hang up,” Inch said. Which Fowler did, although it sounded to Inch a
s if he’d thrown the telephone through a window.

  The next call, however, wasn’t from Fowler’s attorney but from another member of the legal profession. “Sheriff Inch.” The voice was deep – artificially so, Inch thought, like a radio announcer crowding the microphone. “This is Gerald Tolliver. You sent me a copy of an article from your local newspaper.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Inch. “I thought you’d be interested.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Mr. Fowler told me on Saturday that you had advised him and the other commissioners to hold their meetings in executive session.”

  “Yes, I did that,” Tolliver said after a moment.

  “So,” Inch went on, “I thought you might like to know what they did during those meetings. And what they didn’t do.”

  “As a matter of simple human curiosity, perhaps. As a matter of professional concern, not after ten years.”

  “I also thought you might be willing to tell me why you gave them that advice.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, sheriff. Attorney-client privilege applies in the public as well as the private sector, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Inch. “But there are exceptions. If the commissioners were using those meetings as a cover for fraudulent activities –”

  “The exception doesn’t apply if the attorney is unaware that fraud has been or will be committed, sheriff.”

  Inch allowed a brief silence before answering. “Of course, Mr. Tolliver. I hadn’t considered that possibility.”

  Driscoll hadn’t been able to locate an email address for Eugene Alderson, and Inch hadn’t expected to hear from him until later in the week when the newspaper reached them through the postal service. Apparently, however, Roderick Fowler had forwarded them a copy, or so Inch inferred during his conversation with Mrs. Alderson. Although the call went on for several minutes, she said very little, but merely repeated the same statements over and over: that her husband could not have been involved in anything of a criminal nature; that she herself knew nothing about it; that her husband had given 30 years of his life to Walla Walla County; and that if Inch and the newspaper didn’t issue a retraction, she and her husband would take legal action. Inch thanked her for her comments.

  The final telephone call that morning came from Jody Graham. She remembered that Charlie Evans had been deeply troubled by William Cooper’s suicide, and when she read about how Cooper had been cheated by the commission, she realized that the money the commissioners had used to blackmail Charlie belonged to the Cooper family. She wanted to give it back to them – what was left of it – and she also wanted to ask the Union-Bulletin to run a story explaining what Charlie had done with the money, which, she hoped, would dispel any remaining doubts about his innocence. Inch told her that he would be glad to talk to Mr. Robertson and encourage him to write the story and see that it was published.

  Then she asked if one of the commissioners had killed Charlie. Inch replied that he strongly doubted that they had. Then who did? she asked. Inch said that he was sorry, but he still had no idea.

  During the next two days Inch made no progress toward finding the murderer of Charles Evans. That meant – or he felt as if it meant – that he was moving backward, and in one respect he was moving backward: the trail was growing colder. A week ago Evans had been dead slightly less than two days, and Inch had been thinking about the impending deadline, the rule that held that if a crime isn’t solved within 48 hours it probably wouldn’t be solved at all. At the time he was making progress, or so he thought, and he hadn’t been worried about it. Since then he’d made no progress at all.

  Years ago he’d attended a workshop in which a professor from Washington State University had plotted the likelihood of finding the perpetrator of a crime as a function of the time that had passed since the crime was committed. That probability, the professor contended, decreased in a steeply declining curve that quickly – after 72 hours or thereabouts – dropped to around ten per cent and then leveled off, extending into the future in a line that appeared straight but wasn’t, tending closer to zero but never quite reaching it. He’d also presented the probability as a mathematical formula, with “S” (the likelihood of solving the crime) equal to the number 1 divided by the square of the number of days that had elapsed. Or maybe it was the cube of the number of days. Not that it mattered in any practical sense; the point was that after a week and a half, Inch’s chances of identifying Charles Evans’s murderer weren’t much better than his chances of winning the lottery. That was something Inch, and everyone else at the workshop, could have figured out for themselves without a two-hour slide presentation.

  Inch wondered about the impulse that made some people, academics in particular, want to reduce everything to mathematics. He was willing to grant that the physical universe worked that way, but he was far from believing that the psychological universe was equally susceptible to such treatment. Maybe if you took thousands of people, or thousands of crimes, and averaged them. If that was how Professor X had arrived at his formula, fine; Inch could accept that. But the formula said nothing about one crime among the thousands, except that Inch would have to do better than the average to catch Evans’s killer. Much better.

  It was Thursday, two days after the article indicting the former commissioners had been published in the Union-Bulletin, and Inch was at a loss for what to do, when Gregory Luke telephoned. Luke apologized for interrupting; Inch replied that on the contrary, Luke was doing him a favor; and Luke, after several seconds’ silence, said that he didn’t fully understand why, but he assumed that Inch meant to convey that he wasn’t too busy to continue the conversation.

  “Allow me to congratulate you on your success in exposing the crimes of Charles Evans’s former supervisors,” said Luke.

  “I beat the average on that one, at least,” said Inch.

  “You’re disappointed?” said Luke. “Ah. Because you’ve solved only one of the three mysteries we spoke about last Friday.”

  “I’m not disappointed as much as frustrated. Today I’m no closer to finding Charles Evans’s murderer than I was a week ago.”

  “Or finding the person responsible for the death of Emily Reed. I don’t say that merely to remind you of it, but to suggest that I may have been mistaken when I said that there were only three mysteries connected with Mr. Evans. The two deaths, his and Emily’s; the reason why Mr. Evans resigned; and the business that your county commissioners kept secret all these years: that makes four. Of those four questions, you have answered two, which is better than one in three. I should have congratulated you twice.”

  “And I should point out that of those four, those were the two that were the least important. Neither involved the loss of a life.”

  “You’re forgetting William Cooper, Mr. Inch, unless you’ve changed your mind and decided that his suicide cannot be attributed to the distress he suffered at the hands of the commissioners.”

  “I haven’t forgotten him,” said Inch. “Yesterday I spoke with his son. William Cooper, Senior was never a happy man, but he became severely depressed after he was defrauded by the commission.”

  “Then you’ve answered a fifth question, Mr. Inch, one that involved the loss of a life. That puts you at sixty per cent, better than one-half.”

  “Yes,” said Inch, “but that still leaves two unexplained deaths, including the one that I began with, which is the one that led to all the other questions.”

  Luke didn’t answer for several seconds. “I can’t help you with that. But I may be able to assist you in solving a sixth mystery, one that we haven’t mentioned. Perhaps the solution will bring you closer to answering the questions that remain. Do you recall the story that Mr. Mack told us on Friday?”

  “Of course,” said Inch. “It made quite an impression on me, although I can’t say exactly why.”

  “I would say that Mr. Mack made an impression because he has the gift for storytelling,” said Luke. “His
story made quite an impression on one of our money counters, too. She spent a few days struggling with what to do about it, and she came to see me this morning.” Gregory paused. Inch knew that he was doing it for effect, and it worked; Inch got his first surprise of the day. “After talking to Mr. Mack, she realized that she had seen the same incident he had witnessed, and that she knew the man whom Mr. Evans had argued with. He’s a neighbor of hers.”

  An hour later, the three of them – Inch, Luke, and Carla Dean – were sitting in Luke’s office. Luke had introduced her as a cousin on his mother’s side – a cousin once removed, Inch assumed, since she was much younger than he was. Inch tried to remember whether he’d seen her at last Friday’s gathering, but he wasn’t sure, and he finally asked. She said no; she hadn’t been present, but she’d heard what Mr. Mack had said from one of the other money counters, and then she’d sought him out and talked to him. They had decided that they’d witnessed the same incident, only from different points of view.

  “Like Mr. Mack, I was about to start my shift, and I was standing outside the door to the counting room getting out my keys when I heard them arguing, Mr. Evans and Mr. Crain.”

  “Did you hear what they were saying?” said Inch.

  “No,” she said. “I was too far away. I just heard their voices and I turned to look.”

  “If you couldn’t tell what they were saying, how did you know they were arguing?”

  “Mr. Mack said –” She stopped and her face flushed and she turned to Gregory Luke.

  “Don’t worry, Carla,” said Luke. “You won’t get in trouble.”

  Inch said, “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. But I need to make sure that Mr. Crain is the man we want. That he’s the man whom Mr. Evans grabbed by the throat.”