A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  FIFTEEN

  The homicide detective from Kansas had the misfortune of finding only Grant home when he rang the bell at Lee’s Evergreen house. His was a polite and, he assured Grant, informal inquiry regarding property Mr. Lee Garrison had purchased on eBay from a Mr. Gordon E. (as in Elmore) Bunn, recently of Salina, specifically a mining claim in the Argentine Pass area, the “Blue Lark.” The detective, who introduced himself only by his last name, Friendly, was a thick-shouldered, russet-haired man with squarish, wire-rimmed spectacles and an awkward handshake in which his fingers never got set right with Grant’s. Mr. Bunn had died, he told Grant, the circumstances murky enough to warrant an investigation into it, past associates, possible motives, retracing the steps of his previous days, and so forth, resulting in the discovery of the eBay transaction and a long trip to Evergreen to ask the buyer a couple of questions on the admittedly remote chance that Lee might tell the detective something that would, quote, break the case wide open.

  “How often does that happen, though, really?” Grant wondered pointedly.

  Friendly wouldn’t, or couldn’t, commit to an answer. “You could have called ahead,” Grant said.

  “Uh-huh,” said the cop.

  “Are you staying in town? I could tell my brother when he gets home; you could come back.”

  Lee was at his seafaring boat club meeting, way up in north bumfuck Broomfield, but Grant was not inclined to disclose this to the cop.

  Friendly murmured something about his department not having the budget for overnights, and Grant got the impression that the detective had, perhaps, come to Colorado chasing a wild hunch without his Captain’s approval.

  Grant invited him in. They sat in the living room, on the lawn chairs, which were not nearly as comfortable as they looked, and the chairs looked pretty disagreeable. Friendly declined the offer of a beverage and asked a series of random questions that Grant at first thought were calculated, in a Columbo-kind-of-way, but then realized were probably the detective’s halfhearted attempt to buy time in the hope that Lee might come home while he waited:

  “Is your brother in the habit of making large purchases on the Internet? Are the regular chairs out for upholstering? Why mining? No wife or children? Gold or silver? Did he need permits? How long does it take to drive there? How long would it take to commute to Denver in rush hour? Why are there so many ovoid septic tanks planted out in the front yard? Do you think your Rockies will ever get any decent pitchers? Is that Mount Evans? How many years did you do in Cañon City?”

  That Friendly had made Grant for an ex-con was A) not surprising, and B) a hoary old chestnut that Grant irritably didn’t want to let pass; was it, Grant thought acidly, the chalky pallor he’d acquired while inside the Big House and couldn’t seem to shake no matter how much time he spent in the high-country sun, or (more likely) the T-shirt he was wearing, which bore the headline “CTCF RUGBY TEAM” and could only have been obtained in the small visitors’ “gift” shop on-site?

  “No sir, I can tell you were in the system by the way you look at me,” Friendly explained, as if he could read minds. “Relaxed, I mean. Someone untroubled in the presence of law enforcement. Your normal civilian will fidget like Raskolnikov because everybody’s got some damn thing chafing their ass. Except your convict, who’s doing hard time for it, you see.”

  “How did this Gordon Bunn die, exactly?” Grant asked, changing the subject and letting the showy state school Dostoevsky footnote pass.

  “Hanged,” Friendly said. “A neighbor smelled him after he ripened. Bosniak,” Friendly elaborated. “She grew up there; she was there during the war, saw a lot of dead people, I imagine. All that ethnic cleansing in the ’90s. Ahmici. That’s in Herzegovina, I am told.”

  A short discussion of Yugoslavian dissolution and the Balkan War ensued, short because neither man could remember much about it. Grant again offered the detective a beverage, which the cop declined.

  Time passed.

  Friendly asked if Grant knew where his brother had gone, and Grant, with an ex-con’s reflexive circumspection, told Friendly that he didn’t, no. It felt weird, lying. Especially since there was no tactical advantage to it; Grant knew that Lee would be as surprised by the news of the old miner’s demise as anyone. He could answer any questions about the purchase of the land that Friendly might have, but he’d have nothing to add or offer. Maybe, Grant thought, I’m saving everybody time, which is good, right? Friendly heaved himself up out of the folding chair. He guessed that he should be getting back. Could Grant have Lee call him? Friendly handed Grant a card, embossed with a gold Salina PD badge.

  “Is your brother happy with his mine?”

  “Delirious.”

  Friendly frowned, sniffed for sarcasm, but didn’t detect any. “I don’t suppose he’s found any gold yet? Or silver?”

  “No.” Grant bristled.

  “Be ticked off some if he were to discover the mine was played out, you think?”

  “Like ticked off enough to go to Salina and hang the guy who sold him the claim?”

  They just stared at each other, expressionless. That was, yes, the target Friendly was aiming for but, exposed, he blushed slightly over the clumsiness of his question. He looked glad to be solo, no partner, so that no one would report back to his Captain about it.

  “I think you’d be mischaracterizing my brother’s passion for mining, if you thought it was to get rich or anything.”

  “What’d you do,” Friendly asked, “that got you into the correctional system? I’m just curious. I mean, I could look it up.”

  “You could,” Grant agreed, and left it at that.

  He walked Detective Friendly to the front door and opened it. The smell of dust and grass rolled in thick on a dry wind. A bright, colorless pinprick of sun beat down on Friendly’s unfortunate-bronze rental sedan and made the metal tick.

  “Honestly? I don’t think my brother ever met the man who sold him the mine,” Grant said. “And I’m pretty sure he never even knew the man’s name.”

  Friendly frowned again, thoughtful, as Grant explained what Lee had told him of the transaction: eBay, email, the firewall of a username, a wire transfer to a numbered bank account in Delaware, and the quitclaim deed transfer in Lee’s name that a solicitor delivered and notarized.

  “The guy didn’t want my brother to know his real name,” Grant said. “That’s pretty obvious.”

  “He was scared,” Friendly agreed.

  “What? Why?”

  “Your brother ever been to Pakistan? We found a postcard among the deceased’s recent mail. Unsigned,” he added.

  “Pakistan?”

  “Islamabad. Cryptic. Arabic writing. A Sufi saying is what we figured out finally. ‘Evening becomes morning and night becomes dawn.’ I think it’s to throw us off scent, you know, like, terrorism and so forth.”

  “Scared of what?” Grant still wanted to know.

  “Dying, no doubt. But . . . ”

  Friendly cocked his head and looked at Grant the way police officers and prison guards had been looking at him for twenty-odd months, a cheerfulness born of puissance. “Please tell your brother to call me,” Friendly advised Grant. “I doubt seriously he killed anybody, but whatever killed Gordon Elmore Bunn could be catching.”

  The Detective backed his rental out of the driveway like a grandmother, in fits and starts, and didn’t waste any gas crawling up the gentle incline, through the tree-starved neighborhood, toward Highway 74. Looking back on it later, Grant would wonder why he threw the cop’s calling card away. There was no explaining it; he just went to the kitchen and took a pair of scissors from the utility drawer and cut the card into tiny triangle clips that dropped, fluttering into the wastebasket under the sink like midwinter snow.

  Looking back on it, Grant would try to convince himself that he didn’t want Lee to get superstitious about the mine or have his childlike joy in it compromised by the knowledge that its previous owner had met an unfortunate end. Gr
ant would remember driving away in his Camaro, but not where he went. It might have been to the library to look at past issues of the Kansas City Star online and read the news stories about the man found hanged. He might have driven to town again and parked across the street from Lorraine’s realty office and watched the storefront window, hating himself for waiting for her to appear.

  Looking back on it later, Grant would sometimes admit to a deeper, slightly more malevolent motive for never telling Lee about the visit from Detective Friendly or the curious hanging death of an old miner in Salina, Kansas. He had, when it came to his older brother, always been riven with contradictions: love, envy, loyalty, gratitude, jealousy, resentment, rivalry, and confusion.

  Since they were little kids, some part of Grant had always wanted to destroy his brother because the alternative, saving him, would be so much harder.

  SIXTEEN

  “Nor silver nor gold hath obtained my redemption,

  The guilt on my conscience too heavy had grown;

  The blood of the cross is my only foundation,

  The death of my Savior now maketh me whole.”

  A large man in suspenders, whose body did not match his high, fragile, quavering voice, stood in the Evergreen Methodist Church choir box channeling his inner Todd Rundgren to a doleful hymn while, on the other end of the church, Lee balanced on a ladder and secured the cross he made into the wall with big, countersunk lag bolts. The ratchet on his socket wrench kept triple time with the chorus:“I am redeemed, but not with silver,

  I am bought, but not with gold;

  Bought with a price, the blood of Jesus,

  Precious price of love untold.”

  The organ played a different song, with a kind of mid-fifties Wurlitzer feel, but in the same key, with the same notes, and the pastor—tall, shaved head, mournful features—watched, worried, among other things, that Lee would fall from the ladder and present a liability claim to a congregation that was already suffering the fiscal fealties of the previous pastor, who had gone to Ibiza with most of their annual fund and a parish elder’s trophy wife. And then there were the aesthetic issues of a man who never met a Danish furniture set he didn’t covet.

  “I don’t mean to backseat drive, but are we gonna have to see those lag bolts, Lee?”

  Lee shook his head and took a round wooden plug from his pocket to show the pastor that it fit perfectly into one of the lag bolt holes.

  “Beautiful. Truly.”

  “Thanks,” Lee said.

  “Jesus was a carpenter,” the pastor felt inspired, in the moment, to impart.

  “So was Harrison Ford,” Rayna added, from behind him, unsolicited.

  She came down the aisle, and both the pastor and Lee turned their heads to look at her as she stopped at the foot of the altar.

  “That just popped out,” she explained.

  “Rayna Lincoln,” Lee introduced her. “John Leonard. John’s the minister—”

  “Pastor. Don’t hold it against me, Rayna.”

  “I can’t.” Then she glowered up at Lee and pointed out that, after a man has had an enjoyable evening with a woman, it’s traditional, not to mention just plain good manners, for said man to call said woman on the telephone and let her know he had a good time and, if he did, ask her if she’d like to go out again. Isn’t it?

  She looked to Pastor John Leonard for support. To Lee’s chagrin and dismay, the pastor seemed happy to stay and participate in the discussion. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  “Unless he didn’t,” Rayna continued pointedly. “Enjoy the evening, I mean.”

  The pastor said that he was under the impression Lee had enjoyed it, even though, Lee thought, distractedly, John didn’t know anything about it. They barely knew each other, and Lee seldom went to church. Nevertheless, Pastor Leonard flat out asked Lee why he hadn’t called Rayna, and Lee nearly fell off the ladder as he came down.

  “I was going to.”

  “When?”

  “You made it seem like no big deal.”

  “Because I wouldn’t sleep with you on the first date?”

  Lee reddened. The pastor literally leaned into this conversation, his hands folded in front of him, his face rent by a disturbing grin.

  “I had a good time,” Lee said, again. “I did. I was going to call.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, not okay, I should have called.”

  “Okay.”

  Rayna looked away from him purposefully. The pastor pursed his lips, disappointed. Lee started breaking the collapsible ladder down to its portable size, and the organist accidentally bleated a long, low D-chord as she and the singer tried to find common ground between Todd and Methodist hymnody.

  Moments later Rayna and Lee were outside, and the pastor was still inside, and Rayna carried some of the power tools for Lee as he balanced the ladder on his shoulder and carted his equipment back to the Jeep.

  “You came all the way down here to ask me why I hadn’t called you?”

  “Well, I also had a dentist appointment in Arvada,” Rayna admitted.

  Lee hoisted the ladder up onto the roof rack of the Jeep and used bungee cords to secure it there.

  “When you have to travel down from the mountains without a car,” Rayna explained, “you tend to group your errands together, so you don’t spend your life on a bus.”

  Lee didn’t hear half of this because he was talking over her, recounting how she’d told him that she didn’t want to sleep with him, and that he took that to mean she wasn’t much interested in him, the kiss notwithstanding, and so, not to belabor it, he was led to understand and accept that Rayna “just wanted to be friends.”

  “Something wrong with being friends?”

  “No.”

  “You can still call a friend. You can still go out with a friend and have fun.”

  “You’re right. You’re right.”

  “I mean, ’cause you make it sound like—”

  “Nothing wrong with it. I’m sorry I—”

  “Good. Because I’m trying to change, Lee. I need to change, do you understand that?”

  “The new you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee nodded and looked down the long, winding driveway to the parking lot of the golf course restaurant, Keys on the Green, and beyond its tiered redwood terraces, the dark, glassy surface of Evergreen Lake. Once he and Grant had raced skateboards down that driveway through the parking lot and wiped out into the lake where the access road ran alongside it. The water was shallow there. Lee had suffered his wickedest longboard road rash on that very asphalt, a raw wound that ran from his knee to his hip and eventually got infected because the lake water was so polluted. Now, supposedly, the lake was cleaner. There were fish in it. Pale, blind, scaly talapia that came gushing out of Fish & Wildlife tanker hoses every spring like spawn of the dead.

  “The old you would have slept with me?” Lee wondered.

  “Oh, Lee” was all Rayna said.

  “Just asking. The new me wants to know.”

  Rayna thought about it, then said, “I’m sorry.”

  “About?”

  “It’s all so . . . ” Rayna let that thought drop and picked up a new one: “You know, this therapist I used to go to says I have a Sleeping Beauty complex.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Well, it’s an epidemic in women of a certain age, I’ll tell you that.”

  The joke didn’t land. Lee frowned.

  “Never mind,” Rayna added. She sighed. She cocked her hip and looked out in the distance to where Lee was staring. The empty parking lot, the dark water of the lake, the whitish crumbling concrete top of the dam, the thick, black forest of pine beyond the rolling fairways. Clouds roiled overhead, pooling the sunlight in restless, southward-bound blooming. Rayna sighed again, shook her head, and started to walk away.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She stopped, and turned back to him, sad.
r />   “You need a ride?”

  “Your brother’s been calling me,” she said.

  “Grant?”

  “Just about every day, yeah.”

  “Grant?”

  “No,” she said, “your other brother.”

  Then they stared at each other, quiet, for a long time, and in that comfortable silence that settled between them, Rayna smiled.

  The sun was dropping behind Mount Evans when they reached the house. The sky was aflame, leaving the eastern slope all gloaming and languid in blue-darkness. After he stowed his tools and ladder, Lee helped Rayna climb onto one of the capsized septic tanks half-buried in the yard.

  “Grab hold of the . . . there you go. Got it?”

  Rayna pulled herself to a sitting position, then stood up, her arms out for balance, and watched as Lee hauled himself up onto the adjacent septic summit. They stayed there, not talking, separate but connected, bathed in dusty flaxen sunlight that dissolved in a growing gloom, gazing out over Lee’s curious field of bumps. Finally:

  “You buried all these?”

  “When I first got my backhoe. City had just put in sewer service and most everybody in this development was still on septic, and I was parking this unsightly yellow creature at my house. There was a palpable grumbling about it. I thought offering to facilitate their upgrade to city sanitation by digging out the tanks might persuade the neighborhood there could be an upside to heavy equipment in the drive.”

  “Did it?”

  “Sort of,” Lee hedged. “And then not,” he admitted. “I hadn’t told them I was going to repurpose their tanks as installation art. The neighbors tried to get the City to intervene via public nuisance laws, but it turned out Hiwan Meadows, this whole development, had never been legally incorporated into Evergreen City proper. And the County will let you do just about anything.”