Tahoe Hijack

by Todd Borg

  “The other miners in the area hated Sun the way they hated all the Chinese. But they hated old man Mulligan even more. So they let Gan Sun be. Over the years, they always referred to the incident as Mulligan’s War. A war that Gan Sun won by default.”

  “You learned this from Grace.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward when she was murdered? You might have been able to provide useful information.”

  “Because I didn’t know she was murdered. I had left the country on what I later learned was the day after she was killed. I caught the early flight and hadn’t seen any newspaper. Not that I pay much attention to crime news, anyway. I didn’t come back home for three weeks. By then the media had dropped the story. It wasn’t until a few weeks after I returned to the country that I saw my first reference to the murder. I was flipping through some old Chronicles at Club Pacific, the hotel where I used to stay in The City. I was looking at the news from when I was gone, and I saw a reference to the murder victim Grace Sun. The article mentioned that she was an amateur historian who specialized in Chinese miners during the Gold Rush. They printed a picture of her. It was fuzzy, but it looked like the woman I’d met at the library. That was the first time I wondered if the woman I’d met might have been the woman who was murdered. I never did find out for certain. The woman hadn’t told me her last name.”

  “Tell me more about your conversation at the library.”

  Watson breathed deep and sighed. “What difference does it make?”

  “I’m investigating,” I said. “I ask questions. You answer.”

  “I asked the woman about her research. She explained that her Chinese grandfather, two greats removed, came to this country in the early eighteen fifties, two or three years after the start of the gold rush. He worked for several companies in the foothills near what is now Placerville. The woman wanted to learn more about him.”

  “And did she?”

  “I think she mostly learned about the Chinese miners in general and their contribution to the placer mines. Like their fellow countrymen who were later hired to build the railroads, the Chinese miners were mostly limited to doing menial work for daily pay. The mining companies used them to build the flumes, the wooden troughs. They also dug up river sediment and ran it with water through custom sluices. You probably know how it worked. If you adjust the water speed and the angles and such, you can make it so that most of the mud flows out with the water, while the heavier gold dust drops to the bottom.” Watson turned and looked at me. “I suppose you don’t want to know these details. Like the woman at the library, it was my area of interest as well, so I kind of get lost in the subject.”

  “I’m interested,” I said, noticing how expert Watson was about the era. “Go on. Anything that drew Grace’s interest might be useful to me in trying to figure out what happened.”

  “Well,” Watson continued, “people think that the Chinese came to try to get rich mining gold, and quite a few did, but the reality was that China was mostly a source of manual labor for the mining companies. See, before eighteen sixty-nine when they completed the transcontinental railroad, which Chinese laborers built, it was easier to bring workers all the way across the Pacific than to get them across the U.S. from the East Coast. So the mining companies and the railroad companies put the word out that they would hire Chinese. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Even the ship captains who engaged in human transport from China helped by allowing the Chinese to sign a contract to pay for their passage over time once they began working in California. Soon, the Chinese were the largest single ethnic group in the fast-exploding population of California. In fact, the reason why San Francisco ultimately had the largest concentrated population of Chinese outside of China was because of the immigrant labor during the nineteenth century.

  “The Chinese worked hard, didn’t complain, and they kept out of trouble. Of course, the Chinese could rarely work their own claims. Even if they tried, white claim-jumpers would run them off and steal their claims. But some of the Chinese worked abandoned claims on their off-hours. They sifted through the waste tailings for a bit of gold dust here and there. And the Chinese invented some filtering techniques where they used cloth to catch the gold dust, then burned the cloth to process the gold. A kind of smelting. They also developed the rocker, a type of see-saw device that sifted tailings through screens.

  “I think the woman thought that her great, great grandfather had been quite successful at these techniques, because he was eventually able to buy some land from one of the railroad companies.”

  “I thought you could get land for free back then under the Homestead Act,” I said.

  “Yes, that was passed in eighteen sixty-two. And it even allowed foreigners who intended to become U.S. citizens to get land. But around the same time, much of the best land in the area – millions of acres – was given to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads. The purpose was for the companies to sell the land off to finance building the railroads. So this woman’s grandfather bought a little piece from the Union Pacific. She said he wanted to farm it even though it was bad farmland because it was steep foothill land. She learned that he cleared trees and terraced the steep hillsides and was quite successful at growing several crops. But the land also had a stream flowing through it, and she thought that her ancestor may have found gold in the stream.”

  “Grace told you this?”

  “The woman I believe was Grace, yes. I remember because she showed a bit of anger in the library.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be happy about her ancestor creating a farm?”

  “Because the governor of California, a guy named Bigler who was both a racist and a demagogue, saw that political gain could be had by stirring up anti-Chinese hatred. He pushed the idea that Chinese were inferior people and that only whites should be allowed to benefit from California’s riches. He made speeches and so inflamed anti-Chinese hatred that Chinese were lynched several times. Their tents and houses were burned. Many of the atrocities were well documented.”

  “Like with the Native Americans,” I said.

  “Yes and no,” Watson said, shaking his head. “What we did to them was much worse. That was mass extermination. Genocide. But the Chinese were treated very badly, too. White men could murder Chinese and not even be prosecuted.”

  I had a hard time reconciling this man’s intelligent speech with that of a gunrunner. But he was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate.

  “Anyway,” Watson continued, “the woman – Grace – said that this swell of hatred caused her ancestor to lose half his land. Two white brothers – no relation to Mulligan – had a claim that stopped producing. They were angry that the Chinaman had done well. So they took his land. First, they beat him, then killed his best friend. Then they forced him to sell his farm for pennies, threatening him with death if he didn’t sign the bill of sale. The bill of sale gave them legal title to the land. What they didn’t know was that Gan Sun had two parcels. He only signed one of them over to the brothers.

  “A hundred fifty years later, this woman – Grace Sun – was mad as hell at Governor Bigler. She said that Bigler was scum and that his legacy still harmed many people today. She said that her daughter was denied half of whatever rightful inheritance would have passed down to her all because of Bigler’s legalized racism.”

  “It was probably her cousin that she mentioned,” I said.

  “No, she said her daughter.”

  “Did she say what her daughter’s name was?”

  Watson shook his head. “Not that I recall. It was years ago. My memory is like everyone else’s. You can’t trust details years later.”

  “But you’re sure she referred to a daughter.”

  “Yeah. I remember because I had a nasty thought about it, and it stuck in my mind. The woman – Grace – had these enormous hands, like a big blacksmith or something. For some reason, I just couldn’t picture a woman holding a baby with those hands. I know it’s
rude of me to think so. But when she mentioned a daughter, that imagery stuck in my mind.”

  I thanked Watson and left the jail.

  ELEVEN

  When I got home, I made several calls, reporting what I’d learned to Ramos, Santiago, Bains, and, for good measure even though it was out of his jurisdiction, Diamond.

  Then I called Joe Breeze back at San Francisco PD.

  The receptionist said he was out and would be back in five or ten minutes and could he call me back. I remembered what it was like. Breeze would have a hundred other things to do that were more important than talking to me. So I asked to be put on hold.

  I put the phone on speaker, set it down, got out my cell, and called Street.

  “Want to come up the mountain for a celebration dinner?” I asked when she answered.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “I’ve told you that I always wanted to try baking bread, right?”

  “I remember.”

  “I found a recipe online that I thought sounded good, so I bought the ingredients.”

  “You’re kidding,” Street asked.

  “You sound doubtful.”

  “Why would I doubt the cooking skills of a guy who thinks pumpkin pie equals a serving of vegetables, and the whipped cream on top equals a glass of non-fat milk?”

  “Am I wrong about that?” I said.

  “And I remember that attempt at cookies a year ago.” She made a small short sound like the beginning of a laugh. Nothing robust, but it was beautiful music after the black pain of being taken hostage.

  “Hey, I got the flames put out all by myself,” I said. “Never even thought of calling the fire department. Anyway, imagine the delicious smell of baking bread filling my little cabin,” I said.

  “That’s just it,” Street said. “Probably the only way I’ll ever smell that in your cabin is by using my imagination. The alchemy of leavened bread is not simple, Owen,” she said.

  “How hard can it be? You mix up flour, water, yeast, and a few other ingredients, right?”

  There was a pause before she spoke. “What time should I be there?”

  “Seven?”

  “Okay.”

  We hung up. The speaker phone was still silent. So I found the recipe I’d stuck to the fridge and started pulling out my bread ingredients. Whole wheat flour, oats, yeast, molasses, brown sugar, salt. I put all the dry stuff in a big bowl, stirred it around with a spoon. People say bread is tricky, but it seemed pretty easy to me. I stirred too fast at one point and got flour all over the counter and floor, but otherwise I felt like a professional baker. I measured out some room-temperature water, stirred in the molasses and was pouring the result into the bowl when Joe came on the line.

  “Breeze,” he said.

  I picked up the phone. “McKenna calling. I’ve been waiting so long I thought maybe you retired.”

  “You keep calling, I will,” Breeze said. “I heard that the DNA of the guy you told me about matches what we got from under Grace’s nails, and they picked him up.”

  “Yeah. Thomas Watson is currently residing in the Truckee jail, awaiting transfer today to your backyard.”

  “Can’t wait,” Breeze said.

  I kept stirring my bread dough. It was getting very thick.

  “I’ve been thinking about Grace,” Breeze said. “The more we learned about that woman, the more we all wished we’d known her before she was killed. I remember how her neighbors and her colleagues at work all said that she was the sweetest person any of them had ever met.”

  “The picture of Grace,” I said.

  “Right. Like her name was made for her. By the way, Grace’s journal went out this morning, in case you’re wondering.”

  “Appreciate that. I have a lead on who the hijacker might have been. I’m trying to learn what his connection was to Watson. So I need your help again.”

  “I break all the rules for you, put my ass on the line, and you got more favors to ask?”

  “Right. Can you look in the file and see what kind of contact info you have on Melody Sun, the next of kin? I’d like to call her and let her know.”

  I heard Joe sigh on the phone. “Take me a few minutes to go downstairs and dig through the files. Call you back?”

  “Please. Also look and see if there are any other relations mentioned, specifically, a daughter.”

  I hung up. My bread mixture was now unstirrable. I had expected that it would set up, but I didn’t expect cement. Maybe I’d put in too much flour. But I thought I should try kneading it before I added more water. I put the dough on my wooden cutting board.

  The kneading was work the way squeezing rocks was work. And the little bit of dough that hadn’t turned solid stuck to my hands like glue. Maybe I was supposed to grease my hands. I scraped as much gunk off my hands as I could, scrubbed them under water to get them clean, and dried them off. I found olive oil spray and sprayed it on my hands. Tried kneading again. Now the dough didn’t stick to me, but it was still progressing its transformation from sandstone to granite. So I dipped it under the faucet to work some moisture into it.

  The water didn’t soak in. It just made a slick coating on the surface of the ball of dough. The dough slipped out of my hands, rolled across the counter, fell onto the floor and slid to the far wall.

  Spot jumped up, and the phone rang.

  “Spot, no!” I said as I grabbed the phone.

  It was Joe Breeze. “Got a pen?” he said.

  Spot was already at the dough. Spot will eat pretty much anything other than dirt and pine cones. But instead of grabbing the dough off the floor, he sniffed it suspiciously.

  “Ready,” I said to Breeze. “Spot, move away!” I said to Spot.

  Spot didn’t back away, but he shook his head as if he’d gotten pepper in his nose.

  “This is the phone number and address where Melody and Grace lived,” Joe said. He read off a number with a 415 area code. San Francisco. The address was in North Beach. “I also have the number of the neighbor woman who Melody stayed with after the murder. Woman named Veronica Place.”

  “I remember,” I said. “The older lady who still used her stage name from her acting career.”

  Breeze read off a second number with the same area code and an address in North Beach.

  “I hope she’s still around,” I said.

  “I hope she’s still alive, wherever she is,” Breeze said. “She was quite old when the murder happened.”

  “Any other contact info? Email? Work address?”

  “Here’s Grace’s work number. The insurance company.” He read it off. “But there was no mention of a daughter. What’s that about?”

  “Watson said he met Grace, talked to her at the San Francisco Library,” I said. “He said that Grace mentioned her daughter. To my recollection, we never heard any mention of a daughter.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell for me, either. Not like my memory is fresh on this. Hold on, let me look through these papers again.”

  I heard the phone being set down. Folder slapping the desk. Pages flipping. Spot had backed away from the ball of bread dough. He sat down and stared at the dough like it was an alien creature that might move of its own accord.

  “Nope,” Breeze said. “In the summary it says that Grace Sun was single, fifty-one, and her only known relative was cousin Melody Sun, forty-eight.

  “Got it. Thanks.”

  “Keep me in the corral on this?”

  “Will do,” I said.

  We hung up.

  Spot was still staring at the bread dough from the safe distance of a couple of feet. I picked the dough up. It was coated with dust and grit. I ran it under water again and rubbed it. Some of the dirt came off, some got rubbed into the dough. More fiber. Hopefully, the heat of baking would kill any germs.

  I put the dough back on the cutting board and tried kneading it again, working the slippery moisture into it when there was a knock at the door. Spot didn’t bark, which meant it was Str
eet or Diamond or maybe Mallory from the SLTPD.

  “Come in,” I called out.

  Diamond walked in carrying a manila folder. Spot wagged and sniffed him as he passed by. Diamond gave Spot a single head pat like he was ringing the little signal bell at the post office counter. Spot wagged harder. Diamond came over to my kitchen nook and frowned. “You are cooking,” he said with the same tone he would use to remark on me chain-sawing out my front wall for a new window or dragging a hose inside to clean the bathroom.

  “A treat for my sweet,” I said.

  Diamond looked into the bowl where I was kneading. “Lemme guess. Giant roadkill dumpling. What was the original organism? Porcupine?”

  “Bread,” I said. “I’m baking bread.”

  “Awfully dark.”

  “I thought Mexicans were more sophisticated than your basic puffed-air, white, sponge bread. This is whole wheat. Healthy. I even added oatmeal for fiber. And one adds molasses to whole wheat. So yes, it is supposed to be dark.”

  “You added an entire bottle?” he said.

  “You should probably stick with beans and rice and leave the artier foods to me,” I said. “Bread is high-art. It requires the touch of a neurosurgeon, the nose of a sommelier, the ear of a concert pianist.”

  “Baking bread needs a pianist’s ear?”

  “Trust me,” I said.

  Diamond shook his head in disbelief and set a manila folder with some papers in it on the counter. “Heard from Agent Ramos that the Red Blood Patriots might be involved with Thomas Watson, the man the hijacker pointed you toward. Brought you an article about them. Nasty group.”