Blood Stone (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 2)

by Michael Allegretto

  I stood up and Healey put a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off. Dalrymple just sat there, smiling.

  “Temper, temper,” he said. “Is this how you felt when you went up after Meacham?”

  “Are we through here?”

  “Only if you’re stupid,” Dalrymple said. “We can say it like this: You struggled with Meacham and the gun went off. Manslaughter. Simple. In two or three years, you’ll be out on parole. Of course, you might have a tough time finding clients.”

  “Shove it.”

  “Have it your way,” he said. “See you in court.”

  Healey and I went out the door just as O’Roarke was approaching with the search warrant.

  “You can ride with us if you want,” Healey said, his tone as sad as his face.

  “Thanks.”

  “The lieutenant has it in for you personally, doesn’t he?”

  “You noticed.”

  We drove first to my office, and I stood around and watched them do a thorough job of searching for a gun that wasn’t there. Then we drove to my ruined apartment, where they carefully sifted through the mess in each room. They asked me to open the safe.

  Healey showed O’Roarke the envelope with my cash.

  “You should put that in a savings account,” O’Roarke said.

  “Hey, thanks for the tip.”

  14

  WHEN HEALEY AND O’ROARKE left, I phoned Helen Ester. I wanted to know exactly what she’d told Dalrymple. No answer. And there was also no answer at Caroline Lochemont’s house.

  Downstairs, Vaz was busy transcribing Fontaine’s coded journal—with the help of the dead man’s letter to Gloria Archuleta. I told him about my apartment and asked if he’d seen anybody suspicious hanging around or if he’d noticed a tan Ford in the neighborhood.

  “I heard some noises upstairs last night, Jacob, but I thought it was you.” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Forget it,” I said. Then I gave him a full account of my recent adventures at the Frontier Hotel. Vaz was most interested in my description of the shooter.

  “How old was he?” he asked.

  “Hard to tell exactly. Midthirties.”

  “Could he have been older?”

  “I suppose. If he’s been keeping himself in shape. Why?”

  “It is possible, then.”

  He shuffled through the old newspaper clippings, then pulled one out—a faded photograph of a young Chicano male with black, wavy hair.

  “Rueben Archuleta,” Vaz said. “He was twenty-one years old when he disappeared after the Lochemont robbery, which would make him forty-one today.”

  I looked closer at the picture. There was a vague resemblance to my Latino friend, but it was mostly the black hair and dark complexion.

  “I don’t know, Vaz.”

  “But it’s possible, yes?”

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “Jacob, I believe the man who killed Meacham and Fontaine is none other than Rueben Archuleta. Everything fits, if you accept the fact that Archuleta got away without the jewels.”

  “How so?” I asked, but I was beginning to see his point.

  “Let’s say when he got away, he left Soames behind to stash the jewels.”

  “Let’s say.”

  “Then Archuleta would have to hide out, maybe even from his wife and children, as Fontaine’s letter implies, and wait for twenty years while Soames sat in prison. When Soames was released, Archuleta followed. Maybe he approached him, maybe not. In any case, Archuleta soon bumped into the nosy and perhaps greedy private eye Lloyd Fontaine. Fontaine was a nuisance, or more, a threat if he recognized Archuleta. So he had to be killed.”

  “And Meacham?” I asked, already knowing and beginning to agree. Or maybe I just wanted to believe in buried treasure.

  “When Meacham began threatening Soames, he was threatening Archuleta’s chance for the gems. Too bad for Mr. Meacham.”

  “I suppose. But you know, Soames swore to me that Archuleta made off with the satchel.”

  “Then he’s lying.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Idaho Springs is less than an hour’s drive from Denver along Interstate 70. The trip took considerably more time in 1859, when gold was discovered near the present townsite, at the confluence of Chicago Creek and Clear Creek. The rush was on, and folks didn’t mind bouncing over ruts or stubbing their frostbitten toes as long as they had a chance to strike it rich. Even Horace and Augusta Tabor stopped there briefly seeking fortune, but they moved on because by then the pickings were already slim. It was some years later when Tabor hit silver near Leadville, and a few years more before he divorced the stern and stern-faced Augusta in favor of the lovely and fun-loving Baby Doe. Sometime in there he bought her a nice necklace.

  My ears popped from the altitude just before I turned into town. I cruised down Miner Street past some old houses and saloons and storefronts, then turned left on Fifteenth Street and parked at the curb.

  The Gazette was housed in a dull red brick building that had been built when Grover Cleveland was president—the first time. The woman behind the counter may have voted for him. Her hair was as white and crusty as old snow, and the rhinestones in the frames of her glasses sparkled like ice. According to the nameplate, she was Gladys Hicks.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Witherspoon,” I said, handing her my card.

  She sighed, rose with some effort, then shuffled through the room toward the back. That left me alone with a young woman buzzing away on an IBM Selectric and a young guy polishing the lens of his Nikon. Lois and Jimmy.

  Gladys returned and told me to go on back to the editor’s office, which happened to be the only office back there.

  H. R. Witherspoon was middle-aged and wiry, with dark brown hair, short on the sides and curly on top. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up past lean forearms corded with tendon and muscle. He had a number-two pencil wedged behind his ear and small lump of snuff stuffed inside his bottom lip. He sat in the aftermath of a paper blizzard. His desk—in fact, the entire office—was inundated with piles of newsprint, drifts of typed sheets, and a packed base of bound books. He held up my card like a rare square snowflake.

  “Private eye, huh? Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lomax.”

  We shook. He had a grip like a pair of pliers.

  “Call me Jacob,” I said.

  “And you can call me Harry. Sit down, sit down.”

  I did, after moving a stack of folders from the chair to the floor.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, and spit in a metal wastebasket at his side.

  “I’m a friend of Vassily Botvinnov. He phoned—”

  “Sure, the gentleman who called about the photographs.”

  There were green sparks in Witherspoon’s brown eyes and laugh lines etched deep in his face. They gave the impression that he knew more than he’d ever reveal.

  I handed him the contact sheet and the four eight-by-tens. Witherspoon put on a pair of glasses with round lenses and steel frames and examined the photos, front and back. He shook his head and smiled.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said and spit in the basket.

  “Did you take those pictures?” I asked.

  “I sure did.”

  “Do you remember when?”

  “I do now. That call from your friend got me thinking, so I dug around until I found the file.” He slapped his hand down on a fat folder amid the debris on his desk. “The Lochemont jewelry heist.”

  “You’re familiar with the robbery?”

  “Hell, yes. I covered it for the Gazette. I was a reporter back then. The reporter, actually. Also photographer, printer’s devil, and janitor. It was just me and Stan Downey then. He was publisher and editor, and his wife handled the advertising, and his daughter—well, I married her.”

  “Do you remember giving those photos to Lloyd Fontaine?”

  “Sure do,” he said. “It was right after the Lochemont robbery. But say, how did you come by th
em?”

  “Fontaine gave them to me a week and a half ago, along with a journal and some old news clippings. Later that night he was murdered.”

  “You don’t say,” Witherspoon said, his eyes flashing green sparks.

  “He’d been tortured and his office had been ransacked. The next night I got a taste of the same.” I described my first encounter with the Latino—and then my second, at Meacham’s hotel.

  “Zack Meacham murdered. I’ll be damned.”

  Witherspoon opened his Lochemont folder and flipped through the pages. A lot of them were pasted with news clippings.

  “You know,” he said, “I was in the courtroom the day Meacham swore he’d kill Charles Soames when Soames got out of prison. And what do you know? Soames gets out and it’s Meacham who gets knocked off. That’s quite a coincidence, if I believed in them, which I don’t.”

  “Neither do I,” I said.

  “Can I ask you something? How did you get mixed up with Zack Meacham?”

  “I was hired to find him by a friend of Soames.”

  Witherspoon spit in the basket. “Another coincidence?”

  “The only coincidence is that Lloyd Fontaine knew us all.”

  “I see.”

  “Tell me about these photos, Harry.”

  “Well, of course I didn’t know it at the time, but it was about a week before the Lochemont robbery. I was driving back to the paper after covering a house fire and I saw a cop pull over some guy who’d drifted through a stop sign, and pretty soon the two of them are yelling at each other. That’s news in this town, and I had a few frames left in the camera, so I started snapping away. Anyway, the driver turned out to be Ed Teague. Like I say, I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “When Lloyd Fontaine came up here after the robbery. He was an investigator for the insurance company … but you already knew that. Anyhow, he had police photos of all the people involved in the heist—Soames, Buddy Meacham, Ed Teague, Robert Knox, and Rueben Archuleta. He must have questioned half the people in town. Teague had been seen by a few people before the heist, since he’d been staying down the road at the Six-and-Forty Motel. I recognized his mug shot when Fontaine showed it to me. That’s when I realized what I had, and I gave the photos to Fontaine.”

  “You’ve got a good memory, Harry. That was a long time ago.”

  “You’d remember, too, if you’d been up here then,” he said. “It was a regular carnival after Soames wandered out of the trees. Before, during, and after his trial, people came from all over, swarming through these mountains looking for the lost Lochemont jewels. Of course, it wasn’t just the gems that caused the treasure fever, it was the Baby Doe necklace. History, you know. That piece was rumored to have been the last luxury Tabor sprang for before the bottom fell out of the silver market in 1893, and it was the first thing he supposedly sold off to start paying his creditors. But I digress. As I was saying, this town was a circus.” He grinned. “The hardware store sold every pick and shovel they had, and the locals were peddling treasure maps on the street corners.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He winked and said, “Nope. I sold a few myself. The hottest item was a U.S.G.S. quad map with a dashed line showing Soames’s probable route through the mountains and big X’s marking the most likely spots to dig. We still get a few folks up here looking around for those jewels.”

  “After all these years?”

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. He raised his head so that the light glared off his glasses and hid his eyes. “If the robbers hid that satchel of gems in the hills like some people think, there’s a damn good chance it’s still up here.”

  “But you said the area was swarming with treasure hunters.”

  “Hell, you can lose people up there, much less a small black satchel. And if the robbers didn’t bury it, they had about a hundred mine shafts and tunnels to hide it in.”

  “You may be right.”

  “Maybe, hell.” A faint flush had risen to his face. He liked the idea of buried treasure, too. “I’ll tell you something else: If those gems had been found, we’d have heard about it. No treasure hunter can strike it rich and keep quiet. At least none that I’ve bumped into.”

  “I guess,” I said. “Tell me, Harry, do you have the negatives of these photos?”

  “I might still have them. Why?”

  “I’d like to blow up these two frames, the ones I think Fontaine had with him when he died.”

  Witherspoon checked the contact sheet with an eight-power magnifier. “If this wasn’t in such bad shape,” he said, “I could make blowups from it. I’ll look around for the negatives.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate all your help.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “And if you want a guided tour, let me know. I can show you the motel room where Teague bought it and the site of the infamous murder shack. The shack’s long gone, but some people say the house they built there is haunted. How’s that for local color?”

  “Maybe next time.”

  We shook hands and I walked out through the open front room. Lois and Jimmy and Gladys Hicks were still poised, waiting for news to break.

  15

  WHEN I GOT DOWN from the mountains, I stopped by my office to check the answering machine. Just one message: Abner Greenspan telling me to meet him in court tomorrow morning. If Helen Ester were there, too, we could probably get this thing cleared up before it went any further. But there was still no answer at her hotel number. I tried the Lochemont house and Caroline answered.

  “She was here, but she left with my grandfather.” Caroline didn’t like the idea. Maybe I didn’t either.

  “Where did they go?”

  “How should I know?” she snapped. “Out on a date. He thinks …”

  “What.”

  “He thinks he’s in love,” she said and hung up.

  Caroline sounded jealous. And why shouldn’t she? She’d been the only one displaying love for Soames all the years he was in prison, and as soon as he gets out, his old flame shows up and turns his head.

  I locked up and drove to the disaster area I called home. It took me all day to clean up the mess and put everything back where it belonged. The chairs, couch, mattress, and box springs looked like a total loss, so I dragged them all into the middle of the living room, like a huge pile of kindling. That night I slept on the floor on blankets and dreamed that Charles Soames and Helen Ester were dancing naked around a large bonfire in the next room.

  In the morning I called the agent for my renter’s insurance, and then a guy at a rubbish removal company who said he’d have a truck and a couple of boys out there this morning. I told him to get the key from Mr. Botvinnov.

  I went downstairs and explained things to Vaz, then headed out for my day in court.

  Greenspan met me inside the main entrance of the City and County Building.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “So sue me.”

  We walked through the high, wide, echoing, block-long hallway toward our designated courtroom.

  “Have you talked to anybody?” I asked.

  “Dalrymple and the assistant D.A.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Not much, but they seem fairly confident. Also, I get the impression Dalrymple hates your guts.”

  “He does.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The big room was three-quarters full of people waiting to have their lives altered or waiting to make money on the alterations. Presiding over it all was a middle-aged black man, who banged his gavel and kept the flow of people moving before him as efficiently as an auctioneer at a stock show. Greenspan and I sat in a wooden pew and waited our turn. I saw Dalrymple in the front row. He didn’t need to be here, but this was too entertaining for him to miss. Helen Ester was not in sight.

  “The court calls Jacob Lomax,” the bailiff said.

  Greenspan and I stoo
d before the bench. Standing to our right was Bert Krenshaw, district attorney. I’d met him once before, and he seemed like a nice guy.

  Krenshaw spoke. “We charge Jacob Lomax with second-degree murder in the death of Zachary Meacham, and we recommend bail be set at two hundred thousand dollars.” So much for Mr. Nice Guy.

  Krenshaw outlined his evidence against me. It didn’t seem like much to me, but it did to the judge, and he was ready to send me to trial. Greenspan requested, and was granted, a preliminary hearing. The judge set the date on October second, one week from today. Then Greenspan requested bail reduction, explaining to the judge that I had been a trusted member of the community for many years, that I had served with honor on the Denver police department, and that I was now in service as a private detective. He could have left off the PI part. However, the judge did drop the bail to fifty grand, which was still a hell of a lot, on the condition that I swore not to leave his jurisdiction—namely, the state of Colorado—before my hearing. I so swore. Then Greenspan asked me offhandedly if I had fifty thousand dollars in property to put up.

  “What, are you kidding?”

  He gave me a withering look. “Then a friend who does?”

  “You?”

  Greenspan frowned. He didn’t think that was funny.

  “We’ll call a bondsman,” Greenspan told the judge.

  I made the call. Bondsmen generally charge a client 10 percent of the bail, which in this case would mean a cash outlay on my part of five thousand dollars. But this guy owed me a favor and I talked him down to a thousand, which was still a thousand more than I was counting on, since he knew damn well I wasn’t going to run. He said he’d be right over.

  I looked for Greenspan and found him in an anteroom talking and joking with Krenshaw. This was great fun. Krenshaw nodded at me and walked out.

  Greenspan gestured toward the retreating prosecutor. “He says Lieutenant Dalrymple is really pushing him on this.”

  “‘This’ meaning me.”

  “Correct,” he said. “What is it between you two?”