by Joseph Flynn
He continued in a quiet monotone. “I took my gun from Ronnie and he told me who I’d been beating. I called an ambulance and they took that poor young boy away. I’ve got amends to make, for DeWayne and a lot of other people.”
Looking Clay in the eye, Walt said, “My boy’s so much better than I am. You did a fine thing giving both him and me a second chance. I thank you for that, Clay Steadman. And you watch, Ronnie’s going to make both of us look good. He’ll catch that bomber and whoever killed that rich prick, Hale Tibbot.”
Walt smiled and added, “It’s still all right to cuss out rich, white assholes, isn’t it?”
Clay said, “Ought to be required.”
After the video ended, Ron led the others back to the mayor’s living room. They seated themselves. Ron provided drinks from Clay Steadman’s wet bar. Everybody went with something soft, Tall Wolf eschewing soda for a sparkling water. Ron said, “The preparations are underway for the sendoff that my father requested.”
“In L.A.?” Keely asked. “Full-cop funeral?”
Ron said, “That’s what I had thought, too, but he wants the service to be up here. The department has been notified, and any cop who wants to come will be welcome, but he wants things to be low-key. Just three speakers: Esther Gadwell, Mayor Steadman and me.”
“Clay Steadman isn’t going to draw a crowd?” Benjamin asked.
“His publicist has put out the word. Send donations if you’d like but respect the privacy of the family and the deceased. Sergeant Stanley will see to it that casual gawkers are kept at a distance. Same goes for the media.”
Keely took Ron’s hand. “You know the TV creeps will dig up the story about your wrongful death suit and all the crap that went on back then.”
“Can’t be helped,” Ron said, “but it can be ignored.”
Tall Wolf said, “You’ve learned something about your father, haven’t you? Something that has made all this easier for you.”
“I have. He drew up a new will while he was up here. Mayor Steadman was a witness to it. He left me ten percent of his movie money. He did the same for Esther Gadwell. He left the rest to the UNCF.”
Keely asked, “Is that something to do with the United Nations? Unicef or something?”
Ron said, “It’s the United Negro College Fund.”
The chief’s eyes filled and he laughed at the same time.
“Clay said Dad wanted to open the eyes of as many rednecks as he could, the way Esther Gadwell had opened his. He figured the best way to do that was through education. Let people see what can be accomplished when other people are given the opportunity to get ahead.”
Keely kissed Ron’s cheek.
Benjamin said, “Smart man.”
Tall Wolf intuitively knew there was more “There’s still something else, isn’t there?”
Ron nodded. “There was a doctor on hand at the café where Dad collapsed. His name is Bevin Trent. He made a point of talking to me. Said he and all the other doctors and emergency personnel had done everything they could to save my father. I’m sure they did, but the thing that comforted me the most was when Doctor Trent told me the last thing Dad said. He said, ‘Nora.’ My mother’s name. Doctor Trent told me Dad said Mom’s name with a sense of surprise, the way you would if you saw someone you never expected to see again.”
“I can’t think of anything more comforting than that,” Keely said.
The conversation turned to police work.
Ron said, “Veronika Novak got me thinking. She said Glynnis Crowther knew all about Hale Tibbot’s love life. Told me Glynnis knew every time a bedspring squeaked in Tibbot’s house. That made me wonder if maybe Glynnis had caused a spring or two to creak herself.”
Tall Wolf nodded, the parts of the puzzle he’d already seen starting to fit together. “She had something going with a guy from Pinnacle Security?”
“Right,” Ron said. “What’s the next part?”
Keely needed only a second before she said, “She was getting some earlier the same day Tibbot was killed?”
Benjamin took it the next step. “The security guy jiggered the alarm system so the killer didn’t set it off.”
“Right and right.” Ron looked back to Tall Wolf.
He said, “The lawn sign for Pinnacle Security was missing. The inside man took it when he left. That was the sign to the killer he was good to go.”
Ron smiled. “We’ve got some pretty smart cops in this room.”
Keely asked, “How’d you get Glynnis to confess.”
“I asked myself, who would she most likely respond to? Not anyone like the four of us. We’d already gone at her twice and she was still holding back. But my guess was she’d respond to someone higher up the social ladder. Somebody even higher than Tibbot had been.”
“Mayor Steadman,” Benjamin said.
“Exactly.”
Keely added, “It didn’t hurt that you found a guy who could play both the good cop and the bad cop.”
“That was just what the mayor did,” Ron said. “He warned her what would happen to her when her secret, whatever it was, came out. She’d be convicted as a participant in the murder of her employer. She’d go to prison, maybe for the rest of her life. But if she cooperated, she’d be lauded for helping to bring a killer to justice, and the mayor would give her a referral to any number of his show biz friends. She’d get a new job that would make her old one look like charity work.”
Tall Wolf asked, “Did the mayor give his soliloquy in character?”
Ron grinned and said, “Oh, yeah. He was scaring me. Glynnis never stood a chance. We got the name of the inside man at Pinnacle. He was smart enough to quit his job, but Sergeant Stanley has started the search for him. If we need help…” Ron looked at Benjamin. “We’ll call our friends at the FBI.”
Benjamin nodded. Help would be forthcoming.
Keely asked, “Where’s the mayor now?”
Ron told her, “He said his performance took a little out of him. He retired for the night.”
The last thing Ron had ever taken Clay Steadman for was a father figure. He’d had one of those in Walt, and was less than impressed. Times were, Ron consoled himself about not having a family of his own by telling himself he might fail his offspring as badly as he felt Walt had failed him. Seeing his father beat DeWayne was a nightmare that still made the occasional appearance.
So why the hell had learning the old man had died hit him so hard?
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so jarring if he’d still had his mother.
Now, Christ, he was more than fifty years old and he felt like he’d been orphaned. Which he had, but so damn what? It wasn’t like he’d cared about seeing his father all that much when he was alive. He’d told him only yesterday he wouldn’t want him living in his house.
Clay was the one who sorted it out. “You’re going to feel like hell for a while because you and Walt were just starting to come to grips with each other. It might never have been pretty, but maybe it could have started to heal old hurts.”
Ron told him, “You starting to get sentimental?”
Clay had given him the same smile he used when shooting movie villains.
“Not hardly, but I do have some video I think you should see.”
They went to Clay’s screening room. The mayor cued up the forty-seven minutes of video he felt it would be most important for Ron to see. They watched it together. Then the mayor showed the chief how to replay it and left, saying he’d be in his home office. Come see him before he left.
Ron watched his father bare his soul — a surprise right there that he even had one. When his eyes were dry and a sense of calm settled over him after the first viewing, Ron went to see Clay. “Thank you,” he said.
“Didn’t make the recordings for you, but sometimes things work out in ways you don’t expect. I’ll be watching those videos again myself. Your father, for all his faults, was quite a man. I’m going to make a helluva movie based on what he told me. But
what I want from you right now is an answer. Are you going to run for mayor or not? If not, I have to find someone else.”
“I am,” Ron said. “I don’t know if I’ll win or I’ll be any good if I do, but I’m going to run.”
“You’ll win,” Clay said. He sounded like he’d already bought every vote in town.
With the way people in Goldstrike felt about him, and Hale Tibbot out of the way, maybe he had.
That matter settled, Ron told Clay about Veronika Novak feeling she should be compensated for taking a risk in fingering Helios Sideris, and about Glynnis Crowther holding back something the police should know. The mayor’s approach to both women had been identical: scare them first and then buy them off.
Good government in action, Ron thought.
But if he could be half the mayor Clay was …
Then he got to the final items, for the moment, on his list.
“I need to retrieve at least one thing and maybe two from the bottom of Lake Adeline,” the chief said.
Clay knew that Ron had thrown the detonator of the dirty bomb into the water and correctly guessed that was one of the things the chief wanted. He asked what the other was.
“Sergeant Stanley has told me that so far there’s no sign of Helios Sideris anywhere in town. Now, he could be anywhere else in the world but —”
“If he killed Hale Tibbot and he’s dead, too,” Clay said, “that complicates matters for the cops and the courts. And if he’s dead what better place to dump a body than the nice deep lake right here in town? But it is a big lake. Finding a body in it could take some doing.”
“I have an idea,” Ron said, and told him what it was.
Clay actually laughed. “I like that, and I think you could be right. So what’s next and how much will it cost me?”
“You mean cost the town?” Ron asked.
“I mean me. If it was a sure thing, that’d be different. On spec, it’s on me.”
Ron said he wasn’t sure of the cost, but he told the mayor how he wanted to go about the salvage effort.
Clay told him to get the figures and he’d have his lawyer okay the payout.
Then the mayor told the chief he was tired and was going to retire early.
Feel free to watch the video again, he said. Call the other cops in to work on things, whatever he wanted.
“That’s very generous,” Ron said.
Clay snorted. “Yeah, that’s me, generous. But I am thinking of leaving this house to the town to use as the mayor’s official residence.”
With a wave of his hand the mayor was off to bed.
Ron, being a cop, was able to put two recently learned facts together. Clay Steadman had told him he would be the next mayor and Clay would be leaving his home for the use of future mayors. So for at least four years, the chief would reside in a house he’d never be able to afford on his own.
And the mayor had richly rewarded Veronika Novak and Glynnis Crowther.
Not to mention the late Walter Ketchum.
All that philanthropy made Ron remember Elvis Presley’s words of wisdom, “Money’s meant to be spread around.”
But the chief couldn’t recall how close to his death Elvis had been when he said that.
Chapter 25
Ron Ketchum and John Tall Wolf decided the way to go was to engage in a bit of police theater. Many a sworn officer thought he or she would be a natural fit in show biz. Former Chicago cop Dennis Farina was all over TV and the movies, sometimes playing a good guy, sometimes a bad guy. Ex-NYPD officer Eddie (Mahoney) Money had spent two years on the job before becoming a pop singer. Just putting on the uniform was part of getting into a role.
Popular culture had made cops of every stripe — good, bad, indifferent — stock characters. The association between the people who did the job and the people who played cops had become so close that more than a few actors and other celebrities had volunteered their time to become “reserve” officers.
Meaning they got to pal around with cops without the worry of getting shot.
Ron and Tall Wolf on the other hand took precautions against the real possibility that one or both of them might at least be the target of gunfire. They wore Kevlar vests and body mikes. The chief sported a buttonhole video camera on a shirt pocket. Keely Powell, Abra Benjamin and a dozen heavily armed Goldstrike cops would flood the scene in a heartbeat if any shots came from the house the chief and the special agent were approaching.
The Chevy SUV was still in the driveway next to the house. On the driver’s door was the stylized R logo of the California Natural Resources Agency. Special Agent Benjamin’s vehicle search hadn’t extended to SUVs owned by local and state governments. Benjamin had kicked herself a little about that. She was probably aggravated, too, that none of her colleagues bothered to give her any shit about the oversight.
Cops could be cruel that way.
They knew the sharpest needle was always self-administered.
Not counting lethal injections, of course.
There was a half-hour of daylight left but lights were already on in the house. Both Ron and Tall Wolf were happy to see that. It would have been much harder to spot a shooter setting up in a dark room. So their target either hadn’t noticed the police surveillance or he was pretending he had nothing to worry about.
Playing innocent was often the role a bad guy brought to the drama.
Only in this case the circumstantial evidence continued to mount.
Three red arrows painted in blood had pointed the way to the target’s neighborhood. A couple more could have led directly to the man’s door. Then there was his name, on file as the plaintiff in the breach of contract suit against the Cartwright Estate and Hale Tibbot. A bit more problematic, but probative nonetheless, was the claim made by Herbert Wilkins that their target was the man who had found Timothy Johnson’s long lost motherlode of gold.
All of that was well and good, but Ron wanted a rock-solid reason to obtain a search warrant for the man’s house.
Ron and Tall Wolf stood on the sidewalk opposite the man’s house, facing it as if they might walk up to the front door and knock. They didn’t. They remained on public property and waited for the target to appear in a window and take note of their presence.
If he was engrossed in some personal activity — bomb-making, for instance — he would be called by Special Agent Benjamin and asked if he might come to his door. The cops all thought the target would take a peek out a window first to measure the extent of his jeopardy.
That was when Tall Wolf would do his reveal.
Hold up the huge nugget of gold Benjamin had taken from Helios Sideris’ safe-deposit box. Let the man know the jig was up. Things were not going to work out well for him, but circumstances would be less awful if he just gave himself up and confessed.
The target wouldn’t have to start shooting to draw a crushing response. If he reacted with visible panic and ran away from a window, say, the cops would come crashing through his door. Exigent circumstances. The man was already suspected of being behind the aborted attempt to defile Lake Adeline. Who knew if he might have another dirty bomb in his residence?
That possibility had been thoroughly discussed by the four cops at Clay Steadman’s house. Their conclusion was that if he did have another bomb, dirty or conventional, and he’d been foolish enough to keep it at his house, he’d have it either in his basement or his garage. It wasn’t going to be the centerpiece of his dining room table.
There were cops out back watching the garage from the adjacent alley.
If the front door had to be taken down, Ron insisted on being the first man through. It was his town, after all. Tall Wolf promised he’d be close behind and expressed the idea that it would be ironic if he ended up braining the target with the nugget of gold.
Standing there on the sidewalk, Ron told Tall Wolf, “The thing that scares me most? It’s the idea that Goldstrike might become an actual mining town.”
Tall Wolf had shared with the
chief the details he’d learned about how precious metal exploitation was done in the twenty-first century.
“I think we’ll be able to work that out,” Tall Wolf said.
He’d told the chief his plans.
“I hope you’re right,” Ron said.
Tall Wolf smiled. “Remember who sent me here in the first place?”
Ron laughed and said, “Yeah, the EPA. Well, God bless all tree huggers.”
Benjamin’s voice reached them through their earbuds. “Sergeant Stanley has brought Roger Sutherland into police headquarters. They’re waiting for his lawyer to arrive. Sutherland says he’s willing to talk if his lawyer says it’s okay.”
“Let’s hope,” Ron said.
The last hurdle they faced was finding a connection between their target and Sideris. Keely and Sergeant Stanley thought they might have found one. The sergeant knew everyone who was anyone in town. He knew their networks of personal, business and political connections, too. Once Tall Wolf had introduced the six degrees of separation idea to Keely and she’d relayed it to the sergeant, he’d immediately remembered the suggestion to have civilians supplement the police in patrolling Lake Adeline at night.
“Let’s look at Roger Sutherland,” Sergeant Stanley said. “See who he’s met in his travels.”
Quite a few people in his capacity of a documentary filmmaker, it turned out.
Sutherland had done a film called “Vegas Graveyard Shift.”
It examined some of the more exotic characters who came out at night in Sin City. There were gamblers, hookers and drug dealers, of course. But there were also “guys who knew guys.” To take care of problems that needed permanent solutions. One character was a thug who’d already done ten years for manslaughter. He said he’d mended his ways, but he knew other fellas who were still “you know, people you wouldn’t want to meet under any circumstances.”
If Ron or the feds could get Sutherland to say he’d put their target together with one of those scary Vegas fellas, well he might turn out to be Helios Sideris. Or someone who’d made a referral to Sideris. The county DA had said that and all the other accumulated facts should be enough for an indictment.
