Dead As Dutch
Page 27
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Munyon’s obsession with the lost loot of Dutch Schultz had taken took root twelve years previous one auspicious night at a blue-collar tavern in downtown Binghamton, three months after his maritime career had come to a screeching halt in that seedy stretch of Angeles City in the Philippines. As became his evening ritual, Munyon was parked on his regular stool in Pitt’s Stop (owned by three successive generations of the Pitt family) ogling Vanna White flip the letters on Wheel of Fortune on the tiny screen tucked in the corner above the bar. During commercial breaks, he tuned in to snatches of conversation between some blowhard out-of-towners, a pair of paunchy, balding middle-aged men seated next to him. While Munyon nursed a Rolling Rock, the duo in their identical sand-colored canvas coveralls downed a steady flow of Captain Morgan shots and bought rounds for the house, which consisted of about a dozen regulars on this slow weeknight. By the end of the evening, their tongues were loosened, and before the pair weaved out, they boasted to anyone within earshot of their intentions to dig up a fortune buried in the Catskill Mountains long ago by someone Munyon never knew existed.
The next morning, Munyon played hooky from his lube job and instead paid a visit to the Broome County Public Library, the first time in his life he had ever crossed the threshold of such an establishment. A librarian helped guide him to the available reference materials on the subject he requested, and for next several hours Munyon absorbed all he could about the rise and fall of gangland heavy Dutch Schultz. He was transfixed by what he read, startled at the similarities in their lives: fathers that abandoned the family; school dropouts at a young age; criminal behavior as youths that led to incarceration as teens. By mid-afternoon, he was convinced beyond any doubt that the parallels between Dutch and himself were a sure sign that the treasure was destined to be his. Like his great-grandfather Mutt who went in search of gold in 1897 and struck the mother lode, so too would he, with his own modern day quest for a bounty of riches that lay in the soil waiting for a worthy recipient to retrieve them. And, unlike Mutt, who endured the harsh travails of prospecting in the unforgiving conditions of the frigid Yukon, fate had brought him within a two-hour drive of the area where historians determined Dutch had most likely stashed his plunder.
By that weekend, Munyon had purchased a used metal detector from a local hardware store, and he was on his way to Phoenicia, a hamlet in Ulster County, New York, where Schultz had been a regular visitor during his heyday. According to most accounts, it was in this vicinity that Dutch buried his bounty and where countless treasure hunters before Munyon made pilgrimages to unearth it. Few, if any, however, displayed the dogged determination he did, making the journey in his Dodge Caravan through the Catskills week in and week out for over a decade, searching and digging, always coming up empty handed except for a few random coins and discarded scrap. Local residents who spotted him pacing along the railroad tracks or river banks never knew the stranger’s name, but regarded Munyon as a harmless fruitcake and discounted him as just another of the foolish dreamers who arrived in their village hoping to walk away millionaires.
Munyon’s marriage to Cleo didn’t inhibit his single-minded pursuit, despite her mocking, derisive comments every time he left their double-wide trailer to spend a Saturday or Sunday wandering alone along some stretch of highway or creek bed, looking for something that many believed had never been interred there in the first place. Once she deserted him, Munyon often slept in his van overnight on the outskirts of Phoenicia in order to get an early start the next morning, meandering without a break until the setting sun sent him on his way back to Binghamton.
It was only within the past year that the lack of success sapped his fervor, and he reached a point of frustration so debilitating that the frequency of his hunts trickled down to once or twice a month, depending on the weather forecast. No longer did he endure pouring rain or battering sleet as before. There were no more dawn-to-dusk marathons or squabbles with rivals who dared tread on turf he considered his private reserve. Any shred of hope that he still clung to dangled on life support until the arrival on his doorstep this very day of the prize that had eluded him for so long. The irony that Dutch’s secret cache found him instead was not lost on Munyon. It was, after all, his calling.