Reunions Can Be Murder: The Seventh Charlie Parker Mystery Read online

  I carried my refilled mug back to my office and considered what I might do for starters to locate the missing William McBride. Figuring that simplicity is always the best method, I first dialed his home phone number here in Albuquerque. It sounds overly basic, but it’s amazing how many times people make things much more complicated than they are. There was always the chance he’d come home in the past day or so and he’d simply pick up the phone. Of course, then I’d have to give Dorothy most of her money back—but at least I’d be rid of her. The phone rang and rang, ending that little fantasy.

  “I’m going out for awhile,” I told Sally.

  Rusty trotted eagerly beside me so I told him he could come too.

  Chapter 3

  McBride’s home was pretty much what I expected from the outside. Built in the days before the rural north valley had any tight zoning, the structure was a ramshackle collection of rooms that looked like they’d been tacked onto something that used to be a house trailer. The outside walls had been stuccoed in a variety of colors, ranging from pale pink to light coral to dark adobe brown. I tried to see a theme there but couldn’t quite spot it.

  The property, which I judged to be about an acre in size, began level with the elevation of the lane it bordered then dropped off into a dip somewhere in the same area where the third addition to the house happened, so that room sat cocked at a slight downward angle. A couple of huge, old cottonwoods stood at the western edge of the property, flanked by thickets of mesquite and scrub oak, creating a wall of green between McBride’s place and the neighboring one.

  I parked in the flattened dirt area in front of the house where years of vehicle traffic had beaten out a turn-around spot. There were no vehicles in sight, nor any fresh tracks. Obviously, no one had driven in here within the past week or so.

  Rusty whimpered as I pulled to a stop. Not seeing anything he could harm, I let him out to perform his own inspection of the place. He immediately thrust his nose to the ground and began checking the driveway and path leading to the front door, paying particular attention to a couple of scraggly shrubs along the way.

  I inserted the key Dorothy had given me into the wobbly doorknob lock and it turned easily. The stench in the place almost knocked me backward and I began to fear that I might have located William McBride much more quickly than I wanted to. My throat clamped shut and I placed one hand over my nose and mouth.

  Rusty pushed past me and trotted into the first room he came to, a small, square living room. He sniffed the air with no particular foreboding, and proceeded toward the kitchen. Fearful of what he might find, I followed.

  I caught a strong whiff of gas as I passed the oven and automatically reached for the dials to be sure McBride hadn’t left them on. He hadn’t. Everything was tightly in the “off” position. I crossed a linoleum floor tacky with grease residue to the room’s only window and strained against it to get it open. It finally raised with a groan of old wood against wood and I went back into the living room to do the same in there. With two windows and a door open, the smell emanating from a back room somewhere was drawn past me with some force and I gagged again.

  I stepped out to the small concrete porch and grabbed a couple of lungfuls of fresh air before venturing back inside. Rusty had disappeared into another room beyond the kitchen and I walked again across the floor, which sucked at my shoes, to find him. Down a short hall, I found the source of the stench—an unflushed toilet, full of dark brown water that had congealed through evaporation into something unmentionable. Ugh.

  I ran some water in the sink, testing to be sure the home’s system was operational, before taking my chances on flushing the commode. Ready to flee if it overflowed, I pressed the handle. Luckily it worked. The brown muck flushed away and fresh water rushed in. Now why would someone leave home for a planned trip without flushing the toilet?

  Could McBride be so senile, as Dorothy had implied, that he’d forget something so basic? Or could there be a more sinister reason? Perhaps he’d been interrupted and kidnapped. But how would that explain the note he’d sent?

  I gave the room a good dousing from a rusty-looking can of room freshener, then opened another window. A canine yip from elsewhere in the house grabbed my attention.

  “Rusty! Where are you?” I stepped back into the hall, trying to figure out where he’d gone. The short hall led to a bedroom. Rusty stood pointing beside a dresser, to a corner of the floor. I stepped behind him. A dead rat lay on its side, its body a good eight or ten inches long and its tail perhaps double that. Was there to be no end to the sensory delights this house held?

  “Uck! Get away from that,” I told the dog, pulling at his collar.

  He turned to me, as if to say, What? What’s the matter with this?

  “C’mon, you.” I yanked him away from the dead rat and looked a little closer. The body was already beginning to show significant decay and its odor had obviously contributed to the overall ambiance of the house. I glanced around the room. The bed was neatly made, the dresser top clear of bric-a-brac. I’d get back to it later. I led Rusty from the room and closed the door behind us.

  Back in the living room the air had cleared somewhat. I gazed over the layout. A faded gold velvet sofa sat against the far wall, with an end table piled high with papers. I flipped through them, finding mostly pieces of unopened junk mail and a few bills. The postmark date on the phone bill was February. Surprising that the phone company hadn’t shut him off yet. Likewise with an electric bill. No water bill—perhaps he had his own well. I picked out the bills and left the junk. I’d have to ask Dorothy whether she wanted to take care of them.

  Checking the other furniture in the room, I found there wasn’t much of interest. A small bookcase held a TV set, a little thing probably made in the ’60s with a white metal case with red trim, and a few books. I flipped through the books. Most of them were about mines, ghost towns, and gold strikes. Here and there, I came across notes and maps drawn on lined notebook paper, presumably in McBride’s handwriting. I put the books and notes in a small stack with the mail I planned to take with me. They would make some interesting reading tonight at home.

  A bedroom on the other end of the living room appeared to be the one he used. The bed was made, the covers neat and smooth, but the dresser top contained a collection of the kind of things we all accumulate in everyday life—a good-sized handful of change, two small pocket knives, some crumpled receipts, and a wrapped Starlight mint. The receipts were unimportant, meals at Furr’s Cafeteria dated over a year earlier. All this was coated in a neat layer of undisturbed dust.

  I made a quick run through the dresser drawers but found nothing more interesting than two copies of Playboy from 1973. The adjoining bathroom’s vanity drawers yielded an unusual system of filing his financial records—two drawers jammed full of check duplicates. None of them were dated within the past six months, so I wasn’t sure they’d be of any help. I left them in place.

  There were no prescription drugs in the medicine cabinet, unusual for a person in his eighties, I thought. But then, if he’d taken a planned trip, he’d have packed his regular medications with him. The clothes in the closet were simple and few—Levi’s, plaid flannel shirts, a light down jacket, and two pair of worn hiking boots with mud in the treads. The gray suit, shirt, and tie from his portrait hung together on one hanger at the far right-hand side of the closet. His one suit of dress-up clothes. For some reason, the odd thought that McBride would probably end up being buried in that suit flitted through my mind.

  I turned away from the closet and scanned the room once more. Nothing jumped out at me.

  “C’mon kid,” I told Rusty, who had settled on the matted carpet, head on paws. He was obviously miffed that I’d pulled him away from his great find in the other bedroom, and he’d not found any more treasures.

  Near the front door, the smell of gas was fainter but still present. I made myself a mental note to call Dorothy as soon as I got back to the office and suggest that
she have the gas shut off or get a repairman out here. I locked the front door and decided to have a look around the yard.

  Behind the house sat a small toolshed built of warped gray planks. A rusted hasp attempted to keep the door closed but it was pretty much a losing battle. A Master padlock was looped through the ring on the hasp, but the screws holding the device to the shed were barely holding their own. I found a short piece of rebar on the ground behind the shed and pried. Two quick pulls and the screws came away as if they’d been mounted in modeling clay. At my insistence, the door swung outward with a groan.

  I was disappointed to see that the shed was nearly empty. What kind of man was this, anyway? Where was the clutter they all collect? In one corner stood a cardboard box about four feet tall by a foot square. According to the labeling, it had contained a metal detector but it was empty now. A few garden tools hung from nails on the opposite wall and a bunch more nails jutted outward in a haphazard row to the right of them. I imagined picks, shovels, and other mining implements hanging there, but had no actual proof of that. A dented wok-like pan lay on the ground near the cardboard box. I turned it over and saw by the series of concentric ridges inside that it was a gold pan. It was pretty beat up and I guessed that McBride probably had a newer one that he’d taken with him. Admittedly, I was filling in a few blanks but I hadn’t found anything that disproved the theory that the old man had simply packed up some tools and a few clothes and headed for the mines.

  I was drawing a blank on what to do next and, as the police had, I wanted to conclude that he went where he said he was going. Somehow, that wasn’t going to be good enough for Dorothy Schwartzman though, and I wasn’t keen on the idea of facing her without some better news. She was definitely set on the idea that her father attend that family reunion, whether he wanted to or not.

  I stepped out of the shed and glanced around. A stiff breeze rustled the leaves on the cottonwoods with a sound like decks of cards being gently shuffled. The wind blew on through quickly, leaving the air still again. I whistled to Rusty, who by this time had his nose aimed at a woodpile at the back of the house, and motioned him to get himself back to the car. We pulled out and headed south on Rio Grande. Back at the office I called Dorothy’s number and was grateful when I got an answering machine. I left her a message about the gas leak in her father’s house and told her I’d found some unpaid bills and would forward them to her. I stuck the bills into a large brown envelope, addressed it, and stuck on some stamps.

  “Want some lunch?” Sally asked when I took the envelope down to her desk to be added to the day’s outgoing mail.

  A system had evolved within the office where Tammy called in to take lunch orders, which she would pick up on her way in. It was nearly twelve-thirty and she was apparently on the phone now. I decided on a turkey and Swiss on whole wheat from Bob’s Deli.

  Sally filled me in on a couple of messages that had come in while I was gone and I trekked back up to my office to begin returning phone calls and taking care of my standard workload. By five o’clock I’d paid the month-end bills, sent out statements to our regular clients—mainly law firms and insurance companies—and entered most of the monthly expenses into the computer. I’d updated the system the previous month and was still getting used to the new way of doing things. I was just pulling my jacket on when the phone rang.

  “Charlie, it’s Dorothy Schwartzman on line one,” came Tammy’s voice over the intercom.

  Goody.

  “Have you located my father?” Dorothy’s nasal whine came over the line without so much as a ‘hello’ first.

  “Well, not yet.” I felt an edge creep into my voice.

  “I got your message,” she said. “Is that all you’ve done?”

  “Investigation is always a process of elimination. We try to start at the beginning, with the closest and most logical premise.”

  “And that is--?”

  “And that is to find out whether he left any clues at home. Whether there might be signs of foul play, forced entry, or just a simple clue about where he might have gone.” Why was I explaining my every move to her?

  “Well, he told me where he’d gone,” she reminded me sarcastically.

  “I know that.” I felt my teeth clenching. “Our job is to find out whether he actually did what he told you he was going to.”

  “And did he?”

  “Dorothy, I’ve only been on this case for half a day. If you’d rather find a different investigator, feel free. Otherwise, I’ll report to you when I have some new information.”

  I said goodbye and hung up before she had the chance to grill me further. Pushing away from the desk, I leaned back in my chair and remembered to unclench my fists. In the past I’d only become involved in cases when the person needing my help was a friend or when a genuinely nice person was unfairly accused. I wasn’t sure how long I’d hang in there for a nasty-tempered person like Dorothy.

  “Dammit, Ron,” I railed, “why’d you leave me stuck with this?”

  “Everything okay?” Tammy asked from the doorway.

  I opened my eyes. “Yeah. I’m just trying to get my blood pressure to come back down.”

  She looked skeptical. “Okay, if you’re sure. I . . . um . . . wanted to ask you. Would it be okay if I left a few minutes early today?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t even ask for a reason. I was plenty ready to get out of there myself, although I wasn’t sure why. There certainly wasn’t anything exciting waiting for me at home.

  An hour later, with an order of Pedro’s take-out enchiladas in front of me at the kitchen table, I spread William McBride’s books and papers out to take a look. One of the items caught my attention. It was a single sheet of paper, folded intricately into a packet about four inches square, the edges tacked down with sealing wax. McBride’s shaky writing covered one side in oversized letters. MAP- L.D.M.

  LDM? Lost Dutchman Mine? Surely not.

  Chapter 4

  Every miner, dreamer and speculator for the past hundred years or more has fantasized about the possibility of finding the Lost Dutchman mine. I’d heard the legends all my life, about Jacob Waltz’s amazing gold treasure. But the more stories one heard, the more confusing and convoluted they became. I pried one edge of the sealing wax loose.

  The paper was obviously old—yellowed and crisp—but not a hundred years old. Could be thirty or forty, though. I flattened it out and looked more closely. The map was hand drawn in black ink from a fountain pen. It was a water-based ink, definitely, because in one spot a drop of water had blurred one of the lines. The drawing showed lines veering off in several directions, a series of tent-shaped triangles—they might depict mountains or tents or most anything else—and a variety of squiggles and tiny circles. I didn’t see anything to identify a town or highway. I wondered whether McBride had drawn the map of his own knowledge or if it had been given to him.

  Judging by the condition of the paper, I guessed that he hadn’t opened the map in many years, and it certainly hadn’t been folded and refolded a lot, as I’d expect if he’d carried it with him and tried to follow it to a destination. I set it aside and picked up one of the books.

  I was well into the story of the old German and his supposedly unlimited gold find when the phone startled me. I picked it up with a little trepidation, thinking Dorothy might resort to tracking me down at home to quiz me.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” said Drake.

  “Hey! How’s the job going?”

  “Not making much progress yet,” he answered. His voice sounded tired.

  “How big is the fire now?”

  “Probably three or four thousand acres. The wind blew quite a bit today. But I guess it could have been worse. I dropped about a hundred buckets of water and foam, but it’s like pissing on a house fire—not much effect.”

  “Do they know how it started?”

  “Nothing definite yet. It started out in a clearing in the forest. That much is obvious from the air. We could see a
definite pattern where it branched out from the starting point and went like crazy after that.”

  “I heard on the news it was man-made.”

  “That’s the scuttlebutt here. Fire Manager said he’d bet some kids were out partying in the woods. They do that a lot around here. Go out somewhere on the reservation, light a big bonfire, drink a lot and do a few drugs. Next thing you know the fire’s out of control and they’ve all disappeared and nobody’s talking.”

  “Is it all on Indian land?”

  “So far. There are a couple of ranches in the path, so that’s a danger too, but they’re hoping to get a line cut and get the thing contained in the next couple of days.”

  We chatted a bit more and I told him a little about my day. “I may drive down to White Oaks tomorrow and see if I can get a line on whether the old man has been there recently. This woman—the daughter—is tenacious as a bulldog. Guess I better come up with something to appease her.”

  “White Oaks isn’t too far from here. Too bad I’ll be out flying all day.”

  “Well, it’s too far for me to drive down there and back in a day. Maybe I’ll just come on down there and bunk with you at your hotel.”

  Drake told me to drive carefully and we finished the call with a bunch of miss-you type gooey stuff. After he’d hung up I pulled the road atlas out of the hall closet. White Oaks was about fifty miles, mostly over winding mountain roads, from where he was staying. I’d have to see whether it was really practical to go there for the night.

  Now that it looked like I was planning a trip, I decided I’d get to bed early. I cleaned up the remains of my dinner, locked up, and took one of McBride’s books to bed with me.

  I awoke about six the next morning, out of sync with my normal sleep pattern because Drake wasn’t there beside me. Decided to pack a few things and get going. I grabbed enough for an overnight stay, including food for the dog, and phoned the office to leave a message on the machine for Sally to let her know my intentions.