Call Me Joe (32 page)

“She screwed you,” I said softly, “and not in the way you wanted.”

“What was I thinking?” he murmured. “I must have been out of my mind. She gave me one-third of the money but it wasn’t about that. Not for me. Almost all of it is in trust for my kids. All I wanted was her. Her, a married woman. I even knew this would happen one day. I’d find out there was somebody else, it’d be over, and I’d be lost for a while. I…I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

“You were lonely. I’ve been there, man,” I said quietly. “She’s a world-class looker. Of course you fell hard. Don’t beat yourself up. Even if you can’t see it now, you’re gonna survive. You’re probably even going to fall in love again…and maybe this time it won’t be with a snake. I feel for you, I do. But I have a job to do and your only way out is to help me unravel this. You in?”

He was quiet for a minute or more and then sat up, wiped his face with the sleeve of the cardigan, and put the truck back in gear.

“My name’s Jeff Truesdale,” he sighed.

“Truman North,” I smiled. “Call me Tru.”

“I’m in,” he said steadily.

"Glad to hear it,” I nodded.

The story unfolded as we rolled out 395 to Kettle Falls. Aaron called to report that Jane was at her parent’s house and had gone out with her mom. I asked them to meet me in Colville at 4:30 and rang off.

According to Jeff, it was pretty simple. She and the twins found shiny rocks in a couple of shallow caves, back when they were in grade school. One of the twins looked them up in her World Book and declared them fool’s gold or malachite. Jane stored the stones in a cigar box and stuck it on the back of her closet shelf. She had planned to use some of the pieces for custom-made jewelry, someday, and found it when she was preparing to go to L.A. She looked in the yellow pages under “Jewelry Manufacturers” and wound up with Jeff, who had been setting odd stones he found in his land surveys into jewelry settings as a lucrative sideline since grad school.

Jeff knew instantly that the beautiful young woman standing in his workshop was, in fact, holding well over eighteen pounds of real gold. After quickly realizing that there was no way he could casually try to buy the box for what he had in the bank, he told her what she had and asked where she got it. She made no attempt to be cagy. He listened and answered her questions and managed to steer the discussion until she suggested that he go in with her, do the assays, do the geological studies that would find the rest of it, and split the proceeds. He readily agreed. He was three months divorced and being bled dry by alimony payments.

They had to mine it late at night and as quietly as possible. Most times, it was just him but, sometimes, she was there, too. In a cave, by lantern light, with wine, sleeping bags. Soon they were doing more than sleeping. And soon, the money became secondary, for him.

He had deposited a little over $2 million, in three Swiss and Caribbean banks. According to the geology, the gold, which shouldn’t have been there at all, might be a vein that extended throughout the hill and maybe even the region. It could also be one more nugget the size of a tennis ball. No way to know but to dig, and they couldn’t dig, not if they wanted to keep the cash.

Jane told him the land belonged to the Colvilles. It was what everybody thought. When Aaron told her about Joe, it was like a bomb going off in their plan. They were no longer operating in a comfy legal grey area. Now, they were just stealing a guy’s gold.

He argued for stopping, letting the money lie for a year or two. Janie wanted whatever was there. She tried to find Joe; even hiked up to his house, but he was never home. They spent an entire weekend and extracted nearly 18 ounces. They could see more but couldn’t dig it out with the tools on hand.

We pulled the Rover up to the locked gate at the river entrance to Joe’s property. We scaled the fence and hiked about 500 yards up a steep hill, pulling ourselves up with roots, rocks, and tree branches. On a shelf about the size of a folding card table, Jeff stopped and fished a mini mag-lite out of his pocket.

The cave was not even 15 feet deep. Jeff played the mag-lite’s beam over the floor. Half a dozen warm yellow gleams burst into life.

“Is that…,” I began.

“Uh-huh,” he nodded, “embedded in solid rock. No way to extract it efficiently without major equipment.”

He knelt at the back and trained the beam on a basketball-size hole in the wall. A dirty yellow band about two inches wide gleamed dully back at us.

“It extends to both sides,” Jeff sighed. “No way to know. But, as a geologist, I can assure you that there’s a lot of gold in this hill; probably the largest strike since California in 1849.”

He took out a leatherman and dug the blade of a saw tool into the gold. He worked it around for a full 30 seconds and finally dislodged a chunk the size of a small grape.

“Souvenir,” he sighed. “Get your own assay. It’s real.”

We sat on the lip of the shelf and enjoyed the shade.

“So,” Jeff murmured, “what happens now?”

“Now,” I mused, “now, I have to make very short work of Janie Wright because I have to make some sort of headway on a sniper case in Europe that…”

“The Pembroke Properties thing,” he nodded, catching my look of surprise. “I read the online edition of the
London Times
every day. You’re buying that thing about the three murders being connected to Jane’s resort.”

“Not buying it at retail, really,” I shrugged, “but I need to rule it out, at least. Jane sure thought it was connected.”

“How so?” I asked.

“She wouldn’t say, exactly,” Jeff said slowly, remembering, “but she seemed really definite about it. Said she overheard a phone conversation—somebody talking to the sniper. Said it was supposed to stop the project. I…I guess I sorta didn’t believe it because…well, funny as it sounds to say it, Jane thinks of herself as this Machiavellian figure. When I asked her, for example, what would happen when the A.T.V. trails went in—they’re going to cut within 300 yards of this cave—and there were people out here, she just laughed and said she had rigged it so that we had at least a few more months to move what we could by hand. It didn’t occur to me until later that it probably just meant she knew the work schedules and the trail wouldn’t be cut ‘til later.”

“Probably,” I said as noncommittally as I could. “She didn’t say who it was on the phone?”

“No, but, y’know, I just sorta laughed that off,” Jeff chuckled. “See, she wants intrigue about as much as she wants gold. She has a rich fantasy life. She said that, out in L.A., she got some dirt on a guy and used it to get money out of him. Said it like she was proud of it. When I pointed out that doing that is called extortion, she just called me a prude. She claims her long-lost sister is a socialite living in London, Clayton’s in the C.I.A., her dad’s a secret adviser to the President…that’s just a sampling. Jane’s universe includes no normal citizens, that I’ve heard of; just players and the unwashed masses.”

“How are you going to explain all that money?” I asked.

“I’m not, unless I have to,” he shrugged. “I kept about 300K in an account in Switzerland. I make good dough…y’know, before the alimony. My kids’ trusts in the Caymans? Bring it back in small amounts, later on, I guess. The kids are 12 and 10. Plenty of time.”

“You stole it, Jeff,” I said simply.

“From the guy up on the ridge?” he snorted. “There sits a very rich man. I’m going to write it all up and hike up there, drop it off, so he can do what he wants. Then I’m done. My kids are set for life, I have a little emergency fund…I’m going to call it a finder’s fee.”

“You okay with that?” I asked.

“He’d never know, otherwise,” Jeff shrugged. “When we first went back into that cave, there were no telltale flecks on the floor, no holes in the walls. What Jane collected as a kid, was just lying loose. You’d see a damp, smelly cave full of raccoon shit. So, yeah, I’m okay. You?”

“Yeah, actually, surprisingly,” I admitted. “I can’t begrudge you some good fortune. I’d do it, myself.”

“You gonna tell the cops…or the feds?” he asked.

“No, but I’m not the one you’ve got to worry about, anyway,” I cautioned. “Jane will roll over on you like a trick spaniel, to save her own hide.”

“Nothing I can do about that,” he shrugged.

“Well,” I mused, “actually…maybe there is.”



Jeff dropped me off in downtown Colville, leaving his numbers and the strong impression of a man bravely marching off to his own execution.  What I saw was a basically decent albeit a little greed-stricken guy who let his heart, and/or his Johnson, lead him into the clutches of a scorpion. I resolved to try and spring him from the worst of it, on the premise that, if somebody breaks into your house with a hammer, you don’t prosecute the hammer.  Jeff Truesdale was a willing tool of Jane Wright, certainly, but a tool, a mere implement, nonetheless.

Jane’s strategy, then, was to operate under the umbrella of the leases as long as possible, without being compromised by the actual building of the ATV trails. I got Bettijean on my cell and had her check the land plots, and, sure enough, one of the 22 elaborate rest-stop kiosks and picnic areas was about 250 feet from the cave mouth, taking advantage of that grand, panoramic view of the Columbia. Jane obviously spotted it on the plots and was simply scouting surreptitious routes to the caves when she rode out with Aaron.

I sat nursing a beer in our habitual little café while waiting for Jack and Aaron. I was making a conscious attempt to blank my mind, an old technique I picked up from a Japanese investigator in Vietnam, in an effort to refocus and find a way to address the sniper problem.

I kept going back to the missing C.I.A. shooter who vanished in Laos, back in ’74. When he was mentioned at all, people referred to him as Joe. That still wasn’t selling me on him turning out to be our elusive isolationist up on the ridge. From the description Aaron gave, I figured the guy for mid-30's to mid-40's. The agency phantom would be at least my age—maybe older. Anything was possible, I thought. Plugged in as I was, with Navy intel, I never found anyone who could say, with certainty, that they’d ever seen Joe. The only other generally accepted idea about him was that his name actually wasn’t Joe. “Joe” had been hung on him by a former C.O. who started calling his silent new recruit “Java Joe” after spotting a coffee-colored birthmark on his left shoulder. All the other recruits took it up and, as usually happens, it gradually shrank to just “Joe.”

Frankly, at the time, I had my own assignments to handle in Laos and Cambodia—some as black as Joe’s—so I wasn’t really concerned about whatever goon the C.I.A. might have creeping around in the forests. What I picked up was incidental; campfire gossip. I had no reason to be curious, so I wasn’t.

But I knew someone who was.

Nat West was my roomie in basic and on shipboard for four years, and is still one of my two or three closest friends in the world. Unlike me, Nat became a lifer and had risen to Colonel Commander of Navy Records in Arlington.

“Yeah, man, I made a hobby outta that dude,” Nat chuckled, once we got through our catching up. “I dug around, grilled some of those C.I.A. liaison officers, ran down every story I could find. Hell, I even got into a little trouble behind it.”

“Trouble?” I blurted. “You never told me… When?”

“Summer of ’74,” he sighed. “I was back stateside, junior was about a week old, and I was burning some steaks one evening. Musta been 85 out, and here come these two jaybirds up my walk in fucking wool suits. All black, sunglasses, wingtips, fedoras. Stuck out like two turds in the punchbowl out there in those Norfolk suburbs. They say ‘let’s take a ride’ and I say ‘I don’t think so.’ So they say, ‘you ain’t gotta choice’ and I say ‘wanna bet?’ So we have us a brief big-dick contest but apparently their training didn’t cover some large bastardo like myself just saying no. Those boys all figure your bowels’ll get runny when they say the three letters.”

“Finally, they sorta settle, I guess, for telling me that any more snoopin’ around about Joe would result in criminal this and federal that and they better not haveta come back. So I tell them they do, they better bring more guys. They stomp off and I feel pretty manly ‘til my C.O. yanks me in the next Monday and says the exact difference, for me, between a navy career and civilian life is how much shit I flip the C.I.A.”