Copp In Shock, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (16 page)

      
So maybe I had more of a credibility problem than Tom Lancer did.

bearer bond
is in about the same league as an anonymous gift to the possessor. It belongs to whomever has the bond in hand. For the moment there, then, I was a millionaire. I will not say that I did not think of that immediately. It would not be necessary, even, to establish any right to the property; possession alone was the only criterion. Of course I had never dealt with that kind of paper and I still do not fully understand the reason for putting that much money into such an insecure arrangement. I had always assumed, in my limited understanding, that a bearer bond is most often associated with a desire to handle large sums of money in a more or less secretive manner, in order to circumvent or avoid taxes or conceal other illegal activities. But I am no financial expert, so what do I know? All I knew for sure was that I had a million bucks in my hand and that maybe it was legally mine.

So call me a jerk, and maybe I was, but I had never been overly impressed with wealth, per se. Not, anyway, enough to dirty myself to get it. That million bucks, though, had something to do with Martha's death and my reason for taking her to Los Angeles. That was not just a "feeling" but another one of those dim perceptions that had been hammering at me for the past two days.

How would Martha have come into that kind of money—legally?

Obviously, though, it had been connected to not only her murder but also to the recent intrigue in Mammoth. The life insurance money from Kaufman, according to Janice, had been only enough for Martha to set up her small business and get her going on her own. And the potential income from such a small backwoods art gallery would hardly have been enough to make her a millionaire that quickly. So where had the money come from and why had it placed her in such jeopardy?

Surely not from her own father! But maybe so. One could draw a reasonable scenario involving a guy like Harley Sanford if the money had actually been his from the beginning and if, for some reason, Martha had taken it and refused to return it to him.

But I had been in the bank with her when the bonds were placed in the box. I knew that was true; I had a definite memory of helping her put them there. I also knew that the bonds had been placed in the box shortly before we left for Los Angeles—which would have been very soon after the gallery burned. I could even see her consternation as we deposited the bonds—she was scared as hell—and I could see our almost panicky flight from Mammoth.

This kind of peek-a-boo memory is enough to drive a guy nuts.

I knew, yet "in a glass darkly," as a mystic has characterized this kind of "knowing."

I would not make a good mystic, because this shadowed reality can propel you to the very edge of insanity. When you are out there moving through that kind of darkness you can question your own perceptions at times and wonder if you will ever find the full light again.

A cop usually deals with concrete perceptions of the human reality, total logic, and hard facts. Right now I was afraid that I was dealing primarily with human emotions raging against the light. I had to discipline myself continually and wait for the light to dawn. That had never been my way. I had always been the kind of cop simply to seize the truth and try to make sense of it. That can be very difficult when you are forever staggering around half blind and half-witted—yeah, and I was feeling entirely stupid much of the time.

Thank God, it had not yet affected my trigger finger. I had the feeling, even then, that there would be plenty of fireworks ahead.

I
left the
bonds in the box at the bank as the safest place for them at the moment, then I took the computer diskette to a computer specialist for copying. It is amazingly fast once the technician gets a "read" on the program itself. Took this guy about twenty seconds to hand me two duplicates. The guy was good but also curious, so I elected to pass on a printout. I wanted complete privacy for that. I had no idea what information might be hidden away and I sure as hell did not feel like sharing it with a stranger.

If you are not familiar with computers, maybe this

would have little significance to you. A three-and-a-half- inch floppy diskette compresses more than a million bytes of data, which, when run through a computer, translates computer language into ordinary information according to the program originally employed. What it meant to me at the moment was nothing. I would not be able to read the copy until it was fed through a compatible computer.

The contents of a diskette are totally meaningless even to an expert until the computer itself retranslates the data into an ordinary language format. That was where I was at the moment, so I was none the wiser. I simply had preserved extra copies of the data for future use.

A small floppy such as this one could store the equivalent of several large volumes of text, so it was anybody's guess what could be concealed there. I had to feel that it was something very important and I knew that I would have to print out the information from the floppy at the earliest practical moment. I returned the original diskette to the safety-deposit box and then rented another box—in my name alone, of course—and left one of the copies in the new box. And just to circumvent any difficulty that may arise once the bank knew that Martha was dead, I also moved the bearer bonds into my own box.

I felt that my first priority was a visit to Lake Tahoe.

That was my immediate destination.

Lake Tahoe is
widely regarded as one of the loveliest lakes in the United States. It sits astride the California-Nevada border at an elevation of more than six thousand feet, a deep-blue clear lake. The maximum depth exceeds sixteen hundred feet, ranking it among the deepest in the world. Twenty-two miles long and twelve miles wide, the state line splits the lake along a north-south axis to almost the south shore but shears off at a southeast tack a short distance above South Lake Tahoe, so that two-thirds of the lake plus the entire south shore lies within the state of California. The entire east shore of the lake and a portion of the north shore is within Nevada.

The lake has long been a popular and important resort complex for wholesome family fun and is dotted with state parks and camping facilities. Although a popular winter and summer recreational area, one of its major attractions in recent years has been the booming gambling business on the Nevada side adjoining South Lake Tahoe. The relatively few luxurious hotel casinos are closely clustered just across the Nevada line in the town of Stateline. This is nowhere in the same league as Las Vegas, but then also the natural beauty of the area far excels anything to be seen in the stark desert surroundings of Vegas.

This is of no particular moment to the inveterate gambler, since one casino seems much like another once you get inside, but it does offer a contrast to the usual atmosphere of Las Vegas, Reno, or Atlantic City. For myself, I prefer the less strident atmosphere of the High Sierra since I am no great shakes at gambling and usually regard it as an exercise in frustration.

Highway 395 takes you briefly out of California through the western tip of Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe, on to Reno before reentering California, then through the northern part of the state and into Oregon. I jogged over to U.S. 50 just outside of Carson City, Nevada, and rolled on into Stateline at about four o'clock.

      
The first item of business for me was to find the wedding chapel where Martha and I were married. It was an unpretentious place near the lake. An elderly man let me in and immediately asked, "Where's the bride?"

      
I explained that the bride had not come with me this time and showed him the marriage certificate. "Is this one of yours?" I asked him.

      
He had a crackling sense of humor, showed me a droll smile as he jibed, "Did you lose her already?"

      
I did not want to spoil his day so I told him, "No, I'm just wondering if you remember performing the ceremony."

      
He studied the document with that same droll smile then replied, "Oh, it's legal, okay. Were you hoping it was not?"

      
"Would you believe it if I told you I'm suffering from amnesia? That's my signature, okay, but I have no memory of it. I was hoping maybe you would."

      
"You are serious about this?"

      
"Yes, sir, I am dead serious."

      
"What happened to your head?"

      
"I forgot to duck. That's why the memory loss."

      
The justice of the peace became entirely serious. He said, "Just a minute, please. I'll get my wife. She has a better memory for these things."

      
He was back within a minute, his wife in tow. She

was showing me a sympathetic smile so I knew that she was aware of the problem.

      
I asked her, "Do you remember me?"

      
She said, "Oh, yes. And such a beautiful girl."

      
I said, "Could I see the chapel, please?"

      
They took me into a small chapel in the back. Nothing elaborate, but very pretty, and I remembered this place. The scene was traumatic. I had to get out of there. I thanked the old couple and quickly let myself out. Going into that chapel had been a mistake.

      
I drove on into South Lake Tahoe and found the sheriff's substation. A woman on duty there recognized my name and said, "Oh, yes, Chief Terry called about you. Just a minute, please."

      
The guy in charge was a Sgt. Webster. He ushered me into his office and said, "I hear things have been a little hot in Mammoth."

      
I replied, "Too hot. L.A. is calm by comparison. How are things in Tahoe?"

      
He was an easy guy. "We're holding our own. Hope you're not heating things up around here the way you did in Mammoth."

      
I said, "Hey, I had nothing to do with it."

      
"You were just driving through," he said with a smile.

      
"The folks from your area have been behind most of the trouble down there. I was hoping that you could give me a line on some of your
badasses
."

      
"If you're talking about the guys who shot up the hospital, I don't know them. Apparently they blew through here and stole a car, but they didn't check with me first."

I chuckled and said, "I'm sure they didn't. Did you get anything on their movements here?"

"Yeah, we made them at the airport. Apparently they had come in from back East by way of San Francisco. These guys were connected. It was a contract job, I'm sure of that."

"Who, would you think, was sponsoring them?"

"At this stage, it's anybody's guess."

I said, "How about the guys who ripped off the military Jeep in Nevada? Any score on those two?"

He showed me a sober smile. "The Nevada authorities are putting together a package on them. At first glance, they were for sale to anybody with a few bucks. Why Mammoth?"

I said, "Looks like it's all somehow involved with Harley Sanford's problems. John Terry told you that Sanford was found dead in Mammoth this morning?"

"Yeah. Sanford is a big man around here but he's strictly a small fish in a large pond. Hell, he wouldn't be worth much cut down to his own size. I suspect that's exactly what's been behind all this. He just got too big for his pants."

I said, "Maybe so. What can you tell me about a couple of small-time hoods who've been playing games for Sanford? According to the rap sheets that Terry gave me, Sammy and Clifford spend a lot of time up here. What do you know about these guys?"