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CHAPTER 28
BACK AT the Las
Cruces Courts, Rand got out of his bloody clothes and took a long cool shower.
After he dried off, when he looked in the mirror, he saw a man with a
bruised jaw and a red, swollen nose, but he looked neat enough. He was
glad he could breathe through his nose again. More or less.
There was still more than an hour of sunlight after he finished
dressing. From a telephone book in the office, he got Vandergaard's
home address, on Alameda Avenue, only a couple of blocks away.
Everything in Las Cruces was only a couple of blocks away.
Vandergaard's two-story red brick house was set well back from the
street. It was shaded with large mulberry trees and elms. Ivy covered
the railing and on the front porch and crept up the wall almost to the
roof. A silvery fig tree was heavy with fruit by the stairs.
Rand pressed the doorbell. As he expected, there was no answer. He
walked around back and found the screen door latched with a hook, which
he lifted with a blade from his pocketknife. The door behind the screen
was unlocked.
Inside, the house smelled shut-up and hot. The polished floor creaked
under his footsteps as he walked through the kitchen into the living
room. When he saw the orderly rooms with the good paintings on the
walls, the cut glass crystal on the sideboard, the shelves loaded with
books, he thought that Vandergaard was not the sort of man who would try
to steal gold from Noreen Hood. Vandergaard was stuffy and correct, a
lover of good brandy, and the tasteful collector of objects of art.
Vandergaard had converted one of the three upstairs bedrooms to an
office that was considerably nicer than the one in his store. A rolltop
desk held a lamp with a cut-glass shade, and the oak was polished and
smooth.
Rand sat down in the wooden swivel chair before the desk and began
looking through the pigeonholes under the tambour cover. Inside were
keys, photographs of his store, pictures of jewelry he had apparently
either created himself or bought. There was an interest amortization
book, and in the drawers, a ledger with long rows of figures. The
numbers showed that, despite the nice house and his prosperous air,
Vandergaard's business was hard hit by the depression. Rand found
dunning notes from wholesale jewelers, and a letter from a company in
Los Angeles that said they were stopping his credit until he paid what
he owed.
In the bottom drawer, he found a sheaf of little pornographic booklets
modeled on popular cartoon characters, and a couple of other
pornographic books.
Used like a bookmark in one of them was a photo of Noreen Hood smiling
into the camera. Rand had seen a similar photograph in Hood's house,
but Nick Hood was missing from this picture. Obviously, Vandergaard had
been along on the fishing trip. It was he who had snapped Noreen and
Nick together - and then taken one of Noreen alone. The photo was
completely innocent, but its position in the pornographic book told a
tale of its own.
Rand replaced the books in the drawer and walked down the hallway into a
bedroom, which was dark, with windows heavily covered by thick drapes.
Navarette was sitting in a tall Windsor chair. "You took your time
getting here, Amigo."
Rand was startled. "I didn't know you were expecting me."
"I knew you couldn't resist it. Did you see the picture of Noreen and
Vandergaard in the dirty book?"
Rand nodded.
"You can learn a lot from desks," Navarette continued, "I can imagine
him reading it and looking at Noreen. And thinking thoughts far too
nasty for my pure little mind to comprehend."
"I'll bet."
"You notice the ledger and the letters from creditors? He was going
downhill and needed money."
"I noticed." It bothered Rand that Navarette was always a step ahead of
him.
Navarette stood up and started out the door. "C'mon, I'm gonna save you
some time and show you something."
Rand followed him downstairs. Few houses in Las Cruces had basements,
but this one did. When Navarette flicked the switch, it was flooded
with light from several hanging bulbs. The room had a dirt floor and
was damp because of the watered landscaping. Pallid light came through
three dirty windows near the ceiling. A pair of large, crudely-built
tables held shallow tar-caulked wooden troughs filled with a dark
pungent-smelling liquid. Automobile batteries were connected in series
on the table next to the troughs, and wires ran from lumps of gold that
served as anodes. Other wires ran to submerged cathodes suspended in
the solution.
Rand whistled. "How long have you known about this?"
"Maybe half an hour." Navarette picked up a copper ingot from about a
dozen on the table that looked identical to the gold ingot except for
color, and tossed it to Rand. It had the same weight as the ingots.
"This can't be copper. It's too heavy," Rand said.
"It's lead, plated with copper. You can't electroplate gold on lead
unless you plate the lead first with either copper or nickel."
"Where did you learn that?" Rand asked.
"I used Vandergaard's phone to call a guy right after I found this
setup. Look under the table."
On the floor was a shallow box of oily sand with a couple of pigs of
lead alongside of it and a small propane furnace.
Navarette said, "He melted the lead, then pressed his model ingot into
the sand and poured it in. Then he'd hit it with the "C" die on his
workbench over there. Simple . . . just the way the Conquistadors
would have done it, if they had really done it.
"That's it," Rand said.
"There's cyanide in the electrolysis solution. We ought to get out of
here or open a window," Navarette said. He looked contented.
They walked up the stairs to the kitchen and closed the door behind
them.
Rand said, "So the whole thing was a fraud."
Navarette nodded. "Vandergaard wasn't in the garage looking to steal
the ingots. He was delivering them, so you and Noreen and Pritchard
could let you find them. They intended from the beginning to sell stock
in a bogus company. Afterward, they would either skip town or actually
spend a little of the money looking for the non-existent cave, and
pocket the rest."
Rand said, "Maybe Noreen knew that Nick was taking the gold to El Paso
to sell it to Soames. She thought he wanted to make a quick deal, take
the cash, and skip out before Soames got wise. But he'd have to skip
fast, because Soames would soon find out the gold was really lead. So
she called Vandergaard . . . "
Navarette picked up on it. ". . . And Vandergaard sees all his work
going down the drain. They can get thousands with their scheme, but
Nick is queering the deal, and, besides, Vandergaard wants to get rid of
Nick so he can move in on Noreen. So our jeweler friend cuts a couple
of eyeholes in a sugar sack in case anybody sees him and recognizes him,
and heads Nick off, and - Bang! He plugs him and starts to take back
the gold. Then along comes Brennan with Petrie, and he has to leave the
gold behind. Everything neat and tidy - this way, too."
"Yeah," Rand said. "But Vandergaard recognized Brennan, so he got that
guy, Carlos Uribe, to steal back the gold before Brennan learned it was
phony. It wouldn't do to have the lead bars surface while people were
paying Noreen and Pritchard to find real gold."
"You're smart," Navarette said. "Damn near as smart as me, Rand."
"Coming from you, that's very generous."
Navarette didn't seem notice the sarcasm. "They've called another
meeting. They are getting together again at the library in a few
minutes. While we're there, I want you to take your pocketknife and
scrape off the gold and copper on one of the ingots, while I watch their
faces."
"Damn, I'm gonna lose the other half of my fee," Rand said.
"So what. Be glad I'm not pulling you in for breaking and entering.
And I just know you were there when Brennan and Petrie killed the
Mexican and that hay-truck driver."
"You think you know everything," Rand said.
"Well, yeah," Navarette said confidently. "That's because I usually
do."
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