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I stood just inside the back door of Duke Dundee’s cabin and stared at the cowboy boot in my hand as I turned it over to examine the sole.
The worn leather was stained a dark, rusty red.
“The police are on their way,” said Ledbetter. “One of us should probably go up and check on Roberta. No telling—”
“You go,” I said.
As much as I sympathized with Dr. Bagley, I couldn’t resist such a golden opportunity to confirm my suspicions that it had been Duke Dundee who’d hit Reba in the back of her head with her own rodeo trophy, not that a pair of bloody boots was enough to do it. Based on the condition of Duke’s place, someone had been there who didn’t have his best interests at heart, and it couldn’t be ruled out that whoever had it out for Duke might plant evidence implicating Duke in the attack on Reba. Someone had likely already planted evidence to implicate Crystal, although to limited success. What if that person, contrary to my gut instincts, wasn’t Duke?
Ledbetter headed up the stairs, and I scanned the kitchen for clues but found nothing more of interest. I moved in through the opening to the living room, stepping over the broken lamp, and finally spotted something just as Ledbetter called down from the attic, “He’s not here.”
There was a snapshot lying out on the coffee table. It appeared to have been ripped down the side as if someone had been torn from the photograph.
I didn’t recognize anyone else in the picture, but the identity of the blond woman smiling brightly from the center was immediately recognizable.
It was Reba Vance; whoever’s arm was around her at the time the photograph was taken no longer had his body attached.
“I don’t understand it,” Roberta Bagley said as she came down the stairs behind Ledbetter. “Something obviously happened here, but what? Where’s Duke?”
When we’d passed the old mine, Dr. Bagley had noticed the presence of vehicles at the entrance, including a police car. She’d commented that some tourist must have gotten themselves in trouble down in the mine again and expressed the opinion that it really ought to be sealed off somehow before someone died in there.
I hadn’t had the heart at the time to tell her that someone already had. I decided now might be the time to at least let her know there was a body recovery underway. It might not be Duke, but given the state of the place, something of a violent nature, whether it had been a psychotic break with reality in which Duke had struggled with an imagined adversary, or if Duke’s foe had been entirely real, something had to have happened to him. I now placed the chances of that not being Duke down there in the mine at practically nil.
“You know those cars we passed down at the entrance to the mine?” I said to Dr. Bagley.
“Yes?”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you, but Hank Edwards got it in his head last night to go down in the mine looking for those Lost Jewels.”
“Oh, poor Phyliss,” said Roberta. “And they only just got married.”
“It’s not Hank whose body they are recovering,” I said. “He got out last night just fine.”
“What do you mean?” Roberta’s voice was shaking.
“They won’t know who it is until they bring up the body,” I said. “But there was someone who fell down that vertical shaft. I saw it with my own eyes.”
Dr. Bagley sank down to the floor and put her head in her hands.
“It might not be Duke,” I said. “He might just have—run away somewhere.”
I didn’t have time to try and reassure Roberta any further because there was a knock on the front door, and a voice announced that the police had arrived.
It was Officer Reyes who looked uncharacteristically shaken.
After he was admitted, he didn’t even glance around at the disordered condition of the place before he asked Roberta, “Are you a relative of Duke Dundee?”
“I’m his mother,” said Roberta.
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”
“Duke?”
“Yes, I’m very sorry.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I went to stand next to Roberta and put my arm around her, although she didn’t seem to notice.
“Would you be able to identify the body? Or would you rather do it after he’s been taken to the morgue?” Officer Reyes asked.
You could tell this was part of the job that he hated. I couldn’t blame him.
“Of course,” said Roberta mechanically.
“Would you like me to go with you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Officer Reyes didn’t seem to think much of me tagging along to the mine in the back seat of his squad car with Roberta, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t about what Officer Reyes wanted.
I hung back while Roberta was accompanied by Officer Reyes to identify the body.
“It was him,” was all she said when she got back.
“I’m so sorry.”
Dr. Bagley was clearly in shock, and her hands were trembling so badly that I took the clear plastic bag containing what must be the personal effects of her son out of her hand before she dropped it.
Inside the bag was a wallet, a cellphone, and what looked suspiciously like a hand-drawn map of the mine, so old that it was barely holding together with yellowed Scotch tape.
“They said there was a diamond detector down there with him,” said Roberta. “It must have been Hank’s.”
“Hank didn’t lose his detector down the mine shaft,” I said, but I could see Roberta was no longer listening.
After Officer Reyes drove us back up to Duke’s place, I locked the doors of the cabin for Dr. Bagley, put her in the passenger seat of her truck, and drove slowly down the rough dirt road, praying that I wouldn’t bottom out her vehicle.
“Where shall I take you?” I asked.
“I’ll have to cancel all my afternoon appointments,” she said.
“I’ll let Julia and Reba know. Is there someplace you’d like to go?”
“My sister Connie,” Roberta said. “She lives just out of the village.”
Ledbetter followed us all the way to Connie’s, where I left Roberta in the care of her sister and went home on the back of Ledbetter’s bike.
When we arrived back at Little Tombstone, I was shaken and badly in need of a good cry, but when I got to the top of the stairs, Maxwell had finished his lessons and was waiting for me to let him in to be reunited with his canine and porcine best friends.
“Take them out back to the trailer court,” I said. “I have to make a couple of calls and have a word with Mrs. Gonzales.”
When I called the clinic and informed Julia that Dr. Bagley’s son Duke had been discovered deceased down the old mine and that Roberta would be unable to keep her professional obligations for the afternoon, Julia seemed appropriately shocked and saddened. She promised that she’d coordinate with Dr. Vance to either come in after all, or if Dr. Vance wasn’t up to it, Julia would see to the cancelation of all of Dr. Bagley’s afternoon appointments.
I hadn’t been telling an untruth to Maxwell when I told him I needed to have a word with Mrs. Gonzales; I did say hello to Juanita as I passed through the Bird Cage, but my real objective was Hank Edwards in the Curio Shop.
“How’s your ankle?” I asked Hank, who was sitting in an old upholstered armchair he’d drug out from somewhere. His injured foot was elevated on a stack of old phone books.
Hank grunted, which I took to mean he was still in pain.
“Did you sell one of those diamond detectors to Duke Dundee?” I asked him.
“No,” said Hank. “Who’s saying I did?”
“They found one of those detectors down there with Duke when they pulled his body out of the mine shaft,” I told Hank.
“What do you mean? What’s this about Duke being down any mine shafts?”
“You know how when Officer Reyes beamed his big lantern down on you?”
“Darn well near blinded me,” said Hank.
“Well, there was a body down at the bottom of that shaft.”
“You mean some fool went and got himself killed?”
I could have pointed out that Hank had very nearly ended up falling down to the bottom of the mine shaft, too, and was as fully qualified as a fool in every way as a person who’d actually made it all the way to the bottom, but I didn’t.
“It was Duke Dundee down there,” I said. “His mother is devastated.”
This statement resulted in a suitably chastened Hank. He didn’t apologize for his flippant response to the revelation that Duke was dead, but he did grunt what sounded to me like a grunt of contrition.
“Well, I didn’t sell Duke an XQ581,” said Hank. “I’ve only sold a few, and most of those were to tourists.”
At $437.28 a pop, that didn’t surprise me.
“Maybe Rex sold a detector to Duke?” I suggested.
“Maybe.”
“Could you ask him?”
“Nope,” said Hank.
“Why not?”
“Rex is unreachable.”
“Why?”
“He’s on an expedition down the Zambezi.”
“The Zambezi River in Africa?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of expedition?”
“He’s doing charity work.”
“What kind of charity work?”
“He didn’t say.”
I strongly suspected that Rex Popov had never engaged in any activity motivated by charitable impulses in his life.
“Did it ever occur to you that Mr. Popov may have been less than truthful with you?” I asked Hank. “Does Rex going on a cruise down the Zambezi for charitable purposes really seem credible?”
“Did Mr. Wendell have a chance to take a look at that contract?” Hank asked.
As a matter of fact, he had. Jason had spread the contract out on my coffee table and given it a once over after we’d gotten back from the old amethyst mine the previous night. I just hadn’t gotten around to breaking the bad news to Hank yet.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” I told Hank. “I don’t think you’ll be getting any shipment of goods from any factory in China, and Jason doesn’t think there’s much chance of you recovering your money from Rex, even if you could track him down, which is doubtful. You paid money to a shell LLC, which was probably established under a stolen identity, and now that Rex has likely drained the accounts—”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I conceded, “I don’t know that. But Jason thought it a likely scenario, and I’m inclined to believe him, especially considering that within forty-eight hours of convincing you to order $50,000 worth of diamond detectors, Mr. Popov disappeared down the Zambezi.”
“You think Rex is really on the Zambezi?” Hank asked. Apparently, there was a limit to the lies even Hank was willing to swallow.
“No,” I said. “I don’t. If I had to guess, the man who sold you on those diamond detectors is holed up somewhere enjoying the ill-gotten fruit of his labors. His name probably isn’t even Rex Popov.”
Earlier that day, I’d looked Rex Popov up on the internet and found three matches. One was a fifty-year-old who bred miniature ponies on a small farm just outside Warsaw; the second was a sixty-one-year-old former merchant marine living on the coast of Maine who ran marathons in his spare time. The final Rex Popov was a resident of Albuquerque, age ninety-seven. I was able to look up real estate tax records for the man in question. He owned a residence in Albuquerque, but given his age, it was highly likely he no longer lived there. It was also highly probable that unless he had an exceptionally vigilant offspring or professional overseeing his affairs, Rex number three would be a prime candidate for identity theft.
I didn’t need to see pictures of any of the Rexes in question to know they weren’t the Rex who’d been haunting the Museum of the Unexplained like a smarmy specter.
I’d wondered how Hank had become a target for Rex’s diamond detector scam. It wasn’t like Hank had a presence on the internet or any notoriety which might have attracted Rex’s attention. The only conclusion I could reach was that Rex had simply stumbled upon the Museum of the Unexplained, taken one look at Hank’s family of certified genuine Chupacabras, and recognized a golden opportunity to bilk a geriatric eccentric out of every penny he didn’t have.
This made me strongly suspect that the real Rex, if not actually local, had ties to the area. It would take considerably more research to prove it, but I suspected that the elderly Rex Popov, residing in Albuquerque, was likely yet another victim of the counterfeit Rex. This was just a theory, of course, and I didn’t bother Hank with it.
“Don’t tell Phyliss about the credit cards,” said Hank.
“You’re going to have to tell her eventually,” I said.
“Don’t tell her yet,” Hank begged. “I’ll think of something.”
I hoped the “something” Hank was in the process of thinking up wasn’t some tall tale to explain why he’d plunged himself into debt with nothing to show for it.
“I won’t tell Phyliss about the credit cards,” I promised, “but you’re going to have to tell her yourself.”
“I will,” said Hank. “Just give me time.”
“What local people have you sold diamond detectors to?” I asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
“Freddy Fernandez, Blake Vance, and Oliver.”
Freddy Fernandez owns the barbershop next door to the Bird Cage. Juanita calls him Pastor Freddy by virtue that she’s attended the Sunday service he holds in a room at the back of his premises faithfully every week for years. If Duke Dundee had fallen victim to foul play and that diamond detector had been chucked down the mineshaft after his body in an attempt to make it look like a treasure-hunting lark gone wrong, I was certain Freddy wouldn’t have been involved.
Ditto Oliver, our handyman.
I certainly couldn’t speak with the same confidence about Blake Vance. Murders had been committed based on far flimsier motivations than the victim having possibly attempted to kill one’s ex-wife and frame one’s present wife for the murder.
“What about Jimmy the Jinx?” I asked. “You didn’t mention selling one to him, but if he’s been promoting those detectors on his radio show—?
“Jimmy got his for free,” said Hank bitterly.
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because you asked who I’d sold detectors to,” Hank shot back. “Jimmy is just a free-loader.”
Then, after asking one final time for me to promise I wouldn’t tell Phyliss that he’d opened up multiple lines of credit to buy a probably nonexistent consignment of diamond detectors, Hank said he had things to do, and I probably did too.
I’d been dismissed by Hank, but it didn’t matter. I’d found out almost everything I wanted to know from him already.