Pay Dirt, page 20
Over the next three decades, Wheelock sold off chunks of the property to other people. These days the only part of the land still in Wheelock hands was one of the fields near the house. The house and one adjacent quarter-section between the woods and E. 1450 Road were owned by Brett Santich. The rest of the land going up the hill were now owned by a trust managed out of the Pioneer State Bank and Trust.
The entries were written in a flowing copperplate on parchment, which moved stiffly. I carefully turned the pages back to the beginning of the book. The first entries were in 1861, after Kansas achieved statehood. They were for houses and businesses in the part of town where Gertrude Perec lived.
The pages seemed to have been cut by hand. The first page, in particular, had a rough jagged top, as if the original clerk hadn’t been able to hold the scissors steady.
I returned to the Yancy lands. Theodore Wheelock sold off sections of them to other people. I traced the history forward as best I could. In the 1870s, after Wheelock made his claim, he sold or gave parcels of land to other owners, including the Everards. The Everards still had a little land there, but the Wheelock fortunes had sunk in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.
That was when the Santich family acquired the hilltop and several thousand acres along the sides of the hill. The Santiches had prospered for a time, but fell in turn. I read a history of mortgages, sales, refinancing, and, finally, six years ago the selling of the top of the hill to a hedge fund managed by Pioneer State Bank and Trust in Topeka.
The clerk came over to the table I was using to tell me she was closing the office for the day. If I needed to consult the book further, they opened at nine in the morning.
I thanked her and got up to go. “One thing that puzzles me. The Dundee house—you probably saw it on the news—I guess that was built after Theodore Wheelock bought the land, but there are the remains of three or maybe four houses in the woods behind the house.”
I showed her the plat and the woods where I’d found the remains of the chimneys. “The title starts with Wheelock, but it looks as if someone was building there before him. The drug house out there is called the Dundee place, but I don’t see a Dundee anywhere in the title holders.”
The clerk laughed. “This was the wild west back then. People built on land they didn’t legally own. Dundee could have been one of those—he left, but the name stayed. There were a lot of land disputes in the early days of the town. Some people think my job is boring, but when I look at some of the title fights that went on, it’s every bit as exciting as CSI. If I could write, I’d do a murder mystery out of these files.”
I thanked her and headed into the night. It was almost five-thirty, not late, but dark. This time of year, waiting for spring, the early hours when night closes in drag down the spirits.
The library stayed open until eight. I left Peppy in the Camry while I did some deeper digging through local history and genealogy files. These were housed in the basement, in the Osma Room. I hunted through their catalog, looking for more on the fire that claimed Frederic Grellier’s life. I couldn’t find anything. I looked for the Wheelocks and found a number of small stories. They’d been early immigrants, coming from Auburn, a town in western New York State. When Theodore Wheelock died in 1897, the paper gave him a long obituary, with a list of his contributions to Lawrence, and the names of his numerous children and grandchildren.
The funeral had been held at Riverside Congregational Church, newly built on a bluff overlooking the river. The original church (oldest in Lawrence, the paper announced) had sat right on the river and been destroyed in a flood. Theodore had been one of the most important donors to the new building. The writer dwelt on his bravery in leaving a comfortable home in western New York State to serve the cause of those in bondage, especially because his family claimed descent from the earliest English immigrants to Massachusetts Bay.
The obituary also praised Theodore for beginning the “civilization and cultivation of Yancy Hill, which had, until his leadership, been a lawless wound on the body politic, home to Indians, coloreds, and every variety of sin and debauchery.”
I thought of the remnants of the chimneys I’d seen in my first daylight trip to Yancy. Maybe they’d belonged to people committing sin and debauchery. Had he driven them away and destroyed their buildings? Or had they been so thoroughly debauched that they burned their own houses down around themselves?
I looked up the Everards, Deke’s family. They were early immigrants as well, from Lynn, a town near Boston. Like the Wheelocks, their stature as early arrivals meant the papers covered their weddings and funerals, and even Deke Everard’s graduation from the police academy eleven years ago.
What would it feel like to be so rooted in a place that everyone knew your family and your family’s family, going back 175 years? I had no idea what the Warshawskis were doing in 1856, or even if they’d been doing it in Słonim, the town my grandparents had emigrated from. And the Sestieris, my mother’s family? Had they been harmlessly minding their own business in Pitigliano, until the locals decided that Jews were purveyors of every variety of sin and debauchery, and needed to be eliminated? I felt a knife twist of grief for my ancestors and the turbulent lives history had forced them to lead.
30
Armagnac to the Rescue
I restocked my pantry after leaving the library but couldn’t face cooking in the tiny kitchen. Even after I scrubbed the pots, I still could feel the intruder’s hands on them.
I went back to the gastropub I’d found on the east side of town. I kept Peppy with me, along with my laptop. Trig had said that the construction on top of Yancy Hill had been approved by the county planning commission. I searched Zoë’s paper. There was a brief comment under the heading, Your Government at Work.
The county planning commission approved the application for commercial construction on Yancy Hill. The project will include a resort, condos, and small retail shops. We’re all curious about what kind of retail shops will be interested in a hilltop location outside of town, but the lawyer making the presentation said the shops would support resort activities.
I thought again of the pylons I’d seen under construction. Perhaps generating power was the development’s real business, with a resort and shops as a way to sidestep environmental and construction permits. If the investors were expecting the Wakarusa coal plant to be their moneymaker, they could produce a lot more power than they needed, and sell it throughout the region. But why coal, with the push we all knew we had to make for greener energy?
Zoë texted. She’d had a painful interview with Clete Rotherhaite’s wife; could she see me in person? I sent her the restaurant name.
I was drinking Armagnac tonight—its rougher edges brace me when I’m feeling rocky. I was on my second when Zoë arrived. She ordered a local brew, as befit a young local professional.
She gulped down half the beer, then told me about her visit to Rita Rotherhaite. “He died only three weeks ago, so she’s still pretty much in shock. You know, they kissed goodbye and he went off to work and then he called her to say he was resigning, but he didn’t come home. She thought maybe he’d done something stupid like gone off to get drunk, even though he wasn’t usually a drinker. See, his dead body wasn’t found for two days, when some runners came on it. So she had forty-eight hours of worry and fear and then disaster.”
Her vivid face was filled with anguish. “I wish you’d been with me. It was so terrible and I didn’t know what to say. You know, two days by the river—animals—” She took my Armagnac glass and emptied it.
I was glad I hadn’t had to face Clete’s wife. Not another horror on top of all my own horrors, but I took Zoë’s hand and pressed it.
“They must have done an autopsy,” I said after a time.
Zoë made a face. “He’d been a heavy smoker, he worked in a coal plant, so his lungs were shot. Mrs. Rotherhaite begged them not to cut her husband open, not after all the other damage he’d suffered on the river path. So they did a CT scan, but not a full autopsy. Deke let me see the police report. The pathologist said there wasn’t much reason to say it was anything but a heart attack. Deke said he showed it to me because you were peddling conspiracy theories. He said he wanted to make sure I, at least, had my head screwed on straight.”
“Yes, keep your head screwed on,” I agreed. “Don’t be like me, unscrewing it at the least provocation and leaving it lying around in drug houses or places like that.”
Zoë stared at me. “Vic—don’t—I didn’t mean—”
“You’re right. That was mean-spirited. I’m getting so much unpleasant feedback these days that I’m becoming unpleasant myself.
“Clete Rotherhaite. Working around coal doesn’t do your lungs a lot of good. A heart attack is sad but likely. Was his wife surprised that he resigned?”
“Yes and no. He’d been overseeing the plant shutdown. He figured his job would end by the end of the summer, so she was surprised that he quit on the spot. He said he’d explain why when he got home. All he told her was that the plant had a new owner who he didn’t see eye-to-eye with. They wanted to bring the plant back on stream. Clete said he was past wanting to manage an active plant, and why hang on to be miserable when they could do like they’d always wanted, buy an RV and drive around the country.”
Zoë’s face crumpled with grief. “I don’t know why this hits me so hard. I talk to a lot of people who’ve lost their loved ones.”
I signaled to the waitperson for two more Armagnacs. Zoë protested that she didn’t want more, but when they came, she drank hers, again too quickly.
She put on a determined smile and asked what I’d been doing. I told her about the cameras I’d found around the Dundee house. “They could be operated from anywhere, not necessarily from the Dundee house. I didn’t see a control room either of the times I was inside. Whoever is controlling the feed can turn them off if they don’t want their pictures showing up in a file someplace. But where are the controls?”
“Maybe up at the construction site?” she echoed my earlier thought. “You saw Brett up at the worksite. Maybe they gave him a deal when they started construction. Gosh, if that’s true, Trig will have a nuclear explosion.”
“It’s a possibility,” I conceded. “Santich has to know about the drug deals, but he seems like such an ordinary harassed man, taking his daughter to basketball games, selling insurance to support his family—if he was making a bundle from drugs why would he do that? People who know him tell me he doesn’t like the insurance work.”
I found a cash receipt in my bag and wrote down names on the back. Sabrina. Valerie. Power Ranger. Brett Santich. Trig. Clarina. Gertrude Perec. Cady. The Wakarusa plant. The Yancy project. The Omicron boys. The Dundee House.
“You can’t believe Cady or her grandmother killed Clarina!” Zoë cried when she’d read the names.
“They have a connection to her, for sure, but how does Clarina tie into the Dundee house? For that matter, I have no earthly why Gertrude went out to the Dundee house the night Clarina’s body was found. It feels as though there’s a puppet master at work here, who didn’t like the slow pace things were moving and decided to speed them up.”
Zoë shook her head. “I wanted this to be my big breakthrough, but it’s such a mess I don’t know if we can figure it out before you have to go back to Chicago.”
“I can’t go back to Chicago until I clear up Clarina’s death, so don’t lose hope. And any day now, the local DA may arrest me, so you’ll have a super-big scoop.”
She smiled reluctantly. “I know you said you’re second-guessing yourself, but you always seem to know the right thing to do. What will you do next?”
“I’m wondering how the Wakarusa plant connects to Yancy. I think I need to visit it myself, see if the guys will talk to me. A rich-looking cowboy was at the Dundee house today, fighting with Santich, and apparently this same cowboy was at Wakarusa the day Clete died.”
Zoë interrupted, excited again. How did I know? When I told her I had a confidential source she tried to force me to reveal the name.
I wouldn’t budge but showed her the video I’d shot. It was fuzzy and the angle was bad, since I’d been on the ground, shooting surreptitiously, but Zoë studied them under the flashlight from her own phone. In the end, she shook her head.
“If he was a power player from around here, I think I’d know him, but I don’t.”
I asked if she could find out whether the same people applied for a permit to restart Wakarusa as had applied for the permits to build on Yancy.
“I know the Yancy project came before the board two years ago, but do you have any notes on who presented the project?”
Zoë drooped. “There are so many meetings, so many committees. With me as the only reporter in the county, I can’t keep on top of all the things that go on. It was right after I joined the paper, anyway, so I was still trying to figure out what meetings to go to.”
“Really? Did your editor go? Your paper printed a couple of lines about the commission approving the construction. How did you know?”
“My editor?” Her mouth twisted in contempt. “His idea of journalism is checking Google News twice a day. No, I got it from Pat Everard and Gertrude Perec. Pat was chair of the planning commission that year. I asked them for a report.”
“They didn’t tell you who had applied for the permit?”
She shook her head. “I asked, but they said the application was handled by the Topeka office of a big national law firm, and that the commission thought the numbers were good and the paperwork showed the applicants had checked the right boxes for environmental quality, with a permit from the state EPA. Maybe I should have checked with the EPA myself, but—” She flung up her hands, despair, drowning, some signal of distress.
“Like you said, it was just two lines in the paper, but Trig saw it and went completely bonkers. He wrote a gazillion letters, claiming Santich had taken bribes to fast-track the application so he could get rid of his land at a profit, and that it would be an environmental disaster. I asked Trig how he knew, when he hadn’t seen the plans, and he said, destroying the natural springs on Yancy, for one thing, and that anyway, if Brett Santich was involved it would by definition be a disaster. We ran two of his letters, but the rest were so libelous we couldn’t risk printing them. And then he attacked me for being a chicken-shit. His words.”
I finished my brandy and signaled for the check.
“This is hard, trying to work on this investigation and cover all the other stuff that’s happening in the county,” Zoë burst out. “Readers love disaster stories, like big car wrecks, and they also want to know about weddings and funerals. No one really cares about the library board or the county planning commission. I feel like I must miss big stories all the time because I’m covering the little stuff.”
“You’re wrong there. Local people covering local events is a big and dangerous hole in today’s journalism. All these book bans, for instance, they happen at the local level, but all the small-town papers and radio stations have been swallowed by the big sharks, so people don’t have any way of finding out what’s happening in their own backyards. You’re not missing the big stories; you cover a lot of ground. Your only problem is that you’re doing it on your own.”
Kind of like me, trying to run this investigation. At least I had Zoë helping out. And she had me. We were both understaffed.
31
Ladies Who Breakfast
I’d grown up in the shadow of Chicago’s steel mills, when the U.S. steel industry was booming and the plants ran three shifts a day. I’d helped my mother wash the windows and windowsills every morning, but by night they always had a thin layer of soot over them. I was lucky that my dad was a cop, working in a district far from the mills. Fathers of my girlfriends hacked and wheezed into handkerchiefs they covered with blood and tarry mucus. That’s what Clete Rotherhaite’s lungs had probably looked like.
No one wanted to cause his widow additional grief by performing a thorough autopsy. It was only me, wondering what the animal bites had covered up.
In the morning, I called Deke Everard to ask him again about Rotherhaite’s death.
“No you don’t, Warshawski. Little Zoë was already in my face about it yesterday. Rotherhaite’s death was sad but natural. There is no cover-up going on.”
“I didn’t say there was. Just wondered what the guys at the plant had to say about it.”
“The guys at the plant were like people everywhere—some were upset, some were cynical, some were resigned. Rotherhaite wasn’t loved or hated, he was just a guy doing his job. You want to stir things up at the plant, see if you can create a conspiracy where nothing existed before, don’t come crying to me if you find a thousand hornets stinging your ass.”
“Copy that, Sergeant.”
I hung up without mentioning my plan to talk to the guys at the plant, after I spoke with the gals at the Riverside Congregational Church—this was the day a group of them met for breakfast.
At eight, I saw Gertrude Perec come out of her house. She was bundled against the cold in a puffy jacket, but she had on dressy slacks and well-polished ankle boots. Her head was bare, so I could see that her faded blond hair was pulled into a chignon, and she’d put on a dusting of makeup. I wasn’t going to match her for elegance, but with clean jeans, a knit top in my favorite rose, and a wool blazer, I looked respectable.
It was an easy walk from the Perec house to the church, but I drove so that I could leave Peppy in the car. Gertrude had been early, I guess, because knots of women were coming up the walk as I arrived. I followed them to the community building on the church’s south side. A woman at the door smiled in welcome and introduced herself, Lucy Porter.
