Phantom Purloiners, page 15
“Like a power-line corridor?”
“You live up to your reputation, Heinz. Yes, a power-line corridor. The Stupinigi Corporation has purchased the old Laramie Consolidate Syndicate property. Those lands will take the proposed photovoltaic power lines to within a few miles of the Wyoming transmission lines and the national power grid. But the Corporation is taking a gamble. Unless it can cut a deal, to be crude, with the Nimerigar Association, the access corridor is worthless.”
“So the Stupinigi Corporation is gambling that it can cut a deal with the Nimerigar with the transmission corridor as bait.”
“Not really. The deal will be with the photovoltaic company who will be on Nimerigar land. It’s quite complicated. Like I said, dealing with the Nimerigar is quite difficult right now. There is no bona fide point of contact. No legal one, that is. Not yet.”
“So the Nimerigar are not actively involved in negotiations with the Stupinigi Corporation.”
Bodacious smiled. “I didn’t say that. To answer your question, yes, the Stupinigi Corporation is dealing with the Nimerigar on a broad range of issues. After all, they share dozens of miles of property lines. They have to deal with each other. But as far as legal matters, until the Nimerigar form a legal corporation, have a board of directors with the authority to sign on behalf of all the members, no, there are no legal documents between the two.”
“But there will be?”
“Soon. The Stupinigi Corporation will not make a dime off its investment unless the photovoltaic plant comes on line. And the photovoltaic company will not make a dime until the casino is a reality.”
“How about water?”
“Water is yet another problem. Both are possible for the Nimerigar land, but it will take a lot of wheeling and dealing. The Nimerigar and Stupinigi Corporation need transportation corridors to be successful. Title-free corridors, let me add. The roadway is a given since the Stupinigi Corporation owns the land from Cannibal Pass to the interstate.”
Noonan cut in, “But the land for the power line and waterline are a problem.”
“Right now, yes. But such problems can be worked out.”
Then Noonan pulled a fast one. “I’m told a lot of land that the corridors will cross are owned by the Bodacious family.”
“You are well informed. Yes. But you clearly do not come from a large family. You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family. The Bodacious is a large, old, and shall we say, diverse collection of individuals, many of whom avoid family gatherings.”
“Like the Bodacious brothers in Washakie who got robbed?”
“As I said, you are well informed. Harry and Sam are part of the Bodacious family, but they are not welcome by the extended family in any community except Washakie. In Washakie they have immediate family, which, shall we say, has no choice but to embrace the siblings. For the rest of us, Jimmy Carter had Billy, Barak Obama has Malik, and Ivanka has Donald. It’s a sad reality of life.”
Noonan smelled an angle. “So the Bodacious family, in pieces, parts, or as whole is not dealing with the Stupinigi Corporation or the Nimerigar over land issues?”
“There’s a lot of talk. But then again, this is Wyoming, and land is money. No one has signed anything, if that’s what you mean. Like I said before, there is no one with legal authority within the Nimerigar operation to sign for the company. So nothing is going to happen until there is a single point of contact.”
“When will that happen?”
“Today, tomorrow, next week. Legally, it could happen within an hour. Joshua Three Trees has proxies from enough Nimerigar to form a corporation. A temporary board of directors could be chosen and a president elected. Then it would simply be a matter of signing some papers and getting a notary stamp.”
A bell went off in the deep recess of Noonan’s mind. “So once that paperwork is signed, the Stupinigi Corporation and the Nimerigar can do business.”
“Yes, Heinz. And I know you like to be called Heinz. Wyoming is a small state.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“Heinz, once the Nimerigar have a single point of contact, yes the Stupinigi will do business with them. But you are jumping a massive chasm by assuming that once the deal is inked, the casino can move forward. The combined lands of the Stupinigi Corporation and the Nimerigar will still not include corridors to the power grid or the waters of Buckle Bunny Lake. Those corridors must be negotiated with private landowners. That could take some time.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“Wyoming is not Rome, but you’ve got it right.”
CHAPTER 44
Wyoming was a land of firsts. It was the first state to have a county public library. The first book printed in Wyoming was a dictionary of the Sioux language. It had the nation’s first National Park, Yellowstone, and the first dude ranch, the term “dude” being coined in Wyoming. It was the first state to allow women to vote, and, in 1925, Mrs. Nellie Tayloe Ross—Tayloe being spelled correctly—became the first female governor in the country. Wyoming also had its oddities. Residents of Cheyenne cannot take showers on Wednesday; you cannot use a firearm to fish; Wyoming residents overweight by one hundred pounds or more cannot use park equipment; and, in Newcastle, it is illegal for couples to have sex while standing up in a store’s walk-in freezer.
Humor aside, Wyoming also has a dark side to its history. It is rooted in the ancient expression repeated many times throughout history, paraphrased as “it may be illegal, but what are you going to do about it?”
Wyoming had a sordid history of the big pushing out the small.
The roots of modern Wyoming were sunk into the Badlands in 1866 when a rancher named Nelson Story, Sr. drove one thousand cattle to Montana through Wyoming. He recognized the potential of Wyoming as cattle country, and the word spread quickly. By 1873 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association was formed, and it rapidly became both the power behind the throne and the throne itself of territorial government. It was the classic story of the rich and powerful driving out the small. Claiming that the small ranchers were involved in rustling, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hired “regulators”—translated into street language as “hired killers”—to clear up the matter. Thus were men like Frank M. Canton hired. Canton was one of the worst. To quote Western historian Harry Sinclair Drago, Canton was a “merciless, congenital, emotionless killer. For pay, he murdered eight—very likely ten—men.”
What erupted became known as the Johnson County War or the War on the Powder River. In either case it resulted in bloody confrontations. It did not take long for the small ranchers to understand that unless they stood together, they would all die separately. So they organized a posse of over two hundred men to fight the regulators. The war only ended when President Benjamin Harrison sent the US Cavalry to Wyoming to restore law and order.
A century and a half later, the same forces that had erupted during the Johnson County War were still present. But this time the war was not over cattle. It was over water. Mark Twain famously said, “Whiskey is for drinking—water is for fighting over.” He might have said it of California, but it rang true in Wyoming.
It was all about water. Land with no water was cheap. Land with access to water was precious. Noonan knew that precious meant expensive, and expensive meant he might have found his big-money link to the murder and three robberies. They had to be pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle. But if they were—and he believed them to be—there was a time element involved. The murder and the robberies happened when they did for a reason that had something to do with time. There was a clock ticking somewhere. Time was running out for the “Bearded Holmes.” He knew it, but, at that moment, all he knew for certain was that he had a tabletop of loose pieces of the same puzzle, and none of them seemed to fit.
CHAPTER 45
It is generally conceded by historians of Western Civilization that our cultural roots began with the seeds sown by the Egyptian empire—in spite of the fact that Egypt, ancient or modern, is in the East, not West. That irony aside, historian credit the initial inklings of civilization with the formation of the First Dynasty by the first pharaoh, Menes, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt under a single ruler. From that moment, about three thousand years before the Christian era to Roger Bacon in 1215, the loudest noise any human heard was thunder. Bacon was the first to record the explosion of gunpowder.
In the West.
In the East, the Chinese had been using gunpowder since the year 142 when it was discovered that mixing the three critical powders would cause particles to “fly and dance” about violently and produce a loud noise. Western inventors used gunpowder for guns—the Chinese, for fireworks.
In the case of either civilization, West and East, until the dawn of gunpowder, the loudest man-made nose was that of bells. In the early days, bells were the exclusive province of religion, and their ringing served as a clock for those with no watches, a good thing since the first known timepiece dates from the 1530s. Thus did religious time become merchant time. The ringing of church bells at noon, it should be added, is not because it is noon. Rather, it is a practice that began in July 1456. Beginning on July 4, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II had the city of Belgrade under siege. Constantinople had fallen to the Turks three years earlier, and the Ottoman Empire was on the advance. There was very little Christian Europe could do to help the besieged city of Belgrade except pray. So Pope Callixtus III went one better. He ordered that all bells in Christendom be rung at noon every day to remind the faithful to pray for the Christian defenders against the Ottomans who were Muslims. Before the order could be transmitted to all the churches in Europe, the defenders of Belgrade pulled a surprise counterattack and swamped the Ottoman forces, forcing them to retreat. When word of the victory reached Europe, the ringing of the bell at noon for prayer was transformed into a commemoration of victory of the Christians over the Ottomans. Callixtus III never canceled the order of ringing bells at noon and, to this day, Christian church bells ring at noon around the world.
Just as important, church bells also served as a warning of danger. As early as the days of William the Conqueror—who died in 1087, about the same year most grandparents were born—bells were used as nightly curfew. They chimed in London at 8:00 p.m. as the gates of the city were about to be closed. If you could not make it into the city by that hour, you could spend a dangerous night among the bandits who prowled outside the city gate. Three hundred years later, Marco Polo wrote of a curfew in what is now known as Beijing, then called Peking. After the third stroke of a “great bell suspended in a lofty building,” guards in bands of thirty or forty would prowl the streets looking for miscreants. In Europe, some cities were convinced that the bells at night frightened wolves. Rinchnach in Bavaria, a city of barely three thousand, continues this practice of frightening wolves to this day. How many wolves have been frightened from the city since the days of the Black Plague is not recorded.
In America, the bell became associated with fire. In colonial times, a night watchman would alert the citizens to a fire with the ringing of a bell. The practice was carried forward when there were fire stations. A bell would alert the fireman that his assistance was needed. It was said that the ringing of the fire bell left such a strong impression that horses that had been retired from fire-department duty continued to run to fires long after they had been sold for dray animals whenever they heard a fire bell. So powerful was the image of the bell in American history that Thomas Jefferson famously compared slavery in the United States as a “fire bell in the night.” He was correct. Slavery did generate a conflagration that swept the nation two generations after his death.
Well into the twenty-first century, bells were still both a reminder of our heritage and a metaphor. In addition to the fire bell, used equally frequently with fire alarm, a memory, often negative, is said to “ring a bell.” Today, when something “rings a bell” it is a portend of an impending matter that one had experienced before. One must always be aware of the tolling of a bell because, to plagiarize both John Donne and Ernest Hemingway, “it is tolling for thee.”
Heinz Noonan, chief of detectives of the Sandersonville Police Department, was well aware of the tolling of a bell no matter how distant or faint. No matter how soft and indiscriminate the peal, he heard it. Even more important, he took it as an exhortation. In his experience, when he heard the bell, he took it as a hint that something of merit had just occurred. Of specifically what he would not know at the time. But he knew whatever it was, it was important. Once the distant toll of a bell—most often in the singular—was sensed, he knew the spear point of something important had just touched the hull of his ship of inquiry.
In the office of Harold Bodacious, he had picked up the distant toll of a bell.
It was time for a change of direction, the moment to reorient his thinking. Besides the murder, the great unanswered question in this matter was simply “Where was the money?” Every great crime occurs for a great amount of money. Someone, or several someones, had been going through a great deal of trouble to muddy the investigative waters. Noonan was sure the three robberies were connected to the murder, but he could not see a clear link. But he could see several links between the robberies. Two of the three robberies were witnessed by members of the Bodacious clan. This could be a coincidence, but Noonan was loathe to give coincidence its due—even when it was deserved. Second, there was a link between a witness, Sandra Trucco, and someone, Darby O’Reilly, who had been in all three towns when the robberies occurred. Third, the Nimerigar had just received fifty thousand acres of land, which could be a financial windfall if they could coordinate the acquisition of water, power, and access. All three required some action on land, which linked them with Darby O’Reilly and thus with Sandra Trucco.
Then there was the sudden appearance of the Stupinigi Corporation. Noonan was sure that the intent of the company was to take advantage of the proposed casino. After all, if the casino went in—against all odds—the value of the Stupinigi property would increase.
Maybe.
That was the big question. If a casino went in, the Stupinigi land would still be rattlesnake country. What would make the Nimerigar property increase in value was the use of the land. But there was no reasonable use of the Stupinigi land other than a roadway across it from the interstate to the Nimerigar land. How could the Stupinigi Corporation make money on a road that already legally crossed its land?
But there was still big money in the mix. Where it was, Heinz Noonan was not sure. Yet. He was not sure yet. But he could not see how there was not money in the mix. The murder, three robberies, and the Nimerigar land were all connected. But, at this moment, he could not see the connection.
It was all very convoluted, but then again, solving crimes with big money were never easy.
Had this been a usual crime, Noonan would have gone back to the proverbial Square One and looked to see if there was anything he had missed. But there was no Square One here. The only forensic at the murder scene was blood and DNA. The three robberies were ancient history at this point in time, and Harrison Day Three was unresponsive. He did not have a lot of solid options.
So he used a side door.
He played a hunch. The one player, or nonplayer, in the mix was the federal government. Thus he played the only card he had. The next morning he headed for the one place he knew he could find the most knowledgeable federal people in Wyoming.
He made the hour-and-a-half trip to Cheyenne in three hours, thanks to highway construction and then had to wait an hour for the BLM land office egress officer to get back from lunch.
“Heinz, isn’t it?” the man said when he came back from the diner still munching a sandwich.
“I’m getting to be well known in these parts.”
“We’re a small state,” the egress officer said, lifting his pop in salute. “Everyone knows everything.”
“Tough place to have a secret.” Noonan smiled.
“If you want to keep a secret in Wyoming,” the egress officer said as he smiled, “live in Utah.”
“Well, if Wyoming is so small, you probably know why I’m here.”
“I know why you’re here,” the egress officer said still smiling. “But I’m not sure my answers will satisfy you.”
“Humor me.”
“Not a problem. The murder and robberies are way out of our jurisdiction. So, my best guess, you want to know if there is a way for the Nimerigar to do anything with their land.”
“You guess good.” Noonan said smiling. “And the answer is . . .” he let the sentence hang.
“Well, how much to you know about land?”
“If you want to live somewhere, you have to have it.”
The egress officer laughed. “OK. Good answer. Let me come at your problem from a different angle. Let me tell you what you can’t do.”
“Any way I get my answer is fine.”
“I’m going to treat you as if you are a member of the general public who doesn’t know anything about land ownership, egress, roads, corridors.”
Noonan pointed to his face. “Note the look of surprise on my face.”
The egress officer smiled. “I’m going to use that expression with my mother-in-law. Let’s start with basics. The Nimerigar have fifty thousand acres, which is about twenty miles by fifteen miles. If you don’t live in Wyoming, that seems like a lot of land. But the value of land in Wyoming depends on three things: access, water, and power. You can have a lot of land, but if you can’t get to the land because it’s on the side of a mountain, for instance, it has no value. You can’t live on the land without water, and if you want to do any kind of business—like mining or a casino—you’ve got to have power. To have power you need a road to bring in fuel, like diesel, or be able to link into the Wyoming power grid. The closest the Nimerigar land comes to the power grid is about fifteen miles.”
