“I see,” Skip said. Shaking his head in disgust, he kept right on cleaning. “What can I do for you?”
“What can you tell us about Larry Matkin?” Joanna asked.
Skip looked at her over the top of his drugstore glasses. “What do you want to know about him?”
“Do you have any idea where he is?”
“Probably out at his house,” Skip offered.
Ernie shook his head. “We already checked,” he said. He’s not there. Hasn’t been all night, from the looks of it. Was he going out of town for the weekend, by any chance?”
“Not as far as I know.” Skip put down the paint-blackened cloth and then used a clean towel sticking out of his back pocket to clean his hands. He closed the can of paint thinner. “What’s this all about?” he asked. “It doesn’t have anything to do with that dead veterinarian, does it?”
Joanna felt her whole body go on point. No doubt, Ernie’s did the same. He was the one who fielded the question.
“It could,” he said. “What makes you think it might?”
Skip seemed to consider for a moment before he answered. “When you come to a new post like this, it takes time to get the lay of the land. To figure out what’s going on and who’s responsible for what. All that sort of thing.”
Joanna nodded. Taking over as general manager for the local Phelps Dodge branch didn’t sound all that different than taking over as sheriff.
“The guys in corporate up in Phoenix sent me down here to things moving,” he continued. “As you know, we might we’d be reopening some operations last year, but there have been a few-well, shall we say-unforeseen complications. This has all been very hush-hush, but since the whole story’s due to be released publicly sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll go ahead and tell you now.”
“As you may or may not know, when we decided to return n to Bisbee, we had three separate locations we thought might be viable-one north of Don Luis, one just east of Old Bisbee, and one east of Saginaw. The idea was to take core samples from all three, figure out which one had the most potential, and then get that one on a fast track. That’s what Larry Matkin’s been doing-sampling ore and doing assay reports.
“According to those reports, the site east of Saginaw is far and away the winner. It has a major vein of ore, one that wasn’t viable with the old technology. With electrowinning, the new technology, it is.”
“If you’ve got the technology and you’ve got the ore, what’s the problem?” Ernie asked.
Skip Lowell sighed. “When Lavender Pit was opened back in the fifties, homes that were in the way of that operation-places in Johnson’s Addition, Jiggerville, and Upper Lowell-were loaded up on axles and trucked to company land elsewhere around town.”
Joanna nodded. “Everybody in Bisbee knows about that,” she said.
“What everybody doesn’t know is that, in the process of moving all those houses, the company ran into a problem. When they got to one house, a place that belonged to a guy named Melvin Kitteridge, he refused to budge. And the guy had a point. None of the other houses in Jiggerville had mineral rights. His house did. He finally agreed to move but only if company agreed to give him the mineral rights to whatever other property they moved his house to. And that’s exactly what they did. It was a quiet kind of deal. I don’t think ten people in all knew about it. In fact, the Buckwalters themselves may not have realized…”
“You’re saying the Buckwalters own the mineral rights to property under the clinic?”
“That’s right,” Skip said. “As I said, most of the houses Saginaw are located on land the company already owns. We’ve moved those houses once, and if we have to, we can move them again. The big difficulty is that the main body of ore seems to run directly through the tract we don’t own.”
“In other words,” Joanna said, “when you gave it away forty-odd years ago, you shouldn’t have. Now, in order to make the Saginaw site workable, you have to buy it back.”
“You’ve got it,” Skip Lowell said. “That’s it in a nutshell.”
“And you’ll be buying it back from Terry Buckwalter?”
“Whoever the owner of record is, that’s who we’ll buy it n,” Skip answered. “The lawyers will be coming down next week to make the offer.”
“But what does all this have to do with Larry Matkin?” Ernie asked.
There was a slight hesitation before Skip answered. It could have been evasion, or simply reluctance.
“Obviously, Larry has known exactly what’s going on. One day the project is on a fast track. The next, after some company researcher discovers the mineral-rights problem, everything grinds to a halt. Larry had to be told, but he was sworn to secrecy.”
“You’re worried that he’s told someone?” Wilma asked.
Skip shook his head. “No, it’s worse than that. In the past few weeks, I’ve become aware that there have been several unexplained absences on Larry’s part. There’ve been times when I’ve tried to reach him when he clearly wasn’t where he said he would be, where he was supposed to be. Late yesterday afternoon, through a fluke, I discovered that he’s been golfing at a place out near Palominas. He’s been doing it on company time and in the company of Terry Buckwalter. It could be it’s all on the up-and-up. But I’m concerned that if they’re involved somehow-romantically, I mean-that the company will end up with a conflict-of-interest problem.”
Armand “Skip” Lowell was a company man to the bone. His sole worry lay in what kind of corporate repercussions might result from an inappropriate relationship between Terry Buckwalter and Larry Matkin.
krnie Carpenter and Joanna Brady were cops. Both their minds turned to murder.
“How much is that property worth?” Joanna asked.
“Surely, you don’t think…” Skip objected.
“How much?”
“Don’t quote me on this,” Skip cautioned. “The property is probably worth something in the upper six figures. Maybe even more.”
Suddenly Joanna was thinking about Terry Buckwalter-about how pleased she had seemed to be at receiving what she considered fair value for her dead husband’s defunct veterinary practice. She was hoping to come out of the deal with enough money to pay off her debts and maybe get away clean. She was counting on the insurance proceeds to fund her venture into the L.G.P.A. That didn’t add up to an upper-six-figures kind of deal. It sounded to Joanna as though Terry Buckwalter was being shafted. Maybe she knew nothing at all about the mineral rights, and maybe, just maybe, Reggie Wade did.
“Does Terry Buckwalter know any of this?” Joanna asked.
Skip Lowell frowned. “She might,” he said. “But she isn’t supposed to.”
Joanna stood up. “Come on, Ernie. We’ve got to go.”
“But I’m not finished-”
“We’re finished for the time being,” Joanna told him. “We can come back if we need to. For now, there’s something else we have to do.”
“What the hell is going on?” Ernie growled as he climbed into Joanna’s Blazer. “I don’t leave off interviews-”
“I think we’ve found our killer,” she said. “Reggie Wade pushing through a deal to buy out the clinic at something far less than an upper-six-figure figure,” Joanna said. “In fact, I think Terry may have already signed papers on this.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ll bet Reggie Wade knows all about this mineral-rights deal. Knew it was coming and knew when it was coming.”
“You’re saying maybe he and Larry Matkin are in this thing together?”
“It’s possible.”
“So what are we going to do?” Ernie asked.
“Drive down to Douglas and find out,” Joanna told him.
Ernie leaned back in the seat, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Wake me when we get there.”
TWENTY