Rosebushes crept up a knee-high iron fence that surrounded the building, and spruce and aspen trees provided a measure of shade. On the lawn was the obligatory statue honoring local lads who died in various wars, and above the entrance was Lady Justice.
Inside were plaques naming 4-H champions, old black-and-white photos of cowboys, miners, and farmers at work. The local police and county sheriff s offices were in the basement, the county treasurer, the county commission, and tax assessor’s offices were on the first floor. Hardwood stairs with a polished balustraded railing led to the courtroom on the second floor, but my business wasn’t there.
I went into the tax assessor’s office where a pleasant young woman in jeans and a cotton sweater hoisted a ledger book off a shelf for me. The book had the musty smell of age and the heft of a decent-sized barbell. The walls were decorated with framed deeds from the 1800s, plat maps, and the other official memorabilia of the town.
Before opening the book, I studied a framed map of what looked like the town maybe a hundred years ago. There was the courthouse, just where it is now, at the corner of Main and Galena. But there was something odd.
“ What are those lines going through the streets?” I asked the woman, who sat nearby, using a fountain pen to make entries in another ledger.
She followed my gaze to the framed map. “Mines.”
I read some of the names aloud. “‘Durant, Little Nell, Enterprise, Little Mack, Pride of the Hills, Mollie Gibson, Copperopolis, Esperanza.’ I thought the mines were in the mountains, but some of the tunnels go right under Main Street.”
“ That’s right,” she said. “The shafts generally were up on the slopes of the mountains, but once they got as deep as they were going to go, the tunnels started branching in all directions, like the streets of a town that hasn’t been planned too well. We’ve got some right below the courthouse here. Some old-timers say you could get from Smuggler Mountain over to Aspen Mountain and never see the light of day. Just go down the Mollie Gibson shaft, take the right tunnels and come up the Compromise. The skiers on Aspen Mountain don’t know it, but underneath all that snow are dozens of shafts and tunnels. They’re still there, maybe some filled with water, some with rotting timbers, but there are locals hereabouts who own the claims and are just waiting for the price of silver to rise.”
“ And if it does?”
“ Well, wouldn’t it be interesting if the ski companies could make more money leasing the land to miners, instead of hitting up tourists for fifty bucks a day for the lift?”
While I pondered that, I opened the plat book and thumbed some pages until I found K. C. Cimarron’s parcel, all properly described in the arcane language of metes and bounds and “running thence” of the property rolls. This little side excursion might not have been necessary if I hadn’t botched it with the clerk at the ranch this morning. While Kip was eating some dry corn flakes from the box, I asked the skinny clerk, who must have worked all night, if he’d ever run across my buddy, Kit Carson Cimarron.
“ You a friend of that big ole hoss?” he asked, dropping ashes from his cigarette onto the scarred counter.
His tone was neutral, giving nothing away. Cimarron could have been his cousin or someone he hated, or both.
I put on my amiable, out-of-towner face. “Yeah, I met him back in my skiing days.”
He exhaled a puff of smoke at me. “Never heard of him skiing. Horses, sure. ‘Course, ole Kit needs one about the size of an elephant.”
Ole Kit. Maybe these two guys skinned mules together, whatever the hell mule skinning was.
“ No, I was skiing. He was ranching and, as I recall it, always talking about buried treasure, or some such stuff.”
That loosened up his face a bit. “Yeah, that’s ole Kit. The dreamer, that’s what we call him. Spent a fortune, hell two fortunes, on wild-goose chases. Years ago, I remember the town offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who could find the Silver Queen. Ole Kit musta spent a hundred thousand hunting for her, but the damn thing hadn’t been seen since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. I could understand it if ole Kit could profit from it, but hell, she would have gone to the town.”
“ The Silver Queen,” I said. It was more of a question, but what I was really thinking about was the clanging dissonance of Kit Carson Cimarron, the civic booster and historical preservationist, and Kit Carson Cimarron, the coldly efficient mugger and partner of Blinky Baroso.
“ A statue made of silver from the biggest damn nugget ever found,” the clerk continued, “more than a ton, damn near a hundred percent pure. The mining folks got together and made this silver lady, had some gold and diamonds in her too, and some crystals and precious stones for her eyes, the way I hear tell. Anyway, they took her to the World’s Fair, but she disappeared, and ever since, the town wants her back.”
“ Sounds like some wise guys may have melted her down for the metals and stones.”
“ Sure does, and everybody in these parts knows it, except ole Kit. That’s what I mean, a dreamer.”
“ Yeah, that’s him,” I agreed. “Anyway, I don’t see his name in the phone book, and I was wondering where I could find him.”
The clerk squinted at me. If Kip hadn’t been scarfing down a second box of corn flakes, he would have said ole Rusty / Dusty was into his Clint Eastwood mode. “Same place as always,” the clerk allowed.
“ Same place as always,” I repeated, as if savoring rich memories. “The old ranch, I suppose.”
“ Well, not the old ranch off Frying Pan Road just over the Eagle County line. That was Kit’s daddy’s, and they lost that, oh hell, thirty years ago.”
“ Well, the new ranch, then,” I said.
“ It ain’t hardly new,” he corrected me.
“ Not hardly,” I acknowledged.
“ Nice piece of property though, what with Woody Creek and all.”
“ Mighty nice,” I concurred.
I stopped asking questions, and he stopped not answering them, and then I came to the courthouse, dropping off Kip in a video arcade in the middle of the town. I had checked a map and found Woody Creek, the town, plus Woody Creek, the creek, plus two other streams, Little Woody Creek and Dry Woody Creek. Which is why I needed to see the property records.
And there it was. K. C. Cimarron, the fee simple owner of the Red Canyon Ranch, about six hundred acres not far from where Woody Creek and the Roaring Fork River meet. He was up to date on his taxes, and checking the lien ledgers, I saw he owned the land free and clear. In another office, I found he was a registered voter, independent, and hadn’t missed an election in over ten years.
An upstanding citizen, this K. C. Cimarron. At least in these parts. But we know differently, don’t we, ole Kit? I forced myself to remember everything about him. I didn’t get a good look at Cimarron on that dark, dreadful night, but I remembered the mass of him, the sheer raw tonnage. And I remembered his voice.
“ Where is he? Where’s Baroso?” That’s what he said first, and I remembered the deep, gravelly tone of a big man with a deep chest. It was a voice that demanded attention, and attention was surely paid to such a man.
I had answered that I didn’t know, and then he had asked Jo Jo the same question. Which meant Socolow was right about something. Either Cimarron didn’t kill Blinky, or he was going to a lot of trouble to make it look like he didn’t.
Then, just before he stomped my hand, he said something that wasn’t a question at all. “Stay out of my affairs, lawyer! Stay out of my affairs, or you’re a dead man.”
Just like in school, my memory was pretty good, but I wasn’t great at following instructions.
It was a five-minute walk from the courthouse to the arcade, where I picked up a juvenile delinquent who was banging away at a video game where steroid-pumped wrestlers removed each other’s spines. I dragged him out, and he responded by saying I was a “goober-throwing major tude,” which I took as a compliment and thanked him.