“ I don’t blame you. Ye gads, it smells toxic, or maybe radioactive.”
“ Radioactivity doesn’t smell,” Kip informed us.
Charlie reeled in an empty line and said, “I don’t mind the smell of chum.”
“ Of course not!” Granny yelled at him. “After ten thousand autopsies, fish guts would smell like roses.”
“ What did you put in that?” Charlie asked, sniffing the breeze.
I gave in and disclosed my secret sauce. “Equal parts dolphin entrails, grunt heads, and ballyhoo so old the fish market threw them in the Dumpster a week ago. Chopped everything into a slurry that looks like Granny’s blueberry pancake batter, then froze it all in milk cartons.”
“ Chopped how?” Granny asked. “You didn’t use my blender again?”
I didn’t answer.
“ Damn, boy, that’s for making frozen margaritas. I got a meat grinder in the pantry, you know.”
“ I know, but it takes twice as long, and it hurts my shoulder to crank it.”
“ Pantywaist,” she said. “You know, Doc, the boy could never handle pain…”
“ Granny!”
“ Or women…”
“ C’mon.”
“ Or a real job.”
We bantered for a while longer, then the talk turned to fishing. Granny claimed she pulled a seven-pound yellowtail from this very spot a week before, so it must be my chum that was chasing the fish to Omaha or somewhere. Nobody had a bite, but we were all enjoying the warmth of the winter sun. The sky was a Caribbean blue. Not as deep as a Colorado blue sky, but with a hint of turquoise. The breeze was soft, and the temperature an even eighty degrees. I was wearing cutoffs and was barefoot. My shoulder was healing, and so was my reputation.
Granny squinted at me and said, “That persecutor fellow called when you were gassing up the boat this morning.”
“ Socolow, and he’s a prosecutor.”
“ Same difference.”
“ What’d he say?”
“ Said you’d want to know he squashed the indictment for the murder of that phony-baloney salesman.”
“ Quashed,” I told her, but she paid me no mind.
“ Then, not ten minutes later, like it was all planned, the persecutor fellow from Colorado called.”
“ McBain.”
“ That’s him. Dismissed all charges up there, plus he said to make sure to tell you he’s impinging all records of your arrest.”
“ Expunging,” I said.
“ Whatever.”
It had been a good week in the squashing and impinging departments. I also had received a letter from Tallahassee dropping disbarment proceedings, and Judge T. Bone Coleridge called to tell me he had tossed out the child neglect case and also asked my opinion of the recently concluded college bowl games. So, with the Colorado records expunged, it was still true. I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude, and the only time I was arrested, it was a case of mistaken identity-I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop. That made me think of Josefina Jovita Baroso, because she hated it when I said that.
“ I always thought there was something strange about that gal,” Granny said, sadly.
Strange the way that happens, you’re thinking of something, and someone else puts words to it. Of course, Granny had raised me since I was a pup, to use her expression, and we’re often on the same wavelength. I wonder if that’s the way with a husband and wife, and if I’ll ever get the chance to find out.
“ I’m not saying I thought she was a killer,” Granny continued, “but there was always something a little cold about her. Gives me the willies, just thinking about it now.”
I tossed another icy block of chum into the water and cut more squid for bait. Kip had put down his gear and was napping on the aft cushions. Charlie’s eyes were closed and his hat, made of green palm fronds, was pulled down over his face. The water will calm you, or as Granny says, peacify you.
“ Who would have thought she’d be a whatchamacallit, a serial killer?” Granny asked.
“ I think you probably have to kill at least three people to earn that title,” I said.
“ Number three would have been you.”
That gave me some pause.
“ What was wrong with that gal?” Granny asked, still gnawing at the thought.
“ She had an inability to feel the emotions that most of us have,” I said. “Even her brother, a lifelong criminal, never could have killed a man. With Jo Jo, people were just objects, like a table or chair.”
“ A sociopathic personality,” said the voice from under the palm frond hat. And I thought he’d been snoozing. “Used to use the term ‘moral imbecility’ referring to antisocial, morally irresponsible behavior. All the normal emotions of lust, anger, and greed are still there but without the tempering restraint of conscience.”
“ Greed,” Granny repeated, shaking her head.
“ Indeed,” Charlie said. “As Virgil asked, ‘ Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, auri sacra fames? ’”
“ Good question,” I admitted.
Charlie translated, “What lengths is the heart of man driven to by this cursed craving for gold?”
“ That reminds me,” I said. “When the shoulder heals, I’m going up to Colorado for a while.”
“ Skiing?” Granny asked.
“ Not exactly.”
“ Ice climbing in Box Canyon?” Charlie guessed.
“ No, getting too old for that.”
I let it hang there a moment, like a tern hovering in the breeze.
“ So just why does the craving for gold remind you that you’re going to Colorado?” Granny asked suspiciously.
“ In the mine, when the Silver Queen collapsed, I jumped off the top of the Silver Queen just before the Explosion.”
“ I know,” Granny said. “You blabbed about that more times than Doc tells about the land crabs that stole a ring from a corpse in the mangroves.”
“ When I hit the ground, I put my arm down to brace myself, and my hand went inside the queen’s head and touched something…I don’t know, kind of mushy or spongy.”
“ So?”
“ Well, both Cimarron and Blinky both said the head and torso were carved from this massive chunk of pure silver. A year before the statue was made, miners dug a nugget-more like a boulder-out of the Mollie Gibson mine on Smuggler Mountain that weighed twenty-one hundred and fifty pounds. The purest silver ever mined, the largest nugget ever found. For a hundred years, the story has been that the statue was carved from the nugget, but if that were true, the head wouldn’t have been hollow.”
Granny pushed her sunglasses up on her head and eyeballed me. “I’m still listening, but I don’t know what that has to do with you going back to Colorado.”
“ When they let me out of the hospital, I did some research. In the library, all the newspaper clippings of the time say just what I told you, the pure one-ton nugget, the statue, the whole shebang. But in the county historical society, there are handwritten notes from the artisans who made the Silver Queen, and they kept track of all the materials used, including three hundred eighty pounds of papier-mache.”
“ So what?” Granny asked.
“ That’s what I stuck my hand in. They filled that big mama with papier-mache and coated her with a thin layer of silver!”
“ So write a story for the National Geographic. What’s it got to do with you?”
“ The one-ton nugget has never been accounted for. I searched all the records. Every big event in the mines was duly recorded. It would have been major news if the nugget had been melted down or sold or put on display, but it simply dropped off the face of the earth.”
“ Or back into someone’s mine,” Charlie offered.
