Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

But then Chief Investment Officer Victoria Lear had died suddenly while working on the Eurydice IPO. Marla had found a discrepancy in the assays. Albert had disappeared with the investors’ money. Now Tony, too, was missing under suspicious circumstances. And Marla was being made the scapegoat.

Begin at the beginning, I thought. A month ago, Victoria Lear had been working on an initial public offering of stock for the mine venture. I punched the buttons for the Bank of Aspen Meadow and asked to speak with Eileen Tobey on a matter of great fiscal urgency.

“It’s your caterer,” I said breathlessly, when Eileen finally came on the line. “Just have a quick question, but it’s really, really important. What do you know about initial public offerings? What do you have to do to make one happen?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Goldy, I’m busy!” Eileen snapped. Then her voice changed. “Look, I’ve got an important meeting in five minutes. But… I heard a nasty rumor about our mutual friend, Marla Korman.”

“Really.” My heart hardened; bad news sure traveled fast in the high country. No matter how busy you were, apparently, meetings couldn’t proceed until people were up on their gossip.

Eileen’s voice was like syrup. “I’ll tell you what you want to know if you’ll tell me it’s true she knifed Tony Royce.”

“It’s not true,” I said emphatically. “But she is in jail. Now listen,” I plunged on before she could ask any more questions, “I don’t want to keep you, Eileen. If I were a venture capital firm, and I’d done a private placement and raised a bunch of money to reopen a mine, what would I have to do to take the venture public?”

“Hmm. I don’t suppose this has to do with a certain venture capital firm we all know and love?”

“Just tell me what I’d need for an IPO. Please,” I added.

She took a deep breath and assumed an authoritative tone. “Very simply, the firm would hand the whole thing over to an investment banker, who would, among other things, hire an independent auditor to check all the facts presented in the prospectus.”

“Like what kinds of facts?”

“Oh, that you were what you said you were. Say for a mine, you’d have to have the assays done by a reputable assay lab. You’d hire an independent mining consulting firm to go in and check your geology reports. Like that. It takes a long time and a lot of paperwork, Goldy. You have to spend months on an IPO. What are you getting at?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, dejected. “It was just a long shot.”

I hung up and considered the narrow, smeared windows of the booth. I didn’t have a copy of the prospectus, so I had no idea who the geologist of record was, or how trustworthy his or her reports were. Then go to the next thing. What had Victoria Lear discovered? If the assays could be proven to be fraudulent, as Marla had suspected, then finding out who had ordered and paid for those glowing analyses of the Eurydice’s ore might offer something tangible. Maybe that was what Victoria had discovered. I certainly didn’t have a complete set of the assays, and I didn’t think anyone outside of the Prospect Financial offices did, either. But if I could find out who ordered them… it was a long shot, indeed. I dug out my credit calling card, phoned Nevada information, then the number for Kepler Assay Lab in Henderson.

“Ah, this is Kiki Belknap,” I said when the lab receptionist answered. “I’m Tony Royce’s secretary at Prospect Financial? Listen, Mr. Royce is out of the office at the moment? But I need to be connected to the first person he ever talked to down there –

“

“Miss Belknap,” the voice replied stiffly. “As you must be aware, discussion of assays is confidential. Information can only be released to the person originally requesting the assay.”

“And for the Eurydice Gold Mine in Idaho Springs,” I said breathlessly, “who exactly was that? We don’t seem to have it in our files.”

Kepler Assay Labs disconnected. I slammed down the phone. So much for long shots. The sheriffs department could get the information, but for that you needed a subpoena and all kinds of time. I glanced at my watch: 12:15. I didn’t have all kinds of time. And then I remembered what Marla had said to me a week ago. The mine was producing gold during the Second World War, and FDR had it closed down with that order of his, L-208… . I turned this over in my mind. L-208. I thought about executive orders, pushing the idea back and forth and over again, the way I kneaded bread. Then I replayed what Macguire had learned about some man at Prospect and his last conversation with Victoria Lear: They were arguing about World War II.

Shouldn’t there be public records about all this somewhere? Back to long shots.

I leafed through the phone book and called first the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, where I got switched to the Division of Minerals and Geology, which eventually transferred me to the Office of Active and Inactive Mines, where a very helpful person told me that I could find out a mine’s history by getting it pulled – for a fee – from the state archives. Imagining a football stadium full of red tape, I called the state archives.

“Hi there,” I said in a friendly voice when the archivist answered. “I’m wondering if I could get a quick look at the file on the Eurydice Mine in Clear Creek County. I need it this afternoon.”

“Oh, is that you, Ms. Lear?” the archivist said with a laugh. “I recognize your voice. But the last time you wanted a quick look at that file, you were here for an hour!”

My skin chilled to the bone. Now I knew whose voice mine resembled so closely it had scared Albert’s secretary. I replied, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

I sprinted out to the parking lot and gunned the van toward Macguire’s photo place. While they were hunting for the roll of film, I put in a call to Tom.

“Have you found out anything?” I asked.

He sighed. “This guy Albert Lipscomb is bad. Want to know how bad? We just found the body of that bank teller he cozied up to last week. Dottie Quentin. She was supposed to be watching her neighbors’ place. Neighbors had a hot tub. The teller was strangled and then her body was placed in the hot tub with the wooden top on. The neighbors found her when they came back from vacation.”

“Oh, Lord.” The man with the pictures had returned. I said into the phone, “So what does all this mean?”

“It means Marla is lucky Albert, if that’s who it was, didn’t kill her. So far though, only a few people here seem to think Lipscomb would come back to settle a score with Tony and Marla. Killing the teller, that they could see, Albert didn’t want her to talk. But why come back?”

I said, “I don’t know. Maybe Albert and Tony are in on something together and are trying – successfully, as it turns out – to throw law enforcement off their trail. Have you found out anything about Marla?”

“Only that you were right. Shockley’s out for blood. Hers.”

I said I wasn’t surprised and signed off. I paid for the pictures and rushed back to my van, where I slid the envelope open.

Macguire’s graduation pictures showed joyful, silly, mugging faces of teenagers atypically dressed in blouses above long chiffon skirts and pristinely white shirts and striped ties. The first picture after the graduation batch was of Macguire’s scarred Subaru on a dirt road with pine trees in the background. I was willing to bet this was up by the Grizzly Creek campsite. Then Macguire had held the camera out to take a picture of himself swathed in a camouflage-cloth poncho. The rest of the photos were of Tony and Marla in the rain, busying themselves around the campsite. They’d pitched the tent on a mound. They’d lit the Sterno, heated and then eaten the soup I’d sent up. Then they’d hauled water out of the creek, cleaned up their dishes, and put the trash into the trunk of the Mercedes. This was all as Marla had reported.