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CHAPTER 28

      BACK AT the Las Cruces Courts, Rand got out of his bloody clothes and took a long cool shower.

      After he dried off, when he looked in the mirror, he saw a man with a bruised jaw and a red, swollen nose, but he looked neat enough. He was glad he could breathe through his nose again. More or less.

      There was still more than an hour of sunlight after he finished dressing. From a telephone book in the office, he got Vandergaard's home address, on Alameda Avenue, only a couple of blocks away. Everything in Las Cruces was only a couple of blocks away.

      Vandergaard's two-story red brick house was set well back from the street. It was shaded with large mulberry trees and elms. Ivy covered the railing and on the front porch and crept up the wall almost to the roof. A silvery fig tree was heavy with fruit by the stairs.

      Rand pressed the doorbell. As he expected, there was no answer. He walked around back and found the screen door latched with a hook, which he lifted with a blade from his pocketknife. The door behind the screen was unlocked.

      Inside, the house smelled shut-up and hot. The polished floor creaked under his footsteps as he walked through the kitchen into the living room. When he saw the orderly rooms with the good paintings on the walls, the cut glass crystal on the sideboard, the shelves loaded with books, he thought that Vandergaard was not the sort of man who would try to steal gold from Noreen Hood. Vandergaard was stuffy and correct, a lover of good brandy, and the tasteful collector of objects of art.

      Vandergaard had converted one of the three upstairs bedrooms to an office that was considerably nicer than the one in his store. A rolltop desk held a lamp with a cut-glass shade, and the oak was polished and smooth.

      Rand sat down in the wooden swivel chair before the desk and began looking through the pigeonholes under the tambour cover. Inside were keys, photographs of his store, pictures of jewelry he had apparently either created himself or bought. There was an interest amortization book, and in the drawers, a ledger with long rows of figures. The numbers showed that, despite the nice house and his prosperous air, Vandergaard's business was hard hit by the depression. Rand found dunning notes from wholesale jewelers, and a letter from a company in Los Angeles that said they were stopping his credit until he paid what he owed.

      In the bottom drawer, he found a sheaf of little pornographic booklets modeled on popular cartoon characters, and a couple of other pornographic books.

      Used like a bookmark in one of them was a photo of Noreen Hood smiling into the camera. Rand had seen a similar photograph in Hood's house, but Nick Hood was missing from this picture. Obviously, Vandergaard had been along on the fishing trip. It was he who had snapped Noreen and Nick together - and then taken one of Noreen alone. The photo was completely innocent, but its position in the pornographic book told a tale of its own.

      Rand replaced the books in the drawer and walked down the hallway into a bedroom, which was dark, with windows heavily covered by thick drapes.

      Navarette was sitting in a tall Windsor chair. "You took your time getting here, Amigo."

      Rand was startled. "I didn't know you were expecting me."

      "I knew you couldn't resist it. Did you see the picture of Noreen and Vandergaard in the dirty book?"

      Rand nodded.

      "You can learn a lot from desks," Navarette continued, "I can imagine him reading it and looking at Noreen. And thinking thoughts far too nasty for my pure little mind to comprehend."

      "I'll bet."

      "You notice the ledger and the letters from creditors? He was going downhill and needed money."

      "I noticed." It bothered Rand that Navarette was always a step ahead of him.

      Navarette stood up and started out the door. "C'mon, I'm gonna save you some time and show you something."

      Rand followed him downstairs. Few houses in Las Cruces had basements, but this one did. When Navarette flicked the switch, it was flooded with light from several hanging bulbs. The room had a dirt floor and was damp because of the watered landscaping. Pallid light came through three dirty windows near the ceiling. A pair of large, crudely-built tables held shallow tar-caulked wooden troughs filled with a dark pungent-smelling liquid. Automobile batteries were connected in series on the table next to the troughs, and wires ran from lumps of gold that served as anodes. Other wires ran to submerged cathodes suspended in the solution.

      Rand whistled. "How long have you known about this?"

      "Maybe half an hour." Navarette picked up a copper ingot from about a dozen on the table that looked identical to the gold ingot except for color, and tossed it to Rand. It had the same weight as the ingots.

      "This can't be copper. It's too heavy," Rand said.

      "It's lead, plated with copper. You can't electroplate gold on lead unless you plate the lead first with either copper or nickel."

      "Where did you learn that?" Rand asked.

      "I used Vandergaard's phone to call a guy right after I found this setup. Look under the table."

      On the floor was a shallow box of oily sand with a couple of pigs of lead alongside of it and a small propane furnace.

      Navarette said, "He melted the lead, then pressed his model ingot into the sand and poured it in. Then he'd hit it with the "C" die on his workbench over there. Simple . . . just the way the Conquistadors would have done it, if they had really done it.

      "That's it," Rand said.

      "There's cyanide in the electrolysis solution. We ought to get out of here or open a window," Navarette said. He looked contented.

      They walked up the stairs to the kitchen and closed the door behind them.

      Rand said, "So the whole thing was a fraud."

      Navarette nodded. "Vandergaard wasn't in the garage looking to steal the ingots. He was delivering them, so you and Noreen and Pritchard could let you find them. They intended from the beginning to sell stock in a bogus company. Afterward, they would either skip town or actually spend a little of the money looking for the non-existent cave, and pocket the rest."

      Rand said, "Maybe Noreen knew that Nick was taking the gold to El Paso to sell it to Soames. She thought he wanted to make a quick deal, take the cash, and skip out before Soames got wise. But he'd have to skip fast, because Soames would soon find out the gold was really lead. So she called Vandergaard . . . "

      Navarette picked up on it. ". . . And Vandergaard sees all his work going down the drain. They can get thousands with their scheme, but Nick is queering the deal, and, besides, Vandergaard wants to get rid of Nick so he can move in on Noreen. So our jeweler friend cuts a couple of eyeholes in a sugar sack in case anybody sees him and recognizes him, and heads Nick off, and - Bang! He plugs him and starts to take back the gold. Then along comes Brennan with Petrie, and he has to leave the gold behind. Everything neat and tidy - this way, too."

      "Yeah," Rand said. "But Vandergaard recognized Brennan, so he got that guy, Carlos Uribe, to steal back the gold before Brennan learned it was phony. It wouldn't do to have the lead bars surface while people were paying Noreen and Pritchard to find real gold."

      "You're smart," Navarette said. "Damn near as smart as me, Rand."

      "Coming from you, that's very generous."

      Navarette didn't seem notice the sarcasm. "They've called another meeting. They are getting together again at the library in a few minutes. While we're there, I want you to take your pocketknife and scrape off the gold and copper on one of the ingots, while I watch their faces."

      "Damn, I'm gonna lose the other half of my fee," Rand said.

      "So what. Be glad I'm not pulling you in for breaking and entering. And I just know you were there when Brennan and Petrie killed the Mexican and that hay-truck driver."

      "You think you know everything," Rand said.

      "Well, yeah," Navarette said confidently. "That's because I usually do."

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