Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [57]
“I plan to dry stack,” Kerney said.
“How high is the wall going to be?” Joe asked as he jiggled a stone to test its stability. It was firmly placed.
“Three feet,” Kerney replied.
Joe shook his head and rose. “Your foundation is too narrow. You’ll need to double the size of it.”
“You know about this stuff?” Kerney asked.
“My grandfather was a stone mason,” Joe said, with a nod of his head. “I used to work for him in the summertime. Will it be a free-standing or a retaining wall?”
“Retaining,” Kerney said. “I’ll backfill it with topsoil and eventually put in a flowerbed and a flag-stone path.”
“You’ll need to slope it for drainage, otherwise it will give way over time,” Joe said as he walked along the empty part of the trench. “That’s one of the reasons your foundation has to be wider, so you can step it back a bit and still have support at the base.”
“Should I start over?” Kerney asked.
“I would,” Joe said, glancing at Kerney’s rock pile. “And you might want to order more rock. You’ve only got half of what you’ll need.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Kerney said.
“That’s about all the help I can give you,” Joe replied with a smile, “because this thing with Clifford Spalding is a washout. There’s no way I can track down the source of the money Spalding used to buy the leasehold for the Santa Fe hotel or pay his way out of bankruptcy. Nobody keeps financial records for thirty years, unless there are potential litigation issues, and there weren’t any with Spalding.”
“How much money are we talking about?” Kerney asked.
“All together, a little over three hundred thousand,” Joe said, “and none of it came from the life insurance policy on Spalding’s son. That was for ten grand, and the beneficiary was Debbie Calderwood, who cashed it in, according to the insurance company records.”
“Where do you think Clifford Spalding got that kind of money?” Kerney asked.
Valdez shrugged. “One source told me Spalding had no partners. Another, the lawyer who handled the lease agreement for the Santa Fe property, said he had an investor. The state has no record of a partnership contract, so I’m assuming it was an informal, handshake arrangement.”
“Did the lawyer give you the name of the investor?” Kerney asked.
“Nope,” Joe replied. “He didn’t handle that part of it, and Spalding made the first payment on the lease through his personal checking account. Even if I could have found the bank account he’d used, the record wouldn’t be there. Banks only keep checking account information for six years.”
“What about state and federal tax records?”
“You’d need to make a strong case for tax evasion first, before we could access that information,” Joe replied. “Same with bank deposit reports to the feds when the amount is in excess of ten thousand dollars.”
“Did the insurance company have a record of where they sent the policy proceeds to Debbie Calderwood?” Kerney asked.
“Yeah,” Joe replied, stepping off toward his unit. “I’ll get my notes.” He came back and opened a file. “It was sent to general delivery in Taos.”
“Thanks, Joe,” Kerney said.
“Sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful,” Valdez replied. “Good luck with the wall.”
Kerney glanced at his project. He’d put a lot of hours into doing it wrong, and now he’d have to start over again from scratch. “I might as well get it right,” he said.
Valdez laughed and nodded in agreement.
Kerney waved as Joe drove away, thinking maybe his research hadn’t been a complete waste of time. According to Lou Ferry, the PI Clifford Spalding had hired and then fired for failing to continue falsifying his investigative reports, Debbie Calderwood had spent some time in Taos living on a commune before disappearing into southern Colorado.
While the communes around Taos were long gone, many of the old hippies from the sixties and early seventies remained. They formed an alternative lifestyle community of fringe artists, environmental activists, ski bums, building contractors, and reconstructed small business owners.
Kerney decided to pay the Taos police a call in the morning. Given the small