“Yeah. A gunfight.”
I snapped a picture of the print, then glanced around. The homes of Cohen’s neighbors were hidden behind strands of trees—the sound of people leaving for work echoed faintly. But nearer the Walker estate, nothing stirred. Even the greenway was empty of early-morning joggers. I thought of Clyde’s unease at Zolner’s house. And of the chain in Zolner’s backyard.
“With six shooters,” O’Hara was saying. “Those were some crazy times.”
“You’re making this up.”
“You wound my journalistic soul.”
I turned and looked back at the carriage house. Someone standing in the trees would have a view of the kitchen and bedroom windows. But Cohen kept the blinds drawn at night. It was a terrible surveillance spot.
The print simply belonged to someone’s very large pet. It was that and nothing more.
I gestured to Clyde and we walked back to the truck.
“After Parker’s death,” Tom was saying, “a farmer named Wallace Walton claimed the land under the Homestead Act. He farmed it for a few years before he, too, met a bad end—got caught out in a blizzard and froze to death. The pioneering life, eh? His family pulled up stakes and returned east, and the land reverted back to the federal government. The government sold it to the T&W railroad a few years later.”
I let Clyde in on the driver’s side and followed him into the cab. “Alfred Tate’s railroad.”
“Well, it wasn’t Alfred’s then. It was his great-great-grandfather’s, who leased the land to the Edison brothers so that they could take advantage of the local clay and limestone and try the cement business. But after a run of a few years, they went under, and the lease was never renewed—the land was too far out for anything but farming. There’s nothing else in the news about it until the land transferred to Hiram Davenport with his acquisition of T&W. Back then, that acreage wouldn’t have been worth a lot. It’s a different story, now.”
“What about any fraud regarding the land’s value?”
“I can’t find any evidence. The value claimed by DPC is inflated, but it’s not beyond bounds. Property values are going up in Thornton, just like everywhere else in metro Denver.”
“What else you got?”
“What makes you think I got anything?”
“My Marine superpowers. That, and the note of excitement in your voice.”
“Which is why journalists make lousy poker players. I checked with a contact at Tate Enterprises. It was Alfred Tate who hired Clinefeld Engineering to do a site investigation at the cement factory. Strictly illegal since he doesn’t own the land.”
“Alfred Tate suffered a stroke six months ago. He’s incapacitated.”
“Or maybe not. He made the request only a few weeks ago. Or someone in his office did, anyway.”
“You have any idea why?”
“Not yet. Maybe it’s all just post-stroke disorientation. DPC had a survey conducted last April by a company named Geotech Engineering. They didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, and it’s their report that DPC used to state the value for the land.”
“Did Clinefeld actually conduct the site investigation?”
“I’d love to know. I called the office a bunch of times yesterday, but all I get is a request to leave a message. So far, no one has called me back. But the day is young.” A shrill of phones went off in the background. “Ah, crap. I gotta go.”
“Wait—”
“Buy me coffee next time.”
He hung up. I called Cohen and left a voice mail. It was a long shot, but worth pursuing. “If you don’t have an ID on the dead man yet, try Clinefeld Engineering. Alfred Tate asked for a land survey a few weeks ago—the request is in that folder from Ben’s desk. Maybe they only now got it scheduled, and the dead man is one of their engineers.”
Hiram Davenport had homes in multiple locales, as one would expect of someone with his wealth. Island homes, mountain homes, a villa in Italy. But in his hometown, he’d opted to keep it simple—he lived in one of his own developments. Davenport Towers was a cluster of high-rises that had sprouted like weeds in a former industrial area near the railroad tracks close to downtown Denver. Before Transco United took over, the place had been a mix of small and medium-size businesses, low-income housing, and a homeless camp near the river. Hiram’s company had no doubt promised to clean up an area gutted by the 2008 recession and, in exchange, been able to snap up the land for a song. He pushed the rezoning through and got the city to enforce an ordinance that said neither his trains nor anyone else’s could sound their horns in that area between the hours of ten p.m. and eight a.m.
Once he had broken ground, the high-rises popped up like Legos in place of lost dreams and hardscrabble lives. The bottom floors were filled with coffee shops and boutiques and the remaining floors were made up of million-dollar apartments, the parking lots agleam with shiny new BMWs and Range Rovers. Never mind the water shortages or demolished homes or the displaced homeless. Never mind that per capita, Denver already had enough billionaires to make it hit the “most greedy” lists of cities in the United States without luring in more. Hiram had bet that people would jump at the convenience of quick downtown and highway access and the appeal of the brand spanking new, even with the gritty aesthetics of the railroad tracks. And he’d been right. People snapped up the leases like they were freebies on Black Friday.
“Takes money to make money,” as my grams always said. Once Hiram married into it, he’d done well. I’m sure the views were spectacular.
Now as I exited the interstate, the high-rises, each one a glass-and-stone tower rising twenty stories or more, stood rosy in the morning light. Their windows were a gleaming reflection that caught the sunlight and tossed it back into the air in a shimmering halo.
How, I wondered, had Ben Davenport felt about his father’s conspicuous wealth after the poverty of Iraq? His father’s America was a two-edged sword that offered guilt as an ugly counterpoint to the good life. But maybe people like Hiram didn’t worry much about moral injury.
I splashed through a gutter flowing with rainwater and pulled into a lot lined with media vans. A lone cop kept vigil, his job, presumably, to keep the journalistic mob from Hiram’s door. Inside the building, I knew, would be other cops—detectives in plainclothes watching for anyone who might want to murder the family patriarch in order to finish what they’d started.
I found a twenty-minute parking space reserved for the coffee shop on the ground floor. As Clyde and I got out, I saw a man in a gray suit emerge from the towers and head toward a black BMW idling nearby.
Lancing Tate. No doubt come to pay his respects to Hiram only a day after suggesting it was Hiram’s fault that members of his family had been murdered.
I signaled Clyde and we made a beeline across the parking lot toward Tate, cutting him off twenty feet from his vehicle.