A Nose for Justice (11 page)

“Okay, here’s the rest of it. Mr. Peruzzi was well liked. Strong supporter of high school sports, as his older son was on the football team, his older daughter on volleyball. Wife also a community leader. The whole family
was passionate about environmental preservation. One of the things, uh, Sergeant Eades from Susanville mentioned is that Mrs. Peruzzi kept repeating how they’d never see the whales. The family had planned a trip to see the whales off the California coast.”

“Funny what people fixate on.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Mr. Peruzzi appears to have had no enemies, perhaps a disgruntled customer from time to time, but no more than any other person in business. Maybe less. There is one thing, though.”

Lonnie looked up. “Oh?”

“Peruzzi had recently raised the issue of
foreigners
, as he called them, buying up water rights around Susanville and throughout Sierra County. This was in connection with Farmland Trust—another advocacy group of which he was a member. He attended zoning requests in Sierra County and Reno. Seems he was a regular at hearings.”

“Why don’t they call it Ranchland Trust?”

“Started out East. Anyway, his point was that while we are focusing on human consumption and misdirection—
his
words—of water, what about the wildlife? What happens to them when the water table is used up? Peruzzi was supposedly working on a report outlining the problem, identifying those ranches at risk.”

“Huh.” Lonnie pushed his plate away and leaned back a little in his chair.

Pete checked his watch. “Apparently he was passionate about this.”

“So maybe one of the groups he was involved in somehow channeled this passion.”

“Maybe.” Pete frowned. “When there are millions or even billions of dollars to be made, some of those environmental groups will be bought off one way or another. The bad guys get richer and money sanctifies everything.”

A patron rose from a nearby table, three business associates with him, giving the officers the eye as he walked past their table. Middle-aged, self-satisfied, and carrying his own gas tank, he said to the public servant, for the benefit of his compatriots, “You guys sure are living high off the hog. I’m paying your salary and I only come here as a treat.”

Lonnie smiled beatifically. “We could eat shit and die. Would that make you happy?”

One of the big mouth’s associates laughed. The disgruntled taxpayer turned beet red and hustled out of the restaurant.

“Lucky he didn’t write down your badge number.” Nonetheless, Pete had enjoyed the exchange.

F
or different reasons, lunch over at Wings Ranch was also enjoyable. Mags had contacted Sotheby’s in New York where she had associates. Her former brokerage house manager, while raking in millions, often attended the auctions and he’d taken Mags with him.

“Isn’t that stupendous?” At the table, Mags opened the auction catalog for a recent sale of Romanov heirlooms. She’d had the fancy publication overnighted via FedEx.

The auction of the lost inheritance of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna had been November 30, 2009, in London.

Catching Mags’s eye on page thirty-five, a gorgeous Fabergé wood cigarette case with silver-gilt mounts bespoke the marvelous workmanship of Fabergé. Created in 1859, the auction estimate in U.S. dollars was $4,200–$5,900. This was one of the more modestly priced items, other objects priced well into six figures.

Mags told Jeep what she’d learned about the Grand Duchess. Born in 1854, died in 1920, she’d married the brother of Czar Alexander III, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, who lived from 1847 to 1909. Much as they would have hated being called such, they were what Americans would dub leaders of the “smart set.” With limitless resources, exquisite taste, and the expectation of getting her way, the beautiful Grand Duchess was an unforgettable figure in pre-Revolutionary Russia. When the Revolution swept away elegance, refinement, and human life, she escaped, not by hiding, but by leaving in great style. The Bolsheviks didn’t break her spirit but the strain most likely brought her goodbye to life. Then again, if one has lived as the wife to the brother of the czar, then as the aunt to the current czar, perhaps the Soviet’s Brave New World looked tatty and rude, so why bother?

“I wonder if there’s anyone still alive who can create objects like these in this book?” Jeep asked.

“I certainly hope so.” Mags grinned, revealing very white teeth. “There’s got to be some beauty still being made in the world.”

“One hopes there are still dedicated craftsmen and artists out there.”

“Twenty-one-year-olds with tiny tools carving cigarette cases,” Mags said. “Well, everyone has to have a passion.”

“What’s yours?” Jeep caught her off guard.

“Don’t laugh.”

“Why would I laugh? Anyone without a passion is half dead.”

“I used to love fixing motors, cars. Daddy kept saying there’s no real money in that and girls don’t get covered in grease.”

“Your father was a good man, but an unimaginative one. Odd, isn’t it? He was surrounded by creative people.”

“Some movie producers are creative. Not Daddy. It was profit, profit, profit. The actors, writers, directors, were all a means to the profit, like cattle to ranchers. He used everybody. I don’t mean he didn’t like them but I guess ranchers like the cattle they drive to slaughter, too.”

“Well, may he rest in peace and have an account book in heaven where everything is in the right-hand column. So, anything more to say about Maria Pavlovna?”

“Sotheby’s has such incredible connections. The people who mounted this auction contacted her descendants. Perhaps one of them knows a descendant of the cavalry school. Maybe someone has a scrapbook.”

“Good thinking.”

W
ings Ranch rested on both sides of Dixie Lane, down which Jeep roared along on her ATV. To the naked eye, the landscape appeared barren save for the sagebrush, but she knew better. A narrow creek running north and south had stunted trees and some brush along it, which turned silver-green in spring. Thin feeder creeks, most of which dried up in the summer, interlaced through Red Rock Valley. While the land looked barren, a deep aquifer undergirded the valley.

Naturally, Jeep had known that when she bought the Fords’ property. Back in 1905, the Nevada legislature devised a permit system. Early settlers established rights to water flow just by usage, even if diverted from a streambed. Over time, that property had rights to that water, especially if this was established before 1905. The Fords did this, so Jeep inherited these flow rights, plus she owned the water underground. In Nevada terms she had a “vested” water right. Easterners always own the water underground. In Nevada, it’s another form of gold. Whoever owned water rights could sell them to the Sultan of Brunei if they wished.

Back in the mid-fifties when Jeep bought the various parcels that became her ranch, Reno consisted of 35,000 souls, give or take. Even into the early 1960s when the population topped 50,000, the ownership and resale of water rights festered as a recurring problem. Never satisfactorily resolved in the nineteenth century, it remained subject to interpretation in the twentieth and now the twenty-first.

Some people can see beyond their immediate needs. Jeep was one of them. She would never have dug into her wallet for any piece of land to which she did not own the water, and she was farsighted enough to buy up water rights to land she did not own. The key was not owning land without
water rights. It always comes back to water. The human race bred past the food supply in some continents while heedlessly emptying out its water table. Americans kept their breeding at reasonable rates, yet some areas of the country were teetering dangerously close to exhausting groundwater. Eventually blood would flow rather than water.

Intelligent as she was about land, water, and business, Jeep could be stupid about other things. She appreciated the arts, but evidenced little creativity in that sphere. Had it been up to her, the ranch house interior would consist of a kitchen table, chairs, a desk and a chair, a sofa, if she thought of it, and a bed upstairs. Then again she’d have been just as happy sleeping in a bedroll. One of the reasons she loved her Army days was the spartan barracks. Uniforms suited her personality.

The warmth of the ranch—its colors and artwork—reflected Dot’s sensibility. Jeep had readily handed her a checkbook and let her go to it. She didn’t even balk at the gorgeous Remington painting, which she thought pretty costly even back then. The amount of joy she gained from looking at that beautiful work could never be measured in dollars, but Jeep hadn’t been aware of that.

Jeep steered the ATV to the top of the Sand Hills at 1,660 feet near her ranch. She looked down to the edge of the Bedell Flat. Behind her was Mags on a camouflage ATV. Snow arced behind the wheels as Jeep drove along the wide path, dodging large rounded stone outcroppings. She stopped, nose pointing north.

“There.” Jeep pointed.

Mags pulled up behind her. “On the north side of the Dogskins?” Mags looked at the truncated range, which ran northeast to southwest at an odd angle.

“When you were little, your mother and I drove you and Catherine up there to have lunch by Dry Valley Creek. April. One of those unbelievably clear days. You know, I haven’t been back up there since 1973. No reason to, but every now and then I get curious about it because that’s where many people believe old Fort Sage was.”

“Strange really, that an army supply station could vanish.”

“’Tis, but a lot of very strange things happened here in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties.”

“Pretty close to the Indian site.”

“That may or may not be a coincidence. One of the things I learned back in the forties was that all government reports are written to enhance the contributions and value of the author. Even today’s students can learn that from Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
.”

“I don’t think they teach that anymore.” Mags, forced to take Latin by her mother, now realized her mother had been correct that Latin was the founding pillar of all Western society, law, politics, literature, and especially engineering.

“If that’s so, our society deserves whatever they get.” Jeep spoke this without malice. “The past is prologue. I know I’m not the first to say it. What are those reports from J.C.? The Romans fielded a highly trained, technically superior army facing more primitive peoples. The Gauls and primitive tribes, the Romans learned, were hell to conquer. What has changed since then?” She waved her hand. “I don’t give a damn anymore, Mags. If we dumb down our schools, if we turn our backs on the lessons of the past, we deserve to fail—and guess what, we are. All progress is built on prior knowledge. By the time this country winds up in the trash can, I’ll be dead.”

“Oh, Aunt Jeep, you’ve been saying we’re going to hell in a handbasket since I was in college. And whatever happens, you always rise to the occasion.”

“Flatterer.” But Jeep liked hearing it. She looked north to the Dogskins, then west to Seven Lakes.

Mags followed her gaze. “I used to really think there were seven lakes. Seven ponds is more like it.”

“You got spoiled back East squatting between the East River and the Hudson. I never saw so much water in my life until I entered the service. You know the government said we were really civilians, not members of the service. We never got the pay and benefits given to men.” She shrugged, then continued. “I’d never been out of Nevada. I mean, we never even drove to see the Pacific. The biggest body of water I’d ever seen was Pyramid Lake. It wasn’t until I saw how fertile the Midwest and the East are that I understood how easy it was for them to ranch compared to us. For one thing, you don’t need as much land. The forage is rich. Well,
beautiful as it all was to me—and remains, I pray—I couldn’t wait to come home. I belong right here.”

“I hope I do in time.”

“Me too. You asked me about Fort Sage. Now the goddamned wind has picked up. Want me to drive you over there?”

“On the ATVs?”

Jeep laughed. “No.”

“Let’s wait for a slightly warmer day, but I would like to see it again. There’s something romantic about a lost fort. But if you brought me up here looking, you must have something in mind.”

“Well—” Jeep twirled her hand around, put her left land on the starter button, but didn’t push it. “I’ve been thinking about buying up some land that borders Dry Valley Creek.”

“Cost a fortune now.”

“Prices are falling precipitously. Might be a good time.”

Mags grinned. “Which means you think it will shoot back up again in time.”

“Well, if I’m successful, it will.”

“All you have to do is hang on.”

“I have even more in mind, Mags. I’ve been thinking about food a lot. I’ve focused on the businesses and the ranch, my true love, really, and I’ve been fortunate, kissed by the gods. When I offered you a place to rebuild your life I told you I had a dream and that I’d tell you about it in time.”

“Of course I’m wildly curious but before I forget to say it, you may be blessed, but you’ve also worked for every penny.”