Tahoe Chase (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (11 page)

SEVENTEEN

Spot sniffed me all over when I got back in the car.

“Unusual odor, huh, Spot? That’s what a homicidal idiot smells like.”

I was stiff and sore, but I thought I could still be productive. I drove to Ned and Simone’s house to see if she was there, but her Toyota was gone. So I headed back up to Angora Highlands, to try Michael Paul’s house once again.

His Porsche SUV and Range Rover were in the drive, so I parked in the street.

He answered the bell so fast, he must have been on his way out. I knew it was Michael because he was wearing shorts and flipflops and a sleeveless shirt. He had a pair of sunglasses on the back of his head, the bows coming forward through thick hair that came down over his ears. Except for his hands, every inch of visible skin from his shoulders down was tattooed. The current weather was cold enough to freeze him to death in 30 minutes if his car should break down. But why pay attention to winter weather when you have body art to show the world?

I thought I’d try an approach that assumed that Rell Rorvik’s fall was no accident.

“Hi, I’m Detective Owen McKenna, investigating the assault on your neighbor Mrs. Rorvik. Are you Mr. Paul?”

“Yeah. Good to meet you,” he said in a voice so raspy that it made me want to clear my own throat. He shook my hand. “Hey, man, that whole fall-off-the-deck thing was terrible. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it. Now you’re saying it was an assault, not an accident? That just blows my mind. Do you have a suspect? I’d like to take my shot at him.”

“May I come in and ask you some questions?”

“Sure, man. I was just heading out to go pick up my dinner date. She wants to come back here for chicken stir fry, but my cellar is totally set up with beef vintages. So I need a few minutes to get the right wine. But I can chill for a bit.” He lifted his arm to look at his watch, a huge techy-looking slab of metal that he wore on the inside of his wrist. “I could probably do ten minutes of Q and A. Come on in.” He turned and gestured for me to walk past him.

I stepped into a wide entryway, walking slow to favor my pinched nerves, wondering what kind of pad such a hip, tatted-up, beach dude wannabe would have in Tahoe.

His house was done up in Bachelor Black. Black leather furniture, giant black TV, black surround-sound speakers. The walls were gray in both the living room and kitchen. The kitchen appliances were stainless steel to match the gray walls, and the counters were black granite. The only warmth came from the oak floors, but they were mostly covered by expensive black rugs.

“Have a seat wherever you like,” Michael said.

I walked toward an articulated chrome-and-black-leather chair that probably was the tech version of a recliner. With arcing, silvery tubes, the chair looked part robot. I decided that I shouldn’t submit my sore back to such a contraption, and I sat on a rounded, black hassock, thinking that it was unlikely to fold up on me.

Michael sat on a couch and took another look at his watch.

“Sergeant Bains told me that you were out of town the day of Mrs. Rorvik’s fall.”

“Right,” Paul said absently. “I was in the Bay Area. I keep a place in Mountain View. When the weather here sucks for back-country turns, I hang in the valley. It’s good to nose around, see what’s going down.”

“You mean, Silicon Valley.”

 “Right on, man. SOMA, too. There’s a new world being made in the whole South-of-Market area in The City. The best VC opportunities are found by watching the kids.”

“VC?” I said, thinking that this was a kid referring to even younger kids.

“Venture Capital. We go where the kids go. Be there when they hatch a new golden egg. The first adult on the scene can make real bank by just being there, answering questions, providing the capital. Young brains are where the ideas grow. And for the near future, the kids are hanging in SOMA.” He looked at his watch again. Maybe it was a teleprompter.

“How long have you known the Rorviks?” I asked.

It was like jerking him out of a dream. “Oh, awhile, I guess. Three years? Maybe more.”

“Have you spoken to Mrs. Rorvik much?”

“Look, Owen, you know what they’re like, right?”

“The Rorviks? Not really. I’ve met Mr. Rorvik. I haven’t met Mrs. Rorvik. I’d like you to fill me in.”

“Well, ol’ lady Rorvik is sweet. She’s into birds, and all I know about birds is they chirp and they fly and they make a hell of a mess up under my eaves. Anyway, it’s not like there’s much I could talk to her about. We’re cordial. We say hello and goodbye. That’s about it. It’s different with Mr. Rorvik. He’s a world builder like me. He built an impressive company same as me. Sold it like me, too. We talk shop, business, the markets, trends, government interference. He’s actually quite philosophical, which is good for me because I’m probably too focused on making a buck. He connects me to larger issues.”

“What was your business?”

“I wrote software for investment companies. It’s boring, to tell the truth. But it was a market-driven and sales-driven venture from point A. So I never stressed about it not being fun.”

“I’m sorry, I think I’m missing something,” I said.

“Look at it this way. Typically, a guy writing an app, or even a team working on a big project, will think up something that could be innovative or sometimes even fun. They produce the app, it works great, but then they realize that there are very few potential customers for it. Or there are lots of customers, but they don’t have money to spend on such a program. I took the other approach. First find a bunch of customers who have a lot of money and figure out what they want to buy.”

Michael gave me a big grin. He was obviously proud of his business savvy.

“It worked,” I said.

“You bet. I looked at banks and investment houses and found that they generally presented their proposals to customers in a way that frankly looked bad and was hard to understand. So I designed a pretty package and added some effective sales features. It sold very well at a good price. I was already making good money when I approached American Bank Central. They didn’t just want the software, they wanted my whole company. They offered me seventeen million. I would have been a fool to turn that down.”

“Joe Rorvik was impressed. He said you retired at a seriously-young age.”

“Well, I’m not that young. And I’m not really retired. I’ve just shifted to VC work. It would be fun to find the next Apple or Google, huh?” He grinned again.

“Yeah,” I said.

“My dad always said that the world is created by dreamers and that we have a responsibility to dream up a better future. I kind of worry that I haven’t made anything better in the world. But now that I have some capital, maybe I can be more like what my dad talked about.”

“Back to the Rorviks, if I may,” I said.

“Of course. I didn’t mean to take over the conversation.”

“Did you ever hear anything or witness anything that would suggest why someone might toss Mrs. Rorvik off her deck?”

“God, no. When Joe first said that, I thought, what would be the point? Who would benefit? Then the cops asked me a bunch of questions. So I started to think that maybe they had some kind of evidence. Then again, maybe it’s just my tats.”

“You think you get questioned because of your tattoos?”

“Not think. Know. If I put on long sleeves and pants, cops never notice me. If I go out in shorts and sandals and muscle shirt, I get looked at with scowls. I even get pulled over by cops.”

I stood up and handed him my card. “If you think of anything, please call. I hope I haven’t delayed your date.”

 Michael shook his head, looked again at the watch so massive that checking the time was exercise, and showed me out.

I drove down the block to Joe’s house.

“Can you tell me a little more about Manuel?” I asked after Spot and I were inside and sitting down. “What you talked about? What kind of person he was?”

Joe took a moment. “The best way to describe Manuel is to say that he is virtuous. Was virtuous. God, it will be an adjustment for me to think of him in the past tense.” Joe paused. “Maybe virtue is an old-fashioned concept. Either way, Manuel might be the most virtuous person I know. In fact, I think he is the only person I know who looks at every decision as a choice where the task is to identify the best choice and to always make that choice. Manuel says that to make the wrong choice as a result of misinformation is ignorant, but to make the wrong choice as a result of selfish desire is immoral. His words have stayed with me ever since he said them.”

“Sounds like he had high standards.”

“The highest.” Joe pet Spot, thinking, remembering. “Manuel sometimes talked to me about the decisions that a father has to make. Manuel described tricky situations such as when to protect a daughter from the world and when to allow her those experiences that teach her about responsible independence. Manuel was thoughtful and caring.”

“You were probably a mentor for him.”

“He asked for my advice at times, but I always thought that my judgment wasn’t sufficient. At his young age, Manuel had always thought through any subject far more than I had. In fact, the only subject where I could offer him any expertise was in the world of sports and sports equipment.”

“That seems an unlikely area for an environmental scientist to have questions. Were his daughters into ski racing?”

“His daughters ski, of course, just like most young people in Tahoe. But they weren’t racers. Manuel’s interest in my sports advice was about the Steven’s Peak Resort proposal.”

“What’s that? I haven’t heard of it.”

“You haven’t?” Joe sounded surprised. “You must know the mountain.”

“Isn’t that down Christmas Valley?”

“Yeah. The huge mountain at the end. If you’re leaving Tahoe by way of Echo Summit, you stare right at it as you drive up the cliff edge. An investment group out of San Francisco, RKS Properties, has plans to develop it into a resort. Of course, the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the Forest Service have to approve it. And there are already three lawsuits trying to stop the process, one of which UC Davis is connected to. Which means that Manuel was involved in some fashion. But this development group has some legal rights to the land as well as a great deal of money to defend those rights, so the assumption of some people that the resort won’t go through is premature.”

“Manuel came to you for advice on it?”

“Yeah. He found out that I sit on the Steven’s Peak Resort Commission, so he wanted to pick my brain a little.”

“What does the commission do?”

“The Forest Service decided to put together a commission to look at all of the information about the proposed resort and make a recommendation. There are nine of us representing a wide range of viewpoints. Our decision will be a non-binding recommendation, but the Forest Service also has made it clear that they are giving great weight to what we decide.”

“I’ve read that this country has too many rules for a new ski resort to be built. Is that not true?”

“No, it’s not. There have been several new resorts in the last two decades, and there is an entire law written to outline and shape the process. It’s called The National Forest Ski Area Permit Act of Nineteen Eighty-six. The main constraint on resort development isn’t environmental concerns, as everyone seems to think, but simply the belief in the investment community that new ski resorts won’t produce enough business to make the investment pay off. The numbers of skiers and riders is not expanding. So a new resort has an extremely difficult time bringing in enough business. In many ways, it’s a parallel to golf course development. A static customer base means that for any new development to survive, it has to take customers away from existing venues.”

“It sounds like the developers believe differently?”

“Actually, everybody involved believes differently, both those for and those against the idea.”

“Why?”

“There are several reasons. They have plans to run large, free introduction-to-skiing seminars in the Bay Area, which will produce new ski customers. And, no doubt, investors also think that the Stevens Peak Resort will draw many skiers away from other existing resorts. Another reason is the mountain. It’s huge. It has massive terrain for every kind of skiing. Treeless bowls and cirques, steep chutes, meadows and glades, and gentle, treed slopes. The acreage available alone would make it one of the biggest resorts in the country. And the best slopes face north and northeast, so the snow quality wouldn’t be degraded by sun exposure. The area is also easy to access. There’s already a highway right to the base. Like all Tahoe resorts, Stevens Peak Resort would be easy to get to for ten million Bay Area and Sacramento-area people. Outside of other Tahoe resorts, no other top areas in the country have population centers that big and close. Another draw is that the mountain gets massive snowfall just like all of the other areas on the Sierra Crest. Last, there is a large flat area that is perfect for putting up base operations, hotels, restaurants, parking, etc.”

“Really?” I said. “I think of Christmas Valley as being quite narrow at the end.”

“It is. But what gets overlooked is multiple meadow areas to the south of Christmas Valley, just five hundred feet up from the valley floor along the Upper Truckee River. It’s not as large as the floor of Squaw Valley, but it’s close. It would be easy to put a wide road up in there to access the entire resort.”