The Ascent(90)

As I’d expected, confirming Shotsky’s involvement with a group of Las Vegas thugs was much more difficult. But following a phone call to an old college buddy of mine who’d for years worked as a blackjack dealer at a number of casinos on the strip, I learned one piece of interesting information: for the past decade, a New York corporation had reserved a hotel suite at the MGM Grand, although noone could say for certain if the suite had actually ever been used. The corporation was Trumbauer Petrol, the company Andrew inherited from his father after his death.

Chad Nando possessed an extensive arrest portfolio with various police departments throughout the country, mostly petty stuff—possession of dope, minor theft, a couple of DUIs. Undoubtedly, Chad’s biggest claim to fame, at least on the police blotter circuit, had been his arrest in participation with a cocaine-smuggling operation.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested and received documents pertinent to the case, and, although the names and specific identifiers had been blocked out by a black Sharpie, I was able to discern Chad’s role in the whole ordeal with little difficulty: he’d been the snitch. Arrested right up front, he agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency by the courts, which was granted to him in the form of three years’ probation.

When police followed the cocaine’s money trail, a number of high-profile businesses were mentioned in the report, though they were never able to make anything stick, and the business owners were quickly dropped as targets. One business was a small American entrepreneurial company called CliffDiver, Inc. An Internet search yielded very little information about CliffDiver, which had immediately gone out of business following the investigation. I found no records of any of the company’s personnel except for one—Drew Bauer, president and CEO.

Only the police report provided any further insight, stating that just prior to their investigation, CliffDiver had given money to a pharmaceutical company that had patented a pill to combat heart failure. Approval by the FDA never came, the pharmaceutical company folded, and CliffDiver faded into the background before disappearing entirely. Vague? Yes. However, I possessed one small bit of knowledge that the police working the case did not: the word CliffDiver was tattooed on Andrew Trumbauer’s upper thigh, something

I would have never noticed had he not stripped out of his clothes and jumped off the cliff that night in San Juan so many years ago.

The rest were more difficult to decipher, knowing so little about their backgrounds and their individual relationships with Andrew. Any parallels would only be supposition on my part. Yet who knew what sort of things happened in the six months Michael Hollinger spent with Andrew and two aboriginal women in the Australian outback, for instance? The women could never be found, and even if they were, the chances that they knew anything were more than slim.

What had Curtis Booker done to earn his gravestone? I found very little information about the ex-Marine on the Internet, save for an Ohio address. Feeling it necessary, I mailed a letter to that address. The letter mentioned Curtis’s death on the Godesh Ridge, although I went into no specific detail, and concluded with my return address and telephone number in case anyone wanted to get in touch with me for more information. I addressed the letter to Curtis’s daughter, Lucinda Booker. I’d yet to receive a reply.

And, of course, there was John Petras. Since he’d survived the ordeal, there was no need to conduct any research, but that didn’t mean I was able to figure out his connection to Andrew nor why Andrew wanted to kill him. We phoned each other once a month just to keep tabs, and occasionally I’d pester him about it. But Petras would only sigh and say he could think of nothing.

“We’d had one stupid argument years ago in Nova Scotia,” he told me. “It was over who’d win the Super Bowl, and we were both tanked up on liquor. I called him a stupid son of a bitch, and he said I was an ignorant imbecile—hardly grounds for wanting someone dead.”

“Do you believe the dakini exist?” I asked him during our last phone call.

“What brought this up all of a sudden?”

“It’s just been on my mind since you mentioned it.”

“They’re Buddhist myths. The word translates to ‘sky dancer,’ a

female spirit who traverses through space. Some faiths say they’re vengeful. Others say they function as muses. But overall, they’re considered ‘testers’—their purpose is to put man through tests to prove his worth.” “His worth for what?”

“To enter paradise,” said Petras. “Eternal bliss.” “Eden,” I said. “Shangri-la,” Petras added.

“So I guess if you believe in the dakini, you’d have to believe in the existence of Shangri-la,” I said. “You’d have to believe in paradise.”

I could tell Petras was grinning on the other end of the phone. “You can’t have God without the devil.”

My legs pumping, my respiration as tight as a machine, I headed back down Main Street, cut across one of the darkened, narrow alleys that crisscrossed the City Dock, and emptied onto a cobblestone byway illuminated by an interval of lampposts. I burned by the Filibuster, dark and locked up for the evening.

2



EVERY HONEST STORY HRS ONE GRERT REVEAl.

For me and my life—for my story—it would be no different. Despite the proactive research into the people who’d died on Godesh Ridge at the hands of Andrew Trumbauer, my great reveal happened purely by chance nearly one year after my return from Nepal.