The Bishop's Pawn (Cotton Malone #13)(56)

“It is my first assignment,” I noted, with a grin.

“Lucky for us.”

I caught his attempt at humor.

“We want this to be over,” he went on. “We want it contained. Look, everybody knows Hoover kept a slew of secret information on people. It’s one of the ways he stayed in power for as long as he did. Thank God, when he died, his secretary destroyed those private files. For days she shredded paper, and bless her soul for doing that. Nothing good would have come from all that crap coming to light. It was better off gone. Over. Done with. And the same is true for Bishop’s Pawn. Any and all records of that need to be gone, too.”

But something else was bothering me. “You said there were FBI employment records about Valdez that survived. Were they pay records?”

Veddern nodded. “We know he was given a 1933 Double Eagle. And that’s not in a record. Someone else from that time reported it a long time ago. Hence our interest when those words were mentioned recently.”

“He didn’t want cash?” I asked.

“He apparently needed to ingratiate himself with Castro. A lot of people don’t know this, but Castro fashioned himself as some great numismatist. Can you imagine? A murdering moron in green fatigues, collecting coins.” He shrugged. “I suppose everyone has to have a hobby.”

I got it. “And what better way for him to ingratiate himself than to present Castro with the rarest coin in the world.”

“Exactly.”

But something else swirled around in my brain, and I saw it was bouncing around inside Coleen’s head, too. She beat me to it and asked, “How did my father get a 1933 Double Eagle?”

I removed the coin from my pocket.

Veddern stared at the gold piece. “That’s another reason why I’m here. We didn’t even know, until now, that there was another coin out there.”

I could see that Coleen’s patience was nearing its end.

“I need to find my father.”

“I want to find him, too,” Veddern said. “We want to know how and why he has that coin.”





Chapter Thirty-four


We both stood there.

I knew Coleen’s nerves were stretched beyond thin. But Veddern seemed to enjoy her predicament.

Which made me like him even less.

“We need to go,” she said again.

I looked at her. “Not yet. It’s important we hear what this man has to say.”

She stared at me with eyes that swam with fear and alarm.

I could only imagine the thoughts swirling through her brain.

Finally, she nodded, and I faced Veddern. “You had no idea there was a second Double Eagle?”

“That’s what sparked my branch’s interest in the first place. We were planning on being in the Dry Tortugas. Then the boat sank, so we decided to wait a few days and go down to the wreck. You and Stephanie Nelle beat us to it. Ms. Nelle’s mistake was trusting Jim Jansen. If she’d bothered to check with us, we would have told her to steer clear of him.”

Roger that.

“Then things just drifted from bad to worse.” He held out his arms. “And here I am, in nature’s steam room.”

“You get used to it,” I said.

Veddern stared out over the plaza. “I’ve been reading some of the old FBI files. Did you know the KKK had a huge rally, right here, on this spot, in 1964? I’ve seen the film. Scary as hell. In response, there were protest marches around the plaza. Blacks and whites walked in silence. ’Round and ’round. But there was a lot of violence. This plaza became the focal point for the entire war on integration.”

I realized what he was doing. The same thing I did to break a witness. Rarely did frontal assaults work, since they tended to telegraph the punch far too quickly. Guerrilla warfare fared much better. Circle around with your questions. Ask easy ones first. Then friendly ones. Be diversionary. Throw in some brittle chatter to distract. And only at the last minute, when their guard lowered, did you start asking what you really wanted to know.

“King called St. Augustine the most lawless community he ever visited,” Veddern said. “All the things that man endured. Riots. Rocks. Bricks. Beatings. Insults. And to him, this was the most lawless place of all.”

On civil rights, the past had not been kind to St. Augustine. Odd considering that the town’s claim to fame was history. It started in 1963 when three local black integrationists were brutally beaten at a KKK rally. One, a dentist, had his hands intentionally broken. The protest marches that followed turned into full-fledged riots with angry rednecks. Andrew Young was beaten while the local police watched. The home King rented at St. Augustine Beach as his local headquarters was burned to the ground.

Emotions ran high.

Everyone seemed to sense what was at stake.

King intentionally chose St. Augustine as the place to remind America about the need for the Civil Rights Act, which in the summer of 1964 was bogged down in the Senate, frozen from passage by the longest filibuster ever. White, southern, supremacist senators wanted to stop that bill. King opted to take his stand right here. He decided protests were the way to break the stalemate, and his took a variety of forms. From his usual lunch counter sit-ins to a wade-in, where a group of black and white students tried to integrate a whites-only beach. When King tried to eat at the Monson Motor Lodge he was refused service and hauled off to jail. A few days later came the famous swim-in, when the motel’s owner poured acid in the water. For weeks people were attacked and beaten.