Grant Bell's Golden Goat

By Craig Caudill

Should we stop feeling angry and resentful toward someone for a mistake they've made? It's not easy to forgive a person who has sinned against us. Do we deserve to be forgiven for wrongs we have committed? Being saved from sin and evil is the only true redemption.
Brock Skinner and his wife Maude always took Grant Bell for a harmless, if slightly eccentric, regular at their winery in Hazard, Kentucky. But ever vigilant for adventure and injustice, Brock is skeptical when he presses Grant for details about his past. How did he get the cash to buy a large parcel of property nearby, and build a house on it fifty years ago, just after he turned eighteen?
Meanwhile, west of Hazard, Lamar Leetman has returned from California to open a high-end car detailing business in his hometown of London, Kentucky. Brock and Lamar soon bond over their appreciation for luxury cars, but when a long-hidden secret is discovered on Grant Bell’s property, it’s their shared excitement at solving the mystery that unites them as fast friends. Upon investigating, they come to realize that Grant Bell’s golden goat is only a small piece of a much bigger puzzle involving a stolen government artifact, a New York mobster, crypto mining, and even, it seems, a murder.
They enlist Brock’s brother-in-law, Marcel, to help put the pieces together, and the three of them begin colliding with those wrapped up in the affair, including a retired FBI agent, a pastor and her daughter, and the owner of what might be the best gourmet steakhouse in Kentucky, right off the highway, in the middle of nowhere. Brock’s relentless pursuit of the truth takes him to Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas to right the wrongs that an incident, decades ago, put into motion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Caudill
• Release date: Oct 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781734595772

Craig Caudill

Craig Caudill hails from Lexington, Kentucky where he attended Lafayette High School. He was state hurdle champion and received an athletic scholarship to Indiana University. There he became an All-American and won individual Big Ten and NCAA championships. Craig earned an MBA from the University of Kentucky and held the position of CEO at a window manufacturing company for 25 years. He also served a term as President of the American Architectural Manufacturers Association. Jo, his wife of more than forty years, is an artist and retired nurse. They belong to the Keeneland Club and spend time in Indiana and Florida.

Book preview

Chapter 1

On August 21, 2017, the US Treasury Secretary, accompanied by his wife and staff members, flew to Kentucky on a government jet to make sure the gold was still in the Bullion Depository at Fort Knox. The press ballyhooed the junket as a ruse for catching the total eclipse of the sun, which happened to be passing over the Bluegrass State that day. As the secretary’s entourage gathered in front of the gold vault, put on paper glasses to protect their eyes, and squinted up at the eclipse, a man was stepping into the soundproof broadcasting booth at a rock-and-roll radio station in Santa Monica, California. The station had been running a contest for months, offering loyal listeners a chance to win a nifty cash prize. All a contestant had to do was answer two questions correctly and they would walk out of there with a lot of money.

The effusive disc jockey pressed a button on the control panel in front of him to resume the live broadcast. Today we have Lamar Leetman with us. We’ll be giving him a crack at winning a million dollars. The DJ flashed an oily smile and asked, What do you do for a living, Lamar?

Detail cars, Leetman responded proudly.

You do them yourself?

The expensive ones, yes. He leaned left, rested the front of his fist on his thigh, and stuck his elbow in the air. He had freakishly muscular forearms and the hands of a man who spent them on his work.

How long you been at it? The DJ didn’t seem all that interested in the repartee but needed a buildup before sending another poor sot packing after getting stumped.

Over twenty-five years.

That’s impressive. I’ll bet you’ve spruced up some glitzy rolling stock in your day. Leetman volunteered no reply. Okay, let’s get started. I’ll give you the easy question first. How do you spell Suwannee, as in the river?

Stone-faced, Lamar answered robotically, S-U-W-A-N-N-E-E.

"Correct. Most people leave out the U or one of the Ns. Now, for all the marbles, who sang lead on the recording of the hit song Sail On, Sailor by the Beach Boys?"

Leetman came alive, gazed upward, and laughed ghoulishly. The station manager, standing on the other side of the booth’s glass window, erroneously interpreted the contestant’s reaction to mean he had no clue. Blondie Chaplin, Lamar said with a flourish.

The disc jockey froze, and then popped up out of his seat. Mr. Leetman, you’ve just won a cool one million dollars! He was happy for the man. The station manager’s face sagged. What are you going to do with the money?

Move back to London.

You mean London, England?

No. London, Kentucky. That’s where I’m from.

Well, best of luck to you, sir, and congratulations.

——————

Lamar bought his first car at age sixteen: a black ’57 Chevy with flat tires, parked in front of the apartment of a man who’d lost interest in the jalopy. The price was $25. The seller thought he’d ripped the poor kid off. It only took thirty days for Leetman to make the machine look like it had just rolled off the assembly line. The manager at the Ford dealership in London, Kentucky, took notice of the boy’s métier, so he hired him to detail cars in the body shop after school.

Several months later, the dealership fired the kid. He was too much of a perfectionist, and the customers weren’t willing to pay for perfect.

Upon graduating from high school, Leetman wanted to go to Los Angeles or Miami to buff fenders for a living. He figured his skills would be better suited for expensive cars, where the quality of his work could make thousands of dollars of difference in the value of a high-end vehicle. He chose California because of the weather and was right to focus on European racers. Owners of Lamborghinis and Ferraris paid him a thousand or more to spit shine their half-million-dollar rides. Lamar had all the work he could handle.

His next move was to buy a van, allowing him to drive to the customers. The commuting cut into his productivity but solved the problem of downtime and scheduling. He began to make a fair amount of money as his reputation grew. By the time he was tapped for the radio contest years later, he had amassed close to two million in after-tax cash. It wasn’t quite enough to fund his dream, but when the extra million from the contest came his way, he felt sure it had put him over the top.

What Lamar didn’t have was a wife or girlfriend. He’d spent most of his off hours with his nose in books, self-educating himself and becoming a polymath. There had been dozens of relationships with nice woman who were attracted to him or his money, yet not so much his brain. An intellectual female was disinclined to believe a car detailer had much in the way of social standing or conversation to offer. Hope sprang eternal though, so Leetman kept on the lookout. The perfect match, he surmised, would be a sophisticated lady who owned an expensive buggy he could keep looking sharp. He doubted there were many women like that back in Kentucky.

Lamar rolled into London in a rented box truck full of belongings, towing his expensive yellow Porsche, on Thanksgiving weekend in 2017. He had leased a small house before arriving, and he spent the first couple of days there getting settled in. He promptly deposited his millions in the local bank. That got the tongues a-wagging. Nobody remembered him from thirty years ago, when he pulled up stakes and left, but everybody wanted to know what he planned to do with all that money.

Leetman had spent years analyzing people who drove ostentatious cars. He knew what they did for fun. From those proclivities, he formulated a grandiose plan for a car detailing business like no other in the country. Lamar had never borrowed a penny in his life, which meant he was on a limited budget, considering the cash he would need for working capital. The first order of business, though, was to find the right place to build his dream.

There were two I-75 off-ramps in London. The Laurel Road exit ran through the classiest outskirt of town. Saint Joseph Lane, to the west, turned north by the big hospital on the west side of the road. The east side overlooked the interstate and would be the perfect spot for a shop. Lamar coasted along in his Porsche, surveying the stretch of beautiful property, when he came upon something he was only used to seeing in California–a fancy restaurant. The script sign, on a slant, read: Billy Dawson’s Steakhouse. Lamar grinned, parked, got out of his car, and went in.

The entrance door on the right led to the hostess stand. A glass enclosure behind the podium housed hundreds of bottles of boutique wines. The kitchen, along the back, was blocked from view by a custom glass façade that had running cattle etched in it. A brass bar was to the left, and parquetry had been laid in the corner for musicians. Tables with white cloths, positioned diagonally, filled the center of the room. The hostess in a tight black dress asked, One for lunch?

Uh, no thanks. Could I speak to the manager? Lamar smelled the savory aroma of the buttery, cooked beef.

That would be Mr. Dawson. She used the phone to summon him.

A man in his sixties, wearing a gray suit and striped, black tie, weaved his way forward through the mostly empty tables. What can I do for you, sir? Dawson had steel gray hair, combed straight back, fixed with pomade.

Lamar Leetman. I just moved here from Los Angeles. I’m trying to find a parcel of property in this area to build on. I was wondering if you knew of anything.

That’s interesting. I moved back last year myself from New York City, to open this restaurant. What brought you here?

I’m from London originally. I went to California when I got out of school, Leetman explained.

Same here. I grew up in Somerset and headed to New York when I graduated. What kind of business are you in?

I detail expensive cars.

Dawson looked out the front window and saw the shiny Porsche in the parking lot. Maybe we should go back to my office. He led the way past the kitchen to a quiet backroom that had dozens of black-framed pictures on cream-colored walls. Leetman sat in the chair across from the cherry desk where Dawson seated himself. Now, give me a rundown on what you’ve got in mind.

I’m planning to build an upscale facility for dressing out cars. We’ll get customers in and out in ninety minutes, and while they’re waiting, they can use computers, drink espresso, play cards, or smoke cigars.

Dawson rubbed his prominent chin and blinked his eyes. I take it you expect to peel off some of the interstate traffic?

Yes. I also have other programs in mind for attracting business, Lamar replied confidently.

How much are you planning to spend?

A little over two million.

Hell, son, that’ll barely cover the cost of cigars in the humidor, Dawson said hyperbolically.

Leetman’s tone turned slightly defensive. Well, I haven’t done a detailed budget yet, but feel I can make it work.

I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you let me own the building and you rent it? That way you can use your money to trick the place out.

Why would you want to do that?

To lure your customers in here, he responded, as though it were a dumb question. I own the lot next door. You build what you want and let me pay for it, and I’ll set a cheap rent amount.

Lamar stood and circled the room a couple of times, scratching his head. Now that you mention it, having a steakhouse next door could help my business. Fat cats with fancy cars love to eat tasty food, he quipped.

Then let’s make it happen. Dawson went around the desk to shake on it. Lamar came close to crushing every bone in his hand.

The contractor broke ground in the spring of 2018 on the facility that had been drawn up by a local architect. Customers’ cars would be driven around back to the bays where the work was to be done. The plans showed a building mimicking the style of the steakhouse, with long terracotta tiles in different textures of brown, gray, orange, and tan hung in random patterns. The top of the structure had been designed with a false front, in the mansard style, to block the view of the mechanical equipment on the roof.

Inside, a Cuban espresso bar was planned straight ahead through the door, to greet customers as they came in. On the back right would be the card room. The cigar smoking lounge was to the front right, the humidor to the back left, and a nonsmoking area with computers and plugs to the front left. The cashier stand was shown at the entrance, by the smoking lounge. Thirsty customers would have to go next door to get a drink. Billy Dawson had learned plenty about drinking and driving when he lived in New York, so he planned to watch the consumption of high rollers getting their cars detailed.

For weeks, Dawson watched the building going up next to his steakhouse, hoping it wouldn’t end up as some greasy auto repair shop. Leetman invited him over to see the finished facility in the fall of 2018. Well, what do you think?

Man, you’re certainly serious about this. They were standing in the area where the cars were to be transformed. The supplies and equipment–stacked and positioned strategically–looked ready for a sleek machine to pull in, like a race car rolling into the pits during a big race. They returned to the front of the building where Dawson said, I’ve got a question. Will you allow my customers to wander over, buy a cigar, and smoke it?

I’m counting on it, Leetman replied.

That’s good news. I’ve got a feeling; before long, we’ll have every coal, gas, and crypto baron in here throwing money around.

Into our pockets, I hope, Lamar said greedily.

When are you going to officially open for business?

I’ll have a soft opening in mid-December. We’ll go live on the first day of next year.

Leetman spent November hiring and training teams of four people. The price for a detailing job would start at $499 and go up from there, based on what needed to be done. Each man on the crew would get $50 a car, and $40 an hour for extra work. Lamar accepted nothing less than perfection, which meant he had to run through lots of applicants to get the crews he wanted. Finding attractive, well-groomed folks to work up front, who weren’t callow, proved to be an arduous task.

A few customers received discounted prices to be guinea pigs during the trial run. The missteps in the process were readily found and corrected as they happened. Many patrons slipped over to the steakhouse, making Billy Dawson happy, while others smoked cigars or played cards. Lamar occasionally stepped in and did the detailing himself to show the crews what a commitment to perfection really looked like.

——————

At the same moment Lamar showed his crew how to detail a Jaguar, Danica Feinberg was leaning on a corridor wall of the Great Hall in the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress, eyeballing visitors strolling through to see the new display that had been unveiled. It showed a facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible. Passersby didn’t know it wasn’t the real thing. That was a government secret. She was searching for the accomplice of the mastermind who orchestrated the theft of the authentic one, and she knew the chances of catching them would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Chapter 2

The United States bought the three-volume Gutenberg Bible by an act of Congress in 1930. It had been in the possession of the Benedictine Order of monasteries in Austria for years and was considered the finest example of the printed book in existence–it was priceless.

Danica Feinberg spent her life as an FBI field agent. Two months after she retired, her chronically ill husband passed away, leaving her all alone and bitter. To fill her time, she worked on unsolved cases that had been assigned to her over the years; the most bedeviling was that of the stolen Gutenberg Bible.

She went to the Library of Congress ticket counter at closing time to ask a man who knew her, and thought she still worked at the FBI, for a copy of the names of the people who had bought passes that day to tour the library. Danica still had a security clearance to access government databases. She planned to slog through files of the visitors, looking for a scoundrel who had done the unthinkable.

The lead went cold when she couldn’t find anyone of interest in her search. For the next few years, Danica made no real progress solving the case.

——————

Last Sunday, Pastor Sandra stood peering out the dingy window in her church office, watching parishioners come through the door for the 10:30 service. Overwhelming sadness gripped her as she turned to look at the years of memories in the pictures covering the walls. She sat down at her desk and began to pray in earnest. When she had finished meditating, she put the palms of her hands on the desk, drew a deep breath, hoisted herself up, and straightened the flowing white robe she wore, bracing to face the congregation one last time.

Sandra made her way to the chancel through the dark vestry and noticed at once that the crowd was as large as she had ever seen it. Chairs had been set up behind the pews. They were full. The male pastor, who had been hired to replace her, smiled when she appeared. He took a seat and dropped his Bible on the side table as Sandra approached the podium. She switched on the actor inside and said, How wonderful it is to see all of you in God’s house this morning. I’m honored so many of you have come to send me off into retirement. With that, the crowd stood and began clapping. Pastor Sandra clutched the white handkerchief she had stashed on the podium before the service, closed her eyes, and used the hanky to mop the tears running down her cheeks.

Once the scriptures had been read and another song was sung, Sandra stood with pride and energetically stepped up to the rostrum. She wasted no time announcing the subject of her sermon. As I prayed about what to say today, God answered my prayer with a clarity I’ve rarely experienced during my time in the ministry. She looked out over the crowd. Her mind drifted as her emotions bounced from one feeling to another, based on whom she fixed her eyes upon. She refocused and said, What does God hope for us in this life? That we serve and glorify him and build a relationship with Jesus Christ that will last into eternity.

At the end of the service, before the benediction, Pastor Sandra shared, I want to thank my daughter, who is here this morning, and each of you for the love, kindness, and patience you’ve shown me during the forty years this has been my church family. I genuinely appreciate it.

There were other festivities the rest of the day that gave Sandra an opportunity to say goodbye to many longtime friends. By late afternoon, she was boxing up the belongings in her office. She would be moving out of the parsonage on the east side of Louisville, into a condominium in downtown Lexington, near Slade University. To stay busy in retirement, Sandra had agreed to join a group putting together the curriculum for a new class. She’d been asked to take part primarily because important people at Slade knew she was loaded. They intended to put the touch on her.

Sandra’s grandparents left her eight million dollars when she was sixteen years old. Nobody knew about the money until a nosey deacon at the church delved into her finances years later to see if she needed a raise in her position as pastor. It didn’t take long for the wheels of the gossip mill to start turning. She had donated a lot to worthy causes over the years, and fortunately, the man she’d hired to manage her money had made a blue fortune for her in the stock market.

Sandra’s daughter, closing in on fifty, came through the office door and said, Well, Mother, it’s going to be hard for you to leave here. This is the only church you’ve ever known.

Yes, it will. Thankfully, I’m not going too far away. The pall of loneliness came over Sandra when she looked up at her daughter.

All things come to pass, I guess. Let me know when you’re going to move. I’ll come over and help you get settled. Neither Sandra nor her daughter had ever been married. The two women had learned to do whatever needed doing without the help of a man.

——————

The late June weather turned muggy, signaling the end of the cool, breezy spring that wine bibbers preferred when sitting outside, soaking up the Appalachian ambience. Maude Skinner owned and operated Vigneron Winery near downtown Hazard, Kentucky, and besides keeping the operation going, had to make sure her husband, Brock, stayed occupied, or he was inclined to get into trouble. Maude’s brother, Marcel Sutherland, and Brock had made millions in the Internet tailoring business. That meant they had too much time on their hands. When they ran across anything mysterious or interesting, the two of them turned into amateur sleuths, like Mutt and Jeff, without the finesse and precision of a Holmes or Watson. Maude’s strategy was to keep Brock busy doing chores. There was one thing, though, she had absolutely no control over–his Lamborghini.

Maude, honey, I’ve made an appointment for this Thursday at Paragon Voiture. It’s the operation in London owned by Lamar Leetman, the man who details expensive cars. You remember him? He’s been in here a few times to chew the fat.

Oh, yes. That serious fellow, she commented.

He is. Marcel wants to run down from Harrodsburg to have his Mercedes cleaned too. Would you be interested in going over with me? We could have him join us there and try out Dawson’s Steakhouse next door while we wait.

I’d love to go.

I’ll let Marcel know.

Maude looked up and said, "Uh-oh. I hope you weren’t planning to do anything for the next hour. Here comes Grant