“No, nothing,” John said. “Believe me, we’d try to help out. Whoever did this to Bert needs to go down. Connie and I have been talking about it all day. For the life of us, we can’t figure out why anybody would want to hurt him. We wish we could help.”
Joe believed them.
“I think it was strangers,” Connie said. “Itinerants. I think it was random.”
Joe looked at her.
She said, “Since the pandemic, there have been a lot of strange homeless people out there.” She indicated “out there” with a wave of her hand in the general direction of the mountains. “People left cities and now they’re just drifting around. We seen ’em in campgrounds last summer and they’re still out there. I think some homeless people found Bert’s place and hurt him for no good reason.”
“It’s a theory,” Joe said to be conciliatory.
“Connie has lots of theories,” John said with an eye roll.
The billy-goat man at the end of the bar suddenly cleared his throat with a wet, hacking sound that made Connie and Joe cringe.
“Tell him about the treasure,” the man croaked. He’d obviously been eavesdropping the entire conversation.
“The treasure?” Joe repeated.
Connie and John again exchanged glances.
Connie said, “That’s what Bert called it, anyway. He told us about it once when he was really, really hammered. Bert said he had a treasure that belonged to his old man and he was trying to figure out how much it was worth.”
Joe tried to keep his face still. But inside, he felt a mild electric jolt.
“Did he say what the treasure was?”
John opened his mouth to answer, but Connie cut him off. “He found out John here used to be a gold coin and collectibles dealer back in Pennsylvania. That got Bert really excited that night and he asked John if there was a market in World War Two memorabilia. He said his dad brought home some stuff from the war.”
“Like what?” Joe asked.
John waved his thick hand in the air dismissively. “Most people think that crap is worth a lot. You know, medals, helmets, that kind of crap. But that stuff is a dime a dozen. Our boys brought back mountains of it and it isn’t exactly rare at all. I showed Bert where a German steel helmet was for sale on the internet for two hundred bucks, is all. Medals and that kind of memorabilia goes for even less. Hell, you might make more melting that stuff down than trying to sell it as is.”
Joe let him go on.
John said, “What I told him didn’t even faze Bert. He said what he had was special and worth a ton of money. He was convinced of it. He said he’d prove it to me. I told him there were swap meets and conventions where all that stuff gets exchanged, and that it was all low-rent even all these years later. People who collect Nazi memorabilia are a strange bunch, I’d say.
“So the next time we were in here drinking a lot, he pulls out a sheet of paper,” John said. “He’d been carrying it around with him for a while. I think he printed it off the internet. It was a news article saying that Hitler’s phone had sold at auction for a quarter-million dollars or something like that. I looked at the picture and said, ‘Bert, it has his name on it. Otherwise, it’s just an old phone.’ It was the name that was valuable, not the phone. I thought that would put Bert off, but it got him even more excited. He said that his ‘treasure’ had a name on it like that, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
Joe knew what it was.
“Bert might have tried to contact some of those World War Two memorabilia places,” Connie said. “I think I heard him talk about it once. Like he was shopping this treasure around, maybe. But I never heard that it came to anything.”
“He sure never got rich,” John said. “He’s been adding to his tab the whole month.”
“Interesting,” Joe said, thinking about the implications of what he’d just heard. If Bert Kizer was contacting collectors, collectors might start reaching out to potential customers. And if the right customers had wanted the album desperately, perhaps they’d bypassed the dealer and come straight to the source.
He couldn’t wait to tell Marybeth.
“I thank you for your time,” Joe said to Connie and John. “But I better get going home.”
“Thank you for the beers,” Connie said. She reached out and caressed his shoulder. “Don’t be a stranger around here. I heard you were some kind of by-the-book Goody Two-Shoes, but you’re all right.”