Mysteries provide on-the-job training

IT’S easy to imagine movie rights for Bill Merritt’s second book being snapped up. This fast-paced potboiler opens with young Merritt a few months out of law school in 1981, having landed a job in Portland, Ore., with a shyster named Thaddeus Silk. Silk dies of a heart attack at the office one night, leaving Merritt to solve an elaborate web of interconnecting mysteries.

The police appear with alarming promptness, news they’d been bugging the premises for months and suspicions that the scene had already been ransacked. By morning, TV crews also arrive, as do a pair of bar association investigators. Jolene, Silk’s receptionist -- out on work release -- is at her post reading a book, flanked by her trusty but befuddled recovering-alcoholic boyfriend. The hall is full of rubbernecking neighbors who have no trouble overhearing Silk’s sister, Sophie, insisting her brother was murdered and claiming she’s entitled to the treasure of Spanish gold in the safe.

Treasure? Merritt says as innocently as possible to everyone who asks if he’s seen such riches there. What treasure?

Grateful for the job he’d been given by Silk, “a gentle, rumpled old man in a pleasant, out-of-date tweed suit” who kept “a messy desk and messier office,” Merritt also knew about his boss’ extra sets of ledgers and other unorthodox practices. But when the safe is opened, all that turns up is a stack of twenties, a pistol and ammunition, a watch, a ring, a bottle of bourbon, a cigar box containing passports and driver’s licenses with Silk’s picture but bearing other names, and a tantalizing golden smudge.

Merritt takes another look around Silk’s office. Not only are files open all over the place, but several items he glimpsed the previous evening while sharing a drink with his mentor are also missing from the safe. Gold bracelets and a ruby ring, for instance, not to mention a crucifix and a gold brooch set with an emerald.

The police believe Silk was fencing antiquities and assume Merritt was either in on the scheme or stole the goods himself. He denies any knowledge of treasure.

Both the cops and the Department of Justice become so interested in him so swiftly, however, that Merritt hastens to hire a lawyer.

Meanwhile, the first client he “inherits” from Silk is Grady Jackson, a World War II veteran known as the Crazy Man of Neahkahnie Mountain. A gold mine of sorts, Jackson’s been paying Silk in cash for a decade to bring suit against the state, which forbade Jackson from digging for treasure on its beaches

Jackson has no end of crackpot theories about pirate ships and Spanish galleons going aground on Nehalem Spit. Merritt doesn’t know what to believe. He sees more than 2 feet of gold chain decorated with an exotic script when he visits Jackson’s dump of a home on the coast, however, so that bit of plunder seems real. Except Jackson claims the king of Arabia gave him the chain.

Then there’s Abby Birdsong, Merritt’s first true client, seeking representation in a marijuana bust. Birdsong had more than 2 pounds in her purse when she was arrested. Worse, 4 1/2 tons shows up in her storage locker, weed as smelly as if it had washed ashore somewhere.

I won’t give more away. Merritt’s title, which seems to tell too much, really doesn’t reveal all because there are questions of $20 bills, crazy Grady, beach treasure, flaky Abby’s stinky dope, Silk’s scams, corrupt feds, possible murders, a novice attorney barely able to keep himself out of jail and a cast of merry pranksters whose mischief may have begun in the 1970s but whose guilt or innocence Merritt needs more than two decades to sort out.

One thing spoils the fun. An author’s note on the copyright page notes, “This book isn’t journalism.” It features “made-up individuals, composite characters” and fanciful settings. Merritt, or certainly his publishers, could have packaged his book as a mystery novel and avoided passing off liberties as truth. Perhaps, being a lawyer, Merritt assumed the disclaimer would suffice. But the reader can get lost trying to decide what to believe.

Irene Wanner is the author of “Sailing to Corinth.”