Resurrecting Langston Blue

by Robert Greer

  “He had to know something,” countered Ket. “I told you, the day before he deserted he told Mimm that no one in his unit wanted to go on that mission but that captain of theirs, Margolin.”

  “Well, Margolin’s dead, and Blue’s still missing. Looks like we may really have to head back to West Virginia.”

  “Hold on,” said Flora Jean. “Before we head off on some wild-goose chase sprinting halfway across the country and droppin’ in on a state where folks ain’t had a job for the last half a century, I’m gonna try one last MI contact.”

  “Thought you exhausted your intelligence sources this morning?” said CJ.

  “You know better than that, sugar,” Flora Jean said with a smile. “I always keep one hole card for special occasions. I’ve got a source real high up. A two-star general. Served with him during Desert Storm. He was a military intelligence major during Vietnam. Best of all, he lives just down the road in Colorado Springs.”

  “What makes you think he’ll ’fess up any more than those two aces in the hole you talked to this morning?”

  “Oh, he’ll talk,” said Flora Jean with a wink. “Always has. He’s the kind of man who prefers his meat on the dark side, if you get my drift.”

  Chapter 11

  Carmen’s voice rose to a Crescendo. “CJ, he’s here. He left a message for me at my condo. My father’s here in Denver.”

  CJ nudged the slice of sweet-potato pie and a half-eaten ham sandwich Mavis had brought him for lunch across his desktop and adjusted his cell phone from his left ear to his right ear. “Calm down, Carmen.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “When did he leave the message?”

  “About nine this morning. I would never have known he came by until this evening but I had to run home for lunch to pick up some papers I’d forgotten. Fortuitous, don’t you think?”

  “A little. Did he leave a phone number? Say where he was staying?”

  “No. Just a message with the building concierge saying he’d come back.”

  “Did he say what time?”

  “No.” Carmen’s voice trailed off.

  “Did the concierge describe him to you?”

  “No. I didn’t ask him to. Why all the questions?”

  CJ chose his words carefully. “Because we’re dealing with a man who’s been missing in action for over three decades, an army deserter. And in case you’ve forgotten, the man in command of the unit he deserted turned up dead the other day. The important thing here, Carmen, is your safety.”

  Carmen paused and thought for a moment. Thought about never having had a father—never having known her mother. About five-hundred-pound bombs whistling as they dropped from the sky, about the chatter of machine-gun fire and the nauseating disinfectant smell of napalm. She thought about escaping from Vietnam with Ket as part of a flotilla of boat people in 1979 and landing just south of San Francisco, seasick, half-starved, and petrified in a strange new homeland. “I’m tougher than you think, CJ,” she said finally. “And I’m not really concerned with my safety. What I’m concerned about is connecting with my father.”

  “Do you have to go back to work?” asked CJ.

  “No. I finished the experiment I was working on late this morning.”

  “Good. I’ll be over there in twenty minutes. If he shows up before that, stall, but whatever you do, don’t let him in.”

  “For God’s sake, CJ. He’s my father!”

  “Stall, Carmen. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Carmen’s response was halfhearted. “Okay.”

  “See you in a few,” said CJ, shutting off his cell phone and reaching across his desk for Carmen’s file. He opened the file and jotted down Carmen’s phone number and address, stroked his chin thoughtfully, slipped his snub-nosed .38 out of his top drawer, and laid it on top of the file folder before finishing his sweet-potato pie.

  Ginny Kearnes was seated in the Palace Arms Restaurant of Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, one of President Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite places to dine, enjoying a late lunch and leaning heavily on Owen Brashears for moral support. The half-empty room full of well-dressed businesspeople had a classy retro look that shouted 1950s. Staring across the table at Brashears, Kearnes twirled her fork around slowly in what was left of her apple-crumb dessert. “I’ve exhausted every lead, Owen. Talked to that black cop, Newburn, and the bail bondsman, Floyd, looked for dirt on the Republicans’ new fair-haired boy, Alfred Reed, and I’ve got nothing.”

  Not the least bit surprised, Brashears said, “You can be certain as September snow in the Rockies that Newburn won’t toss you any bones. He didn’t get to be a black homicide lieutenant by stepping outside the bounds of the rule book. Just be glad he served you up the day-planner connection between Langston Blue and Cortez. That’s at least something.”

  “But he and Floyd stonewalled me on that, too.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Or have you forgotten I was a wet-behind-the-ears journalist during Vietnam? If Newburn or Floyd won’t give us anything, I’ll do some digging on my own. I’ll turn up something; count on it.”

  Ginny smiled, aware that Owen had been a Stars and Stripes reporter and then a war correspondent during Vietnam. When he’d come home and begun protesting the war, some media insiders claimed that his “on-the-front-lines” war bravado and sudden antiwar switch were nothing more than a ploy for moving up the media ranks. He’d also made some mistakes and garnered more than a few enemies in high places during the war, largely because he’d played a little too fast and loose with facts and cultivated a few too many relationships with noncombatant ladies. But his troubles with stateside media people and military brass subsided over the years, and he’d settled comfortably into the editor-in-chief slot at the Boulder Daily Camera, where he’d been for over fifteen years.

  “You lost your footing once playing advocate, and look what it got you,” said Ginny.

  Brashears shrugged off the inference that his career had been stifled because of his back-and-forth stance on the war. “It got me out of playing pretty boy in front of a camera and back into the print media where I belong. Or maybe you forgot.”

  “I’m not forgetting anything, Owen. I’m just repeating what Peter always said, that you lost your footing for a while after Vietnam.”

  Visibly upset, Brashears forced a smile. “And I found it. I edit the third-largest newspaper in the state, we’ve won five Pulitzers, and now I’ve lost one of my closest friends.” He reached across the table and clasped Ginny’s hand. “We’ll find out who killed Peter, with or without the cops or that bail bondsman Floyd.”

  “How?”

  “Simple. I’ll play reporter. I’ve done it before.”

  “Do you think Peter’s murder is tied to this guy Blue?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s our only lead besides the possibility that Elliott Cole and his band of Republican cut-throats are somehow involved.”

  “They wouldn’t kill someone to get into office.”

  Brashears’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Ginny, you’re a press secretary, for God’s sake. It’s politics, remember? I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

  “You could be right,” she said, shaking her head.

  “When I have something I’ll let you know,” he said, patting her hand and watching her eyes well up with tears.

  “Be careful, Owen. I don’t want someone shoving you over the edge of a retaining wall, too.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Yes. Newburn told me during one of his dreadful visits. You didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Guess they’re holding back on the press.”

  “Don’t they always? I’ll start digging.”

  “So will I,” said Ginny as a tear trickled down her cheek. “Sooner or later Peter’s killer will have to answer to me.”

  Celeste Deepstream knew about the iron lung because of her brother’s illness. Frail, failing to thrive, unstable on his feet, and barely able to breathe,
Bobby had been taken to a reservation infirmary when he was barely six, diagnosed with polio, courtesy of the seventy-five-year-old alcoholic doctor who attended to their Acoma Indian tribe’s health needs, and placed in an iron lung.

  Bobby had spent two nights confined to the iron lung on the strength of the old drunk’s diagnosis before an astute visiting intern determined that Bobby was actually suffering from malnutrition and a postherpetic neuritis courtesy of a systemic infection with the herpes virus that had started out as a case of fever blisters. The two nights in the iron lung, its negative pressure pulling at his chest, suffocating his breathing, trying its best to asphyxiate him, had nearly killed Bobby. The image of Bobby trapped in a seven-foot-long cylinder on wheels with nothing protruding except his head, his eyes pleading for mercy, had remained with Celeste for the rest of her life.

  After Bobby’s death she’d spent most of her days and nights thinking about killing Floyd, but she’d never been able to come up with a plan that would take away his life and at the same time make him suffer the way she had over Bobby. Finding the iron lung had been her salvation. She had stumbled onto the breathing contraption at a Denver flea market six months earlier, and it had been the catalyst for her backup plan to deal with Floyd.

  It had been a struggle to transport the seven-hundred-pound relic left over from the polio scourge of the 1950s almost to the top of a mountain, but she had done it by herself, with help from no one but the bearded salvage-store owner, who had sold it to her and helped her load it into the bed of her pickup.

  Now, as she looked at the iron lung, unloaded with the help of a rusted winch, and watched the sunlight from the front window of the converted New Mexico line shack she had been living in off and on for the past few months dance off its polished metal skin, she smiled and thought about her prey.

  First the Sundee woman. She would be easy. Then Floyd. He’d be harder, but like a bitch in heat, Mavis Sundee would serve up a trail for her hound to follow.

  She hadn’t determined how’d she kill them. Not yet. That would take time, patience, and thought. But she’d construct a plan to follow. A plan that would satisfy her need to avenge Bobby. One that would make him proud of his twin sister.

  A strong mountain breeze kicked a knot of sagebrush against the ramshackle line shack’s flimsy front door with a thud, startling Celeste. Turning her attention from the iron lung, she walked across the shack’s creaky wooden floors and stepped outside onto the sagging front porch. The porch’s hundred-year-old planks groaned with each step. Just to the south, a row of fifty-year-old aspen quaked in the breeze. To the southwest, a petered-out cow trail worked its way down a steep slope toward a dry wash just beyond the aspen stand’s leading edge. Less than a mile away, white-capped Sangre de Cristo mountain peaks kissed the New Mexico sky. She was only 220 miles south of the Mile High City, but the abandoned line shack where she was squatting, hidden on a sweeping hogback above a high-mountain meadow, might as well have been lost to the world.

  To find her—and she had made certain that he could—Floyd would have to find the valley, scale the hogback, and assault the shack. There was almost no way he could, short of climbing the mountains from the Taos side, without her being able to see him coming.

  Watching the sun track west, she checked her watch and went back inside. It was almost 4 o’clock, and she wanted to be back in Denver by sunset. The nearly four-hour drive back north would do her good, give her time to think, allow her to congeal her plan.

  She glanced at the iron lung. For some unexplained reason the cylinder reminded her of a life-saving airlock between two space capsules. Walking past the lung, she patted it and smiled, aware that the use she had in mind for the half-century-old breathing relic was meant to be life-ending, not life-preserving.

  Chapter 12

  “We have no idea if he’ll come back,” said Carmen, pacing the floor of her living room, her eyes darting between CJ and Ket.

  “He’ll be back. The man didn’t drive two-thirds of the way across the country to cut and run. Besides, he can call you. You’re listed, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Carmen, recalling all the trouble she’d had packing up her cancer research laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, subleasing a condo in Denver for a half-year sabbatical, and trying to agree on a wedding date that would accommodate her busy schedule and that of her fiancé, Walker Rios. Only Ket’s steady hand, a nurturing, caring force that had been there all of her life, and Walker’s infectious optimism had nudged her ahead. And then out of nowhere, at home alone one night, without Rios there to hold her or Ket around to tell her no, she’d decided to send her letter to Blue. “I wonder if he likes motorcycles?”

  “Flora Jean told me that you ride an Indian,” said CJ, surprised by Carmen’s response.

  “And she’s a pro,” Ket proudly interjected.

  “A ’47 Chief. Restored it myself. But I’ve only ridden it a few times since I’ve been here in Denver. I leased a car.”

  “Smart. We don’t have the kind of wide-open spaces you have over in Grand Junction. Besides, a vintage ride like that—you’re looking at some chop shop’s ultimate fantasy.”

  “I know, but that bike’s part of me, and I couldn’t leave it behind. Somehow it grounds me.”

  “Carmen learned to ride as a child in Vietnam,” said Ket. “She had to in order to survive.”

  CJ knew that part of Carmen’s story. Flora Jean had told him that Carmen had cleaned houses, collected garbage, driven a cyclo—the Vietnamese pedicab equivalent of a taxi—and begged on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City after the war, but unlike most of her Amerasian compatriots, who all too often ended up wallowing in the muck of discrimination in their homeland, she had been lucky. She’d had the privilege of an education and the advantage of a strict upbringing by a loving, caring aunt. By the age of ten she was a math whiz and fluent in English, French, and Vietnamese. He also knew that despite her success in her adopted homeland, Carmen was haunted by voids in her life. She knew nothing of her father except that by Ket’s account he and her mother, who had died when Carmen was only two, had been star-crossed lovers. And there were other demons in her past: horrific war-linked memories that still occasionally triggered night sweats and bouts of terror. Haunted by memories of the same war, he and Carmen Nguyen had more in common than either of them could imagine.

  “We’ve got a lot in common,” said CJ, walking over to the living room’s picture window. He stared west toward the Rockies.

  Carmen nodded without answering, caught off guard.

  “What kind of research do you do?” asked CJ, walking back toward Carmen, broaching a subject that he expected would offer no such common ground.

  “Cancer research, molecular biology. Some people call it gene splicing.”

  Shaking his head in disbelief, CJ said, “I have a friend over at CU who does the same kinda thing. A pathologist. Name’s Henry Bales. I served with him in Vietnam. He was a combat medic.”

  Carmen’s face lit up. “You’re kidding! He was one of the first people I met after I got to Denver. He helped me with a piece of equipment I was having problems with. He’s delightful.”

  “Tell him hello for me.”

  “I will,” said Carmen, finally taking a seat.

  CJ was about to do the same when an intercom near the condo’s front door erupted in a loud buzz.

  Carmen flashed CJ and then Ket a look of anticipation and headed for the intercom. Her hand shook as she pushed the button below the speaker. “Yes?”

  “You have a visitor, Dr. Nguyen. A Mr. Blue,” came the voice on the other end.

  “Send him up,” she said, her voice quivering.

  “Certainly.”

  Carmen turned back to find that CJ was standing beside her. “Hope I’m ready for this,” she said, full of nervous tension.

  “You’ll do fine. I’ll be right here next to you in case there’s a problem,” said CJ, uncertain of whether the man Carmen w
as about to let in to her home had killed a U.S. congressman.

  “No. If he sees you he might bolt.”

  “Listen to CJ,” said Ket.

  “Both of you go back in the living room and sit down, please.”

  “But …”

  “Please,” said Carmen, motioning for CJ and Ket to move out of the hallway, watching them reluctantly head back to the living room.

  Carmen reacted to the doorbell’s ringing with a start. She shot Ket a final nervous glance, looked through the door’s peephole, and slowly pulled open the door.

  Langston Blue had changed from the clothes he’d been wearing earlier. Dressed now in loose-fitting faded khakis, a freshly laundered long-sleeved blue chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a pair of rarely worn workboots, he looked less rumpled, somehow even younger. Uncertain whether the woman calling herself his daughter might be linked to Cortez, he’d slipped a sixty-year-old .32 Smith and Wesson his father had owned into one of his pants pockets. He had no way of knowing whether the woman standing in front of him was there to end his life or to give it meaning, but he was taking a chance on the latter. Since he had nowhere and nothing to go back to, he figured it was worth the gamble.

  “I’m Langston Blue,” he said matter-of-factly, extending his hand as he stared at a smiling Carmen. She was a smaller woman than he’d imagined, and more beautiful. She had Mimm’s deep-set eyes and silky jet-black hair, but she shared his smile, broad forehead, and prominent cheekbones. She had the nasal flare and cocoa-colored skin of an African American, but he suspected that most white people would mistake her for either Latin or Polynesian.

  Carmen inserted her hand into Blue’s. “I’m Carmen.”

  Blue tried his best to hide his limp as he followed her toward the living room. Ignoring his limp, Carmen concentrated instead on how large a man her father was. Standing just under six feet and with massive forearms, he could have been a logger. When they reached the great room, CJ and Ket were standing. Blue froze when his eyes met Ket’s. She looked so much like Mimm.