Resurrecting Langston Blue

by Robert Greer

  Leaving his salmon dinner half eaten, he left the restaurant area, walked through the lounge, perched on a stool just inside the club’s doorway, and punched the number flashing on his pager into his cell phone.

  Greene’s answer was mechanical. “Sergeant Greene, Third Precinct.”

  “It’s Newburn. Whatta ya got, Joey?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Speak up; it’s hard to hear you. I’m at Dazzle, taking in a set.”

  “Said I’m not sure. But it may be something. Didn’t you say those two street bums I’ve got my people tagging after pretty much kept to themselves?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they’ve turned real sociable tonight. The word I’m getting is there’s at least six people at the dump they live in. Your two streeties and a friend have been there all the time. Half an hour ago, they got visitors. Your street boys came out to greet them. An Asian chick with a rump on her that won’t quit, a black woman who looks like she’s been on steroids, and a huge black guy dressed in a black leather vest and cowboy boots and smoking a cheroot.”

  Newburn’s voice quivered with excitement. “Don’t let any of them leave,” he said, wondering only who the third street person and the Asian woman could be. “I’m on my way.”

  “Okay, but what do we hold them on?”

  “Shit! Loitering, breaking and entering, trespassing, a fire-code violation, I don’t care. Just make sure they stay put. I’m ten minutes away—twelve at the most.”

  “I’ll relay it to my people,” said Greene.

  “You’re the man, Joey.”

  “Looks like I am tonight,” said Greene, shrugging and cradling the phone.

  Dittier was the first to see the headlights of a car dance off the plastic window covering. The light appeared so suddenly, rising out of the surrounding twilight, that he barely had time to rush over to Morgan and point toward the window before the entire front of the building was awash in the glare of police-car spotlights. “We got company,” said Morgan, nodding toward the front of the building.

  “Damn!” said CJ.

  “No problem. All sorts of folks come around here from time to time, includin’ the cops. Everybody just sit tight.”

  Aware that there were just two ways out of the place, through the only window or out the front door, CJ scanned the room looking for somewhere for Blue to hide. “Blue, get over in the corner out of the light and on the cot next to Dittier. And don’t budge.”

  Blue quickly followed CJ’s command.

  “You, inside there, you’re trespassing. Get out here where we can see you,” came a sudden order from a bullhorn.

  “I’d say we’ve got cops,” said Flora Jean.

  “Everyone stay put,” said Morgan. “I’ll try and send ’em packin’.”

  Morgan walked outside, his arms extended well out in front of him. His mouth went dry when he saw the two uniforms. “Problem, officer?”

  “You’re trespassing, buddy.”

  “But the place is abandoned.”

  “I don’t make the rules, friend,” said the taller of the two cops, each stationed to one side of a police cruiser just beyond the glare of the car-mounted spotlights.

  “Everybody inside there, outside now,” said his shorter, much thicker partner through the bullhorn.

  One by one, Dittier, Carmen, and Flora Jean filed slowly out of the building.

  “There’re two more inside,” said the short cop. “I saw them all go in.”

  Flora Jean flashed Carmen a look that said, Stay calm, just as another set of headlights came bouncing across the rutted vacant lot toward them. The unmarked car wound its way through a maze of junk and stopped a few feet behind the cruiser. Wendall Newburn hopped out from behind the wheel and walked up to the tall cop.

  “Got two more inside, Lieutenant,” said the short cop. “Started out with six.”

  Newburn eyed the lineup before him, counted noses, and smiled. He reached for the bullhorn the short cop was holding. “Come on out, Floyd, and bring whoever’s in there with you,” he shouted into the bullhorn.

  When there was no response, he said, “Everything’s been friendly up to now, Floyd. I don’t know who you’ve got in there with you, but I know there were six of you to start. I’ve only got four people standing out here under the party lights; better move it. You’ve got one minute to get out here with your friend before I call for backup and turn this thing from a tea party into a real mess.”

  Moments later CJ appeared in the doorway, cupping a hand over his eyes to shield them from the spotlight glare. He walked through the doorway, followed closely by Langston Blue.

  “My, my,” said Newburn. “Time to recount noses.” He pointed to a weathered cable spool and motioned for Morgan and Dittier to queue up next to it. Looking at Carmen, he said, “And you are?”

  “Carmen Nguyen.”

  “I see. You can join your friends over there. You, too, Benson.” He watched Flora Jean move toward the cable spool and smiled. “And then there were two.” He stared at CJ. “Okay, Floyd, you over there with the others.” Newburn stepped forward until he was eye to eye with Blue. “And you are? Let me guess. The owner of this building? A developer, maybe? The mayor?”

  Blue remained silent, doing exactly what CJ had told him to do when they were inside.

  “Guess not. Got any ID?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I can make this hard or easy. I can detain you for loitering, trespassing, and probable fire-code violations while I run your prints, or you can tell me your name, call your lawyer, and get a running start. Either way, it’ll all come out in the wash. Now, you got a name?”

  Blue looked at Carmen, standing at parade rest, her outline becoming less discernible in the approaching darkness. She gave him a quick wink. He turned his attention to CJ, who gave him a subtle nod. “Langston Blue,” he said finally, relieved that although the circumstances weren’t anywhere close to what he’d imagined they’d be, he’d finally come in from his own unique version of the cold. He looked at a suddenly slack-jawed Wendall Newburn, who took a half step backward and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. The fish I’ve been waiting for. Guess I’ll toss the rest of you back.”

  Celeste Deepstream stood beside a small brook that ran through the base of a sheer rock canyon in the New Mexico Carson Forest wilderness. She looked skyward, searching for stars. There hadn’t been but a few in the sky all night, and she was bothered by their absence. Starlit skies had always brought her good luck.

  The brook gurgled past, slipping through rocks and tree limbs, knifing and squeezing its way downhill toward the Rio Grande. Deciding that it was time to take a break from stargazing, she took a seat on a nearby boulder and gingerly rubbed her right shoulder. Thanks to a quarter bottle of Motrin and a heat pack, the shoulder pain had subsided, but the numbness in her right arm was still there. She’d been injured, a lot more seriously than she had originally thought, as she’d fled from Floyd.

  After hiding in the Taos Mountains for most of the day afterward, nursing her wounds and psyche, she had ventured into Taos that night, found a Wal-Mart, and told a pharmacist who she hoped could help her that she’d been riding fence line at her ranch, checking for barbed-wire breaks, when something had spooked her horse. She’d taken a spill onto a rusty barbed-wire strand and injured her neck and shoulder. What did he know? He wasn’t a doctor. The lacerations caused by flying glass from a truck window that had just taken a couple of rounds from an M16 and those caused by an encounter with a rusty strand of barbed wire probably looked pretty much the same to him. The pharmacist had bought her story and even taken a look at her neck lacerations, some still caked with blood. He’d given her a brief lesson in wound cleansing and given her enough gauze to last for a month, several tubes of Neosporin ointment, a vial of Betadine, two bottles of hydrogen peroxide, and a heat pack. She’d taken his advice, bought the first-aid supplies with what was very close to the last money she had left from selling th
e dump she and Bobby had grown up in, and hurried from the store.

  As with prison life, she could learn to deal with the pain. She knew it was temporary. But the numbness in her arm was a different story. She’d never been able to cope with things that weren’t transitory. That was why she wanted so badly to settle up with Floyd.

  Uncertain what to do next, she’d been searching the sky for stars and at least temporary solace. She could seek medical attention or wait things out and hope that her arm would eventually get better. She thought about Bobby—his innocence, his bad luck, the price he had paid for being her unlucky twin. She knew she couldn’t afford another mistake. She should’ve killed the Sundee woman. Let her starve or die of thirst, trapped in the iron lung in the middle of the wilderness, or at least blown up the line shack, like she’d planned. But she’d been too intent on killing Floyd. This time she’d have to be smarter, more thoughtful, more methodical and patient when it came to carrying out a plan. First, she’d stop hiding in the hills, sleeping in her truck, and dodging every police car she saw. Then she’d find somewhere to reenergize and mend. Floyd had come at her with plenty of firepower, but from what she could tell, there had been only one other person with him, someone who certainly wasn’t a cop, which meant they were still fighting their personal war outside the bounds of the law. She wasn’t worried about finding Floyd again, and she suspected he wasn’t about to change his MO.

  She ran her options through her head one last time. “Time to mend,” she said, so loudly that it startled her, as she flipped on her flashlight and swung the beam around in a circle.

  “Bobby, are you there?” she called out into the darkness.

  “Are you there? Are you there?” echoed off the walls of the canyon.

  When the echoing stopped, she aimed the beam skyward and headed for her pickup, still scanning the sky, thinking about Floyd, Mavis Sundee, and Bobby, and hoping to find at least one lucky guiding star.

  Julie Madrid, a petite green-eyed Puerto Rican, had left CJ’s employ six years earlier to make way for Flora Jean and begin her career as a lawyer. Three years out of law school, she had been plucked out of a solo nickel-and-dime divorce practice by one of Denver’s big three law firms, where she had honed her criminal defense leanings and spent three years with a caseload that had turned her into a top-rung criminal defense lawyer.

  Julie was solidly anchored in twilight sleep in her recently remodeled West Denver Highlands neighborhood home when CJ’s call awakened her.

  “Julie? It’s CJ.”

  She groggily rubbed her eyes and tried to focus on a nearby clock as she forced the sleep demons from her head. Still eyeing the clock, its digital signal locked at 2:21 a.m., she said, “Early start, don’t you think, Mr. Floyd?”

  CJ smiled, aware that Julie’s Mr. Floyd reference meant that she was truly irked and that her nose was probably twitching and her facial muscles tight as a drum.

  “Got a problem, and I need help.”

  “Surprise, surprise.” Julie sat up in bed and flipped on the switch near her headboard.

  “A client of mine’s being held downtown; just got booked.”

  “Couldn’t it wait until morning?”

  “Would I call you if it could?”

  This time it was Julie’s turn to smile. The man who had extracted her from a physically abusive marriage, given her a job, taught her son to dribble a basketball, fed her clients when she was starving, and schooled her on the finer points of Western antique collecting—now her favorite passion—had a penchant for being direct. “Guess not. Shoot.”

  “It’s big.”

  “So am I,” said Julie, the look on her face suddenly courtroom serious.

  “You up to speed on the Margolin murder?”

  “I’ve been following it. Hope your client isn’t in on that.”

  “It’s sure gonna look like he was.”

  “And you sure he’s not in on the murder?”

  “As sure as I am that those eyes of yours are green. He wasn’t even in the state.”

  “How long have the police been holding him?”

  “Just over four hours. On a trespassing charge.”

  “Have they got anything to link him to the murder?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then they’ve got nothing. They’ll waltz him in to a magistrate tomorrow morning and plead a non-evidence-based case for holding him on a possible Margolin connection, the judge’ll toss it and slap him with a fifty-dollar fine for trespassing, and he’ll walk.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Okay,” Julie sighed. “What else have they got?”

  “He’s a deserter. Took a powder from the army during Vietnam. Name’s Langston Blue.”

  “Uh-oh. That spins the wheel. The cops will plug his name into the national crime reporting service computer, and trust me, if he’s a deserter, his name’ll pop up.”

  “How soon can you get on it?”

  Julie ran her schedule for the day through her head. “I’ve got a trial all afternoon. I can meet you at the office at 8. You can bring me up to speed, I’ll clock in as his lawyer and go visit him downtown.”

  “That’ll work. And Julie, there’ll probably be a lot of legwork on this.”

  “Isn’t there always? I’ll see you tomorrow at 8,” she added, realizing only after hanging up that she had uttered the sentence exactly the same way she had when she’d left work every day during her five years as CJ’s secretary.

  Chapter 24

  The day broke overcast and Gray, a rare summer occurrence for the Mile High City but a refreshing change from the mid-90s temperatures that had been scalding Denver and the Front Range for the past week.

  Julie Madrid arrived at CJ’s office a little past 7:30, let herself in with the master key she’d had for nearly a decade, brewed a pot of the Honolulu Coffee Company Kona blend that she’d brought with her, and plopped down at CJ’s desk. She was there, enjoying her coffee, just before CJ arrived a few minutes past 8.

  “Flora Jean?” he said, nudging the door open with the toe of his boot, clasping a box of LaMar’s glazed donuts in one hand and the realty section from the Denver Post in the other.

  Smiling, Kona brew in hand, Julie approached CJ from the back side of the center hall stairway that led up to his apartment, a means of access that he rarely used. “She’s not here yet,” said Julie, startling him.

  “Julie!” Breaking into a wide grin, CJ wrapped all five foot four inches of his former secretary in a bear hug that sent a splash of coffee spiraling down onto the floor.

  They laughed and stepped back from the spill. “You’re wasting the good stuff. I brought some real Hawaiian brew to replace that foul-tasting poison you and Flora Jean pass off as coffee.” Julie held up her coffee cup Statue of Liberty style.

  “You’re living too large, Ms. Madrid.”

  “And I’m liking it.” Julie eyed the box in CJ’s hand. “See you’re still starting the day on a sugar high.”

  “Gotta. It’s that or lose my edge.”

  Spotting the bandage on CJ’s arm, she frowned, recalling the always dangerous bounty-hunting side of CJ’s business. A side she had never been comfortable with and one that, to no avail, she and Mavis had pleaded with CJ to give up the entire time she had worked for him. “What’s with the arm?”

  The look on CJ’s face turned solemn. “Got into a skirmish in the mountains outside Taos with Celeste Deepstream. She’s out of prison.”

  “I thought she got twelve years,” said Julie, aware that Celeste had once tried to kill CJ during the time that Julie had worked for him.

  “Guess she sweet-talked the parole board.”

  “What happened?” asked Julie, still concentrating on CJ’s arm.

  “She snatched Mavis.”

  “Is Mavis okay?” Julie’s voice rose three octaves.

  CJ nodded.

  Aware that the nod meant CJ was too choked up to speak, Julie said, “What about Celeste?”
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  “She sidestepped us. Billy was with me.”

  “Thank God!” said Julie, grateful that Billy DeLong had been along, certain that with Mavis as bait, had he been alone, CJ might well have killed Celeste.

  “Is Mavis at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll go by and see her this evening.”

  “Thanks,” said CJ, lowering his head.

  The room fell silent. CJ set the box of donuts down and topped off his coffee cup as Flora Jean walked in with Carmen in tow. Spotting Julie, Flora Jean rushed across the room. “Hey, sugar,” she boomed, giving Julie a hug.

  “That’s attorney sugar to you,” Julie said, returning the hug.

  “Hope you’re here to lend a hand,” said Flora Jean. “We sure as hell need one.”

  “I know. CJ called me this morning at 2:21!”

  “Ain’t that always the way?” Flora Jean glanced at Carmen. “Want you to meet somebody, Julie. This here’s Carmen Nguyen. The sexy-looking Puerto Rican lady standin’ here callin’ herself a lawyer is Julie Madrid. And she can deal. All 104 pounds of her. You don’t wanna be on the opposite side of her in court.”

  Carmen smiled and shook Julie’s hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Did CJ fill you in?” asked Flora Jean.

  “A little,” said Julie. “I know you’ve got a client the cops are trying to stick with Peter Margolin’s murder.”

  “Turns out our client’s Carmen’s daddy. Name’s Langston Blue.”

  Carmen nodded, her eyes full of sorrow. She’d known her father for less than a week, and now he was lost to her again.

  “How much else did you tell Julie, CJ?” asked Flora Jean.

  “That Blue was an army deserter. That’s about it.”

  “There’s more,” said Flora Jean. “A whole lot more.” Spotting the bag of Honolulu Coffee Company, Kona blend, that Julie had brought in, she said, “Let me brew some more of that high-priced barrister’s blend you ship to us poor folks every Christmas, and I’ll dial you in.” Flora Jean walked over to the coffee alcove, poured herself the last of what was in the pot, and started a new one. Doctoring her coffee with two teaspoons of sugar, she glanced at Julie. “Did CJ tell you about Mavis?”