Resurrecting Langston Blue

by Robert Greer

  “I’m about burned out, Mr. J. Too many years of doing the same thing I was when I was twenty-one.”

  “Don’t mean you gotta sell Ike’s, your building.”

  “It does if I’m gonna start another business. I’m thinking about peddling antiques.”

  Aware of CJ’s passion for collecting, and equally aware of his take-no-shit reputation as the most savvy bail bondsman on Bondsman’s Row, black, white, green, or purple, Johnson said, “Hell of a leap from what you’re doin’ now.”

  “Sometimes you gotta move before you lose.”

  “Mavis got anything to do with this?” asked Johnson, cognizant of CJ’s relationship with the daughter of one of his oldest friends.

  “She’s been pushing me to do something else for a long time.”

  Instead of saying, I know, Johnson bit his tongue. “Got a buyer in mind?”

  “My partner, Flora Jean Benson.”

  Johnson broke into a lecherous grin. “That built-like-a-brick-shithouse ex-marine? I thought she just worked for you. Hell, I didn’t know the two of you were partners.”

  “We’re not really. But selling the building to her will give me a chance to make it official.”

  Johnson looked confused. “I thought you wanted out of the business. How you gonna sell her the building and still be a partner?”

  “I said I was about burned out, Mr. J. Can’t dig a hole and bury everything, you know. There’s no question I need to cash in on the equity in the building if I plan to buy another place, and sell antiques. But like Ike always said, A rabbit’s gotta have more than one hole.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” Johnson relaxed back in his seat, knowing that sooner or later the payday he was looking for would be his. “Well, whattaya need from me?”

  “I need you to do some building comps for me, give me something to pass on to Flora Jean so I can let her know what I’m thinking pricewise. I haven’t really said anything to her about it yet.”

  “Okay. I’ll work up a market-value survey for you and a broker agreement. But you’re gonna need a lawyer when it comes to that partnership agreement.”

  “Got one.”

  “Who you usin’? Adolfus Moore?”

  “No. Julie Madrid.”

  Johnson thought for a moment before breaking into the same lecherous grin he’d flashed when CJ had mentioned Flora Jean. “That little Puerto Rican sexpot who used to be your secretary?”

  “Watch what you say, Mr. J. She’s a lawyer now. Talk like that’ll get your shorts sued off.”

  Johnson laughed. “I’ll try and remember that the next time I’m sniffin’ panties. It’ll take me a day or two to work up those comps, but you can count on havin’ somethin’ by the end of the week.”

  “Sounds fine.”

  Johnson shook his head. “Damn! Ike’s place. I’d never’ve figured you’d ever sell it.”

  “A man’s gotta move ahead, Mr. J.,” said CJ, trying to picture Mavis’s reaction when he broke the news to her.

  “Ain’t that the truth? I’ll call you when I’ve got somethin’. Meanwhile, give my best to Mavis.”

  “I’ll do that,” said CJ, motioning as he turned for Johnson to keep his seat. “No need to get up, Mr. J. I know my way out.”

  “Okay. I’ll be talkin’ with ya.”

  Before he reached the door, CJ could hear the rustling of papers, and he knew that Johnson had his Hustler back open.

  It had started to sprinkle as CJ slipped back into the Bel Air. The layer of dust covering the parking area was barely even dimpled, but he never drove the Bel Air in the rain. Eyeing the position of the storm clouds overhead, he figured he still had time to make it to the office before the Bel Air had to take a street bath. He’d then log in with Flora Jean and tell her about his meeting with Kearnes, switch to his fifteen-year-old Jeep that Rosie Weeks somehow kept running, and drop by to check on Mavis.

  He’d just turned onto 13th Avenue, a straight shot to his office, when the rain picked up. He hated driving the Bel Air in the rain. It caused him and the forty-eight-year-old vintage drop-top too much distress, and like Ike always used to say, Distress breeds anger, and anger breeds hate. When he caught a stoplight at 13th and Grant, the rain began coming down in sheets. Suddenly he found himself grinding his teeth. It wasn’t until the light changed that he realized he’d been thinking about Celeste. Recalling his uncle’s wisdom, he accelerated, aware that it was time to get the Bel Air home.

  Elliott Cole lived in a thirteen-story high-rise condo in the recently developed neighborhood just west of downtown and east of the South Platte River known as Riverfront Park. Billed as Denver’s “downtown neighborhood,” the area’s ten-year development master plan called for a variety of top-end residences, neighborhood shops, and assorted recreation. Commons Park, in truth no more than a greenbelt along the South Platte River, fronted Cole’s building, Riverfront Tower. The building’s west-facing tenants were afforded a view of the Rockies that only Hollywood could imagine. Cole, a sports fanatic, had chosen the location not because of that view but because Coors Field and the Pepsi Center were close at hand to the north and south, and a six-block walk in either direction put him in the center of either the Boys of Summer or Roundball and Hoops action nearly year-round. And since his job as state Republican Party chairman called for him to keep an ear close to the body politic, he could walk across the Millennium Bridge that connected Riverfront Park to Denver’s 16th Street pedestrian shopping mall, hop a free mall shuttle bus, and be at the State Capitol, lobbyists’ eateries surrounding it, or committee headquarters in a matter of minutes.

  Cole was pacing his penthouse apartment’s study on a remilled wide-planked floor that had risen from the ashes of a 150-year-old Pennsylvania farmhouse, sipping a gin and tonic and watching a C-line light-rail train slice through the rain toward the Pepsi Center along tracks just east of his building. The Millennium Bridge blocked his view of the train until it reached 15th Street, where three sharp blasts from the warning bell let its riders know that the Pepsi Center stop was imminent.

  He’d spent most of the afternoon and now into early evening watching the rain, waiting for a phone call, and staring intermittently at the bone-white two-hundred-foot-high tapered steel mast that Riverfront Park developers had built just to the south of the Millennium Bridge on its 16th Street side in an effort to make a landmark statement that would impressively and forever define the eastern entrance to the Riverfront Park neighborhood. They had succeeded beyond their dreams, since photos, paintings, stylized designs, and any number of convention bureau renderings statewide and nationally more often than not now captured the Millennium Bridge mast in any rendering of the Denver skyline.

  Cole was heading for the bar to mix another gin and tonic when one of three phones in his bedroom rang. Sensing that it was the call he’d been waiting for, he set his glass aside and headed for the bedroom. The flashing light on the phone, a privacy phone with an access code and a security lock, told him it was indeed the call. He picked up the receiver, punched in 6-1-4, and said, “Cole here.”

  “Quan,” came the one-word response on the other end of the line.

  “You home?”

  “At the store. We close at 7.”

  Cole checked his watch. It was five past 6. “I’ll be there by 7.”

  “What the problem?”

  “Blue. He’s in Denver.” Cole cradled the phone without saying another word, walked back out to the bar, made himself a fresh gin and tonic, and strolled back to his study. The mast, rising majestically out of the rain and highlighted with floodlights and a bank of lights above nearby Union Station, had the look of a needle-nosed rocket ship awaiting blast-off, tethered to the ground only by cables.

  Cole sat down in a well-used chair, nursed his drink, and listened to the clang of another train passing below. He savored his gin, thinking that privilege had its perks and that if he were a little late for his meeting with Quan, what did it matter? After all, Quan h
ad kept him waiting all afternoon, and regardless of the dicey circumstances necessitating the meeting, it was only with an over-the-hill Vietcong gook.

  Federal Boulevard was flooded just south of 6th Avenue, the power was out, and Cole was forced to run a gauntlet of four-way stops all the way to Le Quan’s shoe store. He walked through puddles to the store’s front door, his feet squishing inside his shoes, and pounded on the door until Chi Quan appeared, swung the door open, a candle in her right hand, and said, “We’re in back.”

  Without responding, Cole followed her through a ghostly canyon of shoe boxes and benches to the store’s back storeroom, where Le Quan was busy gluing Nike swoosh labels onto knockoff running shoes. Methodical in his approach, he never failed to get the logo properly positioned as he ran through a series of a dozen pairs of size tens.

  Cole stomped his water-logged shoes on the cold concrete several times and removed the Aussie bush hat he was wearing. Scented candles sat on tables in all four corners of the room, and the dimly lit storage area, amid the smell of Vietnamese spices and rubber adhesive, seemed to flicker like an old celluloid movie.

  Cole pushed his thinning hair off his forehead, slipped out of his raincoat, and said, “It’s wet.”

  Quan nodded and continued with his labeling. “No foot traffic all afternoon. Business poor.” He finished two more sets of shoes, handing them to Chi to rebox and price, before looking back up. “Now, what about Blue? How you know he here?”

  “The police arrested him the other night, and today the cop who busted him, a detective named Newburn, paid me a visit at work! He said the DA’s office was looking to stick Blue with Margolin’s murder but admitted when I pushed him that it would be hard to get the charge to stick.”

  Chi glanced at her father, nodded, rose from her chair, and began stacking shoe boxes against the wall.

  Watching her, Cole asked, “Are you sure she should hear all this?”

  Quan frowned. “She my daughter. How much this detective know?”

  “Just about everything. The history of Margolin’s Star 1 team, the name of the men who served in it, the fact that Blue deserted, and that I was the colonel in charge.”

  “How he get information?”

  “It could’ve only come from one of three places. Maybe Margolin kept records, and the cops found them. Or Newburn got the war records from the army or pulled information off the Internet, or it came from Owen Brashears.”

  Quan eyed Chi and spoke sharply in Vietnamese. He watched as Chi rearranged the boxes into two tiers, to a height he found acceptable. “Okay,” he said, turning his attention back to Cole. “Problem easy to solve. We talk to Brashears.”

  “And what if he’s working for the cops?”

  “We deal with him. He don’t know about Margolin and us.”

  “I’m glad you’re so calm about the whole thing,” said Cole, irritated that their problem barely caused a ripple in Quan.

  “Always calm,” said Quan.

  “Yeah,” said Cole, seething. “Because you’re not walking point. I’m in the middle of an election with a candidate who’s a notch above paint-dry interesting. Every day I have to rein in a gaggle of overpaid pollsters who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. I’m dealing with an opponent’s murder, and now there’s this thing with Blue.” Cole took a half step toward Quan and slammed his fist into his palm. “If you commies hadn’t been such fucking racists, we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  He’d barely finished his rant when Le Quan spoke again to Chi. A split second later Chi was eyeball to eyeball with Cole. The shiny blade of the Qing Dy elephant bone knife she was holding kissed the loose, rubbery flesh of Cole’s upper neck. Quan gave another order in Vietnamese. The tip of the blade nicked Cole’s skin, and three drops of blood fell onto his shirt collar.

  “Shit,” said Cole as Chi stepped back. He rubbed his neck, then eyed his fingertips for signs of blood. There was none. Chi backed away toward the shoe boxes.

  During Vietnam, Cole had seen enough bodies with their heads completely severed and enough legless and armless torsos to know the capabilities of this kind of knife. He moved out of the candlelight to hide the fact that he was shaking. “You’re crazy, Quan.” He glanced at Chi. “So’s she.”

  Quan smiled. It was the self-satisfied smile of a man in control. “You not curse in front of my daughter, and don’t call me racist. You, America, are the racists. You the ones who contaminated us.”

  Regaining a measure of composure, Cole said, “And you’re the one who asked for help fixing the problem.”

  “It was mistake.” Quan’s face turned serene. “We need to handle current problem.”

  “And how do we do that?” asked Cole, still uncomfortable, his eyes darting back and forth between Quan and Chi.

  “Eliminate Blue. He only outsider who can piece together what happened at Song Ve.”

  “He’s in jail.”

  “He get out. Your American justice system weak. In Vietnam we kill him—long ago.”

  Not wanting things to get out of hand again, Cole said, “Strange that Blue would show up now.”

  “And strange that Margolin dead,” said Quan with a hint of a snicker.

  They exchanged accusatory stares until Cole said, “Then you’ll handle the problem?”

  Le Quan nodded.

  “Good.” Cole watched Chi slip the knife between two shoe boxes. “Let me know if there’re problems.”

  Quan nodded again and smiled at the pasty-faced white man who was barking orders at him as if he were the one in control.

  Sensing that his allotted time was up, Cole turned to leave. He’d taken a step toward the storeroom door when the room’s lights flickered on. He looked back and realized that Chi Quan was at his heels and that her father had a fresh pair of fake Nikes in front of him. Continuing what he’d been doing as if Cole had never been there, Quan reached for his glue bottle. Cole walked away with Chi following him silently toward the now well-lit building’s front door. Afraid to look back, he stepped outside into what was now a drizzle before finally glancing over his shoulder. There was no Chi, the door was shut, and the building was completely dark.

  Squishing his way toward his car in rain-soaked shoes, he thought about the day that had changed his life. The day he had given the captain of a Star 1 team the go-ahead to erase what had become an ethnic stain on Vietnamese culture; to remove, in the words of Ho Chi Minh, the Con Lai, half-breeds who are the recruits, malcontents, and rabble-rousers, the dust of life who would disrupt the pure soul of a nation.

  Chapter 26

  The rain had stopped, but the sound of water gurgling through the downspouts and past the slate-roofed dormer window of Mavis’s bedroom served to punctuate the storm’s intensity.

  “Can’t believe it’s cold enough for a fire,” said CJ, eyeing the antique barn thermometer he’d bought at a garage sale five years earlier. A thermometer he had, at the risk of breaking his neck, nailed to the dormer’s soffit so Mavis could look outside each morning and see the temperature before her feet ever hit the floor. “It’s 43 degrees.”

  Seated across the room in an overstuffed wingback chair, Mavis said, “It’s supposed to warm up tomorrow, get back into the 70s. It’s Colorado, you know.” She watched as CJ stoked a fire that he couldn’t seem to get to burn evenly. She was in love with a predictable man, she told herself, and smiled.

  Looking frustrated, he said, “I think something’s wrong with the damper.” CJ tugged at the damper. “The thing’s never worked right since you had the house remodeled.”

  “The house was built in 1918, CJ. You have the same problem every time you try to start a fire. I don’t think they were expecting the kind of homecoming bonfires you prefer back in 1918. Take out one of the logs.”

  “Can’t now. All the wood’s caught.”

  Mavis got up from her chair, walked over to where CJ was kneeling, and wrapped both arms around his neck. “You’re an impatient man sometim
es, CJ Floyd.” Taking the poker out of his hand, she leaned over his back, pulled one of the bottom logs forward so it no longer kissed its neighbor, allowing space for an updraft, and said, “Now, wait.”

  Moments later the cusp of a flame danced through the opening. Within minutes there was a roaring fire. Smiling and with her left fist balled tightly, she tapped CJ lightly on the top of his head. “See?” she said, placing the poker back in its rack. “Let’s watch it from bed.”

  They walked over to the wrought-iron bed that had belonged to Mavis’s grandparents. Barefoot, both dressed only in sweatpants and T-shirts, they slipped onto the bed, and CJ pulled the comforter up just beyond their knees.

  “It’s the middle of July, not December,” said Mavis, slipping the comforter off them. “I know what you’re up to,” she said with a smile, “but I’m not ready, CJ. The pain’s too fresh. Sex would just be too raw. Just hold me.”

  Sensing that CJ was embarrassed, she said, “My head’s the problem, baby, not my body.” She guided CJ’s hand gently to the warm spot between her legs. “I’ll be fine; just give me a little time.” Relaxing back into CJ’s arms, she added, “I’m still all yours.”

  Unwilling to push the fragile envelope of intimacy any further, CJ sat back against a bank of pillows, pulled Mavis into the crook of his uninjured left arm until she rested comfortably against him, and stared at the fire.

  They watched the sawtoothed flames in silence until Mavis spoke up. “Henry came by this afternoon to look at my injuries.” Mavis rested her head on a pillow at the edge of CJ’s chest.

  CJ nodded. “I know.” He had sent his longtime friend and physician, Henry Bales, to check on Mavis’s injuries after dropping by Henry’s cancer research lab at the University of Colorado to have Henry take a look at his injured arm. After he explained what had happened in New Mexico, his friend had checked CJ’s arm, scurried to a hospital outpatient clinic, and returned with tape, a spool of fresh gauze, and antibiotic ointment.