by Robert Greer
“That’s the same thing I’ve been thinking, but I’ve got to close the door on the counterfeit angle.”
Satoni nodded and cast an eye toward the TV screen. “Dodgers got two on,” he said, his voice full of anticipation.
“Might be their day.”
“Yours too, Calvin. Tell you what I’ll do. First thing in the morning I’ll go see a friend of a friend. Find out what this paper of yours is good for.” Satoni slipped one of the sheets of paper back into the manila envelope, eyes glued to the screen.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll have something for you tomorrow, but I can tell you one thing right now. That paper probably didn’t come cheap. It feels a lot like the kind of high-end stock we use for our full-color sale flyers at the store.” Satoni hunched forward, elbows on his knees, his nose inches from the TV screen.
“Do what you can. I’ve got something else I need to run by you,” said CJ, as the Dodgers second baseman went down swinging, ending the game.
Satoni shook his head, pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket, wetted it, and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. “Sons of bitches lost. Sometimes I don’t know why I even bother to watch ’em. Sorry, Calvin, run that by me again.”
“Need to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“I’m thinking about getting out of the bail-bonding business.”
Satoni clicked off the TV. “And do what?”
CJ shrugged. “Take advantage of some down time, relax, set up a business selling Western collectibles and antiques.”
“Big switch, Calvin. How can I help?”
“Give me some of your business insight and, if you’ve got a mind to, sell me some of that stuff you’ve spent a lifetime collecting.”
Satoni removed his glasses, set them aside, and stared directly at CJ. “You’re serious?”
“As a heart attack.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Satoni, surprised that anyone would consider his passion for collecting anything but a fetish and an excuse to stockpile junk. “I’ll help you if peddling antiques is what you want to do. But let me give you a piece of advice. And take it to heart.”
“I’m listening.”
“Think long and hard before you make your move. Because—and you’ll have to trust me on this—I’ve been there, and once you make your move, you can’t ever go back.”
“I understand.”
“Good.”
Satoni rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth and lit it. The pungent odor of the cheap cigar soon filled the room. “Now, let me work on that other problem you brought me. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Rising slowly from his chair, he retrieved a third set of glasses from a hallway table as he walked CJ to the door.
CJ thought about Satoni’s advice during most of the twenty-minute drive to Five Points, but when he turned onto Welton Street his thoughts turned to Mavis. She was moving in the right direction, he told himself, as he parked the Bel Air four blocks from her house at Rosie’s Garage, left the key in the ignition, got out, and waved to Rosie, who was in his office. Rosie, engaged in a conversation, waved back.
CJ headed across Welton Street toward Curtis Park, knowing that Rosie would garage the Bel Air in a back bay, as he had on alternate nights since CJ had returned from New Mexico. They’d both agreed there was no need to broadcast his whereabouts to Celeste Deepstream by parking the Bel Air at Mavis’s.
As he turned onto Curtis Street with its gaslight replica streetlamps, uneven sidewalks, and stately seventy-year-old trees, he heard what sounded like a truck’s engine revving behind him. When he realized the sound was getting closer, he turned to find himself staring into the headlight glare of a van that was bearing down on him at 60 miles an hour. The van hopped the curb and took him on point blank. He dove out of range several feet beyond a concrete-mounted four-by-four-foot traffic control box just before the van’s bumper slammed into the box, dislodging it from its moorings and sending it bumping end over end down the street. With two of its tires on pavement and two on the sidewalk, the van sped away, nearly missing a mailbox, uprooting two newly planted elm trees, and clipping a stop sign at the end of the block before it spun into a hedge, turned north onto 28th Street, and disappeared into the night.
CJ crawled behind the mailbox, uncertain whether there would be a second assault. He waited a few seconds, then duck-walked his way across the street, leaped over a scraggly privet hedge into the yard of one of Mavis’s Champa Street neighbors, and made his way toward the alley. He zigzagged his way down one side of the alley from trash dumpster to trash can to utility pole until he reached Mavis’s.
As he scanned Mavis’s backyard, brightly lit by two outside security lights, he tried to remember something about the van—a license-plate number, the color, the year—but all he could remember was that the van had looked like an Econoline and had white-wall tires. The only other things he was certain of were that the van had to have sustained severe front-end damage and that he’d get no help from the cops.
He hadn’t seen the driver, and for all he knew the person behind the wheel could’ve been any one of the scores of enemies he’d made in more than thirty years as a bail bondsman. But it made sense that Celeste Deepstream was a likely suspect.
Checking his clothes for dirt, grass stains, and tears, he dusted himself off, ran a hand perfunctorily through his hair, and headed for the house, hoping that he looked like anything but someone who’d just nearly been run over by a van.
Within moments of the back doorbell ringing, Mavis was at the door. She opened it, smiled, leaned forward, and kissed him on the lips softly. CJ swept her square-dance-style out of the doorway before reaching back to close the door.
“What was that all about?”
“Just checking to see if you’re limber enough for what I’ve got in mind,” he said, hoping the boldness of his entrance had served its real purpose.
Mavis draped her arms around his neck and squeezed her body tightly to his. “I’m limber enough to deal with a broken-down street cowboy like you,” she said in the sultriest voice she could muster.
“We’ll see,” said CJ, kissing her passionately, sweeping her off her feet, and carrying her kicking in mock protest from the back entryway into the house.
Chapter 33
Elliott cole, gin and tonic in one hand, paced the floor of his office at the state Republican headquarters. A rolled-up copy of the Boulder Daily Camera was clasped tightly in his other hand, and he was beside himself with anger. He thought he’d nailed everything down. He and Le Quan had Jimmy Moc dealing with the bail bondsman, Alfred Reed had a comfortable, if not commanding, five-point lead in the polls, and he’d spent the previous evening having two amazingly talented women fulfill his sexual fantasies until 1:30 in the morning. Then he’d read Owen Brashears’s half-baked power-of-the-pen follow-up to his earlier editorial. A pile-of-shit piece claiming that the state Republican Party chairman had come home from Vietnam with something more than a few medals pinned to his chest—that in fact he’d returned from the war amid rumors that he’d been involved in an atrocity that had been hushed up. That he could handle. But what had him wanting to grab Brashears by the throat and cut off his air was the inference that Alfred Reed was cut from the same cloth as Cole, his mentor and handler.
Cole slammed the tightly coiled paper against the edge of his desk. “Fucker! That ass-kissing pissant of a Stars and Stripes scribe. Shit!” He opened the newspaper and reread the editorial. This time Brashears had named names, and he’d laid out Margolin’s chain of command, fingering Cole as the man at the top.
Brashears had ended the piece with the promise that there would be more to follow, and since there were still four months until the election, that meant the Republican Party and Alfred Reed had a problem. Cole knew well that when it came to politics perception always trumped truth, and it was an even bet that Brashears could sling enough mud in the next 120 days to destroy Reed’s five-point lead.
Tossing the paper onto a nearby chair, he walked to his desk, sat down, and flipped through a Rolodex until he came to the card with Owen Brashears’s phone number. Deciding that for the moment Reed’s input didn’t matter, he punched in Brashears’s phone number and took a liberal sip of gin and tonic.
Cole endured thirty seconds of elevator music before the woman who’d answered came back on the line. “I have Mr. Brashears for you.”
“Elliott? You’re up and at it early,” said Brashears.
“That makes two of us.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Don’t play Eagle Scout with me, you piece of shit. You know what you can do.”
Brashears forced back a snicker. “And that is?”
“Lay off the Star 1 team shit. You’re trying to paint a picture that just ain’t there.”
“I’m running a newspaper.”
“And you’re doing one hell of a job fucking it up. If you wanna make me into some kind of monster in order to pump up your dead buddy, fine. Just don’t try and connect any of the dots to Alfred Reed.”
“I call ’em the way I see ’em, Elliott.”
“Can it, Brashears. You’re in over your head.”
“No. You’re the one taking on water. I’m just being loyal.”
“My ass. You’re playing king of the hill and loving it, you little twerp. This is the best thing to happen to you since somebody was dumb enough to stick you in front of a camera.”
“At least my paycheck came from the U.S. Treasury.”
Dumbfounded, Cole sat back in his seat. “I wouldn’t go where you’re headed.”
Brashears laughed. “I’m the press, remember?”
Cole took a sip of his drink and eyed his elegant surroundings. He’d come a long way from being an eastern Colorado farm boy. And pushing all the wrong buttons, Brashears was testing his limits. He considered the pros and cons of what he was about to say. “We need to meet.”
“Fine by me.”
“What about this evening?”
“I’m out of the office by 6,” said Brashears.
“How about my place? Eight o’clock?”
“Eight’s fine.”
“Riverfront Tower, in Riverfront Park, number 1350.”
“I know where it is,” said Brashears. “I’ll see you then.”
“Count on it.” Cole hung up, finished his drink, and flipped through his Rolodex until he came to the Q’s. He took several deep breaths before he dialed Le Quan’s number, the way he always had before beginning a mission during his two tours of duty in Vietnam.
Freshly showered, with a towel draped over one shoulder and clad in a pair of gray boxers, CJ called out to Mavis from the corner of her large walk-in closet. “I thought I left a bunch of shirts in here.”
“You gave one to Morgan Williams that time he and Dittier were here for a barbecue. I don’t know about the other ones.” Wrapped in an oversized towel, Mavis stepped into the closet. She shook her head as she viewed the carnage. “CJ, what are you doing?”
“Looking for a shirt.”
“And destroying my closet in the process. Let me look.”
She placed three of her favorite blouses back where they belonged, refolded two of her scarves, and scanned the shelf next to CJ. Spotting a blue chambray shirt near the back of the shelf, she picked it up and handed it to him. “If it had been a snake …”
Before she could finish, CJ hooked a finger beneath the top edge of her towel and pulled. The towel dropped to the floor. “Think I’ll have some more of that,” he said, eyeing Mavis’s well-proportioned body and winking.
“CJ Floyd!”
“That’s my name.” He pulled Mavis to him and embraced her tightly. “I’ll worry about my shirt later.”
“CJ!” Mavis’s protests ended as their lips met and he guided her to the closet floor.
“Not in here,” she said.
“Seems like as good a place as any.”
Mavis smiled, responding with a sweeping roll of her pelvis into his.
When CJ finally got to his office, Flora Jean was wrapping up a phone conversation with Alden Grace. “Thought you were lookin’ at bein’ an antique dealer, sugar, not a banker,” she said, wagging a finger at CJ.
“Had some unfinished business to deal with over at Mavis’s.”
“Hope you got it settled.”
“Sure did.”
“Good. Because that was Alden on the phone. He didn’t have much for us, but he did serve up somethin’. After I told him about me and Carmen stumblin’ into Amerasianville at that China Bay club the other night, he called a few of his old intelligence contacts to check on the ethnic-cleansing angle. Nothin’, but he did find out that a few years back the army investigated the whole Star 1 team thing. Nothin’ that would make the front pages. It wasn’t that kind of probe, and the only reason they took a look in the first place was because the army’s criminal investigation command was already lookin’ into war-crime allegations against U.S. Tiger Force commandos.”
“Yeah,” said CJ. “I remember. Didn’t that probe go all the way up to the secretary of the army?”
“Sure did. And Alden thinks that’s why Margolin’s shit got buried. The government didn’t want both their hands full of poop.”
“So he thinks Margolin may have skated because there were people out there doing worse things than him.”
“Or because he knew somebody.”
CJ shrugged. “Who?”
“What about that guy Cole? Isn’t he some kind of Republican Party muckety-muck?”
“He is now, but he was just a know-nothing colonel back in Vietnam.” CJ took a seat. “What did Alden think about the Amerasian angle?”
“Same as us. Said there were always rumors about how the North Vietnamese planned to deal with their my den issue. But nothin’ concrete.”
CJ leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “There’s something we’re missing here, Flora Jean. The key to the whole damn thing. We’ve got an army special-ops team assigned to kill a school full of Amerasian children. The team’s captain ends up a postwar fat-in-the-wallet congressman who’s eventually murdered. Turns out a Republican Party boss was the dead man’s commander, and a little Vietnamese man with a silver streak in his hair seems to have somehow kicked the whole thing off. What we don’t have is Margolin’s killer.”
“That’s the tale in a nutshell, sugar.”
CJ laughed. “Seems like everybody’s got their story, and they’re sticking to it.” CJ sat up in his chair suddenly, looking as if he’d just been handed the answers to the final exam. “Or maybe we don’t have the whole story. What if we’re still missing a piece?”
“What could we be missin’?”
“I’m not sure, but I have a feeling that if we don’t do something pretty quick to prove that Langston Blue was the fall guy in all of this, he’s gonna spend a few more years out of circulation.”
Wendall Newburn was enjoying an early lunch break and three scoops of strawberry ice cream at the Cold Stone Creamery, thinking about a regional cooperative homicide bulletin that had hit his e-mail that morning. The bulletin reported that a dead man had been found jammed inside a metal oil drum that had floated up from the depths of the South Platte River near the mountain town of Deckers.
He wouldn’t have paid much attention to the communication had it not been for the fact that the dead man was described as Hispanic, forty to fifty years of age, with a badly withered right leg and a dramatic underbite.
Since he now had photos, albeit some of them more than thirty years old, and partial army medical records on the three members of Peter Margolin’s Star 1 team who had survived Song Ve, he had called the Douglas County sheriff’s office and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the Deckers homicide, on the off-chance that the body in the drum might be that of Lincoln Cortez. He’d asked for a briefing and the chance to view the body that afternoon. The deputy had been happy to oblige, informing him that the
body had been found along with clothing and a cane they were dusting for prints.
Deep in thought, Newburn didn’t see Ginny Kearnes walk into the ice-cream parlor. She was at his table, already pulling up a stool, when he realized she was there.
“Your office told me I might catch you here, Lieutenant.”
“Ms. Kearnes,” he said, looking up surprised.
“You look as if you’ve just been stung by a bee, Lieutenant.”
Newburn spooned up a bite of ice cream and said sarcastically, “My time’s your time.”
“I’ll be brief.” Kearnes extracted two twenty-dollar bills from her purse and laid them on the table. “I found these the other day in a strongbox in Peter’s attic.”
“Look like twenties,” said Newburn.
“And this.” She placed one of the blank sheets of paper she and CJ had found on the table.
Newburn fingered the bottom edge of the paper. “And?”
“Any chance the twenties could be counterfeit?”
“They look perfectly real to me,” said Newburn, picking up one of the bills. “Mind telling me where you’re headed with this?”
“I hope I’m on the road to finding Peter’s killer.”
“Are you the executor of his estate?”
“No, his lawyer is.”
“Then if I were you, I’d stay away from his house. I’m surprised a patrol car didn’t spot you.”
Kearnes shook her head disgustedly. “You’re full of advice, Lieutenant, and as usual, just about as much help as I expected.” She slipped the bills and the folded sheet of paper back in her purse.
“Sorry I can’t be your own private security force, Ms. Kearnes, but the fact is, other people help pay my salary. Anything else pop up during your scavenger hunt?”
“If it did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Newburn’s eyes narrowed and his brow muscles tightened. “Listen, lady, whether you get it or not, I’m dealing with a real high-profile murder. Here’s some advice. Sneaking into a murder victim’s home, rummaging through his things, helping yourself to his money, and interfering with a criminal investigation will buy you some jail time, no matter how good your connections are. Now, while I’m still in a good mood, why don’t you take the twenties and the paper back out of your purse, give them to me, and tell me why you think your boyfriend was involved in counterfeiting?”