by Robert Greer
“It’s fiancé. And I never said Peter was involved in anything. What I asked was whether you thought the twenties were real.”
Newburn took a final spoonful of his ice cream and tossed his empty cup into a nearby trash can. “Have it your way, Ms. Kearnes. You can keep playing the faithful fiancée and press secretary if you want to. It suits you. But don’t go back in Margolin’s house. Quit playing detective, and stay out of the way of my investigation. If you don’t, trust me, it’ll cost you more than a parking ticket.”
“I’m listening,” said Kearnes.
“Great. I enjoy leaving a lasting impression.” He rose and stepped back from the table. “Afraid I have to leave. Oh, almost forgot.” Slipping a spiral-bound notebook from his shirt pocket, he ripped out a page, placed it on the table, and wrote, Received from G. Kearnes: Evidence: Margolin murder case. Two $20 bills; one sheet of paper approximately 11 x 13. “Initial this for me, please.” He smiled, handed her a pen, and watched her print GK near the bottom of the paper.
“Appreciate your help.” Gathering up the twenties and the sheet of paper, he turned and walked away.
Disappointed, Ginny Kearnes scanned the bill of fare printed high on a chalkboard behind the counter. She hadn’t gotten much out of Newburn, but she’d played him skillfully, and he had no idea that both she and Floyd had duplicates of everything she’d been forced to surrender.
Deciding to go whole hog and order a triple-decker waffle cone, she walked up to the counter, placed her order, paid the overeager teenaged cashier, and walked back to the table. What she needed to do at this point, she told herself, was count on another of her connections. A connection that neither Floyd nor Newburn could possibly envision. One that had turned her stomach when she’d first considered it: her card-carrying-journalist link to a balding, egocentric man with periodontal disease and bad breath—the bottom-feeding investigative reporter Paul Grimes.
She had thought about using Owen Brashears but decided against it because Grimes had two distinct advantages. He was untainted by anything resembling ethics, and he always seemed to know where to look for the dirty laundry.
She’d given Grimes copies of the press clippings the previous afternoon during their brief meeting in the Western History room of Denver’s central library and asked him to dig up everything he could on the woman named Moc and her son, even meet with them. As she’d expected, Grimes had asked for money, so she had given him five crisp fifties. He had promised to have something for her within forty-eight hours, which meant that her $250 investment should produce dividends by the next day.
Relaxing back in her chair, she bit off a good-sized chunk of chocolate from her triple-decker and smiled. She’d never understood or appreciated the concept of licking ice cream. Like Newburn, she preferred diving right in with her teeth, the same way she was laying the groundwork to find out who had murdered the man she loved.
Wendall Newburn was cruising south on Santa Fe Drive on his way to Deckers to take a look at the John Doe from the oil drum when he called in a cell-phone request to Donny Levine, the detective who was helping him work the Margolin murder case. “I want somebody on Ginny Kearnes for the next twenty-four hours, day and night,” he said authoritatively. “Stay with her at home and work. She’s got something she’s not telling us, there’s no question. And Donny, keep your distance. She’s a sly little fox. If she sniffs you out, she’ll do an end around you like nobody’s business.”
Newburn flipped off his cell phone the instant Levine said, “Gotcha!” and continued to barrel southwest toward Deckers.
Chapter 34
CJ was seated in his office beneath his gallery of bond-skippers. Fifteen minutes earlier, Alden Grace had dropped by to take Flora Jean to lunch. CJ had shown Grace the newspaper clippings and the papers he’d taken from Margolin’s, hoping the former general might shed some light on their significance, but except for recognizing Jimmy Moc’s name, Grace had drawn a blank.
Moments earlier the nicotine monkey had grabbed him, and the pungent, semisweet smell of cigar smoke now filled the room. He ran a hand down the thigh of his slightly too-snug jeans, thinking that maybe he needed to cut back to a single slice of sweet-potato pie a week. He slipped both feet up on the edge of his desk, noticing that the heel of his right boot had split from the sole, and thought that nothing was permanent—not love or friendships, not the good life, not even a career. As he sat in the midday glow blowing smoke rings skyward, he wondered how he could continue to justify getting paid by Carmen Nguyen when he hadn’t delivered anything to her but guaranteed jail time for her father.
Pondering his decision to sell the building and get out from under a life filled with daily uncertainty, his thoughts were interrupted by the high-pitched, incisive ring of the 1920s-style Bakelite telephone on his desk. Debating whether to pick up, he listened to five more lengthy rings before answering, “Floyds Bail Bonds.”
“CJ, it’s Flora Jean.”
“I thought you were at lunch.”
“We are, but it just hit Alden where he might’ve seen a match for that paper you showed him in the office. The one Blue’s citation was printed on.” Flora Jean handed her cell phone to Grace.
“Just had a flash on where I’d seen that paper you showed me,” Grace said amid the clanging of silverware. “The paper’s a lot more yellowed, but it was the same size, and it had the same feel as the paper the army used to print their missing and killed-in-action notices on during Vietnam. The ones that went to battalion commanders on a weekly basis.”
“I’ll be damned!” said CJ, sounding as if he’d somehow been derelict.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. I missed it, too. Got something else for you. I made a call to a friend of mine who’s still in the business.”
CJ smiled, aware that it was next to a certainty that Grace still had his hands in the intelligence game, despite his claim that he had retired. “What did you find out out?”
“That woman in your newspaper clipping, Jimmy Moc’s mother. She was connected. A distant cousin to Ho Chi Minh.”
“Whewww. A chicken with lips,” said CJ, rekindling a phrase his Uncle Ike had liked to use to describe an improbability turning into a reality.
“Yeah. And when you’re dealing with scheming at the level we’re talking about, you never know. Could be she got paid to set up housekeeping in the U.S. on the strength of a favor or two she did for us back in Vietnam. Ratting out a relative wouldn’t be far-fetched. Still doesn’t prove she had anything to do with your Langston Blue problem, but it’s a thought.”
“Sure is. But if she was some kinda Mata Hari with a bloodline straight to Uncle Ho, why cry poverty once she was in the U.S.? You know that if she was ratting out the North Vietnamese, she got very well paid.”
“Cover, CJ, cover. And that gets us pretty close to the end of what I’m able to tell you.”
“It helps,” said CJ.
“No problem.” Grace squeezed Flora Jean’s hand. “Just remember a couple of things. The lady sitting next to me had me take things a whole lot further than I really should have, and until you show me otherwise, Langston Blue’s still a deserter.”
“I understand. We’ll set things straight in the end.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Good-bye.”
CJ couldn’t miss the fact that there’d been something unspoken in Grace’s closing remark, almost as if he’d substituted the word good-bye for something else. It took him a few seconds to recognize what it was, a few moments more to put what Grace had said into perspective. But it was crystal clear to him now. The general’s closing remark had pretty much been an order.
There could be no missing the badly damaged front end of the Econoline van that sat in the middle of a quarter-acre vacant lot in Commerce City just a few miles north of Denver. Jimmy Moc had parked the van in the midst of the acreage in order to replace its timing chain, radiator, and right headlight. He had worked through the heat of the day cloaked in obscurity by
an expanse of slough grass and cattails, and he’d just finished applying a final piece of duct tape to the headlamp. He tested the headlamp’s stability, walked back and slipped behind the wheel of the van, and flipped on the headlights. Both flashed on, but the right one, barely visible in the daylight, beamed cockeyed toward the ground. “Good enough,” he said, sounding weary.
He stepped out of the van, walked to the front of the vehicle, and smiled. The van’s grill was missing, a casualty to his late-night encounter with CJ Floyd, but the replacement headlamp worked just fine. He picked up a crowbar from the dirt and worked the van’s dented right fender away from the tire it had been gnawing on. Grabbing a nearby wrench, he dropped to his knees and removed the last bolt that secured the dangling bumper to its frame. The bumper dropped to the ground with a thud. That was it, done, he told himself. The van was a lot worse for wear, but it was still running, and he was back in business.
The van, a gas-guzzling relic from the 1980s, had been his mother’s. Dead ten years now, she’d been his guiding star. Without her he’d become no more than a piece of trash. He had known little of his mother’s life in Vietnam except that she had been a political activist and Communist Party leader from the northern province of Bac Ninh and that she had a weakness for men, including his father, a French North African he had never known. According to Le Quan, soon after Jimmy’s birth she had been moved from a position of power in the party to an outcast with a my den child. He’d only briefly known what it was like to be a child of mixed race in Vietnam because his mother had immigrated with him to the United States when he was only three. But he had heard stories, mostly in the China Bay club, about what it was like to be my den trash in your homeland, and he knew firsthand what it was like to be a nigger in the U.S.A.
Counseling, alternative schools, street life, and finally jail had taught him that what mattered most in life was survival, getting a leg up on the next guy, always hitting the food bank first, and doing whatever was necessary to keep on breathing air. He had no use for revolutions, patriotism, ideologies, or a missing father. For him and the thousands of other throwaway children like him who’d survived the Vietnam War, the measure of a man would always be the number of dollars in his pocket. Loyalty, family, causes, and character were for fools.
Admiring his handiwork, Moc patted the van’s hood affectionately. He then walked to the back of the van, swung open the rear doors, retrieved his toolbox from the ground, and slid it inside. The box clanged to a stop against a floor-to-ceiling metal barrier. Shaking his head, he crawled inside, laid the aluminum barrier down flat, and eyed the empty oil drum in front of him. A wooden case the size of a milk crate sat next to the oil drum. Lifting the top from the case, he stared down at the .45-caliber pistol and sledgehammer inside. Now that the van was running, he’d swing by an East Denver storage locker and pick up the final items he needed.
He replaced the top on the box, crawled out of the van, and closed the doors. Cranking the engine, he scanned the isolated marshland, thinking that after his current job was finished, he’d like to disappear into a background of cattails and weeds just as he and his van had done today.
After a bumpy ride over the Rockies, Alex Holden’s flight from Los Angeles arrived at Denver International Airport five minutes ahead of schedule. All he could think of as he hiked his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose was that he was on the final leg of his nosebleed tour of the West.
Foot traffic inside the main DIA terminal was light as he made his way toward a sign that read Ground Transportation. He’d barely reached curbside, briefcase in hand, when a spotlessly clean yellow cab pulled to a stop. The driver, a gaunt Hispanic man, nodded, got out, walked toward Holden, and asked, “Where to?”
“The Starlighter Motel on Federal. How far’s that from downtown?”
“Fifteen minutes,” said the cabbie, placing Holden’s briefcase in the trunk. “You’re a good way south. Gonna need a ride later?” he asked, trolling for a second fare.
“No. I’ll rent myself something.”
The cabbie shrugged and closed the trunk lid, aware that his fare with the oversized horn-rims would have a hard time finding a car-rental outlet on South Federal Boulevard, in the heart of Little Vietnam.
When Paul Grimes asked Ginny Kearnes to meet him at 3 p.m. in the Western History room of the central Denver library once again, he snickered into the phone, “You won’t like what I found.”
Now, as they stood at the center of the room beneath its massive stylized two-story wooden replica of an oil derrick, Grimes had the self-satisfied look of someone who’d just found a gold nugget in the dry wash.
“Your boyfriend wasn’t quite as squeaky clean as he projected—or as liberal.” Grimes handed Kearnes copies of several Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News stories from the early 1980s. “Check ’em out. Margolin was leading the band when it came to protesting the resettlement of Vietnamese boat people here in Colorado.”
Kearnes eyed a Denver Post headline—Refugees Displace Americans—and scanned the story below. A second headline screamed, Boat People to Cost Coloradoans Jobs; a third, Economy to Feel Pinch from Resettlement. Each story quoted Peter Margolin as being strongly opposed to any further influx of Vietnamese boat people into the United States, and Colorado in particular. Frowning, she handed the copies back to Grimes.
“There’s more,” Grimes said gleefully. “Some folks claim Margolin was being paid to parrot what labor-protective lobbyists were telling him to say.”
Kearnes shook her head. “There’s no way.”
“It’s all down in black and white.”
“Then Peter had a reason,” Kearnes said defensively.
“Yeah. He had a bunch of lobbyists lining his pocket.”
“No. There’s something else here. Something we’re missing.”
“Well, if there is, unless you wanna ante up another two hundred and fifty bucks, you’re on your own trying to find it.”
“What about that Moc woman’s story?”
“Couldn’t find much beyond what you gave me. Just this AP wire piece.” He handed Kearnes an Associated Press clipping. She read through it quickly.
“Somebody wrote this AP piece. Someone talked to Moc’s mother.”
“Could’ve been anybody. Back in those days the AP and UPI boys were pretty loosey-goosey with other people’s work. That AP story on the Moc woman was probably a compilation from ten other original pieces, including the ones you gave me. I couldn’t dig up any more on her. Seems like as soon as those resettlement stories were done, the woman vanished.”
“I’ll dig deeper.” Kearnes smiled. “We’ve got one advantage over the early ’80s—the Internet. Besides, we know from this AP story that the Moc woman came from San Francisco to Fort Collins to Denver.”
“What the heck are you looking for?” Grimes shook his head.
“The truth. And something that points to why Peter was murdered. There’s a thread of it here,” she said, holding up the AP clipping. “I simply have to ferret it out.”
“Good luck,” said Grimes, staggered by Kearnes’s tenacity. “Here’s a tip. Start with the Fort Collins Coloradoan. When those wire service boys lifted stuff, they tended to stay local.”
“I’ll do that,” said Kearnes, surprised by Grimes’s willingness to offer uncompensated advice.
“Don’t look so surprised,” said Grimes. “Believe it or not, I bleed real blood. Besides, we’re dealing with the murder of a congressman. People want to know what happened. You find an acorn, I’ll eventually find a tree. It’s how I earn my living.”
Aware that Grimes wasn’t just blowing smoke, she said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Do that. And thanks for the payday. When you find that acorn, call me. You never know, we might grow it into a Pulitzer.”
Grimes pivoted and walked away, leaving Kearnes wondering, as she headed for a library computer to begin her search of Colorado boat people archives, why it was that murder, voyeuris
m, and misery made the journalistic world tick.
Mario Satoni showed up at CJ’s office precisely at 4 o’clock, just as he’d told CJ he would during their midafternoon phone conversation. He was dressed in an expensive tailored black suit and a white spread-collar shirt, accented by a $150 silk tie. CJ had never seen the spindly-legged old man who had been selling him antique license plates and Western collectibles for nearly a decade wearing anything but a T-shirt and baggy shorts. Caught off guard as Mario stood in his doorway, CJ’s jaw nearly dropped.
“So this is where you work,” said Mario. “Always wondered. Nice.”
“Thanks! Come on in and take a load off,” said CJ, trying earnestly to mask his surprise.
Mario walked into the room, drank in the surroundings, and nodded his approval. Cupping both hands chest high in front of him, Mario said, “That lady who showed me in has a set on her.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loud. She’s an ex-marine.”
“Marine, Seabee, swabbie, whatever, she’s built like a brick shithouse.”
CJ smiled and shook his head. “What’ve you got for me, Mario?”
“Got plenty, Calvin. Plenty.” Mario slid the now grease-stained envelope with the twenties and the special paper across CJ’s desktop and took a seat. “Bottom line is, your boy Margolin wasn’t counterfeitin’. Those twenties are coin of the realm.”
“So what’s the plenty?”
“I’ll get to that, Calvin. Give me a minute. You got any water?”
“Sure.” CJ walked out to the coffee-break area and returned with a bottle of water.
“Shit,” said Mario, taking the bottle and unscrewing the cap. “You’re runnin’ first class. Bottled water, no less. Now, where was I?”
“You were about to tell me what you had for me.”