by Robert Greer
Luis Alejandro Del Mora arrived in Denver on a Mexicana Airlines flight, with all his papers in order and a newly minted student visa, on a crystal-clear, picture-perfect early-November afternoon, eight weeks to the day after his mother began working for Howard Stafford. Dressed in sandals and a peasant’s poncho, sporting a revolutionary-style Nicaraguan mountain highlands guerrilla’s straw hat, and carrying a backpack filled with two thirty-two-ounce bladders of wine, Luis walked arm in arm with his mother down a Denver International Airport concourse bustling with Americans. During Theresa’s six-year absence, Luis had been taught to despise all such people by the cousins of cousins and the friends of friends with whom he had lived. Luis had arrived on American soil not as a child seeking maternal reunion and comfort, as his mother envisioned, but as a young man soured by years of separation, embittered by a lost child’s disappointment, and angry at having had to live in the underbelly of a Nicaraguan caste system underpinned by American capitalism. He was suspicious, agitated, insular, and independent.
“You’re in America now,” Theresa said, beaming as she stopped to wrap her arms around her only child. “You’re safe.”
Luis forced a half smile and squeezed his mother tightly as he watched the people around him scurry disjointedly in every direction, aware that the place that had given his mother such hope and purpose could never do the same for him.
Within weeks of his arrival, Luis Del Mora was doing what he had learned to do best—what in six years of living with the cousins of cousins in Nicaragua he had been taught to do—steal. In Nicaragua he had stolen cars and stereos, fruit and furniture, and carted away truckloads of computers and TVs. In America he would do the same. However, he wouldn’t steal the trivial tokens that Americans, fat with opulence, toyed with briefly and then discarded. His sights were set much higher, and thanks to his mother’s perseverance and position, he planned to extend his thievery to include the rare and priceless.
And so it began. On days when he was supposed to be attending Denver’s Metro State College, he instead honed his skills as a thief—selling, fencing, and bartering stolen goods. Things went well enough that two months after his arrival, with his mother able to see only warmth, charm, and goodness in her son, Luis informed Theresa that he had secured a part-time job as a translator’s aide at a Denver language school. With his nonexistent college courses and fabricated job that kept him far from the watchful eye of his mother, Luis began to lay the groundwork to steal from Howard Stafford—from a house filled with books and art objects that stretched back to the fourteenth century. Ultimately, Luis knew he would be able to cherry-pick gems that included rare books, ephemera, pottery, textiles, and art; he hoped that a reclusive pack-rat hoarder such as Stafford, steeped in his own eccentricities, might never even miss these things.
Luis started with a series of trial runs, stealing unimportant history books, railroad timetables, and what he took to be insignificant things that Stafford was unlikely to miss in a thirty-thousand-volume library before setting his sights on the real prizes in the Stafford kingdom. Starting small, he told himself, would give him the inspiration he needed to complete the gambit. With his run of the grounds and Theresa’s run of the house, it was easy to learn from the cooperative staff, and from a mother wearing blinders, what things in the hacienda were the most precious. His most significant moment came one day as he walked through the main house with his mother. They passed the door of the library, and Theresa told him that the room, with its massive oak doors and fourteen-foot-high cross-beamed ceilings, was forbidden territory.
“The library is off limits,” she said as they walked by. “Even to me.” She grabbed Luis by the hand and pulled him with her toward the kitchen. That experience moved Luis to read up on Stafford—study the man who was his mother’s employer—infiltrate his thinking in order to find out what treasures he might have locked behind the massive oak library doors. It took some digging to ferret out the reclusive rich man’s passions, but Luis spent days combing through books, newspapers, and the Internet. In the end, he learned that what mattered most to the fifty-eight-year-old reclusive native Coloradan was to amass the world’s ultimate private collection of rare Western maps, vintage Western photographs, and books. With that knowledge in hand, five months after landing in America Luis Del Mora decided that the time for trial runs had passed, and the time for the serious business of stealing had arrived.
CHAPTER 2
The neon sign above the door to CJ Floyd’s recently opened twelve-hundred-square-foot South Broadway Antique Row store screamed in glowing red letters: Ike’s Spot: Vintage Western Collectibles. CJ had chosen the name to honor his deceased uncle, Ike Floyd, the man who had raised him, taught him right from wrong, loved and nurtured him while fighting his own lifelong battle with alcoholism. Ike had snatched CJ by the arm and thumped his “narrow ass” whenever his nephew had strayed from the straight and narrow.
Mavis Sundee, the lifelong drop of feminine sweetness in CJ’s hard-edged life, and fiancée of eight months, had suggested the name. When he’d asked her why, Mavis had emphasized the point with a palm slap: “For the same reason Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen isn’t called Mavis’s Place after me, or Willis Sundee’s after my father.” Aware that Mae’s, the landmark seventy-year-old Denver soul food restaurant and one of the three businesses that Mavis ran for her aging father, had been named for Mavis’s mother, a civil rights pioneer who had been born and bred in New Orleans, CJ had smiled and agreed.
Eight months earlier, after a brush with death in a remote New Mexico wilderness, CJ had stepped away from life as a bail bondsman and bounty hunter, the only job he’d known since coming home from two naval tours of Vietnam. After the New Mexico ordeal, he was determined to open a vintage Western collectibles store on Denver’s famed Antique Row. He had worked the streets and sewer-rat haunts of Denver for more than thirty years, but that case had nearly claimed Mavis’s life, so after dispatching it and leaving his bail-bonding business in the capable hands of his Las Vegas-showgirl-sized partner, Flora Jean Benson, CJ was happy now to call himself a former bail bondsman.
Flora Jean, a U.S. Marines intelligence sergeant during the Persian Gulf War, now operated Floyd & Benson’s Bail Bonds out of the first floor of the stately old Victorian building on Bail Bondsman’s Row that Ike had left CJ. CJ, who still lived upstairs in a converted four-room apartment, had sold Flora Jean the business and a partial interest in the building during a Christmas Eve title-document ritual. A month later, with a three-year lease and every dime he’d managed to scrape together, he’d invested in Ike’s. CJ was now an antiques dealer.
Business had been slow for the entire month of March, and CJ was having second thoughts about his career move, but Lenny McCabe, an aging hippie antiques dealer, and CJ’s landlord, who operated the shop on the other side of the duplex CJ leased and was one of the few dealers who’d welcomed CJ onto the street with open arms, chalked up the lull in business to springtime in the Rockies. In pep talks to CJ, he’d claimed that people don’t like to part with their money during the time of slush and mud.
CJ wasn’t certain he could believe a man who braved Denver’s fluctuating springtime elements in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, wore his hair in a ponytail down to his belt loops, and trudged around in flip-flops in the snow. But he had to trust someone’s experience, and since Lenny, a ten-year resident of the Row, had gleefully leased him space and helped him move into it, CJ was willing to have some faith in him.
CJ had started amassing his collection of antiques, folk art, and Western memorabilia during his lonely preteen years, when his uncle’s drinking and erratic hours had forced CJ to find something stable to immerse himself in. Although sports had served as a partial fix, the world of antiques and collectibles had been his permanent elixir.
His apartment was cluttered with coffee cans full of cat’s-eye marbles, and jumbos and steelies too. In the basement of the building he had stacks of mint-condition records—78s, 45s, an
d vintage LPs stored in tomato crates gathering dust. In his four-decade quest to collect, he had amassed hundreds of tobacco tins and inkwells from all over the world, along with maps in every size, color, and shape, maps whose pages folded and zipped and accordioned into place as they documented every place CJ had ever been and many more.
CJ’s collection of antique license plates said more about him than any other items in his collection. He had started that collection during his teenage years, when Ike’s drinking had reached its peak and street rods and low riders had taken the place of family in his life. The prides of his license-plate collection were his 1916 Alaska plate and a 1915 Denver municipal tag. Both had been fabricated using the long-abandoned process of overlaying porcelain onto iron. Although the collection was impressive, it remained incomplete, and Mavis, one of the few people who had ever seen the entire collection, suspected that, like CJ, it very likely would never be whole.
It was approaching twilight as CJ and Lenny McCabe stood near the back of Ike’s Spot behind a glass display case that housed the bulk of CJ’s lifelong collection of antique tobacco tins, shooting the breeze and trying to guess the temperature as snow fell outside. Lenny was the first to see the customer walk in.
“You got business, CJ,” Lenny said, tugging his ponytail and giving CJ a go-for-broke grin.
CJ nodded, realizing as the man approached and McCabe’s grin softened into a stare that the nervous, gaunt man, whom CJ pegged to be nineteen, tops, was only the fourth customer of the day. He had melting snowflakes clinging to a cowlick of jet-black hair that draped down over a bulbous forehead that dwarfed the rest of his face. He wore a lightweight winter coat and a backpack. He breezed past all the displays without so much as a glance, eyed Lenny dismissively, and turned to CJ.
Before either CJ or Lenny could speak, the hostile-looking teenager said, “Your ad in the yellow pages says you deal in Western collectibles. I have a couple I want to sell. High-grade stuff, guaranteed. Now, who’s Ike?” He grinned slyly at McCabe and then CJ.
The words sounded rehearsed. It wasn’t every day that a brash, pumpkin-headed teen, sporting a hint of a goatee and barking demands in a thick Spanish accent—or anyone else for that matter—marched into any store on Antique Row and offered to guarantee what they were selling. Lenny, looking surprised and agitated, shot CJ a look that said, Watch yourself, rookie; whatever the kid’s peddlin’ is probably stolen or fake.
“Whattaya selling?” CJ asked finally.
The young man slipped out of his backpack, slammed it down on the display case, and unzipped it. Rummaging around in the backpack as if prolonging the search for effect, he extracted his wares. “Books. And don’t try to take me. I know what they’re worth.” He placed two books gingerly on the countertop.
CJ suspected that the round-faced man, whose eyes angled skyward, accentuating their whites, was older than he’d first thought. He couldn’t tell if the man was bluffing, but he knew for sure that his fourth customer of the day had attitude to burn and that the Spanish accent he was anchored to screamed, Not from around here! CJ eyed the two books casually, feigning lack of interest, and glanced toward the store’s front window. It had stopped snowing, and someone outside, clad in a parka, hands cupped above their eyes, had stopped to admire the inkwell and tobacco tin displayed in the window. The person quickly disappeared as CJ turned his attention back to the books.
The larger of the two books, nine and a half by six and a half inches and bound in buckskin, intrigued him, primarily because there was no title on the front cover. Two initials, an M lying on its side and an adjacent D, were stamped into the buckskin where a title should have been. The name “Harvey T. Sethman” was embossed in gold near the bottom. CJ nudged the book aside and tried not to salivate as he moved his attention to the second, smaller book. He had recognized it the instant the customer had set it down on the counter. Although license plates were his passion and inkwells and tobacco tins among his well-researched specialties, he had no trouble recognizing a cattle-brand book when he saw one, and the 1883 Wyoming brand book sitting in front of him was as pristine an example of a rare and collectible cattle-trade gem as he’d ever seen. He had a rough idea of its worth, and he’d have known its value to the penny if his friend Billy DeLong, onetime foreman of Snake River Valley Ranch in Baggs, Wyoming, had been there. CJ picked the brand book up and gently turned the pages, eyeing column after column, page after page of cattle brands, owners, names, and addresses as the nervous seller and an impatient, obviously perturbed McCabe looked on.
“Where did you get them?” CJ asked finally as the gears in his head shifted from antiques dealer to hungry-bail-bondsman wary.
“They belonged to my uncle. He’s dead.”
“Was he a rancher?” asked CJ, nudging the brand book aside, flipping open the other book’s cover, and reading the author’s front note: “This book is number seventy-eight of a special limited edition of three hundred copies of Medicine in the Making of Montana, hand-bound in buckskin and identified with the registered brand of the Montana Medical Association. This edition was commissioned by the Association for the benefit of its members and friends.”
“You from Montana?” CJ asked, now aware of the significance of the initials branded into the buckskin. “Lazy MD,” he said to Lenny, handing him the open book so that McCabe could read the front note.
“Makes sense. But I would’ve chosen Rockin’ MD myself.” McCabe’s attempt at levity seemed forced. Eyeing the seller suspiciously, he put the book down.
Ignoring McCabe, the man looked at CJ and said, “No. Venezuela—my uncle ran a cattle ranch down there.”
Uncertain whether the man was lying, CJ asked, “You got any proof?”
“Have you got proof that you own what’s in this store?” the young man said without flinching.
CJ eyed the man pensively. “You got a name?”
The boy swept the books back toward his backpack without answering.
“Possession’s nine-tenths of the law,” McCabe interjected.
“And stealing’s a crime,” CJ countered.
“I didn’t steal them,” the man said adamantly. He had zipped up his backpack and turned to leave when CJ, wanting to take back the words as soon as he’d uttered them, asked, “How much do you want for them?”
“Eighteen hundred.”
Pegging the brand book’s value at $2,500 to $3,000, CJ said, “I’ll give you fifteen.”
“Seventeen.”
CJ looked quizzically at McCabe, then watched as the seller flashed McCabe a bold, cocky smile—a smile that said, Stay the hell out of this deal, friend.
Taking the hint, McCabe said, “You’re on your own, CJ.”
“You’ll have to take a check,” CJ said haltingly to the nervous man, as if he were looking for a way to squelch the deal.
“Cash only,” the man retorted.
“I don’t deal in cash with these kinds of transactions. Your books could be knockoffs.”
The man laughed. “I’ll take my books and leave, señor.” His cheeks reddened and he took a step toward the front door before McCabe said eagerly to CJ, “I’ll spot you the seventeen hundred. Write me a check.”
“Too risky,” CJ countered.
McCabe shook his head. “Balls, man. Balls. In this business you gotta have ’em.” McCabe eyed the seller for a reaction but got none.
CJ stroked his chin and considered the scores of life-threatening situations he’d found himself stuck in during two tours of Vietnam and thirty years as a bounty hunter and bail bondsman. No risk, no reward, he thought. Concerned that he might be losing the edge that had always defined him, he reached for the inside pocket of his black leather gambler’s vest, a wardrobe trademark, extracted his checkbook, hurriedly wrote out a check for $1,700, and handed it to McCabe.
“I’ll have the cash for you in a couple of minutes,” said McCabe, folding the check in half, slipping it into his shirt pocket, and heading for the front door.
The customer watched McCabe walk away, his eyes locked on every footfall until McCabe disappeared. He and CJ looked at one another in silence for a moment; then, eyes glued to the floor, the young man walked across the room to examine CJ’s porcelain-license-plate display.
An arc of bewildered relief had spread across the man’s face when they’d finally closed the deal. It was a look CJ knew well—the same bewildered look he’d given Ike when his uncle had came home broke, disoriented, and quivering after two nights of drinking and gambling. A look of detached disappointment that leaned heavily on the fact that the bearer carried a burden much heavier than should ever be expected of him. CJ wondered what burden the boyish-looking man was carrying—and, more importantly, for whom.