by Rex Burns
The man’s wife, an older and stockier version of the woman in the photograph, answered Julie’s knock. The faded trim of her robe brushed both sides of the doorway. Bags under her eyes were heavy with worry. When she heard Julie’s name, she silently led the PI across the small living room to a larger family room where Lidke stood looking up at two policemen taking notes. The paneled walls held rows of framed photographs: a much younger Lidke wearing a football uniform bearing the initials SDSU; Lidke’s face, leaner, clamped in a glossy football helmet; Lidke in wrestling tights and pose; Lidke and other wrestlers grinning into a strobe light as they kneeled in a pyramid. Those that weren’t of Lidke were autographed “To Otto.” A broad, ornately gleaming belt hung in a heavy frame over the gas fireplace, and flanking it were shelves holding polished trophies with gilded football players or wreathed footballs. The dates went back to high school.
“Miss Campbell—thanks for coming over. I was just telling these people how much I don’t know.” Lidke introduced Julie to the older patrolman, the one with the notebook. The chrome nametag pinned above his shirt pocket said M. PAYLOR. He sized up Julie with a gleam of admiration that, when he heard why she was there, faded into the distance most police have toward PIs. The other cop, busy with his radio, was answering a query from his dispatcher about how much longer they might be tied up.
“I understand you’re supposed to be providing protection against somebody who threatened Mr. Lidke?” Paylor’s eyes said he didn’t believe that an amateur, especially a female amateur, could protect Lidke or anybody else.
“Our agency’s been hired to investigate a threat to his life, yes.”
“So what have you found out?”
“Nothing, yet.”
Lidke leaned forward. “Hey, I just hired her this afternoon, Officer. She ain’t had time to do nothing yet.”
Paylor’s pencil scribbled something in his notebook. “Phone number?”
Julie told him. “What happened to the car?”
“Fire alarm was called in at one-twenty-seven by a neighbor. By the time the pumper arrived, the gas tank was on fire. Mr. Lidke, here, says he didn’t hear anything until the fire truck’s siren woke him up.”
“The bedrooms are up in back—we sleep away from the street noise. We didn’t hear a sound.”
“What about your children? They hear anything?”
Lidke shook his head, voice dropping. “Naw. In fact, they’re still asleep—sleep through an earthquake, they would.”
Paylor, eager to wrap up and get back on the street to serve and protect, closed his notebook and buttoned it into a vest pocket. Then he fished out an Aurora PD business card and filled in the blank lines. “If you got questions, Mr. Lidke, call this number here. This here’s my name and this is the case number. Your insurance man’ll want that.” He added, “A detective or an arson investigator will probably be out to talk to you in the next couple days. If you think of anything more, write it down so you can tell him.”
Lidke studied the card.
“And if you find out anything,” Paylor handed Julie a second card, “be sure and call this number.”
“May I have a copy of your report?”
“Mr. Lidke can call for one sometime tomorrow afternoon. If he wants you to have a copy, he’ll give it to you.”
Julie nodded.
Paylor paused at the door. “You know what obstruction of justice means, Miss—ah—?”
“Campbell. And yes, I know.”
“Good. You be sure and call if you find out anything at all, hear?”
Julie nodded again. The officers’ leather belts creaked with the weight of attached equipment, of torsos thickened by body armor, of authority. Lidke followed the two men out. When the squat, bald man came back, he told Julie, “The cop said he’s got no evidence of arson yet. Got to wait for an arson investigator to go over the car, he said.”
“Do you or your wife smoke?”
“No. You mean was that fire accidental? No. I know who it was. So do you.”
“Is that what you told the police?”
The man’s heavy shoulders rose and fell as he stared at the championship belt hung above the fireplace. “Naw. I just told them I’d received a threat and that I’d hired you and Jim to look into it. I didn’t know if I should mention Chertok.”
“Best you don’t until we know a little more.”
“You mean until we can prove what we already know.”
Or disprove it. But Lidke didn’t want to hear that. Julie had the man go over the events again—no explosion, just the sound of the fire truck waking them up, and then the phone rang and a neighbor told them their car was on fire.
“Do you usually park on the street?”
“Yeah. My wife’s car goes in the garage. Winter, it keeps the snow off her car, and if she or Patty come home late, I don’t like them walking across the lawn in the dark, you know?”
He thought a moment. “And that was before all this crap. Now maybe I don’t even want them walking across the kitchen after dark.”
“You don’t park in the driveway?”
“No. Patty’s in high school. She’s always going in or out. We’d be moving the thing all the time.”
“And you’ve had the car for a while?”
“Four, five years. You’re asking how they knew it was my car? I drive it all the time—to work, wherever. I figure somebody’s been watching me.”
It seemed that way to Julie, too. In the silence of the house, they heard a heavy rumble as the fire truck gave a lurch, and the flicker of its emergency lights moved, and then stopped. The thump of a fist at the front was followed by a murmur of voices. A few moments later, Mrs. Lidke came hesitantly to the family room doorway and waited until Lidke beckoned her in. The pumper unit roared again, and the lights began moving away.
“The fireman said somebody would be by in the morning to look at it. He said everything was out, but if we noticed any more sparks or smoke we should call immediately.”
“OK, honey. You go on to bed now. I want to talk a little more with Miss Campbell.”
The woman’s light brown eyes, worried and nervous, lingered on Julie’s face as if looking for something to cling to. “Do you think … was it an attack, Miss Campbell?”
“We’ll have to see what the evidence says, Mrs. Lidke. I wouldn’t want to say either way, yet.”
Her lips pressed into a fleshless line and she nodded. It seemed to be a familiar gesture of acceptance. Her lank hair swayed along her cheeks.
Lidke’s thick hand awkwardly patted the woman’s curved shoulder. “Don’t worry, babe. It wasn’t no attack. They were just trying to tell me something. Right, Miss Campbell?”
“Looks that way.”
They watched the woman, dumpy in her worn robe and wilting slippers, pad up the stairs.
Lidke wanted more information about protecting his family and himself. Julie gave him advice and suggested that if the inspector found the fire to be arson, Lidke should notify the local police and ask them to increase patrols in the neighborhood. He also wanted to know what the Touchstone Agency was going to do about it. That was a good question. Neither Julie nor her father wanted to be tied up with personal protection work. And she guessed that Lidke could not afford it, either. “We’ll start by asking questions, Mr. Lidke. Maybe that will be enough to make them back off.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” The man stood in the open front door, his width filling it. His eyes looked at the empty street that led away into a dimness made darker by the black of silhouetted trees. Now that the fire truck had gone, they seemed poised to move closer. His voice was low and angry. “Me, that’s one thing. But they do anything to my family, my kids, I don’t give a shit about evidence. I’m going after Chertok.”
“First, give us a chance to see what we can find out.”
�
�Yeah.”
Exactly what that chance might be, and how she might begin to find out, was on Julie’s mind all the way home.
4
The next morning while her father loaded the electronics into his favorite satchel, Julie sipped coffee and brought him up to date on Lidke. She could understand the wrestler’s anger at anyone who would include his wife and children in threat and fire. Her father, his focus on his equipment, said little. But she knew the arson had caught his attention. Their shared contempt for those who preyed on the weak and bullied the helpless was a major reason they were in this line of work. But they never talked much about it. They didn’t have to.
When she was through, he nodded. “The guy needs help, Julie. You were right to take the case.” He did not add that the violence of the arson made him worry for her safety. They both understood that any nose stuck in somebody else’s business was liable to be hit.
And she refrained from telling him that she knew she was right. Instead, she said, “I’m going to visit some local arenas—see what the managers say about renting space to Lidke.”
“Sounds like a plan. I should be back around four—I’ll call you.”
“Good luck.”
“You too.”
It was nearing ten before Julie could clear the office paperwork and drive toward East Colfax Avenue. Her morning coffee boost had begun to fade, and she felt last night’s lack of sleep pressing hot on her eyes. We strive in weariness, she thought, so hurrah for caffeine. More seriously, she mused, we strive in darkness, too. A hundred years hence, some historian might offer a glimmer of meaning to illuminate that darkness and perhaps even find purpose in the striving. But despite the contemporary ill-directed efforts and failures of humanity, a few basic things remained certain. One was the right to defend against violence. On that, she and her father—despite their tendency to flare over some other issues—had no argument whatsoever.
The Columbine Arena was a tan structure built when masons had time and incentive to decorate walls with geometric designs of dark brown brick. These patterned walls sprawled half a block along busy East Colfax in an area teetering between two zones: Collapsing Urban and Struggling Business. Built in the 1930s as the Araby Ballroom, the arena had seen service as an indoor market after World War II and now survived because of its “historic” architectural designation. In the hard sun of a September morning, it sat faded and old-fashioned with pointed doorways and crumbling Moorish finials that provided nesting sites for pigeons.
The part of the building that fronted Colfax had been converted into shops. The ground floor was lined with sun-faded awnings sheltering display windows that no pedestrian paused to look in. At the corner of High Street, a line of vending boxes held several free ad-rags local to the neighborhood, as well as Westword and the Denver Post. Their headlines focused on the latest scandal in Denver’s police department. Julie wandered past the blue metal boxes and around the corner to find the entry to the arena. It was another arched doorway flanked by dusty display cases whose only objects were notices: the arena was ideal for high school proms, for weddings, meetings, or small expositions; every Saturday in summer, it held the neighborhood farmers’ market and featured organic produce. But none of the space, apparently, could be used for wrestling.
“That’s right, Miss Campbell. I had to tell that fella we couldn’t help him.” The leasing manager, John Hernandez, according to the plastic sign on his door, lifted his hands to show how helpless he was. “I suggested he try the Market Centre out on South University. They’re about the same size we are.”
“But when he first called, you told him the date was open.”
Hernandez seemed to be in his late forties, but his short, curling hair held no trace of gray. A thin gold chain glittered through the open neck of a white shirt and held, she guessed, a Saint Christopher’s medal. It emphasized his dark skin and reflected the glints of gold in the white smile that had welcomed her. “It was. Still is. Hey, I wish I could rent to him—especially since I see who he’s got speaking for him now.” Another wide smile. “That’s what we’re in business for, right?”
“So who told you not to?”
“Insurance. Wrestling’s a violent sport. Somebody gets hurt, and Columbine could be liable.”
“But the promoter’s responsible for the insurance, just like all the other shows. The arena’s waived from liability.”
“For the wrestlers, sure. But what about the audience? Somebody in the audience gets excited, throws a chair, hits an old lady in the chops. Bam—Columbine’s got a lawsuit.” An arm swept the cramped office whose second-floor window looked out over the cars parked along the curbs of High Street. “What we got here is a Denver landmark—a piece of living history, you understand? It would be terrible to lose it just because somebody’s grandma ate a folding chair.”
“Mr. Lidke said his insurance is comprehensive.”
“That what he said? That’s good to hear, but I got to go by what my insurance guy tells me. And what he tells me is not to rent it for wrestling.”
“May I have his name? Perhaps we can clear things up with him.”
The man’s smile drooped a bit. “He told me, I’m telling you: no.”
“You also said the date’s still open.”
“Yeah, well, I got a nibble for it. I’m holding it for a guy.”
“We can move the date.”
Hernandez stopped smiling entirely. “Look, Miss Campbell, I been real polite to you, taking my busy time to answer your questions, just because it’s my Mexican heritage to be polite, you know? But this is a private arena and we got the right to refuse anybody, especially if their insurance is no good.”
“Who told you it was no good?”
“A call. I got a call, all right?”
“From whom?”
“A secretary—somebody—a woman. Tells me Lidke’s insurance is limited, asks me would I like to buy a rider to cover eventualities involving members of the audience. I said no. I especially said no given the price she quoted! I got the right to refuse, and that’s it.”
Julie smiled warmly. “Of course you do, Mr. Hernandez. I’m only trying to find out what we can possibly do to change your mind.”
“Now? Nothing. I don’t want nothing to do with that outfit.” He, too, stretched a wide smile. “Good day, Miss Campbell.”
Through his office window moments later, Hernandez watched the long-legged blonde stand on the corner and look up at the building for a moment. Very nice looking and dressed like money, but a snotty Anglo all the same. Went to college, he bet. Now trying out the work world before getting married to some other rich Anglo and spending her time at the country club. People like her never had to do a day’s real work in their lives. Never had to sweat, never had to make it in a world that asked why you were behind the desk instead of cleaning it.
The story was the same for the Market Centre, except the leasing agent made no pretense at being polite. The attractive woman assessed Julie’s clothes and hair before she decided to answer. “Yes, I originally told Mr. Lidke the space was available. But when I notified Mr. Brundidge, the operations manager, he said he didn’t want that kind of activity at Market Centre.”
“Did he say why?”
Her office was one of a cluster of rooms in the Caldwell Professional Suites, a collection of half a dozen three-story glass boxes placed to follow a tree-shaded irrigation ditch and landscaped to look like a natural stream. Downstairs, the graying secretary-receptionist who served this office complex had nodded Julie toward the small elevator that led to the third floor and a door that read Horan Leasing Service. There, she found Mrs. Horan behind her cluttered desk. The brisk lady wasn’t angry with Julie; she just didn’t like losing a commission, and talking about it brought back the irritation. “Only that he had a bad report about Mr. Lidke’s business but he didn’t go into detail.”
&
nbsp; Julie asked for the manager’s address. “Did Mr. Brundidge mention Sid Chertok?”
“Not to me, he didn’t. He knows my feelings about that scumbag.”
“Care to tell me what kind of trouble you’ve had with Chertok?”
“No trouble, Miss Campbell. Just minor irritation. He’s dealt with sports figures too long—he thinks a signed contract is a negotiable document. I handed the issue to my lawyers and they handed him a court date. That took care of it.” The woman’s eyes gained a note of curiosity. “Why are you asking about him?”
“My client believes Mr. Chertok’s trying to close all the local arenas to him.”
“That’s interesting.” The long red fingernail of the woman’s forefinger tapped on a yellow ballpoint pen that said lowe title and mortgage company in red letters. “His name never came up in this deal… . But Chertok does promote wrestling, among other things… .” She picked up the telephone and punched in a coded number. “Mr. Brundidge, please. Kathy Horan.” Tap tap. “Larry, it’s me. Did you pull out of the wrestling rental because Sid Chertok told you to?”
Julie watched the woman’s expression, trying unsuccessfully to read something. She didn’t know what kind of businesswoman Mrs. Horan was, but she’d make a fine poker player.