Blackbird, Farewell

by Robert Greer

  Chagrined that Mavis and CJ had run off to Hawaii to get married, causing her to miss the wedding, she rose and walked over to the niche at the rear of her office to see if the coffee she'd started before her phone call had finished brewing.

  A tad over six feet tall, the statuesque Flora Jean, who'd recently turned forty-one, could instantly turn a roomful of heads. Her cocoa-brown skin, wiry, closely cropped hair, and undeniably Nubian good looks might have announced African queen on another continent, but in America, until the U.S. Marine Corps had intervened, she'd simply been another case-hardened sister, the often adrift daughter of a drugged-out East St. Louis prostitute. But the corps and then a war had intervened, and by the end of her six-year tour with the marines, she'd become not only a soldier but the very essence of a woman. During her Marine Corps stint she'd also fallen in love—and not with just any man but with another soldier who happened to be an intelligence operative just like her, an officer, and white. During her time in the Persian Gulf, she and Major General Alden Grace had had a not-so-secret affair that would have singed the pages of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Their seventeen-year-long, on-again, off-again romance had reached its zenith a few months earlier when the now retired general had slipped an engagement ring on the reluctant Flora Jean's finger, with CJ standing in Flora Jean's office looking on, and announced that his “reluctant-to-marry-a-white-man future wife” had better work on getting her thinking in sync with that of the new century and forget about her East St. Louis upbringing.

  Smiling and admiring the one-carat diamond on her finger, Flora Jean lifted the fresh pot of coffee off the burner. She'd started to pour herself a cup of the steaming Kona brew when her office door banged against the wall and Damion Madrid, looking haggard, stepped into the room.

  Puzzled, Flora Jean placed the coffee pot back on the burner, set her cup down, shook her head, and said, “Damn, sugar, you look like you been out on an all-night bender.”

  When Damion didn't respond, she realized that the mostly straight-arrow, athletically gifted kid whom she'd babysat while his mother attended law school at night was in serious trouble.

  “What's wrong, Damion?”

  Damion's words came out in a rush. “Blackbird was murdered last night.” Choking back tears, he added, “Over at the Glendale courts.”

  Every muscle in Flora Jean's face seemed to slump. “No!”

  “I called you last night, but I couldn't get you.”

  “I had my cell phone turned off, sweetie. I was down in Colorado Springs at Alden's. What happened?”

  Damion shrugged. “I don't know, really. All I know is that someone shot him and some newspaper reporter. They're both dead.”

  Aware of what it was like to lose a best friend—she'd lost one during Desert Storm—Flora Jean walked across the room and hugged Damion. Holding him reassuringly, in much the same way Julie had the previous evening, she took in the look of desperation on his face. “What can I do to help, sugar?”

  Stepping out of her embrace, Damion said, “You can help me find out who killed Shandell.”

  “Don't you think that's a job for the cops?”

  Aware that the former marine sergeant was also a karate black belt who during her bail-bonding career had been known to knock 200-pound bond-skipping men off their feet, Damion said, “The cops can't do what we can do, Flora Jean.”

  Recognizing where Damion was headed, Flora Jean said, “I think what we need to do, sugar, is think the problem through a little better. Talk things over with your mother, maybe give CJ a call in Hawaii.”

  Damion shook his head in protest. “No way. I know what they'd say.”

  “Like I said, Damion, it's a job for the cops.”

  “I'll do it with or without you, Flora Jean.”

  “Would you hold your damn horses, Damion Madrid? You're on your way to becomin’ a doctor, not some CJ Floyd clone. Believe me, ain't no part of life down here on the Row the kinda life for you.”

  “It wasn't the life for my mother either, but it played a big part in defining who she is. You know as well as I do that most of her clients start their journey right down here. And it's not the life for CJ,” Damion said with a chuckle. “The man even claims to be an antiques dealer nowadays, for God's sake, when in fact anyone in the know realizes that he still does bounty hunting on the side. Call it what you will, Flora Jean, but whether you call yourself a lawyer, an antiques dealer, or a marine, there's always going to be a piece of you that was forged down here. I won't let this thing with Shandell go, no matter what, and I need your help.”

  Flora Jean shook her head, well aware that Damion meant what he said. When he was a teenager she'd watched him practice dribbling and shooting jump shots in his driveway, hour after hour, until his hands were swollen and dehydration seemed just seconds away. She'd seen him study geometry and calculus and French, which he'd hated, late into the night, hunkered down in the conference room just beyond her office door while Julie sat across from him plowing through reams of classroom notes and stacks of law books. She'd seen him at sixteen walk into CJ's office with a bloody, swollen lower lip and a goose egg on his forehead, only to announce to CJ that although two Latino-hating skinheads had gotten their licks in on him, they were both now hooked up to IVs in the emergency room at Denver General Hospital. But as far as she was concerned, the kicker when it came to measuring Damion Madrid's heart had come a year earlier when, after insinuating himself into one of CJ's cases, he'd outfoxed a rifle-toting hit man who'd stalked him to the desolate Pawnee National Grassland east of Fort Collins, hoping to eliminate him from the case, only to have Damion come close to eliminating him.

  Deep down, in spite of her earlier comment, Flora Jean knew Damion had the right stuff to make it in her world, or in the world of medicine or sports, or in whatever world he chose. What he lacked when it came to investigating a murder was seasoning and the kind of experience necessary to work the Denver streets she knew so well.

  Still shaking her head, Flora Jean said, “Let me think about things for just a bit, sugar.” She wanted to take the words back as soon as she'd uttered them.

  “You think long, you think wrong,” Damion offered with a smile, tossing one of Flora Jean's favorite sayings at her.

  “Why don't you tell me everything you know about what happened yesterday, boots on to boots off, and anything else you think I might need to know about Shandell and that reporter who was killed. And Damion, don't leave nothin’ out, no matter how unimportant you think it is.”

  Sensing that he'd made some headway, Damion said, “Okay. But it'll take a while.”

  “Don't matter none to me, sugar.” Flora Jean glanced over her shoulder toward the coffee niche. “We got ourselves all mornin’ long and a fresh pot of coffee. Might as well start from the start.”

  It wasn't the way CJ Floyd would've initiated a murder investigation or, left to her own devices, the way Flora Jean would have either. But one hour and a full pot of coffee later, Flora Jean had mapped out what she considered to be a nonintrusive, low-risk investigative strategy for Damion to follow.

  She now knew about the clearly out-of-sync four or five hours that had preceded Shandell's murder, including Shandell's unfocused efforts at the Glendale courts and the awkward dinner he and Damion had shared at Mae's. Damion had also told her about his midday confrontation with Theo Wilhite. They'd spent close to twenty minutes scouring the pages of the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post, assessing each paper's take on the double homicide in the hope of ferreting out a connection between Shandell and Paul Grimes. They'd come up with one nugget of information: Grimes and Shandell had clearly known one another in spite of what Aretha Bird had claimed the previous evening, and for a good long while it seemed according to the Rocky Mountain News story.

  The only other information they'd been able to glean had come from a TV news piece that had aired while they'd been perusing the two newspapers. The story claimed that autopsies on both victims were pending;
although the Glendale police had apparently tried to keep all information about the cases close to the vest, word had leaked out that both men had been felled by bullets from a .30-06.

  Flora Jean decided with serious trepidation to lay out a division of labor that would separate her investigative efforts from Damion's. She would obtain autopsy findings from Vernon Lowe, chief morgue attendant at Denver Health and Hospital's city morgue and a lifelong friend of CJ, dig up everything she could on Paul Grimes, and handle Theo Wilhite. Damion would head up to Fort Collins to see if any of his former teammates, trainers, or coaches could verify Wilhite's claim that Shandell had purposely blown the winning shot in last season's NCAA title game and then get back to her before the Glendale cops had a chance to do the same thing.

  Damion knew that his job was to try to determine whether Shan-dell might've been involved in transgressions that could have cost him his life—things like point-shaving, illicit drug use, or straight-out betting on games. Although he knew, or at least thought he knew, that Shandell would never have gotten involved in such things, he understood very well that Shandell had had one powerful weakness. Notwithstanding his fourteen-month relationship with Connie East-land, Shandell had had a legendary weakness for women—mostly white women. He'd had a reputation for going through pretty women like a sweet freak working his way through a box of candy. Although Damion wasn't aware of any rifle-toting, sharpshooting disgruntled boyfriends who might have been out for Shandell's hide, he couldn't discount the fact that there might be one.

  Armed with what Flora Jean and CJ liked to call a job ticket, he left Flora Jean's office, hastily scribbled notes in hand, on a caffeine high, hoping that by the time he got back to Denver, Flora Jean would've teased out the link between Grimes and Shandell, and maybe even have determined whether Theo Wilhite might be linked to the double murder.

  As he sped north on I-25, pinned for the moment between an oil tanker and a wobbling semi hauling a load of cattle, he had the sense that although he and Flora Jean had mapped out a logical investigative strategy, he might not have the time to follow it all the way through. He was due to start medical school on September 5, and that gave him less than two weeks to find Shandell's killer. Ten days, in fact, to play the part of CJ Floyd and find out along the way whether he had what it took to be more than simply a onetime basketball star and would-be doctor.

  Moments after stepping out of his customary late-morning, twenty-five-minute shower, Jackie “Happy Jack” Woodson got the phone call from his hGH supplier in Denver, Leotis Hawkins, warning him to keep his mouth shut about anything he knew, suspected he might know, or dreamed he might know about the Shandell Bird murder. The glib, self-anointed ladies’ man was toweling himself off and admiring his reflection in a mirror, not paying much attention to Hawkins, until he heard the words “Mouth off, you little rodent, and count on it, you're in for the same treatment as Bird.”

  Jackie had gotten the word about Shandell's murder early that morning from a friend of Connie Eastland, a woman whose sexual favors he enjoyed whenever the need arose, and he'd laughed. He'd told the woman afterward that at first he'd thought the call was a Blackbird-inspired practical joke.

  Shandell, despite his penchant for playing the loner, had been something of a practical jokester, and Jackie had been the butt of those jokes more frequently than any of Shandell's other teammates. Jackie, a vegetarian who was fond of soup and gargantuan leafy salads, disdained the red meat typically served at the team's training table and enjoyed reminding his meat-loving teammates that when cholesterol eventually clogged their arteries and blew their aortas, he'd respect their memories and say good things about them at their funerals. When Jackie found a tree frog swimming in his soup one day in the midst of the team's NCAA championship run, he had no trouble fingering the culprit. But when he confronted Shandell, Shandell swore that he'd had nothing to do with it. Unconvinced, the five-foot-nine-inch point guard with the clean-shaven head that seemed to always gleam with sweat launched into a courtroom-quality cross-examination. Shandell, unfazed by Jackie's accusations, stood his ground through four minutes of unabated grilling until Jackie, hearing his teammates’ snickers in the background, gave up, grumbling as he left the training table in a huff, “I know you did it, Blackbird, and sooner or later I'll prove it.”

  Later, when Damion asked Shandell how he'd been able to keep from caving in to Jackie's full-court press, Shandell simply smiled and said, “Hell, Blood. You know I ain't had nothin’ but pressure pushin’ down on me all my life. When you're a six-foot-five, doofuslookin’ sixth grader, busy trippin’ over two left feet and scared to death of your classmates’ finger-pointin’, you get good at actin’, even better at denyin’. Shit, man, for me, it's pretty much an art.”

  It was that training-table incident that Jackie found himself thinking of when Hawkins, steaming on the other end of the line, said, “You listenin’ to me, Happy Jack?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I'm listenin’.”

  “Good, ’cause if anybody asks, especially the cops, here's a script I want you to memorize and spit back. You don't know why Shan-dell was murdered. Short and sweet. You got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know any other words besides yeah, asshole?”

  Bristling, Jackie fired back, “I know Damion Madrid's headed up here from Denver to talk to me about Blackbird. He called a little over an hour ago. I'm thinkin’ you need to know that.”

  “Why didn't you tell me that straight off, you fuckin’ flake? And why the shit didn't you tell him to save his visit for later?”

  “Are you crazy? He was Blackbird's best friend. Besides, we were teammates for three years. He would've been suspicious.”

  “Why's he wanta talk to you?”

  “Maybe he's just lookin’ for a comforting ear.”

  “Well, support him, then. Let him cry and lean all over you if need be. Just keep quiet about any of our dealin's.”

  “I won't let anything slip. But just so you know, Blood's real smart. And I don't mean just book smart. He'll spot any bullshit I start tossin’ around real quick. His mother's one of those high-priced criminal lawyers. Think maybe he gets his inquisitiveness from her.”

  Hawkins laughed. “Inquisitiveness, my ass. He's just another wet-behind-the-ears college kid like you. The only thing you oversexed cum drippers are any good at at your age is sniffin’ out pussy. Just follow the script, Jackie. Got it?”

  “And if I don't?”

  “Don't get fresh with me, kid. It don't become you. Now, are we set?” When Jackie didn't answer, Hawkins repeated, “I asked you, are we set?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said softly.

  “Now, that's the Jackie I know and love. The accommodatin’, angle-chasin’ Jackie.” Hawkins paused as if forcing a smile. “By the way, sorry about the NBA draft passin’ on you. But who knows? You could end up smokin’ up the courts this year and earn yourself a real high draft choice. You'll hear from me soon. ’Til then, pleasant thoughts, my boy.”

  Mystified, Jackie found himself listening to a dial tone and standing in a water slick next to his shower. When the oversized towel that had been loosely knotted around his waist dropped to the floor, he found himself naked and trembling, too scared for the moment to move.

  Damion and Jackie met a little before noon at the Johnson's Corner truck stop twenty-three miles south of the CSU campus and just off I-25. It was a place where for three years Damion, Blackbird, and Jackie had strategized about games, griped about classwork, bitched about their girl problems, and fantasized about what it would be like in the pros. It had been their place to get away from the rigors of practice and the sameness of campus life. But this time things were different. There was no Blackbird to tell Jackie he was NBA material despite his size, no Blackbird to bemoan being in the spotlight, and no Blackbird to remind Damion that it was okay to choose medical school over the NBA.

  The fifteen-acre truck stop's restaurant, known from coast to coast for its mouth-
watering cinnamon rolls, sat on a rise just before I-25 took a jog to the east to begin its run to Denver. Noonday customers filled every booth and table as Jackie and Damion, seated in a booth in the far northwest corner, talked quietly.

  Eyeing a barely touched glass of orange juice and his half-eaten cinnamon roll, Damion leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “What you're saying doesn't make sense, Jackie. I grew up with Shan-dell, roomed with him our whole time at CSU. We were closer than brothers. There's no way he'd do drugs.”

  “I didn't say he was usin’ ’em, Blood. You and I both know the man would've never done somethin’ like that to his body. What I'm sayin’ is he was peddlin’ the stuff to kids back down in Five Points. Performance-enhancin’ shit. Not coke or H or weed. Nothin’ like that.”

  Damion shook his head again as if he somehow expected the gesture to make the ugly picture that Jackie had been painting for the past ten minutes disappear. “Shandell wouldn't have done something like that!”

  Jackie, who had lauded Shandell, Brutus-praising-Caesar fashion, for the first fifteen minutes of their lunch, picked up a fork and aimed the business end at Damion. “Maybe you didn't know Blackbird as well as you thought. We both know how quirky and standoffish the brother could be.”

  Damion nodded, aware that Jackie's assessment wasn't that far off target. Shandell had always been a secretive sort. During high school he'd even kept the names of most of his girlfriends a secret. It was only after meeting Connie Eastland during his junior year at CSU, after he'd run through a string of jock-worshipping women as a freshman and sophomore, that Shandell had seemed to Damion to have found someone right for him. Except where Damion was concerned, he'd been just as secretive about his study habits, taste in movies, and favorite foods.