Blackbird, Farewell

by Robert Greer

  Alicia surveyed the disoriented-looking man who now stood within arm's length of her and frowned. Looking weary and concerned that he knew far too much about her, she asked, “So why do we need to talk?”

  Epps looked surprised. “Because my friend's dead, and I need your help and you need mine.”

  Alicia Phillips looked puzzled. “I have in fact heard about your friend, Mr. Epps. Terrible. The whole CSU family lost someone dear to them as well. But I'm not certain how I can help you. And I'm certain you can't help me.”

  “Come on, now. Paulie claimed you were writing a book about the soaring Mr. Blackbird. A smoking-gun, tell-all kind of book.” Epps flashed Alicia a broad, toothy grin.

  “I'm afraid your friend may have deluded you, Mr. Epps.”

  “Oh. I see.” Epps turned stone-faced. “Now, why would he wanta do that?”

  “I wouldn't know his reasons, Mr. Epps.”

  “Maybe you'd do better at coughing up a reason if I was a cop.”

  “You're pushing the envelope here, Mr. Epps.”

  “Hope so. Because that Pulitzer me and Paulie won was for what nowadays they call investigative journalism. Paulie claimed you were working on something that would put a less-than-pretty face on Shandell Bird. True?”

  “You've overstayed your welcome, Mr. Epps.”

  “And you sound a little fidgety, Doctor. Any reason?”

  “I've no reason to discuss anything I might have been doing concerning Shandell Bird with you, sir.” Flashing Epps an icy stare, Alicia turned and walked away.

  “Nope. I guess you don't. No need to discuss the likes of some potential NBA superstar's college point-shaving or his possible drug dealing with me. I was just feeling you out, Dr. Phillips, and you flunked. But I'm not passing out grades. At least not this time around. Like I said though, the boys in blue will be and that'll be a whole different story.”

  “We're done,” said Phillips, pushing her way through the club's revolving front door without another word as a laughing Wordell Epps called after her, “There's done and really done, Dr. Phillips, and we're nowhere near finished with either.”

  Looking frustrated and feeling violated, Alicia Phillips slipped behind the wheel of her expensive BMW SUV and watched Wordell Epps walk across the parking lot of her club, hands stuffed in his pockets, whistling.

  Incensed that he'd been able to invade her world, she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and found herself doing something she'd rarely done since her Montana Junior Rodeo Queen days—grinding her teeth. She'd had concerns about taking on Shandell Bird's problems and his significant psychological baggage from the first moment he'd come to her for help. But as the CSU basketball team's sports psychologist, and the most prominent in the Rocky Mountain West, she couldn't very well have brushed him off. Her job was to teach and nurture and listen and help. She'd helped kids who'd come to college with eighth grade reading skills—kids who sometimes barely understood the need for a knife and fork, kids who too often found themselves stumbling across a cultural and educational terrain they simply weren't meant for.

  She'd counseled sexual predators about not making babies and sociopaths about the art of choosing friends. She'd lectured to egotistical athletes about how to avoid the hundreds of things that could drag them down into the angry underbelly of an adoring but also often jealous society. She'd taught near illiterates how to look and talk and act in front of TV cameras, and she'd turned oafs into virtual Wheaties-box stars.

  But, in spite of her successes, she'd also failed. Failed so frequently at fitting square pegs into round holes, and turning young men and women with amazing athletic skills and not much else into productive human beings, that she'd reached the point that she wanted out of the limelight and the image-making rat race.

  She'd been there herself. She'd seen and felt what it was like to lose your dreams. She'd watched her father lose his ranch and his way of life. She'd felt the sting of not really understanding or appreciating who you really are. She'd never intended to become a psychologist in the first place, and certainly not a psychologist to a bunch of pampered jocks. She had always expected to do what her father and mother and their fathers and mothers had done. But like the athletes she counseled, especially the ones who fell off the pedestal as they stood looking down, she no longer rode horseback beneath the crystal-blue Montana skies. Instead she wrote books and graded papers and gave lectures and talked to people about their feelings in the wake of losing their dreams. Sometimes she had the sense that she should start telling the athletic dreamers of the world the bold-faced truth and let them in on the fact that their moment in the sun would be brief. She wanted to flat-out tell them that the chance they would capture their dream for the most part was exactly that, a dream. That they weren't going to make it to the NBA or the NFL. That gymnastics, no matter how glorified it seemed to a pint-sized pixie who weighed barely eighty pounds, couldn't sustain one past that elusive Olympic gold. But for the most part, she didn't speak the truth, preferring instead to write books and scholarly papers about those dreamers.

  It had been that way with Shandell Bird. His story was an academic sports psychologist's ultimate dream. When she'd stumbled upon it, she'd readily admitted to herself that publishing it could only enhance her reputation and career. It was a story she'd dealt with delicately and discreetly, with the eye of a teacher and scholar and mentor, until Paul Grimes had intervened. And now all she'd worked on for years was about to unravel. Wordell Epps was there to pull her down to the level of Grimes, not to mention the police. She could handle the cops—after all, she was a psychologist. But she wasn't certain she could handle the likes of Garrett Asalon or Leon Bird or the always overly optimistic coach, Russ Haroldson. These were people who were likely to start asking questions after all the sadness and tragedy went away. Questions like why she had in effect strung Shandell along. And more importantly, why she had pages and pages of notes about him.

  She'd weather the storm. She always had. And in the end she'd chisel and waggle and serpentine herself out of harm's way. After all, she had overcome the stigma and the pain of watching the Yellowstone County sheriff oversee the packing-up of her family's one-hundred-year-old ranch. She'd find her way to safety. But for now, what she needed was to think things through. Think and reflect and then call Connie Eastland and tell her about Wordell Epps so they could put their heads together and she could muster some sort of damage control.

  Nodding and thinking, Yes, that's what I need to do, she glanced up from drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and looked around for any signs of Wordell Epps, but there weren't any to be seen. No marijuana smell lingering in his wake, no echoing accusations, no innuendoes or threats. Just an empty parking lot and the realization that Epps was someone who could end up wrecking her dreams, as she'd so often seen happen to the athletes she counseled.

  Chapter 11

  The smell of marijuana still clung to her clothes as Flora Jean sat curbside in her SUV nearly an hour and a half after leaving Wordell Epps's place, eyeing Theo Wilhite's post–World War II, squat, boxy, blond-brick, cookie-cutter bungalow at 1652 Ivanhoe Street, in the heart of Denver's racially mixed Park Hill neighborhood. She was certain after two failed attempts to catch up with Wilhite at home and one attempt to find him at his favorite bar in Five Points that the cigar-smoking windbag was dodging her.

  She had already walked the perimeter of his house, looked in most of the windows, and even tried to jimmy the front door, but just like the antebellum South, Wilhite seemed to be gone with the wind. His car wasn't anywhere to be found, his drapes were all closed, and his house, complete with a pile of newspapers on the lawn, looked deserted. Leaning back in her seat, staring at the bungalow's sagging front porch and feeling frustrated, Flora Jean didn't realize until he was almost on top of her that a boy who'd earlier zoomed his way up the street on a skateboard was now standing just beyond her front bumper. The chubby-faced boy, who looked to be about ten, was undeniably Hispanic
. A Colorado Rockies baseball cap was cocked sideways on a large oval-shaped head that the rest of his body hadn't quite caught up to, and his mustard-stained dingy white T-shirt matched the color of the baggy hip-hop-style shorts that stopped several inches below his knees.

  Flashing Flora Jean a look that said, Whatta you doin’ in my territory, lady? the boy stepped off his skateboard. With the toe of his right sneaker, he popped the skateboard up into the crook of his left arm. “You lookin’ for Mr. Wilhite?”

  “Yes.”

  “He's gone. Packed up and went fishin’ this morning. I helped him with his gear,” the boy announced proudly. “Whatta you want with him?”

  Smiling at her pint-sized interrogator, Flora Jean propped her elbow on the window ledge and leaned out. “Nothin’ I can tell you about, sugar.”

  The boy poked out his lower lip and stroked it thoughtfully several times with a thumb. “You an undercover cop?”

  “Nope. Military intelligence,” Flora Jean said with a grin. Uncertain why she was stringing the boy along, other than the fact that she'd learned long ago to never pass up a lead, she bent down, slipped her right hand beneath the seat, pulled out her old U.S. Marine Corps ID, and flashed it at the startled boy.

  With eyes that were suddenly the size of half-dollars, the boy asked, “Is old man Wilhite a terrorist?”

  “No,” Flora Jean said, straight-faced, wondering if the boy might know how to locate Wilhite. “But I need to talk to him. Know when he's comin’ back?”

  “Tomorrow. He went up to Lake Granby. Told me not to tell nobody. Promised to bring me and my mama back a mess of trout.”

  Flora Jean nodded and flashed the boy an appreciative grin. “Well, if you see him before I do, would you tell him that Sergeant Flora Jean Benson of the U.S. Marine Corps is lookin’ for him? Can you remember that?”

  “I sure can, Sergeant.” The boy's response was a near salute.

  Still smiling, Flora Jean asked, “You live around here?”

  “Yeah, right over there.” The boy pointed catty-corner across the street toward a house with badly weathered clapboard siding. “You know what, Sergeant? Somebody else was with Mr. Wilhite when I helped him pack up this morning. Seen him around here with Mr. Wilhite a lot. Could be he's a terrorist. Even looked like one. He's got a beard, and he wears one of them terrorist turbans on his head. And come to think of it, I've never seen him when he wasn't wearing sunglasses.”

  Sitting up in her seat and drinking in the boy's every word, Flora Jean thought, Damn, ten years old and already programmed to profile. “Any chance the man mighta had a big chunk of his nose missin’?” she asked, thinking that after missing Wilhite so many times, she might have finally caught a break.

  The boy looked surprised. “Yeah. How'd you know that?”

  “It's my business to know those kinds of things, sugar.” Trying her best to keep a straight face, she asked, “Did the man leave with Wil-hite?”

  “No, he left in his own car.”

  Flora Jean nodded. “Guess I'm gonna have to talk to him too.”

  “You know who he is?”

  “Oh, yeah. Like I said, it's my business to know.”

  “Think he might be a terrorist?”

  Uncertain why the boy seemed to have a major case of terrorist on the brain, Flora Jean said, “Nope,” well aware that the boy's description fit small-time Five Points bookie, numbers runner, and occasional fence Marshad Lovell to a T. “He's just a street hustler.”

  The boy looked suddenly at ease. “Hey, I know lots of them.”

  “I bet you do,” said Flora Jean. “Got anything else for me that might be helpful?”

  “Don't think so.”

  “Then I better go chase down that guy with the missing hunk of nose,” Flora Jean said, cranking the SUV's engine, eager now to chase down Lovell. With one last friendly smile, she said, “Thanks for your help. What's your name?”

  The boy shook his head. “I don't give out that kinda information, lady. Especially not to somebody who just might turn out to be CIA.”

  “Smart.” Flora Jean watched the boy drop his skateboard to the pavement, plant his right foot on it firmly, and skate away.

  The boy had disappeared by the time she reached Twenty-third Avenue to head west for Five Points, but she couldn't help but think that he had the stuff to make a good marine. As she turned onto Twenty-third, she flipped her cell phone open and punched in Damion's number.

  Damion was at home and in the midst of wolfing down a ham sandwich when he answered, “Damion.”

  “That you, sugar?” Flora Jean asked in response to the nearly unintelligible salutation.

  Responding to Flora Jean's signature use of the word sugar, Damion said, “Yeah, Flora Jean. Eating something—sorry.”

  “Well, set it aside and tell me if you dug anything up at CSU.”

  “I struck a little gold. How about you? Did you find anything out from Wilhite or that reporter who did the piece in the Rocky?”

  “A little. Why don't we meet at my office around seven thirty? We can compare notes then,” said Flora Jean, schooled in the intelligence game and wary of discussing business on the phone.

  “Come on, Flora Jean. Toss me a bone.”

  “Okay. I'm on my way to talk to Wilhite's bookie. A little weasel of a brother who got religion a few years back and converted to Islam. Name's Marshad Lovell. You know him?”

  “No. Where are you gonna meet him?”

  “At the den. He spends a couple'a nights a week there hustlin’ business. Usually shows up about six before Rosie's real action starts, takes in a few side bets for the big boys up in North Denver and Louisville, talks sports, and takes off with his money. Rosie's been pissed about him skimmin’ business for years, but he's never done anything about it ’cause Marshad is pretty much a circus barker who brings people in. Just hopin’ Marshad's there tonight.”

  “Damn. Do you think Shandell might've really been tied into some kind of gambling scam?”

  “I'm not sure, but if he was, I'm guessin’ that Wilhite's right, and point-shavin’ woulda been the angle. What I can't figure out is the why and the how. I'm hopin’ you can help me there, Damion, ’cause I'm havin’ trouble seein’ how something as big as an NCAA basketball fix could be linked to a small-time hood like Marshad. Be at the office on time, Damion. I gotta run down to Colorado Springs to meet Alden by nine, and you know how he is about folks being late.”

  “I'll be there at seven thirty sharp,” said Damion, wondering as he closed his cell phone and retrieved his sandwich if, besides dealing drugs and possibly shaving points in games, there were other things about his best friend that he hadn't known.

  Flora Jean knew there was little chance that she'd miss hooking up with Marshad Lovell if he showed up that evening at the den. He never missed the chance to bounce around and show himself off, hoping to suck up as much pregaming cash from Rosie as he could. He generally popped up outside Rosie's Garage on Tuesday and Friday evenings to pay out on bets before collecting the new lay-downs, and since luckily for her it was a Friday, she expected him to make an appearance.

  On Fridays Marshad's routine was to handle all the bets he could for the upcoming weekend's sporting events, taking in money on everything from off-track greyhound racing to his biggest moneymaker each fall: college and NFL football. When the real football season rolled around, he could assure himself of making $600 to $900 a week, but currently he was mired in the football preseason and NASCAR race doldrums, and since most of the folks who frequented the den happened to be black, with no interest in NASCAR, business was always slow during August unless Tiger Woods ended up playing in a season-ending golf tournament.

  As she drove up, Flora Jean spotted Marshad, true to form, hovering around one of the garage bays talking to Rosie, punctuating whatever point he was making with sweeping tomahawk hand gestures. She parked in a spot reserved from nine to five for Rosie's wife, Etta Lee, and thought, Bingo. She was barely out of her
vehicle when Reggie Daniels, one of Rosie's high school employees, who she knew had his heart set on going to CSU to play basketball and follow in Shandell's and Damion's footsteps, walked up to her and, with his eyes cast sadly downward, asked, “Wash your ride, Ms. Benson?”

  “Yeah, go on and give it a bath, Reggie,” she said, homing in on his obvious pain.

  “You heard about Blackbird, didn't ya?” he asked, taking her keys.

  “Yes.”

  “Brother can't get a break,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You gotta make your own breaks in life, Reggie. Time you learned that. You still plannin’ on playin’ ball for CSU next year, aren't you?”

  “I guess.”

  “I'd lose the guess if I was you, sugar. Makes you sound too wishy-washy, and that's not the face you wanta show the basketball world if you're a point guard,” she said, aware that Damion had long been the boy's idol. “Tell you what. Suppose I get Blood himself to come by and talk to you. He's hurtin’ real bad right now too. Talkin’ to one another might help you both.”

  “You think he'd do that?” The boy's eyes sparkled.

  “I guarantee it,” said Flora Jean, watching the sadness on the boy's face momentarily wane. “Leave your phone number with Rosie and I'll have Damion get in touch with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And remember, words like I guess and coulda, shoulda, and woulda don't never hold a candle to I am, I will, and I did. You got that?”

  Reggie nodded and stooped to slip his six-foot-one-inch beanpole of a body behind the wheel of Flora Jean's vehicle. Pleased with herself, she watched him drive off before heading to where Rosie still stood talking with Marshad, complete with turban and sunglasses and badly scarred nose. She was nearly on top of them before Mar-shad, arms still gyrating as he spoke, looked up.