by Robert Greer
Chapter 14
Aretha Bird eyed her former husband disdainfully and gritted her teeth. “You're despicable, Leon. A piss bump on the ass of humanity. I'm gonna bury my baby tomorrow, and you've got the nerve to ask me about some damn insurance policy. You're foot rot, Leon.”
Leon Bird glanced back over his shoulder at the cooing Hispanic couple sitting in the restaurant booth behind them and motioned for Aretha to tone it down. For the past hour they'd been drinking margaritas and snacking on tortilla chips at the Satire Lounge, a Tex-Mex restaurant in midtown Denver. Unperturbed, the other couple, more concerned with how soon they could find a bed than with the raised voices in the next booth, barely looked up.
“Hey, I'm just looking out for us, baby,” said Leon.
“Don't baby me, you effing loser. I should've known when you showed up out of the pitch-black darkness last winter that you wouldn't bring me and Shandell nothin’ but pain.”
“I brought you luck,” Leon said defensively. “Or have you forgotten that you're the main beneficiary of Shandell's estate? Baby, you're worth millions.”
When Aretha drew back her arm to slap the linebacker-sized longtime bunco artist and petty thief, Leon said, his voice full of anger, “Don't be no fool, girl.”
Having felt the sting from Leon's hand more often than she cared to remember, Aretha dropped her hand into her lap, upset with herself for even talking to her abusive ex-husband, who for the past two days had overcome her defenses and fueled her hope by saying that he might have a line on who'd killed Shandell.
“Let's say we get back to that insurance policy instead of throwing punches, Aretha. And trust me, I know there's a policy. Shandell told me there was. Face value of two hundred and fifty grand. I'm the beneficiary, and I know you've stashed it. I want my money, girl. You understand me?”
“Oh, I understand, Leon. Just like I understood the kind of scum you were when you left me and Shandell to fend for ourselves all them years ago.”
Unable to contain his frustration any longer, Leon said, “I'll kick your ass, bitch.”
Unfazed by the threat, Aretha broke into a broad, toothy grin. “No, you won't. At least, not here you won't.” She glanced across the room toward the bar and the sleepy-eyed bartender, a skinny, long-faced greyhound of a man wearing a yellow, black, and green African skullcap. A single gold earring hung from his right ear. Up close it would've been easy to see the sea of pockmarks peppering his forehead, but from fifteen feet away he simply looked lean and hungry.
“Friend of yours?” Leon asked.
“No, he was more of a friend to Shandell. But if I tell him you're bothering me, he's real likely to come over here and kick your teeth in. He finished high school with Shandell four years ago, and he lived on the streets for a couple of years afterward. He's a good kid, really, but he's a tad bit slow. I wouldn't want to test his hair-trigger temper if I was you. Somehow during high school, Shandell seemed to be the only one able to help him stay calm. Even helped him get the job behind that bar over there after he left the streets. He'll be one of the pallbearers at Shandell's funeral tomorrow, and he don't like to see big people pickin’ on little ones.”
“You think I'd run scared'a some kid?” Leon said with a snort. “You crazy, woman? You the one needs to be runnin’ scared. And you the one needs to be diggin’ up that insurance policy.” Looking as if he'd suddenly hit on the solution to a problem, he added, “I really don't need them papers when you come right down to it. Insurance companies keep records of beneficiaries, you know. All I really need to do is make a phone call and tell ’em who I am.”
“Tell who?” Aretha tried not to snicker. “You might as well start with the As under insurance companies in the yellow pages. I'm sure that in this age of identity theft, they'll all be chompin’ at the bit to help you.”
“Then I'll get myself a lawyer. Won't take one of them sharks more'n a day or two to dig up the right company.”
“Then get with it, and be sure to tell your lawyer that in addition to you bein’ the policy's beneficiary, you're also a suspect in the policy holder's murder.”
“Bullshit!”
“The cops say otherwise. And I know for sure they've talked to you. Sergeant Townsend told me.”
Leon frowned as he recalled the lengthy talk he'd had with Townsend earlier that day. Townsend, who'd located him after finding his cell-phone number among Shandell's effects, had indeed pegged him as a murder suspect. “Then why the hell are you here talkin’ to me, woman, if you know so much?”
“Because I think you know more about Shandell's murder than you're lettin’ on.”
“There you go, workin’ all the angles again. That's one of the reasons I left your black ass all them years ago. You think too much. I oughta whip your ass right here and now.”
Leon had finally pressed the wrong button. Looking violated, Aretha sat forward in her seat and motioned for the bartender to come over. Moments later Jo Jo Lawson was standing a few feet from their booth. Smiling up at him, Aretha said, “Jo Jo, I want you to meet Leon, Shandell's father. He just offered to whip my ass.”
With his eyes locked sternly on Leon and in the slowest of Western drawls, Jo Jo said, “Don't think you should say things like that to Mrs. B, mister.”
“Why don't you get the fuck outta here, son?” Before Leon could utter another word, Jo Jo had yanked him out of his seat and wrapped his left arm around Leon's neck in an airway-obstructing choke hold.
“You need to leave, mister,” Jo Jo said calmly as Leon struggled to free himself. “I'll cut off all your air, you don't stop resistin’.” When Leon continued struggling, Jo Jo said, “Don't make me have to go back over to the bar and get my friend Johnny.” He looked at Aretha for further instruction.
Aware that the slow-talking barkeep wasn't as quick mentally as most people, and suddenly looking horrified, Aretha said, “Just show him the door, Jo Jo. No need turnin’ this into a free-for-all.”
With both arms flailing and gasping for air, Leon sank to his knees. The lusting couple in the next booth looked up briefly but barely paid the commotion any attention as a determined-looking Jo Jo helped Leon to his feet and ushered him toward the front door.
“I'll get my money, woman. One way or another,” Leon yelled back, his voice raspy.
Aretha remained silent as the marginally retarded boy Shandell had befriended in high school escorted her ex-husband, still gasping for air, out the door.
She'd known when Leon had called her from his motel room and asked to meet her to discuss the insurance policy that things were likely to escalate to the level they had. That was why she'd been careful to choose the Satire Lounge for their meeting and to make certain that Jo Jo Lawson would be tending bar. But she also knew she couldn't pick and choose where or how or when she'd meet up with Leon forever. Sooner or later he might make good on his threat, drag her into some alley, and beat her senseless.
She'd been stupid to let someone who'd once abused her back into her life, even momentarily. But he'd pleaded with her, almost to the point of groveling, and during those first twenty-four hours after Shandell's death, she'd been a ball of Silly Putty in his hands. Now that she was thinking more clearly, she could see Leon in all his natural, evil, living color. A repulsive human being who wanted only the spoils his dead son had left him.
He'd spent months insinuating himself into Shandell's life, chipping away at her precious baby's psyche, and although Shandell had tried his best to keep it from her, she knew that Leon somehow had been able to convince Shandell that the boy owed him. The life insurance policy had been a way for Shandell to either pay him back or pay him off. She and Shandell had argued about his budding relationship with his father, and although she wanted to believe in her heart of hearts that Shandell hadn't paid Leon off in other ways, like possibly shaving points in basketball games, the way Sergeant Townsend had claimed, she couldn't be certain that he hadn't.
Townsend had spent nearly an hour with
her earlier that day, pressing her for information about Shandell's insurance policy and insinuating that Shandell might have been involved in a game-fixing, point-shaving scam that could rock college basketball. He'd chipped away at her little by little, all the while sucking air between the gap in his front teeth, until she'd broken down and cried, regressing to nearly the state she'd been in the first time they'd met.
She realized now that she should've called Julie Madrid the instant Leon had shown up on her doorstep and that she should've refused to talk to Townsend without her lawyer. But she hadn't. She'd been too grief-stricken. Too busy trying to play the part of Shandell Bird's tough-love mother. But now she was through playing cat-and-mouse with ex-husbands and gap-toothed cops. From now on she'd let Julie Madrid do her talking.
“Whatta you mean you don't know why you called me, doctor? You know very well why.” Wordell Epps broke into a sly grin, adjusted the phone receiver to his ear, and toying with the draw string on his pajamas, sat up in bed. “Like I told you before, there's done and really done, Dr. Phillips.”
“So you did.” Second-guessing herself, Alicia Phillips pondered why on the heels of an earlier phone call from a very nervous and unsettled Connie Eastland who'd informed her that she'd just received a threatening phone call from Leon Bird, she'd decided to track Epps down. The reason in fact was quite simple. She couldn't take the chance that Epps might end up doing the same thing to her that Leon Bird was doing to Connie. Nonetheless, she questioned whether she was doing the right thing.
“You're awful quiet there, doctor. Any reason?” asked Epps.
“No. Just thinking.”
“About that book you're writing?”
“No. I was thinking about whether I can trust you or not.”
Epps snickered. “Guess you'll just have to try me and find out.”
“When can we talk at length?” asked Phillips.
“Anytime. You pick the hour.”
“Tomorrow afternoon perhaps.”
“Works for me.”
“I'll be in touch,” Alicia said, feeling inexplicably out of breath.
“I'll be waiting.” Epps cradled the phone and reclined back in bed, thinking to himself that perhaps Alicia Phillips would be the one to take his investigative probe where it really needed to go.
Denver's North Cherry Creek neighborhood, once filled with plain-Jane blond-brick bungalows and scattered apartment buildings, had over the past fifteen years become an assemblage of expensive homes, brand-new duplexes, and trendy condos.
Damion's girlfriend, Niki Estaban, lived in a recently constructed Mediterranean-style duplex at the corner of Third Avenue and Cook Street, on the eastern edge of the trendy Cherry Creek shopping district that abutted her neighborhood.
Niki and Damion, who'd been nearly inseparable during their final two years of college, had drifted slightly apart in the three months since their graduations. Armed with a degree in architecture, Niki now worked for the largest architectural firm in Denver. The second child of a socially and politically prominent South American family, the long-legged, hazel-eyed, exotically beautiful Venezuelan had modeled her way through high school and her first two years of college, and she'd traveled most of the world by the time she was twenty. It was that upbringing and the diversity of her life experience that had caused the two of them to start to feel their differences.
Damion had come up with and from nothing, and although his mother, who'd been CJ Floyd's secretary during his formative years, was now a prominent Denver attorney, Damion remained, at least in his head, simply a poor kid from Five Points with the luck to have a sports skill that had gotten him the education to put him in line to become a doctor. He'd never seen the world and frankly didn't much care to, and while Niki wanted to discover the farthest corners of the globe, his world consisted of Denver and the surrounding wilderness of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Whenever the pressures of living or dying with basketball had become too much, he'd generally disappeared for a few days to hike or hunt or fish. In the past three months, since leaving the protective umbrella of college behind, Niki and Damion had slowly begun to recognize the fact that although they were obviously in love, they were markedly different.
Now, as he stood at Niki's front door with his left arm in a sling and Pinkie Niedemeyer standing next to him nervously looking from side to side, Damion wasn't certain what kind of reception he'd get from Niki. He'd tried to reach her earlier by phone without any luck—not surprising considering her busy postmodeling career and her disdain for both answering machines and cell phones.
Niki's response to Damion's light rapping was to stroll leisurely to the front door, glance through the peephole, and immediately swing the door open, staring in disbelief.
Taking in Damion's meek expression, the dark circles under his eyes, the sling, his blood-splattered shirt, and finally Pinkie, she said softly in her Spanish accent, “Come in.” She gave Pinkie, whom she'd come to know during Damion's and CSU's run for the Final Four, a look that said, Are you responsible for this? before draping an arm around Damion and ushering them both inside. Touching Damion's arm ever so gently as she headed for her living room, she asked, “What happened?”
“I ran into a problem tonight over in Five Points.”
Looking dumbfounded, she again stared at the circles under Damion's eyes and wondered if she might somehow be partially responsible for them. In her quest to complete the required postbaccalaureate on-the-job architectural experience she needed in order to qualify for a Colorado license, she'd spent most of her time over the past three months at the offices of Barrett, Jenkins, and White, often staying until midnight, trying to absorb every nuance she could about the real world of architecture. If she'd been with Damion earlier that evening, she told herself, she might have been able to prevent what had happened. Looking guilty, she eyed Pinkie and asked what she'd been thinking: “You're not responsible for this, are you?”
“He's not responsible for anything, Niki.” Damion slipped her arm from around his shoulders and clasped her right hand in his as they stepped down into a large, brightly lit, sunken living room. The butt of his Glock peeked from beneath the pocket of Pinkie's lightweight jacket as he stepped down into the room behind them.
“I should have been here for you, Damion. I'll cut back at work, I promise.”
“No,” said Damion, looking around the familiar, sparsely furnished room that his privileged raven-haired girlfriend had furnished with an oversized antique wingback chair, a reading lamp, a massive curved leather couch, a coffee table, and a coffin-style German grandfather clock from the 1860s that she'd bought from the virtual antique store that Mario Satoni and his part-time business partner, CJ Floyd, ran out of Mario's basement.
Pinkie headed for the wingback to sit down. Leaving Damion and Niki standing in the center of the room staring blankly at the moss-rock fireplace, he recalled what Mario had said to him before he and Damion had left Mario's North Denver home earlier. The boy don't know what he's in for if he gets to fuckin’ around with Asalon. Better stay glued to his ass ’til this is over, Pinkie.
The room remained silent until Niki slipped her hand out of Damion's and took a seat on the couch. “Penny for your thoughts,” she said, patting the cushion next to her and nodding for Damion to join her. “I've got soda or juice for anybody who wants some, or I can make coffee,” Niki added, trying her best to look calm.
“Nothing for me,” said Pinkie, his eyes on alert as they darted between the room's two windows.
“Me either,” Damion said, drinking in the look of concern on Niki's face as he took a seat.
“Are you sure you're okay, Damion?”
“Yeah. I'll tell you the whole story about the arm later. But for now I need you to help me with something that might help me pin the tail on Shandell's killer.”
The muscles in Niki's face slumped, and for the briefest of seconds her exquisite beauty faded. “Damion, I thought we agreed after that grilling from
Sergeant Townsend the other night that you'd let the police handle the case.”
Damion looked at Pinkie for support, but the skinny hit man eyed the floor and remained silent. “I am. I'm just probing around the edges.”
Niki's voice rose nearly an octave. “I can't believe it. I wish I had a tape recorder. You sound just like CJ.”
“Shandell was my best friend, Niki.”
“And he was just as dear to me,” Niki said defensively, sitting back in her seat and shaking her head. “Look at you. You come in here with blood splattered all over your shirt, your arm bandaged and in a sling, and with a hit … Pinkie … at your side. In two weeks you're supposed to start medical school, Damion. Do you plan to do that on the side while you play at being CJ Floyd and continue to scare me to death?”
“I'll wrap things up before then, Niki. I promise. Now, can we get back on track?”
Niki frowned and said, “Yes, let's get back on track.” Her tone was at once acquiescent and dismissive.
Concerned that he might have just turned a corner with Niki that he really hadn't intended to, Damion asked, “Did you ever hear about Shandell being involved with drugs while we were at CSU?”
“No. Is someone claiming that he was?”
“Rodney Sands and Jackie Woodson both told me that while we were in school, Shandell was selling performance-enhancing drugs to Five Points kids down here in Denver.”
“No way.”
“I said the same thing. But they insisted he was. Even gave me the name of his drug contact in Five Points. A guy named Leotis Hawkins.”
“Hawkins is the one responsible for Damion's arm being in a sling,” said Pinkie, hoping to garner Damion a few sympathy points by passing along the information. The look of alarm on Niki's face told him that he'd probably only made matters worse.