by Robert Greer
“Never known you to be that worried about friendships, Garrett,” Pinkie said smugly. “Why the question?”
“Cuts both ways, Andrus.” Realizing that he and Pinkie were about to head down a road they'd traveled many times before, and that if they continued, Janet Stevens's name was bound to come up and he'd very likely lose his well-bred cool, Asalon said, “I think we're done here, Craigy. Why don't you escort Andrus out.”
“No need. I can find my way.”
“Of course you can. But my way's better.” Asalon nodded for an eager-looking Theisman to walk Pinkie to the door. “And Andrus, when you get back to Denver and speak with those friends of yours who are so intent on finding out what happened to your Shandell Bird, be sure to let them know that you were issued a just-expired, free one-night pass onto the premises. There'll be no more passes handed out. Should they decide to pay Asalon Enterprises a visit, I'm afraid Craigy might have to meet the intrusion with deadly force.”
Pinkie offered Asalon a silent half-nod as Theisman grabbed him by the arm.
“No need for that, Craigy. Just show the man out,” ordered Asalon. With Pinkie and Theisman headed safely toward the exit, he walked across the room toward a 1950s-style rotary telephone. Pinkie was already back out in the damp night air when Asalon dialed Leotis Hawkins's number, thinking to himself that it was high time to get everyone on the same page.
The sound of a telephone ringing caused Leotis Hawkins's already splitting headache to seek painful new heights. Grumbling obscenities and rolling over in bed, he shoved a bank of four pillows aside and picked up the receiver. “Yeah.” Startled to recognize Garrett Asalon's voice on the other end of the line, he sat up in bed and leaned against the headboard, prepared to listen.
Asalon's tone was intimidating and authoritative. “I had a surprise visit from someone I thoroughly despise tonight, Leotis, and he asked me some very uncomfortable questions. Questions that lead back to you. Did I know whether Shandell Bird was in the drug-peddling business, for instance.”
“Was your visitor cut real bad and bleedin’?”
Looking surprised, Asalon said, “No, he wasn't. Why?”
“Nothin’, really. I had a problem with some asshole over in Five Points earlier tonight. Thought it mighta been the same person.”
“Well, your problems and mine do seem to be mounting, don't they? It doesn't do my sense of security or well-being a lot of good to know that there are people out there primed to push my buttons, Leotis. We need to talk, and not by telephone. I want you to get up here to my place in Louisville right now.”
Hawkins eyed his alarm clock. “It's two in the mornin’ and I got a headache that won't quit. Can't it wait ’til tomorrow?”
“I'm afraid not. I want you here within the hour. Do you understand?” The threatening undercurrent in Asalon's tone made Hawkins shiver.
“Yeah, I'm comin’,” Hawkins said with a groan.
“Good. I'll see you in an hour.” Asalon cradled the receiver, and glanced up to realize that Theisman had returned. As he picked the receiver back up to dial Jackie Woodson's number, his only thought was, You'd better be there, kid.
Seconds later the diminutive point guard responded with a groggy “Hello.”
“This is Asalon. I want you here at my place in an hour and a half.”
“What?”
“Be here, Jackie.” Asalon handed the phone to Theisman. “I think our wonder boy needs a little push, Craigy.”
Smiling, Theisman said, “Craigy here, nigger boy. You heard the man. Have your black ass here in an hour and a half. That is, if you wanta keep that dick you're so proud of stickin’ in every white woman on campus still swingin’.”
Drawing an approving nod from Asalon, Craigy hung up, aware that when push came to shove, Asalon understood full well that racial slurs could have a purpose.
Chapter 16
A half-dozen notepads sporting the Holiday Inn Express logo were spread out on the bed in Leon Bird's motel room. Only the first page of each notepad had anything written on it. Four of those pages had the names and phone numbers of the half-dozen prominent insurance companies he'd called jotted below the logo, just above the names and addresses of several Denver attorneys. He'd placed a star next to the names of the insurance companies and lawyers he planned to call.
A bottle of Old Crow, the contents nearly drained, sat on a night-stand next to the bed. Looking exasperated, Leon moved several of the notepads around three-card-monte style before rising from the edge of the bed to massage the cramp in his left calf. Thinking that he'd come all the way from his home of East Chicago, Indiana, to Denver to prime a pump that could no longer give water, he mumbled, “Shit,” and kicked at several wadded-up scraps of paper he'd tossed to the floor. Realizing now that he should have acted faster to set Shandell up and guarantee his pot of gold, he staggered over to a desk in a far corner of the room.
The desktop was covered with NCAA basketball tournament mementos and sports memorabilia, including a half-dozen scorecards, an equal number of game programs, a host of key chains and money clips sporting the CSU seal, and a passport wallet emblazoned with the words “NCAA Sweet Sixteen.” Some of the items Leon had purchased as part of his effort to get in good with Shandell; others had been given to him by Shandell, Shandell's coaches, or other members of the team.
The odd item out, which had always puzzled him, was a book that Shandell had given him, A Morning at the Office. It was a thin paperback written by some Caribbean writer, a book Shandell had told Leon was one of his favorites. Leon had always told himself that one day he would read the book, and earlier that day he'd even thumbed through the pages, briefly fascinated by the stylized drawing of a typewriter on the front cover. He didn't expect the book or any of the rest of the junk piled high on the desktop to help him secure the $250,000 in insurance money that was rightfully his, but he wasn't about to discount anything that might end up being part of a road map to his money. So the book and everything else would stay.
Retrieving the book from the pile, he smiled and thought about the time he'd found three crisp new hundred-dollar bills tucked inside an old calendar that had been sitting on the kitchen countertop in a South Side Chicago home he'd robbed. But when he held A Morning at the Office up by the spine and gave it a shake to ruffle the pages, nothing fell out.
Still angry with himself for letting Aretha Bird's bartending friend from the Satire Lounge get the drop on him, he glanced back at the clock on the nightstand and realized it was 3 a.m. Time didn't matter, really. He wasn't planning to leave Denver until the insurance deal was settled. For the moment, he was flush. The thousand dollars Shan-dell had given him the day before he'd been murdered would hold him for a while. He could wait things out. He didn't like the idea of having to attend Shandell's funeral in what was now less than seven hours. That would be risky. But he'd put on his best grieving face and a dark suit of sadness and work at pretending the best he could.
Deciding he needed a nightcap and a breath of fresh air before calling it a night, he tossed A Morning at the Office back toward the desk. The book landed on a bed of old Las Vegas betting slips as he slipped an unopened bottle of Old Crow out of the nightstand drawer, uncapped it, and poured a finger of whiskey into a glass sticky with barbecue sauce.
As he rolled the liquor around in the glass, his cell phone rang. Surprised that anyone would be calling him at that hour and fuzzy-headed from too much Old Crow, he fumbled with the phone. Finally bringing the receiver up to his left ear, he slurred, “Hello.”
The caller's voice sounded as if it were coming from inside a tunnel. “Leon?”
“Yeah.”
Speaking directly into the wadded-up handkerchief covering the phone's mouthpiece, the caller said, “We need to talk.”
“Who's this?”
“Someone with the answer to your problems.”
“Asalon?”
The caller didn't answer.
“What the hell do you w
ant? Jackie? Connie? Aretha? It better not be one of you.”
“I'm outside. Below your balcony. Like I said, we need to talk.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Leon steadied himself against the nightstand. “And I've got a direct pipeline to Jesus Christ.” He pulled the night-stand drawer open, slipped out a long-barreled .38, and tucked the gun under his belt. “If you got somethin’ to tell me that'll get me the money I'm owed, I'll hear you out. Otherwise, shove off.”
“I do.”
“Okay. Just hope you ain't up to nothin’ funny, friend, ’cause I got somethin’ here for you if you do.”
“I'm not.”
“Smart. Fuck with me and you'll regret it.” Leon staggered over to the room's sliding glass doors, pulled back the drapes, and peered out into the moonlit darkness. “I don't see you,” he said, wishing he'd enjoyed a little less Old Crow.
“You wanta know how to get your money or not?”
Concerned that he was being set up, Leon asked, “Why don't you just come on up to my room?”
“Afraid not. What's the matter, Leon, afraid?”
“Afraid my ass.” Cautiously sliding the door open, Leon stepped out onto the second-floor balcony and into the glow of a full moon. In the distance he could hear the whine of jet engines. His motel, a dot in a hay meadow in the middle of unincorporated nowhere, was six miles from Denver International Airport.
Eyeing the moon and thinking about what $250,000 might buy—a new car, a quick trip to Vegas, cases full of whiskey—he slipped the .38 from his belt. “You out there?”
He was about to ask a second time when a shot rang out. The shot wasn't all that loud, or all that quiet, but at a little past 3 a.m., there was nobody around to hear it. The bullet that pierced Leon Bird's neck and severed his windpipe to ultimately lodge in his second cervical vertebra felled the forty-four-year-old bunco artist as quickly and as permanently as the bullet that had killed his son.
When his .38 thumped to the balcony floor, there was no one above or below him to hear it, and when he crashed face first onto the concrete, fracturing his lower jaw in the midline, no one came to help. Seconds after Leon's last breath, his killer stopped a pickup on an access road that led to Pena Boulevard, the main thoroughfare to Denver International Airport, to stash a set of night-vision goggles and a .30.06 with a night scope behind the seat. As the killer drove away, never looking back, the only sound penetrating the 3 a.m. silence was the high-pitched whine of a DC-10 cargo jet's engines.
The frightened-looking Guatemalan cleaning woman who had discovered Leon Bird's body at 7:30 a.m., lifeless, cold, and working its way toward rigidity, spoke almost no English. In the hour since she'd found Leon lying face down on the concrete balcony, his head in a congealing layer of blood, a haze common in the low-lying former hay meadow had engulfed the motel.
The lanky homicide detective who'd taken the woman's statement after finally calming her down had taped off the murder scene, called in a team of crime-scene technicians, and phoned his colleague and Police Activities League friend Detective Sergeant Will Townsend to inform him that, pending final confirmation, the father of the victim in the high-profile case he'd heard Townsend was working had been found shot to death on a motel balcony a few miles west of DIA.
Townsend, who'd just taken his initial sip of the second of his absolutely mandatory morning vanilla lattes at a trendy Cherry Creek Starbucks when the call had reached him, had arrived at the murder scene just as the distraught cleaning woman was being escorted away by a female officer.
“So what have you got for me here, Cookie?” Townsend asked, ducking beneath crime-scene tape that spanned the motel-room doorway and striding across the room to shake hands with Richard Cook, a twenty-year police force veteran.
“Not much more than I told you earlier. Except that we've had a pass at the victim's car. Illinois registration, no insurance papers, and an expired registration sticker. But he's your boy Blackbird's father, all right. I've got a whole shitpot full of photos, trinkets, and signed ‘ To Leon from Shandell’ game programs sitting over there on the desk to prove it.” Cook shook his head. “He was packing a .38 long-barrel. A lot of good it did him.”
“Two Birds with clipped wings in a space of thirty-six hours. Looks like somebody's got it in for folks with that last name.”
“Seems so.”
“Any leads on the murder weapon?” Townsend eyed an all-but-empty Old Crow bottle on the nightstand.
“Are you serious? I've spent the last thirty minutes trying to keep a hysterical cleaning woman from popping a gasket. That'll teach me to learn Spanish.”
“Did she see anything?”
“No. He'd probably been dead three or four hours when she found him. From the looks of it, he took a single round to the neck from a high-powered rifle. Entry wound says so anyway.”
“Think it was from the same weapon that took out his son?”
“If I were a betting man, I'd lean that way,” said Cook. “But the bullet's still stuck in him somewhere. Got no exit wound. The crime-scene boys say it's probably lodged in his spine.”
Townsend nodded and scanned the room. “Nothing in the human anatomy stops a bullet like a good solid piece of bone.”
“No question. Speaking of betting, got something to show you.” He motioned for Townsend to follow him over to the room's desk.
Eyeing the desktop, Townsend said, “Looks like Bird the elder was a collector of things.” He studied the assemblage of trinkets, key chains, scorecards, and programs.
“And he collected a lot more than souvenir bottle openers and scorecards. I counted up a dozen Vegas betting slips in that pile. Looks as if the senior Mr. Bird liked to gamble.”
“Interesting fodder from my investigation. I spent almost an hour yesterday evening talking to a sawed-off Five Points blowhard named Theo Wilhite who swears that Blackbird was shaving points during games. A little later I had a talk with a friend of that reporter who bought it the same time as Shandell. The friend turned out to be a zonked-out, over-the-hill hippie named Wordell Epps. He's convinced there was point-shaving going on too.”
“Think maybe Shandell was giving his old pappy a little inside dope? Telling him exactly when to spend his sports-pick dough?”
“More likely than not,” said Townsend.
“But why pop the reporter too?”
“Could be Mr. Grimes was getting too close to the truth.”
“Ties things up real nice and neat,” said Cook. “Now all we've got to do is find ourselves a murderer.”
“Or two,” said Townsend. Stepping away from the desk, he extracted a couple of latex gloves from a box on the bed and slipped them on. “Mind if I sort through that stuff on the desk?”
“Be my guest. Looking for anything in particular?”
“No, just trolling.” Townsend shoved several game programs aside before casually flipping through a stack of betting slips. “Run of the mill,” he said, eyeing the collection of money clips and key chains. “What's the book doing here?” he asked, picking up the copy of A Morning at the Office.
“Beats me. I asked the same thing when I saw it.”
“A book right here all by its lonesome among throwaway favors, trinkets, scorecards, and betting trash. I'd say it's out of its element.”
“Could be Mr. Bird liked to read.”
“Maybe.” Townsend flipped through the book's pages. “But it's more likely that Shandell did,” he said with a wry smile.
“How's that?”
“Take a look at the inside of the back cover. It's inscribed.” Townsend handed the book over.
Shaking his head as he read the inscription, To Leon from Shan-dell. Like I've told you … everyone likes to fit in, Cook said, “Afraid I missed it.”
“Easy to miss, an inscription on the back cover like that. In my experience, authors and gift-givers tend to sign their names in the front of a book.”
“Think it has any meaning?”
“Wh
o knows? But I'm thinking I should ask around about books and betting fathers and such. Turns out I've got the perfect place to start.”
“Where's that?”
“At Shandell Bird's funeral an hour or so from now. You never know, I might learn something about your murder from the folks who show up.”
“Are they expecting a big turnout?”
“More than likely. We're talking a celebrity death, you know.”
“Funny, but I don't think old Leon here will end up getting the same kind of send-off.”
“You're right about that.” Townsend eyed the hodgepodge spread across the desktop. Placing A Morning at the Office back on the pile, he said with a shake of the head, “Never like to see things turn out like this. But sometimes, as they say, like father, like son.”
Chapter 17
The bright 11a.m. Mile High City sun could do little to mask the sadness of the graveside service or brighten the tiny plot of land that was now Shandell Bird's. Most of the lofty things that could be said about the twenty-two-year-old college basketball phenom had been said to an overflowing crowd of more than six hundred people back at Mount Gilead Baptist Church. The crowd had now dwindled by half.
Aretha Bird stood at the head of Shandell's casket, intermittently shivering as she shook the hands of departing mourners. Five of the six pallbearers, including Damion, his left arm still in a sling, Jackie Woodson, Coach Russ Haroldson, Jo Jo Lawson, and Shandell's sports agent, Colin McGee, remained next to the coffin, looking somber.
Connie Eastland and Dr. Alicia Phillips stood talking quietly to Rodney Sands at the foot of the coffin as Flora Jean stood several yards away, next to a towering sugar maple, arms behind her back, hands clasped together, talking to Niki and Mario Satoni and watching the crowd disperse. She was still disappointed in Damion for not telling her the truth the previous evening about the Five Points meeting he'd set up with Leotis Hawkins.
No one among those three groups of friends and family or in the throng of departing, teary-eyed mourners noticed that Sergeant Townsend was in their midst until Townsend appeared a few steps away from Aretha and said, “Mrs. Bird? I'd like to speak with you.”