by Robert Greer
“Maybe you should’ve never moved the goods,” Maxie finally said, his tone calculating and analytical.
“Would you stop with the retrospectives, Max? We’ve been all through that. I moved Ducane when I had the opportunity and resources.”
“And look what that move has bought you: a murder investigation in the offing. At least, according to my contacts that’s what you’ve bought yourself.”
Ornasetti smiled knowingly. “Nobody can connect me to Ducane. Hell, I was just a few years out of college when he died, a poor kid working his way through law school, hoping to make myself a better citizen.” Ornasetti forced back a snicker. “Now, my uncle, on the other hand, a notorious Denver mobster at the time, might’ve had a reason to kill Ducane. If I were a cop or a G-man looking to upbuck, and I got wind that Ducane might’ve had a hand in the killing of a president—which nobody by the way has even a whiff of at the moment as far as I make it—I’d put my money on the bad guy in all this being Mario Satoni.” Ornasetti broke into a full-bore snicker.
“So you’re planning on laying this at Mario’s door?”
“If I have to.”
“How, may I ask, do you plan to do that?”
“My worry, Max. My worry. Yours, on the other hand, is to dam up any holes in the dike if we get a water break on this thing.”
A roll of loose flesh just above Maxie’s barely evident neck undulated as he shrugged and said, “Okay.”
“Things could get sticky here, Max. We’re not dealing with just any old murder, you know.”
“So? Sometimes people get hurt, even killed, years after an assassination. It’s a well-documented historical fact.”
Ornasetti sat back in his seat and drank in the calm, self-assured look on Randall Maxie’s face. It was the look of a man devoid of worries or a conscience. Maxie would do his bidding, no matter what. He knew he could count on that. Smiling contentedly, he said, “I want you to handle that tunnel worker who found Ducane’s forearm, McPherson. Looks to me as though he’s some kinda publicity hound. Yesterday his face was spread all over the Denver Post.”
Maxie acknowledged the request with a dutiful nod. “Do you think he knows anything about how Ducane found his way behind that tunnel wall?”
“Nope.”
“I see,” Maxie said thoughtfully. “But I suspect it doesn’t really matter, when you come right down to it, whether the poor man knows anything about Ducane or the Kennedy killing or, for that matter, the power of compound interest. He was simply a man in the wrong position. Do you have a photo of him I can take a look at? Something, as they say, to get me on the scent?”
“Sure do. From a story I tore out of the Post.”
“Good,” said Maxie, salivating at the thought of working a new assignment.
“How soon do you want to start?”
“I’ve started,” said Maxie. “Any restrictions?”
“Not a one. Do what’s necessary,” Ornasetti said coldly. “Just like always.”
Chapter 10
Cornelius McPherson hadn’t told Sheriff Gunther Tolls everything he knew about Antoine Ducane. He’d held back two very important pieces of information. First, McPherson still had an index card, stashed in an old traveling salesman’s valise, with thirty-seven-year-old emergency contact phone numbers for all the members of his original Straight Creek mining team, including Antoine Ducane. More importantly, he also had the address of a house in Denver’s historic Bonnie Brae neighborhood and the name of the home’s owner, a woman Ducane had once told McPherson he should contact if anything were to happen to him. He’d never had cause to use any of the phone numbers or search out any contacts. But for some strange reason—a reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on—he felt obliged to do so now. So he’d filled up his pickup, polished off a meal of lasagna, steak, and fries, and headed east, making the trip from his house to the outskirts of Denver in just over fifty minutes. As he wound his way out of the Front Range foothills, easing his pickup off I-70 and onto Sixth Avenue, a heavily traveled east-west parkway that knifed its way straight into the heart of the Mile High City, he wasn’t quite certain why he hadn’t been completely honest with the sheriff other than the fact that his natural curiosity and the exhilaration of seeing his name front and center in both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post had kindled something that made him want to cling to his flicker of notoriety a little longer.
Cruising along in surprisingly light 8 p.m. traffic, he chuckled at the idea that days before retirement he might have just found a new avocation: private investigation. He couldn’t help but laugh at the prospect, aware that he had an insider’s knowledge about Ducane that the sheriff couldn’t possibly have discovered yet. For example, the fact that Ducane was from New Iberia, Louisiana, and that during a bank robbery he’d once shot a man. He glanced down at an index card that rested on the seat next to him. The card was brown with age. Smiling, he flipped on the overhead light and read down the names of the five other men who’d made up his original Straight Creek crew. Next to Ducane’s name and printed in pencil in McPherson’s very own hand were the numbers 303-722-2418 and the address 780 S. Elizabeth Street, Denver. Just below the word “Denver” he’d printed the name “Sheila.”
In all the years since Ducane’s disappearance, he’d never called the phone number in Louisiana, never had reason to go to the address in Bonnie Brae, and never talked to anyone named Sheila. In fact, he’d never thought about his sullen, green-eyed Creole friend much at all—for good reason, in his book. Although Ducane had been family in a sense, he hadn’t been the kind of family bound by blood. Ducane and the other men whose names were jotted on the index card had been a different kind of kin, a tumbleweed kind that drifted in and out of his and every other miner’s life. They were a drinking-and-carousing-buddy kind of kin that, for a sworn loner like McPherson, faded in and out of his life like ripples in a stream.
At the busy intersection of Sixth and Kalamath, he caught a red light and suddenly found himself deep in thought, unaware that the black BMW that had followed him all the way from Georgetown was just three cars behind him. He knew that men like Ducane sometimes boasted and beat their chests in order to get up the nerve they needed to go back underground the next day. Perhaps Ducane’s drunken assertion all those years ago, that he knew who’d killed JFK, had been no more and no less than another frightened miner’s tale. Or maybe Ducane had been looking for an extended moment in the sun, just as he was at the moment.
It wasn’t until the car behind him honked, breaking his concentration, that McPherson realized just how caught up in the strange mystery of Antoine Ducane he’d become.
He knew the Mile High City well enough to head straight for Bonnie Brae. In fact, he’d spent more than a few weekends drinking at the neighborhood’s historic Bonnie Brae Tavern, a watering hole and pizzeria he’d stumbled across years earlier when his mufflerless 1955 Ford pickup had given up the ghost only a few blocks away. Turning off Sixth Avenue, he headed south on University Boulevard, trying his best to remember, as he sped through a yellow light, why on earth he’d been cruising along the northern edge of Bonnie Brae the night his truck had died. Especially since gambling, whores, and endlessly flowing whiskey weren’t part and parcel of that section of the city.
It don’t really matter now, he told himself, nosing his truck along the northern edge of a neighborhood that he remembered as being made up for the most part of modest single-story brick homes. Even in the twilight, he could now see that many of those homes had morphed into upsized, pregnant-looking two-stories.
“Progress,” he mumbled, shaking his head and breaking into rhyme. “Make it big, make it better, two false tits under a sweater. Looks okay but whattaya got? Water-filled balloons ready to pop.” Still shaking his head, he slowed his pickup and squinted to make out the name on a poorly lit street sign. “Elizabeth, that’s it!” he called out, turning right onto a tree-lined street of rambling ranch homes. “Shit. Ducane must’ve got
lucky,” he blurted out, stroking his chin thoughtfully. As the truck crept along slowly, he counted off the addresses on the houses: “720, 740, 760—bingo!”
He eased to the curb, stopped directly in front of 780 S. Elizabeth, and shut down the truck’s engine. The home, a blond-brick, single-story 1950s Denver ranch, had been painted white; a three-car garage had been added; the grounds had been landscaped to the hilt; and the house sported a brand-new slate roof. A late-model, full-sized SUV sat in the driveway a few feet from two open garage doors. A couple of mountain bikes rested on the floor in one of the bays. “Upscale,” McPherson mumbled, sounding deflated, suspecting from the look of things that Ducane’s mystery lady, Sheila—if that was her real name—had more than likely flown the coop years ago.
Turning off the truck’s lights and thinking, Sure hope these white folk are hospitable, McPherson slipped the index card into his shirt pocket, got out of the truck, and headed for the house. A pigtailed, chubby, rosy-cheeked blond girl who looked to be about six greeted him at the deadbolted, custom-designed, wrought-iron screen door. With her arms folded, looking defiant, the girl said, “You want something, mister?” as McPherson rang the doorbell.
Before he could answer, a stately, square-faced, very pale, and very blond woman stepped into view. “Yes, may I help you?” she asked, trying to look unperturbed by the presence of a strange black man on her front doorstep. Forcing a smile, she edged the girl behind her.
“I hope so, ma’am,” said McPherson, looking past the woman into the house and toward the hallway stairs that rose behind her. “I’m tryin’ to locate a lady who mighta lived here years back. The only thing I got to go on is her name: Sheila.”
Before the woman could answer, a man’s voice called out from somewhere beyond the stairs, “Janet, who’s at the door?” as the little girl moved back in front of the woman.
With both hands planted firmly on the girl’s shoulders, the woman turned and said, “A man who says he’s looking for someone named Sheila.”
A balding man, slightly shorter than the woman and looking about the same age, early sixties at the most, stepped into view. Holding a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, the man stepped boldly up beside the woman, patted the girl on the head, and placed his sandwich on a nearby entryway table. “No one here by that name,” he said adamantly.
“She woulda lived here about thirty years ago, give or take a few years,” an unfazed McPherson said, rocking from side to side. Staring down at the slightly nervous-looking man, he decided to drop his bomb. “Sure you don’t know her? She may know somethin’ about a friend of mine who was murdered.”
“What?”
“This woman Sheila may know something about …”
“I heard you,” the man said curtly.
Glancing at the woman with a hint of guilt, the man said sheepishly, “Could be you’re looking for Sheila Lucerne.”
“Don’t know if that’s her last name or not,” McPherson said, smiling at the man’s quick about-face.
“Was she from Louisiana?”
“Very likely,” said McPherson, stroking his chin thoughtfully, the way he’d seen detectives do in the movies. “Did you know her?”
The man’s gaze moved from McPherson to the woman standing next to him, then quickly to the floor. “If it’s the same person, she owned this house before I bought it back in ’72.”
“Do you know if she’s still living in Denver?”
The man’s answer was abrupt. “No. She’s dead. Killed in a car crash on the Boulder Turnpike years ago.”
“Well, at least you know somethin’ about her, mister, ahhh?”
The man looked up from staring at the floor, as if wondering why on earth, other than the fact he didn’t want to get caught in a lie in front of his wife, he’d just given information about Sheila Lucerne to some black man he’d never seen before. Without answering McPherson, he eyed the woman whose hand he now held and realized from the look on her face that she was just as interested in learning more about the woman named Sheila Lucerne as the black man. Clearing his throat and looking guilty, the man said, “We should probably clear this up right now. I was engaged to Sheila once.”
McPherson watched the woman’s jaw drop as she fought to maintain her composure. “Would you like to come in, sir?” she finally said to McPherson.
“It’s just plain Cornelius McPherson, ma’am, no ‘sir’ to it.”
Looking not the least bit fearful, the woman unlocked the screen door and swung it open. “We’re the Watsons. I’m Janet.” Nodding at the embarrassed-looking man, she said, “My husband, Carl, and the lady in pigtails and ballet slippers is our granddaughter, Susan. Come in, Mr. McPherson, and we’ll see if we can’t straighten this all out for you.” She shot her husband a disappointed look as McPherson stepped over the threshold into the foyer. It was a look that also said, Better come clean. Slipping her hand out of Carl’s and into her granddaughter’s, she said, “Susie, I want you to go change and get ready for bed. Grandpa and I need to talk to Mr. McPherson. Would you do that for me?”
“Sure.” The girl stared at McPherson, drinking in the essence of his blackness, before pivoting and scooting off around the stairwell.
“We can talk in the living room,” Carl Watson offered quickly. “This shouldn’t take long.” He flipped a nearby light switch and moved toward a suddenly brightly lit, well-appointed sunken living room off the hallway. “Watch your step.” His words were directed at McPherson, but his eyes were locked on his wife’s.
“I’ll do that,” said McPherson, catching the look of pent-up rage in Janet Watson’s eyes and thinking as he stepped down into the living room, Nope, my friend, I’m thinking you’d better watch yours.
Thirty minutes and a round of soft drinks later, Carl Watson had indeed come clean, surprising both McPherson and his wife with his story about the Baton Rouge–born, impetuous, and unabashedly Creole Sheila Lucerne. Carl Watson had admitted that Lucerne had been his fiancée during a stormy on-again, off-again romance that had spanned the early 1970s during the years when he’d been a PhD student in engineering at the University of Denver. Lucerne, several years Watson’s senior, and Janet Watson—Janet Highpoint at the time—had known nothing of one another but had shared the nebbishy future mechanical engineer’s favors for nearly a year.
According to Watson, he and Lucerne had tried to make the relationship work, even forcing it to the point of their short-term engagement. They’d even lived together briefly in the house that was now his, which Sheila had then owned. But after five months of constant battling over everything from the arrangement of the furniture to their completely opposite takes on politics and tastes in food, movies, and music, they had broken off the engagement. Watson admitted that he’d gotten the house after Sheila had died, largely because he’d been in the right place at the right time and had had the right amount of cash on hand when the house had gone up for sale as part of probate. That revelation caused Janet Watson to gasp, glance around the room, looking betrayed, and fight back tears.
When asked by McPherson whether he’d ever heard Sheila mention a man named Antoine Ducane and whether she might have known any of Ducane’s people back in Louisiana, Watson had offered a point-blank “No.” The conversation dribbled to a halt after that, but McPherson suspected that after he left, Carl Watson would be offering his wife a much more detailed explanation of his relationship with Sheila Lucerne.
It was nine o’clock when McPherson rose to leave without again mentioning Antoine Ducane’s name. As he moved toward the front door, the little girl stepped out from a barely evident recessed telephone nook in the center-hall stairwell and asked, “You gonna leave now, mister?”
“I sure am,” said McPherson, surprised by her presence. He patted her gently on the head and cast a final backward glance at the girl’s somber-faced grandmother as Carl Watson ushered him to the door.
“Still don’t understand all the interest in Sheila,” said Watson, lookin
g baffled as they reached the screen door. Swinging the door open and looking as if he were preparing to shoo out a pesky fly, he added, “Do you think she was involved in your friend’s murder?”
“Don’t know,” McPherson said with a shrug.
“Do you think Sheila was involved in something illegal?”
“Don’t think so, unless knowin’ the wrong man’s been made a crime.”
“Or the wrong woman.” Watson shot a glance over his shoulder toward his wife.
“Thing’s’ll smooth out, my man. Trust me.”
Watson eyed McPherson sternly. “I hope so. But just for the record, don’t come back.”
McPherson flashed the worried-looking engineer an insightful smile. “I’ll make it a point not to. But from now on, if I was you, I’d do like they tell you when you take the witness stand in court.”
“How’s that?”
“I’d take to tellin’ my wife the truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but the truth.” McPherson gave Watson a quick wink and headed down the sidewalk toward his truck. He was halfway there when Watson called after him, his tone insistent, “No more surprise appearances, Mr. McPherson, you hear?”
Without answering, McPherson continued walking toward his truck in the semidarkness. When he stopped and turned back to see if Watson was still there, the front door was closed.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” McPherson mumbled, stepping off the curb and into the street. He was a few steps from his truck’s rear bumper when a black BMW pulled up next to him. The car’s interior lights flashed on as the front passenger window eased down smoothly and the driver called out, “Hey, buddy, how far’s Colorado Boulevard?”
McPherson raised his left arm to gesture east as the driver, in one fluid motion, raised a 12-gauge, sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun, aimed it squarely at McPherson’s chest, and fired two point-blank rounds.