The Mongoose Deception

by Robert Greer

  Looking dumbfounded, McPherson stared wide-eyed at the driver, gurgled, “What the fuck?” and stumbled back up onto the sidewalk. He took two truncated steps onto Carl Watson’s neatly manicured lawn and dropped. The BMW sped off as Watson, startled by the sound of gunfire, flung open his front door, yelled, “Hey!” and raced toward McPherson.

  With a gaping hole in his chest and blood streaming from both sides of his sternum, a near-breathless McPherson wheezed, “Last night, night before, twenty-four robbers at my door. I got up and let ’em in, hit ’em in the head …” Cornelius McPherson never finished his favorite skip rhyme. When a hysterical Carl Watson knelt in the dew-covered grass and lifted his head, McPherson was already dead.

  Chapter 11

  The Denver City and County Coroner’s wagon carrying Cornelius McPherson’s body pulled away from the curb in front of Carl and Janet Watson’s Bonnie Brae home, heading for Denver Health and Hospital and the city morgue, an hour and ten minutes after McPherson died from a shotgun blast to the heart.

  Denver homicide Lieutenant Gus Cavalaris, a seventeen-year veteran of the Denver police force who much preferred the title “Detective” to “Lieutenant,” had spent almost that same amount of time talking quietly to a visibly shaken Carl Watson and his hysterical wife. Cavalaris’s interrogation of the Watsons, although clearly intended not to look like one, had included questions about everything from McPherson’s arrival on their doorstep to more penetrating inquiries about the mysterious Sheila Lucerne.

  Cavalaris’s calm, self-deprecating style of questioning and his thoughtful, easy manner had worn down the shell-shocked couple to the point that anything he now asked them resulted only in a few clipped words and near-catatonic stare. He was about to wrap up the question-and-answer session when the lead crime-scene technician ambled into the Watsons’ sunken living room, where the questioning was being conducted, and announced, “We’re all done outside, Lieutenant.”

  “Ga-ga-good,” came Cavalaris’s reply. A chronic stutterer since childhood, Cavalaris had largely overcome the affliction except for those rare times when he’d nailed some criminal dead to rights, interrogated someone senseless and into a confession, or worked himself up to the point of total frustration over a case. His hour-long tête-à-tête with the Watsons had been a perfect trigger. As the technician pivoted to leave, the seasoned lieutenant slipped a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Carl Watson. “All my phone numbers, my e-mail, and my fax are listed on that card. Get in touch with me if you think you forgot to mention something this evening.”

  Seated in the middle of one of the room’s two overstuffed couches with one arm draped over his wife’s shoulder, Watson took the card and laid it face down on the glass-topped coffee table in front of him.

  As Cavalaris stood to leave, he couldn’t resist the urge to ask a few final questions. “You say y-y-you didn’t get a good look at either the car the shots came from or the shooter, am I correct?”

  “No, I didn’t, but the car was black, just like I told you earlier. And it was real low to the ground. That’s all I can tell you,” said Watson.

  “No license plates that you could see?”

  “No.” Watson’s tone was beleaguered.

  “And th-th-the woman who was killed in that automobile accident y-y-you men-men-mentioned, Sheila Lucerne. She was from Louisiana, right?”

  Watson frowned and glanced at his pale, exhausted-looking wife. “Why on earth are you asking me the same questions six ways from Sunday, Lieutenant? We’ve been through all that. I didn’t kill that man.”

  Cavalaris smiled. His front teeth, moist with saliva, glistened. “It’s just the way I’m forced to do business I-I-I’m afraid. You do understand that law enforcement is a question-oriented business. And believe me, it’s a quirky kind of business sometimes, especially when you’re searching for answers to a murder. Answers to questions like, wh-wh-why would a man who told you he was a miner from all the way up in Georgetown—and he did tell you that, you said so yourself—end up shotgunned to death, in the most professional kind of way, right out there on your front lawn?” Cavalaris nodded toward the street.

  “I don’t know the answer to that, Lieutenant.”

  “And you know what, sir? I have to believe you,” the hovering, lanky, slightly stoop-shouldered Cavalaris said with a nod. “Th-th-that’s why I’m fascinated by this whole thing. Purely and simply fascinated by a need to wring a simple answer out of such a complex question.” Shaking his head in mock amazement, Cavalaris turned to leave. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, retrieving a mud-colored Wyoming Cowboys ball cap from the coffee table. He stared thoughtfully into space as he turned to head for the front door. “A miner, and a black miner at that. I’ll be damned. And in this pretty much all-white neighborhood. A-a-a black man out there ringing doorbells and asking questions as if he were a cop. Interesting—real interesting—you gotta admit that.” Cavalaris donned his cap, pushed the screen door open, and walked out onto the porch without looking back, leaving Carl Watson looking as exhausted as he was bewildered and Janet Watson looking absolutely drained.

  Damion Madrid smiled to himself as his fingers darted along the keys of the new laptop he’d unboxed an hour and a half earlier, downloaded software into, and set up to perform pretty much all the functions required in the world of a virtual business, except for the actual delivery of the antiques and collectibles that made up CJ and Mario’s Ike’s Spot inventory.

  Hovering over Damion like an expectant father, his eyes glued to the computer screen, Mario asked, “Sure you got everything in there? It took me and CJ a month of Sundays to catalog all our inventory.” Mario reached over Damion’s shoulder and tapped the top spreadsheet on a half-inch stack of papers.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Damion, resisting the urge to sigh as he thought back on all the hours it had taken him to turn CJ and Mario’s handwritten list and his own copy and artful photographs into an eye-catching cyberspace antique store. A store with zoom-in close-up color photographs of its rather remarkable inventory. A store, that in addition to detailed descriptions of its merchandise, offered ordering instructions, testimonials, and authenticity guarantees.

  Eyeing Mario quizzically, Damion paused and thoughtfully asked, “Why’d you and CJ decide to call the store Ike’s Spot, Mario? Don’t think I asked before.”

  Mario smiled. “It’s a long story, Damion.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time. Clue me in.”

  Mario forced back a chuckle, aware that the bookish, overly mothered twenty-year-old sitting in front of him, who proclaimed to anyone who asked that, in spite of being a college basketball star on a fast track to the pros, he planned to chuck the game and go to medical school when he finished college, more than likely actually did want to know the history behind the store’s unusual name. “Okay, Mister I’ve-got-nothin’-but-time. Here’s why. CJ’s Uncle Ike once saved my life. So CJ and me figured that the least we could do was name our store after him.”

  “When’d he do that?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Here in Denver?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “You’ll have to ask CJ that.”

  With a smile, Damion said, “Come on, Mario.”

  When Mario flashed him a stern look that said, Enough with the questions, Damion, well schooled in the all-important issues concerning Mario Satoni’s past, decided to cut short the question-and-answer session. Looking for a secure place to land, he clicked back to the Ike’s Spot home page. “You’re in business,” he said, trying his best to look unruffled.

  Mario rested his hand reassuringly on Damion’s shoulder, recognizing that he’d momentarily allowed a tiny piece of his former self, a piece that he normally kept well hidden, to surface. Smiling down at the lanky, dark-haired, self-assured college junior, Mario said, “I’ll tell you the whole story one day, kid. Promise.”

  “No harm, no foul, Mario,”
said Damion.

  Without responding, Mario threaded his way through a gauntlet of boxes and walked over to the 1970s-vintage color TV in the far northeast corner of the cluttered basement. He turned the set on and said, “Let’s say we take a gander at the news. Need to see how my Dodgers fared today.”

  “Hope they did better than the Rockies,” said Damion, aware of Mario’s passion for his beloved Dodgers.

  The TV slowly brightened, and for the next several minutes they halfheartedly watched the news as Damion fine-tuned the Ike’s Spot home page and Mario impatiently awaited the eleven o’clock news sports segment. Ten minutes into the broadcast, Mario mumbled, “Get to the damn sports, would ya?”

  After a lengthy commercial break, a sportscaster finally appeared. As Mario reached to turn up the volume, the words, “Live late-breaking news” crawled their way across the bottom of the screen, the sportscaster faded into blackness, and in the blink of a satellite feed, an impish-looking reporter, standing on the sidewalk in front of Carl and Janet Watson’s house with crime-scene tape flapping in the breeze behind her, announced, “This is Monica Jergens with a Channel 9 late-breaking news exclusive. A man identified by a Denver police spokesman as Cornelius McPherson has apparently been killed in a drive-by shooting in the 700 block of South Elizabeth Street here in Denver. McPherson, you may recall from a story first reported to you here on 9 News just two days ago, survived a mountaintop earthquake that continues to keep the Eisenhower Tunnel and I-70 closed in both directions. In the aftermath of that earthquake, the partial remains of a miner who had worked with McPherson on the I-70 Eisenhower Tunnel project were found. Denver police have not released any further details about this apparent drive-by shooting. Stay tuned for 9 News updates and be sure to watch Channel 9 First News at 6 a.m. for complete details. This is Monica Jergens, reporting from Denver’s Bonnie Brae neighborhood.”

  The Channel 9 sports anchor’s face returned to fill the screen as quickly as it had disappeared, and, looking directly into the camera as if his words were meant only for Mario, he announced, “The Colorado Rockies squeezed out an eleventh-inning win over the Padres in a …”

  Mario clicked off the TV and took two quick breaths, looking as if he’d just been sucker-punched in the gut.

  Astonished that Mario had turned off the TV without hearing how the Dodgers had fared, Damion asked, “Something the matter, Mario?”

  Staring past Damion into space, Mario didn’t answer.

  “Mario, you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re gonna miss the Dodgers score.”

  “It can wait.” Staring around at the basement’s whitewashed cinderblock walls, Mario asked, “Is your mom at home?”

  “By now, sure. Why?”

  “Just need to know,” said Mario, aware that in the nine years since she’d left CJ’s employ Julie Madrid had finished law school and positioned herself as one of the top criminal defense lawyers in the state.

  Looking puzzled, Damion asked, “Want me to call her for you?”

  “No, I’ll call her myself,” Mario said dejectedly, thinking that he hadn’t had need of Julie Madrid’s kind of counsel in close to thirty years.

  “You in trouble, Mario?”

  When Mario didn’t answer, Damion said timidly, “You’re not connected to what happened over in Bonnie Brae, are you?”

  “Of course not!” Mario shuffled across the room, wavering from side to side as he moved.

  “I think it’s time we closed up shop,” said Damion. Hoping to leave on a positive note, he added, “Mom stays up to midnight most nights. She works way too hard if you ask me.”

  “Don’t ever second-guess your mother, son,” said Mario, who understood Julie Madrid’s dogged will to succeed. He was well acquainted with the story of how she had extracted herself from an abusive marriage to Damion’s father, who was now dead; worked her way through law school at night while working full time as CJ’s secretary during the day; and ultimately earned a stellar reputation as a criminal defense shark.

  For the second time in the space of half an hour, Damion caught a glimpse of a sterner, darker side of Mario Satoni—and it unnerved him. “I didn’t mean it in that way, Mario.”

  “We’ve talked enough this evening, Damion. Time you headed home.”

  Uncertain what to say, Damion walked quickly toward the basement stairs. “I’ll tell Mom you’re gonna call her,” he said, planting his foot on the bottom step. When Mario didn’t answer, he scurried up the stairs. “See you tomorrow,” he called back over his shoulder before moving quickly through the kitchen and down a hallway filled with photographs of once powerful politicians, mobsters, and entertainers from Mario’s generation.

  Moments later he was out the back door and behind the wheel of his SUV. He backed the Jeep, a gift from his mother for maintaining a 3.8 grade point average during his college freshman year, away from Mario’s garage and pointed it toward home. As the Jeep gained speed, he couldn’t help but think that in the three years he’d known Mario Satoni, he’d never seen him so out of sync, or so reflective and intense.

  Weaving his way through Denver’s still predominantly Italian northern section of the city toward his own Washington Park neighborhood and home, he had the sudden sense that people like Mario, his mother, and CJ had seen a side of life that he couldn’t fully comprehend. Even factoring in his early childhood, defined largely by an absent father and life only a cut above poverty, he would never be able to appreciate how the people closest to him had clawed their way out of life’s underbelly. As he turned off Federal Boulevard and onto Speer, he noticed a man who was obviously drunk stumbling down a sidewalk. For some reason the late-night image of the stupefied man weaving his way to nowhere under the glare of a single streetlight stuck with him most of the way home.

  When he turned onto Downing Street, he had the feeling that something strange and undefinable was working its way into his psyche—boring its way into that highly competitive and slightly insecure part of him that had made him a star athlete and stellar student but also a loner. The very same thing that, he suspected, drove his mother to stay up working far too late on far too many nights.

  Long before Damion got home, Mario Satoni had called Pinkie Niedemeyer to tell him he was probably going to need his kind of support. He’d then called CJ to schedule an 8 a.m. meeting with him at CJ’s office. He left the issue of how to approach Julie Madrid, someone who’d always been wary of him but whose counsel he desperately needed, to CJ.

  Mario had no way of knowing whether his nephew Rollie had seen the news about the shooting in Bonnie Brae, but if he hadn’t, he was certain one of Rollie’s stable of kiss-ass flunkies had—if in fact one of them hadn’t been the trigger man. Whatever the case, it was a certainty that Rollie was up to his nose hairs in the mess. Rollie, after all, was the one who’d heeded the siren call to kill a president forty-four years earlier, jumping at the chance to make a name by insinuating himself into an assassination plot that was far too big for him. Now, like it or not, Rollie would have to deal with the fallout from that decision.

  The chickens had finally come home to roost in the form of the frozen remains of a man named Antoine Ducane. Rollie, already an insomniac, wouldn’t get any sleep at all, Mario told himself—and unfortunately, because Mario had been captain of Denver’s crime family operations when Kennedy had been assassinated, his name would crop up in any police investigation, and that meant he’d miss some sleep too.

  Hoping that CJ and Julie could help him extricate himself from a situation that would ultimately reach higher than the mere investigation of the unearthing of some obscure miner’s remains, Mario looked skyward and pleadingly said, “Angie,” aware that if CJ and Julie couldn’t help him, Pinkie Niedemeyer certainly would.

  Mario finally drifted off to sleep a little before 2:30 a.m. He’d been asleep for just over an hour when the sixty-year-old Bakelite phone on the nightstand next to his bed rang, jolting him out of his
uneasy slumber. Lifting the receiver on the third ring and sounding dazed, he answered, “Mario.”

  “Mario, my friend. Hope I didn’t snatch you away from a good dream.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “You mean you don’t recognize my voice? Hell, I’m disappointed.”

  Although Mario recognized something familiar in the caller’s tone, something distinctive about the way he’d said disappointed, he couldn’t place the voice until Randall Maxie said, “Alas, poor Yorick, I thought you knew me.”

  “Maxie,” said Mario, recognizing the quixotic hit man’s penchant for rearranging Shakespearean quotations. “What the shit do you want?”

  Maxie chuckled. “Not much, old-timer.”

  Ignoring the insult that would have cost Maxie at least a pistol whipping forty years earlier, Mario said, “You’ve got one minute to say your piece, Maxie.”

  “Don’t play big shit with me, Satoni. I go back a ways, remember? Maybe you were somebody once, a long, long time ago, but right now you’re just a little old man living in a little old house. All bent over with only a little bit of time left on the clock.”

  Biting his tongue to control his anger, Mario thought back on all the years he’d known Maxie. Maxie had been a pudgy, third-tier, dope-smoking sixteen-year-old North Denver hoodlum when Mario had stepped away from his role as Denver’s top don in the mid-1960s. He had missed the army and Vietnam by the skin of his teeth, and while his slightly older counterparts had been getting their heads blown off in Southeast Asia, Maxie had been sucking up to Rollie Ornasetti. As the Vietnam War wound down and most of Maxie’s cronies had come home bigger nutcases than when they’d left, Maxie, in an effort to puff himself up and appear their equal, had decided to manufacture a few stateside war stories of his own by taking on the task of providing Ornasetti with highly visible muscle. Soon he was killing people at Rollie’s request. “You’re down to thirty seconds,” Mario said finally. “Get to the point, Maxie.”