by Robert Greer
“Sounds like that assassination had a hell of an effect on him.”
“And me too, I suspect,” said CJ, peering into a new fog bank and slowing down to less than ten miles an hour. “In less than eight years Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would be dead, and I’d be on my way to Vietnam. Somehow it always seemed to me that the JFK killing opened the floodgates on America, and we’re still trying to dog-paddle our way back upstream. Maybe if I can shed just a little bit of truth on that killing, those waters might calm down, temporarily at least.” Forcing back a sigh, CJ said, “So anyway, what’s Alden’s take?”
“It’s an interestin’ one, I can tell you that. While I was whippin’ him up that pepper steak he likes so much and lubricatin’ us both with enough wine to cut our cholesterol in half for the year, Alden made half-a-dozen calls to old intelligence contacts. Folks he knew before I ever met him. And except for one lead, he came up with nothin’. Said his friends all got real nervous when he brought up the JFK assassination. Almost to a man, he said they told him that everything concernin’ the JFK killin’ has already been dealt with, and most of the info’s either already out in the public domain, like CIA documents, police documents, the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ report, the Church Committee report, and the Warren Commission report, or it’s locked down tighter than a drum for the next fifty years.”
“So what’s the one thread he found?” CJ slowed the Bel Air to a near stop as a rolling bank of fog enveloped the car.
“Carlos Marcello. Seems the long-deceased Louisiana don had his paws into our sweet state in a couple of the strangest ways. Back in the 1960s, before César Chávez got the United Farm Workers movement rollin’, the farsighted Mr. Marcello, seein’ an opportunity to line up an army of workers whose wages he could tap for union dues and whose votes he could count on to swing elections, tried his best to get farm workers here in the good old Centennial State to line up under the Teamsters’ umbrella.”
“What?”
“You heard me. The Teamsters.”
“Now, that’s a stretch.”
“I said the same thing. But Alden didn’t think it was all that unusual. Especially since the Teamsters and our nation’s truckers move the lion’s share of America’s goods, including Colorado’s Western Slope peaches and its Arkansas Valley cantaloupes.”
“I damn sure would’ve missed the connection. Did Marcello succeed?”
“Nope. Chávez was too nimble for him, and on top of that, Chávez spoke the right language. But here’s a bone for you. Alden claims that if Marcello was stretchin’ his tentacles this far west, it’s possible that Ducane just mighta been runnin’ interference for him. Servin’ as sort of a forward guard for whatever kinda graft and corruption opportunities might open up in Colorado down the road. Ducane was a mine worker, after all, and if memory serves me right, John L. Lewis’s boys always had more than a tinge of mob-connected corruption tagged to them. That means to me that Ducane havin’ a link to the Teamsters wouldn’t be such a stretch.”
“Makes sense. Can Alden get us any more info?”
“What was that? I can hardly hear you.”
“Can Alden get us more information?”
“Oh. Gotcha. He’s tryin’. But he says that in order to loosen up his contact’s lips, we’re gonna need to provide him somethin’ more concrete.”
“Tell him I’m trying, and to stay on it. And if he finds out anything else that might help us figure out what really happened to Ducane, or for that matter JFK, have him pass it along.” Tapping his brakes, CJ hollered, “Damn!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Can’t really tell. Somethin’s blockin’ the road up ahead. Looks like either a tree or a telephone pole. I’ll call you back when I’m around it.”
“Okay, but take it slow, sugar.”
“Can’t go any slower; I’m stopped. Talk to you later.” Flipping his cell phone closed, CJ turned up his jacket collar, opened the car door, and stepped out into blackness.
Chapter 24
The wind was gusting at close to forty miles an hour, and it was raining sideways when CJ stepped away from the Bel Air. He could barely see the shoulder as he walked in the glare of the idling car’s headlights and down a 5 percent grade, hoping to see what was blocking the road. All he could really make out were the undulating shapes of heavy equipment parked along the Poudre River side of the highway. The sight let him know that he was back to Hewlett Gulch, and that Ted’s Place was only a few minutes away. When he realized what was blocking the highway, he mumbled, “Shit.” A tree trunk, three feet in diameter, rested all the way across the highway. It extended beyond the shoulder over the fifty-foot drop-off to the river below like some bizarre diving platform.
As he walked along the length of the trunk, wondering where it had come from, he heard a diesel motor rev. He turned to see a road grader bearing down on him.
Recognizing he’d been set up, CJ sprinted for the Bel Air, hoping to get to the glove compartment and his .44. A couple of strides later he heard the report of a pistol and the thud of bullets slamming into the canyon wall. The grader’s blade was almost on top of him when he dove headfirst along the rain-slicked highway and beneath the front bumper of the Bel Air.
As he crawled beneath the undercarriage toward the rear of the car, the road grader’s engine slipped to idle. The grader’s headlights had the roadway around the Bel Air lit up like daylight, and he had no idea why the grader had stopped instead of simply plowing him and the Bel Air into the canyon wall. Feeling strangely reflective, as if somehow he’d dropped through a hole in the universe and was somehow back in Vietnam on one more river-patrol mission, CJ was having second thoughts about going for his .44 when it hit him that there was another, more accessible gun in the Bel Air.
When his shoulder grazed the sizzling-hot muffler, he jerked his arm away and mumbled, “Shit!” A pocket-calculator-sized object fell from the undercarriage as he lowered his shoulder. He fumbled with it for a second before he realized that it was a homing device. Aware now of how the road grader’s operator had been able to pinpoint where he would be and when, he shook his head disgustedly.
The weapon he was after was in the Bel Air’s trunk. Grasping the rear bumper, he slid from beneath the car and peered around a rear taillight. The grader’s operator, caught in the glare of the massive machine’s headlights, was on foot, and headed for the Bel Air, a gun in each hand. He was dressed in black, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, Levi’s, and muddy high-topped sneakers. The hood was pulled tightly around his head, and all CJ could make out was that the man was white.
Aware that he couldn’t wait much longer or the killer would be on top of him, CJ popped the trunk and patted along the floor of the trunk for one of the flare guns inside. As he grabbed the first one, several shots rang out, and a bullet pierced the trunk lid. Rising from his squat just enough to be able to see his hooded assailant, he waited. The man was ten feet away when CJ took aim and pulled the flare gun’s trigger.
The flare caught the man in the neck, knocking him off balance as CJ prepared to charge him. CJ had barely taken a step when a shot rang out, and the Bel Air’s left front headlight exploded. Startled, he heard someone scream, “Floyd! Stay down!”
He dropped to his knees and hunched against the Bel Air’s rear bumper. Half-a-dozen gunshots exploded around him, and then, except for the loud hum of the road grader’s engine, there was silence. An eerie silence that was finally broken by the sound of footfalls on the pavement and the rushing sound of dirt sliding.
Deciding it was now or never, CJ duck-walked his way along the canyon wall, reached the Bel Air’s front door, swung the door open far enough to wedge his shoulders inside, opened the glove compartment, and grabbed his .44. He poked his head above the hood to see someone with their back turned to him standing next to the fallen tree and peering down over the drop-off toward the river below. There was a gun in the person’s right hand.
“Sta
y fuckin’ put!” CJ screamed. Stretching both arms out across the Bel Air’s hood, he aimed the .44’s muzzle squarely at the person’s back. “I’ve got somethin’ here that’ll take you right over the edge of that cliff if you so much as shiver. Now, drop that piece you’re holding and turn around.”
The man dropped the 9-mm he was holding into the dirt.
“Turn!” CJ yelled. The muscles in his face went slack when CJ realized the man he had his .44 trained on—the man who had obviously screamed for him to stay down when it counted—was a very puzzled-looking Gus Cavalaris.
It’s a wise rabbit with more than one hole, Napper kept telling himself as, flashlight in hand, he worked his way along a rock ledge twenty-five feet above the Poudre River. Without hesitation, he’d jumped in near darkness onto a ledge that was fifteen feet below the shoulder of Highway 14 and doused his flashlight. The ledge would take him back to where he’d parked his SUV in a thicket of sagebrush and thistle half an hour earlier. It was there that he’d run across a cache of heavy equipment and the backhoe he’d used to move the tree that had stopped Floyd in his tracks. He’d originally planned to take his shots at the nosy bail bondsman when he came out of a series of S-curves just above Hewlett Gulch, or to jam the bondsman’s car into the south canyon wall using a road grader. That, however, would have required shooting at a moving target in the dark, or sifting through wreckage and very likely a mangled body to see if the bondsman was carrying anything of importance that he might have gotten from Sheila Lucerne. Blocking the highway with a tree in order to get a better shot and an intact body had seemed like a better idea, but unfortunately, the plan hadn’t panned out.
Concerned now about taking a misstep that would send him plunging to certain death, he could still hear voices from above him on the highway.
“I don’t see him anywhere,” he heard someone call out. Uncertain whether it was the voice of the bail bondsman or the person who’d come to Floyd’s aid, Napper continued sidestepping his way toward safety in the darkness. “Son of a bitch just vanished,” he heard someone yell. He had the urge to scream, I jumped, but instead continued maneuvering his way along the ledge until he reached the end. As he started uphill toward his SUV, aware that the half-cocked young people who now played the game he’d been playing for decades never would’ve considered a back-door plan, he couldn’t help but smile.
As he worked his way up a twenty-foot embankment toward level ground and his vehicle, his flashlight went out. “Low bid,” he mumbled, shaking his head. Stumbling along in darkness, he heard the wail of a siren in the distance. Moments later, winded and soaking wet, he reached his SUV, slipped inside, cranked the engine, and, running with his lights out, eased down the path the SUV had cut in the canyon plateau’s native grasses on his drive in from the highway. Glancing in the direction of the siren, he said, “Too late,” as he turned onto the highway. Snapping on his headlights, he yelled, “I’m gone!”
Ron Else stood at the corner of Glenarm Place on downtown Denver’s Sixteenth Street Mall, just across the street from the city’s famed Paramount Theatre, trying to decide whether the information he’d just paid an informant $500 for had been worth the price. He’d chosen the location to meet the blockheaded man with massive clumps of hair missing from his head for no other reason than the fact that it was 100 percent public. The informant had appeared out of the 11:30 darkness to inform Else that the Antoine Ducane investigation had certain people in New Orleans and Miami very nervous.
That news alone wouldn’t have been worth a dime to him. He already knew that any investigation with the potential for shedding new light on the JFK assassination would cause more than a few ripples.
What, however, was worth something, he reminded himself as he watched a group of six teenage goths, dressed head to toe in black, stroll across the Sixteenth Street Mall’s shuttle-bus lanes toward the Paramount, giggling and whispering obscenities, was that the informant had told him that if he wanted to strike pay dirt on the Ducane killing, he should spend more time looking at Rollie Ornasetti and less time jamming up Mario Satoni. Uncertain how the informant knew he’d been leaning on Satoni, he’d asked the man, “Why Ornasetti?” The informant’s response had been, “Because way back when, Ducane cost Ornasetti a long stretch of money.” It was that response that suddenly had him worried.
Before he could ask any more questions, the man had said, “Don’t ask me no more, ’cause I don’t know no more, and if I did, it wouldn’t be worth the money. Always preferred livin’ to dyin’.”
Deciding that he’d gotten what he’d come for, Else had given the man five $100 bills and watched him disappear into what had grown to a throng of more than two dozen mall-walking goths.
Glancing at his watch and realizing that it was almost midnight, he decided he might as well cruise by Ornasetti’s townhouse and office complex in Denver’s trendy LoDo district and familiarize himself with its stakeout and take down possibilities. As he headed to where he’d parked his car, he knew he’d now be able to better point his efforts in the right direction.
CJ and Gus Cavalaris sat eye to eye across the table from one another, drinking coffee in a cramped booth near the front door of Ted’s Place. Both men were well aware that any chance they might have of putting a face on CJ’s shooter was being washed away by the rain. There had been crime-scene evidence for Cavalaris or the Larimer County sheriff to inspect: two bullet holes in the Bel Air’s trunk lid, two slugs from a .38 Magnum, the Bel Air’s shattered front headlight, a maze of footprints—CJ’s, the shooter’s, and Cavalaris’s—an idling road grader, and the homing device CJ had found. But that didn’t tell them who CJ’s would-be assassin had been.
Even though a half-dozen people had run up against the barricade on Highway 14 and had reported the fallen-tree hazard with a 911 call before turning around to head back down the canyon, none had reported seeing anything else out of the ordinary. Even so, CJ understood very well that his shooter had to be knowledgeable enough about heavy equipment to have maneuvered a fallen tree across the highway, especially in the poor weather conditions. Knowing that fact but unable to capitalize on it, the sheriff had wrapped up his preliminary investigation of the crime scene with a promise to come back in the morning at first light, but neither CJ nor Cavalaris was expecting much to come of that visit.
“You w-w-want another hit of coffee?” Cavalaris asked, glancing down at the notes he’d jotted into a waterlogged notebook.
“Nope. I’m done,” said CJ, still trying to make sense of the evening’s events.
“Hope you’re also done with s-s-sticking your n-n-nose into police business.” Cavalaris slipped a pen out of his shirt pocket and tapped it on the crinkled page of his notebook. Surprising CJ, he said, “S-s-so this is what we’ve got. A woman named Sheila Lucerne, who you claim very likely knows why D-d-ducane died, and m-m-maybe even more. A pr-pr-professional killer who probably murdered McPherson, and from the looks of it has now decided to latch on to you, and one otherwise small-time mafia don named Rollie Ornasetti who’s been in over his head in this th-th-thing from the beginning. Have I covered everything?”
Puzzled as to why Cavalaris had suddenly opened up to him, CJ nodded and said, “Yeah.”
“Y-y-you look confused, Floyd.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
CJ shrugged. “Never had a cop—one who was thinking right, at least—include me in their strategizing.”
Cavalaris smiled. “And you wouldn’t n-n-now if it weren’t for a couple of real p-p-pertinent things.”
“Which are?”
“First off, the McPherson killing took place on my b-b-beat. It’s my case, and I take all my cases personally. Besides, there’s a l-l-lot more to the Ducane and McPherson killings than a couple of onetime miners buying the farm. This thing’s gonna turn out to be a whole universe bigger than y-y-you and m-m-me, Floyd.”
“And your second reason?”
The muscles in Cavalaris’s fac
e tightened. “You ever been made fun of, Floyd?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“How’d you d-d-deal with it?”
“Shrugged it off, for the most part.”
“G-g-good answer, because that’s just what I’ve been d-d-doing all my life. Easy enough of course to f-f-figure out why.” Cavalaris looked directly into CJ’s eyes. “Any idea what it took for me to make police lieutenant?”
“A lot of hard work, no doubt.”
“I wish.” Cavalaris looked away and stared into space. “H-h-hard work was only a tiny fraction of the d-d-drill. I had to pass a psychological p-p-profile and reasoning test, not just once or twice but a h-h-half-dozen times. And reading comprehension and simulated situation tests out the g-g-gazoo just to prove that I wouldn’t screw up a case and let some mass murderer with a bloody ax in his hand and a dead man at his feet walk because the ax man’s lawyer claimed his client couldn’t understand what I was s-s-saying when I read him his rights.”
“You obviously jumped through the hoops.”
Cavalaris nodded and smiled. “I d-d-did just that. Mostly with the help of a police academy classmate of mine who happened to understand the problem of r-r-running a race where the other guy’s got half a football field head start. Problem is, all that hoop jumping has t-t-taken its toll on me. So in between jumps, I’ve m-m-made myself a few promises. One of those promises has been to never help the a-a-arrogant self-absorbed assholes I know lack the c-c-capacity to walk a mile in another man’s shoes. And in my world that includes l-l-lots of folks with shiny b-b-badges and fancy titles.”
CJ took a long, slow sip of coffee. “Agent Else, for instance?”
Cavalaris simply nodded.
“I understand your take, Lieutenant, and believe me, I know what it’s like to be on the outside looking in. But if you’re looking for somebody outside that boys-in-blue club you belong to to help you out, why pick me?”