The Mongoose Deception

by Robert Greer

  As CJ followed a winding gravel road into the park past two small lakes and dozens of campsites, looking for a third, larger lake where Sheila Lucerne had said she’d meet him, he had the sense that he was finally closing in on a very large truth. A truth he wasn’t certain he really wanted to know.

  Squinting into the sun, he found himself thinking about the Vietnam War, truth, and a farm boy from Pennsylvania he’d served with named Gerald Shadden. Shadden had, like him, babysat a .50-caliber machine gun on the aft of a 125-foot patrol boat. It was 1972, and back in the United States bad politics and failed policies had supplanted news about the actual grunt work of war. Two of CJ and Shadden’s 42nd River Patrol Group’s 125-footers had been assigned the task of ferrying CIA operatives up and down the Mekong River delta so that they could carry out covert hit-and-run missions that included taking out U.S. allies and duly elected South Vietnamese officials who’d been fingered as potential Vietcong sympathizers.

  Shadden, who’d come to know some of the South Vietnamese officials, thought helping the CIA eliminate one’s own allies was idiotic, and he made a written point of that fact, not only to his own boat’s captain but to the patrol group’s commander. Three days later, when Shadden’s patrol boat returned from a hastily ordered search-and-rescue mission to supposedly pull a downed F-111 pilot out of the drink—a task normally assigned to the U.S. Coast Guard boats—Shadden was dead. Word soon circulated that he’d been killed by a sniper. But everyone from newly made third-class petty officers to career four-stripers understood that Shadden had been taken out not by the enemy but by the CIA. The morale-crushing fallout after Shadden’s death generated a terse command directive that stated that in the future, and as deemed necessary, patrol-group command would have the ultimate responsibility for assigning the appropriate naval personnel and boats to search-and-rescue missions. The hidden meaning behind that communication, which soon became known to the troops as “Gerry’s Deal,” was lost on no one: Go against the grain, sailor, and we can send you out and have you shot.

  CJ, therefore, understood quite well that by delving into the murder of someone who very likely had been linked to the JFK assassination, he ran the risk of becoming Gerry Shadden’s latter-day equivalent. But for him, just as it had for Shadden, doing the right thing still mattered. Perspiring and trying not to second-guess himself, he left memories of Vietnam and Gerald Shadden behind as he shaded his eyes and spotted the tree-lined shore where he was to meet Sheila Lucerne.

  Uncertain whether he was walking into a setup like the one he’d experienced in Poudre Canyon, he popped the Bel Air’s glove compartment and checked for his .44. “Okay,” he muttered, eyeing the gun butt and bumping along the rocky lakeshore until he spotted the white Chevy station wagon that Sheila Lucerne had told him she’d be driving. He pulled the Bel Air to a stop twenty yards from the station wagon, slipped the .44 under his belt, and got out. Moments later he heard a thud a few yards away. He looked toward where the noise had come from and spotted a baseball-sized rock. Twenty feet beyond the rock, Sheila and another woman sat at a picnic table that was all but obscured from view by two massive Colorado blue spruce trees.

  When Sheila waved for him to join them, he slammed the Bel Air’s door and headed for the picnic table. With his Stetson tipped forward to shade his eyes, he made the walk slowly, finally stopping a few feet from the table. The sun’s unflattering glare made Sheila Lucerne look less attractive than she had the previous evening, but the woman seated next to her, elderly and bent over, seemed surprisingly radiant.

  “Morning,” CJ said, standing his ground.

  “Hi,” said Sheila, looking past CJ toward the Bel Air. She scanned the terrain in every direction slowly and carefully until her eyes came back to meet CJ’s. “You weren’t followed, were you?”

  “Don’t think so.” CJ nodded at the other woman and touched the brim of his Stetson.

  “Good. And Mr. Floyd, you won’t need that gun.” Turning to Willette, she said, “Willette Ducane, CJ Floyd.”

  “My pleasure,” said CJ, reaching out and shaking Willette’s misshapen arthritic right hand.

  Willette smiled and patted the top of CJ’s hand. “Thanks for comin’.”

  Continuing to look around, Sheila said, “Willette has come all the way from New Iberia, Louisiana. She’s hoping to find out what happened to her son, Antoine.”

  “I see.” CJ’s response had a clear ring of skepticism. “Mind me asking just what after all these years prompted you to wanna do that?”

  “I, aahh …”

  “It was at my prompting, I’m afraid,” Sheila said supportively. “I sent her a newspaper clipping about them finding Antoine’s remains up at the Eisenhower Tunnel.”

  “Strange behavior for someone hiding behind a new identity, don’t you think?”

  “I felt guilty.”

  “Awful late to start showing it.”

  Willette cleared her throat. “Would you two stop? This ain’t no time for finger-pointin’, Mr. Floyd. As a matter of fact, neither one of us is certain we can even trust you. Bottom line is, we’re here talkin’ to you ’cause we got nowhere else to turn. I don’t know what made Sheila decide to send me that newspaper clippin’. Maybe she thought a mother needed to know after all these years what had happened to her son. Could be she figured that with Antoine officially dead, and decades of water under the bridge, she could finally act, if not talk, freely. Don’t really matter. What matters is what happened to Antoine. I’ve spent more than forty years tryin’ to outrun the fact that I shoulda never let Antoine get caught up in a mess that ended up costin’ him his life, tellin’ myself that I never shoulda let him leave New Iberia for Colorado, and askin’ myself why I didn’t come after him. I understand guilt, Mr. Floyd. So, even if you ain’t, I’m willin’ to give Sheila a little bit of slack.”

  “So why didn’t you come after him?” asked CJ, his tone now less accusatory.

  “I was scared. Scared to death, in fact. And believe me, fear ain’t somethin’ that comes natural to me. Let me start you at the beginnin’, and maybe you’ll understand. I’ve already told Sheila most of this. Maybe it’ll be easier the second time around. First off, Antoine wasn’t really my son. Truth is, he was my baby sister’s boy. My sweet, naive, beauty-contest-winnin’, insecure baby sister.” Willette let out a mournful sigh. “Monique wasn’t but sixteen when she had Antoine. Sixteen and thinkin’ she owned the world. She was supposed to go to LSU to become a nurse, but she got to runnin’ with the wrong crowd. A white crowd who told her that for a colored girl she was beautiful and sexy and smart. A pack of connivin’, manipulatin’ folks who unfortunately filled her full of what she’d always been wantin’ to hear. Let her know that she could cross the color line if need be.”

  “Who’d she fall in with?” CJ asked.

  Willette swallowed hard and frowned. “I doubt you’d know the name, but she fell in with Carlos Marcello and his lowlife bunch of mobster swamp rats.”

  “Oh, I know the name, all right.”

  “Then you know Marcello was Louisiana’s top crime boss at the time. Thankfully, the SOB’s long since dead.” Looking hurt, Willette said, “I suppose when you come right down to it, it was my fault Monique fell in with him. I was four years older than her, and I knew better. Especially since I’d walked almost the same damn road a few years ahead of her—listened to Marcello’s people’s bullshit, sucked down their promises to turn me into a recording star. I compromised cops and businessmen and unsuspecting politicians for Carlos Marcello and his crew. Even helped him rig elections while his henchmen were out threatening would-be voters’ lives. But unlike Monique, I was lucky enough to get out from under their pull. More importantly, I wasn’t foolish enough to get hooked on the man’s dope.”

  Willette took a deep breath and stared out toward the Rockies. “Maybe I should’ve made Monique leave Louisiana and its dirty politicians and criminals and through-and-through corruption for a place like Colorado.
But, to tell you the truth, back then I didn’t know places like this existed. Anyway, one thing led to another, and next thing I knew, Monique was not only strung out and doin’ the mob’s biddin’, she was pregnant. Fifteen, Catholic, unmarried, and pregnant by a white man. You know what it was like to have all those things goin’ against you back then, Mr. Floyd?” Before CJ could answer, Willette looked at Sheila, shook her head, and said, “Course not. Only a woman would understand. In the end it didn’t really matter. Turned out Monique wasn’t gonna give up that baby. No way—nohow. Said she’d die before she’d have an abortion or give up her child. I tried to get her to tell me who the baby’s father was, but she never would. Three weeks before Antoine was born, she disappeared. To this day I don’t know where she went. All I know is she showed up on my doorstep, lookin’ like hell, with Antoine in her arms at the end of them three weeks.

  “A few weeks later, just before midnight, a limo showed up at my house, and two white men came inside to talk to me and Monique. The driver and another man stayed in the car. The two men, who Monique obviously knew, were dressed in stingy brim hats and trench coats, and they were nice enough at first. But after they asked Monique several times to see the baby, and Monique refused each time to let ’em, things took a turn ’til finally one of ’em grabbed me in a bear hug while the other one snatched Monique by her hair. He dragged her over to the kitchen table, slammed her face down on the table, and jammed the barrel of a gun into her right ear. As I kicked and screamed, the man holding Monique took a hatchet outta his coat pocket, the kind they use down our way for choppin’ chicken necks. With Monique’s head still pressed against the table, he swung the business end of that hatchet down full force. The blade ended up buried in the tabletop, no more than an inch or so from Monique’s head, and Monique let out a scream I can still hear to this day. The man with the hatchet laughed, looked at me, and said, ‘She’s coming with us. Next time I’ll do her for real—and then the baby.’ Monique’s legs gave way, and she slumped to the floor. They ended up havin’ to drag her to the front door on her knees. A few feet from the door she looked back at me and said, ‘Stay with Antoine, Sis. No matter what.’”

  Willette’s eyes glazed over, and her voice became a wheeze. “I never saw Monique alive again. I looked all over three states for her, and off and on she wrote me sayin’ she was okay, the same way Antoine did after he came up here to Colorado, but I could never be sure the words in those letters were hers. People I knew told me they thought they’d saw her in Baton Rouge, or Macon, or Augusta—even Houston. But they were never really sure it was her, and most of ’em said whoever it was they’d seen was all skin and bones. Word circulated around the state for years that Antoine was Carlos Marcello’s Creole woman’s baby. Thought so myself—just couldn’t prove it. But when Antoine won an art contest in junior high school and a chance at a college scholarship, and one of Marcello’s men, a shriveled-up, bug-eyed little Cajun I’d known over the years, showed up at the judgin’ and bought the paintin’, I knew I was right. After that, Marcello, by way of the Cajun, became a patron of sorts—buyin’ up almost anything Antoine sketched. By the time Antoine was seventeen, the mob had him under their spell. I don’t think Antoine ever knew for sure that Marcello was his father, but I think he suspected it.” Wringing her hands, Willette let out a long, sorrowful sigh. “There, now, I’m done with it. Have you heard enough, Mr. Floyd?”

  “Some story,” said CJ.

  “And every word’s true.”

  “I’m not doubting you. Just thinking. Do you think Marcello could’ve talked Antoine into taking part in the Kennedy assassination?”

  “No question about it. He’d already turned my Sugar Sweet into a criminal. And I brought something with me that’ll cinch it.” Willette reached down and lifted the shoebox full of correspondence that Antoine had sent her between 1963 and 1972 from the picnic table’s bench seat. “Might as well have yourself a seat,” she said, placing the shoebox in the middle of the table. “It’s gonna take us a while to sort through what’s in this box.”

  The table rocked as CJ seated himself across from the two women. As Willette lifted the top off the box, she said just above a whisper, “There’s a lifetime of pain inside this shoebox, Mr. Floyd, believe me.”

  “Can you tell me what happened to Monique?” CJ asked sympathetically.

  Glassy-eyed, Willette said, “She died in 1957, when Antoine was a teenager. I’m told she OD’d. Some of her effects turned up just before Christmas that year. A watch I knew was hers. A cheap, gold-plated bracelet and a couple pairs of silver earrings. They came in a padded envelope that Antoine found by our front door.” Willette paused, fighting to regain her composure. “I shoulda gone after Monique harder than I did after they took her, or got my .44 and shot the fuckers on the spot that night. And when you come right down to it, I shoulda come up here to Colorado after Antoine. But I didn’t. I was too scared, or at least pretendin’ to be. But I’m here now, crippled, half blind, and with a foot in the grave, and come hell or high water I’m gonna find out what happened to my Antoine. I’m hopin’ you’ll help me, Mr. Floyd.”

  “I’ll try. Why don’t we have a look through your papers and chart ourselves a course?” said CJ.

  Willette took a handful of papers out of the shoebox and glanced over at Sheila. “You might as well tell Mr. Floyd the whole nine yards about you and Antoine, same as you told it to me. And don’t hold nothin’ back, sweetie. We’re dealin’ with the last chance I got of takin’ a little piece of my life back and keepin’ my sanity.” Looking back at CJ, she said, “Anything else you wanna know, Mr. Floyd?”

  “Not right now, and by the way, I prefer CJ.”

  “CJ it is, then,” Willette said, forcing a smile as she dug deeper into the shoebox.

  Thirty minutes later, after sifting through close to half the papers in the shoebox and listening to Sheila Lucerne’s rueful tale, CJ understood why Sheila had staged her death. Friends of Antoine’s, she told him—people she’d known only casually—had come to her back in 1972 and told her that if she didn’t disappear, they’d kill her. With tears in her eyes, she admitted that she’d known that Antoine was mob-connected, that his mining job at the Eisenhower Tunnel was pretty much pancake makeup and fluff, and that his income was really extorted from a well-known Denver mobster. CJ surprised both women when, before Sheila had a chance to mention the mobster’s name, he said, “Rollie Ornasetti.”

  “Yeah,” said Sheila. “Want me to give you a thumbnail sketch of the man?”

  “No need,” said CJ. “I’ve already got a full-blown picture.”

  It was almost noon when they began sorting through the rest of the papers in the shoebox. A few minutes into the task, CJ mentioned that he’d been told that in early 1972 Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs had tried to distance himself from the findings of the Warren Commission’s report on the JFK assassination. He glanced at Willette and asked, “Think that could’ve had anything to do with Antoine’s disappearance?”

  Willette shrugged. “Don’t know, but Sheila and I were just talking about that yesterday. Why?”

  “Because in October of ’72, Boggs died in a mysterious plane crash in Alaska.”

  Sheila said, “First the congressman died, and Antoine got all jumpy. Then Antoine disappeared, and then I was told to disappear or be killed. Who the heck’s pulling the strings here, CJ?”

  “Who knows? Mobsters, the CIA, maybe even a pack of wacko Cuban dissidents. At one time or another, every one of those groups has been brought up as the power behind the Kennedy assassination. One thing for sure,” CJ said, smiling, “we know it wasn’t Oswald. And whoever they were, or are, they also may have eliminated Rollie Ornasetti last night.”

  “How’s that?” Willette asked, looking puzzled.

  “This morning Ornasetti turned up missing.”

  “So whoever killed Antoine, and maybe even JFK, is still at it?” Sheila asked.

  “Real likely. Did Ant
oine have any friends, mobster or otherwise, that he was particularly tight with?”

  “Not really.”

  “Does the name Cornelius McPherson ring a bell?”

  “Yeah. He’s that miner who got killed.”

  CJ stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Did Antoine know Carl Watson?”

  “Of course not.”

  Looking up from a collated stack of papers, CJ said, “Well, I think Watson might’ve known him. I talked to your old boyfriend yesterday evening, and he mentioned to me that you and Antoine could’ve passed for brother and sister, you looked so much alike.”

  “Why would he have said that?”

  “He saw a photo of Antoine once at your house.”

  Sheila looked perplexed. “Possible, but unlikely. Antoine hated having his photograph taken. And I don’t remember having any around the house.”

  “Strange. Looks like I may have to check back in with our Mr. Watson.”

  “When you do, don’t you dare tell him where I am,” said Sheila.

  “I won’t,” said CJ, thumbing Antoine’s papers and spreading them out on the table. “Here’s the top seven,” he said, looking at Willette for guidance. “At least from what you’ve said. Let’s try to make sense out of what we’ve got here and decide which way to go.”

  “You can discard the two in the middle and the two at the ends,” said Willette. CJ teased four sheets out, nudged them aside, and looked intently at the remaining three sheets. The first sheet was filled with a handwritten description of a dark-haired man Antoine had met in Chicago. “When did Antoine write this?” CJ asked, handing the sheet of paper to Willette.

  “The day of the assassination or the day after. I’m pretty sure.”

  CJ read the page several times, paying particular attention to Antoine’s description of the man’s hat and strange-looking shoes and his comment that the man had been wearing sunglasses. But it was a seeming afterthought, the words low post and high post, near the bottom of the page, that garnered most of CJ’s attention. Low post—benign words when you were referring to a player’s position on the basketball court, CJ thought, but more evocative when used in reference to warfare. During his years in Vietnam, the four words had had but one meaning: they’d always been used to refer to the position of a sniper. Suddenly he had a sense that he was looking at a piece of an assassination trial run. He had no idea who would have been assigned those low-post or high-post positions—Antoine, the dark-haired man, or someone else entirely—but he had the feeling that Antoine Ducane was clearly describing a shooter’s role in the JFK assassination.