First of State

by Robert Greer

  “Awful nice brother,” CJ said, watching from the Victorian’s porch as the man slipped into a late-model Cadillac DeVille.

  “That’s what I thought the first time around, too,” Ike said, shaking his head. “That was before I found out that our polite goateed Mr. Caesaro had just finished servin’ eight years in Canon City for second-degree murder. Seems he took the business end of a shovel to a friend’s head when he found the man in bed with his common-law wife. Now, I ain’t judgin’, mind you. The bottom line here is whether the case can pay. But murder trumps arson, any way you slice it.” Closing the door, Ike found himself chuckling. “You gotta learn to mine for the diamonds in this business, CJ. They tend to come in rough-cut a lot of times, but that’s what keeps the doors open.”

  When CJ flashed Ike a look that said, I’m not certain I can, Ike smiled knowingly. “No problem bein’ a little uncertain at first. You’ll learn.” And for the next five days, with Ike showing him the ropes, that was exactly what CJ did.

  Following more than a week of Ike’s instruction, CJ sat relaxed in Nobby’s, a Welton Street restaurant, bar, and pool hall in Denver’s historically black Five Points community, nursing a beer and winding down from the week. Across the room he could see that Leander Moultry, longtime Five Points pool shark and hustler, was in what Ike would have described as a cesspool of trouble again.

  This time Leander’s troubles weren’t money trouble, or woman trouble, or gambling trouble, or even trouble with the law. It was easy enough to see that. This time Leander had beaten flashy-dressing, slow-thinking Billy Larkin at five straight games of eight ball and taken him for a thousand dollars; then, gloatingly squeezing his testicles in typical 1971, in-your-face, baddest-brother-in-the-‘hood fashion, he’d called Billy a jelly-headed, sissified, tit-sucking mamma’s boy. Leander was in trouble, all right. Trouble enough to threaten the five-foot-six, bird-faced little pool hustler’s life.

  As Leander stuffed the final game’s winnings, two crumpled, damp hundred-dollar bills, into his shirt pocket, Billy said, rumbling anger rising in his voice, “Don’t cup your nuts at me, you slimy throwback. Loosen your grip on ’em or I’ll give you a real reason to hug your jewels.” Cocking his arm, Billy raised the fat end of his pool cue above his head as his girlfriend, Ray Lynn Suggs, and his half-sister, Coletta Newby, rushed across the stale-smelling barroom, pool hall, and greasy spoon toward him.

  “Billy, no!” Ray Lynn shouted, grabbing Billy’s arm too late to stop the cue’s descent. When the hardwood stick slammed against the edge of the pool table and snapped, its lower half skittered across the floor toward a crowd of a dozen onlookers who were waiting to see Billy and Leander tangle.

  Trapped between the pool table and a grease-stained cinderblock wall, Leander crouched, prepared to spring at the much larger Billy. Billy cocked the upper half of the cue, ready for a second swing, as Ray Lynn and Coletta both screamed. A split second later Billy’s broken half of the pool cue came to a loud, abrupt halt when it slammed into the outstretched lower half that CJ had retrieved from the floor.

  “You heard the lady, Billy. Drop the cue.” CJ’s eyes darted back and forth between Billy and Leander, men he’d known since kindergarten. Watching Billy cock his arm again, CJ shook his head in protest. “I wouldn’t do it, Billy.”

  “Ain’t your fight, CJ,” Billy grumbled, contemplating whether or not to take on the six-foot-three, 225-pound CJ.

  “Listen to CJ,” Coletta yelled at Billy.

  Billy thought for a moment, pondering his next move. He’d won eighteen thousand dollars three days earlier playing Policy, the lottery game that most black folks in Five Points simply called “the numbers.” It was the most he’d ever won playing Policy, and in his view Leander had just stolen a thousand dollars of those winnings from him. War hero or not, to his way of thinking CJ Floyd had no damn right to interfere.

  Ignoring CJ’s plea, Billy took another powerful cut at Leander’s head. In the time it took Leander to dodge the blow and Billy to take aim again, CJ tackled Billy at the knees, sending him crashing shoulder-first onto the floor. Seconds later CJ and Nobby Pittman, the bar and pool hall’s owner, were on top of Billy, struggling to pin him to the floor.

  “You ain’t gonna get my liquor license lifted for tryin’ to kill somebody in my place,” barked Pittman, a onetime semipro football player with skin so dark it seemed to have a sheen. “Hell, no!”

  “That little weasel was cheatin’,” Billy shouted, continuing to thrash.

  “You lost!” Pittman shouted. “Be glad you didn’t lose your whole damn wad.”

  “I’ll kill that little rodent,” mumbled Billy, arching his neck and struggling to see exactly where Leander was.

  “Leander’s gone,” said Ray Lynn, who was now down on one knee, stroking Billy’s head. “As soon as you hit the floor, he ran out the door.”

  “Gone with my money,” Billy wheezed, spent from grappling with Nobby and CJ.

  “There’s more where that came from, baby. You’re still fat in the wallet,” Ray Lynn said with a grin.

  Ignoring Ray Lynn, Billy gasped for air. “I’ll kill that MF.”

  “Let him up, mister, please!” Ray Lynn begged CJ.

  “Yeah, you and Nobby get the hell off him!” Coletta chimed in.

  “You gonna behave?” CJ asked, shifting most of his weight off Billy and onto one knee.

  When Billy didn’t answer, Nobby kneed him in the ribs.

  “Yeah.” Billy let out a painful grunt as both men stood.

  For the next half minute, Billy lay motionless with Ray Lynn stroking his head and Coletta despondently shaking hers. Finally struggling to his knees, rubbing his ribs, and dusting himself off, Billy shot Nobby and CJ a defiant, spiteful look. “All that goes around comes around,” he said, glancing toward the pool hall’s exit. “I’ll get even with that little rodent, Leander, sooner or later in spite of the two of you. Come on, Ray Lynn, let’s get the hell outa here.” Locking his arm in his girlfriend’s and still unsteady on his feet, Billy wobbled across the room, through the front door, and out into the star-filled Denver night as Coletta, staring hatefully back at CJ and Nobby, brought up the rear.

  The next morning, after having slept reasonably well for a change, CJ was in the kitchen of his small three-room apartment, which took up most of the second floor of the old Victorian he’d been raised in, sifting through a coffee can full of cat’s-eye marbles and looking for his favorite eighty-year-old steelie shooter that he’d recently realized he might have mistakenly dropped into the can two years earlier, just before leaving for his first tour. Glancing toward his sparsely furnished living room, which minus the dozens of posters that had adorned the room’s walls during his teenage years, was now decorated with only a few Indian pots, a Navajo rug, and a couple of license plates and furnished simply with a couch and a reading lamp, he extracted several marbles, stared at them, and found himself thinking about Wiley Ames.

  During the week he’d spent trying to get a handle on the ins and outs of the bail bonding business, he’d barely thought of Ames; now, seemingly out of nowhere, the image of the murdered war veteran had drifted back up along the edges of his thoughts. He wasn’t certain why, especially since Ike, after working his way through his endless list of contacts, hadn’t been able to dig up much on what the Denver press had labeled the GI Joe’s murders.

  Most of what Ike had been able to find out had come from his longtime friend Vernon Lowe, a bug-eyed, flashy-dressing slip of a black man who for years had been the city morgue’s chief morgue attendant. According to Vernon, Ames and Quan Lee Chin had each been killed by a single shot with a .44 Auto Magnum pistol.

  Chin, per the record-sniffing Vernon, was a Princeton grad, class of 1968, and a concert cellist. By Vernon’s account, Chin had bled to death quickly and Ames had died more slowly, ultimately succumbing to irreversible shock and multiple organ system failure. Vernon had been able to find out that Ames’s only next of kin was
a niece who lived in eastern Colorado on a small ranch outside the town of Sterling. But it was Ames’s boss, Harry Steed, and not the niece who’d made the arrangements for his funeral. A service that CJ, acquiescing to advice from Ike, had not attended.

  Chin had had no one to walk him up the stairs. No girlfriend, no brothers or sisters, no grieving parents, and as far as Ike had been able to tell, no friends in general. He’d left the world with a Princeton education, seven hundred dollars in his pocket, a return plane ticket to New Jersey, and, according to a Denver Post report, a cello. Sensing that the cops, the coroner, and the DA’s office were keeping things concerning the GI Joe’s murders a little close to the vest, Ike had called in a marker from a contact of his in the fencing and stolen-goods community who’d told him that Ames had been busted more than once for fencing stolen goods.

  “Not very much to go on,” Ike had said when he’d first shared the information he’d gathered with CJ. Realizing that it was a lot more info than any homicide cop assigned to the case would have given him, CJ had thanked Ike and, not until that very moment, moved on.

  Digging a hand back into his can of marbles, he’d for the moment put all thoughts of Wiley Ames aside when the thud of footsteps on the grated metal fire-escape landing outside his kitchen door sent him, coffee can in hand, to his back door.

  “You in there, CJ?” Ike called from the landing.

  “Yeah, the door’s unlocked.”

  Ike, who’d sealed off the inside stairway access to the business offices downstairs years earlier, stepped into the apartment, shaking his head. “Got some news for you. Ain’t pleasant, but I thought you’d wanna know.”

  “Shoot,” said CJ, taking in the painful look on his uncle’s face.

  “Couple’a hours ago the cops found Billy Larkin sprawled out dead as a dewdrop in the middle of an alley over in Five Points. His head was split open like a ripe summer melon. The cops told his mamma and that half-sister of his, Coletta, that it mighta been a meat cleaver that brought Billy to his end. Marguerite’s downstairs cryin’ her eyes out right this minute.”

  “Damn.” CJ dropped the marbles in his hand back into the coffee can and draped an arm supportively over his uncle’s shoulders, well aware that Billy Larkin’s mother, Marguerite, and Ike had enjoyed an on-again, off-again romance that spanned nearly twenty years. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “You can find out who killed Billy.” Ike’s words were direct and unrehearsed.

  “What?”

  “Find out who killed the boy, CJ. Think of it as sort of a trial by fire. I’ve gotten too damn slow to handle somethin’ like this on my own, and Marguerite would never forgive me if I tried and failed.”

  CJ eyed his uncle with dismay. “I wouldn’t know where to start. Rounding up bond skippers, well, that’s one thing. But a murderer? That’s pretty far up the food chain for me at this stage, don’t you think?”

  Ike stared at CJ with an earnestness CJ hadn’t seen in years. “You been all gung-ho to find out who killed that Wiley Ames. How’s this any different? And you just spent two years trackin’ down them Vietcongs, didn’t you? And they were busy shootin’ at you. Just think of runnin’ down Billy’s killer as pretty much the same kinda thing.”

  CJ returned Ike’s stare. He’d never, to the best of his recollection, even once disappointed the man. Not even during his teenage years, when Ike’s drinking had been at its zenith. Moreover, he’d never been able to say no to a man who against all odds had built a successful business and carved out a life for himself and his nephew on Denver’s otherwise all-white Bail Bondsman’s Row.

  “I’ll help you,” said Ike, noting the confused, tentative look on CJ’s face. “I may not be able to wrestle in the mud with your new-age kinda roughnecks, but when it comes to logistics, sortin’ things through, and finessin’ the cops, I can still hold my own.”

  CJ rolled his tongue nervously around his cheek, recalling how Ike had once chased bond skippers across most of the Rocky Mountain West, occasionally hogtying the worst offenders to the rails of his pickup for delivery to city and county jails. “Why not let the cops handle it, Unc?”

  Ike glanced down toward the floor below, where he knew Marguerite Larkin was waiting, and shook his head. “First off, there’s Marguerite. I got a duty to find out what happened to her only child. Second, in case you forgot, this here’s still America. Ain’t no white man with a badge or no status quo maintainin’ DA clutchin’ a briefcase really gonna care too much about findin’ out who split some Five Points wannabe gangster’s black-ass head half open. ’Case you missed it, CJ, this ain’t Vietnam. You back home now, and back here things are pretty much the same way you left ’em.”

  Suddenly CJ found himself thinking about his friend Henry Bales and the buddies they’d left behind on the battlefields of Vietnam, from the country-assed white boys to slick-talking Harlem brothers. All of them were friends of his who would never have the chance to straighten out anything. Gritting his teeth, he walked over to a dusty tobacco tin that sat on the table in the kitchen. He opened the tin, glanced down at the cellophane-wrapped Purple Heart and Navy Cross inside, and stared at the medals for a good long while before he snapped the lid shut, looked up at Ike, and asked, “Where do I start?”

  Chapter 6

  Marguerite Larkin was an aging, fair-skinned, large-boned, onetime knockout of a black woman with thinning, too-often-dyed reddish-brown hair. Her face was puffy and her eyes were bloodshot from a night and morning of crying, and the cup of coffee she’d been nursing for over an hour in Ike’s office had turned cold by the time she’d once again told Ike and the recently arrived CJ how the police had found her baby, Billy. How she’d thrown up when she’d been forced to identify his body, and how she’d wandered Five Points aimlessly for hours afterward until Coletta Newby had spotted her sitting at the bus stop across from Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen, a Five Points soul-food eatery, and taken her home.

  Setting her coffee cup aside and snorting back mucus, she looked up at Ike, her eyes laden with sorrow. “Leander Moultry’s the one who killed my Billy. Coletta’s certain of it.” She thumped the top edge of her coffee cup with a middle finger for emphasis. “Leander and Billy had a fight over at Nobby’s place last evening. Coletta told me the whole story. After that fight, Leander came after my Billy and killed him. That’s what happened. I know it in my bones.”

  “Maybe not,” CJ said, surprising not only Marguerite but Ike as well. “I was there at Nobby’s when it all happened,” he added, watching his uncle struggle to separate a stack of coffee filters from one another with uncooperative, arthritic fingers. “There really wasn’t a fight. What happened was that Billy tried to bean Leander with a pool cue after he lost a thousand bucks to him at eight ball. Claimed Leander had been cheating.”

  “Then the little worm probably was,” Marguerite shot back.

  Winning his battle with the filters, Ike slipped a new, coffee-filled filter into the brew bin of his coffee maker. “A thousand dollars! Where the hell’d Billy get that kinda money?”

  Marguerite looked surprised. “I thought you knew, Ike. Last week Billy got lucky at Policy. He hit the numbers for eighteen thousand. It’s been all over Five Points this whole week.”

  “Did the cops find any of the money on Billy?” asked CJ, surprised at how quickly and cop-like he’d asked the question.

  “No,” Marguerite said, choking back tears. “His wallet was missing, and, according to Coletta, so were his watch and glasses. Nothing on him but his driver’s license. Don’t matter one way or the other, really. Leander killed him. He was out there looking for revenge.”

  “And Coletta was the first one the cops called after they ID’d Billy?” asked Ike.

  “Yes. I told you that already.”

  “Why’d they call her?” CJ asked, looking puzzled.

  “’Cause they couldn’t get in touch with me, I guess. And she is kin. She and Lannie Watkins are the ones identified Billy’s body
.”

  “I see,” said CJ, picturing Lannie Watkins, Coletta’s itinerant, saxophone-playing boyfriend, in his head.

  “What about that girlfriend of Billy’s, Ray Lynn? Has she talked to the cops?” asked Ike.

  “I don’t know. But I do know this. She and Billy were planning on getting married or at least she said they were.” Marguerite broke into a series of false starts, then began to cry. Choking back tears, she said, “Ray Lynn wouldn’t have been my choice for Billy, but then you never know.”

  Ike shot CJ a look that said, Check out the girlfriend, just as the coffee began gurgling its way into the pot behind him. Stepping over to Marguerite, he squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “How ’bout a refill to warm you up before I take you back home?”

  “Okay,” Marguerite said absentmindedly. “And you promise you’ll find out who killed my Billy?” she asked, blotting back a new rush of tears with a tissue.

  “We sure will,” said Ike, eyeing CJ as if to say, Won’t we? as several final orphaned gurgles erupted from the coffee maker.

  Rosie’s Garage, once a run-down eyesore of a gas station at the corner of Twenty-sixth and Welton Streets, was now a Five Points government-Enterprise-Zone business success story—and an automotive-repair-shop jewel complete with spotless concrete drives, three service islands sporting six late-1940s-vintage pumps, and a garage with three service bays. The tall, stately gas pumps with their crowning white enamel globes had in the space of only a few years become Denver landmarks, and whenever the city pols wanted to showcase black community business successes, they never failed to single out Rosie’s, which was also a place where Five Points gossip often got its first legs.

  Rosie Weeks was counting out change from a twenty to a customer at the garage’s front-office cash register when CJ walked in. Finishing the transaction the way he always did, Rosie said, “Come see us again, now, hear?” When he looked up and saw CJ, he smiled. They’d long since patched up their differences, even had dinner at Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen twice since their earlier argument. “CJ, my man, hear you’ve been busy playin’ referee,” Rosie said with a wink.