First of State

by Robert Greer

  “No question about it now. It’s gonna snow,” he said, stepping out onto the fire-escape landing.

  “You might be right,” CJ said, eyeing the sky and realizing that since Petey’s arrival the temperature outside had dropped a good ten degrees.

  “You can buy me a beer next time I see you if I am,” said Petey, heading down the stairs.

  “I’ll do that.” CJ scanned the darkening sky, thinking the odds were pretty high that he’d soon owe Petey Greene a beer.

  By the time CJ had showered and gone downstairs to learn from Ike that he’d be the one sticking around the office to “cover the floor,” a task that amounted to sitting around and twiddling his thumbs waiting for business, he’d already had his daily dose of head-banging with Nordeen Mapson, the inefficient, next-to-worthless part-time secretary whom Ike had kept on the payroll for years because her long-deceased father had been Ike’s best friend. When Nordeen got up to leave at eleven thirty, thirty minutes early, claiming that she needed to meet a man about a roofing problem at her house, CJ complained bitterly to Ike.

  Ike answered, “You find somebody better, bring ’em the hell in for me to look at. Just remember, though, I ain’t payin’ anybody no more than what I pay Nordeen right now.”

  “And we’re getting next to nothing for that, Unc. Nordeen’s worthless.”

  “She knows how things around here work. Counts for somethin’,” Ike said from the seat behind his desk.

  “And she loses things, never shows up on time, leaves early, and always has a spit-in-your-face attitude. Yesterday I asked her for a file I needed on the spot, and it took her thirty minutes to find it.”

  “Like I said, find me someone better and bring ’em on in.”

  “I will,” CJ said sharply. “And maybe then we can update a few other things around here.” The instant the words left his mouth, he knew he’d said the wrong thing.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Thinking, In for a penny—in for a pound, CJ said, “We could use a filing system that works, Unc, and maybe even a dictating and transcription system, and it would be nice to get one of those IBM Selectric typewriters like Herman Currothers has.”

  Ike detested Herman Currothers, a chubby, bug-eyed weasel of a man who owned Triple A Bonding Services three doors up Delaware Street. Currothers was a disagreeable tightwad who openly disliked just about everyone, and who made no bones about his distrust of minorities, gays, and educated snobs, so saying they needed the same kind of office equipment as Herman Currothers was tantamount to throwing gasoline on a fire.

  “I wouldn’t use nothin’ that redneck asshole has,” Ike said, fuming. “You listen here, Calvin Floyd. The name on the sign above the front door of this buildin’ reads, ‘Floyds Bail Bonds.’ Means I own the joint, lock, stock, and barrel, and that I get to run it my way. I ain’t so arthritic or so old I can’t think. The buildin’ you live in is mine, the clients you service are mine, and most important, this business here belongs to me. You get to wantin’ it any other way, I’m afraid you’ll have to strike out on your own, son.”

  “I didn’t mean …”

  “Don’t matter what you meant. I been feelin’ your uneasiness about the way I run things around here for a good long while. The air needed clearin’, and now it is.”

  The room fell silent until the only noticeable sound was the ticking of the mantel clock that sat on the hundred-year-old barrister’s bookcase to the right of Ike’s desk. That silence would surely have lingered if Marguerite Larkin hadn’t stepped through Ike’s partially open office door to ask, “Ike, sugar, you ready to go to lunch?” When Ike cocked an irritated eyebrow, she said, “Excuse me,” and stepped back out into the hallway.

  “I’ll be back around one-thirty,” Ike said, rising out of his chair and grimacing from the ever-present arthritic pain. Suppressing one of his increasingly frequent gear-grinding coughs, he headed for the door.

  With his chest feeling tight, suddenly tongue-tied, CJ simply nodded. He’d seen his uncle’s bitter stubbornness surface before, but Ike usually reserved such flashes, which could sometimes escalate into flat-out anger, for the handful of dirty cops, corrupt judges, and mindless repeat offenders he couldn’t stomach.

  Feeling guilty as he watched Ike and Marguerite walk away, CJ had the sense that he’d be mending fences for at least the rest of the week.

  Chapter 12

  Marguerite Larkin’s voice was filled with determination. “You need to let loose of your old-timey ways, Ike Floyd, before they kill you. Everybody from Five Points to Shreveport knows Nordeen Mapson’s next to worthless. You’re the only one on the planet who’d let her keep hangin’ around collectin’ a check. Sure, her daddy was one of your best friends, but he’s dead and gone now, baby. You can’t carry his lazy offspring forever.” Marguerite dusted off her hands, a sign that let Ike know she wasn’t finished, and glanced around at the lunch crowd packing Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen, nodding at several people she knew. Lowering her voice, she said, “CJ’s right. You need to upgrade at the office, and that upgrade means sayin’ goodbye to Nordeen.”

  Ike, who’d barely looked up from his food since Mavis Sundee had brought him the luncheon special, a fried catfish plate with two sides of coleslaw, butter beans, sourdough biscuits and honey, and lemonade, picked up a napkin and wiped his hands. “I don’t particularly like change, Marguerite.”

  “You’re tellin’ me?” Marguerite forced a smile. She’d stuck with Ike through his days of heavy, lost-world drinking, then guided him through years of jumping on and off the wagon. She’d suffered with him as arthritis had gradually tightened its grip on him, slowing his gait, sometimes breaking his spirit, and finally bending him over. She’d spent more than twenty-five years loving the man who’d convinced her when she’d been selling herself to men for fifteen dollars a pop that she had a brain that was the clear equal of her statuesque beauty and that she couldn’t forever wallow in self-pity over the fact that she’d been abused and sexually molested as a child.

  Ike had been the one who’d urged her to go to school. The one who’d been there on his feet, yelling and clapping, when she’d received her Denver Business College associate degree, and the one who’d years earlier given her the money to start a bookkeeping business that now employed four people and did the lion’s share of the books for nearly every business in Five Points. Ike had been there to encourage her when she had been afraid to expand, and he’d been with her every step of the heartbreaking way when her only child, Billy, had been murdered. There weren’t many people in the world who could tell Ike Floyd, as she liked to put it, that his shit was raggedy. Marguerite Larkin was one of them.

  Setting aside his napkin, Ike suppressed a sigh. “CJ ain’t no businessman, Marguerite. What the hell’s he know about upgradin’? If I wasn’t around, the boy’d end up givin’ half his services away. Besides, why should I spend money upgradin’ when any minute CJ could be out the door? If he had it his way, he’d be operatin’ one of them antique stores down on South Broadway peddlin’ license plates, tobacco tins, and spurs.”

  “But he’s not. He’s there coverin’ your sorry, close-to-broken-down behind every day.” She followed this remark with a smile and a quick wink. “Just like me.”

  Her smile seemed to soften Ike. Stabbing a final silver-dollar-sized piece of catfish with his fork, he asked, “You willin’ to help teach CJ the business side of things? The money side, I mean?”

  “Sure. But first you gotta promise me you’ll buy some new equipment and part ways with Nordeen.”

  “The girl’s got nowhere to go.”

  “Neither did I when you met me, in case you don’t remember. She’ll find work. And Ike, you’re gonna have to let CJ help with hirin’ a replacement and stop bein’ a one-man show.”

  Ike took a lengthy drink of lemonade, eyed the consummate love of his life, and muttered, “Change. I hate it.”

  Extending her right arm circus-barker s
tyle and sweeping it around in a 180-degree arc, Marguerite said, “Everybody in here knows that. But change is somethin’ can’t nobody stop. Not even you, Ike Floyd.”

  Deciding he’d hung around the office long enough without the slightest whiff of any business, CJ walked outside to wash the Bel Air. The day’s earlier clouds had given way to a partly sunny, crisp, sixty-degree afternoon. His clash with Ike still had him upset, and he hoped washing the car would help ease the tension he was feeling.

  When Ike pulled into the driveway in the ’71 Olds 442 Cutlass Supreme he always tooled Marguerite around in, CJ wasn’t certain whether to greet them, continue getting out the hose, or head back inside.

  “Any business come around while I was gone?” Ike called out, pulling the Cutlass to a stop and swinging the door open.

  “Nope,” said CJ. He watched Ike struggle to get out of the Olds, delighted that Ike was at least speaking to him again.

  Ike’s shrapnel-filled arthritic right knee gave way just as he reached the front of the Cutlass, and he reached out and grabbed the hood ornament for support as Marguerite and CJ came running. “Fuckin’ Korea,” Ike muttered as CJ looped an arm under his shoulder and steadied him. “Never shoulda been there,” he grumbled. His war protest over, he waved off CJ and Marguerite and limped toward the garage.

  “Whatta you need from the garage, Unc? I can get it,” said CJ, taking in the look of determination on Ike’s face.

  “No, you can’t. You don’t know where the hell to look.”

  CJ glanced at Marguerite for some kind of explanation, but she shrugged and followed Ike through the open double doors of the garage.

  Ike flipped on the garage’s single hanging, bug-splattered, hundred-watt bulb, grunted as if to say I’m all right now, and hobbled toward a cabinet on the back wall. Gritting back his pain, he swung the cabinet door open and began rummaging around inside. “Know it’s here somewhere,” he said, digging through shelves of clutter. “Yeah, yeah. Here it is. It’s a picture of me and your mom when we were kids.” He teased a dust-covered eight-by-ten, sepia-toned photo in a cheap wooden frame from between the old Reader’s Digest condensed-book compilations and handed it to CJ.

  CJ swallowed hard and held the photo up to the light. He’d seen only a couple of photos of his mother in his life, and never one of her as a child. Wearing shorts and a T-shirt that read, “Reds,” Ike looked to CJ to be about ten, so he suspected his mother couldn’t have been much more than five. She was wearing a sundress and straddling a tricycle, and both children sported high-top shoes. CJ felt strangely queasy as Ike took the photo back and dusted off the glass with his shirtsleeve.

  “I’m thinkin’ that picture was taken back home in Cincinnati in the early ’30s, before the war.” Ike was eye to eye now with CJ. “Need you to get it reframed. A family picture like that deserves a better frame.” Ike shot a quick glance at Marguerite before handing the photograph to CJ. “Gonna be makin’ some changes in the office here pretty soon. Figured I’d hang a picture or two of family around the office when I did. That one you’re holdin’ and maybe one’a you in your navy uniform gettin’ that Navy Cross of yours pinned on. Think you can round up one’a them medal-ceremony photos of yours for me?”

  “Yeah,” said CJ, his throat nearly gone dry.

  “Good.” Ike closed the cabinet door, did an about-face, and headed for the door. “Marguerite’s gonna help us find some secretarial help.” His words seemed to echo off the walls.

  Halfway to the open garage doors, Ike’s knees buckled again. When CJ moved to help him, Ike defiantly waved him off, and as CJ and Marguerite watched the stubborn Korean War veteran struggle to walk back to the house, they knew better than to lend a hand. Ike had disappeared inside when CJ turned and asked Marguerite, “What happened at lunch?”

  Hooking her arm in CJ’s, she smiled and said, “Simple. Me and your uncle had one of our productive kinda conversations.”

  Two hours later, feeling as euphoric as he had in months, and with Petey Greene’s advice to get out more circling in his head, CJ pulled into the Mile High Flea Market’s quarter-mile-square asphalt parking lot just north of Denver. He had B.B. King blaring on the radio and the top down on the Bel Air. Thanks to Marguerite, he and Ike were not only speaking, but for once they seemed to be completely on the same page. To add to his sense of contentment, an hour earlier, with a little sleight-of-hand, he’d been able to get an inside track on Molly Burgess. After going back through his notes on her, he’d called the Denver Symphony office and told the naive-sounding person who’d answered that he was a college friend of Burgess’s, a fellow cellist who several years earlier had played with her in the Des Moines Symphony, and that he’d been trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with her. After a little more pleading and prodding on his part, the clerk had suggested that he might even be able to catch Burgess at the orchestra’s 2 p.m. rehearsal the next day, when the musicians would be preparing for a Friday-night tribute to Beethoven. CJ had thanked the accommodating man and hung up, suspecting as he did that confronting Burgess at a rehearsal with sixty or seventy fellow musicians around might not be the best way to extract information from her about Quan Lee Chin. What he needed to do, he reasoned, was talk to Burgess alone, especially since she’d been so evasive over the years. It took him a while to decide on a tactic that made sense. He finally settled on one that involved some degree of risk but was at least a plan, and since he had no phone number or home address for Burgess, he figured he’d go with it.

  Friday evening he’d take Mavis to the symphony and enjoy a little Beethoven, figuring that his chances of hooking up with Burgess immediately after that performance were equal to his odds of catching up with her during a rehearsal. There’d be fewer of her orchestra-mates around as they scurried away from the performance and headed for home. He could pose as an autograph-seeking fan, and in order to appear less intimidating, he’d have a date on his arm. Whether or not his plan would work, he didn’t know. But at least he had one.

  Nosing the Bel Air past a group of screaming teenagers spraying one another with water pistols, he found a parking space near the flea-market entrance and no more than twenty yards from the kettle-corn concession stand. The rich, buttery caramel smell wafted his way as he slipped out of the Bel Air.

  He was through the flea market’s front gate and in line at the concession a half minute later, scanning the huge complex with its hundreds of booths where vendors hawked everything from Indian trinkets to race-car tires. Hoping to spot Petey Greene but knowing he’d probably have to walk the entire grounds to find the little hustler, if Petey were there at all, CJ paid for his kettle corn and took off to the north, leisurely walking one of the flea market’s quarter-mile-long aisles.

  Before he’d left for Vietnam, vendors had as often as not sold their wares from their vans or the beds of pickups. In the years since, things had changed, and for the most part vendor spaces had become more permanent.

  Popping a handful of kettle corn into his mouth, he strolled up to a leather-maker’s booth to examine a row of wallets laid out on a weather-worn metal display table. He was admiring a wallet with expandable pockets when Petey Greene’s unmistakable squeaky voice erupted behind him: “CJ, my man! You’re here, and did you pick the day!”

  With his Coke-bottle-thick glasses slightly cockeyed on his face, Petey grabbed CJ by the arm and tugged him away from the table. “Been hopin’ you’d show. They got your kind of flavors here today. Just about all of ’em.”

  “Brand books?” CJ asked excitedly.

  “Nope, but damn near as good. License plates by the bushel. Come on, I’ll show ya.”

  Petey broke into a fast-paced walk down the aisle, deftly weaving his way between people as only someone who was accustomed to navigating the flea market two to three times a week possibly could. “Down here, down here,” he said, waving for CJ to keep up.

  He stopped his surge at a small booth with a candy-striped canvas front awning. The ha
nd-carved wooden sign sitting on a table in front of the two-sided canvas booth read, “Gaylord’s Antiques.” Half-a-dozen rusted, abused-looking license plates, an equal number of Swiss army knives in various sizes and shapes, a couple of miniature mantel clocks, and two decent-looking 1920s-vintage inkwells sat on the table. A white Chevy Suburban, with its rear hatch raised and badly in need of a wash, was parked behind the booth. A line of wooden boxes filled with merchandise sat on the ground a few feet from the Suburban’s front bumper.

  “Brought you some business,” Petey said to the stoic-looking man sporting a Panama hat who was seated behind the table. Petey grabbed CJ, who’d finally caught up, by the arm and pulled him toward the table. “My friend CJ Floyd here is in the antique-collectin’ business. The man hidin’ behind the Panama is Gaylord Marquee,” Petey said to CJ. Shoving the cache of old license plates aside, to the surprised vendor’s dismay, he said to Marquee, “Show him your good stuff, Gaylord.”

  “You collect plates?” Marquee asked CJ, looking him up and down, his accent unmistakably British.

  “Of sorts,” said CJ, staring at the man’s badly yellowed teeth and ruddy spider-veined complexion before eyeing several wooden boxes filled with license plates that sat behind the table on the ground in front of the Suburban. He couldn’t help but think from the chagrined look on his face that Marquee was somehow sorry he and Petey had shown up.

  “Come on,” said Petey, feigning a punch to CJ’s arm. “There’s no of sorts to it. CJ here’s got a collection of license plates that would make your head spin, Gaylord. Come on, man, let him have a look at your good shit. You’re in a buyin’ mood, right, CJ?”

  “Sure am,” said CJ, wondering why Marquee seemed hesitant to show him his wares.

  Noticing that CJ’s eyes remained locked on the boxes behind him, Marquee said, “My stuff’s pretty high end.”

  “Just what I’m looking for,” CJ said, suspecting that perhaps Marquee’s goods were stolen.