by Robert Greer
“Got any other news hot off the wire?” CJ asked, hoping to forestall one of Petey and Rosie’s all-too-frequent arguments.
“Sure do,” said Petey, chagrined that CJ was trying to stop his gossip-mongering. “Been keepin’ my eye on Gaylord Marquee off and on ever since last fall, just like you asked me to, CJ. Never too close for him to suspect I’m doggin’ him, though.”
“And you ain’t come up with shit,” said Rosie, well aware of CJ’s endless attempts to bring closure to the GI Joe’s murders.
“Wrong, as usual, Red. Didn’t really have much of anything ’til today, though.” He winked at CJ. “You know that woman, the one you told me owns the ranch up by Sterling and the one I saw at Marquee’s place last fall?”
“Cheryl Goldsby?” CJ asked excitedly, having made no progress in solving the GI Joe’s murders in months.
“Yeah. Well, she was back last evenin’. Tight-fittin’ jeans, boots, big head, and all. Right on Marquee’s front doorstep. All mousy-lookin’, with her hair in a bun and sportin’ wire-rimmed glasses this time. She was drivin’ a pickup and pullin’ a horse trailer.”
“Sure sounds like Goldsby,” said CJ.
“Yeah,” said Petey. “And she had another woman with her.”
Before Petey could describe the other woman, CJ said, “A dark-skinned woman with a crew cut? Built like a fireplug?” thinking that perhaps Goldsby and Ramona Lepsos had patched up their differences.
“Nope,” said Petey. “A little redhead.”
CJ’s eyes widened. “Did she walk with a limp?”
Scratching his head and looking befuddled, Petey said, “Sure the hell did. I was gonna mention that next.”
“I’ll be damned,” said CJ.
“Who is she?” asked Petey.
“A fiddler of sorts. She’s that cellist with the Denver Symphony I’ve had you trying to ferret out—Molly Burgess. I’ve been trying to get a line on her for months, ever since the night Detroit Whitey tried to torch this place. Haven’t had much luck. The party line I’ve been getting from the symphony’s PR people is that she’s been on sabbatical with an orchestra back East. Strange that she’d head off on a sabbatical so soon after Mavis and I caught her performance at a Beethoven concert last fall.”
“Sounds to me like she mighta spotted you at that concert and decided to haul ass,” said Petey.
“Question is, how’d she know I was there? The place was packed.”
Petey laughed. “How many black folks were at that concert, man?”
“A sprinkling.”
“Well, there ya go.”
“Come on, Petey,” said Rosie. “Your paranoia’s showin’ again.”
“Come on nothin’,” protested Petey. “There CJ is, all six-foot-three of him sittin’ at the symphony peerin’ down on this cello-pluckin’ woman, and with somebody as fine as Mavis Sundee snuggled up next to him. Hell, the two of ya probably stuck out like ink blots on a white lace curtain.”
“We weren’t snuggled up, Petey.”
“So maybe you weren’t,” Petey said, with a grin. “Least not like the two of you been all this week.”
“Didn’t know you were lookin’ to replace Dear Abby, Petey,” said Rosie.
“I ain’t. But like I said earlier, ears to the ground, eyes on the prize.”
“One day your nosiness is gonna buy you more trouble than you figured on purchasin’, my man.”
Thinking, It never ends, CJ said, “Would you two stop? Got anything else for me on what went down at Marquee’s, Petey?”
“Nothin’ I could see. The two women went inside, stayed in the house for forty-five minutes or so, came back out, and left. Ten minutes later Marquee split, too.”
“Did they deliver anything to Marquee?”
“They went into the house with a couple of cardboard boxes the size of a microwave. Didn’t come back out with anything.”
“Strange,” said CJ. “The three of them being so blatant.”
“Hell, they didn’t know I was there. Folks tend to be open like that when they don’t know they’re bein’ watched.” Petey looked over at Rosie. “Ya gotta be on your toes in my business, Red.”
Refusing to take the bait, Rosie remained silent.
“So whatta ya want me to do next?” asked Petey. “I’m gonna be at a swap meet this weekend. A biggie. I’m thinkin’ Marquee will likely be there for a change, too. He ain’t been around much at meets for awhile. He does some international travelin’, you know. I can keep an eye on him for you, no charge.”
“Okay,” said CJ, aware that in the end, Petey would find a way to not only collect for his recent Molly Burgess sighting, but put himself on the clock for additional pay. Checking his watch, CJ said, “Uh-oh. I’ve gotta go catch up with Mavis before she heads over to Damon Foods with Willis to put in their meat and produce order for the week.”
“How’s it workin’ out with Willis gettin’ his stuff from the big boys instead of Reasoner?” asked Rosie.
“Not bad, and a whole lot better than being extorted or having your business torched.” Watching Rosie and Petey nod approvingly, he was happy to see that for at least once that day they could all agree on something.
For fifty-two years, Willis Sundee had lived in the same Five Points 1920s-vintage home he’d been born in. The sand-dollar-tan, craftsman-style house with white trim at the corner of California and Twenty-seventh Streets was surrounded by an immaculately groomed yard.
The house was as much a part of Mavis Sundee’s life as it was of her father’s. Robbed of her mother, Mae, who’d suffered a heart attack when Mavis was barely six, Mavis had spent her formative years roaming the home’s seven spacious rooms. She’d been encouraged by Willis to excel in academics and athletics, as had her older brother, Carl, a former Denver Prep basketball star who was now an electrical engineer in Dallas. Equally athletically gifted, Mavis had turned down a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Denver, choosing instead to attend Boston University, where she was majoring in business.
Although it was rarely discussed between her and Willis, Mavis was expected to one day take over her father’s businesses—enterprises that included the ownership not simply of Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen but also of an insurance agency, a Welton Street Laundromat, and nearly a dozen rental properties sprinkled throughout Five Points and Curtis Park. Although she’d once dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, business was as much a part of her blood as it was of her father’s, and although she sometimes had visions of forever standing at the entrance to Mae’s greeting diners, she’d long ago realized that the burden of keeping the wheels of her father’s businesses turning, as the powerful and necessary engine that had driven him past depression following her mother’s death, was one she would likely bear for a lifetime.
Mavis was busy in an upstairs hallway adjusting the lock on a suitcase that had jammed on her recent flight home from Boston when CJ rang the front doorbell. Dressed in faded Denver East High School basketball shorts and an oversized T-shirt, she dropped what she was doing and bounded down the stairs. When she slipped on the bottom step and went cascading onto the Spanish-tiled entryway floor, CJ, startled by the loud thud, yelled, “What the hell?”
Rising and brushing herself off, Mavis swung open the front door. “Tripped,” she said, looking embarrassed.
“Damn! I thought a herd of cattle might be headed my way.”
“Bad choice of words when you’re in any way describing a woman, Mr. Floyd.”
“Sorry.”
“No harm, no foul,” she said with a wink, clasping CJ’s right hand affectionately in hers as he stepped into the house. Leading him toward the kitchen, Mavis asked, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No. I just had lunch at Mae’s with Rosie and Petey Greene.”
“Were the three of you talking your usual secret-society kind of stuff, whispering about what dark alleys to head down next?” She took a can of Coke out of the refrigerator, pulled the tab, and, along with CJ, scoot
ed a stool up to the kitchen’s center island.
“Nope. No alleys today.” There was a clear hint of frustration in CJ’s tone. “But I do what I do, Mavis.”
“I know. But I don’t necessarily have to like what you do,” she said, kissing him softly on the cheek.
“All of us can’t go to expensive private colleges back East.” Wishing he could take back his words the second he’d uttered them and worried that he and Mavis were about to head down the same bumpy dead-end road they’d been traveling since their night at the symphony months earlier, he searched for something neutral to say.
Hoping to sound supportive rather than judgmental, Mavis asked, “So what are you investigating next?”
“I’m back looking into the GI Joe’s killings,” CJ said with a shrug.
“Please be careful.”
“Always am.”
“You up for the movies tonight?”
“Yeah, and by the way, how’s that new meat and produce supplier of his treating your dad?”
“So far, so good. I haven’t heard any complaints, anyway.” Looking slightly chagrined she spun her Coke can slowly around on the countertop. “It doesn’t seem like I’ve been home for almost a week. Can you believe it? Tomorrow it’s back to Boston.”
CJ leaned over, ran a hand through her hair, and twisted one of her thick black curls onto his fingers before softly planting a kiss on her lips.
“Where do you think we’re headed, CJ?” Mavis asked, sounding troubled.
“To somewhere special, I hope.”
“Me, too.” She pulled CJ toward her until their lips met again. The kiss they shared was neither soft nor brief but one of lunging tongues and hungry anticipation, a preamble to forty-five minutes of intimate lovemaking that followed.
Two hours later, adrift on a sea of postcoital bliss, CJ walked into Ike’s office to find Ike, with a handkerchief pressed to his mouth, in the midst of a violent coughing spell.
Ike matter-of-factly jammed the handkerchief into a pants pocket the instant he caught sight of CJ. “So, what’s up, Sherlock?”
Determined not to once again let Ike sweep the issue of his increasingly violent coughing spells under the rug, CJ asked, “What did Doc Haskins say about your cough?”
“He said I’m fit enough to go mountain climbin’.” The look of concern on CJ’s face short-circuited Ike’s con. “What the old geezer said is that I shoulda quit smokin’ and drinkin’ years ago. Charged me fifty bucks to tell me what the shit I already knew.” Ike gnawed his lower lip with the edge of his two top front teeth, a sure sign to CJ that he was having trouble dealing with his health issue. “Well, he did throw in a chest X-ray and some half-assed examination. The skinflint.” Ike nudged his handkerchief a little farther down in his pocket and gave CJ a look that said, Case closed. “Where you comin’ from?”
“Mavis’s.”
“You’re headed down the right road there.”
“I’m not so sure,” said CJ, leaning sideways against the edge of Ike’s desk. “I always feel like we’re from two totally different worlds.”
“You are. But what the hell does that matter? Sometimes I wonder about you, boy. You got yourself a woman as fine as wine and as classy as they come, who’s wantin’ to be with you pretty much every second, and you’re busy psychoanalyzin’ the damn situation. You better grab that brass ring while it’s there for the grabbin’, son.” With one hand to his mouth, Ike suppressed a cough. “Second-guessin’ the sweetest dollop’a honey you’re ever gonna have dropped your way is plain stupidity. Got any more gripes you wanna share?”
“No.”
“Good, ’cause things around here are lookin’ up. We got us a new secretary headed our way. She’s second cousin to a girl Etta Lee went to school with back in Detroit. Dropped by Etta Lee and Rosie’s yesterday to let ’em know she was in town. They got to talkin’, Etta Lee told her I was lookin’ for a secretary, and the next thing you know, she’s here interviewin’ with me and Marguerite. Marguerite’s as happy as a pig in slop after helpin’ out all these months.”
Beaming, Ike continued, “Marguerite’s out walkin’ her down Bail Bondsman’s Row and showin’ her the lay of the land right this second. They should be back any minute.”
“That’s one problem solved, at least.”
“And a big one. Now, since you been bent on numberin’ the problems around here from one to a hundred lately, got any others I can solve?”
“Nope. Just happy to know that having somebody around here full-time to help out should free us both up a little.”
Ike shook his head knowingly. “I know where you’re headed, CJ, and I don’t like it. That GI Joe’s murder case you keep wan-tin’ to bump your head up against ain’t earnin’ us one penny.”
“I never expected it would,” CJ said defensively. “It’s just a problem I promised myself way back that I’d solve. And since you brought the issue up, how about I run something about the case by you? I’ve spent a good six months trying to get a line on that cellist, Molly Burgess, I mentioned to you a good while back. Petey’s been running most of my interference. She’s the one I was hoping to hook up with the night Walt Reasoner tried to torch Mae’s. Supposedly she was friends with the Chinese guy who was killed at GI Joe’s.”
“Yeah, Chin. I’ve pretty much heard the whole story before, CJ.”
“Well, here’s a new chapter. Last night my mysterious cellist—her name’s Molly Burgess, in case you forgot,” CJ said with a grin, “showed up at a house here in Denver with Cheryl Goldsby, Wiley Ames’s niece. Goldsby’s the one with the ranch out by Sterling, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah. So, what’s your point? Ain’t no law against showin’ up in Denver, or knowin’ Wiley Ames’s niece, or for that matter bein’ gay, neither.”
“The point’s this. I’m thinking that the Burgess woman is a replacement for Goldsby’s old girlfriend. And here’s another wrinkle. The house they showed up at is home to a guy who sold me one of Ames’s rare license plates a few months back. The both of them were in on the GI Joe’s murders, Unc, I know it.”
“Okay. Now give me a reason they killed two men.”
“They were after rare seashells, the best I can figure. Ames was fencing the shells for Chin, who’d stolen them from museums in Thailand. Goldsby pretty much admitted it to me.”
“Strange that she’d admit to anything that could link her to a couple of murders. What were the shells worth?”
“Ten, maybe twenty grand, according to a couple of marine-biology-professor types I’ve talked to at the University of San Diego. I can go get my notes.”
Ike shook his head. “No need. That’s an awful slow-runnin’ money spigot, you ask me. Goldsby, Chin, Ames, and maybe the cellist dividin’ up that kinda money—hell, they’d barely each come out with five grand. Nope, my guess is that if somebody was fencin’ something, it woulda had to’ve been worth a lot more than twenty grand to end up buyin’ both Chin and Ames plots in the cemetery.”
“Maybe they weren’t all in it together,” said CJ. “No reason why one of them couldn’t have struck out on their own.”
“More likely than your threesome or your foursome. Even so, your lone wolf still wouldn’t’a ended up with much of a haul.”
“People have been killed for a whole lot less.”
“And for a whole lot more,” Ike said, his tone insistent. “You got any other suspects?”
CJ shrugged. “An ex-girlfriend of Goldsby’s named Ramona Lepsos, and there’s GI Joe’s owner, Harry Steed.”
“Any chance either of them coulda been in on the seashell-fencing scam?”
“I checked Steed out stem to stern, and so did the cops right after the murders. I even had an ex-navy buddy of mine who’s now a Denver cop do some checking. Steed came up clean as a whistle. He’s a skinflint and a hoarder of all kinds of things, from what I’ve been able to gather over the years, but fencing stolen goods would be way off the mark for him.”
&n
bsp; “Then I’d get to checkin’ on Goldsby’s ex-girlfriend.”
“I’ll do that,” CJ said, reacting to the sound of the front door slamming.
“Ike, you in the back?” Marguerite Larkin called out from the front entry.
“Yeah. In my office with CJ,” Ike said, unable this time to suppress a series of lengthy dry coughs.
“Great. I’ll bring DeeAnn back to meet him.”
The short, buxom, clear-eyed woman who walked into Ike’s office just ahead of Marguerite looked to CJ to be about his age. Her hair was done up in an exquisitely coiffed Afro, and her clothes looked expensive. In the back of his mind, CJ had half expected a Nordeen Mapson clone. DeeAnn Slater was anything but that.
The black miniskirt she was wearing did wonders for her shapely, slightly knock-kneed legs, and her white form-fitting mock turtleneck pullover was equally flattering in a different way.
Walking from behind his desk and straight up to her, Ike said, “DeeAnn, like you to meet my nephew, CJ Floyd.”
“DeeAnn Slater,” she announced proudly.
“Pleasure,” said CJ.
“CJ’s my wingman,” Ike said, trying not to cough.
“Your uncle’s been singing your praises,” said DeeAnn, her response deep, throaty, and sensual.
“I pay him to do that,” CJ said with a smile.
“Better keep him on your payroll, then,” DeeAnn said, turning to face Ike. “Marguerite’s toured me up and down your block. Interesting. Seems a little strange that every bail bondsman in Denver would be camped out here on Delaware Street. Lots of competition concentrated in one place.”
“It’s just the way things have worked out over the years,” said Ike, impressed by DeeAnn’s quick assessment of things. “No matter. We get our share of the pie. You still ready to start tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. You can begin with tryin’ to make some sense outa my last secretary’s filin’ system.”
“Sure thing.” Eyeing CJ, who was trying his best not to stare at what he was certain DeeAnn Slater enjoyed showing off, she asked, “Have you got anything special you want me to take care of, CJ?”