by Robert Greer
“You think Petey had enough on Marquee to link him to them GI Joe’s murders you’ve been lookin’ into all these years?”
“I’m hoping so,” said CJ, counting out the envelope’s contents, eleven Polaroid photographs, and placing them in a neat stack on the front seat between him and Rosie.
“Some of ’em look pretty damn dark,” Rosie complained.
“Yeah,” said CJ, certain that it had been late evening when Petey had taken the photographs.
CJ placed the three top overexposed, almost totally black photos, in which Marquee’s house was barely recognizable, on the dashboard and eyed the next photo in the stack. “Here’s a photo of Marquee, Cheryl Goldsby, and that cellist, Molly Burgess, I’ve told you about.”
“They don’t look much like dykes in the photo,” said Rosie, pointing at the two women. “The redhead’s actually pretty good-lookin’.”
“That’s Burgess.”
“Nice little tush on her.”
CJ shook his head, thought, Hard to change a brawler into a ballerina, and flipped past three more photos in which Goldsby, Burgess, and Marquee were standing by the tailgate of Goldsby’s pickup. “What’s this?” CJ asked, bringing the next photograph closer to his eyes.
“Looks like a photo of a Quonset hut, and a pretty big one at that,” said Rosie.
“Yeah, and here’s another photograph of it,” said CJ, examining a second close-up photograph of what was for certain a post–World War II galvanized-metal Quonset hut. Judging from the size of the pickup parked next to it, the half-moon-shaped building was at least a hundred feet long and maybe forty feet wide.
“Some kind of storage facility?” Rosie asked.
“Probably.”
“Maybe it’s where Marquee and them two dykes stashed all the stolen goods your buddy Ames planned on fencin’.”
“Awfully big for that,” said CJ, eyeing a third, badly out-of-focus Polaroid photo of the Quonset hut and tossing it on the dashboard. His eyes widened slowly as he examined the next photograph closely. “Take a look at this,” he said, handing the Polaroid to Rosie.
“The Quonset hut again.”
“Yeah, but look in the background toward the little patch of sky in the right-hand corner behind it.”
“I’ll be damned. A neon sign.”
“I know that sign,” said CJ. He grabbed the photo back from Rosie and held it up to the light. “Yep, I can make out the head and most of the right wing. No question it’s the peace dove.”
“I’ll be damned, you’re right,” said Rosie, leaning forward, both eyes glued to the Polaroid. “It’s that damn war-protest peace sign those crazy-ass hippies erected before you left on your first tour in ’Nam. Damn bird’s wingspan has to be a good twenty feet.”
“Maybe more,” said CJ, who knew all about the dove but had only once driven past the gigantic homage to peace that sat on a pole five stories high in unincorporated Jefferson County southwest of Denver. “Didn’t they put that thing up on what was once part of some famous Colorado ranch?”
“I’m not sure,” said Rosie, “but Etta Lee’ll know. She’s got a folder full of photos and newspaper clippings of that damn neon monstrosity. You know how she hated that war, CJ.”
“Yeah,” said CJ, who sometimes still had the feeling that Etta Lee would never totally forgive him for serving in Vietnam.
Looking as if he could see the gears inside CJ’s head churning, Rosie said, “So now that you’ve got yourself a good idea of where that Quonset hut is, you gonna bust into it? ’Cause if you are, count me out. I promised Etta Lee after that arson fiasco at Mae’s that I wouldn’t get involved in any more of your messes. Never shoulda gone with you when you broke into Marquee’s garage.”
“I understand, and you’re right—I am going to bust in.”
His point made, Rosie asked, “Whatta ya think Marquee, or whoever’s using the place, is storing inside?”
“A slow boat to China, for all I know. But whatever it is, or was, Petey thought enough about the connection to follow Marquee there and photograph it. And you know what, Rosie? I’m thinking that Quonset hut just might represent the GI Joe’s murder connection I’ve been looking for all these years.”
“You ask me, I think Marquee and the two dykes were in on those killin’s together.”
“Could be,” said CJ as Rosie moved to get out of the Bel Air.
“Sorry I can’t go with you.” Rosie stretched up and out of the car.
“No problem,” said CJ, aware that if he really ended up needing help, he knew where he could find it. “I’ll catch you later,” he said, cranking the Bel Air’s engine, backing away from the service bay, and turning to head home with Henry Bales, rather than Mavis or DeeAnn, on his mind.
Chapter 25
CJ pulled into his driveway to see DeeAnn sprinting across the grass toward him. Leaning down through the car’s open window until they were almost nose to nose and sounding out of breath, she said, “CJ, you need to get to Denver General right now. Ike’s doctor called about ten minutes ago. There’s been a problem with his biopsy. He’s in cardiac ICU.”
Slamming the Bel Air into reverse and peeling back out of the driveway, he never heard DeeAnn yell, “Call me when you know something, okay?”
Like CJ, the three other occupants of the Lysol-scented waiting room outside the cardiac ICU looked as if the weight of the world could any second finally crush them. Glum-faced, with his heart racing and a strange, sour taste filling his mouth, CJ adjusted his weight in the uncomfortable chair where he’d been sitting for almost fifteen minutes waiting for word about Ike. He’d given the nurse sitting in a partially enclosed cubicle at the far end of the room his name and asked to speak with Ike’s doctor as soon as he arrived. Looking put upon, she’d told him after eyeing a sheet of paper on her desk that Ike’s doctor would be out to speak to him in a moment.
When, ten minutes later, the doctor had failed to appear, CJ called Henry Bales from a courtesy phone, catching Henry, who’d been the first-call hematopathology resident since midnight, in the pathology residents’ room moments before Henry headed out for a long-overdue lunch break.
Thinking, Please let him be all right, and staring at the dingy gray wall in front of him, CJ bolted out of his chair when Henry arrived, unshaven and disheveled. “Been up all night. Just rotated off hemepath—man, what a nightmare. Any word on Ike?” Henry asked.
“Nothing.”
Henry shook his head and fumbled with a button on his lab coat. “Can’t pull any strings here.” He squeezed CJ’s shoulder supportively just as Ike’s doctor, a balding, emaciated man with Dumbo-like ears and a bulbous nose, walked through the double doors of the ICU and into the waiting room. The look on the doctor’s face as he walked over to the nurse who’d earlier spoken to CJ and said something to her before following the arc of her arm as she pointed toward CJ and Henry was a sad, duty-bound expression that both war veterans had seen before.
Walking up to CJ and greeting him with a firm handshake, the doctor said, “Mr. Floyd, I’m Dr. Lessman. Why don’t we step into one of our conference rooms?” He glanced at Henry as he pointed to a doorway near the back of the room, noticing the hospital ID badge that was clamped cockeyed to the lapel of Henry’s lab coat. “Dr. Bales, any special reason you’re here?”
“I’m a family friend. Mr. Floyd and I were in the navy together.”
“Come along, then,” the doctor said softly as CJ and Henry followed him toward the conference room.
When they reached the door, CJ had the sense that he was somehow back in Vietnam on the pitching, yawing deck of the Cape Star, taking on river’s-edge machine-gun fire.
CJ could think of only two things after learning from Dr. Lessman that Ike had died twenty minutes earlier, more than likely from a lung embolism he’d sustained during a routine diagnostic biopsy of his right lung. He realized first and foremost that he’d lost the most important person in his life, and second, as Ike had been fond
of saying, that nothing in life is ever routine.
CJ couldn’t help but think that the look on Ike’s face was one of pure surprise as he and Henry stood quietly viewing Ike’s remains. It was as if the death angel had tiptoed up to Ike and whisked him away without the required notice. When an orderly appeared to wheel Ike’s body to the morgue for autopsy—mandatory protocol in the case of an unexplained inpatient death—CJ had Henry run down to the morgue to inform Vernon Lowe what had happened.
CJ spent the better part of the next hour talking to several of the doctors who’d attended Ike, and also to the hospital chaplain. It was only as he signed papers arranging for the postmortem release of Ike’s body to the Pipkin Mortuary that it finally hit him with the force of a hammer slamming into his skull that the man who had shepherded him through life, and for the most part molded him into a man, was indeed dead.
Now, as he and Henry sat outside the hospital on a bench reserved for smokers, with cigarette butts and candy wrappers blowing past their feet in the gusty wind, CJ wanted to scream, No! but even that word wouldn’t come. Henry, who understood very well in medical terms what had happened, was reassuring, explaining that Ike’s death had more than likely been quick and painless. But neither Henry’s support nor his explanation mattered. What mattered to CJ was that Ike was gone.
The two Vietnam War comrades sat in silence, watching patients and hospital workers shuttle past them for several more minutes, until Henry finally asked, “Sure you don’t want to talk to one of our hospital grief counselors?”
“No.”
“It might help.”
“What’s helping is that you’re here, man.”
“For as long as you need me to be,” said Henry, watching a terrified-looking boy no more than ten years old run by, crying, as he cupped what looked like a broken right arm in his left hand. “The medical beast that owns me is going to come sniffing after my ass pretty soon,” Henry said as the boy sailed through the revolving doors to the hospital.
After sharing one of their been-through-hell-together looks, neither man said anything for another minute. Eyeing his solidly built, dark-haired former shipmate, a man he’d always thought resembled a Hollywood casting director’s version of a brooding Indian in a B-movie Western instead of the three-quarters French Canadian with a dash of Oklahoma Cherokee thrown in that he was, CJ said, “Guess it’s tragedy that generally brings folks together. We need to hook up more often, Bull Tamer.” The nickname had been given to the onetime Colorado high school bull-riding champion by his shipmates in Vietnam.
“Let’s make it a point to for sure,” said Henry. “Call me later today, okay?” He rose and gave CJ’s shoulder a comforting pat.
“Sure.”
“And CJ, don’t try handling this on your own.”
“Read you loud and clear,” said CJ, watching Henry head back toward the hospital entrance and disappear inside. Wondering how someone who’d grown up knowing the freedom of a ten-thousand-acre cattle ranch could cope with the city, CJ reminded himself that there were ways to cope with anything. As he walked away from Denver General, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and considered the uncharted waters facing him.
Twenty minutes later, he was standing on the east bank of a section of the South Platte River a few miles south of what had once been the mud-flat confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek, and the place where the city of Denver had started. The spot where he stood overlooked a fifty-yard stretch of river that tumbled down a string of jagged rocks before spilling into a placid forty-foot-wide, boulder-lined pool. The section of river was as deserted as it had been the day Ike had taught him to fly fish there on a chilly early-April day seventeen years earlier. He could still hear Ike, his breath laced with alcohol, repeating after twenty minutes of instruction and dozens of bad casts on CJ’s part, “Patience, CJ. You gotta learn to think about what you’re doin’, boy. Now, watch me one more time.” Ike took back his fly rod and once again demonstrated the delicate art of fly casting to his nephew. “You gotta load up your line, boy,” he said, reeling in his line. “Let gravity, the laws of physics, and the weight of your line do all the work for you,” he said, preparing to cast again. “Keep it simple and think of it as one, two, three. Now watch: one, load up your line with your back cast; two, cast your line forward; and three, let your fly land as gently on the water as you possibly can. It’s simple grade school arithmetic,” Ike added as his fly landed delicately on the water.
Ike’s words continued to reverberate as CJ now watched a seam of water thread its way through a cut bank and thought, One, two, three. All those years earlier it had taken him dozens more tries, more of Ike’s demanding coaching, and even a little cursing on Ike’s part before he’d laid down what Ike judged to be an acceptable fly cast. But he’d learned, and by his early teens CJ’s fly-fishing skills were those of an expert.
As he watched the water near the edge of the pool gurgle around boulders, he knew that in six weeks’ time, with snowmelt from the mountains in high gear, the stretch of water he was looking at would be unfishable. But the best summer fly fishing always arose out of patience, a virtue he’d have to learn to draw on even more in Ike’s absence. He wasn’t sure if he had what it took to continue to operate the bail bonding business Ike had nurtured from nothing. Maybe he’d have to move on and do something else.
Watching several fish rise near the edge of the tree-lined pool and knowing that in Ike’s absence he couldn’t just stroll along writing low-earning nickel-and-dime bonds while Ike did all the heavy lifting, he realized he’d have to do some heavy lifting of his own if he planned to stay in the game.
In the time he’d been watching the river, a stiff breeze had kicked up out of the west and the temperature had dropped several degrees. Buttoning his vest and wishing he had a jacket, he turned and headed back for the Bel Air. On his way up the rocky trail that led down to the river, he met a young boy who looked about eight years old, carrying a fly rod in one hand and a fishing vest that looked a couple of sizes too large for him in the other. The boy smiled and said, “Hi.”
CJ said, “I saw a bunch of fish rising in an undercut near those cottonwoods.” He pointed toward a stand of sixty-year-old trees.
“Thanks.” The boy turned and yelled back up the path, “Dad, hurry up! Fish rising!”
When a man who’d been urinating in a clump of willows came rushing down the path, CJ chuckled and said, “Knock ’em dead.”
Looking slightly embarrassed, the man smiled and said, “Think I’ll leave that to my kid” as he sprinted down the path.
By eight that night, with his mental and physical exhaustion approaching levels he’d known during Vietnam, CJ was running on fumes. He’d made final arrangements with the funeral home and set a date for Ike’s funeral, searched through Ike’s files and found his handwritten will, and talked with Etta Lee Weeks three times by phone. With Etta Lee’s and DeeAnn’s assistance, he had called just about everyone on the list of more than eighty people they’d jointly compiled to be notified of Ike’s death.
Talking to a Korean War buddy of Ike’s who’d grown up with Ike in Cincinnati, where Ike’s folks had settled after the West Virginia coal mines where Ike’s father had worked had closed down permanently following a strike, CJ learned something about his uncle that he’d never known. According to the war buddy, Ike had refused a battlefield officer’s commission and a transfer that would have taken him out of harm’s way in order to remain with the men in his artillery unit. The reason, as Ike had supposedly told army brass, was so the dumbasses don’t end up gettin’ themselves killed.
CJ had informed every other bondsman on Bondsman’s Row about Ike’s death and asked Vernon Lowe, Rosie Weeks, and Willis Sundee to be three of Ike’s pallbearers. His attempt at writing an obituary ended in failure, and when he phoned Mavis to tell her the news, struggling through a conversation that was mostly on-again, off-again silence, he had the sense that his pain would last forever.
When DeeAnn came into Ike’s office, where CJ had isolated himself after coming home from the river, and timidly handed him Ike’s arraignment appearance schedule for the next day, CJ flashed her a deer-in-the-headlights look and shook his head.
Hoping to take the edge off CJ’s sorrow, she asked, “You want me to get you anything to eat before I head home?”
CJ’s barely audible “No, thanks” had the doleful ring of someone who was struggling desperately to keep from being defeated.
“You need to get up and out of here, CJ. I know you’re hurting, but planting yourself here in Ike’s office won’t do you an ounce of good.” She walked around behind him and began gently massaging his shoulders.
“I didn’t plant myself.”
“You know good and well what I mean, CJ Floyd.”
Her touch, soothing, lingering, and pleasingly soft, nearly brought him to tears. As she continued the massage with her breasts firmly pressed against the small of his back and the warm sweetness of her breath seeming to chase away his pain, he suddenly found himself wanting her in the most physical of ways.
When finally he turned and kissed her passionately, there was no resistance on her part, and later, as they made love, exploring every inch of one another on the threadbare Navajo rug in front of Ike’s desk, CJ’s pain temporarily disappeared.
It was only in the wake of their lovemaking, as he buttoned his shirt and DeeAnn struggled to find one of her shoes, that sorrow again intervened.
Kissing two of her fingers and touching them to CJ’s lips, DeeAnn said, “Wonderful.”
“Pretty much my word choice, too.”
“Even so, you still need to get out of this office, if only for a little bit.”
“I will.”
“I can call more people if you need me to.”
CJ shook his head. “No, go on home, DeeAnn. You’ve been here since before eight this morning.”
“And leave you here by yourself?”