First of State

by Robert Greer

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You enjoy being the loner, don’t you, CJ?”

  “No one enjoys being alone.”

  “There’s a difference between being a loner and being alone, you know. One implies a certain self-imposed isolation. The other suggests a path that a person hasn’t necessarily chosen. Being a loner’s okay, I guess, but you never ever want to end up alone.” She squeezed CJ’s hand briefly, kissed him on the cheek, and walked slowly toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” said CJ, still contemplating DeeAnn’s insightful deconstruction of two similar yet very different words. He thought for a moment about offering a rebuttal, but she was already down the hallway and out the front door of the old Victorian.

  Chapter 26

  After more than five years, CJ’s lost-to-the-world, post-Vietnam feeling of depression was back, gnawing at him from the inside out, causing his ears to ring, and saddling him with a stomach-and headache that made it difficult to breathe.

  He’d given up on trying to sleep and found himself lying wide awake, counting off all the triggers that had sent him trotting back out onto the all-too-familiar playing field of post-traumatic stress. Rising from bed, he walked down the hall to his bathroom to get a drink of water. Reasoning that the major cause for his backward slippage was guilt, he turned on the cold water, cupped his hand under the tap, and took a calming drink. He was guilt-ridden over not being able to prevent Ike’s death. He also felt guilty about being unfaithful to Mavis, even though the two of them had never made any forever-faithful vows, and about the fact that for more than five years he’d failed to solve a murder he’d promised himself he would. That double murder was now more than likely the reason Petey Greene was dead. It had taken a perfect storm of circumstances to trigger the kind of guilt he was feeling and to send his mind back to the killing fields of Vietnam.

  He took another drink of water and stared into his medicine-cabinet mirror. Suspecting that if Ike were there, he’d likely say, “Quit feeling sorry for yourself, boy,” CJ suddenly found himself frowning and thinking, One, two, three.

  He tried to organize his thoughts. Dealing with Ike’s death would take time. Time that would involve a progression to acceptance and closure that would probably take years. Effectively sorting out his relationship with Mavis and dealing with what might develop between him and DeeAnn would be time-dependent as well. But finding out who had killed Wiley Ames, Quan Lee Chin, and now very likely Petey Greene was a problem he could sink his teeth into right away.

  Splashing a couple of additional handfuls of cold water onto his face, he turned to walk back to the kitchen and silently counted off, One, two, three.

  Minutes later he was at his kitchen table, drinking a Coke and sorting through the packet of surveillance photos that Petey Greene had taken outside Gaylord Marquee’s house, hoping to find something in the overexposed Polaroids that would mesh with the fact that the damage to Marquee’s Suburban, at least according to Rosie, didn’t fit for a vehicle that had been involved in a serious hit-and-run accident. He stared at the photos one by one and over and over until on one of his passes through, something struck him as strangely repetitive. In every one of the photographs, Marquee seemed to be looking back over his shoulder toward what CJ could clearly see in one photograph was his garage.

  Studying that photo and wondering if he’d missed something important during his first sweep of Marquee’s garage, CJ decided that a second look was in order—and, late as it was right then, Marquee might actually be home to provide him with a guided tour.

  The antique kitchen clock on the wall above his stove read 12:35 when, dressed head to toe in black, CJ picked up the phone in his kitchen and called Henry Bales, hoping against hope that Henry would be home.

  When the groggy-sounding, sleep-deprived pathology resident answered, “Hello,” CJ said, “Bull Tamer, it’s CJ. Need my ass covered on a mission.”

  Instead of saying, What are you thinking? Goddamn it, CJ, this isn’t the jungles of Vietnam and we’re not fucking nineteen, Henry dutifully asked, “How soon?”

  “Meet me at my place as quick as you can. I’ll fill you in then.”

  “It’ll take me twenty minutes or so.”

  “I’ll be here. And Henry, just so you know, this could get pretty sticky.”

  “No more sticky than directly disobeying an order from your superior during a time of war.”

  “Guess not. Twenty minutes, okay? See you then.”

  As he cradled the phone, for the first time in a long while Henry Bales thought about the fact that the bonds born of war were clearly the equal of those determined by blood.

  Breaking and entering had never been CJ’s forte, although he’d had high school friends, including Petey Greene, who’d been experts. But on the windy, forty-five-degree moonlit night that he and Henry Bales jimmied their way into Gaylord Marquee’s garage, after making certain there were no nosy neighbors and no Marquee dogs around and discovering once again that Marquee wasn’t home, things went smoothly.

  “What are we looking for?” Henry asked after turning on the single overhead light in a garage that now reeked of a pungent, decomposing-flesh smell that they suspected came from a dead rodent.

  “I’m not sure,” said CJ, who on the drive over had brought Henry up to speed on the Petey Greene killing, the GI Joe’s murders, and his five-year-plus attempt to solve the latter crime. He’d also laid out a division of labor: Henry would be responsible for going through the boxes on one side of the garage; he’d be responsible for inspecting the contents of the boxes on the other sides. “But there’s a clue to those murders in this garage somewhere. I’m sure of it.”

  “So that’s the Suburban you told me about,” said Henry, glancing at the damaged Suburban before he stooped and started poking his way through the contents of a cardboard box.

  “That’s it, and it’s registered in Marquee’s name. I checked.”

  “Damn, I think I just found out why it smells like the bottom of a sewer in here,” said Henry, turning over the box next to the one he’d been rummaging through and dumping out a bloated pit bull.

  CJ tried not to gag as, seemingly out of nowhere, images of the bloated bodies of dead GIs bobbing up and down in the Mekong River shallows flashed through his head.

  For the next several minutes, the two friends worked their respective sides of the garage in silence, digging through cardboard boxes, plastic storage containers, wire-mesh bins, and even several U.S. Mail cartons filled with everything from empty paint cans to water-damaged Reader’s Digest condensed books.

  “Hey, I think I’ve found something up your alley,” Henry said finally.

  CJ, who’d moved to sorting through an unlocked toolbox, the kind designed to straddle the bed of a pickup, turned away from what he was doing and walked over to Henry, who’d slipped a twenty-inch-square, eight-inch-deep cardboard box out of the larger box at his feet. “Your kind of stuff,” he said, extracting three miniature Indian pots and several old license plates from the smaller box.

  “Nice little stash,” said a suddenly wide-eyed CJ, watching as Henry spread the contents of the smaller box out on the floor.

  As Henry turned the license plates face up one by one, CJ whispered, “You’ve hit a damn mother lode, Bull Tamer!”

  “Valuable?”

  “Damn straight.” CJ picked up one of the license plates and held it up to the light. “This baby I’m holding is a 1910 Connecticut porcelain passenger plate.” He lined the eighteen-inch-long plate up with a slightly larger neighbor, then paired those two plates up with two others Henry had laid out until he had an almost perfectly rectangular grouping a bit larger than the size of an opened tabloid newspaper.

  As CJ admired his assemblage of four exceedingly rare 1910 through 1913 porcelain gems, Henry asked, “How do you know they’re from Connecticut? There’s no state ID on any of them.” Henry continued to stare at the largest of the four license pla
tes—a plate stamped with a single letter C and bearing number 17249.

  CJ broke into a broad, toothy grin. “The same way you know the name and location of every damn artery running down the back of my leg and where each one splits off before it heads from my big toe, Doctor.” Tapping the largest plate with an index finger, CJ continued, “Color’s nearly the only way you can date these puppies. White on red, the big boy here is a 1910; the blue on white is a 1911; white on green I’m pretty sure was the ’12; and that leaves the white on blue as the ’13. That block letter C just in front of each license-plate number tells me they’re from Connecticut. We’re talking money here, Henry. Hell, these four plates in the shape they’re in, looking like they just came off the production line and with all their odd individual color and size variations, are probably worth three, maybe even four grand. Should’ve looked a little more thoroughly the first time I was here.”

  He moved excitedly from the Connecticut plates to another plate on the floor and whistled loudly. He picked the plate up, scrutinized it carefully, and said, “A fucking New Mexico preemie,” before digging a hand into a box two down from the one the Connecticut plates had come from. “And here’s a Colorado prestate, shit! And one from Texas!” Setting the plate on the floor and with a glazed look in his eyes, he said, “Do you know what the hell these are, Henry? Got any idea?”

  “Beats me.”

  “They’re what we call in the business ‘prestates.’ License plates that predate state-government-authorized, first-issue plates. In most instances, the prestates aren’t as rare or as collectible as the actual first-of-state issues, but they’re pretty damn rare.” CJ quickly sorted through the remaining plates in the box, shaking his head as he did. “Prestates up the wazoo, and in mint condition—ten, maybe even twelve of them. Shit, I don’t believe it.”

  “So what’re they worth?”

  CJ thought for a moment before answering. His response came with a certain degree of breathless awe. “The whole kit and caboodle? All the prestates and the Connecticut porcelains spread out on the floor? Ten, fifteen grand, easy.” Looking as if he’d just realized his fly was open, he shook his head. “Boy, have I been trucking down the wrong damn road.”

  “How’s that?” Henry asked, jerking his head around to the sound of a tree limb scratching against the garage’s metal roof. “I’m gonna take a quick look outside. Make sure nobody’s nosing around.” He trotted over to the door they’d come in, opened it, took a quick look outside to see a symphony of tree limbs shifting in the heavy breeze, closed the door, and jogged back to CJ. “We’ve got no problem unless trees can talk,” he said, sounding relieved.

  CJ, who was busy wrapping the Connecticut plates in an old newspaper, muttered, “Been looking for love in all the wrong places, Bull Tamer. I always thought it was sorta strange that the GI Joe’s killings would be linked to fencing stolen seashells. The money just wouldn’t be there. But, truth be told, seashells are what I thought I’d find stashed here in Marquee’s garage. I should’ve known the stakes had to be higher, especially if there’re more plates around like these.” He patted the now wrapped Connecticut plates almost affectionately and slipped the bundle under one arm. “One, two, three,” CJ said, smiling.

  “What?” asked Henry.

  “Nothing. Just my Uncle Ike’s shorthand for working through a problem the right way.” Suddenly looking perplexed, he said, “You know what, though, Henry? Something’s not quite right here. Things are just a tad off the track. Marquee’s got something close to the mother lode sitting out here virtually in the open for anybody with a little larceny in their heart and a handy crowbar to take off with. No protection, no alarm system, and no deterrent. Now, if I owned plates this valuable, they’d be stashed away in a lockbox in some bank vault. That tells me something real important.”

  “Which is?”

  “That either the mine here’s been salted with these plates and the Suburban to get me or the cops looking Marquee’s way or Marquee’s got a shitload more of these babies squirreled away somewhere else.”

  “So you think Marquee killed your friend Petey, Ames, and the Chinese guy over a bunch of rare license plates?”

  “Rare stolen license plates. That’s the lynchpin. I’d set the odds at 80:20 that Marquee’s the killer. And I’d take the same odds on him having killed poor Petey.”

  “Why lay off the 20 percent?”

  “Gets back to my mine-salting theory, I’m afraid.” CJ turned and glanced at the front end of the damaged Suburban. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why Marquee would stash a vehicle that was involved in a hit-and-run killing in his own garage, why he’d leave all these plates lying around for just about anybody to find, even if he has lots of more valuable plates stashed away, and finally, and most importantly, why I can’t seem to lay my hands on the man.”

  “Good enough reasons. So who have you got jockeying for the other 20 percent?”

  “Believe it or not, three lovely ladies. Wiley Ames’s niece, Cheryl Goldsby, her onetime lover who she tossed overboard recently, a lady named Ramona Lepsos, and Lepsos’s replacement, a concert cellist named Molly Burgess.”

  “Girls just being girls.” Henry lowered his voice and uttered in as dramatic a fashion as he could muster, “‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just something Shakespeare had three witches say at the opening of Macbeth.”

  “Well, since Marquee’s a Brit, I guess Shakespeare sorta fits.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “We’ll leave here with the Connecticut plates. I’ll find out what they’re actually worth, and I’ll try my hand at flushing out the witches.”

  “Makes sense. Who’ll peg their value?”

  “Harry Steed, the guy who owns GI Joe’s. Trouble is, I don’t think he’ll enjoy ratting out Wiley, who I’ve got to guess was up to his elbows in fencing stolen license plates with Marquee.”

  “But Ames has been dead more than five years,” said Henry. “The truth surely can’t hurt him now.”

  “Yeah, but Steed and Ames had serious World War II history, sorta like you and me.”

  Henry nodded understandingly, looked around the garage, frowned at the lingering smell of death, and pinched his nostrils together. “Let’s get the hell out of here. It stinks.”

  Shifting the Connecticut plates to his left arm, CJ headed for the door, cracked it open, peeked outside briefly, and, with Henry on his heels, stepped into Marquee’s backyard. As they made their way toward the Bel Air, CJ whispered, “I can’t for the life of me figure out where Marquee’s hiding.”

  “Maybe he’s not. Could be he’s dead.”

  “Food for thought,” said CJ as they slipped into the Bel Air, unaware that they were being watched from an upstairs-bedroom window of the stately English Tudor next door to Marquee’s.

  Gaylord Marquee stood naked, peering down on the departing Bel Air through the barely cracked plantation shutters.

  “What are you looking at, Gaylord?” asked the woman lying in bed a few feet away. The woman, clearly pouting, wore only red fishnet stockings that stopped halfway up her thighs.

  “Nothing, just a car.”

  “And that car’s more interesting than me?” The woman frowned and poked out her lower lip.

  “No, no,” said Marquee, heading back for the bed. “I just thought it might be stopping at my house.”

  “Well, did it?” The woman toyed with one of her stockings.

  “No, it kept on going.”

  “And that’s exactly what I am going to need you to do for me the rest of tonight. Keep it going, Gaylord. You’ve been out of town most of the month, remember?”

  “I can do that,” Marquee said, smiling slyly.

  “You’d better,” she said as Marquee slipped into bed beside her and ran his hand up the inside of her right leg until it found pay dirt. He began toying with the tiny knot that wou
ld soon swell to the size of a BB. A knot that, when stimulated, gave the woman so much pleasure.

  “We’ve got all night,” she said, laying her head back on a couple of fluffed-up pillows.

  “All night,” said Marquee, concerned less with any offering or receiving of pleasure than with the fact that he’d seen two men leaving the vicinity of his home. Two men who’d gotten into a classic ‘57 drop-top Chevy he’d seen before. A car and driver he intended to check on thoroughly the next day.

  Chapter 27

  CJ slept until ten the next morning, chalking up the surprisingly restful sleep to pure mental exhaustion. After a breakfast of buttermilk biscuits and ham, he arranged for Cicero Vickers, the bondsman next door, to handle one of his early arraignments and headed for GI Joe’s. He arrived at the pawnshop just before eleven to find Harry Steed standing outside on the sidewalk examining a broken plate-glass front window. Two spider cracks ran diagonally down the middle of the eight-foot-square window, crossing in a nearly perfect X near the middle.

  CJ, who’d parked the Bel Air a block north on Larimer, felt uneasy about intruding on Harry’s ill fortune. He felt even worse when Harry greeted him with a scowl that was obviously meant for the window-breaker and groaned, “How ya doin’, CJ? Had a break-in last night. Can you believe it? A frickin’ break-in!

  “The son of a bitch got around my alarm system,” Harry complained. “How the hell he did that beats the shit outa me. Three thousand dollars for a set of useless frickin’ wires. Bad money after bad money, shit. Rewiring’ll cost me. The window’ll cost me, and sparring with the insurance company’s gonna cost me. They’ll increase my rates for sure.”

  “Did they get away with anything or do any more serious damage?” CJ asked, aware that as tight and as set in his ways as Harry Steed was, anything that either cost him money or knocked him out of his routine was a monumental setback.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” said Steed, sounding slightly calmer. “But I haven’t had a chance to check on everything yet. The cops just left. Why don’t you come on in? I’ve got some coffee brewing in the back. Maybe a cup’ll steady my nerves.” Steed waved CJ ahead of him through the front door and continued to mumble obscenities all the way to the back of the pawnshop.