by Robert Greer
Harry’s coffee, bitter and overbrewed, matched his disposition. CJ took three sips and set his cup aside. Harry, however, had finished a full cup of the burned-smelling, syrup-thick brew before he readdressed the break-in. “At least they didn’t get any of my prize pieces or any money. I had a couple of grand in the safe.”
Thinking that his license-plate discovery of the previous evening and the break-in might be connected, CJ asked, “Has Gaylord Marquee been in recently?”
“Yeah,” said Harry, surprised at the apparent change in subject.
“Was he buying or selling?”
“Selling, as a matter of fact.”
“License plates?”
“They are, after all, the man’s game, CJ.”
“I’ve been checking up on Marquee,” said CJ, recalling something Ike had once told him: Never give more than ya get when you’re questionin’ somebody, even if it’s your mother. “What are the chances that back when Wiley and Chin were killed, Marquee was supplying them with stolen license plates and not stolen seashells?”
“Equal to the odds that he was supplying ’em with the seashells, I’d guess.”
“The plates would have been a lot more valuable, though, don’t you think?” asked CJ, knowing that if anyone would have a line on the comparative values of the two items, it would be Steed.
“Depends on the year, the state, and the condition,” said Steed. “Hell, CJ, you know that. License plates, seashells, or buggy whips, Wiley and that Chinaman were fencing stolen goods, and that’s what got ’em killed. Doesn’t matter much what they were fencing.”
“Maybe,” CJ said, thoughtfully stroking his chin. “What did Marquee try to sell you, by the way?”
“A 1912 New York porcelain. A piece of shit, really. Cracked and crazed all over. And a 1917 dealer’s plate. I passed on the New Yorker. The dealer’s plate was clean enough, so I bought it. Paid him nine hundred cash. Wanna have a look at it?”
“Sure.” CJ followed Harry out of his office toward the back of the pawnshop. Midway down the wide center aisle, Harry stopped in front of a lazy Susan and spun it around. When he realized the top shelf was empty, he yelled, “Shit! I put that plate here on the top shelf along with a couple of eighty-year-old bootjacks. Those bootjacks were worth three hundred apiece. Goddamn it! Marquee saw me do it. That fucking son of a bitch! He came back in and robbed me.”
Fuming, Harry took a giant step to his right, pulled out a drawer that contained a vintage Colt revolver, and waved the barrel in the direction of the cracked window. “I’ll shoot the bastard with this gun or another one if I ever see him again, don’t matter!”
“Calm down, Harry. There’s no proof that Marquee’s the one who broke in.”
“The hell there ain’t!” Harry continued erratically waving the gun. “You know what I’m thinking? That goddamn Limey’s the one who killed Wiley and Chin.”
“Eighty:20, and the odds are inching up,” CJ said.
“How’s that?” said the puzzled Steed.
“Nothing. Just thinking about an odds ratio I’ve been considering.”
“Well, whether the odds favor Marquee breaking in here or not, I’m calling the cops back as soon as I have another look around the store to see what else might be missing. You can bet I’ll give them my opinion about him.”
“Reasonable enough,” said CJ, puzzled over why Marquee would break in to GI Joe’s and steal a single license plate and a couple of antique bootjacks. “Can you square up a couple of things for me before you call the cops back?”
“Why not?” Harry said bitterly.
“What do you think four mint-condition porcelain Connecticut plates, 1910 through 1913, might be worth?”
Thoughtfully eyeing the ceiling before responding, Harry said, “Five, maybe five and a half grand.”
“Pretty much my guess, too.”
“You seen anything like that around?”
“I’ve seen them advertised,” CJ said, bending the truth.
“Well, buy ’em if you can. Anything under five grand and you’ve got yourself a bargain. You wanna stick around for the cops?”
“No,” said CJ, suddenly depressed. “I’ve got to deal with a death in the family.”
“Sorry to hear that. Somebody close?”
“My uncle.”
Steed patted CJ supportively on the shoulder. “Then you better go handle that. I’ll deal with the cops, and sooner or later, believe me, I’ll deal with Marquee.”
Turning to leave, CJ took a long, hard look at what had once been Wiley Ames’s Wall of the West, thinking, as he looked at what was now shelf after shelf of what could only be described in the kindest terms as clutter, that in some odd sense, the GI Joe’s murder case had come full circle. “I might give you a call later,” he said.
“With more questions about Marquee?”
“Maybe. And maybe a few about Wiley’s niece, Cheryl.”
The mention of Cheryl Goldsby’s name seemed to send Steed into a rage. “She’s a lying, thieving, ungrateful dyke. You ask me, she and Marquee are birds of a feather. Never thought for one minute either of ’em would’ve killed poor Wiley, though. I guess sometimes you just end up being wrong about things.” Steed lifted the receiver on a nearby rotary-dial phone to his ear. “You take care, now.” By the time CJ reached the front door, Steed was on the line giving the unfortunate cop who’d answered a full piece of his mind.
The partly cloudy day had turned sunny, and as CJ walked up Larimer Street, all he could think of as he glanced skyward was that making final funeral arrangements for Ike couldn’t totally dim the light.
It was becoming increasingly difficult for Korean War veterans to get approval to be buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery west of Denver. Bureaucrats liked to claim that declining space and the ever-increasing number of burial applications were the problem, whereas the real problem, kept pretty much under wraps for years, was that politicians, well-heeled bankers, lawyers, industrialists, high-profile local yokels, and fast-talking movers and shakers, many of whom had had only a whiff of service to their country, had been laid to rest in a place that should have been reserved for men like Ike Floyd.
The okay for Ike to be buried at Fort Logan, nonetheless, came quickly after a couple of strategically placed phone calls by Willis Sundee, and by the time CJ got back to the office, DeeAnn and Etta Lee Weeks had Ike’s funeral arrangements pretty much nailed down.
DeeAnn was at lunch when he arrived, and Etta Lee gave CJ time to settle into his office and finish off a cup of coffee and a day-old donut before she walked in to fill him in on the particulars.
“We’ve got just about everything settled, funeral-wise,” she said, sounding like her usual take-charge self. “Services will be the day after tomorrow. A mockup of the program should be ready by early this afternoon. I’ll run it past you by three o’clock, okay? But I’ve gotta go check on Marguerite first. She’s a nervous wreck. She loved Ike as much as life itself, you know. The two of them shoulda gotten married a long time ago. Tragedy they didn’t.”
“Yeah,” said CJ, thinking about Mavis as he considered what he knew had been his uncle’s greatest regret.
“Pallbearers are gonna be Rosie, Willis, Vernon Lowe, the Hopson boys, and a man named Charlie Thomas who served in Ike’s field artillery unit during Korea. He called a little while ago. Said he’d be flying in from LA tonight. That okay with you?”
“Yes.”
Etta Lee added, “Syrathia Greene stopped by earlier and brought the prettiest flowers. I put them in Ike’s office on his desk. Must’ve set her back two hundred dollars, and in the midst of her own grief. Come on and have a look.”
CJ followed Etta Lee to Ike’s office, where the brightest and maybe the largest arrangement of spring flowers he’d ever seen sat in the middle of Ike’s desk. Daisies, buttercups, tulips, streamers of emerald-green ivy, and a bunch of flowers he couldn’t begin to name lit up the room. “Nice,” he said, swallowing hard.
“Thought you’d like them,” Etta Lee said, smiling. “Oh, and there was one other thing. You had a call that DeeAnn took. She said to tell you it was important. The message slip’s on her desk.”
“Thanks,” said CJ, leaning down and kissing his best friend’s petite, plump-cheeked wife on the forehead. “You know, if Rosie hadn’t gotten to you first …”
“But he did,” Etta Lee said, chuckling, as CJ headed for DeeAnn’s tiny secretarial alcove.
“What you need to do, CJ Floyd,” Etta Lee called after him, “so you don’t end up forever on the outside of love looking in, is to quit your stumbling and hook up permanently with Mavis before some college boy swoops in and steals her away.”
Instead of offering Etta Lee his standard “I’m on the case,” CJ said nothing, which caused the normally opinionated woman to walk quietly away.
A neatly printed phone message from Ramona Lepsos sat near the left-hand corner of DeeAnn’s desk. DeeAnn had checked the sheet’s “urgent” box, jotted down Ramona’s name and phone number and the time she’d called, and handwritten in bold red ink, “Important!!!”
CJ scooped the message up, walked briskly back to his office, plopped down at his desk, and dialed the number on the canary-yellow message sheet.
Ramona Lepsos answered on the third ring, sounding out of breath.
“It’s CJ Floyd returning your call.”
“Wait a sec. Let me set some things down. I’m busy moving furniture into my new apartment.” Thirty seconds later, still sounding breathless, she was back on the line. “How’s your murder investigation going?”
“It’s going.”
“How about I speed it up? I know where Cheryl and that bitch in heat of hers are holding hands. They’re up in Idaho Springs on some kind of lovers’ retreat, staying at the Clear Creek Motel.”
“So where’d your new info come from?” CJ asked, thinking that a thirty- to forty-minute drive from Denver to the mountain town of Idaho Springs might be in order.
“From a little birdie.”
“No time to be coy, Ramona.”
“Okay, I heard it from that antique hustler they’re hooked up with, Gaylord Marquee. I went by his house a couple of nights ago and paid him a hundred bucks, and he ratted them out. The way I hear it, they’re meeting some buyer in Idaho Springs who wants to relieve them of a bunch of their stolen goods. Seashells that Cheryl’s Uncle Wiley latched on to for next to nothing that were stolen from Thailand’s Phuket museum. Seashells Cheryl never showed you.”
“Any chance they might be peddling license plates, too?”
“I don’t know anything about that.” There was hesitation in her voice that made CJ suspect she was either lying or holding back something important.
“Strange,” he said. “I’ve had the feeling recently that the GI Joe’s murders are linked more to stolen license plates than to seashells.”
“Sounds sorta crazy to me. The only license plates I know of that Cheryl owned are the ones you saw at the ranch that day you were there.”
“Could be I’m wrong. So what else have you got on Marquee?”
“Not much, only that he showed up out of nowhere at the ranch off and on over the years; he and Cheryl would conduct their business, and he’d leave. The fucking letch. Him and that filthy-minded guy who owns GI Joe’s. Years ago, before either of them knew I was a lesbian, they each tried to hit on me. I was young and just brushed it off. Today I’d shoot their nuts off.”
Ramona’s tone of voice told CJ she meant every word. “Anything else about Marquee or Harry Steed I should know?”
“Not really, other than the fact that according to Cheryl, in addition to his seashell collection, Marquee collects old cars. So are you gonna head up to Idaho Springs and drop in on Cheryl and her little sweetie pie?”
“Probably,” said CJ, thinking suddenly that perhaps the reason Marquee had left a Suburban that matched the description of a hit-and-run vehicle in his garage was because, as Rosie Weeks had suggested, he didn’t realize the Suburban was there—or that Suburban wasn’t the Suburban.
“Better do it fast. They’re outa there tomorrow.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about their comings and goings.”
“Have you ever been in love or truly hurt, Mr. Floyd?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Then you wouldn’t understand. Why don’t you just head on up to Idaho Springs? You just might find your killers there.”
“You hate them that much?”
“More than you can ever know.”
“Don’t let it eat you up.”
“Wouldn’t dare. I’m just hoping my anger helps me destroy them. We’ll talk again, Mr. Floyd. ’Bye.”
CJ listened to a dial tone for several seconds before hanging up the phone, standing up, and walking across the room to get the extra pack of cheroots he typically left in a rotary-style telephone wall niche that was no longer used. He wasn’t sure whether Ramona Lepsos was capable of murder, but he had no question that she was carrying enough pent-up anger to at least light the fuse.
There was always the chance that she’d killed Ames simply because he’d once made an ill-advised sexual advance, or a second one she’d failed to mention. Why she would have wanted to kill Chin, however, he couldn’t answer.
Tapping out a cheroot, he lit up, took a long drag, blew a couple of smoke rings in the air, and watched them float toward the ceiling, aware that instead of distilling issues surrounding the GI Joe’s killings, Lepsos’s phone call had only muddied the waters. Muddied them so much that he couldn’t decide whether to take off on a trip to Idaho Springs and drop in on Cheryl Goldsby and Molly Burgess or, come evening, continue with his plan to check out the Quonset hut he’d seen in Petey Greene’s photos.
He had an additional day to catch up with Goldsby and Burgess before they left Idaho Springs, according to Ramona’s information, so he decided to put off heading to the mountains and concentrate on making a visit to a peace sign and Quonset hut that evening, knowing very well that the sensible thing would have been to forget about the GI Joe’s murders, concentrate on dealing with his grief, and get Ike buried. But, like Ike, he’d never been good at doing the conventional.
As she prepared to leave work for the day, after watching CJ fumble and stumble his way around the office for the rest of that afternoon jotting notes to himself, mumbling, and drinking coffee, DeeAnn felt the need to at least say something. Standing in the doorway of Ike’s office and staring across the room to where CJ was writing on a notepad at Ike’s desk, she said, “Trying to solve some dusty old murder case won’t help bury your sorrow, CJ, no matter how much effort you put into it.” CJ’s failure to answer her brought a more focused, louder attempt. “Proving a point to yourself won’t bring Ike back or answer any of the should’ves or would’ves you’ve got swirling around up there in your head. And it sure won’t cancel out the two arraignments you need to have bonds ready for tomorrow morning, either. Go on upstairs, get yourself some rest, and clear your head. If you don’t want to be here alone, you’re welcome to come home with me.”
“Thanks. I’ll call it quits here pretty soon.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, walking seductively away. “See you tomorrow.”
“First thing,” said CJ, wondering how on earth Mavis could possibly compete with the pheromones one Ms. DeeAnn Slater seemed to leave everywhere. Licking one corner of his mouth as if he half expected the flavor from some decadent dessert to be there, he went back to poring over the several pages of notes he’d written.
He hadn’t come up with any new suspects in the GI Joe’s murders. Cheryl Goldsby, Molly Burgess, and Gaylord Marquee’s names remained where they’d been all along, at the top of his list of suspects. But Ramona Lepsos continued to hold down a spot as well, and of course he couldn’t leave out Harry Steed.
Tapping the head of his pencil on a notepad, he asked himself who of the people on his list stood to gain the mo
st financially from the deaths of Ames and Chin. Any way he sized it up, Gaylord Marquee ended up with top billing. However, Marquee was missing in action, perhaps even dead, which to his way of thinking left Cheryl Goldsby as the next batter up. She was cold and calculating, no question about that, and if rare license plates had been the driving force behind the murders, she had some stashed away. The question he kept asking himself, however, was whether or not Goldsby had what it took to kill two people, and perhaps a third.
Molly Burgess, it seemed to him, had to be considered the odd woman out. He couldn’t put his finger on what she had to gain from killing Ames, Chin, or Petey Greene. He’d never even seen her except at a distance one snowy night at the symphony. But he’d known for a long time that she’d had some kind of connection to Chin, and that made her acceptable fodder for the list. Besides, like Marquee, she was doggedly elusive. Elusive enough, as far as he was concerned, to have a tie-in to a couple of murders.
When he thought about who among his list of suspects could handle a .44 Mag, former British army officer Gaylord Marquee again rose to the top. But Goldsby and Lepsos, both outdoor types, and certainly Harry Steed, would know how to handle a weapon like that as well. As for the Petey Greene killing, anyone on his list could have been the killer.
He had laid down his pencil and moved back to trying to figure out why any of the people on his list, aside from Marquee, might have wanted to break into GI Joe’s when the phone rang. “CJ here,” he answered in a tone that was surprisingly combative.
“CJ, it’s Henry. I’m wondering if you still need help tonight casing that Quonset hut you mentioned.”
“No. I think I can handle it myself.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell of a combination,” said Henry. “A five-story-tall peace sign and a Quonset hut. Tall and stately, squat and fat. Still thinking that Quonset is stocked to the gills with boxes full of rare license plates?”