The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

He had no idea how Stafford would take to a black man in a battered Jeep blocking his driveway. For all he knew, Stafford had a hotline in his car to the cops, or maybe he carried a gun. It didn’t matter; they were even on the second score, and CJ really didn’t care about the first.

  The sight of the gate opening caught CJ by surprise, the movement was so precision-quiet. CJ quickly started the Jeep, hoping Stafford wouldn’t come barreling down on him, and moved the Jeep directly into the path of what he could now see was a black Buick approaching. Paul Grimes’s article with a photograph of Stafford sat on the seat next to him. He had a backup plan in case Stafford wasn’t behind the wheel. But no backup plan was needed. Stafford didn’t come barreling down on him, and when Stafford stopped the Buick in the beam of the gate’s electric eye, he was barely doing five miles an hour.

  CJ stepped out of the Jeep and headed straight for Stafford. If the rich white man from Cherry Hills was afraid of a black man making a beeline for him with no one else in sight, Stafford certainly didn’t show it. “Got a problem with your vehicle?” Stafford called out.

  “Not really,” said CJ, already standing at Stafford’s door. He looked into the car and realized why Stafford had been driving so slowly. Copies of the Wall Street Journal and Antique Trader Weekly sat open on the seat next to him. Stafford had been reading and driving at the same time.

  “What’s the problem, then?” asked Stafford, his voice high pitched and nasal.

  “Got a problem with a murder—two, in fact,” CJ said boldly, deciding that swinging a ball-peen hammer was probably the best way to get Stafford’s full attention.

  “What?”

  “Got a problem with a college kid whose mother works for you, Mr. Stafford. I can’t seem to find out who killed him or his college history professor.”

  Unintimidated, Stafford eyed the Jeep, CJ, and then finally the gate. “I think you’d better move your Jeep,” he said, backing his car out of the gate’s electric-eye beam and clicking his doors locked.

  CJ trotted alongside the car, his hand on the rolled-down window ledge. Stafford pushed CJ’s hand off the ledge and tapped the button to close the window. The window was a third of the way up when CJ slipped a half-foot-long tree branch from where it had been holstered beneath his belt into the window. The power window ground to a halt. “I only want a moment of your time, Mr. Stafford,” he said with a smile.

  “I’ll call the police.” Stafford reached into his shirt pocket and slipped out his cell phone.

  “Good. Then you and me and Sergeant Commons can have a nice long talk.”

  Stafford’s eyes widened momentarily, but he was no less calm. Every one of his movements up to then had been made with the thoughtfulness of someone who, when faced with a difficult challenge, had the sense to systematically deal with it. That meant, as far as CJ was concerned, that Stafford had also assessed him. CJ’s mention of Sergeant Commons had gotten the hint of a quiver out of Stafford, but the rich man from Cherry Hills whose parents had been early-twentieth-century Slovak immigrants seemed to have ice water in his veins.

  “It’s Commons or me and you,” said CJ.

  Stafford smiled. “Afraid it won’t be either,” he said, looking as if he’d suddenly come up with the solution to a monumental problem. He leaned down and reached beneath the car seat; when Stafford sat back up, CJ found himself staring at a long-barreled .357 Magnum.

  Stafford lowered the window and aimed the gun barrel directly at CJ’s chest.

  CJ tugged the branch out of the window. Unfazed, he said, “I’ve got one of them real handy too.”

  “I’m sure you do, Mr. …”

  “Floyd.”

  “Well, Mr. Floyd, here’s a scenario I’d think over very thoroughly if I were you. And I don’t mean this in any derogatory or racially insensitive way. Just consider it food for thought. Here I am, a prominent white man on my way to work. I’m accosted, or at least threatened, by a very large black man in my driveway. A very calculating man, I might add, who anticipated my every move. He’s a man I’ve never seen before, and he’s nosed his way onto my gated private property. We both have guns. Now, tell me, Mr. Floyd, isn’t it possible that, at least for one of us, my scenario could take off in a terribly wrong direction?”

  CJ eyed the gun muzzle. “It’s a pretty plausible made-in-America story.” CJ stepped away from the car. “We’ll talk sooner or later, though,” he said, taking a second step backward, upset that Stafford had sized up his potency as a threat so accurately.

  “I’m betting we won’t, Mr. Floyd, for two very simple reasons. I’ve got power and influence, and you don’t. Now, if you’ll take one more step away from my car, I’ll give you a couple of pieces of advice.” He watched CJ take a third step backward. “Good. Here’s the advice. Stop trying to tie me to a murder I didn’t commit—and the next time you bogart somebody like me, and I must admit you’re pretty good at it, at least technically, try to look a little more menacing.” Stafford smiled and, with the .357 now aimed at CJ’s head, said, “Please move your vehicle out of my way.”

  CJ walked back to the Jeep, slipped in, moved it out of the Buick’s path, and watched Stafford calmly drive away.

  Flabbergasted, CJ could only shake his head. He’d come to put the squeeze on someone who wasn’t very squeezable. He now had a sense of just how, as a teenager, Stafford had been able to once sit naked in a downtown Denver store window at high noon. Stafford had the arrogance and swagger born of a power broker and the iron-clad testicles of a gambler.

  CJ smiled and made a U-turn in the middle of the street. He suspected that Howard Stafford was also very likely smiling. He’d remember the next time he confronted a rich white man with Stafford’s chutzpah to look more menacing. As he picked up speed, he realized, however, that Stafford, hopefully without recognizing it, had also dropped a stitch. Two stitches when you really came down to it. He had blinked momentarily at the mention of Sergeant Commons, and CJ now realized that Stafford was the calculating, unflappable kind of person who would be capable of killing someone.

  Howard Stafford calmly strolled into his outer office, doling out passing greetings to his executive secretary and one of his technical support staff, and stopped at the door to his office. “I’ll need fifteen minutes to finish up some loose ends from yesterday,” he said to his secretary. “No interruptions, please.” He pushed open the door, walked across the room, and placed the battered briefcase he was carrying beside a massive battle-scarred desk that had belonged to his father. He hung his coat on the most pedestrian of coat hooks, sat down, and picked up the phone.

  He’d had time to think about his encounter with Floyd, and thanks to a few connections and a series of phone calls he’d placed while driving to the office, he now had a cursory sketch of the surprisingly bold black man. He now knew that in addition to working the Del Mora case with the Benson woman, Floyd was a decorated Vietnam veteran. Acknowledging with a grin that Floyd had balls, he punched in a phone number on one of his two secure private lines.

  The answer on the other end was a clipped, “Yes.”

  “Glad to see you can recognize an important call,” said Stafford, adjusting the phone receiver to his ear.

  “They’re the only kind that come in on this line.”

  “We have a minor problem,” said Stafford. “The one that you warned me could eventually erupt.”

  “Floyd?”

  “In person. He showed up on my doorstep first thing this morning.”

  “Was there anyone else with him? He usually operates with backup.”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did he mention anything about the daguerreotype?”

  “No. I didn’t let him get that far.”

  “Inquisitive fellow, Floyd.”

  “Very,” said Stafford, clearing his throat. “We need to talk.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Late today will work,” said Stafford.

  “How’s seven o’clock?”

>   “Fine.”

  “Same place as usual, and don’t be late.”

  “I won’t,” said Stafford, thinking that no matter the outcome of his seven o’clock meeting, he was probably going to have to teach a lesson to Mr. CJ Floyd.

  CHAPTER 28

  After leaving Stafford’s, CJ spent most of the rest of his morning waiting for an auto-glass company to arrive and install a windshield in the Bel Air. Surprised that the credit card he’d handed the installer swallowed the $320 debit, he watched the installer drive off, suspecting that if he charged so much as a cup of coffee to the card, a no mas alarm would sound coast to coast.

  His finances were running on fumes. He couldn’t ask Rosie for another dime, and as for Flora Jean and Mavis, he wouldn’t. If his insurance company came through and Lenny McCabe didn’t push the issue of pooling their money, he was hoping he’d be able to float along until summer.

  Flora Jean owed him for a bunch of hours, but he in turn owed Billy DeLong, who he hoped was putting pressure on Loretta Sheets, driving home the point that her onetime adviser, Oliver Lyman, had been murdered.

  He and Flora Jean had cobbled together a desperate group of murder suspects that included Sheets, Vannick, Stafford, Counts, and Amanda Hunter. A strange assemblage that now had him deep in thought. Hunter seemed the least likely of the five to be a murderer, but she just might be fooling him and Billy. He’d once tracked down a horsey-set debutante out of Aspen who’d had her social registry boyfriend killed in order to get back a cache of triple-A bonds she’d given the three-timing Don Juan. It could be that Hunter wanted the daguerreotype back as badly as the debutante had wanted those bonds.

  As for Vannick and Counts, he had no question that Vannick was the kind of man that could kill straight out. He suspected that Counts, on the other hand, would only have bumbled his way into a murder.

  Loretta Sheets seemed less capable of being top dog in a killing than serving as a bit player. Howard Stafford remained his odds on favorite to have killed Luis Del Mora. If Del Mora had hijacked something precious of Stafford’s from right under the eccentric rich man’s nose, CJ had the sense that Stafford was just calculating enough and felt privileged enough to think that rules that applied to other people didn’t apply to him—including murder.

  What CJ couldn’t figure out when it came to each of his suspects was how Oliver Lyman’s murder fitted in. But sooner or later, he knew that connection would come. He patted the Bel Air’s hood reassuringly and took the fire escape stairs up to his apartment, wondering why he hadn’t seen Flora Jean all morning until he remembered that Alden Grace was in town, a sure sign that Flora Jean would be arriving late for work.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes on the phone talking to Morgan and Julie Madrid, learning from Morgan that all was quiet on the Alexie Borg front and from Julie, who’d checked in that morning with Celeste Deepstream’s parole office, that the laissez-faire judicial short-timer hadn’t heard from Celeste in the nine months since she’d kidnapped Mavis.

  CJ took the two bits of news in stride before calling to check in with Mario Satoni. An LA Dodgers fanatic, Mario was busy watching a Dodgers-Rockies spring training game when CJ interrupted.

  “Damn, I’m watching the Dodgers,” Mario complained.

  “This won’t take but a minute, Mario,” CJ said apologetically.

  “Hope so.”

  “Got any additional takes on that Russian that might help me out?”

  Mario watched a Dodgers infielder muff a groundball. “Shit, the slow-ass no-fielding idiot blew a groundball!” Mario shouted at the TV screen. “Now, what was that, Calvin?”

  “Borg, the Russian, middleman to my bomber. Got any more on him?”

  “Nope. And by the way, the person who saved your bacon last night doesn’t have anything either. Heard you got into a little scrimmage last evening with that she-devil who’s out to blink out your lights.”

  “See somebody’s real talkative,” said CJ.

  “I was told a story, Calvin.”

  “Did the person who told you the story also tell you I appreciated him being there?”

  “I heard mention of it.”

  CJ smiled. “Wondered who in the world had him dogging me.”

  “Got me, but I wouldn’t count on having somebody like that around all the time.”

  “I’ll remember that. And if you hear anything else from your sources about Borg, let me know,” said CJ, hearing the crack of a bat in the background.

  “I’ll be damned! The damn ’roid-popper parked it.”

  “I’ll talk to you, later, Mario,” said CJ, hanging up, aware that for Mario a Dodgers loss, even in the preseason Cactus League, could be a gut-wrenching disappointment.

  Deciding his thoughts were far too disjointed for analytical thinking, CJ was about to make a sandwich for lunch when Billy DeLong called from Wyoming.

  CJ answered with a subdued, “Hello.”

  “Got some news I thought you’d want in a hurry,” Billy said excitedly.

  “Good or bad?”

  “Good, I’m thinkin’. I spent the better part of the mornin’ with Loretta Sheets. Turns out she knew Oliver Lyman a whole lot better than she let on the first time we talked. When I told her he’d been murdered, she broke down like a lovesick puppy. Said she and the good professor had a thing goin’ when she was a student and admitted to me when I pushed her on it that Lyman had been after that layin’-of-the-rails daguerreotype for years. Said he had a contact down in Denver who was gonna help him find it.”

  “Well, well. Did she mention why she was so quick to give you Lyman’s name the first time you were there, knowing that it might lead us right back to her?”

  “Sure did. Said she was hopin’ it might lead Lyman back to her as well.”

  “I thought you said she was a hardcore, no-man-in-my-life feminist,” said CJ.

  “Guess she fell off the wagon, at least where it concerned Oliver Lyman.”

  “Were you able to get anything else out of her?”

  “Sure did. And you’re talkin’ info that’s killer-diller,” said Billy, beaming.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Ain’t sure why she told me this. Hearin’ that her onetime lover boy up and got himself murdered could’ve turned her real confessional. Whatever. Here’s the scoop. Between bawlin’ over Lyman and tellin’ me how rough life had been for her without him, she told me that she and Luis Del Mora weren’t the only two students that Lyman had been real partial to over the years. Turns out the good professor was usin’ some of his students to run hisself a profitable little business tradin’ in stolen books.

  “Accordin’ to Sheets, Lyman would pick out a student, spend a year or so sidlin’ up to ’em real close, playin’ the favorite uncle, and then get the kid to steal books, antiques, artifacts, and all kinds of other valuable stuff for him. Sheets says they stole stuff from libraries, people’s houses, and even Indian reservations where Lyman spoke. They sold the stolen merchandise to secondhand stores, pawnshops, places like that.”

  “A real prince,” said CJ.

  “Yeah. And real, real calculatin’. Sheets said he’d check out a student’s background before using ’em, get hisself some excuse to check out their student records, and then pounce. He preferred kids from outside the U.S., students on study visas who he could keep under his thumb. But every now and then he’d pluck a woman like Sheets right off the limb, promising ’em that if they played their cards right they just might end up becoming Mrs. Lyman, or that he’d make sure that dissertation they were workin’ on sailed right on through committee. Did one hell of a job on poor old Loretta Sheets. When I left that museum of hers, she was still fightin’ back tears and defendin’ him.”

  “Sounds like Luis Del Mora fit right in. I bet Lyman thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he stumbled onto Del Mora—lucking into somebody who not only fit his profile but also happened to be living in the midst of a rare-book and collectibles gold mine.
”

  “Sheets said almost the same thing when I told her about Del Mora.” Billy popped a fresh stick of gum into his mouth. “So now that we have the skinny on Lyman, where’s it leave us?”

  “A lot better than high and dry, which is where I’ve been thinking we were most of the morning.”

  “Good. Need me to do any more with Sheets?”

  “Not right now. I don’t think she killed Lyman, but she may have killed Del Mora. Who’s to say she doesn’t have another boyfriend who picked off the Del Mora kid?”

  “Got any in mind?”

  “Who knows? Counts, Vannick, maybe even Stafford. You never know until you’ve had a chance to strain the water. For the time being, why don’t you stick around Cheyenne and keep tabs on the despondent Ms. Sheets. Flora Jean and I’ll see if we can’t come up with more on Del Mora. She’s got us scheduled to meet with his mother this afternoon.”

  “Watch yourself. You go to steppin’ around that Stafford compound and you’ll be walkin’ around in pretty high cotton.”

  CJ laughed. “I will, and I already have. Talked to the plantation master himself first thing this morning. Son of a bitch pulled a gun on me.”

  “I wouldn’t be laughing about it, CJ. Stafford’s the kind that can fricassee the likes of us and serve us up as dark meat to the hogs in a New York minute.”

  “I’ve read that book, Billy.”

  “Good, ’cause for a second there I got to thinkin’ you somehow forgot where you were. I’ll stick with Sheets and let you know if anything comes up. In the meantime, keep my warning about Stafford taped to the back of your eyelids.”

  “I will. Talk to you later,” said CJ, hanging up and thinking that maybe he was being too blasé about Howard Stafford.

  CJ and Flora Jean sat in the living room of Theresa Del Mora’s utilitarian cottage, watching a sad-eyed Theresa sift through a teakwood jewelry box that contained Luis’s personal effects. She set a stack of baseball cards she’d taken out of the box on the coffee table and looked up at CJ. “Luis loved baseball.”

  When she took a paper-clipped stack of business cards out of the box, CJ eyed them curiously. “Mind if I have a look at those?”