Resurrecting Langston Blue

by Robert Greer

  As he dialed his office, he heard Blue tell Carmen that he had some of her mother’s things down in his truck. Pictures, her wedding ring, a necklace.

  “Things that were special to us,” said Blue, his voice laden with sadness.

  It was Ket’s voice he heard next. A hopeful voice full of anticipation.

  “We’d both love to see them,” said Ket, emphasizing the word both.

  “I’ll get ’em,” said Blue, his voice full of pride, happy that CJ had left and he could share his treasures with no one but Carmen and Ket.

  Mavis disliked having to be the one to have to close the restaurant during the summer. The long work days made her think that she’d missed out on too much of her life. It had been close to twenty years since she’d come back home to Denver with a Boston University MBA and the skills to help her father organize and recapitalize the half-dozen Five Points businesses he owned. She’d ended up running most of them, and when Willis Sundee’s diabetes had nearly overwhelmed him ten years earlier, she’d taken over the day-to-day management of Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen.

  The restaurant, named in honor of her deceased civil rights-pioneering, New Orleans-born and -bred mother, remained the jewel in a string of her father’s successes. And though she sometimes hated to admit it, her father’s entrepreneurial blood rushed through her veins. As CEO of Sundee Enterprises, she had the highest profile of any black businesswoman in Denver.

  Mavis stood near the restaurant’s tunnel-like entry, where there was barely room for three people to stand. Less than an arm’s length away, a mahogany pulpit that had belonged to her grandfather, an itinerant Holy Roller preacher from Baton Rouge, served as a hostess station just as it had for forty years.

  Mavis rubbed an emerging charley horse in her right calf and sighed. “Go on home, Thelma. It’s almost 9,” she called out to the restaurant’s lead waitress. “I’ll lock up.”

  Fumbling with a wad of keys, Thelma shouted back, “You got the master?”

  “Don’t I always? Now, hurry up and get out of here so I can set the alarm.”

  “I’m gone.” Thelma rushed past Mavis through the front door and out onto Welton Street, keys clanging, purse swinging, her new 100 percent human-hair wig cocked slightly off kilter. “See you tomorrow—and don’t forget, tell CJ I’m still in love with him.”

  Thelma’s parting remark was the same one she’d been reciting to Mavis since their junior high days, when, six years CJ’s junior, she’d announced her undying devotion to the man. Now a mother of three, with two sons who played football for Colorado State and a husband who had never appreciated the statement’s humor, Thelma still ended most work days delivering the same straight line to Mavis.

  Mavis’s response never changed. “If I see him, I’ll pass it along,” sent Thelma scurrying off giggling.

  Mavis was set to meet CJ at his apartment, where they had planned an evening of pizza, cabernet to wash it down, and lovemaking. On Saturday and Sunday they would make up for her hectic work week and CJ’s crazy schedule by simply going with the flow. As she walked toward the back of the restaurant, adjusting tables and pushing in chairs, she felt the week’s tension start to fade. Stepping outside, she threw the deadbolt of the back door, shut the burglar-proof wrought-iron outer door with a dank, set the alarm, and headed for her car in the hazy moonlight.

  The parking alcove at the rear of the restaurant offered barely enough space to park two cars, and since she knew her father wasn’t coming in, she had straddled both spaces. She’d pushed the button on her privacy key to unlock the car’s front doors when someone grabbed her by the hair from behind, slammed her headfirst into the hood of the car, and sent her keys sailing into the night.

  Fuzzy-headed, Mavis screamed. Only an adrenaline rush of fear kept her on her feet. Celeste Deepstream grabbed a second handful of hair, but Mavis took the wind out of her with a well-placed elbow to the gut.

  Gasping for air, Celeste screamed, “Bitch!” and slammed Mavis’s head into the car’s hood a second time, and a third, then a fourth, until Mavis slid down the fender and onto the ground, barely conscious. Extracting a nearly spent roll of duct tape from her jacket pocket, Celeste tore off a piece and plastered it over Mavis’s mouth. Mavis let out a muffled groan as Celeste clasped her by the ankles and dragged her the ten yards across the parking lot to her pickup.

  The easy part was over, Celeste told herself. Now she had to lift 120 pounds of deadweight into the bed of a pickup and stuff the body into a dog kennel. Grunting and groaning, she struggled to lift Mavis into the truck bed, telling herself all the while that she’d once been a world-class athlete. Mavis groaned again, and Celeste slammed her head against the bed’s side rail, finally knocking her out. When Mavis’s legs wouldn’t quite make it inside the greyhound kennel, Celeste forced them until Mavis’s knees were wedged solidly against the kennel’s ceiling. “Serves you right, wench.” She slammed the door to the kennel, locked it, and draped a tarp covered in bird droppings over it.

  She tied the tarp to the side rails with rope, checked the tautness, jumped out of the truck bed, and headed for the cab. Her heart was thumping. She hadn’t felt such a rush since she’d won the NCAA 1,500-meter individual medley her senior year in college. Bobby had been there, along with her coaches, a long-forgotten lover, and a gaggle of friends. It had been her defining hour, her shining moment at the top of the heap. The feeling had been intoxicating and it was back. She checked her watch as she slid inside the cab. The whole kidnapping, which she had spent almost a week planning, had taken just under five minutes. Armed with a sense of self-satisfaction, she eyed the silver can of ether resting on the seat next to her. “Like clockwork,” she said out loud. “No drugs required.”

  She smiled and started the truck, wondering what it might be like to be a caged greyhound. What it was like to be CJ Floyd’s beaten-to-a-pulp lover, to be on your way to die. She laughed out loud as she eased the pickup onto Welton Street and pointed it south toward the central New Mexico highlands.

  CJ pulled into his driveway a little past 9, top down on the Bel Air, his left foot tapping to the sounds of Muddy Waters’s voice booming from the car’s tape deck. He rarely dropped the top on the Bel Air or cranked up that kind of volume on the stereo, but he was celebrating and anticipating the evening with Mavis. He had a second check from Carmen Nguyen in his pocket—payment this time, not for finding a man who had wandered into Denver on his own, but instead for hopefully finding Peter Margolin’s killer and eliminating Langston Blue as a suspect.

  He had landed a place for Blue to stay, Flora Jean had nailed down an early-morning meeting the next day with her Colorado Springs intelligence contact General Alden Grace, and Julie Madrid, his former secretary turned lawyer, had called him on his way home to inform him that her ex-husband, Pancho, a prime suspect on CJ’s probable-shooters list, had died in a water-skiing accident in San Juan less than a month before. With Pancho and Bobby Two Shirts Deepstream both dead, the list of people out for his scalp had dropped to only two, and Julie had assured him that she would have a fix on Celeste Deepstream’s whereabouts first thing in the morning and Mohammad Rashaan’s by early afternoon.

  He turned Muddy off as the blues master was in the middle of a gut-wrenching lament about losing his house, his woman, and his dog to another man, stepped out of the Bel Air, and headed up the wrought-iron fire-escape entrance to his apartment, smiling to himself as he contemplated a night of lovemaking, a weekend of decompression, and the relaxing lighthearted pleasures he’d enjoy when he was halfway through the forty-five-dollar bottle of cabernet he was carrying.

  At first he didn’t see the dark square of the envelope taped to his door. Hoping it wasn’t a demand from a collection agency, or worse, a note from Mavis saying that something had come up, that she had to work late or her father was ill, he teased the envelope away from the door, opened it, and read the one-line message printed on the piece of cardboard inside: I’ve got Mavis. 505-555-1288. I
’ll kill her. Best you call. Celeste.

  His mind was suddenly filled with his worst memories from the past. Being abandoned by his mother when he was barely able to walk. His inability to fully connect with Mavis. His Uncle Ike dying. Sitting on the back of a navy patrol boat strapped to a machine gun and taking enemy fire from every direction. The war, the war, especially the war. His mind began to drift. The door to his apartment suddenly became the Mekong River bank as he stepped through the door to the sounds of machine-gun fire. Raising both hands to his ears to block out the noise, he stumbled over to a chair and sat down, his eyes glazed over, his temples throbbing. He tried to gather his thoughts, to move forward into the present and out of the past. When he realized he had crumpled the note into a ball in his left hand and that he was squeezing the neck of the wine bottle so hard that his right hand was numb, he slowly rose, walked to the kitchen phone, and dialed the number on the card.

  After several rings and no answer, a message clicked on: “You’ve reached me. I’m in the New Mexico high country. You’ve got thirty-six hours. Try your garage.” There was no mistaking her voice. He’d heard sound bite after sound bite of it during her manslaughter trial. He suspected she was probably sitting by the phone screening the calls, enjoying the havoc she was wreaking.

  Suddenly the only thing he could think about was Mavis. Was she injured, in pain, suffering, alive? He slammed down the phone and screamed through clenched teeth, “I’ll kill her!” He finally set down the wine and slammed both fists into the closest thing at hand, the aging calico fabric covering the seat back of his prized Mormon rocker. The seventy-year-old fabric ripped at one wooden seam and shredded at the other as he slammed his fist into the seat back over and over. Finally he let out a wail, a sound that recentered him in the present, signaling that it was time to move ahead.

  He thought about the message: Try your garage. Grabbing a flashlight from a nearby kitchen drawer, he scooped up his .38 and walked back down the fire-escape steps past the Bel Air to his garage. When he saw a second envelope taped to the garage door, he ripped it off and opened it to find a detailed, hand-drawn map inside. Flashlight in hand, he studied the map carefully. Celeste had highlighted a location with a yellow pinpoint dot, 220 miles southwest of Denver, somewhere in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains miles from the nearest paved road. He’d been through that country before, fly fishing, but he didn’t really know it—not the way he knew the high country in Colorado. He couldn’t tell how far the dot was from the main highway, but he knew that in order to get there he’d have to trek through rugged country. Folding the map in half, he stuffed it into his pocket behind the butt of his .38 and walked back to the Bel Air. He opened the trunk, laid the flashlight down on the trunk’s custom carpet, then abruptly sat down inside the trunk as he assessed his options. He could call the cops, who’d more than likely get Mavis killed. He could take off after Celeste alone and end up a casualty himself. Or he could call Flora Jean and detour her from her assignment to try to help exonerate Langston Blue.

  Rising from his uncomfortable position, he closed the trunk and headed back to the house to call Flora Jean. He was halfway up the fire-escape steps when he stopped, pulled the map out of his pocket, and reexamined it, his flashlight on high beam. “Billy!” he shouted, nearly dropping the map. “Son of a bitch! I forgot about Billy!” Taking the remaining steps two at a time, he raced into the house, grabbed the leather-bound personal phone book Mavis had given him the previous Christmas, and flipped through it until he came to the boldly scripted name “Billy DeLong.”

  CJ walked back across the kitchen, sat down in a pressed-back chair, grabbed his cell phone from a countertop, and punched in Billy DeLong’s Baggs, Wyoming, number. After eight unanswered rings he was about to hang up when a voice full of gravel and grit said, “This here’s Billy.”

  “Billy, it’s CJ. Got a problem, and I need your help.”

  Aware that CJ had the habit of ranking bounty-hunting jobs on a scale of 1 to 10, and suspecting that it was a bounty-hunting job that CJ needed help with, Billy asked, “Your job got a number?”

  “Can’t rank this one.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. Somebody’s snatched Mavis.”

  Billy let out a lengthy whistle. “How soon you need me?”

  “Now.”

  “I’m on it this second.”

  “And Billy, bring two horses, trail-riding gear, and a couple of Winchesters.”

  “Anything else?”

  CJ swallowed hard. “Yeah. The two M16s I gave you. The ones I brought home from ’Nam.”

  “Shit.” Billy checked his watch. “I’ll be there by 3 in the mornin’,” he said, popping a couple of sticks of chewing gum in his mouth, gearing up for the five-and-a-half-hour drive.

  “See you then.” CJ flipped his cell phone closed. He looked around the room until his gaze settled on the unopened bottle of wine. He gauged his chances of ever again seeing Mavis alive at about an even five as he walked over to the table, picked up the bottle, and brought it gently to his lips. He had no idea of how things would turn out, whether he would ever again see the person he cared most about in the world alive. But he knew one thing for certain. Sadly, Vietnam had taught him what he was capable of when the stakes were high enough. And he knew that if he ever had to kill again, he could. He hoped Celeste Deepstream wouldn’t force him to make the choice.

  Chapter 14

  Since meeting Flora Jean when she was a freshly promoted twenty-four-year-old marine intelligence sergeant, Alden Grace had always thought that except for her larger-than-the-prototype breasts, she could have had a career as a Folies Bergere dancer. He had never mentioned it to her because she was adamantly opposed to being seen as a sex object, but she had the height, a dancer’s legs, the upper-body strength, a well-tapered waist from years of working out, an upright carriage, and a showgirl’s derriere. What she lacked was stamina.

  “Alden, no more,” said Flora Jean, easing from astride her on-again, off-again lover, clasping his still erect penis in her right hand and squeezing tightly.

  “I thought you were a marine,” said Alden.

  “And I thought you were human.”

  They both laughed as Flora Jean fell onto the bed and into the comforting cradle of the former general’s right arm. They lay in silence momentarily before Flora Jean spoke. “You could’ve retired in D.C.,” she said playfully, responding to Grace’s earlier lament that although they lived just seventy miles apart, Flora Jean’s visits were so irregular that he might as well be living in Afghanistan. “This ain’t the service, General. I set the rules now. You agreed to it.”

  “But I am retired, Flora Jean.” Grace slipped his arm from beneath Flora Jean and sat up.

  “You know I got my reasons for keepin’ my distance.”

  “We’ve been through that before, babe. So I’m an old geezer and you’re a spring chick. I’ve just spent close to an hour showing you my youthful credentials. Need more convincing?” He slapped Flora Jean lightly on the butt.

  “It ain’t about age, Alden. Fifty-four and thirty-eight ain’t that far apart. And it ain’t about sex,” she added, running her index finger up the inside of his thigh until her hand found pay dirt.

  “Don’t start,” said Grace.

  “I won’t,” said Flora Jean, removing her hand from his incipient erection. “This is serious. I’m not gonna let you turn me away from the issue by tryin’ to turn me on.”

  “I’ve asked you to marry me before. I’m asking again.”

  “I said no before, and I’m sayin’ it again.”

  Grace stared out the bedroom window directly into the 8 a.m. sunlight. When he finally spoke, the previous playfulness in his voice had been replaced by the tone of a man who was used to having things his way. “You scared?”

  Flora Jean nodded.

  “Of what?”

  Rising until her arm was directly next to his, she said, “The difference in the color of these t
wo appendages mean anything to you?”

  Grace didn’t respond. The defining issue that had kept them on-again, off-again lovers had finally fully bubbled to the surface. He had pretty much suspected it all along, despite Flora Jean’s concerns about their forbidden fraternizing when she was an enlisted woman and he was an officer, or about their age, their differing levels of education, their dichotomous upbringing, even the potential problem of their markedly differing incomes. It had all been a smokescreen.

  Deflated, his tone now a mere echo of its lovemaking pitch, he said, “What finally brought it to a head?”

  “I don’t know. This case I’m workin’ on, maybe.”

  “The one you came here to see me about?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it got to do with us?”

  “Maybe nothin’. Maybe a lot.”

  Grace leaned back against the headboard. “Might as well spell it out. I’m tired of roadblocks.”

  Flora Jean settled next to him, and the headboard banged into the wall. “You know that congressman that got murdered up in Denver last week?”

  “Yes,” said Grace, fully attentive.

  “Well, CJ and I are workin’ for the daughter of a possible suspect. Pretty woman. Amerasian. Beautiful, in fact. One of them war babies that got spit out during Vietnam. Her father’s black. She’s my den.”

  “And that’s what has you so skittish? Some war baby stuck with the label of being my den? In case you haven’t noticed, that’s a problem for the Vietnamese—we’re here in the States.”

  “That ain’t the whole issue, Alden. But it started me thinkin’. What if we had kids? Might be they’d end up in the very same fix.”