The Mongoose Deception

by Robert Greer

  The road from then to now had been rocky. In spite of their love for one another, they came from vastly different social strata, and CJ had failed until their recent engagement to understand that if he wanted Mavis to be his wife, the excitement and the thrill of the chase that fueled his bail-bonding and bounty-hunting self could no longer be the cord that connected him to life. Similarly, Mavis had had to learn that she couldn’t expect to erase every nuance of the very things that made CJ tick. With a December marriage in the offing, they’d finally gotten everything on track after years of false starts.

  Mavis took CJ’s hand and squeezed it as the crowd capped its rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” “You’re pushing back a problem, CJ. I can see it in your face. You know our deal.” She slipped her hand out of his, held up her engagement ring, and rotated her hand in the sun until the diamond sparkled. “Best come clean.”

  “It’s not me with the problem,” CJ said hesitantly. “It’s Mario.”

  “His health?”

  “Nope. Problems with his past,” said CJ, failing to mention that, spurred on by Pinkie Niedemeyer’s comment about the newspaper and the recent earthquake, he’d picked up a Rocky Mountain News on his way to the game. Scanning it for earthquake stories, he’d found a piece about a man named Cornelius McPherson finding a severed arm in the Eisenhower Tunnel in the aftermath of the recent Colorado earthquake.

  Mavis, aware that CJ was bonded to the former Denver mobster in strange ways aside from being his business partner, felt her mouth go dry. She swallowed hard, reminding herself that on the day of their engagement, she’d agreed to living perhaps forever with both sides of CJ’s sometimes dangerous and always dichotomous life. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, she asked, “Is someone from his past after him?”

  CJ shook his head. “I don’t know. But he’s in trouble. I know that.”

  “Bad trouble?”

  “More than likely. Pinkie Niedemeyer was at Mario’s today when I left.”

  Well aware of who Niedemeyer was and what he did for a living, Mavis felt a lump rise in her throat. She toyed with her engagement ring and thought about the sleepless nights, the heartache, and the physical pain she’d been forced to endure because of CJ. She’d once been kidnapped and beaten by CJ’s nemesis, Celeste Deepstream, and although the physical wounds from that encounter had healed, the psychological scars remained. Recognizing that she was in love with a caring but rough-cut street cowboy who would never change his stripes, she slipped a hand into CJ’s and kissed him on the cheek. “If Mario asks, will you help him out?”

  CJ nodded and turned to face Mavis. As he watched her naturally curly coal-black hair shimmer in the sun, he couldn’t help but think that she’d drawn the short straw in their deal—a deal that would forever force her to acquiesce to his troublesome world. Slipping an arm around her waist, he squeezed her to him tightly as Damion reappeared and the Rockies and the Giants retook the field.

  Clearing his throat and blushing, Damion squeezed past CJ into his seat. Hot dog in one hand and lemonade in the other, he picked up the binoculars. “Anything happen while I was gone?” he asked, taking a bite of hot dog.

  “Nope,” CJ said, winking at Mavis.

  “Nothing at all,” Mavis added, smiling and winking back.

  Chapter 9

  Mining superstition demands that no miner worth his salt ever take up residence on the second-penetration side of a tunnel bore, so for thirty-six years Cornelius McPherson had lived down the mountain on the first-bore side of the Straight Creek tunnel dig in the historic silver-strike town of Georgetown. Miners of his generation liked to call this the “mucker safe” side of the dig.

  At an elevation of more than 8,500 feet, with a population of just over a thousand, Georgetown was no longer a rough-and-tumble mining town but a quaint alpine village that, unlike most of its historic gold-and silver-rush counterparts, still had more than two hundred of its original buildings standing. Seemingly every structure in town sported a National Register of Historic Places plaque.

  During his Straight Creek tunnel years, McPherson, who was something of an entrepreneur, had rented and later purchased a quaint Queen Anne house in the heart of Georgetown’s historic district. He’d paid $7,000 for it more than thirty years earlier and over the years had lovingly restored the house. It served as a testimony to his insight, although when pressed on the subject, he enjoyed telling people who recognized that the house was now probably worth a quarter of a million dollars that his success had been “just a case of dumb miner’s luck.”

  As he sat on his back porch in a wicker rocker, enjoying the late-afternoon mountain breeze and talking with the Clear Creek County sheriff, a man he’d known for more than twenty years, McPherson found himself relishing something that he’d never expected to come in his lifetime. Something the sheriff, who sat in a rocker identical to McPherson’s, had just told him every American dreams of: fifteen minutes of fame.

  Six copies of the previous day’s Denver Post sat stacked on an overturned antique milk crate between the two men. Page 2 of one copy had been snipped with scissors from its moorings and rested on top of the pile. The sheriff, a rugged-looking man of fifty, picked up the tear sheet and quoted the headline out loud: “‘Tremor Unearths Miner’s Remains.’” Handing the sheet to McPherson, he tapped the stack with a stubby finger and said, “You ask me, I think you should’ve made page 1.”

  McPherson shook his head. “Hard to overshadow an earthquake, Gunther. Even so, I got myself a three-column story in the state’s biggest newspaper—just days before retirement. What more could a man ask for?” Leaning forward in the rocker, McPherson reread the portion of the story that detailed how he’d ridden out an earthquake while trapped inside the Eisenhower Tunnel and how, in the earthquake’s aftermath, he’d discovered the arm of Antoine Ducane, a man with whom he’d worked decades earlier. “All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I was as close as anybody gets to front-page material.”

  Gunther Tolls nodded and adjusted the brim of his Stetson. “What are you gonna do with all your newspapers?”

  McPherson grinned. “Gonna frame one for sure. Guess I’ll keep the rest, like they say, for posterity.”

  Tolls, who’d arrived thirty minutes earlier, hoping to tie up a few investigative loose ends, simply nodded. He took a sip of the syrupy, now tepid coffee McPherson had given him, and, brow furrowed, asked, “Any chance you can add anything to what you told me about that Ducane fellow that you mighta forgot to mention when we talked the other day?”

  McPherson stroked his chin, as much for effect as to jog his memory. “Not really. But just for the record, back when I knew Ducane, he was a pretty standoffish sort. Didn’t seem to trust nobody. Never did figure out why he took a likin’ to me, other than the fact that in spite of him being a Creole and half white, or whatever he woulda been back down South in his neck of the woods, up here in these mountains the both of us was just plain black.”

  “Good enough reason, I guess,” said Tolls. “Now, what was it again that he told you about knowin’ who killed Kennedy?”

  “I told you that already, Gunther,” said McPherson, sounding put-upon. “We got really sloppy drunk one night durin’ a weekend over in Hanna, Wyoming. He told me then. I guess for some reason, on that particular night Ducane was feelin’ either real confessional or real the hell satisfied. ’Cause it was after one of the women we were with gave him a long, slow blow job that he loosened up.”

  “So he told you he knew who killed JFK right then?”

  Squinting at the sheriff and looking confused, McPherson said, “Shit, man! It’s been more than forty years since all that happened. I don’t really know if he said he knew who killed Kennedy, or if he said he was in on the killin’, or what his exact words were when you really come down to it. Hell, I was pretty near drunk!”

  Tolls nodded, reacting calmly to the fire that he’d seemingly lit. “How do you suppose Ducane ever ended up behind
that tunnel wall on the wrong side of a mountain?”

  “Beats the hell outta me. Like I told you yesterday, after he disappeared off the job, I really didn’t think about him that much. But I can tell you this for a fact. Me and Ducane worked together from 1968 through most of 1970, and the south wall of that tunnel with all its fancy-shmancy tile and catwalks and air vents wasn’t a done deal ’til close to the end of 1973. That leaves a good year or so after Ducane walked off the job for him to have got hisself stuck behind that wall and inside a mountain.”

  “A whole year’s window when somebody could’ve killed your friend and stuck him behind that wall, you mean,” said Tolls.

  “I guess,” McPherson said hesitantly.

  Tolls fingered the cleft in his chin. “And he was sure enough flat-out murdered. Unless of course he was peekin’ back behind that tunnel wall one day on a day trip to the mountains, lookin’ for wildflowers and inspectin’ the mountain for the quality of its dirt, and a boulder fell on his head.”

  “Whatta you mean by that?”

  “Just this.” The look on the sheriff’s face turned deadpan serious. “Between the time you found your friend’s arm the other day, all nicely frozen, tattooed, and preserved for posterity, and late last night, the boys that do crime-scene investigation and mop-up for me found a few other pieces of him scattered around behind that tunnel wall. Not all of him, mind you, but enough. And wouldn’t you know it? The most important piece of Mr. Antoine Ducane they found was pretty much intact. His skull. A skull with a hole the size of a plum punched through the occipital bone.” The sheriff tapped the back of his head just above the base of his skull with two fingers. “Right here,” he said, looking casually up at the ceiling. “Now, I grant you, a boulder the size of a basketball fallin’ from the ceiling would pretty much be guaranteed to open up either one of our heads like ripe summer melons. And first off, I thought about that and said to myself, Maybe a good-sized rock fell on your friend and took him out accidentally. But when one of my crime-scene boys had old Doc Withers, who’s still a little pissed at me for droppin’ a coroner’s case in his lap, slip the head of an ordinary, everyday hammer into that hole in Ducane’s skull, I found myself thinkin’ about the possibility of murder a little harder.” Tolls adjusted his rear end in his seat and, looking pleased with himself, said, “The hole in your friend’s skull was damn near a perfect match for the head of the hammer, Cornelius.”

  “So you’re thinkin’ maybe Ducane got hisself whacked?”

  “Whacked, popped, snuffed, the word choice here don’t very much matter when you come right down to it. My take is that Ducane was murdered. Especially since when we found your friend’s other arm, the one without a tattoo, all frozen and preserved just as pretty as the one you stumbled across, the damn thing had a piece of what Doc Withers and I both think is balin’ wire, the kind they used for balin’ hay before machines and twine took over, looped—you might even say execution style—around the wrist. And there’s some other things the crime-scene boys found I can’t even tell you about. I’m thinkin’ that somebody killed Ducane all right.” Tolls forced a wry smile. “Who knows, maybe it was the same somebody who killed President Kennedy.”

  McPherson shook his head in disbelief. “You mean you think Ducane was tellin’ me the truth all them years ago? Hell, I always figured he was just blowin’ hot air.”

  “Why not? In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, half the folks on the planet have their own pet JFK assassination theory. Might as well include the possibility that Antoine Ducane was in on it.”

  “No way. All he was, as far as I could see, was some sad sack of a country-boy loner.”

  “And so was Lee Harvey Oswald.” A half-cocked smile formed at the corner of the sheriff’s lips. “And so was Oswald.”

  Richie’s Grub Steak Diner, a Denver landmark for more than sixty years, though no longer the dining flagship for mobsters that it had been in the 1950s, nonetheless still warranted emeritus status in that regard.

  The forty-five-ton prefabricated club-car-style diner had come to Denver from New Jersey shortly after World War II, secured to two flatbed railroad cars, with its new owner, Toastmaster Richie Dupree, riding in a Pullman sleeper just behind it. Dupree, part French, part Italian, and 100 percent Jersey con, had earned the nickname “Toastmaster” by virtue of once having been an MC at Minsky’s Burlesque Theater in New York. He’d always considered the term “MC” beneath his dignity, and until the day he died Richie had always referred to himself as “Toastmaster.”

  The diner’s trademark, a forty-foot-high neon cowboy complete with a white hat, silver spurs, purple kerchief, and red kitchen apron, stood on a pedestal in front of the entrance beckoning passersby to drop in for a hearty meal. A full-sized palomino horse feeding at a trough stood atop the diner’s roof, Richie’s theatrical exclamation mark to the cholesterol-laden delights he served up inside.

  Three kinds of people frequented Richie’s: North Denver locals who considered the place a historical landmark and knew a feed-bag bargain when they saw one; tourists who had read the weekly North Denver Tribune’s popular restaurant insert, “Neighborhood Dining on a Dime”; and descendants of the dozen or so East Coast underworld figures who in 1947 had followed Toastmaster Richie Dupree from New Jersey to the Rocky Mountains to help him organize and fine-tune what until then had been the Wild West stepchild of the organization.

  In the years that followed Richie Dupree’s death, infighting between competing factions within the Western intermountain crime families eventually resulted in two equally powerful branches of Colorado organized crime: one in Denver, controlled by Mario Satoni, and a second 115 miles to the south in the steel town of Pueblo. Unlike the East, where turf battles could erupt simply because of proximity, Colorado had thousands of square miles of blue sky and wide-open spaces to facilitate peaceful coexistence.

  Rollie Ornasetti, who’d come to Richie’s to enjoy his favorite dinner—two slices of homemade meatloaf with red sauce, string beans, and mashed potatoes with gravy—was seated in the far southeast corner, snuggled into one of the long, narrow room’s 1950s-style ruby-red Naugahyde booths. Between bites, Ornasetti looked up from his plate to eye Randall Maxie, the rotund man seated across from him. Maxie, who’d already wolfed down his meal, barely looked up. He was absorbed in munching on a cookie and drinking hot chocolate while reading the Denver Post.

  Silver-haired, smooth-talking, and something of a fop, Ornasetti had aged gracefully since his days as a 1960s crime boss wannabe, and he enjoyed boasting that, at sixty-nine, he was like the decanted essence of a fine wine. He’d spent more than four decades climbing the close-knit Rocky Mountain mafia’s organizational chart and now reigned as king of the still largely insignificant Rocky Mountain component of America’s Italian crime family.

  In spite of hop-skipping his way to power ahead of his more respected, sometimes more ruthless, and certainly more knowledgeable crime family brethren, and in spite of having at one time had a direct pipeline to men as powerful as Johnny Rosselli, Santo Trafficante Jr., and Carlos Marcello, Rolando “Rollie” Antonias Ornasetti would never have risen in the organization if his uncle, Mario Satoni, hadn’t vacated that seat. Ornasetti had quickly filled the void left by his uncle, a void that mafia dons across the country had pleaded with Satoni not to create. Like a hungry dog with a soup bone, Ornasetti had devoured the bone and sucked out the marrow. He had twice as many enemies as friends inside the organization, and over the years he had used blackmail, threats, and manipulation to retain power and maintain a significant core of people who were loyal to him. With Randall Maxie, for whom killing was not a necessity but a delight, and a quorum of other loyalists glued to his side, Ornasetti had managed to remain in the Rocky Mountain mob’s driver’s seat for decades.

  Dabbing the corner of his mouth with a napkin, Ornasetti eyed his unusually silent companion and cleared his throat. “How much do you think the cops can figure out about Ducane?” h
e asked, waving for a waiter to remove his plate and the offending sight of food scraps.

  “I’m not certain,” said Maxie. At five-foot-eleven and 310 pounds, the cerebral-sounding Maxie had reportedly been key to the elimination of a half-dozen or more people for Ornasetti over the years. He was said to drink his own urine in homage to his intellectual hero, Mahatma Gandhi. “I can tell you this with great conviction, however. You absolutely and positively do want things to stay bottled up in that yahoo Clear Creek County sheriff’s office for as long as possible.”

  Ornasetti frowned as he watched Maxie daintily finish off his cookie. “Who the hell would’ve ever thought that a fuckin’ earthquake would out us?”

  “Things beyond one’s control can and do happen,” said Maxie. Despite having spent more than thirty years greasing the skids for or mopping up after Ornasetti, he’d never understood Ornasetti’s penchant for crying over spilled milk. To his way of thinking, Ornasetti was too much of a Chicken Little to be a leader, too standoffish to instill loyalty in the troops, and too elitist to fit in with either his lieutenants or the grunts. Nonetheless, he admired Ornasetti’s ability to have remained king of the hill in Denver for forty years.

  The prevailing explanation of Ornasetti’s lengthy tenure at the helm related to the important connection he’d once had to long-dead Midwestern and East Coast mafia kingpins—powerful men who’d reportedly owed him. Men who’d constructed a firewall around him that said hands off to those who might topple Ornasetti. Another story had it that Ornasetti hadn’t been dethroned or, more importantly, eliminated by factions inside his own organization or those in Las Vegas, where he had powerful and vocal opponents, because of his opponents’ remaining loyalty to Mario Satoni. Whatever the case, Ornasetti remained Colorado’s top organized crime power broker, and Maxie remained his top gun.