The Mongoose Deception

by Robert Greer

  “Exactly,” said CJ, watching Damion’s eyes widen as Julie, looking suddenly energized and stepping into a role that Damion had never seen her in, walked over to a nearby phone, dialed information, and said to the operator in the most official-sounding of voices, “The number for Lockheed Martin, please.”

  PART V

  The Solution

  Chapter 22

  The day Gus Cavalaris had turned thirteen, his great-uncle, a wine-maker from the island of Sardinia, had given the sensitive, stuttering teenager thirteen shiny silver dollars and two important hard-and-fast rules to live by: Never sulk over a bad grape harvest—prepare instead for next season and Always follow your instincts, never convention. You’ll be a better man for it.

  Forty-one now, Cavalaris had spent most of his life subconsciously following his uncle’s advice. Advice that had enabled him, for the most part, to ignore the discouraging utterances of men such as FBI Agent Ron Else.

  Else’s shortcomings were his own to wrestle with, and the McPherson killing, not the Kennedy assassination, was what Cavalaris realized he was being paid to investigate. As things stood, he told himself, tagging along after Floyd and Mario Satoni was probably his best option for bringing resolution to that case.

  Earlier in the day he’d ordered a stakeout detail for Satoni’s house, done some homework on the Satoni family’s affinity for defacing twenty-dollar gold pieces, and had a brief conversation with McPherson’s friend and coworker, Franklin Watts, to see if Watts might recall whether McPherson had ever carried a twenty-dollar gold piece with an “S” stamped on it. He’d forced back a chuckle when Watts had said, “Hell, if Cornelius had a coin like that, it would’ve been in the bank earning interest. Cornelius was a man who liked to keep real close to his money. Why are you asking anyway, Lieutenant? Something to do with the issues that FBI agent was so keen on?”

  When he’d told Watts he wasn’t at liberty to say, Watts, raising his voice in defense of his dead friend, had said, “You can take this to the bank, Lieutenant. Cornelius wouldn’t have had anything to do with killing anyone.”

  Surprised by Watts’s adamant, loud defense of his friend, he’d made a mental note to check into the world of Franklin Watts.

  After finishing up some late-day paperwork, he’d gotten a haircut, grabbed an early dinner at a twenty-four-hour diner near the Denver Performing Arts Center, and finally settled into the task that he had assigned himself—staking out CJ Floyd’s Victorian. He’d been parked on Bail Bondsman’s Row, four houses down the street from Floyd’s place, watching rush-hour traffic stream down Thirteenth Avenue and out of the city for about half an hour when CJ came rushing out of his office, Stetson in hand.

  When Floyd jumped into his Bel Air and backed out of his driveway in such a rush that he nearly scraped the car’s pristine right-rear hubcap on the curb, Cavalaris had the feeling that not only was Floyd about to lead him to water but that he would finally get the opportunity to drink.

  Nosing his unmarked car south on Delaware Street as Floyd turned west onto Thirteenth Avenue, he allowed Floyd a five-car-lengths lead before slipping in behind a dump truck, prepared to follow the Bel Air and his instincts.

  The Lockheed Martin Astronautics division’s futuristic-looking campus, home to the U.S. space program’s Titan and Atlas rockets, sits twenty miles west of downtown Denver, nestled into the foothills. The metallic silver headquarters building, the architectural highlight of the Jefferson County complex, sits against the backdrop of red sandstone rock formations and the Rocky Mountains and has the splendidly low, wide feeling of a space temple.

  Carl Watson had gone to work for the aerospace giant thirty years earlier, armed with a newly earned PhD in both mechanical and aeronautical engineering. Over the years he had gained a sterling reputation as a mechanical systems troubleshooter, working his way up to the point that his opinions were now powerful enough to garner boardroom attention.

  Considered by colleagues to be calculating and brilliant but a bit eccentric, Watson had been known to wear the same suit every workday for a week and eat mustard-smothered fried-bologna sandwiches and dill pickles for breakfast. When a project he was in charge of lagged because of a systems design glitch, he would stay at work and sleep in his office, gnawing at the design problem, often for weeks, until it was solved. He was known to take frequent trips abroad, ostensibly to check on the quality assurance programs of some of Lockheed Martin’s business partners, and he enjoyed the reputation of being that annoying fly on the wall that project partners, collaborators, and associates hated to see coming.

  Watson left his office in the headquarters building, whistling to himself, a little before 6, as was his custom, expecting to make it home in time to shave, change clothes, and take in a 7:30 play with his wife at the Denver Performing Arts Center. His face became a mask of irritation and his whistling stopped as he prepared to crank his Volvo’s engine to exit the top terrace of the headquarters building’s oddly configured parking area, only to see CJ Floyd in his rearview mirror.

  Watson tapped his horn as CJ stepped from behind the rear bumper and walked toward him. Only a half-dozen cars remained on the terrace, and CJ had pegged his chances of being interrupted by a Watson coworker—or shooed off by the security guard he’d avoided when he’d slipped into the elevated lot by driving up a ramp the wrong way just after another car had come down it—at less than 10 percent.

  “Evening,” CJ said as a perplexed Carl Watson tried his best not to look intimidated.

  “What on earth are you doing here, Floyd?” Watson said through the rolled-down window.

  CJ smiled. “Following the scent of the number on your license plate. It’s a scent that has a way of betraying you.”

  “I’ll call security.”

  “Why don’t you do that? And while you’re at it, I’ll call the cops. Might as well explain to everybody wearing a badge why the hell you been lying about Sheila Lucerne being dead.”

  Caught off guard, Watson asked, “How’d you know I’d be here? And how’d you get past security?”

  “A real smart lawyer friend of mine sniffed you out. Here’s a little piece of advice. If you wanna avoid people, you need to learn to alter your schedule. As for security, I’d say that considering what it is your company does, somebody here oughta consider sending that job out for another bid. I’d check the timing on your exit gates if I were you, and maybe get your rent-a-cops to understand that traffic on a one-way street can always flow the other way, no matter what the signage says. Now that I’ve shared all of my little secrets, how about us getting back to Sheila Lucerne?” CJ poked his head through the open window. “Why the charade, Mr. Watson?”

  Eyes locked on the dashboard, Watson adjusted himself in his seat. “That’s personal.”

  “I see. Personal enough that I’m guessing you wouldn’t dare share the information with the cops, and certainly personal enough to have never mentioned it to your security-minded employer. Of course not,” CJ said, smiling. “Why the hell would you tell Lockheed Martin that you once faked an old girlfriend’s death? Especially when it might start them thinking there could be other things you’ve faked.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Floyd.”

  CJ straightened up, rested his right arm on the car’s roof, and flashed Watson an intimidating downward stare. “Then let me spell it out for you. Remember that lawyer I mentioned to you earlier? Turns out she’s a lot more than just smart; she’s resourceful to boot. Has to be. Her firm’s got lots of mouths to feed. Secretaries, law clerks, wannabe partners, the partners themselves. So just to check out her resourcefulness, I asked her to have one of her real hungry law clerks do some digging and see what she could come up with about Sheila Lucerne. Guess what she found?” When CJ slammed his palm down on the roof, Watson flinched and rose six inches out of his seat. “Just this. That accident you told me about? The one you claimed your old girlfriend Sheila died in? My friend the lawyer and I think it wa
s staged. Turns out that law clerk of hers couldn’t find but two brief old Denver Post articles describing the accident. No police reports, no death certificate, no hospital admission, and lo and behold, no follow-up stories. All she could find was one amazingly well-placed and very brief story about a Boulder Turnpike crash and the car’s driver, a woman named Sheila Lucerne who died at the scene. It was a story that led to nothing but a dead end.”

  CJ stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Wonder how much you’d have to pay somebody to plant a story like that? A lot, I’m guessing. I’m also guessing you probably couldn’t get it done unless you were connected to people with a whole lot of clout. Mobsters, politicians, people like that.” CJ stuck his head back into the car until he was nearly cheek to cheek with Watson. “I’d vote for the mob, myself. Wonder how finding out that one of your employees was linked to the mob would sit with a big-time government-contract-rich company like Lockheed Martin?”

  Watson inched his face away from CJ’s. Drumming his fingers on the dashboard and desperately looking around the car’s interior, he finally said, “What do you want, Floyd?”

  “Answers. Just a few simple answers. Like what really happened to Sheila Lucerne, and what was she running from?”

  “And if I tell you?”

  “You’ve done your good deed for the day, and you’ve held on to your job.”

  Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Watson eyed the vintage Bel Air that blocked his exit and let out a sigh. “I don’t know why I should tell you. I’d do better telling this to Lieutenant Cavalaris.”

  “Because, Mr. Watson, I’m standing here prepared to make your tidy little life 100 percent miserable.”

  “Could be you’re bluffing.”

  CJ slipped his cell phone off his belt and flipped it open. “You’re free to talk to my friend the lawyer and find out. Be happy to dial the number for you.”

  “Okay, okay. So Sheila and I faked her death. Who did it harm?”

  “That dead man they found on your front lawn the other night is one likely person.”

  Pondering how on earth an old girlfriend he hadn’t seen in decades could possibly have brought him so much trouble, Watson took a deep breath and stared straight ahead. “I was just a kid at the time. In my midtwenties. Sheila was older than me, and she had me by the nose. You would have to have seen her to understand why. Beautiful, 100 percent curves and cleavage, and with a set of legs on her that wouldn’t quit. And she had one of those throaty, come-hither kind of voices that just seemed to paralyze me. I would’ve jumped off a bridge if she’d told me to back then.”

  “So instead you helped her stage her own death?”

  Watson smiled knowingly, as if the thought of what he and Sheila had pulled off somehow served to forever unite them. “It wasn’t hard. Sheila knew people who could get things done. The kind of people I didn’t think existed except in the movies. One of the people she knew was that guy whose remains they found up at the Eisenhower Tunnel after our recent earthquake.”

  “Antoine Ducane.”

  “Yes. He and Sheila had a thing going years before I met her. Something I could never quite put my finger on. Love, larceny, lust? I don’t exactly know which. Could have had something to do with the fact that they were connected in ways that she and I weren’t. They were both Creole and from god-awful Louisiana. I never met Ducane, and I only saw his picture once. Sheila kept it in a dresser drawer. She mentioned him a few times in passing, and whenever she did, her eyes would glaze over. I can tell you this, though. They could’ve passed for brother and sister—they had the exact same cinnamon-toned skin, aquamarine eyes, and curly jet-black hair.”

  “I see,” said CJ, noting the similarities. “So what triggered the fake car crash?” He scanned the parking lot, keeping an eye out for security.

  “Ducane—I’m certain of it. One night after Sheila had sent me to the kind of sexual heights a man could only dream of, she told me she was going to have to disappear. Said someone she’d known several years back had resurfaced and brought her a world of difficulties. I begged her not to run, told her I’d stand by her no matter what. She laughed at me, called me a foolish white boy, and told me if I didn’t help her stage that accident, both of us would be sorry. I thought if I helped her, there’d be a chance that I’d be able to get her to stick around, and that even if I couldn’t right then, someway, someday, she’d come back.” Watson’s voice became a whisper. “That was a mistake.”

  “So you pulled off a plant?”

  “That’s exactly what Sheila called it—a plant. And just so you know, she’s the one who lined everything up. The newspaper photographer, the writer, the semi, the driver, even the ambulance and the tow truck. I was never quite sure how she did it, but she did. And until right now, I thought she’d pulled it off without a glitch.”

  “She did one hell of a job. It took an earthquake to out her. So where’d she go after the phony crash?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is this.” Watson swallowed with such force that his Adam’s apple quivered. “When it was all said and done, she told me she was going to disappear into another world. One like mine. A world that would be lost and lonely and lily-white. And that if I ever came after her, she’d see to it that I only made that mistake once.”

  “And you never saw her again after that?”

  “No. I took her at her word. I’d seen her handiwork, watched her make her own life disappear. I had no question that she could do the same thing for mine. She was connected to someone or something with enough juice to fuel a rocket.” Watson cleared his throat, as if to clear a bad taste from his mouth, looked straight ahead, and said, “I did see her one other time, long after the wreck. Not in person, though, just her photograph. It must’ve been fifteen years ago now. I spotted her photograph in one of those weekly newspaper throw-aways. The kind they fill with advertisements for carpet cleaning, trash hauling, and dentures on the cheap. I was in Boulder when I picked it up. I’d flipped through most of the paper while waiting for my wife to come out of a shoe store on the Pearl Street mall. A few pages from the end of the tabloid, I swore I saw a photograph of someone resembling Sheila. When I looked closer, I realized that without a doubt it was her. She looked older, of course, but there was no mistaking that face. She had a come-hither smile and was wearing a low-cut dress. When my wife came walking out of the store, my nose was within an inch of the newsprint—I could’ve licked the photo off the page. But as we walked to the car, I remembered Sheila’s parting admonition to me all those years ago, and I thought, Been there, done that. I threw the paper in a trash can and never looked back.”

  CJ took a step back from the car. “So why was her picture in that weekly?”

  “She was advertising for a bed and breakfast up in Poudre Canyon. The ad identified her as the place’s manager. There’s no way I could ever forget the name of the place—Peak to Peak Bed and Breakfast. She was using the name Lydia Krebs.”

  “So why didn’t you go after her? She was only two and a half hours away by car.”

  “I’ve told you already. The lady could’ve made me disappear. Besides, I’m an aerospace engineer, Mr. Floyd, not some street tough or, God forbid, James Bond. When I err, it tends to be on the conservative side of things. The side that makes sense to an engineer, like putting a half-dozen backup systems into a moon rocket. Bottom line’s this: I didn’t want the pleasure boat that had become my life to get rocked, possibly even destroyed. What about you? Which side of the fence would you have come down on?”

  “I don’t know. But I can tell you this—I’ve never responded real well to threats, and that would’ve included one from Sheila Lucerne.”

  “So you would’ve gone after her?”

  “I am going after her,” CJ said with a confident smile.

  Watson shook his head. “Bad choice. The better choice in my book would be to call Lieutenant Cavalaris.”

  “Could be you’re right. But if I did, there’s a chance I
’d end up letting down a friend. And like you just pointed out, we live in a world where backup systems are important. Turns out I’m pretty much the only one my friend’s got.”

  “Sheila’s connected to people who could kill you, I’m certain of that.”

  “Think you’re probably right.”

  “Then why go after her? That’s why we pay the police.”

  CJ stepped farther away from the car and looked down at Watson. “The problem with the police, Mr. Watson, is that they move too slow, they posture too much, and they’ve never been real supporters of that friend I mentioned.”

  “Have it your way.”

  “Oh, I will,” CJ said, turning to leave. “Like you, I’m afraid I’m a little too entrenched in my ways to have it any other.” He touched the brim of his Stetson. “Thanks for the info. I’ll see which side of the fence I land on.” His footsteps echoed off the concrete as he walked away.

  By the time he reached I-25 to head north for Poudre Canyon, CJ had used his cell phone to reserve a room at Peak to Peak Bed and Breakfast and a very nervous Carl Watson had called Lieutenant Gus Cavalaris to tell him about his parking-lot conversation with Floyd. Neither CJ nor Watson was aware that Cavalaris had been parked less than fifty yards away from them during their conversation, and CJ remained unaware that Cavalaris was now the same five car lengths behind the Bel Air that he’d been when they’d left CJ’s Delaware Street office an hour and a half earlier.

  Neither CJ nor Cavalaris had any idea that the man calling himself Napper had also latched on to the Bel Air, thinking as they all left Lockheed Martin that since the money was right and the opportunity ripe, he should probably take out Mario Satoni’s boy before dispensing with Rollie Ornasetti.

  A light drizzle was falling in Denver when the Rockies-Dodgers game—in which the Rockies had squeaked in a 2-1 win over Mario’s beloved Dodgers on a bases-loaded tenth-inning pinch-hit homer—ended. Frustrated by the game’s outcome, Mario found himself fidgeting with a photograph he kept on an end table next to the La-Z-Boy recliner in his TV room. The photograph, a favorite, had been taken at his wedding just as Mario, clad in a tux and looking dapper, and Angie, radiant as an angel, raised their arms to fend off a shower of rice as they ran from the doors of Denver’s St. Catherine’s Church toward a waiting limousine.