by Robert Greer
“Don’t know. B-b-but it’s a sure bet that if Watson balks at coming to s-s-see the car, he and I will need to have a serious heart-to-heart. I’m outta here, Toby.”
“Watch those twists and turns goin’ up the canyon, Lieutenant. They can be murder.”
“Oh, I know,” said Cavalaris, breaking into a grin. “I kn-kn-know.”
After a restless night’s sleep and an early morning spent asking himself whether he’d made a deal with the devil by agreeing to, in effect, partner with a police lieutenant, CJ wasn’t sure he wasn’t going soft. He’d had a talk with Flora Jean, who’d told him moments after she’d arrived at work that Alden Grace still hadn’t come up with anything that could help Mario or move their investigation of the Ducane killing and its possible link to the JFK assassination forward. “Alden says he needs some physical evidence, or at least somethin’ more concrete than what we’ve given him, in order to get the tongues he knows waggin’ about the JFK killin’. The folks he deals with don’t talk to nobody on the basis of hearsay, sugar. It could get ’em killed,” had been Flora Jean’s exact words.
Following that conversation, CJ disappointedly left the office, cheroot and coffee cup in hand, and headed for Rosie’s Garage in Five Points to have his best friend since childhood, Roosevelt Weeks, check on the damage to the Bel Air. Rosie had just replaced the car’s headlight and was in the midst of reminding CJ that he was getting too old to run the streets he still insisted on running when CJ’s cell phone rang. Surprised to hear Sheila Lucerne announce herself on the other end, CJ crossed his lips with a finger to let Rosie know he had to deal with something in private, slipped into the Bel Air, and took a seat behind the wheel.
Sheila was coy at first, failing to mention the reason for the call, and CJ knew she was sizing him up. When he pushed for her to get to the point, she dropped a bombshell. “Antoine Ducane’s mother’s here with me, and we need to talk. How soon can you get here?”
CJ wondered if he’d heard her right. “Why me?”
Sheila said without hesitation, “Two very good reasons, Mr. Floyd. You’re not a cop, and you’re black.”
“I can be at your place in less than two hours,” said CJ, checking his watch.
“Let’s cut that time in half. How about I meet you at Barbour Ponds State Park in an hour. I know a place where we can get lost in the trees.”
“Is being lost that important?” CJ asked as Rosie signaled for him to turn on the Bel Air’s headlights.
“You can bet your life on it, Mr. Floyd. One hour. I’ll be in a white Chevy wagon,” she said, abruptly ending the conversation.
CJ was twenty-five minutes south of Barbour Ponds State Park, speeding along at eighty-five, when Pinkie Niedemeyer called. His greeting was curt, his message to the point. “We got problems, CJ. That FBI agent who barged in on us the other day is leanin’ on Mario again.”
“Else? Damn! Sure is a persistent cuss.”
“Like a dog with a bone. Mario called me a little bit ago to tell me that Else came by his place while he was still in his PJs. Wanted to talk to him about Rollie Ornasetti disappearin’. Seems like somebody either snatched Rollie or popped him last night.”
“And Mario’s a prime suspect. Did they haul him in?”
“Nope.” Pinkie snickered. “Mario was too quick on the draw. Soon as he saw Else headin’ for his front door, he called Julie. Told me she was there in no time flat. Mario says Else got nothin’, unless of course you count the fifteen-minute verbal ass-stompin’ he got from Julie.”
“Where’s Mario now?”
“At home.”
“Call him and tell him to keep his butt right there. All damn day if he has to. I’m onto something with Ducane, and if it pans out, I may need to talk to Mario in a real hurry.”
“Okay. And by the way, I’m on my way right now to find out how much of that line Maxie fed me and Damion the other day was a lie.”
“How’d you find him?”
“It’s easy to run down three hundred—plus pounds of blubber when you’re passin’ out hundreds.”
“Real generous of you, Pinkie,” CJ said, laughing.
“Come on, CJ. You know better than that. The generosity’s all Mario’s.”
“Guess Mario still knows how to loosen tongues.”
“Yeah,” said Pinkie.
“Let me know how you do with Maxie.”
“I’ll do fine. Just fine. Talk to you later,” Pinkie said confidently.
Neither Gus Cavalaris’s stuttering, which seemed at the moment to be worsening, nor the fact that Cavalaris remained glued to him like a bluetick heeler on a stray seemed to bother the Larimer County sheriff, who continued his task of policing the previous evening’s washed-out crime scene. “I should’ve impounded that guy Floyd’s car instead of simply dusting it for prints, Lieutenant.”
“And w-w-what would you have found in a rainstorm?” Cavalaris asked.
“Not much. Just like I didn’t find anything when I drove up to that bed and breakfast Floyd claims he was coming from last night. There was nobody there but a couple from Iowa. The lady who runs the place was gone for the evening. Wonder why Floyd was up there in the first place.”
“Beats me,” said Cavalaris, feeling not one bit guilty about holding information back from the sheriff.
“Well, he was coming from there, and the shooter knew it. Why else would he have strapped a homing device to the underbelly of Floyd’s car?”
“Makes sense,” said Cavalaris. “Think I’ll drive up the canyon a bit and see if I can spot anything that m-m-might’ve been overlooked.” He made a half turn toward his car.
“I’ve already done that,” the sheriff said defensively. “Nothing. After I’m done here I’m gonna head up the canyon and go house to house. See if I can’t come up with something. Why’s this guy Floyd so important to you, anyway?”
“He’s k-k-key to a murder case I’m working back in Denver.”
“Must be some case.”
“It is,” said Cavalaris, cutting off the discussion. He headed for his car, trying his best to reconcile himself to the fact that he’d decided to cast in his lot with a bail bondsman he hardly knew, and to pinpoint why he’d become so interested in what had happened to Antoine Ducane. The answer, he told himself as he got into his car, was simple when you came right down to it. He was a cop, he was on the trail of the crime of the twentieth century, and he had a chance to not only overturn history but stick it to an overbearing, full-of-himself, pompous FBI agent. Why not use somebody like Floyd? Somebody who’d keep the trail hot.
Pulling onto the highway and kicking up a contrail of mud as he headed up the canyon, he had the sense that things would soon start to warm up.
Forty minutes later Cavalaris barreled back down the canyon, having learned from a young girl named Emily who worked at the Peak to Peak Bed and Breakfast that for the first time since she’d worked there, her boss, Lydia Krebs, had shown up late that morning. The girl had also informed him that sometime after breakfast Krebs had left her a note saying that she’d left with one of the guests. The trip hadn’t been a total loss, however. When he’d asked the girl whom her boss had left with, she’d walked him to a guest register in the hallway and pointed to the name “Ann Reed” three lines up from the bottom of the page.
Pinkie Niedemeyer stood outside the apartment where the sad-faced woman from Chihuahua lived. He was tempted to kick the flimsy door off its hinges, rush in, grab Randall Maxie by the throat, and choke at least a little bit of truth out of him. But since he was certain that even if Maxie were at death’s door, he’d still have a gun close at hand, Pinkie decided to try a less gung-ho but equally effective approach. He knocked.
The woman’s response was a faint “Who is it?”
“A friend of Maxie’s.”
“Who?” the woman said, sounding as if she were being coached.
“Andrus Niedemeyer.”
“He can’t see you right now. He’s rest
ing.”
“Gotcha.” Taking a step back from the door, Pinkie slipped his 9-mm out of his leg holster, cocked his right leg, and with a single engineer-booted thrust kicked the door open, sending the doorknob and the chain lock flying into the room.
The woman screamed as the doorknob rebounded off the wall. Lunging into the room, Pinkie grabbed the woman by the arm, and by the time a startled Randall Maxie appeared in the doorway of a nearby bedroom, the woman, kicking and screaming and shielding Pinkie from Maxie’s gun, was firmly in Pinkie’s grasp.
Smiling at Maxie, Pinkie said, “Didn’t figure you’d talk to me without me havin’ some kinda bargainin’ chip. So I decided to grab myself one.” Pinkie let out an “Ummph” as the woman elbowed him in the gut. Squeezing her until she could barely breathe, Pinkie yelled, “I’ll cold-cock her, Maxie. Better tell her to stop!” Pinkie’s 9-mm was aimed squarely at Maxie’s chest.
Maxie, his right arm supported by a sling, said, “What the fuck do you want, Pinkie?”
“Some straight answers. The ones you gave me and the Madrid kid the other day seem to run a little crooked.” The terror-stricken woman, barely able to breathe and worn out from kicking, said in a near whisper, “Tell him, Randy. Tell him.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll drop the both of you on the spot and call it a day.”
“Think you can do that before I get off a couple of rounds of my own?” asked Maxie.
“We’ll see.”
Tears streamed down the woman’s face as she gasped for air. The two men stood facing one another down for the next thirty seconds until Maxie finally said, “Let her go.”
“I’ll do that just as soon as you pop the clip on that piece of yours and kick it over here to me.”
Shaking his head and looking disgusted with himself for letting Pinkie get the drop on him, Maxie dutifully removed the clip, dropped it on the floor, and kicked it over to Pinkie.
Pinkie released the terrified woman, retrieved the clip, and said, “Tell her to have a seat. Right there in the chair next to you. And do the same yourself.” Pinkie smiled. “Two people, two guns, two chairs. Damn, my stars must be in alignment.”
The woman and Maxie took seats in two pressed-back chairs that hugged a half wall that separated the apartment’s living room from a small kitchen.
“Good. And by the way, love your sling,” Pinkie said, snickering. “Always heard they had real good doctors up there at Poudre Valley Hospital.” Pinkie stepped back to the door and slammed it shut. “Think you’re probably gonna have to spring for a new doorknob, Max.” Moving back into the living room and with his gun still trained on Maxie, he said, “So, let’s get down to business. I need the whole nine yards on your role in the Ducane killin’.”
Maxie eyed the woman. “Not in front of her.”
Pinkie shrugged. “She’s free to leave the room as long as she’s not goin’ to get a gun. I’ll send you both on the road to glory if she goes after one.” Pinkie smiled at the woman. “I’ll kill you, sweetheart, if I so much as smell a weapon.”
“She knows better than that, right, Margarite? Why don’t you go in the bedroom and lie down, sweetie. I can handle things out here,” said Maxie.
Shivering in fear, the woman offered an obedient nod and rose from her chair.
“Compliant,” said Pinkie, watching the woman disappear into the bedroom.
“I prefer them that way.”
Pinkie smiled and shook his head. “Pigs and men with tiny little dicks usually do. Let’s forget about your preferences for the moment and get back to Ducane.”
“And if I set the record straight for you, what’s in it for me?”
“Let’s see.” Pinkie pretended to stroke his chin. “How about I let you see sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow.”
Not the least bit flustered, Maxie asked, “What’s your angle in all this, Andrus? Is Mario going to let you off the hook for that job you were supposed to do for him a few years back and didn’t? I’m in the know more than you think, Pinkie.”
“That ain’t your worry, asshole.”
“Okay,” said Maxie, his eyes never wavering from the barrel of Pinkie’s 9-mm. “I don’t know why I held back telling you this in the first place. It’s no skin off my nose. Ornasetti’s the big loser.” Maxie eyed the ceiling pensively. “Ducane came up from Louisiana in late 1963, full of sugarcane swagger and Karo syrup and fresh on the heels of the JFK assassination. I always suspected he and Ornasetti were involved in that hit, but neither one of them ever let on just how. Ducane dropped out of the sky and onto Rollie’s back like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. The word back then was that if Rollie didn’t dance to his tune, he’d sing a song about the JFK assassination to the whole damn country, starting with the feds and the press. He had Rollie scared shitless. In order to keep Ducane from peddling what he knew about the assassination, Rollie decided to pay him off for his silence.”
“The fucker was that stupid? Why didn’t he just get rid of Ducane?”
“You have to remember the times we were in back then. Rollie was a nobody trying to be a somebody in a top-heavy organization. A moldy piece of Limburger smelling up a world that belonged to his uncle. He couldn’t afford to make a misstep, much less have anybody focus their microscope on him. I’m told there were lots of people around the country who didn’t want to see a miscue on his part either.”
“So how long did Rollie end up stroking Ducane off?”
“For a long time—from ’63 to ’72. And paying him off wasn’t all Rollie did. He got Ducane a job up at the Straight Creek tunnel dig, a cushy, high-paying job as a trucker. Easy enough for Rollie. He and his people controlled most of the trucking from eastern Montana to the Colorado Continental Divide back then. Ducane’s job was hauling rock out of the dig that would eventually become the Eisenhower Tunnel. The Creole son of a bitch liked to brag that he was a miner, but all he ever did as far as I know was nursemaid a Dumpster.”
“So what happened in ’72?”
“I don’t know exactly. All I know is that one day in mid-November, Rollie came to me and told me Ducane needed to take a permanent rest. He said Ducane was not only getting overly expensive but also troublesome to keep. I never knew where the pressure was coming from to take him out, but a week after Rollie came to me that first time, I know Ducane’s ass got planted.”
“Up at the tunnel?”
“No.”
Pinkie looked surprised. “Then where?”
“Out at an old sugar-beet factory in Brighton would be my guess. Can’t believe you’ve never heard about the place.”
“I’ve heard of it. Even used it in a roundabout way. Just wanted your honest take on Ducane’s fate for a change. So how did Rollie get a pass to the factory? Last I heard, he was a don, not a handler. Rule is nobody but handlers has access out there.”
“Easy. Back then Rollie had a trucking contract to haul sugar beets all over Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That was his in, as far as I know. Rollie somehow got Ducane to come out to the place one night, and he did him.”
“How in the hell did he get Ducane to come out there?”
“Beats me,” said Maxie. “Maybe he offered Ducane a chance to get out of the freezing tunnel-digging cold up in the mountains and promised him a job hauling sugar beets down where it was warmer. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“So what about the specifics?”
“Supposedly Ducane got pickaxed, right in the back of his head, and ended up with his butt planted in with the sugar beets in a storage locker.” Maxie broke into a toothy grin. “A permanent siesta at a frosty 34 degrees.”
“But a short stay, since his body eventually ended up at the Eisenhower Tunnel,” said Pinkie. “How long did the body stay out at the sugar-beet factory?”
“I don’t know. Three days, three weeks, a year. All I know is that just like the rest of the world, I was surprised as hell when I read about Ducane resurfacing at the Eisenhower Tunnel
after that earthquake.”
“Think Rollie planted him behind that tunnel wall?”
Maxie shrugged. “Beats me. I’m not even sure Rollie did him out at the factory. That would’ve been a very unusual job for Rollie. He never liked to get his hands dirty—still doesn’t.”
“You tellin’ the truth for a change?” asked Pinkie, aiming the 9-mm’s barrel at Maxie’s head.
“Why would I lie? You and that Madrid kid damn nearly drained all the blood out of me. My arm’s pretty much useless. You scared my sweet little piece of Mexico shitless, and you’ve got a fucking gun aimed at my head.”
“Because it’s your nature, Maxie. And people like you don’t change their nature real easy.” Pinkie smiled and stepped back toward the door, his 9-mm still trained on Maxie. “I’ll find out if you’re lyin’. Trust me. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a message that Mario asked me to pass along. Go after the Madrid kid again, and I get to kill your big fat ass, no questions asked. And if by chance you’re lyin’ to me again, I get to make sure that somehow, somewhere, sometime before that damaged wing of yours has a chance to heal, I get to disable your lard-ass permanently. And don’t you think that would be one hell of a disability for a man in your profession to overcome?”
“Mario wouldn’t okay that,” said a very surprised-looking Maxie.
“Don’t fool yourself, Maxie. Mario’s been on the hot seat lately. Ain’t nothin’ he hates worse than lookin’ in the rearview mirror for cops. Just remember, I get to toy with your ass, however I like, if you fuck up again.” Pinkie swung the door open, stepped out into the hallway, and, still backing away, said, “To a speedy recovery, Max. Later.”
Chapter 27
CJ turned off I-25 into the eastern glare of the midmorning sun and headed for Barbour Ponds State Park. As he drove into the prairie-like setting with its panoramic view of 14,259-foot Longs Peak, he was still thinking about Pinkie Niedemeyer’s second call, in which Pinkie had relayed everything Randall Maxie had told him about Ducane.
Still not convinced that Maxie had told Pinkie the whole truth, CJ had told Pinkie he’d get back to him as soon as he talked to Sheila Lucerne and Antoine Ducane’s mother, who’d appeared out of the blue.
