First of State

by Robert Greer

  Easing behind the wheel of the Bel Air, he glanced around to make sure he hadn’t been followed. It wasn’t until he’d eased from his parking spot and out of the sun’s glare that he realized there was a parking ticket tucked under his windshield wiper. Shaking his head and heading for Bail Bondsman’s Row, he reminded himself that, as Ike was so fond of saying, “Boy, you got one hell of a lot to learn.”

  A gruff-looking man with a waxed handlebar mustache and muttonchop sideburns stood talking to Ike when CJ pulled into the driveway at home. The dark, oily-skinned man looked to CJ like he might be Italian or Spanish, or maybe even from the Middle East. He eyed CJ and the Bel Air briefly, shook Ike’s hand, and quickly walked off down Delaware Street. He was two houses away by the time CJ reached the Victorian’s front porch.

  “New client?” CJ asked, nodding toward the rapidly disappearing man.

  “Nope, just a man peddlin’ information. I put the word out yesterday that you were lookin’ for Leander Moultry. Finally got a bite. The guy who just left lives, or I should probably say used to live, in the same buildin’ as Leander. Makes himself a little extra cash each month keepin’ an eye on the tenants for the landlord. Lets the landlord know when somebody’s about to skip. He claims that Leander moved a bunch of stuff outa his apartment early yesterday mornin’. Figurin’ that Leander was plannin’ on skippin’ out on his rent, the guy followed Leander when he took off in a rented truck. Seems Leander’s decided to take up residence in Commerce City. Even got the address of his new digs,” Ike said with a wink, handing CJ a torn piece of grocery bag he’d scribbled the address on.

  “Commerce City. That’s one hell of a short trip, don’t you think? Puts Leander less than twenty minutes from right here.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the kind of place you can sure as hell get lost in. The town’s got enough transient motels, migrant workers, illegals, and out-of-work roustabouts to qualify for disaster assistance. And with all its oil refineries, the place flat-out stinks.” Frowning, pinching both nostrils closed, and sounding like someone with a bad cold, Ike asked, “So what did you get outa the Suggs woman over at Metro State?”

  “Not much. When she threatened to sic some rent-a-cop on me, I split. But I did find out that she and Billy were engaged.”

  “Ouch! I’m sure her daddy didn’t like the idea of becoming a father-in-law to the likes of Billy.”

  “My take, too. She did throw one curveball at me. Said the cops have me on their radar as a murder suspect.”

  Ike broke into a broad, knowing smile. “And she’s right. The homicide cop handlin’ the case is a sergeant named Hancock. He dropped by here a little after you headed off to Metro State. Known him for years. White, smart enough, and honest. He asked me a few questions about you, mostly havin’ to do with how you were settlin’ in after Vietnam. I told him you were doin’ just fine and sent him packin’. But he’ll be back. It’s the way cops operate, half a step forward, two steps back. Just tell him the truth when he shows up next.”

  “Okay,” said CJ, sounding less concerned than the look on his face seemed to signal.

  “As for Judge Suggs, I’m thinkin’ me and him need to have a friendly little chat.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah,” Ike said, frowning. “Served with him in Korea the winter of ’51 and ’52. He was an up-buckin’ horse’s ass back then, and I don’t think he’s changed much. Why don’t you follow up on Leander?” Ike patted his belly and belched. “Right now I’m headed to meet Marguerite over at Mae’s Kitchen for lunch. You’re welcome to come along.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got loose ends I need to tie up.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  CJ watched his increasingly arthritis-ravaged uncle wobble his way across the front porch and head toward the garage for his Jeep. He hadn’t smelled alcohol on Ike’s breath, but he knew Ike’s recent sobriety couldn’t last. He needed the numbing effect liquor gave him to take the edge off his pain. Alcohol had been his elixir ever since he’d come home from the Korean War with a Bronze Star, two legs full of shrapnel, and a severely injured back.

  CJ watched Ike struggle to get into the Jeep before heading up the fire-escape stairs to his apartment. “Tough SOB,” he muttered to himself.

  Twenty minutes later, with a ham sandwich in one hand and his Wiley Ames file open in his lap, CJ was seated in his living room talking to a woman named Cheryl Goldsby’s answering machine. Goldsby, Wiley Ames’s niece and next of kin, lived on a small horse ranch on the Colorado eastern plains just outside the town of Sterling. He’d talked to her briefly on the phone a couple of days before Wiley’s funeral and she’d sounded more aloof and standoffish than grief-stricken. Since she represented a possible thread to the murders and since in his one phone conversation with GI Joe’s owner Harry Steed, Steed had recommended that CJ needed to talk to her no matter what, CJ figured he might as well pay her a visit. He had no idea as he hung up the phone after leaving his return-call request whether she was screening her messages or if she’d respond to the one he’d just left. All he could do was be hopeful and wait. Setting the phone aside and taking a bite of his sandwich, he decided he’d be a little less aggressive with Cheryl Goldsby than he’d been with Ray Lynn Suggs.

  Ike Floyd wasn’t used to sitting in the cherrywood-paneled barrooms of exclusive private clubs, so he found himself feeling slightly self-conscious as he shared a beer with Denver District Court Judge Otis Suggs at the city’s exclusive Capitol Hill University Club. He and the judge had had occasion to bump into one another since their military service in Korea, but they’d rarely offered each other more than a passing nod, and the two men had uttered only a few forced pleasantries to each other since a subservient-looking waiter had delivered their beers.

  Suggs, a large, brown-skinned black man with a thin, tubular, crane-like neck, hairy ears, and uneven teeth that seemed much too big for either of his jaws, eased back in the wing-back leather chair he’d been sitting in when the club’s concierge had walked Ike to his table a few minutes earlier, took a sip of his beer, eyed Ike’s nearly empty mug, and asked, “Sure you don’t want another beer, Isaac?”

  “Nope. I ain’t lookin’ to get high, Otis. What I’m lookin’ for is information. How about givin’ me the straight scoop on your daughter and Billy Larkin’s relationship?”

  “And just what is it you’d like to know?” asked Suggs. Every word dripped with condescension.

  “Just wonderin’ how a ne’er-do-well like Billy could find his way up to your neck of the woods.”

  “He didn’t,” Suggs said smugly. “Ray Lynn found him. At Metro State. Larkin was a grounds-crew maintenance worker there until they fired him. Marguerite would’ve surely mentioned him working there to you. The two of you are still an item, aren’t you?”

  “We sure are,” Ike said proudly, wondering as he fiddled with his beer mug how many other things about him the judge had had some beleaguered law clerk dig up since he’d called to ask Suggs to meet with him a few hours earlier.

  “Beautiful woman,” said Suggs. “It’s a shame about her past.”

  “No more than it is about yours,” said Ike, biting back his anger. “I’m hopin’ you’ve kicked that gamblin’ problem you had during Korea. Wouldn’t want to think you got crossways with your future son-in-law over eighteen thousand in gamblin’ winnin’s.”

  Suggs eased forward in his chair. Baring most of his oversized teeth, he said, “I don’t need money, Isaac. Look around you.”

  Ike glanced at his beer mug instead. “I’m thinkin’ Billy was killed over that Policy hit of his. News about it’s been in all the papers,” he said with a wink. “And from what my nephew’s told me, it’s a pretty safe bet he had a partner. Somebody who wanted more than his or her share of that eighteen thousand.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t me.” Suggs finished what was left of his beer in a single quick gulp. “So I’d suggest you troll for your killer somewhere else. But before you d
o, here’s some advice. Send that nephew of yours to bother Ray Lynn again, and I can assure you he’ll pay dearly. She told me all about him accosting her this afternoon.”

  “I didn’t send CJ anywhere. He tends to go where he chooses on his own.”

  “Cute. Real cute.” Suggs took a deep breath and leaned farther forward in his chair. “Don’t screw with me, Ike. I can take that nephew of yours down, and you, too, if need be, in a fraction of a second. You’re out of your element, Sergeant.”

  Ike erupted in laughter loud enough to turn a few heads at the bar. “All these years and you still can’t sight your coordinates in right, can you, Lieutenant? You’re the one who’s outa his element. In case you missed it, Judge, we’re dealin’ with murder here, not one of your cronies cheatin’ on his golf score at the country club. And like it or not, your daughter’s got a connection to that murder. I’m thinkin’ you shoulda hooked her up with one of those country-club types instead of a groundskeeper, Otis.”

  Suggs set his beer mug down with what was meant to be a discussion-ending clunk. “We’re done here, Ike. You’re free to leave, and on your way out, consider this. I can make your life miserable.”

  “No more miserable than you did twenty years ago, Lieutenant. Here’s hopin’ you haven’t made too many similar stateside friendly-fire miscues along the way since then. But then again, how could you? You’re not packin’ around a howitzer.”

  Choking back his anger, Suggs said, “The door’s waiting, Ike.”

  Ike rose slowly and continued to stare judgmentally at Suggs, thinking all the while about how Suggs’s arrogance and battlefield incompetence had cost him a half-dozen friends. Hobbling toward the door, he mumbled, “Asshole,” and simply shook his head.

  “You’re on my list, Ike,” Suggs called after him when he’d nearly reached the exit, surprising everyone in the room.

  “The same way Billy Larkin was?” Ike shouted back over his shoulder, thinking as he left that any army officer capable of whitewashing his role in the death of six of his men was certainly capable of committing murder.

  Commerce City, a northern Denver suburb dotted with oil refineries and garbage landfills and filled with miles of swampy, mosquito-infested Platte River bottom, had always smelled to CJ like a mixture of motor oil and stagnant water.

  He’d never understood why the city fathers had saddled their town with a name like Commerce City, but he knew from his war experiences that there were far worse choices to be made. His navy patrol boat, the Cape Star, had once been pinned down by mortar fire in an estuary rimming a Vietnam village whose English-translated name he later learned to be Bird Shit. Smiling to himself, he eased the Bel Air off Colorado Boulevard, the main thoroughfare that connected Denver and Commerce City, and cruised down Fifty-eighth Avenue past blocks of dilapidated clapboard houses, dozens of junker cars and trucks up on cinder blocks, and nearly palpable hanging-by-a-thread sadness.

  When he spotted 6442 E. 58th, the address he was looking for, he shook his head. The rambling wooden three-story tenement with its peeling paint and boarded-up windows, sitting as it was in the middle of a lot without a single blade of grass, looked like something left over from the sweatshops that had blanketed the East Coast in early-nineteenth-century America.

  Wondering why Leander would have picked such a derelict to hide out in, he eased past the house and parked two houses away in front of a vacant lot. An alley ran along the back side of that lot and Leander’s building. He decided to approach the tenement from the rear, uncertain how many families the building housed or whether anyone was inside. Telling himself that he’d find out soon enough, he made his way across the lot full of beer cans, used diapers, old newspapers, and broken glass. The burned-oil smell of partially refined petroleum had him frowning and walking slowly until the distinct pop of a rifle shot sent him diving headfirst into the dirt. Kicking himself for being unarmed and swearing that he’d never in his life make that mistake again, he scrambled for a nearby trash can and cover. Thinking, One more shot so I can see where the hell you are, he rose, adjusted his weight onto one knee, and caught a glimpse of the sniper. It was a half-second glimpse of a man dressed head to toe in black who suddenly, carrying a rifle in his right hand, was on the run. Cold feet, CJ told himself, aware that when it came down to actually killing another human being, it could sometimes be hard to pull the trigger. Suspecting that he was more than likely dealing with a novice rather than a pro, CJ took off full-bore down the edge of the alley after the shooter. When he stumbled over a tricycle, overturning it in his sprint, a child began crying and, like dominoes falling, heads began popping out through the suddenly open windows of one of the three-deckers. Soon every window in the building seemed to be filled with people shouting in Spanish and pointing.

  He was less than three yards behind the shooter when the man dropped his rifle. Bigger and faster than his assailant, CJ vaulted over the rifle and dove for the man. Tackled at the knees, Leander Moultry let out a grunt as CJ rode him to the ground. Quickly rolling the much smaller Leander over onto his back, CJ straddled him, clamped both hands around the terrified little pool hustler’s throat, and squeezed.

  Leander’s face was a deep, anoxic shade of purple by the time a half-dozen migrant workers gathered around the two black men on the ground. When one of his fingernails dug into Leander’s skin, drawing blood, the darkest of CJ’s days in Vietnam began flickering news-reel-like through his head.

  “You’re gonna kill him, mister!” a young boy with a thick Spanish accent shouted as Leander’s once frantically wiggling body went limp.

  “Si! Let him up!” screamed the woman holding the boy’s hand.

  Close to tears, the boy yelled, “Get off him! Get off him! Get off him!”

  CJ wasn’t sure whether it was the boy’s rhythmic chant, his own adrenaline rush subsiding, or the fact that he suddenly realized that the fingers of his right hand were wet with blood that caused him to release his death grip on Leander Moultry. But whatever it was that stopped him from strangling the little pool hustler to death came just in time. Lifting the rifle and the barely breathing pool shark in his arms, CJ started walking toward the Bel Air.

  “Don’t let him die, mister!” the boy who’d been chanting yelled as the woman holding his hand tugged him in the opposite direction, shouting, “No involve, Pedro, no involve!”

  Halfway to the Bel Air Leander began to gasp for air and wriggle in CJ’s arms. “Cool it,” CJ ordered, glancing back to the spot where a half-dozen witnesses had watched him nearly choke a man to death. Everyone had disappeared.

  “I think you mighta ruptured my windpipe,” Leander wheezed as CJ set him down hard in the Bel Air’s front seat.

  “If I had, you’d be dead. Now shut up.” CJ sprinted to the rear of the car, popped the trunk, slipped the rifle inside, took out a coiled thirty-foot length of yellow tow rope, and headed back for Leander, who was regaining his senses by the second. “You’re gonna ride home real safe and secure, Leander.” Tying the tow rope to the Bel Air’s front seat frame, he looped the rope around Leander’s legs several times.

  “I ain’t gonna run,” Leander protested, his words hoarse and barely audible, as CJ completed the hogtie.

  “I know you aren’t, unless you’re the new Houdini,” CJ said, checking the tension on the rope.

  Walking around the front of the car, he slipped behind the wheel and cranked the engine.

  “Where we goin’?” Leander asked, his words a sudden fearful whisper.

  “To talk to Ike.”

  Leander looked relieved. “Fine by me. But I can tell you right now, I didn’t kill nobody.”

  CJ nodded and swallowed hard without answering, aware as he pulled away from the curb, trembling, that he, on the other hand, very nearly had.

  Chapter 9

  It was six-thirty by the time Ike finally stopped peppering Leander with questions. Looking nearly as worn out as Leander, Ike eased back in his desk chair, glanced across
his desktop at CJ and the handcuffed, glum-looking Leander, and announced, as if offering the final enlightening touch to a sermon, “Don’t think Leander’s the one that killed Billy, CJ.”

  “Well, he sure as hell tried to kill me,” CJ protested, glancing around Ike’s office as if he expected a Greek chorus to begin chanting on his behalf.

  Vigorously shaking his head, as if that might erase the fact that he had indeed taken a shot at CJ, Leander said, “I told you. I was just tryin’ to scare you off. I don’t like being stalked and I don’t appreciate nobody tryin’ to pin some murder on me. Shit, I knew all along you were comin’ my way, CJ. My landlord called and told me some big guy sportin’ a Stetson and wearing a riverboat gambler’s vest might be comin’ after me.” Leander smiled. “Described you to a T is what he did, and for no more than me promisin’ to slide twenty bucks his way for keepin’ an eye out for anyone askin’ questions about me. Hell, if I’d’a wanted to kill you, I could’ve anytime I wanted to for sure.”

  “Well, your landlord pulled a double-switch on your ass because he’s the one who told another tenant about you pulling up stakes, and that guy spilled his guts to Ike about where I could find you. Guess forty dollars in your pocket still beats twenty any day.”

  “Fuckin’ Greek!”

  “Would the two of you stop with the one-upmanship for a second?” said Ike. “Leander’s landlord sure as hell didn’t kill Billy and since Leander swears that he and Billy didn’t go in together on that winnin’ Policy ticket, I say we’re pretty much back to square one with this killin’.”