The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  Commons followed the wealthy oil and gas baron, whose Western lineage stretched back to before Colorado’s 1876 statehood, down a long, Spanish-tiled hallway that led into the house. They walked past a dozen priceless oil paintings, most of which depicted the trials of pioneering settlers or Indian conflict, before turning down a second limestone-floored hallway accented with strategically placed Persian and Indian tapestries. They breezed past a couple of thousand-year-old Mayan vases before reaching the hallway’s end and the massive hand-carved double doors of Howard Stafford’s library.

  Stafford extracted a set of keys from his pocket, disarmed an alarm keypad on the outer wall, unlocked the doors, swung them open, and said, “Step into my world, Sergeant Commons.”

  As he entered the windowless forty-by-forty-foot library, Commons resisted the urge to say, Wow. The massive room, paneled in lightly stained cherry wood, had a captivating bookwormish, lost-to-the-world warmth. Exquisite hand-carved columns supported floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that encased the room. They were accented with lights, and some held rare nineteenth-century Pueblo Indian pottery, baskets, spurs, bridle bits, intricately beaded leather scabbards, and even a few seemingly out-of-place antique children’s toys. Books in every size, shape, and color overflowed from the rest of the bookshelves.

  Three coffin-sized, marble-topped, glass-fronted display cases chock-full of Western artifacts—from tomahawks to tepee hides, Indian moccasins to muskets—occupied the center of the room. A fourth case with locking wooden doors ran perpendicular to the other wall.

  “What do you think?” asked Stafford, slipping his keys into his pocket as he angled his way past the display cases and walked toward the far western corner of the room.

  “Impressive.”

  “It’s meant to be. It’s my pride and joy. There’re things in here the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the National Archives would salivate over.”

  “Hope it’s wired.”

  Stafford laughed. “To the teeth and then some. You’d need a couple of grenades and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to get in here.”

  “Or a set of keys and an alarm code,” Commons said casually.

  Without responding, Stafford stopped, looked up toward a top shelf that was stacked support column to support column with books, and said, “Need a ladder.” He stepped several paces to his left, retrieved a ladder that tracked around the room, and pulled it back to where he’d been standing. He mounted the first three steps until he could reach the shelf he’d eyed earlier. Slowly he ran a finger along the spines of several of the shelved books. Stopping abruptly in the middle of his run, he pulled half-a-dozen books off the shelf and cradled them in his right arm before slipping them back into place, leaving a three-inch-wide gap on the shelf. The look on his face was charged with amazement.

  “They’re gone. Both of them,” he called down to Commons. “That’s a damn shame.”

  “Anything else missing?”

  “Not from this shelf. But I’ll have to check everything. It’ll take some time. Damn! And I thought Luis was different from the rest, like his mother. Guess I was wrong.” Stafford eased his way down to the ladder’s bottom step.

  “Did the books have any distinguishing marks? Anything to prove your ownership?” asked Commons.

  “No,” said Stafford, flashing Commons an incredulous look. “Name plates only serve to deface books and detract from their value. But I can describe the books to a T, and of course my insurance records contain photos.”

  “I’ll need both,” said Commons, watching Stafford step down to the floor. “A few more questions.”

  Dusting off his hands, Stafford said, “Shoot.”

  “You wouldn’t have had any serious differences with Luis Del Mora, would you?”

  “I shouldn’t grace that with an answer, Sergeant, but no.”

  “What about his mother? Any problem with her?”

  “Are you blind, Sergeant? I have the deepest respect for Theresa. Six years ago she came to America penniless, a stowaway in the bottom of a coal car. Today she earns sixty-five thousand dollars a year.”

  “I see,” Commons said with a quick nod. “Did her son have any enemies?”

  “You’ll have to ask his mother.” Stafford’s tone was indignant.

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Good.” Stafford pivoted and headed for the door with Commons at his heels. “And while you’re at it, you can work on recovering my books.”

  Commons didn’t answer, knowing that Stafford’s books would be logged in as evidence in a murder investigation just as soon as he’d paid CJ Floyd a second visit. The books wouldn’t be returned, even to someone as powerful and influential as Stafford, until that murder investigation was finished. But at the moment, Commons saw no need to mention that.

  CHAPTER 5

  Platter-sized puddles, remnants of the previous day’s intermittent snow showers, sat in a shaded spot just beyond the entry to Mae’s Louisiana Kitchen. Minutes earlier the noonday temperature had peaked at fifty-five, and the early-April sun, not yet high enough in the sky to bring the Denver afternoon much greater highs, had moved on.

  CJ was wrapping up lunch with Mavis and his best friend of more than forty years, Roosevelt Weeks. Weeks, known on the streets of Denver’s historically black Five Points community simply as Rosie, was polishing off the last of his sweet-potato pie. Five Points, though still anchored by Mae’s, Rosie’s 1950s-style gas station and garage with its three banks of stately white-globed gas pumps, and the now defunct Rossonian Club, once the heart of the American jazz scene in the West, was moving closer to urban gentrification day by day.

  Matching CJ bite for bite in an apparent contest to see who could finish Mae’s sweet-potato pie, the restaurant’s signature dessert, the fastest, Rosie glanced up at Mavis.

  “You’re worse than a couple of kids,” Mavis said, shaking her head as she watched CJ and Rosie repeat the lunch-ending ritual they’d been practicing for decades.

  Accepting defeat, CJ paused, took a sip of coffee, and eyed Mavis. “Thin lunch crowd today,” he said, scanning the half-empty restaurant.

  “And it’ll likely get thinner,” Mavis said with a sigh. “At least until the yuppie land speculators finally settle in for good and figure out that fried chicken, red beans and rice, and sweet-potato pie are fare to die for.”

  “By then there won’t be a black face in the neighborhood,” said Rosie. “You see the prices they got on them condos they’re buildin’ up there on 28th? Hell, they’re asking rich folks’ prices.” Rosie put down his fork, smiled at CJ’s unfinished pie, and said, “Done.”

  “And they’re selling,” Mavis chimed in.

  “What about the Five Points Businessmen’s Association?” asked CJ, eyeing Mavis, the association’s first female president, quizzically. “Aren’t you pushing back?”

  Mavis laughed. “Like the French did when Hitler took Paris. Lucius Allen sold that piece of land of his just up the street to a bank. He tried to keep it quiet, but Daddy found out. When Lucius came in for lunch yesterday, Daddy let him have it full-bore. I don’t think Lucius’ll want to see any more Willis Sundee for a while.”

  CJ shook his head and thought about what Five Points meant to him. In truth, “the Points,” as it was called by locals, was no more than an intersection formed by the confluence of 27th Street, Welton and Washington Streets, and 26th Avenue, but it had been the cultural core of his life. He’d gone to school in Five Points. It was there that he’d made most of his lifelong friends and fallen for Mavis. And it was the place he’d come home to after his two soul-testing tours in Vietnam. “You’ll have to keep pushing back,” he said to Mavis. “You’ve got a business to protect.”

  “I’ll survive.” Mavis’s response was matter-of-fact. “The question is, what about you?” She smiled and clasped CJ’s right hand in hers. The engagement ring CJ had given her months earlier sparkled. “Give me the rundown on how it’s going at Ike’s.”
<
br />   “Yeah, man,” said Rosie. “I wanta know whether it’s more lucrative to push antique license plates and spurs or write bail bonds.”

  “Neither. Everybody knows the real money’s in peddling fan belts and overpriced tune-ups,” CJ shot back with a smile. “But I’m doing okay, and I caught a real good buy yesterday. Coughed up seventeen hundred for a couple of books. I was nervous as hell when I did it, but I called Billy DeLong up in Wyoming for verification on the value of one of them, and he told me the book was worth at least five grand.”

  Rosie whistled, pushed back from the table, and patted his midsection. All 260 pounds of the massive, no-neck man shook. “Now, that’s what I’d call a smart investment. Two times your money and then some—I’d say you’re kickin’.”

  “Now all you need is a buyer,” said Mavis, toning down Rosie’s exuberance.

  “One will come,” said CJ. “But there is one minor problem.”

  “With the books? They aren’t fake, are they?”

  “No. With the man I bought the books from. A few hours after he sold me the books, the cops found him shot to death in an alley.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Rosie, eyes widening.

  Mavis’s response was silence. She’d ridden every possible high and low with CJ during his thirty-plus years as a bail bondsman and reluctant bounty hunter. She’d seen him beaten and shot. She’d spent days, nights, and occasionally weeks worried about whether he would come home safely after dueling and dealing with what her father aptly called society’s pond scum. She’d watched him helpless, hapless, and sometimes even hopeful as he dogged robbers and fences, con artists, wife-beaters, and shills across much of the Rocky Mountain West, praying that one day he’d get his fill of the excitement of the chase and stop. But he hadn’t until nine months earlier, when Celeste Deepstream had tried to kill them both in the remote New Mexico wilderness. That ordeal had exacted a toll, and when CJ had brought a physically and psychologically damaged Mavis home to recuperate, he’d promised her that his days as a bail bondsman and bounty hunter were over. CJ’s story about the books and a murder sent Mavis spiraling back in time, and now, as she sat limp in her chair with a look of anguish frozen on her face, she couldn’t help but think, I knew it was too good to last.

  Squeezing her hand, smiling defensively, and playfully twisting the ring on her finger, CJ said, “Things are fine.” The smile was quickly replaced by a chiseled frown when he glanced briefly toward the front of the restaurant to see Fritz Commons standing at the hostess station. Commons smiled at the hostess, sidestepped her, locked in on CJ, and walked briskly down the restaurant’s center aisle. He smiled and respectfully nodded to Mavis, but the look he gave CJ and Rosie was more probing and official.

  “Your friend Lenny told me I might be able to find you here,” he said to CJ. “Seems McCabe’s always on the money.”

  CJ shook his head, glancing at Rosie and then hesitantly at Mavis. “Lenny’s got his finger on the pulse of it all. Our guest here is Sergeant Fritz Commons. What can I help you with, Sergeant?”

  CJ’s response, which Mavis had heard him serve up to policemen for years, had her stomach churning.

  “We can talk in private if you’d like.”

  “No need. I’m among friends.” CJ flashed Mavis a look that said, I know, but everything will be okay.

  “Fine,” Commons said with a shrug. “Turns out those books you bought yesterday were stolen.”

  “From whom?”

  “That’s confidential at the moment.”

  “What’s your proof?”

  “The owner can describe them to a T, and he’s got insurance records and photos to back him up.”

  “And I’ve got proof that I bought them—legit,” CJ shot back.

  “Nobody’s claiming you knew they were stolen, Floyd, but what they are now is evidence in a murder investigation. You’ll have to turn them over.”

  “I don’t bring my merchandise with me to lunch.”

  “Didn’t figure you did. But the day’s young, and if I remember right, the shade on the door of your place says, ‘Open 10 to 5.’”

  “I’ll be back in the shop in an hour.”

  Commons smiled through splayed, badly yellowed teeth. “Take your time. We’ve got until five. I’ll be there before you drop that shade.” He nodded at Mavis, pivoted, and walked back up the aisle without another word.

  The dryness in CJ’s throat intensified as he watched Commons retreat. It was a nervous, anticipatory dryness—the kind he’d experienced whenever the 125-foot navy patrol boat he’d been a machine gunner on during the war in Vietnam had left for a mission. His nervousness, however, had nothing to do with the sweaty uneasiness that haunts a soldier during war. What had him on edge and drumming his fingers on the tabletop was that by purchasing two books he shouldn’t have bought, he’d allowed himself to drift out of the safe harbor that he had spent nearly a year constructing and back into waters that were mined. Even worse, he had let Mavis down.

  He glanced over at Mavis, searching for words to smooth things over, words that would let her know he’d had a simple lapse in judgment and that he wasn’t headed back for troubled waters, but the words wouldn’t come.

  CHAPTER 6

  Two hours later Sergeant Commons stood across the counter from CJ with the two stolen books in his hand. CJ had had the good sense to photocopy the page relating to Dr. Jacob L. Covington, the front and rear free endpapers, the pastedowns with the Montana maps, and the first three chapters and index of the Montana medicine book. He’d also photocopied all eighty-six pages of the 1883 Wyoming brand book.

  Commons, who’d arrived at Ike’s Spot ten minutes on the good side of CJ’s duplicating efforts, handed CJ a property receipt initialed F.C. “On the off chance the books aren’t stolen,” he said, with a grin. “Better hold on to it.”

  CJ jammed the receipt into the frayed pocket of his riverboat gambler’s vest, disgusted at himself for taking a flyer on the books and knowing that he’d set fire to his rent money for the month. He shook his head, looked up at Commons, and asked, “Got autopsy results on your victim yet?”

  “That’s no concern of yours, Floyd.” As Commons pivoted to leave, CJ’s porcelain-license-plate display caught his attention. He walked over to the display and picked up a coal-black 1914 Pennsylvania plate with embossed white numerals. “What would this plate set me back?” he asked, turning back to CJ.

  “Right at five hundred.”

  “Steep. Antique license plates your specialty?”

  “Yes.”

  Commons flashed CJ a sly, one-upping smile. “Take my advice. Stick with your strength and stay away from books.” He put the license plate down and headed for the door.

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” CJ called after him, suspecting that the gangly red-headed cop was probably right.

  Business was snail’s-pace slow for the rest of the day, and CJ’s only sale of the afternoon came on the heels of Commons’s visit: $35 worth of vintage Rocky Mountain National Park postcards that he sold to an elderly couple visiting from Louisiana.

  A half hour before closing, he parked himself at his desk, eyed the wall behind him, and let out a sigh. He’d been an antiques dealer for two slow, disheartening months, and all he had to show for it were a couple of Lenny McCabe–authored rent statements he hadn’t paid, less than a thousand dollars in total sales, a police property tag for two stolen books, and a record-breaking one day loss of $1,700.

  Slipping his feet up onto the edge of his desk and deciding to make a call he knew would infuriate Mavis, he dialed the number to Denver Health and Hospitals, asked for extension 48, and waited for an answer. The mellow baritone voice on the other end of the line answered, “Vernon Lowe, Morgue.”

  Vernon, a five-foot-seven, bug-eyed, flashy-dressing slip of a black man and Denver Health’s chief morgue attendant, had been in charge of prepping and eviscerating the dead for almost twenty-eight years. He’d been CJ’s friend for thirty, and Ike�
�s for even longer.

  “What’s up on the downside, V?” said CJ, offering Vernon the same signature greeting he’d been giving him for nearly three decades.

  Vernon’s response was automatic: “Nobody shakin’ in this place but me. What’s up with you, CJ?”

  “Just tryin’ to make a poor man’s living, V.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? I was just about to shut things down. Callin’ pretty late in the day, aren’t you, CJ?”

  “I was hoping you could pin down a few details for me on someone who’s no longer with us.”

  Vernon, who’d been feeding CJ “unofficial” autopsy information for years, said, “Figured as much.”

  “Need to know if you’ve done a post on a Spanish kid—nineteen or so—twenty-one tops—with a big melon head, dark skin, a hint of a goatee, and wide-set eyes that showed pretty much nothing but the whites? I’m pretty certain he took a bullet to the head and maybe one to the throat.”

  Vernon shook his head. “Thought you were outta the kinda business that would cause you to wanta know things like that, CJ.”

  “I am. But the kid and I had a connection.”

  Vernon looked around the room as if to make certain no one was eavesdropping. “Autopsied him this morning. Hold on and let me get his chart.” He set the receiver down on a gurney, walked over to a bank of World War II–vintage metal filing cabinets, and extracted a chart. When he picked the receiver back up, CJ had pencil and notepad in hand. “Here’s the poop,” Vernon said cautiously. “Name was Luis Del Mora. Twenty. Nicaraguan. Rode into the good old U.S. of A. on a student visa. Took a .22 Mag to the brain and another one to the larynx.”

  “Sounds like he met up with a sharpshooter.”

  “Had to. You don’t hit these kind of vitals without knowing how to bang. Especially since the coroner makes the time of death somewhere around dusk. You’d have to be one hell of a shot to be able to hit them two spots right on the money with your daylight droppin’ outta the sky. But if you could, you’d doggone sure hit pay dirt, ’cause you know as well as me, a bullet from a .22 Mag tumbles right through your brain. Whoever popped the kid had to be a pro, or close.”