The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  “At least you woke up to a pocket full of silver,” Commons said, turning an empty pants pocket inside out as he walked past. Commons slipped a small spiral-bound writing tablet out of the inside pocket of his leather jacket as he approached McCabe. “Sure seems to be a lot of action down here on Antique Row, and an overabundance of dead people, McCabe. And for some reason, you always seem to be in the mix.”

  McCabe glanced down at Moradi-Nik’s covered remains without responding.

  “Where’s your buddy Floyd?” asked Commons, attempting to see if he’d get the same response he’d gotten from Morgan and Dittier.

  “He had to go to Wyoming.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “A little bit of both, I think.”

  “And how’s your business?”

  “It’s been good until now,” McCabe said despondently.

  “And Floyd’s?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  Commons smiled. “The two of you wouldn’t have had any reason to, say, ummm, blow up your building?”

  “Are you crazy, Sergeant?”

  “Nope, just looking where I always look when I’m talking to the owner of a building that’s just been blown up and I have the remains of a dead man sprinkled at my feet.” Commons shot McCabe an incisive stare. “So your answer to my question is?”

  “No!”

  “Did you take a look at the dead man?”

  “What was left of him,” McCabe said, frowning.

  “Know him?”

  “No.”

  Commons nodded toward where Morgan, Dittier, and Rosie remained huddled. “Do you know those two street bums I was talking to or that guy with them who looks like he should be an NFL nose tackle?”

  “Yes. And they’re not bums. The one with the shaved head has his bust down in Colorado Springs in the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. Name’s Morgan Williams.”

  “And the deaf one?”

  “Dittier Atkins. He’s a six-time pro-rodeo clown of the year. The big guy’s name is Rosie Weeks. He’s Floyd’s best friend.”

  “I see. And you, McCabe? What’s your claim to fame?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “It sure doesn’t seem as if you do. And you know what? That makes me want to dig a little deeper into this bombing. I did a little checking on you and your buddy Floyd. Turns out Floyd has a pretty impressive service record. Two tours of Vietnam, a Navy Cross, a genuine war hero. And would you believe he’s still alive after working for more than thirty years as a bounty hunter and bail bondsman? But you know all of that, don’t you, McCabe?” Commons flipped his writing tablet open. “Now, here’s what I found out about you. You’ve sold cars and used kitchen appliances. You’ve peddled aluminum siding, brokered secondhand furniture, hawked comic books, sold lawn-aerating equipment, and even peddled scrap metal. Seems you even dabbled in selling health food and real estate for a while. A pretty hit-and-miss career, don’t you think, McCabe?”

  McCabe bristled. “And I’ve had a very successful business down here on South Broadway for the past ten years.”

  “So you hit a lucky streak.”

  “Call it what you want, Sergeant.”

  “You got any enemies, McCabe?”

  “We all do, Sergeant. Friends and enemies; it’s what makes the world go around.”

  “And Floyd, he got any—enemies, that is?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What about the two rodeo cowboys?”

  “Didn’t you ask them?” McCabe answered smugly.

  Commons frowned. “I’ll let you in on something, McCabe. My friend over there from the bomb squad’s gonna look at you long and hard. He’ll take a gander at the lease agreement you have with Floyd, and he’ll scrutinize any insurance policies you and Floyd might have. And after that he’ll nose into your debts and check out how many girlfriends you’ve got and look into how regularly you and Floyd pay your bills. Maybe even add up your tabs down at the liquor store.”

  McCabe cut Commons off. “Maybe he should find out if our mothers are still virgins! Come off it, Sergeant. I didn’t bomb the place, and neither did CJ.”

  Ignoring McCabe’s outburst, Commons smiled and continued. “That’s what my bomb-squad friend will do. My job will be to find out as much as I can about our friend over there under the tarp. Look into whether he blew himself up by mistake or somebody, a building owner perhaps, set him up. I sure hope for your and Floyd’s sake that everything I dig up turns out to be miles and miles away from any connection between the three of you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Laramie Mountains provided enough cell-phone signal interference to ensure that Rosie Weeks’s calls to CJ remained unanswered. Oblivious to the problems that awaited him in Denver, and with Billy drinking in the grandeur, CJ drove beneath the massive log cross-timbers of the Triangle Bar’s eighteen-foot-high entry arch and onto the ranch property a few minutes before seven.

  They bumped along a winding gravel road for the next mile before the road dipped to cut a two-car-wide swath between three hundred acres of irrigated pasture and a section of grazing land. The pasture was still brown and dormant, the grazing section dotted with cattle. Barbed-wire fences, their strands glistening in the sun, hugged both sides of the road, and the entire Laramie Mountains range seemed to arise directly on Triangle Bar property as the early-morning sunlight poked seductively from behind the edges of low-hanging clouds.

  “Pretty,” said Billy as CJ, following Amanda Hunter’s directions, nosed the Jeep across a century-old split-timber bridge spanning the Laramie River. “Bet the fishin’ down there’s world class,” Billy added, eyeing the swift-running waters. When CJ didn’t respond, Billy leaned forward in his seat and, chomping on his gum, said, “What’s troublin’ you?”

  “Nothing. Just wondering whether I should’ve kept on doing what I was good at.”

  “Meanin’?”

  “Meaning, maybe I should’ve stuck with the bail bonding and what I know.”

  “Bullshit! You know more about Western collectibles than most folks do who went to school for it. Quit your moanin’ and mopin’, man, we’ve got business at hand,” Billy said, spotting a windmill and a nearby pickup about a third of a mile down the road. “And don’t let no guilt feelin’s about goin’ back on your word to Mavis get you to second-guessin’ why we’re here. We’re here on business, plain and simple. We get that done, we toss a line in the Laramie, and we head back home.”

  CJ nodded, remaining silent until he’d pulled up next to a battered red pickup. The Triangle Bar brand was stenciled in black on the driver’s-side door. “Guess I better bring my dupes with me,” CJ said, slipping the photocopied pages of the Montana medicine book and the Wyoming brand book from under the front seat. He tucked the copies under his left arm and got out of the Jeep; he and Billy strode toward a woman kneeling a few feet from the stock-watering tank at the foot of a windmill.

  They were within fifteen feet of Amanda Hunter before she looked up. Bent over two rusty windmill blades that looked as if someone had tried to saw them in half along the long axis, Hunter was dressed in faded jeans, a wrinkled chambray shirt with a badly frayed collar, and run-over ropers boots. A baseball cap sporting the Triangle Bar brand sat in the dirt a few feet from one knee. She reached for the cap, positioned it carefully on her head, and stood.

  “I’m hoping you’re Amanda Hunter,” CJ said cordially.

  “I am,” she said, looking CJ directly in the eye. She was chunky and attractive in an outdoor, athletic way. Her face was prematurely wrinkled from years of working in the sun, and her eyes sparkled with a neighborly warmth. Somehow she reminded CJ of some of his Uncle Ike’s people from the Cotton Belt south. “And I’m guessing you’re CJ Floyd.” She said the name as if they’d been friends for years and took a generous step forward to shake CJ’s hand.

  CJ pumped her hand twice and nodded at Billy. “The man wearing the Stetson with the Montana block is my friend Billy DeLo
ng.”

  “Are you out of Baggs?” Amanda Hunter’s face lit up as Billy nodded and tipped his hat.

  “Sure am,” said Billy, looking puzzled.

  “Well, I’ll be. The Billy DeLong. Never figured I’d ever have the chance to meet you.” She looked at CJ. “Guess you know you have one of twentieth-century Wyoming’s most famous cattlemen for a friend?”

  “Sure do,” said CJ, uncertain where Amanda Hunter was headed.

  “Legendary’s a more proper word.” Amanda eyed Billy wonderingly. “Word has it that you once drove seven hundred head of cattle through a snow break in the Never Summer Range during a blizzard, and never lost a calf—and that you’re the only man on the face of the planet who ever has put Andy Holcomb in his place.”

  Billy smiled self-consciously. “Give a story some age and a little yeast and it’ll start to rise on you.”

  “Age, yeast, whatever. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Grinning like a charmed schoolgirl, Amanda reached out and shook Billy’s hand. Realizing she must have looked a little giddy, she shot a quick glance toward the two windmill blades at her feet. “Thought I might be able to fix my windmill problem here on the spot.” She hefted one of the blades and shook her head. “Turns out I was wrong. Lightning latched on to both these puppies. They’ll need some welding, maybe more. Mind following me back to my shop? It’s right at my house, and we can have coffee or something close to it while we tell one another our stories. Besides, there’re some things I should probably show you back at the house.”

  “Fine by me,” said CJ.

  “Good. Just follow my truck.” Amanda picked up one of the windmill blades as Billy hoisted the other. “Thanks,” she said, smiling at Billy and shaking her head in disbelief. “Billy DeLong. Uh, uh, uh. My foreman had to go to Casper for tractor parts. Left at daybreak and won’t be back till late this evening. Shame. Clovis would’ve paid money to meet you.”

  Billy smiled as he and CJ followed Amanda to the pickup. They dropped the damaged blades into a truck bed filled with tires and spare parts. Moments later the two vehicles were headed south on a road that CJ hadn’t noticed on their way in. As they bumped along the rutted road, both trucks jiggling, CJ said, “Didn’t know I was traveling with a superstar.”

  “Me either,” said Billy with a shrug. “But who knows? Could just be the thing we need to grease the skids that’ll help us find that Del Mora kid’s killer.”

  Billy and CJ had been given the Cook’s tour of Amanda Hunter’s hundred-year-old National Historic Registry–listed home, and the two early-nineteenth-century grandfather clocks on either side of the entry to the house’s big-game trophy room where they now sat were chiming half past eight when Amanda finally got to the heart of the story about her uncle. Both CJ and Billy, who was well into his third cup of coffee, were well primed.

  Taking a sip of coffee as she tried to digest CJ’s strange tale of stolen books and murder, Amanda said, “And you say the young man who was killed wrote a term paper that was sprinkled with a heavy dose of my Uncle Jake?”

  “He referenced your uncle in four different places,” said CJ, now so familiar with Luis Del Mora’s term paper that he felt as if he’d written it. “Twice when he talks about Union Pacific doctors working out of a hospital in Cheyenne, once when he discusses how your uncle lost his photographs in a Helena, Montana, fire, and finally when he makes a reference to Jake dying at the age of seventy-two in 1910.” CJ handed the term paper to Amanda. “I tabbed the references, have a look. And by the way, that term paper’s one of the only documents I’ve seen with any information on him. A lawyer friend of mine had one of her people search the Internet for information on your uncle, looking for references about him in the years after he lost his photos in that fire in Helena. Nothing,” CJ said with a shrug.

  “And there’s good reason,” said Amanda. “He pretty much turned into a recluse after that fire. Medicine was his vocation, but photography was what really made him tick, at least according to my grandfather, who’d just turned fourteen when Uncle Jake died. Grandpa always claimed that Jake was as smart as Einstein, as artistic as Picasso, as fearless as Jack Johnson, and as stubborn as ten teams of Death Valley mules. His watercolors were good enough to have been entered in the 1889 Paris Exposition. He engineered the entire irrigation system on this ranch, all seven thousand acres of it, for his brother. He photographed most of the Laramie range, the Tetons, a good measure of Yellowstone, and the Platte River basin, and he surveyed a good part of the Bighorn River and the eastern half of the Snake. He was never married. He didn’t drink, and according to my granddad he continued to take photographs until the week he died.”

  “Sounds like one unique fellow,” said Billy.

  “They broke the mold.” Amanda nodded proudly.

  “There’s no disputing that your uncle was a very special man,” said CJ. “The question is, how does his life tie in to the murder of a kid from Nicaragua ninety-six years after his death?”

  “Simple. His photography. Like I told you on the phone yesterday evening, I’m not surprised that things have come down to someone getting killed.”

  “Why not?”

  Amanda rose and adjusted the plantation shutters that encased the room’s massive bay window, reducing the glare of sunlight that filled the room. “For several reasons. Six months back I had a break-in here at the ranch, and a strange call soon afterward. It’s pretty unusual to lose anything to thieves around here except for the occasional hay bale, or of course a stray cow. But I’m sure that whoever broke into my old machine shed was after what was left of my Uncle Jake’s photos.”

  “Did they find what they were after?” Billy asked.

  “No, because what they were after is locked up in a safe here in the house. But the whole episode unnerved me, and believe me, Mr. DeLong, I don’t unnerve easily. At my foreman’s insistence, I had a security system installed in the house and the shed and even the tractor barn down the road.”

  “What was your grandfather’s take on the break-in?” asked CJ.

  The expression on Amanda’s face saddened. “He died six months before it happened. But I can tell you what he would’ve said.” Amanda paused to let her words gather steam. “Mandy, baby, you should’ve shot the bastards. And I would’ve if I’d caught them.”

  Billy and CJ smiled. It was evident that Amanda Hunter’s lineage included not only thinkers and artists but someone who could be as plainspoken as the people of Five Points.

  “I can show you what I think the thief or thieves were after if you’d like.”

  “Sure would,” said CJ.

  Amanda rose, looked directly at Billy as if CJ weren’t there, and said, “Come with me.”

  They followed Amanda from the trophy room down a hallway lined with photos of blue-ribbon-winning quarter horses and steers and through a large kitchen with expensive-looking custom-crafted cherry cabinets and a massive six-burner stove. When CJ spotted a photo of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seated in a wheelchair shaking hands with a willowy-looking, deeply tanned man in a narrow-brimmed Stetson, he asked, “Isn’t that FDR?”

  Amanda glanced back at the photograph. “And my granddad. He was an original New Deal Democrat,” she said, proudly, smiling at Billy.

  Movers and shakers, CJ thought, taking in Amanda’s smile and wondering whether she would have been nearly as accommodating if Billy hadn’t been along.

  Amanda turned a corner near the rear of the house, ducked into a low-ceilinged alcove, and said, “Watch your step.” She flipped a light switch on the wall and started down a narrow, poorly lit stairway. “From here on out, the house is pretty much the way it was a hundred and five years ago. Watch your head.”

  They descended twelve broad-planked steps, heads tucked, into a musty-smelling adobe-walled cellar with a floor constructed of uneven handmade mortarless bricks. “The ceilings down here are only six and a half feet. It’s a little claustrophobic at first, but you get used to it,” said Aman
da, flipping on another light switch and striding across the forty-by-forty-foot room. “Over here,” she said, stopping next to a squat olive-green safe with gold-leaf lettering on the door that read, “San Francisco Safe Company.” A barrel-faced steamer trunk stood a few feet away.

  Amanda eyed the safe and shook her head. “I don’t know how my grandfather ever got this thing down here. He never said. My father always claimed that they must’ve set it in place with a crane before they put on the first floor. It’s been sitting here in pretty much the same spot all my life.”

  CJ surveyed what he now realized was only a partial basement. Other than the steamer trunk, the safe, a dozen or so antique canning jars that lined a row of shelves attached to the wall to their left, and a couple of floor-to-ceiling half-empty bookcases that hugged the opposite wall, the large, dimly lit space was pretty much empty.

  “I’ll have the safe open for you in a sec,” said Amanda, spinning the ship’s lock—style combination. “Don’t peek,” she said, winking at Billy, who stepped back, looking embarrassed. “There.” She swung the door open. “Let’s have a look,” she said, removing a 1950s-style wooden pop-bottle crate, placing it on the floor, then quickly retrieving a second.

  CJ stepped forward to find himself looking down on what appeared to be rows of metal picture frames packed domino-style, back to back inside the two crates. There were at least a couple of dozen of the frames to a row. He estimated that each box probably held at least sixty.

  “Here’s what they were after,” said Amanda. “My Uncle Jake’s daguerreotypes.” She teased two of the framed photo plates out of place, handing one to CJ and the other to Billy.

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Billy, recognizing the art form. Peeking into the safe, he asked, “How many more boxes of these you got in there?”