by Robert Greer
“You think she’s afraid of him?” asked CJ.
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll have to figure out a way to undress the wealthy Mr. Stafford without involving her,” said CJ.
Flora Jean let out a sigh and shook her head. “White men with power always scare me, CJ.”
“There’ll be a way to get to Stafford,” CJ said reassuringly. “Like they say, even power has limits.”
After twenty-five years in law enforcement, twenty-three years of it as a Denver homicide cop, Jumbo Jim Nicoletti had seen it all—scalded babies relegated to burn units and life support because their fourteen-year-old mothers couldn’t stand their incessant crying, headless torsos, torsoless heads—so finding a dead man who was naked except for his socks, with road base dumped from a front-end loader covering most of him, wasn’t out of the ordinary.
It had taken Nicoletti twenty minutes to fight his way through South Denver traffic and Colorado Boulevard standstills before working his way to the crime scene through a maze of I-25 T-REX highway-widening construction vehicles that included a crane moving a bridge girder. He had finally arrived at the site, smoking an illegal Cuban and wearing a twenty-year-old bulletproof vest. The District Three sergeant who’d interrupted Nicoletti’s lunch to request detective-level crime-scene support and a patrol officer who’d happened on the scene had cordoned off a fifteen-by-ten-foot area with crime-scene tape that looked as if it had been through a taffy pull.
“What the hell happened to your tape, Sarge?” asked Nicoletti, walking down a dirt embankment that T-REX construction crews would eventually engineer for drainage, groom, and line with stamped concrete noise-abatement walls.
“Got it knotted up in the dispenser.” A greasy, tarpaper-black tape dispenser swung from the index finger of the sergeant’s right hand.
Nicoletti eyed the dispenser and shook his head. “You need a new one.”
“No way. I’m taking this one with me to the grave. I’ve had it fifteen years,” he said, following Nicoletti beneath the tape.
“He’s a John Doe as far as we can tell,” said the sergeant as they approached the body. “No ID.”
Nicoletti looked down at the nearly naked, partially dirt-covered lifeless form at his feet. The torso looked pretty normal except for a hole the size of a quarter, puckered and ragged at the edges, that sat like a bull’s-eye in the center of the dead man’s chest. “Somebody must’ve needed a set of clothes for the prom,” said Nicoletti, staring at the man. “Whattaya say, Sarge? Maybe forty-five, fifty?”
“That would be my guess. Crime-scene boys are on their way; they’ll peg it closer.”
Nicoletti took a knee and examined the exit wound in the man’s chest. “Bought it from behind,” he said.
“Yeah,” said the sergeant. “But he wasn’t lying out like that originally. The guy standing over there by that front-end loader scooped him up and dumped him here.”
Nicoletti glanced toward a man leaning on the front tire of a bright yellow front-end loader.
“Told him you’d want to talk to him,” said the sergeant. “I didn’t have enough tape to cordon off the path the loader took from where the operator scooped the body up, but I dropped some pebbles next to the tire tracks all the way back down that hill.” He nodded toward a set of tire tracks. “Wanta take a look?”
Nicoletti nodded, wrestling with the idea that besides the fact that he was naked, something else seemed strange about the dead man. He followed the pudgy, balding sergeant down a second embankment that leveled off a few yards from I-25. Four lanes of cars zoomed past a double row of concrete barriers that separated traffic from where they stood.
“Lord,” said Nicoletti. “Acid rock on wheels.”
The sergeant nodded and shouted over the traffic noise, “The front-end-loader guy said the trench over there’s for drainage.” He pointed toward a long, six-foot-deep trench that ran to the southeast and past them a few yards away. The trench was flanked by a row of concrete conduits.
“Guess whoever popped our John Doe wanted the T-REX boys to be in charge of his burial,” said Nicoletti.
“That was my take too.” Noticing movement up above, the sergeant shaded his eyes and looked back up the embankment. “Looks like the crime-scene boys are here.”
“Let’s get back up top,” said Nicoletti, glancing back at what would have been one very lengthy grave for their John Doe.
Winded from climbing back up the hill, his shoes covered in dust, Nicoletti stopped to take a final look at the victim. The man looked peaceful enough, even with the hole in his chest and dirt covering him from his hip joints to his knees. As Nicoletti knelt to take a final look at the victim, he realized what was so unusual about the body. It was the man’s socks, and the fact that not only were they slightly different colors but the right sock had a noticeable bulge in it just above the ankle. Nicoletti slipped a latex glove out of his back pocket, pulled it on, and tugged at the top of the puffy right sock.
“Crime-scene boys wouldn’t approve,” said the sergeant.
“So let ’em sue me,” said Nicoletti, removing the sock. He turned the sock inside out, extracting a small hunting knife and a moist piece of cardboard that had molded itself to the dead man’s foot. “Looks like our John Doe here was carrying around a little protection.”
“Protection he didn’t get to use,” said the sergeant.
“Yeah,” said Nicoletti, eyeing the cardboard. “But he told us where to look for his killer.” Adjusting the cardboard in the light, he read the two neatly printed lines that ran its full length: Problem—Benson and Sergeant Commons. Solution—Loretta Sheets. Beneath the printing was a drawing of what looked like either a ladder on its side or a railroad track.
“Anything important?” asked the sergeant.
“Maybe. That is, if there’s not another Denver homicide detective named Commons.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said Nicoletti, slipping the sock back onto the dead man’s foot and adjusting the cardboard and hunting knife back in place. “Think I’ll let the crime-scene boys do the honors on that foot,” he added as he watched a man carrying a black crime-scene tackle box in one hand and a partially eaten Egg McMuffin in the other stride casually toward them.
CHAPTER 20
Things at Homer Smith’s Tonsorial Parlor had just started to take their usual shape for the day when CJ stuck his head in the barbershop’s doorway and yelled, “Hey, Petey-Boy, how about a shine?”
Petey-Boy Lumus, a forty-year-old, three-foot-eight-inch-tall dwarf who had overcome spina bifida, mocking, and childhood abandonment, looked up from the tooled, leather-bound, 1930s-style salesman’s traveling case that held his shoe-shine paraphernalia and smiled. “Don’t know if I got enough polish to handle them shit-stompers of yours, CJ.”
“Then order some in,” CJ shot back, tossing Petey-Boy the same follow-up line he’d been giving him for the past twenty years.
“It’ll cost you double.”
“What’s money when you bathe in it?” CJ asked jokingly, taking a seat, pulling off his boots, and handing them to Petey-Boy. Petey lined up the boots next to a pair of spit-shined wingtips. Eyeing the wingtips, CJ said, “See Willis is here.”
“In the back.” Petey-Boy nodded toward a door across the room.
CJ walked stocking-footed across the shop’s spotless black-and-white-tiled floor, then shot Petey-Boy a look that asked, Okay? as he approached the door and stopped.
Petey-Boy nodded as CJ pushed the door open and quickly disappeared into the room where Willis Sundee and another man stood talking. When they saw CJ, both men called out, “CJ,” in unison.
“Willis, Homer, what’s happenin’?”
“Same ol’, same ol’,” Homer Smith said, hefting a double-bagged Safeway grocery sack that contained the numbers money Homer had collected from barbershop customers, runners, Five Points housewives, teachers, drunks, construction workers, and even a few in-the-know suburbanites
the previous day. Homer stapled the bag shut, wrote the previous day’s date in bold numbers along the top edge of the bag with a Sharpie, and delicately etched the number 3 on both sides of the bag before setting it aside on a nearby table.
Homer looked at Willis and shook his head. “Pretty light. Ain’t like the old days,” he said. “Nine hundred ninety-eight dollars. Not even a grand. Nobody wants to gamble around here like in the old days, except over at the den. Shit, I remember when I could run ten grand a day through this place. And maybe even a little more if Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington was playin’ down the street at the Rossonian. Hell, I remember when Welton Street jumped all night and you could get a full-course gourmet meal served to you at three-thirty in the a.m.”
“Those days are gone,” Willis shot back. “Hell, you’ve got legalized gambling right up the road in Central City and Black Hawk. The state runs a lottery, and you’ve got a dozen New Mexico Indian reservations stealing your thunder all the way down I-25. Who’s gonna risk placing an illegal bet or making a wild-haired guess on a couple of numbers that somebody pulls out of a hat when they’ve got all that other stuff available to them? What matters, Homer, is that you’re still in the game. So quit your bitchin’.” Willis walked over to CJ, draped an arm sympathetically over his shoulders, and asked, “How you copin’? With the bombin’ and all?”
“Best I can,” CJ said to his future father-in-law.
“Heard about that,” said Homer, turning up the room’s lights. “Sorry, CJ.”
“Thanks.”
“Mavis thinks that Deepstream woman’s involved,” Willis said.
“More than likely,” CJ admitted hesitantly.
“You gotta put an end to your feud with her, CJ,” said Willis, every bit the worried father. “You and Mavis can’t stand to go another round with that psychopath.”
CJ almost said that he just wanted Celeste to go away and leave him alone. But he would have been lying. He wasn’t looking for a truce. Deep down he wanted to pay Celeste back for kidnapping and brutally beating Mavis, for trying to fracture his skull with a tire iron two years earlier, and for once trying to asphyxiate him. Most of all, he wanted to settle up with her for insinuating herself into the back reaches of his mind and bubbling up to the surface at will.
“I’m handling it,” he finally said. “Things’ll be okay.”
“Hope so,” said Willis. “’Cause you got a wound that’s festering, and that’s never good.”
“Let’s say we forget about my Celeste Deepstream problems for the moment. I’m here on other business. Been working up a case for Flora Jean, and I need some help. What do the two of you know about a guy named Theodore Counts?”
“I know he’s an asshole,” Homer shot back.
“Willis?”
“I could say worse, but I won’t.”
“Guess you both know the man, then.”
“Yeah, we know the skinny cream-colored wannabe-white SOB. And we know he’s a lying thief.” The veins in Homer’s neck pulsated.
Willis nodded. “He’s what we used to call a hit-and-run nigger when I was a boy down in Louisiana. Keeps his foot in the black community, glad-handing and kissing up so he can steal what little they’ve got. After he’s milked folks raw, he parks his behind as close as he can to the straw boss’s house. Surprised you’ve never run across him.”
“Guess he hangs out in different circles from me.”
“Fucker should be hangin’ out in prison,” said Homer. “SOB’s a flat-out crook. Five, maybe six years ago he was runnin’ a scam where he and some white boy were stealing rare books from libraries all over the state.”
“They sold the books to collectors,” Willis chimed in. “And when the bubble burst, it was pretty much hush-hush because of Counts’s political connections. Next thing I hear, Counts has some bullshit position at our library right here in Five Points. From what I hear, all he does now is sit around and take up space.”
CJ nodded as Petey-Boy swung open the door and waddled into the room. Eyeing Homer as if he were a truant, Petey-Boy said, “You got a customer waiting, Homer.”
“Who?” Homer shot back, upset that his story had been interrupted.
“Charlie Renfroe. He said for me to come get you before you and Mr. Sundee talked away all his appointment time.”
“Think Counts is capable of killing someone?” CJ asked as Homer headed for the door.
Homer laughed. “Shit, no. The man’s a pussy.”
“What about that book-stealing buddy of his?” asked CJ. “Got a name for me?”
“Nope. But I know that didn’t nothin’ happen to him either.” Homer eyed Petey-Boy. “Tell Charlie I’m comin’,” he said, watching Petey-Boy scoot from the room before turning back to CJ. “What’s Counts done now?”
“I think he’s back to his old book-stealing ways. But this time it looks like he’s tapping the private sector.”
“Boldness knows no boundaries,” said Willis, trailing CJ to the exit. “You and Flora Jean gonna put the clamps on Counts?”
“We’re trying,” said CJ, heading across the barbershop to get his boots. CJ handed Petey-Boy a $5 bill, picked up his boots, planted himself on the top step of Petey-Boy’s shoe-shine stand, and slipped both boots on. He was almost to the door when Homer, clippers in hand, called out, “We’re lookin’ for you to bat cleanup on Counts, CJ. Don’t nobody like inhaling the stink on shit.”
The ride from Five Points to Mario Satoni’s mostly Italian neighborhood in North Denver normally took CJ fifteen minutes, but by the time he’d stopped for gas, inhaled two glazed donuts at LaMar’s Donuts on 6th and Klamath, and checked in with Mavis, pleading with her during the conversation to bake his favorite dessert, a sweet-potato pie, nearly an hour had passed. As he entered Satoni’s neighborhood, he realized that he was spending his whole morning sparring with feisty octogenarians.
Satoni, an eighty-one-year-old curmudgeon who ran a secondhand furniture store a few blocks from the house he’d lived in for fifty-five years, smoked foul-smelling cheap cigars that he imported from back East, wolfed down provolone cheese by the wedge, and ate Italian sausage half-smokes for dinner most days of the week. The thing that had sparked and ultimately cemented Satoni and CJ’s lasting friendship, besides the fact that Satoni had known Ike, was the fact that Satoni had the largest collection of mint-condition license plates CJ had ever seen.
CJ had called ahead to make certain that Mario would be home, knowing the call was probably unnecessary since Satoni came home from his secondhand furniture store for lunch every day promptly at eleven a.m. to enjoy a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on toasted Jewish rye, a bottle of Dad’s Old Fashioned root beer, which he bought by the case from a store in Los Angeles, a dill pickle, and a salted lime.
After discarding a cloak of early-morning clouds, the day had turned bright, and Mario’s mustard-colored bungalow, its basement chock-full of antiques and Western collectibles, seemed to glow in the noonday sun. CJ pulled the coral red Bel Air into Satoni’s driveway, got out, stretched, eyed the crystal-blue sky, and realized that with all his problems, he’d still rather be right where he was than any other place.
He didn’t see Mario approaching until the former Denver crime boss was nearly on top of him. Beltless, dressed in droopy khakis, an unironed dingy white shirt, and a chest-protector-wide tie, Satoni adjusted one of the dozens of sets of glasses that he kept around the house, brought CJ into focus, and on the heels of an ear-to-ear grin said, “Calvin, this could be your lucky day.”
No one had ever called CJ by his given name, Calvin, except Ike—generally when Ike needed to press a point—but Mario, a man for whom protocol still mattered, had called CJ Calvin since the first time they’d met, reminding CJ whenever he asked to be called by the initials he preferred that Calvin, his God-given name, was the one he would be greeted with if and when he ever reached the pearly gates.
“How’s that?” CJ asked, smiling and pumping Satoni’s rig
ht hand. The old man, once nearly six feet tall, was now shriveled and stoop-shouldered.
Beaming like a child who’d just found the prize at the bottom of his Cracker Jack box, Satoni said, “Right after you called to say you were coming over, a guy walked into the furniture store and said, ‘I hear you collect license plates,’ then handed me the sweetest deal I’ve run across in decades. Come on in; I’ll show you.”
CJ followed Mario across his backyard and into the house, through the kitchen, and down a hallway whose walls were filled with photographs of mobsters and Colorado movers and shakers from another era before stepping into what Mario liked to call his theater—a windowless dark box of a room with a fifty-seven-inch flat-screen TV, two matching La-Z-Boy chairs, and a reenameled fifty-year-old Kelvinator refrigerator. “There it is, over there on the TV tray next to the fridge” said Mario. “Have a look.”
CJ walked over to a TV tray that held an empty Coke can and a bowl of stale-looking popcorn. A porcelain license plate rested between them.
“Go ahead, pick it up,” said Mario, watching CJ salivate.
CJ hefted a license plate that had been constructed by the long-abandoned process of overlaying porcelain onto iron and held it up to the light.
“Whattaya think? And for just five hundred bucks. Did I get a steal, or did I get a steal?”
CJ rotated the license plate, as near to mint as any porcelain plate he’d ever laid eyes on, in the light, knowing that it had to be the rarest of the rare since that was all Mario collected. “Can the suspense, Mario,” he said finally. “Fill me in.”
Mario grinned. “You ever seen a 1915 Oklahoma first-state?”
“A couple, at shows.”
“Ever laid eyes on a prestate?”
“No.”
“Well, you have now. You’re holding a 1914 Chickasha Oklahoma premie. Easily worth four grand.”
CJ ran three fingers along the smooth, green, porcelain surface, then back across the plate’s raised white numerals, and smiled.
