The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  “You’ve lost me, Lenny,” CJ said, frowning. “I’ve got insurance on my space and the contents. The way I handle my insurance settlement’s up to me.”

  McCabe smiled. “CJ, my man, you’re lost in the forest. Can’t you see the opportunity here? What we need to do in the face of this whole unfortunate deal is make a little progress on our misfortune. Grab ourselves a nest egg as we pull ourselves back up out of the mire. What we need when all’s said and done is to have enough money in our pockets to make up for our temporary out-of-business slump. And to do that we’ll have to pool our resources, build ourselves enough of a kitty to be able to buy a few engineering and construction shortcuts—buy down the cost of rebuilding. See where I’m headed on this?”

  CJ didn’t answer, recognizing that what he’d earlier mistaken for McCabe’s tough-edged resiliency was in fact the armor of an opportunist. CJ wasn’t averse to greasing a few bureaucratic palms in order to move things ahead, and he certainly had no interest in dealing with a gaggle of contractors—McCabe could do that. But CJ wasn’t willing to green-light the reconstruction of a building that might potentially collapse on his head just so he could pocket a little money, and he wasn’t about to pool his insurance money with anyone. Eyeing McCabe sternly, he said, “Lenny, I think we might be headed in opposite directions.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I can handle redoing the lease-hold improvements in my half of the duplex on my own.”

  “I see,” said McCabe. “Then tell me this. Can you handle an engineering mandate that calls for steel-beam reinforcement and masonry construction of a building that wasn’t really much more than a bunch of two-by-fours to begin with? That’s how they’ll make me redo the place, I guarantee it.” McCabe forced a sly smile. “And in the end, that’ll end up tripling your rent.”

  “And you need my insurance money to make certain that you aren’t faced with that kind of construction.”

  McCabe beamed. “Exactly.”

  “So in other words, I’ve gotta go along to get along.”

  “Your words, CJ.”

  “Looks like I’ve got a lot to think about,” said CJ.

  “Not really,” said McCabe, looking up to see his brother Ritchie bounding through the trailer’s front door.

  “Got me a live one on that ’98 Mazda sittin’ out front,” Ritchie boasted to Lenny, oblivious to CJ. “New paint, a cheap set of tires, a spruce-up on the interior—never ceases to amaze me what people’ll buy.” Taking note of CJ, he finally said to Lenny, “Thought you were here by yourself,” grabbed several sheets of paper off a desk in the corner, and rushed back out the door.

  Unperturbed, Lenny said, “All you really gotta think about, CJ, is how soon both of us can get back in the money-making business.”

  CJ nodded, extracted a cheroot from a box in his vest pocket, and lit up, realizing as he watched smoke swirl toward the ceiling that there was no need to think about reopening Ike’s Spot, at least in its current location, and there was no further need to ponder reconstruction and money-pooling and cutting corners and slicing up insurance-settlement pie. He’d move. Recalling one of Ike’s favorite sayings, Don’t never give a kid who’s cheatin’ off your test the right answer ’cause the son of a bitch just might end up usin’ that answer against you, he took a long drag on the cheroot.

  “You thinkin’?” asked Lenny, drinking in the look of concentration on CJ’s face.

  “Nope, just remembering,” said CJ, smiling and blowing a series of smoke rings into the air.

  Colorado’s two-hundred-thousand-acre Black Forest is a heavily wooded and characteristically rural expanse that hugs the Palmer Divide just before the Rockies swoop down to meet the wide valley that becomes Colorado Springs. The acreage had been named by a German immigrant who’d thought the dark hue of the forest’s dominating ponderosa pines resembled the famed Black Forest of his homeland. Once a pristine enclave of flora and fauna, the forest had gradually evolved since the late 1960s into a hodgepodge of five- to thirty-five-acre parcels of second-home dream escapism. In it, campers, log cabins, A-frame homes, and gas-guzzling RVs had become home to people looking for the bucolic life, including glassy-eyed retirees, loners, and a handful of survivalists.

  Alexie Borg had purchased the twenty-acre parcel of land and the five-room log cabin that Celeste Deepstream had called home for the past six months four years earlier for $150,000. In that time he had doubled the value of his investment. But what mattered to him most about the isolated acreage was not the upslope of his money but the fact that six months earlier he’d first made love to a heavily intoxicated and thoroughly depressed Celeste Deepstream on the floor of the cabin after two months of rebuffed advances.

  After their brief disagreement at his condominium in Denver, Celeste had come back home, where for the past two days she’d been fighting her own quiet demons, once again dependent on Alexie. Dependent on the house he provided, the money he gave her, and the secrecy he ensured and forced to accept his volatility, bad manners, and sexual whims. She suspected that Alexie had known all along that she’d come running back, had even savored the fact. She was, after all, a parole-violating fugitive and kidnapper with nowhere else to go.

  She looked around the sparsely furnished cabin, frowning at the smell of the lacquered log walls that reeked of pine tar and creosote. It was a noxious smell that reminded her of her poverty-stricken childhood. A smell left behind by Bureau of Indian Affairs seasonal workers hired to seal the termite-infested logs that formed the cinder-block-walled crawl spaces beneath the poorly constructed cookie-cutter tract homes the government had marched across the open spaces of the Acoma reservation. She rose from the rocker she was seated in, grabbed her leather jacket, and said to Alexie who was making himself a vodka martini, “Let’s go outside. The smell in here’s making me sick. Besides, I need to practice.”

  Alexie shrugged and, drink in hand, followed her out the door. The mountain air was crisp, the temperature a half notch above freezing. Spreading her arms, Celeste inhaled the pristine air. “You can almost taste the freshness.”

  Borg, his mind cluttered with sexual fantasies, snorted perfunctorily before cupping Celeste’s derriere in his left hand.

  Celeste stepped out of his grasp, took another deep, intoxicating breath, and said, “Alexie, please. I should practice.”

  “But I need you right now.”

  “What did we agree to, Alexie?” Celeste turned and stared the big Russian down.

  “That I wouldn’t interfere with your plans to kill Floyd.”

  “You’re interfering, Alexie.”

  “But …”

  “Go back inside, Alexie. I’ll only practice for a little while. Thirty minutes at the most. Besides, you’ll enjoy it more if you have to wait for it.” She tried not to choke on her words.

  Borg drank in the outline of Celeste’s body, imagining the firmness of her nipples in the chilled mountain air. “No longer than a half hour. I can’t stand it.”

  Celeste walked away sensually without uttering another word, leaving Borg with an erection and sipping his drink. She quickly covered the twenty yards between the house and a tool shed that hugged the property line, leaving her footprints in a shaded skiff of snow. She stepped into the tool shed and flipped on a light switch, watching her breath stream out in front of her. She walked to a workbench in the center of the shed, picked up the instrument she’d handpicked to kill Floyd, and smiled. Thirty minutes of practice, she told herself, a solid twenty or thirty attempts, and an equal number of trips up and down the tree-stand ladder to check on her shots, and that would be it. It would tax her stamina, but in the end it was always practice that made perfect. It was practice that had turned her into an Olympic-caliber swimmer, patience that had helped her maintain the kind of self-control that had gotten her through five years in prison, and discipline that had enabled her to shed forty pounds of prison fat and recapture her figure and exotic good looks.

  Practice,
patience, and discipline, she silently repeated to herself again and again as, clutching the weapon she would use to kill Floyd, she walked away from the workbench, across the room, and back outside. She eyed the tree stand that Alexie had built for her six months earlier, when she’d demanded a private spot where she could retreat from her demons. The stand filled the lower branches of a forlorn-looking pine tree. Thirty minutes of practice, she told herself. Just thirty uninterrupted minutes to practice killing.

  Her eyes were moist with anger, anger she wanted to draw on and linger, anger that would intensify when she had to go back inside to the Russian. Anger that had grown into a festering boil of hate that would explode the instant she dispensed with Floyd.

  Haste makes waste, Theodore Counts kept reminding himself as, standing in his bedroom, he jammed clothes into a suitcase. Reacting in fear, his actions had been totally disjointed since he’d heard on a six o’clock news report that Oliver Lyman was dead. Suspecting that a police investigation would link him to Lyman, he’d decided to run.

  He slipped a pair of penny loafers into the suitcase, layered the shoes with two cashmere sweaters, and scanned his bedroom for his running shoes. I never should’ve started dealing in stolen books again, he told himself, darting around the room, searching for the shoes—and he never should have told Vannick about the daguerreotype.

  Now he was riding a wave with a dead man, a man he’d supplied with barely a dozen stolen books. He was certain Lyman had been the one who’d sicced Flora Jean Benson on him.

  He tossed a Baggie filled with toiletries into his suitcase, uncertain how long he’d be gone. It really didn’t matter. He needed breathing room. He’d spend the night at a friend’s place southeast of Denver in the sleepy town of Kiowa, distancing himself from Lyman. As soon as he found his running shoes, he’d be gone.

  CHAPTER 22

  Russet, Amanda Hunter’s six-year-old border collie, heard the noise first. The dog was at the front door spinning in circles and whining well before Amanda realized that she’d heard something too.

  “Something out there, girl?” asked Amanda, surprised that a barely perceptible noise had triggered such an agitated response in the dog. Suddenly Russet stopped spinning and, with her nose inches from the door, let out a low-pitched, troubled growl. Amanda rose from her favorite chair, set aside the book she’d been reading, and, brow furrowed, walked over to the front window to peer into the blackness. Patting Russet on the head, she said, “Let’s say we take a look.”

  Russet stopped growling, but her nose remained aimed squarely at the door as Amanda flipped the switch to a bank of outdoor floodlights and the front of the house was suddenly awash in light. She flipped a second switch, and a string of lights that her father had always called his runway lights flashed on along the thirty yards of the gravel driveway that led from the house to the nearby storage shed. She heard the unmistakable thud of the door to the storage shed bang into the outside of the shed when she reached for a third switch.

  Most of the shed had been dug into a hillside so only its front timbers were visible. Amanda hefted the loaded shotgun she kept next to the front door, snapped it closed, grabbed four additional shells from a nearby table, flashed Russet a hand signal to stay, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the porch.

  She could see from twenty yards away that the door to the shed was open. So much for her security system. A few steps from the open doorway, someone dressed from head to toe in black sprinted away from her down the driveway. The next instant Russet darted after the streaking figure.

  “Russet!” Amanda screamed, racing down the front steps. Russet was within five feet of the intruder when the dark figure stopped, turned, and fired a .22 point-blank at the dog. Russet let out a yelp as two ear-shattering blasts from Amanda’s over-and-under echoed in the mountain darkness.

  “You son of a bitch!” she shouted, reloading the shotgun and firing off two additional rounds. Russet, undaunted by the coat-brushing sting from the .22, was about to bolt once again, but Amanda’s sure hand on her collar stopped the dog short. The sound of a vehicle roaring to life in the distance coincided with the sound of the over-and-under snapping open again. Amanda reloaded, snapped the shotgun closed one-handed, scooped up the quivering forty-five-pound border collie, and, anger seeping from her pores, headed back toward the house.

  Rosie’s den was packed, jammed to its recently painted enamel-white cinder-block walls. It was a crisp, calm, quarter-mooned Saturday night, and cars lined both sides of Welton Street for almost three blocks on either side of the den.

  As CJ negotiated his way through the boisterous gambling throng inside and toward a roulette table, Rosie Weeks called out to him, “Glad you could show up, Mr. Wonderful.”

  Only when CJ reached an island of calm just beyond the roulette table did he realize that Flora Jean was standing with Rosie. Flora Jean flashed a half-cocked smile. “Watch out, CJ; Rosie’s ticked.”

  “Over what?”

  “Over the fact that the Broncos traded one of their draft choices for some washed-up running back. When I told him the Broncos should have my problems and that the cops had found a dead men with my name written on a piece of cardboard inside his sock, he ignored me, claimin’ that he could probably outrun that back.”

  “Yeah, I heard—about Lyman, I mean,” said CJ. “Julie called me just after I had a business strategy meeting with Lenny McCabe this afternoon. Fed me the whole nine yards. Said Sergeant Commons wanted a piece of you.”

  “A big piece. Alden and Julie got him to back off, but not before I’d spent two hours in his dingy little office with him breathing green-chili breath in my face.”

  “Sounds like a pain.”

  Flora Jean shook her head. “Gotta admit, though, he’s pretty damn smart. He’s up to speed on the whole daguerreotype story. While I was sittin’ there in his office, waitin’ for Julie to toss around a little of her barrister’s muscle, don’t you know that damn Joe Friday contacted Loretta Sheets, talked to the Hunter woman at her ranch, and had a chat with Stafford!”

  CJ look peeved. “You mean in two hours he dug up everything it took us days to uncover?”

  “Sure did. Extracted it all from a note he said he found in Lyman’s sock. Sheets told him about Amanda Hunter. He talked on the phone for a good ten minutes with Stafford, and my guess is that he’s pretty much even with us when it comes to Counts and Vannick.”

  “Damn,” said CJ as a woman who was painted into a red sequined cocktail dress screamed, “Full house! Show me the money! Show me the money!”

  “Shit, Aquanetta Dunn just hit,” Rosie lamented. “I’m gonna have to go get her some money. She’ll want all her winnings in hundreds so she can slip the wad inside her bra and spend the rest of the night flashin’.” Rosie moved toward the screaming woman, shaking his head as he watched her raise her arms and wiggle them skyward.

  Flora Jean watched Aquanetta follow Rosie toward the den’s portable cashier’s cage. Looking back at CJ, she asked, “Did you see the six o’clock news?”

  “Sure did, and you can bet whoever did in Lyman saw it too. One good thing, though—they don’t know about that note in Lyman’s sock, and thanks to Commons, we do.”

  “Think I’ll check out Lyman’s office and his house. See what I can dig up. As for the note in his sock, why do you think he did that?”

  “More than likely because he needed an ace in the hole. Something the person who killed him wouldn’t know about. He probably put the note there on real short notice.”

  “Why not just leave a written note back at his office?”

  “Because it might not have been found, not to mention the fact that whoever killed him could’ve destroyed it.”

  Flora Jean shook her head. “Maybe. But writin’ a note on a piece of cardboard and stickin’ it inside your damn sock! I don’t know, CJ.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Flora Jean. It worked. And …” The chime from CJ’s cell phone interrupted them. “Hold o
n a minute. It’s probably Mavis.” CJ flipped his cell phone open. “Floyd here.”

  “CJ, it’s Billy. I’m headed for the Triangle Bar. Amanda Hunter just called. Said she had a break-in at the ranch. Somebody busted into her storage shed.”

  “She okay?” asked CJ, shouting over the background noise.

  “She’s fine. Her dog got grazed by a .22 before Amanda let whoever broke in have a double taste of buckshot from her over-and-under. The lady’s tough.”

  “Where are you?”

  “South of the Snowy Range Mountains, about two and a half hours away from the ranch if I step on it. Just bought myself a new pair of boots over in Laramie, and I was headed back home. I’m guessin’ Amanda can use some peppin’ up. Who knows, my visit just might shine some light on that murderer you’re after too.” Billy paused and pinched one ear shut. “What’s all the noise in the background? You at an arcade?”

  “I’m at the den.”

  Billy laughed. “Rosie’s still sucker-punchin’ all them dumbass Denver gamblers?”

  “That he is.”

  “Flora Jean there with you by any chance?”

  “Yeah. We just finished talking about one of our suspects buying the farm. Oliver Lyman, that professor who was one of Loretta Sheets’s dissertation advisers, well, somebody killed him earlier today.”

  “Guess I can strike Lyman off the list of people who might’ve broke in at Amanda’s. Any idea who might’ve killed him?”

  “No. But he left a note behind pointing a finger at Sheets. A piece of cardboard the cops found inside his sock.”

  “Ummm. Let me know if you need any more help with Sheets. She ain’t but a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Triangle Bar.”

  “I will.” CJ turned to Flora Jean. “You need to say anything to Billy? I’ve got him here on the phone.”

  Flora Jean shook her head.

  “I’ll keep you posted, Billy,” said CJ, shouting into the phone. “Let me know what you come up with at Amanda’s. And Billy, while you’re there, why don’t you ask her about her degrees. Found out she has one in photography.”