by Robert Greer
Theresa handed CJ the cards without responding. He shuffled through the seven cards one by one, noting that each card was for either a used-book store or a pawnshop. Recognizing the names of one of the stores and two of the pawnshops, he handed the cards to Flora Jean. “Looks like Luis was dealing with people who were into moving the merchandise.”
“I don’t know where he found the time,” Theresa said. “He spent most of his time at the library studying.”
CJ simply nodded.
“How was Luis’s money situation?” Flora Jean asked, setting the business cards aside.
“We barely scraped up the money for his tuition,” Theresa said, clearly incensed. “I know what you’re thinking—that Luis was a common thief. But you’re wrong. If he did take those books from Mr. Stafford’s library, there’s an explanation. He may have needed them for his studies or for some college project. Luis was no thief.”
CJ suppressed the urge to tell Theresa what he knew about her son’s connection to Oliver Lyman. During his bail-bonding life he’d run across many mothers in denial, even seen the mothers of three-, four-, and five-time losers, including killers, arsonists, and rapists, argue that their hardened-criminal offspring were misunderstood angels. But Theresa Del Mora’s denial struck him as different, somehow proud and earnest.
“Do you have anything else you think we should take a look at besides what’s in the jewelry box?” asked Flora Jean.
“No. Luis lived a quiet, humble life.” She teased a yellowed newspaper clipping from where it was wedged in a corner of the box. As she unfolded the clipping and scanned it, a small tin crucifix slipped out from inside and fell to the floor. Theresa dropped to her knees and crossed herself. “Alejandro! Alejandro!” She looked up at CJ. “Luis was carrying his father’s crucifix.” Sensing CJ and Flora Jean’s puzzlement, she rose, and sat back down. “It’s my husband, Alejandro’s, obituary.” Holding up the crucifix, she added, “This crucifix was his. And Luis had them both among his possessions.” Looking relieved, as if an excruciating burden had suddenly been lifted from her, she said, “Luis and Alejandro were estranged when Alejandro died.”
Uncertain how to respond, Flora Jean asked, “How bad was their break?”
“As bad as one can be for a father and son. Alejandro was a lover of freedom. He died because of his passion. He wanted Luis to follow the path he’d chosen in life, but Luis, a mere child, didn’t care to. The friction was too great for either of them to overcome.”
“Can I have a look at the obituary?” Flora Jean asked, draping an arm over Theresa’s shoulders.
“He was ambushed, and his car was set on fire,” said Theresa, handing the obituary to Flora Jean. “I was never sure Luis understood the significance of his father’s sacrifice.”
“It seems that somehow he did,” said CJ.
“And that makes all the difference now that I have lost them both.” There was serenity on Theresa’s face that hadn’t been there earlier. A look that said, Whatever comes now I can handle on my own.
“Can I take the business cards with me?” CJ asked hesitantly.
“Yes.”
CJ slipped the cards into his jacket pocket.
“Do you think the cards will lead you to Luis’s murderer?”
“I’m not sure. But they represent leads we need to follow.”
Flora Jean clasped Theresa’s hand in hers. “We’ll find Luis’s killer,” she said, eyeing her sympathetically.
“I know you will,” said Theresa, glancing over at CJ. “Did your meeting with Mr. Stafford go well?”
“Afraid not.”
“He can be crusty,” said Theresa.
“I found that out.”
“I can talk with him if you’d like.”
“No need. We parted with an understanding.”
“You don’t think that he was involved in Luis’s murder?”
“I’m not sure.”
“There’d be no way!”
Surprised by Theresa’s defense of Stafford, CJ said, “We’ll see where the business cards take us.”
“They’ll take you away from Mr. Stafford. He’s a generous, caring man.” She slipped her hand out of Flora Jean’s, closed the jewelry box, arose, and moved toward the door. She squeezed Flora Jean’s hand a final time as Flora Jean exited, but she made it a point to simply nod at CJ as he walked out the door.
I need a plan of my own, Theresa Del Mora kept telling herself as she sat in a turn-of-the-century Boston rocker in her living room, fingering Alejandro’s crucifix, rocking back and forth in silence. A plan that would, now that she knew that Luis had made peace with his father’s memory, mete out a kind of justice that she could understand.
She looked up toward the full-length mirror that hung on the wall in front of her and eyed her reflection. She looked no different than she had twenty years earlier. She remained square-faced, lantern-jawed, bug-eyed, and disfigured. She would forever be an anomalous, sharp-minded woman forced to constantly negotiate her way in a world that others traveled with ease.
She rocked back and forth, squeezing the crucifix until it cut into the fleshy part of her right hand. She wasn’t certain how she could speed up her son’s murder investigation, but she had a plan that would keep her more fully in tune with the progress that CJ and Flora Jean were making. A plan that would have made Alejandro proud.
CHAPTER 29
Two of the business cards Theresa Del Mora had given CJ led directly to Theodore Counts. The owners of both Bosco’s Collectibles and Used Books, a store in the 8800 block of Denver’s East Colfax Avenue, and Pilot’s Book World and Western Artifacts in the Capitol Hill section of the city, told CJ with very little prodding after he described Luis Del Mora that Del Mora had sold them books and Western ephemera that included Santa Fe Railroad schedules, Trailways bus-line schedules, and dozens of sepia-toned photographs from the 1930s. Del Mora, both store owners calmly noted, had been sent to see them by longtime customer Theodore Counts.
CJ’s attempt to pry additional information out of the two wily old traders met with a double wave of indifference. When he made the bold move of mentioning that he was investigating Luis Del Mora’s murder, both men clammed up.
After leaving Bosco’s, which had been his second stop, CJ headed west on Colfax in five o’clock rush-hour traffic. He was delighted that he’d pinned a donkey tail on Counts, but he wasn’t certain how knowing that Counts had steered Del Mora to the two used-book and collectible dealers would actually help him.
If Counts, like Lyman, had been using Del Mora to steal valuable Western collectibles, and maybe even the book that contained the missing laying-of-the-rails daguerreotype, their relationship had to have been short-lived, especially if the only source of the stolen goods turned out to be Howard Stafford’s house. That angle didn’t make sense because the merchandise Del Mora had sold to both Bosco’s and Pilot’s had been very un-Stafford-like and pretty low-end.
Turning left onto Quebec, CJ decided to take a quick run by Counts’s house. Flora Jean had told him when he’d called twenty minutes earlier to fill her in on what he’d found out, that she’d driven by Counts’s place when she couldn’t locate Vannick and found the front lawn littered with newspapers. He wasn’t sure why he needed to go there, but he felt it was worth another try.
Peering through the Bel Air’s new windshield into the glare of the fading sun, CJ flipped down his visor and continued toward Counts’s upscale Hilltop neighborhood.
Theodore Counts had come home to get a credit card, enough fresh clothes to last him through the weekend, and a carton of stolen books he’d stored in his garage.
He hadn’t heard any more news stories about the Lyman murder since leaving Denver, and there had been very little about the murder in either the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post, aside from brief pieces that each paper had run the day he’d left town. Having convinced himself that if he really were a murder suspect the police would have found him by now, he felt a stra
nge sense of relief, but to be on the safe side, he’d decided to spend a few more days in Kiowa.
Several newspapers on his front lawn, and a nearly full mailbox told him that no one, including the police, had been around. He picked up the newspapers, tucked them under his arm, and headed toward his garage to deal with the carton of books that could link him to Lyman.
He had pulled his car into the garage a few minutes earlier, uncertain what to expect and prepared for a full-out police assault. Convinced now that no one had been around, not even a neighbor to retrieve his newspapers, he pushed the button on his garage-door opener, watched the door rise slowly, and walked into the garage.
The incriminating carton of books sat at eye level in plain view on the third shelf of an unpainted six-foot-high storage shelf unit. He had constructed the free-standing top-heavy wooden shelves himself; they were now laden with shop tools, library-style book cartons, and cardboard boxes filled with everything from sprinkler-system parts to Christmas ornaments.
He closed the garage door and walked casually between the north-facing wall of the garage and his car toward the shelves. He had slipped the book carton he was after off the shelf, reached into his jacket pocket for his car keys, and triggered his car’s trunk-lid remote when CJ, who’d entered the garage through a window just after Counts had first pulled his car inside, said, “Whattaya got there, Mr. Librarian?”
His face a snapshot of hysteria, Counts dropped the book carton and froze as CJ rose into view from behind the car’s right rear fender and moved toward him. CJ had reached the car’s front grill when Counts reached up, grabbed the unstable utility shelf by one of its two-by-four supports, and toppled it and its contents down onto CJ.
An old Skil saw, its blade exposed, crashed into CJ’s right shoulder as he let out a loud grunt and sidestepped the shower of unboxed hammers, wrenches, plumbing pipe, Christmas ornaments, and fencing and nails that careened down onto the hood of the car.
Hyperventilating, Counts punched the button on his garage-door opener and raced toward the slowly rising door. He’d almost reached the half-raised door when CJ, his jacket and shirt ripped and with a line of blood oozing from just above the curve of his right shoulder, reached out with his left hand, grabbed the much smaller Counts by his shirt collar, yanked him off his feet, and slammed him backward into the open trunk of his car.
“You little pissant!” CJ was on top of the screaming, frightened librarian, straddling him with his hands around Counts’s throat, when he remembered that once in Vietnam he’d been forced to kill a man with his bare hands.
Counts’s screams penetrated the still, dry air until, shaking in anger, CJ mumbled, “War’s over,” released his grip, and stood, leaving the petrified librarian quivering in shock.
Counts’s urine-stained khakis, a toppled storage shelf, its contents, and the six-inch-long gash along CJ’s shoulder remained the only signs that Counts’s garage had ten minutes earlier been the site of a near-death struggle.
Having explained who he was and why he was there, CJ stood looking down on Counts. The skinny librarian, his legs still draped over the trunk lip, continue to shiver.
CJ had dressed his shoulder wound with ointment and gauze he’d found in a first-aid kit in the car’s glove compartment. He’d tossed Counts a shop towel to clean himself up, but Counts had instead wrapped the towel around his neck. When CJ had pressed Counts to explain why he’d toppled the storage shelf on him, suspecting that Counts might claim that he’d thought CJ was an intruder, Counts had chosen silence. When he’d tried to get Counts to say whether he’d been involved in Luis Del Mora’s murder, Counts had remained mute.
Frustrated, CJ finally said, “Guess I’ll have to call the cops.”
“No. No,” Counts said woefully, his voice a near whisper.
“Then tell me what I need to know about the Del Mora murder, and I’ll leave.”
Looking punch-drunk, Counts sat up in the trunk, eyed CJ thoughtfully, stared blankly around the garage, and in a hushed voice said, “I was brokering books.”
“Brokering? Come on, Counts. You can choose a better word than that.”
“Okay. I, ah, we were selling books that had an uncertain source.” Counts looked frightened.
“No need to look so scared now, brother. The time for that was when you started stealing. Now, how about clueing me in on who the we are you just mentioned?”
“Arthur Vannick. He came up with the idea of lifting a few books out of Howard Stafford’s library.”
“And you just went along for the ride. Come on, Counts. I know your MO. You’ve been stealing books from libraries and God knows where else for years.”
Sounding confessional, Counts said, “This time I got in over my head.”
“Because of Vannick?”
“That and the fact that I had a chance to tap into a rare-book mother lode.”
“Stafford’s library.”
Looking ashamed, Counts nodded. “I never should’ve agreed to help with the remodel job on his library.”
“So you stole books from Stafford and sold them. To who?”
“Anyone who’d buy them. Rare-book dealers, private parties, museums, even other libraries.”
“Did you ever sell books to secondhand stores and pawnshops?”
“Occasionally. But that was more Del Mora’s territory.”
“He was in this with you?”
“No. He worked his own side of the street. And he didn’t work it for very long before he was murdered. I don’t know how many other places Del Mora was stealing from, but I know he hit Stafford’s. I also know he was careless and overeager—pretty much an amateur.”
“Unschooled enough that Stafford would’ve figured out what he was doing?”
“Very likely.”
Looking puzzled, CJ asked, “Mind telling me why Stafford wouldn’t have been able to do the same thing when it came to you?”
When Counts didn’t answer, CJ cupped a hand to his right ear. Grimacing in pain, he said, “I’m listening.”
Counts cleared his throat and leaned back on his elbows, eyes to the ceiling. “He didn’t have to. It was all part of a game we were playing.”
CJ flashed Counts a bewildered look. He understood that Stafford was a crank, but he couldn’t begin to fathom what kind of game he and Counts could have been playing. “Mind telling me about it?”
Counts’s answer came slowly. “In case you didn’t know it, Stafford’s at the top of the mountain when it comes to being not only rich but eccentric. I don’t think there’s much that still really excites him. For some reason, that remodel job on his library seemed to get his quirky juices flowing. One day he called Vannick and me into his office for a talk, right in the middle of when we were working out the library’s bookcase design and security-system grid. He had dossiers on both of us, and he knew that I had faced some … ah, problems and that Vannick liked to bill himself as being mob-connected. He strung us along for a while, taking us places we didn’t want to go, and then out of the blue, with the two of us standing there staring at him, waiting for our pink slips, he asked if we wouldn’t mind stealing for him.”
Counts cleared his throat and continued. “The whole thing sounded kind of crazy, crazier still if you consider that while he was presenting his stealing proposal to us, he was grinning and licking his lips like he was somehow getting a rise out of hearing himself talk. The most bizarre part was that he wanted us not just to steal for him but from him.”
CJ shook his head in disbelief. “Go on.”
Looking less frightened, Counts continued, “The heart of the plan was for us to take books from his library and replace them with stolen books that were rarer and more valuable. We’d have years to play the game, he claimed. When the library was finished, Vannick and I would have the run of it. I could look through his collection, find items that needed upgrading, and then go out and search for suitable replacements. He’d get his jollies out of recognizing that a rare boo
k was missing from one of his shelves and knowing that an even rarer book was on its way to replace it.”
“The whole thing sounds ridiculous,” CJ interrupted. “Where in the hell would you get the replacement books?”
“Plenty of places. You’d have to be in the book business to understand. Other libraries, museums, private collections, and occasionally antiquarian book stores and even flea markets. That was where Vannick came in. When I found a book in a place that was well protected, his job was to get us around security. Half the time I didn’t need him. That’s how poorly the kind of items we’re talking about are secured against insiders like me.”
CJ thought about Howard Stafford’s well documented strangeness. His teenage department-store-window masturbating episode, his aloofness, the fact that Stafford had pulled a gun on him—suddenly the whole bizarre scheme sounded a bit more plausible. Eyeing Counts circumspectly, he asked, “And you were stupid enough to say yes to Stafford’s offer?”
Counts eyed the floor sheepishly. “I’d already been stealing books for him for years. In a sense, Stafford owned me.”
“And Vannick? Did he own him too?”
“No. The whole scheme simply made Vannick feel more like he was a big man.”
“How far did you get with your game?”
“Not very. I only had a chance to pull half-a-dozen books off Stafford’s bookshelves and find suitable replacements when Luis Del Mora’s murder shut the whole thing down.”
“You mean steal suitable replacements, don’t you, Counts?” CJ could only shake his head. “The whole scam sounds like something dredged up outta Alice in Wonderland. What the hell was the upside for you?”
Counts hesitated before answering, as if he didn’t expect CJ to believe him. “The chance to spend time going through Stafford’s library collection and savor the rarity, and a chance for Vannick and me to make some money on the books we took from it and sold. The books I obtained and … ah, put back as replacements were, how can I best put it, free.”
