The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  He slipped the daguerreotype out of the felt-lined slipcase he’d had made for it, held it up by the outer edges, and stared at it lovingly before bringing it to his lips. He thought about what it must have been like to have been the telegraph operator who’d announced as the Golden Spike was driven, “Done!”—signaling to the world that America was now a truly united continent.

  Jacob Covington’s daguerreotype was indeed one of a kind, a masterpiece of alchemy and art. He stared at the photograph for several more minutes, thinking about what it must have felt like to build that which had never been built before, then he eased the photo back into its slipcase, closed the display case doors, and rose. He walked away with a smile on his face and headed for his customary predinner vodka and tonic, feeling a sense of relief. He had put the daguerreotype to bed, Floyd was a fleeting memory, and the day’s turbulent events had ultimately ebbed to a manageable flow.

  The fire started in Stafford’s library, destroying everything inside. From there, without benefit of a sprinkler system that had been sabotaged, the fire burned its way beyond the library’s massive oak doors to sweep into the adjoining hallway, engulfing millions of dollars’ worth of precious art.

  The smell of smoke and soot and burning timbers permeated the air as, clad only in his pajamas, Howard Stafford, hysterical, and paralyzed by fear, watched an entire wing of his house become an inferno capped by plumes of red-and-orange flames. As fire-truck sirens screamed in the distance, he watched helplessly as his most precious passions turned to ash right before his eyes.

  Howard Stafford had taken something precious from her, and now, as she sped south on I-25 beyond the southern outskirts of Colorado Springs on her long trip to Nicaragua and ultimately home, Theresa Del Mora knew that without benefit of the sprinkler system, Stafford’s home should be a raging inferno. She understood fire—Only fire and water can completely cleanse, Alejandro had once told her. Now she and Howard Stafford were even. What mattered most to him in the world had turned to ashes and a memory.

  She cruised along at seventy, her conscience clear, and thought about something else Alejandro had taught her: Freedom and family are all that really matter in the world. Her trip to America had cost her all she had left of her family, and freedom no longer had any meaning.

  She glanced toward a sign announcing the exit for the Fort Carson Army Base, a symbol of American military might. She sped past the sign, knowing that in spite of all of Howard Stafford’s wealth and power, there was no chance that he would ever see her again, much less have an opportunity for recourse. For, as Alejandro had always said about the American giant to the north, Might in all its glory can never overpower all-out home-turf guerrilla warfare.

  EPILOGUE

  CJ stood in Mario Satoni’s basement, watching Mario, down on one knee, dig through one of the shoeboxes he’d gathered into a semicircle in the middle of the floor.

  “It’s here someplace. I just gotta find it,” Mario said, sounding peeved.

  “Why all the fuss, Mario? I believe you.”

  “Yeah. Like you believed you were gonna catch up with that Deepstream woman before she slipped through your fingers, and like you thought Lenny McCabe had your best interests at heart. Hell, Calvin, sometimes I think Mavis has it right. You do need to be nurtured.”

  CJ didn’t answer, concerned that if he did, the inexplicable spell he had cast over Mavis might evaporate. He’d struggled for weeks to get Mavis to buy in to the story that Celeste Deepstream had been erased from his life; weeks more to convince her that he would be at the periphery, not the center, of a Lenny McCabe murder trial—a trial that was shaping up to be a slam-dunk for the prosecution.

  Two weeks earlier Fritz Commons had found the .22 Magnum that Lenny McCabe had more than likely used to kill both Luis Del Mora and Oliver Lyman. The gun had been wrapped in tissue paper and stuffed in a shoebox that Commons had found beneath the bed liner of McCabe’s impounded dually. CJ had let out a sigh of relief when the news media had leaked the “murder weapon found” information, knowing the find would put him a few steps further from the center of a sensational double-murder trial.

  He still hadn’t been able to figure out exactly where he was now headed in life, but he suspected that sooner or later a proper choice would surface. He hadn’t fully abandoned the idea of continuing in the antiques business, but he knew for certain now that he couldn’t completely turn his back on being a bail bondsman. He had no idea how he’d combine the two polar-opposite careers, but with Mavis’s hesitant blessing, he was going to try.

  “I found it!” Mario shouted. “Right here under my nose. Been a snake it would’ve bit me. Have a look.”

  CJ knelt and eyed the box’s contents: a handful of gaudy costume jewelry, a couple of old Bulova watches, and a rubber-banded stack of poker chips. “Will this take long, Mario?” CJ checked his watch as Mario handed him a worn leather coin purse. “We don’t wanta be late for Mavis’s Easter dinner. Hope you aren’t forgetting, I’m still on semiprobation.”

  “I’m not forgetting anything, Calvin, but you’re the one who’s gotta toe Mavis’s mark. Just hold your horses. It’s not the Last Supper. The food won’t evaporate if we’re a couple of minutes late.”

  CJ smiled, knowing Mario was right. Mavis and Rosie Weeks’s wife, Etta Lee, had more than likely cooked twice as much food as they’d need to feed eleven. Earlier that morning he’d checked in and found that Flora Jean, Alden Grace, and Morgan and Dittier had already settled in at Mavis’s. When CJ had called Mavis to say he’d arrived at Mario’s to pick Mario up, Mavis had said that Billy DeLong and Amanda Hunter were just walking through the door. He was hoping no one would put pressure on Billy or Amanda to define their relationship, but knowing Etta Lee’s inquisitiveness, he suspected she would.

  “Have a look inside the coin purse, Calvin. Go ahead.”

  CJ unzipped the coin purse and extracted a twenty-dollar gold piece and what looked like a spent bullet. He eyed the two objects quizzically before looking at Mario, who was now standing.

  Mario smiled. “The slug’s from a .38. The twenty-dollar gold piece belonged to your Uncle Ike. You know that story I’ve been promising to tell you all these years about me and Ike? Well, you’re about to hear it. But before I strike up the old band, I need to know exactly where you and me stand on a few things, Calvin.”

  “Stand how?”

  “Stand with belonging to a two-person fraternity that requires a lifelong bond. A bond that can’t be broken until one of us is dead.”

  Looking surprised and uncertain where Mario was headed, CJ said, “That’s pretty heavy-duty, Mario.”

  “For most of my life I was involved in what some folks would call a heavy-duty business, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I know that,” said CJ, stunned that Mario would even hint at his prior life as a mobster. Thirty-five years earlier, as Denver’s top crime boss, Mario could have sealed anyone’s fate with just a nod of his head. A mere wink would have ensured that on any given night a quarter of a million dollars passed through his hands.

  “So have you got an answer for me, Calvin?”

  “No offense, Mario, but you caught me off guard. Mind telling me that story first?”

  Mario shrugged. “What can it hurt? You’re still the one’s gotta make the decision.” Mario watched CJ roll the gold piece and the slug around in his right hand. “So here’s the story. It was 1948, and the country was just flexing its muscle after climbing outta the Second World War. I was a twenty-three-year-old rookie in my business, working my way up. It was the second week of June here in Denver, the air was late-spring sweet, and the trees had just finished leafing out. I had a pocket full of money from a business deal I’d just closed, and Angie, God rest her soul, was expecting.” Mario paused. The hurt that always filled his eyes when he talked about his deceased wife seemed magnified.

  Mario cleared his throat and continued. “Duke Ellington was in town for a three-night stand, playing
down on Five Points at the Rossonian. I wanted to catch him, but Angie wasn’t up to it. With the strain of impending motherhood tugging at her and knowing how much I loved jazz, she shoved me out the door and told me to take in Duke on my own. Back then, when jazz was king, you could count on seeing as many white folks as black folks walking the streets of Five Points. Anyway, I sauntered into the Rossonian for the first show and took a seat at the bar. I was listening to Duke and his orchestra flow through an up-tempo rendition of ‘Take the A Train’ when a muscle-bound black man wearing cowboy boots, bib overalls, and a Stetson took a seat on the stool next to me.” Mario eyed CJ and winked as CJ acknowledged his pinpoint-accurate description of Ike with a smile and a nod.

  “We struck up a conversation that ran on the whole rest of the evening, and by the end of the second set, I knew this about your uncle. He was a World War II veteran. He’d been a member of the mainly black Red Ball Express Transportation Corps in France, and he was now a bail bondsman.

  “I didn’t say much about myself except to tell him that my family was in the furniture business,” Mario smiled, “which was the truth.

  “I was all warm and fuzzy-headed an hour or so later when I got up to leave, but Ike, who I had found out later had been nursing iced tea all night because of his on-and-off battle with alcohol, was as sober as a mule.

  “We walked out of the place together and headed up Welton Street. Ike was hoofing it back to his place on Bail Bondsman’s Row, and I was headed for my car. Two blocks later, just before we were about to go our separate ways, a guy stepped out of an alley, waved a .38 at us, and demanded money. It wasn’t the money in my pocket he was after, I knew that the second I saw him, but Ike didn’t. What he wanted was to slide me out of certain business relationships I had developed and slide himself in.

  “I reached into my pocket to give him what money I had. As I handed him the money, our eyes met; then outta nowhere, like a damn rocket, Ike clobbered the guy with the meanest clench-fisted, double-armed, baseball-bat-swinging cut I’d ever seen. The gun went off, I felt a stab of pain in my shoulder, and the next thing I knew I was bleeding from under my armpit like a stuck pig.

  “When our gunman collapsed into a ball on the ground, Ike kicked him in the head like he meant to kill him. To this day I swear that kick was the very last vestige of World War II coming outta your uncle. The guy let out a grunt. Ike looked at my bloody shoulder and said, as calm as you and me are talking right now, ‘We better head for Denver General.’ When I told him I couldn’t and pleaded with him to get me to my car, he looked at me like I was crazy. It wasn’t until I said four or five times in a row that I had a special family doctor in North Denver who would take care of me that Ike began to recognize the kind of situation he’d stumbled into.

  “When he asked me point-blank, ‘You a damn mobster?’ I remember laughing in pain and saying that I was a guy just like him, somebody looking for a leg up on the American dream.” Mario paused and watched CJ continue to roll the twenty-dollar gold piece and the .38 slug around in his hand before continuing, “That slug you’re holding could’ve killed me. But it didn’t. I was way too stupid and ornery. Anyway, Ike slipped his arm under my shoulder, walked me to the car, helped me inside, and followed my directions to the house I was renting. By the time we got there, I’d lost so much blood I was hallucinating, thinking I was in church singing. Ike pretty much carried me up to the house, and when Angie answered the door he announced that I’d been shot. Realizing instantly what had happened, she barely gave Ike a second look. Cool as a cucumber, a lot like Mavis, I suspect, she had Ike carry me into the living room and lay me out on the couch before she ran to call her Uncle Alonzo, who was a hell of a lot more than just the family doctor. Fifteen minutes later, after Angie had helped Alonzo pump a couple of bags of fluid into me—Angie was a nurse, you know—Alonzo pulled that slug you’re holding outta the fat pad just below my left armpit. Turned out the damn thing had nicked an artery.

  “So much went on in the course of the next half hour that not much was said other than Angie telling Ike who she was, Ike doing the same, and Alonzo, who always saw himself as cut outta different cloth from the rest of Angie’s family, exclaiming over and over that sooner or later I was gonna be the death of him.

  “When Angie was convinced that I was outta the woods, and Alonzo finally shut up his complaining, she walked Ike to the door, slipped the twenty-dollar gold piece she always carried out of her pocket, and demanded that Ike take it. When Ike refused, Angie stared him down, and with Alonzo standing right there next to her, shaking his head, saying, ‘No, the man’s not family,’ she gave the coin to Ike.”

  Mario let out a sigh. It was the kind of sigh that seemed to release years of pent-up pressure. “That coin you’re holding has the blood of my family and Angie’s coursing through it. It’s been rubbed along the edge to remove the fluting, and if you look real close—you’d need a magnifying glass to see it—you’ll see there’s a tiny S stamped into the gold right at six o’clock. In the old days that coin carried a lot of weight, Calvin. Even today, if you happen to be the bearer, in certain circles it’s worth a hell of a lot more than twenty dollars. It’s yours to keep. Who knows, one day, you may need it.”

  “Some story,” said CJ.

  “There’s a little more to it. Let me just finish. In the end Angie closed Ike’s hand over the gold piece and ushered him out the door a few seconds before I passed out.” Mario’s eyes misted over. “A week later Angie miscarried. I gave Ike the slug one night at a poker party fifteen years later. Ike mailed the gold piece back to me, certified mail, two weeks before he died.”

  CJ watched Mario fight back tears before finally asking, his tone respectful and hushed, “How is it that after all our license-plate transactions over the years, I never knew that you and Ike knew one another until just last year?”

  “Because I wanted it that way, Calvin, and so did he. There are some relationships you don’t really broadcast.”

  CJ shook his head. “You put me in a tough spot, Mario. Prefacing that story the way you did.”

  “I understand,” said Mario. “But think about that coin for just a moment, and consider what it represents. You no longer have Ike, and I no longer have Angie. But you do have Mavis. All I’ve got is a money-grubbing asshole lawyer of a nephew and his over-educated flunkies who sit around all day long hoping I take a hip-breaking tumble or lose my mind. When you come right down to it, Calvin, I really got no one I can trust but you.”

  CJ ran a finger along the amazingly smooth edge of the gold piece. “What do you want from me, Mario?”

  “What I’ve always asked of you, Calvin. Your confidence and your friendship. And maybe just a little bit of protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “From that nephew of mine, Rollie, and his rat pack.”

  CJ shook his head. “I’ve heard it said that there was a time when half the businesses along the Front Range ran to your protection.”

  Mario shrugged. “Things change, Calvin. Anyway, we’re not talking about that kind of protection.”

  “What kind are we talking, then?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute, but first off I need something else from you. Something that’ll keep my nephew and his asshole friends from sticking their noses where they don’t belong. I want you involved in a business venture with me, one that’ll explain to Rollie and his trained monkeys in business suits why you’re always around. An antiques and collectibles business, sort of.”

  “Afraid I can’t help you there, Mario. I’m tapped out financially.”

  “Then I’ll get you retapped. Money’s not an issue. I need you in this venture with me, Calvin. We won’t have to run a fancy business out of a store like you were doing at Ike’s Spot. We can have a different sort of operation. A virtual kinda store. We can sell things, yours, mine, even consigned stuff, by appointment or on eBay right out of this basement. That way you can have your cake and eat it too.
You get to spend part of your time with Flora Jean doing what you’ve always done and the rest over here with me offering up antiques and collectibles for sale—and a little protection.”

  “Mario, do you realize you’re talking about me getting crossways with people who are your blood kin? A special kind of kin involved in a special kind of business that’s never taken real well to outsiders.”

  Mario paused, looking as if it hurt him deeply to say what came next. “So was the guy who Ike cold-cocked and stomped in the head that night in Five Points. He was kin too. How else do you think I realized right off what that sham holdup was really all about? He was family, Calvin, and he was gonna kill me if Ike hadn’t stepped in. My nephew and his wolf pack are nothing more than a twenty-first-century refinement.”

  “I’m an outsider, Mario,” CJ protested.

  “So was Ike. Don’t worry so much. If you take me up on my offer and the shit really does end up hitting the fan, we’ve got ourselves an inside ringer.”

  “Who?”

  “Pinkie Niedemeyer.” Mario smiled. “You never heard any more from that Vannick character after Pinkie talked to him, did you? One little visit from Pinkie, and Vannick and his friend Mr. Counts were singing about Stafford and Lyman and even McCabe to the cops. Guess they weighed the lesser of two evils and punted. Pinkie may think he’s out of my debt, but you know what, the man still owes me.”

  “Damn, Mario. This is starting to sound deep woods serious.”

  “Life and death, Calvin. It’s not just my money that Rollie’s after. There are things I know about him. Things that tend to make my Stanford-educated nephew uncomfortable, sometimes even sweat. When you come right down to it, he’s a lot like that Howard Stafford guy you brought down: haughty, rich, and above it all. Except Rollie’s a hundred times more ruthless.”