Astride a Pink Horse (20 page)

“Did he have any enemies that you know of?”

“Besides the husband of that lieutenant who killed herself, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“None that I recall.”

“One last question, and I think we’re through. Was Giles in any way linked to the antinuclear movement that took place out here in the Rockies back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and is there any chance that he was friendly with any of the movement’s leaders?”

“That’s two questions, and the answer’s no on both counts. Thurmond didn’t have much use for dipshits, fainthearted patriots, commies, or whiners. He was red, white, and blue through and through. We done?”

“Yes,” Bernadette said, surprised by Breen’s directness. “Let me
give you my cell-phone number in case you remember something important you may have forgotten. You can get me on it anytime.” She recited the number.

“Got it,” said Breen. “But I can tell you right now, I’ve told you pretty much everything I know about the man. By the way, do you know anything about funeral arrangements?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Terrible for Thurmond not to have anyone there for him at the end. But I guess there’s probably nobody out there who cares, really, except maybe me. It probably goes all the way back to our basketball connection and the sharin’ and carin’ we did there. Sort of a been-through-the-wars-together, squadron-leader-to-wingman kind of thing. Something that you bein’ OSI and not a pilot wouldn’t understand.”

“Perhaps not,” Bernadette said, glancing down at her pilot wings. Polishing the wings with the cuff of her shirtsleeve, she hung up, wondering how Cozy’s meeting with Wilson Jackson had gone.

Most of what Cozy had so far been able to get out of his visit with Wilson Jackson as he and the reverend sat in Jackson’s dingy, musty parsonage office were complaints. That and a 1960s-news-reel-type rehash of how blacks had been getting the shaft in America for more than 235 years.

Each time Cozy tried to get Jackson to talk about Thurmond Giles, the sad-eyed, balding, ebony-skinned man with oversized teeth and the barest hint of a mustache segued into another tirade about America’s lengthy mistreatment of the black man,
emphasizing with each new assault that the Giles killing had to have been a hate crime.

When Jackson, scrutinizing Cozy from his massive, throne-like wingback chair, asked indignantly, “How much black blood have you got in you, Mr. Coseia? If I had to guess, I’d say you’re easily half.”

“As much as any Dominican transplant,” Cozy said, checking his temper and thinking back to what his grandmother, the proud firstborn of a French mother and Nigerian father and an outspoken critic of onetime Haitian president Papa Doc Duvalier, would have certainly said about a zealot like Jackson:
Papa Doc likes to boast about being French, and about not having but a pinprick of African blood, but Lord knows the only thing French about that lying African is the toast he eats in the morning
.

“Well, you need to find out how much for certain,” Jackson scolded.

Having had his fill of the bombastic, opinionated little preacher, Cozy sat forward in his chair and locked eyes with Jackson. “I’ll do that, asshole. Now, can you tell me anything useful about Thurmond Giles?”

Surprised and insulted, Jackson said, “I can tell you this. He was the kind of man who’d sell you out in a heartbeat.”

“And you know that because?” Cozy said, with the authority of someone who’d just unmasked a fraud.

“Because he spent two years as a member of my congregation, and I knew him. Black man or not, he was a loser and a user.”

Sensing that Jackson’s dislike for Giles was somehow personal, Cozy asked, “Nothing more specific?”

“Nothing. We can sit here all day, and I’ll say the same thing. So
let’s not,” Jackson said, rising from his chair to indicate that their mostly one-sided discussion had reached an end. “All I can say is that I hope the authorities find his killer.”

“Makes two of us,” said Cozy, standing and making a point of not shaking Jackson’s hand. He was halfway across the room when he stopped and turned back to face the irritating little preacher. “One last question. Why so vocal about the Giles killing being a hate crime? Nothing at all has surfaced that I’m aware of to suggest that it was.”

“Because, as I’ve been telling you for the past twenty minutes, Mr. Coseia, I know America. It’s my job, and it should be yours, to keep a spotlight on our racist oppressors.”

“Guess I’ve got it wrong, then. I thought my job was to deliver the news, and yours was saving souls.” Leaving Jackson looking dismayed, Cozy continued toward the door. “You’ve got my number. Call me if something you think might be important surfaces.”

Thinking as he walked across the parsonage grounds to his truck that Jackson was the kind of man his grandmother would’ve called
a nobody looking to be somebody
, Cozy paused briefly and shook his head, certain that the good Reverend Jackson hadn’t told him everything he knew about Thurmond Giles.

The FBI agent who stopped by Freddy Dames’s office unannounced a little after nine forty-five a.m. sounded far more homespun than the half-dozen or so spit-and-polish agents Freddy had run across during his journalistic career. To top it off, the man looked foppish and out of FBI character, dressed as he was in a Panama hat, black-and-white wingtip British walkers, and a barely wrinkled seersucker suit.

After announcing who he was in a slow West Texas drawl, removing his hat, handing Freddy his business card, and shaking Freddy’s hand, Thaddeus Richter, a twenty-two-year veteran of the FBI, took a seat across from Freddy in one of the room’s three eight-thousand-dollar overstuffed, imported Italian leather chairs and went straight to work. “I’ve been following your stories on the internet, Mr. Dames. You’re quite the persistent reporter. Three groundbreaking stories in the space of two days. Made me want to drop by and see if you wouldn’t mind sharing any information about the Thurmond Giles murder that you haven’t yet sent into cyberspace. And while you’re at it, perhaps you can tell me more about Sergeant Giles’s link to the possible sale of American nuclear secrets—which you’ve so intriguingly hinted at in your stories. To tell you the truth, sir, our agency hasn’t been able to establish such a connection.”

“That’s probably because there’s not a straightforward link,” Freddy said, watching Richter slip a trifolded sheet of paper out of a suit-coat pocket, unfold the paper, and lay it on the coffee table in front of him.

“But it says right here in a story you posted this morning that ‘Thurmond Giles was a man with virtually unlimited access to our nation’s most sophisticated nuclear weaponry, a man with the skill and authority to have worked for twenty years on the air force’s arsenal of nuclear-missile warheads. He was a man who knew not only what made America’s Minuteman missiles tick and where they were located but who moved them around the High Plains West with impunity until his sexual misconduct caused him to be shipped off to an American Siberia. It’s entirely possible that Giles, long smarting from a series of perceived slights, career-ending reprimands, reductions in rank, and transfer of duties, may have decided that his nuclear knowledge was worth selling. That decision may have gotten him killed.’ Have I quoted you correctly, Mr. Dames?”

“To the letter,” Freddy said, smiling. “But my story clearly states that Giles
may
have decided to sell what he knew and that it
may
have gotten him killed, not that it actually did.”

“There’s a fine line between fiction and fact, Mr. Dames.”

“I’m simply reporting what I’ve been able to gather, Agent Richter. And in case you missed it, the heading above my story clearly labels it as an opinion piece.”

“I know news business jargon very well, Mr. Dames, but it seems to me that you just might be editorializing your way toward a wrong conclusion, maybe even a lawsuit.”

“Maybe, maybe not, but either way it’s my business and my reputation that are on the line.”

“ ‘Web-based journalism,’ I believe they call it these days,” Richter said, smiling. “Truthfully, I didn’t realize until now that you web-based folks have as much influence as it appears you do.”

“Sorry you didn’t, and I’m sorry you don’t care for the way I choose to report the news. But like they say, it’s a free country.”

“What I don’t care for, Mr. Dames, is irresponsibility. Hypothesizing, hyperbolizing, and hiding behind the shield of the fourth estate in order to sell some product that pops up next to your story on a computer screen.”

“Then I suggest you get your news elsewhere.”

Richter’s cordial tone was gone. “And I suggest you listen, sir. I had an agent from our Albuquerque office talk to Howard Colbain this morning. Figured it was prudent to do so since you tossed Colbain’s name around so liberally in your last story. Mr. Colbain, it turns out, was quite cooperative and very forthcoming. He told our agent that he was quoted out of context in your piece. That you made him sound like a man bent on revenge when he clearly isn’t.”

“Then I guess Mr. Colbain and I are seeing things through very different lenses.”

“I guess so,” said Richter. “And I have this gnawing feeling that Mr. Colbain’s not the only person out there who’ll have a different view than yours. No problem, though. Someone from one of our offices will speak with those people, too. Rest assured that you and I will be talking to one another quite frequently from this point on.” Richter broke into a self-satisfied smile. “Oh, and I’d appreciate it if you’d pass on the gist of this conversation to your associate,
Elgin Coseia. I understand the two of you played baseball together at Southeastern Oklahoma State. And on a national championship team, no less. Too bad about Coseia’s leg injury costing him a chance at the majors. Hope to God he doesn’t blame you.”

“Yeah, too bad,” said Freddy, smiling and thinking of the fun he would have describing the seersucker suit–wearing, two-tone shoed FBI dandy to Cozy. Suspecting that Agent Richter probably had a three-inch-thick dossier on the both of them, he said, “Glad to know that the FBI takes such a keen interest in the lives of former collegiate baseball players.”

“We’re interested in anyone and everyone who might be able to assist us in the solution to a murder, Mr. Dames.” Stern-faced, Richter rose to leave. As he adjusted his suit coat, Freddy understood clearly that the salt-and-pepper-haired, solidly built FBI agent was far less homespun than he’d initially appeared. Thinking that before Richter left, he might as well try to coax an official FBI take on the reason for the Giles killing out of him, Freddy asked, “So, since your agency doesn’t believe that Sergeant Giles might have been trying to peddle U.S. nuclear secrets, what do you think got him killed?”

“We don’t discuss ongoing cases with the press, Mr. Dames, or for that matter take unfounded positions. It would be much the same, I’m afraid, as editorializing. The job of the FBI is to act as an investigative arm of the Department of Justice and to gather facts. My advice to you is that in the future you try to do the same. Gather facts, that is.”

“I’ll do that,” said Freddy, watching Richter take a half-dozen long strides across the room and disappear through the doorway.
As the door closed behind him, Freddy frowned and said, “And hopefully I’ll gather those facts before you do, dickhead.”

The diner on the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming, where Grant Rivers and Sarah Goldbeck were meeting for breakfast was two hours south of Rivers’s ranch and three hours north of Sarah’s Hawk Springs home, enough distance that it had seemed to both of them to be the perfect place to meet and be assured that no law enforcement person or reporter might drop in. When Rivers had suggested the previous evening that they meet for breakfast there at ten a.m. to hash over their ongoing Thurmond Giles problem, he was certain they’d be able to do so in private.

He’d just ordered a waffle and a double order of hot link sausages, and Sarah, a bit road-weary from the drive up from Hawk Springs, was in the midst of taking her first sip of coffee when, after surveying the longtime ranchers’ hangout for the fourth time, looking for anyone who didn’t seem to belong, Rivers said, “First that reporter, Coseia, shows up on my doorstep, then the Platte County sheriff, and yesterday evening the FBI. Like I said to you last night, this Giles killin’s turnin’ into a nightmare.”

“Would you calm down?” Sarah said, patting Grant reassuringly on the back of his hand and setting down her coffee cup.

“Calm down, hell! Don’t you realize that this whole Tango-11 murder mess may very well end up in our laps? How’d I ever let myself get tied up with you and your mother’s gang of left-leanin’, antinuclear flake-offs all those years back, anyway?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Sarah said, smiling at the man who’d once
been her lover. “I’ve talked to the same people you have, Grant, and to an air force OSI officer as well. A black lady who’s a take-no-prisoners sort. So I’m one up on you.”

Rivers frowned. “So you’re tellin’ me to sit back and wait for the same woman to show up on my doorstep? No way. You know as well as I do that sooner or later the air force is going to dig up a bunch of thirty-year-old protest photos and Lord knows what else that’ll link the two of us to Giles. And if they dig deep enough, they’ll figure out that I was the one feedin’ your mother and Kimiko Takata information about which air force silo sites they should protest at or vandalize. In the end, they’ll figure out that I was get-tin’ my information from an inside source, Thurmond Giles. And for a goddamn pretty penny, I might add.”