The Fourth Perspective by Robert Greer

Author:Robert Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504043212
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

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 right 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

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