Eden's Demise - Patrick Sean Lee (best free ebook reader TXT) 📗

I dedicate this book to all my faithful readers.

                          Contents

One......................Page 4

                                     ONE

They whispered murder under a sky so blue and enduring that the words might have been mistaken for utterances of deep affection in a less-idyllic setting. Medford Stenchcomb had returned to Denver after a long absence, a rich man. He was old, now, and bald, with a pugilist’s nose and wary eyes, but he dressed the part of a bishop in laymen’s clothes, or a banker from Wall Street. He was neither of course; only a crank moving stealthily in his latest caper to become richer still. Bent in close, in order to catch every syllable of every word sat John Sampson, two weeks free of prison, dressed in the same suit he’d worn in court the day of his sentencing. He was tall, though sitting hunched forward it was hard to tell precisely. His grey hair was cropped short, as was the current style for convicts at Colorado’s State Penitentiary, and his skin was the color of flour. He nodded often at whatever Stenchcomb was saying.

In front of them a hundred feet away, across the cobbled-brick surface of the Greek Amphitheater in Civic Center Park, a duo of joggers in garishly stylish running apparel whisked by in the direction of the State Capitol Building to the east. An elderly woman led her dog on its straining leash in the opposite direction toward the City and County Building.  She stopped at intervals while her panting, frantic pet lifted his leg to pee on every mound of grass, or bush bordering the walkway. Medford Stenchcomb shot her a disinterested glance as he gestured with his right hand at some comment he’d just made. John Sampson shook his head again, approving of the remark.

They spoke of vengeance; were agreed on that point, but whereas Stenchcomb thought in terms of simple humiliation, Sampson thought on a much loftier plane, honed to a razor-sharp edge over the twenty years of his incarceration. The objects of their loathing—Sampson’s hatred—varied slightly, but they had one figure in common; retired Governor Richard Harris. That was the starting and ending point for Stenchcomb’s wrath. Only the beginning for Sampson’s. Something else that Stenchcomb spoke of caught the ex-attorney’s attention. Certain documents of infinite value lay hidden away somewhere.

A few feet away, her back resting against the cool surface of a massive Limestone column in the colonnade, out of sight, but not out of hearing, a young woman wearing horn-rimmed black glasses caught snippets of the whispered conversation. “Murder,” two syllables growled by one of the men. More difficult to make out, those spoken by the other. “No, no, no…be rich if we… He hid them.” But as though it had been shouted through a bullhorn, the next single word made the woman gasp. “Delilah…”

The perforated exchange continued on for several long minutes, Maribeth Ann Delilah calling on non-existent powers to stretch her ears around the column, or temporarily release her eyes from their sockets so that unhindered they could see who the speakers were. At length she closed the book in her hands, stood, and then quietly and quickly walked away.

The colonnade was semi-circular, with a stone balustrade following its graceful arc’s perimeter. Thirty feet removed from the whispering voices, she sat atop it, swung her legs over, and then jumped to the ground. She circled down a sharp incline ten feet away, and then returned to the spot where the two men still sat, mouths moving until they noticed her approach. She smiled up at them and nodded slightly. “Good morning.”

Both men stared down at her impassively. She memorized their faces, and then walked on, leaving them to their business, whatever dark color it might be painted, and in whatever way her family name was connected to it.

The steps leading up to the atrium sheltered by the colonnade were worn, and vaguely comforting to the soles of her sandaled feet, but instinctively she felt violated. Maribeth turned left when she reached the top. She casually ambled eastward, the Capitol across Broadway visible through the columns, reflecting the mid-morning sun striking its dome in a shell-burst of gold. Near the end of the walkway she hesitated, and then sat on a stone bench, her line of site fixing quickly on the two men forty feet away. Maribeth lifted her feet, leaving the sandals on the stone, and placed them onto the bench. She opened the book, waiting.

Sampson said little, at least his mouth remained closed, fixed in a rictus. Impossible to hear at the distance away that Maribeth sat from them, she focused on movement. Gestures that might hint of some devious plot being hatched. Sampson glowered at his companion suddenly. A group of squealing kids, shepherded by a young woman in shorts and a plain white T-shirt, entered their sanctum, which seemed to make Sampson nervous. He tsked as he stood up, leaning hard on his right leg. He glanced upward at Maribeth Ann Delilah, a sharp, penetrating gaze that sent a chill up her spine. Turning back to Stenchcomb, he made some final remark, and then walked away with an almost imperceptible limp toward Colfax Avenue to the north. Stenchcomb crossed his feet resting cockeyed like two tiny tombstones on the concrete, threw his hands behind his head, and smiled. He sat for several minutes, eyes closed, Maribeth Ann Harris waiting for him to move.

From some distance far away, a clock chimed in deep bass tones ten times. Stenchcomb opened his eyes, oblivious of the young woman with her glasses perched far down on the graceful bridge of her nose, her eyes glued on him, and rose with some effort. Reaching down, he picked up a manila envelope, eased the half-buried papers back into it, and then walked up the steps toward Fourteenth Street. When he stopped momentarily for the traffic, Maribeth pushed her glasses up higher, and followed him.

Stenchcomb had returned. Nineteen years ago he’d left after having sat through the trial of one John Sampson, Attorney-at-Law. The bitter-faced, much healthier-looking man had been accused of plotting the murder of John Delilah, his ex-partner, and victor in the battle for a young woman’s affections. And bed. The shooter in that badly managed affair failed in his assignment when another man—a young man, in fact—stepped in between himself and the target. Less than two seconds later, after the first man fell, Gerald Giardino had re-sighted, squeezed the trigger, and John Delilah fell.

But it wasn’t the “who gives a shit” murder that caught the land huckster’s eye. It was media reports that the then-governor himself had been subpoenaed to give testimony regarding the dead victim. A person of little consequence, really, were it not for the strange story that emerged concerning some incredible miracle he’d performed, and the fact that he had been lodged in the governor’s household that summer long ago while changing the rancid chalice of water into new wine.

At first, like so many curious citizens of the city, he’d digested the half-told story with an air of amused incredulity, interested more in the governor’s role in the affair. An idiot, Stenchcomb surmised sitting in the balcony of Courtroom 1, listening, cursing under breath at Harris, the man who had thrown him out of his office a few months before.

But IF the story, half-baked though it was, pried in bits and pieces by the defense attorney from the mouths of Harris, his wife, his weeping daughter, John Sampson’s lunatic ex-partner Delilah, and a host of other madmen and women—if the story was true…

Publication Date: 04-06-2014

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