While I’d been getting to know Denver, my art business percolated profitably, with clients seeking out my partners and me, instead of the other way around. We worked with an elite group of clients who were interested only in the finest works. Even so, in the fall of 1998, I received the kind of call of which art dealers’ fantasies are made.
The call came after Denver and I had begun making the rounds of museums. I had just dropped him off near the mission when my cell phone rang. The man on the line headed a large Canadian real estate development firm that had purchased a thirty-six-story bank building in downtown Fort Worth. Fortunately for the Canadians, the deal included “Eagle,” a forty-foot sculpture by the twentieth-century master Alexander Calder, one of only sixteen monumental stabile sculptures the artist executed in his lifetime.
At that moment, Eagle was firmly nested eighteen inches deep in the concrete plaza outside the bank building, a spot that dominated the heart of the city. The citizens of Fort Worth had long considered the master sculpture public domain, a symbol of the city’s place in the world of art and culture. The new Canadian owners, however, weren’t so sentimental; the man on the phone said they wanted me to sell it.
My heart raced as I thought of the possibility of making this seven-figure deal—likely to be the biggest of my career at that time or ever—especially since a Calder sculpture of that category would almost certainly never be for sale again. At the same time, I realized that if I did sell it, I risked being run out of town. I knew that to be a fact because the prior owner, a bank in crisis, had asked me to explore a sale only a couple of years earlier, but had ultimately backed down, bowing to citizen pressure so formidable that even local museums had declined to buy the Calder and left it in the city instead. But the Canadians, the man on the phone said, wanted a deal that was clean, fast, and silent. And, as it happened, I had a buyer.
We developed a plan shrouded in secrecy that included code names, as well as “The Phoenix,” a Delaware corporation my partners and I set up just to handle this very special transaction. We hired two eighteen-wheel trans-port trucks, along with crews and drivers who would jackhammer and disassemble the twelve-ton sculpture under cover of darkness. I joked that if word leaked, the workmen might need to wear body armor. But maybe I was only half-joking: So great was the need for absolute secrecy that the plan included the proviso that the crews would not be told where they were taking “Eagle” until they crossed the Texas border into Oklahoma.
We set the date for the move: April 10. Months passed as my partners and I hammered out the details. Meanwhile, I worked on my relationship with Denver. In late December, I’d started trying to talk him into going to the mountain retreat with Debbie. But by January, I’d pretty much given up on that idea. Deborah and Mary Ellen were still going, but I wasn’t there to see them off since the retreat coincided with the Palm Beach Art Fair.
That’s where I was when my cell phone rang just as I was attempting to sell a Matisse drawing to a fancy couple wearing matching pink slacks. It was Deborah, calling to tell me that she’d convinced Denver to go to the retreat. Our son, Carson, by then twenty-two and aiming toward a career dealing in art, had joined me on the trip, so I excused myself and let him take over. In light of Denver’s “Jump Street” speech, I couldn’t believe he’d actually gotten in Deborah’s car—or, even more amazingly, that he had stayed at the retreat the whole weekend.
The highlight, Deborah chattered over the phone, was the last day when Denver—urged on by all the white ladies—sang. Reluctantly, he sat down at the piano in the worship area and belted out a song he made up as he went. His audience gave him a standing ovation.
“I wish you had been there,” Deborah said.
“I wish I had, too.” On the other hand, I thought, if I had been, maybe Denver and I would have been off fishing when God wanted Denver to be singing. “On second thought,” I said, “I think everyone was exactly where we needed to be.”
I couldn’t wait to hear Denver’s take on the retreat—the horrors of hanging with white ladies and all that. But that Tuesday when we went down to the mission, I learned that no one had seen him since Deborah had dropped him off on Sunday. And the next day, still no Denver. That night at home, Deborah and I had started to feel like a family member had gone missing when the phone rang. It was Denver—calling from a hospital.
“I’m okay,” he said. “But when I got home from the retreat, I was hurtin so bad, I walked to the hospital and checked myself in.”
I dropped everything and took off. The Harris Hospital is a good two miles southwest of the mission. I sped there, making a quick stop at What-aburger to pick up Denver’s favorite milk shake, vanilla. Inside Harris, I remembered the floor but forgot the room number, so I walked down the long hall, peeking into each room as I went. Finally, I saw his name, hand-printed on a card, slipped into a slot on a closed door.
A pretty blonde nurse stood nearby, jotting notes on a chart. “Can I help you?”
“Well, I just spent the last ten minutes looking for my friend’s room, but I guess I just found it,” I said, nodding toward Denver’s name card.
“He won’t be in there,” she said, lowering her voice confidentially: “The man in there is black and homeless.”
I grinned. “Then I’m obviously in the right place.”
Embarrassed, she skirted off, probably hoping I wouldn’t tell her boss. I pushed my way through the door. “Hey there, Denver! All those white ladies put you in the hospital?”
Denver, by now able to laugh, told me about his long walk to the hospital through the hood. “Don’t tell Miss Debbie, but out there at the religious resort, I just kept eatin all that free food, but I just didn’t feel right ’bout usin the Man’s bathroom, so I didn’t go the whole time I was up there. So here I am, tryin to get unplugged!”
We both howled. When we finally settled down, he got serious. “Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin takin me up to that retreat.” He didn’t confide any details and I didn’t press.
A couple of weeks later, when his innards were ready, I took Denver to the Mexican restaurant where he had first learned to identify the parts of a combination plate. He ordered his usual—taco, enchilada, rice, and beans—but he pushed it all around on his plate, more interested in talking than eating.
“Miss Debbie knowed what she was doin—takin me outta the street environment I was in so I would have time to think about my life,” he said. “You know, you got to get the devil out the house ’fore you can clean it up! And that’s what happened to me up in them woods. I had time to clear my head and shake loose of some old demons and think about what God might have in mind for the last part of my life.”
Then Denver got quiet again. Finally, he parked his fork tines in his refrieds, wiped his hands on his napkin, and put it back in his lap. “Mr. Ron, I got somethin important to tell you. The work Miss Debbie is doin at the mission is very important. She is becomin precious to God.”
Denver’s brow wrinkled and his head dropped. Then with that dark glower that always preceded his most serious pronouncements, he said something that still rings in my ears today: “When you is precious to God, you become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron. Somethin bad gettin ready to happen to Miss Debbie. The thief comes in the night.”