by Rex Burns
There was some fairness in Stubbs’s accusation, and beneath his suspicion and even that shade of contempt he had for the man, Wager felt a mild twinge for maybe not giving him a chance. Every man deserved the opportunity to screw up. Wager had taken advantage of his own chances a time or two. “I guess I can tell you. But you’d better keep it quiet because it could be your ass along with mine if something goes wrong.”
“What do you mean, my ass?”
Wager smiled. “Remember Councilperson Voss? Well, now I’m out on that limb. But there’s plenty of room for you, too. You want to hear? Yes or no.”
The little jaw moved out a fraction more. “Yeah. Yeah, I want to hear. What fucking limb?”
“I heard Green might have been on the take. Now I’ve got a little corroboration—I think K and E Construction paid him for at least one zoning change.”
Stubbs took a few seconds to think that over and then a few more to consider what it meant. “Jesus Christ, Wager. That’s a real bag of worms.”
“You asked. Now, you can forget what you heard if you want to. As long as you keep your mouth shut, nobody will know I told you a thing about it.”
The younger man frowned at his desk and the pictures of wife and kids lined up beneath its glass top. “The D.A.’s office should be in on this, Gabe. Christ, even the FBI. What the hell are you sitting on it for?”
“You’re sure you want to know?”
He ran the tip of his tongue across a dry lower lip. “Yeah. Sure. I’m in it with you.”
Wager still wasn’t certain he should tell him all of it, but what the hell, the man was drawing a detective’s pay, too, and he was old enough to know what he was getting into. Or thought so, anyway. “I’m sitting on it because it’s still just guesswork. If the information’s wrong, I don’t want Green’s reputation smeared. Especially if the street thinks we’re doing it to cover up a racist killer.”
“Christ, I never thought of that angle.”
“And if the information’s right, it might have something to do with the murder.”
“Voss told you about it? I mean, it had to be somebody on the City Council, right?”
Wager shook his head. “I promised I wouldn’t say.”
“You know why she made you promise that, Wager! If something goes wrong—if the information’s no good—she’ll deny she ever said a thing to you.”
“That’s about it.”
Stubbs’s little whistle emphasized one of those sudden lulls in the telephone and radio traffic that echoed down the hallway. “We are on a limb, aren’t we?”
Stubbs hadn’t made the initial decision to crawl out there—that had been Wager’s alone, and it wouldn’t be fair to pull him along blindly. “You can still forget you heard anything. You don’t say anything about it; I don’t say that I told you. If something goes wrong, you’re in the clear.”
“No, I reckon not. We’re on this case together. That means together.” Stubbs’s words sounded good, but they didn’t bury all his worry. “Bribery and extortion involving public officials—that’s definitely FBI. I read up on it: all bribery and extortion investigations of public officials alive or dead are supposed to be approved at FBI headquarters in Washington.”
“This is a homicide investigation. It’s my jurisdiction—our jurisdiction—and our sworn duty.” Besides, from what Wager had seen of the FBI, they would screw things up. They’d want to solve their case, and to hell with Wager’s. They’d plea-bargain away any homicide charge to get a conviction in the bribery case, and Wager explained that to Stubbs.
“Yeah.” Stubbs was still trying to convince himself. “That’s true. The homicide’s ours.” And Wager could see the thought in the man’s worried face: It’s too late to fret about it now. “So all right, what do you have on it?”
Wager told him about the zoning change for the schoolhouse and about Ellis’s touchiness.
“And the guy was wearing cowboy boots?”
Wager nodded.
“You want me to check out his story?”
“It’ll have to be quiet.”
“So I’ll be quiet about it.”
1755 Hours
Officially, he was off duty now, but the only difference was that Wager drove his own car instead of a police vehicle. Being on call meant no drinking or going beyond the dispatcher’s range; it meant going about your life while trailing a leash to the office.
He swung through the evening traffic on East Colfax and spotted the familiar pink sign for the Satire Lounge and turned into the drive leading to the parking lot behind. The last hour or so had been spent going over and over the time sequences of Green’s last day, and arranging and rearranging all the known information about the victim and everyone who had anything to do with him. Stubbs tried to dig into the paper background of K and E Construction, but there wasn’t much that could be learned on a Saturday. Wager had tried to figure out what Green might have had going in the time gap of 6:30 to 8:45 on the evening of his death. He had left Sonie Andersen around 6:30 or even earlier, missed his appointment at the Prudential buffet, and shown up at Vitaco close to 9 P.M. And, Wager recalled from the autopsy report, he had chicken and peas for supper. Unless he ate right after he left the Vitaco reception—which had not served chicken and peas—he must have eaten dinner in that two-hour period. All Wager had to do was discover which of ten thousand restaurants he might have dined at. If he had eaten at a restaurant instead of another girlfriend’s home.
The Satire Lounge was one of the survivors along the East Colfax strip, thriving when the street had been the major porno and nightlife center of Denver and still doing well, despite the clean-up spurred by local merchants and residents. The bar side was crowded as ever with a lot of people who seemed to know each other, shouting jokes back and forth along the fluorescent gleam of shiny wood. The restaurant side, with its half-dozen wooden booths looking toward the open kitchen door, was almost empty, as usual. Wager had been coming here since he was in uniform; cops got a good discount because they helped keep the place quiet, and it didn’t hurt to have friends patrolling the streets. Generations of cops kept coming back because it didn’t hurt to save a few bucks on meals, and the green chili was good. A pair of uniformed officers sat at the booth by the window, where they could watch the street while they ate. Their radio on the table between them crackled with the dim traffic of the district. Wager didn’t know either man, a sign of how long he had been away from Patrol Division, but one of them recognized him and nodded hello.
“You ready to rumble, Sarge?” he asked Wager.
Wager shared a bench with the one who slid over to make room. His name tag said “Bennett,” and Wager introduced himself. The one who knew him was Martin. “I hear tonight’s the night.”
Bennett turned the radio’s speaker down to a mutter. “You can feel it. The street’s quiet, but you can feel it.” He pulled at his Coke. “You’re in Homicide, Sarge?”
Wager said yes, and Bennett asked how he liked Homicide and nodded approvingly when Wager lied and said how much he missed the excitement of Patrol. Wager asked them about names they shared, on both sides of the law, and caught up on the precinct’s latest gossip. To a civilian, it looked like a bunch of fat-assed cops telling jokes and wasting the taxpayer’s money when they should be out arresting muggers and rapists. But it was the grapevine in action. Street cops knew their own territory better than anyone else—the buildings, the twisting alleys and nameless slots between dark walls, the tangles of parking lots and fences and trash dumpsters behind the stores, the people who lurked in the shadowy corners and dim doorways and usually didn’t want to be found. And the only way a plainclothes cop could keep up with that subsurface current of humanity was to talk with the uniformed cops who patrolled it regularly.
“Your people got any word about Five Points tonight?” Martin mopped at his rice with a tattered tortilla and came back to the subject that was always there even when they talked of other things.
; “I’m on call, along with almost everybody else. That’s all I know.” Wager ladled more chili across the roll of tortilla and meat on his plate. “You heard anything?”
“Only what the sergeant said at roll call.”
They talked awhile about that and other threats that had been reported over past years and what had happened during those times. Wager got the talk around to the White Brotherhood and even touched on the cause of the unrest—Green’s killing—probing for anything the officers might have picked up without knowing they’d found an item of interest.
“Is that what it’s all about? The White Brotherhood’s supposed to have offed that councilman?”
“It’s a possibility. Have you seen any of them on Colfax lately?”
“Naw, the precinct’s pretty quiet anymore. Shitheads like that, they go out north of the city limits now. That’s where the skin joints are now.”
Bennett added, “Northglen. They can have them. I like the street quiet.”
As if in answer, the radio popped a call for patrolmen to respond to a robbery in progress; Martin grabbed it up and took the call, and the two men hustled out to their cruiser, leaving their food half-finished, with a shout to the stocky, sweating cook who came to the kitchen doorway, “Be back, Ernie—keep it hot for us.”
Wager watched the flickering lights of the cruiser swing across the lanes of traffic and out of sight toward downtown. Then he finished his enchilada, wishing for the luxury of a beer to soften the bite of the chili. A soda pop just didn’t do it. His own radio picked up the police response to the robbery and in a few minutes he heard Martin’s voice call for assistance from the Assault section. If the victim had been dead or dying, the call would have been to Homicide, and Max or Devereaux—who had tonight’s seven-to-three—would be on their way. Despite the threat of a riot, the steady parade of the city’s violence had to be matched by the equally steady parade of duty watches.
“You finished? Can I get you some coffee?” The young waitress hurried in from the barroom, her pencil still busy with an order from that side.
Wager checked the time and shook his head; the girl scratched the total and said thanks and went quickly to the kitchen. He left the usual large tip and stopped off at the men’s room before dropping a couple of dimes into the pay phone lit by a white glow from the cigarette machines. After the routine, he heard Fat Willy’s heavy voice. “Where the hell you calling from, Wager? Sounds like you in the middle of a riot already.”
“The Satire Lounge. You have anything for me?”
“If I did, you’re not in no hurry to get it—I called you this afternoon, man.”
“Where do you want to meet?” ‘
“Not that place—it’s got about as much class as you do.”
“Try the green chili—it’s good.”
“Yeah, that’s all I need: a belly full of spic sauce. I’ll meet you over at City Park, the east side. That way won’t nobody see us together.”
It was a quiet area, ill-lit by a few streetlights that shone emptily through the park’s trees and across the mown grass of the municipal golf course. A steady stream of traffic pulsed through the darkness on Twenty-third Avenue, but the narrow winding roads leading to the parking lots that served the natural history museum and the zoo were almost vacant. Wager turned off Colorado Boulevard, between the old brick pillars that marked the park entrance, and began cruising slowly around the winding service roads. His headlights finally picked up the gleam of Fat Willy’s white Cadillac moored like an ocean liner beside the shaggy dark of a towering spruce. He pulled the Trans-Am beside it and got out. In the open window of the Cadillac glimmered the wide-brimmed white hat and Fat Willy’s face masked by dark glasses.
“Why the hell do you wear sunglasses at night, Willy?”
“Privacy, my man. I like to travel incognito.”
“Right—a white panama hat and matching Caddy. You’re incognito, all right.”
“Let’s just say I don’t want to be seen talking to the likes of you. And the glasses keep your ugly face from hurting my tender eyes. You talked to that Nick-the-Greek asshole yet?”
“No,” he lied. “I want to hear what you have, first.”
Willy’s breath panted slightly against the weight of his own flesh and he listened a moment to the distant night sounds of the city. “All right, I’ll tell you. But by God I want something for it.”
Wager turned his back to the faint gleam of a pair of headlights swinging around on the parkway across the wide lawns. “Let’s hear it.”
“I found the blonde he was planking—that store manager of his. Name of Sonie Andersen.”
“That’s not news anymore. Who’d you talk to?”
“My sources. That’s all you got to know.” The sunglasses turned to gaze through the screen of spruce limbs at the flicker of passing lights on Colorado Boulevard. “I suppose I can’t blame him for dipping into that little honeypot.” The glasses turned back, their lenses dotted with the glow of street lamps. “But don’t get me wrong, my man—I got no itch to screw white or do white. I don’t need one damn thing from whitey.”
Wager didn’t care about that. “Who else knows about it?”
“Enough so it ain’t no big secret. But it wasn’t all over the street, neither. The people, they didn’t talk about it all that much. They was sort of protecting him against himself, you know what I mean?”
Wager got the idea. “What about payoffs? You hear anything on that?”
“Now that’s a hard one. I caught some whispers, but that’s all. That’s not something a lot of the people would know about.”
“What whispers, Willy?”
“That maybe he did do some favors for some big contractors. That maybe he was pulling in some extra cash because he could do favors for people.”
And if he had to launder the money, the furniture store would be the place to do it. Wager made a mental note to ask for a subpoena for the store’s books. “Any names?”
“Naw. It’s not like him getting a little jellyroll on the side, you know? The people just ain’t all that excited about no payoffs. That kind of shit happens all the time.”
“Who told you?”
“That’s my business.”
“It’s a murder, Willy. That makes it my business, too. I’d like to talk to your informant.”
“No way, Wager! My people talk to me only. No way am I going to up and say, ‘Hey, tell this policeman what you told me.’ You think I want people to know what kind of company I been keeping?”
“So don’t tell him I’m a cop.”
“Shit, you got cop sticking out all over you.”
“It could be important, Willy. I’d like to ask him some questions.”
“What you like and what you get’s two different things. I don’t go handing my people over to the police, Wager. That I do not do.”
“So far you haven’t given me a damn thing I don’t already know. I can’t use any of that for leverage on Papadopoulos.”
“The hell you can’t—you better!”
“Then give me something I can use. What about Green’s car? Any of your people find it?”
“No. That White Brotherhood’s probably got it chopped up and sold in little bitty pieces by now.”
“Did you find out where he ate supper?”
“No.”
“Did you find somebody who saw him after nine o’clock?”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Then what the hell have you brought me? Franklin and Roberts have got your ass in a sling and Papadopoulos has theirs, and all you give me is crap I already know!”
“Yeah? How the hell did I know you already knew it? And I ain’t telling you where I get my information, Wager. I goddamn know what will happen to my people if I lead you to them—they end up just like Franklin and Roberts!”
If a man has no honey in his jar, he’d better have some in his mouth. It was a saying he remembered from Grandma Villanueva, and Wager smiled and said quie
tly, “OK, Willy. I’ll do what I can with what you’ve told me. I’ll sure try. But since I didn’t hear much, don’t be surprised if I can’t do much.”
“Shit!” The wide-brimmed hat dipped to shadow the man’s wide face and Wager saw the heavy shoulders clench angrily.
“Monday’s day after tomorrow,” he reminded Willy. “About thirty hours away.”
The brim lifted. “I ain’t telling, Wager! I’ll tell you something else, though—Sister Green, the councilman’s widow, going to be on the street tonight. Trying to cool things down.”
“Who’s idea was that?”
“Church people. Preachers and all. They got them some basketball player or something, and Mrs. Green said she be there, too. Talk to the people, you know; tell them ain’t no sense tearing things up.” Fat Willy grunted. “I hope to hell they listening. This here crap costing me money.”
“How’s that?”
“Business, my man. Deals in the air, deals on the ground, deals all around, and deals going down—business. Which, of course, I ain’t telling no cop about, either.”
“I’m only interested in Green’s killer.”
“Shit you are. You be out busting them White Brother-fuckers, you interested in his killer.”
“That’s what you think?”
“That’s what I know. And I ain’t the only one—the word’s all over: You cops ain’t doing shit because it’s the White Brotherhood killed Green.”
“Get me something on them, Willy. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll haul them in.”
The sunglasses stared through the dark at Wager. “I believe you might. You just dumb enough to try something like that all by yourself, ain’t you? I’d like to see that—I wish to hell I had something so’s you would do it. But all I got is what’s on the street.”
