by Rex Burns
“Yeah.” Rodriguez looked up from the tangle of heat-twisted wire hangers and the fallen clothes bar that lay atop the figure. “There’s not much to work with.”
He nodded agreement. The closet had been a trap rather than a refuge. Disoriented, blinded, choking, the victim could have groped for the bedroom door in the other wall, stumbled across the closet door instead, and, overcome, collapsed to smother in the heavy smoke instead of finding his way out. “How’d the fire start?”
“Don’t know yet. Arson won’t get here until morning.” The fire fighter glanced at the heavy wristwatch under the cuff of his glove. “Which won’t be too goddamn long. You can’t see that much at night anyway.”
Wager gazed around the once-private room, now invaded by disorder and by figures lumpy with protective gear and bulky equipment. A platform of scorched slats held a futon that had charred and split to spill wads of water-soaked cotton. A broken lamp and a burned and overturned end table had been kicked into a corner. The sheathing had burned off two of the walls, to show fire-blackened two-by-fours that glittered and dripped as if a summer shower had passed over. Through glassless windows and ragged gaps in the outside wall, floodlights from the fire trucks threw streaks and patches of light. He could hear a thunk and creak as fire axes dug for hot spots in the smoldering debris somewhere in the back rooms. There wasn’t much he could do in the dark, except to tell Rodriguez to keep everyone away from the closet until the forensics team arrived, which should be soon. He followed the high boots that mashed their way back through the small living room cluttered with fragments of plasterboard from the ceiling and a soggy, half-burned sofa that had been ripped apart in the search for remaining sparks.
Wager crossed the small wooden porch and went down the three steps to the cramped front yard. A clutch of neighbors huddled against the night’s chill in robes and blankets and watched in silence. Wager used his GE radio pack to ask the dispatcher for a deputy DA to bring a warrant—the body was on private property, and any possible evidence gathered there had to be legally covered. Then he went over to the knot of silent people.
“Does anyone know who lived here?”
A man whose beard stubble looked like a dark smear of ash on his pale skin glanced at the woman standing beside him. Then he cleared his throat. “Told me his name’s John.”
Wager had his small green notebook out. “John? Did he give you a last name?”
“No. Hasn’t been here long—rented maybe a month ago. John.”
That was a problem: Wager wouldn’t be able to notify the next of kin until he could identify the victim. “Can I have your name, sir?”
“I guess.” The man told him and gave Wager his address. It was the house next door, a small frame building like the burned one, and the rounded eyes of the man and woman said they were staring at the sudden nightmare vision of their own home. The curtained windows behind them reflected the erratic flash of emergency lights as an unmarked official car pulled up. Probably forensics. “My wife saw the fire. Got up to go to the bathroom and saw it and called me. I called the fire engines.” His voice dropped. “Seemed like they took a hell of a long time to get here.”
The woman, brightly flowered robe gripped tightly at her throat, nodded and spoke in a puff of frosty breath. “Virgil got the garden hose out of the shed and started wetting down our roof. He had time to do all that before they got here.”
“Yes, ma’am. Is this John the only person living there?”
This time the woman answered first. “He has some people stay with him now and then. Young people, you know. Visiting him, I think.”
“Some? How many?”
“Sometimes one, sometimes two or three—wouldn’t you say, Virgil?”
Virgil nodded. “Hard to say for sure. They come and go, and they’re quiet. I mean, it’s not like one of these party houses or crack houses or whatever you call them. But there’s been maybe half a dozen people there one time or another.” He added, “A lot of times from out of state. Arizona plates, and Oregon, I remember. Some others too.”
Wager glanced up at Virgil. “You go out and look at their license plates?”
The man got defensive. “Sometimes they park their cars in front of our house. You got to park on the street in this neighborhood, and sometimes parking’s hard to find.”
“Were the cars there this evening?”
The man’s fingernails scratched in his whiskers. “Not when the fire was going. Didn’t look like nobody was home.” He glanced at the curb where the pumper truck made a steady clatter with its auxiliary engines. Another unmarked automobile was waved past the orange police tape by a uniformed officer. This would be the medical examiner, to say the corpse was a corpse. “There’s no cars parked now. Maybe earlier. I can’t remember, tell you the truth.”
“What about John’s car? Do you see it?”
Another squint. “No. Might be down the block—dark car, blue, I think. Like I say, parking’s hard to find.” The man looked again at the smoking hulk whose roof was half-eaten away. “You telling me he was in there?”
“Someone was.”
One of the woman’s hands went to her mouth. “Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, that poor man!”
Virgil cleared his throat. “I—ah—I yelled ‘fire.’ I couldn’t get near the place—it was too hot, and the sparks was coming down on my place. But if I’d of known somebody was in there …”
“He was probably dead by the time you saw the fire. Do you know the name of the realtor who rented the house?”
Virgil looked at his wife again. “Miller? Milton? Red-and-blue sign—Milltown Realty?”
“McMillan,” said his wife. “McMillan—that was it. Had the sign up for the longest time. Big red ‘McMillan Realty.’”
The post office could give Wager a name to go with the address, but most rental agreements also listed the name and address of the nearest relative. Wager elicited enough description of John to help verify the corpse—white male, about six one, maybe one hundred eighty pounds, in his mid-thirties—and went to the next group of staring figures. They lived on the other side of the burned house and told him pretty much the same thing, except that they didn’t even know the occupant’s first name. But they had heard a fireman say someone had been found inside, and no one wanted to say anything bad about the dead. “He was friendly and all; he waved whenever we saw each other. But we didn’t have any reason to talk much.”
Wager was finishing with the last of the neighbors when the ambulance team brought the body bag across the small wooden porch and down the steps to lay it on a gurney for the short ride to the vehicle. A few minutes later, one of the forensics people, Archy Douglas, followed. He paused to blow his nose into a wad of handkerchief and glance at the sooty results. Then he stuffed it back in his hip pocket. “Only one thing worse than bloaters or floaters: crispy critters.”
“What’s it look like to you?”
Douglas shook his head; his strip of balding scalp caught the red and blue of the flashers as the ambulance pulled out for Denver General. “Can’t tell. I just had Lincoln take some pictures, and I marked the scene. If we have to, we’ll come back tomorrow when there’s better light.”
The tall, lanky photographer—Lincoln Jones—came down the steps and rubbed wearily at bloodshot eyes. A still camera hung over one shoulder; on the other he balanced a video camera. Nodding to Wager, he told Douglas, “I’m done. Anytime you’re ready. …”
“See you later, Gabe.”
Wager, too, was done—for a while. The search for identity and next of kin could start in a few hours, when the various offices and bureaus opened. Now there was only an hour or so left of the night, not enough for sleep, maybe, but at least enough for a shave and a long, hot shower to wash his skin and hair clean of the clinging smell of smoke and other odors.
He could have gone back to Elizabeth’s to clean up. After their first three or four months of going together, she had bought him a toothbrush and a razor as an in
dication that he was welcome to stay at her place. But there was no sense waking her up again by clattering around in her house. Besides, he should check the telephone recorder and yesterday’s mail at his apartment. He didn’t expect anything—the dispatcher had Elizabeth’s number for emergencies, and the mail was never anything but bills and ads. Still, it was his habit to look.
The red light of the answerer gleamed for message waiting, and as he stripped off the smoke-tinged shirt and dropped it into the wicker hamper, he played back the tape. Elizabeth’s sleepy voice said, “Hi. If you get this before you go to work, I’ll be in meetings all day. If it’s after work, give me a call. I don’t know what my schedule is for tonight.”
That’s what he got for shacking up with a city councilperson: someone whose days were as busy and unpredictable as his own. But the warm, slightly husky voice brought an image of her face looking up at him through the half-light, dark hair curling out on the pillow, and the pale glimmer of her teeth between lips slightly swollen from kissing. The image tightened his groin with sudden yearning, and he had that hunger to cling to a living body, a feeling that often came after he’d seen death. Maybe he should go over there. … No, not stinking with the odor of smoke and burned flesh. And by the time he showered and shaved, it would be morning anyway.
They had talked about his moving into her home. It was a hell of a lot larger than his apartment, and he spent a lot of time there. But so far it was only talk, and casual at that; they had each lived alone so long that it was difficult to think of sharing all their space and time with someone else. And given the chaos of days that each of them faced, periods of isolation were a necessity.
His trousers had a black smear from brushing against something in the burned house; he set them aside for the cleaners. His sport coat he placed on a hanger, which he looped over the towel rack before stepping into the hot shower. The steam would loosen the smoky odor from the wool, and in a day or so he could wear it again without clamping his lips against the smell. It was a trick he’d learned while he was still in uniform and the cleaning bills ate deeply into his patrolman’s pay. The maintenance allowance never had been enough to cover shoe repair and the various rips and stains from cleaning up others’ messes. Now he made enough so the steam trick wasn’t necessary, but old habits have long life, and that—in a roundabout way—was another reason why he and Elizabeth had decided to keep separate homes and why they steered away from any talk of marriage.
He washed his hair three times before trusting that the smell was gone, then boiled up a cup of coffee as he dressed. Twenty minutes across town, and he would walk in the door of the homicide offices, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Max Axton greeted Wager when he checked in for the regular shift. “Christ, Gabe, you look almost as good as dog puke.” A wide finger tapped the brief notice of the unidentified body found in the fire. “You catch this one?”
Wager nodded and sipped at a mug of sour-smelling coffee. No matter how often the coffeemaker was washed out or what brand they changed to, it always smelled and tasted the same. And started each day with the same vicious bite. “Anything from the morgue yet?”
Axton shook his head. His heavy shoulders pushed his collar up a thick neck. “Homicide?”
“Don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.”
“Let’s hope not—I’ve got an interview lined up on Moralez this morning. I could use your help, partner.”
Ray Moralez was the latest teenaged victim of the increasing gang violence over on the west side of town. Not too long ago, neighborhood gangs were just bunches of kids who hung around together, drank a little illegal beer, maybe had a few fights to show how tough they were. But west Denver’s gangs were becoming big business, with cheap labor and high, tax-free profits from dope. Now there were ties between gangs in L.A. and Denver, Chicago, and Kansas City. There was a viciousness now that spread to younger and younger kids, along with a carelessness about life that, more and more, erupted in quick and deadly violence. The line had become thinner between a bunch of kids hanging out and acting tough and a criminal gang, and as a consequence the room for those kids to bend a few laws had become smaller, the results harsher. Wager didn’t know the causes of it—maybe the feeling that the country is crumbling away and nobody gives a shit, maybe throwaway kids whose mothers had them when they were thirteen or fourteen years old, maybe so many people out of work or sweating their talangos off for nothing while they see people with connections and power steal millions with the blessings of Congress. Maybe it was from the river of drugs our own government had allowed in to pay for its illegal wars in Central America. Maybe it was the still-echoing effects of that decades-old turmoil called Vietnam. Whatever it was, a feeling of resentment and anger and frustration filled the streets like an evil odor and affected the kids who lived there.
With the Moralez shooting, no witnesses had been found, as usual, and no one wanted to talk to cops. Or at least to Anglos like Axton, and that was where Wager, with his roots in the barrio, came in. “Let me make a couple calls first.”
Axton glanced at his watch. “Sure—take your time,” he lied.
The first call was to the fire department’s headquarters; the arson investigator hadn’t reported in yet, but the woman who answered the telephone took Wager’s name and number and told him the investigator would get in touch with Wager as soon as he had any conclusions about the fire’s origins. The second call was to Denver General and the morgue. The secretary said the pathologist hadn’t started yet on that case number. “Dr. Hefley will get to it as soon as he can, Detective Wager. It’s the best I can tell you.”
Wager tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. “I need to know as soon as possible if it’s a homicide or not.”
“I understand that, Detective Wager. And I’ll tell the doctor.”
He thanked her and hung up.
“No luck?” Axton was shrugging into his jacket.
“He’s in no rush. Victim’s health insurance ran out.” Wager drained the bitter coffee, rinsed his mug in the break room’s small sink, and hung it on its peg to dry. “Let’s go talk to your snitch.”
CHAPTER II
9/21
0830
THEY PARKED THE unmarked cruiser in front of a two-story brick building that filled a busy corner on Tejon Street. Here and there, in the rows of windows that punctured the blank walls, potted plants—geraniums of the same bright-red shade—sat on the whitestone sills. They were probably all cloned from a single plant; Wager could remember his mother’s kitchen window and the jars of cloudy water that held cuttings from a friend’s geranium she’d admired. As a kid, he used to watch for the first tiny wisp of root at the ragged tip of the pale twig, and when the water was filled with a swirl of white roots, like coarse, bleached hair, he and his mother would gingerly transplant the fragile plants into wax-paper cups filled with rich, black earth. Then, when the scalloped leaves grew wide and dark with health, the plants would be set out in the warm sun of late spring to form an avenue along the entry walk. Here, where there were no walks, the red flowers perched in the windows like bright targets in a shooting gallery.
The desk was vacant, the lobby almost bare. It had a tired, worn feeling, but it was reasonably clean; Wager had seen much worse. High in a corner, a silent black-and-white television with an ill-adjusted horizontal hold slowly rolled its image frame by frame over the screen. A couple of Naugahyde chairs, sagging and wrinkled from too much use, faced the grainy screen. On the stained plaster beside an old-fashioned mirror was a large poster of a Hispanic youth in a black beret wearing some kind of olive-drab uniform. He clenched his fist against a threatening red glow, and under the figure, raw brush strokes spelled a black “Vinceremos!”
“Everybody’s on a crusade,” said Wager.
“Yeah. Well, some of these people, that’s all they have, Gabe. They’re alienated from society’s normal avenues of change, and their traditional family values are breaking down.”
Wager never liked it when Axton talked like a goddamned sociologist—one of those people who made up labels for everything and understood nothing. “Sure, man—tha’s why we off the peegs when we’re deprived of offing each other, man.”
Max’s large head wagged, but he didn’t push it. He’d been Wager’s partner long enough to know that the smaller man didn’t like to hear excuses for criminal behavior. And to Wager, the word “family” meant only the Denver Police Department.
“What room’s she in?” asked Wager.
“Two-oh-three.” His partner had never said much about it, but Axton knew Wager’s divorce had put a lot of distance between him and his own family, especially his mother, who had liked Wager’s wife. And the death years later of Wager’s longtime girlfriend, Jo Fabrizio, hadn’t left many people in Wager’s world. Maybe this new woman—City Councilperson Elizabeth Voss—was helping. His partner had been dating her for half a year now, and what little Max had seen of the woman, he liked. And apparently Wager did too; he wasn’t the kind of man to spend any time with anyone he didn’t like. Wager had met her on the Councilman Green homicide, and at the time, Max had thought they didn’t like each other. But then, Max had to admit, Wager wasn’t the easiest guy to get close to; you had to understand his compulsion to do the job better than anyone else—a textbook case of overcompensation for the insecurity Gabe felt at growing up half Anglo, half Hispanic. You just had to understand those things, and when you did, you could see Gabe was good people. And there was no one at all that Max would rather have back him up in a tight spot—you could trust the man, and that’s what Max told his wife whenever she got going about his partner.
