Angle of Attack

by Rex Burns

  “Would you call it a gangland slaying?”

  “Well, no … We can’t really … ”

  “Do you think there’s any possibility of another gang war starting? Like, maybe, the unsolved Scorvelli killing last year?”

  “There’s no link that we know of.”

  “I heard the victim might have been connected with Scorvelli’s death.”

  “Who the hell told you that?” asked Wager.

  Gargan finally looked at him, his lips stretched in the kind of smile that twisted the corners of his mouth down. “You did, Wager. When you tried to find out from Mrs. Covino if her kid was tied in with the Scorvellis. That really got to her, man—you really have a talent for doing that to people. You must have hair on the bottom of your feet.” He turned back to Max. “All that poor old lady could talk about was how Frankie wasn’t like his brother in Cañon City. You got to admit that it looks like a gang killing, Max, and you guys were the ones who brought up the Scorvelli name. What about it, now—is there anything to it?”

  “It does look something like a gang killing, Gargan. But it could be that someone was just after his car; the street divisions haven’t run across his car yet. Why don’t you check back with us tomorrow? I hope we’ll have something by then.”

  Gargan finished scribbling a few words in his notebook. “All right. It’s ‘possibly’ a gang killing, and the Scorvelli name’s been mentioned. That’s all I’ll say, Max, I swear. And thanks.” He left without nodding good-bye to Wager.

  Max watched the figure hurry away between the parked cars. “What’s Gargan got against you, Gabe?”

  “We had some fun and games a few months ago. I had him busted for drunk driving.”

  “You set him up?”

  Wager shrugged. “He had it coming.”

  “That could have cost him his job!”

  “That’s what he tried to do to me. It was a fair fight.”

  Axton’s thick eyebrows bobbed. “Still, you start using the law like that …”

  “Sometimes the laws aren’t enough,” said Wager. “Besides, Gargan did break the law—after a small shove.”

  “You are one hard little bastard, Gabe.”

  Wager unlocked the cruiser’s door and slid beneath the wheel, set his radio pack in the dash mount and reached to unlock the rider’s door for Axton. “I sure don’t feel bad about it.’“

  “Well, you didn’t make any lifetime friend out of him.”

  “Tough titty.”

  Their first stop was a Buy-Rite gas station on North Federal, just past the city-county line in an unincorporated corner of the sprawling suburbs. They were looking for one Terry Valdez; his name had a little box around it in Wager’s notebook, indicating that he had been a close friend of Frank Covino’s. “His mother said he worked from seven to three,” Axton told Wager. They pulled onto one side of the concrete apron and the two detectives got out.

  The station manager, from his desk near the cash register, watched them all the way into the small building. “You guys cops?”

  “Are we wearing a sign?” asked Max.

  “It’s the way you walk. You walk like cops. Who’re you after?”

  “Do you have a Terry Valdez working here?” asked Wager.

  “Yeah. He’s in the service bay. What’s he done?”

  “Not a thing.” Axton smiled. “We just want to ask him some questions about a friend of his.”

  “What friend? Is it something I should hear about?”

  “Why should you?”

  “I mean, he’s only been with me three or four months. They told me I got to hire a minority, so I got this Valdez kid. If he’s in trouble, I got a right to know about it, right? It’s bad enough they tell me who to hire, but I sure as hell don’t have to have a thief working for me.”

  “We’re not after Valdez for anything, sir. We just want to ask him about one of his friends,” said Axton.

  “Well, birds of a feather, you know.”

  “Birds of a feather what?” asked Wager.

  The manager looked at him closely and ran a pale tongue over his lower lip. “Nothing. He’s out there. Being paid by the hour.”

  They went into the small service bay, the kind of unit that a few self-serve stations still have. “Terry Valdez?” called Wager.

  “Down here.” The grease-streaked legs of red overalls stuck from beneath the end of a ’69 Ford. “Be with you in a minute.”

  They waited until the young man slid from under the car on his creeper, then showed their badges. “We’d like to ask you some questions about Frank Covino.”

  “Oh, God.” The thin face with its soft, struggling mustache paled slightly. “That’s awful. It’s like you’re walking down the street with your buddy and you turn to say something to him and he’s gone. Just like that.”

  Axton asked gently, “You fellas were good friends?”

  “Sure—all the way through school together. Grade school, junior high, high school. Just a couple minutes ago I was thinking about giving him a call tonight to see what was going on. It was a habit—give old Frankie a call.” Valdez scrubbed at his grimy hands with a wipe rag and looked at them closely. “Tonight’s the rosary. That’s what he’s doing tonight.”

  “Do you have any idea who’d want to kill him?”

  “Some fucking loco! If I knew, man, you people wouldn’t have to be bothered!” His glance shifted to Wager, the dark eyes suddenly shot with a mixture of anger and pain. “He was my compadre, you know?”

  “Did you see him at all the night before last?” asked Wager.

  “Sunday night? No. I saw him Friday at school; we had a beer and then he went to his class and I went to mine.”

  “This is at the college?” asked Max.

  “Yeah. I go to Community. I’m taking the automotive course. He’s at Metro State in this electronics program. He wanted to work in the space business. He could have, too—he was smart, man.”

  “Did you see him after class on Friday?”

  “No. He was on this work-study deal and had some stuff to do in some office. His old man was Italian—Covino—but his mother’s Chicana. So he applied for this minority grant. What the hell—it’s the same thing the chicas do who marry Anglos, you know? They keep their Chicano name so they can get the grants. Mrs. Martinez-Jones—like that.”

  “You have a grant?”

  “No, I didn’t want to be bothered. Too much paper work and crap. You should see the papers Frankie had to fill out—every cent his whole family made he had to put down.”

  “Did Frankie need the money badly?” asked Wager.

  “Well, he qualified for the grant. But he wasn’t hurting; he had this job over at the liquor store and his mother has her pension from his old man’s death. He was a miner. It was more that Frankie wanted it on his record. You know, for job applications and such. Frankie, he talked me into taking this job. I was going to work construction for more money, but Frankie says it would look better if I had a job in my field. Like an investment.” The thin face smiled for the first time, a flash of white teeth beneath the struggling mustache. “That old man, he don’t like it, but I’m as good as any he’s got and a lot better than most around here.”

  “That’s the station manager?”

  “Yeah.” The smile went as quickly as it had come. “Frankie was like that, always planning ahead. But not like a strainer—not like he was trying to jew somebody out of something; he just had good ideas about what to do.”

  “Do you know anything about his activities last weekend?”

  Valdez shook his head. “We didn’t have anything lined up. I had a date Saturday night, and he was working at the liquor store. I didn’t even ask what he was doing after work.” He studied the greasy wipe rag again. “Next thing I know is when I called up his house and Gracie told me what happened.” Suddenly Valdez moaned and slammed the rag to the concrete deck. “Aw, crap! Why’d it have to be him?”

  Wager nudged the lifeless cloth
with his shoe. “That’s one of the things we’re after—why.” And when they had that, who. “Was Frankie ever mixed up with the Scorvelli family?”

  “Scorvelli?” The wide, dark eyes seemed genuinely shocked. “Frankie? Come on, man!”

  “We heard he might be,” said Wager.

  “You heard wrong! He wasn’t that way, man.” Surprise gave way to anger. “He wasn’t no pollo—he could look after himself; but I knew Frankie like my own family, and there was nothing like that he was into!”

  “We’re sure of that, Mr. Valdez,” Axton soothed. “But we don’t have much to go on, so we have to ask all sorts of questions.”

  “Yeah. O.K. But you talk to anybody—the priest, anybody. They’ll all tell you the same: Frankie was a good man.” Again Valdez’s voice almost broke. “Good!”

  Wager convinced Valdez to give them the names and addresses of a few more of Covino’s acquaintances who might have seen him Sunday night, and then, still watched by the seated service manager, they swung back toward town among the midmorning traffic on Federal. Here, north of I-70, the four-lane street made long rises and falls across the sandy flats of lower Clear Creek valley. This time Axton drove and Wager stared in silence out the window. It was one of those light-filled spring days whose sun stung hot through the windshield. Only when you saw the roadside dust scud across the highway or felt the shudder of the car did you know how hard the wind was blowing off the iron-colored mountains. Wager watched the snapping pennants and blurred plastic windmills over the truck and camper sales lots, the passing furniture warehouses and cut-rate lumber stores, the plaster horses that touted Western gear; just beyond the cluttered line of sprawling one-story commercial buildings rose a fringe of cottonwood trees not yet ripped from the stream bed to make room for more asphalt. Their sharp lines of branches had grown slightly fuzzy with the pale green of early leaves. Wager gazed at the faint spring greenness and wondered why someone wanted to tear up those trees instead of build around them—wondered what was in some people that made them search for the tallest and cleanest, the noblest, just to disfigure and destroy it.

  Axton broke the silence. “I get the idea we’re going in circles. It all comes back to the same thing: he was a good kid and there was no reason for what happened.” He eased up on the gas, coasting until the distant traffic light changed and the column of waiting cars and trucks began to move; then he smoothly joined the line without wasting motion.

  Axton was like that, Wager mused; he had the kind of forethought Valdez admired in Frank: looking ahead, planning the moves for the greatest economy of effort. Maybe that came from living in a body as big as Axton’s: you learned to look ahead for low doorways or jutting furniture, you stayed at the edge of crowds, you sat with care on strange chairs. “Do you think Valdez was telling the truth?”

  “Don’t you?” Axton’s question meant “What did I miss?”

  “Yeah.” Wager’s fingers rapped the dash. “I guess I do.” He knew he’d held a faint hope that Valdez would lie about something. If the kid had lied, their work would be a hell of a lot easier. But Valdez had not seemed to, and for a cop to have too much imagination was as bad as not having enough. Wager knew that this was one of those dangerous times when his hopes, guesses, and inventions were beginning to be churned by impatience, and he could feel himself pulling against the facts to create a pattern of motive and opportunity. But take it easy—cachaza. “The seed sprouts when it will,” his mother would have said. “Chico, you’ll end up with a fistful of farts,” would be his father’s warning. It all said the same thing: stick to the facts.

  “You know the only link we have between Scorvelli and Covino is your informant’s word. Maybe he was wrong, Gabe.”

  It could be. Information like that came in whispers and nudges and not in legal depositions. Every informant’s words had to be salted a little, and some more than others; though Tony-O was the most reliable Wager had found in ten or so years of sifting information, the wrong word, the wrong interpretation, was always possible. “Right or wrong, it hasn’t taken us anywhere. I think we should know more about the victim before we talk to the rest of the people on that list.”

  Axton eased into the left lane for the turn onto the I-70 freeway and the quickest route to the downtown campus. “Valdez said Covino filled out some work-study forms at the college.”

  Max was thinking Wager’s thoughts again, which is what good partners did. “That’s what I had in mind, too.”

  Wager was lost. The Auraria neighborhood that had been his home was gone, and in place of the rows of small brick houses there now sprawled two- and three-story buildings that looked vaguely like factories. He recognized the large block of blue tile and white brick that was the defunct Tivoli Brewery and, near it, the freshly painted yellow and gray plaster of old San Cajetano’s bell towers, empty of everything except bird droppings. But these and the abandoned red stone synagogue were the only buildings left that he recognized—churches and breweries being prime targets for historic landmarks—and the very pattern of streets had changed, too. Some were gone completely beneath the new campus’s grass and malls and buildings; others were blocked off by steel pipe and chains. The location was just half a dozen blocks from main headquarters, but since it had its own security force, the D.P.D. detectives had few calls to the area. Except for the bomb squad: several times a year they were alerted by anonymous threats to destroy that symbol of an evil society, the university. “Let’s try the campus security office. It’s supposed to be over on Seventh Street.”

  They were helped by a blue-uniformed sergeant whose brightly colored shoulder patch said “Auraria Campus Police.” She had shoulder-length black hair and said “sir” at the end of every sentence.

  “How’d you get in police work, Sergeant?” asked Max.

  “I was a philosophy major, sir.” That seemed to explain it for her; she showed them on the map where the Metro State student aid office was located and then aimed them out the door in the right direction. Past a building that looked as if it were made of flattened tin cans and was labeled the Learning Resources Center—Wager had always thought books were kept in a library—they rounded a corner to see the granite blocks of St. Elizabeth’s church. Somewhere near here, beneath the Vibram soles of the students in jeans and down parkas who streamed in and out of that Learning Resources Center, was the spot where Wager had lived when he was a kid. Maybe he and Axton were even now walking over the old basement where his father and his mother’s brothers made their wine every year, mashing the grapes in the smoothly worn wooden tub—never a metal washtub like some used—and sending Wager and his cousins scouting through the autumn streets for empty jugs and bottles, tinted glass only, because too much light wouldn’t be good for the wine. Wager could still remember the heavy, dizzying smell trapped between the basement ceiling’s joists, where drops of resin had long ago aged to amber beads and glinted in the motey light of the single basement bulb like the eyes of a hundred spiders. And he could still feel the cold, spongy glide of grapes popping beneath his treading feet; and he remembered, too, the dark-red stain halfway up his shins that wouldn’t wash off but had to wear away while other kids at school, whose fathers didn’t make their own, would ask him what kind of socks he was wearing. His father had always given one of the first bottles to Mr. Ojala; you could never tell when someone in the family might need Tony-O’s help. That was—Jesus!—twenty-five, almost thirty years ago.

  “Here we are, Gabe.”

  It was an office with thin, movable walls and unpainted concrete beams and pillars. Wager had heard the design described as “functional modular,” but that was just another name for cheap. He hoped the new justice center which they were to move into someday would not be as ugly. The dark-eyed girl in jeans who sat poking two fingers at an electric typewriter seemed surprised to see Wager and Axton, their ties and sports coats, the slacks and shiny shoes. “You need some help?”

  Axton showed his badge. “We’re trying to
get some information about Frank Covino, miss. I understand he had a job here?”

  “Oh, wasn’t that terrible—he really was a nice guy.”

  “Did you know him?” Wager quickly asked.

  “He was in and out of the office. I bet you want to talk to Mr. Dumovich.”

  “Who’s Mr. Dumovich?”

  She looked as if Wager ought to know. “He’s the director. Just a minute.”

  It was half a minute. Her head came back through the doorway cut into the thin wall. “Come on in.”

  Mr. Dumovich was in his late thirties and trying to look younger, pale hair sprayed to lie straight to his collar. He didn’t wear jeans; instead he had on washed khakis that reminded Wager of his own Marine Corps summer uniform. But Mr. Dumovich did wear the same kind of Vibram-soled hiking boots that all the students clumped around in, and as the man walked back to his desk, he rocked slightly fore and aft in the thick, unbending leather.

  “Yes, Frank Covino was one of our students. But the only information we have would deal with his family’s financial status and his academic standing. We don’t look into a client’s personal life.”

  “Can we see his file?” asked Wager.

  Mr. Dumovich frowned. “I don’t know about that. There have been so many changes in the access rules, and the dean hasn’t sent down a memo yet …”

  “The man’s dead,” Wager said. “He’s not going to complain about an invasion of privacy.” If need be, they could get a duces tecum subpoena for the records. But that would take time and mean another trip.

  “His relatives might! It’s surprising how many people these days are after personal information of the most innocuous type. And I certainly don’t want the college or this office to be embarrassed in any manner possible.”

  “Mr. Dumovich.” Axton leaned toward the man like a falling, smiling tree. “Nobody wants to embarrass anybody. We’re just asking for a little help in catching the boy’s murderer. It would embarrass me if I didn’t want to help catch a murderer.”