Angle of Attack

by Rex Burns

  “Well, of course I want to help! But the records access rules …” He fidgeted and looked from Axton’s gentle smile to Wager’s not so gentle one and finally said, “Oh, very well. But it must be entirely confidential, understand?”

  Dumovich called to the girl laboring at the typewriter in the outer office and she brought the folder. Beneath a pile of pay receipts for the last year and a half, it held a computer printout labeled “BEOG-FFS” and a mimeographed form with the title “Application for Financial Aid.” Max took one, Wager the other, and they began reading the several pages of each. Buried among the sections requesting information about the student’s status, about his spouse if any, his parents if living, his residential history, his job history, current instate status, evidence of taxes paid, was a section for Income and Expenses. Covino had listed his basic family income as $500 per month for three people; source, United Mine Workers survivors pension, social security, Black Lung Pension Supplement. He also listed as his own income his liquor store job at $2.35 an hour, and his sister’s $1.75 an hour as a waitress. At the time of the initial application, almost a year and a half ago, he carried the minimum twelve credits of academic work and had a B average. Under the heading for Assets and Liabilities, he listed only a 1972 Chevrolet, value $1100.

  “This is it?” asked Wager. It wasn’t a hell of a lot for Dumovich to get embarrassed about.

  “That and the grade transcripts. Each term we check to see if the client is maintaining a satisfactory academic standing in units taken and in grade-point average. If he or she is not, we bring him or her in for counseling—often he or she is carrying too many hours or working too much. And of course, if he or she fails, we terminate the funding. It’s all strictly governed by federal rules and regulations and is part of the contract.”

  With him or her. Wager glanced at Axton, who nodded and bent to shake hands with Mr. Dumovich. Outside, leaning against the stinging grit of a sudden gust of raw wind, Max wagged his head. “It looks like everybody’s telling the truth. Hard-working, honest, ambitious—not your usual target for a professional hit man.”

  That was true. And it meant they had exactly the same number of motives they began with—zero.

  Four

  THEY SPENT THE rest of Tuesday morning and all that afternoon tracking down the people on Max’s “list of friends.” Accentuated by a tone-alert call to a holdup in progress at a fast-food joint, and the discovery of one more nameless teenage victim of an overdose in a sagging crash pad off East Colfax, the day was a waste. Not one of the people they located told them anything new about Frank Covino; and not one had been with him on Sunday night. Covino had simply walked out of his house headed for a movie, and then turned up dead.

  Axton rinsed the last of the day’s coffee out of his cup and dried it with one of the paper towels used to wipe ink from suspects’ freshly blackened fingers. “Any ideas?”

  Wager looked down the list; all but a few of the names now had the little x in front which meant they had been seen and crossed off. “I’ll try to get to the rest of these this evening. And maybe some of my old snitches have run across something new on the Scorvellis.”

  “Want me to help you with that?” asked Max.

  “No. It’s my turn for the overtime.” Max had worked on the list the night before, and he was a family man who liked to look in at home once in a while. Wager knew exactly what his own empty apartment was like, and it wasn’t going to change much in his absence. It did not change much in his presence, either.

  Axton left five minutes before the four-to-midnight shift came on. Wager stayed to argue Fat Willy, an informant from Wager’s stint in narcotics, into meeting him at the Frontier; he was hanging up the telephone when the two night-shift detectives—Ross and Devereaux—entered the office together.

  “Don’t you ever go home?” Ross tried to make the question sound like a joke, but it didn’t quite come off. Since their first argument when Wager had come over to homicide, they got along like two dogs with one bone, and when either saw a chance to snap at the other, he took it.

  “Some cops are more professional than others, Ross.”

  The man’s hazel eyes bulged. “If you’re so goddamned professional, Wager, why in hell don’t you belong to the union!”

  Devereaux grinned uneasily. “Either of you guys want some coffee?”

  “The union doesn’t make better cops, Ross. It just makes more lawyers.” He closed his notebook and smiled as he stood, ready for whatever the taller detective felt like trying.

  But the man with the angry face and carefully sculpted brown hair only glared at him while Devereaux busied himself pouring a single cup of coffee. Wager nodded pleasantly and stepped into the hallway, followed by Ross’s half-strangled “Fucking spic runt!”

  Wager had almost stopped smiling by the time he walked the two blocks to the Frontier Bar and Grill; at some time during the afternoon, the morning’s cold, clear wind had blown itself out and in its place an April snow shower gusted off the icy mountains in wet, gummy flakes that fell like a heavy curtain across the prairie, soaking clothes and streets, driving people’s faces toward the ground as they hurried. Already the dark sheen of wetness on the sidewalk was stippled with tiny grains of ice, and by early evening the dirty water running along the curbs would turn thick and scummy with yellow slush. Fat Willy had bitched about meeting him at the Frontier in this kind of weather, but Fat Willy always bitched about meeting Wager, anyway; the one thing worse than Willy’s coming over here would be to have Wager drop by and give him a big friendly hello in front of his own people. “All right, Wager,” Willy had grumbled into the telephone. “I be seeing you there at six o’clock. But it better be worth my valuable time.”

  That gave Wager a couple of hours to eat and to think. He wove between the crowded tables of the Frontier’s barroom, where Red glided back and forth behind the long counter to serve happy-hour doubles at the gabbing men standing rib to rib against the dark rail. In the rear dining room, quieter with only a few groups scattered here and there this early, Wager slid into his favorite booth near the clatter of the serving window and raised a hand to Rosie, who said, “Be with you in a minute, Gabe.”

  When the woman came for his order, it wasn’t with her usual smile.

  He glanced over her worried face. “How are the kids?” There was a husband to ask about, but neither Rosie nor anyone else knew where he was.

  “Fine, Gabe. They’re all fine.” The woman’s dark, round face relaxed into the familiar smile when she talked about them. “Inez is in college and doing just fine. I told you she’s going to be a teacher? Her first year, and she’s doing real good.”

  “The other two?” He never remembered their names, either.

  “The kids are all O.K.” She absently scratched her pencil across the order pad, and the sagging permanent that curled her graying hair quivered. Then she looked up. “They’re closing us down, Gabe. They told us they’re going to close the Frontier at the end of the week.”

  It took a minute to understand what she meant. “Why?”

  “They condemned the building for a parking lot. For that … thing!” Her stubby, strong hand flapped at the wall, beyond which was the blank concrete face of the new concert hall. “They put up something like that, and the taxpayers get stuck for a couple million a year. While a place like this … This place has been paying taxes for eighty-two years!” She abruptly cut off the words and forced a tired smile. “And I feel like I been working here for most of them. You’re hungry, Gabe—what’s yours?”

  He gave his order and, as he waited, gazed around the dimly lit walls at the rusty branding irons, rowels, yokes, varnished and crackling Wanted posters, samples of barbed wire, mining equipment, and various photographs of awkward posed figures with the occasional blurred face of someone who moved too soon. Eighty-two years of collecting junk from ranches and farmhouses that had once been a half hour’s horseback ride across Cherry Creek or the South Platte; eighty
-two years of customers bringing some piece of old mining gear from Leadville or Central City to see it mounted on the dark paneled walls with their name typed on a little piece of paper underneath. And almost thirty-five years that Wager had been coming here, too; first as a wide-eyed kid with slicked-down wet hair when his father would take them for one of the rare treats of a meal out: Mother’s Day or a birthday. Then, much later—and with that half-pleasant, half-itchy feeling of coming back to a place after a long time—when he was a uniformed cop. Lorraine, his ex-wife, used to say he spent more time here than at home. It wasn’t true, at least not then. Now, of course, it was. There wasn’t another place in town in which he felt more at home. And now it was going, too.

  Rosie brought the dish of steaming chicken and rice with its poached egg and jalapeno sauce. “Watch the plate it’s hot,” she said automatically.

  “What are you going to do when this place closes?”

  “Mr. Harter wants me over at his Sixteenth Street restaurant. I’ll have a job, sure; but it won’t be the same.” She, too, looked around the cluttered walls and listened to the hoot of male laughter from the bar. “I been here so long it’s like home. There won’t ever be another place like it. It almost makes me feel like I’ll bust out crying.” But she didn’t; instead, she hustled back to the serving window, where the bell was ringing another order.

  As usual, Fat Willy was late; it made him feel good to think that Wager was waiting for him. Just as it made Wager feel good to act as if he didn’t notice the wide figure in the familiar white suit and broad-brimmed Panama hat as it floated across the room toward his booth.

  “All right, Wager, you tell me what’s so important I got to come out in this kind of weather, man.”

  “Vodka and Seven?”

  The broad black face bobbed yes. “But I ain’t got all day to socialize. I’m a working man—not a cop.”

  Wager ordered the drink, knowing that if Fat Willy ever did as much business as he talked about, he’d be living up in Aspen screwing movie stars. “What do you hear about the Scorvelli people lately?”

  The large man sipped and tilted his head back, letting a little of the room’s dim light glisten on cheeks that swelled fully beneath his slitted eyes. “Not much. I thought you was out of that organized crime thing?”

  “I am. But somebody with Dominick might have wasted a kid named Covino.”

  Fat Willy held the glass under his nose and thought before he drank long and deeply. “That’s heavy. Very heavy. What’s this Covino do to get that?”

  “That’s one of the things I’m asking you.”

  Fat Willy set his empty glass down; Gabe gestured for another. “You sure as hell don’t ask for much, do you, Wager?”

  “Just some information about that hit.”

  “Shit, Mexiboy, not from me. People who ask about hits gets hit.”

  “Just listen around and tell me what you hear. Nothing else.”

  “Look, my man, I don’t mess with them Scorvellis. They been in town a long time and they got more connections than the whorehouse telephone. They work their side of the street, and I got my own little corner where nobody bothers old Willy. You want me goosing around for some Scorvelli hit man?” Willy’s head jerked up with a short laugh. “Wager—you got what they call gall.”

  “You lay off your bets with the Scorvellis, don’t you?” One of the actions in Willy’s little corner was gambling, another was dope. He may have run a small stable of whores, too; more likely, he rented protection to their pimps. But he had been Wager’s snitch for quite a while now; and as long as he dodged the other cops and didn’t get too big, Wager let him run.

  “Who says that!”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Man, I don’t know nothing about laying off because I don’t know nothing about betting. That is illegal!”

  “You don’t have to ask anybody anything, Willy. All you have to do is listen. If you hear something of a tie between this Covino killing and a guy who got bumped off the board a year or so ago, let me know.”

  “Which guy’s that? There’s been more than one.”

  “The Marco Scorvelli killing. The brother.”

  In the dark beneath the hat brim, two white circles appeared. “Jesus, Wager,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe Wager would ask him something like that. Then he sat silent, his breath coming with that steady lurch that some fat men have. Finally, he spoke in a very soft voice. “If there is a tie-in, there’s a hell of a lot going down somewhere.”

  “That’s why there must be talk somewhere.” If Tony-O had picked up on it, Willy should, too.

  “A hell of a lot.” Willy finished his second drink and rattled the ice at Wager, who ordered another for him. “And that means I want less than nothing to do with this whole motherin deal, Wager.”

  “Just use your ears, Fat Willy. They’re next to nothing.”

  “Ain’t you funny! But supposing I do, my man? I would like to know what it’s worth.”

  If he were still on the narc squad, Wager could flash the bills right now. But homicide’s snitch budget rode on the Bulldog’s hip, and he paid each dollar as if it was out of his own retirement fund. “I don’t know.”

  For once, Willy’s surprise wasn’t faked. “Don’t know! Mister Detective Sergeant Wager, this old boy don’t chop cotton for nothing. Ain’t you heard of Uncle Abe and that emancipation jazz?”

  “I heard.” Willy had been as far south as Pueblo, Colorado, where he was busted once for hustling a crap game in somebody else’s protected territory. But he acted as if he’d been whipped, worn chains, and branded; to Wager it was as bad as the Return to Aztlán preached by some of the Chicano kids, and just as wearisome. It seemed to be a fear of standing naked without the masks of the past; it seemed that a whole generation of people was trying to cash in on what their forebears had survived. “Willy, if you get something for me, I’ll get something for you. But I don’t know how much. It’s not like I’m begging you to dangle your fat ass in the wind; just keep your ears open.”

  “I ain’t fat! I am big, my man, and don’t you try leaning all over me, Wager. You are too small to lean on me.”

  “I can pop you like a cockroach, Willy. A fat one. You want to try me?”

  The answer came in a sullen mumble. “One of these mornings, you gonna get out of bed dead.”

  Wager only smiled and waited.

  Willy shoved his half-empty glass away with long, shiny fingernails that looked delicate and out of place on his thick hands. “I’ll listen, Wager. And if I hear something, I might tell you. Only if the price is right—because it sure as hell ain’t gonna be for love.”

  Among the four or five names left on the list of Frank Covino’s friends, Wager finally found one who told him a little more.

  “Yeah, I was supposed to go to the movie with him, but I got a call to work at the last minute.” Peter A. Cruz, twenty, friend of the deceased, interviewed at his home at 3212 Wyandot, City-County Denver.

  “Where do you work, Mr. Cruz?”

  “At the Bahia restaurant. I’m a busboy. Last Sunday was supposed to be my night off, but one of the other guys called in sick and I had to cover. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, Frankie’d be alive now. Or I’d be dead, too.”

  “You were a good friend of Frank?”

  “Yeah, sure. There’s a bunch of us went through school together. We see each other a lot—well, maybe not as much as we used to, but still a lot.”

  “Is the Bahia a good place to work? You make good money there?”

  The young man’s alert eyes were set widely apart, and they said that was a strange question. “It’s O.K. Next year, I ought to make waiter. Waiters got to serve liquor and I ain’t twenty-one yet. I’ll get some decent money then.”

  “But you don’t make much now?”

  “Maybe sixty-five a week. If I wasn’t living at home, I couldn’t get by. But it’ll be O.K. when I make waiter. I’m learning the trade, like.”<
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  “Did Frank ever lend you any money?”

  “Frankie? Naw. Where would he get it? He made more than me, sure, but not that much more. And he gave part of it to his mother, anyway.”

  “Tell me what happened on Sunday.”

  Cruz shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. He gave me a call around five and asked if I wanted to see a flick. Said he’d be by about seven or eight. Then the restaurant called about six-thirty and told me to come down. So I tried to call Frankie and tell him, but he’d already left. I told Mom to tell him I had to work when he came by. Next I heard, he was dead. It’s really too bad.”

  “What movie were you planning on seeing?”

  “Star Wars. We seen it before, but it’s worth seeing again. That space stuff is something. Really profound, you know? Frankie liked it a lot—all the computers and robots. He was always reading this science fiction, really heavy stuff. That’s what he wanted to go into—space electronics or something like that.”

  “Where’s it playing?”

  “It was down at Cinema One, but I don’t know if it’s still there.”

  “Did Frank have any special girl friend?” There were a few females on the list, but so far none seemed to be deeply involved with the victim, and all had denied receiving any expensive gifts or money from him.

  “A novia? Naw. That was something his mom was always getting on him about: ‘When you getting married?’ ‘Don’t you meet any nice girls at college?’” Cruz laughed. “My mom does the same thing, but I tell her I’m too young to die. I mean … Well … you know what I mean. Poor Frankie.”

  “But Frank dated girls?”

  “Sure! Hey, he wasn’t queer or anything like that. He just didn’t find nobody to get serious about. He was like me, man, a Catholic. You stay married a long time when you’re a Catholic, so why rush it? That’s what I tell mi angustiosa.”

  Angustiosa. Wager recognized the word as slang for “mother.” “Are you going to college, too?”

  “What for? There’s already too many college people running around that can’t get a job. Hell, a waiter at a good restaurant, he can make as much—more!—than a lot of people with college degrees.”