by Rex Burns
“Do you have any idea why somebody might want Frank dead?”
“Not a one. He was a real good guy—the kind you have over for Sunday dinner with your family. Maybe one or two people didn’t like him so much. Hell, you go through life, you can’t help making some enemies if you got any talangos at all—I’ve learned that! But Frankie?” The youth shook his head. “He liked most people and they liked him. And nobody didn’t like him so much they wanted to kill him.”
Wager’s next stop was the Cinema One, a neighborhood theater that made its living by showing the big hits a lot later and a little cheaper than the major theaters downtown. He stood out of the thick snow and under the radiant heat above the open glass doors to the lobby, waiting until the last couple in the short line bought tickets. Then he held his badge up to the glass window at the startled bleached blonde in the ticket booth. “Were you on duty Sunday night, miss?”
“Yes, sir.”
He slid a photocopy of Covino’s picture under the ticket window. “Do you remember seeing this man?”
She frowned at the picture. “I don’t know. He looks kind of familiar. But lots of times I don’t even look at people’s faces any more.”
“Was the same doorman on duty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can I talk to him a minute?”
She looked worried and scratched at the dark roots of her hair. “I guess you can go in. I guess Mr. Paxton won’t mind. I hope not.”
“I’ll only be a minute.”
The doorman, a sallow kid in his late teens with a maroon uniform and freshly squeezed pimples to match, had been watching him suspiciously. “Yes, sir?”
Wager showed him his badge and the photograph. “Did you happen to see this man come in or leave last Sunday night?”
The kid held the picture and looked at it first from one angle, then from another, up close and then out at arm’s length. Through the curtained entry to the auditorium came the quavering violin sounds of tension and pursuit. Another bleached blonde, perhaps the younger sister of the ticket girl, yawned behind the candy and popcorn counter. “I’m not sure, Officer,” the kid said slowly. “He looks like a guy I saw. He was standing in line to buy a ticket and some guy came up and said something to him and they left.”
“What’d this other man look like?”
“Well, he had his back to me; I couldn’t point him out in a line-up. And I didn’t really notice either one until they left. It was a long line—you know how Sunday nights are when we got a big bill. And if this is the suspect”—he tapped the picture—“then he was only two or three back from the ticket window when they left. That’s how come I noticed him—he waited all that time in line and then went off when he got near the window.” He added confidentially, “I’m supposed to kind of keep an eye on the ticket window in case of a stickup so I can identify the criminal. We haven’t had one yet, but I’m ready.”
“Was this person who spoke to him tall or short?”
“Kind of short. Maybe a little shorter than you.”
“Did he have a beard? Was he wearing any jewelry or anything that would make you notice him?”
“Like I said, I only saw him from the back … excuse me.” He reached past Wager to say “Thank you” and take the tickets of a middle-aged couple coming in. “I was busy collecting,” he said to Wager, “and I just looked up to see this man say something and then the two of them left. I don’t even know where the other guy came from.”
“Any idea about his age?”
“No.”
The kid would be a real asset in case of a stickup. “Was he noticeably fat or skinny?”
“I guess thin. It’s hard to say because he had a coat on, but his shoulders didn’t look too wide.”
“What color was the coat?”
“Light. Maybe gray or tan, something like that. And long. I mean below the knees. That was something a little different—I noticed that,” he said with a pleased smile.
“Color of hair?”
“Right—that was something else I noticed! He had a hat on, one of these black things—a beret. I couldn’t see his hair, but you don’t see too many hats like that around any more. There used to be a lot of Brown Berets, but this one was black.”
“What color was his neck?”
He thought back. “Light—it was a white guy.”
“How long did they talk?”
“I’m not sure. A minute, maybe. I tore a couple tickets and when I looked up again, they were walking off.” He couldn’t hold it back any longer. “What’s this guy done? The suspect in the picture?”
“He’s a homicide victim.”
“Jeez!”
“Did the man in the coat walk in any special way? Have a limp or anything?”
“Not that I noticed. They went off pretty fast.”
“Can I have your name?”
“Sure. What for?”
“In case I have to come back to verify some of these facts.”
“Oh. Bill Paxton. I’m here all the time; my dad runs the place.”
The boy didn’t seem overjoyed about working for his father. “Can you tell me what time the show started last Sunday?”
“Like always—shorts at seven-twenty, feature at seven thirty-five.”
Wager took a business card from his wallet. “Here’s my name and number. If you think of anything else—no matter how small it might seem—call and ask for me or leave a message, O.K.? Think it over real well—you just might have seen the man who killed this kid.”
“Jeez!”
It was almost nine now, and Wager was starting to feel the heavy hours of the long day press on his shoulders and stiffen the small of his back. Still, there was one more thread to tug before calling it a day: Gerald Covino’s arrest. He called in to the dispatcher for Detective Franconi’s location; the reply came that he was on Code Seven at an all-night truckers’ restaurant farther down on Wyandot, where the freeway ramps and railroad spurs looped in tangles around each other. Wager found him in the last booth, scraping egg yolk with a piece of toast and half listening to the crackle of his radio pack standing on the small table.
“Hi, Gabe. I heard you asking for me.” Mario Franconi, about Wager’s size, had on a navy-blue blazer with neat silver buttons that looked out of place against the simulated leather and greasy chrome of the restaurant. He wore a closely trimmed mustache in a thin line over his wide upper lip, and with the blazer, it made Wager think of a hotel manager or a jewelry salesman. But the man had a pretty good reputation as a burglary detective, and Wager tried not to hold against him the fact that Franconi was studying to be a lawyer.
He slid into the facing seat and shook hands. “I’m after some information on Gerald Edward Covino. You popped him about eight or ten months ago, remember?”
Franconi slid the egg yolk back and forth with a corner of toast for a second or two as he mentally thumbed through the arrest reports he carried in memory. “Covino. Yes, indeed. Burglary, but he bargained for breaking and entering. Yes, indeed. We had a four-square conviction on the lesser charge.” He dabbed gingerly at his mouth with a folded napkin, ran a finger along each side of the thin mustache, and neatly tugged his jacket sleeves up to loosen them before propping his elbows on the table and leaning forward. “He was found with his burglary tools on him, so we might have gotten him on intent, but the D.A. didn’t want to waste time pushing for it. Covino had taken nothing—opened no cash drawers or safes—so the strongest charge was breaking and entering. We suspected he had accomplices, but he was the only one we caught; and he wouldn’t name anyone else.” The thought suddenly landed in Franconi’s eyes. “Wasn’t that the name of the latest homicide victim? Any relation?”
“Younger brother. First name Frank or Frankie.”
He stroked his mustache a moment or two more. “I don’t recall that name. Only Gerald’s.”
“Do you remember anything about the bust?”
“Yes, indeed! It was almost comic. Th
e uniformed officers received a ten-ninety, silent type, at approximately 3:45 A.M. It was at a drugstore on the north side of town off the I-25 and Thirty-eighth Avenue intersection. The exact location escapes me, but it’ll be in Covino’s trial record. I was on graveyard and of course responded, too. When I arrived, the patrolmen had been there perhaps two or three minutes ahead of me, having come up without lights or siren. They found the front door still locked and one of them was looking for a way to the back of the store. Let’s see … one of the officers was McBride—Pat McBride. I can’t remember the other’s name. It was this other one who was looking for a way to the back entrance. But the building was one of these long series of stores side by side, so of course there was no immediate access to the rear of that particular store,” Franconi explained carefully.
Wager took a deep breath and forced a patient smile and nodded. Franconi was going to make a fine lawyer.
“I picked him up and we swung around the corner and came down the alley. At that time of night, we naturally made some noise driving up, and fully expected to see the suspect or suspects running down the alley, so I had my high beams on. And remember, the patrolmen had already rattled the front door, so that anyone inside must have known an alarm had gone off and that officers were on the scene. But no one was visible. We stopped and tried the back door and found it open. Later investigation revealed that the dead bolt had been picked and the snap lock had been slipped by a piece of plastic. We thought we were too late, but in we went, anyway; I covered while the uniformed officer entered, and then he covered for me. We stood on each side of the doorway for a few seconds to let our eyes adjust, and then began moving through the stockroom toward the front of the store. We couldn’t find the light switch, of course, so the officer whose name I can’t recall was shining his flashlight around as we went forward. Still nothing—no sound of anyone running, no heavy breathing, no scurrying around. We reached the main part of the store and by the streetlights coming through the front window could see the pharmacy station on the left. The cash register was near the door, and so the two of us started down the left side toward the pharmacy and then we were going to sweep the cash register area and unlock the front door for McBride. All this time, we were keeping our eyes wide open in case someone was still in there and bolted for the back. We didn’t really expect that—as I’ve said, we had made enough noise to scare off an army. Anyway, we made it past the pharmacy, and since none of the drawers behind the counter were pulled out, we again thought the thief had been scared off. When we drew near the register, we could see that the cash drawer was closed, but it was approximately then that we smelled him.”
“Smelled him?”
“Drunk as a skunk and twice as fragrant. Apparently, he had passed out before he could rifle the cash register, and there he lay sound asleep and soaking wet, with an empty bourbon bottle in his hand and a puddle of booze deep enough to drown in. Kentucky Royal, it was—foul-smelling stuff.”
“He pulled the job while he was drunk?”
Franconi’s eyebrows shrugged. “It’s not so unusual. Granted, you’re more likely to get stickups from drunken impulse than you are burglary. Still, it does happen, especially with your younger class of criminal.”
“I thought Covino had a little more going for him than that. I thought he was a pro.”
“Granted, that’s generally for the amateurs. But Covino wasn’t that much of a professional. We placed him in a holding cell until he sobered up and then tried to clear as many cases off him as we could. And there just weren’t that many. He admitted to half a dozen break-ins and burglaries, and that was all.”
If a suspect stood a good chance of conviction on one charge, it paid him to confess to all the others he had gotten away with. That way, he couldn’t be prosecuted on those after he was given his time for the first one. But Wager still felt something slippery underneath the surface of facts. “Covino has been out of Buena Vista for five or six years. Are you telling me he only pulled half a dozen burglaries in that time?”
“That’s all he admitted to. What would he gain by lying about that?”
A shorter sentence. But most wouldn’t gamble that against further convictions. Unless there was something Wager could not yet see clearly. “Any idea what else he was up to before he tumbled?”
“Nothing concrete. We of course asked around when we checked up on his claims to the other burglaries. But you know how that is—if you have someone who wants to help you clear your books, you’re not going to try very hard to paint him as a perjurer.”
“Any talk about him at all?”
“Only that he was very hungry for the big time. But most of our respondents thought he talked a great deal more than he accomplished. It merely adds up to the familiar picture of a small-time hood with dreams of glory.”
If that was the case, Covino would have been likely to exaggerate his other jobs. “Did you ever hear of a tie between his name and any of the Scorvellis?”
“No. I don’t recall any. I don’t think it’s likely, though. Covino was a nonentity. Indirectly, of course, he may have known them through his fence—the Scorvellis have a finger in that pie, too. But Covino never named his fence. He was quite arrogant about not spilling a thing.”
“You said he wasn’t alone on this drugstore thing. Any leads?”
“None. And the only reason I think he had accomplices is because he had no transportation in the vicinity.”
Wager thought that over. “West Thirty-eighth’s not too far from where he lived. He might have walked.”
“That’s possible, but not likely. My experience shows that most burglars will have a car within a block, either to pull up and load the goods or to put a lot of distance between them and the crime scene. There were no abandoned cars in the vicinity, and it’s likely that the accomplices were parked at the back door, waiting for him to come out. Remember now, at this point in time, Covino had been in there long enough to pass out. A burglary like that should have taken, at the most, three or four minutes once the door was open. By the time I reached the alley, some eight or ten minutes had passed since the alarm went off. If Covino’s accomplices were as amateurish as he was, they would be extremely nervous and might have left as soon as McBride and the other officer tried the front door. Or they might have had a police frequency scanner and heard the dispatcher call McBride. That technique’s becoming quite popular of late. Either way, if they drove out the other end of the alley, I’d never have seen them.”
And, Wager thought wearily, that left things about where they had been. “Come on, I’ll walk you to the cars.”
“Be with you in a minute. I want to wash up and comb my hair.”
Five
WEDNESDAY MORNINGS WERE still conference mornings at the Organized Crime Unit’s headquarters in the old office building that gazed through the trees of the state capitol grounds toward the gold dome. Wager and Axton, following the Bulldog’s suggestion, stood outside a small pane of Plexiglas at the second-floor landing. Security person Gutierrez remembered Wager by name and smiled widely as she pushed the loud buzzer that unlocked the door. “They’re all in conference, Detective Wager, but they’ll be out in ten minutes or so. If you gentlemen want to wait in the interview room, I can get you some coffee.”
“Thanks. I’ll say hello to Suzy first.”
“Oh, do! She’ll be so glad to see you.”
Wager led Axton past the desks jammed into a warren of open cubicles to the corner that had been his. On the whole, the place was the same; but here and there, in small details such as a new wall chart or a different arrangement of office furniture, changes had been made. Wager felt that curious mixture of familiarity and distance, as if he remembered the location better than the location remembered him, and it brought home the fact that he was no longer an O.C.U. agent but just another visitor from an outside unit.
“Gabe! I mean, Detective Wager!” Suzy, whose plainness was one thing that would never change, looked up from he
r typewriter. “I heard you were coming by.”
She shook hands and he introduced her to Axton. “Is Ed in conference, too?”
“Sure—same old Wednesday routine. It looks like your new job really agrees with you! You’re looking just fine.”
“You do, too. I heard the unit was re-funded—that’s real good.”
She held up a thumb and forefinger, a quarter of an inch apart. “Gee, it was that close, but Inspector Sonnenberg really put on a good budget presentation. He really deserves a lot of credit.”
“That’s real good,” said Wager again, because there wasn’t much else to say, and all the words he’d used so far seemed awkward and strained. Odd, how things that seemed vital when he worked here weren’t worth talking about after he left. He glanced at the three desks, empty at the moment, lining the wall beside the old, square window. His had been the middle one and he had kept its surface clean. Now it was littered with a wad of papers and had somebody’s family album propped at one corner; on the other corner, beside the window, grew a potted marijuana plant with a small sign: “Keep Off the Grass.”
Suzy followed his glance. “That’s Detective Beasley’s desk. He’s real funny—he uses the plant for lectures to junior high kids.”
It made no difference to Wager whose desk it was any more or how messed up he let it get. “Do you know if anybody’s working on the Scorvellis?”
“I’m sure someone must be, but no one ever tells me anything.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but Suzy knew how to keep her mouth shut. That was how she kept her job, and Wager didn’t hold it against her. “Can we wait in Ed’s office for him?”
“Sure. I’ll get you another chair. Gee, it’s good to see you again!”
When they had been settled in the unit sergeant’s cubicle with a third chair and the usual cups of coffee, Axton murmured, “I think you’ve got a girl friend there, Gabe.”
