by Rex Burns
Unconsciously, Wager lightly touched first the Star P.D. holstered over his kidney and then the oily chrome circles of the handcuffs looped over his belt at his spine. In the silence, a solitary car crossed the viaduct overhead, its tires a tiny sizzling zip in the black sky. Traffic from the city’s center and from the Valley Highway across the South Platte River made a steady rushing sound like distant falling water; nearer, the only loud noise was the quick blat of a switch engine’s air horn signaling backup. Clearing his ears with a forced yawn or two—a trick he learned on Marine patrols when danger was no less real or imminent but only more constant—Wager felt himself slip into that familiar air of threat that a cop, especially a uniformed cop, moves through on every street.
He walked down the viaduct’s shadow to a corner whose old streetlight struggled sullenly against an older dimness, then he crossed quickly into the murky gloom of warehouses and the unlit, barred windows of sagging brick offices. Trying to avoid the clink and scrape of broken bottles, Wager moved slowly toward the site of Covino’s murder on Denargo Street, listening as much as looking. Once, a car wagged its stiff beams down the bumpy street toward him and, like those he sought, Wager melted into the strip of black lining a deeply recessed door, easing out again when the taillights blurred with distance. He had passed the narrow gap where the boy had been found and turned along one of the pale warehouse walls, when he heard, on the other side of the street, the clatter of a stone and a thick, muffled cough. Against the dark surface, a darker form moved slowly but steadily with the slightly awkward movements of a beetle on a fixed course. Wager let the figure get halfway down the block before crossing over behind it. Then he sprinted forward on tiptoes.
“You there—hold it right there.”
The figure jerked and turned to stare bug-eyed at Wager, an arm’s length away. “Don’t hurt me! I ain’t got nothing—I got some cigarettes is all. I’ll give you my cigarettes if you don’t hurt me!”
“Whistles? Is that you?” The whistling sibilants sounded familiar, but Wager couldn’t see the thin face clearly.
“Who’s that?”
“Sergeant Wager. Remember me?”
The figure thought hard. “Sergeant Wager? No. But I don’t remember names real good. You won’t hurt me, will you?”
“No, Whistles. I only want to ask you some questions. Come on over here in the light.”
“All I got’s some cigarettes. I got four, but you can have them all.”
“Look at me—now do you remember?” Wager pulled the slight figure under the streetlight. His face was even thinner than Wager remembered, but the man’s broken nose was the same, as was the left eye, which wandered frantically whenever he was afraid. “I’m not going to hurt you. And I don’t want your cigarettes. Do you remember me? Sergeant Wager.”
“I remember now. Now I seen you, I remember you. You’re a policeman.”
“That’s right.” It seemed that the man really remembered and wasn’t just saying what he thought Wager wanted to hear. “I’m a policeman. I want to know if you walk down this street every night.”
Whistles frowned, the left eye beginning to settle in slower arcs, like a marble rocking to a halt. Wager didn’t recall how old the man was; he looked sixty, but he was somewhere in his forties. His record said he had been a battered child who, when he reached twenty-one, had been “graduated” from the state school as a legally defined adult capable of contributing to his own welfare and that of the great democracy to which he was born. And which found it cheaper to dump him into the street. He was one of those that Wager used to haul down to county jail once a month for washing and delousing, for a little hot food and a cursory medical check.
“Sure, Sergeant Wager. I go by here every night. I got a nice place I live in now.” He poked a grimy hand toward the dark railway yard. “You ain’t going to bust it up on me, are you? Nobody said they want me to move yet.”
“Not if you tell me about coming by here every night, Whistles.”
“I got to go by here every night. I got to go from my place to Manolo’s restaurant. I got a job there!”
“What kind of job?”
“I take out the garbage in these buckets and dump it in these barrels out back. And sometimes Mr. Zapata even lets me sweep out the front room. It’s a real job!”
“How much does it pay?”
“You mean money? Oh, he don’t pay money—he don’t make so much hisself. But I get a meal, all I want to eat.”
“How many hours do you work?”
Whistles thought hard. “There’s four buckets and I take them out, and then sometimes I sweep, and then I eat. Mr. Zapata’s nice. He ain’t never hit me. He gives me seconds if I ask. Maybe it takes two hours.”
“Did you come by here last Sunday night?”
“I … I can’t remember. You gonna tear up my place? Please don’t do that! Sure, I came by here. I came by here last Sunday night.”
“I’m not going to hurt you or your place, Whistles. Is the restaurant open on Sundays?”
“Sure. It’s open every day.”
“Have you missed any days?”
“You mean not go to work? No! It’s my job. I go even when it’s raining or even if my head hurts.”
“All right now, Whistles, listen hard. When you were going to work a few nights ago, did you see anything happen over there where those fruit warehouses are? Think real hard, now. Did you see anything at all?”
The broken nose aimed in the general direction of the painted brick buildings. A long, tiny whistle came out of his half-open mouth as he thought and tried to remember. Finally, “I saw a car! It stopped over there.”
Wager carefully kept the excitement from his voice; he didn’t want to spook the man. “What did the car look like, Whistles?”
“It was dark.”
“The car?”
“Yes. And it had long fenders. Like wings that lifted up in the back. And it had two mirrors, one on each side.”
“Wings? What do you mean, wings?”
Whistles looked frightened and his eye began to roll slowly back and forth. “I don’t know, Sergeant Wager. Maybe it wasn’t wings. If you say it wasn’t, then I guess you’re right!”
“That’s O.K., Whistles; never mind the wings. Who was driving?”
“I don’t know. I hid over there.” He pointed to the corner of a building where a wire-mesh fence collected blown trash. “Whenever I hear cars at night, I hide. Lots of times they want to hurt me.”
“What did you see?”
“It came up and stopped and turned off the lights. But nobody got out right away. I thought they saw me and was waiting for me to come out. So I stayed quiet. Then they got out and went between the walls.”
“How many people did that?”
“I saw two. They went between the walls.”
“Did they get out on the same side of the car? Or did each one use his own door?”
He began to look worried again. “I don’t know. They went between the walls.”
“When they went there, did you hear anything?”
“I heard a big bang. Like a gun!”
“You heard it?”
“It was loud and scared me. I don’t like guns.”
“How many people came back?”
A faint whistle from his sagging mouth. “One. And he got in the car.”
“What did he look like?”
Whistles squinted toward the building as if seeing it all again. “He had a coat on. A long one. And maybe a kind of hat or maybe it was his hair.”
“You could see all that from over there?”
“The lights at the roundhouse were on. That makes things kind of brighter. I like it when they’re on and it’s all light and clean-looking. It’s real nice when they’re on and it’s snowing.”
“Did you go over to the building?”
“No! The other one was still there and he might hurt me. I went to my job.”
“Did you see a gun?”
>
“No.”
“Can you tell me anything more about the car? The license, maybe?”
“No. It squeaked.”
“How’s that?”
“It turned and drove off. It went over the railroad tracks and squeaked real loud.”
“Did the man see you?”
“No. I hid like always. I’m real good at hiding,” he said.
In court, Whistles’s testimony wouldn’t go as far as a bailiff’s fart, Wager knew; all a defense attorney had to do to discredit him was ask Whistles to count his own fingers and toes. But for Wager’s use it was good enough; the long overcoat, the gun, the beret—those points were corroborated and linked the man who had picked up Covino at the movie with the man who had pulled the trigger in the alley. The car was something else; cars with wings, cars that squeaked. Without some kind of supporting evidence, it wasn’t safe to believe Whistles on that. Wager fished in his wallet for a bill—ten dollars—and held it out to the thin figure. “Here. Buy yourself some fresh cigarettes.”
“Money? For me?”
“Go on, take it.”
“No. I better not.”
“Why in hell not?”
“If I got money they’ll hurt me for it. I never have no money, so they mostly don’t hurt me.”
Wager didn’t bother to ask why this piece of flotsam was ever born and why it was left to creep its painful way through these shades of terror. Questions like that were for people like Frank Covino’s mother, who would ask and ask and ask and get the same answer Wager had found long ago: there was no reason for it. There was every reason against it, and not one goddamned reason for it. And even the reasons against it only went as far as a man could take them and no further; they were the things he could pretend to find meaning in, things he could pretend were important to try to do or to try and save. Beyond what he pretended, those reasons didn’t mean a goddamned thing.
A cunning look almost closed Whistles’s bad eye. “Can you gimme some matches? I got four cigarettes, but I got no matches.”
Wager took from his vest pocket the pack of stale cigarettes he carried to offer witnesses and informants, and pushed a book of matches under the cellophane wrapper. “Here. Now you’ve got some more cigarettes, too.”
“Gee!”
By the time Wager was in his car and driving toward Manolo’s Bar and Grill, Whistles’s dim outline had glided into the protection of other shadows.
Wager found the restaurant by its half-broken neon sign, which said “—nolo’s.” It was on a corner, the door angled to catch both sidewalks, and the small kitchen was at the far end, past the bar on one side and the hard wooden booths on the other. Three or four men sat near the kitchen end of the bar, leaving the booths empty, their varnished seat backs darkened by wide bands of oily dirt, head high. The bartender, heavy-set, with a handlebar mustache, smelled cop when Wager walked in. “You got a Mr. Zapata here?” Wager asked.
“Why?”
Wager showed his badge. “Because I want to know.”
“I’m him. What you want?”
Wager glanced down the bar at the men nursing their small glasses of pale beer; they quickly turned back to their own business—staring at the small television set quacking high in the corner above the entry way. “Do you have a busted-up guy named Whistles working for you?”
“Whistles? Yeah—he thinks he works here. I give him a meal of leftovers and he takes out the slops. What’s happened to him?”
“Was he here last Sunday?”
“Sure. He’s here every day. Like I said, the son of a bitch thinks he works for me.”
“You don’t pay him for his work?”
“What, you some kind of labor cop or union organizer or something? I give the son of a bitch a meal for doing nothing. I could empty the buckets myself, but he likes to think he’s got a job.”
“That’s fine with me.” Wager put the ten-dollar bill on the counter. “Give him some cigarette change every now and then out of this. Tell him he’s earned it for working so hard.”
The bartender’s dark eyebrows climbed up toward the point of straight hair that made a V high on his forehead. “What’s this for?”
“He did a job for me. But he doesn’t want to carry this much money around—he’s afraid somebody’ll roll him for it.”
“Oh. Yeah. He ain’t that dumb.” Zapata rang No Sale, then said to Wager, “Just a minute.” He came back with a small slip of paper and a piece of Scotch tape. He stuck the paper on an upright beam by the cash register. “I’ll keep it on a record. I don’t want no cop saying I’m cheating him.”
Ten
LEAVING MANOLO’S, WAGER drove slowly along upper Larimer. At this time of night, and before the workers had been rounded up for the sugar beet fields, the three blocks of Little Juarez were filled with braceros spilling from the red and blue lights of bars and onto curbs to stand in arm-wagging knots talking loudly, to watch cars roll past with windows shut and pale faces staring wide-eyed or away. Only an occasional black or woman could be seen among the swarthy men, but here and there Indians in denim jackets and shining, plaited hair reeled in or out of a doorway, or stood swaying and silent, staring at the pavement in hazy thought. The night was another warm one, the kind that came in late April and early May, hinting of summer and fooling the men and trees into thinking winter was gone. But of course it wasn’t; there would be at least one more heavy, wet snow to snag in the new leaves and snap the tender branches or split the tree trunks, because this high and this close to the mountains, winter was never far away.
He turned left on Seventeenth, the windows of the financial district almost as dark and blank as those of the deserted warehouse area. In this city of half a million or so, no one but cops, firemen, hippies, and drunks seemed to care much for it after dark; and more of the streets lay empty like this one than were filled with the gab and action of Larimer or East Colfax. When the offices and stores closed—when the papers were shuffled and the day’s money made—Denver became a city of a few veins and no heart.
At a closed gas station, Wager joined the short line waiting to use a telephone booth; inside the transparent plastic box a fat young girl, braless in a T-shirt and bib overalls, laughed into the receiver. Anxiously waiting behind her stood a barefoot and stringy-haired kid, who, when his turn came, relayed directions to a shadowy figure in a New Jersey van parked beside the booth and sprayed with tie-dye blobs of random color. Bumper stickers scattered on its sides said “Make Love Not Atomic Bombs,” “Go Solar Not Nuclear,” “Think Trees,” and “Save Our Whales.” Finally, when Wager could drop his dimes into the slot, he leaned far into the booth to close out the traffic sounds while he dialed the bar that served as Fat Willy’s office.
“Who wants him?” asked the voice on the other end.
“Gabe.”
“I see if he’s around.”
He was, grudgingly. “I don’t appreciate you calling me here, man. I told you that before.”
“Don’t hurt my feelings, Willy. I’ll begin to think you don’t like me.”
“You’ll begin to think right, then. What-all you want this time?”
“It’s been days since I heard your dulcet tones, Willy. I want those tones to tell me what you’ve picked up on the people I asked you about.”
“I ain’t talking about it here, man.”
“Fine. I’ll see you on the corner of Colfax and Race in ten minutes.”
“Wait a fucking minute! I got—”
Wager hung up. Behind him, the stringy-haired youth said, “It’s about time, man,” and roughly elbowed past him into the booth. Wager stepped aside, careful to scrape his shoe down the skinny Achilles tendon poking beneath the fringe of frayed Levi’s. He left the kid dangling halfway between cursing at Wager and trying to save his coin in the telephone.
The swollen figure of Fat Willy in its linen suit and Panama hat was not on the corner when Wager drove past, and Wager wasn’t surprised. He went a block down R
ace Street and pulled around in a U-turn, moving back slowly to wait just beyond the glare of the East Colfax strip. Sooner or later the big man would come sauntering past the brightly lit liquor stores, porno shows, pawnshops, and fast-food joints that lined Colfax from the city limits to the shadow of the state capitol. And in another five minutes, Wager’s Trans Am rocked heavily as Fat Willy slid into the front seat beside him.
“How come you didn’t meet me right out on the street, Wager? Out there in the light where the whole motherin world can see me talking with you?”
“Because I’ve got to watch my reputation.”
“It ain’t your reputation’ll be hurt. Look, I don’t know nothing about what went down this afternoon, so this is just a waste of my time.”
“What do you mean? What went down?”
“You telling me you don’t know?”
“What went down?”
Fat Willy’s head tossed back with a loud “Haw! I swear to God, Wager, you couldn’t find your own ass with both hands and a rear-view mirror. You call yourself a cop and you didn’t hear about this Covino dude in Cañon City?”
“Tell me, Fat Willy.”
“He was stabbed today, man. Somebody nailed him real good.”
“Who told you this?”
“I heard it in casual conversation with a recent traveler from those distant shores. Haw!”
“Is he dead?”
“I do not know. And I did not ask. I don’t want to look too interested in that dude or in his friends—because I ain’t.”
“Have you heard anything about him and the Scorvellis?”
