by Rex Burns
The bulk settled comfortably against the seat. “Wager, I recollect there was some little mention that this information you are after might be valuable. You read me?”
“I can’t tell you how valuable it is until I hear it.”
“Well, start counting coin, my man—here’s what I got.” He canted his head so the shadow of the large-brimmed hat shielded his face from a figure walking past on the sidewalk. “The word I hear around is that this Covino maybe did a job for Dominick Scorvelli.”
“The one in Cañon City? Gerald?”
“Naw, man. The other one that got hisself shot last week.”
“What kind of job?”
“The word I hear is ‘hit.’”
“Come on, Willy! We don’t have a thing to show that kid ever crossed the street.”
“They’s a lot of things cops ain’t got, Wager. One of them’s good sense. Now, you want to hear what I picked up? Or you want to waste time disputing my solemn word?”
“Which hit?”
“Dominick’s brother. Marco.”
The hell he did. Wager sat and turned that information inside out, upside down, and backward, and it still didn’t fit what he’d discovered about Frank’s life. Unless there was a pot load more to learn about him somewhere. As Willy said, cops never knew everything. “How’d you hear this?”
“Around.”
“It’s important to know, Willy. I’m not coming down on anybody; I just want to corroborate.”
“What’s this here ‘important’ worth?” Willy rubbed together a thick thumb and forefinger, the flesh making a dry whisper.
Wager pulled out his wallet and counted out a hundred dollars of his own money. Maybe the Bulldog would pay him back. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.
Fat Willy counted the twenties against the light cloth stretched tight across his thigh. “Is that all? Hell, just sitting here is costing me more than this in business.”
“It’s all I have right now, Willy. If your information checks out, I’ll double it. If you don’t want it, you can always give it back.”
“Just like you gonna give me back my information, right?” He folded the bills into a tight wad and slipped them somewhere beneath the expanse of linen coat.
“How did you hear this about Covino and Scorvelli?”
“I heard it in a couple places. Couple days ago some people was talking about it at a game of chance I know about. And I heard it today, too, down at the Ebony Billiard Saloon. It come up when we got the word on the other one getting stabbed. It’s all over the place, man.”
“Who was talking it up?”
“Nobody special. It was just talk, you know?”
“You think somebody could have planted it?”
“Sure! But how in hell’s anybody going to know if it’s the real skinny or it ain’t? I mean, you got to get a lot closer to them Scorvellis to know that, and I am as close as I aim to get.” He opened the door and grunted his way out, then bent to the half-lowered window. “And another thing: why would somebody want to blow smoke like that? And another thing, too: somebody sure didn’t like them Covinos for some real heavy reason. You dig? Don’t forget, you owe me. I be waiting.”
He was gone, a wide blur of white against the darkness of worn and cautious houses whose shades were pulled to pinch out the glare and noise and eyes of the Colfax corner.
Why would somebody plant that story? It would be easy enough to do—a murmur here, a whispered “did you know” there. Anything about the Scorvellis was news everywhere, and the person who could tell his buddies something first would stand a notch taller in their eyes. A day, two days, and the story would be all over town and impossible to trace back to the one who started it. But for what reason? The police weren’t even close to a suspect in Marco’s death, so there was no one trying to shake off attention. And there was no reason Wager could see in naming Frank the hit man after he was dead—no reward to collect from Dominick, no revenge against a corpse. And not one goddamned bit of the kid’s life even pointed that way. But as Willy said, Frank was dead, and now his brother had been stabbed.
An uneasy chill ran up Wager’s back. Frank had been shot just after Wager had heard the name, and Gerald was stabbed within three days after Wager had gone to see him. It was almost as if there was a connection—as if Wager, himself, was the connection.
But that made as little sense as the rumor that Frank killed Marco. As little sense as any other link between that and Gerald’s stabbing. Wager swore again and started his car and turned it west on Colfax, toward headquarters.
“Well, jumping Jesus—it’s Wonder Wager.” Ross looked up from a mound of papers, his red ballpoint pen aimed at the line of type he had been studying. “Did you come down on your free time just to help us lesser minions serve and protect?”
“No. I came to find out something about that stabbing in Cañon City today. Did you or Dev get anything on it?”
When it came to business, Ross could forget his animosity toward Wager. “Only that it happened. Is it part of that shooting last weekend?”
“I don’t know. It’s the victim’s brother, but there are too many loose ends to say they’re tied together.”
“Anything we can do?”
Wager ran a finger down the list of frequently called numbers, looking for the duty officer at the state penitentiary. “I guess just listen around. So far, there’s not much to do anything with.”
“What do you want us to listen for?”
Wager told him what Fat Willy had said. If Sonnenberg didn’t like the Scorvelli name talked about, he could take it up with Fat Willy.
“My, my. The plot does thicken. Is there a jacket on this Frank Covino?”
“He seems as clean as a hangman’s conscience. But unless there’s some kind of truth in that rumor, nothing makes any sense.” Wager dialed the number and waited four or five rings before the male voice of the duty officer, cadenced with routine, answered.
“This is Detective Wager, D.P.D. Can you give me a status report on the prisoner who was stabbed today—Gerald Covino?”
“Just a minute.” The voice came back. “He died at approximately 10:30 A.M. without regaining consciousness.”
Damn. “Any idea who did it?”
“Yes, sir. But we’re not allowed to give that information out over the telephone. We can send a report if you’ll give me your official address and a statement of need to know. Or you can come down here. It might be quicker if you came down here, anytime between 9 A.M. and 3 P.M.”
“Has the next of kin been notified?”
“Yes, sir. They have.”
Wager hung up and looked at Ross without really seeing him. Dead. Another thread cut—a thread of life, a thread in the case. Somewhere, Wager realized, half buried in the back of his mind, he had been putting some hopes on Gerald. Give him a little time to think about his brother, let his mother’s suffering work on him a little; make another trip down to Cañon City in a week or two and then again until something broke in the case. Hell, Gerald wouldn’t be going anywhere—and Wager had plenty of time on his side to chip away at the man’s silence. But now Gerald was gone for good, and Wager couldn’t help the recurring question about his own part in it; he couldn’t help wondering if somehow he had set Gerald up like a mouse trapped in a box. Like poking a stick at a goddam mouse cornered in a box.
Ross was saying something to him.
“What?”
“Did Covino buy it?” Ross asked again.
“Yes. This morning.”
Ross wagged the ballpoint pen in a series of short taps. “Convenient, ain’t it?”
It was that. And again came that feeling, like a moth butting its head and shredding its wings against the screen to get at a light inside, that something was there just beyond him. Something that he should be able to get hold of. “The dumb bastard should have told me what he knew.” Wager said it more to himself than to Ross. “The dumb bastard could have saved his life if he’d told
me.”
“Or had his throat cut for being a snitch.”
“I suppose.” Wager hadn’t built that box; the mouse had found it all by himself and crawled in and was trapped by its own stubbornness. It was that simple. It should be that simple.
“Do you want Dev and me to start shaking the trees? We’ve got a few contacts that even you don’t have, Wager; and if there’s any word about the Scorvellis, they’re bound to hear it.”
Sonnenberg wouldn’t go for that; he was already getting diarrhea over his project, and to have the whole Homicide Division snuffling at Dominick’s heels would either give the inspector a heart attack or send him right up to the department chief himself. And that would bring in another variable, a political one, which Wager didn’t want to risk right now. “No. Just listen around.”
He could see it in Ross’s eyes—the other detective figured that Wager was trying to keep the case entirely in his own hands, that Wager was afraid there wouldn’t be enough glory to share. “Sure. If that’s the way you want it.” What the hell, it wasn’t skin off Ross’s fanny; he’d offered and he sure as hell wasn’t going to beg to be let in on it. Ross turned back to the forms, the red ballpoint pen stabbing sharply at the lines of print.
Wager got out of the office; it wasn’t his shift, so it wasn’t his territory. Let Ross sulk if he wanted to; there were things that Wager could not explain to him. And there were things he couldn’t explain to himself, either. Call it instinct or ESP. Or even Celestial Seasoning tea leaves. But damn Gerald and damn the feeling that padded after Wager like a hungry dog down the corridors empty of everyone but the night janitor swinging his heavy, noisy waxer from wall to wall like the weighty pendulum of a clock.
Sitting in his car, Wager fiddled with the GE radio pack that rode either on his hip or in the rack he had mounted just under the dash. The terse queries and replies filling the police band told him nothing. He knew they wouldn’t, but neither did they bring that calmness which often came from half listening to the routine governance of the city’s daily violence.
Maybe he should go back and start at the beginning. At this time of night, midnight, it was as good a place as any; and Wager knew he would not be able to sleep, anyway.
Turning up Lawrence, he parked just north of the cold symmetry of the main post office, with its government lions in frozen crouch and the scattered bums sprawling on the benches at their stone feet like sacrificial offerings. Two blocks over was the Little Juarez section, and this time Wager cruised it on foot, silent among the loud intermingling of broken Spanish and fractured English, and the louder, brassy music spilling from the bars. Panhandlers came a step or two toward him, recognized a cop, and suddenly found something across the street to interest them; men lining the small bars that he entered one after another watched him from the corners of their eyes or in the mirrors. An occasional bartender nodded hello, and Wager asked quietly if he’d seen Tony-O.
“He came in maybe an hour ago. I ain’t seen him since.”
“Any idea which way he went?”
A shrug. “Out.”
“If he comes back, let him know I’m looking for him.”
“I’ll tell him, sure. But you know how he is—mucho orgulloso, that one.”
“I know. Just tell him.”
“Cómo no. Sure.”
It wasn’t in a bar that he found Tony-O; it was crossing the street in front of the wide concrete walls and blank, tinted plate glass of an office building that formed a barrier between this raw corner of the city and Old Larimer Square, where tourists paraded in shiny shoes or imitation grubbiness through expensive bars and restaurants, looking for authentic echoes of the boom town that Denver used to be. The old man walked with his usual careful but erect stride through the bustling street life, his wrinkled face restless in its habitual scan of the people strolling the sidewalks or weaving through cars stopped for the traffic lights.
Wager cut across the street and caught up with him. “Tony-O! Wait a minute.”
“Quién es? Wager?”
“Let’s get a beer. I need to talk to you, Tony.”
“What about?”
He gestured at a corner tavern whose plaster wall was still painted with a faded 7-Up sign, the last remnant of the neighborhood grocery store that had preceded the bar. An equally faded sign in the window facing Larimer said “Aquí hablamos Español.” “I want to ask you a few questions. Something’s come up, and maybe you can help me out.”
The shoulders of the old man’s coat, square and fragile as if draped on a wire hanger, rose and fell. “Maybe; we’ll see.” He followed Wager into the bar and they found a pair of empty stools at the far end of the counter, away from the wailing jukebox. Wager ordered two draws. A newer sign in the middle of the oily mirror behind the bar said “We Support the Boycott. No Coors.” People had signs for everything; not arguments or discussions, just signs.
“What’s this help you want?”
“Remember that name you gave me? Frank Covino?” asked Wager.
“I read in the paper what happened to him.”
“Now his brother’s been killed down in Cañon City.”
“Killed? When?”
“He was stabbed sometime this morning. He died around ten o’clock.”
The gnarled knuckles on Tony-O’s hands made the bones of his fingers look thin and brittle as they slid up and down the lines of the small beer glass. “I didn’t hear about that. That’s too bad.”
“Maybe there was a tie-in.”
“Like what?”
“I really don’t know. I don’t have the whole story on the stabbing, but the coincidence is enough to make me wonder.”
Tony-O’s white head bobbed silent agreement. “So what do you want from me?”
“I need to know where you got your information on Frank Covino. It’s all over town now, but you were the first one I heard it from. I need to trace it down, Tony-O.”
The knotty fingers rasped over the gray bristles speckling the sagging flesh under his chin. “You need.” It did not come out like a question.
“That’s right. I need.” And there was no apology in Wager’s voice.
Tony-O’s eyes beneath the lids with their net of deep wrinkles glided his way, and Wager felt the old man probe this harder tone as he rolled a cigarette on his tongue and poked it into the corner of his mouth with his fist. “I guess I can tell you. But I don’t know what good it’ll do you.”
“Why?”
“The guy that told me ain’t in town no more.”
“Where’d he go?”
“He said he was going back to L.A.”
“What’s his name?”
“Chavez. Bernie Chavez. Know him?”
Wager knew half a hundred Chavezes, a few who had numbers following their names and a lot without; but “Bernie” didn’t fit any of them. “Does he have a record?”
Tony-O shrugged and sipped his beer. “Maybe. He’s been around. He’s an old guy like me—all washed up.”
Wager jotted the name in the little green notebook. Bernie Chavez in L.A. There shouldn’t be more than five thousand of them, but he didn’t have anything better to put in his notebook.
“How did he know about this? Why’d he tell you?”
“He told me because he wanted to. Not because I asked him. You know what I mean?”
“I wouldn’t be bothering you if it wasn’t really important, Tony-O.”
“Yeah. Well, I was over at Centennial watching the quarter horses, and Bernie sees me in the two-dollar line. He’s one of them from the old days, before he moved out to L.A. He comes back every now and then.” Another slow sip. “He come up and wanted to borrow some bucks, so sure, I let him.”
Wager could see it in his imagination: this Bernie Chavez spotting the old man and giving him the “Hey—Tony-O!” routine, asking, “Do you remember …?” and saying, “Jefe, I remember when you …” And Tony-O eating it like candy, even up to the part where Bernie drops his v
oice to a whisper and says, “Jefe, I got a good tip on this one, but nothing to lay down. I mean, it’s just two bucks and it’s against a sure thing …” And, as in the old days, the jefe tosses him the bills like they were nothing.
“Did his horse come in?” asked Wager.
He took a long drink, then said disgustedly, “Yeah, it did. At about thirty to one. He wanted me to bet it, but I was too smart to listen to him. I think mine’s still looking for the finish line.” He rinsed his tongue with another swallow and dragged thumb and forefinger along the deep lines at the sides of his mouth. “So then this big winner wants to buy me a drink. To make me feel better for not listening to him, you know? And that’s when he told me.”
“Do you remember what he said exactly?”
Frowning, the old man stared across the bar top somewhere toward the tequilas and cheap bourbons lined up in front of the mirror. “Not exactly, no. We started talking about the old days again and Bernie said something about how the wops took over Denver and how the Scorvellis had a habit of killing people in their own family. Which was something none of us ever did.”
That wasn’t entirely true, Wager remembered from neighborhood stories; but he didn’t interrupt.
“‘Like Marco’s getting killed,’ he said. And I said, ‘Everybody thought that was from the outside,’ and he said, ‘No, hombre. It was one of our people did it, but he was hired by Dominick to make it look like an outside job; Dominick wanted somebody who wouldn’t have no loyalties.’“ Another thoughtful sip of beer. “‘Where’d you get this?’ I said. ‘From a guy out in L.A. He had some trouble when Scorvelli was pushing the Ortegas out and he still keeps tabs on them wops.’“
“Did Chavez say who that was?”
“I figured if he wanted to tell me, he would have. So I didn’t ask. But he saw that I didn’t really buy his word, you know? So he says, ‘It was a kid done it—named Covino.’ ‘There’s a lot of Covinos,’ I said. ‘Try Frank,’ he said.’“
Wager gave the old man another half minute, but he added nothing. Tony-O drank his beer and stretched his thin upper lip with a silent belch, watched the bubbles rise through the yellow liquid and stroked the damp glass with thumb and forefinger.
