Angle of Attack

by Rex Burns

  “Ray got married to a real nice girl, and there was a kid six months, a year old when he was killed. That was in sixty-two.”

  “I remember. Anita? Was that his wife’s name? She remarried a year or so later?”

  “That’s right. Her and her husband moved out to San Diego.” Tony-O groped at a hip pocket. “Kay’s the girl’s name. She graduated from high school out in San Diego. Got a diploma and everything. Here’s her picture.”

  A yearbook photograph: smooth oval face, straight black hair held back by a headband, Indian style, large black eyes. Carefully inked across one corner was “To Grampa with love, Jeannette.”

  “She’s pretty,” said Wager. “It’s hard to think of Ray having a daughter that old.” Tony-O’s son had been three years younger than Wager.

  “Yeah. It just don’t seem that long ago, does it? She looks a little like Ray’s mother did—my woman.” He folded the wallet gently and put it back. “Anyway, about nine or ten months ago Jeannette came here and got a job. A secretary at some kind of office supply company.”

  “Is the name important?”

  Tony-O shrugged. “Call it Smith … Jones … Hell, I’m not sure. It’s over on Eleventh, I think. It’s supposed to be a big outfit. But say, Wager, don’t go poking around over there—for her sake. Jeannette’s.”

  “What harm would a few questions do?”

  “I’m telling you—I’m getting there! Just give me a chance to tell you!”

  Wager nodded and sipped and waited.

  “I used to go over there every now and then—meet her for lunch once or twice a week to see how she was doing.”

  “And?”

  “I said I’m getting there! Estoy un viejo—have a little patience.” Tony-O stretched the pause with a large mouthful of beer and a disgusted wag of his head at Wager’s lack of respect for the aged. “O.K. You want to know so much. One day I go by to pick her up and who do I see but Mr. Dominick Scorvelli walking around and looking the place over like he’s going to buy it.”

  “When was this?”

  “A couple months ago. Sometime in February. So I got curious—worried—and I started asking around. I can still get some information when I want it, Wager. A lot of people still remember the old jefe. “

  “Ya lo creo. What’d you find out?”

  “I found out I didn’t want Jeannette working there. I ran into Bernie Chavez and I asked him what he’d heard about Dominick. He didn’t like mouthing it around, but finally he told me about Dominick having his own brother killed and that Frank Covino pulled the trigger, and that now, with his brother out of the way, Dominick was expanding his organization.”

  “Weren’t you curious about how Chavez knew?”

  “Hell, no. Didn’t I see Scorvelli going around that place? Don’t I know what him and his people are like?”

  “And you lost Chavez? He’s not hiding somewhere here in Denver?”

  “Is that what you think? I swear to the Holy Mother, Wager, he’s in L.A. He went back to L.A. That is all I know about him!”

  It was Wager’s turn to drink slowly and to ponder. “Why didn’t you tell me this to start with?”

  “Because of my granddaughter! I don’t want her or her name anywheres near Scorvelli’s. You think he wouldn’t check out everybody in that place before he moved in? You think he wouldn’t find out whose granddaughter she was? Suppose you let something slip—suppose you got into court and had to say where you got your information about Frank Covino. You think Scorvelli wouldn’t go after her to get at me? He can do what he wants to, Wager, and not all the cops in the goddamned world can stop him.”

  It seemed that way. Maybe that was the thing Wager hated most about the Scorvellis: their insulation. Anything they wanted, they could take; and it seemed that the law never quite reached them. “Then why did you tell me at all?”

  Tony-O’s voice rose with bitterness. “I shouldn’t have! I should have kept my goddamned mouth shut and played it safe. But I know how you feel about the Scorvellis, and I figured I owed you, Wager—for the way you helped Ray that time. I figured it was a debt of honor.” His breath hissed in his nose for a moment or two until he was calm again. “Like those goddam bubbles … one thing after another, they just keep right on coming, and I’m not so young as I used to be.”

  “Where’s your granddaughter now?”

  “Back in San Diego. I gave her this crap about how I heard the business was going to fold and that’s why they were thinking of selling. I made her think she’d be a lot better off in computer work in San Diego.”

  “Do you have her address?”

  The eyes in their net of wrinkles turned to Wager. “Don’t do that, Gabe. Don’t go near her—don’t make Scorvelli even think of her. Por favor. I’m asking you, Gabe. Tony-O is asking, as a favor!”

  He gazed back into the old man’s worried eyes at the plea he saw there. In the old days, the jefe did not beg; he ordered. But even if those days were gone, Wager did not feel good at hearing the note of pleading in Tony-O’s voice, because his loss was Wager’s, too. And what more could the girl tell him? Whatever it might be, it wouldn’t be as much as this old man was worth to Wager.

  “All right, Jefe.”

  “Gracias, hijo mio.”

  But Wager still didn’t have Bernie Chavez, and he still did not have a killer for Frank Covino.

  He dreamed of a man in a beret and a long coat. Wager stood in a line of people waiting for something and this figure came looking for him. Even among a thousand other people, Wager knew that the faceless shape in the beret and coat was looking for him and no matter who Wager hid behind or how he twisted, he would have to hold his spot in line until sooner or later the figure would see him. And it did and came straight toward him, a towering shadow that leaned forward and beckoned and opened the coat slowly to show a skull where the groin should be. The back of the skull had a hole shattered through the bone and as Wager strained away yet stared, the skull gained color and became the back of Frank Covino’s head and the swarm of flies began to swirl and pull him forward into the suffocating stickiness of exploded brains until Wager heaved himself out of tangled, binding sleep with a hoarse shout.

  Below his partly open bedroom window, the city was quiet with Sunday morning. From somewhere near downtown rang the wind-tossed notes of electronic chimes, and across his still-sweating skin the morning breeze brushed like a light, cool feather. It would be nice if every day were a Sunday morning. It would be nice if there were no such things as nightmares—either in the world of sleep or in the world of wake. But then it wouldn’t be this world, Wager knew. Father Shannon—the short, sandy-haired priest who didn’t like Hispanos or blacks—used to tell them what the world was like. Wager could remember sitting during mass as a little boy, suffering through the endless Hail Marys and Creeds and Affirmations and then the even longer sermon, when the stubby priest would talk about the virtues of affliction visited on the dark corners of the soul, of the world, of humanity’s skin. So the darker people had to try harder, pray harder, suffer more. Their faith would receive the stronger test, but their reward would be just as great. Which, to Wager, didn’t seem quite fair. But so secretly that he didn’t say it aloud even to himself, Wager was glad he was half Anglo and so would suffer only half as much. Less than the Hispanos, who teased him and called him a coyote; maybe even as little as the Anglos, who called him half-breed.

  Father Shannon had told them to accept, and they did—or said they did—going to mass, observing the sacraments, confessing, and doing the penances handed out by Father Shannon or the more popular Father Richter, whose nice deep voice spoke an impressively pure Castillano that his parishioners could only half follow. But more popular or not, Father Richter, like Father Shannon, saw this world as nothing more than a mild form of Purgatory shot through, here and there, with the miraculous light of God’s Love, which hinted at the glories of Heaven awaiting the faithful.

  Wager had long since lost any hope
of those glories, but the priests’ vision of this world stayed with him.

  He padded into the bathroom and woke up under a cool shower, washing away sleep, trying to wash away the chill of that nightmare but only succeeding in pushing it off toward the distant edge of consciousness. Carefully, he shaved his chin and around the thick mustache, and in the kitchen, began chopping vegetables and cheese for his favorite, a Marine Corps omelet. Perhaps the priests had been right, and this was a world where humanity was punished for sins unremembered and committed in some previous life or on some other planet. Wager had seen enough people who tortured themselves and others as well, enough people who ripped into each other for things they did not really want and for reasons they never understood. Perhaps that perception lay at the bottom of his disgust with those who wrote or believed things like It Was Never Me: they expected to be born into heaven, and when they found that they weren’t, they neither served what little good there was, nor offered sympathy to anyone but themselves. Parents had betrayed them or politics had betrayed them, even civilization or life itself had betrayed them, and the only thing left was to blame and whine and write books for other whiners.

  Rinsing his dish and stacking it in the small washer, he poured another cup of twice-boiled coffee and, before remembering, started planning on an afternoon of Sunday eating and drinking in the expanse of the Frontier’s half-empty dining room. But there would be no more of those. And he remembered something else: he had promised to have supper with Max and his wife. That really was not what he wanted to do; he could barely stomach the occasional family meals at his mother’s, with their echoes of old conflict and their tangles of promises assumed, and unvoiced accusations for failures to heed those promises. No one ever said “I told you so”—except his sister, of course—but the phrase lay just behind their conversations, and the more they realized that it no longer made a difference to Wager, the closer it came to expression. But Max’s dinner would be different. Max’s dinner would have to be different because he wasn’t family, and besides, it was too late for Wager to call and back out. Wager told himself that there would be none of those threads of feeling and implication that defined a family meal, and he told himself there was a good possibility he could go there and enjoy it. As he gazed at the clean morning light bringing the mountains sharp and close to Denver’s western edge, Wager could really believe in the possibility of enjoying that dinner.

  The telephone pulled him in from the balcony and the book on fur trappers, which he had picked up again. It was Jesus.

  “Holy shit, Gabe. Why didn’t you tell me that Tony-O had me spotted? I thought that old man was going to kick the crap out of me!”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I got the wife and kids off to mass this morning and figured I’d go by his place and sit there awhile. Out he comes, and I follow him maybe half a block and then he turns right around and marches up to me like he’s in a parade or something, and says if I don’t quit stepping on his shadow he’s going to fix it so I don’t step anywhere any more. He meant it, too, hombre! He didn’t have much good to say about you, either.”

  Wager sighed. “I don’t guess he did.” He had done it now. Another screw-up, and as far as Tony-O was concerned, Wager’s name belonged on urinal walls—low, near the floor, where it would get splashed on. “I should have called you last night, Jesus. He picked you up yesterday afternoon and he spotted me last night. I should have called you.” Now there would be more apologies—if the old man would even let Wager get close enough to mouth them. Because he would think that Wager, by keeping Jesus on him, had called him a liar; and the chances were good that the jefe would take no apologies at all.

  “Well, I sure left him alone. I mean, there was no sense me hanging on after that, right?”

  “That’s so, Jesus. It was my fault, not yours.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess everybody screws the goose sometime. I know I do once in a while. But not too often. Say, you remember Nihisi—the guy Tony-O met at the Foxtail?”

  “Yes.”

  “His address is 950 East Fourteenth. It was in the phone book and I went over and asked around, and it’s the same dude I know, all right. And the other guy—this Anglo—his name’s Arnie Alquist. I don’t know where he lives, but I got where he works.”

  Life’s little surprises! “Where’s that?”

  “Let’s see .… I got it written down here .… Information Resources Corporation. The Columbine Building on Seventeenth. Room 1008.”

  “Who told you this, Jesus?”

  “Well, after Tony-O landed on me with both feet like that, I got to thinking about it and it made me pissed, you know? I mean, it’s a free country; I got a right to walk down the street just like he does, right? Anyway, I went back to the Foxtail and asked the bartender about those guys. He had a business card that this Alquist guy gave him.”

  “Why’d he give the bartender a card?”

  “I told you, hombre. That place is for queers, but they got strict rules—no feelies, one at a time in the crapper, things like that. They don’t want to get busted, so everything’s kept real polite, you know? Anyway, people are always asking the bartender, ‘Who’s this guy?’ ‘Who’s that guy?’ and he kind of runs a dating service. He thought I was—you know—one of them. But guess what that son of a bitch said? He said I shouldn’t bother; I’m not Alquist’s type, he said. Hell, I don’t want to be his type, but the son of a bitch didn’t have to say something like that, did he?”

  In the early afternoon, the glare of the sun drove Wager from his small balcony, and he once more gave up on the fur trappers, who by now had moved into the Columbia River system and were dueling with the British. But the sun wasn’t the real cause. It was as if he had not fully wakened from that nightmare of a skull flasher, with its lingering unease. An unease amplified by the thought of Tony-O’s anger, by the feeling of loose threads that he had not yet tugged. Finally, he made up his mind and went to the telephone to call Records and ask for vital statistics—the name of the man who married Anita Ojala sometime between 1962 and 1964. After leaving Jesus for Tony-O to find this morning, he wouldn’t get in any worse with the old man for talking to his granddaughter.

  The police person said it would take a while because it was Sunday, and she was right. Almost two hours passed before she called back. “An Anita Rodriguez Ojala married Llewellyn D. Rogers on September 11, 1963. We’ve only got two other Ojalas being married during those years, Detective Wager. And none of them an Anita. It’s not a very common name, is it?”

  Wager agreed that it wasn’t and then asked her to find out if the San Diego police could provide a telephone number or address for Llewellyn and Anita Rogers. That request took less time, but when the police person called back, she apologized anyway. “They didn’t live right in San Diego, Detective Wager. It’s near Chula Vista, and the number’s area 714-792-2528.”

  The number rang three times and a girl answered; Wager asked for Jeannette.

  “This is she.” The puzzled tone said she did not recognize the caller’s voice.

  “I’m Detective Wager of the Denver Police Department, miss. Are you the granddaughter of Antonio Ojala?”

  “Yes! Has something happened to him?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s fine. Did you work in Denver not too long ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re trying to find an acquaintance of your grandfather, a Bernie Chavez. Did he ever mention that name to you?”

  “Chavez? Gee, not that I remember. I didn’t see Gramps too often, though.”

  “Didn’t he visit you regularly at the office supply place?”

  “Office supply? I didn’t work at an office supply place. Boy, Gramps sure gets things mixed up!”

  “Where did you work?”

  “At Information Resources Corporation. The same people I work for now. They had a computer operator’s job here, so I moved back.”

  Wager yanked his notebook from his shirt pocket and t
urned to the last entry to verify what he already knew. “Was that in the Columbine Building?”

  “Yes. Right downtown, smog and all.”

  “Didn’t your grandfather visit you there?”

  “Once or twice. But that’s all, because the boss didn’t like people coming to the office. We have a lot of regulations like that.”

  “What kind of business does the corporation do?”

  A tinge of caution came into her voice. “It’s a big company—kind of new. We store and retrieve information from companies and agencies all over the world. A lot of it’s general, but it’s never been centralized before, and we have these special indexes designed for quick retrieval. Anybody anywhere in the world can call up and get what they want to know.”

  “Does the company handle confidential stuff?”

  “Sure. But you have to have a coded clearance to call for that. That’s the Special Section, and I don’t know much about that. I think it’s mostly research and development information, financial information, that kind of material. I’m sure the sales staff could tell you a lot more about that than I can.”

  And where there was a need for secrecy and codes, there was an opportunity for someone to make money. Possibly very much money. “I guess some of the companies using the service are pretty big.”

  “Oh, sure! But we have a lot of smaller companies, too, that don’t want to spend the money on equipment and programming. If they get big enough and want to set up their own retrieval system, they can buy their tapes from us, but most don’t.”

  “Have you heard any talk of the company changing ownership?”

  “Well, Gramps mentioned something once—he asked me about it, anyway. And I’ve heard some talk out here. But I’m sure that’s all it is.”

  “I think I know somebody who works for I.R.C.—Arnie Alquist. Did you know him?”