Speak for the Dead

by Rex Burns

  “Maybe next time.” Wager showed his badge and the photograph. “Can you tell me if this woman’s ever been here?”

  The man glanced around the foyer, empty this late on a Wednesday, and then tilted the glossy sheet beneath the low bulb on the reception stand. “Very attractive. She does look kind of familiar… .” The French accent had disappeared.

  Wager read his hesitation. “She’s a homicide victim and I’m trying to find out as much as I can about her.”

  A small wrinkle came and went above the man’s nose. “If she was here, it was quite a while ago.”

  “About four months? And before that, she came a lot of times?”

  The man glanced up with faint surprise, then shrugged; it wasn’t his problem. “Yes. Maybe two dozen times over a year or so.”

  “With the same person?”

  “Yes. I suppose you know who it was.”

  “You tell me.”

  Another shrug. “Mr. Pitkin. He brings his friends here quite often.”

  “Did they ever come with anybody else?”

  “Mr. Pitkin and one of his friends? Never. He likes that table over there.” He discreetly pointed to a dim corner alcove where the glow of a single candle threw two faint shadows on the wall. Only from the kitchen door could anyone tell whom the shadows belonged to.

  “Is he there now?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s he brought lately?”

  “A blonde. A big one with a very nice figure.” He handed the photograph back. “You … don’t believe that Mr. Pitkin … is involved?”

  “It’s not likely.” He could have added his thought that the unlikely often happened.

  A sigh of relief. “I’m glad of that.”

  “Why?”

  “He never seemed like somebody who could—well, do something like that. And he’s a good customer—not a big tipper, but a steady one. He’s never caused a disturbance. A real gentleman.”

  “How long has he been coming here?”

  “Four or five years now.”

  “With how many different friends?”

  “Who keeps count? He has taste, though; they’re all tres bonne.”

  Ross and Devereaux had gone home by the time Wager reached the homicide office. He glanced at the empty twenty-four-hour board and headed for the police lab where Baird was just putting his coat on a hanger.

  “Good God, Wager. Do you live here?”

  “I hear you got a report for me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I haven’t had time to look yet.” He deliberately placed his coat on a rack and went to the file cabinet. “Right. Here’s a real nice report and a fat envelope, just for you.”

  Wager carried them back to his desk like a dog with a bone and started down the itemized lists. He was finishing the section describing the contents of the vacuum bag when knuckles rapped once on the doorframe of the office. A uniformed sergeant leaned in. “You’re Gabe Wager, aren’t you?”

  Wager vaguely remembered the face from somewhere in District 2—maybe the Traffic Division—but he still needed help from the man’s name tag: I. Meyer. Beneath that little chrome rectangle was a newer one: Staff Inspection Bureau. It was a two-year assignment that most experienced officers got and few of them liked; the duty was to make certain that fellow cops did their jobs. “Hello, Irv.” Wager held out a hand. “Long time.”

  “I thought that was you, but I wasn’t sure. Putting on a little weight, eh, Gabe?”

  He wasn’t. But Irv was one of those people who had to say something cute to put themselves at ease.

  “The—ah—bulldog asked me to drop by. To see how things are going.”

  “Why didn’t he come himself?” Wager asked.

  “He needs his sleep; he’s getting old, Gabe, like all of us. And he’s got a touch of the flu. There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “What’s he want you to snoop at?”

  “Hey, nothing like that. Just routine crap—you know how it goes.”

  Wager knew that it wasn’t routine for a captain to ask the S.I.B. to check up on an officer. “He has a reason, Irv. What is it?”

  “The reason is he doesn’t feel like getting out of bed at one o’clock in the morning. You’re on the graveyard shift, you know. Hey, that’s pretty good—the graveyard shift of homicide!”

  Wager waited.

  “Anyway, he just asked me to ask you—very politely, and only because I was coming down here anyway—how things are going on that Crowell case.”

  Wager thought so. He pointed to the desk top covered with a stack of canceled checks and papers spilled from the laboratory envelope. “The state’s getting its money’s worth.”

  “Don’t it always. And then some. So I can tell him things are moving O.K.?”

  “As smooth as Ex-Lax.” His flare of anger faded as quickly as it came; Meyer didn’t like the job he had to do. No cop would. “There’s fresh coffee in the machine—help yourself.”

  “I’d like to, but I got to get out and get seen.” A pause told Wager he wasn’t through yet.

  “What the hell else did Doyle want?”

  “Ah—he wanted me to tell you—very politely—that if the case was hung up, not to waste much time on it. Your new partner’s due back on the fifth of November, and—ah—the bulldog thought maybe since nothing’s turned up yet, you might file the case until you get a little—ah—help.”

  Wager held himself rigid against the desk. “That’s very thoughtful of him, Irv. I’ll do my best not to catch the killer.”

  “Doyle didn’t mean it that way!” Meyer rubbed at the hairline far beneath his hat. “He was just a little worried that maybe you might waste time on this when you’re needed on the street. Or maybe get in too much of a hurry and use some procedures that were—ah—unorthodox. You know how he feels about narcotics procedures.”

  “I’m not in narcotics. I’m in homicide.”

  “I know that! But the bulldog—well …”

  “He has already told me, Irv. Twice.”

  “All I’m doing is my job, all right?” It was Meyer’s turn to get pissed because he didn’t like what the bulldog made him do, and if Wager had not been an ex-narc, he wouldn’t be doing it.

  “Fine. And I’ll do mine. Sergeant,” said Wager.

  “Fine. Detective.”

  The S.I.B. man’s heels smacked against the tiles of the hallway.

  Screw Doyle and Meyer both. Wager couldn’t decide which he disliked more, Doyle’s nervousness about his narcotics background, or Meyer’s pussyfooted way of trying to do a job. Screw both of them. He sipped once at his coffee to burn out the bilious taste of his anger and then turned back to the papers on his desk.

  The canceled checks were in numerical order, beginning with number 237 and dated January 2, 1976. It was to Conoco Oil Company for $14.19. He leafed through the slips, noting a monthly payment to Famous Faces for $50, occasional payments to High Country Profiles ranging from $26.23 to $131.11. He counted five of those checks, the last dated in September. Other payments were for rent, for “cash”—usually in twenty-dollar amounts—to King Soopers or Safeway, to half a dozen department or clothing stores. Something about those store names—something half familiar in those names; Wager thumbed through the appointment book that was becoming as well known to him as his own notebook. There: three sets of initials that fit three of the names on the checks—”A.I.,” Ardree Innis; “F.W.,” Fashion Wear; “E,” Emporium. The only Ardree Innis in the telephone book was a boldface entry repeated in the yellow pages: “Exquisite Fashions for Women.”

  Wager counted the cryptic entries in the Crowell appointment book. At first they came one or two a week, then toward November as many as six, sometimes two or three a day. Fashion shows! Somewhere along the way, he had read the initials as men’s names, and to find out that they weren’t made him feel curiously better and worse—better about the name of the victim, worse about losing a possible lead on who killed her.

  He dug t
hrough the canceled checks for the returned deposit slips and monthly statements. Seldom did she leave more than $100 in the bank at the end of a month, though the September statement noted a balance of $114.51. If the fashion shows brought enough money, then she covered her known expenses—without blackmailing, without whoring. And still without a motive for getting killed.

  Turning to the other papers in the small stack, he found the title to her car, the 1976 license number matching the number of his notebook; a call to the Traffic Division told him what he suspected—that the car had not yet been spotted.

  Beneath a collection of assorted receipts lay a letter from her parents tucked into an opened envelope. Among the lines of pale blue ink, erect parentheses singled out items that might have been answered. Wager hoped so, because the parentheses brought into focus the image that he had been forming: that the girl ordered her life as straight as a ruled line to whatever goal she wanted. She was dedicated, orderly, persistent. Wager liked those traits. And she had an honesty he could understand, too; Pitkin had brought that out. Yet somehow she carried those traits to someone who had not liked them—someone who hated them enough to kill her. That someone murdered her not for any apparent threat she might hold, but simply because she wasn’t what the killer wanted her to be.

  Wager’s pencil tapped gently but insistently on the fiber blotter that held the little stack of papers. There was something like motive. A crazy one, maybe, and no factual evidence led to it. Nowhere in Doyle’s procedure manual would Wager find support for the feeling. And even if he located a suspect, he sure as hell couldn’t get near a courtroom with just that feeling. But it lay there in his mind like a stone under sand—he could feel it in those hazy thoughts, if they could be called thoughts. It was there: a growing sense of what the murderer was like because he was beginning to know what the victim was like. Just as he had seen in his mind’s eye the shadowy figure squat in the dark conservatory to stare at the head, so now he could almost name the motive, almost say what would make someone kill this girl.

  “Any homicide detective.” His radio woke him to the two-toned wall of the office. “Any homicide detective.”

  “X-eighty-five.”

  “We have a ten-thirty-one in the alley behind 1706 East Colfax. Shots have been fired; squad in vicinity.”

  Crime in progress. Always something in progress—he wouldn’t put it past Doyle to set up some action just to make sure Wager was on the street. “Ten-Four.”

  Quickly gathering the papers, he slipped them into the laboratory envelope, pausing when one near the bottom caught his eye. It was a light tan brochure that opened into eight panels and described the history and holdings of the Denver Botanic Gardens.

  CHAPTER 11

  HIS ALARM BUZZED at 1:30 P.M. and his hand groped for the snooze button, then stopped as he remembered: Thursday—one day less. Usually, the faint click of the radio woke him to turn off the station before his mind was invaded by the insistent drawling voice of the afternoon disk jockey with its heavy struggle to be witty, persuasive, and hip. There were better radio stations, but none that woke him more quickly; and when two minutes of that voice failed its duty, the buzzer sounded. Today’s was third-degree weariness, and he began to think that the eight-to-four shift next month would seem like a vacation. Maybe Ross was right about letting the case work itself out. For the night shift, anyway. His hand slid over the pillow with its lingering spot of warmth. To hell with Ross—cases didn’t work themselves out; someone had to work them. He stumped into the kitchen to start the pot of coffee and chop onions and sausage for a Marine Corps omelette.

  While he ate, he laid out the four hours left in the normal working day: first, Crowell’s last known job—the modeling agency; then, the Botanic Gardens—that damned key, and now a brochure that said she might have visited it while she was alive. He made the first call after stacking the dishes in a dishwasher that had been too small for Lorraine but was the right size for one user.

  “New Faces Modeling Agency!”

  “I’d like to talk to Miss Jeri Roberts, please.”

  “I’ll see if she’s in! Who may I say is calling?”

  “Detective Gabriel Wager of the Denver Police Department.”

  “Oh! One moment, please!”

  It was more than a moment, but worth it to clear his ear of hot, breathless eagerness. “This is Jeri Roberts.”

  Wager identified himself again. “I’d like to talk with you about a girl who worked for you—Miss Rebecca Jean Crowell. She also used the name Tommie Lee.”

  “Oh, yes. I saw that in the paper this morning. It’s awful.”

  Denver’s morning paper was the Rocky Mountain News; Gargan’s paper, the Post, was an afternoon sheet. Some rival had beat him to the story, and Wager couldn’t help a tiny smile. “Are you free now? Can I come over?”

  “Certainly.”

  The office wasn’t what Wager expected; he imagined that modeling agencies featured shiny chrome-and-glass rooms with furniture somehow shaped like the smoothly curved letters seen in mod advertisements. Instead, the New Faces Agency was in a converted two-story home on East Eighth Avenue, complete with lace curtains and a fireplace that held the marks of real soot. The receptionist’s desk was just inside the entry.

  “Hello! You must be the detective!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He was relieved that he didn’t look like a male model, then wondered why it was so easy to tell he was a detective.

  “Wow! Have a seat! I’ll tell Miss Roberts you’re here!”

  He wandered into the living room and stared at the wall of pictures filled with posturing men, women, and children. Behind him, the receptionist pushed a button on an intercom and breathed, “He’s here!”

  A door opened and a short woman with cropped black hair strode out quickly; she shook hands like a man. “I’m Jeri Roberts. Come in the office.” It was not an invitation.

  She stood beside one of the old-fashioned floor-to-ceiling windows with her back to Wager and stared at the dark red of the brick wall next door. Then she blew her nose and took three quick steps to the desk. A jerking movement thumped a bottle of Jim Beam Green Label on the littered desk. “Sit down. Drink?”

  “No, thanks.” Wager had bought the News on the way over. The brief article identified Rebecca Jean Crowell and said that last week her body had been found in one place, her head in another. It did not mention Tommie Lee or the New Faces Agency.

  She poured a three-finger drink into a tumbler and splashed a touch of water on top of it. In two gulps, it was gone. “You wanted to ask questions.” Most people would have explained a drink like that: the death was such a shock, Rebecca was such a dear friend. But Miss Roberts only poured another one and squeaked the cork into the bottle. “Go ahead.”

  “How long did you know Miss Crowell?”

  She leaned back in the swivel chair and lifted down a thin volume from a short bookshelf filled with similar black bindings. Each had a name in gold leaf on the spine. The first page gave the information: “Since August 8, 1975. She enrolled with my affiliate, the Famous Faces Modeling School on that date. She had her first employment for us in February of this year.”

  “How long has she used the name Tommie Lee?”

  “Since we put her file together,” a rapid peck on the book with a blunt fingernail. “‘Crowell’ just didn’t have it, and ‘Rebecca’ sounded too Jewish.” Wager thought that he hid surprise, but she caught it. “A number of our customers equate Jewishness with New York. That works against a local model unless she’s top of the line. They like to think we have enough local talent.”

  “Don’t we?”

  “Some of the boys are all right. But local girls move like cows. Most of my girls come from somewhere else.”

  “I thought the model stood still for pictures and such.”

  “Pictures? Photography? There’s not much in that line out here yet. The local money’s still in fashion shows.”

  “She did a lot
of those?”

  “As many as I could book her for.”

  “Was she good at it?”

  “Not very. But she was one of my hardest workers and getting a little better all the time.”

  “So she could make a living at it?”

  “Not a good one. Cigarette?” Wager said no; Roberts waved the match out with a snap of her wrist. “Goddamned few models make a good living in this town. If you want to make it as a model, you go to Chicago or San Francisco or New York. Especially New York.”

  “Was that Miss Crowell’s plan?”

  “That was her plan, yes.”

  “But?”

  The small head gave a sharp shake. “She’d never make it there. I told her that.”

  “Why not?”

  “By the time she learned what so many others were born with, she’d be too old. Hell, she was twenty-three already.”

  “I heard that more than anything in the world, she wanted to be a model.”

  “Most people don’t get what they want more than anything in the world.” The cork squeaked out of the bottle. “I think perhaps Rebecca was a little insane on the subject. It happens.”

  “What did she say when you told her that?”

  “Nothing. She simply didn’t believe me. I said she’d be better off in Denver doing local stuff because the competition could chew her up anywhere else. You have to understand, Mr. Wager, this is one very tough business.”

  He believed her. “According to her appointment book, she had more and more fashion shows.”

  “Yes—the advance shows for spring begin as early as October. Then comes the Christmas business—retail customers—which starts around Thanksgiving. She was getting her share of that, and there’s some money in it around here. But in a bigger city she’d have been squeezed out of that market, too.” The head shook once. “She just did not believe me.”