by Rex Burns
“Hi—didn’t see you come in.” She smiled professionally.
That was because she sat beneath the television set like a cat watching a goldfish bowl. “Do you know Dominick Mauro?”
“Nick? Sure—he’s right over there.” The flabby arm pointed to a figure dim in the glow of a cigarette machine and settled comfortably at one of the few tables.
“Can you tell me if he was in here on the nineteenth? That’s two Tuesdays ago.”
The woman peered at Wager; her frizzy hair was bleached yellow like thick smoke and jiggled when she jerked her head. “Maybe you better ask Nick himself.”
Wager showed his badge. “I’m asking you.”
“Oh. Listen, this here’s a family place, you know? We got our neighbors come in here. There ain’t been no kind of trouble and we don’t want none.”
Wager smiled. “Then answer the question.”
“You’ll have to ask George. He’s my husband. He worked all that week.”
“All right. Where’s George?”
“Goose-hunting. He left yesterday and won’t be back until Sunday night.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Nebraska. Up near Scotts Bluff. We got relatives got a ranch near there.”
Two or three faces had turned down the bar to see what was keeping the woman from filling beer glasses.
“How about a draw,” said Wager.
She pulled it and almost dropped the wet glass as she set it on the bar. “That’s fifty cents.”
Wager had the coin ready. “Thanks.”
She turned back to the television picture where now the black man wore bandages and shouted angrily at a white police chief. Wager went to Mauro’s table and sat without a word.
The thick-bodied man squinted at him. “What the hell you doing here?”
“Asking about your activities on Tuesday, October 19th.”
“The hell you are!”
“You spent part of the morning helping your landlord fix his roses. Around noon you left. You came back home about four. Where’d you go?”
Mauro’s mouth hung slightly open. “I’ll be goddamned. You really have been poking your goddamned nose into my life, ain’t you?”
“Where’d you go that day?”
“Maybe I don’t want to tell you!”
“That’s your privilege.” Wager smiled for the second time in five minutes; he was beginning to feel like Mr. Sunshine. “If you’re sure you want it that way.”
Caution came into Mauro’s voice. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean if I don’t find out from you, I start asking all your friends. I tell everybody you know that I’m a cop and that I’m interested in your whereabouts on the day that a murder was committed.”
“Murder? You think I had something—? I didn’t even know that cunt!”
Most people would have said they’d never seen her or never met her. “Your friends will believe that, won’t they?” He aimed a thumb at the bar.
Mauro glanced at the woman bartender. When she saw his eyes, her face jerked back to the television set. “You sons of bitches ain’t changed in twenty years,” he said.
“But you have. You’ve paid your debt to society; now you’re an honest citizen. What’s an honest citizen like you got to hide?”
“You ain’t getting me on no murder!”
“Somebody put that head in the conservatory, Mauro. Somebody with a key.”
Even in the dim light, Wager saw the worry gather in wrinkles around the man’s eyes. “It wasn’t me, goddamn you! There’s lots of keys to that place!”
“No. There’s not. There’s six. I know the whereabouts of five. You are number six.”
Mauro licked at his lower lip and then drained the beer glass. “I … I went—let’s see, I went to the grocery store. And then took the groceries home. And then—Christ, I can’t remember! That was almost two weeks ago. What the fuck were you doing two weeks ago?”
“Where’d you go after the grocery store?”
“Let’s see… . Cheesman Park! I drove over to the park and walked around a while—fed the ducks.”
“Did you meet anybody?”
Mauro looked up. “You mean did I meet somebody who’d remember I was there?”
“Yes.”
“I bought some peanuts from that guy with the push wagon—you know the one. He might remember. Maybe.”
“Then where’d you go?”
“I drove back home. Then I came over here for a beer.”
“What time was that?”
“I don’t know! Mid-afternoon. Ask George—we talked about goose-hunting. He was going goose-hunting and we talked about that.”
“What time did you leave here?”
“I guess four. Maybe five.”
“What’d you do that night?”
“I don’t know… . I watched TV, I guess. I can’t remember if I came back here or not.”
“Did you go anywhere else?”
“No. I’d remember that. I don’t remember doing nothing special, so I must of just watched TV or come here.”
“What kind of car do you have?”
“A Chevy Impala—’72.”
Wager caught the woman peeking their way again and signaled for two beers. She drew them and seemed relieved that he and Mauro were now good drinking buddies. “Who’s the Elton the place is named after?” Wager asked her.
“Ain’t nobody, really.” Her heavy lips lifted in another professional smile. “I’m Mary and my husband’s George, and our last name’s Smith. We wanted something with a little more class than that, but still had a neighborly sound.”
“You picked a good name.”
The lips smiled thanks, and she went back to the cash register and the television.
Wager drank in silence; Mauro stared down at the strings of bubbles rising in his beer. “You’re sure you never saw the dead woman before?” Wager asked.
“Yes, I’m sure!” But the worry still hung around the man like a bad smell.
CHAPTER 15
WHEN WAGER REPORTED for duty at midnight on Sunday, the twenty-four-hour board held a lab report of the complete inventory of Crowell’s apartment, a note from the motor vehicles section saying the Crowell car had been found, and a clipping of Gargan’s article with Wager’s name and the adjectives circled in red pencil by Ross. Wager dropped that into the trash can. There was also a short note from Doyle, and he saved that for last.
The Mustang had been found locked and apparently abandoned in the 3600 block of Irving Street in northwest Denver. It had been ticketed once for obstructing the street cleaner’s weekly tour down that side of the pavement; after the second ticket, it was towed to the police garage and impounded. Somehow the officer writing the tickets did not know—or care—that the vehicle was being sought; it turned up during a routine inventory of the police compound. Wager knew the area where the car was left, a mixture of small houses and older apartments; there weren’t enough garages, and many residents parked on the streets. No one would notice one more car. Searching over the city-county map with its color-coded pins showing clusters of various crimes, he found Irving Street, and yes, three streets away a major bus line ran downtown. Crowell could have left the car there herself; that was a possibility and he would take her photograph through the neighborhood to see if anyone recognized the girl. But he didn’t think they would. His guess was that the killer drove her car to a place where he could leave it without attracting attention, then caught a bus downtown—a taxi would be too easy to trace through the dispatcher’s records. He also guessed that the car wouldn’t tell them a thing, but he dialed the lab number anyway. Baird answered.
“This is Gabe Wager, Fred. I’d like you to go over a vehicle down in the compound. A 1970 Ford Mustang, Colorado AR-3753.”
Baird repeated the description and number. “Can it wait until tomorrow? That place is darker than hell at night; I wouldn’t be able to see much.”
“Sure; I don�
�t think you’ll find anything, anyway. It’s Rebecca Crowell’s car.”
“Right—I got a good set of her prints here. We’ll see if anything else shows.”
Wager pulled her file from the drawer marked “ACTIVE: CURRENT CASES UNSOLVED” and read the pathologist’s report one more time. Then he called Baird back again.
“Did the F.B.I. ever send an answer on the fibers found in the wound?”
“Wait one.”
He waited.
“Gabe? It came in two or three days ago, and somebody filed it without forwarding a copy to you. Sorry.”
“What’s it say?”
“The tests run were spectroscopy, microcrystallization, chromatography, and neutron activation analysis.”
“What did they come up with, Fred?”
“Not a hell of a lot. The fiber samples were too small to do much with, so most of the report’s inconclusive. But it’s a nylon of thin diameter, probably the kind used for underwear, nightgowns, that kind of thing. There’s another fiber trace, cotton. That corroborates the hypothesis, it says here, because many manufacturers use a blend of nylon and cotton for nightgowns, and there was no spandex, which is used in undergarments. The samples weren’t big enough to get a composition, so there’s no way to match them to any other cloth that turns up. That’s about the best they can do for us.”
“She was wearing a nightgown when she was killed?”
“Only probable; it’s safer to guess she wore only one layer of clothes in that area. But I can’t think of anything else it could have been. You can’t go into court with that, though.”
What the hell was she doing wearing a nightgown at the time of day when she was stabbed? “O.K.—read it again and let me get it down.” He jotted the basic facts in his notebook and told Baird to send him an official copy of the report, then sat staring at the papers spread across his desk. Nightgown. Wager went to the inventory of the girl’s belongings and marked off each item as he read the three-column list. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; but tugging at the edge of his mind were the things missing from the list: not one picture by Tanaka, no other photographs except those found in the portfolio, no tapes or film rushes from High Country—maybe she kept only those pictures which could help her, and tossed the rest away; from what he knew, and liked about her, she didn’t treat herself with much sentimentality. Nor did the list mention nightgowns. Underpants, brassieres, a robe, but not one nightgown or even a pair of pajamas. He gathered the papers back into related piles and clipped them together, replacing the now thick folder in the file drawer. She had driven somewhere, had a little booze, put on a nightgown, and then got stabbed. But, goddamn it, no evidence of sex. And whoever killed her tossed her body away like garbage but treated her head like an idol. It was not as crazy as it seemed. Weird, yes; but insane, no, because there was some kind of motive and there was a fear of consequences. Wager slammed the drawer shut and thought of the worried look in Mauro’s eyes.
The last item from the twenty-four-hour board was the note from Doyle: “See me in the morning before you leave.” He had a good idea what that was about. Slipping his radio pack into his jacket pocket, he dropped that note into the trash can, too. Before he saw the bulldog or anybody else, he had his eight hours of duty to put in.
Doyle was waiting when he ended his tour Monday morning. “You got a minute, Wager?”
It wasn’t a question. He followed the chief into the cubicle crammed with files, duty charts, statistics, pamphlets, and reviews, and its own white plastic coffee maker.
“I read that Post article on the Crowell case,” said Doyle.
“Yes, sir.”
“The reporter—what’s his name? Gargan?—seemed to know a lot about it.”
“He asked me some questions, but most of it he found out on his own.”
“He also found out you’re Jesus Christ come back, didn’t he?”
“I didn’t see his story before he filed,” said Wager. “And I didn’t do him any special favors. I answered what questions I could just like the procedure manual says to.”
Doyle poured himself a cup of coffee. “I also read something else—Meyer’s report. He said you were bent out of shape that I asked him to talk to you.”
He could imagine how the S.I.B. man wrote it up, and he could have made an excuse. But he didn’t. “Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
Wager wondered if that was a serious question. “Putting the S.I.B. on me? That doesn’t show much confidence, does it, Captain?”
“Confidence isn’t something I give. It’s got to be earned.”
Which was something that went both ways. “My work’s good in every division I’ve been in.”
“But you’ve never been in my division before. And this is your first homicide case. And it’s one which is not routine. And, by God, when I delegate authority to someone—S.I.B. or otherwise—it’s my authority they’ve got.” He paused, but Wager said nothing; there was no sense wasting words. “Did you talk to this reporter before or after you talked to Meyer?”
“Both. Gargan’s been on the story since the beginning, and I saw him Thursday afternoon at the Botanic Gardens.” What the hell was Doyle after now? “Why?”
“Here’s why. On one day, Meyer tells you to let the case wait for your partner to get back. On the next day, this reporter’s telling the world that you’re the best thing since Sherlock Holmes and that you’ve got the case sewed up. The thought did cross my mind, Wager, that maybe you used this reporter to make sure you kept the case.”
It took a minute for that to sink in, and when his words came, they had a very strong Spanish inflection. “Meyer, he told me you wanted to know how the case was going—that you wanted to be sure it wasn’t a waste of time and interfering with my other duties. In my judgment, Captain, and as the officer of record, the case is going all right. Not good, but all right. As for that crap in the newspapers, Captain, I don’t play those games.”
The bulldog looked at him for a long moment. “I’m glad to hear it. Because that kind of glory-hunting tears a division apart. And I won’t stand for it. I want a team, not a collection of self-seeking individuals.”
Wager didn’t give a damn for teams, but he knew what Doyle meant. And he generally agreed with the chief. Cops had to work together—there were too few of them not to. But a man also felt pride in doing a little better than anybody else wearing the same label. “Yes, sir.”
Doyle motioned to the coffee maker on its stand with the several cups upside down beside it. “You want some coffee? I want you to fill me in on where the case is now.”
It was a cautious peace offer. Wager accepted just as cautiously: “Black.”
He left the bulldog’s office some forty-five minutes later with Doyle’s last sentence in his ears: “The case is still yours, Wager. But don’t take chances with any part of it. Your partner reports back in four days, and you’ll have some help then.”
Wager stopped off at his desk to make one call; Lisa Dahl answered, “Rocky Mountain Tax & Title Service.”
“This is Detective Wager. Can I talk to William Pitkin?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t an old friend’s voice. “Just a moment.”
“This is Bill Pitkin.”
“Can you tell me what kind of nightgown or pajamas Rebecca Crowell used?” It was something that still bothered him.
“I never saw her wear any—and not just because … well, you know.”
“Did she sleep naked?”
“I do recall her saying that she didn’t like to wear anything to bed because she rolled and tossed and got twisted up. We—ah—sort of joked about it.”
“Thanks.”
Pitkin didn’t hang up. “You didn’t tell me that she was the one who had been decapitated.”
“That’s right. I didn’t tell you.”
“The reporter said the funeral would be in Kansas City. Is that right?”
“I think so.”
“I see. Well, that
’s really too far to go. But don’t you think that the office should send flowers?”
The office should send. “That’s up to you, Pitkin. You and Lisa Dahl.”
The man’s silence was brief. “I suppose it is. Goodbye.”
Wager drove to the Botanic Gardens and parked in the employee lot. The gabby groundskeeper with the bifocals was the only person in Greenhouse 1.
“Is Nick Mauro around?”
“You’re the policeman! How’s things going on that murder case?”
“I’m still working on it, Mr. Duncan. Is Mauro around?”
“That was a terrible thing. I read that story in the paper. I don’t know that the reporter should of put in a picture of the conservatory, though; Mr. Sumner sure didn’t like that. But that poor girl. I feel real sorry for her parents. They seem like such nice folks.”
“Yes, sir. Is—?”
“Nick? No. It’s a bit early yet. He should be here soon if you want to wait, though.”
Wager should have remembered; maybe he was getting old—or tired—or maybe there was no difference. “No, thanks. Will you tell him that I was asking for him?”
“If that’s what you want, I sure will.”
Mauro’s apartment was empty, or at least no one answered his knock; Wager tore a blank page from his little book and slipped a note under the door: “Gabe Wager dropped by.” He thought of going past Elton’s Place but decided against it. For now, it was enough just to leave messages; besides, he was too goddamned tired.
His shower over, Wager was dressing for the next tour of duty when the telephone rang. Gargan’s voice asked if he had seen Friday’s story on the Crowell murder.
“I did.”
“Ross says you didn’t like it much.”
Wager almost told him exactly how much, but Gargan’s voice was poised to laugh. “The first time I read it, I thought you laid it on kind of thick. But when I read it again, it didn’t seem too bad, Gargan.”
