by Rex Burns
Sure he didn’t remember. Wager spun the pad to read over the short passage of shaky handwriting. The confession began with the familiar dictated sentences: “I have been advised of my rights and warned that anything I say might be used against me in a court of law. I make the following statement in my own hand and of my own free will.” Then Bennett’s words started: he and Tommie Lee had a photography session around noon on October 19th. They argued about her leaving, and nothing he said could make her change her mind. He wasn’t sure what happened next. He remembered seeing the knife beside the platform in the studio; he kept it around for cutting heavy paper. He remembered setting his camera down and grabbing the knife. He must have stabbed her, but he did not remember much until he kind of woke up in the darkroom and saw what he had done.
“This is all you want to say?”
The narrow shoulders lifted once and fell. “What more is there?”
There wasn’t much more that was needed, but a lot more that Wager wanted. “Sign here and put today’s date—November 3rd.” Bennett signed; then Wager signed and dated it as witness. “Was she wearing a nightgown when you stabbed her?”
Through the lines of weariness and lingering nausea, Bennett was surprised. “Yes. She bought it for that session.” He massaged his crotch. “God, she was beautiful—not like that broad you saw today, but beautiful!” His gaze shifted to the brown wall of the office. “It was like that session in the conservatory. I made her beautiful. I knew it was there, and I found it.”
“What did you do with the clothes and the knife?”
“I buried them in the trash can in the alley after dark. I was scared by then. I knew what I’d done by then.”
“Why’d you put her head in the conservatory?”
Bennett’s pale eyes swiveled his way, but Wager could not tell what the photographer was looking at. “I brought her to life there. That was where I made her live!”
“You took her head to the conservatory at about two in the morning, is that right?”
The pale eyes blinked and Bennett was back now to gaze at Wager. “I don’t remember cutting it off. I just sort of woke up and looked down and she was … in the sink. So I took her to the spot where she was beautiful. I was sorry. I told her I was sorry.”
“You had a duplicate of Mauro’s key?”
“Mauro? That’s the name of the guy at the conservatory? Yes. I had one made so Tommie and I could go back… . ” He sighed. “You want all that written down, too?”
A deal was a deal, even with Mauro. “No. Why’d you dump her body in that car?”
The question took a second or two to work through Bennett’s thoughts; then his eyes turned milky with the haze of pure hate. “What fucking good was it any more!”
Doyle came in and muttered that the doctor would be by in a while.
“Were you lovers? Bennett—were you and Tommie lovers?” asked Wager.
He focused his gaze like a stiletto point on him. “What?”
“Were you and Rebecca Crowell lovers?”
“Yeah.” The photographer blinked two or three times and sucked in a deep breath. “That’s kind of funny.”
“How, funny?”
“She wasn’t worth a shit in bed. I’ve had a lot better.” Another deep breath and he turned to Doyle, explaining. “It was more than screwing. Nobody knew what she had but me. I found it—I made her live! And then she said she didn’t want to waste any more time in this town.”
“Or with you?” asked Doyle.
“She didn’t say that. But that’s what she meant.”
“Haven’t you ever left anybody?” asked Wager.
“I left them. There’s a big difference.”
Wager leaned forward, his hand rubbing gently at the hot swelling of bruised muscle in his neck. “What did she say that made you do it?”
Bennett, too, was tired and hurt. He straightened and winced against the pull of his sore groin. “You figured that out, too, didn’t you? Yeah.” He shook his head. “After all that—after that wonderful birth of life in all that greenness and heat of the garden, and then being able to re-create the same thing right there in the studio… . You really know what it was? I wanted so much for her to stay—I never before asked anybody to stay. I even begged!” Another shake of the head. “She just told me to finish the session. She said she wanted the proofs ready before she left town. And then that bitch smiled for the camera!”
Doyle grunted. “And that’s when you did it.”
Bennett looked at him and then at Wager and then at a corner of the office floor where someone had kicked a mashed cigarette butt. His voice rose in pitch and the jive talk returned. “I don’t remember exactly, man. Like I said, things got pretty fuzzy in my head about that time.” Bennett’s face lost a few of the lines that had been there a moment ago. “I must of flipped out, you know? The next thing I remember is being in the darkroom after it was all over.” He shook his head. “Man, I must of blown so far out I was in orbit!”
Innocent by reason of insanity. Wager could hear a lawyer’s voice make that plea: “Your honor, my client has freely confessed to the crime, but the evidence clearly demonstrated that the act was not premeditated, and that at the time of committing said act, Mr. Bennett was not of sound mind. Surely, your honor, the subsequent mutilation of the victim is prima facie evidence of an unbalanced state of mind.” Surely.
The prosecutor would buy that plea. It saved work, it saved the court’s time, it served justice—more or less. And, in a way, there was truth to it.
Because, as Wager thought back over what he’d learned of Rebecca Crowell and the people whose lives had mixed with hers, Bennett seemed only a small part of an insane world. And maybe even the victim shared that insanity.
“Here comes the doc,” said Doyle. “When he’s through with the prisoner, I want him to look at you.”
A uniformed officer accompanied the doctor into the office. “Is this the one? Take off your shirt, please. Let’s see how bad it is.”
“It’s not just the shirt, man.” Bennett painfully stood and began unbuttoning.
The bulldog led Wager down to his office and drew a cup of coffee from his private stock. “Here. We’ll get a warrant for the lab to go over that studio for hard evidence in case the confession’s thrown out.”
“I did not beat it out of him.”
“That’s not what the defense will say. And that’s why I want the doc to look at you, too.”
Wager should have guessed it wasn’t just because he hurt.
“I don’t know how you got a lead on Bennett, Wager. But you did all right.”
He knew that. “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t go get the big head, though. Your partner comes back the day after tomorrow, and you’ve got a lot to learn about proper procedures.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose you’ve heard about your friend Gargan?”
“No.”
“He was picked up early Tuesday morning. On a tip. Speeding, reckless driving, six counts of running a stop sign, failure to yield the right of way, driving under the influence, evading arrest, disturbance, use of filthy language, interference with an officer, resisting arrest, and threatening an officer.”
“My, my.”
“If he hadn’t been so drunk, he could have gotten off with a warning because he’s a reporter.” The bulldog looked at him. “But he started handing out all this crap about a big story and some police conspiracy to keep the press away to protect somebody important. You wouldn’t know anything about that?”
“Why should I?”
“He mentioned your name in passing.”
“We had a drink or two. I thanked him for the nice story he did on me.” Wager smiled. “And if he was that drunk, I wouldn’t trust his memory too much.”
Doyle’s lower teeth showed in what may have been a smile a little like Wager’s. “That’s what I figured.”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Gabe Wager
Novels
One
IT CAME LIKE a whiff of sewer gas on a cold night: “Do you remember that Marco Scorvelli thing? The guy that got aced nine months, maybe a year ago?”
Homicide Detective Gabriel Wager set his beer down and peered at Tony-O through the dim lights of the Frontier Bar and Grill. The lines across the old man’s face always made it hard to tell whether he was ready to smile or ready to frown. “We never got a thing on that one,” said Wager.
“Everybody in Denver knows that. But maybe I heard a little something.”
Wager raised his empty glass and held up two fingers. Rosie, rushed by the Sunday-afternoon crowd, bustled past with a row of dirty dishes on her sweating arm and nodded an answer.
“You want to tell me, Tony?”
That was the way the testy old man liked it: first you asked him if he wanted to, then he always said “Yes,” then you let him give it at his own speed. If you tried to push him, he’d tell you to go to hell.
“Yeah. But it ain’t much.”
Something where there was nothing was always much; Wager split the beer remaining in his bottle between their glasses. Marco Scorvelli had been found in his front yard by a milkman on his morning delivery. A shotgun blast hit him at the navel and angled upward to unzip his belly and spread his intestines over his new raw silk sports coat. The sawed-off shotgun, clean of prints, was left lying like a message squarely across the sidewalk; somehow Scorvelli lived long enough to crawl fifteen feet toward the front door before dying. Neither Scorvelli’s widow nor the neighbors in the surrounding split-levels reported hearing a thing. Except for the carcass of a justly suspect member of a local crime family, there was nothing to build a case on.
Rosie came back with two bottles of Coors and Tony-O waited until the head on his refill settled back below the glass’s rim before speaking.
“What I heard was the hit didn’t come from outside. It was made to look that way—the shotgun on the sidewalk and all.”
The shooting had taken place before Wager joined homicide, but the news of anything involving one of the Scorvellis went through every division of the police department faster than a list of new promotions. At the time, there was little doubt it was a gang killing; but oddly, nothing ever came after it—none of the muted, vicious squabbles over territory, none of the bloody advertisements of revenge or triumph. Marco Scorvelli had been killed for a reason, but that, like everything else in the case, remained hidden. “We figured that if it was local, it would have been followed by a little more action. We figured it was a revenge hit for something Scorvelli did in Vegas or Chicago,” said Wager.
Tony-O shrugged. “I’m only telling you what I heard, Wager. If you heard something better, then you tell me.”
Gabe let the old man have a minute or two to cool off, but Tony-O didn’t continue. “Can I ask you where you got it?”
“Sure. You can ask.” Tony-O’s tone said he might or might not answer. He studied the long neck of his beer glass, rubbing a wrinkled thumb up and down its smooth curve and watching the strings of bubbles rise like points of light from the bottom. The old man had become the neighborhood jefe about the time Wager reached nine or ten years old, and his air of power and mystery used to awe Wager and the other kids who ran up and down streets and alleys that had since disappeared into freeway interchanges, industrial parks, and a new university campus. For a long time after he grew out of short pants, Wager had felt uncomfortable calling him Tony-O instead of Mr. Ojala. But that was the way the jefe wanted it, so that was the way it was—to adults he was Tony-O, to children he was Mr. Ojala, only because children should develop respect for their elders. If a family in the old neighborhood had trouble with city hall, they talked to Tony-O and he would call someone; if a son or brother or father was picked up by the police, Tony-O could tell the worried women what the charges and bail were—and, more importantly, how badly the accused was tangled in the mysteries of the legal web. When election time came around, Tony-O rode in the same convertible as the alderman; and whenever the mayor marched down Larimer Street, Tony-O was just one pace behind him all the way from Seventeenth to Ninth Street. If the election was going to be a close one, he even walked beside the mayor. For those who had the money, he could arrange purchases that the Anglos officially frowned on but unofficially sold—a little marijuana for the nerves, a safe corner to have a cockfight for some excitement at fiesta time. There were rumors that he could do other things, too, through connections from the old Prohibition days; and if a man wanted to lay some of his paycheck on the horses or the Lotería Nacional, Tony-O could fix him up for a small percentage. Wager remembered him best from the war, when, if the price was right, he was good for whatever the black market was handling; and if a family had a son or husband in the service, they’d find a few extra ration coupons in the mail at Easter or Natividad, free. Tony-O was the neighborhood jefe, and he looked after his people.
In the early 1950s, Tony-O was arrested for murder. But even with a change of city administration and a new look at all the people still voting from the cemetery, Tony-O had a few strings left to pull—and he used up the last ones to get the charge reduced to manslaughter. He came out of the penitentiary at Cañon City four years later, just as Pfc. Gabriel Wager came out of boot camp headed for Korea, and the only thing the ex-jefe had left was a tavern and its parking lot. Soon that, too, was gone like the whole Auraria neighborhood, because in those four years Tony-O’s contacts dried up, and big money had come to buy and develop the twenty or so blocks that the new city planners labeled slums. After the forced sale of his property, and with social security, the old man got by. And people still talked to him who would not talk to Wager because he had turned cop.
Tony-O talked to Wager because he liked him, cop or not, and not just for the old days; he liked him because Wager had once looked out for his son, and that made Wager a lifelong friend. “Besides,” the old man once told him with a dip of the wrinkled eyelid that drooped at the corner like a sad smile, “I had lots of cops for friends when I was jefe. “
The old man looked up from watching the strings of bubbles wind through his beer. “You finished butting in?”
Wager sighed. “I’m listening, Tony-O.”
“What I heard was, his own brother was behind it—Dominick. That’s why nothing blew up when Marco was killed. Everything went straight to Dominick and there wasn’t no waves, not even a ripple.”
“I heard that Dominick put out a big reward.”
“What else could he do? Hell, he’d never have to pay it off, would he?” Tony-O took a long drink and pinched the moisture from the deep creases at his mouth’s corners. “I also heard a name for you.” He took another drink.
Talking with Tony-O was a lot like a slow checker game; every sentence was studied from all sides before it came out. Wager sipped and waited.
“Frank Covino.”
“What’s his connection?” asked Wager.
“I don’t know. I just heard the name. Like I said, no vale mucho.”
When Wager reported for duty Monday morning, he began thumbing through the “Cases Current” drawer for Marco Scorvelli’s file. His partner found him ears deep in the diagrams of the scene, the police reports from the morning of June 4, the autopsy reports of the following day, and the glossy 5”X7” photographs of a figure whose nattiness was lost in the sprawl of death.
“Don’t tell me it’s slow enough for a little recreational reading?” said Maxwell T. Axton—inevitably called “Max the Ax,” a nickname that pained him. (“I don’t like hurting people. Civilians hear that name, and right away they start thinking police brutality. In my heart, I’m a pacifist; a cop’s job is to prevent violence, not make it happen. So just call me Max. O.K., Gabe?”) He stood six four and, in his mid thirties, was just beginning to struggle to stay as thin as a tree trunk. He was one of the few blue-eyed Anglos Wager had known whose gaze could seem deeply sad and concerned, and never more so than when he was quietly talking a
murderer into confessing.
“Max, do you remember Marco Scorvelli? Whose case is it?”
“Sure—everybody remembers Marco. We all worked on that one. It was before you got here, when the cases weren’t assigned to individuals but were carried over from shift to shift. I guess it’s never been assigned to anybody. What the hell was there to assign?”
Wager told him.
“Frank Covino?” Max’s fingernails scratched under his square chin. Wager had occasionally wondered if Axton’s gentleness came from being big enough to worry about accidentally stepping on others. Just as his, Wager’s, occasional mild abrasiveness came because he was short, and short cops were always called on to make up in deeds what they lacked in appearance. Max’s large head wagged thoughtfully. “It doesn’t ring a bell. Have you looked through the contact cards?”
“Not yet.”
“Be back in a minute.”
He was, broad hands empty. “Nothing under Frank Covino. There’s a Gerald Edward Covino, currently on vacation in Cañon City, but no mention of a Frank, and no aliases.”
Wager folded the yellow manila cover over the thick pile of papers and photographs. Maybe he could get Tony-O to tell him a little more, maybe not. Probably not. They’d just have to keep their ears open, ask around, talk to fellow detectives and street cops and see if the name brought some nods. As always, there was the easy way to get information, and then there was the usual way. He dropped the file back into the “Current” drawer, where all the unsolved cases sat waiting for the time when something might break. Some had been waiting there for years.
The Homicide Division was on duty all hours, every day. When, as now, there were no murders or no weapons fired, the shift was to patrol likely trouble spots around the city. The first tour every morning for the day shift, just after the 8 A.M. traffic cleared, was past the trashy clutter of Spanish-named bars that made up Little Juarez, and then through its neighboring Asian section, clustered at the front of the pale tan tower of retirement apartments and fancy restaurants called Sakura Square. Inside the unmarked police sedan, the air was still stale with the breath of the preceding crews and of the hundreds of tours before that one; Wager rolled his window down halfway to let the cold air of early spring blow out the odor. In the glaring sunshine of a cloudless morning, and with the smog driven out by the westerlies of the last few days, even the tired brick walls along Larimer Street looked bright and warm and stood etched against the hard blue sky. It reminded Wager of one of those paintings his ex-wife had showed him: blank streets lined with aging buildings and vacant pavement, but full of a brittle light that made the colors solid and sharp. What was that painter’s name? Hooper? Hopper? For some reason, his ex-wife had thought the paintings said something about him.
