by Rex Burns
He swung the car around the sterile concrete of the Sakura Square tower and down across the bumpy railroad tracks toward Union Station, cruising slowly beneath the grimy viaducts and along the unused and weedy rear doorways of warehouses and office buildings whose windows were painted over and blank. It was an area undecided whether to live or not, and it was here, especially on Sunday and Monday mornings, that the day shift would find the dead winos.
“Is that one?” Max pointed at a pair of legs lying toes down in the tall grass beneath the rotting timbers of a loading dock. Wager turned through the crackle of splintered bottles to park, and they got out, deliberately, two men beginning another long day and a bit reluctant to have it start so soon and in such a way.
Even before they poked through the screen of weeds to peer beneath the shelf of weathered wood, they could smell the sour bile and feces from the figure.
“Watch your shoes.”
“Yeah.” Wager hauled at the grime-slick coat and rolled the man’s dark, seamed face from the stringy mud of his own vomit. A bubble of saliva broke in a large gap between his rotting teeth and his eyelid lifted once to show the yellow of an eyeball.
“Dead?”
“No. Crawled under here to sleep it off.”
“It’s nice to see civic pride.”
Wager used to be able to haul the drunks down to the station and lock them up for a day or two so they’d get a couple of good meals and a free delousing. Now a new city ordinance had given the winos their rights, and the cops were ordered to let them lie in their filth like the free citizens they were. He and Max went back to the cruiser, and Wager guided the car down one of the littered alleys that ran behind a row of weary flophouses, whose tilting, paintless back porches and rusted fire escapes held shapes that watched them in cautious silence. Near the alley’s end, their radio popped: “Any homicide detective.”
Wager answered, “X-85. Go ahead.” “X” was the Detective Bureau designation; the 80 series meant the Homicide Division.
“Go to blue channel,” said the dispatcher.
“Ten-four.” He switched to the frequency that was secure from the police band scanners sitting in news rooms all over the city.
The dispatcher was waiting for his acknowledgment. “You got a body in the 2700 block of Denargo Street. Officers on the scene; Code Two.”
Code Two: siren and lights at officer’s discretion. “We’re on our way.”
Wager didn’t bother with running hot; traffic was light and the victim wouldn’t be going anywhere. Denargo was one of the nearby streets close to the South Platte River, and he reached it beneath the bridges and viaducts over the river’s rubbish-filled flood plain. The street occasionally lost its outline in loading aprons and the snarl of bumpy railroad tracks, but half a block ahead, they saw the blue-and-white unit marking the site. Two uniformed officers had separated a pair of witnesses and were taking notes when Wager and Axton pulled up.
“Jesus, it didn’t take you guys long.”
Wager recognized the black corporal talking to the older of the two civilians. “We were just around the corner. What do you have for us, John?”
“This here’s Mr. Walker. He called in the report about ten minutes ago. We haven’t really gotten started yet.”
Wager nodded good morning to a lanky man whose hair was combed straight back in oily flat grooves above his ears. “Why don’t you answer Officer Blainey’s questions, Mr. Walker, while I take a look at it?”
“Sure. But listen, I got a load of perishables to move. How long’s this gonna take?”
“It won’t be too long, Mr. Walker.”
“It’s over there, Gabe. Between the buildings.” Blainey’s Bic pen bobbed at a narrow gap between the long windowless walls of the brick warehouses.
“Identification?”
“Don’t know. We didn’t move a thing. And Mr. Walker here says he and his buddy just took one look and called us. We ain’t seen nobody else around.”
“Well, I sure wasn’t going to touch him. A guy with a hole like that in the top of his head .…”
“You did the right thing, Mr. Walker.” Wager motioned to Axton. He left off talking to the other officer, a young kid Wager didn’t know, who frowned earnestly when he talked.
Careful where they put their feet in the pebbly soil, Wager and Axton stood at the alley between the chipped bricks of the close walls and stared into the narrow canyon which was about half as wide as a doorway. This body, too, lay toes down on the packed dirt and the sprouting clumps of grass between the walls. But unlike the drunk, there was no need to see if he was breathing; as Walker had said, a hole that size in his head left no doubt. The hard, blue-green glints of flies moved busily at the ragged edge of the slightly bloody hole with its eruption of gray brain. It was the kind of wound blown by a large-caliber dumdum or a shotgun. Wager keyed the GE radio pack on his belt and called for the lab people and the medical examiner.
“Looks like he’s still got his wallet.” Axton pointed to the bulge that had worn the rear pocket of the denim trousers pale in a square shape.
“See if you can reach it,” said Wager. “My arms are too short.”
Axton braced himself against the painted brick and stretched out to tug the wallet from the tight pocket. It was rubbed shiny and held the curve of the man’s buttocks, and was cold to the touch.
“Money’s here—twenty-eight bucks.”
“Who is he?”
Axton flipped through small plastic windows that had two or three smiling pictures and various cards. In the front panel, he found the driver’s license. Then he looked at Wager and blinked. “Frank Covino.”
Two
“THE MEDICAL EXAMINER guesses he was killed in that location sometime Sunday night; apparently, he wasn’t moved after he was shot.” Fred Baird, the lab technician on the day shift, took off his gold-rimmed glasses and blew at something clinging to the lens. He, Wager, and Axton sat around one of three desks in the small cubicle that was the single office for all the homicide detectives. They were supposed to have moved to a new police and justice building a year ago; but the date had shifted more often than a politician’s word, and all three crews were still jammed into the same space. Each of the desks had a glass top. Under them were lists of telephone numbers, codes for quick reference, names and addresses that meant something to one of the three people who shared the desk; on top of this one were spread the color photographs taken that morning by Baird. They still held a slightly acid odor, and their shiny finish was tacky under Wager’s thumb. “One shot was fired,” Baird went on. “At close range; probably a contact wound because it’s smoothly marginated and has a lot of powder residue as well as localized discoloration of the skeletal muscle. The intake of carbon monoxide causes that,” he explained. “The area of penetration is centered approximately nine millimeters behind the point of the chin and five millimeters to the left of a mid-sagittal line. The path of penetration angles upward into the brain at approximately sixty degrees from a transverse plane to emerge at the top of the right parietal, effecting subtotal decapitation with an orifice of approximately six to ten centimeters.”
“Good God,” said Max. “That rolls trippingly off the tongue.”
“Baird, why can’t you just tell us what the hell happened?”
The lab tech glanced with surprise from Axton to Wager. “I did! That’s the medical description.”
“Then why don’t you give us the civilian description, Fred?”
In the short silence, a twang of country-and-Western radio music rose above the steady clatter of office machines and police frequencies from the busy Records Section down the hall. “It won’t be very goddamned scientific that way,” Baird said with disgust.
“But it may be a hell of a lot clearer,” answered Max.
Baird shrugged and put his glasses back on and blinked once or twice as if seeing the two detectives for the first time. “If that’s what you want. Say this pencil’s the path of the
round.” He held the yellow shaft just under the left side of his chin. “It entered here and took off the back of his tongue and soft palate …” He lowered the pencil. “That’s part of the roof of your mouth.”
“Come on, come on,” said Wager.
“It went through the opening behind the nasal area and through the brain. The shot widened out in the brain and emerged near the top of the skull. Back here.” His hand patted a spot on the top of his head near the little tonsure of thinning hair.
“The weapon used was a shotgun?” asked Wager.
“Double-aught buck. The doc found seven of the pellets inside the brain and we found a few more in the alley. This supports the idea that he was killed right there. The lividity and rigor fit, too, so it’s pretty definite.”
“A shotgun. That won’t help much,” said Max. “Smooth bores don’t leave much identification.”
“Not without the shell; that’s right. We’re still looking around for evidence, but don’t keep your hopes up.” Baird pushed the photographs apart to find those that gave the long-range views of the crime site. “We couldn’t find any footprints or fingerprints that were worth a damn, except yours, Max. You left a beautiful set on this wall here.”
“It’s when I took his wallet.”
“Whatever. There were no tire tracks that meant anything, either; there’s too much vehicular traffic around the site during the day. So that’s the sum of it—about five pounds of nothing. No leads at all. We did take samples of the environment. Bring us a suspect and we’ll try to match his clothes to the environment.”
“Sure,” said Wager. “A suspect. We couldn’t even find any eyewitnesses.”
“You’ve been a great help, Fred.”
“Always glad, Max.” Baird stood. “Next time, pick a better corpse. I’ll get the complete autopsy report up to you sometime tomorrow.”
“Was the identification positive?” asked Wager.
“Right. Fingerprints match the driver’s license application. It’s Frank Arnold Covino. Got his address?”
Wager nodded and also stood. “Let’s get that over with,” he said to Max.
The Covino address was on Quivas Street, a gently rundown neighborhood that once had been Italian and was now becoming Hispanic. One or two Italian restaurants still remained, the biggest being a rambling wooden house with a giant neon sign: “Pagliacci’s.” Half a block farther was a Mexican restaurant, and graffiti covered the cracked stucco walls of the remaining stores: “Chicano Power,” “Viva FALN,” and “Libre Puerto Rico.” Axton glanced at the sprayed slogans as they passed. “Did I tell you I’m taking bagpipe lessons?”
“What the hell for?”
“It’s part of my heritage—I’m a Scot.”
Wager looked to see if he was joking, but the large face remained placid. “You going to wear one of those little dresses?”
Axton winced. “It’s not a dress, Wager. It’s a kilt. And yes, I’m buying one. I had to order it from San Francisco.”
“I hope you’ve got cute legs.”
“There’s nothing wrong with ethnic pride! I like to see it—there should be more of it. I like the variety we’ve got in this city. Hell, you Chicanos are always talking up your Mexican roots, so there’s no reason why a Scot can’t. Or an Eskimo, or a Greek.”
“I’m Hispano.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Plenty.”
“There; see? I didn’t know that. If you took more interest in your cultural heritage, people would know the difference between Chicanos and Hispanos.”
“I don’t give a damn whether they do or not.”
“Well, I’m as proud to be a Scot as somebody else is to be Chicano. Highland, too.”
There was a big difference between being something and saying you were something, and it seemed to Wager that these days everybody was claiming identification with some group or another. Maybe they needed it—even Max. But not Wager; he had discovered a long time ago that he held within himself all that he would ever need, and it kind of surprised him that someone as big as Axton felt the need for more identity.
Finding the house number, Wager wordlessly slipped the car into a no-parking zone. In the nine or ten months he had been in homicide, he and Axton had gotten along better than Wager had expected. The big man was as steady as one of the mountains squatting on the western horizon, and Wager had begun to trust him. Axton put his trust in Wager, too. With time and care, it could turn out to be the kind of partnership every cop would like to have but too few did; though it would be all too easy to snuff out the understanding and trust necessary to it. That was something Wager wanted to keep in mind at times like this, when Axton struck him as a little bit weird. He turned off the car’s motor. “You ready for it?”
“Nope,” said Axton. “But what choice do we have?”
The old house was similar to the rest on the block, dark-red brick with a small front porch held up by square pillars of half brick and half white wood; a second floor was cramped under the sloping green roof, a low, flat dormer over the white trim of its window. The yard had fewer worn spots and more early crocuses along the foundation than did the ones on either side, and from somewhere around back came the thin crowing of a young rooster, a sound that Wager hadn’t heard in a long time. The lady who answered their knock was in her fifties, short, thick-bodied; beneath the cropped gray hair, her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Yes?”
“Are you the mother or a relative of Frank Arnold Covino?”
“No. I’m a neighbor. Mrs. Covino’s inside.” She did not move from the doorway.
Wager showed his identification and badge. “We need to ask Mrs. Covino some questions about her son.”
“It’s a bad time.”
“It’s never a good time, ma’am,” said Axton. “But the faster we can get our information, the better our chances are of finding the people that did it.”
For a moment more, she didn’t move; then, “Come in.” She led them through the living room to a tiny formal parlor. On a shelf opposite the door was a small madonna with two red prayer candles at her feet. Three women sat on the maroon sofa; Mrs. Covino was apparently the one in the center. The thin light from the curtained window made the lines on her wide forehead and cheeks deeper, and her graying hair lay straight down her back, as it probably had since the telephone call early this morning. The pain in the room was so thick that Wager felt as if he were wading through a cold current, and like the crowing of the rooster, the feeling brought the distant memory of other parlors and other dead.
“They’re policemen, Alice,” said the woman with the short hair.
“Mrs. Covino? Can we talk to you?” asked Wager.
The woman nodded silently, tugging the collar of her robe closer to her neck.
“Do you have any idea who would want to do this?”
Mrs. Covino’s broad face sagged and she pressed a wad of handkerchief under her nose to stifle the whining moan; it was a long two minutes before she could breathe evenly, her loud sighs gradually shuddering into long, labored breaths.
“Tell them,” she said to no one. “Tell them he was a good boy. No trouble. Never.”
One of the women on the sofa, younger than the others, stroked Mrs. Covino’s hand and glared at Wager. “Haven’t you people done enough to her through Gerry? Now you got to start on Frank, too?”
“Gracie …” Mrs. Covino sucked another deep breath loud and flat past her stuffy nose.
“Mrs. Covino’s daughter,” explained the woman with short hair. “Frank’s sister.”
“Detective Wager, miss.”
“Detective Axton. We’re sorry to have to be here, ma’am.”
“Tell them we got some coffee, Gracie,” said Mrs. Covino. “Get these gentlemen a cup of coffee.”
“I’ll do it, Grace. You stay here with your mother.” The fourth woman, silent until now, rose and went into the kitchen.
“Can you tell us something abou
t Frank, Mrs. Covino? Who some of his friends are? If he had any enemies? If there’s someone who might know why it happened?”
“Why? I ask God in heaven why! There is no why! Tell them, Gracie—tell them he was a good boy and didn’t have no enemies!”
“Alice …” The woman with short hair put an arm around Mrs. Covino’s curved and shaking shoulders. She, too, glared at the detectives; in her case, Wager felt, not because they were cops but because they were men, and men—sons, lovers, husbands—were the cause of the grief of womankind.
“I’m all right.” Mrs. Covino dabbed at her eyes. “Frankie was the youngest. First Gerry, then Gracie, then him—Frankie. He had lots of friends. Everybody liked Frankie. Tell them about Frankie going to college, Gracie. Tell them about how he was studying electricity.”
The young woman nodded. “At Metropolitan College downtown. He was a work-study student.”
“Did he have any other jobs, Miss Covino?”
“At Aztec Liquors, over on Federal.”
“Tell them what Mr. Rosenbaum said, Gracie, about Frankie being such a good worker that he could own his own store someday. But he wanted to study electricity.”
“Did he work days or nights?”
“Afternoons,” said the young woman. “Sometimes nights or weekends, but Mama didn’t like that. She was afraid he’d get hurt in a holdup.”
