by Rex Burns
“Cream or sugar?” The woman from the kitchen held a tray of guest china out to them.
“Neither, ma’am.” Wager took the flowered, fragile cup; his finger did not quite go through the small handle. Beside him, he heard Axton rattling the china softly, trying to figure out a way to pick up the cup politely in his large fingers.
“Can you give us some names of his friends, ma’am?” asked Wager.
Mrs. Covino let her daughter name eight or ten while she nodded and said, more to herself than to Wager, “I forget all his friends. He had so many friends.”
Wager listed names and some addresses in his little green notebook. There were three that the mother said were her son’s best friends, so he penciled boxes around those.
“Did Frank happen to tell you where he was going last night?”
Again Mrs. Covino spoke to her daughter, as if otherwise she would not be able to speak at all. “To a movie with friends. He ate supper and he phoned one of his friends, didn’t he, Gracie? And then he just went out the front door like any other time .… He said, ‘Don’t wait up, Mom,’ and went out like always. And I didn’t wait up—God forgive me. Maybe if I’d waited up …”
“Alice, it’s not your fault.”
They sipped their coffee and studied their shoes until the wet, muffled explosions stopped, and then Wager asked, “Do you know who he might have gone with? Which movie he went to?”
“No. It was on the phone. I didn’t listen,” she said weakly. “Oh, God, what could I do? What could I do?”
“Is there a photograph that we could have to show people?” Axton asked the daughter. “We’ll copy it and get it right back to you, ma’am.”
“There.” Mrs. Covino’s puffy eyes looked hungrily at the shelf of family pictures lined up against the dark wall near the madonna. “Gracie …”
The girl brought it quickly, not looking at the high school graduation face that smiled out through the glass; with tight lips, she thrust it at Wager.
“Did Frank have a car, ma’am?” he asked the girl.
She described it, the mother adding, “He loved that car. Always, he bought something for it. Maybe that’s why! Maybe somebody wanted that car!”
“That could be, ma’am,” said Wager. “We haven’t found it yet.” He tried to make the next question sound equally routine. “Did your son ever talk of knowing a Marco Scorvelli?”
“God, no! Tell him, Gracie—I know who that is, and tell him that Frankie never knew that kind of man!”
“My brother was good! Why do you want to say these things that aren’t true? It’s bad enough what you cops did to Gerry!”
Axton leaned slightly forward, the dark, thickly padded chair creaking under his weight. “Would that be Gerald Edward Covino, miss? The one in Cañon City?”
“What do you think?”
“Gracie, Gracie,” said the mother wearily. “Not now; please, not today.”
The young woman stood quickly. “You through with those cups?”
“Yes, ma’am.” They set them gingerly on the tray and she left with the quick, stiff strides of anger.
Mrs. Covino closed her eyes and rocked to and fro, talking in a low voice to no one in particular. “Some of it was Gerry’s fault. But not all. What can anybody do with kids? No father; you can’t pick their friends for them; you can’t be on them every minute of the day … Gerry wasn’t a bad boy. He was so afraid when they sent him to the reformatory that time. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘Mama, I don’t know if I’ll make it.’ But what could I do? They just took him. He was caught stealing a car—it was the first time, and he swore to me it wasn’t even his idea. It was the ones he ran around with. But they weren’t caught. They weren’t the ones sent to the reformatory. Almost a year, and when he came out, he wasn’t my Gerry any more. He wasn’t anybody’s anything any more.” The tears started again, as much for the living dead as for the newly dead.
“Mama, they don’t want to hear that.” The daughter stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed tightly on her chest. “They got their files and their records. They know all about Gerry in their files.”
“We know he has a second conviction,” Wager told her.
“Sure! He ain’t Anglo, is he? That means guilty, right?” She glared at Wager, daring him to say no. “And don’t you go trying to make Frankie out like that. If Gerry did something wrong, it was because he never had a chance. Nobody gave him a break. But Frankie wasn’t that way. Now why don’t you two just go on out of here!”
In their car, Wager pulled a very deep breath, then asked Max, “Well? What do you think?”
“I sometimes think this is a shitty job.”
There was nothing new in that. “Miss Gracie feels the same way.”
“Yeah,” said Axton. “She and her people have inherited a lot of hatred. More than she knows how to get rid of.”
“Maybe it’s a crutch. She’s as ugly as a goddam totem pole.”
“For God’s sake, Gabe—these people have a right to feel resentment! Anybody would.”
“They have better things to resent than us. They can try resenting the sons of bitches that bring us down on them.”
“Maybe it’s not that easy. I mean, it’s her own brother in the pen, and cops helped put him there. Now another brother’s dead, and two cops come around making more implications. I’ll bet if some kid from Cherry Hills or the Polo Grounds steals a car, he won’t be sent to the reformatory. The judge will give him a tut-tut and a big bad frown. And a free ride home.”
But Wager knew a lot of Hispanos who took everything that was thrown at them and never whined. They minded their own business, they worked hard, they moved up. And then they were envied and hated by people like Gracie, for whom hatred was life because they could not leave old hurts behind. “They should both be sent up,” said Wager. “At least we got one of the little bastards.”
Axton’s head wagged from side to side. “And these are your own people!”
Wager almost replied. The angry words pushed against his clamped teeth to tell Axton that “his” people were cops and cops only. Not the criminals, not the civilians, not the goddamned activists who would rather see a cop than a hood lying in his own blood. But he did not say it. Fancy words and explanations and excuses were for the world’s lawyers, not its cops; cops had to do their duty, not just talk about it. “Well, right now, amigo, one of ‘my’ people is in the morgue. And I have a strong feeling that the rest of ‘my’ people either didn’t tell all or didn’t know all there was to tell us.”
The large man squeaked some air between his teeth in a faint whistle. “Yeah. Kids sure as hell don’t tell their parents everything. God knows, I didn’t.”
It could be that, Wager agreed. It wouldn’t be the first time that a parent didn’t know—or was willfully ignorant. It was Wager’s theory that a lot of parents didn’t have the guts to ask questions of their own kids. “Somebody has to go down to Cañon City and have a talk with Gerald.”
Axton stretched and pushed his big frame against the seat. “You want to do that? I’ll start on this list of friends.”
“All right. You cover for me this afternoon. I’ll go down after lunch.” Wager turned the car across the Sixteenth Street viaduct toward headquarters, radioing a stolen car report on Frank Covino’s missing vehicle.
He had read over the jacket on Gerald Edward Covino before making the three hour drive to the state penitentiary in Cañon City. In addition to his adult record, Covino had a juvenile sheet, mostly petty theft. It culminated in a tour in the reformatory at Buena Vista for grand theft, auto; the last adult conviction was for breaking and entering a place of business. That was the tumble that put him behind the walls at Cañon City. There were half a dozen contact cards on him, too, which revealed him to be a suspect in various burglaries and even a couple of armed robberies. None of those ever got as far as the courts, though of course the cards didn’t state why. But as Wager’s grandfat
her used to say, when you step on a thorn long enough, you know something’s there; to his sister, however, Gerald was just one more downtrodden victim of a racist capitalist materialist sexist society, and it was everybody’s fault except his.
Wager steered the road-hot vehicle off Highway 50 to the parking lot of the prison. As usual, the pale stone walls and the gnawed-at granite of the hillside behind them spoke of eternal rock and dust and heat. No trees, no grass, no shrubbery that could shelter an escaping inmate; blank walls that gave clear fields of fire from the towers, and were surrounded by acres of crushed gravel. People had been crushing that gravel for a lot of years here, and Wager was damned satisfied that he had swept some of that garbage off the streets and stuffed it behind these walls.
He showed his identification to the matron in the control center and filled out the request form, sliding it across the scratched and stained fiber tabletop to a turnkey.
“You want to sit over there, Sarge? I’ll see if he’s in.”
It was a tired joke and Wager didn’t smile back. He chose one of the sticky plastic couches of the reception area and waited to be called to an interview station. It was between visiting periods and the only other person in the room was a young black woman who smoked steadily and tried hard not to look worried. In about twenty minutes, the turnkey called him by name. “Station two, Sarge.”
Gerald Covino was waiting when Wager entered the booth with its warning signs and bars and the thin Plexiglas barrier forming the line between inside and out. Gerald was in his late twenties, Wager knew, but the face that looked guardedly at him over the inside telephone had that stiff prison quality that could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty.
“I’m Detective Wager, Covino. Homicide Division, D.P.D. You heard about your brother?”
“What about him?”
So the sister who loved him so much had not bothered to telephone the news down yet. And the papers and television had not broadcast the name. “He was killed last night. Gang style.”
“Frankie? You sure it was Frankie?”
Wager gazed through the Plexiglas at the man’s bulging eyes and probed for the seam between sincere shock and expert lying. With this one, it would be hard to tell.
“Do you have any idea why somebody might want your brother dead?”
Covino, still chewing on the news, shook his head. His straight black hair swept back above his ears into a ponytail on his neck, and a thin scar ran through his upper lip to make a light line across the dark flesh. The man’s face slowly stiffened again into the prison mask.
“It’s your brother, Covino. Somebody executed him. They used a shotgun on his head and left him like a scumbag in an alley. I’m not asking you to fink on any friends of yours; I’m asking you to give me something on whoever wasted your own brother.”
When the man finally spoke into the telephone, it was to say, “I don’t know, man. What do I know, stuck here in this fucking place?”
Sometimes inmates knew things as fast as the police—or faster. “Was Frank into anything?”
“Frankie was clean! He saw what happened to me, man; he didn’t want nothing like this.” Covino stared at the plastic top of the shelf for a long minute, and through the shadowed reflections in the Plexiglas Wager saw the man’s knuckles grow white around the telephone. “Mama,” he said softly. “He was the baby. It’s gonna kill Mama.”
This one had done his share, too, Wager thought. “She’s suffering,” he agreed.
“You went and seen her?”
“I did.”
“You told her that Frankie was mixed up in something?”
“I did not. I asked her if he was, and she said no.”
“You didn’t even have to ask her that! Anybody could of told you—he was clean!”
“Then who executed him? It wasn’t an amateur hit, Covino. His car is missing, but his wallet, watch, and money were on him. We figure he parked his car somewhere and took a ride with somebody who knew exactly how to handle the job. Now come on—he was your goddamned brother!”
“I told you, Wager—I told you, I don’t know! He was a kid—seven years younger than me. We didn’t even go around with the same bunch of people. But he was no chulo.”
Wager turned back to fiddling with his pen and with the little green notebook that lay open on the tabletop, which was gummy with the nervous, oily sweat from countless other arms. “All right, Covino. Let me tell you what it looks like so far. If your brother was as clean as you say, then it looks like somebody might have been after you. Or wanted to tell you something.” He glanced up. “Was anybody with you in that breaking and entering?”
“Maybe; maybe not.”
“Did any of them ever think you might fink?”
The man’s black eyes narrowed. “I don’t fink. Nobody thinks that. Is that what you’re after? You come down here giving me all this shit about my brother being dead, thinking I’ll fink?”
“Frank is dead,” said Wager. “It’ll be on the news tonight. And what I’m after is a lead on who did it. Is anybody after you, Gerald?”
The scarred upper lip twisted into a sour grin. “If anybody wanted me, cop, they could get me in here. For one fucking carton of cigarettes. Look, Wager, I been inside ten months now. Four more, maybe six at most, and I’m up for parole. It’s downhill on my time, man. I’m not gonna fink on anybody now. Why should I? And everybody knows it: Gerry Covino’s no fink. If somebody’s trying to tell me something by offing Frankie, I swear I do not know who or what.”
“Ever hear the name Scorvelli?”
A total blankness of expression. “Who hasn’t?”
“I had a tip just before your brother was killed that he knew something about Marco Scorvelli getting wiped last year.”
“Shit! Who handed you that shit, man?”
Wager half smiled. “Sure—I’ll tell you! What do you know about it?”
“I know it’s a bunch of crap. Somebody’s crapping all over you. Frankie was straight—he didn’t know Scorvelli or anybody like him.”
“What about you?”
“What?”
“Did you ever know any of the Scorvellis?”
“No, man. We don’t run in the same circles.”
“Denver’s a small town.”
“Not that small. I heard the name is all. But they don’t even know I breathe their air. The wops don’t like us, you dig?”
Nothing. Wager tapped the ballpoint on the table. Maybe nothing would turn out to be something. Sometimes it worked that way. But more often, nothing was just that. “Covino, I’m sorry you lost your brother. I’d like to nail the ones that did it. Here.” He wrote a telephone number on a leaf of his notebook and turned it so Covino could read it. “This is my number—memorize it. If you get any ideas or hear anything, use one of your telephone calls to help me get whoever killed your brother.”
The hard black eyes never shifted from Wager’s own. “I’ll be keeping my ears open, don’t worry about that. But I don’t fink. Even on this.”
Three
THE NEXT MORNING, Wager reported in early, as always. Munn, who was alone on the graveyard shift this month, had that baggy-eyed look of someone who has suffered a long, slow night waiting for the sun to rise. And then didn’t like what he saw. “How’re you doing on that Covino shooting, Gabe?”
Wager looked through the papers in his box and glanced over the twenty-four-hour board for any messages. “Not a thing so far. Maybe Axton had better luck.”
Munn stretched and drained his coffee cup and tried not to look too eager to leave. “Nothing happening last night. Dull as a goddam cucumber.”
“Cucumber?”
“Ain’t that the expression? Cucumbers always struck me as being pretty goddam dull. Next to zucchini.”
Wager turned back to his handful of papers.
“God, I feel lousy,” said Munn. “I think I’m coming down with something.” He snorted some phlegm down his sinuses and into his thro
at. Munn really didn’t look healthy; dark skin puffed under his eyes, and beneath the stubble of morning whiskers, his cheeks were sallow. “Maybe I had too much coffee. I always drink too much coffee on this shift. Especially when it’s so goddam quiet.”
Wager looked at the electric clock high on the tan wall. The walls of the building were either anemic tan or sick green, and because the department had been scheduled to vacate a year or so past, they had not been painted in a long while; around the base, the color was leached out by the splash of mop water, and the morning light, cheerful coming through the window, lost its warmth on the dirt and scuff marks in the gray film. The clock said 7:45. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
“You’re a real jewel, Gabe.”
He was glad to see Munn go. When the old shift hung around, there was always the feeling of intruding; and when Wager was on duty, he liked to think of it as his shift, and his only. Tossing the mail onto his desk, he took it in random order: a request for information on a suspect being held in Phoenix, a query from neighboring Jefferson County about the disposition of a case, the union telling him what great benefits they had won for officers in New York and asking why he didn’t join the Colorado chapter now. It was the usual routine pile of papers, but down at the bottom was a memo from Chief Doyle: “You and Axton see me before leaving this morning.” It was noted 0730; the Bulldog seemed to spend as much time here as Wager did.
He pulled the Frank Covino file and spread the photographs and the lab report and the offense report and the witness statements across the glass top of the desk. When Axton came in at precisely 8 A.M., Wager was staring at the pictures and at the jottings in his green notebook. But if Max had asked him what he was thinking, Wager could not have put it into precise words; it was more subjective—more like absorption than thought.
Axton’s first move was for a cup of coffee; his second, to ask about Wager’s progress down in Cañon City.
“Gerald’s tough,” answered Wager. The Spanish word was duro and was more accurate, but Max wouldn’t have understood it. “I tried to shake him into telling me something, but he wouldn’t even squeak. It was his own brother, and still he wasn’t about to talk to any cop.”
