Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  Sheldon hitched up on one thin ham and pulled out his wallet. Flipping through the plastic windows, he drew out a glossy square. It showed a statuesque woman nude from the waist up. Looking more closely, Wager saw that she wore a sequined G-string and a large, feathered headdress. Her slightly awkward arms were raised high, and she smiled over the camera as if she were a Las Vegas chorus girl. At one side of the photograph, almost trimmed out of the picture, the edge of a kitchen chair showed. “It’s a publicity photo. It was her favorite.” Sheldon gazed at it before handing it to Max. “I took it for her portfolio. She was beautiful. Really beautiful.”

  Wager put it on top of the victim’s folder. “We’ll make copies of it and get it back to you, Mr. Sheldon.” Unless some horny bastard in the division lifted it for a pinup.

  “Thank you, Mr. Sheldon.” Axton heaved to his feet and Sheldon’s head swayed back as he watched the man keep rising. “You’ve been very helpful. I hope we’re soon able to catch the person who did it.” He handed the slender man a business card. “If you think of anything that might help us—someone who might have threatened your wife in any way—please give us a call, any time of the day or night.”

  Sheldon held the card in both hands and stared at it before he, too, stood. “Is that it? You’re not going after nobody?”

  “We don’t know who to go after, do we?” said Wager. “But if you have any ideas, tell us.”

  The man’s mouth chewed for a minute, then clamped into bitter wrinkles. He shook his head and carefully put the card in his wallet. “It just seems … I don’t know. … It seems the cops—the police—somebody—should be doing something.”

  “We will do something. We’ll be going over to the Cinnamon Club to ask questions. But if there’s something you know,” Wager insisted, “no matter how slight, and you don’t tell us, then you’re going to slow things down. Maybe enough to let the killer get away.”

  “I don’t know anything, goddamn it!”

  “Do you need a ride home?” Max asked.

  “Ride? No. My car—it’s out front.”

  Max’s large hand brushed Sheldon’s arm in a nudge. “Come on, I’ll walk you down there.”

  Wager followed, pausing to lift a key ring from the transport board. He flipped the little slides by their names to show the duty watch where they were. The personnel board read In, On Patrol, In Court, Off Duty, and a few other less popular locations. It didn’t seem necessary to Wager; all the detectives were tied by radio to the dispatcher, who could reach them anywhere in the city. But the board looked impressive and up-to-date and filled one wall. And they were ordered to use it. It was part of the team concept.

  “I’ll bring the car out,” he told Max.

  CHAPTER 2

  “WHAT DO YOU think, Gabe?”

  Wager drove while Max shoved back hard against the passenger seat as he tried to find room for his legs in the small, underpowered sedan. The department saved money by buying year-old rental cars, the economy models. But no matter how well they were taken care of, the guts were always run out of the engine by the time the detectives got them. Fortunately, they were seldom involved in hot pursuits.

  “I think he’s lying about something.”

  Max grunted assent. “He’s keeping something back, anyway. But I don’t believe he killed her. I didn’t get that feeling.” He said after awhile, “He’s not a good liar.”

  “He’s what, ten, fifteen years older than she was? And she must have met a lot of men,” said Wager. “A lot of men every night.”

  “Yeah, I understand that. But this doesn’t look like a jealousy killing. Rape his own wife? Shoot her in the back of the head? And carry a picture like that! What kind of husband carries around that kind of picture of his wife?” Before Wager could reply, Max answered his own question. “Maybe he wants to brag about what he’s got: money, new car, sexy wife. Things he never thought he’d have.”

  “Maybe he wants to show how jealous he’s not,” said Wager.

  Max thought that one over and came up with some of the sociology crap that always irritated Wager. “That’s convoluted psychology, partner. But it could be, I suppose. A defense mechanism that he doesn’t even recognize.” He gazed at the dim shine of the gold leaf on the state capitol dome, no longer illuminated in an effort to save energy. “Leave it to a Mex like you to come up with the jealousy motive. But still, it doesn’t look like a jealousy killing.”

  That was true, but it was the truth of experience, not some half-baked college-class theory. Most jealousy killings came during a fight. First a few drinks to loosen up the bitter questions and the short, defensive answers; a few more drinks and a sneering exchange to blame each other and to hurt as deeply as possible; a few more drinks as dinner’s forgotten in the circle of endless quarreling, and then the explosion. The shot, the butcher knife, the head clubbed against a doorframe. And then the fear. The frantic effort to make it look like something or someone else: she ran off; a burglar broke in and shot him. Those were the easy ones. A homicide cop could almost have fun cracking a suspect like that.

  “He didn’t seem very shook up over her murder,” said Wager.

  “He said he knew something had happened. After the second day, he said he knew she was dead.” Axton thought back over the man’s statement. “It’s like that sometimes—you know bad news is coming and you get ready for it. He had five days to get used to the idea.”

  “What’s his alibi?”

  “He was home waiting for her.”

  “Alone?”

  “C’mon, Gabe. What the hell else would he be doing at two in the morning?”

  “Coming from another woman’s house, wise-ass. Or,” he added, “following his wife after work.”

  Axton whistled a tune softly between his teeth, a habit he had when mulling something over. There had been that note of evasiveness in some of Sheldon’s answers. True, that wasn’t unusual—a lot of honest citizens had a lot of things they didn’t want cops to pick up on. And they had nothing to do with a homicide. But neither Wager nor Axton liked to see evasiveness, not in a murder case, not from a man who said he wanted so badly to have his wife’s killer caught.

  “Maybe he planned it. Maybe he threw her into the flowers to make it look like a garden-variety rape and murder,” said Wager.

  “‘Garden variety,’ ha.” Axton half-smiled and the green of a traffic light glimmered over his teeth. “Have all you Mexicans got such twisty minds?”

  As usual, Wager hadn’t intended the pun. “It runs in the family. My cousin’s a Jesuit.”

  “At least your family’s got somebody to be proud of.”

  They were, too. More of his cousin than of Wager, who was not only a cop but one who had divorced his Catholic wife. And who was now running around with an Italian woman who had no religion at all and who didn’t care if she slept with a man she wasn’t married to. “It’s because he’s a coyote,” said the more rabid cousins on his mother’s side of the family. “Aunt Ynez shouldn’t have married his father—she shouldn’t have married outside the people; that’s what’s wrong with him.” Cousin Gabe the mixed-breed—half-Anglo, half-Hispano; neither dog nor wolf: a coyote.

  Wager steered the white sedan through the tangle of heavy traffic near the state capitol and its oval of dimly lit trees and paths. The area was now known as Sod Circle because of the male prostitutes who strolled these paths to pose and smile at the cruising cars. A monument to Colorful Colorado and the equality and majesty of the laws Wager was sworn to uphold. He turned onto East Colfax, one of the few corners of the city that still held life after dark, and joined the slowly moving cars nosing down the tunnel of neon and pin spots that made headlights unnecessary. Colfax Avenue was one of the longest sex strips in the country.

  The west end went four miles toward the mountains and was dotted with drive-in restaurants, a plentiful scattering of bars, and a line of motels that did business by the hour rather than by the night. It was mostly the teenie’s d
rag strip. The east end was called adult—adult films, adult bookstores, adult arcades, adult live shows. It went across the prairie in the direction of Kansas, leaving Denver around mile eight, and then staggering on as far again before fading into the bug-spattered neon of all-night truck stops and cut-rate gas stations with their scratched and scarred “adult dispensers” on the grime-streaked walls of men’s rooms.

  At this, the lower end of the strip, a short walk from the capitol, the Cinnamon Club’s glowing pink-and-green sign hung out over a sidewalk crowded with night people. The car glided past a Laundromat, half-filled at one-thirty in the morning with customers hunching their shoulders against one another. Across the street, a dark-colored van sat in the unlit parking lot of a small group of closed shops. Around the van half-a-dozen men of various ages clustered wearing the street uniform of the dope world: tattered fatigue jackets, Levi’s, hats of several styles, vests. One, standing at the open door, carefully counted out his money while the driver, glancing anxiously at Wager’s unmarked car, snapped his fingers.

  “You recognize that dude?”

  Axton craned his neck. “No. New pusher in town.”

  Wager tried to see the plates on the van, but they had been bent and smeared with dirt; besides, it was an item for Vice and Narcotics. If they had the time, if they had the manpower, if they had the interest, Vice and Narcotics might set the dealer up for a buy-and-bust. Had Wager and Axton swung around to arrest them for what was plainly a rolling dope market, the money and the dope would disappear into the vehicle, and so would the case—in some kind of constitutional infringement. It wasn’t enough anymore to witness a crime in progress; you had to get a warrant to investigate a homicide if it was on private property. There was a lot of talk about some pendulum swinging back toward law enforcement, but Wager hadn’t seen it yet.

  He pulled into a yellow zone near the corner, half-aware of the cautious eyes slanting their way from the strolling crowd. Their car caused a subtle undertow among the people walking or standing and talking, or alone and watching the action along the street. A teenaged whore in white shorts turned away abruptly to wander toward the other end of the block, her legs awkwardly thin and bony on tall sandals. From the shadowy landing of a stairway leading up to the cheap apartments above the stores, a figure withdrew into the darkness. Wager and Axton locked the car’s doors and walked toward the glare of light. Along the curb, eyes slid away from them, and a grimy pair of panhandlers eased out of their path.

  The Cinnamon Club advertised its shows as Sweet-n-Spicy. A glass case at the brightly lit entry showed a fly-specked collection of nude girls standing at the edge of a stage, smiling regally down at the camera. At the top, near the center, stood one who looked like Annette Sheldon; it was hard to tell, though, because the stiff poses and the harsh light made them all look alike, except for the various hairstyles.

  “Let’s get some culture,” said Max.

  The white glare of the entry wasn’t only to illuminate the come-on shots; it was to keep exiting customers from being mugged, at least until they stepped off the club’s property. It was also a kind of barrier: the inside was almost black; anyone—customer, cop—had to pause a moment to let his eyes adjust and give the bouncers and B-girls a chance to look them over. Wager’s ears told him that the room was not very crowded tonight, and when his vision cleared, he could pick out empty chairs along the runway where customers sat and drank and watched. Of the faces he could see, most were young; but at least one gray head near the wall caught a remnant of pink light. Here it was, a half-hour before closing—one of the busiest times of the night—and the place was half-empty.

  Voices were muffled by the thudding crescendo of stereo music while, on the runway in a dim glow of red lights, a dancer writhed under the stroke of her hands and snapped her long hair back and forth whip-like across her torso. Her thumb edged under the narrow panties and began to slip them down one pale hip with a slow, pumping motion to show a corner of dark hair to a man who held a bill out and tucked it into the girl’s garter.

  Axton led Wager to the bar dotted with faces that seemed rubbery and smooth in the glow. As he stepped to the serving station to catch the eye of the bartender, a heavyset man in a sport coat materialized from the back and tapped his arm.

  “Not there, friend—that’s the waitresses’ stand.”

  Axton looked down at the bouncer. “Police. Where’s the manager?”

  Hesitating until Axton showed his badge, he said, “Come on, gentlemen.” His tongue had trouble with all those syllables, and it came out “gemmn.”

  He shoved through empty tables and chairs and past the end of the runway, where a man stared with a lax smile at the dancer who had now turned her back and was looking over her shoulder. The music’s volume was lowered. The other side of her panties inched down and she ran her tongue in circles over wet lips as her shiny hips ground in the glow.

  “Just a minute,” said the bouncer. “I’ll see if he’s in.” The man’s hairy knuckles rapped twice on the door and he opened it to peek in. Then he stepped back. “Go ahead, gemmn.”

  The manager was in his fifties and wore a Hawaiian-print sport shirt that bulged out over a stomach as tight and round as a bowling ball. Graying hair tufted above his ears; the rest of his head was shiny. He took off a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals as he stood in the dimly lit office and held out his hand. He had a wide smile and guarded eyes. “Police? What’s the problem, gentlemen?” He waved toward a wide couch that filled one wall. “Sit down. You want some coffee? A drink?”

  Wager folded his badge case; they remained standing. “Did Annette Sheldon work for you?”

  “Shelly?” The man’s baggy eyes blinked. “She’s been found?”

  “She’s a homicide victim,” Wager said.

  “Ah. Well, shit. Well, that’s really bad.”

  “She worked here, is that right?”

  “Yeah—a long time. Longer than me. … How’d it happen? Who did it?”

  “She was shot. We don’t have a suspect yet. What’s your name?” asked Wager.

  “You got to ask me like that? Like I’m a suspect?”

  “That’s not what we meant, sir,” said Max. “We need your name as her employer.”

  “Berg. David Berg.”

  “You’re the manager?”

  “Manager, owner, chief accountant—you name it. I don’t dance. That’s the only thing I don’t do around here.”

  Axton looked up from his notebook. “I thought Irv Sideman owned this place.”

  “He used to. He sold out to Jim Parmelee, what, a year ago. Parmelee couldn’t make it, and I bought it from him six months ago.” He ran a palm across his shiny head. “I should have waited another six months. Parmelee would have paid me to take it.”

  “How long did Mrs. Sheldon work here?”

  “She came when Sideman had the place, I think.” He glanced at the steel filing cabinet against the shadowed wall of the small room. “I could find out from the pay records. It’d take some time, though.” The telephone clattered and a light winked under one of its plastic buttons. “Excuse me.” Berg sat back in his swivel chair, the soft glow of the desk lamp catching a film of sweat on his face. “Yeah?” He listened a moment. “How much and what bank? … Okay, get the number and go ahead and cash it. If not, give him a free drink and say we’re sorry.” He hung up. “Out-of-state check,” he explained. “I got to okay every one. People are pushing a lot of bad paper lately. Bad times, bad paper.”

  “It’s not too big a crowd tonight,” said Max.

  “Listen, I’m not knocking it—I wish all of them were this good.” His head wagged sadly. “Weeknights, I’m lucky to make the overhead.”

  “When did you see Mrs. Sheldon last?” Wager asked.

  “Last weekend, what, Saturday? Yeah. She showed up Saturday for work and then Tuesday her husband, what’s his name, he called to ask where she was. First I knew she was missing, I swear.”

  “You didn
’t see her Sunday or Monday?”

  “We’re closed then.”

  “Mr. Sheldon didn’t call until Tuesday?”

  “My private number’s unlisted. In this business …” He ended with a shake of the head.

  “Do you know Mr. Sheldon?”

  “I seen him once or twice. He seems like a real gentleman. But I can’t say as I know him.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Sheldon leave the club last Saturday?”

  Berg shook his head. “Unless it’s payday or unless they got a problem, I don’t see the girls come and go. We have a business meeting once a week—Thursday morning. That and payday’s about the only time I see all of them.”

  “She was at last Thursday’s meeting?”

  “She was still working Thursday night. You miss a meeting, you’re out on your sweet ass.” He smiled, “That sounds hard, maybe, but some of these young ladies, they never had discipline in the home, you know?”

  “Did she have any men friends other than her husband?”

  “You mean was she cheating on him? Not with my customers! The young ladies dance for the customers. When they’re not dancing, they serve the customers their drinks. The rest of the time they leave the customers alone and vice versa. This is a clean establishment, gentlemen. Wholesome exotic dancing, you know? You could bring your wife or mother here. Some broad tries dating up the customers, out she goes on her sweet ass.”

  “No one ever asks the girls for a date after the show?”

  “Well, sure—that’s human nature, right? But all she’s got to say is she’ll lose her job. It gives the girls an excuse they appreciate, you know? I find out somebody’s hustling customers, she’s through. Period. I make this very plain at the hiring interview. I tell them the rules and tell them they can be replaced like that if they break the rules—it’s simple as that.” He thought a minute. “Of course, what they do on their own time away from here, that’s their business. I’m not a fascist, right? But this is a clean place; if Shelly had something going on the side, it wasn’t from here.” The telephone rang again and, after a terse conversation, Berg hung up. “Things get real busy about this time,” he hinted.