Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  Axton showed his badge. “He was shot last night and we’re trying to trace his movements.”

  “Oh, my! Shot!”

  “Was he here?”

  “No. Oh, my, isn’t that too bad!”

  “Did he ever come here with anyone else?” Wager asked.

  She fiddled with the pencil sticking out of her hair. “Before Rosalyn, he had another girl. I can’t remember her name, though.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Oh, my—a year and a half? A long time, anyway. Was Doc hurt bad?”

  “He was killed.”

  “Oh, my. Poor Rosalyn.” She studied her order book for a few moments as if looking for words. Finally she asked, “Do you folks want dessert?”

  Axton drove across the sun-softened tar streets toward Kalamath and Sandy’s. It was one of those August afternoons when the clouds were already piling up over the mountains west of town and promised to boil into towering thunderheads that would sail east across the prairies toward Kansas and Nebraska and, eventually, the sprawling green land of tree-lined farms that was the Mississippi valley. Later in the day, toward evening, you would see the clouds disappear over the eastern horizon, their tops glimmering white like distant sails, their feet under the curve of the earth, and a blue haze where rain and hail and wind pounded down. Then the radio would broadcast warnings about severe thunderstorms and tornado sightings, and, here and there on the gullied prairies, small streams would explode with yellow boiling water and the foamy debris that jammed culverts and washed out bridges and sent slices of Colorado clay roiling eastward toward the giant rivers. But here in Denver, just inside the formation of the storms, the streets were scorched and dusty and the odor of an occasional lawn sprinkler steamed off the glittering surface with the smell of summer. It was, Wager thought, like one of the old sayings vaguely remembered from childhood, one of the many he’d half-forgotten—something about the rain falling on some, while the sun shone on others, and only El Buen Dios could say why.

  Doc was about Wager’s age, maybe a little older. Maybe, like Wager, he had hopped barefoot and yelping across the summer heat of dirt streets before they were tarred and paved. Maybe, like Wager, he had sought the relief of some neighbor’s cool sprinkler winking diamonds of water in the sun.

  Max slowed and turned onto Kalamath, the shade of the remaining trees forming a tunnel of coolness down which bicyclists weaved past parked cars, and kids on skateboards thumped noisily over the concrete slabs of sidewalk. Here and there, joggers sprinted past, running as if all eyes were on them. Wager looked at the lean, tanned legs of a girl running through the mottled shade and half-wondered if Doc had found pleasure in such a sight. There were a lot of things about Doc he would never know, and he had no reason at all to get maudlin over the man’s death. Snitches died every day in every way, and sooner or later everyone joined them. There was no reason for Wager to feel diminished. But he did.

  The heavy sun came back as they reached a block where the sheltering trees had been sliced down to make the street wider. Ahead, the glittering swirl of windshields and hot metal marked busy Colfax, and now the homes were mixed with old-fashioned small apartment buildings and occasional two- and three-unit businesses. Max turned the car into a narrow drive leading past a chipped corner that bore a scarred sign, PARKING IN REAR.

  “Ever been here?” he asked as they walked to the entry of the small tavern. The two large windows in front were half-blanked out, and above the blue enamel a painter had scrolled in long-faded gold, Sandy’s Bar.

  “No.” But he knew what to expect—one of the few remaining neighborhood taverns. There were a few booths and a lot of tables, and a long, dark bar whose carved pillars rose up to the ceiling, holding a mirror and surrounded by shelves of bottles, most so high out of reach that they were probably never used. Wager suspected that a lot of the brightly labeled containers were empty, anyway. At arm’s level were the bourbons and scotches and ryes that most of the single men ordered when they spent the evenings watching the television set mounted up in the corner. The ladies tended to drink gin and vodka, and customers of both sexes believed they had a true friend in the bartender.

  Maybe they did; he looked like everybody’s friend, a round face with a quiet smile and a fringe of white hair over his ears. He moved placidly behind the counter, chatting with a middle-aged man and woman who nursed a couple bottles of Miller’s. There was no jukebox, the television set was off, and not one fern sprouted anywhere. The only sound was of quiet voices and the hum of two large fans on the ceiling. Wager understood why Doc liked the place.

  “Help you gents?”

  Wager opened his badge case. “We’re investigating a homicide, a man who came in here a lot.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lewis Rowe. Also known as Doc.”

  The man’s scraggly eyebrows lifted. “Thin guy? Kind of nervous? Always telling jokes?”

  Wager showed the bartender Doc’s driver’s license. “Is this him?”

  The bartender settled a pair of bifocals across his fleshy nose and tipped his head back to peer through the lower half. “That’s Doc. Well, I’ll be darned.” He called to the couple sitting at the cool end of the bar, glancing their way. “Fella here says Doc’s been killed.”

  “Killed?” The woman wagged her head. “Isn’t that just awful!”

  “How’d it happen?” asked the man.

  That’s what they were trying to find out. Wager asked, “Was he in here last night?”

  The bartender tugged thoughtfully at an earlobe. He had gray hairs sprouting there, too, as if the baldness on top had forced the hair out in other directions. “Yeah—I believe he was.” He called down the bar again. “Doc was in here last night, wasn’t he?”

  “Sure was.” The woman had one of those quacking voices that seemed to be pressed flat somewhere in her throat. “Sat right there at that table. Talked about going to the greyhound races tomorrow with Rosalyn. Poor woman.”

  “Was he with anyone?”

  “No,” said the bartender. “Doc usually came in just with his wife or by himself. He was a real nice fella, real friendly. It sure is a shame.”

  “What time did he leave?”

  “Oh, gosh, let’s see—Friday night’s a busy night—let’s see. …”

  “It was a little after eleven,” came the quacking voice. “You just turned on ‘Benny Hill’ and Doc said he wanted to watch it but he couldn’t. He had to meet somebody, he said.”

  Axton was standing closer to the woman. “Did he say who?”

  She shook her head.

  “Or where?” Wager asked.

  “Yes, he did say where—we joked about that. He said he had to meet this man, and I said it wasn’t a man, not at that place, and that’s why he came in without his wife. We always joked like that, you know.”

  “What place?”

  “The Cinnamon Club. That topless-bottomless place over on Colfax. Doc had to be at the Cinnamon Club to meet this man about something, but he didn’t say what.”

  They sat in the car in the small parking lot behind the tavern and did more thinking than talking. You looked for patterns. In a series of possibly related crimes, you always looked for a pattern. That’s what the idea of a modus operandi was all about. If something worked once for a criminal—burglary, rape, even murder—chances were he’d do it the same way again. A learned technique could be polished with repetition, leaving more time to guard against witnesses or evidence. It was the same thing that led animals down familiar paths at the same time every day: they knew what to look for each time, had an idea how a victim would behave, were more aware of any threatening change in the pattern or the menace of a larger predator. And now Wager was a predator, looking for the worn path, the warm spoor, the gently rising blade of grass.

  “All he told you was that he had something important about Sheldon and Williams. You think he was going to find out more?”

  “My guess is it was about Sheldon a
nd Williams—he didn’t say for sure. And I guess he asked one question too many.”

  Axton sighed and started the car. He eased out into the busy traffic on Kalamath. “Have you come up with any ideas at all?”

  “Nothing.” About his contacts and moves, Doc was as silent with Wager as he was with everyone else. Now he was as silent as the grave. “I’ve found out that Annette Sheldon was making a lot of money. I think it was a lot more than she made as a dancer, and I think it has something to do with dope. But none of my leads corroborate that.” He added, “Angela Williams apparently brought home only what she made as a dancer. Other than the way they were killed, there’s no tie at all between them that I can find. Can you make something of that?”

  Axton grunted a negative sound. “But it keeps coming back to that, doesn’t it? That all three were killed the same way.”

  “Well, the murderer didn’t make Doc look raped.”

  The big man snorted. “Right. He was robbed instead. Or made to look that way.” He sighed again and swung the cruiser back toward the block where Doc’s body had been found. It was time to start knocking on all those apartment doors.

  CHAPTER 10

  BY THE TIME the shift ended, Wager was wincing when an apartment had neither bell nor knocker. He could buzz from the lobby and identify himself so they’d open the security door; but once in the building and going down the long halls a door at a time, he had to use his knuckles, and after four hours of it they were sore. All to no profit—so far no one in the surrounding apartment towers had seen or heard anything when Doc’s body was tossed on the trash heap. When they returned to Homicide, Max scribbled a note for the oncoming shift, telling them where he and Wager had quit canvassing. Stretching mightily so that his fingers brushed the ceiling of the office, he asked casually what Wager had planned for his Saturday evening.

  “A night on the town.”

  “Look, Gabe, what you’re doing … It’s tough enough when somebody goes under legitimately—when they have the proper backup and authorization. …”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, well, just make sure you’re covered, okay? And I’m not talking about the bad guys. More than one career’s been flushed because somebody went out on a limb by himself.” He led the way to the elevator and pushed the button for the underground parking garage. “Have you thought about telling Doyle what you’re doing?”

  He had, and decided against it. “I’m just drinking a few beers and talking to some people. On my own time.” And he didn’t want to take the chance that Doyle, with an administrator’s reflexive No, would tell him that the Homicide Division was a team, and that, by God, cases would be dealt with according to the operations manual or he—Detective Sergeant Wager—could get his butt out of his—Chief Bartholomew Doyle’s—Homicide section and into the Traffic Division.

  The garage doors opened to the cool odor of stale automobile exhaust and a scattering of concrete pillars holding up the gloom between distant lights. The two men paused for a moment, groping for something that would not let the shift end on an argument.

  “Munn thinks he spotted Pepe the Pistol again.”

  “Where?”

  “Over in the projects near his girlfriend’s house. The word is she’s knocked up and that’s why he’s still around.”

  “His buddies are dead but chivalry’s not, is that it?”

  “Just young love, I guess.” Max’s large shoe scraped the gritty concrete floor. “If you need help, Gabe, will you give me a call? Don’t try and do it all by yourself, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean it, partner.”

  “Right—will do.”

  He watched the big man thread his way between the silent cars, and a few moments later heard the slam of a door. Max was all right—Max was his partner. But he had a wife and kids to worry about. He was the kind of guy who had a lot more fear for them than he had for himself, and so sometimes he wouldn’t take chances that he thought might hurt them. Not the physical threats and dangers—those came with the job, and Max, like every other cop and most of their families, accepted those chances. It was the paperwork dangers that worried the big man, those ill-defined risks that lay outside the boundaries of authorization. But Wager liked to believe that if you let that happen, then pretty soon you might not act at all—you only reacted.

  You hid behind what the team thought, and you let rules govern how you moved and where you headed. For Wager, that was no way to go after murderers.

  He slept heavily until the alarm went off at nine and then took a long, steamy shower after a series of push-ups and squats and sit-ups that worked the stiffness out of muscles and put a feeling of alertness back in his mind. Sound mind, sound body—everything but a sound plan. He was still groping for a coherent pattern that would lead to a motive, but doing something was always better than doing nothing. “Do something, lieutenant!” He could still hear the terrified voice of an ashen corporal shrieking at their new platoon commander, a kid who, by the calendar, was Wager’s own age. They hunkered, drenched by the urine-smelling spray of a rice paddy, while the earth shuddered and the goggle-eyed corporal screamed, “Do something—even if it’s wrong—do something!” He did; he stood up and caught one right in the head—thoonk! That’s just how it sounded, like a stick hitting a ripe watermelon: thoonk.

  But right or wrong, do something. And that led Wager back to the strip, his Trans Am surging and slowing with the heavy Saturday night traffic that crammed the four lanes. He passed LaBelle’s corner but she wasn’t there; half-a-dozen blocks down, he swung out of the stream of cars to look for a parking place along one of the crowded side streets. Across from a small neighborhood grocery store that lit up the corner of a large apartment building, he found a telephone hood with a machine that still worked. The Eveready Lounge was a block and a half away, and he dialed its number.

  “Is Charley Plummer there?”

  “I’ll ask.” A hand muffled the receiver and Wager could picture the bartender calling over the crowd. A cautious voice finally answered, “Yeah?”

  “This is Gabe. I want to talk to you.”

  “Now?”

  “That’s right. Meet me on the corner of Colfax and Washington—south side. Ten minutes.”

  “… All right.”

  Wager saw the thin figure hunched like a half-closed hand before the Lizard noticed him. The man walked slowly, close to the storefronts, his glance restless but elusive with that kind of guarded awareness that prison taught. And which served on the street as well. When their eyes met across Washington Street, Wager tilted his head down the darker sidewalk leading away from the strip. Without a reply, Plummer turned that way.

  He waited in the shadow of a tall hedge halfway down the block. “What have you got for me, Plummer?”

  “Not much.” His lips scarcely moved and Wager had to lean close to hear the hoarse murmur. “I hung around Foxy Dick’s like you wanted me to. I asked about that one—Angela. I said I was just back in town and wanted to see her again. Hell, most of them don’t remember her name by now.” He hesitated. “That other place, the Cinnamon Club, that was a little different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it. I asked about that one—where she was.”

  “So?”

  “So the bartender—what’s he, Vietnamese? Anyway, he calls the bouncer and says, ‘He’s asking about Shelly.’ It was like it was some big deal, you know?”

  “Any threats?”

  “No, nothing like that. But this big sumbitch, seven feet high and a face like a gumball, he comes over and says, ‘What for?’ ‘I been out of town,’ I says. ‘I want to say hello.’ ‘She ain’t here no more,’ he says. ‘She got shot.’ And then he stands there like I’m supposed to say something. Hell, what am I supposed to say? ‘Sorry to hear that,’ I says. ‘How’d it happen?’ ‘Why do you want to know,’ he says. ‘Hey, man, I’m just asking,’ I says. ‘Ask somewhere else,’ he says, and
he looks at me like he don’t really believe what I’m telling him. Looks at me all the way out the goddamn door like he wants to remember me. I didn’t even get a chance to buy a drink.”

  Wager weighed the Lizard’s story, turning it over. Then he showed the wizened man a sketch of Doc that the police artist had put together from the driver’s license and the corpse. “Did this guy show up while you were there?”

  He bent to peer at the drawing. “I don’t think so. It’s darker in there than it is here, and I didn’t get to see many people. I mean, he sort of ran me out, you know?”

  “He was killed last night. The last place we trace him to is the Cinnamon Club. He was asking about Shelly, too.”

  The puffy eyes swiveled up. “Holy shit, Wager, what are you getting me into?”

  It would be nice to be able to say “Nothing.” Like it would be nice to be able to say that Doc was still alive. “That’s why I’m telling you. Better stay away from there for a while.”

  “Hell yes, I will! And more than a while, man. I told you before, I don’t like them places anyway.” He added, “And I’ll tell you something else—I’m not working for you no more!”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Clinton!” The whisper hissed. “He’s laughing at you fuckers—he helped beat that kid—Goddard—to death, and he knows you can’t lay a thing against him.”

  “That’s because Jimmy King won’t name him. I figure he’s afraid to.”

  “He’s too smart to. He gets out of the can, he’s still alive; he fingers Clinton, he’s dead.”

  “Has Clinton said anything to you?”

  “Not to me, no. But he’s making noises like he thinks somebody spilled on both him and King. He could think I’m one of them somebodies.”

  “Has he asked anything about me?”

  “About you? Goddamn, man, he better not even think I know your name! I don’t even want to know your name!”

  “Somebody’s been asking around about me. I thought it was him.”