by Rex Burns
Wager had never met a saint, let alone investigated the murder of one; and he guessed that Green was as human as anyone else and as liable as anyone else to making enemies. But racism was the only motive so far. “We haven’t had a chance to find out if there might be other motives, because all we’ve been doing is sitting here scratching our ass.”
The man flushed and his pale eyes hardened as he stared at Wager’s blank face. “Then why don’t you just get off your ass and start working?”
On the way down the hall, Stubbs murmured, “Jeez, you really gave it to him.”
“He wanted us to sit there and hold his hand.” The anger that had lunged out from that ill-defined place in the back of his skull was slow to ebb, fired by another sleepless night and by the waste of his time at Wolfard’s pleasure. “He’s pulling the pay and he’s got the rank. By God, he should do his own work.”
“He’s as new as I am in Homicide.”
“Then he should know enough to let me do mine.”
Stubbs fell silent as they passed the receptionist’s desk where the civilian woman nodded and smiled, her ears alert to anything they said. In the elevator, just before they reached the basement, he asked, “What time’d you quit last night?”
“I don’t know. Nine or ten.”
Stubbs watched the light jump across the numbers to B-2. “Does Doyle want us to put in all that overtime?”
“I don’t claim overtime.”
“You don’t? You put in a sixteen-hour day just for the hell of it?”
“It’s the way I see the job. A lot of people see it that way.” And it was something Stubbs shouldn’t have to ask. If he wanted eight hours a day, five days a week, he should be a civilian. Or go back into uniform where a sly cop could manage to wrap up his paperwork right at the end of his shift. Axton, too, had made some comment to Wager about losing himself in the work: “You’ve been like this ever since you got back.”
“Like what?”
“Trying to work yourself to death.”
The anger had stirred then, too, and Wager started to tell the big man that it was his self and his work, and if Axton thought there was something wrong with either one, he was free to walk in and bitch to Doyle. But he didn’t. Instead, he let the flare silently die back and reminded himself that Max had been his partner, and that he spoke because he cared. “It doesn’t seem much different. I never did like to work by the clock.”
“Yeah, I know. But there for a while, you know, when you and Jo … Well, you were a lot looser, then, Gabe.”
“She’s dead.”
That, and the tone he used, said it all. Axton had gotten off the subject and Wager had been relieved by his silence. Just as he welcomed Stubbs’s wordlessness, even if it was a bit sullen. He tossed the man the ring of car keys—it was his turn to drive. As they cleared the concrete walls of the police parking garage Wager keyed the mike for DMV and any luck they had looking for a dark Lincoln Continental, license HRG-1.
0848 Hours
Embassy Furniture was one of the smaller warehouses in the home furnishings district just off north I-25. Flanked by flag-bedecked buildings the size of hangars and advertising SALE ON ALL STOCK, Embassy’s display windows showed samples of different rooms that featured a lot of dark wood and leather trim and beveled glass. Wager had half expected the store to be closed for mourning, but the only sign in the door stated the usual hours of operation. He and Stubbs were early—it wasn’t yet nine—but Stubbs knocked loud and long enough to stir up a figure behind the glass. An attractive woman met them with a worried look. She had blond hair that tumbled in stiff curls and her makeup was precisely lined, like—Wager thought—one of those enameled-looking Texas blondes who were always entering beauty pageants. Before she could ask what they wanted, Wager showed his badge and identified himself. “Could we ask you a few questions?”
She was in her late twenties or early thirties and her age showed in sudden tired lines as her gray eyes stared at them for a long moment. Then she nodded. “Yes, of course. Let’s go to the office.” Turning, she called to someone out of sight among a forest of glinting mirrors. “Ray, will you watch the floor? I’ll be in the office with these gentlemen.”
A voice came back, “OK, Sonie.”
Her name was Sonja Andersen but everyone, she said, called her Sonie. She had worked for Mr. Green for almost three years, first as salesperson and accountant and then as store manager after he was elected to City Council. Her voice was soft and reflective, as if she were telling herself rather than them what had happened. “When I heard about it, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, whether or not to open the store this morning, or what.” She shrugged and looked around at the silent gleam of oiled wood. “So I came down and opened up. I didn’t know what else to do …”
“How did you hear about it?” Wager asked.
“Last night. The news. It still doesn’t seem real.”
He waited a moment until her breath steadied. “Can you tell me when you saw Mr. Green last?”
“Yesterday afternoon. He always goes over the day’s bank.”
“That was after seven?”
“About then, yes. That’s when we close at midweek. Fridays and Saturdays, we stay open until nine. And we’re open on Sunday afternoons until five.”
“So he left here some time after seven?”
She nodded and thought back. “A little after. I can’t say for certain.”
“He was driving his own car? The Lincoln?”
“Yes. He always drove that. He said it was one of his trademarks.”
“Sounds like you work a lot of hours,” said Stubbs.
“We rotate. Mr. Green makes it up to us. He’s—he was—a very good employer.” Her nose grew red and Wager saw tears tremble on her lower eyelids. “He was such a kind man …”
“Did he seem upset in any way? Worried?”
“Not really worried, no. Tired. I think the City Council work was making him awfully tired.”
“Did he say anything about it?”
“No. He’d never say if he was worried about anything; he wasn’t that kind.”
“Do you know where he went when he left here?”
The blond hair wagged from side to side. “A political meeting. He always had a political meeting to go to, but I don’t know what time it was or where.”
“Can you tell us the names of anybody he may have been meeting?”
“No. I just don’t—didn’t—know that much about that part of his life. Only what he told me now and then.” She fell silent, staring at the Kleenex wadded in her fingers. Wager and Stubbs gave her more time to remember whatever she could. That was one of the things you learned about asking questions—not to move too fast, not to push a person off a topic too soon, because something may still be coming. “Mrs. Wilfong might know. She’s Mr. Green’s aide.”
Wager jotted down the name. “Did he have a lot of all-night meetings?”
“All night? What do you mean?”
“Late enough so he wouldn’t get home. So he might stay at a friend’s house. Or maybe a motel.”
“I … I really don’t know. I guess he could. I don’t know that much about his political life, so I suppose he could.” She added, “The Council meetings go very late a lot of times, I know that.”
“Did he ever say anything about a threat on his life?” asked Stubbs.
“Threat? No.” The woman’s hand went to her throat and Wager noted the absence of a wedding ring. “I thought—I just assumed—that it was a robbery. That someone killed him for his money.”
“Did he usually carry a lot of money?”
“He always liked to have two or three hundred in cash.” She went on, “He didn’t like credit cards, which was kind of funny. We do a big credit business.”
“The store’s making money?” Wager asked.
“Yes. It’s our line of furniture—Henredon, Thomasville, Ethan Allen—quality lines. The other stores,” her hand waved at the walls
and beyond, “they sell cheap stuff in bulk. But a lot of people want quality furniture now; the market’s going upscale, and they don’t mind spending a little more for something that looks nice and will last. Horace—Mr. Green—believed in quality. That quality would sell better than junk.” The tears finally spilled in a silent stream and Miss Andersen dabbed the Kleenex quickly, splotching the heavy mascara from her eyelashes. “I’m sorry.”
“Can we talk to the other employees?”
“Yes—certainly.” She sniffed. “There’s Ray and Allie, up front. Do you want to talk to the people out back, too?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody. It shouldn’t take too long.”
It didn’t. Ray Coleman, a young man in a dark suit whose teeth glinted whitely against the ebony of his face, said that he had seen Mr. Green come in yesterday afternoon around five, maybe five-thirty. No, he didn’t seem worried in any way—happy, in fact. He was always happy. Almost always—sometimes he got pretty mad if somebody screwed up, but that was OK because that’s what a boss was supposed to do.
“What time did he leave?”
“Sometime after closing. He and Sonie got back about six-thirty, maybe. They were still here when I left at seven.”
“Got back from where?”
Coleman shrugged and looked from Wager to Stubbs and back. “Coffee. Him and Sonie usually went out for a cup of coffee.”
“Do you know of anyone who might want to hurt Mr. Green? Anyone who ever threatened him?” asked Stubbs.
“Nobody would want to hurt Councilman Green! He was a man the people were proud of!”
“Can you think of any reason someone might kill him?”
“No. I swear to God I can’t. A city councilman—a successful businessman. People looked up to him—we admired him.” The young man stared down at the gleam of his pointed shoes. “I wanted to be like him.”
He would be, Wager thought—we all would: dead. “Do you have any idea where Mr. Green went last evening?”
Coleman shook his head. “No. He was always going to some political meeting or council meeting or something. That or home.” The youth shook his head again. “There’s no reason for it. None at all. He was a good man, you know? Just plain a good man.”
Good or not, Green hadn’t gone home. “Do you know what kind of car he drove?”
“Sure. Everybody knows that showboat—big black Lincoln Continental. Even had his initials on the license plates. That’s why he drove it, so people could see him coming. He’d toot the horn and wave and everybody’d yell back, ‘Hey, Councilman!’”
“Do you have any idea where he might have been last night between nine and midnight?”
“No. Something political’s my guess. It wasn’t where I was, anyway.”
“Where was that?”
“Movies. Over at the Mann on Colorado Boulevard.”
Wager thanked Coleman, and he and Stubbs divided up the stockroom people. What little they added told them the same thing: Green was admired and respected by everyone and had no enemies that they ever heard of; he had arrived between four and five and was here doing paperwork with Sonie when the store closed at seven. If he was worried about anything, they didn’t notice.
On the way out, Wager paused to ask Miss Andersen if she had been in touch with Mrs. Green.
“No. Not yet.” Her makeup was repaired and she had herself under control. “I don’t want to intrude.”
0932 Hours
“That’s a good-looking blonde,” said Stubbs. “I got this thing for blondes. Maybe because my wife’s a brunette.”
Wager grunted some answer; his mind wasn’t on Stubbs’s preference in women.
“Where are we headed?” Stubbs steered the vehicle into the slow lane of I-25 and glanced at Wager.
“City Council offices.”
The sedan picked up speed as it wove easily through traffic toward the Twenty-third Street off-ramp. The City Council chambers and offices were on the fourth floor of the City-County Building with its façade of stone columns reaching out in two wings from a rotunda. Atop the tall center section was an odd cupola designed like the choragic monument to Lysicrates. Whoever the hell Lysicrates was. For some reason the phrase welled out of Wager’s memory as he glanced at it. Jo had told him its name and why so many public buildings had the little doodad stuck up there. He wished he had asked her who Lysicrates was and what “choragic” meant. There were a lot of things he should have done when he had the chance. And things he regretted doing now that he had no chance to correct them. Maybe that was the cause of the taut anger that hung on like a fever and made him edgy and sore. Anger for those careless things done and not done. Anger for the easy assumption that the same sun would rise tomorrow for all of us. Anger for those debts thoughtlessly assumed in the belief they would never have to be paid. La paz con otros comenza con la paz de sí. “Peace with others begins in peace with one’s self.” One of the bits of philosophy his mother had offered from her family’s store of sayings. But he remembered another of her sayings, too—one that usually came on a long sigh of weary exhaustion: “The only peace is in the grave.” That was the trouble with living life by homily—there was more than one for every occasion, and they usually contradicted each other. And all they left Wager with was an ill-stifled anger born of self-contempt.
0947 Hours
“The agenda’s set before Council meets—that’s part of my job as chief of staff along with the council president.” Mr. Fitch—Jeremy Fitch—was heavy-set but no taller than Wager, with a tuft of white hair that sprouted long on top and sagged over like a rooster’s comb. It bounced slightly when he walked, sometimes dropping across a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that straddled his fleshy nose. He had the quick smile of a politician and the eyes of an insider who could tell you more than he was free to say. “After opening the session and taking care of the minutes and other routine items, they move into the conference room to go over items of motion and decide how they’re going to vote. That’s where they can say what they really think without it going into the minutes.”
“They go out again?” asked Wager.
“That’s right.”
“Is it an open meeting?” asked Stubbs.
“Sure. The press goes right with them. The Sunshine Law, you know. That’s where they talk over the business part of the agenda first so they won’t waste time when they come back to the council hall. Usually, that’s the most important and interesting part of the meeting, too. Sometimes some pretty harsh things get said in there that, you know, if they got in the minutes, might embarrass everybody later on.”
“Did Councilman Green get into it with anybody?” asked Stubbs.
“Say, now, that’s not what I meant—nobody gets wound up enough to kill anybody!” The hair bounced up and down as he shook his head quickly. “Don’t go putting words into my mouth, all right?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Stubbs said quickly. “We’re just trying to get a sense of who Councilman Green was. What his routines were. Anyone who was important to him as a friend or a political enemy.”
Fitch led them from the stale air of the wide hallway with its gleaming walls of polished stone. Past the closed and dark doors of the members’ offices, he hesitated. “You’re telling me he was killed by a political enemy?”
“No, we’re not,” said Wager. “We don’t know who he was killed by. We’re just trying to get as much information on the man as we can.”
“Politics gets pretty hot around here sometimes.” The glasses aimed at Stubbs. “But there’s nobody who’d go killing anybody over it. Their reputation, maybe—ha. But certainly not the man himself.”
“I understand that, Mr. Fitch. And that’s not my meaning.”
“Just want to make that clear. A whisper in these halls is heard a long way, and a wrong word can do a lot of damage.” He opened a glass-paneled door that said CHIEF OF STAFF and led them into the office whose single window seemed to dwarf the small space. Through the open
ing, Wager glimpsed a gray stone wing of the same building. “I sure wouldn’t want it getting around that the police insinuated things about City Council.”
Although the budget was the responsibility of the mayor’s office, the council had approval of that budget. Including the police line. Fitch made certain the two detectives remembered that, and Stubbs understood and looked worried.
“Did you see him at all yesterday?” Wager asked.
“Once in the morning, once in the afternoon.” The man’s eyes were guarded by puffy flesh that had squinted against tobacco smoke and the glare of fluorescent lights far more than against the sun. “We had three committee meetings here yesterday—Health and Social Services; Recreation; and Zoning. He’s on the last two. He might have spent some time in the council offices, too, but I didn’t see him.”
“Did he show up for work every day?”
“Unless they have their district offices here, council members don’t come around except for meetings. Thank God.”
“How many committees was Green on?”
“Councilman Green,” Fitch corrected him, “was on five standing committees and had several special assignments.”
“Five?” Stubbs glanced up from his notebook. “How many committees are there?”
“Twelve. Got to have twelve so each councilman gets to chair a committee. Thirteen councilmen, twelve committees. The council president chairs the council meetings and sits on all the committees.” Fitch added, “Gets paid more for it, too.”
“Whether the city needs twelve committees or not?” asked Wager.
Fitch didn’t smile. “They’re all busy committees, Officer.”
“Can you list his committees for us?” Stubbs asked.
The man rustled through a tray of papers and pulled out a blue-and-white brochure labeled DENVER CITY COUNCIL: COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS. “This is part of the press packet. It has this year’s members and their committees and special assignments.”