Killing Zone

by Rex Burns

“That’s all? She could have asked me that.”

  Wager shrugged. “She said she wanted to cut out the middleman.”

  “Middleman? Me?” The lieutenant sagged back in his chair. “That’s a bunch of crap.”

  “Her words, Lieutenant. Not mine.”

  “Jesus. So what’d you tell her?”

  “I gave her what we have. It didn’t take long.”

  “Did she make any comments?”

  “She’s worried about race relations. She told me how important Green was to the black community.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I’ve been saying. But that’s it? That’s all she wanted?”

  Here came the outright lie and Wager kept his face and eyes still and unblinking as he gazed back at Wolfard’s pale-blue ones: “That’s it.”

  With a curt nod, the lieutenant dismissed him and Wager went quickly around the corner to the detectives’ office. Stubbs had his lunch spread across his desk and was chewing an apple and grunting into the telephone. He saw Wager and pointed at a list anchored by a small can of tapioca pudding. “Tenants,” he said away from the telephone, and then into the mouthpiece, “Yessir. Davis, Jerome H. That’s right. Thank you.”

  The taste of the lie was still sour on Wager’s tongue as he read down the names of those evicted by Green’s vote. The list wasn’t complete, but it had most of them, and Wager was pleased that Stubbs had been busy.

  The man hung up the telephone. “I wasn’t sure when you’d be back, so I called the parole board about those White Brotherhood people, the names Martinez gave you. Sonny Pickett’s p.o. tells me he’s working construction over on East Colfax. I can’t get a thing on Big Nose Smith—he’s off parole. What happened over at the CC building?”

  “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  He did, most of it. Stubbs’s foot lifted slightly from the accelerator, and the unmarked cruiser slowed a bit in the surge of traffic between red lights. “Some kind of payoff?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The source wasn’t all that clear about it.”

  “That puts you way out on the end of a little bitty limb, Wager. And me with you.”

  “Just me. I never told you about it. And you won’t tell anyone else.”

  “Right, sure. But holy shit, Gabe, you didn’t have to promise one damned thing to whoever told you. You should have stopped them right there and told them to save it for the chief.”

  “I don’t think the person would have told anybody. Then where would we be?”

  “We wouldn’t be up shit’s creek.”

  “It’s only a rumor. That’s the whole point.”

  “I understand that. But what it means is they want it looked into. They want it done without getting tied to it. If something pops, they’ll deny they ever told you or anyone else a thing.”

  That was true.

  “It’s politics, Wager!”

  That was true, too. But there was one other truth that outweighed all that: “It’s also a lead.”

  1351 Hours

  The construction job was more a destruction job, at least so far; a crew was slowly dismantling an old hotel that had served as a nightclub and whorehouse to rebuild it into a combination retail and office building. It was a “historic landmark”—for some reason Denver’s preservationists wanted future generations to admire old churches, breweries, and brothels. A few blocks east of the state capitol on Colfax, the site was marked by a façade of rawly stripped brick and cast-concrete ornaments, and by sheets of flopping plastic over the glassless holes of windows, to protect the busy street from the dust and occasional explosions of splinters and chips. Stubbs set the cruiser in a yellow zone and flipped down the visor with its police identification; Wager found a slit in the mesh fence and went past a sign that warned against trespassing. A springy plywood ramp led up to a ragged hole in the brick wall and into a barn-like first floor whose steel piers showed where partitions used to be. Above them, on the other side of thick planks that formed the floorboards of the second story, the brief ratcheting clatter of an air hammer was followed by a startled hoot and a loud crash and a cackle of high-pitched laughter.

  “Wouldn’t you know Sonny could find a job where he’d be paid for trashing a place?”

  Wager stepped carefully over a splintered two-by-four that lay with long nails aimed skyward. Another ramp, this one lined with strips of lath, led to all the excitement above.

  A young man in a yellow hardhat and stained muscle shirt wrestled a wheelbarrow load of old brick toward another hole in the back of the building. “Below!” he called without bothering to look, and dumped the load into space. Turning, he was surprised to see Stubbs and Wager watching him. “You looking for Mark? He’s out back, in the trailer.”

  “Who’s Mark?” asked Wager.

  “Foreman. Who you looking for?”

  “Sonny Pickett.”

  “Pickett?” The man, in his late teens or early twenties, was coated with brick dust that had channels of sweat carved down his chest and ribs. “No Pickett on this crew.”

  “He’s a big guy,” said Wager. “Beard, tattoos, the whole bit.”

  “Great big?”

  “Right.”

  “Must be the guy working on the elevators. I don’t know his name, but goddamn, he’s big, all right.” He gestured across the open floor toward a cluster of beams that formed a kind of open cage. “He’s working in the shaft, down in the basement.”

  Wager peeked down the hole surrounded by the skeleton of iron. Far below, the white glare of an unshaded bulb lit a hulking figure humped over a tangle of greasy metal. Even from this distance of three stories, he recognized Sonny.

  They went back down and stopped at the top of a ladder dropping into a square hole in the concrete floor. “Pickett?”

  A broad, bearded face looked up. The hairy flesh over the cheekbones swelled with gristle that dwarfed the man’s tiny, snub nose and made his eyes look smaller than they were. “I know you.”

  “Detective Wager, Denver Police. I busted you a few years back. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  The face turned back to its work, showing Wager a sweaty tangle of long black hair that wasn’t much different from the front. In no hurry, he hooked his hands under the shaft of a large electric motor and, with a fluid motion that was surprisingly quick, stood to heave the machine to his shoulder. Then, ponderously, he turned and climbed the ladder, each step swaying the creaking two-by-fours that formed its rails. They stepped back to let Pickett out, first the broad hand and forearm gripping the barrel of the motor, then the hairy head canted against the weight, then the rest of him, a cannonball of a man whose bulk beneath the sleeveless overalls looked fat but was really solid flesh and bone. He tilted the elevator motor off his shoulder and swung it heavily to the scarred wooden floor.

  “What’s that thing weigh?” Stubbs asked.

  Pickett kicked it thoughtfully with the toe of his motorcycle boot. “Three-fifty, four, maybe.” He looked from Stubbs to Wager, eyes sleepy beneath the wet ringlets of black hair. “What you want to ask?”

  “We want to know about the White Brotherhood.”

  Pickett grunted and reached to scratch one massive arm with a finger that left a smear of grease across a tattoo. An eagle, it looked like, wings spread and a banner in its beak reading “Liberty or Die.” “Yeah. I’m a member. So what?”

  “So did the Brotherhood have anything to do with the death of Councilman Green?”

  “Who?”

  “The city councilman who got shot a couple days ago—the black councilman.”

  Pickett looked down at Wager. “What the hell kind of question is that, man?”

  “The word going around is that it was a racist killing. The White Brotherhood’s racist. What do you know about it?”

  “I don’t know shit about it. And I don’t care. One less nigger, fine. But don’t lay it off on me.”

  “I looked over your jacket, Sonny. You’re on probation for another eighteen mo
nths.”

  “So?”

  “So you can go back in if I don’t like the way you look.”

  The shape seemed to grow wider and Pickett swayed forward like a leaning tree. “Why you hassling me, man?”

  Sonny wasn’t all that dumb, but like a lot of big men he acted dull and brutal to heighten the sense of threat and to mask the vulnerability of intelligence. It reminded Wager of a high school football player’s act. “To get answers, Pickett. If you know something, tell us. Because it’s your ass if you don’t.”

  “I never heard of that son of a bitch.”

  “The Brotherhood hates blacks. Maybe somebody decided to stir things up.”

  The eyebrows pinched together under their fringe of damp ringlets as he traced Wager’s meaning. “You want me to fink? Is that it? You want me to be one of your fucking ‘confidential informants’? That what you want?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No way.”

  “Eighteen months, Sonny. All I do is blink my eyes and you go up for a year and a half.”

  The large head that seemed to rest directly on the thick, sloping shoulders wagged once. “No.”

  Wager held out one of his business cards with a penciled number on the back. When the man’s arm didn’t move, he tucked it into the front of the greasy overalls. “If it was some of the Brotherhood and you find out about it, it’s you or them. If you don’t tell us and we find out—it’s you and them.”

  They left the man staring after them and scratching vaguely at the place where the card had fallen inside his sleeveless overalls. In the car, Stubbs shook his head. “He’s not going to turn, Gabe. Doing eighteen months is nothing for him; hell, he can hold his breath that long.”

  “The way it smelled, he should. But his jacket says he just had a baby daughter and he’s buying a house out in Commerce City. It’s not just his ass hanging in the breeze and he knows it.”

  Stubbs was doubtful. “If word gets out he finked, he’ll be just one big target. He’s not going to do it.”

  “Maybe not. But we’ll see. If anything’s there, he just might shake enough dust to make somebody sneeze.”

  1522 Hours

  Stubbs had the list of names and addresses of the evicted tenants, and now he and Wager would probe to see which might hold a grudge against Green. By this time most had scattered into other housing in the neighboring North Capitol Hill and Five Points areas; some had disappeared, leaving no forwarding address, no telephone numbers where bills might catch up with them. But many of the families who had just moved were single women with children who needed their ADC checks and made it easy for the mailman to find them. Most had no idea that Councilman Green had any responsibility at all for the eviction—“They going to put up a parking lot, so they made us move, that’s all”—and a large number did not even know who Councilman Green was. A few knew and were angry.

  “I heard what I heard. That Councilman Green, he voted to throw us out, that’s what I heard.”

  “Have you ever met the man or seen him, Mrs. Dent?”

  “No, and I sure don’t want to. I’m not sure what I’d do to that man.”

  “You know he was murdered?”

  “He what? Somebody killed him?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Wager studied the broad face as she seemed to hear the news for the first time. Behind her in the tiny, hot apartment that opened from a door roughly chopped into the side of the frame house, a girl about fifteen sullenly nursed a heat-sprawled child.

  “Well, he didn’t deserve that.”

  “Do you know anyone who might have thought he deserved it? Anyone evicted who said anything about getting even?”

  “No. And nobody would around me. I’m a church woman, praise be the Lord.” She spoke over her shoulder, “Claudine, you hear what this man say?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “You know anything about it?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “You sure now? We talking a killing here, girl. One of the Lord’s Commandments already been broke around here and I don’t want you breaking another being a false witness.”

  Wager was unsure which Commandment the woman was talking about—killing or adultery—but it made little difference; the sullen girl shook her head. “I don’t know nothing about it, Mama.”

  The questioning dragged into the dinner hour when the heat and odors of cooking began to seep through the open doors and mingle with the smell of the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. The sun was still three hours above the jagged outline of the mountains west of town, and it would be longer than that before its weight began to lift and the cramped and airless rooms started to cool. Now, the inhabitants sought relief on porches and on steps that caught a strip of shade, the men still in their work clothes or peeled to undershirts and pulling on a can of beer, the women stepping away from the heat of stoves to take a deep breath. Everywhere, impervious to the heat, children flowed in clusters, their voices high, birdlike sounds sharper than the steady rush of the traffic they dodged through.

  They were two-thirds of the way down the list when Stubbs pulled to the curb in front of a small, brown-brick house sandwiched between two apartment buildings. He and Wager got out, an assortment of kids drawing back from the curb to eye them in curious silence. Even the six- and seven-year-olds recognized detectives, and cops meant some kind of excitement, and maybe even trouble for somebody.

  On the porch, in silent suspicion, a gray-haired woman rocked slowly and stared at them. Beside her, two young men in grimy tank tops sat and stared, too. Wager caught the eyes of the one he recognized, and the man blinked and slowly tilted his head to spit something between his feet.

  “Denver Police,” said Stubbs. “We’re looking for Mrs. Bliscomb.”

  “What you want with them?” The woman kept rocking, the unhidden anger in her eyes making them dark and wet.

  “Ask a few questions. I hear she moved in with you.”

  “She ain’t done nothing.” The woman added, “Officer.”

  “She’s not wanted for anything,” said Stubbs pleasantly. “We just want to ask her some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s between her and us, Mrs. Wells.” Wager glanced at the larger of the two youths whose closed faces said how much they hated cops. “How are you, Edward? Keeping out of trouble?”

  “I’m doing all right.”

  Which meant he hadn’t been caught. The Wells brothers and their mother were familiar names in the burglary division; the kids did the stealing, the mother did the fencing. The two sons had long juvenile records, though the oldest, now that he had turned eighteen, had become cautious. Beyond the water-starved hedge at one end of the porch, Wager saw the bobbing heads of children sneaking close to see what was going down—to find out what the police wanted with the Wellses this time so they could carry the story breathless and get the attention of the older kids and grown-ups at home. Wager remembered the awed and scary feeling he used to have as a kid when the Gonzales family, who generated a lot of whispers among the grownups in the Auraria barrio, used to be visited by the Anglo police. Pato Gonzales would always look for a fight after the cops came to get one of his older brothers; it was his way of telling Wager and the other kids he wasn’t afraid of them or Anglo cops or anybody. The last Wager heard, Pato was in jail in Texas.

  “It’s about a homicide,” Stubbs explained. “A murder.”

  “Who she supposed to kill?”

  “Nobody. We just want to ask her some questions. Is she here?”

  The woman’s eyes flicked to her younger son, Edgar, and he heaved himself carelessly off the stone of the porch wall. A few moments later, a woman came nervously onto the porch; Edgar leaned silently against the door frame and watched.

  “Mrs. Bliscomb?”

  “Yes.”

  “Denver Police. Can we ask you some questions?”

  “I reckon.” She wore an apron that clenched tightly around her hands and a bandanna tucked over he
r hair in a way that Wager thought of as Southern. He hadn’t seen that often in Denver. They went through the list of questions, Mrs. Wells rocking in the background and listening intently.

  “You don’t know Councilman Green?” Wager asked.

  “I heard of him, I think. But we haven’t lived here long—we came up from Galveston only a while ago.”

  “You’re living with Mrs. Wells now?”

  “We rents a room. Me and the children. Until we can find another place of our own.”

  “You’ve got a job?”

  “Yessir. We getting by. I just wish they’d of left us stay where we was at.”

  “Were a lot of people mad when they had to move?”

  “Mad? I reckon some, maybe. Most was just worried. It’s hard, you know, when you got a place and then they takes it away from you. I just put up some curtains, too.”

  That was the god called Progress worshipped in the name of Profit. It had a way of abstracting people into percentages and norms so their faces couldn’t be seen when they were uprooted and—as in his old neighborhood, the Auraria barrio—the bulldozers scraped away their homes and memories both. But Wager was paid to deal with the faces; he couldn’t hide them behind computer printouts or the fake-leather binding of planning documents. Developers did that, and lawyers, and even city councilmen. “Did anyone make any threats against Councilman Green for voting to rezone the apartments?”

  “No, sir. Not that I heard.”

  They thanked her and turned to go down the cracked brick steps. The sound of Mrs. Wells’s rocking chair stopped. “That what you trying to do?”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Wells?”

  “You trying to blame the people for Councilman Green’s killing?”

  “We don’t have anybody to blame yet.”

  “You are, ain’t you? But we heard already—we know.”

  “Know what?”

  “We know he was killed by a white man. We heard what happened.”

  “We don’t know who killed him. If we did, we’d have an arrest.”

  “You want us to think he was killed by a Negro, don’t you? Well, we heard what really happened—it wasn’t no Negro killed Councilman Green!” Behind her, staring with the same hatred, her two sons were poised shadows.