by Rex Burns
Well, Wager and Elizabeth might have started out rubbing each other wrong, but that, Max figured, was because they were alike in a lot of ways. Which, he also figured, was why that dislike had turned to mutual respect and maybe even something more.
A span of scarred and uncarpeted stairs lifted to the dimly lit landing. At the top, they turned left. Wager found the number and rapped on the door. From an apartment down the hall came the mumble and the long, music-filled pauses of a soap opera. From somewhere else, the squawk and loud laughter of a game show. But Vickie Salazar’s apartment remained so quiet they heard the cautious squeak of a floorboard. Wager had the feeling someone was peering through the peephole. Finally, a dead bolt grated, and the heavy door opened to a length of security chain above a brown eye. “Who’re you people?”
“You’re Miss Salazar?”
“Yes. What you want?”
Axton showed his badge. “I’m the one you talked to on the phone.”
The door closed and then opened just quickly enough to let them in. Wager and Axton crowded into the narrow entry that led past a doorless closet to a sunlit room divided by a breakfast bar into a kitchen and a living area. A foldaway bed had not yet been made up into the couch. Cigarette smoke spread from a wavering column that rose out of an ashtray on a magazine-littered coffee table and layered the closed room with haze. In a corner, the small television set had its volume turned down to a whisper so the woman could listen to the sounds of the hallway.
“This is Detective Wager. Miss Salazar.”
They touched fingers like a couple of boxers.
“I heard of you,” she said. “You’re Charlene Quintero’s cousin, right?”
The name was familiar to Wager. Second or third cousin, maybe—his grandmother’s sister married a Quintero, so it was likely. His mother kept book on all that family stuff. Wager figured he had marriage or blood ties to half of Hispanic Denver. But the only time it meant anything was when he used to get an occasional call from some relative who needed something from the police. Then Wager had had to put two of his cousins in the Canon City prison, which didn’t do much for his relationship with the family, and even those calls had stopped.
Max sat on one of the wooden stools at the tiny breakfast shelf, and it gave a startled groan as the heavy man settled. “You told me you had something on the Moralez shooting.”
“Yeah, I got something—Flaco Martínez. He’s the one did it.”
“How do you know, Vickie?”
“Everybody knows. The whole barrio. You ask anybody.” Ignoring the smoldering butt in the ashtray, she rattled another cigarette from the pack and lit it with a match, striking the head toward her like a man.
“We have,” said Wager. The woman was somewhere in her mid-twenties, though the dark circles under her eyes made her look older and Wager thought she was a little on the scrawny side too, which added a few years. “All the people we talked to didn’t know anything. Now all of a sudden you do.”
“You go find Flaco. You ask him where he was at when Raimundo got hit.”
“He was your man?” asked Wager.
Her shoulders under the baggy sweatshirt sagged, and she stared for a long moment at the large patch of naked weave that showed where the carpet took the most wear. “Was. Yeah.”
Max cleared his throat. “Did you actually see Flaco shoot Ray?”
“Nobody saw it. You know that.”
Wager corrected her. “Nobody’s told us they saw it.” He strolled to the window and lifted a side of the gauzy white curtain to peer down at the traffic on Tejon. The threads felt stiff, more like plastic mesh than cloth. “That’s why you’re dropping the dime on Flaco?”
She shrugged and then said angrily, “I don’t owe that pendejo nothing! I heard it from my compañera—she asked me did I know Flaco killed Raimundo. She says she heard it from her man.”
“Names?”
“No. No names.”
Wager had seen the woman’s hand and the dark-blue gang symbol tattooed on the smooth flesh between thumb and forefinger. She was taking a big chance to tell them anything, especially here in the neighborhood, where every kid over the age of eight would recognize the unmarked police car at the curb. He could understand why she didn’t want to name her best friend and the boyfriend, but the case would need corroboration and—if possible—an eyewitness. “All this Flaco will have to do is say he wasn’t there.”
“But he killed Raimundo. I’m telling you, he’s the one killed him!”
“You may know it, and I may know it,” said Wager. “But we got to prove it in front of a judge and jury who won’t know it. We need a witness for that.”
“Goddamn it, you bust our people all the time and you got no goddamn witnesses! What is this shit?”
“Murder,” said Wager. “Premeditated and first degree.”
“Miss Salazar,” said Axton soothingly, “we’ll arrest Martinez—we can bring him in and ask him questions. But without some kind of evidence to justify a charge, we can’t even serve papers on him, let alone take him to trial.”
Her stiff jab broke another cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know who saw him do it! I just heard it was him, that’s all!”
Wager walked away from the window and looked down at her. “So find out who saw him. Find out who heard Flaco brag about it.”
“What the hell you supposed to be doing? You’re the goddamn cops—you want me to do your fucking job for you, that it?”
Axton pulled out his notebook and clicked a ballpoint pen. The tiny mechanical noise punctuated the tenseness of the woman’s silence. “What can you tell us about this Martínez, Miss Salazar? Where he lives, who he runs around with, where he hangs out?” Wager and Axton needed the information, but equally important, the questions turned her anger away from them and back on her boyfriend’s killer.
From what she said, Wager guessed that Flaco Martínez was another of those criminals whose careers were just getting under way; most likely, a police computer—the contact file—would hold a little more information on him: aliases used, criminal convictions, time served, any instance where Martínez’s name had turned up in conjunction with other investigations. But there were a lot of things the computer wouldn’t know that people in the barrio would, and if Vickie Salazar really wanted to nail Flaco Martínez, she’d find out those things.
All that she could or would tell them now was the kind of information that drifted through the barrio on whispers and boozy gossip at corner tables or behind pulled blinds. It would be overheard by the women, either because the men were drunk enough to talk loudly or because they wanted this or that one to be impressed without bragging openly in front of her. And the women passed it on to one another for the same reasons: “My man was there, chica; here’s what he saw go down ….” “That cabrón Flaco, he told my man …”
Flaco Martínez had been in Denver a few years, but no one seemed to know much about him. He’d come up from Albuquerque, claiming to be a member of Los Puñales, one of that city’s smaller gangs, and carved out some territory on Denver’s north side. Something about running from a murder charge, but nobody knew for sure. Flaco didn’t deny it; the whisper helped his image. He said he had contacts down there who could bring up stuff for the local market: weed, Mexican brown, a little ice, maybe, and even peyote from off the reservation. It’s a good market, Denver, and he wanted to expand, and that’s where he started stepping in shit with the locals, who had their own ideas about whose territory it was. So what he did was make some promises to the Gallos, and that started trouble with the Tapatíos, Ray Moralez’s gang. Vickie Salazar spoke only in general terms about the causes of the war, and neither Wager nor Axton pushed her on that; if she was forced to choose between giving the cops information on her own people and letting Flaco walk, it would be the latter. She finally told them what neighborhood Flaco lived in—but she didn’t know the address—and the bar where he liked to hang out, La Taverna Chihuahua. “Him and three, fou
r others. They pretend they got colors, you know? Hang around a lot with some of the Gallos. Bunch of bobos!”
Max asked, “Names?”
She thought a moment. “Sol. I don’t know the others.”
“Does he have a chunda?” Wager asked.
The thin shoulders rose and fell under a sweatshirt stenciled with a sunny palm tree and the name Venice Beach. “I don’t know. Maricón like that don’t have enough to have a chunda with.”
Max didn’t ask until they were on the sidewalk and getting into the car. “What’s a chunda?”
“Girlfriend. Lover.”
The big man glanced over his shoulder at the traffic as he pulled out. “Think any of this is reliable?”
“Only one way to find out.” Besides, it was the only lead they had.
CHAPTER III
9/24
0930
THE CHIHUAHUA TAVERN was in the southwest corner of Denver, just across the line of District Four. On the way, they called in Flaco’s name for anything the computer might have. The report came back as Axton pulled their drab white vehicle into the bar’s parking lot, a small square of muddy gravel. As Wager suspected, the information didn’t add up to much: a few rumors and whispers of a tie-in with a couple of drug dealers, an investigation for assault that was dropped at the victim’s request, a reference to the Albuquerque PD for further information.
Max made a note to himself to call New Mexico when they got back to the office, then they picked their way across the parking lot to the bar. It was flat-roofed and stuccoed with grimy tan plaster and looked vaguely southwestern. The door was sunk in the corner and stood open to a stale-smelling interior. A long mirror, smeared with a wipe or two, reflected a row of bottles behind the counter. This early in the morning, the place was almost empty. A pair of men sat hunched at one end of the bar. An old man bent over a short broom to dig out last night’s detritus from a corner and sweep it toward the door. In the glow of a small desk lamp set near the cash register, the bartender leaned to check figures in an account book. He looked up, baggy eyes going flat as he smelled cop.
Axton flipped his badge case over a forefinger and snapped it closed again. “We’re looking for Flaco Martínez. Seen him around?”
“Who?”
“Flaco Martínez. He hangs out here with Sol and a couple other buddies.”
The man frowned and scratched at his ledger with a ballpoint pen. Nobody wanted a snitch label—they were easy to get and never went away.
Wager eyed the line of bottles. Many held varieties of tequila and mescal, complete with pickled worm. The bar’s license was posted on the wall under the mirror. He leaned over to read it. “You’re George Urbano?”
He looked up from the page. “Yeah.”
“Don’t make us hassle you, George. We don’t want to go to the trouble. And you don’t want that kind of trouble.”
“I don’t make no trouble, man.”
“You don’t make no answers, either.” Wager glanced at his watch: half after nine. The various offices would be open now, and he could start the process of identifying last night’s corpse. “You tell us where Flaco lives, we’re out of here. You don’t tell us, we keep coming back.” He nodded down the bar toward two men who tended their own business in careful silence. “Your customers won’t be comfortable with that.”
Urbano, too, glanced down the bar. Then he made up his mind. “A guy they call Flaco comes in sometimes. I don’t know his last name. I don’t know where he lives.”
“Who’s he drink with?”
A shrug. “I don’t know their last names, either. Sol and Dave, that’s all I heard.”
“They belong to a gang?”
“Not in here they don’t.” He jerked a crooked thumb toward a sign above the long mirror: NO COLORS SERVED. “What they do outside is up to them.”
It was the way a lot of neighborhood taverns tried to stay neutral in the turf wars. Sometimes it worked; a number of the gangs were mostly made up of kids below legal drinking age anyway. But a number weren’t, and a lot depended on how tough the bartender was and how tough the gang wanted to act.
“He drinks with the Gallos?”
“If you say so.”
“All right. When Flaco comes in, you tell him we were here asking about him.”
Max handed the baggy-eyed man a business card. “You tell him we said he better come down and talk with us.”
Urbano glanced at the name. “If I see him.”
In the car, Max sighed. “I guess we have to go talk to Fullerton.”
Wager felt his cheek twitch in a tiny smile. Fullerton, the Gang Unit’s sergeant, was like flypaper. When you had to see the man about something, you got stuck there. “What’s this ‘we’ stuff, honkie? It’s your case.”
Another sigh. “I figured you’d say that.”
Back at the Crimes Against Persons offices, Axton checked his box for messages and then headed upstairs to Intelligence and Fullerton’s desk. Wager settled down at the telephone.
The forensic pathologist still hadn’t gotten to last night’s victim. The secretary said he would probably be in around ten. She’d be happy to call Wager when Dr. Hefley was finished. Another secretarial voice said the arson squad was on the scene now. They should have some preliminary information by this afternoon. Wager was looking up the McMillan Realty number when his telephone rang. “Homicide. Detective Wager.”
“This is your favorite Denver Post reporter, Wager. I understand you were on duty last night. How about filling me in on that fire victim.”
The only thing Wager wanted to fill in for Gargan was his grave. But just last week Chief Sullivan had sent a memo to all personnel reminding them to cooperate as much as possible with the press. Improved public relations, the memo said, would be a departmental priority. Wager figured the brass hadn’t been getting enough favorable newspaper clippings lately. “No identification yet, Gargan.”
“Was it a homicide? Arson? What?”
“I don’t know yet. All I have so far is a fire and a body—still unidentified, cause of death unknown.”
“And of course you’ll call me as soon as you know something more.” He didn’t wait for the answer. “What about the Moralez gang shooting? Any more on that?”
“I don’t know a thing about it.”
“Come on, Wager. Goddamn it! I know you and Max are working that one. It’s news, and the public’s got a right to know!”
Wager reasoned sweetly. “I’m not working it, Gargan. It’s not my case. But we do have a public information officer, who will be overjoyed to give you whatever facts the investigating officer is free to reveal.”
“You’re a real bastard, Wager.”
“I think highly of you too, Gargan.”
As soon as he hung up, the telephone rang again, and he answered with disgust still in his voice, “Detective Wager, homicide.”
“Gabe? That you?”
Well, yeah, it was; nobody else in the division was named Wager. “What do you need, sir?”
“It’s me, Gabe!”
The voice was kind of familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Fine, ‘me.’ What do you need?”
A brief, hurt silence. “It’s me: Stovepipe. You know—Henry Stover?”
“Stovepipe! It has been a while, Henry.” Almost three years, in fact, since the man went to Canon City on a burglary charge.
“Yeah! Tell me about it. Look, man, I just got out. I’m in a halfway house, you know? But I wanted to thank you, you know, for helping out with my mother.”
Stover was a burglar who claimed to be reformed, and a good thing. One more conviction, and he faced a long time in a small space. He had given Wager a key tip on a knifing four years back. He didn’t do dope, he hated violence, and, except for an overwhelming curiosity about locked doors and other people’s goodies, was—given the circumstances—a fairly reliable citizen. At least that’s what Wager told the judge at sentencing. But Stovepipe also had a spotty record—a
string of juvenile stuff, mostly car snatching—and already one stretch for B and E. He could have been hit with ten years on this arrest, but he got off with six, less good time. This was his last bust, he’d promised Wager; when he got out, he was going straight. He had some money saved up that the IRS didn’t know about—”I earned it, Gabe. I’ve paid for it, man!”—and his mother was getting pretty old and weak. He didn’t want to cause her any more hurt. So when he got out, he was going to get a job; he was going to buy a little house in the country for him and his mother. “She grew up on a farm, Gabe. And Denver’s getting too big, you know? It’s dangerous, too, especially for somebody getting old like that. I want to get her and me a little place where we can raise some chickens and I don’t have to see any goddamn walls.” He was going to be a genuinely righteous citizen; prison just wasn’t worth it.
Now he was out on early release.
“Anyway, Mother said you called a couple times to see how she was getting on, and I just wanted to say I appreciate it, Gabe. It meant a lot to her. And to me too, man.”
A lot of cops went out of their way for the families of prisoners. It didn’t show up on the fitness reports, and it didn’t count in the public-service column of the official-activities sheets. But it answered an urge that was one of the reasons many people went into law enforcement in the first place: to help people in trouble. Besides, sometimes the perps’ families had been ripped off as much their victims. And Wager had another reason too—the care and training of a good snitch. “No problem, Stovepipe. How’s her health?”
“It’s OK—it’s basically fine. She’s just getting old. There’s all sorts of crap when you get old.” He cleared his throat. “I wanted to tell you, too, I think I got a job lined up. The counselor here says he can get me work as a janitor in a electronics plant up around Brighton. It’s a start, man.”