by Rex Burns
Yawning, stiff from sitting, he started his car and swung its headlights around the park to catch scattered figures in the glare. Some sat on the park benches, others stood uneasily, turning from the lights. Still no dealers selling, just increasingly anxious buyers; and no Big Ron. But he would know that Wager had been here, and why.
7
JULIO’S MASS OF Christian burial was Saturday afternoon at St. Joseph’s. Wager had not been inside the redbrick building in years, though he drove past it often enough and had occasionally interviewed one or another of the priests about one or another of their parishioners. He and Elizabeth found a parking place half a block down Galapago Street and walked slowly past other parked cars toward the white stone steps that led up to the heavy, recessed doors. As ever, Wager felt the weight of the towering, sooty brick; the shadowed corners and yawning, dim interior brought back the uneasy sense of intrusion and sadness he had felt as a child when, on rare occasions, the family had attended mass here. Before urban renewal had emptied the Auraria barrio and its church, they had gone to San Cajetano’s. It had been yellow and smooth outside the adobe-looking walls and twin bell towers lifting against the sky; the windows and eaves had been trimmed with bright red and blue paint. Inside, its whitewashed walls had made it light, and the stained-glass windows had brought in sunshine. But in this church, which was narrow and tall, gloomy and cold, and hinted of the grave, the colored glass seemed to keep the daylight out, and even the sprays of flowers by the casket and at the altar seemed leached of color.
The organist had not yet started to play, but the shuffle of shoe leather on a gritty floor and the wet sound of tears and of purses unzipping for handkerchiefs made a constant rustle as viewers filed past the open casket and paused to whisper a prayer. Wager and Elizabeth walked up the aisle, and he genuflected to the cross that loomed over him with almost frightening nearness. Then they joined the line of people saying a last goodbye to Julio. Aunt Louisa, supported by Wager’s mother and Uncle Tony, sat hunched in the front pew. The black of her dress was crisp and shiny—new mourning clothes for a new loss. His mother caught Wager’s eye, and she nodded her head slightly, her glance going to Elizabeth with a somewhat warmer smile.
A waxy-looking Julio lay with his hands folded and a well-worn rosary woven between the fingers. His mother’s, probably. Fell asleep using her rosary to say his prayers. Dressed like he was going to a wedding. Wager tried to think of something to say to the boy’s spirit or to God or just to himself, but the only thought was that the heavy cosmetics made the corpse look awfully young. And that the mortician had done his best to hide the missing part of Julio’s skull by brushing back combed and sprayed hair. But his best wasn’t good enough, and through the stiff black hair you could see the white satin cushion where some of his head should have been. Wager filed past and down a side aisle to find seats in a rear pew.
Elizabeth, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of a tiny handkerchief, whispered, “He was very handsome.”
“Yeah.”
The sermon was brief. It was about the violence of life and the mysteries of death and God being the only refuge and peace. The half-sung words of ritual, the gray smoke rising from the swinging censer, the ceremonial movements of the altar boys and the robed priest all brought back a sharp memory of his father’s funeral, and Wager was surprised to feel once again the hurt and emptiness that had made those black days of his childhood a blur of ache and yearning. As well as a repeated realization of the absoluteness of death. Squeezing his eyes shut, he stifled the burning sensation that welled up behind his nose and governed the spasm of breath that could have been a sob. It was Julio in the coffin, not Wager’s father, and Wager felt some guilt and even self-contempt at the realization that he had milked self-pity out of Aunt Louisa’s loss.
But despite what he had told himself, the rising note of the organ echoed from the corners of the church and from his memories as well. He tensed to keep his mind on the present, on the sounds around him, on the hard cushion under his knees. His hand, spread wide on his own thigh, pressed against the cloth of his trousers as if anchoring something. Lightly resting on the back of his hand, almost unnoticed until his eyes sought them and found focus, were Elizabeth’s gloved fingers. Wager turned his hand palm up and clasped them tightly.
At the graveside in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Wager had eyed the mourners, looking for faces that he didn’t know. There had been several, but a question here and there of his cousins and uncles had identified them. It had been a long shot that one of Julio’s murderers would show up at the funeral, but it sometimes happened. Not out of remorse but, as Wager understood it, in an effort to extend the sense of power over the victim that the murderer had enjoyed at the killing. But not this time, and on the long way back down I-70 from the cemetery, Wager and Elizabeth had been silent with their own thoughts. Finally Elizabeth sighed deeply and said, “I like your mother.”
So did Wager, usually. But at first he didn’t understand what that had to do with Julio. Then he realized that Elizabeth was trying to push her mind away from death.
“She likes you too.” Otherwise, his mother would have behaved with an absolutely correct—and cold—formality. The “la patrona face,” as Wager and his sisters used to call it.
“I think you are a lot alike.”
He had to give that some thought. “She’s older than I am.”
“Idiot,” she said affectionately. “I mean you both have this shell that you use to keep people at a distance until you’ve made up your mind about them.”
Wager had seen that in his mother but not in himself. In his line of business, the people he tended to know most about kept their own distance because they were dead. And of the ones that were alive, there weren’t too many he cared to know more about. “I hope she kept her distance about showing you pictures of my ex-wife.”
“Lorraine? She hasn’t spoken much about her.”
That was a relief, and Wager hoped that his younger sister—who had taken Lorraine’s side even more stridently—could manage the same self-control.
“I didn’t realize how young you were when your father died.”
“Sounds like you’ve been getting the whole family history.”
“Don’t get huffy—you’ve never told me much about your family.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Nothing specific. It’s just that I’m interested in you, and your family is part of you.”
Whether, it seemed, he wanted it to be or not. “I haven’t had too much to do with them for a long time.”
“Not since your divorce from Lorraine?”
“That what my mother told you?”
“She said you felt very guilty about it.” Elizabeth added quickly, “That’s about all she did say, except that there was no reason to feel guilty—that Lorraine simply couldn’t take being a cop’s wife, and you couldn’t stop being a cop.”
That about summed it up, but it was the first time Wager heard that his mother finally saw things as he did. “She said that?”
“You seem surprised.”
“It’s what I tried to tell them at the time: I didn’t blame Lorraine, and I sure as hell don’t blame myself. It just didn’t work out, is all.” His voice calmed. “I guess I’m surprised that all of a sudden my mother accepts it.”
Elizabeth looked out the window at the spidery arcs of the Lakeside roller coaster gliding past above a fringe of trees. “I think she wants to see more of you, Gabe. You’re two very proud people—and very stubborn, too. But I suspect she would be happy to forget any ill feelings that came out of your divorce.”
“Well—” Wager concentrated on guiding the Camaro through a cluster of slower traffic that filled all three lanes. He wanted to say it was about time, but the truth was that not all of the estrangement was the fault of his mother and sisters. For a long time Wager had avoided them not just because they had been—and still were—friends of his ex-wife but more because they had be
en reminders of that bitter time. Which really wasn’t their fault. “Well,” he said again, “I guess I ought to visit my own mother more.”
He saw that for some reason, the comment pleased Elizabeth.
Elizabeth did not subscribe to the Sunday Denver Post—she preferred the Rocky Mountain News; their editorials tended to attack her for being too liberal—she supported sex education and free lunches in the schools, not necessarily in that order—and she said it was good to know what her opponents’ latest lies were. So Wager did not see Gargan’s article until he came in to work and found a clipping centered on his desk. Whoever put it there had circled the department’s public relations photograph of Wager in his uniform and scrawled, “Do You Know This Criminal?”
There were other photographs, too, a full-page spread with a yearbook picture of Julio, Aunt Louisa standing outside the church after the funeral and unaware of the camera, a shot of their house taken from across the street. But the story Gargan wrote dealt less with Aunt Louisa and her son than with the fact that Julio was the cousin of a Denver homicide detective.
TRAGEDY TANGLES POLICE WORK! Denver’s increasing violence is a daily routine for the members of its police department, but even one of its homicide detectives, dulled to the pain of others by long experience with death, could not escape feeling emotion when seventeen-year-old Julio Lucero was viciously gunned down Thursday evening as he returned home from the corner grocery store in the Barnum neighborhood by an unknown assailant or assailants who fled in an automobile after the shooting.
The youth, who attended West High School and is the son of Mrs. Louise Lucero, is also related to Detective Gabriel V. Wager of the Denver Police Department’s Homicide section. Although the case is officially being pursued by Homicide Detective Maurice Golding, Wager has stated his intention to participate in the search for his relative’s alleged killer or killers.
Chief Thomas Doyle, head of the Crimes Against Persons Division, which is the home of the Homicide section, has said that although the department has no established policy relating to cases being assigned to officers who happen to be relatives of victims of crime, perhaps the issue should be assessed to prevent undue exercise of police powers by any officer personally involved with a victim.
A longtime homicide detective, Wager is well known throughout the department for receiving occasional warnings for being short-tempered and occasionally overbearing in his relentless pursuit of alleged murderers, although his superiors have rated his work as acceptable. Chief Doyle stated that “The department would not want to compromise the legal standing of any case by having its investigator subject to personal bias of a nonprofessional nature.”
Detective Wager refused to be interviewed by this reporter, citing family grief as his grounds for non-cooperation. However, Detective Golding stated that efforts to solve the murder are proceeding apace and that progress was expected soon. The energetic and well-respected detective in his mid-thirties also stated that the police would appreciate any help from anyone who might have witnessed the death or who might have information about the killing. …
The article went on to describe Julio’s job at DIA as well as the death of his father. Then it mentioned Wager’s shock and anger at the irony of a murder in his own family, and worried about the possibility that a police officer’s desire for personal revenge might distract him from solving the murders of other, less well connected citizens such as the late John Erle Hocks, a case to which Wager had been assigned. This victim’s alleged killer or killers were still unapprehended, and reputedly Hocks’s death was the start of a gang war. It ended with the statement that apparently no one in Denver, not even a minion of the law, was isolated from the flood of alleged gang violence that was flaming almost uncontrolled through the metropolitan area. A trailer line said, “Tomorrow: The Possibility of Open Gang Warfare Erupting in Denver.”
Wager guessed that if Big Ron didn’t start one soon, Gargan would have to.
He made the call from a public telephone outside a Burger King on East Colfax. As he listened to the ring, his eyes, of their own will, focused on the scar in the brick wall where a glancing bullet had chipped out a shallow hole. It was a ragged oblong about two and a half inches at the widest and maybe a quarter-inch deep—the bullet had knocked off the brick’s glossy surface to leave its grainy insides open to the weather. The Anthony shooting, six—five?—years ago: a stickup gone wrong and two dead. The rough surface of the broken brick was now almost as grimy as the smoother brick around it, and you had to know what you were looking for to spot it. Wager figured it said something about his job that he remembered where so many of the city’s scars were. And maybe something about his life, too. Which, by God, Gargan for all his fancy words didn’t know one damn thing about.
A bored-sounding voice finally answered, and Wager asked for Fat Willy.
“Who wants him?”
Always the same question in the same slow drawl, and, even before noon on a Monday, the clack of pool balls in the background. Probably a game still in progress from last Saturday night. “Gabe.”
“I see if he’s around.”
A minute or two later came the lurching wheeze of Willy’s voice. “Heyo, my man.”
“How much you pay your secretary to be a bartender, too?”
“He get a little something, just like everybody else.” A half-grunted chuckle. “Everybody want something, even you, or you wouldn’t be talking now.”
“You got that right. I need some information.”
“Right now? What’s so important you got to interrupt my morning coffee?”
“It’s not morning, Willy. It’s almost eleven. And I’m looking for a killer.”
“Shit, when ain’t you? And when you gonna start catching some?”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, Willy.”
“I don’t read the papers, my man, just the racing form. I got my own ways of finding things out. And I bet you calling right now from a donut shop, ain’t you?”
“Close—a Burger King. I want to know what you’ve got on Big Ron Tipton.”
A few wheezing breaths as the heavy man thought. “That be about the kid got shot? The one over near the old Stapleton projects?” Fat Willy was telling Wager that he did, indeed, know what went down in his neighborhood.
“John Erle Hocks, yeah. Thirteen years old.”
“Um.” Breath. “That Big Ron is a mean nigger, all right. Crazy-like, you know?” Another breath and Wager could sense the man feeling his way, trying to discover what the event might mean for him without letting Wager or anyone else know what was or wasn’t important about it. Life, for Fat Willy, was a poker game. “What you after with him?”
“I hear John Erle was one of his runners. I want to know if that’s why he was shot.”
“One of Big Ron’s runners? He don’t have runners. He works by hisself. Least, that’s what I hear.”
“I’d like to find that out for sure, Willy.”
“Uh-huh. You mean maybe Big Ron trying to expand his business, like?”
“Or if someone’s moving in on him.”
“Either way, could be bad news all around.”
“Something else; I want people to know I’m asking around about him.”
“Folks hear that, they gonna be careful about doing business with him. Big Ron ain’t going to like that.”
“Tough shit.”
“Um.” In the background another clack of pool balls at the break, followed by a high-pitched laugh. “I see what I can do. And Wager—”
“Yeah?”
“Like I say, everybody get a little something, right?”
“I deal fair, Willy.”
“Uh-huh.”
8
HIS NEXT CALL was via his radio. The Vice and Narcotics people would be straggling into the office about now, catching up on their paperwork before meeting with the SWAT teams to set up tonight’s festivities. Walt Adamo, who had been in Wager’s clas
s at the police academy and who had been miffed when Wager made detective sergeant and he didn’t, had finally been promoted and found a home in V & N. It wasn’t, to Wager’s way of thinking, equal to the Homicide section; but then not much was.
He also knew that most good cops would think the same way: that the job they were doing—V & N or whatever—was the most important one in the department. But Wager knew absolutely that his was. Evidence: There was no statute of limitations on murder. And it didn’t matter who was killed—John F. Kennedy or John Erle Hocks—it was the act itself, it was murder itself, that gave so much weight to the job he did. And maybe that was the real reason Gargan’s article was still rankling so much: Running through the reporter’s facts was the implication that, because a victim had been Wager’s relative, he would work harder to find the killer. A personal stake that called for effort he would not give to a victim he didn’t know. But Wager had never met a killer who required just ordinary effort, because murder was not just your ordinary crime—despite the familiarity corpses were gaining on television and in the newspapers. No homicide was run-of-the-mill. There were a lot of killers who were just plain dumb and careless, even more who did what they did out of an immense selfishness. There were some who were pure scum, and even a few he might have let himself feel sorry for after he had nailed them and they were convicted. But despite who they were or how they got that way, it was what they had done that counted with the law and especially with Wager; it was what they had done, not who they were or who they killed, that drove Wager to catch them.
The V & N secretary told Wager that Adamo had not yet checked in. She took his name and number and said she would leave a message he’d called, and when the phone rang Wager picked up the receiver expecting to hear Walt’s voice. But it was Golding.
“Gabe—did you see that story in the paper? The one about the Lucero shooting?”