by Rex Burns
“I’ll be there.”
“Thanks a lot, Detective Wager!”
The lilting relief of the girl’s voice made a distant refrain in his mind as he read and listened to the microwave’s hum. He hoped the filets would come out all right; they would never taste as good as those rolled in meal and broiled over a campfire, but the simple instructions told him what to do and assured him that the fish would taste just fine. They had been in the freezer since he caught them on his one fishing trip last summer, bringing them home with some vague idea of someday having a trout fry for some friends. However, there was never anyone to invite over. Of course, there was Axton and his wife; he supposed he could invite them sometime. But that would mean asking another woman, to balance things out. Maybe Suzy or even Police Person Fabrizio, who wasn’t going around any more with that tall blond cop from Personnel Division. Yet even as he thought the names, he knew he wouldn’t invite them. He understood himself well enough to know he couldn’t be serious about either one in the way she would expect if he ever did ask her to his apartment.
Still, there came the times like this, when the small landscape photograph and the Marine Corps N.C.O.’s sword hanging on the apartment walls seemed no more than feeble attempts at scrawling his own name against blankness—like the sprayed graffiti on rocks and buildings, which meant nothing to anyone except the “Rick” or “Sandy” who put it there. Times when it seemed as if he really could give someone the part of his life that Lorraine had asked for in vain. Except that he hadn’t really changed. When he plumbed the deepest well of his mind, he found that what Lorraine had said of him was still true—he was totally complete without her. How had she put it? She always felt like an intruder in her own marriage. And Wager couldn’t tell her otherwise, because it was true. So his marriage, like other things, had gone; but occasionally, in uncharted times like this, he felt that loss.
Wager wandered through the featureless living room and out onto the little concrete balcony to gaze at Downing Street below. There, beneath branches still leafless and winter-stiff, the mercury vapor lights drained the color from locked houses and cars and walks empty of pedestrians.
He wouldn’t change. That being so, it was no good to drag someone else into his life. That mistake had been made once, and the anger and pain, the accusation, the guilt, were not worth the little happiness he and Lorraine had had at first. When they both realized that, it was over. And, oddly, the formal gentleness with which they treated each other when that point was reached had caused a deeper ache in him than any of the earlier loud arguments or tense silences. Nothing was worth reentering that magnitude of pain, or bringing anyone else into it.
Wandering back inside, he turned the television’s volume up a bit, the dialogue as mindless and half familiar as the taped music or the mechanical laughter that accompanied it. Most of the programs weren’t meant to do more than destroy silence and turn off thought—when they worked. Tonight they did not seem capable of even that.
Did he regret what had happened? Not any more. It was as matter-of-fact as his feelings about the old neighborhood whose disappearance he had perceived so sharply yesterday. Better if it had been he alone who had suffered and not Lorraine, too. But todo tiene su precio, y su valor. If there had been a price, there was also value in learning the range of his isolation and his strength to match it. Not everyone could or wanted to be able to say that, but he found pride in it.
So there would be no one over to share those fish and that was fine. Because what Wager really wanted was not to fill his apartment with dinner guests, but to clap both hands on something concrete and to pull and tug until a shape emerged that would tell him who killed Frank Covino and why. He wanted something more solid than the feeling that what he was looking for was just beyond his fingertips. If a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, it sure as hell wasn’t in homicide.
The microwave had fallen silent; its dial rested at the off position. He lifted out the trout and sniffed at the aroma loosened when he unfolded the wrapping. The fish filets lay in their juices, pale brown skin and steaming white flesh traced here and there with butter and lemon and crumbled chives. Gingerly, he peeled them onto a plate and then tasted. One was mushy, the other raw at the center; the instructions, like so many other simple guides, turned out to be wrong.
Trimming off what small portions were edible, he opened a can of beans and turned back to his book. What the hell; the supper fit with the rest of the evening, and he would soon be on patrol again, anyway.
Eight
SINCE LITTLE USUALLY happened during the graveyard shift, only one homicide detective was assigned to that duty, and no partner was there to tell Wager if Munn had been working on anything. He found no notes about current cases, nor did the twenty-four-hour board hold any messages for the ill detective. It was as if for all the years he had served, Munn had not really existed; and, the routine of duty watches ruffled only slightly by the man’s absence, a replacement would be in the schedule by tomorrow night. A lot of people might find that heartless or demeaning. Wager found more comfort than not in knowing that Munn, Wager, even the Bulldog himself, were all dispensable. It was the sense of totality that his ex-wife had complained of and his distant cousin—the one who joined the Jesuits—had praised. “Police force,” “agent,” “commission”—to Wager, these words had a range of meaning that many civilians and even some of his fellow officers didn’t grasp; but it was enough for him that he knew what service meant. Just as there was faith in serving the church, so there was faith in serving the law—and, it was to be hoped, justice as well. Except that his dedication was not to the remission of sin, but to its conviction and punishment.
Slowly, Wager guided his police cruiser down the tunnel of dim glow from widely spaced streetlights that converged on one of Denver’s high-crime areas, the Five Points section. At this hour, the patrol was more from habit than need, since the life that used to fill the heart of the black neighborhood until long after midnight had ebbed as more and more inhabitants moved into east Denver or to the suburbs in the surrounding counties. Soon developers in search of cheap land for expensive offices would move in; soon this area, like Wager’s own, would be ground to powder under the steel treads of bulldozers and blown away in puffs of dust from collapsing walls.
He headed southwest, toward the brighter lights of Larimer. Almost by itself, the cruiser wove through alleys and side streets, tracing a pattern as random as the thoughts that ran like stray mice through his mind. And kept returning to nibble one thing: Covino’s corpse. Those thoughts gradually led him toward the empty streets of the Denargo area and the site of the shooting. But in the widely spaced circles of dim streetlight, no figures shuffled across the pavement or scurried away from the headlights that swept over wall and doorway. Wager would try again tomorrow. And the night after. And the night after that. Since bums, like stray cats, had their territories and trails, and maybe the one he was looking for would show up. The one who had seen something last Sunday night. It was another long shot, but that was the only kind of shot Wager had, and there was nothing lost but a little time and a little patience.
The routine cruising through Denver’s empty streets helped prop the sagging hours of Munn’s tour; so did surveillance of Scorvelli’s restaurant, which, Wager knew, never had many customers until near midnight, and then, for three or four active hours, large and flashy cars swung in and out like teenagers cruising a drive-in. Wager, parked in the shadows of a vacant lot across the street from the Lake Como, absently watched the male figures, always in twos and threes, cross the brightly lit parking area to the cloth-draped front door. Once, a face turned to squint over at his still car, then the figure went inside and a few minutes later the curtain was held back while another face—that of young Henry Clark—came to peer out at him. Wager yawned and poured one more cup of coffee from the large Thermos that always rode the night tours with him. So they knew someone was watching. Good. If it bothered them, that was even be
tter. Because Wager was bothered, and it always made him feel better when he could spread his irritation around.
He was deeply bothered. His irritation had gradually tilted into a subterranean anger because there was nothing to show that Covino had deserved what he got. It had been no accident—the boy had been selected to die. He had been executed not in fear or jealousy or blind madness—none of the things that civilization accepted as excuses for slaughter. He had simply been discarded like a thing empty of value, and Dominick was capable of doing that. But always for a purpose, and that’s what chafed Wager’s thoughts. Nothing, not one thing, even hinted that Frank Covino ever crossed over into Scorvelli’s world, where laws and codes and values were distorted reflections of the so-called normal world. “Satanic reversal,” Wager’s Jesuit cousin would call it. From Wager’s angle, the old-fashioned name for it was “underworld.” And just as his Jesuit cousin was at the border between two worlds, so Wager paced the line between this and that nether world, part of neither. But sometimes he felt pulled closer to Scorvelli’s realm than he liked to admit.
He sipped at the plastic cup, the coffee’s stinging heat gone but its metallic flavor just as hard. The radio that tied him into the sporadic traffic of District Two muttered with that monotonous, level tone that always came halfway through the graveyard shift, announcing the ripples and swirls that bubbled to the surface of that world surveyed by Wager and other cops. Flipping the cold dregs of coffee out his window, he watched another Cadillac roll heavily and incongruously past the grimy pink stucco of the small restaurant whose mountain and lake glowed brightly over the dark door. Then Wager’s radio buzzed an all-channel alert and the dispatcher’s voice woke with excitement.
“Any homicide detective!”
Wager was it. “X-85; go ahead.”
“We got a reported shooting in the one hundred block of South Broadway, and the assault team’s tied up over on Colfax. Can you cover it?”
“I’m available. Is this a verified report?” It was the dispatcher’s job to make certain that night calls were legitimate before sending a cop in; like the routine of surveillance and patrol, there had developed the routine of the false emergency that lured an officer into a dark alley to be shot in the back. “Revolutionary action,” it was called; “ridding society of oppressors.” The national figure for officers killed in the line of duty last year was 123; Wager didn’t know what the score was on assassins, but he bet it wasn’t that high. Otherwise the Civil Liberties Union would be screaming about police brutality.
“It’s verified. A uniformed team is on the scene; the victim was still alive when the ambulance picked him up.”
“I’m on North Federal; I’ll be there in about ten.”
“Ten-four. Time out: 0308.”
Switching the car’s radio to Channel Three, which carried the traffic of that police district, Wager wrenched the sedan around in a hard, squealing turn and headed south beneath the strobe-light flashes of streetlamps and through silent intersections blinking yellow. As he bounced across the short Cherry Creek bridge, the radio buzzed an all-channel alert for the suspect: a white male, around twenty-five years old, blond hair, wearing a light-colored sweat shirt and Levi’s, southbound on Broadway on foot.
Wager eyed the empty sidewalks lit by dull neon and glanced into streets that whipped past like fence posts. But the suspect had already slipped away into some dark crack. Two minutes later, Wager slid the car behind a blue-and-white unit parked in the middle of the block.
A small apartment building sat behind a shallow lawn sandwiched between the unpainted concrete block walls of two flat-roofed commercial buildings, one a paint store, the other a garage. The apartment was square and plain, with four units in front, two up, two down. In the yellow light from the marquee of a large porno theater across Broadway, its color seemed pale blue. In the identical dark windows of all four living rooms, faces gazed out against the marquee’s glare. On the lawn stood two uniformed officers and three or four civilians. Wager recognized one of the patrolmen, Adamo, who had been a rookie on Wager’s beat ten years ago.
“Hello, Walt.”
“Gabe, amigo! I heard you moved over to homicide. Hey, a lot of people wanted that slot; I’m glad you got it.”
Walt Adamo was one of those who had wanted it, but with him, at least, there was none of the suspicion that the job had been given to Wager because he was part Hispano and the department was hungry for the federal money that came with compliance.
“What’s the story here?” Wager asked.
Adamo led him away from the witnesses and snoopers clustered near the small landing that served as a front porch. “We got a man shot twice by a male assailant; witnesses say he ran south on Broadway past the furniture store. We put out an alert on him.”
“I heard it.”
“The victim’s Charles Porfirio. You know him?”
“He’s been on the street five or six years? Pushes a little dope now and then?”
“That’s the one. A little dope, a little fencing, maybe some burglary, though I haven’t been able to land anything definite on him in that line—just rumors. Anyway, the witnesses say they were sitting on the porch, talking, when the assailant came out of this path here between the apartment and the paint store.”
“Got their names yet?”
“Yep.” Adamo tilted his notebook to catch the glare from Bunny’s Adult Arcade across the street. “The first one’s Jesus Quintana. He lives in apartment two.”
“Which one’s he?”
“The fat one over there by the steps, smoking.”
“Anything on him?”
“No. He’s been around the neighborhood for a while, but he hasn’t attracted any attention. That’s his wife in the front window of the right-hand apartment, first floor.”
The woman caught Adamo’s gesture and stared their way, a frown of worry pulling lines into her thin, dark face, and Wager half remembered the same expression, the same worries, on the faces of women in his childhood. It was more than the worry of a witness; it was the anxiety of someone involved. She said something to her husband, who looked at Wager and then went into the house. A moment later, he showed in the window, herding three small heads away to bed.
“According to him, the assailant walks up and says to the victim, ‘I been looking for you,’ and the victim says, ‘Well, you see me. What about it?’ Then the two of them walk over near the corner of the garage and onto the sidewalk, right there. They talk for a couple minutes and then the victim turns around and starts back to the steps to where Quintana’s sitting and talking with another witness, who’s staying with him. This second guy was leaning out the same window there where Mrs. Quintana is.”
“Pretty busy around here for three o’clock in the morning.”
“Yeah, well, some of these people don’t like to be seen in the daytime. The second witness is one Ernie Taylor. He’s the black kid talking to my partner. He’s new to the neighborhood, but he’s working some deal or other. You can smell it all over him.”
“What happened next?”
“The assailant shoots Porfirio once in the back of the shoulder, and as far as we could tell, the bullet stayed in. Then Porfirio starts running for that path next to the paint store, but he trips on a kid’s tricycle and while he’s trying to get up, the assailant runs up and pops him right in the back of the head. Then he takes off that way down Broadway.”
“He didn’t threaten or shoot at the witnesses?”
“No. They say he never even looked at them. Only at Charley. They think he was drunk or high, and that fits the behavior.”
“Where’d the victim fall?”
“Over here.” Adamo led Wager to a patch of yard worn to gray sand by foot traffic and children’s games. “That’s the blood there.” He pointed to a small, very soggy spot. “He was still pumping blood when the ambulance got here, and the attendant said he had a chance.”
“None of the witnesses recognized the assaila
nt?”
“Crap, no. They swear they never saw him before. Never ever.”
“I hear you. Can you and your partner hang around long enough to keep an eye on this Taylor while I talk to Quintana? I’m working alone.”
“Let me tell the dispatcher I’ll be here a little longer.”
Wager went into the dark, narrow hallway of the apartment building and knocked on the door of number two; the husband opened it. “Mr. Quintana? I’m Detective Wager. You think you could tell me what you saw?”
“I already told the policeman. That tall one there.”
“I’d like to hear it from you. Maybe you could show me exactly where they were standing and where you were when everything happened.” Over Quintana’s thick, sloping shoulder, Wager could see his wife sitting stiffly in the dark; the lights from the porno marquee invaded the small room and fell across her tense face. From a half-open door came the excited whispers of children. Wager nodded hello; she didn’t answer, but watched with wide eyes as her husband led Wager into the yard.
“Well, I was sitting here, and Ernie was at the window over there, and Charley was standing on the walk here, talking to me and Ernie.”
“What about?”
“Aw, nothing. Just shooting the—ah—bull about this and that. You know how it is on a warm night.”
“And then?”
Quintana scratched at the stomach bulging beneath his brightly patterned shirt. “Well, I didn’t see the guy at first; he come from around there, and I’m sitting over here. But Charley says, ‘My, my,’ or something like that, and this guy says to him, ‘I want to talk to you. Come over here.’ And Charley, he don’t really want to go. He says, ‘We got nothing to talk about.’ The guy says, ‘I been looking for you. I want to talk to you.’ He was acting high, you know. Drunk, maybe.”
“Did Charley say his name?”