Speak for the Dead

by Rex Burns

  “Did you notice any people in the area?”

  “No. It’s too dark to see anything in the alley.”

  Wager was finishing his notes when the bedroom door clicked softly open to show a blinking, frowning woman pulling a feathery dressing gown over her shoulders. “Ron? Who is this? What’s going on?”

  “He’s a detective from the police.”

  “Police! My God—what’s happened? What’s he want with you, Ron?”

  “Me? Nothing! He was asking about the lights I saw in the conservatory. Remember? I told you about them last night.”

  She pushed a string of hair up under the pink ruffle of a plastic nightcap and blinked again. “That’s all? You’re sure that’s all?”

  “What else do you think it would be?”

  “Good night, Mr. Mikkelson. Ma’am.”

  Neither answered Wager.

  “Well, how would you like to wake up and find a policeman in our own living room talking to me?” she asked.

  “I’d sure as hell ask why, Sherri, before jumping to conclusions!”

  Wager closed the apartment door behind him, dimming Mikkelson’s rising voice: “And just what the hell did you think I …”

  He reported for the Tuesday shift the usual fifteen minutes before midnight. Ross and Devereaux were wrapping up an investigation of discharge of firearms by an officer on duty. It was another of homicide’s jobs to investigate every bullet fired by an officer whether or not injury resulted.

  “Here he comes, leaping tall buildings with a single fart.” Ross thumped a date stamp on a document. “If you come in any earlier, Wager, me and Dev can stay at home.”

  “It’s my time.”

  “Yeah. There’s a note for you from the lab. They said to call.” He gestured at the twenty-four-hour board. “Are you still running around on that mutilation death?”

  “And not getting anywhere. We don’t have any identification yet.”

  “You’d be better off waiting for that. In the five years I’ve been doing this shit, most cases solve themselves once the victim’s family and friends are known.”

  “Ross is right,” said Devereaux. He pointed to a long, detailed chart covering a quarter of one wall. It broke down ten years of homicides into statistics matching the F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Report. “The pattern’s changing, but most of the killings are still the result of a little excess emotion by friends or loved ones. The stranger-to-stranger stuff comes as part of another crime—rape, robbery, maybe a professional hit. And maybe you just got a loony with this one. Anybody who’d do that must be nuts. But when they come in cold and without witnesses, there’s no sense busting your balls until the victim’s identified.”

  That might be all right if someone other than the killer knew she was dead. But so far, it seemed no one even knew she’d ever been alive. “I don’t like sitting on my tail.”

  Ross snorted and shoved his papers into an interoffice mailing envelope and whipped the short string around the cardboard button. “No cop does, Wager. You’re not so special.”

  “I don’t claim to be. But it’s my way of working. If it’s no good, I’ll hear it from the chief.”

  “You sure will.” Ross left.

  Wager telephoned the police lab. “Baird? This is Wager. I got a note to call you.”

  The voice on the other end of the line said, “Hang on,” followed by a muffled clatter as the receiver was set down. Then, “The coffee was boiling over; these beakers aren’t worth a damn for making coffee in.”

  “What do you have for me, Fred?”

  “A couple of things. The tissue and blood tests have come back—the head and torso belong together. No question. But the coroner’s report on the torso isn’t so good.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s not as conclusive as we’d like—the trunk of that car got hot in the sun, and the plastic bag kept all the moisture in, so the decomposition and the generation of gases and bacteria was accelerated. It’s hard to be conclusive about what she ate. The guess is this: her stomach seemed nearly empty—maybe some fruit and cheese, but again that’s just a guess. The blood showed a trace of alcohol, but we can’t tell how much. No clear indication of narcotics or poisons anywhere in the system, but they could be there. It comes to damn little that can stand up in court.”

  Wager jotted it down anyway. “Could the doc tell how long after death the head was severed?”

  “That’s guesswork, too. Maybe an hour.”

  “Was the stab wound the primary cause of death?”

  “It’s the only clear cause. But because of the decomposition of the organs, some son of a bitch might challenge it in court.” His voice grew almost happy as he moved to more definite facts. “The wound was in good condition, though—it measures three centimeters wide, eleven deep. The shape of the perforation indicates a single-edged knife; all in all, it looks like a butcher knife. A single thrust entered between the third and fourth ribs at approximately fifteen degrees below horizontal plane and thirty degrees left of the sagittal plane. What that means is—”

  “That the killer was right-handed.”

  A moment of silence. “Right, Wager! That’s pretty good!”

  He wondered why the specialists always thought they were the only ones who could read technical manuals. “What damage did it do?”

  “Oh—it penetrated the left ventricle and severed the aorta and partly severed the pulmonary artery. It was a good thrust—death was instantaneous. There was also a contained haemopericardium tamponade. Guess what that means, you bastard.”

  “Just tell me, Baird.”

  “It means the blood didn’t come out of the wound but stayed in the cavity around the heart. Say, did you know that most people are right-handed and have hearts on the left side? God made it that way so people could stab each other easier.”

  No, Wager did not know that; and he didn’t give a damn for jokes made to show how tough a person was. “Did the doc check her fingernails?”

  “Right. Very clean. No flesh or hair. Heavily painted and carefully manicured. Looks like professional care.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Right. We ran an adhesive test on the stab wound and came up with what looks like bits of fiber. It looks like the knife cut through cloth before entering the body; we sent the samples on to the F.B.I. lab for identification.”

  “Any evidence of sex?”

  “Other than the body being stripped, nothing. No tissue damage or indication of sperm traces in vagina, anus, or mouth. That’s about the only examination the condition of the body would allow. Hell, if the killer’s a crock, he probably wouldn’t screw her anyway—he’d cream his pants when he killed her.”

  “Yeah. Send me a full copy of the report when you can.”

  “Right.”

  He poured himself a mug of coffee and stared at the file, the notes, the envelope that held the photographs. A killer stood close enough to make a single thrust with a wide blade. No struggle—no scratching that left traces under the victim’s fingernails, no bruises on the head or body from a preliminary assault. No evidence of sexual relations. And no one yet asking missing persons for her—not even a week later. All right, let’s look at it this way: she’s drinking a little booze, and the killer steps right in front of her to stab her without a struggle—it all points to somebody she knew. To some place she felt comfortable in. Time sequence? The coroner’s evidence puts the body in two positions—face down just after death while the head’s cut off; then, twelve to sixteen hours later, doubled up in the trunk of the Buick. Of course that was a guess. Hell, everything was a guess; Wager could guess, too. According to the witness Mikkelson, the head could have been put in the conservatory around 2 A.M. Wager counted hours on his fingers back from 2 A.M. Twelve to sixteen hours back—give or take the time he would need to go from the junkyard to the conservatory or vice versa. Between, say, 10 A.M. on Tuesday, October 19th, and 2 A.M. on Wednesday, October 20th. Wager printed
the times and date in block letters on a separate page of the little book and absently etched lines around it. The suspect would need an alibi for that time. And a key. That damned key. The victim knew someone who had a key. And a place. Wherever the killing and cutting took place, there would be a hell of a lot of blood. A place to leave the body stretched out until it was bagged and toted to the junkyard. An assault without a struggle, a little butchering without interruption, time to clean up, then transporting the victim at night, and no one asking for her. Hell, Wager almost smiled at himself for wasting time: it added up to a whore making a house call in an apartment with a bathtub. And there were only half a million such places in the city. But the living green and the dead junk; head in one, body in the other. That, too, was a key—and a puzzle.

  Still, without a witness, without knowing the victim’s name, Wager felt his mind sketch in things about the killer. But slowly, slowly; “Quien anda al reves, anda el camino dos veces.” He could still hear his grandfather warning him when he was anxious and bouncing to be turned loose on some half-baked project, and was answering, “Yes, sir; yes, sir, I understand,” and not hearing a word of the instructions. Wager had long since learned that it was no pleasure to walk the same road twice.

  And he did feel something solid forming from the web of his thoughts.

  The telephone’s ring pulled him back to the brown box of the homicide office. Gargan was asking what else had been found.

  “The tissue test matches the head and torso,” answered Wager.

  “Any identification of the victim?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Anything in the coroner’s report about dope or sex?”

  “The body was too decayed to be conclusive.”

  “Thanks heaps.”

  “Anytime,” Wager said.

  After he got rid of Gargan, he tried missing persons again. That was something that bothered him as much as the key—no one seemed to know that the person was missing.

  “We haven’t had any listing like her, Detective Wager. I really will call you as soon as we do.” The female voice clicked off.

  Thanks heaps to you, too. Wager felt a sour grin in the back of his mind: a bad word always comes back. He drained his almost cold coffee and scraped the papers and envelopes into the manila cover of the Jane Doe file. Maybe Ross and Devereaux were right; maybe it was better just to let the case wait and start working it when the identification came in. If it came in. Maybe. But Wager knew that he had something more than air in his hands. He couldn’t yet call it a profile of the killer, but he did sense something about the suspect’s mind.

  He slammed shut the file drawer and was pulling on his jacket when the telephone called him back to his desk. It was Baird.

  “The dental records just came through—we got an identification!”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Rebecca Jean Crowell. She had a lot of orthodontist work done in … let’s see, 1973 to 1974. The dentist is a local one … Albert Miller. His office is down near the Cherry Creek shopping center, 105 Milwaukee Street.”

  “Any address for the victim?”

  “As of May, 1974, she listed 2418 Tremont, Apartment 3. No—wait—that was the last office call. Let’s see … she made the last payment by mail in November, 1974, apparently from the same address. She had a follow-up visit in June, 1975, but there’s no indication of another address. She apparently paid cash for that instead of being billed.”

  Wager carefully scratched out the “Jane Doe” on the file’s lip and penned in “CROWELL, REBECCA JEAN.” “Any other Crowells in the dentist’s records?”

  “We didn’t ask. That’s your job. This just came through in the evening mail.”

  “It’s enough to move on. Thanks a lot, Fred.”

  The Tremont address was less than a mile from the homicide office; Wager had just pulled in to a cross town street empty of everything except blinking traffic lights when his radio called for “any homicide detective.”

  This shift had only one. “X-eighty-five. Go ahead.”

  “We have a discharged-weapon report to be filed. Corner of Quitman and Seventh.”

  One of the phony things about TV detectives was that they were given all the time they needed to work a single case. The television cops never juggled two or three new cases and as many old ones; they never came off the night shift with an hour to shave, shower, and shit before sitting through a long morning and even into the afternoon trying to stay awake to testify in court; they never reported two hours early to do the paperwork to meet a court deadline, or sat on their own time through the weekly closed-channel telecast that covered the latest court rulings which brought changes to police procedure. And they never got turned around when they were headed for a victim’s residence. “I’m on my way,” Wager said.

  The shooting was at the west edge of Denver near the city-county line and in an area he wasn’t completely familiar with. He crossed above the street on the Sixth Avenue Freeway and saw the red flashers of the blue-and-white unit two or three blocks distant. But it took another five minutes to thread his way off the freeway and in and out of dead-end streets to the scene.

  “You Detective Wager?” The officer sitting in the yellow glow of the roof-mounted flashlight peered out of the squad car at him.

  “Yes. What’s the story?”

  The officer turned off the whipping glare of the red flashers to leave the street dark except for the living-room lights of a small house with a deep porch. “We had a ten-sixteen at this address—husband drunk and wife not drunk enough, you know the kind.”

  “I know.” Domestic-disturbance calls were always bad news.

  “Well, she phoned in the request, and when we come around that corner there, our headlights picked him up chasing her down the street with a pistol in his hand.”

  “You saw the weapon?”

  “Son of a bitch, we did. As soon as he saw us, he opened up.”

  “How many shots?”

  “Two or three. My partner heard three. I was on the radio and heard only two.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “Inside, still talking to the broad.”

  “The husband?”

  The officer’s teeth flashed. “We fired back and the fucker took off into Martinez Park. Right down there.” He pointed to the dark end of the short street. “It’s blacker’n shit in there—he ran smack into a tree and knocked himself silly.”

  “Injuries?”

  “None. The fucker missed and so did we.”

  “How many rounds did you fire?”

  “My partner fired one. I fired two.” He added modestly, “He was driving—I got out of the car faster.”

  Wager glanced over the shooting report filled with the officer’s square printing. “This looks pretty routine.” The word was becoming more and more accurate to describe an officer’s getting shot at; but a report like this would usually be filed at the end of the shift. “What do you want with me?”

  “The wife is screaming police brutality.”

  “What?”

  “She thinks we shouldn’t have fired at hubby just because he was trying to blow our fucking heads off. She says it was our fault he ran into that tree.”

  “After he chased her ass down the street with a pistol?”

  “Yeah. She says he does it all the time and never fired a round before tonight. She’s right—we’ve had three or four domestic calls at this address in the last couple years. But she lays it on us that the dumb son of a bitch cold-cocked himself.”

  Jesus. And for that two cops stuck their necks out. Wager began taking notes on a clean page of his little green book. A policeman really had to like the job for itself; it was harder than hell to like the people involved. “All right, let’s start with the names and addresses.” The patrolman was right to call for an investigator as soon as possible. Weaker charges than this had been known to stick like shit on a shoe, and it didn’t take more than one or two such inci
dents to make a man a target inside as well as outside the department. In fact, right now Wager could think of one detective who was suspected of being an animal.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE SHOOTING BEGAN a busy night. Following that came a burglary in progress, a disturbance call in the Curtis Park area, a request from a patrolman for procedural help in questioning a minor, and a known-dead report that turned out to be natural causes but still required paperwork to clear it from the division’s statistics. By the time Wager filed his end-of-tour reports, the Wednesday sun lay two hours high and heavy crosstown traffic choked the one-way streets that sliced up the old neighborhood surrounding the Crowell address. The apartment was in one of the last private homes on the block, the rest replaced either by rambling three-story apartments built in the 1930s for lung patients and later converted to general use, or by the newer concrete apartment towers that dwarfed the few trees left along the red stone curbs with their rusted iron rings for tying horses.

  As Wager crossed the creaking boards of the front porch, he met the tang of bacon and coffee and his stomach reminded him that he had again forgotten to eat during the eight-hour tour. In a rusty row beside the front door were tacked three old-fashioned mailboxes. Two of the slips of paper wedged in the boxes’ gritty slots were new; the other was yellow and brittle and bore, in faded purple ink, “Dove, G. N.” The Crowell name was not posted. Wager tried the curtained front door; it opened into a paneled box that had doors on each side and a dark flight of carpeted stairs leading up to a third door. The Dove apartment was number 1.

  He knocked for five minutes, shifting from one foot to another, smelling the indefinable odors that seeped from the oak panels. The old home was well built and very quiet except for occasional squeaks in the ceiling as someone above moved back and forth in a morning ritual. At last the spring lock clicked and a second bolt slid back; the door opened a crack to show two noses: one white and fleshy, at eye level; one dark and wet and growling, at knee level.

  “Who is it?”

  “Detective Wager, Denver Police. Are you the landlady here, ma’am?”