by Rex Burns
“You know, this crap should be legalized. I mean coke and pot—hell, nobody gets hooked on that. And even the other stuff, people are going to get it anyway. Look what they’re willing to pay now! It would wipe me out overnight if they legalized the shit; the bottom would fall right out of the market. But think of the money the government would save. I mean, people are going to do it anyway, you know? Like Ramona says, all we do is give people what they want, and they want it enough to pay what we charge. Just like Prohibition. Hell, I got a buddy whose old man made it big running rum during Prohibition, and when you think about it, that’s all this is. It’s the same goddam thing. You know up in Aspen no jury’ll convict a dealer? The fuzz files all their cases down in Denver because nobody up there thinks it’s a crime to be in this line of work. And it’ll be that way in the rest of the country, too: first the legalization of marijuana, then the other stuff. It’s coming because it’s what the people want. We’re just a little bit ahead of our time is all, and I hope legalization holds off just long enough for me to make my score.”
“Me, too,” said Wager.
The late-evening wind creaked the timbers of the cabin and crackled through the wooden shingles on the low roof. The flames hidden in the Franklin stove gave muffled flaps and died back. Wager sipped at the bourbon and felt again the motion build up in the room: the wind around its walls, the steady creak of the rocking chair where Farnsworth sat, the waggle of the tufts of hair. “What happened with the narc you were telling me about—Chandler?”
“What? Oh—yeah. I was telling you about that, wasn’t I? Well, he set me up. I trusted the son of a bitch and he set me up for a buy and bust.” Again the shake of the head. “He even fooled Ramona—she thought he was O.K.”
“What happened at the bust?”
“Now there’s a question.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, we went with the deal and then the buyer—Rietman was his name—blew the whistle, and the next thing I know I’m asshole-to-asshole with a big forty-four, and my old buddy Chandler’s saying, ‘Surprise, I’m a narc.’”
“But the bust didn’t stick?”
“No, and that’s what I can’t figure”—Farnsworth aimed the pipe stem at Gabe—“because there I am in the cage thinking, Shit, I just blew five years, and wondering what little Pedro would look like in 1980, when my lawyer comes in to tell me there’s no case. He says the stuff I sold them was lactose.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Hell, no, it wasn’t! Man, I lost almost forty thousand dollars’ worth of coke on that deal, and all I could do was smile at that lawyer and say, ‘How about that?’”
All the motion in the room froze and Wager felt himself freezing with it. “You sold Rietman the real thing?”
“Yeah, I did—I’m an honest dealer, man. You know what I bet?”
Wager knew. He knew exactly what Farnsworth bet, because he bet the same thing. But he made himself say, “What?”
“I bet either Chandler or Rietman or both of them switched it. I bet those sons of bitches just picked up that brick and rode off into the sunset with it. You and me, we’re just giving the people what they want; but those sons of bitches are cheats, man! They just ain’t honest!”
CHAPTER 7
IT WAS ONE of those late-autumn periods along the Front Range when clouds settled in for long, drizzly days. Above eight thousand feet, the mountains were getting a wet snow that would pack solidly for the winter; in Denver it rained steadily—not heavy, not light, just steady. Wager listened to the faint crackle of drops on the wide lip of the balcony outside his apartment. Down below, the normally busy street held a Sunday stillness. On this kind of wet and muffled afternoon, he wished for a fireplace or wished that Lorraine … He turned from the rain-speckled glass of the balcony door and clicked on the television; the excited voice of a football announcer faded into the glare of cheering voices as someone scored a Sunday-afternoon touchdown somewhere. Wager left the noise on and went into the kitchen to heat the skillet. Ed Johnston would be watching the game. He’d have to talk to Ed Johnston. And then to Sonnenberg. Best to wait until the game was over before calling. He cracked a couple of eggs onto the hot iron skillet and scraped a patty of hash browns from the half of potato wrapped in tinfoil and still generally fresh. A spoon or two of green chili as the eggs came off; toast, the pot of coffee that never tasted exactly right until it had chilled and been reheated. And the rain. His wife—ex-wife—had liked the rain: walking in it, listening to it; the dampness made her skin feel soft, she said. She had liked fireplaces, too. She did not like a cop’s hours. But he had been a cop in the uniformed division when she married him, and there hadn’t been any Sunday mornings at all then; Saturday night was always one long hassle, and the paperwork was never finished until well into Sunday. “I don’t mind,” she said at first; but she did mind, and pretty soon she couldn’t hide it any more.
But before they were married, he had told her what a cop’s life would be like.
Well, tried to. Maybe he hadn’t told her enough. Maybe way down deep he had thought that she would get used to it and then he could have both. Maybe with himself and her, he had only been playing games. He knew for a fact he had not told her enough about the new O.C.D. job. But she had been so pretty—she still was. And there had been times when they both forgot he was a cop. A few times; and then fewer. And then none at all. And in these quiet, inward-gazing times, he could see through the surprise and shock of Lorraine’s leaving to know that there were no games left to play.
He shoved his toast through the last of the chili and eggs and rinsed the dishes, then stood gazing once more through the rain-splattered balcony doors at the grayness that masked the mountains west of the city. A wet autumn promising lots of snow, bringing lots of run-off in the spring, and with it poor fishing until late in the season. Not that it made any difference to him any more; despite all the leave he had built up over the last three or four years, he knew he wouldn’t take it. The mountains held quiet spells like this one, times that trapped him with echoes and memories, times when his mind kept jumping from one painful thing to another. It was better not to take leave. Better to be able to sleep through these Sundays. Best of all if he didn’t have to call Johnston.
He waited until the game ended and the sports announcer was explaining the holes in the Bronco pass defense to another sports expert, who kept saying, “Yes, Don, but you have to give credit to …” He turned it off and telephoned Johnston.
“Hello?” Behind the sergeant’s voice, he heard, “Yes, Don, and you have to give credit to …”
“This is Gabe, Ed.”
“What’s the problem?” There had to be a problem; Wager never called him at home unless there was one.
“It’s the Rietman bust. Last night Farnsworth told me he sold Rietman the real stuff.”
In the background, the sports expert had begun to tell Don about next week’s match against Oakland. “Jesus Christ.”
Wager waited.
“Jesus goddamn Christ!”
“I guess you want a report in writing?”
“Yes—no! Have you told anybody else? S.I.B?”
“Hell, no.”
“O.K., Gabe—don’t get pissed. Just let me think a minute.”
He knew what the results of Ed’s thought would be.
“I better call the inspector. I’ll get back to you. You at home?”
“Yes.”
The gray became darker. Wager left the lights off and sat and read through his small notebook until it became too dim to see. At some point, evening slid into night before the telephone rang again. It was Sonnenberg himself. “Can you come down to the office, Gabe?”
“Yes, sir.”
He lived closer than either Ed or the inspector; only the stairway light and the duty watch’s room glowed from the windows in the painted brick wall that faced the O.C.D. parking lot. He sat at his desk and waited. In a little while, the door warning rattled loudly
and Wager recognized the inspector’s steady stride thumping the bare wooden floor.
“Let’s wait in my office. Ed will be here in a few minutes.”
Sonnenberg was in the middle of his ritual of lighting a cigar when the door buzzed again and Ed’s hurrying footsteps echoed through the empty desks and partitions. The duty watch finally roused and poked his head around a corner to see who was making all the commotion. “Oh, hi, Sergeant Johnston.”
“Evening, Tom.”
Ed rapped at the doorframe and came in, closing the door after him.
“So Farnsworth claims he sold cocaine and not lactose,” said Sonnenberg as soon as the sergeant sat down.
“Yes, sir.”
“Could he be leading you on?”
“I don’t think so. I hope not. If he was, it means he thinks I’m a narc or a snitch. I’m sure he doesn’t think that.”
“Maybe he was just drawing the long bow.”
Wager blinked; he hadn’t heard that phrase in years. Every now and then, Sonnenberg came up with something like that. “He didn’t seem to be, sir.”
Johnston—rocking first on one ham, then on the other as the wooden captain’s chair grew harder against his thin body—asked Wager, “Any chance of his trying to frame Rietman and Chandler for revenge, maybe?”
“Only if he thinks I’m a narc or a snitch. Only if he thinks I’ll carry his story to authorities, Ed.”
“Oh, yeah. You said.”
“Possibly he’s just testing you with a false story?” asked Sonnenberg.
“That could be.” But Wager didn’t think so. Farnsworth’s surprise and wry humor seemed genuine. “He’d sure know where the story came from if word ever got out about Rietman.”
One, two, three heavy yellow smoke rings bounced gently off the green blotter on Sonnenberg’s desk and drew into a quivering column over the desk lamp. “Yes,” said the inspector slowly, “yes, he would know for certain. And we don’t know for certain that Rietman was alone in this. We don’t know if he’s working with someone else in this unit or in D.P.D.”
“Jesus,” said Johnston, “if the guys in the department start looking out of the corners of their eyes at each other, we might as well hang up our jocks.”
One more smoke ring. “And we’ve invested an awful lot of time and money on Farnsworth. Too much to risk it now. All right, what we do is this: we sit on the Rietman thing until we nail Farnsworth. We don’t move on Rietman at all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maybe it was Chandler,” said Johnston. “Maybe I should check with D.E.A. and see what’s in Chandler’s history.”
Sonnenberg shook his head. “They’d want to know why you’re asking. I don’t want to risk a leak until we’ve got Farnsworth.”
“It wasn’t Chandler,” said Wager.
Johnston and Sonnenberg looked at him.
He took out the small notebook. Turning to a dog-eared page, he read the summary of his telephone conversation with Chandler, emphasizing that the D.E.A. man and Rietman had driven alone in separate cars back to headquarters after the bust, and that the dope had been in Rietman’s possession all the way.
“Maybe Chandler lied?”
“No,” said the inspector. “It would be too easy to verify. The surveillance team would know who drove what.”
“And Rietman signed the stuff into the custodian’s office. He was the only one in the chain of possession from the bust to the locker.”
“And he’s had four months to sell that cocaine.”
“I can check out his recent behavior,” said Johnston. “If he’s spending more than he’s making, we can find out easy enough without tipping anybody.”
“I suppose we can go that far. But for God’s sake, don’t make waves.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sonnenberg’s cigar crackled gently. “Gabe, put all this in writing as soon as you can—for Ed’s eyes and mine only. No one else, not even Suzy. There’s not a blessed thing we can do until we bag Farnsworth; but when he’s out of the way …”
“Then we’ll sack that son of a bitch Rietman.”
In his mind, Wager corrected the sergeant. First they would sack the facts. And then Rietman. So it would stick on the bastard.
Wager drew routine surveillance until late in the week, which was fine with him. Since he was supposed to be peddling 150 pounds of the choicest Colombian weed, he had to stay out of Nederland anyway; and at least surveillance got him away from the small apartment. But it did not stop him from thinking about Rietman. Or from feeling the anger well up in his stomach with a sour taste that made the lukewarm coffee churn uneasily in his gullet. Things like that did happen—Hansen had said it months ago. But you did not expect it to happen in your own unit. You didn’t expect it with someone you had trusted. Caga—you never really expected it. What you did expect was that cops would do their jobs, nothing more or less. You expected more from the men who worked with you than you did from a marriage.
His suspect, a slender Negro male in his early twenties, came out of the dark apartment building. He stood a moment or two on his yellow high heels to case the street, then with a loose, cocky walk went east toward Emerson Avenue. Wager, slumped against the shadow of the car seat, emptied his cup of coffee back into the thermos and marked the time on a contact card: 1:23 A.M. The suspect’s gray topcoat flickered briefly in the barred shadows of treeless limbs before turning north out of sight on the empty avenue. Wager waited two or three minutes, then swung after the figure, expecting—and finding—that the suspect’s car, which he had earlier parked at a distance from the apartment, was gone. He noted that on the card and, with a yawn, started home; routine periodic surveillance for bits and pieces of this and that. In the morning, he would give his cards to Suzy, who would give them to Ashcroft. And they might build into something now or later. Or they might not. That was what routine surveillance meant.
He turned up the volume on the radio pack under the seat and half listened to the quiet traffic of District 2 while his mind kept sliding back to Rietman. Thank God Rietman was new to the unit and did not have wide exposure among the snitches. When the word got out about him, all those he touched would either be terrified that Rietman might have sold them for a deal or would be twice as hard to squeeze because Rietman proved that cops were no different from crooks. That son of a bitch; when the story finally hit the street, it would hurt everybody and everything. It would erode the power that Wager and other cops had worked at so hard to give weight to their promises and threats; worst of all, it would raise a question in every cop’s mind—as if there weren’t enough worries already. A rogue cop. A crooked cop. It had really happened, and to him.
He eased up on the gas pedal, which his anger had pressed. Evidence. It was all circumstantial, and without an admission from Farnsworth that he had sold Rietman cocaine, there would be no conviction. The inspector was right: the only way they could get to Rietman was through Farnsworth, and the only way Farnsworth would admit to selling to Rietman would be if he was afraid of something bigger. Wager could see it coming: pop Farnsworth so hard that there would be a deal. Sonnenberg—and himself, too, he guessed—would put more value on hanging Rietman than Farnsworth. But both of the bastards should hang; it was just that Rietman should have more air under his feet. He pulled into the numbered parking place behind his apartment and disconnected the radio pack, clipping it onto his belt. Perhaps there was another way to cook bacon: if Rietman thought Farnsworth was about to be popped, maybe he would want to beat Farnsworth in copping a plea. Maybe there were two roads to the same place.
He called D.P.D. at midmorning; Rietman and his partner were on patrol in District 1. Wager arranged to meet them on their coffee break at a Jack-in-the-Box drive-in.
Rietman was riding shotgun; his partner looked across at Wager curiously. “Is that you underneath the beard, Wager?” Rietman asked. “What do you want now?”
“A few questions about Farnsworth. Why don’t you get in my
car? Your partner can monitor the radio.”
Rietman strode slowly to Wager’s vehicle and slid in beside him. “I hope it’s worth your fucking up my coffee break.”
Wager kept his eyes to the front of the car where a waitress trotted back and forth carrying trays up and down the long row of covered parking slots. “We’re real close to busting Farnsworth.”
“Gee, that’s nice.”
“When we get him, he may want to bargain.”
“So let the son of a bitch. He ain’t my worry no more.”
Wager ordered a hamburger and coffee. Rietman did not want anything. “If he bargains, he’ll confess to everything he’s ever done so we can’t charge him on anything additional later.”
“What’s your thing, Wager? What are you laying on me?”
He was cool. Wager smiled and couldn’t help a touch of sour admiration: Rietman was one cool dude and a good actor.
“We’ll be looking at all his deals—everything he ever did.”
“And?”
“I might want to check some of his story with you.”
“As long as it’s during working hours. Anything extra’s time and a half.”
He gave Rietman a few minutes’ silence, a few minutes to think—to say something more. But the uniformed cop was quiet.
“Well, I thought you’d like to know that we’re real close to getting him.”
“Detective Wager, sir, I just don’t give one small shit one way or another.”
On his way to O.C.D. headquarters, Gabe ran the scene through his memory over and over, seeking something in the words or voice or eyes that told him Rietman was indeed worried. But nothing showed. Either Rietman was one of the smoothest liars Wager had ever run across or he really wasn’t worried. And if Rietman wasn’t, Wager should be—because something was wrong.
He rapped on Johnston’s doorframe; the Sergeant looked up from the sports section of the Post. “Gabe—come on in. Did you hear about the MDA case? The one in the Springs?”
“No.”
“Three to five! They’re appealing, but it won’t get nowhere.”