by Rex Burns
“There’s the overtime kid—Wager thinks he’s still Supernarc.” Detective Ross, completing a records-search application form, winked at his partner, another tall, thick-bodied man. At five eight, Wager was half a foot shorter than any other member of the homicide section.
“Wager thinks he needs a cup of coffee and a little peace and quiet,” Gabe said.
The partner, Devereaux, glanced up from his stack of papers. “Fred Baird told us you really got a good one.”
“I’m glad he liked it. Did he have anything from the lab yet?”
Ross didn’t try to hide his irritation. “No, he didn’t have anything from the lab yet. He put in his time and he went home. You really do think you’re a supercop, don’t you?”
Wager guessed he had just broken a rule of the office by not kidding back. “No, Ross. I’m tired.”
“Then knock off. You’re not in narcotics any more; you don’t have to make anybody think you’re rupturing yourself for Mama and apple pie.” Ross tugged his checked sport coat over his arms. “We do things different over here. But, by God, just as good. We got a goddamned good conviction rate in this section, and we didn’t get it by being hyper—we got it by collecting the evidence!” He strode out of the office.
Devereaux, with a little embarrassed grin, paused a moment in the doorway. “Ross didn’t sleep good again. Nightmares. You get them after a while; you know how it goes. Is there anything you want us to follow up on?”
“Not yet. Thanks.”
“Ciao.”
Wager closed his burning eyes and slumped in the hard chair to hold the coffee mug under his nose.
The steam smelled better than the thick coffee tasted, and he inhaled deeply, feeling the rigid muscles in his neck begin to relax, listening to the rhythmic clatter of a distant teletype, the tinny rattle of telephones, voices male and female raised over the chatter from the records section just down the hall. On his desk, his portable radio popped and squawked with the business of District 2, the most active of the quadrangles that divided the City and County of Denver. All those noises added up to the familiar sounds of every division he’d worked, from street grunt to narcotics. And now homicide. It wouldn’t take long to feel at home here. But Ross’s words held some truth: the pace was slower, more methodical. In the narcotics section, you were part of the crime while it was taking place in order to have a case for court; the pace was always set by the bastard you wanted to bust. Here in homicide, you picked up the pieces after the crime was committed. If there were witnesses, you could move fast; if not, you could only go as fast as the evidence allowed.
But there was another reason behind Ross’s anger; Wager knew Ross was threatened by Wager’s putting in a little overtime. Here was Ross doing his eight hours and happy in his stride, when along comes a runty Hispano who strides a little faster and works a little harder. All of a sudden Ross has competition. Well, piss on him—Ross didn’t have to compete unless he wanted to; and if he did, it was his worry. Because now homicide was as much Wager’s home as anybody’s.
He took another sip of bitter coffee and picked up the telephone; the drawling voice on the other end answered, “Lab, Hawkins.”
“This is Wager in homicide. Do you have anything yet on that head found out at the Botanic Gardens?”
“Wager? You new up there?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, that’s a weirdo. It sure as hell doesn’t give us much to work with. The dental-records check could run two weeks; maybe a month or more if she’s from out of town. And if we’re lucky.”
“The team hasn’t come back from the field yet?”
“No. They called in some uniformed people to go over the grounds. It’ll take most of the morning to search the area—that’s a big place. But we should have the morgue shots by this afternoon, so you’ll have a little to work with. Too bad she didn’t have fingers. We could get an I.D. in an hour if she had fingers.”
“Yeah. Ain’t that like a woman.”
“Ha. Right.”
Wager hung up and glanced at his watch: 9:45. His headache was worse, and whether he wanted it or not, he should put something into his stomach before going back to the Botanic Gardens to see Mauro. But Doyle stopped him in the hallway.
“You still here, Wager?”
It was a stupid question, and he hesitated a second too long before answering simply, “Yes, sir.”
The bulldog’s lower teeth shone; this time it definitely was not a smile. “Who’s handling the thing that came in this morning?”
“I am.”
It was the chief’s turn to pause and he made it longer than Wager’s. “Maybe you’d better turn it over to Ross and Devereaux.”
“It came in on my shift. I’m the officer of record.” And Doyle’s own procedure manual named the officer of record as the officer in charge.
“This isn’t your basic, everyday snuff,” Doyle said. “I’ve already had four calls from the press on it.”
“I’m the officer of record,” Wager said again.
The bulldog pulled his upper lip behind those lower teeth and made little chewing sounds. “So you are, Wager. So don’t screw it up; I want a sound conviction on this one.”
What the hell did he think Wager wanted? The combination of a headache and Doyle made him distrust his own mouth. He just nodded.
“If you need any help at all, you ask—understand? We get convictions because we work as a team. There are no prima donnas in the homicide section.”
“If I wasn’t any good, I wouldn’t have been sent here.” That was only partially true—he was also here because a federal Law Enforcement Assistance grant ran out and closed the special narcotics section; D.P.D. had to put him somewhere.
“Well, you better know that I took you on a trial basis, Wager, because I’m short-handed as hell. And you better know this, too: homicide isn’t narcotics. You got a reputation for being an animal; if you screw up in my division, you’re going to end up sitting at the information desk arranging tours for Boy Scouts.”
“I’m a goddamned good cop.”
“We’ll find out. Just you remember: good cops get facts—they don’t go around lumping people.”
On his way to the Botanic Gardens, Wager drove slowly around the green lawns and clusters of blue spruce that formed Cheesman Park. It lay just west of the gardens across a winding street now emptied of the last clutter of rush-hour traffic. Tall iron bars and a padlocked gate whose rusty hinges were unused fenced this end of the gardens, and it wasn’t until he swung up Eleventh Avenue that he glimpsed the crinkled glass of the conservatory through the towering apartments and expensive condominiums scattered along the edge of the grounds. He turned down the narrow end of Gaylord Street where it dead-ended at the north entrance, and pulled in beside Solano’s red Toyota truck. Half a dozen other cars and pickups nosed against the wall of the detached greenhouses, and as Wager looked up the soaring arc of the conservatory, a uniformed officer plodded around the building to poke his arm cautiously into the pfitzers that sprouted along the foundation.
Earlier, when Wager had entered the grounds from the east entrance, he had hopped a locked turnstile in a low fence of metal pickets, the same one that gave the ambulance attendants so much trouble. But from this side, a gap between a chain-link fence and Greenhouse 1 opened onto a wide concrete apron; beyond that, a rose garden gave easy entrance to the main grounds. Behind him, across the alley, apartments and condominiums peered down; and half a block away towered a forty-floor column of staggered balconies. He could see few outside lights at this corner of the building; chances were that no one in the apartments had seen anybody enter last night.
But they would have to be questioned anyway. And that was something Ross could do—ask a hundred people if they saw anything last night.
Slipping through the gap between fence and greenhouse, Wager crossed the concrete apron. A policeman and three groundskeepers stood digging through a tall bin of compost. The officer looked
up.
“This area’s closed, mister. Go on back out.”
“I’m Detective Wager from homicide.” He didn’t bother to show his shield; there was enough identification in his voice. “It looks like you haven’t found anything.”
“No, sir.” The officer stamped first one shoe and then the other to shake clinging brown shreds from his trousers. “We’ve got one more bin to go through.” There were eight of the tall, open squares, each half filled with mixtures that differed slightly in color and odor. “But if you ask me, it’s a waste.”
Wager hadn’t asked. But everybody liked to get in on the act. “Why?”
“Well, if he brought the whole body here and cut off the head, there’d be a hell of a lot of blood somewhere. And we haven’t seen a trace anywhere. I think he did it someplace else and just brought the head because it was easier that way.”
Wager thought so, too, but that didn’t answer why. “It’s all got to be looked at.”
“Yeah. What the hell, the pay’s the same.”
He wandered through the lanes of rose and lily beds toward a cluster of figures near a patio halfway across the open grounds. One or two roses still held flowers, but it was a last effort and the plants looked weary and ready for winter; all but two or three lilies had bloomed and died, and the few remaining narrow leaves hung brown at the tip. He paused a moment: the browning of the long leaves, the flowerless lily stalks like a field of twigs, the weak sunlight finally burning away the overcast—all brought a memory of the tiger lilies that had filled every square inch of his aunt’s yard that the kids hadn’t worn flat with their running and games. Her house was no longer there— the whole neighborhood was no longer there, all of it scraped under and buried beneath brick-and-glass boxes. Urban renewal, they called it, though nothing had been renewed. It was just new. But here, among these lilies pulling life down into their roots, Wager again saw that house, those plants, smelled the cold darkness that wafted from under the wooden front porch and through the browning leaves of late-September mornings.
Memory. He tugged a brittle tip of a lily leaf and ground it to powder between thumb and forefinger. Maybe that was why the hair was combed and the head set like a bit of statue in the living green of the streamside: memory. And if that was it, then maybe she and her killer had been here before—or had somewhere shared some garden. Wager scooped a pinch of damp earth from the lily bed and sniffed its crisp cleanness. What kind of person? It was easy to shrug and answer, “Some nut.” The evidence—Doyle’s evidence—pointed at some nut. But in the back of his mind, Wager questioned if it was that simple.
The aggregate walk bent toward a small rectangle of water that reflected mounds of sculpted earth rising like miniature Mayan temples. At first, he had not liked them because they were too angular to be natural. But as he wandered between their straight lines and open faces, they gave a sense that the flower beds were much, much larger; and they blocked the surrounding houses, streets, and apartments to create hollows of sky and privacy. At the highest part of the gardens, the main fountain gushed and splattered to fill the cool air with its sound. The water flowed through the grounds in lines and pools, ending at a final level near the patio where a knot of men gazed over a retaining wall at something on the west side. Wager went toward them.
Two uniformed officers glanced up. Wager identified himself to the corporal in charge. On the other side of the waist-high wall, two more officers dragged a grappling hook through a small, deep hole filled with scummy water and bordered by high weeds. Their shoes made sucking sounds as they moved.
“Nothing?” asked Wager.
“Not a goddamned thing. We’ll be through here in a few minutes.”
The final third of the grounds, weedy and unkept, sloped west toward the rusty gate and Cheesman Park across the street. On the garden’s south edge, multi-windowed backs of mansions rose over a low hedge. Access could have been made there, but it was less likely; a person would have to cross private land, probably with a plastic bag in hand, past somebody’s guard dogs or silent alarm system, and then scramble through the hedge. “Your people have gone along the tree line down there?”
“No trace of nothing.”
Wager turned back toward the conservatory. In front of the main entrance, a group of senior citizens craned their necks. The lab people’s cardboard sign “CRIME SCENE KEEP OUT” closed the admission window, and Wager heard an old woman’s cracked voice ask over and over, “What? Why won’t they let us in? What?”
Mr. Sumner, white hair now tamed, met him in the lobby. “We were supposed to open at nine, Inspector. We’re an hour and fifty-one minutes past that. How much longer is this going on?”
“It shouldn’t be much more. Did the medical examiner get here yet?”
“I really have no idea. The ambulance took the thing away, but there’s still someone in the conservatory.”
“Is Dominick Mauro here yet?”
Sumner gave a short, disgusted sigh and looked once more at the customers held outside the gate. “In Greenhouse One.”
A lab man crouched to flip a fingerprint brush lightly at the outside handles of the emergency door.
“Any luck?” asked Wager.
“Plenty—and all bad. When you get this many prints, you know none of them mean a thing.”
“Nothing inside?”
“No. The alarm system for this door hasn’t been tampered with, and there’s no sign of forced entry anywhere. My guess is somebody used a key.”
That was Wager’s guess, too. He turned in to the warm air of the first greenhouse; in the far corner, on folding chairs drawn up to a table with a large coffeepot and hot plate, sat three men. “Is Mr. Mauro here?”
“I’m him.” The man closest to the pot stood. An inch or so taller than Wager and perhaps ten years older, Mauro had a thick round body that didn’t show signs of softening. His nose had long ago been broken and moved slightly away from center.
“Detective Wager, homicide. Can I talk to you?”
“Why not?” He shoved a chair with his foot. “Sit down.”
The other two men were unsure whether to go or stay. Then, without saying anything aloud, they decided it was their coffee break and Wager was the intruder. They sat and pretended not to hear his questions.
“Were you the last one to leave yesterday, Mr. Mauro?”
“No. It was my day off.”
“On a Tuesday?”
“I worked last Sunday. Me and Sal change off weekends; whoever works Sunday gets next Tuesday off.”
“Who locks up when you’re not here?”
He bobbed his head at the two men in overalls. “Leon or Joe. They’re the senior gardeners.”
“They have keys, then?”
“Not their own. They use the emergency master—it’s over there, locked in the keyboard.”
A small steel cabinet with a glass door hung just inside the entry. It was secured by a combination padlock.
“It’s that first key,” added Mauro.
“They use the master to lock up the conservatory, then lock it in this greenhouse when they go home?”
“That’s it.”
“How many people know the combination to that padlock?”
“Only them, I guess. I don’t know it, anyway.”
“Can I talk to you two a minute?”
The elder of the two—lean, with large rimless bifocals—looked up. “Couldn’t help hearing—me and Joe worked yesterday, but it was me that locked up. Leon Duncan is my name.” He held out a hand that looked too wide for its thin wrist.
The second man stuck out his broad hand: “Joe Mazzotti. It’s a terrible thing. Really terrible.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Lord, no!” said Duncan. “We just heard about it when we come in to work.”
Wager copied their names and addresses into his notebook. “Can you tell me what you did when you locked up last night, Mr. Duncan?”
“Sure I can. Mostly because
there’s not much to it. Nick, here, he’s got the hard end of the job when it comes to locking up. Me, I just look through the conservatory and the bathrooms and lobby to make sure nobody’s there. Then I lock up. We never had anybody get locked in yet; but if they did, they’d sure have a time getting out. No, no, wait. If they was in the conservatory itself, they could get out the emergency doors, but them bells would set off a racket.”
“Yes, sir. Did you—?”
Duncan didn’t hear him. “If they was in the lobby section, now, they’d have the devil of a time, wouldn’t they, Nick? All them doors is latched with a key and you can’t open them without one, inside or out.” Behind the bifocals, the eyes frowned. “But the telephone’s in there, ain’t it, Nick? They could always call somebody and get out that way. If they had a dime.” Another pause. “I don’t know what they’d do if they didn’t have a dime.”
The other groundskeeper nodded, and Wager got the feeling that was the most Mazzotti ever had a chance to do. “Yes, sir. Do you check out the other areas, too? Gift shop? Library?”
“No, I don’t. Because those folks are supposed to shoo everybody out themselves, and I can’t recollect ever finding their doors unlocked. I guess if I did, I’d look and see, though.”
“What do you do after you lock the outside door?”
“After? Well, I put the key back in the cabinet and lock the greenhouse. Can’t be too careful, what with them heads running around and everything.”
“Yes, sir. Did anybody ever find the master key missing? Do you know if anybody ever lost one?”
“Well, I tell you—I been here almost eighteen years now, and the conservatory was built in 1966, that’s ten years ago, and there ain’t been no keys missing since then.”
“How many people know the combination to that padlock?”
“Two. Me and Joe; that’s all. That’s all that needs to know. Anybody else wants a key to something, they can always find me or Joe.”