by Rex Burns
“How do you know?”
“I get ten percent. That’s part of the deal—minimum wage from Berg and ten percent of the girls’ take. It’s not like I don’t earn it, man—it’s my job to establish the mood for the sets. I cool things down and then build them up a little bit, give a girl her introduction. Then I run their music the way they want it and handle the volume. That’s an art—you have to run the volume up a little at a time through the set, you know? It’s no easy job.”
“Did you do the music for Shelly that night?”
“Sure. She was real particular about it. A real artist, you know? She talked once about going to dance in Las Vegas or maybe she’d been there—I’m not sure. But she was good.”
“Did she ever talk about any friends of hers? Or her husband’s?”
“No. She was strictly business. She told me what she wanted and I did it, and that was it.”
“Did she give you her ten percent last Saturday?”
“Sure. A girl doesn’t give it over, I have a word with Mr. B. She either feeds the kitty or she’s out on her sweet ass. Unless I screw up—then no ten percent.” He shrugged. “It happens once in a while. We’re all human, man, and some of the music the girls want. …” He shook his head and fingered the gold chain around his neck. “A monkey couldn’t hop to some of the music they drag in.”
Wager asked, “Does the bartender get ten percent, too?”
“Sure. He’s got the same arrangement I do. That’s where the real money is in this racket. It sure ain’t in the salary.”
“Any of the girls ever skim?”
“It happens once in awhile, sure. But you can usually tell—you have a pretty good idea what each night brings. Things have been dropping off lately, though. The depression, right? But it’s overall, if you know what I mean. A girl skims, she stands out.”
“Shelly?”
“No. Never. What for? Shit, she could pick up two, three hundred. And a few nights she even made half a grand.”
“In one night? Five hundred dollars in one night?”
“Right. You get a Saturday-night house pretty well oiled, they can put a lot of bucks on the table. It’s amazing what some guys will pay just to look up a girl’s snatch.” He shrugged. “Like I say, minimum wage, that’s for the IRS, you know?” A thought struck him. “Ah—you guys don’t talk to them, do you?”
“Only about my own taxes, Ed.”
Gollmer smiled with relief. “Right. What the IRS don’t know won’t hurt us.”
“So Shelly paid you Saturday. Was that before or after she changed clothes?”
“After. They go in and count the tips and then settle up on their way out.”
“You saw her go out?”
“Right. I was sitting at the bar and having my drink, like always. She says, ‘Here you go, Ed,’ and hands me my money, and then out she goes.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah—right.”
“You saw her go out the front door alone?”
“No. The back door. Over there.” He pointed off across the vacant ramp whose waxed surface threw back the ceiling’s cold glow like a strip of ice. “There’s an employees’ lot out back where we park.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”
Gollmer shook his head.
“Nobody in the audience who showed special interest in her? Gave her a big tip? Asked her out after the show?”
“No more than usual. You know, ‘Can I give you a ride home?,’ that kind of crap. The out-of-towners do that, not the regulars. She got her share of it—she was a good-looking girl. Really a good figure.” He shook his head again. “Murdered … What, was she raped and killed?”
“It looks that way.”
“Well, I guess I’m not all that surprised.”
“Why’s that?”
“You do get your share of sickies coming in here. Some of them…well, Cal has a tough job, you know?”
“That’s the bouncer?”
“Right. Mr. B. keeps the place clean; nothing rough, nothing dirty. It’s not like some of the other skin houses. Still,” he added, lighting another cigarette, “we do get our ration of sickies.”
Wager went through the rest of the questions, asking the same thing a couple of different ways, but getting the same answers. Shelly left for the parking lot a little after two. She had been alone. No one seemed especially interested in her. Gollmer knew of no trouble between her and her husband. He knew of no one who might want her dead. And he could think of no sickie that stood out in the audience Saturday night.
When Wager came back down the stairs, Axton was waiting for him.
“Anything?”
“It looks like the disc jockey was the last one to see her leave.”
“Alone.” It wasn’t a question now.
“Yeah. Let’s go out this way—it’s the employees’ parking lot.”
It was a dirt square tucked between the windowless brick walls of the adjoining buildings and open at the back to an alley that glittered with crushed glass. Across the pavement, a high wooden fence with a board broken here and there guarded someone’s backyard, and beyond that a darkness of thick trees protected an old neighborhood from the noise and gleam of Colfax. High on the club’s wall above them, spotlights flooded the parking area with light. A black Mercedes sat in the slot closest to the door. Its license plate read MR. B. and on the wall in front of it was stenciled Reserved for Numero Uno. Other slots were numbered in older paint half-hidden under sprayed graffiti. Only four cars were left in the lot by now. They were all late models and one other had vanity plates reading D.J.-1.
“Not much hope for any witnesses,” said Axton.
He was right. It was, despite the openness and light, a secluded spot. Wager glanced again at the solid brick walls boxing in the lot. A girl could step through that door and, crossing suddenly into another world, simply disappear. “Looks like another wait-and-see killing,” he said. Wait-and-see if anything would turn up, because there sure as hell wasn’t much to help them right now.
CHAPTER 3
ANNETTE SHELDON WAS autopsied the next day. Parts were taken out, weighed and measured, sampled and tested, then tossed back into the body cavity, which was tacked together for burial. Golding and Munn, on the day shift, interviewed Mr. Sheldon again to see if he could remember anything else after a night’s sleep. They handed their report on to Ross and Devereaux on the four-to-midnight, but those two were called to a shooting on the west side. A Chicano gang had squared off against a Vietnamese gang over the question of who was getting a bigger share of the welfare cut. So Ross and Devereaux had no time to follow up on Sheldon. When Wager and Axton came on at midnight for their eight hours, Sheldon’s second interview lay unread in the case file and the thick autopsy report was still in its brown routing envelope. Axton picked them both up when he gathered the day’s mail.
The pages of procedural steps and blanks were filled in by the medical examiner’s findings. It was, as usual, a detailed and comprehensive job. Doc Laban had been at it for over thirty years, and though some people outside Homicide might wonder at Doc’s continued fascination with the mangled and the mutilated, the division had a lot of respect for him. When he retired, it was going to be hard to find somebody as good.
“Gabe, Doc says there’re no sperm traces.”
Wager looked up from pouring his first cup of coffee. “She wasn’t raped?”
“No medical evidence of it. No bruises, abrasions, or sperm in the vaginal, anal, or oral areas. No sperm traces on thighs or buttocks.”
He thought about it for a moment. “We still don’t have all her clothes.” Sometimes a rapist got his kicks before he could go all the way. But not usually. More often, the rapist needed to feel a woman’s writhing terror and pain, even her hatred, as part of his pleasure.
“We probably never will have them,” said Axton, and added, “still—”
Wager agreed. “Like I said, why would someb
ody want to make it look like a rape?”
“You and your twisty mind.” Axton turned to the section on internal organs and read through the findings. “Approximate time of death, four to six days before the autopsy.” He counted back. “That could fit early Sunday morning—she got off work and got killed the same night.” His finger skipped down to the next paragraph. “He located a cocaine trace in her body fluids. The organs are normal, though. No evidence of long-term abuse.”
“Recreational chipping?” Wager wasn’t surprised. It was fairly common for a customer to offer a toot instead of a tip to a nightclub waitress. She either used it herself or sold it later.
Axton read further. “Looks that way. No other foreign substance. Generally a healthy woman.” He looked up. “All that dancing—she got a lot of exercise. Wasn’t Golding in an aerobic dance class?”
“Golding’s in everything. Did he and Munn ask about any insurance coverage?”
Axton turned to the follow-up interview. “Let’s see … ‘Mr. Sheldon stated he could remember nothing more concerning …’ No, Sheldon said there was no insurance at all, on either of them.”
So there went that theory. Wager tested the heat of his coffee with a cautious tongue. “Where does Sheldon work?”
“He was interviewed at home … here we are: 375 Oldham, Nickelodeon Vending Repairs. He’s the owner of a vending machine repair service.”
“The owner?”
“Owner and manager, it says here.”
“Anything else on it? Partners? Employees?”
“Nothing. What sly convolutions are going on now?”
Sometimes Axton made preppie-sounding jokes, maybe to show that he went to college. But he was still a good cop despite the sociology degree; besides, he was Wager’s partner. You let your partner get away with things like that now and then. “If there was no insurance on the victim, and if there was no other man involved, then what other reason might Sheldon have for doing it?”
“Gabe, I think you really don’t like the guy.”
What he didn’t like was the odor of a lie in some of the man’s answers. “He’s a suspect.”
“So is anybody in the club that night. And half the people outside, too.”
“But it was made to look like rape.”
“It happens that way sometimes, Gabe. You know that.”
But very seldom with guns, and not to the back of the head. Strangulation, sure: sometimes a rapist got a little more persuasive than he intended and the victim’s throat was crushed before he could complete the act. But weapons, pistols especially, were something else. No one tended to argue with a pistol, so the rapist would have gotten his way and left the evidence of it. Still, Axton’s point was the right one. Even if the man shared the same suspicions as Wager, he was offering the right objection: lack of evidence. There was nothing to point to Sheldon or to anyone else. Only that feeling. Wait-and-see. And perhaps wait-and-no-see, like too many of those red-tagged files in the steel cabinet of cases labeled Open.
“Anything from ballistics?”
Axton riffled through the pages and shook his head. “Not enough for a report. The slug fragmented. Doc says it was probably a .22 hollow-point.”
Which didn’t tell them much. There were maybe half-a-million .22-caliber pistols in Denver; they were cheap and easy to buy and most of them were unregistered. They were also the professional killer’s favorite close-range weapon because the slug tended to rip apart and was unsuitable for a ballistics trace.
Axton glanced at his watch. “Want to eyeball some skin? Maybe some of Annette’s regulars will be there now.”
Wager nodded and drained his cup. The taxpayers weren’t getting their money’s worth while he sat on his rump and drank coffee. No, sir, he should be out there sitting on his rump watching naked women.
Cal the bouncer remembered them, but there was no happy smile of welcome. “You gemmn need something more?” Behind him, on the runway, Scarlet was smiling in front of a man whose glasses winked pink sparks as he stared up at her. It was her first dance of the set and she still wore her costume, a strapless bra and a sarong slit high up her thigh. It flared teasingly when she braced her fingers against the ceiling and spun sharply.
“We’d like to talk to some of Shelly’s regular customers,” said Axton.
“The customers? You want to start talking to the customers now?”
“Something wrong with that?” asked Wager.
“Well, yeah! It might scare them off. How’d you like to have cops come up and start asking you questions?”
“It happens all the time,” said Axton.
“We could get a warrant,” said Wager. “We could do a lot of nasty things with a warrant for this place.”
Cal chewed his lip and then said, “Mr. Berg’s got to hear about this. You guys wait right here—I’ll go get him.” He turned away and then turned back, remembering his manners, “You gemmn can have a drink if you want—on the house.” He hustled off into the red glow. Nguyen, the bartender, smiled widely and raised his eyebrows. Axton shook his head.
Berg came out a few minutes later, a worried frown wrinkling the wide strip of flesh above his eyebrows. “Cal says you gentlemen want to start hassling the customers now?”
“Not ‘hassling,’ Mr. Berg,” said Max. “Just ask Shelly’s regulars a few routine questions. We don’t have much else to go on.”
“I don’t know that any of them are here now.”
“We can keep coming back until they show up,” said Wager.
“I see.” He glanced around the dimly lit room. It was Friday and busier than last night; chairs on both sides of the runway were filled and a haze of cigarette smoke thickened the red glow. Scarlet was into her second dance; with pirouettes and pauses, she slowly unwrapped her sarong and opened the bra that strained to hold her breasts. “Let me ask the young ladies if they recognize anybody.” He strode toward the runway and tapped a waitress on the shoulder. She listened a moment and looked at Wager and Axton, and then nodded and came over, with Berg right behind her.
“All right,” he said. “Sybil says a couple of them are here. But look—let’s do this with a little couth, all right? Sybil offers them a free drink and asks them to come over and talk to you. No rousting, okay?”
“That’s couth enough for me,” said Wager.
“Okay, honey,” said Berg. Then to Wager, “I’m cooperating, right? But I got a business to run, too. I’d appreciate it if you gentlemen remembered that.”
“We will, Mr. Berg,” said Axton.
Wager watched as Sybil threaded between the tiny tables and up toward the chairs along the runway. She bent beside a man who smiled up at her and then stopped smiling as she spoke. He glanced toward them and then asked Sybil something. Then he nodded and followed her back to Wager.
“This is Jim,” she said. “I’ll go ask the other one.”
“Hi, Jim.” Wager rested a friendly hand on the back of his arm. “Let’s step over here out of the noise. I’m Detective Wager and I’m investigating Shelly’s murder—it’s nice of you to help me out.”
Max waited for the second one, a pleasant smile on his face, too. Couth.
Jim was as short as Wager but wirier; in the dim light, he seemed in his late thirties. His black hair was long on top and short on the sides, and he had long, narrow sideburns that came far below his earlobes and ended in little shaggy points. His full name was James M. Hugo and, yes, he liked to watch Shelly dance. “She knew my name,” he said. “She always said hello. She was really a good dancer—better than anybody else here.”
“You came to see her a lot?”
“Three or four times a week. I’m a regular, I guess.” He shrugged apologetically. “I like it better than watching television.”
“You live alone?”
“Yeah. I drive short-hauls. I like this place—the people’s nice. They’re not always hustling you like in some other places.”
“You were here last Saturda
y?”
“No. I was over to Durango to pick up some cows.”
“Can you tell me where you stayed there?”
“Sure.” He did. Wager noted it for later corroboration.
“How long did you know Shelly?”
“A year, I guess. She was a real lady.”
“Did you ever ask her out?”
“Me? No! I liked her dancing—that’s what I come here for. We’d say hello, but, no—I wouldn’t ask her or nobody out!”
“Did she ever go out with any of the customers?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you know any of her other regulars?”
“Know them? No. I see some guys here a lot and she talks—talked—to some of them, but I don’t know any of them.”
“Anyone special she seemed interested in?”
“Not that I know of. She was real popular. She said hello to a lot of guys. But she never went out with any of them that I saw.”
“Did anybody get angry when she turned him down?”
“No. It’s a rule, you know? Like ‘No touching.’ You can’t date the girls or they lose their jobs. They’re nice girls.”
“Did you know her husband?”
A pained look crossed his eyes. “She was married?”
Wager nodded.
“I didn’t know she was married.” He added, “I guess most of them’s married, ain’t they?”
Jim said little after that, and there wasn’t much left for Wager to ask. He thanked the black-haired man and sent him for his free drink and caught Sybil’s eye as she made her way to the bar with a tray of empty glasses.
“That’s the only two here tonight.” She wasn’t any friendlier than she had been yesterday. “There’s maybe two or three more, but that’s all that’s here now.”
“You don’t know the names of any of them?”
She shook her head. “A few first names, but that’s all.” Her voice dropped and so did the corners of her mouth. “We don’t even want to know their names. We’ve got our own names for them—you know, the Fat Man, or the Crip, or Whitey or Mr. Cool. Or the Drooler. He’s a real winner. I got to go, I’m on.”