by Rex Burns
Wager thanked her and waited for Axton to finish talking with his man. Max did, and gave a friendly wave toward Cal, who returned a stiff “Goodnight, gemmn.” Wager followed the big man out of the smoke and thudding music, and they paused in the glare of the entry. A grime-encrusted panhandler started to approach, smelled cop, and quickly faded back into the weekend crowd that had begun to fill the sidewalks.
“Anything?”
“Just sheer wonder,” said Max, “that anyone would waste his time and money night after night doing the same damned thing.”
“It sounds a lot like police work.”
“Don’t it, though. What about you? Your man have an alibi, too?”
Wager told him. “I’ll check it out in the morning.”
“Better turn it over to the day watch,” Axton reminded him. “Bulldog Doyle’s hot for this team concept.”
Wager spat on the sidewalk. “Right. I guess Golding can handle that much.”
“He gets the same pay you do,” agreed Max. Then, “I don’t think it would be a regular.”
Wager didn’t think so either, but he asked, “Why not?”
“For one thing, they can be traced—they’d know that. But the stories are all the same: she was never overly friendly with any one of them. And you get the feeling the regulars are happy with what they pay for, a little extra attention from a woman that everybody’s looking at.”
“Yeah.” But there was another angle, one that Wager hadn’t fully groped his way through and that he did not yet want to trust to his partner or anybody else on the team.
Nickelodeon Vending Repairs was a pale-brick building of one story and two wide panes of glass that flanked a recessed entry. Apparently, it had been built as some kind of retail store—clothes, shoes—before the original owner discovered that a neighborhood shop was not a good investment in most places, and was a definite loser on the north side of Denver. The flanking buildings had also been converted to light industry or service trades, and the few private homes that made up the rest of the block—large houses with peaks and cupolas and turrets—now advertised Rooms by the Day, Week, Month. The curb in front of the building was empty, and Wager pulled his Trans Am to the doorway of the shop, where he sat for a moment to study it.
The blank display windows opened to an interior half-filled with the hulking shapes of vending machines. In one window, a square red machine glinted with fresh enamel; beside it, an unlit pinball machine lifted its back panel like an ornate tombstone, reinforcing the feeling that the store was empty.
Wager crossed the wide, vacant sidewalk in the hot sun and tried the door. He was a bit surprised when it opened with the jingle of a bell whose sound bounced slightly among the machines scattered around the tile floor. Most had their backs off or showed gray steel racks in place of removed front panels. No one answered the door’s ringing.
“Sheldon? Anybody here?”
A distant voice echoed back. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
“Police, Mr. Sheldon. Detective Wager from Homicide.”
He heard a shoe scrape somewhere in the rear of the store, then Sheldon, wiping his hands with a rag, appeared between two of the upright boxes.
“Detective Wager? You found out something about Annette?”
“No, Mr. Sheldon. We still don’t have anything. But I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”
“Jesus. Didn’t those other two guys ask enough?”
“Just a few more, Mr. Sheldon. Things they overlooked.”
“Well, is it going to do any good? All these questions, and nothing coming of it … I’m busier’n hell. I don’t have time for—”
“We’re trying to catch your wife’s killer, Mr. Sheldon.”
His narrow shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh. “Yeah. I know. Come on back.”
He led Wager into the rear section, which had been a stockroom. Now it was a machine shop; a long bench down one wall was lit by fluorescent tubes and held a steaming coffeepot. Above the work site, framed on the wall, was an enlargement of Annette Sheldon’s publicity picture with a small silk cross tucked behind one corner; beneath, on a shelf of newly planed wood, were several sympathy cards in a row. At each end, a white vase held a single fresh rose. Sheldon saw Wager look at the shelf.
“Some of the girls sent cards,” he said. “It was nice of them—they didn’t have to. Mr. Berg even came to the funeral.”
Wager glanced at the names under the black script; one was signed by Rebecca and Sybil, another by David Berg, a third said “a friend.” A larger one had four or five girls’ names in different-colored inks. “You put up new flowers every day?”
“Yes. Annette loved roses. Every day.”
Wager felt uncomfortable in the aura of sentiment and pain that seemed to pool in front of the little shrine. “What can you tell me about Berg? Do you know him well?”
“Mr. Berg? He’s a nice guy. He gave Annette the good sets—the late ones. Because she was such a good dancer. He knew real talent.”
“Did your wife ever talk about him?”
Sheldon’s eyebrows bobbed. “Just business talk. Who he put on the afternoon shift. Who he moved up to night work.”
“She never told you he tried anything with her?”
Two red patches rose on his cheekbones. “Hell no. He didn’t, either! Annette didn’t have to put up with that kind of crap from him or anybody! She was too good a dancer. She even got offers in Vegas—the Dunes, the Sahara—to dance in the reviews. That’s real big-time and that’s how good she was, man!”
“She got offers but she didn’t go?”
The anger died as quickly as it came, leaving his pale eyes wide and aching behind their thick lenses. “She said we were doing too good here—her business and mine. … We were making better money here, she said.”
“Better than she’d be paid in Vegas?”
He nodded and swallowed and tugged at the thin mustache. “You got to figure the cost of living there. They pay good, but it costs a lot, too.”
“You visited Vegas?”
“Every two or three months. Gamble a little, lay around the swimming pool and get some sun. Annette liked to see the new dance routines.” He stared at the plumed figure on the wall. “She liked the costumes, too. She got ideas for her own routines from watching the reviews.”
“How’d you meet your wife, Mr. Sheldon?”
“Meet her?” He didn’t face Wager but talked to the photograph and smiled slightly with the memory. “She was tending bar at a place I used to go when I worked for Precision Metals. We just got to talking and hit it off. We liked the same things. … After awhile, I asked her out. I didn’t think she’d go with me, you know? I figured she thought I was just full of bar talk, and I’m not the best-looking guy in the world—believe me, I know that. Somebody was always hustling her, though, and she was tired of that trip. I didn’t; we just talked. Maybe that’s why. … Anyway, it took me a long time to get up the nerve to ask her out, and when I finally did, she just said ‘Sure’ like that and smiled, and I almost fell off my stool!”
“How long ago was this?”
“Three years and six months. We were married three years and four months.” He straightened one of the sympathy cards. “I figured out all the dates.”
“She wasn’t dancing then?”
“No. But she always wanted to be a dancer, ever since she was a kid. Her parents bought her lessons when she was little, and she was in all her high school shows—the musicals.” He glanced at Wager. “That’s what we talked about when we dated. I didn’t know anything about dancing then, but she was crazy about it, and I talked her into taking lessons again. At first for the exercise, you know, but she was good at it and liked it. The Cinnamon Club was my idea—she didn’t want to at first, but I told her, ‘Look, a professional dancer’s an entertainer, and it’s something you’ve wanted to do, now’s your chance.’ She could have been. …” He stopped talking, mouth squeezed in a hurt line and eyes
shut against the rise of pain from within.
Wager strolled a step or two away and gazed out through the half-open delivery door at the graveled alley and the wire fence and the carefully mowed backyard beyond. In the center of the yard, someone had put up a birdbath; beside it a pink plaster flamingo stood on one leg and curled its neck toward the water. Around the base of the pedestal, a froth of bright petunias caught the morning light. At the far end of the yard, the white stucco wall of the house held metal awnings that shadowed the windows. The distance of that sunny yard from the little shrine behind Wager stretched far more than time or space could measure; it was a distance that made heavier the weariness of a long tour of duty, and now he felt the added drain of groping his way through this man’s defenses, one question at a time.
He took a deep breath and pushed back at the surge of weariness. “She worked at the Cinnamon Club a long time. Didn’t she ever talk of finding a dancing job somewhere else?”
“Sure. We talked a lot about moving to Vegas or L.A. There’s not much going on in Denver for dancers, and what there is, is pretty amateur.”
“But you stayed here.”
“You mean why? Like I said: the money.” Sheldon started wiping the bits and pieces of a vending machine drive. “She made good money at the Cinnamon Club and she was still learning more about dancing. We figured one, two more years at the most, and then we’d have enough saved up to try somewhere big.”
“You were working somewhere else when you met her? Precision Metals?”
“Did I say that? Yeah, right. We bought this place maybe a year ago. Annette invested a lot of her money in it—she said she wanted me to have a place of my own.” He looked around and sighed. “We figured we’d sell this place and go wherever.”
“The shop makes a good living?”
“Yeah. Annette did all the bookkeeping. She was real good with numbers and paperwork—she liked it. I really don’t know how much this place made last year. I haven’t felt like going over the books yet.”
Good money dancing, good money from the shop. They lived at a very good address, too—a condominium in a new tower near City Park. “We haven’t found any trace of her car yet.”
“I figured I’d hear from you if you did. It’s probably in Mexico by now.”
“Mr. Sheldon, what we think is that somebody in the club followed her out to her car and pulled a gun on her. Then forced her to go with him.”
He wiped again at the drive shaft. “I think so, too. The bastard. The dirty bastard!”
“Did she ever say anything about anyone at all who might have been after her? A regular customer? A stranger? Anyone at all?”
The anger drained away. “No … I mean, she had her regulars; all the dancers got fan clubs, you know? That’s show business. But they tip good and they mind their manners. She’d tell me about them and we’d sometimes laugh at them and even feel sorry for them. In bed, we’d talk about them and—ah—feel sorry for them, like.”
“You don’t know much about any of them, though?”
“No. Mr. Berg didn’t like me to go there too much—the customers don’t tip as much if they know the girls got husbands or boyfriends in the audience. But Annette never told me about anybody who was after her that way.” He looked up as if begging to be believed. “And she’d have told me. If anything like that happened, she’d have told me, so I could take care of it, you know?”
Just like she’d told him about Berg’s hiring interview, Wager guessed. “How, take care of it?”
His thin shoulders pulled back slightly. “Well, I’d tell them first, ‘Leave my wife alone.’ I mean, most people go there to enjoy the dancing, not to hassle the girls. If that didn’t work, I’d tell Mr. Berg. He don’t put up with stuff like that. He’d heave that dude out on his tail.”
“And you never had to do that to anyone?”
“No! Annette said she could take care of anything like that.” His eyes turned back to the picture of the girl standing with arms upraised and smile frozen. “She told me never to worry about anything like that, and I didn’t.”
Wager said carefully, “The medical evidence shows she was not sexually attacked before she was shot.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No. It looked that way. But she wasn’t.”
Sheldon leaned on the bench as if his stomach hurt. “I’m glad for that. I’m glad she didn’t have to go through that.”
“Yes. About how much money did Annette bring home each week, Mr. Sheldon?”
He came back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “How much? Oh—sometimes two thousand dollars a week. Any week she didn’t make fifteen hundred was a poor week for her. I told you, she was real popular. There was a bunch of Arabs used to come in sometimes and see how high they could stack twenty-dollar bills before she finished a dance.”
“What did you and your wife do with all that money?”
“Do with it?”
“Did you spend it? Save it? Invest it in something?”
“Well, ah, we spent a lot—the condo, that’s expensive. And the cars. Video stuff—working nights, you miss the good programs. Vacations—a little gambling in Vegas.” He looked around the cinder-block walls of the machine shop. “And a lot of it went into this business. This whole set of tools and machines … all new. …” He shook his head, “Like I said, Annette kept the books and I just haven’t had the heart to go over them yet.”
“Did you lend money to anyone who might not want to pay it back?”
“No,” he said definitely. “We never lent money. We saved some and we spent some. That’s it.” His voice rose. “And I don’t see what any of that’s got to do with some son of a bitch killing her. Why don’t you just go out and find what crazy son of a bitch followed her out of the club and killed her! Why don’t you do that instead of coming around here and bugging me with all these questions that don’t mean shit! Go on—go on and find out who it was, and leave me alone!”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1983 by Rex Raoul Stephen Sehler Burns
cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4532-4792-1
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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