Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  “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 somebody 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 b
oth 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 Saturday?”

  “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.”

  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.”