Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  Nolan snorted a laugh. “When we want someone we stand outside the back door and send a couple uniforms in the front. It’s like picking grapes.”

  “Do the girls push, too?”

  “Some do. But it’s not your usual thing. Most of them use everything they can get their hands on. They might steer a customer to a dealer for a fee or a free toot, but that’s about it.”

  “True,” added Nolan. “There’s a large amount of coke on the scene now. Some of the girls dance four, five sets—coke keeps them going. It’s a lot of exercise. That and alcohol. Drinks are free for the girls; it loosens them up onstage. They can drink all they want as long as they can still dance, and, man, some of those girls can really sauce it away.”

  “What about whoring?” Wager asked. “Any of them make a little on the side?”

  “On the side, on the back, on the front—you name it,” grinned Nolan. “As long as they don’t solicit customers in the club, they’re safe. But who in hell can stop them from setting up dates after hours or on their days off?”

  “They’re not all whores,” said Moffett. “Some of them; not all.”

  “Perhaps,” said Nolan. “But if the rent’s due and they’re a little short, they’ll pull a trick. A customer goes in and sees something he likes, he shows a couple hundred and tucks it back in his pocket.” He grinned again. “She understands what it means.”

  “You ever bust any that way?”

  “Used to. Can’t anymore. Entrapment.”

  “Ever bust an Annette Sheldon—Shelly—or Angela Williams?”

  Moffett said No. “I thought about that when I saw the Homicide reports come through. But I never had a contact on either one.”

  The men fell silent and watched the swarm of pedestrians and motor traffic pass the café’s parking lot. Moffett, lighting a cigarette, glanced at Wager’s sleeve. “Staples are better.”

  “What?”

  “Your sleeve—the paper clip. Staple it next time.”

  “Right.” Moffett, like Wager and so many other cops, was divorced; his ex-wife had custody of their two sons and most of his paycheck.

  “Jesus,” said Nolan. “Here’s comes Raymondo.”

  He nodded toward a tall black jaywalking through the stop-and-go traffic. He wore something that looked like a white string-bead cape across his bare shoulders and down to his hips. Below that was a black jockstrap, and his legs were bare down to the high-heeled, white thong sandals that poised him on tiptoes. A voice from a passing car howled at him and he grinned and made kissing motions toward it and patted his nude buttocks.

  Moffett yawned. “I got to admit, he is one of our brighter sights.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Nolan said. “His real name’s Raymond Green. We ran a make on him—nothing. Just your average Colfax citizen.”

  Wager had seen him before; it was hard not to. “How else might a girl make extra money at one of those skin houses?”

  “She’s got to have something to sell, I guess,” said Moffett. “A lot of money?”

  “Sometimes double the tips.”

  “That’s a lot of money.” The Vice detective’s eyes covered the flowing crowd in a practiced scan while he thought. “Selling herself or selling dope. That’s all I can think of.”

  Wager didn’t think Annette Sheldon was selling herself—her free time seemed accounted for. But there was that cocaine trace in her corpse. And none of the other girls would mention Annette’s or anybody else’s habit—not to a cop.

  Axton and Wager thanked the Vice team and sat in their own car a few minutes to watch the parade of cowboy hats with feathers, straw farmers’ hats, afros brunette and blond, even a mohawk cut, which Wager had last seen in the late fifties when he was a kid.

  “You think Annette was pushing on the side?” Max asked.

  “Her husband says she brought home a lot of money—more than Berg says she made.”

  That little half-tune whistled between Max’s teeth. “What about Williams? Did you talk to her mother?”

  “She’s closer to what she was supposed to bring home. If she was dealing, it wasn’t much.”

  “So there’s still no connection.”

  “Just the manner of death. The same m.o.”

  They watched the passing show. Across the street, LaBelle Brown smiled widely as a car slowed to a stop and she bent to talk to the driver before getting in. On the corner where the bright entry to a porno arcade lit the sidewalk, a pair of young men in cutoff denims kissed each other. A shirtless lad wearing bib overalls and barefoot said something to make them laugh, and a young white girl, seeing LaBelle away from her place, hoisted her hot pants and began strolling the curb.

  “They’re all playing at being something else,” said Axton. “What is it, the television generation? Images become substance? Maybe they think they can flip a channel and be someone else with a different hat.”

  Here came Max’s sociology bullshit again. “It’s no different from any other uniform,” Wager said. “Looking different is looking the same. And if I was born like some of that scum, I’d try to change my looks, too.”

  “Gabe, I think your milk of human kindness has curdled.”

  Wager didn’t have a chance to find out what that meant; the radio popped its call for any Homicide detective, and the quiet spell of the last few tours was blown all to hell with a shotgun slaying. By the time Wager and Axton made their run across town and into the quiet neighborhood of small, neat homes that looked like Monopoly houses in a row, the medical examiner had come and gone, and the lab people were already sampling and photographing.

  Axton, looming even larger in the shadow of red and blue lights flashing across the grassy yard, found the uniformed officer who first responded to the call. He began taking the man’s report; Wager started to sketch and measure. In the background, beneath the various laconic voices of the radios, a steady moaning sob came from a woman who sat on the front step holding herself and rocking. Another woman had an arm across her rounded shoulders and said helplessly, “There, there,” over and over.

  “What’s this one, officer?” The question came from a short, slender man dressed all in black: shoes, pants, and string tie with large loops. He wore a black nylon Eisenhower jacket with a white patch on the arm that said CRS. Behind him, a woman in black slacks and a similar uniform jacket peered over his shoulder.

  “Domestic,” said Wager. “Son shot his father.” He stepped aside to let Lincoln Jones flash a series of photographs of the form lying on the lawn. It was curled from the impact of the round, but any pain had long since ebbed.

  “Well, whenever you’re ready, we’re just over here. Okay?”

  CRS stood for Cadaver Removal Service. Somebody on the city council figured they could save money by letting private enterprise haul the dead rather than dispatching a city-owned ambulance and crew. They must have figured right, because by now a half-dozen husband-and-wife teams had submitted bids to serve different areas of town. Max once guessed that there were fewer mom-and-pop groceries than there were mom-and-pop cadaver services.

  Wager said “Fine” and stretched a tape measure from the corner of the porch to the head of the victim, whose lank iron-gray hair sprayed out in violent stillness. At the far end of the small wooden porch he could hear Axton talking to a young man who sat staring dully at the focus of Wager’s measurements: “Tommy, I want to tell you what your rights are, and then I want you to tell me what happened. Tommy? You hear me?”

  “Do you need some light, officer?” From just beyond the glow-pink tape roping the crime scene, a mobile television crew began setting up quickly to film the body as it was removed. A technician pointed to the light frame he balanced on his shoulder. “We got lights if you need them.” Behind the crewman, the woman from CRS quickly checked her makeup with a small compact and patted her stiff blond hair into place.

  Wager shook his head. The light might help, but it meant the delay of working around another pair of feet. And the pape
rwork, even on a smoking-gun murder like this, was going to take the rest of the night.

  Modern police management worshiped quantification, and statistics were forever being updated and refined and compared. If homicides declined a percentage point or two, crime was being beaten. If they went up, the bad guys were winning. There were figures on the ratio between solved and unsolved cases in every category, and a red pencil marked a quantifiable line between the acceptable and unacceptable jobs done by departments. There was even an annual time study of the number of crime reports divided into the total man-hours available for each division and section. The result indicated the average amount of time that could be allotted to each crime. In Homicide, it was sixteen hours. Last night’s domestic slaying had taken Wager and Axton only five hours each to wrap up a case for the DA’s office, so Wager figured that left the remaining six free for Sheldon and Williams. At least that’s what he’d tell the division chief, Doyle, if there were any union complaints about Wager putting in more unpaid overtime. Or maybe he’d just laugh at Doyle—there was genuine pleasure in seeing the Bulldog sweat, caught between a red-faced, fist-thumping Ross and Doyle’s own knowledge that homicides weren’t solved by time studies or union rules.

  At any rate, Wager was on the street by nine that night, his Trans Am, with its goosed peacock on the hood, prowling the darker avenues that fed into the glare of East Colfax.

  In the shadows, figures singly and in pairs drifted toward the light, drawn out of their efficiency apartments or from the tiny rooms carved from made-over mansions and paid for each day in advance. Even if, as with most of them, there was no business waiting on the strip, there was still the action. There was always something to see that was better than the close, stained walls of a rented room.

  Wager was looking for some of those people who saw the most, those for whom knowing meant money. His list of CIs—Citizen Informants—went back years, to his long stint of duty on the Organized Crime Unit. Every cop had his list, and the names were on it for a variety of reasons: a kind of perverted friendship, sometimes fear, even the need to feel important. With some, an angle with the police became an ace in the hole in case of trouble elsewhere; with others, it was the hunger to know someone constant in a world where faces shifted and disappeared like sand in the wind. But however they got on the list, CIs were not team property—they were a cop’s own, and you guarded the good ones like a kid guards candy.

  When Wager finally spotted the glimmer of white moving steadily and massively through the gloom beneath the spread of ash trees, he flicked his high beams twice, pulled slowly past the man, and turned at the next corner into an even shadier street. A minute or two later the unhurried steps followed, and he heard the lurching gasp of the heavy man before the panama suit and hat leaned to the open window.

  “As I live and breathe—the Spicky Piggy hisself.”

  “Hello, Fat Willy. I thought they’d have you buried in two graves by now.”

  “Two graves! Ain’t two gonna be big enough for this man. What’s this I hear you on Homicide now?” Willy liked to stress the black accent when he spoke to Wager. Wager heard the big man’s telephone voice—his “white lips,” he called it—when Willy was making a deal with some Anglo.

  But the Chicano-black rivalry was still strong with Willy, and Wager sometimes wondered if the man expected him to sound like the Frito Bandito.

  “That’s right. And I keep expecting to run across you.”

  “Ha. It ain’t ‘cause some don’t want it that way. How come you got off the Crime unit? They finally figure out you a crooked cop?”

  “Naw. The city’s cleaned up. Organized crime is no more, Willy, so they disbanded the unit and transferred me to Homicide. Pretty soon we’ll have that cleaned up, too.”

  “Sure it is, and sure you will!” Willy tugged the brim of his hat closer across his face as the sound of steps passed in the dark behind him. “You cops ain’t cleaned up nothing, and you never will, man.”

  “Faith, hope, and charity, Willy. Without these, a man is nothing.”

  “Well, I got faith you ain’t never going to do it, and I hope you ain’t looking at me for no favors, ‘cause if you looking, it sure ain’t gonna be for charity—ha!”

  “I didn’t expect it would be.” Wager held up a bill and Willy slipped it from between his fingers and tilted it against the dim light of the street.

  “Only a fifty? That’s toilet paper, man!”

  “You can always give it back.”

  But the bill, folded small, had already disappeared somewhere under the expanse of his linen coat. “What you trying to buy for that little tidbit? I hope it ain’t much.”

  “A line on who’s pushing at the Cinnamon Club and at Foxy Dick’s.”

  “Half the telephone book, Wager! You want the names in alphabetical order or by the pound?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s no big secret—except from you cops. Fifteen, twenty dudes got regular runs to all them places. Just like the mailman. Keeps the girls happy, you dig?”

  “All of them big?”

  “Naw, man. They got too many for all of them to be big. But different girls got different contacts.”

  “Who has runs to both the Cinnamon Club and Foxy Dick’s?”

  “Now that I don’t know right off. But it’s got to be some of them. Them skin houses is one of the best markets around.”

  “I’d like to find out.”

  “You done overpaid me.”

  “And I’d like to know why they might want to snuff a couple dancers.”

  “You just underpaid me.”

  “If you find out something, I’ll try to balance the account.” He held out a card.

  “Sho’ you will. What’s that?”

  “A business card. It’s got my home number on the back.”

  “I don’t want that damn thing on my sweet body. Just tell me your new number, man. I got a memory for phone numbers—it’s my business, you dig?”

  Wager told him. The man’s broad hand tipped lightly at his hat brim and, in the gloom, Willy’s teeth shone briefly. “I will call you, Wager. Don’t you call me.”

  He watched the pale suit fade into the darkness beneath the trees, then he pulled away from the curb to look for a telephone. His next contact had never been more than a voice over the wire or an envelope slipped under a door. As usual, the number was answered by a female.

  “Is Doc there?”

  “I’ll see. Who wants him?”

  “Gabe.”

  Then a man’s voice, slightly raspy from cigarettes and nervously quick. “Say something, man.”

  “Hello, Doc.”

  “Jesus Christ, it is you! Hey, man, I couldn’t believe it when the ginch said it was you. Hey, you back in Narcs, baby? It ain’t been the same!”

  “No, I’m still in Homicide. But maybe we can do a little business.”

  “Old times—I love ‘em! Listen, I read about you and them, what was it, killer angels? I hope to hell you ain’t got nothing like that going down.”

  “Avenging angels. No—this is something different. It’s the killings on the strip. I want to know if they’re tied to dopers or a pimp war or something like that.”

  “Oh, yeah—the two dancers. I read about them.” The line was quiet for a breath or two. “I ain’t heard of any pimp war going on. They don’t like to kill off the merchandise anyway. They’ll cut them where it don’t show, but they don’t like to kill them.” Another breath. “Dope, huh?”

  “It’s a possibility, Doc.”

  “Yeah, it is. And if it is, it could be heavy. I mean, with two shootings, somebody must have a lot invested.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Yeah, well, you always did—that ain’t what worries me.” In the past, Doc had proven reliable because he seldom promised more than he could deliver. But he always thought that what he did deliver was important enough to rival the Second Coming, and he figured that
the importance of his information made him an equally important target. “Homicide’s a tough rap. People don’t talk much about it unless they’re, you know, new in the business. Then they can’t keep their mouths shut and you don’t need me, you follow?”

  “Nobody’s talking on these, Doc.”

  “That’s my drift. That means the guy ain’t new at it. But I’d be new in those strip joints—somebody asking questions on new turf, he stands out.”

  “I need you, Doc. Really.”

  “Aw, yeah! Well, it never was just the money with us, right?”

  “Right.” Doc did it for love. Just like a whore.

  “Okay—I’ll keep an ear out. I don’t like it, and I can’t promise nothing—it’s not my usual line of contacts. But give me a few days.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I mean that.”

  “Like old times! Gabe—I love it.”

  There were a few other cryptic names and numbers penned in the back of his little green notebook; in the cold gleam of the telephone hood, he scanned the list of CIs left over from his days on the Narc squad of the Organized Crime Unit. One was dead and he crossed out that name. Another had been sent to prison. Wager had been meaning to visit him—someday he’d be out and be valuable again, and a prisoner always had a message or favor that someone on the outside could do for him. He tried another number, but a recording said it had been disconnected. That was a problem with Homicide: the cases very seldom involved what Axton called a subcommunity—not like the dope world or organized crime. So the tendency was to let the lesser names in your stable go unattended, and, like any other bunch of animals, they strayed. Now Wager was in need of them, and it was his own damned fault if they weren’t around.

  He dropped another couple dimes into the greasy metal slot and tried still another number. It turned out to belong to a person who had never heard of Lumpy Gallegos and who was very pissed to be woken up at ten-thirty at night by some goddamned drunk. Wager hung up and crossed off that number, too.

  He had not tried the distaff side, mainly because he had no distaffs to lean on. But it never hurt to meet new and interesting people, provided you had a little leverage to make things go smoothly. He gathered up his unspent dimes and headed the Trans Am toward Colfax.