Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  Wager paused at the door before opening it. “Who do you think killed Ricky?”

  Plummer groped in his shirt pocket for a pack of Camels, shook one to his lips, and then shrugged. “Clinton finished him off.”

  “Why?”

  “Him and Ricky and King were pretty thick there for a while and then something happened. King was pissed off at Ricky about something—really pissed. A couple nights ago, Clinton came in and said something that scared the shit out of Ricky. He came over to my table like he was a goddamned zombie and drank, I don’t know, six or seven gins. Didn’t touch him, he was that scared. He cut out, and I never seen him again.” Plummer lit his cigarette. “Clinton done it. King don’t have the balls.”

  Wager laid another twenty on the pile to pay the man for losing his virginity as a snitch. “Okay, Lizard—you get more for me, there’s more of this for you.”

  “Don’t call me that,” the man said. “It’s not my fault I had this skin condition when I was a kid.”

  Wager studied the scaly, swollen flesh around the man’s eyes and then shrugged. “I thought it was because you ate flies.”

  “You fucker,” said Plummer as he closed the door.

  In his car, Wager radioed to Records for anything on a Clinton who matched the description Plummer had given him. By the time he reached Colfax and the Eveready Lounge, Records came back with two possibles: Henry Albert Clinton and William Frank Clinton. Henry was a burglar currently doing time in Cañon City. William had an old jacket with four counts of assault or armed robbery and two falls; no arrests since being paroled in 1965.

  “Send a copy to me in Homicide, please.”

  “Ten-four.”

  He found a parking slot along the curb near the Eveready Lounge and backed the car into it. The bar sat between a check-cashing service and a shoe shop whose dusty gray window display was all that was left of a string of small stores which, at one time, sold hardware or greeting cards or appliances to a quiet neighborhood. Now they sold anything that a whisper and the rustle of money could buy in the dark. The lounge didn’t have a parking lot of its own, and that explained why it had a regular trade: people living nearby walked over each evening knowing there wouldn’t be too many tourists; that kind didn’t usually like to get too far from their cars.

  Along one wall of the bar was a line of booths whose high backs gave a little privacy for head jobs. The center was open for dancing, and a long bar served the johns who hadn’t yet drunk enough courage to go to a booth with one of the girls. This early in the day—eleven—the place was almost empty and had that cool, stale smell of waking up in damp sheets. From somewhere behind the bar came the domestic aroma of coffee. In one booth, two girls pushed food around their plates with the drowsy look of eating at their own kitchen table.

  Wager did not try to hide who he was; it wouldn’t have worked anyway. The bartender, bald head bent over a stock list, looked up, and his face went blank as he nodded good morning.

  “I’m looking for James King,” said Wager. He strolled down the row of booths and peered in each one. The sound of the girls’ forks stopped.

  “I don’t know anybody named that.”

  “Sure you do.” He strolled back toward the bartender. “He lives here. I want him for questioning about a homicide. Anybody that knows him and doesn’t tell me becomes an accessory after the fact.”

  The bartender, his round face cut in thirds by heavy eyebrows and a narrow mustache, said, “What was that name again?”

  “King. James King. He uses that back booth all the time.”

  “There’s a kid named Jimmy sits there a lot. I don’t know his last name.”

  “Any idea where he is now?”

  “No. You might ask the girls. They talk to him sometimes.”

  Wager turned to the two women, who looked at him across a cop-hating distance.

  “Do either of you know James King?”

  Neither answered. They sat with the stillness of trained animals that suffer the touch of men’s hands but don’t like it.

  “He’s wanted for a murder investigation,” said Wager. “That’s a heavy charge.”

  “You ain’t with Vice?” The younger one was maybe sixteen years old. Her pale hair, dark at the roots, was cut in bangs across her forehead and hung straight to frame a snub-nosed face. Her wide brown eyes were made even larger with thick eye shadow, and pink makeup almost hid the deepening wrinkles below the corners of her mouth.

  “No, miss. Homicide.”

  On the scale of crimes, murder was more serious than either girl had been involved in yet, and you had to draw a line somewhere. Even if you might be pushed across it—as so often happened—you drew still another line farther down and then you held out for as long as you could before you crossed that one, too.

  “You going to tell him where you found out?” asked the older one. She wore a powder-blue cashmere sweater and a wide skirt; she, too, had bangs, but her dark hair swept over her ears into a long fifties-style ponytail. Wager guess she specialized in middle-aged businessmen.

  “No. And he’ll be too worried to ask.” Behind him, the bartender turned on a radio just loud enough to keep their words from reaching him. A female voice mashed flat to the sound of country-and-western wailed, “I used to be your steady flame but now I’m just your ash.”

  The girls glanced at each other—you go first, no you—and finally the older one shrugged and said, “He’s got a place on Fillmore, just off Colfax. 1485. Apartment 4.”

  The building was made of brick and designed like a brick, too. It was two stories high with a central corridor leading straight back. Pairs of doors marched down the hall. Number 4 was the second on the right. Jimmy King was too scared to act tough.

  “I never heard of Richard Goddard. I don’t know the guy.”

  “Bullshit. His mother says you came over to his house two or three times. You’re not going to call his poor old grieving mother a liar, are you, Jimmy?”

  King was thin and had a downy mustache that curved around the corners of his mouth. A small rash of pimples reddened each side of his pointed chin. Now, as he stared at Wager, he picked nervously at one, drawing a tiny smear of blood.

  “Think about it, Jimmy. I found out you and Goddard were buddies. I found out where you live. I found out how you get your pocket change. I found out about Clinton, and I know you and Goddard and Clinton had a deal going. Now you should start telling me what I don’t know. Like what your part in it was.”

  “Nothing! I know him, yeah, but I swear I had nothing to do with killing him!”

  “If you did the beating and killed him,” Wager went on, “your ass is peanut butter and it’s going to be spread all over the landscape. But if Clinton did the heavy stuff, and if you didn’t mean to kill Goddard—and if you tell me what you know—then maybe we can work a deal.”

  Some were like that—they made you wonder how dumb a man could be to help kill somebody he knew for a reason that anyone could figure out. Maybe dumb had nothing to do with it. At least not in the usual meaning. But dumb in the dull and unimaginative way that led some people to surrender themselves to the will of another person and become their tool. It was early afternoon now, and Wager stood in a corner of the brightly lit and silent interrogation cubicle. Max, back from his court appearance, was having his turn at King. The suspect’s thin face glistened with sweat and his worried eyes kept shifting from Axton to Wager and back. His fingers scratched at cuticles until shreds of dry flesh lay on the gray table like bloodless scabs.

  “I’ll bet Goddard screamed, didn’t he, Mr. King?” Axton’s low voice gently nudged the silence made heavier by the buzz of fluorescent lights. Max’s style wasn’t Wager’s. Wager preferred to attack the bastards with his knowledge of their guilt, and he got his share of results. But Max had a way to make a suspect feel that the hulking, sad-eyed man across the table shared the suspect’s guilt and his fear of what was going to happen; that nothing the suspect admitted could
shock or make an enemy of those forgiving eyes that had seen everything. And the soft voice implied the relief that would come if the suspect only told all about those terrible things he never really meant to do.

  “And I’ll bet something else, Jimmy. I’ll bet you didn’t want to be there. I’ll bet you wanted to close your eyes and stop your ears and then open them up and find that the whole thing was just a nightmare.” His quiet voice grew even softer. “That your friend, your buddy whose mother fed you, wasn’t being beaten to death. That you weren’t really there, watching.”

  A row of glistening drops oozed from a crease over King’s knotted eyebrows, and even from his corner Wager could see the quiver at the awkwardly tilted collar point of the man’s sweat-stained shirt.

  “It’s your tail, King,” said Wager in a bored voice. “You help us out, we’ll help you. You don’t help us,” he shrugged, “screw you.”

  “You’re not going to get off free, Mr. King,” said Max. “But if you didn’t kill him, there’s no reason to pay for that. I don’t think you really wanted him dead, Jimmy. Dead is a long time. I think you just wanted to scare him. What was it, he bought some dope on credit and didn’t come up with the payment? You bought from Clinton and sold to Goddard, and Clinton wanted to show you how to get your money back?”

  King’s mouth worked like he was chewing a ball of cotton and he closed his eyes tightly before opening them with an almost sightless stare. “I wasn’t there.”

  “Then where were you? Tell us where you were and we’ll check it out, Jimmy.”

  Another sliver of flesh came off his cuticle, and then the fingers went to his blotched chin. “I was at the lounge. The Eveready Lounge. All night long.”

  “Unh uh,” said Wager. “You weren’t. You left about midnight. Clinton left around eleven-thirty and you and Goddard left later. You’re the last one to see him alive, King. Clinton planned it that way. You’ve got no alibi, and I bet Clinton does. Think about it.”

  It was so quiet they could hear the man swallow. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat with resignation. “I want a lawyer. I got nothing to say without a lawyer. I want a lawyer.”

  “Sure, Jimmy,” said Wager. “It’s your life you’re throwing away.” He opened the door and called a sheriff’s officer to the interview room. “Keep him segregated,” he told the thick-bodied man who idly jingled his ring of keys. King would have to wait awhile for his lawyer—he was theirs to have and to hold for seventy-two hours before filing a charge. Seventy-two hours of sitting alone, and thinking, and worrying.

  Axton sat on the edge of his desk, his thigh in the taut trouser leg spreading across a foot of the glass-topped surface. “I thought he was going to crack. I really thought he’d buy state’s evidence.”

  Wager thought so, too. “He wanted it. He was tempted.”

  Axton whistled quietly. “He was afraid to, wasn’t he?” Whistle. “Clinton?”

  “That’s my guess. He watched Clinton or somebody Clinton hired work Goddard over and he doesn’t want that to happen to him.”

  Axton picked up the telephone and dialed Records; before he could ask, Wager thumbed through the afternoon mail and drew out a Xerox of Clinton’s rap sheet. Axton, hanging up, grinned at Wager. “I should have known you’d run his record.” He glanced down the sheet. “This one’s been around … and learned a few things.”

  Wager agreed. “He’s smart enough to hide behind King.”

  “And he’s mean. Assault … assault with … King’s probably right to be afraid of the guy. Still,” Axton tossed the sheet back onto the small pile of mail, “eight-to-ten years minimum, that’s a pretty high price.” The whistle. “I’ll talk to him again in the morning—promise to keep Clinton away from him.”

  “It’s worth a try.” According to Lizard, King had thought he was a tough guy. Now the kid’s play-acting had become real. More real than King wanted. Yet he still didn’t take the way out that Max had offered. And Wager didn’t think it was because of any pride King might have—scum like that had no pride. It was Clinton. They’d have to run Clinton down, question him, discover what Wager already knew: that he would have an alibi in his mouth and a leer in his eyes. Clinton was one of the leviathans.

  The pop of his GE radio interrupted his thoughts. “Any Homicide detective.”

  “X-89. Go ahead,” said Wager.

  “We have a probable suicide at 5002 Elizabeth Place. Officers at the scene.”

  “On our way.”

  One in the morning, one in the afternoon; a steady pace made the shift go quickly. Wager grabbed his coat and followed Axton down the cushioned hall toward the wide elevators and the streets below.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE DAY SHIFT, like the others, slipped into routines more or less designed to give time for the scheduled paperwork, to leave a little space for the unscheduled homicides, and to let the long-unsolved cases do as they always did: wait. Because of the effort to have an officer’s court appearances coincide with his day shift, Wager and Axton spent a lot of weary hours sitting on the blond wooden benches in the City-County Building, where they listened to the shuffle and drone of the law in action. More hours passed knocking on doors to follow up requests from the night shift, and some time was even spent on routine patrol, more to let the wind and motion blow away that cramped feeling that came from hours at a desk than to serve and protect.

  For Wager, there developed another routine as well, one of groping and dead ends, of itching for whatever it was that never seemed to arrive. King had stuck with his story despite Max’s best efforts, and was now out on bond. Munn and Golding had found Clinton and questioned him; he had a friend who swore they were playing cards when Goddard was beaten to death, so he, too, strolled the streets like any other honest citizen. Annette Sheldon and Angela Williams moved farther back in the Open drawer, to sit there until a lucky break or the Resurrection, whichever came first. Even Pepe the Pistol seemed to drop out of sight despite occasional tips called in anonymously by friends and relatives of the slain.

  Axton, reading a memo from Bulldog Doyle that ordered officers to cease and desist from driving patrol cars across lawns, did not deny that King was lying or even that Kenneth Sheldon could be hiding something. But he did believe that King would talk and Clinton would be nailed, and that the exotic dancer cases would stay unsolved until someone was arrested in some other city for a similar homicide and confessed to these as well.

  “You think the killer skipped?”

  “The two murders came within a week of each other, Gabe. It’s been over a month, now. If the guy was around, I think he’d have hit again.”

  “It doesn’t explain Sheldon’s act.”

  “That’s only your feeling.” He spread both large hands before Wager could answer. “I know, I know; you’ve been right on things like that before. But what’s the connection between the Sheldons and Angela Williams? None—not a thing, right? It all points to a stranger-to-stranger. Somebody watched them dance and then killed them, and that somebody has moved on.”

  “I don’t see how Sheldon makes a living in that shop of his.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He doesn’t have any business. One time I saw a delivery truck drop off a couple vending machines. The rest of the time, nothing. And he has no employees.”

  Max did not bother to ask his partner why or when he kept an eye on Sheldon. “So?”

  “So how many machines can one man fix? What’s he charge, fifty bucks an hour? He’s got overhead, taxes, insurance, and he still has to make a living out of it. He hasn’t moved out of that expensive apartment; he hasn’t changed his style at all, as far as I can find out. I think he even took another vacation in Vegas.”

  “Maybe it was a sentimental journey.”

  “Maybe. But he’s not bringing any money in from that business of his.”

  Axton thought it over. “You’re saying it’s a cover for something.”

  “Unless the gu
y is just a lousy businessman. Which is possible.” Then he added, because he knew Axton was thinking it, “Even so, there’s not a damned thing connecting his business to the two murders.”

  “Right,” said Max.

  Which meant that Wager, like everyone else, had to wait. Not that he was bored: in the slack between old paperwork and new court appearances, there were the occasional shots fired by officers which required detailed reports from Homicide detectives, patrolmen who requested help with legal niceties in search and arrest or with juvenile suspects, queries and alerts from neighboring departments and states, and even occasional VIPs to be shown through the still-new headquarters building. Wager was never assigned to that detail. The Sheldon and Williams cases, in short, had been given the team’s sixteen hours each and were now dead ends. No matter how much Wager might believe that his finger was on something, there was no way he could get his hand around anything solid—not officially. Maybe unofficially there was something he could do, but even that had to wait, too, until one of his CIs came up with a halfway decent lead.

  The wheezing voice pulled Wager out of sleep. Even with his eyes still closed, he knew who was on the telephone. But it took him longer than it should to anchor Fat Willy’s words to a case. For a moment, he thought it was something to do with a narcotics buy—Willy had set somebody up for a buy-and-bust—but that wasn’t quite right: he couldn’t come up with the target’s name. And he wasn’t in the Organized Crime Unit anymore—he wasn’t working undercover. He was in Homicide, and Willy was talking about the Sheldon and Williams murders.

  “You hear me, Wager? You there, man?”

  “I’m not awake yet, Willy. What’s their names?”

  “Shit, how many times I got to tell you? You wanted dudes who deal regular at the Cinnamon Club and Foxy Dick’s, right? Well, I got them: Curtis Evans, Sugar Watney, and Little Ray McAfee. They work other places, too, but you didn’t pay none for that.”