Strip Search

by Rex Burns

  He picked up the receiver and dialed Max’s number. A promise was a promise, even at three in the morning.

  It rattled half a ring and Max, a cop even in his sleep, was wide awake by the time he said “Hello.”

  “It’s Gabe. I’ve been invited to another dark alley. Want to go with me?”

  “Where do I meet you?”

  “I’ll pick you up in fifteen.”

  It was less than that—vacant intersections and empty streets allowed him to shoot the Trans Am across town without stopping. But Max was already waiting, a figure seated on the porch steps of his large old house, caught in the sweep of headlights as Wager pulled into the driveway. Wordless, he got in; Wager backed out and shoved the car through the gears as he worked his way toward the north side and Sheldon’s shop.

  “Hope I didn’t wake up Polly.”

  “No. She’s used to it.”

  Sure she was. Wager just hoped his partner hadn’t told her who called; she’d be clinging to the ceiling if she knew her husband was helping him on another one of his semiprivate expeditions. So would Bulldog Doyle, for that matter. But since Wager had his partner along, maybe the Bulldog would see them as a team.

  “What do you think Sheldon’s connection is?” Max asked after Wager had filled him in.

  Wager had thought a lot about that. But saying it aloud made the pieces click solidly, and he took his time. Besides, talking kept his mind away from that other question, the personal one, the one that had lain unbidden but like a heavy stone at the back of his mind ever since that night under the viaduct.

  “It’s got to be part of the laundering. My guess is the vending repair service is a dummy corporation—Annette was getting a lot more money than Sybil. She had to be doing more than just transporting.”

  “Well, that could explain how Sheldon knew you were after Whitey.”

  “That, too. And a vending machine service is a natural expense for clubs and bars. Repairs, rental, stock—a bar could account for an extra couple thousand a week if IRS wanted to take a close look.”

  “So Whitey brings in the hot cash and turns it over to the bar owner.” Max’s voice was a musing rumble. “The owner lists it as income, takes his cut, and then writes a check to Nickelodeon for vending machine service. And that goes on the books as a legitimate expense.”

  “Maybe with a few refinements, but yeah. And then Nickelodeon covers its income with employees’ salaries, overhead, other expenses—all dummy—and hands most of it back to Whitey.”

  “You think Annette Sheldon started taking a little more than she was supposed to?”

  “That’s my guess. I figure that’s what Sheldon’s been trying to hide all this time.” Wager added, “But I can’t figure Angela Williams. Unless she learned something. Like Doc.”

  “Well, we’ll sure as hell find out.” Max watched the streetlights flicker across the hood of the car as it sped down I-70 toward the Seabury district. “Jesus, where does that much money come from in the first place?”

  “The usual: dope, prostitution, vigorish, gambling. What’s new is the laundry service. Clinton, maybe a few others, provided Whitey with the money; Whitey provided a weekly laundry service.”

  Max grunted. “Whitey was with Clinton and Jimmy King just before Goddard was beaten to death. And wouldn’t it be nice to get Clinton, too!”

  “Wouldn’t it though.”

  “What’s the going rate for loan sharks?” Max asked.

  “Last I heard, it was five percent a day.”

  “That’s a lot of money—those nickels and dimes add up.”

  The car tilted down a ramp that led them past the looming black curves of the Coliseum. In the distance, cramped by the bulk of the elevated highway above, a grimy yellow sign glowed in front of a truckers’ motel; Wager angled north two blocks to the row of small shops that held Sheldon’s store. When he was half a block away, he turned off his headlights and slowed to pass the front of the darkened windows. He was not surprised to find no light, no shape standing in the open waiting for them. There hadn’t been that other time, either.

  Sunk out of sight below the window, Max said, “He told you to come to the back?”

  “Yeah.”

  The cramped voice panted, “I wish to hell you had a four-door.”

  Wager turned the lights back on and swung toward the alley. Trash cans and telephone poles nudged the space as he steered toward the solid mass of the shops. Maybe a hundred yards down, a faint patch of light spread across the gravel, glittering on fragments of a bottle. Wager let the motor pull them forward slowly and quietly. He, too, sank farther down in his seat, hand resting on his pistol as he eased past the raised door and saw the single work lamp fill one corner of the room with a glow. The rest of the shop was dark.

  “We’re going past now,” said Wager.

  “See anybody?”

  “Not a soul.” He turned off the dome light. “I’ll park a little way down the alley.” Letting the car coast to a stop, he killed the engine. Max already had his door open; Wager, looking back, studied the shop before he opened his. “I’ll cross the alley and go along the wall.”

  “I’ll be behind you. Just take it easy, partner.”

  “Not too close, Max. Give me plenty of room.”

  “Right.”

  He listened for a final few seconds and then shoved his door open to step through the night glow that gave the alley a faint shine like starlight. His hand brushed the gritty stucco of the wall as he carefully worked his way past black, grated windows and garbage cans toward the paleness of the raised garage door. Pausing at the frame, he listened. Nothing. It was as quiet and dark as that viaduct had been, and Wager felt his shoulders draw tight at the vision of that blinding rush coming toward him out of the black.

  “Sheldon?” His dry mouth didn’t work too well and he called again. “Sheldon?”

  No answer.

  Loosening the Star PD holstered in front of his left hip, Wager leaned cautiously around the frame. Above the glare of the hooded lamp the shrine to Annette flickered, shadowy and elongated in the yellow splash of a prayer candle cupped in a dark red bowl.

  “Sheldon?”

  Crouching, he stepped into the shop and glanced toward the dim end of the workbench, where the door led to the front. Empty. Wager squatted to peer at any mass of blackness hiding under the long shelf. Nothing. He snapped off the lamp and waited for his eyes to clear, ears sharp for any sound; now the dim shine of the alley came in the doorway and the yellow circle of the prayer candle danced softly against the ceiling. Slowly, Wager moved toward the far end of the room.

  The door leading to the front of the shop stood open; beside it, another door, labeled Men, was tightly closed. He hesitated at the edge of darkness, feeling the crusty surface of a poorly varnished frame beneath his fingers. Then he bent low quickly and ducked forward, stepping to the side as he cleared the door and squinted among the scattered vending machines that made tall black rectangles against the windows.

  A muffled whump and the red flash of a stifled muzzle. Wager sprawled and blinked and rolled, knowing that the shot came from somewhere to his left, somewhere among those tall, clustered shapes. He held his breath, pistol angled up, until the rattle of shoe leather moved toward him and he rolled again, hard, away from the doorway as a crouching figure moved across the light of a front window and was gone.

  He fired once, the noise loud against the walls as the bright flash of his weapon lit up the darkened vending machines. Rolling again, he blinked away the glare of his pistol, only half-aware of a second shot flung his way between two oblong shadows. Crawling, his shoulder cracked into a metal corner and he heard the quick rip of his coat on something, then he was up and crouched in the blackest shadow, breathing lightly through his open mouth as his ears strained to hear through the tingle of that first shot.

  Somewhere, somebody was whining.

  That’s what it was: the high-pitched nasal whine of somebody trying to s
trangle his own terrified noise.

  Blinking, shifting his gaze quickly from point to point in the way that had become habitual on those night patrols in Nam, Wager tried to use his lateral vision to thin the darkness. A scrape—a tiny crackle of grit—over there … just beyond his vision … A thin creak like a rusty nail slowly pried from a hole … Wager’s pistol, gripped in both hands, turned toward the slightly darker gloom that seemed to gather into stealthy movement.

  He didn’t see it. He wasn’t sure what told him it was coming. A more solid blackness, maybe, or the air mashed in front of it, but a moment before it hit him he ducked his head, catching the plummeting, solid weight of the metal case across his shoulders and curling against the hard gouge of knobs and the sudden, lung-crushing weight. The machine rocked across his humped back and crashed in a splinter of glass and quivering steel, knocking Wager aside before it thudded flat on his leg and wrenched his knee sideways. Wincing against the searing pain of pulled ligaments, he saw a blurry shape lunge toward him. His pistol swung toward the rush of legs and then the man was gone, leaping through the tangle of fallen machines, and Wager, tugging himself from under the angled weight, stumbled after him.

  He reached the workroom in time to see Max dart across the opening and hesitate, looking where he had heard the shot.

  “I’m okay, Max! Which way?”

  Max’s arm pointed across the alley and Wager saw a shape dark against the gray of a distant house’s wall. It stumbled into something and clattered it into fragments, fell, rolled, then staggered up again into a crippled lurch.

  Vaulting the low mesh fence beyond the alley, Wager sprinted after the figure, the ache of his knee suddenly gone. Behind him, he heard Max’s large shoes thud into the lawn as the big man angled left to head off the man and Wager, pistol cocked, darted for the shape that started right, saw Max, then turned toward the other side of the house. A light winked on behind a drawn shade and a silhouette bent to peer out a crack. Somewhere in a neighboring yard a dog barked insanely and Wager, feeling a shattered birdbath grind beneath his shoes, swung right as the man hobbled toward the narrow lane that led between the house and the chain link fence.

  “Police officer,” Wager shouted. He dropped to one knee, pistol balanced in both hands and rock-steady; the barrel traversed toward the shape that halted to jerk its arm up and aim at Wager. “Police officer,” he said again. “You’re covered—drop it!”

  A shot answered him. A spurt of blue-yellow at the pistol end of the silencer frayed into the air as the red of the muzzle speared his way and a solid, quivering thud punched the fence behind him. Wager squeezed the trigger with the even, straight pull born of long target practice.

  But before his weapon could buck, a shot blasted from beside him.

  A splash of orange light showed the white-haired man peering at Wager down the long shaft of a silencer, then the grass blades flickered in another muffled round and a loud second shot, strobe like, showed him lift back and half-turn with orange eyes goggling toward Max, his revolver braced against the side of the house as a third round shattered the blackness. Then the clunk of a heavy weapon against the earth, and a long, groaning sigh, like no other sound, of life stunned into death.

  The man’s ID said Eugene North, but Wager and everyone else in Homicide guessed that a check of fingerprints with the FBI records would turn up a different name. Through the sealed windows behind Sheldon, Wager could see the sprinkled gleams of distant office towers pale gradually as the sky lightened from a still-hidden sun beginning to rise somewhere over Missouri or eastern Kansas. This time, Wager asked the questions, and this time Sheldon did not get mad when he was advised of his rights. He just talked. “I want to get it over with,” he told Wager and the small cluster of Homicide detectives that brought a strangely crowded feeling to the early-morning emptiness of the offices. Ross and Devereaux on the duty shift were filling out their forms: the measurements from Max to the victim, the location of known bullet holes, the number of rounds fired by everyone. Max, pale and with dark circles under his eyes, sat with a cup of coffee and answered when he was supposed to answer and kept quiet when he was not. Pacing restlessly between the two groups of his people, Chief Doyle, unshaven and rumpled from the haste of yanking on his clothes, chewed an unlit cigar. He had a rule never to smoke before breakfast, but chewing wasn’t quite satisfactory and it irritated him.

  “So North made you hide in the men’s room?” Wager asked.

  “Yes,” said Sheldon. “He thought you’d try the door—hear me, maybe—and then he’d get you from the front room. I thought you were going to shoot through the door! When the shooting started, I thought …” He swallowed and wiped at the corners of his soft mustache and looked at Wager. “I didn’t want to phone you. Honest to God, I didn’t want to. But he made me. He … he killed Annette …”

  “You witnessed that?”

  “No—oh no! Afterward … before I came to see you people. He called me and told me she was dead and told me to say she was missing.”

  The organization of the laundering scheme had been just about the way Max and Wager figured it. The business had half-a-dozen phony employees on its books, under contract rather than salary so the Social Security and withholding wouldn’t have to be accounted for—one of Annette’s touches. The clubs paid the vending repair service, the service paid its “employees’” salaries and expenses into Annette’s pocketbook. The Sheldons’ trips to Vegas had been courier service—they deposited North’s cut in a bank there as one more bit of distance between him and the operation. The Sheldons had been doing all right, but Annette thought they were taking more risk than North and figured they deserved more money for it. She threatened North with the police, and North wasn’t the kind to be threatened.

  “Did Berg get a cut?”

  “I think so. Or maybe he was paying off a loan. Annette told me once that North or somebody had loaned him money to keep the business going. The liquor and stereo equipment, the overhead, the license—all that stuff is really expensive. And then the profits weren’t as good as they expected.”

  What Sheldon didn’t know, Wager could guess. Clinton and North helped Berg and the others over a rough spot or two—”Hey, think of it as a friendly loan; take what you need”—until they had Berg and the others owing their souls at five percent a day. Then they offered a way to work the debt off. “What about Angela Williams? Did he kill her, too?”

  “Him or somebody working for him.” His eyes gazed at the gray rug between his feet. “It was cover, he said.”

  “What?”

  “Cover. I’d told him about you coming by the shop and asking about Annette’s money—how much she made and all. That worried him a lot. He wanted you to think that some crazy guy was killing dancers. He wanted cover for the operation.”

  So Wager had stirred things up all right. Do something, lieutenant, even if it’s wrong. And one of those things was another death. “He killed her for that?” And Angela Williams’s death was what had stirred Wager’s suspicions about Annette Sheldon. So tangled a web of causes that things seemed almost fated, almost as though things really had worked out for the best—except for the dead. But what was Wager supposed to do—nothing at all?

  Again the tuft of straight, uncombed hair sprouting from Sheldon’s crown nodded. He took off his thick glasses and wiped them on his cuff and Wager was surprised at the amount of baggy flesh beneath his wet eyes. It made him look even older and weaker. It made him look like someone who could be manipulated by a strong woman. Even one who maybe loved him. “He killed Annette for the same thing. Money. She was a good dancer … she could have made it all the way to the top. …”

  And Angela had been a good mother and a good daughter. And Doc a good snitch. Everybody was good at something. Wager would give Detective Lee a call in an hour or so and tell him the Angela Williams case could be closed and Lee would know that Wager was good at solving homicides. And Clinton would still be on the street because he
was good at covering himself. Everybody was good at something.

  Wager sipped at his coffee and glanced at Max. His partner had been good at shooting. Max had fired three rounds and then called to Wager, and they had stood there as the yard light winked on, showing the broken birdbath and uprooted and scattered petunias, their fragrance thick in the cool air, the scared face at the back door, and the sprawled figure, whose pumping blood slowed to an erratic pulse, then a weary flow, then ceased, even as they watched.

  “I thought he hit you,” said Max. “When you didn’t fire back, I thought he hit you.”

  They heard the querulous voice from behind the dark screen door, but it didn’t register with either man. “Thanks, Max.”

  “Why’d you yell at him? Why’d you give him a shot at you?”

  Because it was procedure. And because he wanted to know if he had the guts to hold his fire. But all he told Max was, “It seemed like the thing to do.”

  “I thought he hit you,” Max said again.

  “He tried.” Wager remembered the ease and sureness with which he had leveled his pistol and aimed, unafraid. The steadiness of his trigger pull. “You got him before I could, that’s all.” And it was true.

  Max sucked in a long, slow breath that stifled his feelings; they would come later. Alone. Maybe with Polly. Probably not. Those kinds of feelings weren’t something you loaded onto your wife. Max would give himself the familiar arguments and he would go about his life because there was no bringing anyone back. He would joke about all the paperwork. He would nod and smile when someone said he had saved the taxpayers’ money. He would say “Thanks” when someone told him “Good shooting.”

  And late at night, in the silence of his apartment, Wager would wake up sweaty and staring and be glad that Whitey was dead and not him. But he would be glad, too, that this time his flesh had stood its ground and done its duty.

  Wager turned his attention back to Sheldon, who had not moved. Behind him, he heard Bulldog Doyle’s heavy tread as he made another round between the two groups. The odor of the unlit cigar wafted around Wager’s shoulder as Doyle leaned toward him.