Endangered Species (2 page)

His trousers had a black smear from brushing against something in the burned house; he set them aside for the cleaners. His sport coat he placed on a hanger, which he looped over the towel rack before stepping into the hot shower. The steam would loosen the smoky odor from the wool, and in a day or so he could wear it again without clamping his lips against the smell. It was a trick he’d learned while he was still in uniform and the cleaning bills ate deeply into his patrolman’s pay. The maintenance allowance never had been enough to cover shoe repair and the various rips and stains from cleaning up others’ messes. Now he made enough so the steam trick wasn’t necessary, but old habits have long life, and that—in a roundabout way—was another reason why he and Elizabeth had decided to keep separate homes and why they steered away from any talk of marriage.

He washed his hair three times before trusting that the smell was gone, then boiled up a cup of coffee as he dressed. Twenty minutes across town, and he would walk in the door of the homicide offices, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Max Axton greeted Wager when he checked in for the regular shift. “Christ, Gabe, you look almost as good as dog puke.” A wide finger tapped the brief notice of the unidentified body found in the fire. “You catch this one?”

Wager nodded and sipped at a mug of sour-smelling coffee. No matter how often the coffeemaker was washed out or what brand they changed to, it always smelled and tasted the same. And started each day with the same vicious bite. “Anything from the morgue yet?”

Axton shook his head. His heavy shoulders pushed his collar up a thick neck. “Homicide?”

“Don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.”

“Let’s hope not—I’ve got an interview lined up on Moralez this morning. I could use your help, partner.”

Ray Moralez was the latest teenaged victim of the increasing gang violence over on the west side of town. Not too long ago, neighborhood gangs were just bunches of kids who hung around together, drank a little illegal beer, maybe had a few fights to show how tough they were. But west Denver’s gangs were becoming big business, with cheap labor and high, tax-free profits from dope. Now there were ties between gangs in L.A. and Denver, Chicago, and Kansas City. There was a viciousness now that spread to younger and younger kids, along with a carelessness about life that, more and more, erupted in quick and deadly violence. The line had become thinner between a bunch of kids hanging out and acting tough and a criminal gang, and as a consequence the room for those kids to bend a few laws had become smaller, the results harsher. Wager didn’t know the causes of it—maybe the feeling that the country is crumbling away and nobody gives a shit, maybe throwaway kids whose mothers had them when they were thirteen or fourteen years old, maybe so many people out of work or sweating their
talangos
off for nothing while they see people with connections and power steal millions with the blessings of Congress. Maybe it was from the river of drugs our own government had allowed in to pay for its illegal wars in Central America. Maybe it was the still-echoing effects of that decades-old turmoil called Vietnam. Whatever it was, a feeling of resentment and anger and frustration filled the streets like an evil odor and affected the kids who lived there.

With the Moralez shooting, no witnesses had been found, as usual, and no one wanted to talk to cops. Or at least to Anglos like Axton, and that was where Wager, with his roots in the barrio, came in. “Let me make a couple calls first.”

Axton glanced at his watch. “Sure—take your time,” he lied.

The first call was to the fire department’s headquarters; the arson investigator hadn’t reported in yet, but the woman who answered the telephone took Wager’s name and number and told him the investigator would get in touch with Wager as soon as he had any conclusions about the fire’s origins. The second call was to Denver General and the morgue. The secretary said the pathologist hadn’t started yet on that case number. “Dr. Hefley will get to it as soon as he can, Detective Wager. It’s the best I can tell you.”

Wager tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. “I need to know as soon as possible if it’s a homicide or not.”

“I understand that, Detective Wager. And I’ll tell the doctor.”

He thanked her and hung up.

“No luck?” Axton was shrugging into his jacket.

“He’s in no rush. Victim’s health insurance ran out.” Wager drained the bitter coffee, rinsed his mug in the break room’s small sink, and hung it on its peg to dry. “Let’s go talk to your snitch.”

9/21

0830

T
HEY PARKED THE
unmarked cruiser in front of a two-story brick building that filled a busy corner on Tejon Street. Here and there, in the rows of windows that punctured the blank walls, potted plants—geraniums of the same bright-red shade—sat on the whitestone sills. They were probably all cloned from a single plant; Wager could remember his mother’s kitchen window and the jars of cloudy water that held cuttings from a friend’s geranium she’d admired. As a kid, he used to watch for the first tiny wisp of root at the ragged tip of the pale twig, and when the water was filled with a swirl of white roots, like coarse, bleached hair, he and his mother would gingerly transplant the fragile plants into wax-paper cups filled with rich, black earth. Then, when the scalloped leaves grew wide and dark with health, the plants would be set out in the warm sun of late spring to form an avenue along the entry walk. Here, where there were no walks, the red flowers perched in the windows like bright targets in a shooting gallery.

The desk was vacant, the lobby almost bare. It had a tired, worn feeling, but it was reasonably clean; Wager had seen much worse. High in a corner, a silent black-and-white television with an ill-adjusted horizontal hold slowly rolled its image frame by frame over the screen. A couple of Naugahyde chairs, sagging and wrinkled from too much use, faced the grainy screen. On the stained plaster beside an old-fashioned mirror was a large poster of a Hispanic youth in a black beret wearing some kind of olive-drab uniform. He clenched his fist against a threatening red glow, and under the figure, raw brush strokes spelled a black “Vinceremos!”

“Everybody’s on a crusade,” said Wager.

“Yeah. Well, some of these people, that’s all they have, Gabe. They’re alienated from society’s normal avenues of change, and their traditional family values are breaking down.”

Wager never liked it when Axton talked like a goddamned sociologist—one of those people who made up labels for everything and understood nothing. “Sure, man—tha’s why we off the peegs when we’re deprived of offing each other, man.”

Max’s large head wagged, but he didn’t push it. He’d been Wager’s partner long enough to know that the smaller man didn’t like to hear excuses for criminal behavior. And to Wager, the word “family” meant only the Denver Police Department.

“What room’s she in?” asked Wager.

“Two-oh-three.” His partner had never said much about it, but Axton knew Wager’s divorce had put a lot of distance between him and his own family, especially his mother, who had liked Wager’s wife. And the death years later of Wager’s longtime girlfriend, Jo Fabrizio, hadn’t left many people in Wager’s world. Maybe this new woman—City Councilperson Elizabeth Voss—was helping. His partner had been dating her for half a year now, and what little Max had seen of the woman, he liked. And apparently Wager did too; he wasn’t the kind of man to spend any time with anyone he didn’t like. Wager had met her on the Councilman Green homicide, and at the time, Max had thought they didn’t like each other. But then, Max had to admit, Wager wasn’t the easiest guy to get close to; you had to understand his compulsion to do the job better than anyone else—a textbook case of overcompensation for the insecurity Gabe felt at growing up half Anglo, half Hispanic. You just had to understand those things, and when you did, you could see Gabe was good people. And there was no one at all that Max would rather have back him up in a tight spot—you could trust the man, and that’s what Max told his wife whenever she got going about his partner.

Well, Wager and Elizabeth might have started out rubbing each other wrong, but that, Max figured, was because they were alike in a lot of ways. Which, he also figured, was why that dislike had turned to mutual respect and maybe even something more.

A span of scarred and uncarpeted stairs lifted to the dimly lit landing. At the top, they turned left. Wager found the number and rapped on the door. From an apartment down the hall came the mumble and the long, music-filled pauses of a soap opera. From somewhere else, the squawk and loud laughter of a game show. But Vickie Salazar’s apartment remained so quiet they heard the cautious squeak of a floorboard. Wager had the feeling someone was peering through the peephole. Finally, a dead bolt grated, and the heavy door opened to a length of security chain above a brown eye. “Who’re you people?”

“You’re Miss Salazar?”

“Yes. What you want?”

Axton showed his badge. “I’m the one you talked to on the phone.”

The door closed and then opened just quickly enough to let them in. Wager and Axton crowded into the narrow entry that led past a doorless closet to a sunlit room divided by a breakfast bar into a kitchen and a living area. A foldaway bed had not yet been made up into the couch. Cigarette smoke spread from a wavering column that rose out of an ashtray on a magazine-littered coffee table and layered the closed room with haze. In a corner, the small television set had its volume turned down to a whisper so the woman could listen to the sounds of the hallway.

“This is Detective Wager. Miss Salazar.”

They touched fingers like a couple of boxers.

“I heard of you,” she said. “You’re Charlene Quintero’s cousin, right?”

The name was familiar to Wager. Second or third cousin, maybe—his grandmother’s sister married a Quintero, so it was likely. His mother kept book on all that family stuff. Wager figured he had marriage or blood ties to half of Hispanic Denver. But the only time it meant anything was when he used to get an occasional call from some relative who needed something from the police. Then Wager had had to put two of his cousins in the Canon City prison, which didn’t do much for his relationship with the family, and even those calls had stopped.

Max sat on one of the wooden stools at the tiny breakfast shelf, and it gave a startled groan as the heavy man settled. “You told me you had something on the Moralez shooting.”

“Yeah, I got something—Flaco Martínez. He’s the one did it.”

“How do you know, Vickie?”

“Everybody knows. The whole barrio. You ask anybody.” Ignoring the smoldering butt in the ashtray, she rattled another cigarette from the pack and lit it with a match, striking the head toward her like a man.

“We have,” said Wager. The woman was somewhere in her mid-twenties, though the dark circles under her eyes made her look older and Wager thought she was a little on the scrawny side too, which added a few years. “All the people we talked to didn’t know anything. Now all of a sudden you do.”

“You go find Flaco. You ask him where he was at when Raimundo got hit.”

“He was your man?” asked Wager.

Her shoulders under the baggy sweatshirt sagged, and she stared for a long moment at the large patch of naked weave that showed where the carpet took the most wear. “Was. Yeah.”

Max cleared his throat. “Did you actually see Flaco shoot Ray?”

“Nobody saw it. You know that.”

Wager corrected her. “Nobody’s told us they saw it.” He strolled to the window and lifted a side of the gauzy white curtain to peer down at the traffic on Tejon. The threads felt stiff, more like plastic mesh than cloth. “That’s why you’re dropping the dime on Flaco?”

She shrugged and then said angrily, “I don’t owe that
pendejo
nothing! I heard it from my
compañera
—she asked me did I know Flaco killed Raimundo. She says she heard it from her man.”

“Names?”

“No. No names.”

Wager had seen the woman’s hand and the dark-blue gang symbol tattooed on the smooth flesh between thumb and forefinger. She was taking a big chance to tell them anything, especially here in the neighborhood, where every kid over the age of eight would recognize the unmarked police car at the curb. He could understand why she didn’t want to name her best friend and the boyfriend, but the case would need corroboration and—if possible—an eyewitness. “All this Flaco will have to do is say he wasn’t there.”

“But he killed Raimundo. I’m telling you, he’s the one killed him!”

“You may know it, and I may know it,” said Wager. “But we got to prove it in front of a judge and jury who won’t know it. We need a witness for that.”

“Goddamn it, you bust our people all the time and you got no goddamn witnesses! What is this shit?”

“Murder,” said Wager. “Premeditated and first degree.”

“Miss Salazar,” said Axton soothingly, “we’ll arrest Martinez—we can bring him in and ask him questions. But without some kind of evidence to justify a charge, we can’t even serve papers on him, let alone take him to trial.”

Her stiff jab broke another cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t know who saw him do it! I just heard it was him, that’s all!”

Wager walked away from the window and looked down at her. “So find out who saw him. Find out who heard Flaco brag about it.”

“What the hell you supposed to be doing? You’re the goddamn cops—you want me to do your fucking job for you, that it?”

Axton pulled out his notebook and clicked a ballpoint pen. The tiny mechanical noise punctuated the tenseness of the woman’s silence. “What can you tell us about this Martínez, Miss Salazar? Where he lives, who he runs around with, where he hangs out?” Wager and Axton needed the information, but equally important, the questions turned her anger away from them and back on her boyfriend’s killer.

From what she said, Wager guessed that Flaco Martínez was another of those criminals whose careers were just getting under way; most likely, a police computer—the contact file—would hold a little more information on him: aliases used, criminal convictions, time served, any instance where Martínez’s name had turned up in conjunction with other investigations. But there were a lot of things the computer wouldn’t know that people in the barrio would, and if Vickie Salazar really wanted to nail Flaco Martínez, she’d find out those things.