Killing Zone (13 page)

“Yes’m.”

“You know anything about it?”

“No, Mama.”

“You sure now? We talking a killing here, girl. One of the Lord’s Commandments already been broke around here and I don’t want you breaking another being a false witness.”

Wager was unsure which Commandment the woman was talking about—killing or adultery—but it made little difference; the sullen girl shook her head. “I don’t know nothing about it, Mama.”

The questioning dragged into the dinner hour when the heat and odors of cooking began to seep through the open doors and mingle with the smell of the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. The sun was still three hours above the jagged outline of the mountains west of town, and it would be longer than that before its weight began to lift and the cramped and airless rooms started to cool. Now, the inhabitants sought relief on porches and on steps that caught a strip of shade, the men still in their work clothes or peeled to undershirts and pulling on a can of beer, the women stepping away from the heat of stoves to take a deep breath. Everywhere, impervious to the heat, children flowed in clusters, their voices high, birdlike sounds sharper than the steady rush of the traffic they dodged through.

They were two-thirds of the way down the list when Stubbs pulled to the curb in front of a small, brown-brick house sandwiched between two apartment buildings. He and Wager got out, an assortment of kids drawing back from the curb to eye them in curious silence. Even the six- and seven-year-olds recognized detectives, and cops meant some kind of excitement, and maybe even trouble for somebody.

On the porch, in silent suspicion, a gray-haired woman rocked slowly and stared at them. Beside her, two young men in grimy tank tops sat and stared, too. Wager caught the eyes of the one he recognized, and the man blinked and slowly tilted his head to spit something between his feet.

“Denver Police,” said Stubbs. “We’re looking for Mrs. Bliscomb.”

“What you want with them?” The woman kept rocking, the unhidden anger in her eyes making them dark and wet.

“Ask a few questions. I hear she moved in with you.”

“She ain’t done nothing.” The woman added, “Officer.”

“She’s not wanted for anything,” said Stubbs pleasantly. “We just want to ask her some questions.”

“About what?”

“That’s between her and us, Mrs. Wells.” Wager glanced at the larger of the two youths whose closed faces said how much they hated cops. “How are you, Edward? Keeping out of trouble?”

“I’m doing all right.”

Which meant he hadn’t been caught. The Wells brothers and their mother were familiar names in the burglary division; the kids did the stealing, the mother did the fencing. The two sons had long juvenile records, though the oldest, now that he had turned eighteen, had become cautious. Beyond the water-starved hedge at one end of the porch, Wager saw the bobbing heads of children sneaking close to see what was going down—to find out what the police wanted with the Wellses this time so they could carry the story breathless and get the attention of the older kids and grown-ups at home. Wager remembered the awed and scary feeling he used to have as a kid when the Gonzales family, who generated a lot of whispers among the grownups in the Auraria barrio, used to be visited by the Anglo police. Pato Gonzales would always look for a fight after the cops came to get one of his older brothers; it was his way of telling Wager and the other kids he wasn’t afraid of them or Anglo cops or anybody. The last Wager heard, Pato was in jail in Texas.

“It’s about a homicide,” Stubbs explained. “A murder.”

“Who she supposed to kill?”

“Nobody. We just want to ask her some questions. Is she here?”

The woman’s eyes flicked to her younger son, Edgar, and he heaved himself carelessly off the stone of the porch wall. A few moments later, a woman came nervously onto the porch; Edgar leaned silently against the door frame and watched.

“Mrs. Bliscomb?”

“Yes.”

“Denver Police. Can we ask you some questions?”

“I reckon.” She wore an apron that clenched tightly around her hands and a bandanna tucked over her hair in a way that Wager thought of as Southern. He hadn’t seen that often in Denver. They went through the list of questions, Mrs. Wells rocking in the background and listening intently.

“You don’t know Councilman Green?” Wager asked.

“I heard of him, I think. But we haven’t lived here long—we came up from Galveston only a while ago.”

“You’re living with Mrs. Wells now?”

“We rents a room. Me and the children. Until we can find another place of our own.”

“You’ve got a job?”

“Yessir. We getting by. I just wish they’d of left us stay where we was at.”

“Were a lot of people mad when they had to move?”

“Mad? I reckon some, maybe. Most was just worried. It’s hard, you know, when you got a place and then they takes it away from you. I just put up some curtains, too.”

That was the god called Progress worshipped in the name of Profit. It had a way of abstracting people into percentages and norms so their faces couldn’t be seen when they were uprooted and—as in his old neighborhood, the Auraria barrio—the bulldozers scraped away their homes and memories both. But Wager was paid to deal with the faces; he couldn’t hide them behind computer printouts or the fake-leather binding of planning documents. Developers did that, and lawyers, and even city councilmen. “Did anyone make any threats against Councilman Green for voting to rezone the apartments?”

“No, sir. Not that I heard.”

They thanked her and turned to go down the cracked brick steps. The sound of Mrs. Wells’s rocking chair stopped. “That what you trying to do?”

“What’s that, Mrs. Wells?”

“You trying to blame the people for Councilman Green’s killing?”

“We don’t have anybody to blame yet.”

“You are, ain’t you? But we heard already—we know.”

“Know what?”

“We know he was killed by a white man. We heard what happened.”

“We don’t know who killed him. If we did, we’d have an arrest.”

“You want us to think he was killed by a Negro, don’t you? Well, we heard what really happened—it wasn’t no Negro killed Councilman Green!” Behind her, staring with the same hatred, her two sons were poised shadows.

“Where’d you hear that, Mrs. Wells?”

“We heard. We know.” She added, “We know what we gone to do about it, too.”

In the car, Stubbs gave his short, timeless whistle. “We found him yesterday and the rumors are all over the street today. Even if they didn’t like him, they hate Whitey worse.”

Wager could understand the feeling. It was one thing to fight among your own, but something else when an outsider came into the barrio to kill. And it wasn’t just hate; there was a lot of fear, and that was far more infectious than hate. It gave an easy excuse to those who sought revenge and could weld the non-committed to the bringers of violence. “We can’t prove it’s not a racist killing.”

“Yeah, right. But we haven’t had that kind of trouble in so long, it’s hard to realize how close to the surface those feelings still are.”

A bruise was always touchy, Wager knew, even when it wasn’t visible. Maybe you had to grow up in a barrio or ghetto to know that. But some, no matter where they grew up, were always seeking revenge. “She just hates, Stubbs—black, white, everybody.” It was the others: her sons, their friends, the kids who ached for a chance to play their role as rebellious victims, who would fill the streets. “Head back to the Admin Building—the lieutenant’s probably wetting his pants waiting for us.”

He wasn’t; Wolfard had left shortly after five with the rest of the administrators. But a note in Wager’s box told them to telephone him at home. Wager did.

“So far, nothing, Lieutenant. We talked to one of the White Brotherhood—an overgrown meatball named Sonny Pickett. He claims he didn’t even know who Green was.”

“That’s not very damned surprising. Who else in the Brotherhood did you run down?”

“Nobody. They’ll be hard to find on a weekend. They get on their bikes and go.”

“So we have to wait until Monday to trace this out?”

“I didn’t feel Pickett was lying. But I twisted his arm to come up with whatever he could. Maybe we’ll be lucky.”

“Maybe doesn’t cut it, Wager. I heard from the chief this afternoon; he’s under a hell of a lot of pressure from the mayor’s office to clean this up ASAP. There’s rumors all over the place about Green being killed by a racist and what the blacks ought to do about it. I told the chief I assigned you and Stubbs to this full-time, and he wanted me to put even more people on. Hell, you two are one-fifth of the entire homicide section right now, so he went along with it. But he’s thinking of bringing in the CBI and maybe even the Feds if we don’t come up with something soon. People have been knocking on his door all day long, and if we don’t produce, he’s taking it away from us.”

“We also talked to twelve of those sixteen families evicted from the apartments. Nothing there.”

“Damn it all, Wager, I told you to stick to the racist angle! That’s what those rumors say and that’s what I want you to spend your time on. Not any goddamned long shots like that!”

In a killing, any possible motive needed checking out. Wager shouldn’t have to tell Wolfard that. “Yessir.”

“You and Stubbs are on duty tomorrow, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, keep after that White Brotherhood. I want to know who and what they are and if there’s any possible chance one of them might be involved. Any chance at all.”

“Yessir.”

“And keep me posted.”

Wager leaned back and stretched against the back of his chair and gazed around the homicide offices without really seeing the pale walls and the clutter of gray metal desks. The television set mounted high in a corner flickered with a sitcom where a large black woman leaned threateningly toward a slender youth whose eyes widened with mock innocence as he held up his hands palms out. The sound was turned off but dialogue wasn’t really needed; the emphasized gestures carried the familiar story and defined the equally familiar characters, and you didn’t really need to suffer through whatever they were saying. In some ways, it was like this case—the kinds of actors were already known, and all the lieutenant wanted Wager to do was supply the names and faces to play those familiar roles. The trouble was, of course, life wasn’t a sitcom, and there might be a few players whose roles as well as names were neither predictable nor clear. Political players, maybe, such as the one who could have paid off Green for a favorable vote.

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE, 1930 Hours

Stubbs had gone for the night, the long tour pressing on his shoulders to make his walk heavy. The only other figure in the office was Golding, who shared the night shift with Max. As usual, he was on the telephone talking to someone about improving the spiritual side of life; this time it was by moon-phase dining. “Well, it sounds kind of weird, yeah, but she said to try it for a couple of months. And when you think about it, there’s some sense to it—you know, the moon regulates the tides and a full moon brings all sorts of weird calls. Even the birthrate goes up. So I thought I’d try it … No, what you do is pick foods that coincide with moon phases—receptors, she calls them.”

Wager tried to ignore the list of full- and quarter-moon foods as he shuffled through the papers that had piled up in his mailbox during the tour, routine bulletins and notices that went to every detective in every section whether or not they were pertinent. He did not use the computing service, so it made no difference to him that new limits had been put on mainframe access, but the notice was there, anyway. What did make a difference was the memo stating that all computer terminals would shut down between 2 and 3
A.M.
every morning, so Denver General, which shared the same equipment, could run their bills for the day. That meant the police had to stop chasing criminals while the city chased its dollars. A newsletter from the Police Brotherhood complained about long hours and understaffing, both of which had been around for as long as Wager could remember, and a hell of a lot longer than the PBA. But they were right: the numbers of crimes committed, especially burglary, had leaped, while the number of cops to investigate them stayed the same. The result was fewer minutes to spend on each crime, so you went after the ones you had a chance of clearing fast. What that meant was the professionals—the burglars who made their living with occasional big hits—were safer from arrest than the busy amateurs who tended to make small scores and big mistakes. But the brass went by stats and an arrest was an arrest. So you tried for the easiest bag.

He found a reminder that he was due to pop a few caps this month, and he’d better make time to get out to the range for that—it was a silly way to lose pay. Finally, the forensics package on Green—an envelope wrapped with a short string and sealed with a
CONFIDENTIAL
label. He opened it and slid the pile of forms and pages onto his desk. As Wager began reading the insistent buzz of Golding’s voice faded from his consciousness.

Much of what the pathology report told him, he already knew—the manner of death, approximate time, and so on. Nothing in the official document mentioned the possibility that the body had been moved—Doc Hefley was cautious about committing himself to that idea. But Wager forced his way through the familiar facts one more time, making occasional notes as stray ideas came up. Then he turned from the medical to the investigators’ reports. Walt Adamo’s survey of the crime scene turned up several patterns of footprints that had not been attributed to witnesses or investigators walking the scene. The prints were described in the appendix and Wager studied the paragraph that told him most of the unattributed prints seemed to be from either tennis shoes or street shoes. One set of tracks going to the murder scene and back out again looked promising: the deeper imprint of a narrow, tall heel, like the heel of a cowboy boot. The depth and distance between strides going in implied that the wearer carried a heavy weight; the few prints found exiting were shallower and the stride longer, and that could mean the burden had been dropped. The distance between exiting strides indicated a person approximately 5 feet 9 inches, medium build, and normal walk. Casts had been taken of all prints that had been found; however, the friability of the dry earth made identifying characteristics difficult to determine. “See item #151.”