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Authors: Rex Burns

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BOOK: Angle of Attack
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“Other than that.”

“Wait. That and keep our ears open. What the hell else can we do?”

“Yeah.” The big man’s disgust matched Wager’s and he gave a slight whistle between his teeth like a steaming kettle. “By the way, Polly asked me to invite you to dinner Sunday night. If you don’t already have plans,” he added quickly.

Wager rapidly tried to think of something he could call plans, but he wasn’t fast enough; Max took the brief silence for consent.

“Fine. Come on over about seven—that’ll give us time for a drink.”

“I—”

But Max strode out of earshot with a wave of his wide hand, and Wager had the feeling of being told rather than asked to come to dinner. He watched Axton’s square Bronco pass between the steel posts of the parking compound’s gate and swirl among the heat-shimmered car roofs surging down Thirteenth Street in rush-hour traffic. Feeling the twist of irritation that always came when someone pushed him into something he didn’t want to do, he had an impulse to call and tell Axton that he had a date. One he’d forgotten about. Except that Axton wouldn’t believe him, and the thought of being weak enough to have to lie his way out of something was more painful than the thought of going to dinner. Besides, Wager was getting tired of that book on fur trappers; the only reason he wanted to finish it was that he had started it. And what the hell, maybe Axton’s wife was a good cook.

Fourteen

A
T TEN THAT
evening, Wager quit forcing himself to relax. The lingering spring warmth had long faded from the stone of his balcony wall, and the restless glare of Friday-night traffic rose from Downing Street below to wipe away any stars that may have shown above the ragged black shadows of the mountains. He had again resisted as maudlin the impulse to have a last meal at the Frontier and instead ate a frozen dinner whose picture this time said it was turkey and green peas, though it tasted suspiciously like roast beef and broccoli baked in cardboard. Rinsing the silverware, he left it to dry, poured himself a beer, and sat down once more to the book on fur trappers.

But he was too restless to read.

Even the news on TV didn’t soothe him. The small screen flipped pictures of rescue groups at plane crashes, police squads at crime scenes, political teams accusing other political teams, and platoons of demonstrators accusing everybody. Then the twenty-two-second editorial questioned earnestly if “our city” was going to become a hunting ground for organized crime since the police still had no suspects in the gangland slaying last week, and it ended by saying that the television station and this reporter certainly hoped not, and qualified persons having contrasting views were encouraged to respond.

Wager turned it off and stood, forehead against the cool glass of the balcony doors, to look out across the winking, gliding lights of the city below. Colorado had had its share of organized crime since the days of Soapy Smith a hundred years ago, and with varying intensity it was still here—all the way from Trinidad in the south to Fort Collins in the north. The Scorvelli family was only the best-known in Denver, having made contributions to the city’s criminal code for the past thirty years. The family had large territories in Denver and Pueblo, and many members lived just north of Denver in a small ex-coal-mining town which called itself “the most law-abiding little city on the Eastern Plains.” But there were plenty of other groups, some bound by loose ties, who had carved up the rest of the state. Sonnenberg’s classified files were packed with reports and studies of them, and they came and went and changed alliances with the shifting flow of money and the rare convictions of an occasional leader. What filled Wager with mild wonder was the TV editorial’s assumption that the Scorvellis and all the others had disappeared; that somehow Denver was clean and now ran a risk of being sullied by “new” criminal activity. It was a public blindness, a laziness, perhaps even a cowardice in the face of facts—one that Wager could not understand.

The afternoon paper, too, had carried a story about Covino’s death: an article headlined “Police Still Baffled by Gangland Slaying,” by police reporter Gargan. Since the reporter had got nothing from Wager, he apparently called the Bulldog, because most of the short column on page 28 quoted what Chief Doyle had said—that yes, the police were still looking for the culprits; no, they had nothing concrete yet; no, all leads to well-known criminal figures had been exhausted; and no, the police had no further plans to investigate in that area.

And Wager, too, had better not have any plans to go near Dominick. Not the man himself, nor the Lake Como restaurant, nor any of the people close to the man—the only people most likely to know of any connections with Gerald, and who might be squeezed into talking if Wager had enough freedom to get his hands around their necks.

But he was free to get out on the street and find the man in the beret. He would never locate him. Wager was absolutely certain he would never locate him, since the coat and beret had been used for a disguise. But prowling through those streets down there was better than prowling through this apartment up here, kicking the two sling chairs from one spot to another and back again, straightening the Marine Corps sword and the framed photograph on the wall. He would not ask anyone about Scorvelli; but if someone wanted to walk right up and say, “Wager, I’ve got proof that Dominick wasted Frank and Gerald,” he wouldn’t say, “Don’t tell me.” Sure, someone was going to walk up and say that and everything would work out just fine! Just like the proud City and County of Denver was still a virgin.

He slipped his Star P.D. into its holster and shrugged into his light sports coat. At times like these, the street was better than his apartment. In fact, most of the time the street was better than his apartment.

Driving slowly on Downing to the Colfax light, he turned west, keeping in the right lane to glance along sidewalks already filling with summer crowds of shaggy transients and with night people lured from their close rooms and converted garages on the side streets to this glow of lights and restless motion. Especially the motion. It was the same thing that had drawn Wager out of the silence of his apartment, and as he eased his Trans Am along the trash-littered curbing he felt a kind of kinship with the quick-eyed movement of the street people who wandered looking for the action, watching for the fuzz, seeking what was going down, man. It beat hell out of staring at the four walls of a rented room and listening to the echo of your own breathing.

On Broadway, the character of the sidewalks changed abruptly from the topless bars and porno shops and nude photography studios to the ground floors of office towers that seemed to be faced with the same polished stone and vertical strips of aluminum. Inside, the foyers were dimly lit and empty, and even the banks of elevator lights were off. Here the few pedestrians were tourists and conventioneers who, crossing from one downtown hotel to another, had made a wrong turn and were groping their way back to the sheltering arcades of the Brown Palace or the Continental. Wager saw an occasional face that he recognized working the tourists, one of them being “Hey You” Jones, the demented and half-crippled Negro whose outstretched palm and “Hey you got a quarter?” drifted from street to street like a piece of blowing newspaper. Two or three blocks up Broadway, the sidewalks changed again, darker and lined with store windows papered over and painted with signs saying “Lease” or “For Rent—Easy Terms.” Here the curbs formed triangular corners, and wedge-shaped taverns drew customers from the aging apartments and converted sanitariums just behind Broadway. The few trees in tiny, three-sided parks cast uneasy shadows over the figures on the grass, smoking, talking, passing wine bottles back and forth. Wager reached upper Larimer and parked on Twenty-fifth, locking his car and pausing to smell the odor of frying grease and spiced meat that drifted from one of the drooping houses between stubby office buildings and wholesale businesses. If a person looked hard enough, he could see the remnants of a neighborhood still here, stretched thin by the increasing distances between homes. Just how long it could last, and who—besides the old people clinging to the small houses with their cheap rent and low taxes—would care when it was gone, Wager didn’t know. But right now, even with the torn and sagging screen doors, the pale glimmer of unpainted and warping boards at the porch edges, there was more life, more humanity to watch and to talk about, than in all twenty stories and two hundred units of his own apartment tower. Despite the violence and noise, despite the drunks pissing in the front yards or retching against doors or window screens, this was a place where life was not a television set, and because of that the residents struggled to remain.

As he strolled toward Little Juarez, his mind was divided between the present—this stretch of Larimer with its dim glow of lights behind pulled roller blinds—and the past: memories of his old neighborhood before the “developers” turned under the homes to turn up a profit. For the first time in a week, he was not really looking for anyone, did not give a damn about Scorvelli or the Covinos or Sonnenberg or Doyle. He merely walked and felt the loosening muscles in his neck and shoulders tell him that at last he was slowly relaxing.

But someone saw him.

“Wager!”

The call came from one of three small houses wedged between brick buildings across the street, and he saw Tony-O’s figure stiffly erect even as he sat on a tiny front porch that only had room for two rusty patio chairs. Another figure sat beside him, and Wager crossed between the automobile traffic to the sidewalk that ran a scant four feet from the edge of the low wooden porch. “Is this where you live, Tony-O?”

“Yeah. I rent a room in back from George, here.”

George, a thick-bodied man in railroad overalls, nodded without speaking or changing the gentle bounce of his metal chair.

“What’s this crap I read in the paper about you cops giving up on Scorvelli?”

Wager started to say he hadn’t given up on anybody. But it wasn’t true. “No evidence.”

“What about that tip I handed you? Hell, I told you about that Frank Covino!”

He wondered at the note of anger in the old man’s voice. Tony-O’s information had been offhand; at the time, he hadn’t seemed to care if Wager used it or not. Yet now he was angry. Perhaps it was an old man’s pique at having his word rejected; perhaps it was something else—Wager vaguely remembered something else … His thoughts, like the muscles of his neck, began again to clench. He remembered something that he should have paid more attention to: an attitude … a note in the voice … a tiny question in his mind. He tried to recall and at the same time mask his thoughts with a casual voice. “We checked it out. We couldn’t corroborate anything you told us, Tony.”

The erect shape remained wordless and accusing. From somewhere farther down Larimer, a hoarse voice whooped and a bottle shattered, followed by the frantic bark of a large dog. “But I told you what that Chavez guy said. You can work on Scorvelli with that.”

“We haven’t been able to find Chavez. And from you, it’s just hearsay evidence—not enough to support holding Scorvelli. If you know where to find Chavez, then tell me and I’ll go after him.”

Tony-O’s wrinkled face dipped in the flash of passing headlights. “All I know is L.A. He didn’t give me his goddamned address and telephone number, Wager.”

That was it—Wager remembered it now: he had asked Tony-O before about someone else who might know Chavez, and Tony-O had answered “no” a shade too quickly. In itself, nothing notable—just a feeling that the old man wasn’t giving Wager all that he knew. And now the realization that Tony-O was eager to see Wager land on Scorvelli and disappointed that he had not. With chagrin, Wager realized the obvious—that Chavez, with good reason, might be afraid. Especially if he was still in Denver. “Have you heard anything else that might help? Anything on the brother down in Cañon City?”

“Naw. I ain’t been listening.” The anger was gone and now Tony-O’s voice held threads of boredom and sullenness. “Why in hell should I, when you people don’t use nothing I give you?”

“If you get us something we can take into court, Tony-O, we’ll use it.”

“I bet you will.”

Wager, still feeling the air between him and the rigid old man, said it again: “You get us something we can use, Tony, and we will.”

Tony-O no longer answered. George, his chair squeaking rustily, bounced in gentle rhythm and watched the street life flow back and forth just beyond the edge of the porch.

No longer walking without purpose, Wager quickly crossed Larimer Street toward the half-lit sign in the next block: “—NOLO’S.” The round-faced bartender with the drooping mustache recognized him with a cautious nod and wandered down from the small group of men clustered at the far end of the bar. They looked like the same ones who’d been there the night before, still in the same positions, still falling into the same silence when a stranger walked in.

“Look.” Zapata tapped a stubby finger on the scrap of paper taped to the post beside the cash register. “I gave Whistles a dollar last night. The damned loco didn’t know what to do with it, but he was happy enough to wet his pants. He thinks I’ve hired him now like for a real job, you know? I’ll never get rid of the son of a bitch now.”

Wager took one of his business cards from his wallet and slipped it across the bar. “When that runs out, give me a call.” He put a five-dollar bill beside it. “How about some phone change and a beer?”

“Mexican or Yankee?”

“You really sell much Mexican beer?”

Zapata shook his head. “Once in a while to some
borracho
. Hell, who can afford it? You want a draw? All I got’s Schlitz—no Coors.”

“Draw.” He paid his quarter and took the small, cold glass and the handful of coins over to the wall telephone in the room’s dim corner. The first number he dialed was Fat Willy’s.

“Hey, I been waiting to hear from you, my man.” Wager could almost see the fat man squeeze himself into the corner telephone booth of the bar that was his office. “You owe me a little something and I ain’t seen you. Why is it I never see the people that owes me, but I always see the ones that wants?”

BOOK: Angle of Attack
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