Avenging Angel (31 page)

Jim was as short as Wager but wirier; in the dim light, he seemed in his late thirties. His black hair was long on top and short on the sides, and he had long, narrow sideburns that came far below his earlobes and ended in little shaggy points. His full name was James M. Hugo and, yes, he liked to watch Shelly dance. “She knew my name,” he said. “She always said hello. She was really a good dancer—better than anybody else here.”

“You came to see her a lot?”

“Three or four times a week. I’m a regular, I guess.” He shrugged apologetically. “I like it better than watching television.”

“You live alone?”

“Yeah. I drive short-hauls. I like this place—the people’s nice. They’re not always hustling you like in some other places.”

“You were here last Saturday?”

“No. I was over to Durango to pick up some cows.”

“Can you tell me where you stayed there?”

“Sure.” He did. Wager noted it for later corroboration.

“How long did you know Shelly?”

“A year, I guess. She was a real lady.”

“Did you ever ask her out?”

“Me? No! I liked her dancing—that’s what I come here for. We’d say hello, but, no—I wouldn’t ask her or nobody out!”

“Did she ever go out with any of the customers?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you know any of her other regulars?”

“Know them? No. I see some guys here a lot and she talks—talked—to some of them, but I don’t know any of them.”

“Anyone special she seemed interested in?”

“Not that I know of. She was real popular. She said hello to a lot of guys. But she never went out with any of them that I saw.”

“Did anybody get angry when she turned him down?”

“No. It’s a rule, you know? Like ‘No touching.’ You can’t date the girls or they lose their jobs. They’re nice girls.”

“Did you know her husband?”

A pained look crossed his eyes. “She was married?”

Wager nodded.

“I didn’t know she was married.” He added, “I guess most of them’s married, ain’t they?”

Jim said little after that, and there wasn’t much left for Wager to ask. He thanked the black-haired man and sent him for his free drink and caught Sybil’s eye as she made her way to the bar with a tray of empty glasses.

“That’s the only two here tonight.” She wasn’t any friendlier than she had been yesterday. “There’s maybe two or three more, but that’s all that’s here now.”

“You don’t know the names of any of them?”

She shook her head. “A few first names, but that’s all.” Her voice dropped and so did the corners of her mouth. “We don’t even want to know their names. We’ve got our own names for them—you know, the Fat Man, or the Crip, or Whitey or Mr. Cool. Or the Drooler. He’s a real winner. I got to go, I’m on.”

Wager thanked her and waited for Axton to finish talking with his man. Max did, and gave a friendly wave toward Cal, who returned a stiff “Goodnight, gemmn.” Wager followed the big man out of the smoke and thudding music, and they paused in the glare of the entry. A grime-encrusted panhandler started to approach, smelled cop, and quickly faded back into the weekend crowd that had begun to fill the sidewalks.

“Anything?”

“Just sheer wonder,” said Max, “that anyone would waste his time and money night after night doing the same damned thing.”

“It sounds a lot like police work.”

“Don’t it, though. What about you? Your man have an alibi, too?”

Wager told him. “I’ll check it out in the morning.”

“Better turn it over to the day watch,” Axton reminded him. “Bulldog Doyle’s hot for this team concept.”

Wager spat on the sidewalk. “Right. I guess Golding can handle that much.”

“He gets the same pay you do,” agreed Max. Then, “I don’t think it would be a regular.”

Wager didn’t think so either, but he asked, “Why not?”

“For one thing, they can be traced—they’d know that. But the stories are all the same: she was never overly friendly with any one of them. And you get the feeling the regulars are happy with what they pay for, a little extra attention from a woman that everybody’s looking at.”

“Yeah.” But there was another angle, one that Wager hadn’t fully groped his way through and that he did not yet want to trust to his partner or anybody else on the team.

Nickelodeon Vending Repairs was a pale-brick building of one story and two wide panes of glass that flanked a recessed entry. Apparently, it had been built as some kind of retail store—clothes, shoes—before the original owner discovered that a neighborhood shop was not a good investment in most places, and was a definite loser on the north side of Denver. The flanking buildings had also been converted to light industry or service trades, and the few private homes that made up the rest of the block—large houses with peaks and cupolas and turrets—now advertised Rooms by the Day, Week, Month. The curb in front of the building was empty, and Wager pulled his Trans Am to the doorway of the shop, where he sat for a moment to study it.

The blank display windows opened to an interior half-filled with the hulking shapes of vending machines. In one window, a square red machine glinted with fresh enamel; beside it, an unlit pinball machine lifted its back panel like an ornate tombstone, reinforcing the feeling that the store was empty.

Wager crossed the wide, vacant sidewalk in the hot sun and tried the door. He was a bit surprised when it opened with the jingle of a bell whose sound bounced slightly among the machines scattered around the tile floor. Most had their backs off or showed gray steel racks in place of removed front panels. No one answered the door’s ringing.

“Sheldon? Anybody here?”

A distant voice echoed back. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

“Police, Mr. Sheldon. Detective Wager from Homicide.”

He heard a shoe scrape somewhere in the rear of the store, then Sheldon, wiping his hands with a rag, appeared between two of the upright boxes.

“Detective Wager? You found out something about Annette?”

“No, Mr. Sheldon. We still don’t have anything. But I’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

“Jesus. Didn’t those other two guys ask enough?”

“Just a few more, Mr. Sheldon. Things they overlooked.”

“Well, is it going to do any good? All these questions, and nothing coming of it … I’m busier’n hell. I don’t have time for—”

“We’re trying to catch your wife’s killer, Mr. Sheldon.”

His narrow shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh. “Yeah. I know. Come on back.”

He led Wager into the rear section, which had been a stockroom. Now it was a machine shop; a long bench down one wall was lit by fluorescent tubes and held a steaming coffeepot. Above the work site, framed on the wall, was an enlargement of Annette Sheldon’s publicity picture with a small silk cross tucked behind one corner; beneath, on a shelf of newly planed wood, were several sympathy cards in a row. At each end, a white vase held a single fresh rose. Sheldon saw Wager look at the shelf.

“Some of the girls sent cards,” he said. “It was nice of them—they didn’t have to. Mr. Berg even came to the funeral.”

Wager glanced at the names under the black script; one was signed by Rebecca and Sybil, another by David Berg, a third said “a friend.” A larger one had four or five girls’ names in different-colored inks. “You put up new flowers every day?”

“Yes. Annette loved roses. Every day.”

Wager felt uncomfortable in the aura of sentiment and pain that seemed to pool in front of the little shrine. “What can you tell me about Berg? Do you know him well?”

“Mr. Berg? He’s a nice guy. He gave Annette the good sets—the late ones. Because she was such a good dancer. He knew real talent.”

“Did your wife ever talk about him?”

Sheldon’s eyebrows bobbed. “Just business talk. Who he put on the afternoon shift. Who he moved up to night work.”

“She never told you he tried anything with her?”

Two red patches rose on his cheekbones. “Hell no. He didn’t, either! Annette didn’t have to put up with that kind of crap from him or anybody! She was too good a dancer. She even got offers in Vegas—the Dunes, the Sahara—to dance in the reviews. That’s real big-time and that’s how good she was, man!”

“She got offers but she didn’t go?”

The anger died as quickly as it came, leaving his pale eyes wide and aching behind their thick lenses. “She said we were doing too good here—her business and mine. … We were making better money here, she said.”

“Better than she’d be paid in Vegas?”

He nodded and swallowed and tugged at the thin mustache. “You got to figure the cost of living there. They pay good, but it costs a lot, too.”

“You visited Vegas?”

“Every two or three months. Gamble a little, lay around the swimming pool and get some sun. Annette liked to see the new dance routines.” He stared at the plumed figure on the wall. “She liked the costumes, too. She got ideas for her own routines from watching the reviews.”

“How’d you meet your wife, Mr. Sheldon?”

“Meet her?” He didn’t face Wager but talked to the photograph and smiled slightly with the memory. “She was tending bar at a place I used to go when I worked for Precision Metals. We just got to talking and hit it off. We liked the same things. … After awhile, I asked her out. I didn’t think she’d go with me, you know? I figured she thought I was just full of bar talk, and I’m not the best-looking guy in the world—believe me, I know that. Somebody was always hustling her, though, and she was tired of that trip. I didn’t; we just talked. Maybe that’s why. … Anyway, it took me a long time to get up the nerve to ask her out, and when I finally did, she just said ‘Sure’ like that and smiled, and I almost fell off my stool!”

“How long ago was this?”

“Three years and six months. We were married three years and four months.” He straightened one of the sympathy cards. “I figured out all the dates.”

“She wasn’t dancing then?”

“No. But she always wanted to be a dancer, ever since she was a kid. Her parents bought her lessons when she was little, and she was in all her high school shows—the musicals.” He glanced at Wager. “That’s what we talked about when we dated. I didn’t know anything about dancing then, but she was crazy about it, and I talked her into taking lessons again. At first for the exercise, you know, but she was good at it and liked it. The Cinnamon Club was my idea—she didn’t want to at first, but I told her, ‘Look, a professional dancer’s an entertainer, and it’s something you’ve wanted to do, now’s your chance.’ She could have been. …” He stopped talking, mouth squeezed in a hurt line and eyes shut against the rise of pain from within.

Wager strolled a step or two away and gazed out through the half-open delivery door at the graveled alley and the wire fence and the carefully mowed backyard beyond. In the center of the yard, someone had put up a birdbath; beside it a pink plaster flamingo stood on one leg and curled its neck toward the water. Around the base of the pedestal, a froth of bright petunias caught the morning light. At the far end of the yard, the white stucco wall of the house held metal awnings that shadowed the windows. The distance of that sunny yard from the little shrine behind Wager stretched far more than time or space could measure; it was a distance that made heavier the weariness of a long tour of duty, and now he felt the added drain of groping his way through this man’s defenses, one question at a time.

He took a deep breath and pushed back at the surge of weariness. “She worked at the Cinnamon Club a long time. Didn’t she ever talk of finding a dancing job somewhere else?”

“Sure. We talked a lot about moving to Vegas or L.A. There’s not much going on in Denver for dancers, and what there is, is pretty amateur.”

“But you stayed here.”

“You mean why? Like I said: the money.” Sheldon started wiping the bits and pieces of a vending machine drive. “She made good money at the Cinnamon Club and she was still learning more about dancing. We figured one, two more years at the most, and then we’d have enough saved up to try somewhere big.”

“You were working somewhere else when you met her? Precision Metals?”

“Did I say that? Yeah, right. We bought this place maybe a year ago. Annette invested a lot of her money in it—she said she wanted me to have a place of my own.” He looked around and sighed. “We figured we’d sell this place and go wherever.”

“The shop makes a good living?”

“Yeah. Annette did all the bookkeeping. She was real good with numbers and paperwork—she liked it. I really don’t know how much this place made last year. I haven’t felt like going over the books yet.”

Good money dancing, good money from the shop. They lived at a very good address, too—a condominium in a new tower near City Park. “We haven’t found any trace of her car yet.”

“I figured I’d hear from you if you did. It’s probably in Mexico by now.”

“Mr. Sheldon, what we think is that somebody in the club followed her out to her car and pulled a gun on her. Then forced her to go with him.”

He wiped again at the drive shaft. “I think so, too. The bastard. The dirty bastard!”

“Did she ever say anything about anyone at all who might have been after her? A regular customer? A stranger? Anyone at all?”

The anger drained away. “No … I mean, she had her regulars; all the dancers got fan clubs, you know? That’s show business. But they tip good and they mind their manners. She’d tell me about them and we’d sometimes laugh at them and even feel sorry for them. In bed, we’d talk about them and—ah—feel sorry for them, like.”

“You don’t know much about any of them, though?”

“No. Mr. Berg didn’t like me to go there too much—the customers don’t tip as much if they know the girls got husbands or boyfriends in the audience. But Annette never told me about anybody who was after her that way.” He looked up as if begging to be believed. “And she’d have told me. If anything like that happened, she’d have told me, so I could take care of it, you know?”

Just like she’d told him about Berg’s hiring interview, Wager guessed. “How, take care of it?”

His thin shoulders pulled back slightly. “Well, I’d tell them first, ‘Leave my wife alone.’ I mean, most people go there to enjoy the dancing, not to hassle the girls. If that didn’t work, I’d tell Mr. Berg. He don’t put up with stuff like that. He’d heave that dude out on his tail.”