Blood Line (18 page)

It was a block and a half to Anthony’s and nearing dinnertime when Wager knocked on the door of a house almost identical to Julio’s. The homes along the wet, tree-lined street looked as if they had been built from the same plan: all brick, all small. Some were painted tan, others white, still others brighter colors like that Day-Glo purple house on the corner. Any differences in shape or size had grown gradually as rooms or even floors were added by one generation or another.

A kid in his mid-teens answered the door and nodded when Wager identified himself and asked if he was Anthony Ortiz.

“Got a few minutes to talk, Anthony? I’d like to ask you a few questions about Julio Lucero.”

“Sure!” He came out onto the porch and shut the door against the cold air. “I don’t know what else I can tell anybody.”

“Have you talked to any other detectives?”

“Yeah. This guy came by a couple weeks ago was a detective, but I couldn’t tell him much.”

Wager was surprised that Golding had been ahead of him. And mildly piqued. “Did he ask you how Julio felt about his job out at DIA?”

“No. Just when I saw him last, if he was in a gang. If I could give him the names of other kids he ran around with, like that. If I had any idea who wanted to kill him.” He shook his head. “I didn’t. Still don’t. It’s … I don’t know … something like that just makes the world seem like it’s full of crap, you know?”

More crap than this young man knew about—or, if he was lucky, would ever know about. “Did Julio have a lot of money after he started working out there?”

“A lot of money?” Anthony’s black eyebrows pulled together and he shook his head. “He had a little, but it wasn’t a lot. He kept some out of his paycheck, but a lot of it he gave to his mother. He liked to think he was paying for his room and board, since he was working full-time. I guess she put it in the bank for him or used it for groceries, I don’t know.”

“Did Julio ever talk to you about his job before he was killed?”

“Yeah. He didn’t like it. He said he was thinking of quitting, but he knew his mother wouldn’t want him to.”

“Did he say why he wanted to quit?”

“Said they weren’t teaching him anything. He thought it was a way to learn construction, you know? Learn a trade.”

“Did he say anything about being afraid of somebody out there? Or worried about somebody?”

Anthony reached up and scratched under the small pigtail of straight brown hair gathered over the nape of his neck. “He did kind of say something like that. Not that he was really afraid of the guy but that some guy was hassling him at work—giving him a hard time, like.”

“Did he say why?”

Anthony shook his head. “Just a black guy. Didn’t like him because Julio was
la raza
, you know?”

Wager nodded. “Anything else? Anything at all you can remember about that?”

“Well, he wanted this guy to lay off him. Said if he didn’t he was going to get him in trouble.”

“The black guy was going to get Julio in trouble?”

“No—the other way around. Julio’d do for him.”

“What was Julio going to do?”

Another shrug. “He didn’t say. Just get the guy in trouble.”

“Did you talk with him after he quit his job?”

“No. I didn’t even know he’d quit. He never got home from work until late, and I work four days a week over at McDonald’s after school. I called a couple times but he wasn’t home. His mother always answered and said he wasn’t home. I don’t know where he was.”

Wager asked a few more questions about other people Julio might have confided in, but Anthony had no names other than the ones Wager had already interviewed at West High: Ricky Gonzales, Henry Solano. When he dropped out of school, Julio had dropped out of what social life he led. No, he’d never heard Julio mention anyone called Roderick Hastings or Big Ron. No, he’d never ever heard of Julio getting mixed up with any gang, either in school or after he quit. Wager thanked Anthony and left a business card in case he remembered anything else.

S
ERGEANT
B
LAINEY, LIKE
most of the cops in District Two, had the night shift. Wager’s telephone call caught the man as he was reporting in. “Doodle Bug? That’s what they called him?”

“Because he was always writing in a notebook.”

“I ain’t asked around about any Doodle Bug.”

“I’d like to find that notebook, too.”

“Awright. I see what I can find out.” There was something else on his mind. “What’s this I hear you pulled in Big Ron Tipton for shooting at you? He the one?”

“I talked to him about it. I don’t think he did it himself.”

“But maybe he knows something about it?”

“Yeah. I do believe he might. Have you heard anything?”

“No. But I’ll keep my ears open. Keep my eyes open, too, for that worthless bastard.”

His next call was to Mrs. Hocks. A girl answered and said she wasn’t home right now but could she take a message.

Wager identified himself and asked, “Is this Coley or Jeanette?”

“Coley.”

“Did your mother say anything about finding a notebook that your brother liked to write in?”

“No, sir.”

“Well. I asked her if she’d mind looking for it. It might be important. Could you tell your mother I called and asked if she remembered to look for John Erle’s notebook?”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up and made a note to call again—the little girl might or might not remember to give her mother the message. The electric clock on the wall over a bulletin board crowded with notices and wanted flyers told him that Adamo might be reporting in about now, and he punched in those numbers. The V & N detective, sounding rushed, answered.

“Hi, Gabe. I’m doing what I can with what I got about Big Ron. Apparently nobody was checking on him the night you were shot. Schuyler says he spent most of his time at that accident call and then responded to your call—how’re you doing, by the way?”

“Fine, Walt. But that’s not what I need this time. What can you tell me about a Roderick Hastings? Fullerton tells me he and some others are probably helping the CMG Bloods set up a crack ring.” He gave Adamo the nicknames of Hastings’s friends. “Wesloski says he doesn’t have anything on him, but I just heard on the street that Hastings and his people are dealing big.”

That put Wager into Adamo’s territory, and he got interested. “Who’d you hear that from?”

“A hooker. She sounded pretty sure of her facts.”

The line was silent a moment. “The CMGs bit fits—like I told you, we’ve netted up a couple members of that little bunch lately. But Hastings and these other names, nothing.”

“She sounded pretty sure, Walt.” He thought a minute. “What about these names—they work out at DIA with Hastings.” He read off the list of the man’s coworkers at the airport site.

“No. DIA? You say this Hastings works out there?”

“Yeah. Does that mean anything?”

“ … Maybe … Word is, there’s been a lot of stuff available out there for a long time. Uppers and crack, mostly. A big construction job always has its share of users—you know, young guys with good pay and nothing to spend it on except cards and hell-raising. But we’ve started hearing some real stories about DIA. Construction accidents with stoned workers, that sort of thing.” He added, “As far as I know, we haven’t had a chance to look into it. My section hasn’t, anyway. Of course there might be some undercover work going on out there; I wouldn’t necessarily know about that. We got a big push against crack houses right now. We got all we can handle with that.”

And, Wager was well aware, there was an election coming up. Citizens with votes would read about the crack houses being cleaned up in their neighborhoods, but any drug activity out at DIA was a long way from the polling booth.

“If you do hear anything about Hastings or those other names, would you let me know?”

“You got it.”

That election was three weeks off, and Elizabeth’s brief respite was over. She was spending this evening at the studio of the public television channel as one of the panel of candidates for city council. The interviewer was a man whose aviator glasses emphasized his triangular face. He talked through his nose and asked questions that tended to be longer than the answers he got from the half-circle of faces he addressed. Most likely, Wager thought, because it kept the camera on him. Elizabeth was the third from the right, and Wager—being absolutely objective—thought her answers were sharp, clear, direct, and at times really witty. She was the best of the bunch. She did a good job answering and even clarifying some of the more convoluted questions from the self-important moderator, and Wager found himself feeling damned proud of her.

Trotter, Liz’s main opponent, was tanned, handsome in a blow-dried sort of way, and smiled a lot; he made a lot of jokes and bowed slightly toward Liz when he addressed her directly, calling her “Miz Voss.” Wager didn’t like him. But the audience did, and the moderator, responding to a kindred soul, bantered back and forth with him, repeated several times that the Chamber of Commerce supported him, and gave him plenty of time to talk about uniting the citizens and the police to stop crime. He believed that the Broncos deserved a brand-new stadium but couldn’t say much about how it should be financed except that it would be a good thing for Denver’s image and the city would benefit by it. To which the moderator agreed.

When the program ended—with a steady stare by the moderator into the camera—Wager turned off his set and glanced at the time: ten o’clock. Liz would make it home in about an hour, exhausted and faced with a 7:00 AM breakfast meeting. Wager, on the other hand, was on his way out again. He paused long enough to leave a message on her telephone answerer telling her he liked the job she did. He didn’t tell her that he was going out on the street; he wasn’t planning on being shot again.

The apartment house on the corner of 16th and Washington was red brick and trimmed with white stone over the doors and windows. A narrow band of white stone marked each of the building’s four floors, and the corners of those bands had white stone carvings: flowers of some kind that hung out to catch the grime of the city. Wager had once asked somebody why so many of Denver’s buildings were brick or stone or stucco; the answer had been the fire code. The town, originally of log shanties and wood-frame shops, had come close to burning down so many times that toward the end of the nineteenth century, the city fathers decreed that henceforth all building would be in masonry. It not only helped fireproof the city but also made a couple of new millionaires: councilmen who had bought out a local brickworks the day before the issue was put on the public agenda.

The buildings had not only been erected against fire, many of them had been built to stay. The Washington Arms was one that stayed, and it seemed to be kept in pretty good shape. At least it didn’t smell of anything worse than dust, and the solid walls and deep, slightly worn carpeting sealed off both the outside noise as well as any coming from the apartments. Wager walked up the silent, cushioned stairs to the second floor; apartment nine was at the end of the hall next to a large window with a Fire Exit sign over it. That would give the occupants two ways in and out of the building if they needed them. He knocked, the rap muffled by the thick wood of the heavy door.

He could not tell if anyone peeked through the security eye in the center of the door, but the time it took before the first lock rattled hinted that he had been appraised. The sound moved down the doorframe as other locks clattered, and a final bolt slid back at the knob. The door swung open to show a large figure wearing lime green slacks and a silver-and-black mesh T-shirt that emphasized the bulge of shoulder and chest muscles. His head was shaved up the sides and back, and the long hair on the front and top—woven into narrow woolen strands—was gathered together in a bunch that sprouted straight up like a clutch of black yarn. “He’p you?”

Wager dangled his badge over his forefinger. “I’m looking for Roderick Hastings. He in?”

Across the room, glowing with red indicator lights and the flicker of three or four illuminated monitors, a large sound system pumped out soft music: something in cool jazz that didn’t have a clear melody but seemed to drift with the saxophone player’s mood. “I’ll see.”

The door closed and a minute or two later opened again. Hastings, flat nose and all, scowled at him. “What you want?”

“I’ve got a few more questions to ask about Julio Lucero, Mr. Hastings. Maybe you can answer them.”

“Maybe. What you want to know?”

“You were already on the job when he was hired, that right?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you worked out at DIA, Mr. Hastings?”

“Me? About a year, maybe a little more. Why?”

“Just trying to fill in the picture. Did Julio ever say anything to you about being afraid of somebody out there?”

“Afraid? What for?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Wager smiled. “He told a friend of his that he was having some trouble with you, Mr. Hastings. Any truth to that?”

“Trouble? I didn’t have no trouble with him. What kind of trouble you hear about?”

“Just trouble.”

“Somebody giving you a line.”

“But you did have some trouble over at JP’s Lounge, right?”

He thought that over, eyes staring into Wager’s. “That wasn’t much of anything. I wouldn’t call that trouble.”

“The charges were dropped for lack of evidence?”

“That’s why it wasn’t no trouble. All this got something to do with that Lucero kid?”

“Might. I’m still trying to put things together.”

“That because he was your cousin?”

“Where’d you hear about that?”

“Was in the newspaper a while back.” A tiny gleam in the dark eyes, but his voice remained carefully neutral. “Along with something about you getting sued. How’s that going?”

“My lawyer’s taking care of that,” Wager said carelessly. “Happens all the time.” Then he chanced something. “Do you know Charles Neeley?”

Another pause. “I heard the name around. Why?”

“Just wondered. What about Big Ron Tipton? Know him?”

Hastings shook his head. “No. Who’s he?”