Speak for the Dead (3 page)

“What’s the chairman’s name?”

“Mr. Klipstein. Gerald Klipstein.” Sumner frowned.

“He and his wife are in Europe. When he returns, he’s going to be quite upset about all this.”

“Who can get to the emergency key?”

“The senior gardeners. They have the keys to the greenhouses, and the emergency key’s in a locked cabinet.”

“What’s the names of these gardeners?”

“Leon Duncan and Joe Mazzotti. Both very fine men; they’ve both been here since the nineteen-fifties. I can look it up on the longevity chart.”

“That’s O.K., Mr. Sumner. You went home earlier than Mauro last night?”

“Unless we have a special evening function, Mr. Weimar and I go home around four. The buildings and grounds close promptly at four-forty-five.”

“What kind of evening functions do you have?”

“Oh, previews for our members, occasional night classes, slide presentations. We’re really quite active when the sun goes down, ha, ha.”

“Yes, sir. But there was nothing going last night?”

“No, Inspector. There was ‘nothing going,’ as you say.”

“Have you ever seen the victim before?”

“Good Lord—I didn’t even glance at it! I have no idea what it looks like, and I really don’t want to!”

“Could I have your address? In case I’ve got more questions later.”

“Certainly.” Sumner gave the street address of the gardens’ administration building as well as his unlisted home telephone number. His home address was, like Solano’s, within a long walking distance of the gardens, though in a southern direction toward the Denver Country Club.

“Is that all, Inspector? I’m afraid the press will make a field day of this, and I’ve got to warn the trustees.”

As Sumner let himself out the main entrance, Wager saw the ambulance crew heaving a rubber-tired stretcher over the locked turnstile of the picket fence. The two attendants puffed toward him. “Where’s the victim?”

“Through there,” said Wager. “But the M.E. hasn’t come yet. And you won’t need that thing.”

“Oh, yeah? Why?” The lead attendant was a stocky kid with cropped red hair and freckled arms that filled the short sleeves of the smock. A blue-and-orange shoulder patch said he had passed his Emergency Medical Technician’s examination. The driver was a thin Negro with heavy oil holding his hair down in a slick crust.

“All we have so far is the head.”

“No shit!” said Red. “Why in hell didn’t somebody tell us that before we unloaded this thing? We had to haul it over that goddam gate to get it here.”

“It’s not something you put on the air,” Wager said.

“Yeah? Well we got rubber bags for that kind of thing, you know? I mean these wagons are heavier’n hell and we didn’t really need to unload it, did we?”

“It’s down that way. You’ll see the lab people.”

“Jesus Christ. That’s the trouble with everybody, they never think of nobody else. Come on, Ernie, let’s run this fucker back.” They swung the stretcher around and rammed it through the doorway. “Like I was telling you, Ernie, just once—just one time, man—I’d like to meet somebody that didn’t just think of their own fucking self first. Just once!”

W
AGER REACHED THE
homicide office a little after nine with the list of people who had keys and with the slight headache he always got when he went too long without food. A team from the day shift, Ross and Devereaux, was finishing its paperwork before going on the street. When not working a homicide, the detectives were on call to help other sections of the Crimes Against Persons Division: stickup, assault, bunco, occasionally rape—though lately the politicians had given that section enough funding, and they preferred to use their own specially trained man-woman teams. And the bomb section was always on its own.

He took the dregs of night-shift coffee from the chrome cylinder in the hall and sighed as he slid behind the desk he shared with two other men. Already two of the names on the list of key-owners had been checked off: Klipstein, who was in Europe; and the conservatory director, Weimer, who was at a three-day conference in St. Louis. That left six names. Wager scraped at his eyelids with his thumbs and sipped the strong coffee, staring at the list without really seeing it.

“There’s the overtime kid—Wager thinks he’s still Supernarc.” Detective Ross, completing a records-search application form, winked at his partner, another tall, thick-bodied man. At five eight, Wager was half a foot shorter than any other member of the homicide section.

“Wager thinks he needs a cup of coffee and a little peace and quiet,” Gabe said.

The partner, Devereaux, glanced up from his stack of papers. “Fred Baird told us you really got a good one.”

“I’m glad he liked it. Did he have anything from the lab yet?”

Ross didn’t try to hide his irritation. “No, he didn’t have anything from the lab yet. He put in his time and he went home. You really do think you’re a supercop, don’t you?”

Wager guessed he had just broken a rule of the office by not kidding back. “No, Ross. I’m tired.”

“Then knock off. You’re not in narcotics any more; you don’t have to make anybody think you’re rupturing yourself for Mama and apple pie.” Ross tugged his checked sport coat over his arms. “We do things different over here. But, by God, just as good. We got a goddamned good conviction rate in this section, and we didn’t get it by being hyper—we got it by collecting the evidence!” He strode out of the office.

Devereaux, with a little embarrassed grin, paused a moment in the doorway. “Ross didn’t sleep good again. Nightmares. You get them after a while; you know how it goes. Is there anything you want us to follow up on?”

“Not yet. Thanks.”

“Ciao.”

Wager closed his burning eyes and slumped in the hard chair to hold the coffee mug under his nose.

The steam smelled better than the thick coffee tasted, and he inhaled deeply, feeling the rigid muscles in his neck begin to relax, listening to the rhythmic clatter of a distant teletype, the tinny rattle of telephones, voices male and female raised over the chatter from the records section just down the hall. On his desk, his portable radio popped and squawked with the business of District 2, the most active of the quadrangles that divided the City and County of Denver. All those noises added up to the familiar sounds of every division he’d worked, from street grunt to narcotics. And now homicide. It wouldn’t take long to feel at home here. But Ross’s words held some truth: the pace was slower, more methodical. In the narcotics section, you were part of the crime while it was taking place in order to have a case for court; the pace was always set by the bastard you wanted to bust. Here in homicide, you picked up the pieces after the crime was committed. If there were witnesses, you could move fast; if not, you could only go as fast as the evidence allowed.

But there was another reason behind Ross’s anger; Wager knew Ross was threatened by Wager’s putting in a little overtime. Here was Ross doing his eight hours and happy in his stride, when along comes a runty Hispano who strides a little faster and works a little harder. All of a sudden Ross has competition. Well, piss on him—Ross didn’t have to compete unless he wanted to; and if he did, it was his worry. Because now homicide was as much Wager’s home as anybody’s.

He took another sip of bitter coffee and picked up the telephone; the drawling voice on the other end answered, “Lab, Hawkins.”

“This is Wager in homicide. Do you have anything yet on that head found out at the Botanic Gardens?”

“Wager? You new up there?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, that’s a weirdo. It sure as hell doesn’t give us much to work with. The dental-records check could run two weeks; maybe a month or more if she’s from out of town. And if we’re lucky.”

“The team hasn’t come back from the field yet?”

“No. They called in some uniformed people to go over the grounds. It’ll take most of the morning to search the area—that’s a big place. But we should have the morgue shots by this afternoon, so you’ll have a little to work with. Too bad she didn’t have fingers. We could get an I.D. in an hour if she had fingers.”

“Yeah. Ain’t that like a woman.”

“Ha. Right.”

Wager hung up and glanced at his watch: 9:45. His headache was worse, and whether he wanted it or not, he should put something into his stomach before going back to the Botanic Gardens to see Mauro. But Doyle stopped him in the hallway.

“You still here, Wager?”

It was a stupid question, and he hesitated a second too long before answering simply, “Yes, sir.”

The bulldog’s lower teeth shone; this time it definitely was not a smile. “Who’s handling the thing that came in this morning?”

“I am.”

It was the chief’s turn to pause and he made it longer than Wager’s. “Maybe you’d better turn it over to Ross and Devereaux.”

“It came in on my shift. I’m the officer of record.” And Doyle’s own procedure manual named the officer of record as the officer in charge.

“This isn’t your basic, everyday snuff,” Doyle said. “I’ve already had four calls from the press on it.”

“I’m the officer of record,” Wager said again.

The bulldog pulled his upper lip behind those lower teeth and made little chewing sounds. “So you are, Wager. So don’t screw it up; I want a sound conviction on this one.”

What the hell did he think Wager wanted? The combination of a headache and Doyle made him distrust his own mouth. He just nodded.

“If you need any help at all, you ask—understand? We get convictions because we work as a team. There are no prima donnas in the homicide section.”

“If I wasn’t any good, I wouldn’t have been sent here.” That was only partially true—he was also here because a federal Law Enforcement Assistance grant ran out and closed the special narcotics section; D.P.D. had to put him somewhere.

“Well, you better know that I took you on a trial basis, Wager, because I’m short-handed as hell. And you better know this, too: homicide isn’t narcotics. You got a reputation for being an animal; if you screw up in my division, you’re going to end up sitting at the information desk arranging tours for Boy Scouts.”

“I’m a goddamned good cop.”

“We’ll find out. Just you remember: good cops get facts—they don’t go around lumping people.”

On his way to the Botanic Gardens, Wager drove slowly around the green lawns and clusters of blue spruce that formed Cheesman Park. It lay just west of the gardens across a winding street now emptied of the last clutter of rush-hour traffic. Tall iron bars and a padlocked gate whose rusty hinges were unused fenced this end of the gardens, and it wasn’t until he swung up Eleventh Avenue that he glimpsed the crinkled glass of the conservatory through the towering apartments and expensive condominiums scattered along the edge of the grounds. He turned down the narrow end of Gaylord Street where it dead-ended at the north entrance, and pulled in beside Solano’s red Toyota truck. Half a dozen other cars and pickups nosed against the wall of the detached greenhouses, and as Wager looked up the soaring arc of the conservatory, a uniformed officer plodded around the building to poke his arm cautiously into the pfitzers that sprouted along the foundation.

Earlier, when Wager had entered the grounds from the east entrance, he had hopped a locked turnstile in a low fence of metal pickets, the same one that gave the ambulance attendants so much trouble. But from this side, a gap between a chain-link fence and Greenhouse 1 opened onto a wide concrete apron; beyond that, a rose garden gave easy entrance to the main grounds. Behind him, across the alley, apartments and condominiums peered down; and half a block away towered a forty-floor column of staggered balconies. He could see few outside lights at this corner of the building; chances were that no one in the apartments had seen anybody enter last night.

But they would have to be questioned anyway. And that was something Ross could do—ask a hundred people if they saw anything last night.

Slipping through the gap between fence and greenhouse, Wager crossed the concrete apron. A policeman and three groundskeepers stood digging through a tall bin of compost. The officer looked up.

“This area’s closed, mister. Go on back out.”

“I’m Detective Wager from homicide.” He didn’t bother to show his shield; there was enough identification in his voice. “It looks like you haven’t found anything.”

“No, sir.” The officer stamped first one shoe and then the other to shake clinging brown shreds from his trousers. “We’ve got one more bin to go through.” There were eight of the tall, open squares, each half filled with mixtures that differed slightly in color and odor. “But if you ask me, it’s a waste.”

Wager hadn’t asked. But everybody liked to get in on the act. “Why?”

“Well, if he brought the whole body here and cut off the head, there’d be a hell of a lot of blood somewhere. And we haven’t seen a trace anywhere. I think he did it someplace else and just brought the head because it was easier that way.”

Wager thought so, too, but that didn’t answer why. “It’s all got to be looked at.”

“Yeah. What the hell, the pay’s the same.”

He wandered through the lanes of rose and lily beds toward a cluster of figures near a patio halfway across the open grounds. One or two roses still held flowers, but it was a last effort and the plants looked weary and ready for winter; all but two or three lilies had bloomed and died, and the few remaining narrow leaves hung brown at the tip. He paused a moment: the browning of the long leaves, the flowerless lily stalks like a field of twigs, the weak sunlight finally burning away the overcast—all brought a memory of the tiger lilies that had filled every square inch of his aunt’s yard that the kids hadn’t worn flat with their running and games. Her house was no longer there— the whole neighborhood was no longer there, all of it scraped under and buried beneath brick-and-glass boxes. Urban renewal, they called it, though nothing had been renewed. It was just new. But here, among these lilies pulling life down into their roots, Wager again saw that house, those plants, smelled the cold darkness that wafted from under the wooden front porch and through the browning leaves of late-September mornings.