Blood Line (5 page)

“No.”

“Did you notice anyone hanging around the area when he left?”

“Gabe.” His mother’s anger was plainer now. “You stop that. You quit acting like a cop!”

“It’s all right, Theresa. He’s trying to help.”

And Wager was a cop. “Did Julio say anything when he left?”

“Just … just that he’d be back in a few—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Wager’s mother said, “That’s enough,” and led her sister into the bedroom to lie down. A few moments later she came back. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“She’s going to have to answer questions sooner or later, Mom.”

“
¡Basta!
Let it be later, then. When she feels up to it.” That topic was closed. Now her eyes glanced from Wager to Elizabeth. Wager made the introductions.

The two women studied each other; Elizabeth smiled, his mother did not.

“Elizabeth Voss. I’ve heard the name. Would you care for some coffee, Miss Voss?”

“Please.”

“She’s on the city council, Mom. That’s where you heard her name.”

“I know that Gabe. Get us some milk for our coffee, will you?”

Wager could take a hint. He also took his time in the kitchen, and when he came back with the milk, the two women were seated at the table and leaning toward each other, their voices quiet as the other women watched and listened.

“I’m going over to talk to Golding,” he said. “See what he can tell me.” He asked Elizabeth, “You want me to take you home?”

“I’ll drive her home, Gabe.” His mother’s voice had lost its stiffness. “Elizabeth came to pay her respects and it was very kind of her. And it’ll give us a chance to talk.”

Wager was sure who the subject of that talk would be; he wasn’t so sure if he liked the idea. Cousin Frank’s half-muffled snort didn’t make him feel any better about it, either; but since childhood, Wager had heard one or another of the men of his family moan that God gave woman a tongue but the Devil gave her the will to use it. Now it was his turn to weigh the truth of that saying. On his way out, he nodded to the priest who was hurrying toward the front door.

The crime scene was still roped off with police tape, the band of yellow plastic bobbing gently in the breeze of slowly passing traffic. Shiny black letters spelled POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and LINEA DE POLICIA NO CRUCES. Golding was watching the tall, thin figure of Lincoln Jones angle his camera at the chalked outline on the sidewalk. The quick glare of a strobe starkly brought out the dark red of dried blood and the stray litter of a cigarette butt, a tatter of grimy paper, a smear of spit. Then Jones circled for another angle. Archie Douglas, bent close to the ground, was carefully walking down the joint between the sidewalk and the age-darkened brick of the building wall. A scattering of graffiti marked the walls where taggers had been busy; some of it Wager could read—the WSB of the West Side Boys, an elongated rooster of the Gallos—some he couldn’t. There were no doors or windows in the wall, and the nearest escape from the sidewalk was an alley about thirty yards away. Julio’d had nothing to fight back with and no chance to run anywhere.

A uniformed cop, whose arm jerked irritably as he waved the traffic past, recognized Wager. “Can you believe these goddamn people?” Then to the gaping automobiles. “Come on, you can watch it at home on TV—come on! Nothing to look at now—move along, you’re blocking traffic!”

Golding, dapper in tan slacks, tweed sport coat, and suede vest, didn’t seem too surprised to see Wager. “You know the victim, Gabe? One of your snitches?”

“Relative. Cousin.”

“Ah. Too bad.” Golding jotted the information in his notebook, just as Wager would have done. “Any ideas?”

“No. I just heard about it. What happened?”

“Drive-by. Victim exited that grocery store on the corner, was walking in this direction, and apparently a vehicle pulled up alongside him. I’ve got a witness at the grocery store heard three shots. Looked like at least two hit the victim, one in the body, one in the head. Victim crawled or rolled against the wall over there.” He pointed to where Lincoln Jones was squatting for another photograph, this one a low-angle shot to show the background to the location. A few feet away lay a grocery sack; something inside had broken and soaked the paper dark. “No witnesses yet to the incident, no idea yet what kind of car it was.” Golding shrugged. “Feels like another gang shooting to me.”

“He told me he wasn’t in a gang.”

Golding shrugged again. “Just a theory.” And they both knew that kids could lie. Especially to cops.

Wager said, “I just got through talking to his mother.” He told Golding what little she had said.

The detective wrote that down in his book, too. “Saves me a trip. Thanks.”

“I explained that you’d probably be by.”

“Yeah? Well, see how much time I have. What you tell me, she don’t know anything.” Golding glanced over the protocol sheet on his clipboard to check off the steps of the investigation.

Then he looked up. “My guess, it’s going to be the usual, Gabe, and pretty soon somebody’s going to shoot their mouth off about doing this, and then we’ll hear about it. Until then …no witnesses, no evidence, no case.”

Wager couldn’t argue against Golding’s statement. He’d seen a lot of shootings that worked just that way, and in fact he had one of his own: John Erle Hocks. And just because Julio was his cousin didn’t mean the boy’s death would be any different from Hocks’s. But a good cop wouldn’t be content to sit and wait, not if he had ways of shaking things loose. “I’ll do a little asking around. See if I can turn up anything.”

“Hey, be my guest! I’ll use any help I can get.”

Wager figured that.

His first stop the next morning was at the yellow brick building whose chillingly familiar concrete decorations were from another era and whose very walls seemed worn by the shoulders of generations of kids. It was the high school Wager had dropped out of so long ago that he was surprised at how easily he remembered the way to the secretary’s office. Maybe it was because he had been sent there so many times or because so little had changed, including the green-brown paint of the corridor. Chickenshit green they had called it then, and it looked as if the same chicken was still busy. It even took an effort not to shuffle his feet in the glare of the icy spectacles that the thin, gray-haired woman aimed at him as he stood in front of the scarred counter to be noticed.

“May I help you?”

The official politeness turned to official concern when he showed his badge and told her what he wanted.

“Yes, certainly, I’ll see if he’s available.” She said a few words into a telephone and replaced it. “Room one-twelve, down the hall to your right.”

The door said MR. KINNEY. PLEASE KNOCK. Wager did and a voice answered “Come in!” Wager did that, too. Mr. Kinney, in his thirties and prematurely bald, stood to shake hands across his desk. It was something that had never happened when, as a kid, Wager had been forced to poke his head through this same door. “I read about Julio Lucero. It’s a very sad thing.”

Wager agreed. “Can you tell me who he hung around with? Any names he might have mentioned?”

The lean man ran his fingertips along the fringe of dark hair above his ear and across the line of mustache above his lip. Wager wondered why men with that pattern of baldness often grew a mustache. “We haven’t really seen much of him in the last three or four months—he was apparently transferring to a vocational program.”

“Any names at all would be a help.”

“Yes, of course.” Kinney flipped open a manila folder. “There’s really not much here,” he said in apology. “I didn’t have much contact with him—a couple of mandatory referral visits for excessive absences.” He explained, “The school population’s grown so much, but the staffing hasn’t kept up. Anymore, the cases I know most about are crisis cases. That’s all I have time for now.”

“Julio wasn’t a crisis case?”

“No.” The man looked embarrassed. “In the past, maybe—a few years ago—excessive absence would have called for intervention. But now with addiction, pregnancy, attempted suicide, physical violence, abandonment … It seems cold to admit it, but we don’t have much time to spend on dropouts. One of my co-counselors calls our work ‘social triage.’”

Wager didn’t know what “triage” meant but he heard the note of bitter surrender in Kinney’s voice. “Can you tell me if Julio was tied in with a gang?” The brief newspaper story of his nephew’s death had been headlined POLICE SUSPECT GANG SLAYING, and Wager figured the reporter had interviewed Golding.

“I don’t have any indication of that, but it’s certainly possible. No gang clothing or signs are allowed on campus, of course, but it would be naive to think that none of our students are gang members or at least affiliates.” He shook his head. “But I never heard that about Julio.”

“Did he have trouble with anyone? Fighting, maybe?”

Another shake of the head. “I don’t have much on him at all. I’m sorry.”

The counselor, by telephoning a couple of Julio’s teachers who were on break, finally managed to get three names for Wager. He arranged for an interview room while he called the boys out of classes. One was absent, and the other two couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Wager much.

“Naw, man. I never seen Julio with no gang.” Ricky Gonzales, pudgy and pockmarked, spoke with nervous rapidity. “I didn’t see much of him at all, you know, since he started work out at DIA. I don’t know, maybe he got connected out there, but not here, man.”

Henry Solano was short and stocky, long hair brushed back in a large pompadour to give him another couple inches of height. He had very crooked teeth and a story that matched Gonzales’s: “He wasn’t a gang member that I know of, no sir. He didn’t like school, very much. We used to talk about that a lot. But you got to get a good education. I mean, that’s why I’m staying in school. I want to be an engineer, you know? And my mom and dad, they been saving up for me to go to college for a long time.”

There was a lot more about Henry’s future, not much about Julio’s past, and nothing at all about Julio after he dropped out of school. But the question had been asked and the answers had to be listened to. When Wager finally worked his way out through the students cramming the hallways between classes, he had a curiously empty feeling—that Julio had never really existed. A student number, a name in a newspaper story, a couple people who couldn’t think of anybody else the boy might have called friend. Not even a girlfriend. It was the picture of someone who had been lonely, ill directed, struggling for a purpose. Wager’s own cousin, a relative. Somebody who, if Wager had bothered to think about it, might have been tossed a word or two. But he hadn’t thought about it. He had thought of a lot of other things, but he hadn’t thought about his own uncle’s son. And now the name, like Hocks’s, had turned into another statistic. But for some reason somebody else had been thinking about Julio. For some reason, somebody had waited and, to judge from the site of the murder, had planned to kill the boy. In life, Julio had been important to some unknown somebody, and now in death he, like John Erle, was finally important to Wager.

R
EPORTERS WERE LIKE
flies, you shooed them away but they kept buzzing back: nagging, irritating, pompous with the self-proclaimed power of their newspaper or television station, and self-righteous because everything they said was the Truth. For Wager, the biggest blue-assed fly of them all was Gargan. When he heard the reporter’s nasal voice on the telephone, he almost slammed it down. “No, Gargan. No progress yet on the Hocks shooting. We’re working on it.” He caught himself hiding behind an official “we” instead of using “I” and blamed Gargan for that touch of bureaucratic cowardice, too.

“You’ve been working on it for days, Wager. What’s this I hear it was gang related? That you think it might be the start of a turf war?”

“I never said that.” Not in public, anyway. But obviously Elizabeth’s message had reached the governor’s ears and others.

“Is there any truth to it?”

“It’s an active and ongoing case, Gargan. You know what that means.”

“I know you wouldn’t tell me even if the goddamn case was closed!”

“Then why ask?”

“It’s my job. Just like you got yours. But I do my job, Wager. And the taxpayers expect you to do yours.”

“You want to accuse me in print of not doing my job, Gargan? You do that, you’re going to want some damn good evidence—evidence that will stand up in court because it’s going to have to!”

“You’re the case officer, Wager. That makes you an official source of information. The chief of police has urged the press to use official channels in pursuing their stories. Now what am I supposed to do? Tell the chief—your boss—that the official channel refuses to cooperate?”

“Call the PIO. When I have something, I’ll tell him, he’ll tell you. That’s official.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Good-bye, Gargan.”

“Wait a minute—what about this: What about you being the relative of a shooting victim? The Lucero kid, Julio Lucero. He’s a member of your family, right? Cousin, right?”

“What do you want to know that for, Gargan?”

“My editor thinks it’s a human interest story. Put a face on crime, that kind of thing. He is your cousin, right?”

If Wager didn’t tell him, the reporter would be pestering Aunt Louisa until he verified what Golding had leaked. “Yeah. He’s my cousin. Was my cousin.”

“So you got a personal stake in this one? Putting in overtime on it, that kind of thing?”

“I’m not on the case.”

“Oh, yeah? That department policy? Officers don’t investigate crimes involving their own relatives?”

“No. I don’t know what the department policy is on that. I just wasn’t on duty when he was shot. But I am on other cases such as Hocks. Good-bye, Gargan.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute! OK, so you’re not on the case. Anyway, how do you feel about it?”

“What?”

“A homicide cop’s personal reaction to murder in his own family. In his own words.” He added, “And I’d like to send a photographer over for a couple pictures of you. Don’t worry, he’ll make you look as good as he can.”