Strip Search (14 page)

“I’ll bet Goddard screamed, didn’t he, Mr. King?” Axton’s low voice gently nudged the silence made heavier by the buzz of fluorescent lights. Max’s style wasn’t Wager’s. Wager preferred to attack the bastards with his knowledge of their guilt, and he got his share of results. But Max had a way to make a suspect feel that the hulking, sad-eyed man across the table shared the suspect’s guilt and his fear of what was going to happen; that nothing the suspect admitted could shock or make an enemy of those forgiving eyes that had seen everything. And the soft voice implied the relief that would come if the suspect only told all about those terrible things he never really meant to do.

“And I’ll bet something else, Jimmy. I’ll bet you didn’t want to be there. I’ll bet you wanted to close your eyes and stop your ears and then open them up and find that the whole thing was just a nightmare.” His quiet voice grew even softer. “That your friend, your buddy whose mother fed you, wasn’t being beaten to death. That you weren’t really there, watching.”

A row of glistening drops oozed from a crease over King’s knotted eyebrows, and even from his corner Wager could see the quiver at the awkwardly tilted collar point of the man’s sweat-stained shirt.

“It’s your tail, King,” said Wager in a bored voice. “You help us out, we’ll help you. You don’t help us,” he shrugged, “screw you.”

“You’re not going to get off free, Mr. King,” said Max. “But if you didn’t kill him, there’s no reason to pay for that. I don’t think you really wanted him dead, Jimmy. Dead is a long time. I think you just wanted to scare him. What was it, he bought some dope on credit and didn’t come up with the payment? You bought from Clinton and sold to Goddard, and Clinton wanted to show you how to get your money back?”

King’s mouth worked like he was chewing a ball of cotton and he closed his eyes tightly before opening them with an almost sightless stare. “I wasn’t there.”

“Then where were you? Tell us where you were and we’ll check it out, Jimmy.”

Another sliver of flesh came off his cuticle, and then the fingers went to his blotched chin. “I was at the lounge. The Eveready Lounge. All night long.”

“Unh uh,” said Wager. “You weren’t. You left about midnight. Clinton left around eleven-thirty and you and Goddard left later. You’re the last one to see him alive, King. Clinton planned it that way. You’ve got no alibi, and I bet Clinton does. Think about it.”

It was so quiet they could hear the man swallow. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat with resignation. “I want a lawyer. I got nothing to say without a lawyer. I want a lawyer.”

“Sure, Jimmy,” said Wager. “It’s your life you’re throwing away.” He opened the door and called a sheriff’s officer to the interview room. “Keep him segregated,” he told the thick-bodied man who idly jingled his ring of keys. King would have to wait awhile for his lawyer—he was theirs to have and to hold for seventy-two hours before filing a charge. Seventy-two hours of sitting alone, and thinking, and worrying.

Axton sat on the edge of his desk, his thigh in the taut trouser leg spreading across a foot of the glass-topped surface. “I thought he was going to crack. I really thought he’d buy state’s evidence.”

Wager thought so, too. “He wanted it. He was tempted.”

Axton whistled quietly. “He was afraid to, wasn’t he?” Whistle. “Clinton?”

“That’s my guess. He watched Clinton or somebody Clinton hired work Goddard over and he doesn’t want that to happen to him.”

Axton picked up the telephone and dialed Records; before he could ask, Wager thumbed through the afternoon mail and drew out a Xerox of Clinton’s rap sheet. Axton, hanging up, grinned at Wager. “I should have known you’d run his record.” He glanced down the sheet. “This one’s been around … and learned a few things.”

Wager agreed. “He’s smart enough to hide behind King.”

“And he’s mean. Assault … assault with … King’s probably right to be afraid of the guy. Still,” Axton tossed the sheet back onto the small pile of mail, “eight-to-ten years minimum, that’s a pretty high price.” The whistle. “I’ll talk to him again in the morning—promise to keep Clinton away from him.”

“It’s worth a try.” According to Lizard, King had thought he was a tough guy. Now the kid’s play-acting had become real. More real than King wanted. Yet he still didn’t take the way out that Max had offered. And Wager didn’t think it was because of any pride King might have—scum like that had no pride. It was Clinton. They’d have to run Clinton down, question him, discover what Wager already knew: that he would have an alibi in his mouth and a leer in his eyes. Clinton was one of the leviathans.

The pop of his GE radio interrupted his thoughts. “Any Homicide detective.”

“X-89. Go ahead,” said Wager.

“We have a probable suicide at 5002 Elizabeth Place. Officers at the scene.”

“On our way.”

One in the morning, one in the afternoon; a steady pace made the shift go quickly. Wager grabbed his coat and followed Axton down the cushioned hall toward the wide elevators and the streets below.

T
HE DAY SHIFT
, like the others, slipped into routines more or less designed to give time for the scheduled paperwork, to leave a little space for the unscheduled homicides, and to let the long-unsolved cases do as they always did: wait. Because of the effort to have an officer’s court appearances coincide with his day shift, Wager and Axton spent a lot of weary hours sitting on the blond wooden benches in the City-County Building, where they listened to the shuffle and drone of the law in action. More hours passed knocking on doors to follow up requests from the night shift, and some time was even spent on routine patrol, more to let the wind and motion blow away that cramped feeling that came from hours at a desk than to serve and protect.

For Wager, there developed another routine as well, one of groping and dead ends, of itching for whatever it was that never seemed to arrive. King had stuck with his story despite Max’s best efforts, and was now out on bond. Munn and Golding had found Clinton and questioned him; he had a friend who swore they were playing cards when Goddard was beaten to death, so he, too, strolled the streets like any other honest citizen. Annette Sheldon and Angela Williams moved farther back in the Open drawer, to sit there until a lucky break or the Resurrection, whichever came first. Even Pepe the Pistol seemed to drop out of sight despite occasional tips called in anonymously by friends and relatives of the slain.

Axton, reading a memo from Bulldog Doyle that ordered officers to cease and desist from driving patrol cars across lawns, did not deny that King was lying or even that Kenneth Sheldon could be hiding something. But he did believe that King would talk and Clinton would be nailed, and that the exotic dancer cases would stay unsolved until someone was arrested in some other city for a similar homicide and confessed to these as well.

“You think the killer skipped?”

“The two murders came within a week of each other, Gabe. It’s been over a month, now. If the guy was around, I think he’d have hit again.”

“It doesn’t explain Sheldon’s act.”

“That’s only your feeling.” He spread both large hands before Wager could answer. “I know, I know; you’ve been right on things like that before. But what’s the connection between the Sheldons and Angela Williams? None—not a thing, right? It all points to a stranger-to-stranger. Somebody watched them dance and then killed them, and that somebody has moved on.”

“I don’t see how Sheldon makes a living in that shop of his.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He doesn’t have any business. One time I saw a delivery truck drop off a couple vending machines. The rest of the time, nothing. And he has no employees.”

Max did not bother to ask his partner why or when he kept an eye on Sheldon. “So?”

“So how many machines can one man fix? What’s he charge, fifty bucks an hour? He’s got overhead, taxes, insurance, and he still has to make a living out of it. He hasn’t moved out of that expensive apartment; he hasn’t changed his style at all, as far as I can find out. I think he even took another vacation in Vegas.”

“Maybe it was a sentimental journey.”

“Maybe. But he’s not bringing any money in from that business of his.”

Axton thought it over. “You’re saying it’s a cover for something.”

“Unless the guy is just a lousy businessman. Which is possible.” Then he added, because he knew Axton was thinking it, “Even so, there’s not a damned thing connecting his business to the two murders.”

“Right,” said Max.

Which meant that Wager, like everyone else, had to wait. Not that he was bored: in the slack between old paperwork and new court appearances, there were the occasional shots fired by officers which required detailed reports from Homicide detectives, patrolmen who requested help with legal niceties in search and arrest or with juvenile suspects, queries and alerts from neighboring departments and states, and even occasional VIPs to be shown through the still-new headquarters building. Wager was never assigned to that detail. The Sheldon and Williams cases, in short, had been given the team’s sixteen hours each and were now dead ends. No matter how much Wager might believe that his finger was on something, there was no way he could get his hand around anything solid—not officially. Maybe unofficially there was something he could do, but even that had to wait, too, until one of his CIs came up with a halfway decent lead.

The wheezing voice pulled Wager out of sleep. Even with his eyes still closed, he knew who was on the telephone. But it took him longer than it should to anchor Fat Willy’s words to a case. For a moment, he thought it was something to do with a narcotics buy—Willy had set somebody up for a buy-and-bust—but that wasn’t quite right: he couldn’t come up with the target’s name. And he wasn’t in the Organized Crime Unit anymore—he wasn’t working undercover. He was in Homicide, and Willy was talking about the Sheldon and Williams murders.

“You hear me, Wager? You there, man?”

“I’m not awake yet, Willy. What’s their names?”

“Shit, how many times I got to tell you? You wanted dudes who deal regular at the Cinnamon Club and Foxy Dick’s, right? Well, I got them: Curtis Evans, Sugar Watney, and Little Ray McAfee. They work other places, too, but you didn’t pay none for that.”

Wager blinked at the digital clock whose dull red numbers glowed 1:08; he recognized the first two names, and they would recognize him. “Who’s Little Ray?”

“Somebody new. I don’t have no line on him yet. He’s a sawed-off little honky runs around wearing them bib overalls, you know, like a farmer. But I bet he don’t know which end of a horse the oats goes into and which end they come out of.”

“Anything on Sheldon or Williams dealing?”

“Naw. But, hell, they been dead for a month or so. Nobody’s talking about them anymore. And since there ain’t but one reason to ask about them, I am not.”

“Don’t hang up yet, Willy—this McAfee, can you set me up with him?”

“What?”

“I want to talk to him.”

“Well, he sure as hell don’t want to talk to no cop, Wager. Can’t you figure that out all by yourself?”

“Don’t tell him I’m a cop.”

“You look like a cop. You talk like a cop. You smell like a cop. Sometimes, man, I am downright ashamed to be seen in your presence.”

“Go through a cutout, Willy.”

“How’s that?”

“You introduce me to somebody else; he sets me up with McAfee. You’re in the clear.”

“You even think like a cop.”

“Set me up with him. It’s important, Willy.”

“Uh huh—and how important’s ‘important’?”

What the hell, payday was only a couple weeks off. “A hundred.”

“We got different ideas of important.” The wheezing breath held the line open. “There’s this other little item I picked up on. You better know about it.”

“What’s that, Willy?”

“Somebody is mentioning your name.”

“What are they saying?”

“It ain’t all that clear. Just somebody been asking around about you—personal stuff, you know. Where you hang out. Where you live. Family.”

“Who?”

“That ain’t clear either. Somebody asked somebody who asked somebody—on down the line. You know how it is.”

He knew how. The why was something else. “Anything to do with a man named Clinton?”

“Wager, it could be one of a thousand of your admirers. People don’t like cops, and a lot of people don’t like you especial. You don’t have a warm personality, my man. But because somebody is asking about you especial, I ain’t eager to be the one who leads you to McAfee, you dig?”

Willy was right; there were a lot of people who would lean back and smile widely if something happened to him, and not all of them were outside the law. But you didn’t lose sleep over it; start doing that, and you’d end up like Munn, sucking on chalky tablets and trying to live long enough to die a civilian. “I’m not afraid if you’re not, Willy. And I never figured you for chickenshit.”

“Aw, man, come off that crap! I’m talking business. Somebody’s asking about you—you know what that means for my line of business. And now you want to tie yourself to me? Bullshit!”

“It’s either that or I walk up to McAfee and tell him you sent me.”

The slow voice said incredulously, “The shit you would! You would, wouldn’t you?”

“I would. It’s that important, Willy. Now how soon can you do it?”

“I’ll call you.”

Two nights later, Wager met the big man in the glow that spilled from Colfax down the windowless ripple of brick wall that was one side of the Aladdin Theater. Fat Willy sat in his white Cadillac drumming thick fingers on a steering wheel padded with a tiger-skin wrap. When Wager tapped on the car roof, Willy peered haughtily a moment and then his jaw dropped.

“Holy Jesus! Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

“Holy Jesus. You could walk right by and I’d never know you. Hey, you better not let the Immigration people see you.”

Wager stood there in stained and faded Levi’s, a sweat shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, a tassled Mexican vest of rough wool flung over that. He wore a leather cowboy hat with a flat crown, and huaraches. He had not shaved since early this morning and had darkened his stubble with a coat of mascara. “It’s my ethnic heritage. I wear this, you wear a plantation suit.”