Authors: Rex Burns
“I’m afraid she’s dead, Coley. We’re all very sorry.”
“Dead? Mama?” The two girls wrapped their arms around each other and rigidly stared at him. “Dead?”
“You’ll both be looked after,
queridas
. A neighbor’s coming now to take you home, and we’re calling your relatives in Texas.”
Mrs. Owings’s heavy arms folded around the two thin figures. “Oh, babies—you’ll be all right. Sure you will!”
“I have to ask you some questions, Coley. You and Jeanette. Can you answer them for me?”
The older girl looked as if she didn’t quite hear him or didn’t understand what he was saying. Jeanette stared up at her sister, silent tears beginning to spill from her eyes.
“Coley, can you answer some questions for me? It will help me find out what happened.”
The girl finally nodded. Short, black braids sprouted from her small head and wagged the polka-dotted ribbons tied at their ends.
“When did you see your mama last, sweetheart?”
“Yesterday. Afternoon. She … she found that book … she tried to call you and tell you and then she went into her room for a while. …”
“The book? The one John Erle was always writing in?”
“Yessuh. She axed me did I know where it was and I did. I know where John Erle liked to hide things. There’s a board loose under his bed, like, and he put things there he didn’t want us to know about. It was in there.”
“That was after school yesterday?”
The girl nodded again, and her eyes wrenched with pain at the guilty thought that her action might have caused whatever happened.
Wager said quickly. “You did the right thing, sweetheart. Your mother asked you for it and you told her the truth—that was the right thing to do.” Wager stroked the girl’s shoulder like he would a frightened kitten. “She tried to call me?” The time on the memo had been, he thought, about five—late afternoon, anyway.
“Yessuh. Then she started reading in it and then she ran into her room for the longest time.”
“What then, Coley?”
“We had us supper. It was late and Mama ’most burned the potatoes. She was, you know, real kind of worried-like. I axed her was anything wrong and she just looked at me like she didn’t even know me. She made us go to bed early. Said we should ought to go to bed, and said it like she meant it. So’s we did.”
“Then what?”
“Nothing. We got up and come to school.” She explained. “Lots of times she ain’t home mornings. That’s ’cause she got to work at the Seven-’Leven.” The realization that her mother would never be home again came into her eyes, and the tears finally began.
“There now—” Mrs. Owings gathered both girls to her. “There, now—”
Wager persisted through the shaky gasps of both girls’ wet breathing. “She wasn’t home this morning?”
“No, suh.”
He asked Mrs. Owings, “What time do the children arrive for school?”
“Eight forty-five. The first bell.”
A four-, maybe five-block walk for the girls. “Do you know if your brother’s book is still at home?”
Coley couldn’t say anything, now. Her head wagged no, and now the crying started in earnest. Wager awkwardly patted both girls, their bony shoulders jerking and twitching under his palm. Then, leaving his business card for Mrs. Owings in case she needed anything from him, he got the hell out of there.
He brought two uniformed patrolmen with him; one covered the rear of the house, the other two accompanied Wager to the front door. Bulky with his weapon, radio, and accoutrement belt, he and Wager almost filled the small front porch. The officer’s heavy black shoe accidentally kicked a beer bottle across the boards, sending it off the porch with a hollow rattle. Wager banged on the doorframe with the side of his fist.
The notebook had not been found with the body; Wager, with a telephone warrant to establish the chain of evidence in case the notebook had to be used in court, found it at Mrs. Hocks’s home. It was in the tiny room that served as her bedroom, sitting on a battered bureau that was missing some of its pull knobs. It was a small pocket notebook, bound with wire across the top and with bright green paper covers chapped and bent from riding in John Erle’s pocket. Inside, in large and uneven writing, was the boy’s schedule of his way to wealth: the plan he had for setting up his own drug ring, complete with a list of current prices, a roster of customers, actual or potential, and a page headed “BRs Rutine” and filled in with day, time, place, and initials that matched many of the names on the “List of Customers.” You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that John Erle had made a log of Big Ron’s weekly business routine. Other pages held columns of numbers that showed that the boy had been shaving enough off his deliveries to develop a little stash of his own. A scrape here, a corner there, little enough so it wouldn’t be noticed but, over time, it was building into a couple of ounces. Then there was the page that figured the margin—and where John Erle could place his ounce or two just under Big Ron’s price but still make enough to build up his investment fund. He had the amounts carefully figured out and even the time schedule he intended to follow; prospective customers were listed, too, apparently those he thought could be trusted not to tell Big Ron that he was underselling. Another page had the names of half a dozen gangs, among them the L-102s and the word
Falcon
followed by the figure
25
. That was probably the number of hits or ounces or chips he had promised to deliver when he finally got his route started.
It was a smart plan, workable and ambitious, and John Erle had been a sharp kid. He probably could have done it, too, if Big Ron hadn’t somehow found out about it A complaint about a light dime, maybe, or one of those names that the kid thought he could trust. What John Erle had not figured into his plan was that although Big Ron was stupid, he was also dangerous; that in the world he was entering, John Erle, no matter how much pluck, still needed luck. Because he had absolutely no value as a human being for anyone except his sisters and his mama.
Mrs. Tipton came to the door and didn’t bother to glance at Wager’s badge. “You again!” But the large woman’s voice wasn’t as strong as the last time Wager stood there. There was fear in it and her eyes went nervously from Wager to the patrolman and back.
“Where’s Big Ron, Mrs. Tipton? We’ve got a warrant for him.”
“Why? What for?”
“Murder. He beat a woman to death.”
“No!”
“Where is he?”
“He’s my son—he wouldn’t hurt nobody!”
“We both know that’s a bunch of crap, lady. Open the door or we come in through it.”
“You can’t do that!”
“The hell we can’t.” The heel of Wager’s fist banged the screen door and sent pieces of the lock clattering into the dim living room.
“You stop that—you can’t do that!” She backed up quickly; one slipper flew off her foot as she pulled away from Wager, who lunged through the doorway.
He waved the folded S and S warrant in one hand and his pistol in the other; behind him, the uniformed officer stepped quickly into the dim living room and to the side of the door, his weapon out and searching for a target. Wager shoved the hefty cursing woman aside and went for the door that led from the living room deeper into the home. The gliding rustle of something moving in the dark warned him, and he flattened against the wall, shouting alert to the officer. “He’s here!”
“No—he ain’t! Ronnie—run—run, boy. They gonna kill you!”
“Jerry”—Wager keyed his radio—“he’s coming out the back. Back door, Jerry!”
Three seconds later they heard a garbled shout from somewhere toward the rear of the home, then the pop of weapons, oddly soft and muffled, and, unconsciously, Wager counted them: one—two three—four five—six. Six shots, two weapons.
“Oh, my God! Ronnie—Ronnie!”
He pushed the struggling old lady out of his path to send her in a sprawl across the living room sofa, and sprinted for the back. The screen door stood open, snagged by a large twisted leg in cut-off jeans that twitched and jerked on the top step. Beyond that, across the small backyard and backed against the garage wall, Jerry Lindeman crouched in the two-handed delta position, his eyes stretched wide over the tilted and still smoking muzzle of his pistol. Wager froze, waiting until those eyes showed that Lindeman recognized Wager, then he came onto the back steps. Big Ron, grunting and doubled over, was grabbing at his chest with both fists; on the old sidewalk beyond his reach lay a chrome pistol. The side of the man’s face had been bandaged, but his plunge down the worn plank steps and into the weeds beside the foundation had ripped the tape and cloth to reveal deep claw marks across his cheek. It was as if he had been attacked by a crazed animal.
It was well after dark by the time the paperwork was finished. Mrs. Tipton had been arrested for obstructing a peace officer, accessory to a crime, refusal to permit inspection, refusing to aid a peace officer, aiding escape, and compounding. Nonetheless, her lawyer had sprung her on bail in an hour or two, even while Wager was punished for doing his duty by having to complete the official forms. At least he had not been the one to shoot Big Ron, so that lengthy form, the shooting diagram, was not his to fill out.
Big Ron was alive—critical, but still alive, and Wager sent a memo to the DA’s office that he thought the suspect had money hidden somewhere. Maybe the DA’s financial crimes section could find it; no sense letting the state pay Big Ron’s medical bills if the man had squirreled his profits away in his sock. Though he suspected that Mrs. Tipton was busy this very minute moving any cash or accounts to safer hiding.
She, of course, had made no statement other than to ask for her lawyer. But Wager had a pretty good idea what happened: Mrs. Hocks had seen in her son’s book both the story of his corruption by Big Ron and the reason for Ron to kill her boy. It wasn’t evidence that Wager could bring into court except as a probable motive, but it was enough to send the woman after Big Ron. Perhaps at first she asked, then accused, then attacked. And Ron reacted as he usually did by hitting out, and had kept hitting, even after she had stopped attacking him.
Ron had not made a statement either, sliding into shock before they could get anything from him, and then being protected by his mother’s lawyer before he was off the operating table. But Wager expected a self-defense plea—six-five and almost 300 pounds, Big Ron had been terrified of Mrs. Hocks, who had reached up and bit him in the shin for no reason and Your Honor Mr. Tipton swears he didn’t mean to kill her, only to stop her from hurting him. Wager thought the best the state could do was murder in the second degree, a class 2 felony, and that’s what he wrote for an initial charge. Tipton’s lawyer would claim criminally negligent homicide, a class 1 misdemeanor. They would probably settle on a plea bargain for manslaughter, a class 4 felony with maybe two years to be served in prison on a four-year sentence. But when that hearing was over Wager would be ready to file the next case Big Ron and his lawyer would have to try and wiggle out of: premeditated murder. Because not only had Doty notified Wager that he found bloodstains matching Arleta Hocks’s type on the underside of the trunk lid of the Cadillac belonging to Ron, but that the pistol Tipton had used to shoot at Officer Lindeman just happened to be a .32 caliber and just happened to match the slug that killed John Erle. Too dumb, too greedy, or both, Big Ron had kept the weapon he used to murder John Erle.
It wasn’t worth what it had cost, but Mrs. Hocks would have her revenge after all, and Wager felt pretty damn good about that.
W
HAT
W
AGER DIDN’T
feel good about was the Neeley case and its unclear ties to Roderick Hastings. His mother used to tell him and his sisters that if you struggled, sooner or later the stone would break. Though she hadn’t intended it that way, it was something any detective had to believe, too. But if you weren’t even allowed to struggle, the stone stayed there, a rock in your shoe or a wall in your face. And it challenged your belief in your own abilities or in the very reasons behind the work you did. The thing that made it worse was the call from Aunt Louisa asking Wager if that reporter from the newspapers, Mr. Gargle, had talked to him about Julio.
“Not lately. What’s the matter?”
The voice was shaky and muffled, coming through a nose still stuffed from crying. “He kept asking me if Julio had been selling narcotics. He kept saying that Julio was mixed up with a gang and that’s why somebody shot him, because he was mixed up with narcotics.”
“That’s not true, Aunt Louisa. Gargan doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“You’re sure, Gabe? Really?”
“I’m positive. I don’t know where he got that story, but it’s a lie.”
A long, quivering breath. “My son …”
Jesus. Maybe it would be better if mothers had no sons. “Don’t you believe what that guy said, Aunt Louisa. Julio was a good kid.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to find out who killed him. Real soon, I promise you. And it will show that Julio didn’t do what that reporter said.”
“Yes.”
After a few more words, she hung up, and Wager, knowing he shouldn’t even as he jabbed at his telephone’s number pad, called the editorial desk of the
Post
. Gargan was in.
“What the hell are you doing, Gargan, telling the mother of a homicide victim that her son was killed because he was dealing dope?”
“Hold it, Wager—just keep a civil tone in your head. I didn’t tell her that. I asked her if it was true. She denied it.”
“Goddamn right she denied it because it’s not true! But you hurt the woman, Gargan. You made her think her dead son was a dirtbag.”
“Hey, I got a story to write, and I was following my lead.”
“What lead? Nobody ever told you Julio was dealing!”
“Oh, yeah! Yeah, they did, Wager. I interviewed the official officially in charge of the investigation—Officer Golding—and he made the statement that the killing seemed to be the result of a dealers’ squabble. And that, Wager, is what I was following up on. If you’ve got further information pertaining to the case, I’d like to have your statement.”