Authors: Rex Burns
“Even that makes sense if Tony-O had the right information but the wrong names. If he told someone else what he told you, and that someone went looking for revenge against the wrong person.”
“I asked Tony-O that already, and he says he didn’t. But he thinks the word might have gotten out through the guy who told him.”
“Who was that?”
“Some old man named Bernie Chavez, from L.A.” Wager sighed.
“Any leads on him?”
“Nothing.”
Axton whistled a short tune between his teeth. “I suppose we could ask the L.A.P.D. But it’s a hell of a long shot. There must be a thousand Chavezes out there.”
“And half of them named Bernie.” Wager finished his coffee and stood. “But we have to ask anyway. And we’d better let the Bulldog know we’re moving back into Sonnenberg’s territory. We’d better let the Bulldog handle him this time.”
“That’s fine with me!” Axton followed Wager down the short hallway to the corner office with its frosted-glass door bearing the flaking letters “Division Chief.” Doyle looked up from the wash of papers over his desk and motioned toward the hard upright chairs along the wall; the Bulldog said his door was always open to his men, but those chairs ensured that none of them stayed too long.
“A lot of what you’ve told me is circumstantial—less than that, even; hypothetical,” said Doyle when Wager and Axton had finished. “What I don’t understand is why you’re not out there crawling all over Scorvelli like flies on crap—why you’re not out there squeezing everyone around him until you find someone willing to talk. If he had Gerald Covino scrubbed, somebody’s going to know about it. And any links between Gerald and Scorvelli makes the possibility of links between Frank and Scorvelli all the better.”
“Yessir. But we promised Inspector Sonnenberg we wouldn’t put his operation in jeopardy. He’s very nervous about what we’ve done so far, and we don’t want to stir things up any more without him knowing about it first.”
“And you still won’t tell me the nature of that operation?”
Wager wanted very much to. “Well, we promised Sonnenberg to keep it confidential,” he said. “But maybe if you talked to him and told him what we’ve found out, then he’d tell you what he’s doing. Maybe he’d give us the go-ahead to move on Scorvelli.”
“I’ll be the one to give you any go-aheads—homicide’s my territory.” He chewed at his upper lip with those protruding lower teeth. “But I’d better call him and stroke his feathers. I suppose that’s what chiefs are for.”
It was, thought Wager, exactly what chiefs were for.
“All right, boys,” Doyle went on. “You two work around the periphery of this thing until I can talk to him.” He pressed the button on his digital watch. “It’s eleven twenty-three now; check with me around two. I should have something by then.”
“Yessir.”
In the hallway once more, Axton said, “What about lunch? It’s our last chance to visit the Frontier before it closes.”
It had slipped Wager’s mind that today was the end of the Frontier, and on remembering it, he really didn’t want to go there for a last meal. It would be like helping time wash away another of those things he had called his. Those things would go—they always did—but it didn’t seem right to celebrate them. Better to let them fade in peace and silence, better to let memory hold them as they were until their going was eased. But he could not think of any substantial excuse to give to Max. Like a lot of other things that were really important, the feeling seemed silly and even sentimental when he tried to frame it in words; he simply did not want to eat a last meal at the Frontier because he did not like to think of it as ending. But that wasn’t something you could explain, even to your partner.
Wager was relieved that the snap of his radio broke the silence with his call number and saved him from answering Max. “This is X-85,” he replied.
“You have a telephone call. What’s your ten-twenty?”
“I’m in the building. Tell them to hang on.” He walked quickly back to his office and lifted the receiver. “Detective Wager.”
An unfamiliar voice asked cautiously, “You the detective that investigated that shooting the other night? The one over on South Broadway?”
“I am.”
“This is Jesus Quintana. You said I should call you if I heard something about, you know, the Covino brothers or this certain other party.”
Usually when Wager cast his bread on the waters, it sank. Maybe this time he’d get a crumb in return. “What have you got, Jesus?” He lifted a finger to Axton, who nodded and lowered himself to the corner of the desk.
“This is just between you and me, right, Wager? I mean, it ain’t snitching or nothing, but I wouldn’t want my name to, like, get around down there. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Just you and me, Jesus. I wouldn’t work any other way—you’re too important.”
The man tried feebly to mask his pleasure. “Right!”
Axton made a sick face.
“O.K.,” said Quintana. “I got this relation … well, he’s a real distant cousin on my mother’s side. Anyway, this relation was a buddy of the Covino down in Cañon City. You know, the one that got killed yesterday? The one that’s in the paper this morning?”
“I know.”
“Well, this relation is very important people in certain circles. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the story came out in the paper this morning about this Covino getting it in Cañon City and this relation says to me, ‘I knew it.’ He says, ‘I knew it would happen, him getting mixed up with them wops.’“
Wager leaned forward. “What’s this person’s name, Jesus?”
There was a long silence; in the background, a car horn beeped and the rapping sound of a motorcycle or truck passed, and Wager guessed the man was calling from a telephone booth. “I’d just as soon not say.”
“He won’t know it came from you. We’ll tell him we’re investigating all of Covino’s friends and associates, and that he’s just one more name on a list.”
A second pause. Then, “O.K. His name’s Huey Santos. Maybe you guys got a jacket on him down there. Maybe you could say you got his name and where he lives and all from his jacket or something.”
So Quintana had thought it all out before he called, and Wager knew there was no “maybe” about a file on Santos. “That’s what we’ll do, Jesus. Good idea.”
“Sure. I’ve cut all my teeth. This is pretty important info, right?”
“It could really be big, Jesus. It could be that you’ve just come through with something really big.”
“All right!” The line clicked dead.
“We’re looking for one Huey Santos, a friend of Gerald’s,” Wager told Axton. “He might know about something between Gerald and the Scorvellis. Let’s take a look in Records.”
The Santos file wasn’t overly thick, but it was far from empty. The juvenile section finally noted a tour in the reformatory, and Wager checked the dates against those he had written in his little green notebook. “The same as Gerald. They probably met there.” The subsequent entries were investigative and only one conviction was listed, a two-year-old sentence for burglary. Intermediate to nine, suspended. Wager guessed that the suspension was part of a deal between Santos and some prosecutor who didn’t think the defendant was important enough to waste the court’s time on. He flipped to the page of general information, and this time found that some nameless cop had made the effort to do things right. Sketched in on this page were some of the blank spaces of Santos’s life, which fit nowhere else in an official sheet but were invaluable when—as now—Santos was wanted again.
“He likes that gin mill over on Kalamath, the Juanita,” said Axton, reading over Wager’s shoulder.
“And there’s Gerald’s name.” Wager copied that and another half-dozen names from the list of known associates. “Let’s go visiting.”
Axton groaned and said with fading hope, “I thought we were going to the Frontier to eat.”
Wager, already striding out the door, did not answer; given the present choice, he’d rather work.
Santos’s room was in one of the shoebox-shaped apartment buildings whose narrow fronts lined lower Lincoln Street. From the back of the long, dim hallway came the odor of wood rot and rusty iron pipes; from somewhere indefinable—perhaps the brown wallpaper itself—was the added smell of old food scorched on illicit hot plates. Wager showed his badge and Santos squinted at it through the smoke of his cigarette as if he had seen badges before. Then, saying nothing, he let them in.
“We found your name among a list of Gerald Covino’s acquaintances. Have you seen much of him?”
“Not since he was sent to Cañon City.”
“You heard that he was killed down there?”
Why else would two cops be spending their afternoon with him? The cigarette in the corner of his mouth jerked when he spoke. “I read it in the paper. Too bad.”
“We’re trying to find out what he was doing just before he was arrested. We’d appreciate your help.”
The wrinkles in Santos’s forehead deepened momentarily.
“That was a while back. I don’t know what I can tell you.”
“How about starting with the burglary? Did Gerald do that one alone or with someone?”
Santos walked restlessly across the threadbare carpet of the narrow room to a small, dark bookcase under the single window. Its two shelves were scarred by puckered cigarette burns and held stacks of newspapers and an occasional centerfold magazine. Burglars tended to be avid readers of newspapers, especially the society sections. “You guys checked me out, right?”
Axton replied, “Yes, we have, Mr. Santos.”
“Mister Santos!” He started a new cigarette. “What division you guys in?”
“Homicide.”
“So you don’t have the hots for crimes-against-property cases?”
“No, Mr. Santos. We’re after information on homicides,” Max said easily, and lowered himself to the arm of a stuffed chair whose nap had been rubbed away to pale bare threads and which creaked dangerously beneath him.
Santos’s slow nod said that he had seen a lot of cops and some of them a man could get along with. A little bit, anyway; and there was no percentage in antagonizing any of them without good reason.
Wager spoke up. “Do you know who was with him on that last job?”
“That was a drugstore?”
“Yes.”
“He would have been alone. Unless it was a heavy lift—you know, television sets or stereos, stuff that’s hard to carry—he liked to work alone. A drugstore job where you pick up cash, pills, a couple packs of razor blades—that’s a singles gig.”
“You know for certain he was alone on that job?”
“No, not for certain. But it ain’t likely he’d have somebody with him. I mean, why should he? The more people you got, the smaller the divvy and the easier it is to be spotted. And Gerry liked to work alone. The real artists are that way.”
“Gerald was a real artist?”
“Not as good as some I could mention. But he liked to think so. He was all right—he was learning.”
“Did Gerald usually get high before a job?”
Santos was shocked. “Hell, no! That’s for junkies—that’s kid crap!”
“Did you know that Gerald was caught because he passed out in the store?”
“Come on! You’re blowing smoke. Maybe Gerald wasn’t the best, but he was a professional. He took some pride in his work.”
“It’s true; you can read it in the arrest report. The officer smelled him before he saw him—passed out cold with a bottle of bourbon spilled all over him.”
“Well, then somebody dumped him there! Because Gerry, he didn’t even like bourbon. Vodka and gin, yeah, but bourbon always made him sick.”
Wager and Axton glanced at each other with the feeling of still another rabbit popping out of this hat. “Why would somebody want to do that?” asked Wager.
The forehead’s wrinkles deepened again. “You got me, because something like that really don’t make sense. He never drank on a job and he never drank bourbon, anyway. But why anybody would set him up for a fall that way just don’t make sense.”
Damned little made sense. Just when they thought there was a pattern, just when one event seemed to explain another, something like this came and put question marks behind everything they believed. It was as if someone were moving the things Wager reached for—as if some magician knew exactly which hand Wager was watching and then with the other hand shifted the facts before he could grasp them. He began a slow pace of three steps back and forth across the creaking floor as his anger at the slippery yet intractable facts began to build. “Did you ever hear Gerald mention the Scorvellis?”
Santos, standing beside the window, which—like the room and the scarred bookcase and the man himself—was long and narrow, did not hear Axton’s tiny moan. The man’s stillness told Wager that he was carefully judging what and how much to say.
“We’ve heard from other sources that there was some connection,” Wager added.
“That’s right,” said Axton quickly. “It’s all over the street.”
“So you heard that.” Santos started another cigarette and slowly pressed the long butt of the old one into an overflowing ashtray. “I heard it, too, but I never saw anything. Gerald talked to me, you understand, but his own jobs were his own thing.”
“You met him in Buena Vista?” asked Wager.
Again the momentary deepening of wrinkles. “Yeah. You’ve checked all that out, too?” Santos sounded half pleased to be the center of so much attention. “Well, we got to know each other there. I met him around a few times before we got busted, but we didn’t have much to say to each other. In Buena Vista, there wasn’t much else to do but talk. He talked, anyway. He was always full of these big plans for himself.”
Santos looked out the grime-coated window toward the brown stone wall of the apartment building next door, and Wager could see how it went: two second-story men, passing each other briefly in the stores or garages used by fences, finally ending up in a cell with nothing to spend except a lot of time. Wager studied the gray light from the window falling across Santos’s sharp profile and wondered how really different from his life in a cell was the man’s life in this narrow room. “What kind of plans?”
“Oh, the usual stuff—big connections, big scores, big man. Someday.” The scorn in his voice seemed as much for himself as for Covino. “Everybody’s got crap like that to dream about, right? Hell, I let the kid talk.”