Authors: Rex Burns
Four clerks took turns working the windows that serviced the boxes. None recalled Beauchamp.
“We don’t usually see the customers after they rent their box,” said a bony man with graying hair and eyes set into deep sockets. “Unless they get a lot of packages or registered mail—the stuff that brings them to the window.”
Axton nodded. “Do you know what post office would serve this address?” He showed the clerk the Beauchamp house number.
“Just a minute; I’ll check.” He took the address and disappeared somewhere behind a partition.
“That’s the guy who should be superintendent,” murmured Axton.
“He’s too nice,” said Wager. “The secretary has my vote.” It was the kind of verbal silliness that came when you were bone-tired but the adrenaline was pumping because there was a chance—however faint—that something was going to pay off.
When the bony man came back he said, “The South Denver substation—255 South Broadway.”
They nosed through the crowded parking area, finally locating a slot. “It’s another federal jurisdiction,” said Max. “You want to call the FBI?”
“Naw, let’s just use our good looks and friendly dispositions.”
“Right—look how far they’ve got us already.”
This station had a single long window served by three or four clerks who called “next” to the line of waiting customers. There was no door marked Supervisor or Office, so Axton and Wager stood behind a short, heavy lady who smelled of old sweat. When their turn came, Wager showed his badge and the photograph.
The clerk, wearing a checked civilian shirt open at the neck, slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so … maybe … but I can’t be sure.”
“Would you show it to the rest of the people? It’s very important.”
He shrugged but did, moving down the row of clerks as a disgusted whisper came from somewhere in the line behind Wager, “What the hell now!”
When the clerk came back, he bobbed his head toward the last station. “Henry says he recognizes him.”
“Thanks.” Wager was already halfway down the counter.
Henry had a round face, bald on top, with a full, pointed beard that made him look like a shovel. Wager stood by restlessly as the smelly woman counted pennies for her short string of stamps, then he showed his badge. “What can you tell me about this man?”
The clerk shrugged. “He got a box, let’s see … nine or ten months ago. He wanted to pay by the month instead of quarterly—that’s how I remember him. He made a thing of it, but we only accept quarterly payments. It cuts the billing costs, and most people if they’re only going to be here a month use general delivery.”
“Can you tell me anything about him? When he came in? If you ever saw anybody with him?”
Henry thought back. “When he did come in, it was usually midafternoon, I guess. Slack-time—not many customers. That’s when I’d notice him, anyway. And always by himself.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Dawson? Doggett?”
“Do you know which box he rented?”
“I guess I could go through the cards and see if his name comes up. But that’s gonna take some time.” He glanced at the line of people waiting silently.
“It has to do with that mass murder of women and children.”
“Oh! God, I read about that.” He looked at the photo, then back at Wager. “This guy might be the killer?”
“Another victim,” said Wager.
“Oh—okay, hang on a minute.”
It took more than a minute. Almost ten, in fact, before Henry came back with a file card. “Drayman. Edward B. Drayman. I knew it started with a D, but I had the rest of it wrong. I’m better on faces than I am on names. Maybe I shouldn’t be a mailman.”
“That’s okay—that’s fine—what’s the box number?”
“Fifteen twenty-two. But I can’t let you in it. It’s the U.S. Mails. You need a warrant or something.”
“We’ll get one. Thanks again.”
Axton scanned the wall full of little glass and steel doors for 1522; when he found it, he turned to Wager and grinned. “Bingo!”
Wager, too, looked. Against the other side of the glass panel leaned a small stack of envelopes. “Now let’s see what Doyle can do for us,” said Wager. “Unless you’re ready to knock off for the day.”
“I’m ready to see what’s in that mailbox, my man.” He moved with surprising quickness out to the Trans-Am baking in the morning sun; Wager used his GE radio pack to call in, and the Bulldog’s voice returned, blurry through some kind of electronic interference halfway across Denver.
“You want to spell the name the box is under?”
Wager did.
“All right—I’ll bring the warrant myself.”
He did, within the hour, and found Wager and Axton half asleep in the hot car.
“No problem with the Feds this time,” said Doyle, his lower teeth thrusting out happily. “Full cooperation.”
It wasn’t always like that Wager knew; in narcotics and organized crime, the Feds held their cards pretty close to the chest and didn’t want the locals to see much of them. But he guessed that Doyle used the notoriety of this case to get good cooperation—who wouldn’t want to help capture a slayer of women and children?
The station superintendent had never before seen a federal warrant and had to call for instructions from the Central Post Office. They were slow in coming, even over the telephone, and the voice at the other end—as stout and sullen as it had been earlier this morning—asked three times for the name of the federal judge who signed the paper. Finally he said, “I guess so,” and the local superintendent, still frowning worriedly at the warrant, said to Doyle, “Come with me, sir.”
He was back in a minute. The three men huddled over an empty writing shelf to gaze at the envelopes. They were all addressed to Edward B. Drayman. One, Wager recognized: Winston, Rt. 6, Box 81, Loma Vista, Colo. Another lacked a return address. The last two were from A. Cooney, Box 2013, Pueblo, Colo.
“That must be it,” said Axton. “A box number and an alias—Kruse used the same technique as Beauchamp.”
“Worked about as well, too,” said Wager.
“Can we open them?” asked Max.
“The warrant didn’t specify,” Doyle answered.
Wager unfolded his pocket knife. “Then it doesn’t say not to.”
Carefully holding the envelope by a corner, he slit the top seam. The letters were penned in blue ball-point on lined paper; they talked about the health and troubles of a dozen names, and offered the answers to questions Beauchamp had asked in earlier letters. At the bottom of the second letter Kruse had written, “Thank you for sending Z’s warning about W though it is scarcely needed. The Lord will guide and protect. Our faith like yours is in the goodness of the Lord. His will be done.”
“Does that mean anything?” Doyle pointed at the W.
“Willis Beauchamp,” said Wager. “‘Z’ is probably Zenas Winston, and he wrote to warn that Willis was after them.”
The Bulldog squeaked a bit of air between two teeth. “It’s not much, but it may lead to motive.”
The chief was already thinking trial, which was fine; but Wager figured they’d have to catch somebody first. “I’ll go down to Pueblo,” he told Doyle. “I can call this information to Orvis, and by the time he gets a street address for the Kruse family, I can be there.”
“I can go,” said Max. “You went last time.”
“It’ll be more consistent if I go,” said Wager. “Orvis and I know each other. Besides, Polly’s barbecue’s coming up; if you’re not around to help her plan that we’ll have the murder of Max-the-Ax on our hands.”
“Very funny.”
“Gabe’s right,” Doyle said. “Let’s see what we’ve got in these other letters, then you get on down there.”
He met Detective Orvis at the Pueblo police station, a two-story building of tan brick whose design was institutional ugly, which made Wager feel at home. Parking was down a graveled alley and into the scorched and unfenced lot behind the building. As he walked to the entry under the large
PUEBLO POLICE DEPARTMENT
sign, Wager noted an attempt to soften the brick face with a few sickly trees and one window that had frilled curtains and a potted geranium on the sill. It must have been the policewomen’s lounge. Orvis’s office was in the annex, next building north; the architect for this one did his best to match the main building, and succeeded. A uniformed officer pointed him down the waxed hall to Orvis’s office, where Wager found a man who was slightly taller and maybe ten years younger than himself. He had a quick handshake and a wide mustache that matched his brown hair. And he wanted Wager to know that despite Denver’s interest in the Kruse shooting and the establishment of a statewide task force, this case was still in his territory. “We haven’t yet come up with a street address on that post office box,” he said. “Kruse put a fictitious street number on the application, so we’re canvassing the area around the substation for people who might recognize him. It might take some time,” he apologized. “We’re short-handed. We don’t get all the federal funds you people in Denver get.”
They didn’t have all the criminal activity that Denver had, either, but Wager let it slide. He was after cooperation, not a quarrel. The politeness lasted through two cups of coffee and a tour of the facility, including a new central communications room that they were very proud of. But Orvis, like Wager, was restless, and when Wager suggested that he could help with the door-to-door, the Pueblo detective grinned with relief and drove them out to the neighborhood.
By late afternoon Orvis and Wager were working down both sides of a street lined with houses built of dark brown brick. They all had identical tiny porches in front and detached garages down the dirt alley behind: a row of workers’ cottages, probably built for the steel-mill crews at the beginning of the century. They were still filled with kids and housewives, now mostly Hispanic instead of Italian; and as Wager knocked and showed Kruse’s picture and asked the same fruitless question, he heard the sounds of his own childhood, and smelled the odors of familiar cooking as the homes began to prepare for their men’s return.
Perhaps it was the result of another long day after little sleep, perhaps it was the disjointed locations of the past few days, but Wager once again felt a jolting shift of time, this one into his own memory. In the wide, dark eyes of children peeping from behind their mothers’ knees, he saw faces familiar from his boyhood before the Auraria barrio had been swept away by machines. In the frayed chalk lines on broken slabs of sidewalk, he saw the games that had filled the long summer twilights when kids liked to gather in groups, hoping their parents would forget to call them in to bed. Even the trees, cottonwoods with thick twisted trunks whose bark was polished with the rub of familiar hands, brought memories of cool shade on sun-scorched afternoons, and quiet play—making pictures in the gray sand or building rock houses and forts for ants and beetles to live in. Of the soft, unformed faces that, like his own, had somehow grown up and scattered away. Those memories were such a long way from knocking on screen doors with their little wad of cotton to scare away the flies, such a distance—from such a different direction, even—that he could not clearly trace what led from an alien and wide-eyed kid to homicide detective Wager, a man for whom the past was now found only through the lives of others, and through nothing in himself. The isolated man. His ex-wife had thought of him as that. So, in her own way, did Jo. And Max. Wager even admitted it about himself. He was an isolated man trying to keep his goals limited to what he could set his hands on. There was nothing wrong in that—it was just a fact, one that Wager was truly comfortable with. And now, ironically, he was pursuing a people who scorned all goals except the abstract one of completing God’s design—a people for whom his kind of isolation was as foreign as their kind of union was to him.
He reached the end of the block and was about to cross into the next, a collection of frame houses built at different times, when the nasal quack of Orvis’s radio caught his ear. Looking, he saw Orvis beckon, and even halfway across the street the man’s smile was widely visible.
“We got a positive, Detective Wager. Over near Craig and Thirteenth. It’s just a few blocks.”
They found the uniformed officer chatting with a lady who half filled a wooden porch swing. Her iron-colored hair was clipped short all around, and the bulk of her breasts and stomach and hips made the cotton dress taut across her flesh. The officer, sitting on the edge of the porch with a cold glass of tea, wiped his hatband with a handkerchief as he told Orvis about it.
“This is Mrs. Tillotson. She says Kruse lives behind her on the next street over.”
“You’re sure it’s the same man?”
“Well, I didn’t know his name. But I saw him enough. Almost every day for six months. Him and his wife and children and her sister, too. You boys want some ice tea? It’s awfully hot today.”
“Can you show us the house?” Orvis asked.
She grunted herself out of the swing, whose chains twanged slack. “Only take a minute to get you your ice tea. That house ain’t going anywhere no matter where the people went.”
“How’s that?”
“They left. Couple weeks ago now. Children, dog, everyone—just up and left like they meant to come back, but they ain’t. Not yet.”
“Did you see them go?” asked Wager.
“No. But if you don’t see me go you won’t get that ice tea.”
Wager and Orvis glanced at each other.
The woman, tugging her dress down in back, went into the shadowy house.
“Go on around back,” Wager said to the patrolman. “See if you smell anything.”
“Smell?”
Wager nodded. “They might still be there.”
“Oh?” Then, “Oh, Lord!” The patrolman swallowed uneasily and peeked down the driveway beside the house. “Maybe there’s a dog back there.”
“Here you boys are, nice and cold. Why, you ain’t going yet, are you, Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am—I thought I’d cut through the yard and see which house you meant.”
“Oh, land sakes, sit down. I’ll show you just as soon’s you finish that ice tea. There’s too much rushing around, and it’s just too hot for it.”
“Ma’am—”
“Sit, young man!”
“Did you ever talk to the family, ma’am?” Orvis asked.