Authors: Rex Burns
“What’s ‘ears,’ Jeremy?”
Fitch looked past Wager and his face folded into a pattern of smiling lines that masked his eyes. “Hello, Ray. Ears in the walls—ears everywhere. This young man’s waiting to see you.”
Albro, a leaky hamburger clutched with a napkin in one hand and a
Rocky Mountain News
in the other, nodded curtly. “You’re the one who called? Come on in.” He juggled the paper with a door key. “Any messages, Jeremy?”
“Not so far.”
“Interrupt us as soon as anything comes up.”
“Will do, Mr. Councilman.”
He led Wager into the room whose height seemed equal to its depth. Like Councilwoman Voss’s office, this one had a window looking across an open airspace to another gray stone wall.
“Now, Detective—ah—”
“Wager.”
“Wager. What is it you want?” He busily shuffled the papers on his desk as he talked, eating with one hand and reading through them while he turned one ear to Wager.
“Anything you can tell me about Councilman Green and his work. How he ran his committee.”
“Councilman Green was a fine man and his death is a serious loss to the city and county of Denver.” Two papers went from one pile to another.
“Yessir.”
He turned from a memo, his mouth full. “I’ll be the first to tell you that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, but I had nothing but the highest respect for the man.”
Wager nodded. “Were there ever any problems on the Zoning Committee?”
Albro took another bite of hamburger and dabbed at the corner of his mouth while he chewed. “What do you mean, problems?”
“Any decision you might have questioned?”
“There were some of those, yes indeedy. I respected Green, like I told you. But just between us girls, I don’t think he ran that committee the way it should have been run. A lot of times I don’t think he ran it at all. It was that aide who did all the work—what’s her name, Julia.”
“He wasn’t a good chairman?”
“Let’s just say the committee went a hell of a lot smoother and a hell of a lot more effectively when I ran it.”
“Are you the chair now?”
The man winced slightly, the loose skin under his neck quivering. “That depends on Voss. Normally, I would be, yes. In the absence of the chair, the vice chairman’s supposed to take over. But the death of a councilman in office raises a lot of procedural questions, and we’re debating now whether Voss has the right to reappoint committee assignments or whether the charter spells out succession.” He finished the hamburger in a large bite and spoke through the wad in his cheek as he began re-reading one of the papers he’d just moved. “The Law Department’s working on the question. God alone knows what those people will come up with. Depends on who the mayor appoints to fill Green’s seat, too. His appointment could carry all existing committee assignments.”
“Any idea who that might be?”
“Yeah, I got an idea—it’ll probably be another of those pro-divestiture, left-wing, pansy pinkos that the mayor’s been stuffing on his cabinet. By God, the charter should be amended to prevent just this kind of corruption of the council.” He paused to make a note on a blank pad of paper. “That’s an amendment I want the Legal Office to draw up, by God.” That note went into a clear section of his desk.
Wager noticed that many of the papers were either blank or seemed to be routine notices and bulletins carefully organized into some pattern of importance. “Aside from differences of opinion, Councilman Albro, did you ever suspect any kind of questionable activity by the Zoning Committee chairman?”
Albro’s blue eyes, pale and slightly bloodshot, studied Wager for a moment. “Do you know what the hell you’re suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
“You’re suggesting, by God, some underhandedness on this committee—a committee that I am vice chairman of!”
“I’m asking questions about Councilman Green. About any possible motives for his death.”
“Well, before you ask any more questions like that, let me remind you the City Council has the duty to review police department finances. You understand me?”
Wager could hear in his own words the slight Spanish lilt that came when he was angriest, and he tried to keep his voice level and reasonable. “You have your duty, Councilman, and I have mine. And mine involves a Class One felony.”
“Your duty doesn’t include making accusations against city councilmen!”
“I’m not accusing you or anybody else. I’m trying to get information.”
“Well, you’re getting beyond the scope of your investigation, mister. Way beyond it. And by God, I won’t put up with it, understand me?” He gestured an angry finger at the door. “Now take off—I’m busy.”
Wager paused before leaving and tried to govern his Spanish inflection. “It’s a murder, Councilman. People have to put up with a lot in a homicide investigation.” He clenched his cheeks in a wide smile. “Thank you for your help.”
He closed the door on Albro’s hot silence; from the quiet emptiness around the bend of the hallway came the faint whisper of crepe soles.
1256 Hours
The telephone was already ringing when Wager reached the Homicide section.
“Wager? This is Captain Van Velson. I just had a call from Councilman Albro.”
Van Velson was one of the captains in the administrative division, another of the recent promotions that would add to the number of chiefs and reduce the number of Indians. As a junior captain, he pulled duty on Saturdays and Sundays, and some of the more cynical said that that was the reason for all the promotions: so senior officers could have weekends off. “I just had an interview with Albro.”
“I know that. He said you were in his office trying to dig up some kind of dirt on the City Council. The man was so pissed I could hardly understand what he was saying.”
“Dirt? I asked about Councilman Green and his activities as committee chairman.”
“Asked what, for God’s sake?”
“The usual routine questions any homicide raises—any enemies, any causes somebody might have for killing him, that kind of thing.”
Van Velson mulled that over. “I still have to make a report on this, Wager.”
“You do what you have to, Captain. Just like I do.”
“Right. As long as you know what’s coming down.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Wager held down the telephone’s off switch and then dialed a number and waited while the bartender called Fat Willy to the phone.
“You got this crap settled yet, Wager?”
“A long way from it, Willy. Come up with anything?”
“Yeah—you sit there drinking coffee and want me to do your work, that right?”
“You got it. What’ve you heard?”
“A lot of heat, my man. A lot of angry people out on those hot streets. And tonight they’ll be even hotter.” He added slyly, “I even hear somebody say they going to take down a pig.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“What’s new on my two people?”
“Nothing. You haven’t given me anything to work with.”
“Well, goddamn, this ought to be worth something!”
“I’ll call Papadopoulos. How’s that?”
“Shitty. Just like you. What good’s that do?”
“I’ll talk to the man again, Willy. That’s all I can do. Now what do you have?”
“One of these punk gangs come here from L.A. The Uhuru Warriors, they call themselves. Sort of advertising what badasses they be. They say they going to shut down the plantation.”
“Time? Place?”
“Well, they didn’t send invitations, Wager! They just put the word on the street. You starting to sweat a little?”
No cop took lightly a threat to kill policemen; cops lived on the edge of that threat every time they put on the uniform that made them both authorities and targets. “What about Green—anything on him?”
“Nothing more than I told you already. He’s clean.”
“Is he?”
“What’s that mean? You say it that way, what you mean by it?”
“It means there’s things I want you to look into, Willy. His car, for one. It’s missing. A black Lincoln Continental, license—”
“I know what his car looks like, Wager. Everybody knows what that car looks like.”
“Then somebody should be able to spot it, if it’s still around. Alleys, driveways, parking lots, wherever. Second, see if you can find out where he ate supper last night. Sometime between six and ten at night.”
“What the hell you supposed to be doing?”
“Third, find out if he had a girlfriend—a blond one.”
“Blond!”
“And fourth, find out if there’s anything at all about a payoff for voting the right way on a zoning deal.”
“Say, what?”
“You heard me.”
“What’s this crap, Wager?”
“Keep it quiet, Willy. Just see what you can find out.” He added, “I hear the woman worked for him at the furniture store.”
“No shit?” The heavy breathing slowed before he spoke half to himself. “A man got the itch, I reckon he got to scratch. But it don’t sound like no Horace Green.”
“See what you can find out.”
He would, Wager knew, as much from competitiveness as from nosiness; Willy didn’t like the idea of a cop—and a spic, at that—knowing more about his territory than Willy himself. And when he discovered the truth about Sonja Andersen, he would start to dig into the payoff question with both hands.
Wager’s next call was to the Intelligence Unit. Fullerton, his voice muffled around something in his mouth, answered.
“Norm, this is Wager. I just heard a rumor about a threat to kill a cop.”
“What? Wait a minute.” In the background, Wager heard the busy tweedle of other telephones. “OK—just trying to get a little goddamn lunch down. What rumor?”
“One of my C.I.’s. He says it’s supposed to go down tonight.”
“Reliability?”
Wager sighed. “He’s reliable, Norm. A long-time C.I.”
“All right. What exactly did he say?”
Wager told him.
“You’re sure it’s the Uhuru Warriors?”
“That’s what he called them.”
Fullerton mumbled something to himself as he apparently made notes. “We’ve got a couple of those groups starting to form—moving from collectivities to gangs, you know.”
“I remember.”
“If one of them pulled it off, it’d give them a real boost. OK, Gabe—we’ll shake a few bushes and see what runs out. If you come up with any corroboration, get on the hook right away.”
Wager said he would and agreed to follow up the phone call with a memo; Fullerton wanted to make sure he had a paper trail on this one. Wager quickly wrote it and slipped it into an interoffice mailer, and then pondered the next name and number on the page of his notebook. Glancing at the wall clock, he decided he had time to call before Stubbs came back. The woman answered after the third ring. “Miss Wilfong? This is Detective Wager. I wonder if I can come by and talk to you for a few minutes.”
1321 Hours
Julia Wilfong’s apartment was in a four-plex of glazed brown brick and marked with glass brick panels, the kind whose design spoke, in its rounded corners and horizontal lines, of a 1930s sense of modern. There used to be a lot of buildings like it in Denver, Wager remembered, but most had been torn down and now only a few remained here and there in older neighborhoods that had once been fashionable. The tree-shaded street held a few other small complexes between large homes, many of which had been cut up into apartments. The next stage would be to divide those large apartments into smaller cubicles for a population that wanted only to rest and not to stay. That had happened already, a block or two down the street.
Apartment Four—upstairs and to the right. After buzzing himself through the entry, he followed the sweep of curving stone steps lined with bright aluminum rails. Julia Wilfong waited at the doorway. The glare of light from the glass-brick panel that formed the end of the hallway brought out wrinkles under her eyes that he had not noticed yesterday morning.
She led him through the short entry into a large living room with curtained windows that formed one corner. “Would you like a glass of iced tea, Detective Wager?”
“No, ma’am.” He sat on a flowered chair across the coffee table from a matching couch where she settled. The table’s glass top was clean of marks and held a stack of thumbed magazines on one end and a small pile of refolded newspapers on the other. The rest of the room, too, had the orderly air of someone who had worked out a place for each item and wanted to keep it there. “Have you lived here long?”
“Four years. Almost five, now. Why?”
“Just making polite conversation.” He smiled. “Is Denver your home?”
“It is now. Like everybody else, I came here from some other place. It’s a city of immigrants.”
Wager could have told her that it was the same for a lot of people who had been born and raised here, as well—that everybody comes from some other place, and, finally, that place is only a buried corner in a fading memory. “Where’s your home?”
“Philadelphia. It used to be. Detective Wager, I really am relaxed. Can we get on to your questions, please?”
“All right. Can you tell me if Councilman Green seemed worried or under any kind of strain in the last couple days before his death?”
She thought for a few seconds. “Not worried, exactly, no. Excited, maybe.”
“How do you mean?”
“Hyper—full of energy and jokes. The way he got when a lot was going on and he was barely managing to keep up with it. He liked that: being on top of a lot of fast-moving events.”
“Any idea what caused it?”
“I don’t think anything special. It’s a busy time on the council, plus all the committee work. And he was considering a reelection strategy.”
Wager remembered she had mentioned that. He also remembered her reaction when he’d wanted to know about the councilman’s personal life. “Some of the questions I have to ask don’t make much sense, Mrs. Wilfong. But they have to be asked.”
“Please ask.”
“Did you ever hear any rumors or hints that Councilman Green had a mistress?”
Her reaction this time surprised him; instead of getting angry, she laughed—a rare flash of white that emphasized the width of her face, and maybe that was why she laughed so seldom. “Of course—he was a handsome man. And a lot of women find politics to be an aphrodisiac. I can name you a dozen who tried everything they could think of to crawl in bed with him.”