Killing Zone (23 page)

And if he had to launder the money, the furniture store would be the place to do it. Wager made a mental note to ask for a subpoena for the store’s books. “Any names?”

“Naw. It’s not like him getting a little jellyroll on the side, you know? The people just ain’t all that excited about no payoffs. That kind of shit happens all the time.”

“Who told you?”

“That’s my business.”

“It’s a murder, Willy. That makes it my business, too. I’d like to talk to your informant.”

“No way, Wager! My people talk to me only. No way am I going to up and say, ‘Hey, tell this policeman what you told me.’ You think I want people to know what kind of company I been keeping?”

“So don’t tell him I’m a cop.”

“Shit, you got cop sticking out all over you.”

“It could be important, Willy. I’d like to ask him some questions.”

“What you like and what you get’s two different things. I don’t go handing my people over to the police, Wager. That I do not do.”

“So far you haven’t given me a damn thing I don’t already know. I can’t use any of that for leverage on Papadopoulos.”

“The hell you can’t—you better!”

“Then give me something I can use. What about Green’s car? Any of your people find it?”

“No. That White Brotherhood’s probably got it chopped up and sold in little bitty pieces by now.”

“Did you find out where he ate supper?”

“No.”

“Did you find somebody who saw him after nine o’clock?”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Then what the hell have you brought me? Franklin and Roberts have got your ass in a sling and Papadopoulos has theirs, and all you give me is crap I already know!”

“Yeah? How the hell did I know you already knew it? And I ain’t telling you where I get my information, Wager. I goddamn know what will happen to my people if I lead you to them—they end up just like Franklin and Roberts!”

If a man has no honey in his jar, he’d better have some in his mouth. It was a saying he remembered from Grandma Villanueva, and Wager smiled and said quietly, “OK, Willy. I’ll do what I can with what you’ve told me. I’ll sure try. But since I didn’t hear much, don’t be surprised if I can’t do much.”

“Shit!” The wide-brimmed hat dipped to shadow the man’s wide face and Wager saw the heavy shoulders clench angrily.

“Monday’s day after tomorrow,” he reminded Willy. “About thirty hours away.”

The brim lifted. “I ain’t telling, Wager! I’ll tell you something else, though—Sister Green, the councilman’s widow, going to be on the street tonight. Trying to cool things down.”

“Who’s idea was that?”

“Church people. Preachers and all. They got them some basketball player or something, and Mrs. Green said she be there, too. Talk to the people, you know; tell them ain’t no sense tearing things up.” Fat Willy grunted. “I hope to hell they listening. This here crap costing me money.”

“How’s that?”

“Business, my man. Deals in the air, deals on the ground, deals all around, and deals going down—business. Which, of course, I ain’t telling no cop about, either.”

“I’m only interested in Green’s killer.”

“Shit you are. You be out busting them White Brother-fuckers, you interested in his killer.”

“That’s what you think?”

“That’s what I know. And I ain’t the only one—the word’s all over: You cops ain’t doing shit because it’s the White Brotherhood killed Green.”

“Get me something on them, Willy. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll haul them in.”

The sunglasses stared through the dark at Wager. “I believe you might. You just dumb enough to try something like that all by yourself, ain’t you? I’d like to see that—I wish to hell I had something so’s you would do it. But all I got is what’s on the street.”

SATURDAY, 14 JUNE, 1944 Hours

That was all anyone had: street rumors about the White Brotherhood, rumors about threats to his wife and to other prominent blacks, rumors about what was going to happen tonight and who was threatening to do it. Wager tried sitting in his apartment with the TV low enough so he could monitor the police traffic on his radio, but the air felt stuffy and the walls—bare except for a couple of pictures and his NCO’s sword—seemed to swell inward from the pressures building up outside.

There were familiar pressures from inside, too: stray echoes of the visits Jo had made to this apartment, and he could even hear her laughter at his few wall decorations—“Uh, oh. I stepped on his macho”—which brought the ghost of a smile to his mind even now. That had been one of those times when they were hunting for some subject to talk about that didn’t have anything to do with the job. It had been difficult, more so for him than for her, because until she forced him to, he hadn’t considered anything beyond the job to be worth talking about. But slowly and with a lot of retreats back to police work, they had found other things, usually following her lead—photography, fishing, horses. They even had a ski trip vaguely planned. And the changes in his life wrought by her hadn’t been so bad. Sitting in his apartment, the police traffic a steady buzz at the edge of silence, he could still see that little gleam of triumphant laughter in those golden eyes when she’d tricked or teased him into trying something new. It hadn’t been so bad at all. Then, of course, he had talked her into that raft trip. That had been bad.

He stood and, with an effort, forced his mind away from that theme. It was one thing at night when the loss and sense of failure came on him in his sleep. But he didn’t need to surrender to it now. He was awake. He could control his own mind. He didn’t have to sit here and be drawn into a dead past like a cockroach down a swirling toilet.

The television show was lousy, anyway. Something about some old lady solving a homicide because the killer drank a certain brand of herb tea. Wager didn’t think even Golding could do it that way. Better to ride around in the Trans-Am, where he could feel the wind across his face and see motion and lights; better than sitting here with the television on and not watching it, with the radio on and not listening. Better to be out close to whatever might happen than trying to keep his mind free of those other thoughts.

He drove slowly along Downing to Colfax, the street scene gliding past the window to bring its familiar narcotic for the images that troubled him in his apartment. The glitter of a cluster of emergency lights a block or two west caught his eye, and, swinging toward them, he pulled into the parking lot of an Arby’s. Hanging his badge on his jacket pocket, he strolled over to the teams of policemen standing beside a handful of civilians.

“Hello, Blainey. What’s going on?”

“Gabe!” The black officer grinned hello and pointed his Bic pen at a figure sitting in the back seat of the cruiser. “We got us a social reformer.” He lifted a butcher knife from the hood of the cruiser. The long, narrow triangle of steel flashed icily in the blink of the emergency lights. “He’s trying to get rid of sin.”

“Aren’t we all. What’s his gimmick?”

Near the second police car, a stout black woman shook her head angrily at something an officer said, and pointed indignantly toward Blainey’s cruiser. “Him!”

“He’s going after the ladies with this pig-sticker. Says he wants to get rid of abonibations in the sight of the Lord.”

“Get rid of what?”

“Aboniba—whatever the hell he calls it. Tattoos. Tattoos are sinful, he says. They’re not from God.”

“So he’s going to cut them off people?”

“You got it.” Blainey set the long knife down and began writing again. “But I guess he couldn’t find anybody to volunteer, so he had to go out looking for customers. I hope the good Lord can save me from people who want to save the world.”

Wager peered into the cruiser’s back seat, where a slender figure hunched forward against the pull of his arms handcuffed behind him. The pale face glared back at Wager, his eyes wide with silent, wild rage and a smear of grime and blood streaking one side of his face. Under the dirt and tangle of hair, he seemed somewhere in his twenties, skinny with an insane tautness, and shorter, perhaps, than Wager. He was another of those released from a mental hospital because the courts said they had a civil right to be free. And because there wasn’t enough money to house and feed them.

“He from around here?”

“Won’t say. No name, no address. Nothing but that there butcher knife and a thing for tattoos.”

“First bust?”

“First time I seen him, anyway.”

The victim was the woman talking to the other pair of officers. She was still shaking her head rapidly, her spray of stiff hair wagging in the haze of passing car lights, and Wager recognized her as one of the street’s regulars. “Hello, Butterball. What kind of trouble are you into this time?”

“Officer Wager! I ain’t in no trouble—it’s him.” She again pointed a long red fingernail at the police car where Blainey leaned over the hood to write. “He’s the one got trouble. Coming at me with that knife like that.”

“He just wanted your tattoos, Butterball.”

“He ain’t getting them! That man is crazy and he ought to be locked up!”

One of the uniformed officers looked up from taking her statement. “Is your name really Butterball?”

“Naw, it’s Mary Murphy. Don’t I look Irish? I been on this street ten years; I got rights! I ain’t going to let him or nobody start chasing me around with no knife.”

Wager caught a glimpse of a familiar Honda Civic turn into the parking lot and watched Gargan—pulled, like Wager, onto the streets by the uneasiness spreading from Five Points—walk toward him.

“I thought I recognized your smiling face, Wager. What’s going on?”

“Officer Blainey’s in charge. He can tell you.”

“It’s a real pleasure seeing you, too.” The reporter glanced at the woman still talking loudly to the officers, and then bent to study the face of the man in the car. “Assault?”

“That’s right.”

Gargan snorted something from his sinuses and spit it out. “First call tonight. Saturday night, too. Colfax isn’t the circus it used to be.”

“Things change, Gargan. Most things.”

“Ha. If I could get any better, I would change, Wager. And you’re sure as hell not changing—you can’t get any worse.” He listened for a moment to a call for police to respond to a fight in progress a dozen blocks away. A voice answered the dispatcher and a moment later they heard the distant wail of a siren. “What have you heard about Five Points?”

“The same thing you have.”

Gargan glanced at him. “You think the White Brotherhood did it?”

“That’s the rumor.”

“I’m asking what you think.”

Wager smiled. “We’ve known each other for years, Gargan. And you know I don’t think.”

The reporter spat again. “Yeah. I keep forgetting.” But he didn’t walk away in anger as he usually did. Instead, he idly watched Blainey pause in his writing to ask the suspect a question before laboriously filling in another section of the report. The suspect only shook his head, eyes fixing hotly on Blainey as the officer wagged his head and went back to his paperwork. “I never got a chance to tell you this, Wager: I was sorry to hear what happened to Josephine Fabrizio. She was good people.”

He didn’t reply with the first thing that came to his mind. Instead, he answered stiffly, “That’s right. She was.”

“I met her a few times in the Records office. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Again, he forced himself to be polite. He didn’t like Gargan—never had, never would. And he really didn’t give one tiny damn what Gargan felt or thought. But the man was showing respect for Jo, and that demanded manners. “Thanks.”

Gargan nodded shortly as if finishing an unpleasant chore he’d promised himself. “Just wanted to tell you.” He wandered toward Butterball and the pair of uniforms finishing up their part of the complaint.

Wager had a twinge of something unfamiliar as he watched the narrow back swagger toward the police car. It wasn’t remorse—he didn’t feel remorse about anything he said to Gargan. It was more a recognition of having shared something valuable but fleeting: the sudden and ill-defined awareness that Gargan had a part in Wager’s own life—that he was in the picture that had included Jo. After all these months, her name was still alive in somebody else’s mind, and it turned out to be Gargan’s. Of all people, Gargan had become some kind of reference point for Wager’s memories of Jo. If he let it, the recognition might even generate a little warmth for the man—despite the defensiveness Wager felt about her memory. But he wouldn’t let it, because he knew Gargan. The moment would pass, and Gargan would do something, say something, in some way show that he was the same anus he always was despite his appreciation of Jo. Which, when Wager thought about it, was a comforting idea; dislike of the man was more familiar than this uneasy and new feeling that one of Wager’s most vital and important memories was shared with Gargan.

2103 Hours

The calls began to come in just after 9:00, half-a-dozen alerts and requests for officers to respond to disturbances and crimes in progress in District Two. It had the marks of a coordinated plan—H-hour at
9 P.M.
—and in his mind’s eye, Wager spotted the locations on the city map. They formed a wide circle around the Five Points neighborhood, probably an attempt to spread out the police so the main disturbance could get well-started before enough cops could gather to squelch it. But the SWAT teams were already deployed and they would not be committed for such routine calls, Wager knew. Their vans would be in reserve at some quiet corner close by, and near them the K-9 trucks with their slotted air vents would be waiting, too, the tense night punctuated by the eager whines of the dogs.

He pulled his Trans-Am against a shady curb on Columbine Street and followed the reports as they came over the police band. Burglar alarms had been set off by broken windows in the fronts of two stores, and looters had been reported running from the scenes; responding officers were looking for suspects or witnesses and guarding the premises until the owners could come down. A car had been set afire at Twenty-eighth and Curtis and firefighters reported hearing gunshots as they responded. They wanted police protection immediately. A patrol car was fired on by a sniper in the vicinity of Twenty-seventh and High—half a dozen blocks from Wager—and backup units were responding to cordon off the area and begin a systematic sweep.