Blood Line (7 page)

He turned off Marion onto 29th Avenue. Three or four blocks down, Fuller Park—across from Manual High School—was one of the places he might find Big Ron. Morrison Park, three blocks to the north and near Cole Middle School, was another. According to Wager’s contacts in Vice and Narcotics, Big Ron wasn’t supposed to be selling to the schoolkids, but the parks—put near the schools by the city planners of a less defensive time—were the favorite gathering places for various neighborhood groups. During the day it was mothers and their kids; when night came, the moms and toddlers fled, leaving the grounds to those who didn’t want to be seen in daylight. By now, the sun had dropped below the mountains west of town and night was slipping into the streets in a purple-red haze of dust and exhaust fumes. Cars were starting to turn on their headlights, too, and traffic was picking up, moving not with that earlier weariness that came at the end of the workday but with the building energy of a Friday night. Payday. Money to spend, things to spend it on, and tomorrow morning for sleeping late. From one passing car came the visceral thud of stereo speakers turned full volume to drum, Wager thought, like some kind of jungle message.

Pulling to the curb near the park, he sat and studied the grassy level with its concrete benches, some still resisting vandalism, and the sodium lights just beginning to glow orange. The area was mostly open: a few trees scattered here and there, a cluster of slides and swings for small kids, few clumps of shrubbery or hedges left that could conceal rapists and muggers. On the asphalt basketball court, two youths wearing their baseball caps backwards took lazy shots at a backboard. Several figures sat on benches or strolled along the walks. A handful of boys played tag football on the worn grass at one open end. They had the high-pitched voices and excited movement that kids get when the world turns magic at dusk. But none of the shapes that Wager could see had the hulk of Big Ron. He gave it another ten and then turned up Franklin toward the narrower strip of Morrison Park. Where Humboldt formed a small cul-de-sac nipped into one side of the park, sat a pair of cars. Their headlights were off, and even from this distance, Wager could tell they were real cockroaches—dented, rusty, no loss to the dealer if they were seized by a narc. Even Big Ron was smart enough not to use his Coupe DeVille for drug dealing. Wager flipped on his high beams and cruised slowly and steadily toward the cars. As he approached, puffs of exhaust showed their engines starting and they quickly pulled away, turning onto 31st. Wager took their place in the cul-de-sac and waited; five minutes later one of the cockroaches slowed at the end of the block to peer through the dusk and then speed off.

He waited some more as the darkness slowly gathered like rising water, leaving the sodium lights to show brighter and brighter cones of orange light. The kids playing football had disappeared, and now figures approached from the dark, paused and stared, moved hesitantly away; a kid on a bicycle rode slowly past and studied Wager and his car. Then he pedaled harder into the dark, his thin voice calling “Five-O, Five-O” into the waiting silence. It reminded Wager of one of the calls that haunted long summer evenings during his own childhood—“Olly olly all’s in free.” But this message had a less innocent purpose: “Five-O,” part of the title of an old television series, was street code for a plainclothes cop. The kid was a lookout warning his dealer. Maybe even one of those who had been shouting for a pass a few minutes ago. Wager could feel the anxiety in the restless shadows at the edges of light. But no Big Ron. That was OK—Wager didn’t expect to bust the man, just hassle his business a little. Let him know that his silence was going to irritate his customers and even cost him some money.

After a while, it was too dark to make out anything but the vague shapes, probably cursing Wager and sweating with eagerness, who moved back and forth hungrily on the fringe of light.

Yawning, stiff from sitting, he started his car and swung its headlights around the park to catch scattered figures in the glare. Some sat on the park benches, others stood uneasily, turning from the lights. Still no dealers selling, just increasingly anxious buyers; and no Big Ron. But he would know that Wager had been here, and why.

J
ULIO’S MASS OF
Christian burial was Saturday afternoon at St. Joseph’s. Wager had not been inside the redbrick building in years, though he drove past it often enough and had occasionally interviewed one or another of the priests about one or another of their parishioners. He and Elizabeth found a parking place half a block down Galapago Street and walked slowly past other parked cars toward the white stone steps that led up to the heavy, recessed doors. As ever, Wager felt the weight of the towering, sooty brick; the shadowed corners and yawning, dim interior brought back the uneasy sense of intrusion and sadness he had felt as a child when, on rare occasions, the family had attended mass here. Before urban renewal had emptied the Auraria barrio and its church, they had gone to San Cajetano’s. It had been yellow and smooth outside the adobe-looking walls and twin bell towers lifting against the sky; the windows and eaves had been trimmed with bright red and blue paint. Inside, its whitewashed walls had made it light, and the stained-glass windows had brought in sunshine. But in this church, which was narrow and tall, gloomy and cold, and hinted of the grave, the colored glass seemed to keep the daylight out, and even the sprays of flowers by the casket and at the altar seemed leached of color.

The organist had not yet started to play, but the shuffle of shoe leather on a gritty floor and the wet sound of tears and of purses unzipping for handkerchiefs made a constant rustle as viewers filed past the open casket and paused to whisper a prayer. Wager and Elizabeth walked up the aisle, and he genuflected to the cross that loomed over him with almost frightening nearness. Then they joined the line of people saying a last goodbye to Julio. Aunt Louisa, supported by Wager’s mother and Uncle Tony, sat hunched in the front pew. The black of her dress was crisp and shiny—new mourning clothes for a new loss. His mother caught Wager’s eye, and she nodded her head slightly, her glance going to Elizabeth with a somewhat warmer smile.

A waxy-looking Julio lay with his hands folded and a well-worn rosary woven between the fingers. His mother’s, probably. Fell asleep using her rosary to say his prayers. Dressed like he was going to a wedding. Wager tried to think of something to say to the boy’s spirit or to God or just to himself, but the only thought was that the heavy cosmetics made the corpse look awfully young. And that the mortician had done his best to hide the missing part of Julio’s skull by brushing back combed and sprayed hair. But his best wasn’t good enough, and through the stiff black hair you could see the white satin cushion where some of his head should have been. Wager filed past and down a side aisle to find seats in a rear pew.

Elizabeth, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of a tiny handkerchief, whispered, “He was very handsome.”

“Yeah.”

The sermon was brief. It was about the violence of life and the mysteries of death and God being the only refuge and peace. The half-sung words of ritual, the gray smoke rising from the swinging censer, the ceremonial movements of the altar boys and the robed priest all brought back a sharp memory of his father’s funeral, and Wager was surprised to feel once again the hurt and emptiness that had made those black days of his childhood a blur of ache and yearning. As well as a repeated realization of the absoluteness of death. Squeezing his eyes shut, he stifled the burning sensation that welled up behind his nose and governed the spasm of breath that could have been a sob. It was Julio in the coffin, not Wager’s father, and Wager felt some guilt and even self-contempt at the realization that he had milked self-pity out of Aunt Louisa’s loss.

But despite what he had told himself, the rising note of the organ echoed from the corners of the church and from his memories as well. He tensed to keep his mind on the present, on the sounds around him, on the hard cushion under his knees. His hand, spread wide on his own thigh, pressed against the cloth of his trousers as if anchoring something. Lightly resting on the back of his hand, almost unnoticed until his eyes sought them and found focus, were Elizabeth’s gloved fingers. Wager turned his hand palm up and clasped them tightly.

At the graveside in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Wager had eyed the mourners, looking for faces that he didn’t know. There had been several, but a question here and there of his cousins and uncles had identified them. It had been a long shot that one of Julio’s murderers would show up at the funeral, but it sometimes happened. Not out of remorse but, as Wager understood it, in an effort to extend the sense of power over the victim that the murderer had enjoyed at the killing. But not this time, and on the long way back down I-70 from the cemetery, Wager and Elizabeth had been silent with their own thoughts. Finally Elizabeth sighed deeply and said, “I like your mother.”

So did Wager, usually. But at first he didn’t understand what that had to do with Julio. Then he realized that Elizabeth was trying to push her mind away from death.

“She likes you too.” Otherwise, his mother would have behaved with an absolutely correct—and cold—formality. The “
la patrona
face,” as Wager and his sisters used to call it.

“I think you are a lot alike.”

He had to give that some thought. “She’s older than I am.”

“Idiot,” she said affectionately. “I mean you both have this shell that you use to keep people at a distance until you’ve made up your mind about them.”

Wager had seen that in his mother but not in himself. In his line of business, the people he tended to know most about kept their own distance because they were dead. And of the ones that were alive, there weren’t too many he cared to know more about. “I hope she kept her distance about showing you pictures of my ex-wife.”

“Lorraine? She hasn’t spoken much about her.”

That was a relief, and Wager hoped that his younger sister—who had taken Lorraine’s side even more stridently—could manage the same self-control.

“I didn’t realize how young you were when your father died.”

“Sounds like you’ve been getting the whole family history.”

“Don’t get huffy—you’ve never told me much about your family.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Nothing specific. It’s just that I’m interested in you, and your family is part of you.”

Whether, it seemed, he wanted it to be or not. “I haven’t had too much to do with them for a long time.”

“Not since your divorce from Lorraine?”

“That what my mother told you?”

“She said you felt very guilty about it.” Elizabeth added quickly, “That’s about all she did say, except that there was no reason to feel guilty—that Lorraine simply couldn’t take being a cop’s wife, and you couldn’t stop being a cop.”

That about summed it up, but it was the first time Wager heard that his mother finally saw things as he did. “She said that?”

“You seem surprised.”

“It’s what I tried to tell them at the time: I didn’t blame Lorraine, and I sure as hell don’t blame myself. It just didn’t work out, is all.” His voice calmed. “I guess I’m surprised that all of a sudden my mother accepts it.”

Elizabeth looked out the window at the spidery arcs of the Lakeside roller coaster gliding past above a fringe of trees. “I think she wants to see more of you, Gabe. You’re two very proud people—and very stubborn, too. But I suspect she would be happy to forget any ill feelings that came out of your divorce.”

“Well—” Wager concentrated on guiding the Camaro through a cluster of slower traffic that filled all three lanes. He wanted to say it was about time, but the truth was that not all of the estrangement was the fault of his mother and sisters. For a long time Wager had avoided them not just because they had been—and still were—friends of his ex-wife but more because they had been reminders of that bitter time. Which really wasn’t their fault. “Well,” he said again, “I guess I ought to visit my own mother more.”

He saw that for some reason, the comment pleased Elizabeth.

Elizabeth did not subscribe to the Sunday
Denver Post
—she preferred the
Rocky Mountain News
; their editorials tended to attack her for being too liberal—she supported sex education and free lunches in the schools, not necessarily in that order—and she said it was good to know what her opponents’ latest lies were. So Wager did not see Gargan’s article until he came in to work and found a clipping centered on his desk. Whoever put it there had circled the department’s public relations photograph of Wager in his uniform and scrawled, “Do You Know This Criminal?”

There were other photographs, too, a full-page spread with a yearbook picture of Julio, Aunt Louisa standing outside the church after the funeral and unaware of the camera, a shot of their house taken from across the street. But the story Gargan wrote dealt less with Aunt Louisa and her son than with the fact that Julio was the cousin of a Denver homicide detective.

TRAGEDY TANGLES POLICE WORK! Denver’s increasing violence is a daily routine for the members of its police department, but even one of its homicide detectives, dulled to the pain of others by long experience with death, could not escape feeling emotion when seventeen-year-old Julio Lucero was viciously gunned down Thursday evening as he returned home from the corner grocery store in the Barnum neighborhood by an unknown assailant or assailants who fled in an automobile after the shooting.

The youth, who attended West High School and is the son of Mrs. Louise Lucero, is also related to Detective Gabriel V. Wager of the Denver Police Department’s Homicide section. Although the case is officially being pursued by Homicide Detective Maurice Golding, Wager has stated his intention to participate in the search for his relative’s alleged killer or killers.

Chief Thomas Doyle, head of the Crimes Against Persons Division, which is the home of the Homicide section, has said that although the department has no established policy relating to cases being assigned to officers who happen to be relatives of victims of crime, perhaps the issue should be assessed to prevent undue exercise of police powers by any officer personally involved with a victim.

A longtime homicide detective, Wager is well known throughout the department for receiving occasional warnings for being short-tempered and occasionally overbearing in his relentless pursuit of alleged murderers, although his superiors have rated his work as acceptable. Chief Doyle stated that “The department would not want to compromise the legal standing of any case by having its investigator subject to personal bias of a nonprofessional nature.”

Detective Wager refused to be interviewed by this reporter, citing family grief as his grounds for non-cooperation. However, Detective Golding stated that efforts to solve the murder are proceeding apace and that progress was expected soon. The energetic and well-respected detective in his mid-thirties also stated that the police would appreciate any help from anyone who might have witnessed the death or who might have information about the killing. …