Endangered Species (13 page)

“Jesus, they can do better than that! Let me call them. I’ll get back to you.”

9/23

1431

W
AGER HAD GAMBLED
by telling Mallory about sending the X-rays and hands to the FBI lab. But the payoff could be an early positive identification. That would open the victim’s world of relatives, acquaintances, credit and bank accounts—the things that would fill out her life and possibly lead to her killer. The danger was that those things could also lead to motive, and motive could involve whatever it was the FBI was interested in. Mallory might get his positive ID and then go about his business, leaving Wager to wait the six weeks or more for the routine identification while the FBI worked its own side of the case.

That worry nagged at the back of Wager’s mind as he labored through the early afternoon, and it wasn’t relieved by a phone call from Stovepipe, who was upset when he learned what the bank officer had said.

“My father’s signature! That bastard skipped when I was ten years old, Gabe!”

“Or certification of his death.”

“But I don’t know if he’s dead or alive—I don’t even know where he is!”

“Look, Stovepipe, if you put anything up for collateral—house, car, dog, anything—it has to be yours. If it’s not, the people who do own it have to agree to it.”

“Aw, man, this is so much shit. My old man never made a payment on that place after he split. My mother paid it off—almost twenty goddamn years, she paid it off, one month at a fucking time. It’s hers!”

“That’s not what the papers say.”

A long silence, followed by a deep sigh. “All right. What the hell do I do now?”

“Maybe she can have him declared dead. Maybe she can claim desertion and get the property title cleared that way. It’s something a lawyer will have to tell you.”

“Lawyer—I went to the pen because of a fucking lawyer!”

There were also the aggravating circumstances of breaking and entering and a record of unauthorized withdrawals from banking institutions. But Wager let it pass. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Stovepipe.”

“Goddamn, Gabe, it was a hell of a lot easier to get my money the old way.”

“Maybe it won’t be so bad. Talk to a lawyer and see.”

“Lawyer,” he said, before he hung up. “Crap. Put them bastards in and let the inmates out, and the goddamn crime rate’d go down fifty percent.”

Max stopped at Wager’s desk to ask if he’d ever heard of Inez Suazo. “She’s supposed to be Flaco’s local squeeze. I’m on my way to see her—like to go along?”

It beat shuffling papers and counting the minutes between phone calls. Besides, it was obvious Max wanted him to. “How’d you find out about her?”

“I went back and leaned on Urbano—the owner of that bar where Flaco hangs out. He said Inez came in with him a few times. She’s a local girl; he knows her. Said she and Flaco looked like they were getting it on.”

Max drove. Suazo lived across the city-county line, in the small municipality of Mountain View. A few streets away, the spidery arches of the Lakeside Amusement Park’s roller coaster lifted above the trees hanging over blocks of tired-looking cottages. Suazo’s was a flat-roofed duplex behind a sagging picket fence that had once been white and once had a gate. The duplex had once been white too, but the paint had flaked away to leave crumbly red brick showing through in ragged patches like mange. A boy of about ten answered Max’s knock. He stayed behind the rusty screen door that opened directly to the sidewalk.

“Is Inez Suazo in, please?”

Over the boy’s shoulder, from a dim living room that looked too small for its sagging furniture, came the chatter of a televised cartoon adventure. “No, sir. She’s not home from work yet.”

“Can you tell me where she works?”

The boy hesitated, dark eyes wide with a confusion of surprise, worry, and hopeful trust.

Wager showed his badge, and the boy’s eyes got wider as he stared at it. “We’re police officers, son. We’d like to talk to her about some people she might know.”

The eyes blinked. “She works at her office. She’s a secretary.”

“Can you tell me where the office is?”

“Over on Federal. It’s an insurance office. I think it’s called the Colorado Agency or maybe the Columbine Agency.”

“What time does she usually get home?”

“Five-thirty. Sometimes six.”

Max glanced at his watch. It was a little after four. “Are you a relative of hers?”

“She’s my mom.”

“Did she leave you a phone number to call her?”

“Yes, sir. But she don’t like me to call her at work unless it’s real important.”

“Can you give us the number? We’ll call—it’s important.”

“I guess so. Just a minute, please.”

He came back and read it from a square of paper with a thumbtack hole in the edge. Wager copied it down. On their way back into Denver, Max said, “Nice kid.”

“Yeah.” Wager thought about latchkey children and working parents and single moms who tried to make a home for their kids and also have a social life of their own. He was glad he and Lorraine had not had any children. For one thing, it made the divorce easier and cleaner. More important, his would not be the lonely kid who had the television blaring to drive away the emptiness of the house.

They stopped at a pay phone, where Max called in for an address on the telephone number. Back in the car, he said, “It’s the Columbus Agency. Nine hundred block of Federal. Kid doesn’t even know the name of the place his mother works.”

It was a wooden cottage that had been moved to a commercial lot and converted into an insurance office. The steeply pitched roof and scalloped shingles that decorated the pinched second story reminded Wager of his old barrio, now disappeared into urban renewal. A brightly painted sign at the top of the porch said
COLUMBUS INSURANCE—AN INDEPENDENT AGENCY.
A slender Hispanic woman looked up as they entered; in her mid-twenties, she smiled without showing her teeth, which made her seem prim, but she had an attractive and friendly face.

“Are you Inez Suazo?” Max showed her his badge.

She stared at the badge. Then her face went white, and her mouth gaped open to spoil her looks. But it wasn’t her appearance she worried about. “Ramón! My son—something’s happened to him!”

“No, no—he’s all right, ma’am,” said Max. “We just stopped by your house and talked to him. He told us where you work.”

She gasped with relief, and her metal-and-leatherette chair creaked as she sagged back against it, eyes closed. “
Dios!
”

The other rooms in the cramped building seemed empty. Inez used what had been the living room, and her desk, computer station, and filing cabinets took up most of it. A doorway led to another room, converted into an inner office. It, too, had a desk and computer station, as well as a pair of comfortable chairs. Wager couldn’t see beyond that, but guessed a kitchen and bath made up the rest of the space. There would be one, maybe two rooms upstairs, jammed under the steep roof, with windows in the gable ends. It was possible that the house had been trucked from his old barrio to serve as the agency office.

“Didn’t mean to frighten you, ma’am.” Max smiled. “Is your boss here?”

Her color had come back. “No—he’s gone for the day. Is there something you need?”

Wager turned back from inspecting the offices. “I understand you and Flaco Martínez see a lot of each other.”

“Flaco?” Her fear had gone, but now caution replaced it. “I know him. Why?”

“We’re just looking for him, ma’am,” said Max. “We’d like to ask him a few questions.”

She weighed several things in her mind. “I don’t know where he is. I’m sorry.”

It was Wager’s turn. “We want to talk to him about killing Ray Moralez. Do you know anything about that?”

“… No. I really haven’t seen him for a while. We sort of stopped seeing each other a while back.”

Max asked, “Do you have any idea where he might be, Ms. Suazo?”

She shook her head, eyes on the papers stacked by her computer keyboard.

“You ever heard of section 40-8-105 of the Colorado Criminal Code?” Wager waited until she looked up, puzzled. “It tells what accessory to a crime means: ‘Any person is an accessory to a crime if with intent to hinder, delay, or prevent the discovery, detection, apprehension, prosecution, conviction, or punishment of another for the commission of a crime, he’—or she, Ms. Suazo—‘renders assistance to such person.’ It’s a class four felony. That means one to ten years, plus a fine of up to thirty thousand dollars. In your case, it could also mean turning Ramón over to his grandparents or to the state. Or to his father.” Wager leaned close so he could study the woman’s dark eyes. “Is your boyfriend worth that?”

“He’s not my boyfriend! I told you!” She glared at Wager, then added in a weaker voice, “He never was, really.”

“Ms. Suazo, Detective Wager’s only trying to explain just how serious it is to protect a suspect. Especially in a murder case. If you know anything that might help us—anything at all—it’s to your advantage to tell us.”

She wasn’t as pale as when she thought her son was hurt, but her color was sallow. “Flaco can be mean. He scared me. That’s why I stopped dating him.”

“Flaco won’t know we talked to you if you don’t tell him.” Max smiled again. “That’s a promise, ma’am.”

Suazo chewed at the dry flesh of her lower lip. The grimace showed badly crooked teeth, poor people’s teeth, and Wager understood why she liked to smile with her mouth closed. “He knows where I live. He knows about Ramón.”

“But he doesn’t know we’ve talked with you. And we’ll keep it that way.”

Wager added, “You want him hanging around you and Ramón for the rest of your life? Or do you want us to get rid of him for you?”

“Did he tell you anything about Ray Moralez, Ms. Suazo?”

The woman hesitated and then sighed. “No—not exactly. But one night he came by the house all wound up. Excited and jumpy, you know? He drank a lot—beer, water, anything—like he was real thirsty.” She shrugged. “He just acted kind of funny. It was kind of scary.”

“When was this?”

She shrugged again. “A week ago, I suppose.”

“What time?”

“Pretty late. One in the morning, maybe. He woke me up, knocking on the window.”

Moralez had last been seen alive around eight-thirty at night. The body temperature, lividity, and autopsy showed he was killed before midnight. “What’d he say?” Wager asked.

“Just that he’d done the big one. I asked, ‘Big what?’ and he didn’t say. He just smiled and asked if I had something to drink—he was really thirsty, he said.”

“He didn’t mention Moralez by name?”

“He didn’t mention anybody by name. He was … funny—different. Like I say, excited. That’s when he started to get rough.”

“What do you mean?”

Her voice lost some of its inflection, as if she were reporting something unpleasant that happened to someone else. “Sex. He drank a lot of beer and was getting drunk real fast. He started acting rough, and I wanted him to leave. He was getting noisy, you know? I didn’t want him to wake up Ramón. I wanted him to leave, so I told him it was my period. He started getting nasty—wanted me to give him head or do it up the
culo
. I got mad and told him to get out or I’d call the cops. Then he just laughed and called me a dumb bitch and walked out. That was the last time I saw him.”

It sounded to Wager as if she was telling the truth. If they had to build a circumstantial case against Flaco, the woman’s testimony might sound truthful to a jury too. But she didn’t have to know about that possibility yet—no sense losing her if she decided to run rather than show up in court. “How’d you meet Flaco?”

“In that bar. The Chihuahua. I go there sometimes—the bartender, George, we went to North High together.” She shrugged. “Flaco bought me a drink; one thing led to another.”

“Flaco and George pretty tight?”

“No, I don’t think so. George’s been there a long time; I think Flaco just started coming in.”

“He ever talk to you about his business?”

“Flaco? No. I asked him what he did. He said he worked around here and there. But he always had money.”

Max asked her about any friends Flaco might have introduced her to, and she mentioned Sol Atilano and Dave—she couldn’t remember his last name—and she didn’t know where either one lived. Wager asked if she’d ever seen Flaco with any members of the Gallos gang.

“I guess so, sometimes. Roy Quintana—Flaco told me Roy was a Gallos, but I never saw him wear colors. I don’t know much about the gangs—I don’t like them. George doesn’t let gang colors in his bar.”

She didn’t know where Roy Quintana lived, either, but Wager guessed Fullerton would have the name in his files. He asked the woman if she had any idea where Flaco might be hiding.

“We went to his place once. It’s over on Thirty-eighth.” She didn’t know the number but said she drove by it sometimes on the way to work. She told them where it was and what it looked like. Wager remembered the building from his years of patrolling the neighborhood, a brick row of sagging one-bedroom apartments whose doorways opened onto small pads of concrete one step up from the sidewalk.

“That’s the only place you know where he might be?”

She nodded. “Mostly we’d meet at the bar when I got off work.” She added, “Sometimes he’d come over to my place later—after Ramón was asleep.”

“What kind of car’s he drive?”

“A hot one—a white Z car. Calls it his baby.”

Driving up Federal Boulevard, Max asked, “You want to call for backup?”

Wager shook his head. “Waste of manpower. He’s probably long gone.”

They turned onto busy Thirty-eighth Avenue, and Wager told Max to stay in the left lane. In a couple of blocks they saw the row of single-story apartments, and Max waited for a break in the steady flow of cars. “Looks like a long dog kennel.”

The series of eight or ten doors with their flanking pairs of grimy windows made a crooked line a pace or two back from the sidewalk. Half the doors sagged open for air, but all they caught was traffic noise and fumes. A knot of kids hung like flies around one doorway, peering in, their voices shrill against the rush of cars. They didn’t notice Wager and Max park.