Strip Search (10 page)

“No, ma’am. It’s just a possibility. Did Angela ever mention the name Annette Sheldon or Shelly?”

“She’s a dancer?”

“Yes.”

She thought back and then shook her head. “Not that I remember. She didn’t really talk much about the other girls. Sometimes when they did something funny or when she was mad at one, like that one with the dumb name, what’s her name … Sugar Plum. God, what these girls call themselves nowadays.”

“What happened?”

“She’s a hustler—a prostitute—she’s always trying to pick up the big tippers, you know. Angela couldn’t stand her. Nobody can.”

“Did they fight?”

“Fight? You mean … ? No. Angela just talked about her sometimes. Mostly she wanted to forget work when she was home. I think she didn’t want Eddie to know what she did.” Mrs. Sanchez added quickly, “She wasn’t ashamed of it! Nor me either—honest work is good work, and she had herself and that little boy to look after.” Her voice dropped again. “My husband’s dead. I’m on Social Security.” She sighed and glanced at the toy truck. “Thank God she saved up some for Eddie. She didn’t spend much—I couldn’t of made it without her paying room and board, and I don’t know what I’m going to do now. Food prices … everything. …”

“Angela had a car?”

“Yes. One of them Caprices. Almost new and paid cash for it, and now the insurance company don’t want to make good—they want to see if it turns up before they pay off. Maybe you can help me with that? They’re quick enough to take your money, but when it comes time to pay … !”

“I don’t know that I can help, Mrs. Sanchez. But there’s an office for customer complaints in the state insurance division.” He asked for a telephone book and looked it up in the blue pages. “Here it is—‘consumer complaints.’ Give them a call and see what they can do.”

“Well, I guess that’s better than nothing—I’m a consumer and I got a complaint. But I bet they’re on the side of the big companies. Them agencies, they know what side their bread’s buttered on.” The corners of her mouth lifted and fell. “I appreciate your help, though, officer. God knows, that poor child will need what help he can get in this world.”

“Yes, ma’am. About how much did Angela make, Mrs. Sanchez?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed slightly and she stubbed out the cigarette in one of those ashtrays that was crusted in small hemispheres of glass. It looked to Wager like a wad of blisters. “Some weeks she’d do better than others.”

“She was paid every week?”

The gray-streaked head bobbed.

“Seventy? Eighty a night? Some of the girls told me they made as much as four hundred a week.”

“Yeah. Sometimes even better. And she didn’t throw it away like the rest of those girls. Easy come, easy go, most of those girls.”

“Eight hundred? A thousand a week?”

“I don’t think that much. I don’t know for sure. It was her money. She earned it. I’m her mother—she’d tell me sometimes if a week was good or bad. But it was her money and I didn’t stick my nose into it.”

“Did she have any debts?”

“She didn’t owe nobody nothing. She paid cash for everything. That TV”—she pointed to the large set where, now, the talk-show host was singing and grinning at the same time—”she bought that for my birthday and counted out the bills right into the salesman’s hand. Fifties and hundreds. You could have knocked him over with a feather.”

“And you don’t have any debts?”

“No—this house is mine. Food and heat and taxes, that’s all.”

“So Angela saved a lot. … In the bank?”

“Some.” She did not like this direction.

“Where else?” Wager finally had to spell it out. “Look, Mrs. Sanchez, did your daughter ever lend money to anyone? Did anyone owe her enough money or want money from her badly enough to kill her?”

“That’s what you think?”

“I don’t know what to think. I’m going over possibilities. Is that a possibility?”

“Don’t you bully me! I may be an old woman all alone with her only daughter dead and a poor little boy to raise, but you don’t have to bully me!”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. I don’t care how much Angela made. I just want to know what happened to the money in case it has something to do with her death.”

“She was killed by some loco—one of them men, that’s who killed her!” Then she said, “Certificates.”

“What’s that?”

“These—what do you call them—CDs. She’d save up five thousand and then go down and get a certificate. They pay good interest and they’re safe.”

“But she didn’t lend money to anyone? Not even to her boyfriend?”

“Brad? He never asked. Not that I know. Sometimes she’d pay for the dates, sometimes he would. But lending money”—her head wagged—”that’s business. She invested. ‘Jesus saves but Moses invests,’ we used to joke.”

“She didn’t invest in any business or real estate—nothing like that?”

“Certificates.”

Wager thanked her and left his card and sat for a long time in his car trying to see down the avenues of possibility that his questions had opened up. He couldn’t see very far, and there wasn’t much there anyway. It was as if he had his hand deep in a hole, but through the blackness and beyond sight his groping fingers could sense a presence. Not touch; not that definite. Rather, a mere thickening of the air, and even that might not be real.

Starting the car, he listened for a moment to the deep, muffled rumble of the engine. That was something you could really touch: a good car, a heavy engine, the lunge of a steering wheel guiding a car fast down an open road. It was something a hell of a lot more concrete than a vague hunch. But hunches were better than nothing, and on the way back to his apartment, he stopped at a pay phone to dial a number from his notes. After a lot of rings, Brad Uhlan answered groggily and Wager identified himself and said what he wanted.

“She was picked up one night after work?” Uhlan repeated.

“By someone with a dark blue or green Chevrolet. Late model.”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe a month. Did she go out with any other men, Mr. Uhlan?”

“I don’t think so. She’d have told me if she did—we were pretty sure, you know, about getting married someday; we didn’t have no secrets from each other. Maybe three weeks ago?”

“Could be. Why?”

“Well, I came by on my night off in my brother’s car. It’s a metallic green Caprice—’80. My truck was in the shop.”

Wager thanked him and crossed off the item that had been sitting expectantly in its blank space on a leaf of his notebook. Another hunch, another try, another dead end.

W
HEN
W
AGER REPORTED
for duty twenty minutes early, as usual, the stale air of midnight was stirred by a flutter of excitement. Devereaux, shirt open at the neck and tie loose, mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and looked sheepish. Ross, his partner, sat frowning with his arms crossed.

“What’s up?” Wager asked.

“Pepe the Pistol,” said Devereaux. “I almost got the little fucker.”

“Where is he now?”

“If we knew,” said Ross, “we’d be doing the paperwork on him, wouldn’t we?”

Devereaux dragged the handkerchief under his chin and down his neck. “Somebody called in, said he was over at his girlfriend’s house. We went by and spotted him and he lit out as soon as he saw the car. Ross drove across the goddamn lawn with the kid in the headlights. So he cut between two buildings in the project. The car couldn’t make it, so I went after him. I was that close!” He held his hands up a foot apart. “The little shit was climbing a fence and I got that close!”

“Armed?”

“He didn’t flash any iron. He was too busy running.” The handkerchief stopped under Devereaux’s chin as he remembered something. “But the pissant’s pistol hasn’t been found yet, has it?”

“No.” Wager grinned. “He probably had it in his hip pocket, waiting for you to grab him. Then he’d pump six shots in you. What’s his girlfriend say?”

“She wouldn’t answer the door and we didn’t have a warrant.” Devereaux stood and folded his handkerchief. “Ross figures the kid was timing his visits for the change of shift, so we were in the neighborhood early. But we didn’t know about the girlfriend’s house until the call came in. That close!”

“That’s real good thinking, Ross. Does the union demand extra pay for that?”

“Up yours, scab.” The dark-haired detective strode to the board and flipped his name slide to Off Duty. “It don’t take much to outthink a Mex.”

Wager grinned at the back disappearing rigidly toward the elevators. “Have a good day, Ross!”

“Aw, Gabe. Why do you say things like that?”

“Because it makes me feel good, Dev. Ross is one of life’s little pleasures.”

Devereaux went out shaking his head. “Good night, Gabe.”

Wager, starting his shift, half-listened to the radio sitting in its charger unit on his desk. The voices, alternating with the dispatcher’s, were coming from the housing project where Ross had called in the alert for Pepe the Pistol. But they wouldn’t have any luck tonight, Wager knew. The kid had found some hole in the tangle of dormitory-like buildings and was in it now, probably pissing one minute and laughing the next, trying to convince himself that he could outrun the cops forever. If the kid was smart, he’d head for LA or even Chicago. But he didn’t seem that smart. Or hadn’t been able to steal a car yet. Or maybe his mother just hadn’t been able to borrow enough money to send him on his way. Pepe wasn’t your triple-A credit risk. Still, it was unusually dumb to hang around like that, and Wager wondered idly why the kid did it.

At three minutes to midnight, Max came in with his handful of the day’s mail and dealt Wager’s out on the glass-topped desk.

“What’s new?”

He told him about Devereaux and Pepe the Pistol. “I also set up a meet with Mike Moffett for around one.”

“Moffett in Vice? What do we want with Vice?”

“Maybe he can tell us something we don’t know about the skin shops.”

Axton paused in his thumbing through the envelopes. “Annette’s been bothering you, has she?”

“Yeah.” Wager leaned back in the creaking swivel chair and tugged gently at a loose thread on a cuff button; the thread seemed to leap out and the button fell to the glass with a tiny click. “Damn.” He fished in the drawer for a paper clip to hold his sleeve together. “I talked to Sheldon again.”

Max looked up from a brightly colored sheet of paper that had pictures of Colorado mountain land for sale in Conejos County. A fisherman was smiling at a gigantic trout on his line, and the jumping fish was smiling back. Max could get a free gift if he would just drive over and look at the land. “And?”

“Sheldon’s hiding something.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I am.”

“Is that why you went after Ross?”

Devereaux must have said something to Max when he came in. “What’s that mean?”

“It means you get feisty when you can’t nail something down. Which,” he tossed the land offer into the trash, “is a hell of a lot of the time. No offense intended, partner.”

They met the Vice detectives at a White Spot café on the corner of Pearl and Colfax, near the lower end of the strip.

Moffett and his partner, Nolan, sat in their unmarked cruiser in the restaurant’s trash-littered parking lot. At the car window, half-bent with age and wearing what used to be a suit, an old black man grinned and pointed with his chin at something or someone across the crowded street under the lights of an adult-movie arcade. Moffett, behind the wheel, laughed back and the old man, his red-rimmed eyes slanting in Wager’s direction as they walked up, murmured something and slid away into the clusters of mostly young men and women drifting past the café.

“Hello, Max—Wager.”

He had noticed it before: most of the other officers called Axton by his first name and used only Wager’s last. He liked it that way—it gave him a little extra distance from everyone. “Wasn’t that Berry Juice Johnson?” Wager asked as they settled into the backseat. “I thought he was dead by now.”

“He’ll outlive all of us. He was telling me who he wants for his new main squeeze—LaBelle Brown. You know her?”

“I busted her once for dealing. She out again?”

“Out and working, but I don’t think she’s dealing. Not big, anyway.” He wagged a thumb toward the arcade. The woman, watching the automobile traffic out of the corner of her eye, strolled along the curb to the end of the block, swung slowly about with her white purse over her dark shoulder, and began walking back.

“Say hello for me,” said Wager. “I think she’s got fond memories.”

“You say hello,” grunted Moffett. “Last time I popped her, she about tore my head off.”

“It wasn’t his head she wanted,” laughed Nolan. “She was just too stoned to tell the difference.”

“Did you get a make on that rolling drugstore?” asked Max. “The one we spotted a couple weeks ago?”

“The dark van? Hell, we’ve been trying to nail that son of a bitch for six months. He sets up his meets ahead of time only with people he knows, and it all goes down in ten minutes. He’s pushing a lot of stuff, too. And getting bigger. If you see him again, use the telephone—he’s got a police-band scanner mounted in that rig.”

“Will do,” said Wager. “What can you tell us about the Cinnamon Club or Foxy Dick’s?”

Moffett turned his police radio down to a crackling mutter. “They’re your basic skin shops. I think Foxy Dick’s is a little harder place. The new guy at the Cinnamon Club—what’s his name?”

“Berg,” Axton said.

“Yeah, him. He thinks he’s putting on a class act.” Moffett spat out the window. “But they’re all alike: scum traps.”

“We had a victim out of the Cinnamon Club; she had a trace of cocaine.”

“Not to be surprised. Most of the girls have habits. Half the pushers on this side of town make runs every night to supply the girls. That’s why that guy in the black van’s moved in—it’s a good market.” Moffett tilted back over the seat to explain. “A cop walks into one of those places, Gabe, and a red light goes on behind the bar. You see half-a-dozen dealers and waitresses head for the back like the place was on fire.”

Nolan snorted a laugh. “When we want someone we stand outside the back door and send a couple uniforms in the front. It’s like picking grapes.”