Strip Search (6 page)

“She never told you he tried anything with her?”

Two red patches rose on his cheekbones. “Hell no. He didn’t, either! Annette didn’t have to put up with that kind of crap from him or anybody! She was too good a dancer. She even got offers in Vegas—the Dunes, the Sahara—to dance in the reviews. That’s real big-time and that’s how good she was, man!”

“She got offers but she didn’t go?”

The anger died as quickly as it came, leaving his pale eyes wide and aching behind their thick lenses. “She said we were doing too good here—her business and mine. … We were making better money here, she said.”

“Better than she’d be paid in Vegas?”

He nodded and swallowed and tugged at the thin mustache. “You got to figure the cost of living there. They pay good, but it costs a lot, too.”

“You visited Vegas?”

“Every two or three months. Gamble a little, lay around the swimming pool and get some sun. Annette liked to see the new dance routines.” He stared at the plumed figure on the wall. “She liked the costumes, too. She got ideas for her own routines from watching the reviews.”

“How’d you meet your wife, Mr. Sheldon?”

“Meet her?” He didn’t face Wager but talked to the photograph and smiled slightly with the memory. “She was tending bar at a place I used to go when I worked for Precision Metals. We just got to talking and hit it off. We liked the same things. … After awhile, I asked her out. I didn’t think she’d go with me, you know? I figured she thought I was just full of bar talk, and I’m not the best-looking guy in the world—believe me, I know that. Somebody was always hustling her, though, and she was tired of that trip. I didn’t; we just talked. Maybe that’s why. … Anyway, it took me a long time to get up the nerve to ask her out, and when I finally did, she just said ‘Sure’ like that and smiled, and I almost fell off my stool!”

“How long ago was this?”

“Three years and six months. We were married three years and four months.” He straightened one of the sympathy cards. “I figured out all the dates.”

“She wasn’t dancing then?”

“No. But she always wanted to be a dancer, ever since she was a kid. Her parents bought her lessons when she was little, and she was in all her high school shows—the musicals.” He glanced at Wager. “That’s what we talked about when we dated. I didn’t know anything about dancing then, but she was crazy about it, and I talked her into taking lessons again. At first for the exercise, you know, but she was good at it and liked it. The Cinnamon Club was my idea—she didn’t want to at first, but I told her, ‘Look, a professional dancer’s an entertainer, and it’s something you’ve wanted to do, now’s your chance.’ She could have been. …” He stopped talking, mouth squeezed in a hurt line and eyes shut against the rise of pain from within.

Wager strolled a step or two away and gazed out through the half-open delivery door at the graveled alley and the wire fence and the carefully mowed backyard beyond. In the center of the yard, someone had put up a birdbath; beside it a pink plaster flamingo stood on one leg and curled its neck toward the water. Around the base of the pedestal, a froth of bright petunias caught the morning light. At the far end of the yard, the white stucco wall of the house held metal awnings that shadowed the windows. The distance of that sunny yard from the little shrine behind Wager stretched far more than time or space could measure; it was a distance that made heavier the weariness of a long tour of duty, and now he felt the added drain of groping his way through this man’s defenses, one question at a time.

He took a deep breath and pushed back at the surge of weariness. “She worked at the Cinnamon Club a long time. Didn’t she ever talk of finding a dancing job somewhere else?”

“Sure. We talked a lot about moving to Vegas or L.A. There’s not much going on in Denver for dancers, and what there is, is pretty amateur.”

“But you stayed here.”

“You mean why? Like I said: the money.” Sheldon started wiping the bits and pieces of a vending machine drive. “She made good money at the Cinnamon Club and she was still learning more about dancing. We figured one, two more years at the most, and then we’d have enough saved up to try somewhere big.”

“You were working somewhere else when you met her? Precision Metals?”

“Did I say that? Yeah, right. We bought this place maybe a year ago. Annette invested a lot of her money in it—she said she wanted me to have a place of my own.” He looked around and sighed. “We figured we’d sell this place and go wherever.”

“The shop makes a good living?”

“Yeah. Annette did all the bookkeeping. She was real good with numbers and paperwork—she liked it. I really don’t know how much this place made last year. I haven’t felt like going over the books yet.”

Good money dancing, good money from the shop. They lived at a very good address, too—a condominium in a new tower near City Park. “We haven’t found any trace of her car yet.”

“I figured I’d hear from you if you did. It’s probably in Mexico by now.”

“Mr. Sheldon, what we think is that somebody in the club followed her out to her car and pulled a gun on her. Then forced her to go with him.”

He wiped again at the drive shaft. “I think so, too. The bastard. The dirty bastard!”

“Did she ever say anything about anyone at all who might have been after her? A regular customer? A stranger? Anyone at all?”

The anger drained away. “No … I mean, she had her regulars; all the dancers got fan clubs, you know? That’s show business. But they tip good and they mind their manners. She’d tell me about them and we’d sometimes laugh at them and even feel sorry for them. In bed, we’d talk about them and—ah—feel sorry for them, like.”

“You don’t know much about any of them, though?”

“No. Mr. Berg didn’t like me to go there too much—the customers don’t tip as much if they know the girls got husbands or boyfriends in the audience. But Annette never told me about anybody who was after her that way.” He looked up as if begging to be believed. “And she’d have told me. If anything like that happened, she’d have told me, so I could take care of it, you know?”

Just like she’d told him about Berg’s hiring interview, Wager guessed. “How, take care of it?”

His thin shoulders pulled back slightly. “Well, I’d tell them first, ‘Leave my wife alone.’ I mean, most people go there to enjoy the dancing, not to hassle the girls. If that didn’t work, I’d tell Mr. Berg. He don’t put up with stuff like that. He’d heave that dude out on his tail.”

“And you never had to do that to anyone?”

“No! Annette said she could take care of anything like that.” His eyes turned back to the picture of the girl standing with arms upraised and smile frozen. “She told me never to worry about anything like that, and I didn’t.”

Wager said carefully, “The medical evidence shows she was not sexually attacked before she was shot.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No. It looked that way. But she wasn’t.”

Sheldon leaned on the bench as if his stomach hurt. “I’m glad for that. I’m glad she didn’t have to go through that.”

“Yes. About how much money did Annette bring home each week, Mr. Sheldon?”

He came back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “How much? Oh—sometimes two thousand dollars a week. Any week she didn’t make fifteen hundred was a poor week for her. I told you, she was real popular. There was a bunch of Arabs used to come in sometimes and see how high they could stack twenty-dollar bills before she finished a dance.”

“What did you and your wife do with all that money?”

“Do with it?”

“Did you spend it? Save it? Invest it in something?”

“Well, ah, we spent a lot—the condo, that’s expensive. And the cars. Video stuff—working nights, you miss the good programs. Vacations—a little gambling in Vegas.” He looked around the cinder-block walls of the machine shop. “And a lot of it went into this business. This whole set of tools and machines … all new. …” He shook his head, “Like I said, Annette kept the books and I just haven’t had the heart to go over them yet.”

“Did you lend money to anyone who might not want to pay it back?”

“No,” he said definitely. “We never lent money. We saved some and we spent some. That’s it.” His voice rose. “And I don’t see what any of that’s got to do with some son of a bitch killing her. Why don’t you just go out and find what crazy son of a bitch followed her out of the club and killed her! Why don’t you do that instead of coming around here and bugging me with all these questions that don’t mean shit! Go on—go on and find out who it was, and leave me alone!”

T
HEY RODE THAT
night, and the next, and all the following week, too. The Sheldon file moved an inch or so toward the back of the Open drawer as later homicides, farther up the alphabet, crowded in. Some of those files were open-and-shut within an hour and moved to the Action drawer for legal disposition; others sat longer while the detectives methodically interviewed witnesses, gathered physical evidence, and put together cases for the cadre of young assistant DAs, who would face the accused in court. It was during busy times like these that Wager had an occasional image of himself as swimming just above an ocean floor and fingering the detritus that settled into the murky slime. High above him, the people who could afford to be near the light passed each other, surrounded by comfortable space that cushioned their jostle for money or power. Farther down, where things got darker and more crowded, the jostling wasn’t so polite or so well governed. There, when species bumped, they tore at one another for other reasons besides greed. It had more to do with reflexes or terror, or even the pleasure of destroying another living being. Below that was the turbulence of a continual struggle of one against the other, and against those above who pressed down. There, the occasional leviathan swam out of the gloom to feed when hungry, to awe when not. There, those smaller than the leviathan, but quicker, more savage, dipped to feed on the easier prey at the bottom. And there, too, was where Wager swam. While, beneath it all, the bits and pieces, tattered remnants of the struggle, spun slowly down to lie in the sludge and serve things that could only crawl to their dying feed.

By now, almost two weeks after her death, Annette Sheldon had become just another piece of jetsam on the floor of this sea, and other, more recent victims demanded more attention. There was the four-year-old boy who was beaten to death by his mother’s live-in; no confession yet, but good medical evidence that the bruises and the ripping loose of the child’s brain from its skull did not occur when he took a little tumble out of bed, as the mother claimed. There was the enraged shooting of two teenagers by a third, who was now known as Pepe the Pistol Aguilar. Five .25-caliber bullets into one corpse; reload; six into the other. Pepe the Pistol was still hiding in the shadowy corners of the city, but it was only a matter of time before one of the friends of those he had killed spotted him and made a quick, anonymous phone call to the police. There was the knife fight between two drifters along upper Larimer Street; one died from a severed artery—and, a witness swore, the shock of breaking his wine bottle. Wager and Axton picked up the other one ten minutes later, painted with his own blood and that of the victim. Most of that night’s tour was spent taking statements from the soberest witnesses and fending off the gabble of the drunkest. There was the killing and burning of an old woman by a neighbor’s son who had only been looking for some loose change in the lady’s bureau when she caught him. It wasn’t fair for that old lady to have more money than she knew what to do with and not give any to him—it wasn’t fair for her to start yelling like that when all he wanted was her fucking loose change. So he thumped her and then tried to burn the evidence, which wasn’t quite dead yet, and had shrieked the neighborhood awake. All these and more came into the night watch and were rotated through the division as each team picked up the cases in turn, and handed them on to the relief shift while the clock swung through another twenty-four hours. Except for the infrequent times when Wager’s eyes paused at the name on the manila folder in the Open drawer, Annette Sheldon was left farther behind. In the minds of the Homicide detectives, she had become another wait-and-see, another victim of a stranger-to-stranger murder whose solution, if it ever came, would depend on luck. Right now there was a stack of corpses in the morgue whose slayers were within easier reach of the Homicide team. And the team invested its time where the payoff was most likely.

Wager was already at his desk and checking the crime reports of the preceding watch when Axton, the latest mail dwarfed by his fist, came on duty. Max liked to deliver the letters and Wager let him; it was a kind of ritual for the big man. It helped make the homicide business routine and put some kind of psychic distance between the fact that Max and his family and friends were human, and the things he investigated had once been human, too.

“Ross tells me there’s another one.”

Wager looked up. Ross preferred to talk to Max because Wager had refused to join the police union. Max had joined—”We need some protection, too, Gabe”—but never urged it on Wager. But Ross was the union rep for the division and believed that if a cop wasn’t for the union, he was against it. To which Wager agreed: anything Ross was for, he was against. “Another what?”

“Exotic dancer.” Axton tossed Wager’s letters to him and began leafing through his own. “She’s not ours—she was found out in Adams County. But she lived and worked in Denver.”

Wager’s envelopes were always the kind that had postage meter franks instead of stamps, and those little plastic windows with his name preprinted on the easy-return, postage-paid acceptance card. He shoved them unopened off his desk into the circular file. “Let’s hear it.”

Axton thumbed through his letters. He liked to look at the pictures of all the prizes and free gifts he could win. “One shot in the back of the head, probably from a small-caliber handgun.” He tossed most of his mail after Wager’s and poured a cup of coffee from the stained Silex. “Got a dime?”

Wager rattled it into the dish with the coffee-splattered card that read PLEASE.