Angle of Attack Read online

  “Good God,” said Max. “That rolls trippingly off the tongue.”

  “Baird, why can’t you just tell us what the hell happened?”

  The lab tech glanced with surprise from Axton to Wager. “I did! That’s the medical description.”

  “Then why don’t you give us the civilian description, Fred?”

  In the short silence, a twang of country-and-Western radio music rose above the steady clatter of office machines and police frequencies from the busy Records Section down the hall. “It won’t be very goddamned scientific that way,” Baird said with disgust.

  “But it may be a hell of a lot clearer,” answered Max.

  Baird shrugged and put his glasses back on and blinked once or twice as if seeing the two detectives for the first time. “If that’s what you want. Say this pencil’s the path of the round.” He held the yellow shaft just under the left side of his chin. “It entered here and took off the back of his tongue and soft palate …” He lowered the pencil. “That’s part of the roof of your mouth.”

  “Come on, come on,” said Wager.

  “It went through the opening behind the nasal area and through the brain. The shot widened out in the brain and emerged near the top of the skull. Back here.” His hand patted a spot on the top of his head near the little tonsure of thinning hair.

  “The weapon used was a shotgun?” asked Wager.

  “Double-aught buck. The doc found seven of the pellets inside the brain and we found a few more in the alley. This supports the idea that he was killed right there. The lividity and rigor fit, too, so it’s pretty definite.”

  “A shotgun. That won’t help much,” said Max. “Smooth bores don’t leave much identification.”

  “Not without the shell; that’s right. We’re still looking around for evidence, but don’t keep your hopes up.” Baird pushed the photographs apart to find those that gave the long-range views of the crime site. “We couldn’t find any footprints or fingerprints that were worth a damn, except yours, Max. You left a beautiful set on this wall here.”

  “It’s when I took his wallet.”

  “Whatever. There were no tire tracks that meant anything, either; there’s too much vehicular traffic around the site during the day. So that’s the sum of it—about five pounds of nothing. No leads at all. We did take samples of the environment. Bring us a suspect and we’ll try to match his clothes to the environment.”

  “Sure,” said Wager. “A suspect. We couldn’t even find any eyewitnesses.”

  “You’ve been a great help, Fred.”

  “Always glad, Max.” Baird stood. “Next time, pick a better corpse. I’ll get the complete autopsy report up to you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Was the identification positive?” asked Wager.

  “Right. Fingerprints match the driver’s license applica­tion. It’s Frank Arnold Covino. Got his address?”

  Wager nodded and also stood. “Let’s get that over with,” he said to Max.

  The Covino address was on Quivas Street, a gently rundown neighborhood that once had been Italian and was now becoming Hispanic. One or two Italian restaurants still remained, the biggest being a rambling wooden house with a giant neon sign: “Pagliacci’s.” Half a block farther was a Mexican restaurant, and graffiti covered the cracked stucco walls of the remaining stores: “Chicano Power,” “Viva FALN,” and “Libre Puerto Rico.” Axton glanced at the sprayed slogans as they passed. “Did I tell you I’m taking bagpipe lessons?”

  “What the hell for?”

  “It’s part of my heritage—I’m a Scot.”

  Wager looked to see if he was joking, but the large face remained placid. “You going to wear one of those little dresses?”

  Axton winced. “It’s not a dress, Wager. It’s a kilt. And yes, I’m buying one. I had to order it from San Francisco.”

  “I hope you’ve got cute legs.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with ethnic pride! I like to see it—there should be more of it. I like the variety we’ve got in this city. Hell, you Chicanos are always talking up your Mexican roots, so there’s no reason why a Scot can’t. Or an Eskimo, or a Greek.”

  “I’m Hispano.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Plenty.”

  “There; see? I didn’t know that. If you took more interest in your cultural heritage, people would know the difference between Chicanos and Hispanos.”

  “I don’t give a damn whether they do or not.”

  “Well, I’m as proud to be a Scot as somebody else is to be Chicano. Highland, too.”

  There was a big difference between being something and saying you were something, and it seemed to Wager that these days everybody was claiming identification with some group or another. Maybe they needed it—even Max. But not Wager; he had discovered a long time ago that he held within himself all that he would ever need, and it kind of surprised him that someone as big as Axton felt the need for more identity.

  Finding the house number, Wager wordlessly slipped the car into a no-parking zone. In the nine or ten months he had been in homicide, he and Axton had gotten along better than Wager had expected. The big man was as steady as one of the mountains squatting on the western horizon, and Wager had begun to trust him. Axton put his trust in Wager, too. With time and care, it could turn out to be the kind of partnership every cop would like to have but too few did; though it would be all too easy to snuff out the understanding and trust necessary to it. That was something Wager wanted to keep in mind at times like this, when Axton struck him as a little bit weird. He turned off the car’s motor. “You ready for it?”

  “Nope,” said Axton. “But what choice do we have?”

  The old house was similar to the rest on the block, dark-red brick with a small front porch held up by square pillars of half brick and half white wood; a second floor was cramped under the sloping green roof, a low, flat dormer over the white trim of its window. The yard had fewer worn spots and more early crocuses along the foundation than did the ones on either side, and from somewhere around back came the thin crowing of a young rooster, a sound that Wager hadn’t heard in a long time. The lady who answered their knock was in her fifties, short, thick-bodied; beneath the cropped gray hair, her eyes were red-rimmed.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you the mother or a relative of Frank Arnold Covino?”

  “No. I’m a neighbor. Mrs. Covino’s inside.” She did not move from the doorway.

  Wager showed his identification and badge. “We need to ask Mrs. Covino some questions about her son.”

  “It’s a bad time.”

  “It’s never a good time, ma’am,” said Axton. “But the faster we can get our information, the better our chances are of finding the people that did it.”

  For a moment more, she didn’t move; then, “Come in.” She led them through the living room to a tiny formal parlor. On a shelf opposite the door was a small madonna with two red prayer candles at her feet. Three women sat on the maroon sofa; Mrs. Covino was apparently the one in the center. The thin light from the curtained window made the lines on her wide forehead and cheeks deeper, and her graying hair lay straight down her back, as it probably had since the telephone call early this morning. The pain in the room was so thick that Wager felt as if he were wading through a cold current, and like the crowing of the rooster, the feeling brought the distant memory of other parlors and other dead.

  “They’re policemen, Alice,” said the woman with the short hair.

  “Mrs. Covino? Can we talk to you?” asked Wager.

  The woman nodded silently, tugging the collar of her robe closer to her neck.

  “Do you have any idea who would want to do this?”

  Mrs. Covino’s broad face sagged and she pressed a wad of handkerchief under her nose to stifle the whining moan; it was a long two minutes before she could breathe evenly, her loud sighs gradually shuddering into long, labored breaths.

  “Tell them,” she said to no one. “Te
ll them he was a good boy. No trouble. Never.”

  One of the women on the sofa, younger than the others, stroked Mrs. Covino’s hand and glared at Wager. “Haven’t you people done enough to her through Gerry? Now you got to start on Frank, too?”

  “Gracie …” Mrs. Covino sucked another deep breath loud and flat past her stuffy nose.

  “Mrs. Covino’s daughter,” explained the woman with short hair. “Frank’s sister.”

  “Detective Wager, miss.”

  “Detective Axton. We’re sorry to have to be here, ma’am.”

  “Tell them we got some coffee, Gracie,” said Mrs. Covino. “Get these gentlemen a cup of coffee.”

  “I’ll do it, Grace. You stay here with your mother.” The fourth woman, silent until now, rose and went into the kitchen.

  “Can you tell us something about Frank, Mrs. Covino? Who some of his friends are? If he had any enemies? If there’s someone who might know why it happened?”

  “Why? I ask God in heaven why! There is no why! Tell them, Gracie—tell them he was a good boy and didn’t have no enemies!”

  “Alice …” The woman with short hair put an arm around Mrs. Covino’s curved and shaking shoulders. She, too, glared at the detectives; in her case, Wager felt, not because they were cops but because they were men, and men—sons, lovers, husbands—were the cause of the grief of womankind.

  “I’m all right.” Mrs. Covino dabbed at her eyes. “Frankie was the youngest. First Gerry, then Gracie, then him—Frankie. He had lots of friends. Everybody liked Frankie. Tell them about Frankie going to college, Gracie. Tell them about how he was studying electricity.”

  The young woman nodded. “At Metropolitan College downtown. He was a work-study student.”

  “Did he have any other jobs, Miss Covino?”

  “At Aztec Liquors, over on Federal.”

  “Tell them what Mr. Rosenbaum said, Gracie, about Frankie being such a good worker that he could own his own store someday. But he wanted to study electricity.”

  “Did he work days or nights?”

  “Afternoons,” said the young woman. “Sometimes nights or weekends, but Mama didn’t like that. She was afraid he’d get hurt in a holdup.”

  “Cream or sugar?” The woman from the kitchen held a tray of guest china out to them.

  “Neither, ma’am.” Wager took the flowered, fragile cup; his finger did not quite go through the small handle. Beside him, he heard Axton rattling the china softly, trying to figure out a way to pick up the cup politely in his large fingers.

  “Can you give us some names of his friends, ma’am?” asked Wager.

  Mrs. Covino let her daughter name eight or ten while she nodded and said, more to herself than to Wager, “I forget all his friends. He had so many friends.”

  Wager listed names and some addresses in his little green notebook. There were three that the mother said were her son’s best friends, so he penciled boxes around those.

  “Did Frank happen to tell you where he was going last night?”

  Again Mrs. Covino spoke to her daughter, as if otherwise she would not be able to speak at all. “To a movie with friends. He ate supper and he phoned one of his friends, didn’t he, Gracie? And then he just went out the front door like any other time .… He said, ‘Don’t wait up, Mom,’ and went out like always. And I didn’t wait up—God forgive me. Maybe if I’d waited up …”

  “Alice, it’s not your fault.”

  They sipped their coffee and studied their shoes until the wet, muffled explosions stopped, and then Wager asked, “Do you know who he might have gone with? Which movie he went to?”

  “No. It was on the phone. I didn’t listen,” she said weakly. “Oh, God, what could I do? What could I do?”

  “Is there a photograph that we could have to show people?” Axton asked the daughter. “We’ll copy it and get it right back to you, ma’am.”

  “There.” Mrs. Covino’s puffy eyes looked hungrily at the shelf of family pictures lined up against the dark wall near the madonna. “Gracie …”

  The girl brought it quickly, not looking at the high school graduation face that smiled out through the glass; with tight lips, she thrust it at Wager.

  “Did Frank have a car, ma’am?” he asked the girl.

  She described it, the mother adding, “He loved that car. Always, he bought something for it. Maybe that’s why! Maybe somebody wanted that car!”

  “That could be, ma’am,” said Wager. “We haven’t found it yet.” He tried to make the next question sound equally routine. “Did your son ever talk of knowing a Marco Scorvelli?”

  “God, no! Tell him, Gracie—I know who that is, and tell him that Frankie never knew that kind of man!”

  “My brother was good! Why do you want to say these things that aren’t true? It’s bad enough what you cops did to Gerry!”

  Axton leaned slightly forward, the dark, thickly padded chair creaking under his weight. “Would that be Gerald Edward Covino, miss? The one in Cañon City?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Gracie, Gracie,” said the mother wearily. “Not now; please, not today.”

  The young woman stood quickly. “You through with those cups?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” They set them gingerly on the tray and she left with the quick, stiff strides of anger.

  Mrs. Covino closed her eyes and rocked to and fro, talking in a low voice to no one in particular. “Some of it was Gerry’s fault. But not all. What can anybody do with kids? No father; you can’t pick their friends for them; you can’t be on them every minute of the day … Gerry wasn’t a bad boy. He was so afraid when they sent him to the reformatory that time. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘Mama, I don’t know if I’ll make it.’ But what could I do? They just took him. He was caught stealing a car—it was the first time, and he swore to me it wasn’t even his idea. It was the ones he ran around with. But they weren’t caught. They weren’t the ones sent to the reformatory. Almost a year, and when he came out, he wasn’t my Gerry any more. He wasn’t anybody’s anything any more.” The tears started again, as much for the living dead as for the newly dead.

  “Mama, they don’t want to hear that.” The daughter stood in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed tightly on her chest. “They got their files and their records. They know all about Gerry in their files.”

  “We know he has a second conviction,” Wager told her.

  “Sure! He ain’t Anglo, is he? That means guilty, right?” She glared at Wager, daring him to say no. “And don’t you go trying to make Frankie out like that. If Gerry did something wrong, it was because he never had a chance. Nobody gave him a break. But Frankie wasn’t that way. Now why don’t you two just go on out of here!”

  In their car, Wager pulled a very deep breath, then asked Max, “Well? What do you think?”

  “I sometimes think this is a shitty job.”

  There was nothing new in that. “Miss Gracie feels the same way.”

  “Yeah,” said Axton. “She and her people have inherited a lot of hatred. More than she knows how to get rid of.”

  “Maybe it’s a crutch. She’s as ugly as a goddam totem pole.”

  “For God’s sake, Gabe—these people have a right to feel resentment! Anybody would.”

  “They have better things to resent than us. They can try resenting the sons of bitches that bring us down on them.”

  “Maybe it’s not that easy. I mean, it’s her own brother in the pen, and cops helped put him there. Now another brother’s dead, and two cops come around making more implications. I’ll bet if some kid from Cherry Hills or the Polo Grounds steals a car, he won’t be sent to the reformatory. The judge will give him a tut-tut and a big bad frown. And a free ride home.”

  But Wager knew a lot of Hispanos who took everything that was thrown at them and never whined. They minded their own business, they worked hard, they moved up. And then they were envied and hated by people like Gracie, for whom hatred was l
ife because they could not leave old hurts behind. “They should both be sent up,” said Wager. “At least we got one of the little bastards.”

  Axton’s head wagged from side to side. “And these are your own people!”

  Wager almost replied. The angry words pushed against his clamped teeth to tell Axton that “his” people were cops and cops only. Not the criminals, not the civilians, not the goddamned activists who would rather see a cop than a hood lying in his own blood. But he did not say it. Fancy words and explanations and excuses were for the world’s lawyers, not its cops; cops had to do their duty, not just talk about it. “Well, right now, amigo, one of ‘my’ people is in the morgue. And I have a strong feeling that the rest of ‘my’ people either didn’t tell all or didn’t know all there was to tell us.”

  The large man squeaked some air between his teeth in a faint whistle. “Yeah. Kids sure as hell don’t tell their parents everything. God knows, I didn’t.”

  It could be that, Wager agreed. It wouldn’t be the first time that a parent didn’t know—or was willfully ignorant. It was Wager’s theory that a lot of parents didn’t have the guts to ask questions of their own kids. “Somebody has to go down to Cañon City and have a talk with Gerald.”

  Axton stretched and pushed his big frame against the seat. “You want to do that? I’ll start on this list of friends.”