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  “I saw it.”

  “The reporter did a pretty good job, didn’t he? Maybe it’ll shake out some witness or something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah—well—listen. I just got a call from that reporter, Gargan’s his name. He wants to know what new stuff we have on the shooting. Has he talked to you anymore about the case?”

  “I don’t tell Gargan much of anything, Maury. And we didn’t talk about the case in the first place.”

  “He—ah—gave you a lot of space in that story he wrote. Like, you know, you’re the officer of record or something.”

  “That much I told him; that I wasn’t. I said he should talk to you.”

  “Yeah, well, he did. And he asked me all sorts of questions about you. About how you felt getting a cousin killed and what you were doing about it. Like if you were taking it personal, you know.”

  “I read the story.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope you didn’t mind my telling him. I didn’t know he was going to sort of focus on that.” Golding waited for Wager to tell him something more. When he didn’t Golding added, “Gargan’s a nice guy; he’s doing some more articles on city crime. But if he interviews you again, I don’t want to come out in the newspaper looking like a idiot, you know?”

  That would take some effort, but Wager kept that comment to himself. “I’m not sure what you’re telling me, Maury.”

  “Just if Gargan does come to you for any more information on the case, we make sure our stories check out together. You know, so we don’t tell him different things and sound like we don’t know our ass from our elbow on this.”

  “We’ll do it this way: It’s your case, you be the one to talk with Gargan.”

  “You sure that’s OK? After all, the Lucero kid was your cousin, and like Gargan says, that’s the human interest side of the story.”

  “Believe me, it will not hurt my feelings.”

  “That’s great, Gabe.” There was a brief pause, then Golding offered something in return. “Hey, did I tell you about this dentist I found up in Boulder—guy who practices holistic dentistry? It’s the latest in dental care. He says a person’s lifestyle choices affect dental health in a big way.”

  “All right. I’ll choose to brush my teeth after every meal.”

  “That’s not what this guy’s about. That’s important, sure, but this is your whole life—that’s what holistic means. The whole thing. He combines dental technology with folk medicine and orients your life to your teeth.”

  “To my teeth?”

  “Yeah! You ever consider how central to your well-being your teeth are? Even when you’re asleep. Ever grind your teeth in your sleep?”

  “Maury—”

  “I’m serious, Gabe. Do you?”

  “I don’t know—I’m asleep.”

  “There, see? You don’t even know whether you do or not. That’s a sign you don’t know how important teeth are to your entire holistic well-being.”

  “Golding—”

  “All right, all right. It’s your life. But you got to remember, Gabe, every moment you’re happy is a gift to the rest of humankind. And when you’re not happy, you take that gift away. You know what I mean?”

  “No. Good-bye.”

  He seemed to be hanging up on everybody this morning. Maybe, goddamn it if everybody would let him do his work, he would find some sweetness and light to give to the rest of humankind.

  But it wasn’t sweetness and light that was on his mind when Adamo from V & N finally returned his call. “You know Big Ron Tipton, Walt?”

  “I wish I didn’t. He kill somebody now?”

  “Not that I know of.” Wager explained about John Erle.

  “A territorial squabble?” Adamo knew the possibility was something to worry about. “Does Intelligence have anything on it?”

  “Nothing yet. You heard anything?”

  “No. Maybe that’s not why the kid was killed. I hope.”

  “I’d like some heat put on Big Ron—enough to make him want to talk to me.”

  “A little high-profile stuff be good enough? We’re wading through shit up to our chins right now. Won’t have a lot of time to develop anything much more than that for a couple of weeks.”

  “That’ll be fine, Walt. Just enough so he knows I wasn’t blowing smoke.”

  “You got it.” Adamo was still thinking gang war. “If you hear anything more about why that kid was killed, let me know, OK?”

  Wager promised he would.

  “High profile” was Walt’s shop talk for making an officer’s presence known to a suspect. It was a form of harassment usually just inside the law: park an obvious survey vehicle on the street near his house, cruise by favorite corners and addresses where he was known to do business, have the uniformed people stop him for jaywalking or littering, that kind of thing. That arranged, Wager checked the time and then took the elevator down to the basement garage where the duty cars waited. The senior counselor at Cole Middle School had finally located some of John Erle’s friends and promised to have them in his office over the noon hour for Wager to talk to.

  The building was a smaller version of Julio’s high school: three stories of brick, this time dark red, whose sprawling wings were surrounded by asphalt that once might have been lawns. The paved areas had that grimy, tired look given by a lot of wear over a lot of years, and in the corners the wind had blown trash into little piles that gave a slightly ominous feel. It was as if the ghosts of boys who had gathered there in packs before school or during PE were still waiting to jump an isolated kid. The unyielding brick and asphalt, the sense of isolated corners and empty corridors where dark things could happen, the rows and rows of square windows that seemed to mask staring eyes, all brought back a feeling Wager had forgotten, and he could almost see himself in that first year of junior high school, a skinny runt who despite his name wasn’t one of the Anglos, and despite his skin wasn’t one of the Hispanics. And in the fights between the two, he had ended up battling both. That hadn’t left much time for what he was supposed to be learning from books and classes, and looking back on it, he guessed that was another of the reasons he finally gave up on high school: that lost year when studies had been outweighed by survival. Not that he’d cared enough about schoolwork to try and make it up, but that’s what the rigidity and grayness of this soiled building reminded him of. And the memory made the swarm of open-mouthed adolescent faces that filled the hallway seem half-familiar; among the gabbling swagger of many of the boys and the self-contained alertness of the budding girls he saw faces he almost recognized, and lives he could almost read.

  He had a pretty good idea about the lives of the three kids sitting on hard chairs in the waiting room of the counselor’s office, too. They eyed him when he came in, a mixture of suspicion and curiosity half-masked by a show of worldly carelessness.

  “Gentlemen,” Wager nodded.

  Two nodded back. One just stared defensively.

  Wager knocked on the door whose plastic name plate said Mr. Hoyer. A voice said “Come in,” and Wager did. Hoyer was a large man whose skin glistened with its own blackness. His thick hand wrapped around Wager’s in a brief, strong grip, and he nodded to one of the chairs placed in front of the desk. “The three boys are waiting for you.”

  “I saw them. How well did you know Hocks?”

  The man’s forehead wrinkled in a shrug, and Wager noted the glint of a scar leading into the short, graying hair. There were a few more tiny cuts in the puffy flesh beneath his eyes, like an ex-boxer might have. “I didn’t have any official contact with him; he was doing all right in his schoolwork, I hear—one of the better students, in fact. But I did ask around, and”—another shrug—“he had some money coming from somewhere. You know, talking big, flashing it around. Lord knows he didn’t get much from his mama, so it’s probably like you suspected—he was working the street for somebody.”

  “Any names mentioned?”

  “Not to me. Maybe one of those
three out there know something.”

  “Anything you can tell me about them?”

  “They hung around with John here at school; I don’t know how tight they were away from here. In fact, from what I can learn John didn’t have too many close friends his own age. He seemed to hang around after school with an older crowd, which would go along with what you believe.”

  “Any place I can talk to them privately?”

  He hauled himself out of his creaking swivel chair. “Use this office—I got a class anyway.” He locked his desk drawer and filing cabinet and then opened the door to point a large finger at the nearest boy. “Go on in, Londe.” Hoyer turned back to Wager, speaking over Londe’s head. “I hope these boys can help you, Detective Wager. John Hocks didn’t deserve what happened to him—he never really had a chance.”

  Londe Straight was the boy’s name. It wasn’t the kid Wager wanted to start with, but the choice had been made; he was the one who had stared a challenge, and, slouching in the chair across from Wager’s, he kept it up. “I don’t have to tell you nothin’.”

  Straight was right; he was given a lot of protection from accessory-after-the-fact by the juvenile laws, which, Wager guessed, the lad knew as well as any judge or lawyer. It was an education but not exactly the kind the schools touted. “You know John Erle’s mother, don’t you? You’ve been over to their house, talked with Coley and Jeanette, right?”

  The bony shoulders beneath the loose-fitting plaid shirt rose and fell. He wore his cloth windbreaker tied by its sleeves around his hips. An LA Raiders baseball cap, its pirate popular with several gangs, was jammed into one of the soiled pockets. Students were forbidden to wear gang colors and clothes to school, but the principal couldn’t do much about what they wore coming and going home.

  “You think Mrs. Hocks was very happy about burying her son?”

  “Quit it!”

  “How about you? Would your mother be happy about burying you?”

  “Hey, man, we all got to die sometime!”

  “Yeah, but how about making it later than sooner? You heard what Mr. Hoyer said: John never had a chance.” Wager waited; in the building the final bell rang, and the traffic noises from the hall died away. “You think John Erle wanted to die? You think he didn’t give a shit about living another day?”

  “He talked the talk and he walked the walk. He knew what he was doing.”

  “And so that makes it all right for somebody to kill him.”

  “He knew what he was doing, man!”

  “What was he doing, Londe?”

  The boy’s thick lips shut tightly.

  “Did he tell you who he was working for?”

  Nothing.

  “Are you afraid of Big Ron?”

  “I ain’t afraid of nothin’!”

  “You’re afraid of talking to me.”

  “You a cop—nobody talks to cops.”

  Wager figured Londe was about Hocks’s age—thirteen, maybe going on fourteen. Eager to be away from childhood, hungry for the big adventures talked about by kids two, three years older who were cool, man. And those kids—despite all they did talk about—knew other things that were only excited whispers that stopped when Londe showed up. “Hocks is going to be dead a long time, Londe. He’s never coming back to see his mama and his sisters. Never.”

  The eyes blinked, and Wager saw a tiny tremor in the boy’s fist.

  “Only thirteen years of living—thirteen Christmases, thirteen candles on his birthday cake. And now he’s dead until the end of time. That sound fair to you?”

  “Man—!”

  “I want to know who killed him.”

  His answer came in a wrenched whisper, “I don’t know who done it!”

  “I’m not saying you do. But I can find out a lot sooner if I know all about John Erle—what he did on the streets, who he did it for.”

  “Who said he was doing anything on the streets!”

  Wager waited. A lot of people, including kids this age, once they started talking, had a hard time with silence.

  “Who said that, man?”

  Wager waited.

  “How long you going to sit there like that? I got to get to class!”

  “Was Hocks in the same class, Londe? How late you think he’s going to be?” Wager settled more comfortably against the hard angle of his chair. “And how much do you think he’d want his killer to get away with what he did?”

  “But I don’t know who killed him!”

  “Was Hocks selling?”

  Londe sighed. “’At’s what he say. I don’t know. He had him some money, though, and he was talking a lot more where that come from.”

  “Did he say who he was working for?”

  “Not right out, no. But he was hinting around about how he just might be in with Big Ron and all. You know, talking like he know more but we was too little to tell it to. And everybody knows what Big Ron does. Even you cops.” The boy’s lips twisted. “He pays off the cops to let him alone, like.”

  “You know this or you hear this?”

  A shrug. “He still in business, ain’t he?”

  “When did all this start to happen?”

  “Couple weeks before he was killed.” Londe’s brown eyes looked out the window. “I reckon he didn’t have much time to enjoy all that money.”

  “Do you know Big Ron?”

  “I seen him around. Everybody seen him on account of he can’t do no business without being seen. John Erle, he say you cops either getting paid off or you got to be dumber than Big Ron not to catch him.”

  “He thought Big Ron was dumb, did he?”

  “Man, he is dumb! I mean John Erle told me he almost can’t even write his own name! John Erle told me he have to read things for him because Big Ron can’t do it hisself.”

  “Did Big Ron send John into somebody else’s territory?”

  Londe looked at the worn carpet and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  He didn’t know the answers to the rest of Wager’s questions either, but what he’d said confirmed what Wager had been thinking. The other two boys, although more willing to help, couldn’t give any information about why Hocks would be shot. But what they did say filled out the picture of Hocks as a sharp kid with big dreams who suddenly had a lot of money to back up his bragging, enough to buy all the CDs and videos and clothes any of them wanted, and who acted both proud and secretive about where that money came from. So out of the time spent with the witnesses, Wager came away with a few more names, a clearer picture of the victim, and a rough idea of Hocks’s last few days of life. And the same questions that faced him with Julio’s murder: why and who?

  9

  IT WASN’T HIS case, and perhaps he should not have stopped by the DIA worksite. But Golding said he’d welcome any help he could get, so Wager decided to give him some. The decision wasn’t so much the happy gift to the rest of humankind that Golding wanted but the result of a telephone call from Wager’s mother. She asked about progress on Julio’s murder. She said she wasn’t nagging him, though neither of them believed that; she just wondered if there was any good news she could bring when she visited Louisa this evening. Wager didn’t have any, so she thanked him in a tone of voice that asked him why not.

  Danny Aragon drove a low-slung Chevrolet Belair old enough to belong to Wager’s father. Its rusty panels were held together by strips of duct tape and hope, and the license plates were the blue-and-red Collectors Car issue. That was a way owners of older vehicles got around the emissions inspection law. But Wager figured the clunker was the kid’s first automobile, because he stopped off at an auto parts store and even a car wash. Wager was mildly surprised to see the vehicle hold together under the pummeling brushes, but Aragon seemed happy, pulling to the side of the concrete apron to wipe the excess water off the patches of rust and primer paint before heading down I-25. Wager followed the gently smoking car to the Jefferson Park neighborhood and past blocks of two- and three-bedroom bungalows. Finally Aragon t
urned into a Taco Bell and parked. Between the bright poster-paint ads covering the plate-glass windows, Aragon spent a long time talking with one of the girls at the serving counter. Then he took a paper-wrapped meal to a vacant table. When he sat down, Wager went in after him.

  “Hello, Danny.” He slid into the molded plastic chair across the small table with its sprinkle of cheese and lettuce fragments.

  The youth’s eyes widened with surprise. “What you doing here, man!”

  “I followed you.” Wager glanced at the girl busily carting an armload of food to the drive-up window. She had large breasts and tightly curled blond hair that fought against a baseball cap. “Nice-looking girl. She your chunda?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes strayed to the kitchen area. “We’re, you know, planning on getting married.” He added, “Soon’s I get a real job and she finishes school. You say you followed me?”

  Wager nodded. “I got the feeling there was something you wanted to tell me about Julio, but didn’t want your friends out at DIA to know about.”

  The young man stared at Wager for a long moment and then dipped his face under the painted advertisement for a ninety-nine-cent taco special to search the street outside.

  “Nobody else tailed you,” said Wager. “I’ve been with you since DIA.”

  “You were behind me all that time?”

  “Checkers Auto Supply, Robowash, here.”

  “Man, I didn’t even know you were back there!”

  “You weren’t looking, were you?”

  “No, but—” He glanced out again.

  “You worried about something?”

  “No! I’m just, you know, surprised. …”

  “What’s your girl’s name?”

  “What? Oh—Lisa. Lisa Klovstad. Why?”

  “She’s a real pretty girl. You’re a lucky man.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” Danny smiled, a mixture of happiness and wonder, as if the life that had aged his face prematurely had for some reason decided to reward him with a miracle. “She’s something fine, man.”

  “Good luck to the both of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you tell Julio that you and Lisa are planning to get married?”