Free Speak for the Dead by Rex Burns Page B

a target inside as well as outside the department. In fact, right now Wager could think of one detective who was suspected of being an animal.

CHAPTER 7
    T HE SHOOTING BEGAN a busy night. Following that came a burglary in progress, a disturbance call in the Curtis Park area, a request from a patrolman for procedural help in questioning a minor, and a known-dead report that turned out to be natural causes but still required paperwork to clear it from the division’s statistics. By the time Wager filed his end-of-tour reports, the Wednesday sun lay two hours high and heavy crosstown traffic choked the one-way streets that sliced up the old neighborhood surrounding the Crowell address. The apartment was in one of the last private homes on the block, the rest replaced either by rambling three-story apartments built in the 1930s for lung patients and later converted to general use, or by the newer concrete apartment towers that dwarfed the few trees left along the red stone curbs with their rusted iron rings for tying horses.
    As Wager crossed the creaking boards of the front porch, he met the tang of bacon and coffee and his stomach reminded him that he had again forgotten to eat during the eight-hour tour. In a rusty row beside the front door were tacked three old-fashioned mailboxes. Two of the slips of paper wedged in the boxes’ gritty slots were new; the other was yellow and brittle and bore, in faded purple ink, “Dove, G. N.” The Crowell name was not posted. Wager tried the curtained front door; it opened into a paneled box that had doors on each side and a dark flight of carpeted stairs leading up to a third door. The Dove apartment was number 1.
    He knocked for five minutes, shifting from one foot to another, smelling the indefinable odors that seeped from the oak panels. The old home was well built and very quiet except for occasional squeaks in the ceiling as someone above moved back and forth in a morning ritual. At last the spring lock clicked and a second bolt slid back; the door opened a crack to show two noses: one white and fleshy, at eye level; one dark and wet and growling, at knee level.
    “Who is it?”
    “Detective Wager, Denver Police. Are you the landlady here, ma’am?”
    “I might be. What is it you want?”
    “I’d like to ask some questions about a tenant of yours.”
    “Them Willcoxes? Is it them Willcoxes again? I told them last time I didn’t have to put up with them bringing the police in here. If that’s the kind of people they are, they can just move across the street. They don’t care who they rent to over there!”
    “It’s about Rebecca Jean Crowell, ma’am.”
    “Crowell? Crowell? She don’t live here no more.”
    “Can you tell me when she did live here?”
    “Maybe. Why you want to know? What’s she gone and done?”
    “She may be the victim of a homicide, lady. I want to find out.”
    The eye bulged to show a pale blue iris in a yellow and bloodshot ball. “Victim? Does that mean dead?”
    “Yes.” Wager clenched the corners of his mouth up into what he hoped was a friendly smile. He was tired, he was hungry, he did not want to waste time getting a duces tecum warrant that would give him the legal right to search the landlady’s records. “I want you to help us out. I want to know how long she lived here and where she might have moved.”
    “What you want and what you get’s two different things. What’s your name?”
    “Wager.”
    “You just wait a minute, Wager. I’m calling the police to see if you’re telling true.”
    “That’s a smart thing to do, lady.”
    “You think I don’t know that?” The door shut, the wet black nose at Wager’s knee giving a snort of quick pain.
    Two or three minutes later it cracked open again, the white nose poking out further than the black nose this time. “She lived here from May of 1974 to November of 1975.”
    “Do you know where she moved to?”
    “No. They come and go. It ain’t my business as long as