WAGER KNEW LITTLE would come of showing Crowell’s picture around Irving Street, but it had to be done. Besides, it was still too early in the morning to visit Mauro; he’d learned that yesterday. Parking near where the Crowell vehicle had been ticketed, he began knocking on doors. It took an hour; no one in any of the small homes or sagging row houses had ever seen the girl. That corroborated what Baird told him last night—that the steering wheel and the various handles and mirrors of her car had been wiped clean by someone, and that the only prints found on the trunk or in the back seat belonged to the victim.
He said “Thank you” at the final door and checked his watch. With time out for breakfast—or supper—he should reach the Botanic Gardens when Mauro was just starting work.
The heavyset man was walking slowly with a bag and trash-pick down the side of a walk when Wager arrived. He let Mauro, face to the ground, come close enough to be startled when he saw Wager’s legs planted in front of him.
“Goddamned!”
“Don’t be nervous, Nick. I just stopped by to say hello.”
The rusted iron needle leaped at a paper cup. “Why didn’t you just leave another goddamn note?”
“Because you have something to tell me.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. But you do.”
“I got nothing to say to you! I say to you leave me the hell alone!”
“Tell me what it is, and I’ll leave you alone. It’s going to happen sooner or later; do it now and save us both all this crap.”
The man’s barrel chest rose and fell and he twisted his head back and forth on its thick neck to glare along the path leading through tangles of bare rose branches. Wager watched the tip of the trash-pick twitch upward once, twice. He didn’t think Mauro would do it—but the graveyards were full of cops who didn’t think someone would do it. His hand slipped beneath his coat to the walnut handle of the Star PD holstered above his kidney. The man’s eyes caught Wager’s arm tucked behind him and a hard gleam of laughter came into them. “Now who’s nervous, piggy?”
“Maybe we both got reason to be.”
“Goddamn you, I didn’t kill nobody!”
“Then tell me what you did do.”
“I don’t have to tell you nothing. There’s laws against harassment, even from sons of bitches like you.”
“You’ll have to go to court to make those laws work, Mauro. I’d like that.”
Silence. Across an expanse of frost-killed grass two children shrieked and tumbled down the broad side of one of the geometrical slopes that led down to an empty patio at its bottom. The mother—a long tan coat and blue-and-white scarf—stood at the edge and called something after them. Behind Mauro, the diamonds of the conservatory roof split the sun into sparks of white glare.
“I’ll tell you a little story, Mauro, and you tell me if a prosecutor can make a case out of it. A woman’s stabbed to death during midday on October 19th. It probably takes place in an apartment—that could be anywhere, couldn’t it, Mauro? The killer then cuts off the woman’s head. My guess is he did it in a bathtub. It would be a messy job, but you can just wash out a bathtub, right? Hell, just turn on the shower and hose it down. I’ll bet you’ve hosed down a bathtub that way, haven’t you, Mauro? The guy leaves her until it’s dark. He comes back about midnight, maybe one o’clock, and puts the body in a plastic garbage bag. One of the black ones that everybody has. I bet you have some around your place, don’t you? Then—and here it could be the other way around—he dumps the body in an old car in a junkyard, and comes over here with the head. Probably that’s in a plastic bag, too, so it don’t drip all over; the lab people couldn’t find any splash marks anywhere, but the head still drained a little on the sand. You should have seen the sand, Mauro—it stuck together in a kind of wad from the stuff that came out of the neck. Some blood, some other stuff off the brain.” He looked at the man, who stood head down and legs spread like a steer clubbed between the eyes. “Pay attention, Nick—here’s where it gets exciting. The guy who brought the head into the conservatory had to have a key. There’s just no evidence that shows any other way to get inside. But everybody who has a key also has an alibi. Or almost everybody. There’s this one guy who says he went to the park at the time the woman was killed, and that he stayed home during the night the body was moved. But he was all alone, Nick; there’s nobody to back up his story. Not even the peanut seller remembers. Think about it: one means of entry, one key, one man with no alibi. And a hell of a lot of pressure on the D.A. to nail somebody—anybody—for the crime. What’s a prosecutor supposed to do, Nick? Especially if the prime suspect already has a record for violence.”
“I didn’t do nothing like that, goddamn you to hell!” The thick knuckles whitened on the wooden handle of the trash-pick. “I did not do that!”
“Everybody says they’re innocent, Nick. You’ve been inside—tell me how many innocent victims of justice are inside. And then tell me an ex-con’s going to get a break.”
The wide head, showing upright bristles and a scattering of gray, still faced the ground. It shook slowly back and forth. “No. I did not do that. No! I did not do that!”
Legs spraddled, he stood almost bending the wooden handle between his broad fists.
“Think how that prosecutor’s going to tell that story to some jury. Who do you think that jury’s going to believe?” He waited and tried not to look tired. He stood and waited. But the figure was motionless now. “I’ll see you again soon, Nick.”
“Again” was the next morning, Wednesday, fifteen days after the killing. Wager yawned and waited along the route that Mauro followed to work. When his rear-view mirror showed the slow figure approach with its slightly waddling stride, he opened the door. Mauro stopped to peer at the car’s back window; then the man started past almost at a trot.
“Good morning, Nick.”
“Get off my back!”
“It’s a public street. Even cops can be in public places just like innocent citizens. Maybe I’ll drop by Elton’s Place tonight—just to buy you a beer.” Wager smiled. “I’ll come in every night for a while. Then I’ll start missing a few. I’ll make it so whenever that door opens, you’ll look to see if it’s me. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every time that door opens, Nick.” Wager tried not to look as if he’d just finished another eight-hour shift; he tried to look happy at the thought of visiting Mauro every night. “Elton’s is a nice little bar, almost like home; I’ll like it there. If you don’t want to see me, you can stay in your room.”
“You bastard.” Mauro jabbed a thick finger at him. “I been doing some thinking. And you can’t lay a thing on me!”
“Tell me your thoughts, Nick.”
“I thought about you maybe having a case. And you ain’t. It’s all circumstantial, Wager—I learned some shit at Buena Vista, and all you got is circumstantial evidence. And there ain’t no motive, either! On a heavy charge, things like that work for a defendant, and you know it.”
The man was right. He had seen too many juries without the talangos to call a guilty bastard guilty unless the evidence was absolute. But more important was Wager’s feeling about Mauro—he could be dumb enough to kill, but he wasn’t dumb enough to put the head in the place where he worked. Yet he’d lied. “How about an accessory charge? If you know something about the killer and don’t tell the cops, you can get nailed for an accessory after the fact.”
The grinning face turned away from Wager’s eyes, and with the surge of returning worry Mauro’s shoulders sagged. “I didn’t think of that.”
“You’re in trouble. All you got to do is tell me what you know and you’re out of trouble.”
His voice was a whisper: “If I tell, I’m still in trouble.”
“What kind?”
“My job, goddamn you! In eight years I get a pension—I lose this job and I lose it all! It ain’t much to you, but it’s a lifetime to me—a whole lifetime!”
“You’re a state employee?”
“Yes.”
“When I take you into court, you’ll lose your job anyway. Accessory to murder is a felony charge. Felons don’t get state pensions.”
The wide shoulders sagged more and Wager heard a faint strangled sound deep in the man’s throat. But Mauro didn’t give up yet, and Wager, now that the end was in sight and the weariness was lifting from him, in a way liked that.
Mauro said, “If I tell you something, you bastard, will you keep me out of it?”
“You tell me. Maybe I can, maybe I can’t.”
“I want a deal, Wager. I want you to do it so I’m clean.”
“I’ll see. You did know Rebecca Crowell, didn’t you?”
Mauro whispered something.
“What?”
“Yes!”
“When?”
A deep sigh. Wager beckoned him to sit in the car. The heavy body slouched against the creaking seat and he stared through the windshield. “Maybe two months ago now. I didn’t know her name, but her and this guy got to talking with me at work. I guess they came to the gardens a few times because they knew what they wanted. But I never noticed them before they talked to me.”
“Who was the guy?”
“A photographer. I forget his name. They had this thing about shooting some pictures of her in the conservatory. It sounded like a bunch of shit to me—she said she was a plant freak, and he called her a—I don’t know—a ‘woods goddess’ or some crap. But he paid me a hundred bucks to borrow my key for one night. I was supposed to tell him when the place would be empty—no classes or meetings or things—then I would leave my key in a flowerbox where he could find it. Him and this girl would take the pictures, and put the key back for me to pick up the next day.”
“Sumner wouldn’t allow him to use the conservatory?”
“No. There’s this rule against professional photographers. When Sumner finds out, he’ll can me for sure. A whole goddamned lifetime for a shitty hundred bucks.”
“Was this for the night of the nineteenth?”
“No. Maybe a month before—six weeks, maybe. A while ago.”
“Was the key there the next morning?”
“Yeah.” Mauro stopped talking.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Is that it? Is that what you’ve been crapping your pants about?”
“It’s my job, Wager! If Sumner finds out that girl had something to do with the gardens, he’s going to want to know what. I’ll lose my goddamned job because of that!”
“No, you’ll lose it for a hundred bucks. What time did you pick up the key that morning?”
Mauro pulled himself back from wherever he’d been watching his pension fly away. “A little after I got to work. Around eleven.”
“How were you supposed to let this guy know what night to come?”
“He gave me a number to call.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No. But some secretary answered the phone. I think she said it was High Country something.”