Booked to die

I went through the coat pockets, then the vest. In the pants I found two receipts from a 7-Eleven store.

“Are these your receipts?” I asked.

Jackson looked at them and shook his head. “Must be something he left in there.”

I showed them to Hennessey. “No telling which store,” Neal said “Must be hundreds of ‘em in Denver.”

Suddenly Jackson said, “It was on Madison Street. I remember it now, he went in that store late that night. He was hungry, he hadn’t had anything to eat in almost two days. He had been working about four hours and was feeling faint. He went out on the upper porch for some air. He saw the sign, 7-Eleven, about half a block away. It was the only place open that time of night. It was unusual that way—usually they don’t put those places in residential areas like that, but there it was… like the Lord had sent it just for him. He had two dollars in his pocket. So he walked up and got a soft drink and a Hostess cake.”

I asked for his phone book. There was only one 7-Eleven on Madison Street. It was in the 1200s, only a few blocks away.

We found the house without much trouble after that. It was half a block north of the 7-Eleven, on the opposite side of the street. It was the only house in the block with an upper porch. The doors were open and there were people inside, pricing stuff for an estate sale. There were signs announcing that the sale would be this coming weekend. Inside were bookshelves. There were bookshelves in every room, all of them empty.

14

“Where’re your books?” I said from the open doorway.

The man looked up. “We don’t open till Saturday.”

“I’m just wondering where all your books went.”

“Come back Saturday and I’ll tell you.”

A smartass, I thought. I walked into the room and Hennessey came in behind me. I flashed my tin and said, “How about telling me now.”

He looked at the badge, unimpressed. “So you work for me. Big deal. Am I supposed to hyperventilate and lose control of my body functions because you can’t find a real job?”

“Look, pal, I’m not trying to impress you. I’m asking for your cooperation on a murder case.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s been killed?”

“How about letting me ask the questions.”

I knew it was a bad start. I meet a lot of characters like him, cop-haters from the word go, and I never handle them well.

“You can ask all you want,” he said. “There’s nothing that says I have to talk to you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“I should be. I’m a lawyer.”

Wonderful. So far I was batting a thousand.

“I don’t owe you bastards one goddamn thing,” he said. “I got a ticket coming over here this morning.”

Now the woman looked up. She was in her mid-thirties, five to ten years younger than the man. Pretty she’d be, in a cool dress, relaxing by a pool: pretty in the bitchy way of a young Bette Davis, mean and intelligent and all the more interesting because of that. Now she was dirty and hot, doing a job that must seem endless—cataloging and sifting and fi-nally putting a price tag on each of the hundreds of items of a man’s life.

“You have just made the acquaintance of Valentine Fletcher Ballard,” she said. “Charming, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to make of the two of them, didn’t know if they were playing it for laughs or if I had come in in the middle of something. The look he gave her seemed to say that they weren’t playing anything.

“You’d think the goddamn mayor of this goddamn city would have better things for the goddamn cops to do than sit in a speed trap with goddamn radar guns harassing the hell out of honest citizens,” he said.

“Don’t even try to talk to him,” the woman said. “You can’t talk to a fool.”

The guy went right on as if she hadn’t said a word. “Have you seen what they did on Montview? Lowered the goddamn speed limit all of a sudden to thirty miles an hour. It’s four lanes in there, for Christ’s sake, it ought to be fifty. You think the mayor gives a rat’s ass about safety? Don’t make me laugh. They bring ten cops in on fucking overtime just to write tickets and generate revenue. When you get your cost-of-living raise this year, copper, remember whose pocket it came out of and how you got it.”

I hate the term copper, but I couldn’t argue much. I’ve never liked the city’s use of cops that way. If you have to bring a cop in on overtime, let him do the legwork on a murder case or chase down a rapist. Let him walk the streets in a high-crime area, where his presence might mean something. Don’t put him in the bushes with a radar gun on a street that’s been deliberately underposted. Don’t make sneaks out of cops. The guy was right, people don’t like that, and that’s how cop-haters are born.