“I don’t think that’s essential to the thrust of the story,” White said. “It confuses the issue.”
“Besides, it’s embarrassing,” said Sloan, stepping up, wiping his nose. To Lucas: “Rochester’s working it; and they’re bringing in an on-duty Highway Patrol guy and the Sheriff’s Department.”
IGNACE PUSHED THE BUTTON on the story, sending it on its way, and said to Lucas and Sloan, “You guys owe me big.”
“Bullshit. You’re about one inch from being busted as a material witness,” Sloan said. He sounded defensive.
Ignace smiled, calling the bluff: “So bust me. I might enjoy it.”
“You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Sloan said.
“What, you’d put me in some cell with some big faggot?”
Sloan shook his head. “No, we’d put you in a locked room by yourself with a toilet and a sink and let you sit there. It’d be like taking a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Duluth for three straight weeks. Except that the food would be better.”
“Fuck you,” Ignace said, linking his fingers together over his soft gut. “You owe me, and you know it. When you get this guy, I want a phone call. If you get him.”
“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll call, maybe we won’t.”
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER ten minutes, going over the story. Ignace gave Lucas a shortened transcript of the conversation, only the material covered in the story. Lucas told Stone that the state would subpoena Ignace’s shorthand notes. “Keep them safe.”
“We’ll probably fight the subpoena,” Stone said.
“Probably—but don’t lose the notes.”
OUT ON THE STREET, Sloan said, “Ruffe is a noxious little motherfucker,” and then, “Stand back, I’m gonna sneeze.”
Lucas stepped away, Sloan sneezed, and Lucas said, “One good thing—Pope’s staying in his home territory. He’s not off in some goddamn weird place where nobody’s seen the stories about him. He’s hiding out. That means somebody has seen him, whether or not they know it, and all we have to do is find the connection.”
“So now what?”
Lucas yawned and said, “I’m going over to the office to work the phones. I’ll put together a meeting in Rochester, tomorrow morning. Everybody I can find.”
Sloan looked at his watch: “It’s way late.”
“So I jerk a few people out of bed. Big deal. Uh—you personally might want to take some more pills.”
“No kiddin’. My face is coming off. What about the baseball bat?”
“We can run down to Mankato early, check on the bat, then over to Rochester. We gotta find this woman he’s looking at. That’s the thing: if he’s telling us the truth, we might not have a lot of time.”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t have anybody. I couldn’t deal with another woman like Larson.”
“Just . . . hold on, man,” Lucas said. “You’re going through a tough spot.”
“It’s all been tough,” Sloan said. “Now, it’s breaking me up.”
THE MAN WITH THE throaty whisper felt better after talking with Ignace; more complete. Talking about what he was doing actually helped him to think through it, to appreciate it. Though . . . what a weird fuckin’ name the guy had. Ruffe Ignace. Who’d name their kid something like that? Why not something decent, like Bob, or Roy? With a name like Ruffe, you were bound to grow up queer.
And it was nice to talk about Millie, even if just a little.
ONE THING MILLIE found out early was that sex in the shower sounded good in books but was less fun in real life. First of all, you were standing up, and you had to concentrate on not falling down. The way you did that was, you hung on the water faucet handles, and then just about the time you got a rhythm going, you pushed too hard on the cold handle and Mihovil got a shot of icy water down his back and his dick retracted like a snail in a shell. That wasn’t good.
Then there was the drowning issue. Oral sex always seemed like a possibility in a shower, but that meant you had to rely on nose breathing to keep you alive, and with water pouring down on you, that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
They tried it in Mihovil’s bathtub, but in a modern bathtub, there just wasn’t enough room, and Mihovil cracked his head so hard on the water faucet that he actually bled from the cut.
In either the shower or the tub, soap was a problem in a number of ways . . .
They tried it standing up in the bedroom, but that was almost as awkward as the shower—something usually went wrong at exactly the wrong time. The pumping action would produce rude noises, or Mihovil would fall out and they’d lose the rhythm, and once he ejaculated on the shag carpet in Millie’s bedroom, which had been amess. . .
There were issues.
THERE WERE ISSUES, but they also made a lot of progress. She found that she could actually learn to have an orgasm. She could link a little fantasy with a little reality, she could get Mihovil to behave in certain ways to increase the sense of fantasy, get the physical part to match the mental stuff, and Pop! It worked almost every time, after she learned how to do it.
Like this. They were doing it doggie style, had just gotten started, and Mihovil asked, “How often do you masturbate?”
She was embarrassed by the question. That seemed a little private, and if she said something like “Every night,” it might even seem to reflect on Mihovil’s own sexual efficacy (in her case) so she temporized and said, “Well, I guess, you know . . .”
“No, tell me,” he said. “You must (uh) do it all the time when you have no boyfriend.”
“I do it (grunt) sometimes,” she said. “I think it’s (um) natural . . . I guess.”
“Yes. It’s natural. I do it all the time. Sometimes (ah) when I’m watching football. Okay?”
“Okay.” But she was a little doubtful. Where was this going?
He cleared up that question right away: “Now. When we do it this way, it would work much better if you would just reach up and rub yourself a little, because I can hardly reach in there with my hands, and I know my cock doesn’t rub you the right way . . . so just reach up there . . .”
So she did.
THE BEST THING, they discovered, with research, was to start in the shower, and then get toweled off, and then race into the playroom and do all the stuff in the bed that you imagined doing in the shower, but you let the bed hold you up. Since you were squeaky clean, there really were no limitations. The icky factor essentially vanished. And you didn’t drown. And they only fell out of bed twice, which was actually, when you thought about it, pretty neat.
Falling out of bed, it felt so good . . .
11
THE MORNING WAS BRILLIANT, a bluebird sky with a breath of breeze from the south, and a lick of humid gulf air that meant there’d be thunderstorms in the afternoon.
Lucas woke at six, cleaned up, and went to the phones. Nordwall said he was moving people into the bean field even as they spoke; the Rochester chief of police said his guys had come up empty the night before. “You sure he was here?” the Rochester cop asked.
“Unless Ma Bell is lying to us,” Lucas said. “You got a place for us to get together?”
“Yup. We’re getting quite a few calls, too. The sheriff did some kind of District Six hot-line thing. You know where the government center is, downtown, right on the river? We’re gonna use the boardroom.”
“I know it. See you at ten. Get some coffee and doughnuts—the state will spring for it.”
“Jeez—no wonder the legislature is back in session.”
SLOAN SHOWED UP a few minutes after seven o’clock, dragging. He looked better than he had the night before, but only because he was standing in daylight. Lucas told him about Grant’s visit the night before and their talk about the possibility of a second man. “A second man?” Sloan wondered.
“Or a woman.”
“Could be a woman, I guess. Another nut. They had a problem at St. John’s with male and female patients getting together . . .”
“We h
ad a report on that: they keep the sexual predators away from the mixed-gender units,” Lucas said. “Charlie wouldn’t have met a woman there.”
“But what if he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a woman . . .”
They talked about inmates at St. John’s, about the phone call from Charlie Pope, and about Mike West, the missing schizophrenic, as they finished the coffee. Lucas had decided during the night that he wanted to talk to Pope’s mother, who lived in the town of Austin, south of Rochester.
“You’re better at talking to old ladies than I am,” Lucas said. “I thought as long as we were down there . . .”
“Yeah, sure.”
When they finished the coffee, Lucas stood at the kitchen sink and rinsed the cups and said, “You don’t look so good.”
“Ah, I took about four orange Nyquils. I oughta be okay,” Sloan said. He didn’t look okay: his eyes were rimmed in red, and he occasionally gurgled. He’d brought a box of Kleenex with him.
“Your call,” Lucas said.
“HOW ABOUT ‘BEAST OF BURDEN’?” Sloan asked, on the way out of town.
“That’s one too many Stones songs,” Lucas said. “Besides, what’s-her-name covered it, and I never liked the cover.”
“How about Def Leppard, ‘Rock of Ages’?”
“On the possible list, but down a way.”
“You know what you oughta do? You oughta make a worst song list from the rock era. That’s something nobody’s seen before.”
Lucas considered the possibilities for a second, then said, “Wouldn’t work. You’d play ‘American Pie,’ followed by ‘Vincent,’ and then any normal human being would throw the iPod out the window.”
THEY TOOK THE TRUCK, because the Porsche’s paint job didn’t like gravel, heading south again, down the four-lane to Mankato, through town, out to the Rice farm. They’d just gone through town when Weather called from London.
“You sound like you’re up,” she said.
“I just went through Mankato. I’ve been up since dawn.”
“Something broke!”
Lucas told her about it, and about Sloan figuring out a murder, and the press conference. She told him about revising the burns on the face of a little girl who was messing around with the white gas in her brother’s camp-stove set.
“At least we’re both staying busy,” Lucas said.
“What about the music list?”
“We were just talking about it. I’ve got about a million songs,” he said.
“You know, for a few more bucks . . .”
“That’s not the point. The point is the discipline. The best one hundred songs . . .”
“Have you considered ‘Waltz Two’ from the Jazz Suite by Shostakovich?” she asked.
He wasn’t sure whether she was joking; sometimes it was hard to tell. “Uh, no.”
“Well, I know you liked the music.”
Lucas smiled into the phone. “Weather, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I never heard of the thing.”
“You know, it was the theme music in Eyes Wide Shut, when what’s-her-face took her clothes off.”
He remembered. Clearly. “Ah . . . that was a nice piece.”
“I thought you’d remember . . .”
She said she missed him; he said that he missed her; Letty, their ward; and Sam, the kid; and even the housekeeper.
“Three more weeks,” she said. “This is great, but I gotta get back.”
WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the farm, they found two cop cars in the driveway, one of them just leaving. Lucas pulled onto the lawn and got out of the truck. Nordwall got out of the passenger side of the cop car that had been rolling down toward them.
“What happened?” Lucas asked, as they crunched toward each other on the gravel drive.
“Took about twenty minutes to find it,” the sheriff said, hitching up his uniform pants, looking back over his shoulder at the bean field. “You see the tape over there? Right in there . . . Right where Pope said it would be. And exactly what he said it would be—an aluminum baseball bat.”
“You already pick it up?”
“Yeah. We had our crime-scene guy photograph it, and he’s driving it up to your lab right now. He said there’s some hair stuck to the end of it, gotta be the kid’s, but we want to nail it down. We don’t want some smart-ass saying it was a practical joke.”
“It never felt like a joke,” Lucas said. They both looked out at the field with the tape strung over the bean plants, the cops tromping up and down the rows. Then, “You coming over to Rochester?”
“Yeah—but that’s not for a couple hours. I gotta stop back at the house. I haven’t had breakfast yet.” A man who didn’t miss many meals.
“You see the paper?”
“Yes. Pope scares the shit out of me,” Nordwall said. “I told my guys to shoot first, ask questions later.”
“See you in Rochester.”
THEY CUT CROSS-COUNTRY; the trip took an hour. They rolled down a long hill, the towers of the Mayo Clinic in the distance. Sloan sniffed and said, “Look at the fuckin’ golf courses; just like a town full of doctors.”
“Bigot.”
“Ruin a perfectly good cornfield,” he said. “What do you want to do? We got some time.”
“Let’s look at that pay phone. Maybe we can shake something loose.”
“Like what?”
“Security camera?”
“Yeah, right,” Sloan said. “Fuckin’ waste of time.”
“Hey, something could happen.”
“And Snow White might come over to my house and sit on my face,” Sloan said. His voice was nasal, stuffed.
“Okay. So let’s sit around with some cops and drink coffee and talk about pensions.”
Sloan sighed, pulled out a sheet of Kleenex, and blew into it. Lucas winced. “Okay,” Sloan said. “We look at the phone. And don’t look like you’re trying to crawl out the side window.”
ROCHESTER WAS DOMINATED economically and socially by the Mayo Clinic; but there was still a piece of the old downtown stuck to the south side of the hospital district—exfoliating brick and patched concrete block, halfhearted attempts at rehab, streets emptier than they should be in a town jammed with cars; streets from an Edward Hopper painting.
The phone was on a wall of an out-of-business gas station, the only outside phone they’d seen in the city. “Must’ve known where the phone was,” Lucas said. He pulled into the parking area and killed the engine.
“Probably a doc at the Mayo,” Sloan said. “Most docs are a little whacko.” The words were just out of his mouth when he remembered that he was talking to the husband of a surgeon. “I hope you took offense at that.”
“I didn’t,” Lucas said. “I tend to agree.”
They got out of the truck and looked up and down the street. “Two slim possibilities,” Sloan said. “The grocery store or the bookstore. Take your choice.”
“I’ll take the bookstore,” Lucas said.
“Maybe they got some poetry,” Sloan said. He looked across the street toward the grocery. “Park’s Grocery. With any luck, Park is a Korean. They tend to stay open late.”
SLOAN WALKED ACROSS the traffic-free street; Lucas headed down the sidewalk toward Krim’s Rare and Used Books. The store occupied a twenty-foot-wide retail space with a single large window and a door to the side. The window was rimed with dust and showed two dozen fading hardback covers under an arc of hand-painted black letters: KRIM’S: THE COLLECTOR’S PLACE.
An overhead bell tinkled when Lucas went through the door, and he was hit by the odor of paper mold: not unpleasant, he thought, if you liked books.
Inside, two men huddled together over a book that sat squarely on the counter between them. The book’s dust jacket was carefully covered with protective cellophane; collectors did that, Lucas knew.
“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter was overweight, blond, with smooth, ruddy cheeks. He filled a pink golf shirt as though he’d been poured i
nto it; squinted at, he resembled a strawberry milk shake.
“Are you the owner?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm-hmmm.” He nodded, friendly.
Lucas glanced at the second man, who was the physical opposite of the owner—reed thin with dark-plastic-rimmed glasses perched on a knife-edge nose, and under the nose, a mustache that looked like it had been sketched in with a pencil. He wore a seedy gray suit and yellow-brown shoes. A tie hung around his neck like a cleaning rag.
Lucas held up his ID: “I’m an investigator with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Do you have a security camera in here?”
The owner’s eyebrows arched, and he shook his head: “No. Not much to steal. Never had a break-in. What’s going on?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw the thin man casually lay his arm on top of the book that he and the owner had been looking at, then slip it off the counter and out of sight. “Just doing a check,” Lucas said. “What time do you close?”
“Five, usually?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, five o’clock. Nothing down here after five.”
“Okay . . .” Lucas stepped back toward the door, then paused. Never hurt to ask the question. “What was the book you were looking at when I came in . . . if I might ask?”
The thin man was nervous. “Just a thriller.” He flashed it up and down.
“Could I look at it?” Lucas asked. He put a little thug into his voice. “I like thrillers.”
“Uhhh . . .” The thin man glanced at the store owner, who shrugged. The thin man said, reluctantly, “I guess.”
He handed over the book: Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met O. “I read this guy,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Block’s name. “Who’s O?” He flipped through the book: Was there something hidden inside?
As he did it, there was a quick intake of breath by the thin man, who said, “Please . . . you’ll break the binding. That’ll cut the value in half.”