“An old pickup. Green, I think.”
“Hang on a minute,” Bo said. He went to his car, got the faxed photo of Luther Gallagher, and brought it back into the office. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
“No.”
“Never in the company of the man in number ten?”
“No. But then, I’m not here that much.”
Bo unlocked the door of Max Ableman’s room, stepped in, and turned on the light. It looked as if no one had ever been there. The bed was neatly made. Through the opened doorway to the bathroom, Bo saw that the towels hung perfectly folded. He walked to the closet. Empty. He went to his car and punched in Diana Ishimaru’s home phone number. She answered, sounding groggy from sleep.
“Diana, this is Bo. I need a fingerprint technician. Now.”
chapter
sixteen
Clean,” Rosie Mortenson said. “Not a print anywhere. Not even any residuals in the usual places. The bathroom fixtures, the lamp, the doorknobs, the jambs, the television. Christ, even the damn Gideon Bible. They’re all absolutely clean. What does that tell you, Bo?”
“If this were the Hilton, I’d say excellent housekeeping.” Bo shook his head. “He knew what he was doing.”
“I did pull a few prints off the headboard, but they were in a place where someone might grab hold in the throes of passion, if you know what I mean. I’ll run them, but don’t get your hopes up.”
“Thanks, Rosie.”
“I wish I could have been more help.”
“You came out at a god-awful hour, and what you found tells me a lot.”
The fingerprint technician began to pack up her gear. Diana Ishimaru stood in the doorway to room ten, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her jeans, her eyes on the carpeting. “Who is Max Ableman?” she asked, more to herself than to Bo.
“I’ve been asking myself that for a while,” Bo said.
“Do you have a photograph?”
“No. He probably had a picture taken for his hospital ID. I’ll get it first thing in the morning.”
“Let’s contact the Washington County sheriff’s office and have them put out an APB on the pickup.”
Bo said, “I’d like to talk to Luther Gallagher.”
Ishimaru glanced at her watch. “Not at this hour. Go on home and get some rest. You can check him out tomorrow.” Rosie Mortenson slipped past them and went to her car. Ishimaru took one final look at the empty room. “I admit this is getting curiouser and curiouser, Bo. But we still have no evidence that connects Ableman to Tom Jorgenson’s accident. For that matter, we still have no proof that a crime has been committed.”
“I’ll get the proof.”
“Get it tomorrow, Bo. Tonight, get some sleep.”
But Bo knew sleep was going to be impossible. There were too many unanswered questions, and he’d roll them over and over in his mind until the sun came up. So he took I-94 to the beltway, swung south of the Twin Cities, and picked up Minnesota 169 heading southwest toward St. Peter, where Luther Gallagher lived. As he drove out of the bubble of urban light, the country night closed in around him, and the number of stars in the sky seemed to multiply. Distant yard lights became beacons that indicated farmhouses set among broad fields. The moon lit the land, and the highway was a long white corridor between silvered stalks of corn and leafy soybeans. He was heading into the country that long ago had been the site of his salvation.
Bo’s memories of his father were vague and shadowy. A huge shape looming over him, dark against the sunlit slats of venetian blinds. The smell of diesel fuel on big hands. A ride once atop broad shoulders to watch a parade. Only bits and pieces, as if he were always looking at fragments of torn-up photographs.
His father left when Bo was five years old. Ran off, according to Bo’s mother, with some Frederick’s of Hollywood whore who had all her brains between her legs. Bo never understood why his father would leave. Even Bo recognized how attractive his mother was. She was pretty enough to be in the movies. The men she brought home were always telling her that.
When Bo was fourteen, they lived in a run-down apartment building in an old section of St. Paul known as Frogtown, within sight of the golden horses that topped the capitol. His mother worked nights as a cocktail waitress; days, she slept off her weariness or slept off the booze. Bo was left pretty much on his own. Sometimes he went to school, but often he did not. He spent a lot of time on the streets. Although he was small for his age, he had an attitude that made kids much larger steer clear of him. He had a juvenile record, nothing serious, mostly truancy, a couple of incidents of shoplifting, one charge of criminal trespass that was eventually dropped. He’d done other things, just never been caught. Several social workers had threatened to put him in a foster home, but the truth was, and they all knew it, there were kids much worse than Bo, and much worse off. His mother kept a roof over his head and food in the cupboards. Bo knew how to wash his own clothes (and hers), and how to cook his own meals (and hers).
Bo loved his mother. He also sometimes hated her. It wasn’t uncommon for him to leave the apartment in a rush of anger, aiming back over his shoulder a parting shot that usually went something like, I wish you were dead. They argued about everything. His truancy, her drinking. His friends, her boyfriends. His dreams, her realities. Sometimes as he headed out the door, she called him back suddenly and held his face between her hands. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?” she’d ask, as if she were seriously afraid. If it had been a good day, he’d answer Don’t be silly. If they’d argued, he was likely to say Don’t bet on it. Their fights could be verbally brutal, but until the last night he saw her alive she’d never laid a hand on him.
He was in a fight at school that day. He’d been talking to the girlfriend of a kid named Krakhauer, when Krakhauer gave him a hard shove from behind and slammed him headfirst into the lockers. Bo coldcocked the kid. It didn’t matter that Bo hadn’t started things. Krakhauer was the one bleeding all over the hallway floor when the vice principal showed up. Bo was suspended. No big deal. It always struck him as odd punishment, this banning him from school, because school was a place he’d just as soon avoid anyway.
His mother came home late that night, drunk, and not alone. Bo was awake, lying in his bed. He’d waited up, wanting to talk about the fight, the suspension. When he heard the other voice, he grew angry. Once things started on the other side of the thin wall that separated his bedroom from his mother’s, he got up and got dressed. As he was heading toward the front door, his mother came from her room.
“It’s one o’clock in the morning. Where the hell do you think you’re going?” She’d thrown on an old robe that she held closed over her breasts with the clutch of one hand. In the other hand, she held an empty gin bottle.
“Why?” Bo asked. “You want me to pick up some booze for you?”
“Don’t get smart with me.” Her hair, long and blonde and disheveled from what had been going on in the bedroom, lay fallen over one eye. She brushed it away with the back of the hand that held the empty bottle.
“I’m going out.” He gave a surly glance toward her closed bedroom door.
Her own eyes went there, too, and everything about her seemed to sag. She came close to him, and when she spoke again, she’d softened. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?”
Bo was sick to death of it. Sick to death of everything. And he said the cruelest thing he’d ever said to her. “He left you, you know, because you weren’t pretty enough.”
She drew back as if Bo had struck her. Then she let go her hold on the robe and slapped him. The robe fell open. Bo could see the stretch marks on her breasts and belly. “You will not speak to me that way,” she said in a choked voice. “I’m your mother, goddamn it.”
“That’s not my fault, goddamn it,” Bo threw back at her. He turned and stormed out the door.
It was a long way to the river, and Bo walked the whole distance in heated strides. The streets were empty. The season w
as autumn, the night cool and windy. All around him Bo heard the scrape of dead leaves on pavement. He made for a grove of cottonwood trees near the High Bridge where an old school bus sat wheel-less in tall grass. The bus smelled of urine and was full of litter, but it offered seclusion and a measure of protection, and kids often gathered there to get high and sometimes to crash. As he approached, he could see a glowing ember in the dark inside.
“Hey, man,” a voice called to him in a laid-back greeting.
“Otter, that you?”
“Halloween in a couple of weeks, Spider-Man. I thought maybe you were a goblin.” Otter laughed softly. He sat near the middle of the bus with his feet propped on the back of the seat in front of him. He was a tall kid, awkward-looking, but when he moved it was with a slow kind of grace that always put Bo in mind of a giraffe. “Late to be out, even for you.”
“You, too,” Bo said. He sat down across the aisle from Otter and accepted the joint his companion offered.
“The devil’s in my old man tonight. Figure I’m better off here until he cools down.”
Otter’s old man was infamous. A huge railroad worker, he was a brute who laid into his son with frightening regularity. Bo had often sat in the bus with Otter while his friend smoked or drank away the pain of a beating.
“So what’s up?” Otter asked.
They were hardly more than a stone’s throw from downtown St. Paul, and the lights of the city drizzled a neon illumination over the grove of cottonwoods and the bus within it. Bo could see Otter’s face, long and serene.
“Fight with my mom,” Bo replied.
“I wouldn’t mind fighting with your mom,” Otter said. The attractiveness of Bo’s mother was a constant subject of comment among Bo’s friends.
“She hit me,” Bo said. “She’s never hit me.”
“She hit you hard?”
“Doesn’t matter. She hit me.”
“It matters, believe me,” Otter said.
They were quiet for a while. Bo saw something big moving on the river. The trees made it difficult to see exactly what, and the wind through the branches covered any sound.
“Hear that?” Otter said
Bo heard only the wind and the leaves.
“I think it’s the dead getting restless.”
“What are you talking about?” Bo asked.
“I’ve been hearing it a lot tonight. With Halloween coming on, I figure all those dead folks are getting anxious for a little action.”
Otter was definitely stoned, probably drunk as well. The restless dead thing Bo decided to chalk up to altered consciousness.
Bo said, “I’m going to take a piss.”
He left the bus and walked out of the trees to the riverbank. The Mississippi was like a strip torn from the night sky and laid against the earth. Bo could see the glow in the pilothouse of a towboat that was nearing Harriet Island. Maybe that was the sound Otter had heard, the deep thrum of the engine as the towboat had passed. Bo watched the light until it disappeared beyond a bend in the river, and he imagined what it would be like to escape on a barge bound for New Orleans. He relieved himself in the grass on the riverbank, zipped up, and returned to the bus.
Otter offered him a swig from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Bo declined. “You going to spend the night?” he asked.
“Probably,” Otter replied. “You?”
“Naw. Think I’ll go back home.” He headed to the front of the bus. “Later,” he said.
“Later, Spider-Man,” Otter called after him.
It was going toward morning by the time Bo returned to the apartment in Frogtown. The walk had done him good. Probably the joint, too, and the mellow influence of Otter. When he stepped inside, the place was quiet. He could see that the door to his mother’s bedroom was slightly ajar. An open door usually meant that the man who’d come with her had done his thing and left. Bo went to the doorway and peeked in. He saw the bedding in a jumble and saw the stains, black in the darkened bedroom. He hit the light switch, and he saw the rest—a bloodied broken bottle, and his mother’s skin, once marred only by stretch marks, marred now, and forever in Bo’s memory, by the deep cut of glass.
All his life, Bo would wonder if other people had a moment that clearly divided their lives. There was everything before, and everything after, and between, only one unforgettable heartbeat. Standing at the door to his mother’s bedroom with his hand still on the light switch, Bo had his moment. It ended in a cry that brought the neighbors running.
They never found the man who murdered her. Bo hadn’t seen him nor had anyone else, and there was little for the police to go on. Bo wanted desperately to move back in time. He wanted to protect his mother, wanted never to have said the things he said, wanted never to have deserted her. He also wanted to find her murderer and to kill the bastard with his own hands.
He kept all this to himself, kept it in his heart, which had become a fist. He refused to talk about it to anyone, not his social worker, not the psychologist social services provided, not the foster parents he was sent to live with and from whom he eventually ran away, not even Otter who joined Bo after he, too, split from home. All the time that he and Otter, and later Egg and Pearl and Freak, lived together in the bus in the cottonwoods, Bo never once spoke about what his mother’s death meant to him. What would have been the point? They’d all been wounded. And Bo, like the others, believed that was just the way life was, harsh and unforgiving.
It was Annie Jorgenson who set him on the way to a different view of the world. He appeared before her in juvenile court after being arrested for petty theft. The cops had discovered the bus by the river and had taken Bo’s street family into custody. Bo was prepared for the worst. What he received was something far different, something he would be grateful for all his life. A second chance at growing up.
He was brought into her office and left alone with her. She wore reading glasses and slowly scanned the documents in front of her. She looked up at Bo with her intelligent blue eyes.
“Thief,” she said. “That’s what it says here. You’re a thief. Do you think that’s true?”
Bo shrugged. Let her do what she wanted, he didn’t care.
“I’m not asking if you stole things. We both know you did. I’m asking, do you think of yourself as a thief?”
The truth was that he didn’t. He saw himself as a provider, a protector. Stealing was the means to that end. He was about to offer her another shrug, then changed his mind. He shook his head.
“No,” she said, giving voice to his gesture. “As I understand it, you pretty much took care of—how many was it? four?—other runaways besides yourself.” She glanced down again at the documents in front of her. She nodded to herself, then she took off her glasses. “I see a lot of runaways, Bo. Most of them end up here because they’re being used in despicable ways by other people, usually adults. They’re prostitutes. They’re drug runners. They’re thieves in a den of thieves. In my view, you’ve done your best to keep four other kids out of the hands of the people who would use them that way, and out of my courtroom. I think that’s admirable.”
Bo tried to remember the last time an adult had praised him in such a way. What was this judge up to?
“These other kids, were they your friends?” she asked.
“Family,” Bo said.
“Family.” She nodded. “Family is important.” She folded her hands on her desk and leaned toward him. “Well, Bo, I have a couple of options. I can send you to the juvenile correctional facility at Red Wing. Your family there would be pushers, punks, bullies, some who go on to be murderers. Do you want that?”
No, he thought, but he gave no sign of it.
She locked him in her unwavering gaze. Her eyes were steady, not cold. Patient, not demanding. She seemed prepared to wait him out.
“No,” he finally said.
She sat back. “There’s a place I know that’s a good place. People I know who are good people. I’d like you to spend some time with them.” r />
“Why?” Bo asked.
“Because there are all kinds of families. I’d like you to experience a good one. If you give it a chance, you won’t be sorry, I promise.”
“Promises are easy,” Bo pointed out.
She nodded, granting him that. “I imagine you’ve been lied to a lot. I imagine people have been a pretty big disappointment to you. I’m a judge. That gives me some power. The promises I make, I’m able to keep. All you have to do is give me a chance, Bo, give these people a chance. We won’t fail you.”
It had been a long time since he had believed an adult, but the woman judge seemed sincere. More than that, she seemed strong in a good way. And what the hell. If things didn’t work out, he could always run.
“All right,” he said.
“A good decision, Bo,” she told him seriously. “I think you’re going to like them. Their name is Thorsen.”
Headlights dashing at him from behind yanked Bo from his memories. The vehicle rode his bumper awhile. Bo wondered why the damn thing didn’t pass him. Then it dropped back and followed at a safe, legal distance. Bo kept glancing at the headlights reflected in his rearview mirror, and he began to imagine them as a pair of glaring eyes watching him.
Thorsen, you need some coffee, he told himself.
He pulled into an all-night gas/convenience store on the outskirts of St. Peter, and the vehicle that had been behind him flew past on its way down Minnesota 169. He didn’t catch the make, but it certainly wasn’t the creature with eyes his tired brain had imagined. After he’d filled the gas tank, he got some coffee and asked the clerk for directions to the street where Luther Gallagher lived.
The address was near an industrial park. Gallagher’s house stood alone behind a wall of ragged lilac bushes. It was a two-story cadaver of a structure. Death by neglect, Bo thought. In the hard, brilliant moonlight, he could see peeling paint and window screens that carried long, open wounds. The yard was a mix of thin grass and hard bare dirt, reminding Bo of the coat of a distempered dog. He walked along a cracked and weedy sidewalk to the enclosed front porch. Five newspapers, still rolled in the cellophane bags in which they had been delivered, lay where they’d been tossed on the steps. Bo took out his penlight and checked the dates. Each was a Sunday edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. There was a mail slot beside the door. Bo mounted the steps and shined his penlight through the dirty porch window. Unopened mail lay in a jumble under the slot on the other side. He was tempted to resort to a little B and E but restrained himself. He returned to his car and headed back to St. Paul.