“Hmph,” Lucas grunted. He stood up, slipped his hands in his pockets and wandered over to Daniel’s wall of trophy photos. Jimmy Carter’s smiling face looked back at him. “We’re leaning the wrong way with the media. If Bekker hired a killer, the best handle we’ve got is the boyfriend. The witness . . .”
“Loverboy,” said Sloan.
“Loverboy,” said Lucas. “He’s got some kind of conscience, because he called and he wrote the letter. He could’ve walked out and we might never have suspected . . .”
“We would have known,” Swanson said. “The M.E. found that she’d had intercourse not too long before she was killed. And he did leave her to die.”
“Maybe he really thought she was dead,” Lucas said.
“Anyway, he’s got some kind of conscience. We ought to make a public appeal to him. TV, the papers. That does two things: it might bring him out of the woodwork, and it might put pressure on the killer, or Bekker, to make a move.”
“No other options?” asked Daniel.
“Not if you want to catch the guy,” Lucas said. “We could let it go: I’d say right now that the chance of convicting Bekker is about zero. We’ll only get him one way—the witness has to identify the killer and the killer has got to give us Bekker on a plea bargain.”
“I hate to let it go,” Daniel said. “Our fuckin’ clearance rate . . .”
“So we get the TV people in here,” Lucas said.
“Let’s give it another twenty-four hours,” Daniel said. “We can talk again tomorrow night.”
Lucas shook his head. “No. You need to think about it overnight, ’cause if we’re going to do it, we got to do it quick. Tomorrow’d be best, early enough for the early evening news. Before this boyfriend, whoever he is, gets his head set in concrete. You should say flatly that we don’t believe the boyfriend did the killing, that we need all the help we can get. That we need him to come in, that we’ll get him a lawyer. That if he didn’t murder the woman, we’ll offer him immunity—maybe you can get the county attorney in on this angle. And that if he still doesn’t think he can come in, we need him to communicate with us somehow. Send us letters with more detail. Cut out pictures from magazines, people who most look like the killer. Do drawings, if he can. Maybe we can get the papers to print identikit drawings, have him pick the best ones, change them until they’re more like the killer.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“And we watch Bekker. If we make a heavy-duty appeal to the boyfriend and if Bekker really did buy the hit, he’ll get nervous. Maybe he’ll give us a break,” Lucas said.
“All right. I’ll think about it. See me tomorrow.”
“We gotta move,” Lucas urged, but Daniel waved him off.
“We’ll talk again tomorrow,” he said.
Lucas turned back to Jimmy Carter and inspected the former president’s tweed jacket. “If it’s Bekker who did it, or hired it, if he’s the iceman Sloan thinks he is . . .”
“Yeah?” Daniel was fiddling with his cigar, watching him from behind the desk.
“We better find Loverboy before Bekker does,” Lucas said.
CHAPTER
5
The evening sky shaded from crimson to ultramarine and finally to a flat gray; Lucas lived in the middle of the metro area, and the sky never quite got dark. Across the street, joggers came and went on the river path, stylish in their phosphorescent workout suits, flashing Day-Glo green and pink. Some wore headsets, running to rock. Beyond them, on the other side of the Mississippi, the orange sodium-vapor streetlights winked on as a grid set, followed by a sprinkling of bluer house lights.
When the lights came on across the river, Lucas pulled the window shade and forced himself back to the game. He worked doggedly, without inspiration, laying out the story for the programmer. A long ribbon of computer paper flowed across the library table, in and out of the puddle of light around his hands. With a flowchart template and a number-two pencil, he blocked out the branches of Druid’s Pursuit. He had once thought that he might learn to program, himself. Had, in fact, taken a community college course in Pascal and even dipped into C. But programming bored him, so he hired a kid to do it. He laid down the stories with the myriad jumps and branches, and the kid wrote the code.
The kid programmer had no obvious computer-freak personality flaws. He wore a letter jacket with a letter and told Lucas simply that he’d gotten it in wrestling. He could do chin-ups with his index fingers and sometimes brought a girlfriend along to help him.
Lucas, tongue in cheek, thought to ask him, Help you do what?, but he didn’t. Both kids came from Catholic colleges in the neighborhood and needed a cheap, private space. Lucas tried to leave them alone.
And maybe she was helping him. The work got done.
Lucas wrote games. Historical simulations played on boards, to begin with. Then, for the money, he began writing role-playing quest games of the Dungeons & Dragons genre.
One of his simulations, a Gettysburg, had become so complicated that he’d bought an IBM personal computer to figure times, points and military effects. The flexibility of the computer had impressed him—he could create effects not possible with a board, such as hidden troop movements and faulty military intelligence. With help from the kid, he’d moved the entire game to an IBM 386 clone. A computer database company in Missouri had gotten wind of the game, leased it from him, altered it and put it on line. On any given night, several dozen Civil War enthusiasts would be playing Gettysburg via modem, paying eight dollars an hour for the privilege. Lucas got two of the dollars.
Druid’s Pursuit was something else, a role-playing game with a computer serving as game master. The game was becoming complex . . . .
Lucas stopped to change discs in the CD player, switching Tom Waits’ Big Time for David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus, then settled back into his chair. After a moment, he put the programming template down and stared at the wall behind the desk. He kept it blank on purpose, for staring at.
Bekker was interesting. Lucas had felt the interest growing, watching it like a gardener watching a new plant, almost afraid to hope. He’d seen depression in other cops, but he’d always been skeptical. No more. The depression—an unfit word for what had happened to him—was so tangible that he imagined it as a dark beast, stalking him, off in the dark.
Lucas sat in the night, staring at his patch of wall, and the sickly smell of Stephanie’s funeral flowers came back, the quiet dampness of the private chapel, the drone of the minister, . . . all who loved this woman Stephanie . . .
“Dammit.” He was supposed to be concentrating on the game, but he couldn’t. He stood and took a turn around the room, the Sanctus chants banging around in his head. A manila folder caught his eye. The case file, copied by Sloan and left on his desk. He picked it up, flipped through it. Endless detail. Nobody knew what might or might not be useful, so they got it all. He read through it and was about to dump it back on the desk, when a line of the lab narrative caught his eye.
“Drain appeared to have been physically cleaned . . .”
The bedroom and the adjoining bath had been wiped, apparently by Loverboy, to eliminate fingerprints. That demonstrated an unusual coolness. But the drain? That was something else again. Lucas looked for returns on Stephanie Bekker’s bed but found nothing in the report. The lab report was signed by Robert Kjellstrom.
Lucas dug in his desk and found the internal police directory, looked up Kjellstrom’s phone number and called. Kjellstrom had to get out of bed to take the call.
“There’s nothing in the report on hair in the bed . . . .”
“That’s ’cause there wasn’t any,” Kjellstrom said.
“None?”
“Nope. The sheets were clean. They looked like they’d just been washed.”
“The report said Stephanie Bekker had just had intercourse . . . .”
“Not on those sheets,” Kjellstrom said.
• • •
Lucas finished with the
file and looked at his watch: ten o’clock. He walked back to the bedroom, changed from tennis shirt, slacks and loafers to a flannel shirt, jeans and boots, pulled on a shoulder rig with his new Smith & Wesson double-action .45, and covered it with a fleece-lined Patagonia jacket.
The day had been good, but the nights were still nasty, cutting with the last claws of winter. Even the bad people stayed inside. He rolled the Porsche out of the garage, waited in the driveway until the garage door was firmly down, then headed north on Mississippi River Boulevard. At Summit Avenue he considered his options and finally drove out to Cretin Avenue, north to I-94 and then east, past downtown St. Paul to the eastern rim of the city. Three St. Paul cop cars were parked outside a supermarket that had a restaurant in the back. Lucas locked the Porsche and went inside.
“Jesus, look what the fuckin’ cat drug in,” said the oldest cop. He was in his late forties, burly, with a brush mustache going gray and gold-rimmed glasses. He sat in a booth with three other cops. Two more huddled over coffee cups in the next booth down.
“I thought you guys could use some guidance, so I drove right over,” Lucas said. A circular bar sat at the center of the restaurant floor, surrounded by swivel stools, with booths along the wall. Lucas took one of the stools and turned it to face the cops in the booth.
“We appreciate your concern,” said the cop with the mustache. Three of the four men in the booth were middle-aged and burly; the fourth was in his twenties, slender, and had tight blue eyes with prominent pink corners. The three older cops were drinking coffee. The younger one was eating French toast with sausage.
“This guy a cop?” the youngest one asked, a fork poised halfway to his mouth with a chunk of sausage. He was staring at Lucas’ jacket. “He’s carrying . . . .”
“Thank you, Sherlock,” an older cop said. He tipped his head at Lucas and said, “Lucas Davenport, he’s a detective lieutenant with Minneapolis.”
“He drives a Porsche about sixty miles an hour down Cretin Avenue at rush hour,” said another of the cops, grinning at Lucas over his coffee cup.
“Bullshit. I observe all St. Paul traffic ordinances,” Lucas said.
“Pardon me while I fart in disgust,” said the speed-trap cop. “It must’ve been somebody else’s Porsche I got a picture of on my radar about five-thirty Friday.”
Lucas grinned. “You must’ve startled me.”
“Right . . . You workin’ or what?”
“I’m looking for Poppy White,” Lucas said.
“Poppy?” The three older cops looked at each other, and one of them said, “I saw his car outside of Broobeck’s last night and a couple of nights last week. Red Olds, last year’s. If he’s not there, Broobeck might know where he is.”
Lucas stayed to talk for a few minutes, then hopped off the stool. “Thanks for the word on Poppy,” he said.
“Hey, Davenport, if you’re gonna shoot the sonofabitch, could you wait until after the shift change . . . ?”
A red Olds was parked under the neon bowling pin at Broobeck’s. Lucas stepped inside, looked down toward the lanes. Only two were being used, by a group of young couples. Three people sat at the bar, but none of them was Poppy. The bartender wore a paper hat and chewed a toothpick. He nodded when Lucas walked up.
“I’m looking for Poppy.”
“He’s here somewhere, maybe back in the can.”
Lucas went to the men’s restroom, stuck his head inside. He could see a pair of Wellington boots under one of the stall doors and called, “Poppy?”
“Yeah?”
“Lucas Davenport. I’ll wait at the bar.”
“Get a booth.”
Lucas got a booth and a beer, and a minute later Poppy appeared, holding wet hands away from his chest.
“You need some towels back there,” he complained to the bartender. The man pushed him a stack of napkins. Poppy dried his hands, got a beer and came over to Lucas. He was too heavy, in his middle fifties, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt under a leather jacket. His iron-gray hair was cut in a Korean War flattop. A good man with a saw and a torch, he could chop a stolen Porsche into spare parts in an hour.
“What’s going on?” he asked, as he slid into the booth.
“You need a starter motor?”
“No. I’m looking for somebody with new money. Somebody who might of hit a woman over in Minneapolis the other day.”
Poppy shook his head. “I know what you’re talkin’ about and I ain’t heard even a tinkle. The dopers are sweatin’ it, because the papers are saying a doper done it and they figure somebody’s got to fall.”
“But not a thing?”
“Not a thing, man. If somebody got paid, it wasn’t over on this side of town. You sure it was a white guy? I don’t know about the coloreds anymore.”
He was looking for a white guy. That’s the way it went: whites hired whites, blacks hired blacks. Equal-opportunity bigotry, even in murder. There were other reasons, too. In that neighborhood, a black guy would be noticed.
He left Poppy at the bowling alley and headed west to Minneapolis, touched a gay bar on Hennepin Avenue, two more joints on Lake Street and finally, having learned nothing, woke up a fence who lived in the quiet suburban town of Wayzata.
“I don’t know, Davenport, maybe just a freak. He wastes the woman, splits for Utah, spends the money buyin’ a ranch,” the fence said. They sat on a glassed-in porch overlooking a pond with cattails. The lights from another house reflected off the surface of the water, and Lucas could make out the dark shapes of a raft of ducks as they bobbed shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the pond. The fence was uncomfortable on a couch, in his pajamas, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, his wife sitting beside him in a bathrobe. She had pink plastic curlers in her hair and looked worried. She’d offered Lucas a lime mineral water, cold, and he rolled the bottle between his hands as they talked. “If I were you,” the fence said, “I’d check with Orville Proud.”
“Orville? I thought he was in the joint, down in Arizona or someplace,” Lucas said.
“Got out.” The fence picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. “Anyway, he’s been around for a week or so.”
“Is he setting up again?” He should have known. Proud had been in town for a week—he should have known.
“Yeah, I think so. Same old deal. He’s hurtin’ for cash. And you know the kind of contacts he’s got. Fuckin’ biker gangs and the muscle guys, the Nazis, everybody. So I says, ‘The word’s out that it might have been a hit, the husband brought somebody in.’ And he says, ‘That ain’t a good thing to be talking about, Frank.’ So I stopped talking about it.”
“Huh. You know where he is?”
“I don’t want none of this coming back,” the fence said. “Orville’s a little strange . . . .”
“Won’t be coming back,” Lucas assured him.
The fence looked at his watch. “Try room two twenty-one at the Loin. There’s a game.”
“Any guns?”
“You know Orville . . . .”
“Yeah, unfortunately. All right, Frank, I owe you.”
“ ’Preciate it. You still got that cabin up north?”
“Yeah . . .”
“I got some good deals coming on twenty-five horse Evinrudes.”
“Don’t push your luck,” Lucas said.
“Hey, Lieutenant . . .” Frank grinned, reaching for charm, and his teeth were not quite green.
The Loin was the Richard Coeur de Lion Lounge & Motel on the strip across from Minneapolis-St. Paul International. The place started straight, lost money for a few years, then was picked up by a more creative management out of Miami Beach. After that, it was called either the Dick or the Loin, but Loin won out. As a nickname, it was felt by the people who decided such things, “Loin” had more class. The better gamblers, slicker coke peddlers, prettier whores and less discriminating Viking football players populated the bar and, most nights, the rooms in the attached motel.
The ba
r was done in red velvet and dark wood with oval mirrors. There were two stuffed red foxes in the foyer, mounted on chunks of driftwood, on either side of a bad reproduction of The Blue Boy. Upstairs, the rooms had water beds and pornographic movies on cable, no extra charge.
Lucas walked through the lobby, nodded at the woman behind the desk, who smiled, almost as though she remembered checking him in, and walked up the steps to the single hallway that ran the length of the motel. Room 221 was the last one on the left. He stood outside the door for a moment, listening, then took his .45 out of the shoulder rig and stuck it under his belt in the small of his back. He knocked on the door and stepped back across the hall, where he could be seen through the peephole. The peephole got dark for a moment; then a voice said, “Who is it?”
“Lucas Davenport wants to see Orville.”
“No Orville here.”
“Tell him . . . .”
The eye left the peephole and a minute passed. Then the peephole got dark again and another voice said, “You alone?”
“Yeah. No problem.”
Orville Proud opened the door and looked down the hall.
“No problem?” he asked.
“I need to talk,” Lucas said, looking past Orville. Room 221 was a suite without beds. Seven men sat frozen around an octagonal table, their eyes like birds’ eyes, picking him up; cards on the table but no chips, ashtrays and bottles of mineral water on the table and the floor by their feet. Behind them, a short man in a hip-length leather coat sat on the heat register. He had a thin pointed beard under delicate gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He looked like Lenin, and he knew it. Ralph Nathan. Lucas put his hand on his hip, six inches from the butt of the .45.
“You’re gonna get your fuckin’ ass killed someday,” Orville said flatly. He stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. “What do you want?”
“I need to know if there’s been any talk about a hit on a woman in Minneapolis. Got herself beat to death, some people think her husband might have hired it. There’s a lot of heat coming down.”