"Okay."
"And if he gets closer to Minneapolis, call me. I'll leave the phone on. I'm probably gonna want to look at him this afternoon, wherever he is."
Marcy was out of the operating room and back in the recovery room. Tom Black was standing in the corridor outside the operating suite with a nurse; when Lucas and Del walked in, Black stepped toward them. "She came through it okay. They had a pretty good leak, but they stopped it, and everything else seems to be holding."
"But she's not awake."
"They're keeping her asleep. They want everything tying together before she wakes up and starts moving around."
They talked about that for a minute: the way Lucas had been tied down once when he got shot in the throat, and hadn't been able to move his head for three days; and about the pinking-shears incident, when Del's hips had been immobilized for two days. Then Del said, "I'm gonna go see this gal over at the BCA. See if the state's got anything on Rodriguez. What're you gonna do?"
Lucas looked at his watch. "I've got a date, God help me."
Catrin was sitting; in a back booth, facing the door, when Lucas arrived. He smiled when he saw her, and she nodded and then paid a lot of attention to picking up a cup of coffee and taking a sip.
"Hey." He slid into the booth on the opposite side and waved at a waitress.
"I hope I'm not tearing your day apart," she said. She'd dressed down this time, in jeans and a cornflower blue shirt that didn't seem to have a button—a subtle, outdoorsy peek-a-boo blouse. "I was watching the Alie'e thing on television, and it seems like people are going crazy."
Lucas nodded and tried to keep his eyes on her face. "It's worse than I've ever seen it. We've had some bad ones before, but this is nuts."
"Are you making any progress? Or can't you tell me?"
"If we were making progress, I might not be able to tell you, but since we aren't, I can tell you. We aren't."
The waitress came by, and they both ordered salads and coffee.
Then they spent a couple of minutes in dragging chitchat until Catrin said, "I called you up because you're the only person I can call up and talk to. I'm in pretty bad shape."
"You look… terrific. You even look happy."
"More like anesthetized," she said. Then she shook her head. "I shouldn't be here."
"Why not?"
"I can't even tell you that. I mean, I would tell you if I knew."
"Have a little trouble sleeping? Can't stop your head going around, big dark dreams keeping you up?"
She tilted her head to one side and looked at him curiously. "I'm not suffering from depression, if that's what you're asking. But you did, huh? I recognize the description."
"Yeah."
"I had a friend with the problem. We were worried about her. She eventually got straightened out."
"Chemicals."
"Of course. What'd you do?"
"I had this superstition about chemicals, so I just… waited until it went away. I knew what was going on, and I read about it, and in most cases, it'll go away. So I waited. I hope to Jesus it doesn't happen again, but if it does, I'll do the chemicals. I'm not going through it again."
"Good call," she said. "But my problem… it's the good old midlife crisis, Lucas."
"Haven't really had mine yet," he said.
"Knowing you, you probably won't. Not until you're about sixty-five, and realize that you're not married and you don't have any grandchildren, and then you'll wonder what happened."
"I could have grandchildren," Lucas said, a little truculently. "I've got a kid."
"Who you don't see much."
"What are we talking about here?" he asked, suddenly irritated.
"Maybe I'm dragging you into your midlife crisis with mine," she said. The waitress came with the salads and nobody said anything until she was gone, and then Catrin said, "Way back when, after I left you, and you didn't call—"
"I called."
"Yeah. Twice. If you'd have called four times, I would've come back. The next time I saw you, you were walking around with some skinny blonde with a terrific ass and these little bell-bottoms, and you stopped on a street corner and she tried to stick her tongue down to your tonsils."
Now Lucas blushed. "I don't even remember," he said.
She maneuvered a lettuce leaf into her mouth and crunched on it, watching him. He pushed his salad bowl away and waited. "Anyway" she said, "About two days after I saw you with the blonde, I met Jack and we started dating and I liked him a lot and I liked his parents and they liked me, and my parents were delighted, he was one year away from his M.D. So we… just got married and he did his hitch in the Army and then we went down to Lake City and bought a house and had kids and dogs and sailboats and goddamnit"—testing the word, goddamnit—"here I am, twenty-five years later. What happened to me? I thought I was gonna have a movie, but all I've ever been is the woman in the background of somebody else's movie."
She thought about that, and poked her salad fork at Lucas and said, "That's what we're talking about. Metaphors. The other day when we met, I used that movie metaphor. It just jumped up and I said it. I've been thinking about it ever since. When's my movie?"
Lucas sat looking at her for a long moment, and Catrin said, "Say something," and Lucas sighed and said, "If I could only figure out a way to run for the door without freakin' out the restaurant."
She sat back and didn't quite snarl at him, "You'd run for the door?"
"Catrin… I know women who run businesses and make a zillion dollars a year and drive around in Mercedes-Benzes and every night they go home and wonder what the hell happened, how they could've forgotten to have kids. They're forty-five years old and have everything but kids, and that's all they think about: no kids. Then I meet people like you who have these great kids and they're all messed up because they're not running General Mills."
She'd wiped her mouth with a napkin, and now tossed the napkin into the middle of her unfinished salad. Her eyes were bright and a little too wide, and he started to remember her temper. He thought, Uh-oh, and she said, her voice rising a notch, "So all I'm going through is some kind of routine female bullshit that I'll get over."
He shook his head. "No. You see women thinking along these lines, and about half the time it ends in disaster. They walk on their old man and their kids and they get their freedom and they wind up living in a crummy apartment and selling cupcakes in the local foo-foo dessert bar. If you ask them if they'd go back, they think a long time and most of them say, There's no way to go back,' but if they could, on some kind of negotiated terms, they would."
"What about the other half, the ones who don't walk?"
"Then, they come to some kind of accommodation, but… I'm not sure how happy they ever are, not having tried it."
"So you're saying I'm fucked," she said.
"Well, you've got a problem. You've got to think about it a long time."
She looked away and said, "I'm thinking about moving out. I didn't tell you that the other day. I wanted to impress you with how wonderful I was, after all these years."
"Does your husband know?" Lucas asked.
"At some level, maybe—but he wouldn't want to think about it. I mean, he seems happy enough. He's got all the prestige and his patients like him and he's delivered half the kids in town and we've got a sailing club and he's got a hunting shack across the river in Wisconsin, and all his buddies."
"You've got friends, too, don't you?"
"Housewives. Waiting for death. Three or four of them have actually taken off."
"What happened to them?"
"They're selling cupcakes in foo-foo dessert bars," she said, and grinned at him.
"Not really."
"One sells real estate and not very well. One works in a decorating business and doesn't make much. One went back to school and became a social worker and got a job in St. Paul, and she's okay. One's a waitress who's trying to paint."
"And you'd take pictures. Photographs."
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"Maybe. You think I couldn't?"
"I don't even know how you'd go about it."
"It's not like I'd be broke. Like I said the other day, we've got money."
"So why don't you just go ahead and do what you want, without walking? Just tell him, 'Look, I'm gonna be busy for the next couple of years. Remind me to stop by once in a while.' "
" 'Cause he's in the way," she said. "Anything I'd do, it'd be a hobby. We'd have to go to London for shows and someplace for family medical conventions, and I'd have to cook at Thanksgiving and Christmas for the kids and we'd have to keep up with our friends… I couldn't think. I just need to think."
"And what happens to Jack?"
"You know what I think?" She looked at him steadily. "I think if we got divorced in January, he'd be married again by December."
"You've got somebody in mind for the job?" Lucas asked.
"No. He doesn't fool around. But he needs a wife to hold him up, and if I moved out, there are plenty of women around town who'd sign up as candidates."
Lucas shook his head. "You know what? I bet he'd be devastated. I bet he wouldn't be married in five years. You'd be a little hard to… get over."
She smiled at him, a sad smile. "Thanks."
"You gotta think about it," Lucas said. "Probably the most important thing you've thought about since you got married, or got pregnant."
"I didn't think about those things. I just did them," she said.
"So think about this."
She nodded. "Let's get out of here."
Outside, on the sidewalk, she said, "This whole conversation took a kind of unexpected turn. It was more like therapy than anything… You've thought about this more than I expected you would have."
"I had a woman I wanted to marry, and didn't. She wouldn't. I'm still not over it," Lucas said. "When I look around City Hall, or the County Courthouse, the place is full of wounded people. I don't know what happened. I don't remember this happening to our parents' generation."
"It probably did, but they just never told us," Catrin said.
"Yeah." Lucas took a step back. "So think about it."
"One of the things I'm thinking about," she said, "is sleeping with you. But I've got to decide whether to do it before I walk, just to try it out, to see if I've got anything left… or just go ahead and walk out, and sleep with you later."
Lucas was offended. "Like I don't have a say in it."
She regarded him for a minute, then shook her head. "Not much. You already want to sleep with me. If I really wanted to force it, I could press up against you and you'd get all kinds of Catholic guilt and everything, and you'd go raving up and down the house waving your arms, and then you'd do it."
"Jesus, I'm a piece of meat."
"Not that," she said. She reached out with an index finger and pushed against his chest. "You're just one of those guys who likes to sleep with women. You need the comfort. And you're not seeing anyone now. So I could do it, if I wanted to… I just have to think."
He took another step back. "Well… let me know."
Now she laughed, and for a moment she looked like she was nineteen again. "I will."
From his cab, Lucas used his cell phone to call his friend Bone; fifteen minutes later, Bone's secretary pushed him past a panel of waiting middle managers in the bankers outer office.
Bone was looking at two computer monitors at the same time. He turned away from them when Lucas came in and said, "Sometimes I feel like I've got so much radiation going through my skull, you could put a roll of film behind my head and get an X ray."
"How's your ankle?"
"Hurts. Should be okay by next week." They played pickup basketball twice a week. Bone had once been a suspect in a case Lucas had worked. Now he was not only a friend, but his banker connections could get Lucas useful financial information. "I got that stuff on your guy."
"Confidentially."
"Of course. But there wasn't much."
"Would you loan him money?"
Bone leaned back. "There are two things you look at before you loan a guy money: history and security. He never had much security, but, boy, his history is good."
"Too good?"
"No such thing as too good," Bone said. "It just can't be too bad."
"What if you depend on a hundred percent tenancy in your apartment buildings to meet your financing? And then make it? Is that too good?"
"He can't be doing that," Bone said. He rocked forward and shuffled through the papers, looked from one to another, punched a few numbers into one of his computers, and pushed a key. Then he said, "Jeez, that's a little tight, isn't it?"
"He's greasing it with dope money," Lucas said.
"Ah."
"What I need to know—this'll never get to a second person, past me—would the guy who's making his loan know about this? About the dope?"
Bone spun his chair around until his back was to Lucas. He was looking at a walnut bookcase full of financial manuals, a few computer guides, the complete works of Joseph Conrad, and a tattered multivolume set of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. A copy of the Oxford Study Bible was jammed sideways on top of the Proust. After a minute, without turning back, Bone said, "He'd have to know something."
"But maybe not the dope?" Lucas asked of the chair.
Bone spun the chair around. He had a lean, wolflike face. He grinned, showing his teeth. "Maybe not, because there's another good possibility that bankers don't like to talk about—the other possibility is, he found a guy at the bank and either bribed him to okay the loan, or kicked back part of the loan itself."
"But whatever happened, the bank guy would have to know."
"I don't see how he could avoid it, if his IQ's over eighty," Bone said. Then: "I hope I haven't screwed anybody here."
"You might be reading about it," Lucas said. "This Rodriguez…"
Bone was a smart guy. He knew Lucas wouldn't be on a routine errand. "Alie'e?"
"You might be reading about it," Lucas said again.
Del called to suggest they meet in St. Paul. Lucas checked on Marcy by phone, then got his car and headed across the river. Rodriguez's office was in the Windshuttle Building, hooked by Skyway to Galtier Plaza. Lucas dumped the Porsche in the Galtier parking garage and found Lane and Del loitering in the Skyway.
"He's down there now, talking to his secretary. See the Temps office? Look one window to the left, the guy in the pink shirt. That's him." Lane handed Lucas a pair of miniature Pentax binoculars, and Lucas looked down through the Skyway windows at the man in the pink shirt.
Rodriguez was ordinary. At six-two or six-three, he had thinning brown hair and a gut. He didn't look Latino; he looked like an everyday Minnesota white guy. He was intent on the secretary's computer screen. He said something to her, looked at a printer, looked back at the computer, tapped the screen, then turned back to the printer as a piece of paper rolled out.
As he turned back and forth, Lucas got a good view of his face. "You're sure this is the guy?"
"This is the guy," Lane said.
"He looks like a city councilman." Lucas turned to Del, "What'd the BCA say?"
"He had a fairly heavy juvenile record in Detroit, burglary mostly. They think he was running dope early on, just deliveries on his bike, then got his nose into it. He didn't do much in the way of sales… Then he just disappeared. They never tried to find out where he went, they were just happy he was gone. They did some assessments on him when he was in juvenile care. They say he's smart, but as far as they can tell, he never went to school after the fifth grade."
"All right," Lucas said. He handed the glasses back to Lane and said, "You go home, relax, have a couple beers, visit your girlfriend, whatever. But I want you back on this guy tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, wherever he is, and you can plan to stay on him every day, all day, until we take him down."
"Good." Lane nodded. "Where're you guys going?"
Lucas looked at Del. "We better go talk to Rose Marie."
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Rose Marie had just broken free of a press conference when Lucas and Del arrived. They could see her through the glass door of her outer office, waving her arms around, as the receptionist shook her head in sympathy. Lucas pushed through the door. Rose Marie nodded at them, turned back toward the receptionist to finish what she was saying, saw Del's "Lick Dick" T-shirt, did a worried double-take, lost her thought, and asked, '"What?"
"We gotta talk."
Inside her office, with the door closed, Lucas said, "I think we got the Alie'e killer. I'd say maybe eighty-five percent."
Rose Marie looked from Lucas to Del and back to Lucas and asked, "Who?"
"A guy named Rodriguez." They laid it out for her. At the end, she said, "So we know who it is, but we can't convict him."
"That's pretty much it," Lucas admitted. "When you make the leaps, you can convince yourself that he's the guy… but a jury, I don't think so. One thing, he doesn't look like a dope dealer. He looks like a washing-machine salesman."
"What if he isn't the guy?"
"We put together a case. If we can put together a solid enough case to convince ourselves… maybe we'll have a chance. Or maybe we'll stumble over something," Lucas said. "I mean, we convicted Rashid Al-Balah and he didn't even do it."
"So… we brace the loan officer from the bank."
"As soon as we do it, he's gonna go out the back door, make a phone call, and Rodriguez will know we're on his ass," Del said.
"Good thought. We ought to have Rodriguez tapped," Lucas said. "If we can get him talking about it…"
"Do we have enough for a tap?" Rose Marie asked.
"Probably," Lucas said. "We can get that going this afternoon. The best thing that could happen to the county attorneys office is to have something to distract from the Al-Balah story, when it breaks. If we can hang Rodriguez for Alie'e, Al-Balah moves to page nine."
"Al-Balah has already broken," Rose Marie said. "The county attorney's guys decided it'd be better to get out there first with the news, put some of their own spin on it."
"Still…"
Rose Marie nodded. "I'll get them started on a tap."