"No. I've had about enough," Lucas said.
"So have I. When he started talking about Plain, that was like being electrocuted." They walked back to the car, climbed in. And she said, "I know this is going to sound like the Hollywood bullshit Olson's trying to get away from, but… he's good. He's really good at it. Something about the way he looks, like a big tough hillbilly, and his voice…"
"You gonna make a vest?" Lucas asked.
"There's something in what he says," Jael said. "Especially if you don't have to sign up for the great Christian march to the Pearly Gates. The way he was talking, anyone could be Plain. There's a lot of that Plain feeling with potters."
"Except that it's too late," Lucas said. "At this point, being Plain is purely a luxury that most of us can't afford. Like big expensive artist pots."
In the car, she asked, "Do you think that the blood was faked? That he cut himself?"
"Not unless he's the biggest hypocritical phony on the face of the earth, and he sure doesn't give off that vibration."
"But if he was the biggest hypocritical phony, he wouldn't give off that vibration."
"I don't know, but I'll tell you what: I saw him go down—faint, or have some kind of a füt—after his parents were killed, and he wasn't faking that. This thing tonight was over in that direction: It looked real to me."
"So he's nuts?"
"Depends on your definition of nuts," Lucas said. "There are some genuine ecstatics running around out there, and he apparently is one of them. Maybe they're nuts, I don't know."
"You don't think he did it. You don't think he killed Plain," Jael said.
"There's some evidence that he did."
"I wasn't asking you a question," Jael said. "I know there's some evidence, but I can tell: You don't think he did it."
"You're wrong. I think it's possible that he did it. But the… being… who did it is not the one we see. Tonight we saw a saint; maybe there's a devil in there, too. We just haven't seen it yet."
They were halfway back when Lucas's phone buzzed. "You turned your phone on?" Jael asked. "I thought the joke was you never turned it on."
"Things are coming together," Lucas said as he fumbled it out. "If somebody makes a move, I want to know it." He thumbed the answer button. "Yeah."
"This is Frank, Lucas. Where're you at?"
"Down on 494 by France. Somebody moving?"
"Your boy Rodriguez is dead," Lester said.
"What?"
"He might've killed himself," Lester said. "That's what they're saying."
"C'mon, man, how'd he—"
"Jumped. Down that open space thing inside a building, what do you call it—an atrium. He jumped down the atrium in his building. He's pretty busted up."
"Who's there?"
"Couple of our guys, and now St. Paul's coming in. I'm heading over. I've got to call Rose Marie, and then I'm going."
"See you there."
Chapter 24
« ^ »
Jael bitched and moaned, but Lucas dropped her at her studio before he went on to St. Paul. The St. Paul scene was a business-district replay of the murder scene at Silly Hanson's, with cop cars piled up along the curb and four big TV vans parked illegally down the street, reporters and cameramen milling around them.
A woman from one of the stations pointed at him, at the Porsche, and lights came up, putting a nearly opaque glare on the windshield. As he threaded his way past them, he could hear a woman shouting, "Lucas, Lucas …" and somebody slapped the car.
He pulled in beside a Jeep that he recognized as Lester's, got out, showed his badge to a St. Paul cop, and asked, "Where?"
The cop pointed at the building's main doors, and Lucas walked in, down a hallway toward a cluster of cops, then out into the open atrium space. Rodriguez was still on the floor, uncovered. His face had been crushed like a milk carton. Lester nodded as Lucas walked up.
"Ah, for Christ sakes," Lucas said in disgust. "Who was on him?"
"Pat Stone and Nancy Winter," he said. "Over there."
Stone and Winter were both patrol cops, borrowed for the loose net they'd had on Rodriguez. Lucas walked over and asked, "What happened?"
Winter said, "He left here, went out to his apartment, went inside. We saw the light come on in his living room, and we were just getting snug when he walked back out and got in his car. So then he drove over to a CompUSA and went inside and bought some stuff, we didn't get close enough to really see what he was getting, and then he came back out and drove back down here."
"You couldn't see what he bought?"
"No, I'd already gone back outside, but I could see him through the window at the cash register. Nothing big, whatever it was. Still got to have it on him, unless somebody took it. In his briefcase."
"All right. Then what happened?"
"I watched the ramp exit while Pat ran back to the Skyway and watched his office," Winter said.
"When he showed up in his office, then I was gonna call Nancy back," Stone said, picking up the story. "But he never showed up in the office. I was in the Skyway, so we know he didn't go out that way."
"Aren't there other Skyway exits?"
"Not open this late," Stone said. "Only open my way. You can only get out of the building three ways: the Skyway past me, the parking ramp, and the front door—that has a push bar. The other ground-floor doors are locked."
"We thought maybe he'd stopped in the can," Winter said. "I showed my badge to the lady in the ramp's pay booth, and then I got my keys out and started jingling them like I was looking for my car, and walked up the ramp until I saw his car, to make sure he'd parked. Then I walked back out and Pat still hadn't seen him. So I sorta strolled over to the door and looked in—I didn't have a key, so I couldn't get in at that point—and I saw this lump way down on the floor. I wasn't sure what it was, but I got the lady in the pay booth to let me inside, and… You saw him."
"How long from the time he drove in the garage until you saw the lump?" Lucas asked.
"We've been trying to figure that out. We were talking on cell phones, so you can probably get the exact time from the calls, but I figure it was about ten minutes," Winter said.
"I think it might have been a little longer," Stone said. "I think it might have been ten minutes before you walked up the ramp, then another few before you came back out, then walked down and looked in the door… Maybe twelve or thirteen minutes."
"You can tell from the phone calls," Winter repeated. The two cops were anxious to get out from under, Lucas realized. And he couldn't see what else they might've done.
"All right," Lucas said. "You done good, guys."
Stone glanced at Winter, relieved. Lucas went back to the circle of cops around Rodriguez's body.
"Where's his briefcase?"
"Up there." He pointed up, at the railing around the second floor of the atrium. "He set it down before he took the dive—if he took a dive."
"He's a big guy to have somebody throw him over without a fight," one of the St. Paul cops said.
"Goddamn TV was all over him. He was about to lose his ass," another one said.
Lucas said, "I want to look in his briefcase."
"Crime-scene guys working it," one of the St. Paul cops said. "Take the elevator."
Lucas went up, found a crime-scene cop probing the briefcase. "Papers," he said. "This thing." He held up a plastic box in his latex-covered hand.
"What is it?" Lucas asked.
The crime-scene guy turned it in his hand. "Zip disk, two-pack."
"How about a receipt? You see a receipt in there?"
The cop dug back into the briefcase and came up with a slip of paper. He held it away from himself, in better light: "CompUSA. Zip disk. Two-pack."
Lucas walked back downstairs. The St. Paul chief of police was coming down the hall, two steps behind Del. Del lifted a hand, and the St. Paul chief said, "He jump?"
Lucas said, "I don't know, but I'd send a guy down to get his computer. I thi
nk he came down to clean out his disk drive. Maybe changed his mind when he walked up to the railing."
They all looked up at the railing. The St. Paul chief said, "Woodbury is out at his apartment. They say there's no note."
"Didn't have time to write one." Lucas looked at Del. "You wanna ride out to Woodbury?"
Del looked down at Rodriguez's body, then up at the railing, and said, "Might as well. Elvis has left the building."
As they stepped away, the St. Paul chief said, "If he jumped… he took a lot of problems with him."
On the way out to Woodbury, Del called the Woodbury cops and got directions. Rodriguez's apartment was in one of his own buildings. "The Penthouse suite," the cop said, deploying a capital P. "That's what I'm told."
"Find out who was watching his phones tonight," Lucas said. "Find out if there was a call."
Del checked. "Not a single call at his apartment today," he said.
"Goddam nit."
Rodriguez's building was a routine-looking apartment with a pea-gravel finish over concrete block, double-glass doors, and a line of mailboxes and buzzers between the two doors. A Woodbury patrol-man sent them to four, the top floor. His apartment door was open, and Lucas stepped in, with Del just behind. "Dope money," Del said as soon as he was inside.
All the walls had flocked wallpaper; the furniture all came from the same store, and that was Swedish modern; high-style graphics on the walls. A plainclothes cop stepped toward them. "Chief Davenport. I'm Dave Thompson."
"How are ya? This is Del… what'd you get?"
"Not much. Yet. He's got a lot of paper in his office, taxes mostly… No suicide note, nothing like that. We checked the answering machine, nothing there. No computer in the house."
"Talk to his neighbors?"
"He's only got one on this floor," the cop said. "We haven't been able to find them yet. It's a married couple, they left here about six. People downstairs said they looked like they were going out. A little dressed up."
"All right… Mind if I walk through?"
"No, like I said. There just isn't much to see. Mirrors in the bedroom… Big TV, he's got a home theater."
Lucas and Del did a quick walk-through, all the way to the back. The master bedroom was at the end of a central hall: mirrors on the bedroom wall beside the bed, and two more on the ceiling. Heavy pine chests and chest of drawers, with black metal fixtures. The next room up was a small office, with a built-in desk, a Rolodex, a two-drawer filing cabinet, and a telephone. A cop was on his knees, going through the cabinet. "Grab the Rolodex," Lucas said.
"We will."
The theater had a projection TV and a wall of video and stereo equipment, with a big black-leather circular couch facing it; a leather-covered refrigerator sat next to the couch. The room originally had been two bedrooms, Lucas thought; The join was imperfect, a ridge running around the ceiling and walls. "Dope money," Del said. "A goddamn dealer's wet dream."
The Woodbury plainclothesman wandered toward them, and Lucas asked, "Find anything like a wall safe?"
"No, no, nothing like that."
"You might want to tear the place up a little," Lucas said. "It's about five-to-one that he has a little hideout someplace in here."
"Check the power outlets, see if any of them don't work," Del said. "That's a longtime crowd favorite."
Lucas had stopped in the kitchen. A book of matches lay open on the counter next to the sink.
"You think he smoked?" Lucas asked Del.
Del looked at the ceiling, then at the curtains, sniffed, and said, "I don't think so. Why?"
"Had these matches sitting here…" Lucas picked them up, then looked at the sink. Grains of black stuff in the strainer. He put his finger in it, rubbed lightly, and took it out.
"What?" Del asked. The Woodbury cop strained to see.
"Looks like ash," Lucas said.
"He burnt something?"
"Maybe," Lucas said.
And that was it: a group of cops standing around on a carpet with too-deep burgundy pile, looking at the Leroy Neiman print.
"What're we gonna do now?" Del asked.
"You think it's a suicide?"
"Yeah, I could buy it—it would solve a lot of problems. I'd like to know a little bit about his medical history, though," Del said.
"Doctors?"
"Yeah. See if he was depressed, if he'd ever been treated. But maybe he just saw the walls coming down, walked up to that atrium and just… an impulse."
"From the second floor? Christ…" Lucas shook his head.
"That's a high second floor. You look down from there, you know you ain't gonna bounce. I'm seeing a guy who's freaked out, he's got TV all over his ass, he knows he's in trouble on the dope, he's built up this fortune and he sees it drifting away… maybe he's even guilty about Alie'e. Who knows? Anyway, he puts down his bag and dives over the rail."
Sounded good. "Maybe."
"I'd give it a strong maybe," Del said. "Reserving the right to change my mind."
"So let's see what the ME says."
Lucas dropped Del back downtown, thought about going over to see Jael, decided against. Thought about calling Weather—but she wasn't the one to talk to about death and destruction, not when they might be limping back to some kind of reconciliation.
And was that what they were talking about? Is that what she meant when she said he could call her? What the fuck did she mean? And why was he screwing around with Jael? And Jesus, he didn't even want to think about Catrin.
So he went home, thought about the game for a few minutes, then took a shower and crawled onto his bed. Ran it all around his head, and drifted off to sleep.
He woke twice during the night, lay awake for an hour each time, running it through. In the morning, he shaved, showered, and, still tired, headed into downtown St. Paul. On the way, he took out his cell phone and called the department photo guy.
"I got a picture I want you to take," he said.
Chapter 25
« ^ »
Friday. The seventh day of Alie'e.
Rodriguez's building had been cleaned up and was open for business; except for the cops working on his computer, nobody would have known. Lucas stopped at Rodriguez's office and was introduced to Rodriguez's secretary, a young woman who was dealing with her loss with equanimity. "I'll be working tomorrow night," she told Lucas. "In this economy, a dead guy could get a job. Whoops—maybe I oughta rephrase that."
"Do you think that Richard would have committed suicide?" Lucas asked.
"He wasn't the moody type," she said. But she pressed a finger to her lips, thinking. "On the other hand, when he decided to do something, he'd do it, impulsive-like. Real quick. So, I mean, with all this publicity… But I don't know. Maybe you really don't know a person until he does something like this. And then, of course, you don't know him at all, because he's dead. So, like you never really get a chance to know anybody, you know? When you think about it."
In the hall, Lucas told the St. Paul cop, "She seems to be dealing with it."
"Yeah. A little too well, if you ask me. I wouldn't be surprised if she was holding a little cash for the boss, or a little product."
"Cash, maybe. Not dope. She's too ditzy to be trusted with dope," Lucas said.
"We'll probably find out that she's the brains behind the operation." They both looked at her through the window slit beside the office door. She was talking to another cop, unconsciously twirling a ringlet of hair with an index finger. Lucas and the St. Paul cop looked back at each other and simultaneously said, "Maybe not."
"You know what I really need," Lucas said. "I need to find the maintenance guy."
The maintenance man looked worried. "I'll do anything I can to help."
"What I need to know is, how would you get out of this building if you couldn't go out the ramp and you couldn't go out the front door and you couldn't go out the Skyway?"
"You mean, like, if there was a mystery man here last night?"
 
; "Exactly."
The maintenance man thought about it. "Couldn't do it," he said finally. "He'd need a key. But all the keys are on two rings, and you have to know what you're looking for before you can use one. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of numbers on the keys. So if you wanted to get just one, you'd have to steal the whole ring—which nobody did. Even then, you still wouldn't know which key opened what until you tried them all. That'd take a couple of days if that's all you did."
"So let's say the guy didn't have a key."
"Well, there are some windows on the second floor that open, so he could lower himself down—but that'd be pretty obvious. I mean, there are cars on the street at that time of night."
"And it's a long way down," Lucas said. "He'd need a big rope."
"Yeah." The maintenance man thought for another minute, puzzled. "You say he can't go out through the garage."
"Nope."
"Well, if it were me, I'd hide in the building until the cops were gone, and then I'd just jump out and walk away with the crowd. Lots of places to hide."
"St. Paul went through here pretty thoroughly, last night and this morning."
"No kidding—had me running around like a madman."
"How about access to the alley?"
"Nope. Them overhead doors lock with padlocks and… Ohh. Wait a minute."
"What?"
"The regular door there. There's a great big dead bolt on it, but…"
"It opens from the inside," Lucas said.
"Yeah. I never use it. If we got a big delivery, they ring and we open the overheads…"
"Lets go look," Lucas suggested.
The maintenance man started toward the far end of the building. "It locks with a key from the outside."
"You can't just pull it shut?"
"No. Nope. Gotta lock it with a key from the outside, or with the knob from inside," the maintenance man said.
They walked down the basement stairs, then along a dark corridor to a loading dock. Lucas stepped over to the access door. The door was metal, with a small window with inset wire mesh. He said, "Don't touch the lock… You got any lights?"