Hart was worse. He’d tried to talk money with some of his acquaintances, and everything, he said, had changed. He’d be a pariah. The Indian man who bought people. And he worried about Harold Richard Liss.
“Man, I don’t like this, I don’t like this.” He sat in the backseat, twisting his hands. Tears ran down his face. He wiped them away with the sleeve of his tweed jacket.
“He’s a fuckin’ criminal, Larry,” said Lucas, annoyed. “Jesus Christ, quit whining.”
“I’m not whining, man, I’m . . .”
Lucas let the Ford idle along. A hundred yards ahead, Harold Richard Liss ambled down Lake Street looking in the store windows. “He was making money selling chloroform to little kids. And glue,” Lucas said, interrupting.
“This still isn’t right, man. He’s a fuckin’ teenager.” Hart shivered.
“It’s only for a couple of days,” Lucas said.
“It still isn’t right.”
“Larry . . .” Lucas started in exasperation. Lily touched his shoulder to stop him and turned and looked over the seat.
“There’s a big difference between Welfare work and police work,” she said to Hart, keeping her face and voice soft and sympathetic. “In a lot of ways, we’re on different sides. I think you’d be more comfortable if we just dropped you off.”
“We might need his help,” Lucas objected, glancing sideways at Lily.
“I won’t be much help, man,” Hart said. There was a new note in his voice, the sound of a trapped man who sensed an opening. “I mean, I spotted him for you. I don’t know shit about surveillance. It’s not like you need to interrogate him.”
Lucas thought about it, sighed and picked up the radio. “Hey, Sloan, this is Davenport. You still got him?”
Sloan came back: “Yeah, no sweat. What’s happening?”
“I’m dropping Larry. Don’t worry when you see us stop.”
“Sure. I’ll hang with Harry.”
Lucas pulled over to the side and Hart scrambled to get out. “Thanks, man,” he said, leaning over the driver’s side window. “I mean, I’m sorry . . . .”
“That’s okay, Larry. We’ll see you back downtown,” Lucas said.
“Sure, man. And thanks, Lily.”
They pulled away from the curb and Lucas turned to Lily. “I hope we don’t need him to talk to the guy.”
“We won’t. Like he said, you’re not planning to interrogate him.”
“Hmph.”
Lucas watched Hart in his rearview mirror. Hart was peering after them as they continued down the street after Harry. Then Hart turned and walked away, around a corner. Up ahead, Harry stopped on the street corner to talk to a fat white man in a black parka. The parka was a full season too big, the kind you wore in January when the temperature went down to minus thirty. Harry and the white man exchanged a few words, the white man shook his head and Harry started pleading. The white man shook his head again and stepped away. Harry said something else and then turned, despondent, and started down the street again.
“Dealer,” said Lily.
“Yeah. Donny Ellis. He wears that parka ’til June, puts it back on in September. He pisses in it, never washes. You don’t want to get downwind of him.”
“This is going to be stupid, Lucas . . . . Nobody ever sold anybody that much crack on credit. Especially not . . .”
“Hey, we don’t have to convince anybody. It’s just . . . Okay, there’s Stone . . . .” Lucas picked up the radio and said, “Stone just came around the corner.”
“I got him,” Sloan said.
Lucas looked at Lily. “You know what? We should have gotten rid of Larry sooner than we did. He’s the kind of guy who might go to the Human Rights Commission.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. That’s why he was sweating,” she said. She was watching as Elwood Stone walked toward Harry Dick, who was still shambling along the sidewalk. “It’s not like we’re going to do anything with the Liss kid. Hold him a couple of days and then kick him out of the system. My sense of Larry Hart is that his career means everything to him. He’s a success. He makes some money. People like him. They depend on him. If he went outside with this, he’d be on the city’s shit list. End of career. Back to the res. I don’t think he’d risk that. Not if we kick the kid back out on the street after a couple of days.”
“Okay.”
“But it will make him feel like a small piece of shit,” Lily added. “We whipsawed him between his job and his people and he’s smart enough to see that. He’ll never trust you again.”
“I know,” Lucas said uncomfortably. “God damn, I hate to burn people.”
“Professionally, or personally?”
“What?” Lucas asked, puzzled by the question.
“I mean, you hate to burn a guy because it loses a contact, or because it loses a friend?”
He thought about it and after a minute said, “I don’t know.” Up the street, Harry spotted Elwood Stone and quickened his step. Stone was one of the tightest dealers on the street, but it never hurt to ask. All he needed was a taste. Just a taste to tide him over.
“They’re talking,” Sloan said on the radio. “That goddamn Stone is shuckin’ like he’s on Broadway.”
“I told him not to overdo it,” Lucas muttered to Lily. Lucas had pulled into a parking place and couldn’t see well from the driver’s side. He crowded against Lily, who had her face pressed against the passenger-side window, and let his hand drop on her thigh.
“Watch it.”
“What?”
“The hand, Davenport . . .”
“God damn it, Lily.”
“It’s going down,” she said.
“It’s going down,” Sloan said. “He’s got it.”
“Let’s take him,” Lucas said.
Sloan came in from the west, Lucas from the east. Sloan pulled into the curb ahead of Harry, Lucas did a U-turn into a fire-hydrant zone behind him. Harry was still grinning, still had his hand in his jacket pocket, when Sloan hopped out of his car. He was inside fifteen feet before Harry figured out something was happening. He turned to run and almost bumped into Lucas, who was closing in from behind. Lily stayed in the street, blocking a dash to the side. Lucas grabbed Harry by the coat collar and said, “Whoa.” A second later, Sloan had him by the arm.
“Hey, man,” Harry started, but he knew he had been bagged.
“Come on, on the wall,” Lucas said, “on the wall.” They pushed him onto the wall. Sloan frisked him and found the baggies in his pocket.
“Holy shit,” Sloan said. “We got us a dealer.”
He opened his palm to Lucas, showed him the two eight-balls.
“I’m no fuckin’ dealer, man . . . .”
“A quarter-ounce of dog-white cocaine,” Lucas said to Harry. “That’s a dealer load, kid. That’s presumptive prison term.”
“I’m a juvenile, man, look at my ID.” Harry was old enough to be worried.
“You don’t get no juvenile break on a presumptive-dealer rap,” Lucas said. “Not unless you’re ten years old. You look older than that.”
“Oh, man,” Harry moaned. “I just got it, a guy give it to me . . . .”
“Right,” Sloan said skeptically. “He gave it to you all right. He gave it to you right in the ass.” He cranked down one arm while Lucas hung onto the other, and Sloan put on his handcuffs. “You got the right to remain silent . . .”
Daniel wanted to push as hard as they could. If they waited, he thought, Len Meadows would get Liss’ family organized and protected.
“You can fly out to Sioux Falls and rent a car . . .” Daniel started.
“Fuck fly,” Lucas said. “I’m driving. We’ll be there in four hours. We wouldn’t get there any faster if we waited for an airplane and then drove up from Sioux Falls.”
“Are you going?” Daniel raised an eyebrow and looked at Lily.
“Yeah. We’ll be dealing with this Louise Liss. Maybe a woman would do it better.”
“Okay. But take it easy with the Liss woman, will you? This whole thing is a little shaky. Larry Hart is shitting bricks. He’s scared,” Daniel said. “Worse than that, he’s pissed off.”
“Can you talk to him?”
“I already did and I’ll go back with him again. I’ll tell him if we squeeze anything out of Liss, we can probably send him back to work at Welfare . . . .”
They took overnight bags to Brookings. If they didn’t get the information the first night, there wouldn’t be much point in staying a second.
“Your friend . . . Jennifer. She’s in Brookings, right?”
“Yeah. They sent out a crew. She’s producing.” They were crossing the Minnesota River at Shakopee. A flock of Canada geese were standing on the riverbank, watching the water go by. Lucas said, “Geese.”
“Mmm. Will you stay with her?”
“What?”
“Jennifer. Will you stay with her?”
Lucas downshifted as they came into town and rolled up to a stoplight. He glanced at her, then turned right on the red light. “No. I’d rather that she not know I was there. She has a way of reading my mind. If she sees me, she’ll know something is up.”
“Do you know where she’s staying?”
“Sure. It’s out by the interstate that comes up from Sioux Falls. The Brookings cops told me that Louise Liss is staying in a place downtown. I thought we’d check in there.”
They were going through the town of Sleepy Eye on Highway 14 when they passed a man on bicycle, dressed in cycling clothes: a green-striped polo shirt, black cycling shorts, white helmet. It was cool, but his bare legs were exposed and pumped like machine pistons. Lucas estimated that he was breaking the speed limit through the downtown.
“He looks like David,” Lily said. “My husband.”
“David’s a cyclist?”
“Yeah. He was pretty serious about it, once.” She turned her head to watch the cyclist as they went by. “He’d go out every Saturday with a group of people and they’d ride centuries. Sometimes two. A century’s a hundred miles.”
“Jesus. He must be in great shape.”
“Yeah.” She was watching the storefronts in the tiny town. “Bicycles bore the shit out of me, to tell you the truth. They always break down, then you’ve got to fix them. Or they’re not broken, then you’ve got to fiddle with them to get them tuned up exactly right. The tires go flat all the time.”
“That’s why I bought a Porsche,” Lucas said.
“A Porsche’s probably cheaper too,” Lily said. “Those goddamned racing bikes cost a fortune. And you can’t have just one.”
A few minutes later, back in the countryside, they passed a herd of black-and-white dairy cows.
“Neat cows,” she said. “What kind are they?”
“Beats the hell out me,” Lucas said.
“What?” she said in amusement. “You’re from Minnesota. You ought to know about cows.”
“That’s the cheeseheads over in Wisconsin who know about cows. I’m a city kid,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say they’re Holsteins.”
“Why’s that?”
“ ’Cause that’s the only cow name I know. Wait a minute. There’s also Guernseys and Jerseys. But I don’t think they’re the spotted ones.”
“Brown Swiss,” Lily said.
“What?”
“That’s a kind of cow.”
“I thought that was a kind of cheese,” Lucas said.
“I don’t think so . . . . There’s another bunch.” She watched a herd of cows ambling down the pasture toward the barn, walking in ones and twos, like tourists coming back to a bus, shadows trailing behind them. “David knows the names of everything. You drive up toward the mountains and you say, ‘What’s that tree?’ And he says, ‘That’s a white oak,’ or, ‘That’s a Douglas fir.’ I used to think he was bullshitting me, so I started checking. He was always right.”
“I don’t think I could stand it,” Lucas said.
“He’s really smart,” she said. “He might be the smartest man I ever knew well.”
“Sounds like fuckin’ Mahatma Gandhi.”
“What?”
“You once told me he was the gentlest man you ever knew. Now you say he’s the smartest.”
“He’s really quite the guy.”
“Yeah, I doubt Gandhi rode a racing bike, so he’s one up . . .”
“I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”
“All right.”
But a few minutes later she said, “Sometimes, I don’t know . . .”
“What?”
“He’s so centered. David is. Peaceful. Sometimes . . .”
“It bores the shit out of you,” Lucas suggested.
“No, no . . . I just feel like I’m so taken care of, I can’t hardly stand the weight of it. He’s such a good guy. And I hang out at the refrigerator and eat too much and I walk around with a gun and I’ve shot people . . . . He was freaked out when I went back home. I mean, he wanted to know all about it. He had this friend come over, a shrink, Shirley Anstein, to make sure I was all right. He was wild when he heard I was coming back. He said I was damaging myself.”
“You think he’s screwing this Anstein broad?”
“Shirley?” She laughed. “I don’t think so. She’s about sixty-eight. She’s like an adoptive mother.”
“He’s faithful, then.”
“Oh, yeah. He’s so faithful it’s almost like it’s part of the weight on me. I can’t even get away from that.”
“Walnut Grove,” Lily said, looking at a highway sign as they rolled through the edge of another small town. The sun was dipping toward the horizon. It’d be dark before they got to Brookings. “When I was a kid, I used to read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I loved them. Then they put the TV show on, you know, Little House on the Prairie. I was grown-up and the show was pretty bad, but I watched anyway, because of Laura . . . . The show was set in a place called Walnut Grove.”
“This is it,” Lucas said.
“What?” Lily looked at the sign again. “Same place?”
“Sure.”
“Jesus . . .” She looked out the windows as they went through and saw a small prairie town, a little shabby, very quiet, with side streets that Huckleberry Finn would have been comfortable on. When they were out of the town, she still looked back, and said, “Walnut Grove . . . Damn. You know, given the change in time, it looks right.”
They found Louise Liss through the Brookings Police Department and went to her motel. She was in the coffee shop, sitting by herself, staring into a glass of Coke. She was overweight, worn, with tired eyes now rimmed with red. She’d been crying, Lucas thought.
“This’ll be bad,” Lily muttered.
“Let’s get her down to her room,” Lucas said.
“I’ll talk,” Lily said.
They closed in the last few steps to the table and Lily took her ID case from her purse. “Mrs. Liss?”
Louise Liss looked up. Her eyes were flat, dazed. “Who are you?”
“We’re police, Mrs. Liss. I’m Lily Rothenburg and this is Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis . . . .”
“I’m not supposed to talk to police,” Louise said defensively. “Mr. Meadows said I wasn’t supposed . . .”
“Mrs. Liss, we don’t want to talk about your husband. We want to talk about your son, Harold.” Lily sounded like somebody’s mother, Lucas thought, then remembered that she was.
“Harold?” Louise reached out and gripped the Coke, her knuckles turning white. “What happened to Harold? Harold’s okay, I talked to him before I left . . . .”
“I think we should talk in your room . . . .” Lily took several steps away from the table and Louise slipped out of the booth, following.
“Your purse,” Lucas said.
She reached back to get her purse, saying, “What happened, what happened?” And she started to cry. The cashier was watching them. Lucas handed him three dollars, flashed his badge and said,
“Police.”
Outside the coffee shop, they turned toward the room. Louise grabbed Lily’s coat and said, “Please . . .”
“He was arrested on cocaine charges, Mrs. Liss.”
“Cocaine . . .” She suddenly pulled herself together and looked at Lucas; her voice rose to a screech. “You did this, didn’t you? You framed my boy to get at John.”
“No, no,” Lucas said as he tried to keep her walking toward her room. “He’ll tell you himself. The Narcotics people saw him touch a dealer. They stopped him and found two eight-balls in his pockets . . . .”
“Eight-balls?”
“Eighth-ounce packets. That’s a lot of cocaine, Mrs. Liss.” They got to her room and she opened the door with the key. Lily followed her inside and Lucas stepped in and closed the door. Louise sat on the bed. “It’s what they call a presumptive amount. With that big an amount of cocaine, the law presumes he’s dealing and it’s a felony.”
“He’s just seventeen,” Louise said. She seemed barely able to hold up her head.
Lucas put a sad expression on his face. “With that much cocaine, the county attorney will put him on trial as an adult. If he’s convicted, it’d be a minimum of three years in prison.”
The blood drained out of Louise’s face. “What do you want?” she whispered.
“We’re not Narcotics people,” Lily said. She sat on the bed beside Louise and touched her on the shoulder. “We’re investigating these murders with the Indians, like the one with your husband. So anyway, one of the Narcotics guys, his name is Sloan, came in this afternoon and said, ‘Guess what? You know that guy they got out in South Dakota? The guy who killed the attorney general? We just busted his kid.’ And then he said, ‘I guess the whole family is rotten.’ ”
“We’re not rotten,” Louise protested. “I work hard . . . .”
“Well, we’ve got some room to maneuver with Harold, your son,” Lily said in a quiet voice. “The court could treat him as a juvenile. But we have to give something to the Narcotics people. Some reason. We said, ‘Well, his father is refusing to talk, and that thing is a lot more important than another dope charge.’ We said, ‘If we can get him to tell us just a few things, could we promise that we’d treat Harold as a juvenile?’ The Narcotics officers thought it over, and we talked to the chief, and they said, ‘Yes.’ That’s why we’re here, frankly. To see if we can make a deal.”