“Nothing I’ve ever done is as brutal as what corporate execs do all the time,” Lucas said. “I’ve never fired anybody. Never taken a perfectly innocent hardworking guy and screwed up his life and his family and his kids and his dog, because somebody needed to put an extra penny on the fuckin’ dividend.”
“Communist,” she said.
LATER THAT EVENING, Lucas sat up in bed and sighed.
“Oh, go on,” Weather said. She pulled a blanket up to her chin.
“What?” But he knew.
“Go on, see if you can find this guy. The one getting the blow jobs.”
“Not much of a night for finding guys,” Lucas said, his eyes drifting toward the bedside clock.
“Lucas, you’ve been twitching ever since we got in bed,” she said.
“Del was gonna be out late,” he said, tentatively.
“Then call him. I’m working tomorrow so I’ve got to go to sleep anyway. I won’t if you keep twitching. Go.”
Lucas pretended to struggle with the idea for a moment, then kicked back the sheet, crawled across her to reach the telephone on the nightstand, and called Del’s cell phone. Del answered on the first ring. “What?”
“You awake?”
“I hope so. If I’m not, I’m dreaming that I’m standing in a puddle of slush at Twenty-ninth and Hennepin, with snow blowing down my neck.”
“It’s snowing?”
“Yeah. The snow pushed the rain right out of the picture.”
“I’m in bed with Weather. We’re warm and naked,” Lucas said. Weather reached beneath his chest and gave one of his nipples a vicious pinch. “Ow. Jesus Christ . . .” He bounced away from her.
“What?” Del asked.
“Never mind,” Lucas said, rubbing his chest. “You know the Cobra over in St. Paul?”
“My home away from home,” Del said.
“There’s a guy who hangs out there, a Larry Lapp. Julie Aronson was playing his bagpipe at a hundred bucks a toot. That’s what I’m told.”
“Do tell. Want to look him up?”
“Yeah. Meet me there in half an hour,” Lucas said.
“If you meet me there in half an hour, and you’re really naked and warm in bed right now, you’re a crazier fuck than I ever knew. It’s bad out here.”
“See you then,” Lucas said.
As he dropped the phone on the hook, Weather asked, “Playing his bagpipe? Where do you guys come up with that trash?”
“That was really bad,” Lucas said. “Pinching me. It still hurts.”
“Aw. What are you going to do about it?”
He looked at the clock. He was ten minutes from the Cobra. “I’m gonna have to turn you over my knee,” he said.
“Fat chance,” she said.
THE WEATHER WAS as bad as Del had said it was. A bitter winter wind was blowing the snow directly into the car’s windshield as he headed north along the river, and created an illusion of a funnel; Lucas felt as though he were staring into the small end of a tornado. Ten minutes later, he spotted Del standing under a streetlight, and parked next to him.
“The place is cursed,” Del said, as Lucas got out of his Tahoe. Del was wearing his winter street outfit, an East German Army greatcoat with home-knitted mittens and matching toque. He was looking across the street at the Cobra. The place was a storefront with venetian blinds covering the windows, Busch and Lite signs in the window, and a gold-on-black sign that said “Cobra” and flickered from a bad fluorescent tube.
“Cursed? You mean Minnesota?”
“I mean the Cobra. I bet there’ve been ten businesses in there in the last fifteen years,” Del said. “Nobody makes it.”
“That snake place,” Lucas remembered. “Is that how the Cobra got its name?”
“Yeah, I think so. I knew that guy who owned it, the snake place. Herpetology Grand. He said snakes were the coming yuppie pets, the next new thing. They were beautiful, clean, quiet, and they only ate once a week. Plus there was a big markup on them. He wanted me to invest; he was going to start a whole chain of them.”
“What could possibly have gone wrong?” Lucas asked, as they crossed the street.
“You had to feed them live gerbils,” Del said. “Turns out that yuppie women can’t get tight with the idea of feeding live gerbils to big snakes. You know, as an everyday thing.”
THE COBRA WAS as dim inside as out, a narrow entry past the bar with its red leatherette stools, a couple of tables in the back with a color TV, a shuffleboard bowling game, and what appeared to be a little-used dartboard. The smell of beer and peanuts and smoke. A unisex toilet in the back showed down a back hall, next to a lighted sign that said “Caution, Alarm Will Sound: Emergency Exit Only.” Two customers sat at a table in the back, watching a Lakers game. A third huddled over the bar. Lucas pointed at a stool and said, “Beer?”
“You buy,” Del said.
The bartender drifted over, pulled two beers, gave Lucas change on a five. Lucas laid his badge case on the bar and said, “We’re cops. We’re looking around for one of your regulars.”
“Yeah?” The bartender was friendly enough. “I seen you on TV once or twice. You the Minneapolis guy?”
“Yeah. We’re looking for Larry Lapp,” Lucas said. “You know him?”
“Larry?” The bartender was surprised. “What’d he do?”
“Nothing, really. We need to talk about a friend of his.”
“I wondered. He’s a good guy. . . . He was here tonight, must’ve left two hours ago. He only lives two or three blocks away, I think, but I don’t know where, exactly.”
“Couldn’t find him in the phone book,” Lucas said.
“He’s got an old lady, I think it’s her house.” He spread his hands apologetically. “All I know about her is that her name is Marcella.”
Del nodded toward the back of the bar. “Any of those guys know him?”
The bartender looked. “Those guys?” He thought about it. “Yeah, maybe.”
Lucas and Del collected their beers and walked to the back, where the two guys were watching the basketball game; they were painters, Lucas thought, still in paint-spattered jeans. Both were in their mid-twenties; one was wearing a Twins baseball hat and the other a Vikings sweatshirt with a plastic football on the chest. Lucas and Del watched the game for a minute, then Lucas said to the guy in the baseball cap, “We’re police officers. We’re looking for a friend of yours.”
The two men looked at each other, then the guy in the baseball hat shrugged and said, “Who? What’d he do?”
“Larry Lapp, and he didn’t do anything. We just need to talk to him about a woman he used to know.”
“Oh, jeez . . . You’re talking about that girl that got killed?” the Vikings fan asked.
They nodded, and Del asked, “You knew her?”
“Knew who she was,” the Vikings fan said. “She was from the neighborhood, until her folks moved out-state somewhere. She knew some other kids from over here.”
“I understand she was . . . seeing this Lapp guy,” Lucas said, giving a little extra to the “seeing.”
“Oh, man, I don’t think so—and you could get Larry in big trouble with his wife, talking that way,” the guy said. “Him and this girl went back a long way, you know, to junior high or something. They weren’t doin’ nothing, but Marcella ain’t gonna believe that if you go knockin’ on her door.”
Del said, “Mind if we sit for a minute?” and pulled around a chair without waiting for an answer. Lucas pulled one up for himself, leaned on the table, and said quietly, “We were told that this girl . . . might have been selling it. Hundred bucks a throw. Nobody’s gonna get in trouble for talking about it, or even going with her—we’re just trying to get some traction on the murder. Either of you guys ever hear anything like that?”
“That’s bullshit,” said the baseball cap, sitting back. “Whoever told you that is an asshole.”
“Never heard nothing like that,” the football-shirt guy said, s
haking his head. “She was a nice kid. Shy. I mean, if she was selling it, she could’ve sold it to me, and she never offered or even let on that, you know, it might be possible.”
The baseball cap said, “Same with me. We get a pro in here every once in a while, and it’s not like you don’t figure it out pretty goddamn quick.”
“Look around,” the football shirt said. They looked down the bar at the cheap stools, at the used booths sloppily cut into the new space, at the crap littering the floor. “You think you’re gonna find a hundred-dollar girl working this place? Twenty-nine-ninety-five is more like it.”
“This Lapp guy,” Del said.
“You’re gonna fuck him up if you talk to him with his wife around,” the baseball cap said. “He has a troubled marriage.”
“If you want, I could go get him,” the Vikings guy said. “He’s only two blocks from here.”
“That’d be cool,” Lucas said. “If I could get your names first . . . for the notebook.”
“In case we decide to run for it?” the baseball cap asked. He grinned at Lucas.
“Well. For the notebook, you know.”
LARRY LAPP WAS short and square, wore a heavy, short, square dark coat, and a Navy watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He followed the painters into the bar, nodded at the bartender, and continued back to the table where Lucas and Del were waiting. He nodded, quickly, and sat down, hands in his coat pockets. He had a flat, wide face and a day-old beard that looked like it was made of nails. “What’s this shit about Julie?”
“We’re trying to follow up on some information.”
“If somebody told you she was selling it, that guy oughta be investigated, because he’s full of shit,” Lapp said. He was angry, his face tight and white despite the cold. “She was one of the nicest goddamn girls you could want to meet.”
Lucas shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry, we just heard . . . actually, we heard that you were the recipient of some of her favors, but that you’d had to pay.”
“You heard this?” Lapp asked, his voice rising. “About me? How could you hear this about me? What’d you hear? Who told you this?”
“I can’t tell you where the information came from, we just got it from one of our intelligence guys . . . . she said that Julie was selling, ummm, oral sex at a hundred bucks a time.”
“Blow jobs?” Lapp whispered hoarsely. He looked from Lucas to Del, unbelieving, then at the two painters, and he said to the painters, “You know who they were talking to? That fuckin’ Haack.”
The baseball cap nodded judiciously and said, “Yup. Bet it was.”
“Who’s Haack?” Del asked. He looked at Lucas, then back at Lapp.
“Gerry fuckin’ Haack,” Lapp said. “He saw me in here a couple times with her—this must’ve been last year, right after he got out of jail—and the last time he said something about me getting a blow job from her. I told him to shut his mouth or I’d pull his fuckin’ nose off.”
“He’s got a thing about blow jobs,” the football-shirt said. “Always hearin’ that this chick gives head or somebody was caught gettin’ some head.”
Lucas scratched his forehead. “Ah, shit.”
Del asked Lapp, “What do you know about art?”
“Art who?” Lapp asked with apparent beetle-browed sincerity, and when Del started to laugh, said, “What?”
“Did you actually date Aronson?” Lucas asked.
“Hell no. I knew her way back when,” Lapp said. He shook a brown cigarillo out of a cardboard box and lit it with a Zippo. He blew a stream of smoke and said, “We went to kindergarten together and the same schools up to eighth grade, and then they moved away. She came in here with a couple of other friends from the neighborhood, and that’s when I saw her again. But we were doing nothing. Nothing. I’m happily married.” The baseball cap guy snorted, and Lapp turned and looked up and said, “Fuck you, Dick, this is serious.”
“Was she dating anybody that you knew of?” Lucas asked.
“Is this the first time you guys . . . I mean, how come you don’t know this shit already? She disappeared more’n a year ago.”
“We never knew about the St. Paul connection,” Lucas said. “We were just checking out a random tip.”
“Well, she said she was going out with an artist guy—is that the art you meant?—I think maybe over where she worked or something. I think they were . . . in bed.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because he was taking these pills. She told me this, we were laughing about it.” He looked at the baseball cap. “What do you call them? That new cholesterol drug? Lapovorin? Is that it? Anyway, she said he’d told her that the pills had weird sexual side effects. They made you come backwards.”
“Come backwards?” Del asked. He seemed fascinated by the concept. “How can you come backwards?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” Lapp said, leaking more brown smoke from the cigarillo. “But that’s what she said. He said that he had to quit the pills, because instead of coming, he went.”
Nobody laughed; this could be a serious problem. “What else did she say about him?” Lucas said, leaning forward. “Names or where he lived—”
“Nothing. He was older than she was. This was like two weeks before she disappeared.”
“That’s all? She was dating an artist and he was older than her.”
“Actually, I might have seen the guy . . . .”
Lucas and Del looked at each other, and then Lucas said, “Where?”
“I was coming out of Spalonini over in Minneapolis. I went in there for lunch? There’s this diner across the street.”
“The Cheese-It. She worked there part-time,” Del said.
“Yeah. I saw her coming out of there with a guy and she had her arm under his. Tough-looking guy, but kind of artistlike. You know, he had a buzzcut and a three-day beard, had this long dark wool coat all the way down to his ankles. Maybe an earring, I think. They walked on up the street.”
“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?” Lucas asked.
Lapp thought for a minute, then said, “Nah. I just saw him for one second, from the side, and then from the back. I remember he was a cocky-looking sonofabitch. You know who he looked like? This stuck in my head. He looked like Bruce Willis in this movie where Willis was playing a boxer? Uh, something Fiction ?”
“Pulp Fiction,”Del said.
“Yeah, that’s it. He looked like Willis in that movie, kind of fucked up, big shoulders. Dark like that, but a buzzcut.”
“But you couldn’t pick him out?”
“If you had a lineup with Dick and George, here,” Lapp said, waving at the Vikings guy and the baseball cap, “and a buzzcut who looked sorta like Bruce Willis, then I could pick him out. If you had six buzzcuts, then I couldn’t.”
“Goddamn good memory anyway,” Del said. His voice may have carried a vibration of skepticism.
Lapp shrugged. “Just between you and me . . . maybe I did have a little thing about her. Nothing serious. Then she went away . . . . I just remembered. I remember remembering, if you know what I mean.”
“How come you didn’t call this in? We could’ve used the help,” Del said.
Lapp shook his head. “I didn’t think it would be important. I mean, I heard about it when you were looking for her, but it seemed like she just might’ve, you know, split.”
“And there’s his old lady,” the baseball cap said, nodding at Lapp. “If he told you, he’d have to tell her.”
They talked a few more minutes, and Lucas took Lapp’s address and telephone number. Outside, on the sidewalk, Del said, “Lapp is right. Unless we get lucky with those lists, we ain’t got shit.”
“He’s an artist and he’s got a buzzcut and he takes Lapovorin. We can check pharmacies and make more lists.”
“Buzzcuts are the fashion right now, and Minneapolis’s got more artists than rats and every second guy on the street takes Lapovorin.”
“But it??
?s something. I can see him in my mind’s eye now.”
“Then you oughta stop down to one of them photo booths and have a picture taken before you forget,” Del said. He yawned, looked up and down the street at the wind-whipped snowflakes slanting through the streetlights like shading in a cartoon. He slapped Lucas on the back and said, “See you in the morning. We’ll look up some artists, or some fuckin’ thing.”
5