“Lucas? Ah, Agent Davenport? This is…”
“Sandy. What's up?” Lucas thought he heard something in the hallway, and peeked out.
Nobody but the spirits. He turned back into the room.
Sandy said, “I got your Widdlers. The Toms cousin had a file of purchases, and Mr.
Toms, the dead man, bought three paintings from them, over about five years. He spent a total of sixteen thousand dollars. There's also a check for five thousand dollars that just says “Appraisals,' but doesn't say what was appraised.”
The thrill shook through him. Gotcha. “Okay! Sandy! This is great! That's exactly what we need-we don't have to figure out what the appraisals were, all we have to do is show contact. Now, the originals on those papers, can you get them copied?”
“Yes. They have a Xerox machine right here,” she said.
“Copy them,” Lucas said. “Leave the originals with your guy there, tell him that the local cops will come get them tomorrow, or maybe somebody from the DO.”
“The who?”
“The Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation,” Lucas said. “I got a friend down there, he can tell us how to deal with the documents. But bring the copies back with you.
When can you get here?”
“Tonight. I can leave in twenty minutes,” she said. “I'd like to get a sandwich or something.”
“Do what you've got to,” Lucas said. “Call me when you get back.”
He slapped the phone shut. This was just exactly…
A man spoke from six inches behind his ear. “So what's up?”
Lucas lurched across the narrow room, nearly falling over the chair, catching himself on the file cabinet with one hand, the other flailing for his gun, his heart trying to bore through his rib cage.
John Smith, smile fading, stood in the doorway, looked at Lucas's face, and asked, “What?”
“Jesus Christ, I almost shot you,” Lucas rasped.
“Sorry… I heard you talking and came on up,” Smith said. “I thought you might appreciate some help.”
“Yeah.” Lucas ran his hands through his hair, shook himself out. His heart was still rattling off his ribs. “It's just so damn quiet in here.”
Smith nodded, and looked both ways down the hall: “I spent a couple of evenings by myself. You can hear the ghosts creeping around.”
“Glad I'm not the only one,” Lucas said. He turned back to the file cabinets. “I've done two of them, I'm halfway down the third.”
“I'll take the bottom drawer and work up,” Smith said. He went down the hall, got another chair, pulled open the bottom drawer. “You been here the whole time?”
Lucas glanced at his watch. “Three hours. Did the office, started up here. Went over and talked to Miz Coombs, before I came over. She's all messed up. Oh, and by the way-we put the Widdlers with Toms.”
Smith, just settling in his chair, looked up, a light on his face, and said, “You're kidding.”
“Nope.”
Smith scratched under an arm. “This might not look good-you know, calling in the killers to appraise the estate. If they're the killers.”
“I'm not gonna worry about it,” Lucas said. “For one thing, there was no way to know.
For another…” He paused.
Smith said, “For another?”
“Well, for another, I didn't do it.” Lucas smiled. “You did.”
“Fuck you,” Smith said. He dipped into the bottom file drawer and pulled out a file, looked at the flap. “Here's a file that says Antiques.'“ “Bullshit,” Lucas said.
“Man, I'm not kidding you…”
Lucas took the file and looked at the flap: “Antiques.”
Inside, a stack of receipts. There weren't many of them, not nearly as many as there were in the furniture file. But one of them, a pink carbon copy, said at the top, “Widdler Antiques and Objets d”Art.”
He handed it over to Smith who looked at it, then looked at Lucas, looked at the pink sheet again, and said, “Kiss my rosy red rectum.”
“We got them with Toms and Bucher, and we know that their good friend actually worked with Donaldson, and they pulled off a fraud. That's enough for a warrant,” Smith said.
“At the minimum, we get Leslie to lift up his pant legs,” Lucas said. “If he's got bite holes, we take a DNA and compare it to the blood on Screw. At that point, we've got him for attempted kidnapping…”
“And cruelty to animals.”
“I'm not sure Screw actually qualified as an animal. He was more of a beast.”
“Can't throw a dog out a car window. Might be able to get away with an old lady, but not a dog,” Smith said. “Not in the city of St. Paul.”
Lucas was a half block from his house when Jenkins called from Wisconsin. He fumbled the phone, caught it, said, “Yeah?”
“Got 'em,” Jenkins said.
The whole story was so complicated that Jane Widdler almost couldn't contain it.
She wrote down the major points, sitting at her desk while Leslie was upstairs in the shower, singing an ancient Jimmy Buffett song, vaguely audible through the walls.
Jane wrote:* No way out* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Prison forever Then she drew a line, and below it wrote:* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Time in prison? Then she drew a second line and wrote:* Save the money The last item held her attention most of the afternoon, but she was working through the other items in the back of her head.
Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn't get to them, but unlikely. She'd seen him operating.
She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.
If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn't been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn't taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she'd be cooked with him.
From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.
As for the money…
They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.
With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She'd eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.
Amity Anderson, Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn't tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that.
Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.
Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.
Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.
Leslie called, said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple.38-caliber pistol.
The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS6through MS69-so choice, in fact, that they'd been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.
> The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands.
If she didn't make it back… what a waste.
The pistol went into her purse. She'd never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn't matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.
She wondered where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that's where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…
She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in… Where'd you go?”
“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”
“Yeah? I'd like a fox tail for the car.”
“We've got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”
When she told him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He's got to go.”
“There's no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he'll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”
Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight.
Just have to figure out how.”
“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”
“Maybe that's a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he's crooked…”
“No. Too late, too late… The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he's going to be wary, I'd be afraid to approach him.”
“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.
“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it's powerful enough.
You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We'll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”
“If we see him in a window-a.300 Mag won't even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.
“Whatever.”
“If we're going to do it, we've got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I'm gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I'll sit in the back. We'll need earplugs, but I've got some. What's the layout?”
“We can't park on River Boulevard, it's all no-parking. But there's a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door.
If he goes anywhere…”
“Too bad it's summer,” Leslie said. “We'll be shooting in daylight.”
“We can't go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can't read out faces.”
“Not before nine-fifteen, then,” Leslie said. “I've played golf at nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can't see the golf ball anymore.”
“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there'd be some way to lure him out?”
“Like what?”
“Let me think about it.”
He went up to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.
Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I've got to run out: I'll be back in twenty minutes.”
The water stopped. “Where're you going?”
“Down to Wal-Mart,” she said through the door. “We need a couple of baseballs.”
When she got back home, Leslie was in the living room, sliding the rifle, already loaded, into an olive-drab gun case. He was dressed in a black golf shirt and black slacks.
“God, I hate to throw this thing away,” he said. “We'll have to, but it's really a nice piece of machinery.”
“But we have to,” Jane said. She had a plastic bag in her hand, and took out two boxes with baseballs inside.
“Baseballs?”
“You think, being the big jock, that you could hit a house a hundred feet away with a baseball?”
“Hit a house?” Leslie was puzzled.
“Suppose you're a big-shot cop sitting in your house, and you hear a really loud thump on your front roof, or front side of the house at nine-thirty at night,” Jane said. “Do you send your wife out to take a look?”
Leslie smiled at her. “I can hit a house. And you get smarter all the time.”
“We're both smart,” Jane said. “Let's just see if we can stay ahead of Davenport.”
“Wish we'd done this first, instead of that harebrained dog thing,” Leslie said.
“You oughta see the holes in my legs.”
“Maybe later.” Jane looked at her watch. “I have to change, and we have to leave soon. Oh God, Leslie, is this the end of it?” That, she thought, was what Jane Austen would have asked.
She turned to look back at the house when they left. She'd get back tonight, she thought, but then, if the police arrested her, she might not see it for a while.
A tear trickled down one cheek, then the other. She wiped them away and Leslie growled, “Don't pussy out on me.”
“You know how I hate that word,” she said. She wiped her face again. “I'm so scared.
We should never have done Bucher. Never have killed at home.”
“We'll be okay,” Leslie said. He reached over and patted her thigh. “We've just got to kill our way out of it.”
“I know,” she said. “It scares me so bad…”
They GOT to Davenport's at nine-fifteen and cruised the neighborhood. Still too light.
They went out to a bagel place off Ford Parkway and got a couple of bagels with cream cheese for Leslie. Nine-thirty. There were more people around than they'd expected, riding out the last light of day on the River Boulevard bike trail, and walking dogs on the sidewalk. But the yards were big, and they could park well down the darker side street and still see Davenport's house, one down beyond the corner house.
There were lights all over Davenport's house; the family was in.
“I could probably kill him with the baseball from here,” Leslie said, when they rolled into the spot Jane had picked. He had gotten in the backseat at the bagel shop. Now he slipped the rifle out of the case, and sitting with his back to the driver's side of the car, pointed the rifle through the raised back window at Davenport's front porch.
“No problem,” he said, looking through the scope. Jane put the yellow plastic ear protectors in her ears. Leslie fiddled with the rifle for a moment, then snapped it back to his shoulder. “No problem.
A hundred and fifty feet, if these are hundred-foot lots, less if they're ninety feet…” His voice was muffled, but still audible.
“God. I'm so scared, Les,” she said, slipping the revolver out of her purse. Checked the streets: nobody in sight. “I'm not sure I can do it.”
“Hey,” Leslie said. “Don't pussy out.”
She lifted the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. There was a one-inch spit of
flame, not as bright as a flash camera, and a tremendous crack.
She recoiled from it, dropped the gun, hands to her ears, eyes wide. She looked out through the back window. The gunshot had sounded like the end of the world, but the world, a hundred feet away, seemed to go on. A car passed, and ten seconds later, a man on a bicycle with a leashed Labrador running beside him.
Leslie was lying back on the seat, and in the dim light, looked terrifically dead.
“Damn gun,” Jane muttered into the stench of gunpowder and blood. She had to kneel on the seat and reach over the back to get the revolver off the floor. She wiped it with a paper towel, then pressed it into one of Leslie's limp hands, rolling it, making sure of at least one print.
Leslie kept his cell phone plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. She picked it up, called Amity Anderson. When Anderson picked up, she said, “Can you come now?”
“Right now?” The anxiety was heavy in Anderson's voice.
“That would be good.”
“Did you…”
“This is a radio,” Widdler said. “Don't talk, just come.”
She checked for watchers, then let herself out of the car. Shut the door, locked it with the second remote. That was a nice piece of work, she thought. Locked from the inside, with the keys still in Leslie's pocket. These keys, the second set, would go back in the front key drawer, to be found by the investigators.
She walked away into the dark. She was sure she hadn't thought of everything, but she was confident that she'd thought of enough. All she wanted was a simple “Not guilty.” Was that too much to ask? Amity found her on the corner.
Jane wasn't all that cranked: Leslie had been on his way out. His actual passing was more a matter of when than if.
And though she was calm enough, she had to seem cranked. She had to be frantic, flustered, and freaked. As she came up to the corner she brushed her hair forward, messing it up; her hair was never messed up. She slapped herself on the face a couple of times.
She muttered to herself, bit her lip until tears came to her eyes. Slapped herself again.
Amity found her freshly slapped and teary eyed, on the corner, properly disheveled for a recent murderess.
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