Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Lot of money,” Lucas said.

  “Sure. But that two hundred thousand is purely thrown away—a little bit would go to taxes and commission and so on, but he’s basically taking a fifteen percent hit by trying to sell it quick. Two hundred thousand, in the context of a million three, is a big chunk.”

  “What’d he say?” Lucas asked.

  Smalley came back with his own question. “Why’re you investigating him?”

  “There’s a possibility that he’s using large amounts of drug money to make up the difference between actual rents, on one side, and his mortgage and maintenance payments on the other,” Lucas said.

  Smalley considered that for a moment, then said, “You mean he cooked the books? But he cooked them up? I never heard of that.”

  “That’s what we think. It’s a form of money laundering,” Lucas said. “The investigation is in the context of the overall investigation of the Alie’e Maison murder.”

  “Holy shit.” Smalley was impressed. And he was a smart guy. “You think he did it? Strangled Alie’e?”

  “I can’t tell you that—we’re conducting an investigation,” Lucas said. “So answer my question. What’d he say when you told him about the hit?”

  “He said, ‘Sell it.’ I said, ‘Listen, Richard’—he doesn’t like to be called Dick—I said ‘Listen, Richard, if you could give us two months,’ and he just cut me off and said, ‘Dump ’em.’”

  Then it was Lucas’s turn to think. After a moment, he asked, “If you’d heard about this investigation unofficially, what would you do?”

  “Do? I’d drop the deal like a hot rock,” Smalley said. “We don’t need to mess around with Alie’e Maison and all of that. We sure as hell don’t need to peddle a couple million bucks’ worth of real estate to a REIT”—he said “reet”—“and then have them come back and tell us that we sold them a bunch of cooked books. That’s not the kind of reputation you want to build.”

  “So do what you want,” Lucas said.

  “Drop him? You want us to drop him?”

  “I don’t care what you do,” Lucas said. “Drop him, if that’s best for your company. This is an official call—you’ll be subpoenaed in the next day or two. But if you were to call him and drop him, we wouldn’t object, certainly.”

  Smalley scratched his chin, looked at the telephone, then back at Lucas. “You’re using me to fuck with him.”

  “I’m just trying to uphold the law, Mr. Smalley.”

  “Right. I almost forgot.” They sat together for a few seconds, contemplating the law, and then Smalley said, “I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”

  LUCAS TOOK DALE Street down to I-94 and got on the interstate heading west. He was inching toward his own exit at Cretin, then, at the last second, moved back left and continued across the Mississippi River bridge, into Minneapolis, and down south to Jael Corbeau’s studio. Lucas rang the bell and a voice fifteen feet away said, “Go on in, Chief.”

  Lucas jumped. “Jesus, I thought you were a bush.”

  “I feel like a fuckin’ bush.” Then, sotto voce, on a radio: “It’s Davenport.” As Lucas pushed through the door, he said, “Tell dickweed it’s his turn out here.”

  Two more bored cops were sitting in the studio, watching a portable TV that was set up on the floor, plugged into a DVD. When Lucas walked in, one of the cops paused the picture; they were watching The Mummy.

  “Whichever one of you is the dickweed, I’m supposed to tell you it’s your turn out there.”

  One of the cops looked at his watch. “Bullshit. I got fifteen minutes yet. You looking for Jael?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s upstairs, reading.”

  “Is she decent?”

  “Aw, man, don’t ask me that. It gives me a hard-on.”

  “Let me put you down for sensitivity training. We have it every Saturday morning at six.”

  “I’ll be there. Count on it.” The cop restarted The Mummy halfway through a street riot; it resembled the media scrum outside City Hall.

  Lucas went halfway up the stairs, called, “Jael?”

  She came to the top of the stairs and said, “Hey—Davenport. What’s going on?”

  “What’re you doing?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m down to reading a book called Natural Ash Glazes. What’d you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I’d check you out, we could roll around town for a while,” he said.

  Her face brightened. “That’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks. If I have to sit around here anymore, I’ll scream.”

  Lucas told the other cops that they’d be gone for a while. One of them said, “Hang on,” and pulled on a pair of camo coveralls. “I’m going to sneak out through the garage. Give me two minutes. Give us a chance to see if anything moves after you leave.”

  So they sat watching The Mummy for a couple of minutes, and then Lucas said, “Let’s go.” Outside the door, Jael took his arm, and the bush said, “Wish I could go.” Jael jumped. Lucas laughed and said, “Got me coming in.”

  Down the sidewalk, she asked, “See anybody?”

  “No. Don’t look around.”

  “What if the guy follows us?” she asked.

  “Then we follow him.”

  “But what if he’s watching from farther away, and we don’t see him, but he follows us anyway.”

  Lucas loaded her into the Porsche. “Not possible,” he said.

  They pulled away from the curb, Lucas watching ahead and in the rearview mirror, Jael craning left and right, looking for headlights. “Lots of cars, but I didn’t see any headlights come on,” she said.

  “So he’s probably not around.”

  “But what if--”

  “Reach behind your seat there, there’s like a black plastic bag. . . .”

  She got the bag, opened it, took out the little bubble light, and looked at it.

  “Gimme it,” Lucas said. He look the light, licked the suction cup, and stuck it on the dash; the cord plugged into the cigarette lighter. A minute later, they rolled down the ramp on I-35W and Lucas dropped the hammer.

  The Porsche took off, running through moderate traffic, and a half-mile down, he flipped the switch on the flasher and Jael laughed and the speed went up and Jael braced herself against the dashboard and said, “Now you’re showing off,” as they went past the 100 mark. They flew along the interstate, cars ahead of them scattering like chickens. At an open spot, Lucas killed the flasher and said, “No point in advertising,” and backed off the speed a notch, bringing it down to ninety-five.

  A minute later, they burned past a highway patrol car that had been hidden behind a Ryder truck.

  “Aw, shit,” Lucas said.

  “Highway patrol,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. Stop or go?”

  “Go,” she said.

  He went, and the needle pushed past 100 to 108, and Jael said, “He turned his flashing lights on. . . . I think he’s coming. . . . He’s coming, but you’re still gaining.”

  Exit coming up. Diamond Lake Road. One car at the top of the ramp. Lucas pushed it until the last second, then cut right, took the ramp. The car at the top was turning left, so Lucas went right, around the corner, down a long block, and turned left: He accelerated to the end of the block, turned left again, and rolled down the window. They could hear the siren from the Highway Patrol car, but it was north and then west of them—going the wrong way.

  “They usually turn right if they lose a guy,” Lucas grunted. “We gotta get south.”

  They zigzagged south and west, past Oak Hill cemetery, under another limited-access road, Jael teasing Lucas as he lurked through residential neighborhoods, avoiding headlights. “Shut up, shut up,” he said, and she laughed and said, “Mr. Speed-o.”

  They finally made I-694, and Lucas took the car onto the highway, two exits, off, into a bookstore parking lot, part of a shopping complex. “Now what?” Jael asked.

  “We go to the bookstore for
an hour, then walk over and get something to eat, and maybe go shopping for a while. Gotta stay off the road for a couple of hours. There aren’t that many black Porsches around.”

  “What if they stop us anyway?” she asked.

  “Then I lie like a motherfucker,” Lucas said.

  “I thought cops got free passes.”

  “Not if they’re showing off for a girl,” Lucas said. “I hope you like books.”

  SHE DID LIKE books, and disappeared into the Art section. Lucas browsed through Literature, slowed down at Poetry, found a collection of Philip Larkin’s stuff, and was reading through it when she snuck up behind him. “Guns ’n’ Ammo,” she predicted, reaching for the book. He let her have it, and she turned it over in her hands and then looked up at him. “Showing off for a girl, eh?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I don’t read much fiction, but I read poetry.”

  She closed one eye and examined him. “You’re lying like a motherfucker.”

  “Nope.”

  “One of the other cops told me you once owned a computer company.”

  “Yeah, but it was really somebody else who did the computer stuff,” Lucas said. “I just had some good ideas at the right time.”

  “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Having the right ideas at the right time.” She turned the book over. “You think I’d like him?”

  He thought for a minute, then said, “Nope. He’s a little too guy for you.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Emily Dickinson? She’s my favorite—probably the best American poet ever.”

  “All right, I’ll try her,” she said. “Otherwise, all I got was this.” She held up a book with a pot on the cover that said, Japanese Ash Glazes.

  “I got a deep interest in ash myself,” Lucas said.

  AFTER THE BOOKSTORE, they went to a bagel place and got healthy bagels. As they were eating, Jael paging through her collection of Dickinson, she suggested that they go back to the bookstore so she could buy some mysteries. “I always go into the bookstores and wind up buying books for work, or something serious, but if I’ve got to keep sitting in that house, I gotta have something else. I can’t stand TV anymore.”

  “If you want to buy mysteries, there’s a place on the way back that we could stop. Nothing but mysteries.”

  “Sounds good.” She licked a drip of sun-dried tomato hummus off her thumb. “We need to kill some more time.” But in the car, she said, “At your house, do you have both a bathtub and a shower? Or are you just a shower guy?”

  “No, I have both.”

  “Since we’ve gotta kill time, why don’t we go back to your place and jump in the tub? It’s been a while since I had a really great back-washing.”

  They were sitting at an uphill stop sign, and Lucas had one foot on the clutch and let the car roll back a few feet, then accelerated forward, and rolled back, thinking. “Maybe I need a little more romancing,” he said finally. “Besides . . .”

  “Another commitment?”

  “Not exactly. But . . . I’m sort of between everything,” he said.

  “I know you’re not gay, the way you look at me.”

  “That’s not the problem.” But it had been a long time: He remembered standing outside the cabin and looking up at the great smear of the Milky Way stars and feeling not insignificant, but lonely. And alone.

  “It’s just casual sex, Lucas. Therapy,” she said.

  “Maybe I’m still too Catholic. Besides, what about the guys at the bookstore? They need the sales. What’re their children gonna eat if we don’t buy books?”

  “You remember what it feels like? Sitting in a tub, with a woman between your legs, all slippery and slidey, and you’ve got the soap in your hands . . .” She was laughing at him again.

  Lucas let the car roll back, and accelerated, and let it roll back, and accelerated, and said, “All right.”

  “Good choice,” she said. “Fuck the guys at the bookstore.”

  She was laughing, but later that evening she said, “For three hours, I almost forgot about Plain.”

  22

  THURSDAY. DAY SIX of Alie’e Maison.

  Frank Lester was carrying a brown sandwich bag up the City Hall steps when Lucas caught up with him the next morning, half jogging through the cold twilight, trailing a long streamer of steam. “Baloney sandwiches?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly,” Lester said. He held up the bag; he was wearing ski gloves. “I understand you were out late with Jael Corbeau.”

  “Yeah, a little late, rolling around town,” Lucas said evasively. “She didn’t want to go back home.”

  “Not a goddamn thing happening. Not with Corbeau, not with Kinsley. Maybe we’re fucked up. Maybe Olson’s not the guy. He’s been preaching every night, he goes around to all these churches. The guys who’re tracking him say he’s completely loony, but the people at these churches, they love him. Last night, he started to bleed--”

  “Aw, man, I don’t want to hear that,” Lucas said.

  “Can’t figure out how he did it. Thought maybe he has a little razor blade stuck on his belt, or something, but they say he got all cranked up and he spread his arms above his head, screaming, and all of a sudden, the blood started seeping out of his palms, and then he gets a red spot on his shirt, right . . . you know. Right where the spear went in.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Exactly. . . . What’s happening with Rodriguez?”

  “Pushed a button last night,” Lucas said. “Maybe today we’ll see something.”

  “Hope so.” He looked past Lucas, and Lucas turned. A TV remote van squatted down on the street, its engine running. “Wonder if they’ve got a microphone on us?”

  “Better not,” Lucas said. “I’d slam their butts in jail for that. Talk to the judge, we could probably get them three years.”

  “Yeah.”

  They both watched the van for a few more seconds—no signs of life, just the exhaust; and they went inside.

  LANE CAME BY ten minutes after Lucas got to his office. “We need an accountant to look at some of that paper from the bank,” he said. “I’ve got it narrowed down to a few questions, but I can’t answer the questions without an expert.”

  “What are the questions?”

  “How could Spooner give him the loans? That’s the basic question. If I could have gotten a home loan on the same terms, I’d be living on one of the lakes. The loans stink.”

  Lucas leaned back in his chair. “See? That’s why I had you reading the paper.”

  “I’d rather be bustin’ somebody’s balls. So get me the accountant, and I’ll go over and bust Spooner’s.”

  “Let’s talk to Rose Marie.”

  ROSE MARIE HAD a better idea. She knew the banking commissioner from the old days, made a call, and got Lane lined up with a bank examiner. She’d just gotten off the phone when the secretary buzzed her. Rose Marie picked up, listened for a minute, then said, “It’s Rodriguez,” and pushed another button.

  “Rose Marie Roux. . . . Yes, this is . . .” She listened for a long minute, then said, “I’m not aware of any of this. Chief Davenport is leading that aspect of the investigation, and we haven’t met yet this morning. . . . No, I can’t tell you anything. If he did that, as part of the investigation, I assume he had good reason. I appreciate that, Mr. Rodriguez, but there’s really no more that I can tell you. I can have Chief Davenport call you when he comes in. . . . Yes, I’m sure he would. Yes, I’m sure he would. . . .”

  After another minute of back-and-forth, she politely said goodbye, hung up, and said to Lucas, “Not a happy man. Some real estate deal was canceled. . . . You did have good reason?”

  “Sure. We’re trying to panic him. We’ve got him tapped.” He stopped, scratched his head, said, “How come a cop called me and told me about his appointment with a real estate dealer, but we didn’t get it on the wiretaps? He had to have called the guy.”

  Lane said, “He’s a dope dealer, dummy. He�
�s got a blind phone.”

  Lucas stood up and said, “Shit! How’d we miss that? All of his good calls have been going out somewhere else.”

  Rose Marie asked, “But how would you find a blind phone if--”

  Lucas shook a finger at her. “We need to talk to the phone company, and get incoming phone numbers yesterday afternoon. Wait a minute—who’s watching the lines?”

  “Somebody from Narcotics, I guess,” Rose Marie said.

  “Call down and get a number.”

  Two minutes later, Lucas was talking with the Narcotics cop who was monitoring Rodriguez’s lines. “Did he just take a call from a real estate dealer?”

  “Nope. He’s gotten a couple of calls from one of his apartment managers. They had an electric panel fire last night. He’s been making calls to some of his other managers, and a maintenance company. He just talked to the chief, I assume you know that.”

  “What line was that?”

  The cop gave Lucas a number. “But no real estate dealer?”

  “Nope.”

  Lucas rang off, got Rose Marie to dig a St. Paul phone book out of her desk, looked up Coffey Realty, dialed, and asked for Smalley. Smalley came up, and Lucas asked, “We just got a call from Mr. Rodriguez. He sounded a little upset. I assume you called him?”

  “Yeah, just a little while ago. He was not a happy camper.”

  “Can you give me the number you called?”

  “Well, sure. I guess,” Coffey said.

  “I don’t have it here. I want to call him back,” Lucas said.

  “Just a sec, I’ve got it on a piece of paper. Where . . . Here it is.”

  Lucas copied the number and said, “Thanks. I would stay away from Mr. Rodriguez for a while. Until he cools off, anyway.”

  “I plan to stay away from him forever,” Smalley said.

  Lucas hung up, and Rose Marie said, “Different number?”

  “Yeah.” He punched in the number for the monitoring cop, got him, and said, “We think Rodriguez is using a blind phone that we’re not monitoring. I want you to call him, make like you dialed a wrong number . . . see if it’s him. If the voice is right.”