Andreno leaned in from the backseat. “Wal-Mart, man. Home Depot. There are all these places that hire and fire hundreds of people every day. They don’t know who the fuck they are. Half of Mexico used to work for Wal-Mart.”
“All right, he can get a job.”
NOBODY WAS HUNGRY, but they stopped in Virginia for coffee, and helped Nadya buy two pounds of magazines for her flight to Washington. At seven o’clock, they drove to Eveleth, got lost, drove around aimlessly for a while, and eventually found the place by a process of elimination.
THE DANCE WAS an AFL-CIO affair with a polka band and an acre of sheet cake and Jell-O molds, a cash bar, and balloons on the ceilings. The polka band was hot, and the governor not only liked to dance, he was good at it.
Elmer Henderson was a willowy man, narrow shouldered, with short blond hair going gray at the temples, a man who wore handmade suits and shoes and a different Hermès tie each day. His clan was one of Minnesota’s richest, and Elmer was a typical product of money: conservative, mild, polite.
But he could dance a polka about as well as anybody Lucas had seen, and when he got going, the other dancers fell back into a circle and clapped with the band, and Lucas and Nadya laughed out loud.
He was dancing with a very fat lady—also a good dancer—when he spotted Lucas and waved. Lucas waved back and a man who’d come up behind him said, “Don’t interrupt him. I’ve got six photographers shooting their ass off for the next campaign.”
Lucas turned and found Neil Mitford, the governor’s chief political operator. “Heck of a dancer,” Lucas said.
“Hard to believe, huh? Look at the motherfucker go . . .”
A WHILE LATER, the governor got loose and said, “Let’s find a spot.”
They found a spot and Lucas introduced Nadya and Andreno, and the governor nodded and said, “Rose Marie briefed me, and I see it’s leaked onto TV. Is there anything in it? For us?”
Lucas shook his head. “You should stay clear on this one. If that tape gets out—and it may, there’s a whole question of probate, because he made it his last will—you can’t help feeling sorry for the old guy. I’d say, take the credit for doing the feds’ job for them, but then say it’s up to them to carry the ball the rest of the way.”
“How about the Russians?” the governor asked Nadya. “You okay with this?”
“Yes. Thank you very much. I go back home tomorrow, I will ask them to send you an official thank-you for Minnesota’s help.”
“Excellent. Always happy to help.”
Nadya held up her camera. “Is it permitted to get a picture of you? With me?”
“Absolutely.”
Lucas took the picture, one of Henderson and Nadya shaking hands, and one of Henderson with his arm around her shoulder, giving her a little hug.
“Like old comrades,” Lucas said.
Mitford said, nervously, “Not comrades, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ve got to get back to the dance,” Henderson said. He leaned into them, his head between Lucas and Nadya and said, “I really like to dance with the big fat ones. Even if I look like Jack Spratt. Not only that, Neil says you can tell that I like it, when you see it on TV. Did you know that twenty-two point four percent of Minnesota women of voting age are officially obese?”
“Plus-sized,” Mitford said.
“That’s what I meant.” Henderson beamed. “Plus-sized.”
HE LEFT THEM, and Nadya looked at Lucas and said, “What is this Jack Spratt?”
“Just a guy,” Lucas said.
“Who could eat no fat,” said Mitford.
“And his wife could eat no lean,” Lucas continued.
When they were done, she said, “You are joking me again.”
When she’d gone to the ladies’ room, Mitford looked after her and asked, “You getting any of that?”
“No, I am not. I am a happily married man,” he said, thinking of Jerry Reasons. If he’d been an unhappily married man, like Reasons, he might be dead.
“Looks pretty good.”
“She is pretty good. If you put her on your staff, she’d fit right in. She’d be one of your top guys in a week.”
Mitford squinted at Lucas: “What you’re saying is, you wouldn’t trust her any further than you could spit a rat.”
“Did I say that?”
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK, they were on their way back to Duluth when Lucas’s cell phone rang. Weather, he thought.
He picked it up, said hello, and found a switchboard operator from the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. “A woman called for you. She says it’s urgent, life-and-death. She said she’s tried your hotel room in Duluth three times, but you’re never there. She’s calling from public phones . . . she says she’s the laptop lady.”
“Ah, Jesus, is she gonna call back?”
“I told her we could probably get in touch with you, and she said she’d call back in half an hour.”
“Give her this number, but tell her I’ll just be getting back to Duluth and there are some cell-phone dead spots. Tell her I’ll be in my hotel by nine o’clock at the latest, or she can call me here on this phone any time after about eight forty-five.”
“Okay.”
“Trace the call, just in case.”
Lucas hung up and Andreno said from the backseat, “What?”
“The laptop lady,” Lucas said. “Life-and-death.”
“Jesus. Maybe she knows where Roger went.”
“How?”
“Then what the fuck is life-and-death?”
29
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF Roger Walther, and the murder-suicide of Burt and Melodie Walther, fell on Jan Walther’s household like a thunderclap. She heard about it from a customer, rather than the police, closed the store, and drove to Burt and Melodie’s house, where she was turned back by the police.
She saw the state cop, Davenport, and tried to flag him down. She was sure that he’d seen and heard her, but he ignored her. As the police did their work, the crowd outside the house continued to grow, now fed by rumors coming out of the police department—that the Walthers were Russian spies, and that there were other spies in the community.
When she heard that, and with no luck talking to police at the scene, she went back home and found a message from Kurt Maisler, Burt Walther’s attorney. She called him back, and he told her of Burt’s phone call.
“What do I do?”
“Just sit tight. I understand the FBI is taking over. They’ll want to talk with you, and you might want to ask for representation.”
“A lawyer? I haven’t done anything. I can’t afford one.”
“If you can’t afford one, they have to appoint one for you. But I’d have a lawyer if any of this, uh, is true, these rumors about Burt.”
Maisler said that the exposure of a spy ring would draw the media like flies, and after a long series of public screw-ups, the FBI was frightened to death of more bad publicity. On the rare occasion when they actually found a bad guy, they tended to tear him to bits, Maisler said. “You’ve got to be prepared.”
She hired him. She took a check for fifty dollars to his office, promised to call him if the FBI approached her. She went back to Burt and Melodie’s house, not knowing what else she could do, and found Carl waiting for her.
CARL HAD HEARD about the murder-suicide at a service station, while he was buying gas for his old Chevy. He’d hurried downtown, found the store closed, went home, found the house empty, and continued on to Grandpa’s house. The cops wouldn’t let him within a block, so he ditched the car and walked in through alleys and backyards, joining a group of sixty or seventy people across the street. A few of them patted him on the back, a few edged away, and a couple pointed him out for the three TV cameras on the scene.
A moment later, his mother arrived and she ran over to him and gave him a hug, and he said, “They said Grandpa and Grandma . . .”
“It’s true,” she said. She held on to him but looked toward the house: “They won’t le
t us in. I’ll call Roy Hopper direct, to see what’s going on, but I think we should go back home.”
“They’re taking pictures of us,” he said. He nodded, and she turned toward the TV cameras.
“I think we should go back . . .”
THE PHONE WAS ringing when they got back home. TV, she thought—but it was a friend named Lucy Parks, who worked at a rug-and-tile store down the street, and who had been one grade ahead of Janet in school. “I heard what happened. Is there anything I can do?”
“No, I don’t know what to do myself—this is crazy.”
“Everybody’s talking about the spy business. Do you think Burt was really a spy? And Roger?”
“Burt. I don’t know about Burt. But Roger—you’ve met Roger. That wasn’t a disguise. You think he was a mastermind?”
Parks laughed. “If it was a disguise, he was a mastermind. Well, tell you what, honey, it’s gonna be interesting. You need anything, give me a call.”
Three more old friends called, and all of them offered support. She was a little amazed, because if this had been a TV story, the whole town would have turned on her; the yard would have been full of people with ropes and pitchforks.
Then the TV people arrived, trucks parking in the street, and people began banging on her door and taking pictures of her when she answered, so she stopped answering and called Maisler.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. He arrived ten minutes later, talked to all the media people, then knocked, and Jan let him in. “I’ve told them to stay off the lawn, and I called Roy Hopper direct and asked him to send a car over here. He said he would.”
“Thanks.” She was grateful, but wondered if his clock was running; he seemed to be enjoying himself too much to charge for it.
“If you want, I can make a statement to these people, unless you want to. They won’t go away until they have something.”
“If you could do it . . .”
He was happy to.
SHE WAS TRYING so hard to stay on top of the problem that she didn’t notice how quiet Carl had been. When she did notice, she went back to his bedroom and knocked. No answer. “Carl?” She turned the knob and peeked in. He was sprawled on his bed, faceup, forearm over his eyes. “Are you okay? Honey?”
“Go away.”
“Are you okay? You’ve got to come out and talk.”
“Later. I just want to lie here for a while.”
“You’ve been lying there for an hour. You should come out and eat something. I’ll make some soup and sandwiches . . .”
“I’ll be out in a while,” he snapped.
“I’ll call you when the soup’s ready.”
HER HORROR OF the moment, and her astonishment, were real, for the most part. But there was a part of her, a small kernel at the edge of her mind, that had known that Burt was a spy, that there were other spies connected to him, and that Roger had, when he was young, done some spy things. Had been involved.
She hadn’t known when she married him—hadn’t known for a few years, after Carl was born, but small parts and pieces of it started to come out when Roger began drinking. He would talk to relieve stress—and then say he couldn’t talk about why he was stressed. He began hinting of bigger forces, of untellable but important issues.
She thought of it simply as self-aggrandizement in the face of a life that had started sloping downhill after his junior year in college, when it became obvious that he wouldn’t be the big hockey star at UMD.
But more pieces kept coming out, and then one night, thoroughly in the bag, he simply told her: we’re a family of spies. She hadn’t really believed him, and had gone to Burt, and Burt had simply sat in his chair, smiling at her, and Melodie had twinkled, and they’d said, “That was all a long time ago. Best not to think about it anymore.”
She’d bought that—even when it turned out that it probably hadn’t been so long ago . . .
ROGER HAD CONTINUED to drink, the divorce had followed, and Burt and Melodie had come to her rescue. The previous owner of the frame shop was about to give it up and suggested that Jan, who was working the counter and enjoyed it, might want to buy the place. “It makes just about enough to support a family of two,” he said. “If you work your butt off.”
Burt helped with a down payment, and for the next ten years, all through elementary and junior high school, Burt and Melodie provided Carl’s day care. She’d get him off in the morning, and they’d pick him up in the afternoon, be ready with snacks and dinners on nights when she had to work late. They’d take him to after-school activities, keep him busy.
They were, she thought, as much Carl’s parents as she was; and that was why, she realized, Carl was lying on his bed like a log. The boy was in serious shock, the kind of shock you experience when a parent dies . . .
She hurried with the soup and sandwich.
THE NEXT FEW hours were a jumble.
The television never left. Maisler was all over the place, and not just local television, but on Fox, CNN, the major networks. She was afraid to leave the house, and instead, parked in front of the TV, nervously eating anything she could find. Other families were being interviewed, the talking heads said: the Spivaks, the Svobodas, the Witolds.
The FBI called, and made arrangements for an interview, tomorrow, first thing.
GRANDMA’S AND GRANDPA’S bodies were taken away from the house—she saw it all on TV, the bodies coming out on gurneys, in black bags—and the police didn’t know when they would be released for burial.
The house was sealed, Roy Hopper told her. Nobody in, nobody out.
SHE TOOK SO many calls, talked to so many people, that she lost track of time. When she noticed that it was eleven o’clock, she realized that she hadn’t talked to Carl for an hour or more. She went back to Carl’s bedroom. “You’ve almost worn that bed out,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think you should go to school tomorrow,” she said. “I think we can forget that.”
“I’m going. If I don’t go, it’s like we’re guilty of something.”
“The TV people, Carl, I think it’d be—”
“I’m going,” he said, stubbornly. “I can take it.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” she said.
He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Are you going to reopen the store?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to eat, so . . . we’ll see.”
“If you can open the store, I can go back to school.”
She kissed him on the forehead. “You’ve been a good boy, Carl.”
30
THEY WERE ON the outskirts of Duluth when the call came in. Lucas took the car to the side of the street and stopped as he answered the phone: “Lucas Davenport.”
“This is the person who called you at your hotel in Duluth. I have some more information.”
“You’re a little late. We broke things out this afternoon. We haven’t got him yet, but we know who he is—”
“No, no. You mean this Roger person? You’re chasing the wrong man. The man who killed the Russian—he’s a boy, really—I saw him on television tonight. He was outside the house, the spies’ house, where they committed suicide.”
“The house?”
“Yes. Outside the house. If you get the video they had on Channel Three tonight, he’s the blond boy who is hugging the blond woman. He comes into the camera scene and she gives him a hug. He’s wearing a dark jacket, but it’s open, he had a T-shirt underneath. He’s handsome.”
Nadya whispered, “What?”
Lucas shook his head at her, then said, “Look, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come in. You can’t just tell me . . .”
“I’m not coming in. But I will tell you two things. The first thing is—”
“I don’t think that’ll work,” Lucas said, interrupting.
“Then the killer will get away with it, because I’m not coming in. Two things, and then I’ve got to run, because I’m afraid you’re tracing thi
s. First, when he tried to shoot me, I cut him on the arm with my knife. Left arm. He should still show the cut, because he bled a lot and I think I slashed him pretty good. Second, I’ve sent you the knife in the mail. It’s still got some blood on the blade and in the grooves, and it’s his blood. That should get you somewhere. I mailed it this evening at the main post office, right after the five-o’clock news, so you should get it tomorrow. I sent it to your name at the criminal apprehension office.”
“I don’t—”
“Good-bye.” Click.
“Goddamnit,” Lucas said.
“What?” Nadya and Andreno asked simultaneously.
LUCAS DROPPED THEM at their hotel. Nadya said that she would cancel her flight: she would be there until they found the killer. Lucas said that wouldn’t be necessary, but she insisted.
Andreno offered to cancel his flight, but had a problem—his ticket was nonrefundable, and it would cost six hundred bucks to cancel and get another.
“Take off,” Lucas said. “If this is something, we pick up the kid. If it isn’t, we don’t. It’s all over but the shoutin’.”
“Well, shit, I feel like I’m running out on you,” Andreno said uncertainly.
“There’s not much to do,” Lucas said. “If we go after him, which is still a big if, it might not be for a couple of days. We’ll have to take local cops with us, and if I’m there, and Nadya . . . it’s already overkill.”
“All right. I’ll take off. If you need me to cancel, call me on the cell phone.”
“I think we’re good,” Lucas said.
LUCAS WENT HOME. He hurried through the dark, pushing ninety the whole way, his flasher on top of the car. The Public Safety Department cleared him through the two highway patrol troopers still working I-35.
On the way, he made phone calls:
He called Rose Marie Roux, to update her. “I’m going to need to talk to a lawyer. Tonight, if possible. See if you can get one to call me. I need to know how to handle this, if it turns out to be true.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 165
