Unidentified Woman #15

by David Housewright

  “How do you know about the call anyway?” I asked. “Did you subpoena my phone records?”

  “You’re a suspect in a homicide, you bastard.”

  “Since when?”

  Bobby sighed heavily and glared at Shipman.

  “We checked the kid’s cell phone,” he said. “His call log captured your number and the time when the call was made. The call lasted three minutes.”

  “You didn’t check my phone records?”

  “Of course not.”

  I glared at Shipman, too.

  “Detective,” I said, “and I use the term loosely—you’re the reason there are so many bad cops on TV.”

  “Says the bastard who’s withholding evidence,” Shipman said.

  I lowered my voice and spoke to Bobby, not caring if Shipman heard of not.

  “I think El meant it when she told me she wanted to change her life,” I said. “I think that’s precisely what she’s attempting to do. Fix today and tomorrow will take care of itself. One of the dumber things I’ve said.”

  “Now you agree with us?” Shipman said.

  “I don’t think El is responsible for this, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You don’t get to make that call.”

  No, you don’t, my inner voice said.

  On the other hand—“I don’t believe that she killed Oliver,” I said aloud. “If you want to change my mind, you had better come up with better evidence than you have now.”

  “What a bastard you are, pretending you’re still a cop,” Shipman said.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “You two know that I love you both,” Bobby said. “Right?”

  Bobby returned to the crime scene, Shipman and I watching his back as he walked away.

  Yeah, but he loves you more, my inner voice said.

  * * *

  Let me explain how things work. The cops in St. Paul and Minneapolis might labor in separate jurisdictions, yet they are more than willing to help each other out; happy to search for a suspect or a car, check out an address, gather intel and report back to the other agency. But that didn’t mean a detective was welcome to cross the river and flash her badge anytime she damn well pleased. If Shipman—I assumed it would be Shipman—wanted to interview the kids living at the address I had supplied, protocol dictated that she first notify the Minneapolis Police Department and, if the case was hot enough, arrange for one of its officers to accompany her. This wouldn’t be a problem. It would take time, however. Which gave me a head start.

  * * *

  The duplex was smartly located on Thirteenth Street between Hennepin and Como, two bustling avenues with active bus lines. It was about a twenty-minute walk from Dinkytown, a retail community bordering the University of Minnesota that catered mostly to students; five minutes by bike if you rode with reckless abandon, which almost no one ever did in winter. There were two mailboxes flanking the front door. The one with the “1/2” added to the address featured six names including Ella Elbers and Tim Foley, the latter name crossed out.

  The door was unlocked. I stepped past it into a foyer. There was a door to my right that led to the downstairs apartment. Someone had attached a wicker vase to the jamb and filled it with artificial flowers so lifelike that they gave off a pleasant, almost sweet aroma. In front of me was a narrow staircase that spiraled upward. While climbing it, I thought it must be a bitch getting furniture up and down.

  I knocked on the door at the top of the staircase, waited for a response that did not come, and knocked some more. When that also went unanswered, I tried the doorknob. It turned easily.

  Who leaves their door unlocked these days? my inner voice asked.

  Small-town kids who don’t know any better.

  I don’t believe it.

  Neither do I.

  I opened the door and called out. Silence followed. I touched my right hip where my gun would have been if I had thought to bring it. Asshole or not, sometimes it pays to carry a concealed weapon.

  I stepped inside the living room. A place gives off a kind of empty vibe when there’s no one home; I moved cautiously just the same. I found furniture—sofas and tables, plus shades on the windows, paintings on the walls and rugs on the floor. Yet there were no TVs, laptops, CD players, books; no clothes strewn across the floor, no discarded pizza boxes. Five kids couldn’t possibly be this neat, I told myself.

  I called out again.

  There were four doorways leading out of the living room. I checked each one in turn. The first three led to bedrooms. Each contained mattresses without sheets, and closets and bureaus without apparel of any kind. The fourth door led to the kitchen. There were no glasses, plates or bowls in the cupboards and no silverware in the drawers. I checked the refrigerator. It had been cleaned out but not turned off—there was ice in the trays in the freezer.

  A door in the kitchen led to a bathroom that also was empty. I examined the medicine cabinet and linen closet. Nothing. I returned to the kitchen.

  Clearly the kids had moved, I told myself. But where? When?

  I went back through all the rooms, this time checking wastebaskets. They were empty as well, except for the larger basket in the kitchen. There I found discarded bags, wrappers, and paper cups from several fast-food meals that couldn’t have been more than a couple of days old. Under the debris I discovered a sheaf of flyers. There were ten colored copies advertising a winter garage sale in Arden Hills on Saturday and an equal number of flyers promoting a garage sale in Woodbury on Sunday. I took one copy of each and stuffed them into my inside coat pocket. I left the rest for Detective Shipman.

  I stood in the kitchen, hands on hips, searching for something that I might have missed. That’s when I heard the creak of a floorboard behind me. I tried to spin around. Hard metal hit me above the right ear. An explosion that sounded like fireworks from a long way off filled my head; red and white lights blinded me. I went to my knees thinking, You didn’t lock the door behind you, you dumb sonuvabitch. A wave of nausea filled my stomach and tried to force its way out of my throat. I was able to push it back down.

  My vision cleared slowly. I looked up. I saw the handgun first. A heavy black automatic. I saw him a second later. Bigger than I was by a couple of inches, heavier by a couple of pounds. He stood at a professional distance, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. I knew he was tough because the top button on his winter coat was undone.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He could have been asking for directions to the nearest shopping mall for all the emotion in his voice. Meanwhile, my inner voice was screaming.

  He doesn’t recognize you!

  I tried to keep calm.

  “Who are you?” I said aloud.

  I didn’t know the name, yet I knew the face. He was the man who had followed Ella and me across the Stone Arch Bridge to the Aster Cafe. I kept it to myself, though. Why give him more incentive to shoot me than he already had?

  “Right now I’m the guy pointing a gun at your head,” he said. “You gonna fuck with me, what?”

  Play it innocent, my inner voice said.

  “Hey, I’m just looking for a friend,” I said aloud. “I wasn’t trying to burgle the place. The door was open…”

  “What friend?”

  Since her name was already listed on the mailbox, I answered.

  “Ella Elbers.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, now I remember. You’re the guy in Minneapolis. So she got away from you, too, huh?”

  Dammit!

  “So what do you want her for?” he asked.

  “To get her recipe for coq au vin.”

  “Cute. What’s your name?”

  He doesn’t know who you are, my inner voice said. You were just a guy walking with the girl, as far as he’s concerned.

  “Call me Ishmael,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  He took a step closer, raised the gun like he was going to hit me again, stopped, and backed away, leveling the gun back at my face.

  “Nice tr
y,” he said. “Goad me into making a mistake. Draw me close enough for you to fuck with me. Know what? I don’t need to know who you are or what you’re doing here. Get up. Real slow.”

  I did.

  “Turn. All the way round.”

  I turned.

  “Real good. Now. Hands flat against the table. Keep ’em there. Move your feet back toward me. A little more. More.”

  I was positioned as if I were doing push-ups against the kitchen table. Even then he was careful, using quick taps of his fingertips to search the areas where I might have been carrying a weapon and a few where no one goes armed. Satisfied, he stepped back again.

  “All the way up,” he said.

  I straightened.

  “Why are you looking for El?” I asked.

  “I’m looking for all of them.”

  “Why?”

  “What you do now is shut the fuck up and walk—slowly—into the living room. You walk to the door. You touch the door and I’ll blow your head off. You go down the staircase. You try to run, I’ll fire a warning shot into your spine. Stop at the bottom of the stairs. Let’s go.”

  I was in trouble and I knew it. With amateurs, you could always count on a moment or two of hesitation before they pulled the trigger. That at least gave you a fighting chance. This guy, he wasn’t going to hesitate. Not for a second. My only hope—he didn’t actually want to shoot me, I told myself. He could have done that already. Instead, he wanted to take me somewhere. Along the way, who knows what might happen?

  I stopped at the bottom of the steps as instructed. I glanced behind me. He had been momentarily distracted by the door with the flowers attached, probably wondering if danger lurked behind it. Yet he was too far away for me to take advantage.

  “Eyes front,” he said.

  I turned toward the closed front door.

  “I want you to open the door. Open it wide. You walk out onto the stoop away from the door and stop. No sudden movements. You don’t need to look behind you. I’ll be there.”

  Again I did exactly as he instructed.

  I heard the door shut behind me. I felt his presence.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “Which one is your car?”

  “The Jeep Cherokee.”

  “You walk slowly down the steps, down the sidewalk to your car. You get in on the passenger side. Do not try to close the door. You get in and ease yourself across the seat until you’re behind the steering wheel. You put both your hands on top of the wheel.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll know when we get there.”

  I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with winter air. I did not feel cold, though. I felt as if it were summer and ninety degrees in the shade.

  “Now,” he said.

  I took two short steps. Before I could manage a third, I heard it—a sound like a man being punched hard in the chest followed instantly by the thud of weight being thrown against the duplex door; the sudden exhale of breath. I felt it, too—liquid spraying the back of my neck and head. I turned.

  The gunman stood against the door as if he had been glued there. A spreading red stain in the center of his chest sopped the fabric of his winter jacket. His head faced the street, his sunglasses firmly in place. He coughed weakly and blood ran from the corners of his mouth and down his chin. His arms hung limply at his side. He dropped the gun and it clattered against the cement. The glue gave, and he slid slowly along the door, leaving a streak of blood behind, until he was sitting on the stoop, his knees up.

  I dove off the stoop into the snow and rolled, rolled, rolled until I was lying against the foundation of the house next door.

  A Minneapolis Police Department cruiser was on the street. Its brakes locked up and the car slid sideways on the icy pavement in front of me. Detective Jean Shipman came out of the passenger side, her Glock in both hands, using the car for protection. The driver, a uniformed officer, dove out of his door and found cover behind a car parked on the far side of the street. Together we scanned the houses, parked cars, trees, and snowbanks. There was no movement that any of us could see.

  “McKenzie,” Shipman said.

  “Here.”

  “Where did the shot come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rifle?”

  “Subsonic round. Something big.”

  “Stay where you are.”

  Sounds like a plan.

  It seemed longer, yet only ninety seconds passed before the air was filled with the sound of sirens. Enough cops with enough guns appeared on the scene that you’d think they were storming the beaches at Normandy. They searched the area with great vigor and found nothing except a couple of kids walking home from the U. They interviewed every neighbor, including the old woman a block over whose backyard deck had a clear view of the front door of the duplex. She hadn’t heard a thing but was pretty sure that the footprints in the snow leading to and from the deck weren’t hers.

  EIGHT

  I was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase inside the duplex feeling numb, wondering what the hell happened and did I cause it. The Minneapolis cops seemed to think so. I was questioned a half-dozen times by both them and a Hennepin County assistant attorney. No one seemed satisfied with my answers. It wasn’t personal, though. They weren’t particularly thrilled by what the landlord had to say either.

  Leon Janke lived in the ground floor of the duplex. He said he had been renting the top floor to college kids for over twenty years without a lick of trouble.

  “These kids,” he said, “were even better than most. Quiet. Respectful. Helped out with the snow shoveling and grass cutting. Good kids.”

  Janke said he received a check from them just last week. He had no idea they had moved without telling him, couldn’t imagine they’d break their lease.

  That’s the part the Minneapolis cops had trouble getting their heads around: how they were able to move all of their belongings down that narrow, twisting staircase without him noticing.

  In reply, the old man cupped a hand around an ear and said, “Huh? Speak up.”

  I was the only one who laughed. The cops looked at me like I was cracking wise at a funeral. The lead detective on the case was named John Luby.

  “Shut up, McKenzie,” he said.

  “Are you done with me?”

  “No, I’m not done with you. Sit there and shut up.”

  So I did while they continued questioning Janke. He explained that he had not been home when the shooting occurred because he was out for his daily walk.

  “I do five miles a day come rain or shine,” he said. “I never run. Oh, no. Satchel Paige said to avoid running at all times, and I agree with him. At my age you gotta keep the juices flowin’ by jangling gently as you move, also what Paige said. I saw ’im pitch, you know. When I was a kid.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Saw ’im that time he was barnstormin’ with Bob Feller,” the old man said. “And later when he had a cup of coffee with the Moorhead Red Sox.”

  “Very cool.”

  Detective Luby and his colleagues made it known that they were upset that I had interrupted their interrogation, but Minneapolis cops were like that—unlike St. Paul police officers, who were reasonable all the time.

  Yeah, right.

  The cops became bored after a while. A third of them went upstairs—what they hoped to find there, I couldn’t say. Another third went outside. The final third, led by Luby, commandeered Janke’s downstairs apartment for a strategy session, leaving him alone in the foyer with me.

  “The police don’t like you at all, do they, son?” he said.

  “Wouldn’t seem so.”

  “Got anything to do with all that blood on ya?”

  “Little bit.”

  “Can I ask…”

  “I was standing next to the victim when he was shot.”

  “Cops act like you were the one what squeezed the trigger.”

  “Cops are like
that.”

  “FUBAR.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Know what it means?”

  “Fucked up beyond all recognition. It was something the old man used to say on occasion when things got out of hand.”

  “Your daddy, did he serve?”

  “He was with the First Marines at Chosin Reservoir.”

  “Hell you say.” The old man sat on the step below me. “I was with the Seventh Infantry. Your daddy and me, we ate some of the same dirt. He still with us?”

  “He passed closing in on seven years now.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Not many of us left what did time in Korea.”

  “The Forgotten War.”

  “Lord knows I’ve been trying to forget it. So, what you doin’ here—McKenzie, is it?”

  “Looking for El and the others.”

  “You don’t mean ’em any harm, do ya, son?”

  “No, sir. Believe it or not, I’m trying to help them.”

  “How long you know them kids?”

  “The only one I’ve met is El, and that was four days ago.”

  “Hardly makes sense you bein’ here, then.”

  “That’s the way the cops look at it, too. What can I say? You become attached to people, and how long you’ve known them doesn’t always factor into it.”

  “No, it doesn’t. These kids—I grew up in Cohasset. I haven’t really lived there since I was drafted, but these kids come lookin’ for a place to stay, I find out they’re from Deer River what’s ten miles down the road, I kinda adopt ’em, you know? Can’t help but look out for ’em.”

  “What else did you know about them? What did they do for a living?”

  “This and that. I guess El did some house-sitting. You know how real estate agents have their tricks like puttin’ out flowers and fresh-baked cookies, like makin’ sure the closets are half empty so it looks like there’s plenty of storage space? El says they sometimes also hire people to stay in a house that’s for sale cuz an empty house is harder to sell but also because buyers come in and see these beautiful people livin’ there and they want to be just like ’em. You believe that?”

  “Who did El work for? Did she tell you?”

  “You soundin’ like the cops now.”