Lovelady

by Wynne, Marcus

  “Will do, Wayne. Who else is going?”

  “Haven’t decided yet. Probably the whole crew. But you’re first on the list.”

  “I’ll wait for your call.”

  “Okay, Frank. Later.”

  I held the phone and listened till he hung up, then replaced it in the charging cradle. I stared at the phone, willing it to ring, and it did. The number was blocked.

  “Hello?”

  “Lovelady? This is Joe Spenser. I need you to come down to Hennepin County Hospital, the emergency room.”

  “What happened?”

  “Marcos is down here. A couple of guys beat the shit out of him. I heard the call on the radio and met the ambulance down here. He was conscious and he said to get you. So get down here.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. “Do you know what happened?”

  “We’ll talk, Lovelady.” Spenser hung up.

  I went into my study and unlocked the closet there. Taking up most of the closet was a Remington gun safe. I ran my fingers over the electronic key pad and unlocked it, then swung open the heavy steel door and looked in at the tools of my trade. Most of my operational equipment was kept in a safe house in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, outside Washington D.C., where we gathered for our briefings and prepared for our assignments. But like all killers, I had my favorite tools, and I like to keep some of them close at hand. There were my blades: a selection of commercial knives, folders like the Spyderco Military-Police and the Emerson Commander, fixed blades like the SOG Pentagon and Recon, small neck knives like the Perrin La Griffe and the new one from Spyderco. I kept a handful of surgical scalpels honed to an edge so keen you’d only feel a sting while the blade cut to the bone. I liked them for hits. They were concealable and disposable, easily replaced, and nearly invisible when cupped in a palm on the approach. I kept pistols and revolvers and concealment leather for all of them. In the Cells, we were issued a variety of authentic law enforcement credentials that would let us carry weapons anywhere, even on board airplanes. I had FBI, U.S. Marshal and even Federal Air Marshal credentials and badges. They were useful in the States. There were a few long guns, of the sort that would raise eyebrows: a silenced submachine gun, the H&K MP-5SD, a fully automatic M-4 carbine with a Trijicon Reflex CQB scope, a carefully worked M-70 sniper rifle with my favorite Leopold scope on it.

  I stood there and thought for a moment.

  I couldn’t take any of them with me. Not at this juncture. But a noisy little person in my head said I needed a weapon, because when I carried a weapon I changed my mindset, and it was time to quit fucking around and put my game face on.

  I took out a well worn Spyderco Military-Police and flicked it open. The blade was honed to razor sharpness. The black finish on the blade was fading from time and use. I carried that blade as a back up to a concealed handgun for years. It felt good to clip it into the front pocket of my jeans.

  Now I was ready.

  I locked the safe and went to my car.

  ii.

  Joe Spenser and I stood in the gritty tile floored emergency room waiting area. Harsh fluorescent lights washed out the color of his face.

  “He put up a hell of a fight,” Spenser said. He sipped from a paper cup of vending machine coffee. “One of the witnesses said he fought for almost five minutes. That’s a lifetime in a street fight.”

  “Back up and fill me in,” I said.

  Spenser measured me with his eyes, took a deliberate sip of coffee. “I told you if you went sticking your nose where it didn’t belong that somebody would get hurt.”

  “Is that what it’s about?”

  “Apparently. But he should tell you.”

  He led me down a corridor to a door that said staff and patients only. He pushed the double door open and nodded to the nurse at the desk. She smiled, clocking his badge, and waved us by without a word. Four doors down the hall on the right and we went into a semi-private room, the bed nearest the door empty, and Marcos in the other. A young Hispanic nurse, speaking in a low voice, hovered over Marcos.

  His head was swathed in bandages and both eyes were blackened and swollen almost shut. His nose and one of his ears were taped. His left arm was wrapped in gauze. Both legs stuck out from beneath the light blanket as though his feet were too warm. His right ankle was wrapped in an Ace bandage.

  I stood there till he shifted sleepily towards me.

  “Hey, Frank,” Marcos said in a whispery tone. “Like my pretty nurse?”

  The nurse smiled at him, then turned her attention and a no-nonsense voice towards us. “I know you are police and you need to talk to him. He has a concussion and he’s on medication that makes him sleepy. He needs rest right now, so don’t take too long with him.”

  “We won’t be long,” Spenser said. “Thanks for taking such good care of him. He looks like crap, but he’s not a bad guy.”

  She had a lovely smile, perfect teeth. “He can use some laughs.”

  She walked out, her bottom twitching, and Marcos looked after her as she went.

  “Sweet,” he said in his thready voice.

  I pulled a chair close and sat down. Marcos rolled his head back to look at me.

  “Terminator?” I said.

  “That black guy from the station?” Marcos said. “He was driving the van. The two white guys and the Cuban, they were the ones threw a beating into me.”

  “How do you know he was Cuban?” Spenser said.

  “Same way you know someone’s from Atlanta or Maine, hermano. The sound of their voice. He was one tough motherfucker. I threw an elbow into his jaw, he went down and got right back up again. That’s when I knew I was in the shit.”

  “Who’s the Terminator?” Spenser said.

  “Did you give him the plate number?” I said to Marcos.

  “Never had a chance,” Marcos said.

  “What are you talking about?” Spenser said.

  “We got a plate on a Green Hummer last night. 978 LVE. That’s the guy we think’s behind this.”

  Spenser took a small notebook from his breast pocket and jotted down the license plate number. “Why would this guy send some muscle after you?”

  “They weren’t basic muscle, man,” Marcos said. “These guys been around the block, they knew what they were doing. They worked as a team. They weren’t expecting me to know how to fight. They would have killed me otherwise. These are serious guys, not your basic street muscle.”

  Spenser made a note. “Okay, so back to my question. Why would Mr. Hummer send a bunch of experienced thugs after you?”

  “We’ve been handing out flyers,” I said. “We ran into this guy a couple of times. He was eyeballing a couple of kids down at the bus station. We took them out of there and put them in the youth hostel.”

  “Do gooders,” Spenser said, exasperated. “I told you about this.”

  “What did we do to start this?” I said. “We’re not the ones you should be pissed at.”

  “Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been nosing around, Lovelady,” Spenser said.

  “Frank?” Marcos said.

  “Yeah, man.”

  “You got to watch out,” Marcos said. “These guys, they caught me out on the street, on my bike. I don’t think they know where I live. But they got your telephone number from the flyer. They can look you up in the reverse directory.”

  “They’re not going to come after me,” I said. “And I’m not listed anyway. They got to you because they saw you. Did they say anything?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Marcos said, wincing. “They said to mind our own fucking business and to stay off the streets. Not to stick our noses where they don’t belong. That the Man had his eye on us.”

  “The Man?” I said.

  “I told you about this,” Spenser said.

  “I think that’s the Terminator. The Man,” Marcos said.

  Spenser snorted. “The Man. The fucking Man. These guys all got delusions of grandeur.”

  “The Man,” I s
aid. “That’s what they said?”

  “These guys knew their business,” Marcos said. “They’d have killed me if I hadn’t fought back. You need to tell Rick Faye for me. The training saved my life.”

  “So what is this?” I said to Spenser. “They’re going to kill us over some flyers?”

  “Maybe there’s more to your girl than meets the eye,” Spenser said. “I’ll run this plate, get a feel for who this is. Then we’ll go see him. You’re an eyewitness, Lovelady, you can ID this guy.”

  Marcos rolled his head slowly. “You go with him, Frank. Make this motherfucker.”

  “I’ll do that, Marcos,” I said. “You just take care and heal up. Is there anybody you want me to call, let them know where you are?”

  “No, man. Don’t call my family. They’ll bug out and jump on a plane and they can’t afford that. Joe will tell my training partner down at the Kali Group. You just go take care of business,” Marcos said.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “We’ll take care of business.”

  “Get some sleep, Marcos,” Spenser said. He gave me a hard look. “I’ll take care of things.”

  Outside the room, in the hallway, Spenser squared up on me. He would be a tough one in a fight, I could tell, fast and strong and furiously determined. A good guy to have on your side, but that wasn’t where he was right now.

  “Let’s get something out right now, Lovelady,” he said. “I told you to stay out of this business and you ignored me. Now you got Marcos fucked up. Whoever you got stirred up is heavy weight. This isn’t the normal behavior you’d expect. So it seems to me that you’re into something you can’t handle. I need you, right now, to see if we can finger this guy. But you keep your mouth shut and out of my play unless I say otherwise. You understand me?”

  I have a lot of practice in concealing my anger. I bowed my head, slumped my shoulders, looked contrite.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you say. I just want to help.”

  “You’re not fooling me with that Mr. Mealy Mouth pussy shit,” he said. “I find it a lot easier to believe that you’re an ex-paratrooper who hides his violent streak and likes to play at Mr. Know It All on the street.”

  “Why are you angry at me?” I said. “If I were you, I’d save it for the guys who did Marcos.”

  “We wouldn’t be in this place if you’d listened and let me do my job.”

  “Get it straight, Spenser. All we did was hand out flyers and talk to people.”

  “We’re getting no place fast,” Spenser said. He didn’t back down one bit. “I got my eye on you, Lovelady.”

  “Whatever, Spenser,” I said. “What I know is we’re wasting time standing here trying to see who has the biggest balls while the guys who did Marcos are out having a beer.”

  He considered that for a moment, then nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “Enough. I’ve said what I need to.”

  “I’ll do whatever you say,” I said. “I just want to help.”

  At least until I knew enough to go ahead on my own.

  iii.

  Spenser went out to his car to use the radio and the car’s computer to check the plate while I went to the rest room. He came back and got me from the waiting room and handed me a slip of paper while we walked to his car. The address he got from the plate was out in Plymouth, a moneyed ring city in the western suburbs. And he got a name: Manfred Wollheim.

  The Man.

  “I checked with Plymouth PD on this guy,” Spenser said, unlocking the door for me. The wind blew grass clippings from the freshly mowed lawn across the parking lot. “He’s as squeaky clean as you can get. He’s known to the Plymouth cops…he’s some kind of millionaire philanthropist and wannabe…he donated the money to outfit all Plymouth PD cops in the latest body armor. I was asked, in a not so friendly fashion, just what the fuck we were doing nosing around him.”

  The front passenger seat of Spenser’s unmarked car was cramped. A radio and a computer took up most of the center console space and sprawled over onto the passenger side. I stayed close to the door.

  “So what did you tell them?” I said.

  “We want to talk to him as a possible witness. That cooled them out.”

  Spenser tooled through town, took 55 East out of Downtown through Golden Valley out to Plymouth.

  There was a long silence in the car, with only the intermittent crackle of a call on the radio.

  “Your girl, she might be in Golden Valley,” Spenser said. “The feds busted an outcall agency that was making porn on the side. Lots of young blond girls there.”

  “You going to look for her over there?” I said.

  Spenser grinned without looking at me. “Now you’re learning. No. I’ll send her picture over to the PD and the feds, see if anybody recognizes her.”

  We crossed 495 and entered Plymouth proper. He turned down a street lined with big expensive houses and followed it to the end, where a guard stood beside a brightly painted shack with a drop rail blocking the road. A sign on the drop rail said private property. Spenser stopped, and held out his credentials for the guard to see.

  The guard was a bull necked grey hair in his fifties or sixties. “These are Minneapolis creds.”

  “I’m glad they teach you to read,” Spenser said.

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction, Detective,” he said.

  “Somebody call you, tell you I was coming?” Spenser said.

  “No, sir,” the guard said. “I need to know your business if you’re coming onto this private property.”

  “I’m here to interview a Mr. Manfred Wollheim,” Spenser said, patiently. “I’ve already coordinated with Plymouth PD.”

  “Just a moment, Detective,” the guard said. He went back into the shack and picked up a phone and spent a long five minutes on the line before he came back.

  “Thank you for your patience, Detective,” the guard said. “You can go ahead. Do you know which one is Mr. Wollheim’s?”

  “I’ve got his address,” Spenser said.

  The guard continued as though Spenser hadn’t spoken. “It’s the last house on the last cul-de-sac, sits up on the hill. Biggest house on the property, you can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” Spenser said.

  The guard lifted the gate and let us through.

  “Not too impressed with the law, is he?” I said.

  “Fucking rich people and their flunkies give me the ass,” Spenser said, frustration thick in his voice. “They all think their shit don’t stink. There’s nothing I like better than busting one of these high and mighty assholes.”

  “Don’t like rich people?” I said. “Blue collar rage?”

  “Fuck you, Lovelady,” he said without looking at me.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

  We followed a wide, winding street that slowly climbed through the subdivision till it came to a large hill. There were huge houses, in the upper six figures to lower seven figures, I’d guess, on both sides of the street. The capper was the house that sat above all the others on the crown of the hill. It was a huge inverse V-shape, with the legs of the V pointing down the hill. A curving driveway went to a big central entrance at the apex of the V and curled around in a parking circle. We parked and got out and walked up wide Italian tiled steps to the double doors, which were wide and heavy and intricately engraved with a coat of arms.

  “Fancy,” I said.

  Spenser pursed his lips in distaste. He pushed the doorbell button and looked up at the tiny video camera discreetly placed in the arch of stonework over the door. A small inset speaker crackled to life.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  A woman’s voice.

  Spenser held his credentials up to the camera. “Minneapolis Police. I’m here to see Mr. Wollheim.”

  “Just a moment.”

  There was a short interval and then the wide door swung open. A woman stood there looking at us with a calm level gaze. She was quite beautiful,
an Oriental mix of some kind, with long legs and high cheekbones. I guessed maybe Thai-French or Thai-American. Her epicanthic fold was less pronounced than you saw in most Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans. The most startling aspect of her stunning good looks was her green eyes. She was quite exotic: a green eyed Asian woman, surprisingly large breasted with long legs shown off to good advantage in a tailored black business suit with short skirt and clingy top.

  “May I see your identification, please?” she said. She wasn’t house help; she sounded cultivated and too used to giving orders.

  Spenser fumbled out his ID and handed it to her. I hid a smile; she was beautiful enough to reduce him to nervousness.

  “Here you go,” he said.

  She took her time examining his ID. She looked from his photo to his face, a faint smile curling at the corner of her lips. There were fine lines around her eyes artfully concealed with expensive make up, so she was no youngster, though it’s hard to tell with Asians. She handed Spenser back his ID and turned her attention on me.

  “And yours?” she said.

  “He’s here with me. He’s a witness,” Spenser said.

  She was amused by that. “You saw Manfred near a crime?”

  “We’re not sure,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. I’m Frank Lovelady.”

  I held out my hand. She looked at it, her amused expression growing, then took my hand and shook it firmly. She was stronger than she appeared. “I am Miss Emerald.”

  “That’s a lovely name,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Will you come in?”

  She led us down a short entrance hallway with alcoves on either side for coats and shoes and umbrellas. Impressionist paintings, maybe originals, were on the walls past the entrance, where the hallway opened up into a great room with a sweeping set of stairs to one side, and an expansive sitting area dominated by white leather couches and arm chairs set around the biggest plasma screen television you could buy.

  Manfred Wollheim, the Terminator look alike, sat in an armchair facing the hallway we entered from. He sipped what looked like Scotch from a cut glass tumbler.

  “It’s the cocktail hour, gentlemen,” he said. “May I offer you a drink?”