The laundry elevator began to climb from the basement. Bo waited. But it wasn’t Ableman pushing the cart that emerged. This man was older and heavier. He stooped in his labor, and he eyed Bo with a sour look. “Who’re you? What’re you doing here?”
Bo offered his ID. “I’m looking for Max Ableman.”
“Makes two of us.” The man pushed the cart past Bo.
“I thought he worked evenings,” Bo said, following.
“I thought so, too. Guess maybe he thinks different. Didn’t show, didn’t call. If I didn’t need him so bad, I’d fire his ass.” He positioned the cart between two big washers.
“Did you try calling him?”
“Hell, yes. No answer.” He was wearing yellow rubber gloves, and he began to reach into the cart and sort out linen into different machines. Some of it was blue surgical linen heavily bloodstained and still wet. Some of it was bedding, badly soiled. The strong smell of blood and human waste rose from the cart, and Bo could understand why the job was a hard one to hire for and to keep filled.
“Has he pulled this kind of stunt before?” Bo asked.
“He was good for the first month. Lately, he’s called in sick a lot. And tonight he didn’t call at all.” He looked with disgust at the linen in his hands. “Christ, I hate covering for these worthless jokers.”
Bo left the hospital and headed to the Bayport Court. Several cars were parked in the lot, but the old Chevy pickup wasn’t there. Room ten was dark. Bo knocked on the door and got no answer. He walked to the office. The hour was late, but the desk was still occupied. He was surprised by the desk clerk he found on duty. The kid looked to be no more than eighteen, and wore a white Stillwater High football jersey, number 7. There was innocence in his blue eyes and the natural blush of youth and health in his cheeks. He’d been watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central, but he stood up as soon as Bo walked in, and he stepped attentively to the desk.
“You in charge?” Bo asked.
“Yes, sir. Need a room?”
“No thanks.” Bo looked him over, then impressed the kid with his Secret Service ID. “You work here?”
“Not really. My uncle owns it. During the summer, he likes to spend time at his cabin up in Wisconsin, so I help out. I get a little extra money toward tuition, and a hell of an education.” The kid smiled wide, white teeth in a face that could have done milk commercials.
“I’m interested in the man renting number ten. Have you seen him this evening?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“Sure. See him head off to work in the afternoon. Don’t see him very often when he comes back. It’s usually pretty late. Times I’ve seen him he’s been covered with dirt. I figure he must work construction somewhere. Maybe roadwork they got going at night, you know.”
“You haven’t seen him today?”
“No, sir.”
Bo glanced back at the lighted walkway that ran in front of the rooms the length of the court. “I’d like to see his room.”
“I don’t know—” the kid began.
“I can have a warrant in a couple of hours, but I’d prefer to see the room sooner. It may well be an issue of national security, son.”
The kid caved easily. He reached into a drawer and drew out a key. “It’ll open every door.”
“Thanks.” Bo started away but turned back and asked, “What does he drive?”
“An old pickup. Green, I think.”
“Hang on a minute,” Bo said. He went to his car, got the faxed photo of Luther Gallagher, and brought it back into the office. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
“No.”
“Never in the company of the man in number ten?”
“No. But then, I’m not here that much.”
Bo unlocked the door of Max Ableman’s room, stepped in, and turned on the light. It looked as if no one had ever been there. The bed was neatly made. Through the opened doorway to the bathroom, Bo saw that the towels hung perfectly folded. He walked to the closet. Empty. He went to his car and punched in Diana Ishimaru’s home phone number. She answered, sounding groggy from sleep.
“Diana, this is Bo. I need a fingerprint technician. Now.”
chapter
sixteen
Clean,” Rosie Mortenson said. “Not a print anywhere. Not even any residuals in the usual places. The bathroom fixtures, the lamp, the doorknobs, the jambs, the television. Christ, even the damn Gideon Bible. They’re all absolutely clean. What does that tell you, Bo?”
“If this were the Hilton, I’d say excellent housekeeping.” Bo shook his head. “He knew what he was doing.”
“I did pull a few prints off the headboard, but they were in a place where someone might grab hold in the throes of passion, if you know what I mean. I’ll run them, but don’t get your hopes up.”
“Thanks, Rosie.”
“I wish I could have been more help.”
“You came out at a god-awful hour, and what you found tells me a lot.”
The fingerprint technician began to pack up her gear. Diana Ishimaru stood in the doorway to room ten, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her jeans, her eyes on the carpeting. “Who is Max Ableman?” she asked, more to herself than to Bo.
“I’ve been asking myself that for a while,” Bo said.
“Do you have a photograph?”
“No. He probably had a picture taken for his hospital ID. I’ll get it first thing in the morning.”
“Let’s contact the Washington County sheriff’s office and have them put out an APB on the pickup.”
Bo said, “I’d like to talk to Luther Gallagher.”
Ishimaru glanced at her watch. “Not at this hour. Go on home and get some rest. You can check him out tomorrow.” Rosie Mortenson slipped past them and went to her car. Ishimaru took one final look at the empty room. “I admit this is getting curiouser and curiouser, Bo. But we still have no evidence that connects Ableman to Tom Jorgenson’s accident. For that matter, we still have no proof that a crime has been committed.”
“I’ll get the proof.”
“Get it tomorrow, Bo. Tonight, get some sleep.”
But Bo knew sleep was going to be impossible. There were too many unanswered questions, and he’d roll them over and over in his mind until the sun came up. So he took I-94 to the beltway, swung south of the Twin Cities, and picked up Minnesota 169 heading southwest toward St. Peter, where Luther Gallagher lived. As he drove out of the bubble of urban light, the country night closed in around him, and the number of stars in the sky seemed to multiply. Distant yard lights became beacons that indicated farmhouses set among broad fields. The moon lit the land, and the highway was a long white corridor between silvered stalks of corn and leafy soybeans. He was heading into the country that long ago had been the site of his salvation.
Bo’s memories of his father were vague and shadowy. A huge shape looming over him, dark against the sunlit slats of venetian blinds. The smell of diesel fuel on big hands. A ride once atop broad shoulders to watch a parade. Only bits and pieces, as if he were always looking at fragments of torn-up photographs.
His father left when Bo was five years old. Ran off, according to Bo’s mother, with some Frederick’s of Hollywood whore who had all her brains between her legs. Bo never understood why his father would leave. Even Bo recognized how attractive his mother was. She was pretty enough to be in the movies. The men she brought home were always telling her that.
When Bo was fourteen, they lived in a run-down apartment building in an old section of St. Paul known as Frogtown, within sight of the golden horses that topped the capitol. His mother worked nights as a cocktail waitress; days, she slept off her weariness or slept off the booze. Bo was left pretty much on his own. Sometimes he went to school, but often he did not. He spent a lot of time on the streets. Although he was small for his age, he had an attitude that made kids much larger steer clear of him. He had a juvenile record, nothing serious, m
ostly truancy, a couple of incidents of shoplifting, one charge of criminal trespass that was eventually dropped. He’d done other things, just never been caught. Several social workers had threatened to put him in a foster home, but the truth was, and they all knew it, there were kids much worse than Bo, and much worse off. His mother kept a roof over his head and food in the cupboards. Bo knew how to wash his own clothes (and hers), and how to cook his own meals (and hers).
Bo loved his mother. He also sometimes hated her. It wasn’t uncommon for him to leave the apartment in a rush of anger, aiming back over his shoulder a parting shot that usually went something like, I wish you were dead. They argued about everything. His truancy, her drinking. His friends, her boyfriends. His dreams, her realities. Sometimes as he headed out the door, she called him back suddenly and held his face between her hands. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?” she’d ask, as if she were seriously afraid. If it had been a good day, he’d answer Don’t be silly. If they’d argued, he was likely to say Don’t bet on it. Their fights could be verbally brutal, but until the last night he saw her alive she’d never laid a hand on him.
He was in a fight at school that day. He’d been talking to the girlfriend of a kid named Krakhauer, when Krakhauer gave him a hard shove from behind and slammed him headfirst into the lockers. Bo coldcocked the kid. It didn’t matter that Bo hadn’t started things. Krakhauer was the one bleeding all over the hallway floor when the vice principal showed up. Bo was suspended. No big deal. It always struck him as odd punishment, this banning him from school, because school was a place he’d just as soon avoid anyway.
His mother came home late that night, drunk, and not alone. Bo was awake, lying in his bed. He’d waited up, wanting to talk about the fight, the suspension. When he heard the other voice, he grew angry. Once things started on the other side of the thin wall that separated his bedroom from his mother’s, he got up and got dressed. As he was heading toward the front door, his mother came from her room.
“It’s one o’clock in the morning. Where the hell do you think you’re going?” She’d thrown on an old robe that she held closed over her breasts with the clutch of one hand. In the other hand, she held an empty gin bottle.
“Why?” Bo asked. “You want me to pick up some booze for you?”
“Don’t get smart with me.” Her hair, long and blonde and disheveled from what had been going on in the bedroom, lay fallen over one eye. She brushed it away with the back of the hand that held the empty bottle.
“I’m going out.” He gave a surly glance toward her closed bedroom door.
Her own eyes went there, too, and everything about her seemed to sag. She came close to him, and when she spoke again, she’d softened. “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?”
Bo was sick to death of it. Sick to death of everything. And he said the cruelest thing he’d ever said to her. “He left you, you know, because you weren’t pretty enough.”
She drew back as if Bo had struck her. Then she let go her hold on the robe and slapped him. The robe fell open. Bo could see the stretch marks on her breasts and belly. “You will not speak to me that way,” she said in a choked voice. “I’m your mother, goddamn it.”
“That’s not my fault, goddamn it,” Bo threw back at her. He turned and stormed out the door.
It was a long way to the river, and Bo walked the whole distance in heated strides. The streets were empty. The season was autumn, the night cool and windy. All around him Bo heard the scrape of dead leaves on pavement. He made for a grove of cottonwood trees near the High Bridge where an old school bus sat wheel-less in tall grass. The bus smelled of urine and was full of litter, but it offered seclusion and a measure of protection, and kids often gathered there to get high and sometimes to crash. As he approached, he could see a glowing ember in the dark inside.
“Hey, man,” a voice called to him in a laid-back greeting.
“Otter, that you?”
“Halloween in a couple of weeks, Spider-Man. I thought maybe you were a goblin.” Otter laughed softly. He sat near the middle of the bus with his feet propped on the back of the seat in front of him. He was a tall kid, awkward-looking, but when he moved it was with a slow kind of grace that always put Bo in mind of a giraffe. “Late to be out, even for you.”
“You, too,” Bo said. He sat down across the aisle from Otter and accepted the joint his companion offered.
“The devil’s in my old man tonight. Figure I’m better off here until he cools down.”
Otter’s old man was infamous. A huge railroad worker, he was a brute who laid into his son with frightening regularity. Bo had often sat in the bus with Otter while his friend smoked or drank away the pain of a beating.
“So what’s up?” Otter asked.
They were hardly more than a stone’s throw from downtown St. Paul, and the lights of the city drizzled a neon illumination over the grove of cottonwoods and the bus within it. Bo could see Otter’s face, long and serene.
“Fight with my mom,” Bo replied.
“I wouldn’t mind fighting with your mom,” Otter said. The attractiveness of Bo’s mother was a constant subject of comment among Bo’s friends.
“She hit me,” Bo said. “She’s never hit me.”
“She hit you hard?”
“Doesn’t matter. She hit me.”
“It matters, believe me,” Otter said.
They were quiet for a while. Bo saw something big moving on the river. The trees made it difficult to see exactly what, and the wind through the branches covered any sound.
“Hear that?” Otter said
Bo heard only the wind and the leaves.
“I think it’s the dead getting restless.”
“What are you talking about?” Bo asked.
“I’ve been hearing it a lot tonight. With Halloween coming on, I figure all those dead folks are getting anxious for a little action.”
Otter was definitely stoned, probably drunk as well. The restless dead thing Bo decided to chalk up to altered consciousness.
Bo said, “I’m going to take a piss.”
He left the bus and walked out of the trees to the riverbank. The Mississippi was like a strip torn from the night sky and laid against the earth. Bo could see the glow in the pilothouse of a towboat that was nearing Harriet Island. Maybe that was the sound Otter had heard, the deep thrum of the engine as the towboat had passed. Bo watched the light until it disappeared beyond a bend in the river, and he imagined what it would be like to escape on a barge bound for New Orleans. He relieved himself in the grass on the riverbank, zipped up, and returned to the bus.
Otter offered him a swig from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. Bo declined. “You going to spend the night?” he asked.
“Probably,” Otter replied. “You?”
“Naw. Think I’ll go back home.” He headed to the front of the bus. “Later,” he said.
“Later, Spider-Man,” Otter called after him.
It was going toward morning by the time Bo returned to the apartment in Frogtown. The walk had done him good. Probably the joint, too, and the mellow influence of Otter. When he stepped inside, the place was quiet. He could see that the door to his mother’s bedroom was slightly ajar. An open door usually meant that the man who’d come with her had done his thing and left. Bo went to the doorway and peeked in. He saw the bedding in a jumble and saw the stains, black in the darkened bedroom. He hit the light switch, and he saw the rest—a bloodied broken bottle, and his mother’s skin, once marred only by stretch marks, marred now, and forever in Bo’s memory, by the deep cut of glass.
All his life, Bo would wonder if other people had a moment that clearly divided their lives. There was everything before, and everything after, and between, only one unforgettable heartbeat. Standing at the door to his mother’s bedroom with his hand still on the light switch, Bo had his moment. It ended in a cry that brought the neighbors running.
They never found the man who murdered her. Bo hadn’t seen him n
or had anyone else, and there was little for the police to go on. Bo wanted desperately to move back in time. He wanted to protect his mother, wanted never to have said the things he said, wanted never to have deserted her. He also wanted to find her murderer and to kill the bastard with his own hands.
He kept all this to himself, kept it in his heart, which had become a fist. He refused to talk about it to anyone, not his social worker, not the psychologist social services provided, not the foster parents he was sent to live with and from whom he eventually ran away, not even Otter who joined Bo after he, too, split from home. All the time that he and Otter, and later Egg and Pearl and Freak, lived together in the bus in the cottonwoods, Bo never once spoke about what his mother’s death meant to him. What would have been the point? They’d all been wounded. And Bo, like the others, believed that was just the way life was, harsh and unforgiving.
It was Annie Jorgenson who set him on the way to a different view of the world. He appeared before her in juvenile court after being arrested for petty theft. The cops had discovered the bus by the river and had taken Bo’s street family into custody. Bo was prepared for the worst. What he received was something far different, something he would be grateful for all his life. A second chance at growing up.
He was brought into her office and left alone with her. She wore reading glasses and slowly scanned the documents in front of her. She looked up at Bo with her intelligent blue eyes.
“Thief,” she said. “That’s what it says here. You’re a thief. Do you think that’s true?”
Bo shrugged. Let her do what she wanted, he didn’t care.
“I’m not asking if you stole things. We both know you did. I’m asking, do you think of yourself as a thief?”
The truth was that he didn’t. He saw himself as a provider, a protector. Stealing was the means to that end. He was about to offer her another shrug, then changed his mind. He shook his head.
“No,” she said, giving voice to his gesture. “As I understand it, you pretty much took care of—how many was it? four?—other runaways besides yourself.” She glanced down again at the documents in front of her. She nodded to herself, then she took off her glasses. “I see a lot of runaways, Bo. Most of them end up here because they’re being used in despicable ways by other people, usually adults. They’re prostitutes. They’re drug runners. They’re thieves in a den of thieves. In my view, you’ve done your best to keep four other kids out of the hands of the people who would use them that way, and out of my courtroom. I think that’s admirable.”
The Devil’s Bed Page 11
