“Wow,” I said.
Nina paused before taking a sip of wine. “What?” she said.
“Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter.”
“What about him?”
“He ran Murder Incorporated.”
“Murder Incorporated?”
“In the early thirties, Lepke, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Vito Genovese, and a couple of others invented what became the New York Mafia. They wanted to protect their interests from rival gangs. They also grew tired of all the random killings that were taking place, especially those involving civilians, because it outraged the public, and that made it harder to bribe cops and judges and conduct business. So they created an enforcement arm that would bring organization to the killings, and they called it Murder Incorporated and put Lepke in charge of it.
“Murder Incorporated was basically a cadre of professional killers made available to every syndicate in the United States. How it worked, someone would ask that a bum—that’s what they called victims—be assassinated. If the Mafia approved, then Murder Incorporated would be given the contract. These guys would fly into a city, dispose of the bum—making sure that there was no collateral damage to civilians and cops—and then get out of town. Because they were strangers, they couldn’t be identified and they couldn’t be tied to the victim by motive. It was big business. A hit cost anywhere from one to five thousand dollars depending on the importance of the bum, and Murder Incorporated must have killed a couple of thousand people before it was exposed in 1940.”
“Kathryn certainly knew some interesting people,” Nina said.
“It’s more than that. What was the date on the letter?”
Nina glanced at the sheet of personal stationery. “August 17, 1936.”
“Brent Messer was killed on August 29. He was killed by a bomb that the St. Paul cops believe was planted by ‘eastern gunmen.’ ”
“You don’t think—?”
“What does the next letter say?”
Nina reached into the carton for the final letter that Kathryn sent to her sister.
Sept. 2, 1936
New York City
Dearest Rose:
Rejoice for me, dear sister. We are coming home at last! James spoke at some length with his father over the phone. Afterward, he informed me that, if it meets with my approval, we will return to St. Paul, where James intends to start a construction firm dedicated to building homes for families. If it meets with my approval? Of course it meets with my approval. What a foolish, wonderful man! Yet this joyous news comes hard on the heels of such sadness. I have heard about the death of Brent Messer. If I had ever loved him, I stopped a long time ago, yet the news jolted my heart and sent tears streaming down my cheeks just the same. What a world we live in, sister. Still, nothing can dampen my happiness. I am taking my son home. Home! What a wonderful word …
“They arrived three weeks later,” I said.
“You think she’s responsible, don’t you?” Nina said. “You think Kathryn hired Murder Incorporated to kill Brent Messer.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.” I drained the remainder of my wine and slapped the long-stemmed glass down on the tabletop with more force than I probably should have. “No wonder Tim Dahlin is so bent out of shape. It’s not his name he’s trying to protect. It’s his mother’s.”
17
We talked it over until the sun began to peek above the horizon. Nina decided to go home before Erica woke and began getting ready for school—so much for my forty-two-dollar investment in French wine. I went to bed, yet only managed a couple hours of sleep before the phone jolted me awake.
Heavenly spoke breathlessly, with genuine alarm in her voice. If she was acting, she was damn good at it. “McKenzie, two men … when I was getting dressed, two men … I saw them at the window. One of them tried to open my door. McKenzie, please help me.”
“Are the men still there?”
“I screamed. I screamed and yelled that I was calling the police and they left, but McKenzie—they didn’t run. Not like they were scared or anything. They walked away. They walked away like they were already planning to come back.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No … I … it’s about the gold, and I—”
“It’s not necessarily about the gold,” I said.
Heavenly hesitated for a moment, said, “Oh, God, I didn’t think,” paused again and said, “Will you come over? Please.”
I thought about how I had so cavalierly dismissed her fears the evening before.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Heavenly lived in a duplex on Fifth Street, not far from the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota and only a stone’s throw from the I-35W bridge that fell into the Mississippi River. I had crossed the bridge myself only ten minutes before it collapsed on my way to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome to watch the Twins play the Kansas City Royals. I didn’t even know it went down until the PA announcer asked for a moment of silence just before the game. I was astonished by the news and, despite the overwhelming evidence, couldn’t make myself believe it actually happened until I snuck over to the site a couple of days later to see for myself the twisted metal, smashed concrete, and battered vehicles still in the water. Bridges don’t fall, I kept telling myself. You’d think a guy who lived the way I did would know better; still, I couldn’t get my head around it.
News coverage was wall-to-wall for several days, of course. Seven stations including CNN and Fox rushed crews to the scene. The pictures they broadcast were almost as astonishing to me as the collapse itself—literally dozens of courageous people rushing onto the broken pieces of the interstate and bridge to aid the injured. Not just first responders, who are trained to run toward a disaster while others are running away. Ordinary people. Men and women who just happened to be at hand when the bridge fell. My favorite was the softball player who lived in an apartment building overlooking the river. He was putting on his uniform when he glanced out of his window and saw the bridge go down. He forgot about his game, left the apartment—he didn’t even bother to close his door—jogged to the bridge, and began assisting whomever he could, including a bunch of kids trapped on a school bus. Later, a reporter stuck a microphone in his face and asked, “Why did you do it?” as if he had committed a crime.
“People needed help. I was here,” he said and then shrugged at the camera and said, “Sorry.”
“He should be sorry,” Nina said at the time. Her eyes were glistening with tears. “Getting caught doing good, what was he thinking? Doesn’t he know that up here in stoic Minnesota acts of heroism and compassion are expected to remain anonymous?”
I was never so proud to be a Minnesotan as on the day the bridge collapsed. Hell, it took nearly a week before politicians started pointing fingers at each other.
Still, a replacement bridge hadn’t yet been erected, and that made rush hour traffic iffy at best. It took me nearly twenty minutes to drive the half-dozen miles from my place to Heavenly’s duplex. The porch was a concrete slab beneath a flat roof held aloft by two wooden supports. There were two doors. Heavenly opened the one on the left before I had a chance to knock. From the eagerness of her greeting, I gathered she hadn’t been all that sure I would come.
“Thank you, McKenzie. Thank you,” she said and pulled me inside. She closed and locked the door only after looking both right and left, as if she were afraid I was being followed.
She repeated what she’d told me earlier, claiming that she didn’t know the men and was confused about what they wanted. “This business with Josh and now Mr. Dahlin—I was so frightened,” Heavenly said. “Then I thought about what you said and I was even more afraid. My mother, when I was a girl—pretty attracts evil, she told me. Do you believe that? Pretty attracts evil?”
She was wearing tight low-waisted jeans with a lacy cherry-colored form-fitting T-shirt that revealed her flat stomach each time she raised her arms. She did indeed look pretty, yet it was my experience that men don’t attac
k women because they’re pretty. They attack them because they’re women.
Heavenly was twisting a magazine in her hands that she had rolled up into a stiff rod, a formidable weapon, although I doubted that she realized it. I took the magazine—of course it was Cosmo—and led her to a chair. She was trembling.
“Can I get you anything?” I said. “Water?”
I made a move for the kitchen, but she grabbed my arm with both of her hands and held it the way she had the magazine. I patted her hands and said, “Heavenly, it’s okay.” She stared into my face with those amazing blue eyes, nodded as if she saw something there that reassured her, and released my arm. I went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the tap. While I was there I took a look at the back door. It had a cheap lock that your average juvenile delinquent could pop with a student ID.
I returned to Heavenly’s side with the water. While she drank it I told her, “I doubt it’ll make you feel any better, but I don’t think those two guys wanted to do anything more than frighten you.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t make me feel any better.”
She finished the water and handed the glass back.
“More?” I asked.
She shook her head, and I set the glass on an end table. The living room was furnished out of the JCPenney Sunday flyer and didn’t seem to fit Heavenly’s personality—but hey, at least she had living room furniture. The room was small, and so was the dining room. The kitchen was off to the side through a narrow doorway; you couldn’t see inside it from the other rooms.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Couple of years. Boston and I—” Heavenly looked up and to her right as if she were remembering something important. “Most of the furniture is his. I don’t know why he never came back to claim it.”
“Maybe he’s hoping you’ll reconcile,” I said.
Heavenly shook her head as if she couldn’t imagine the possibility.
“Before you called me,” I said, “did you think of calling him? Did you think of calling him first?”
She didn’t answer.
I might have pressed the matter, except at that moment my cell phone rang. I glanced at the display and said, “Huh.”
“What?” Heavenly asked.
“My security service. Apparently someone has just broken into my house.”
“Your house? Maybe it’s the same men who came here.”
I flashed on an incident that took place when I was in college. Bobby Dunston and I had gone to an open house for a newly married couple that we knew; they had a twenty-four-gallon keg of beer on the back porch. During the evening, the cops arrived to investigate complaints of a wild party. All of the guests drifted to the front of the house and swore that the complaints were inaccurate, that the party was actually quite subdued. The cops went away, and we returned to the back porch to find that the keg had been stolen.
“Yeah, it could be the same men,” I said. “Only if they’re after the letters, they’re going to be disappointed.”
“Because you don’t have the letters,” Heavenly said.
“Actually, I do.”
“What? You said you didn’t have them. You lied to me.”
“I didn’t get the letters until last night—after you left Rickie’s.”
“Did you read them? Can they lead us to the gold? Where are they?
Where are the letters now? Are they safe?”
“Don’t get so excited, Heavenly.”
“How can you be calm? Someone is trying to steal the letters.”
“The letters are not in my house.”
“Where are they?”
“Locked in the trunk of my car.”
“Why did you put them there?”
Because I’m going to deliver them to Bobby Dunston before he becomes even more pissed off at me than he already is, my inner voice said.
For Heavenly’s benefit, I held up the cell phone and said aloud, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
There were enough St. Anthony police cars and private security company vehicles on Hoyt Avenue and in my driveway that I was forced to park a couple of houses down. About a dozen neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk in front of my house, some of them coming back from early morning jogs, others getting a late start to work. There wasn’t much to see—an officer from the SAPD and a couple of private security guards standing in the middle of my yard, talking it over. I joined my neighbors, yet they were so intent on the cops that they didn’t notice until I spoke in a loud voice.
“What did the sonuvabitch do this time?”
Over the years I’ve developed a kind of love-hate relationship with my neighbors. I think some of them secretly love that I’ve added a little excitement to the neighborhood and given them stories to tell. Yet most of them hate that I live there and have even gone so far as to get up a petition asking me to move. I can’t say that I blame them. Because of me there have been gunfights on Hoyt Avenue; people have been shot off of my front porch. Cops gathering on my doorstep—gee, that hasn’t happened since last September.
My neighbors edged away as if they were afraid I might be contagious, and I crossed the lawn toward my house. One of the security guards moved to intercept me, and I had to identify myself. He escorted me to the front door. It opened just as we reached it, and two officers from the St. Anthony Police Department stepped outside. Each was holding on to one of the arms of a suspect, whose hands had been cuffed behind his back.
The suspect was Allen J. Frans, Timothy Dahlin’s hired hand.
He glared at me; his mouth was clenched so tightly I swear I could hear his teeth grinding.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk,” I clucked. Then I gave him my best Desi Arnaz—“Lucy, ju got some ’splainin’ to do.”
A third officer stepped out of the door. I recognized him, a sergeant named Martin Sigford. He recognized me.
“Hey, McKenzie,” he said. “Look what we found. Asshole tripped your alarm at 8:17 A.M. Seeing as how it was your place, we took our time, didn’t get here until 8:22—”
“We arrived moments later,” the security guard behind me said.
“I really appreciate how quickly you all responded,” I said just to be polite.
“Found dipshit here in your bedroom,” Sigford said. “So fucking busy going through your closet, he didn’t even know we were there until we drew down on him. He must really like those Armani suits of yours.”
Throughout it all, Allen stared straight ahead. If he blinked, I hadn’t noticed.
“You ever see him before?” Sigford asked.
“Can’t say that I have,” I said. “Why? Does he claim he knows me?”
“Doesn’t claim anything. Has no ID on ’im.” Sigford gave Allen an idiot slap to the back of his head. “Says he won’t even tell us his name until he’s made his phone call.”
“Was he carrying?”
Sigford held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside the bag was a silver-plated revolver.
“Man is caught by the police creeping a house while armed with a gun, what do they call that, Sarge?” I said.
“They call that aggravated burglary in the first degree, minimum sentence of forty-eight months, provided this is the first time he’s been caught.”
“A lawyer isn’t going to do this young man any good at all.”
“Never know,” Sigford said. “Might be able to plead to diminished capacity. How ’bout it, friend? Your capacity diminished?”
Allen didn’t answer.
“What do you think he was looking for, McKenzie?” Sigford asked.
“Letters.”
“Letters?”
“I believe this young man is a murderer. I believe he killed a man named Josh Berglund for the letters a couple days ago in St. Paul, and I believe the gun you have in the evidence bag is the murder weapon.”
“Fuck you say,” Sigford said.
Allen spun to face me. “I had nothing—”
“Sh
hhhh,” I said, holding a finger to my lips. “Wait for your lawyer.”
Allen looked away and ground his teeth some more.
“Talk to me, McKenzie,” Sigford said.
I pulled him aside and laid it out for him, telling him that he should get the gun to Bobby Dunston in St. Paul homicide as soon as possible. I told him he should hold the suspect—I didn’t identify Allen—on the burglary beef and wait until he heard what Bobby and the Ramsey County attorney’s office had to say. I said I would be giving Bobby a call myself.
Sigford said he’d like it better if I went to St. Anthony police headquarters and gave a statement to a stenographer, tape recorder, and video camera. I promised him I would do that as soon as I cleaned myself up. I had left the house after Heavenly called without shaving, brushing my teeth, or even running a comb through my hair.
“McKenzie, you are going to sign the complaint, right?” Sigford said. “You’re not going to make me go through all this work for nothing, right?”
“Would I do that to you?” I said.
“We’ve been called out here before just to have you say sorry, big mistake.”
“Not this time.”
“You’ll come down to the station?”
“In just a little bit, I promise.”
Sigford told me not to keep him waiting too long. Which would have been a good exit line except that both the cops and security guards had reports to file, so while the SAPD was transporting Allen to the cop shop, I was giving a tour of my house, making sure nothing was damaged or destroyed and confirming how Allen gained entry—he had jimmied the back door. Satisfied, they soon departed, taking their vehicles with them. That should have been enough to send my neighbors back to their homes, but just as the last SAPD cop car turned the corner, a new attraction pulled onto Hoyt Avenue and came to a halt in front of my house. A TV news van.
I glanced at my watch.
It’s been a helluva morning, my inner voice remarked, and it’s not even nine yet.
Kelly Bressandes fluffed her honey-colored hair, lifting it off her neck and shoulders and then letting it fall again. It was the third time she had done it since she and I settled around my kitchen table, and I was beginning to understand that it was a habit with her, along with the way she sat in the chair and angled her magnificent legs. Looking sexy without looking too sexy—apparently it was part of her journalistic training.
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