I had unlocked the Audi with the key-chain remote, opened the passenger door, and draped my jacket over the seat when he hit me hard in the kidney. The pain rippled through my body and I nearly lost my legs. I had to grip the top of the door to keep from falling. He hit me again—and again—before moving to my head. I pivoted toward him, tried to get my hands up to fend off his blows. It was only a gesture, a suggestion that I knew how to defend myself. I don’t think he noticed.
He was six inches taller than I was and at least fifty pounds heavier. His long hair and full mustache were jet black, and his features were Hispanic. The expression on his face told me only that it took some effort to beat me up, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
He put a hard fist into my solar plexus and my legs melted beneath me. I slid into a sitting position, my back against the rocker panel, my legs drawn up to my chest. He hit me twice more with his fists and then a couple of times with the car door.
Is this about Benny? my inner voice wondered, but only briefly. I was losing focus fast. Two stinging slaps on both cheeks brought me back.
“I told the lawyer and now I’m telling you.” His voice was calm but demanding. “You ain’t helping that bitch Merodie Davies no more.”
Merodie? Who’s. . . Oh, her.
“Do you understand?”
Understand?
“Nod your head if you understand.”
I nodded.
“Don’t make me tell you again.”
I might have nodded some more—I don’t remember. I don’t remember seeing him leave, either. Or if he had any parting words. See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile. He was there and then he wasn’t there. Maybe he left an instant ago. Maybe an hour. It was hard to tell. Possibly I had lost consciousness and that’s why I had no sense of time. Yet if I was unconscious, why was I singing “What a Wonderful World”? Wait, that was Louis Armstrong. Jeezus, my head hurt.
It was growing increasingly difficult to see, and for a panicked moment I thought there was something wrong with my eyes, but it was only the gathering dusk. I wanted to stand and knew it was going to hurt, so I took my time getting ready for it. I unfolded my body and, using the car door, lifted myself high enough to fall onto my car seat. A tsunami of nausea told me that I had made an unwise decision. I hugged my knees until the convulsions subsided, proud that I kept the contents of my stomach to myself. Minutes passed, and the bright red light behind my eyes faded to a dull amber. I made a slow and careful inventory of body parts. Everything seemed to work more or less as designed, although if I were a used car, they’d have me in the “best offer” lot.
The loud chiming in my ears became the tinkle of a dinner bell. I could hear my own thoughts again.
He wasn’t so tough, I told myself as I gingerly fingered my jaw, satisfied that it was still in one piece. Bobby Dunston’s girls can hit harder.
Yeah, right. What was all that about, anyway?
Merodie. Someone wants you to lay off Merodie.
Merodie?
The man said, “I told the lawyer and now. . .”
“G. K.!”
The notebook I was using for the Merodie Davies investigation was in my glove compartment. Pressed between the pages was the business card Genevieve Bonalay had given me. I dialed the home phone number she had written on the back. After four rings a voice mail message kicked in.
“Dammit.”
I hopped out of the passenger seat and jogged around the Audi to the driver’s side without thinking about the pain that squeezed my head and body. I slipped behind the wheel and started up the engine. The address G. K. had scrawled below the phone number placed her residence on Xerxes Avenue North in the Cleveland neighborhood. That was on the far west side of Minneapolis. I estimated it would take me at least twenty minutes to reach it, assuming I obeyed the prevailing traffic laws, which, of course, I didn’t.
Twice more I called G. K., and twice the phone was answered by voice mail. By the time I came to a skidding halt at her address on Xerxes sixteen minutes later, I was anticipating the worst. The two Minneapolis police cruisers parked out front of G. K.’s house confirmed my suspicions.
I left the Audi in a hurry and sprinted up the concrete walk toward the front door—or at least I ran as fast as I could, considering my legs seemed to belong to someone else. I passed a large clay planter that was broken into several pieces and the remains of what I thought were impatiens. A man watched me from his perch on a stepladder, the ladder leaning against the front wall of G. K.’s two-story brick house. He was using a battery-operated screwdriver to secure a sheet of plywood over what should have been a bay window. He kept watching while I rapped hard on the door. He could easily see all of me under the porch light. The only feature of his that I could make out was his bald head reflecting the street lamp.
“It’s not locked,” he said. I rapped on the door anyway. It was opened by a uniformed Minneapolis police officer.
“Genevieve Bonalay,” I said.
“Here.”
G. K. called to me from a living room sofa. She was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was damp and fell to her shoulders. She was sitting with her bare feet tucked beneath her. Another police officer sat next to her, his notebook out.
I moved around the cop at the door. “Are you all right?”
“God, McKenzie, what happened to you?”
“Are you all right?” I asked again.
“Yes, fine, but you . . .”
The cop spoke up. “Is he a friend of yours?”
“Yes,” G. K. said.
I heard the screwdriver and turned toward the window. The sheet of plywood was covering a large hole. Someone had smashed G. K.’s window from the outside. I was willing to take bets on who.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” I asked G. K.
She left the sofa and moved toward me on her bare feet, and I said something about broken glass. She assured me all the glass had been cleaned up and nudged me toward a stuffed chair.
“Sit,” she told me, and I did. “Tell me what happened.”
“I met a man. We had a conversation. It was a trifle one-sided.”
The cop spoke again. “Can you describe your assailant?”
I said I could and then proved it. He took notes while I spoke. When I finished, he said, “It’s the same man.”
“Yes,” said G. K.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“You tell us,” said the cop.
I looked to G. K. for an indication of how to answer. Technically, I was working for her and her client. She said, “It’s about Merodie Davis.”
“Yes,” I said. If she was going to tell the truth, so was I. “A large man attacked me from behind.” I made sure I got that last part out in case the cop thought I was a wuss. “I was already down before I could see his face. He told me to lay off the Merodie Davies case or he would come back.”
“Exactly what he told me,” G. K. said.
“He said that he had already told the lawyer, meaning Ms. Bonalay. That’s why I’m here. I called first, but your voice mail picked up.”
G. K. glanced at her phone. “I’ve been letting it ring,” she said.
“Would you like to file a complaint?” the cop asked.
“Sure, only who would I file it against?”
“Ms. Bonalay?”
We all turned toward the door. The man with the screwdriver was standing there. He appeared in his mid- to late sixties with a balding head and a strong weathered face.
“I got the plywood up. That’ll keep the weather out and the air-conditioning in for a spell. Tomorrow we can call someone about fixing the window.”
G. K. came off the sofa. She moved to the old man and hugged him close. “Thank you for everything,” she said. “I’m so lucky to have you as a neighbor.”
The interest she showed the old man made his heart pump too much blood to his face, and he turned away.
“It was nothing,” he sai
d. “Glad to help. I best be getting home now—tell Mary everything’s all right.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said the cop. “Do you remember anything more about the man you saw?”
“No, sir,” said the old man. “Only what I told you.”
“His car?”
“Just what I said. It was a black car. Something small. I tried to get the license plate, but my eyes, they ain’t what they once was.”
“Thank you,” said the cop.
The old man left, and a few minutes later, so did the officers. They promised to keep an eye on G. K.’s house for a few days, but I knew that wouldn’t amount to much more than watching it when they drove past.
“You look like hell,” G. K. said when they left.
“I don’t feel much better.”
She took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom and turned on the light.
The entire left side of my face was bright red and purple and swollen, including my ear. My eye was little more than a slit, and there was a visible knot on my forehead. Touching anything caused red explosions between my eyes. I lifted my shirt. My back on the right side of my spinal cord was the same color as my face—the man must have broken a thousand blood vessels. In a couple of days I was going to be just one giant black and blue bruise.
“I’ll get ice,” G. K. said.
A few minutes later I was sitting on her sofa, an ice pack pressed against my kidney. I held another against my face. “Thirty minutes on, thirty minutes off, repeat as needed,” my hockey coach once told me.
“I’m impressed,” G. K. said.
“By what? That I can take such an awful beating?”
“That you can take such an awful beating and then come rushing to my rescue.”
She was sitting in a stuffed chair across from me, her feet again tucked beneath her. She was nursing what looked like a vodka and orange juice.
“If you had answered your phone I might not have,” I told her.
“Yet you did come. Beat up like you were, all you could think of was me.”
“I’m a helluva guy. Ask anyone.”
“I can see that for myself.”
“Tell me what happened to you.”
G. K. took a long sip of her drink. “I took a shower when I came home from work—was taking a shower.” She took another sip. “A lukewarm shower because it’s been so hot. I was washing my hair, and I heard a pounding. I stopped and listened. The pounding stopped, and then it started again, and I . . . I left the bathroom. The upstairs bathroom. I threw on a nightshirt and came downstairs. The pounding was coming from my front door, and I looked through the peek hole and I saw him. He was—he looked awful. Frightening.”
“Yes,” I said, and shifted the ice pack to my forehead.
“I shouted through the door—no way I was going to open the door. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. I asked him who he was. He didn’t answer, just kept pounding on the door. I told him to leave or I would call the police, and the pounding stopped. I went to my window”—she gestured with the glass at the plywood—“and looked out. He was watching me and smiling, and I realized that the nightshirt—I was still wet from the shower and the nightshirt was clinging to me and he could see my body outlined in the shirt, he could see . . .”
G. K. took another long pull of her drink.
“He said things to me. Vile things. And I . . . I just stood there listening. I couldn’t move. I don’t know why. I just. . . Then he shouted that I was to stay away from Merodie Davies or he would come back and he and I, we would have a party. He said he might come back anyway. That was when my neighbor came out of his house. When the man saw my neighbor, he picked up a planter I had outside my front door and threw it through the window.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No, the planter, the glass—I wasn’t hurt. But it made me—That’s when I called the police and ran upstairs to put on clothes. He was gone by the time I came down again.”
“It’s over now.”
“No, it’s not,” she said.
“I knew you were going to say that. So we’re still on the case, then?”
“Of course we are. Aren’t we?”
“We are if you say so. Just tell me one thing. Is it you talking or Mr. Muehlenhaus?”
“You know about him?”
“We’re old friends.”
G. K. finished her drink and made another. She had offered me one before, but I had turned it down. Mixing alcohol with a possible concussion didn’t seem like a good idea. When she returned to her chair, she said, “Mr. Muehlenhaus told me to contact you.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, well, try to make it simple. I have a headache.”
G. K. drank more orange juice and vodka. “I became involved because I was Merodie Davies’s attorney when she was busted for the discon. To be honest, I was going to blow her off. I didn’t owe Merodie anything. Then Mr. Muehlenhaus called. I don’t know who brought him into it or why. I think it might have been Rollie Briggs, but that’s just a guess.”
“Rollie Briggs,” I said. “He’s the assistant county attorney in Anoka County under David Tuseman.”
“Yes.”
“Considering how helpful he’s been, he either hates his boss or likes you.”
“Both, I think,” G. K. said. “Anyway, Mr. Muehlenhaus asked me to get Merodie Davies off before her case came to trial. He didn’t want Tuseman to get any traction from her trial at all. I told him we might have a good chance of getting it kicked because a cop roughed up Merodie and the man who tried to help her during questioning. I mentioned your name, and Mr. Muehlenhaus laughed.”
“He would.”
“He said some people have all the luck. I think he meant himself, not you. Anyway, he said we should try to recruit you to help, that you would help if we asked you the right way. He said you were resourceful. He said you were courageous—I guess you proved that tonight.”
“Sure.”
“He said you never quit.”
“He’s wrong about that.”
“McKenzie.”
“Genevieve. Did it ever occur to you that Merodie Davies might be guilty as sin?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Not to you—you’re her attorney. It matters a great deal to me. Listen. Robert St. Ana abused her; he’s dead. Brian Becker abused her; he’s dead. Richard Nye abused her; he’s doing time for drugs. Eli Jefferson cheats on her; he’s dead. Do you see a pattern here? Then there’s the softball bat.”
I told her about it. G. K. turned the information over in her head.
“Tuseman will claim it supports a history of violence,” she said. “He’ll probably try to get it admitted under Spriegl.”
“I’m not going to protect a murderer just because I’m miffed at the Anoka City Police Department,” I said. “Muehlenhaus knows that. Which brings us to our friend tonight. Who do you think sent him?”
G. K. stared at me for a few beats before answering. “Not Mr. Muehlenhaus.”
“He’s done it to me before—kept me interested in a case by trying to scare me off of it.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Sure he would. The man’s a master manipulator. He enjoys it.”
G. K. stared at her drink for a few moments, took a sip, and said, “I don’t believe that’s true, and if it’s not true, that means there’s someone else at work here.”
“There’s always that possibility.” I shifted the ice pack again.
“McKenzie, you can’t quit. I need you. I need you to help me sort it all out.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I’ll stick. For a while, anyway.”
“But you said . . . You’re confusing me.”
“I think there’s a good chance Merodie Davies is a serial killer,” I said. “I think that Muehlenhaus knows it—he seems to know everything—and that he sent his thug to motivate me i
nto helping Merodie get off anyway. The moment I can prove either for sure, I’m gone. Make no mistake about that, G. K. However, there’s one small, nagging detail that makes me think, yeah, you could be right, there might be more to it than meets the eye.”
“What detail?”
“Your neighbor said our visitor drove off in a small black car. It could be a sports car.”
“Yes?”
“Yesterday Mollie Pratt told me that she saw a small black sports car parked in Merodie’s driveway the day Eli Jefferson was killed.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Last night Mollie Pratt was murdered.”
“Oh.”
G. K. made a third vodka and orange juice. We talked some more while she drank it. I told her about Mollie Pratt; told her I had been convinced that she had seen Priscilla St. Ana’s car even though the description and time didn’t exactly match, only now I wasn’t so sure. I told her about my adventures with Lieutenant Weiner that morning and everything else I had learned in the past few days. We talked for a long time. After a while it became just conversation.
I told G. K. it was time for me to leave. The news sent a visible shiver through her.
“McKenzie, I know I’m asking a lot, but. . . can you . . . can you stay here tonight?”
She didn’t need to tell me she was frightened to be alone. I could see it in her eyes.
“Do you have more ice?”
I stretched out on G. K.’s downstairs sofa. The streetlights shone in every window save the one covered with plywood. It was nearing midnight. I was tired, yet each time I started to drift off to sleep I found another aching body part that demanded attention. After a few minutes I discovered G. K. standing at the foot of the sofa. She was dressed in a white lace nightgown that ended at her knees. I could barely make out her face in the dark.
She said, “Would you like to come upstairs?”
I said, “I would like that very much.” She reached out her hand to me. “But not tonight.” She let her hand fall slowly to her side. “You’re frightened, Gen, and a little confused. Plus, you’ve had too much to drink. I don’t want you to do anything now that will make you feel uncomfortable in the morning. Come to me tomorrow when you’re sober, clear-headed, and feeling no pain. I’ll still be here.”
Dead Boyfriends Page 15
