“So, Mr. Bruder. Where have you been keeping yourself?”
He hushed me—“Don’t use my name”—and glanced around nervously before sitting.
“Seriously,” I told him. “You look nice. Why is that?”
He had no idea what I was talking about.
“I didn’t kill my wife,” he announced.
You sure look good for it, I thought but didn’t say.
“I didn’t,” Bruder insisted, as if he had read my mind.
“Okay.”
“Everyone thinks I did.”
“Do you blame them?”
He didn’t say if he did or didn’t.
“Mr. Bruder, where’s your son?”
“He’s safe.”
“Listen to me. I don’t give a shit about you. But your son, Jamie’s son, is a different matter … .”
“All you care about is Jamie’s sister.” Bruder sounded disappointed.
“That’s why I’m involved. Now tell me where he is.”
“With friends.”
“What friends?”
“When I’m safe, I’ll tell you. But only after I’m safe.”
“Is he with the same friends who said you could trust me?”
No answer.
Since Bruder refused to confide in me, I decided to tell him a thing or two.
“You had dinner with a woman at Rickie’s the evening your wife was slaughtered.”
That brought a high color to his face.
“You know about that?”
“Me and the woman on the psychic hotline. We know everything. What happened afterwards?”
“I went home and I saw, I saw what they had done to her. I took TC—he was asleep in his crib, thank God—and I ran.”
“What they had done to her. Who is they ?”
“I won’t talk now.”
“No?”
“When I’m safe I’ll tell you everything.”
I was wondering what it would take to make him change his mind.
He added, “This is—this is much bigger and more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.”
“I don’t know. I can imagine a lot.”
“I need to talk to the FBI.”
“Federal Building is only a few blocks away.”
“Should I go there or to St. Paul, first?”
“St. Paul,” I told him. Bobby was in St. Paul.
Young, beautiful, and smart as hell Jeannie took the call. Bobby was in a meeting with Tommy Thompson and couldn’t be disturbed.
I told her, “When he’s finished with his important meeting tell him that McKenzie called. Tell him I have David Bruder … .”
“What? How?”
“Tell him to meet me at the Tenth Street entrance next to the garage in fifteen minutes.”
“McKenzie?”
I deactivated my cell phone. This was going to be fun, I told myself.
While riding the escalator to the ground floor, I asked Bruder if he had a lawyer.
“I have a friend, Warren Casselman.”
The name triggered my memory’s replay button. David, this is Warren. Something’s gone wrong. Better call me ASAP. The message on Bruder’s telephone answering machine.
“Is he any good?”
“He makes a lot of money,” Bruder replied. I had to shake my head at that. Judging people by the money they make is like judging them by their height. I didn’t tell him so, of course. Bruder had enough problems.
“Here’s some advice, for what it’s worth,” I said. “When we get to the cop shop, don’t say a word. Don’t say yes, don’t say no, don’t say your name, don’t say anything. Just call your lawyer friend and keep your mouth shut until he arrives.”
Bruder nodded. I could feel his muscles tense where I held his arm. He was scared. I didn’t blame him.
“Why did you call me, really?” I asked.
“I ran out of options.”
Whatever that meant.
We exited through the door on Hennepin Avenue, emerging into bright afternoon sunlight. My SUV was parked in the lot across the street. To get there, we followed the wide sidewalk to the 5th Street intersection. While we waited for a green light, a black Chevy van peeled round the corner at 6th Street and accelerated hard toward us. The cargo door was open.
“Down!” I yelled.
Bruder didn’t move. He seemed transfixed by the rapid bam, bam, bam the heavy gun made just inside the door.
I dove to the pavement, landed hard on my shoulder, and rolled to the curb, finding cover in the gutter.
Explosions splattered on the sidewalk like large rain drops.
The heavy gun kept firing even as the van accelerated through the intersection against the light.
The street began to fill with screams. I shouted Bruder’s name over them. He didn’t hear me.
12
“Two dead, three wounded,” Clayton Rask said sadly.
I winced at his accounting of the casualties.
“Did you hear that? Did you hear that, McKenzie? Because of you, McKenzie. Two dead, three wounded because of you!”
Thomas Thompson stalked the Homicide Unit’s conference room inside the Pink Palace. There were five others in the room—Bobby Dunston, Rask, an assistant Hennepin County attorney, an Assistant Ramsey County Attorney and a lieutenant wearing the uniform of the Minneapolis Police Department who wanted to know what story his chief should tell the media. Thompson was by far the most vocal. Bobby simply sat with his hands folded on the table before him, staring at nothing. Rask was pacing, too, but quietly.
“What should I have done differently?” I asked. The look on Bobby’s face, he knew the answer as well as I did—I should have called the cops.
Thompson threatened to send me to Oak Park Heights for ten thousand years.
The unidentified lieutenant said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Two dead and three wounded,” Thompson shouted. “He’s responsible.”
I felt like crying. Only what good would that do? It wasn’t going to bring back Bruder. Or the mother of three who had been standing next to him. It wasn’t going to heal the wounds of the businessman directly behind her, the one who caught it in the gut. Or the bicycle courier. Or the secretary.
“What do we know about these Family Boyz?” the lieutenant asked.
“They don’t exist!” Thompson shouted. “They’re a figment of McKenzie’s warped imagination.”
“My chief wants …”
“I don’t work for your chief.”
The lieutenant wasn’t impressed by Thompson’s outburst. Calmly, but firmly, he said, “You are a guest of the Minneapolis Police Department. You are in our house now. If you do not behave I will ask you to leave.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to, Lieutenant?” Thompson said the word “lieutenant” like it was the medical term for a social disease.
The lieutenant rose from his place at the conference table and went to the closed door. He opened it. “Thank you for coming, Deputy Chief Thompson.”
Thompson didn’t say a word, nor did he make a move toward the open door. After a tense couple of moments the lieutenant shut the door firmly and returned to his seat.
“Tell us again what happened, Mr. McKenzie.”
I told my story for the fifth time.
“And you’re sure it was the Family Boyz?”
“I can’t identify the assailants,” I confessed. “I only saw the black van, but yeah, I’m sure. The machine gun …”
“We found shell casings,” Rask interjected. “Seven-point-ninety-two millimeter. Czechoslovakian made.”
“They carry a lot of heavy stuff,” I added.
“How does this tie into your investigation of Bruder?” This time it was the assistant Hennepin County attorney who asked the question. He was talking to Bobby.
“It doesn’t,” Thompson told him. “We believe this—assault—wasn’t meant for Bruder but for McKenzie.”
“Do y
ou agree with that, Mr. McKenzie?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” Thompson snorted. “Our chief suspect in two brutal murders is dead and you don’t know.”
“I wonder,” Bobby said softly.
All eyes turned to him.
“Now that we have him, there are tests we can perform to determine whether or not Bruder did, in fact, kill his wife and Katherine Katzmark. What interests me is his reference to they. When McKenzie mentioned the Family Boyz, Bruder didn’t do the one thing everyone else has done.”
“Which is what?” Thompson wanted to know.
“He didn’t ask, ‘who?’”
“We may never know,” Thompson insisted. “Two dead and three wounded.” He said it just that once too often.
“Excuse me.” I was up and moving quickly toward the door. “I need to use the rest room.”
I squatted before the porcelain toilet, expecting to vomit. But the gesture alone seemed to quiet my stomach. After a few minutes of unproductive hacking, I left the stall. Rask was waiting for me.
“You better wash,” he said, gesturing to the dried blood on my hands and the red swipe on my forehead. I did what he suggested. The blood mixing with the liquid soap created a sickly pink color in the sink and again I felt like throwing up.
I dried my hands, looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. The sight of my own drawn and haggard face made me back away until I was hard against the far wall. I slid down the wall until I was sitting at its base, my legs drawn up, and hugging my knees.
“God help me.”
Rask grinned. “Nothing like catastrophe to separate the true atheists from the whiners.”
“Do you believe in God, LT?”
“Yes.”
“After everything you’ve seen on the job?”
“Especially after what I’ve seen.”
“I stopped believing.”
“No you didn’t. You just found an excuse to stop praying.”
“I wasn’t looking for a sermon.”
“No, only absolution. Can’t help you there, my friend.”
I didn’t suppose he could. After a few more minutes of feeling sorry for myself, I used the wall to climb onto my unsteady legs.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“You didn’t do anything illegal, McKenzie. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Two dead and three wounded,” I said. “And the child still missing.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It feels like my fault. I had to be a hero. I had to show everyone how clever I was.”
“C’mon,” he said, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Thompson will think you’re making a break for it.”
Suddenly, there were ten people in the conference room, including the Minneapolis police chief. None of them were sitting. Instead they were gathered in a knot at the far end of the room around a tall man wearing a dark blue suit with black hair slicked back like the movie star Alec Baldwin. Standing next to him was a smaller man—thin, grizzled, brown suit—who looked like he’d lived three lifetimes already and was working on his fourth. He reminded me of Harry Dean Stanton, one of my favorite character actors. Alec was doing most of the talking, with Harry adding the occasional comment.
Bobby excused himself from the group and approached us as if he had been waiting impatiently for our arrival. “They want you,” he told Rask. I made a move to join the group but Dunston put a hand on my chest to keep me in place.
“Who are those guys, Bobby?”
“Tall man in blue is ATF. Small man in brown is FBI.”
“What’s going on?”
“Listen to me. Are you listening to me, McKenzie? Don’t say a word, not to anyone. Don’t ask questions. Just go home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go home.”
“Just like that?”
“Exactly like that.”
“Bobby?”
“I can’t tell you anything. In a couple of days, maybe. Right now you have to leave.”
“By whose order? The Department of Justice?”
“Remember what I said Saturday night? About you being the best friend I’ll ever have? Well, right now I’m the best friend you’ll ever have. Do what I say. Don’t make a fuss. Just go home.”
I looked past him at the knot of men, picking out Thompson’s face. The way he glared at me, it was like he was daring me to do something, anything.
“Ever have the feeling you’ve been invited for drinks but everyone else is staying for dinner?”
“Frequently,” Bobby told me.
I turned to leave. Bobby laid a gentle hand on my arm. “When you get home, stay there.”
“Why?”
“Because honest to God, McKenzie, you’re in way over your head this time and you’re probably going to get yourself killed.”
Several hours later the chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, dressed in full regalia, stood before a phalanx of reporters, Thomas Thompson at his side. He calmly told them that David Christopher Bruder, a suspect in the brutal murders of two women in St. Paul, had been shot and killed in downtown Minneapolis earlier that afternoon by persons or person unknown, along with a Golden Valley woman who was unfortunate enough to be standing next to him at the stoplight. Three others were wounded, he added, one in critical condition at the Hennepin County Medical Center, names were being withheld pending notification of family members. A full-scale investigation into the shooting had been mounted and certain suspects had been identified, although the chief declined to identify them at this time. As for the Bruder murder investigation, additional information, such as the whereabouts of Bruder’s infant son, Thomas Christopher, would be released by the St. Paul Police Department as soon as it was confirmed.
A reporter asked if the shooting was gang related.
The chief would not speculate at this time.
The reporter persisted, suggesting that “a drive-by shooting” would seem to indicate gang violence.
Again the chief refused to speculate.
What other possibilities existed?
The chief wouldn’t say.
Next it was Thompson’s turn, acting for the St. Paul Police Department. Only one station carried the news conference live but Thompson acted as if he had an audience of millions. There were a lot of “I”s in his address. Yet despite the fact that his statement was twice as long, in the end he had nothing more to add to what the chief had already said. The only favorable comment I could make about his performance was that he didn’t once mention my name.
I lay on my sofa and listened as Cecilia Bartoli sang eighteenth-century Italian songs. Cecilia’s magnificent voice climbed to a ridiculously high note, danced on top of it for a while, and then slid effortlessly down the other side. One song in particular—a simple, straightforward aria by Alessandro Parisotti—aroused my interest enough to check the English translation in the liner notes:
I no longer feel
the sparkle of youth in my heart
“Ain’t that the truth,” I told the empty room.
I closed my eyes.
A sense of unfinished business fell about me like a heavy shroud that provides no warmth. It had been a long, emotionally exhausting day. I just wanted it to end. I should have been so lucky. At seven-thirty-five p.m. the telephone rang.
“The eagle has landed,” a woman said.
“Excuse me?” I was groggy from my nap and the reference went right over my head.
“This is Nina.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Hester is here.”
That woke me up.
“Is she?”
“Yes, and if you want to catch her you’d better hurry. She and her date have already ordered dinner and I suspect they’ll be going somewhere else for dessert.”
It took me fifteen minutes to reach Rickie’s. Nina was starting down the staircase as I was starting up. We met in the m
iddle and she took my arm, leading me to the downstairs bar. She was excited.
“Same table in the corner. Hester is wearing mallard blue tonight. The gentleman is wearing tweed—a little more tony than her usual date. They asked for their check as soon as dinner was served. Good Lord, you look worse than you did this morning.”
“Thank you for noticing.”
“Is that blood?” she asked, noticing the stain on my sleeve—I had changed my jacket but not my shirt.
I nodded.
“You might find this hard to believe since I’m a saloon keeper, but I never encourage customers to drink alcohol. However, in your case …”
“I could use a drink,” I admitted.
She poured one for me on the house. Booker’s neat. The shot was like a cold shower, it jolted my senses, making me more alert. Or maybe it was Nina’s brilliant silver-blue eyes, the way they kind of flickered at me, demanding my attention. The second shot she poured had nearly the opposite effect, quieting my nerves, warming me like the blaze from a fireplace. A feeling of perfect comfort and ease settled over me—the way it does when you unexpectedly find yourself somewhere familiar and safe. But again, I don’t think it was the high-priced bourbon, as delicious as it was. It was Nina. There was an expression of concern on her face that went well beyond caring about my appearance. Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt as if I had known her since the beginning of time.
I asked for a third shot.
Nina refused. “Two ounces of alcohol acts as a stimulant, three is a depressant.”
She would know, I decided. After all, she was a professional.
“How are you doing, McKenzie?” she asked with all sincerity.
“I am so glad to see you,” I blurted out.
A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels) Page 17
