Buried Prey p-21

by John Sandford

  He’d never been there in civilian clothes, and felt a little sleazy as he went slinking down the street toward the entrance, hoping that no past, present, or future women friends saw him going in.

  When the strip joint became a gentleman’s club, the owner took down the NUDE-NUDE-NUDE red-blinking neons and put up a green one that said, “Gentlemen.” Other than that, not much had changed; the first bar stool by the door still had a strip of duct tape covering a slash in the vinyl cover, and it still smelled of cheap disinfectant, layered over by even cheaper lilac perfume.

  Del was in the back, playing shuffleboard bowling with a tall, heavyset man with a drunk-red face under a white Sparkle Drywall hat with the bill turned up. A dozen empty Bud bottles were sitting on a table behind them. Lucas marched past the three main poles, two with active dancers, one down to her G-string. The other peeled a pastie as Lucas went by, then cupped her breasts and pointed them at him.

  “Stick ’em up,” she said.

  He kept going, not amused.

  Del was looking at a six-seven split on the shuffleboard machine, and Lucas came up, crossed his arms, and stared at the back of his head. He’d worked with Capslock a couple of times as a drug decoy, and he’d seemed a little out there.

  After a couple of practice strokes, Del let the puck slide, took out the six and cleanly missed the seven, said, “Rat poop,” and without turning around, reached for his beer.

  The drywall guy, peering through small drunk eyes at Lucas, asked, “What’re you looking at, college boy?”

  Lucas, still pissed at being pulled off the Jones kidnapping case, snapped, “Not you, fat man. I got better taste.”

  The drywall guy put down his beer and started around Del, as Del straightened, saw Lucas, put his arm across the other man’s chest, and said, “Whoa. Slow down, Earl. He’s a cop, he was third team all-Big Ten in hockey, he can press three twenty-five and he likes to fight.”

  “And if you keep coming, I’ll beat your ass into one big bruise and then put it in jail,” Lucas said. “I am not in a good mood right now.”

  Earl saw it in Lucas’s eyes, and slowed down. “I’d kick your ass if I wasn’t so drunk,” he said.

  “Go away,” Lucas said. “I got business with this clown.”

  Earl picked up his beer and went to stare at a pole dancer. Del said, “Clown?”

  “Third team?”

  Del smiled, his teeth still yellow in the subdued light: “So we’re even.”

  “I didn’t know if the fat guy knew you were a cop,” Lucas said. “Or I woulda called you Ossifer Capslock.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  Del was a thin, middle-height man with salt-and-pepper hair that seemed premature, and a short, neatly trimmed beard. His face was weathered, and his arms were dark with the sun. He was dressed in jeans and an antique Bob Dylan T-shirt ripped at the neckline, with a silver Rolex on one wrist. He led the way out of the bar to his vehicle, a ’77 Scout pickup convertible that somebody had painted white with a brush. He settled in his seat and said, “We’ve got four interviews-friends and relatives.”

  “Why in the middle of the night?”

  “Because that’s when they’re home and we can find them,” he said, as he put the truck in gear. “They don’t have straight jobs.”

  They found friends and relatives, but nobody knew anything about the killing, and Lucas tended to believe them. Smith, they said, was out doing his thing, which mostly involved wandering around, talking to his homeys. Everybody knew he’d been pounding the crack, and sometimes sold it, and was often holding. So the belief was, somebody needed some crack and they took it.

  One guy angrily told them that “That shit is everywhere and it’s fuckin’ up everybody and you ain’t doing a damn thing about it. Not a damn thing.”

  Del told him, “I don’t know what to do. You tell me what to do.”

  “Do something,” the guy said. “Anything. Arrest them. Put them in jail. They’re a buncha animals, they’re fuckin’ up the whole neighborhood. If we were white, you’d be all over it.”

  His wife was standing behind him, arms crossed, nodding.

  Moving around with Del felt weird.

  As a uniformed cop, Lucas generally assumed that the people with whom he came in contact were the enemy, until proven different. In the course of covering traffic accidents or making traffic stops, breaking up fights, chasing down robbers or burglars, calling ambulances, talking to victims, uniforms really didn’t need to project much empathy. They were like the army: not there to make friends. And sometimes, rolling through the dark across hostile neighborhoods, inside a car filled with weapons, radios, and lights, he felt like he was in an army, and in hostile territory.

  Del, on the other hand, solicited help, listened carefully, displayed great patience, and when the guy went off about crack, he was nodding in agreement, and when the guy finished, he said, “Don’t tell the boss I said this, but I agree with you.”

  And he got some cooperation, but no real information, probably, Lucas thought, because nobody had any.

  At ten o’clock, Del had gotten involved in a convoluted discussion with a minister who’d once run a church that Smith and his mother had gone to. Lucas had drifted off down the street, toward the corner where they’d parked, when he saw a thin young white man walking toward the same corner, from the right-angle street. The man was wearing what cops had called a pimp hat, a widebrimmed fuzzy thing that had gone out of fashion sometime in the seventies, when disco died. Long knotted Rasta braids flowed out from under the hat, and Lucas said, aloud, “Randy.”

  The man stopped, saw Lucas, did a double take, turned, and started running. Lucas went after him, fifty yards behind.

  The thing was, Randy Whitcomb could hoof it, like skinny people often can. He wasn’t in the same class athletically as Lucas, but he wasn’t carrying the weight, either. Lucas heard Del shout, “Hey! Hey!” as he went around the corner, and then the race was on. Lucas could close by ten yards or so every short block, but there was traffic. Sometimes he caught it wrong, going across the street, and Randy stretched his lead, and sometimes Randy caught it wrong, and lost ground. Five blocks and Lucas was getting close, fifteen yards back, and Randy swerved into an alley and as he turned, Lucas caught a flash of plastic going over a hedge; so Randy had off-loaded his crack, coke, or grass, hoping that Lucas hadn’t seen it.

  Toward the end of the block, Lucas was four feet behind him, then two feet: Randy glanced back in desperation, hearing the footsteps, and lost another foot in looking, and Lucas hit him between the shoulder blades. Randy went down on his face and Lucas was on top of him, one hand on Randy’s neck, his weight on Randy’s upper back.

  “You little cocksucker, I told you to get out of my part of town,” Lucas said. He banged Randy’s face on the alley’s concrete one time, then maneuvered to put the cuffs on. “What’d you throw in that bag, Randy? Yeah, I saw it. You got a little crack in there? You got five years in there?”

  “I’m gonna kill you, you motherfucker,” Randy said. “I’m gonna cut your fuckin’ nuts off.”

  Randy Whitcomb was a twenty-year-old refugee from suburban St. Paul. He gave every sign of believing that he was a black pimp, though he was so pale that he almost glowed in the darkness of the alley. Not only did he believe that he was black, but a stereotypical TV gangster black, with the fuzzy hat, the cocaine fingernails, the braids, and even a ghetto accent, picked up from MTV. It might have been laughable, if he hadn’t been such an evil little fuck, attempting to recruit runaway girls to hustle for him, beating them blue when they failed or didn’t work hard enough or held out on him.

  Lucas got the cuffs on and jerked Randy to his feet, and started marching him back down the alley to the hedge where he’d thrown the bag. “You know what’s in the bag, dickhead? There’s one-half ounce of weed, which will get me about, uh, an hour in jail, you piece of shit,” Randy said. “Good going, Davenport, you’re a real fuckin’… you know�
� that guy with the hat.”

  “What?”

  “The fuckin’ cop with the fuckin’ backwards hat.”

  “Fuck you, Randy,” Lucas said, with no idea of what Randy was talking about. But if he was telling the truth, the weed hadn’t been worth the chase.

  Then Lucas said, “You can take that weed and stick it up your ass, as far as I’m concerned. You’re going down for the Billy Smith murder, you little shit.”

  “What? What the fuck?”

  “We just got fuckin’ tired of you,” Lucas said. “We got the knife he was stabbed with, and guess whose fingerprints are gonna be on it? Man, I been waiting three years for this day…”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Randy said, trying to twist around to see Lucas’s face.

  “Bullshit, I wouldn’t,” Lucas said. “So would every other cop on the south side. We solve a murder, we put you away for eighteen fuckin’ years, get you outa our hair.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” Randy said. “I didn’t do it.”

  “But you’ve done all kinds of other shit. We’ll just call it even,” Lucas said. “You get away with that, we frame you for this. Everybody’s happy. Especially those three-hundred-pound weightlifting homos out at Stillwater. They’re gonna love your little red ass.”

  They came to the point in the hedge where Randy had tossed the bag, and Lucas steered him through a hurricane fence gate, and found the bag sitting on the back lawn of a darkened house. Lucas picked it up between two fingers, not getting prints on it: weed, all right, and probably not much more than a half-ounce. He stuck it in Randy’s back pocket. “Oh, look-he’s still got the weed.”

  “You fuck.”

  “And you murdered that poor Billy Smith boy.”

  Then Randy said, “Davenport, listen, goddamnit. I got something for you. You know when Rice got stabbed the other week? I know who done that.”

  “Rice?” Lucas knew about a guy named Ronald Rice getting stabbed on the north side, out of his territory, but hadn’t heard much more about it.

  “Yeah. I know who done that, and I know who’ll tell you about it. You let me go… you got nothing here with this little bit of weed

  … you let me go, I’ll give you the name. Just you and me.”

  “Randy, you’re going to prison. Right now. You’re off-”

  Randy smelled the interest. “No, no, no, man, I got these names. They’re good names, honest to God. I just don’t want to go to jail tonight, and I don’t like this asshole anyway, he gives me a lot of shit, so I’ll give the name to you. And the name of the chick who can back it up.”

  Lucas thought about it, standing in the alley. Then he said, “If there’s one thing I hate more than you, it’d be you punkin’ me,” Lucas said. “You punkin’ me, Randy? If you are, I swear to God, I’ll find you and I’ll choke you to death and I’ll throw your body in the fuckin’ Mississippi River.”

  Randy felt the deal coming: “Okay. Okay. Here’s the name: Delia White. She lives on the corner of Cornwall and Eighteenth, in a big red house. You know that big red house?”

  Lucas did. “Delia White.”

  “That’s right. The guy who stabbed Rice is her brother-in-law, which name is El-Ron Parker. And she’ll talk, because she thinks El-Ron killed her sister two years ago.”

  “Did he?”

  “How in the fuck would I know? And who cares?”

  Lucas looked at Randy for a minute, then said, “How do you know this?”

  “Because I sell a little medicine to Delia and her friends.”

  “Crack?” Lucas asked. A crackhead wouldn’t be the best witness.

  “Not crack, just a little weed.”

  “If you’re punkin’ me…”

  “I’m not, I swear to God.”

  Lucas looked at him another moment, then said, “You get off the south side. I don’t care where you go. You go up north, you go over to St. Paul. I don’t want to see you on my turf.”

  “I’m outa here,” Randy said. He held his cuffed hands out to the side. Lucas looked at him for another long moment, moved him over into the light from a streetlight, and popped the cuffs. Randy rubbed his wrists, moving away, then turned and ran. Lucas moved more under the light, wrote “Delia White” and “L. Ron Parker” in his notebook, circled them, and drew a line to “Ronald Rice.”

  A block down the street, Randy turned again and began screaming: “You cocksucker… you cocksucker…”

  Lucas saw Del’s truck coming down the street, and stepped out and flagged it down. When he looked back after Randy, Randy was gone.

  Lucas got in the truck and Del asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

  “Little asshole I’ve been trying to get rid of,” Lucas said.

  “You get rid of him?”

  “Probably not,” Lucas said. “You get anything?”

  “I got a rash. I think my underwear’s too tight.”

  At eleven o’clock, they were ready to quit, and headed back toward the river to drop Lucas; they were talking about cars.

  Del confessed that his heart beat a little harder every time he saw a Camaro IROC-Z. “Zero to sixty in seven seconds, thirteen grand to put it in my driveway.”

  “We called them dork-mobiles, over at the U,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Dork-mobiles. You get one, you’d have to grow a mullet.”

  “Now you ruined it for me,” Del said.

  “I’m thinking Porsche,” Lucas said. “They’d, like, Eat a fuckin’ IROC-Z.”

  “Along with your paycheck for the next ten years,” Del said. He pointed off to his right and said, “Smith was killed about three blocks over there.”

  Lucas frowned. “Over there?”

  “Yeah, right over there.”

  “Let’s go see it,” Lucas said.

  “It’s dark, man,” Del said. “There’s nothing to see. There wasn’t much to see in the first place.”

  “I wanna see it,” Lucas said. “It’ll take you what, two minutes?”

  Del shrugged and took the next right, and they went back around the block, took a left, went four more blocks down and took another right, and another right into a narrow alley, and rolled a few car lengths into it. Del did a little jog so his headlights played across the side of a garage and an adjoining hedge. “That’s it. He was stabbed right by the garage door, we think, and thrown into the hedge beside the garage.”

  “And the garbage guys found him at six this morning, and the ME said he’d been dead for quite a while, but they weren’t sure how long because it was so hot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he was stabbed by a long knife with a heavy blade,” Lucas said.

  “Where’re we going with this?”

  “We’re about a five-minute walk from the Jones girls’ house. We got a tip that the killer was this guy-”

  “The bum with the basketball. Crank, or whatever his name is.”

  “Scrape. We took a long knife off him. Butcher knife.”

  Del looked at him in the thin ambient light and said, “Ah… fuck me.”

  They considered that statement for a while, then Del added, “This asshole, Smith, was killed by some other asshole for six dollars’ worth of crack cocaine.”

  Lucas said, “Probably. But, you gotta consider the possibilities. A guy gets stabbed with a long butcher knife, and a crazy dude, who is a suspect in a kidnapping-murder in the same place at Exactly the same time, is picked up with a long butcher knife. Probably a coincidence, but you gotta look at it. Am I right?”

  Del said, “You’re gonna cause a lot of trouble in this goddamn department. We gotta talk to somebody.”

  Lucas took out his notebook. “I got Daniel’s home phone number. If we can find a phone, I’ll give him a ring.”

  “You’re a braver man than I am,” Del said. “But if you’ll talk to him, I know the location of every single fuckin’ pay phone in Minneapolis, and there’s one on the back wall of the Ugly Stick
. We can be there in two minutes.”

  “Got a quarter?” Lucas asked.

  Daniel took the phone from his wife and said, “Davenport… goddamnit. It’s almost midnight. Why’d I give you this number? I really need the sleep.”

  Lucas and Del were in the back room of the Ugly Stick, a pool parlor on Lake Street, thick with smoke and wiseasses. Del leaned against the wall and dug around his teeth with a toothpick, and listened as Lucas made the call. Lucas asked, “What’d we do with that knife we took off Scrape?”

  “It’s in an evidence locker. Did you hook up with Del or what?”

  “Del’s right here-he’s the one who insisted we call,” Lucas said. Behind him, Del clapped a hand to his forehead. “Listen: Scrape’s in jail, right?”

  There was a moment of dead silence, then Daniel said, “No. He took off. Snuck out. We don’t know how-probably out a side window-but we can’t put our hands on him. We checked his cave, he’s not there. We’re looking for him… but I don’t want to talk about this in the middle of the night. What the hell are you doing?”

  Lucas was dumbfounded. “He got away? Weren’t we watching him? What was that thing about being inside his sweatshirt?”

  “Davenport…”

  “Smith got killed at the same time the girls disappeared, and he was stabbed to death with a butcher knife with a long heavy blade,” Lucas said. “That was four blocks from the Jones house. You can’t see it unless you’re down here, how close they are. The girls could have been walking out to the stores on Lake, there’s all kinds of stuff down there that kids might go for. And they would have gone right by this alley. Or through it. We need to look for Smith’s blood on the knife.”

  Daniel said, “Aw, for Christ’s sakes… Del’s there? Let me talk to Del.”

  Lucas pushed the phone at Del: “He wants to talk to you.”

  Del took the phone and listened for a minute, then said. “Right. Talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up and said to Lucas, “Thanks a lot for that ‘Del insisted’ bullshit.”