“I don’t think we should touch her,” Jane said. “She fell perfectly…What we could do…” She pulled off one of Coombs’s slippers and tossed it on the bottom stair. “Like she tripped on the toe.”
“I’ll buy that,” Leslie said.
“So…”
“Give me a minute to look around,” Jane said. “Just a minute.”
“Lord, Jane…”
“She was an old lady,” Jane said. “She might have had something good.”
OUT IN THE CAR, they drove fifty yards, turned onto Lexington, went half a mile, then Leslie pulled into a side street, continued to a dark spot, killed the engine.
“What?” Jane asked, though she suspected. They weren’t talking Elegance here.
Leslie unsnapped his seat belt, pushed himself up to loosen his pants, unzipped his fly. “Gimme a little hand, here. Gimme a little hand.”
“God, Leslie.”
“Come on, goddamnit, I’m really hurtin’,” he said.
“I won’t do it if you continue to use that kind of language,” Jane said.
“Just do it,” he said.
Jane unsnapped her own seat belt, reached across, then said, “What did you do with that package of Kleenex? It must be there in the side pocket…”
“Fuck the Kleenex,” Leslie groaned.
7
THE NEXT TWO DAYS were brutal. Kline was hot, and Lucas had no time for the Bucher case. He talked to Smith both days, getting updates, but there wasn’t much movement. The papers were getting bad tempered about it and Smith was getting defensive.
Reports came in from the insurance companies and from the Department of Corrections; the halfway house was looking like a bad bet. The St. Paul cops did multiple interviews with relatives, who were arriving for the funeral and to discuss the division of the Bucher goodies. There were rumors of interfamilial lawsuits.
Despite the onset of bad feelings, none of the relatives had accused any of the others of being near St. Paul at the time of the murder. They’d been more or less evenly divided between Santa Barbara and Palm Beach, with one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.
All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie’s inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.
LUCAS HAD three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.
The first interview went badly.
Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma’s genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.
While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.
At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “…conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”
Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We’ve already got her on tape, Jimbo.”
“That would be ‘James’ to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.
Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.” He looked back at the lawyer. “What’d you find? He’s got some kind of asset we didn’t know about?” His eyes came back to Lucas: “I say we take a research guy, pull every tax record we can find, run down every asset Kline has got, and attach it. Do a real estate search, put Kline on the wall…”
“Why do you want to steal the rightful compensation from this young woman?” the lawyer demanded. “It’s not going to do her any good if Burt Kline goes to jail and that’s it. She may need years of treatment—years!—if it’s true that Mr. Kline had sexual contact with her. Which, of course, we’re still trying to determine.”
“Motherfucker,” Flowers said.
The lawyer, shocked—shocked—turned to Jesse and said, “Put your hands over your ears.”
Jesse just looked at Flowers, twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers, and stuck a long pink tongue out at him. Flowers grinned back.
“SHE’S HOT,” Flowers said when they left the house. They had to step carefully, because a yellow-white dog with bent-over ears, big teeth, and a bad attitude was chained to a stake in the center of the yard.
“She’s sixteen years old,” Lucas said, watching the dog.
“Us Jews bat mitzvah our women when they’re fourteen, and after that, they’re up for grabs,” Flowers said. “Sixteen’s no big thing, in the right cultural context.”
“You’re a fuckin’ Presbyterian, Virgil, and you live in Minnesota.”
“Oh, yeah. Ya got me there, boss,” Flowers said. “What do we do next?”
THE SECOND INTERVIEW was worse, if you didn’t like to see old men cry.
Burt Kline sat in his heavy leather chair, all the political photos on the walls behind him, all the plaques, the keys, the letters from presidents, and put his face in his hands, rocked back and forth, and wept. Nothing faked about it. His son, a porky twenty-three-year-old and heir apparent, kept smacking one meaty fist into the palm of the other hand. He’d been a football player at St. Johns, and wore a St. Johns T-shirt, ball cap, and oversized belt buckle.
Burt Kline, blubbering: “She’s just a girl, how could you think…”
Flowers yawned and looked out the window. Lucas said, “Senator Kline…”
“I-I-I d-d-didn’t do it,” Kline sobbing. “I swear to God, I never touched the girl. This is all a lie…”
“It’s a fuckin’ lie, he didn’t do it, those bitches are trying to blackmail us,” Burt Jr. shouted.
“There’s that whole thing about the semen and the DNA,” Flowers said.
The blubbering intensified and Kline swiveled his chair toward his desk and dropped his head on it, with a thump like a pumpkin hitting a storm door. “That’s got to be some kind of mistake,” he wailed.
“You’re trying to frame us,” Burt Jr. said. “You and that whole fuckin’ bunch of tree-hugging motherfuckers. That so-called lab guy is probably some left-wing nut…”
“Here’s the thing, Senator Kline,” Lucas said, ignoring the kid. “You know we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to send it to a grand jury. Now we can send it to a grand jury here in Ramsey County, and you know what that little skunk will do with it.”
“Oh, God…”
“Just not right,” Burt Jr. said, smacking his fist into his palm. His face was so red that Lucas wondered about his blood pressure. Lucas kept talking to the old man: “Or, Jesse Barth said you once took her on a shopping trip to the Burnsville Mall and bought her some underwear and push-up bras…”
“Oh, God…”
“If you did that for sex, or if we feel we can claim that you did, then that aspect of the crime would have taken place in Dakota County. Jim Cole is the county attorney there, and runs the grand jury.”
The sobbing diminished, and Kline, damp faced, looked up, a line of calculation back in his eyes. “That’s Dave Cole’s boy.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Lucas said. “But if you actually took Jesse over to Burnsville…”
“I never had sex with her,” Kline said. “But I might’ve taken her to Burnsville once. She needed back-to-school clothes.”
“They wear push-up bras to high school?” Lucas asked.
“Shit, yes. And thongs,” Flowers said. “Don’t even need Viagra with that kind of teenybopper quiff running around, huh, Burt?”
“You motherfucker, I ought to throw you out the fuckin’ window,” Burt Jr. snarled at Flowers.
“You said something like th
at last time,” Flowers said. He didn’t move, but his eyes had gone flat and gray like stones. “So why don’t you do it? Come on, fat boy, let’s see what you got.”
The kid balled his fists and opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, and then Kline said to him, “Shut up and sit down,” then asked Lucas, “What do I gotta do?”
“Agree that you took her to Burnsville. Agent Flowers will put that in his report and we will make a recommendation to the county attorney.”
“Dave Cole’s boy…”
“I guess,” Lucas said. “Neil Mitford would like to talk to you. Just on the phone.”
“I bet he would,” Kline said.
ON THE STREET, Flowers said, “I don’t like the smell of this, Lucas.”
Lucas sighed. “Neither do I, Virgil. But there’s a big load of crap coming down the line, no matter what we do, and there’s no point in our people getting hurt, if we can confine the damage to Kline.”
“And the Republicans.”
“Well, Kline’s a Republican,” Lucas said.
“Fuck me,” Flowers said.
Lucas said, “Look, I’ve got loyalties. People have helped me out, have given me a job chasing crooks. I like it. But every once in a while, we catch one of these. If you can tell me who we ought to put in jail here—Burt Kline or Kathy Barth—then I’ll look into it. But honest to God, they’re a couple of dirtbags and nobody else ought to get hurt for it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Flowers was pissed.
Lucas continued rambling. “There’s a guy I talk to over at the Star Tribune. Ruffe Ignace. He’s a guy who can sit on a secret, sit on a source. I’d never talk to Ruffe about something like this—I’ve got those loyalties—but we go out for a sandwich, now and then, and we always argue about it: Who has the right to know what? And when? And what about the people who get hurt? Is it going to help Jesse to get her ass dragged through the courts?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Flowers said again.
“So I gotta go talk to this Cole guy, down in Dakota County,” Lucas said.
“Sounds like another in a long line of assholes,” Flowers said.
“Probably,” Lucas said.
They walked along for a while and then Flowers grinned, clapped Lucas on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks, boss. I needed the talk.”
THE THIRD INTERVIEW was better, but not much, and Lucas left it feeling a little more grime on his soul.
Jim Cole was a stiff; a guy who’d get out of the shower to pee. He said, “That all sounds a little thin, Agent Davenport, on the elements, but I’ll assign my best person to it.” Behind him, on the wall, among the political pictures, plaques, and a couple of gilt tennis trophies, was a photo-painting that said, “Dave Cole—A Man for the Ages.”
Lucas thought the elder Cole looked like a woodpecker, but, that was neither here nor there. Dave’s boy, Jim, bought the case.
“I would assume there’s been a lot of concern about this,” Cole said. “It seems like a touchy affair.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Why don’t you ask Neil Mitford to give me a call—I’d like to discuss it. Purely off the record, of course.”
“Sure,” Lucas said.
ALL OF THAT took two days. On the third day, Lucas made a quick call to Smith about the Bucher case. She was still dead.
“I’m gonna get eaten alive if something doesn’t break,” Smith said. “Why don’t you do some of that special-agent shit?”
“I’ll think about it,” Lucas said.
He did, and couldn’t think of anything.
HE HAD his feet on his top desk drawer, and was reading Strike! Catch Your River Muskie!, a how-to book, when his secretary came into the office and shut the door behind her.
“There’s a hippie chick here to see you,” she said. The secretary was a young woman named Carol, with auburn hair and blue eyes. She had been overweight, but recently had gone on a no-fat diet, which made her touchy. Despite her youth, she was famous in the BCA for her Machiavellian ruthlessness. “About the Bucher case, and about her grandmother, who fell down the stairs and died.”
Lucas was confused, his mind still stuck in how to fish the upstream side of a wing dam without losing your lower unit; something, in his opinion, that all men should know. “A hippie? Her grandmother died?”
She shrugged. “What can I tell you? But I know you’re attracted to fucky blondes, especially the kind with small but firm breasts…”
“Be quiet,” Lucas said. He peered through the door window past the secretary’s desk into the waiting area. He couldn’t see anybody. “Is she nuts?”
“Probably,” Carol said. “But she made enough sense that I thought you should talk to her.”
“Why doesn’t she talk to Smith?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her.”
“Ah, for Christ’s sakes…”
“I’ll send her in,” Carol said.
GABRIELLA COOMBS HAD an oval face and blue-sky eyes and blond hair that fell to her small but firm breasts. Lucas couldn’t tell for sure—she was wearing a shapeless shift of either gingham or calico, he could never remember which one was the print, with tiny yellow coneflowers, black-eyed Susans—but from the way her body rattled around in the shift, he suspected she could, as his subordinate Jenkins had once observed of another slender blond hippie chick, “crack walnuts between the cheeks of her ass.”
She had a string of penny-colored South American nuts around her neck, and silver rings pierced both the lobes and rims of her ears, and probably other parts of her body, unseen, but not unsuspected.
Given her dress and carriage, her face would normally be as un-clouded as a drink of water, Lucas thought, her wa smooth and round and uninflected by daily trials. Today she carried two horizontal worry lines on her forehead, and another vertically between her guileless eyes. She sat down, perched on the edge of Lucas’s visitor’s chair, and said, “Captain Davenport?”
“Uh, no,” Lucas said. “I’m more like a special agent; but you can call me Lucas.”
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “Could I call you mister? You’re quite a bit older than I am.”
“Whatever you want,” Lucas said, trying not to grit his teeth.
She picked up on that. “I want us both to be comfortable and I think appropriate concepts of life status contribute to comfort,” she said.
“What can I do for you? You are…?”
“Gabriella Coombs. Ruffe Ignace at the Star Tribune said I should talk to you; he’s the one who told me that you’re a captain. He said that you were into the higher levels of strategy on the Bucher case, and that you provide intellectual guidance for the city police.”
“I try,” Lucas said modestly, picked up a pen and scrawled, Get Ruffe, on a notepad. “So…”
“MY MOTHER, Lucy Coombs, two fifty-seven…” She stopped, looked around the room, as if to spot the TV cameras. Then, “Do you want to record this?”
“Maybe later,” Lucas said. “Just give me the gist of it now.”
“My mom didn’t hear from Grandma the night before last. Grandma had a little stroke a few months ago and they talk every night,” Coombs said. “So anyway, she stopped by Grandma’s place the morning before last, to see what was up, and found her at the bottom of the stairs. Dead as a doornail. The cops say it looks like she fell down the stairs and hit her head on one of those big balls on the banister post. You know the kind I mean?”
“Yup.”
“Well, I don’t believe it. She was murdered.”
LUCAS HAD a theory about intelligence: there was critical intelligence, and there was silly intelligence. Most people tended toward one or the other, although everybody carried at least a little of both. Einstein was a critical intelligence in physics; with women, it was silly.
Cops ran into silly intelligences all the time—true believers without facts, who looked at a cocaine bust and saw fascism, or, when somebody got killed in a back-alley gunfight, reflexivel
y referred to the cops as murderers. It wasn’t that they were stupid—they were often wise in the ways of public relations. They were simply silly.
Gabriella Coombs…
“I THINK the medical examiner could probably tell us one way or the other, Miss Coombs,” Lucas said.
“No, probably not,” Coombs said, genially contradicting him. “Everybody, including the medical examiner, is influenced by environmental and social factors. The medical examiner’s version of science, and figuring out what happened, is mostly a social construct, which is why all the crime-scene television shows are such a load of crap.”
“Anyway.” He was being patient, and let it show.
“Anyway, the police tell the medical examiner that it looks like a fall,” she said. “The medical examiner doesn’t find anything that says it wasn’t a fall, so he rules it a fall. That’s the end of the case. Nobody’s curious about it.”
Lucas doodled a fly line with a hook, with little pencil scratches for the fly’s body, around the Get Ruffe. “You know, a person like yourself,” he said. “…have you studied psychology at all?”
She nodded. “I majored in it for three quarters.”
He was not surprised. “You know what Freud said about cigars?”
“That sometimes they’re just cigars? Frankly, Mr. Davenport, your point is so simple that it’s moronic.”
He thought, Hmm, she’s got teeth.
She asked, “Are you going to listen to what I have to say, or are you going to perform amateur psychoanalysis?”
“Say it,” Lucas said.
She did: “My grandmother was killed by a blow to the head that fractured her skull. Last Friday or Saturday, Constance Bucher and Sugar-Rayette Peebles died the same way. Grandma and Connie were friends. They were in the same quilt group; or, at least, they had been. A story in the Star Tribune said that Mrs. Bucher’s murder might have been a cover-up for a robbery. When Grandma died, I was supposed to inherit a valuable music box that her grandmother—my great-great-grandmother—brought over from the Old Country. From Switzerland.”
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