“Who are you?”
“I own the place.”
“You’re Rickie?”
“Nina. Nina Truhler.” She offered to shake hands, her grip was firm. “Rickie’s my daughter, also known as Erica.”
“McKenzie.” I didn’t tell her I wasn’t a private investigator. Why ruin the illusion?
“Pleasure.”
“Where’s the namesake?”
Nina looked at her watch and said, “Erica should just be getting home from dance class now. She’ll read my note telling her to eat a decent meal, ignore it, grab some Lucky Charms and eat them dry from the box like peanuts while she decides if she’ll go cruising with her friends tonight or simply curl up with a good book. I’d say it was fifty-fifty.”
“No gentlemen callers?”
“She’s fourteen. Boys bore her.”
“Boys bored me when I was fourteen, too.”
“Are you gay?”
“No,” I said way too loud. “I was just making a joke.”
“Oh, funny.” She rolled her eyes and moved down the bar.
I liked her. I liked everything about her. I liked the way her movements were smooth and effortless when she served her other customers—a dancer who knows all the steps. I liked her clear, unaffected voice and the way she spoke as if she was in the habit of speaking up for herself. I liked it that her high cheekbones, narrow nose, and generous mouth required little makeup. I liked her outfit—a brandy colored turtleneck sweater under a matching long-sleeve cardigan, the sleeves pushed up, and a pleated, charcoal gray skirt. I even liked it that she was ten pounds over what the New York fashion designers decreed was her ideal weight—a woman who cared about her appearance but who wasn’t going to starve herself over it.
“Okay, good, not gay,” she said when she returned. “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“Children?”
“No.”
I was beginning to think Bobby was on to something. Maybe I was a catch.
“How about you?” I asked.
“Divorced.”
“Happily?”
Nina chuckled. “Very.”
“Rickie your only offspring?”
“Yes, thankfully.”
“Thankfully?”
“Believe me, Erica is enough to keep both hands full.”
“And all this,” I said, gesturing at the club.
“The business is starting to run itself, now. I could probably even sneak away on a Saturday night and not be missed.”
“Is that a proposition?”
Nina blushed, something rarely seen in a mature woman. I found it entrancing. She glanced away, looked back.
“Try me.”
I think maybe we should start seeing other people.
It seemed to me I heard someone say that not too long ago.
“Ms. Truhler, I would be delighted if …”
“Call me Nina.”
“Nina, I would be … Damn!”
Napoleon Cook was coming down the staircase.
I pretended I was a photograph on the wall. Nina did an interesting thing. She positioned her body to conceal me from Cook as Cook swept the room with his eyes. How could I not like her?
When Cook reached the bottom step, he shot an impatient glance upward. Hester had halted halfway down the staircase and leaned against the shiny brass railing, posing like a model in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, looking just as alluring, just as inviting as any of the women you’ll find there. Cook watched her. I watched her. Nina watched her. The bartender watched her. So did everyone else. Now I know what is meant when they say, “A hush fell …”
Hester’s hair was long and black, blacker than Nina’s if that was possible. Her eyes were the color of flawless jade. She wore an oriental-style jacket, carefully fitted at the waist, with a floral tapestry on a hunter green background, a high mandarin collar, antique gold buttons, and slightly raised shoulder pads. Below the jacket was a very short, very tight black skirt—it could have been painted on—and black hose and heels. The ensemble didn’t look like something you ordered from Spiegel.
Hester glided—I’m not exaggerating—to the bottom of the staircase. Cook said something to her. She grinned at him. Cook moved to
the door. I swear she winked at the room before following him out. I waited a few beats and followed, too. I covered half the distance before turning back. Impulsively, I told Nina, “I’ll call you when I can.”
“Please do.”
The way she said that made
me
blush.
Cook and Hester went to Cook’s Porsche. I headed for the Jeep Cherokee. Cook didn’t notice me two rows back. I guessed he had something else on his mind. He started the Porsche, went west out of the parking lot. I gave him a reasonable head start.
I began to think about the woman. I placed her in the midtwenties, five feet eight or nine inches tall, one hundred twenty pounds, with the kind of face and figure usually featured on the cover of women’s magazines found at supermarket checkout lines. The way she had moved—if Merci Cole could move like that she’d be rich.
The Porsche went north on Dale to I-94, followed the freeway west two miles, took the Snelling Avenue exit and headed north again. I followed, punching it through the yellow on University Avenue to keep up. We went north past Hamline University, past Midway Stadium where the St. Paul Saints play, past the state fairgrounds, to a low-slung motel with green neon flashing the name PARADISE between two pink flamingos. The Paradise was what they used to call a “motor lodge,” with a dozen or more rooms each facing an asphalt parking lot. A man in shirtsleeves was busy hosing down the driveway. He waved as the Porsche passed him and parked at the far side of the lot in front of the last room. I hid my face as I drove past, stopping down the street.
Cook left the car and walked toward the office—walked like he was trying hard not to run. Hester waited in the Porsche. Shirtsleeves decided he had given the asphalt enough water, shut off the hose, pulled it to the side and, wiping his hands on his trousers, followed Cook into the office. A few minutes later, Cook worked the lock of the room
directly in front of the Porsche. Hester stayed in the car until the door was opened. The light did not go on until both were safely inside. It stayed on for only a few moments.
I glanced at my watch. Seven-thirty-three.
I flipped a U and parked the SUV in the street next to the motel parking lot. I turned on the radio and worked the tuner until I found WCCO-AM, joining the game in progress. The Rangers were shredding the Minnesota Twins’ pitching staff, knocking out a long reliever I hadn’t even heard of with three singles, a double, and back-to-back dingers justlikethat. The Twins were forced to bring in a third pitcher and it was only the bottom of the second. Damn. It looked like the eight-game winning streak was about to end. Still, the team had a sixteen-game lead over the Chicago White Sox in the American League Central and were cruising into the playoffs. It was just like the glory days of Puckett, Hrbek, Gagne, Gladden, Bush, Newman, and Larkin—the seven players who were on both the 1987 and ’91 World Series championship teams. I found myself humming the Twins’ fight song.
In the top of the fourth the door to Cook’s room swung open. He and Hester stepped out, looking no worse for wear. They wasted little time climbing into the Porsche. I glanced at my watch. Eight-oh-two? You’re kidding me? They had been in the room only twenty-nine minutes? I guess passion does burn fast.
The Porsche went south on Snelling. So did I. They made me almost immediately. Cook sped up and slowed down and sped up again. He watched his mirror. Hester turned around to look at me twice. At University Avenue they hung a left, Cook accelerating through the turn. I went straight, hoping he and Hester now felt silly over their unfounded suspicions. I caught I-94 again, exited at Dale and about a mile later parked on the street across from Rickie’s parking lot. I didn’t have to
wait long. The Porsche, coming from the opposite direction, soon pulled into the lot and sat idling, its headlights on.
Hester’s door opened. By the interior light I could see her smile seductively at Cook as she slid her fingers across his cheek. She leaned toward him like she was going to kiss him, but didn’t, laughing in his face instead and swinging her legs up and out of the Porsche. She yanked down the hem of her short skirt, then extended her hands high above and behind her head, stretching like she had just awakened from an afternoon nap. The silhouette she created was inviting indeed. In fact, I found the entire performance quite exciting. I especially liked the part where she closed the car door with a bump of her hip—I gave it two thumbs up. Cook apparently disagreed, burning a couple of inches of rubber as he drove off, leaving Hester standing alone in the parking lot. He didn’t even bother to wait until she had unlocked the door to her silver Audi and was safely inside. Miss Manners would have been appalled.
I stayed with Cook. He must have assumed I was a figment of his guilty imagination because he was paying no attention now to what was behind him. He went north on Dale again and west on I-94, crossing the Mississippi River and driving toward downtown Minneapolis. He caught the Fifth Street exit, but stopped midway on the ramp, swinging off into an “accident reduction area,” a kind of wayside rest where accident victims can threaten each other with lawyers without blocking freeway traffic. I was forced to drive past him. Fortunately, there was a meter at the bottom of the ramp and I parked there. My first thought was that Cook had made me again. After a few minutes I realized he was waiting for someone. Perhaps that was why he had been in such a hurry at the motel—he was late for an appointment.
At exactly eight-thirty a black Chevy van pulled up next to Cook’s Porsche. It was identical to the pair parked next to the apartment building the Family Boyz were renting from David Bruder.
What was it Bobby told me?
You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.
Right.
Neither driver got out. The vehicles stayed side by side for about five minutes and then the van departed, driving the rest of the way down the ramp. I ducked when the van sped past me. I was tempted to follow it. Instead, I stayed with Cook. He fired up the Porsche and followed 5th Street around the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. After a succession of rights and lefts, he pulled into the underground garage of a thirty-floor tower of apartments and condos overlooking the Mississippi River. I parked on the street and made my way into the well-lit foyer. According to the directory, Cook had a place on the twenty-seventh floor.
I thought of returning to Rickie’s, but decided against it. I’d had enough excitement for the day.
Wondering what Napoleon Cook and the Family Boyz had to discuss kept me up much of the night. However, the next morning the answer seemed clear. They were talking about me. I came to this conclusion because the black van Cook had met was now outside
my
house, parked across the street and one block down with an unobstructed view of my front door. I noticed it when I bopped outside to get my newspapers.
Bradley Young, Merci Cole, and now this. Why do so many people know where I live? Foolish question. In the computer age, nothing is private.
I was so pumped with adrenaline I could have beaten Carl Lewis in the sprint of his choice, yet I forced myself to stroll—
stroll, dammit!
—back into my house. Once inside, I locked the door. Like that was going to keep me safe. Like the ordnance the Boyz packed couldn’t reduce my place to a box of toothpicks.
“Okay, okay. Relax. They came at you before and things worked
out. So, relax, wouldja! Besides, they had plenty of chances to kill you already and they haven’t. Which means they have something else in mind. What would that be? How the hell should I know? I don’t even know why they wanted to kill me in the first place. Okay, relax. Think. You could ask them what they want. Sure. Just walk up and say, ‘Hi, guys.’ Where do you get these ideas, anyway? HBO? Think. What do they want? They want to watch me, follow me, find out where I go and who I talk to. Why? How the hell should I know why? Think …”
It’s a bad sign when you start talking out loud to yourself.
While I was talking, I went upstairs and took the Beretta from the table next to my bed. Gun in hand, I went through every room in my sparsely furnished house—including rooms I hadn’t entered in months—peeking through window blinds and around curtains, my CD player off so I could listen for any unusual noises. There were plenty of them in that old house. I found myself jumping at every creak. I really should renovate. Maybe put in bulletproof glass and armor plate.
“This is ridiculous,” I told myself as I descended the staircase for the third time. “Show a little backbone, geez.”
It’s easier to be calm when you have a plan, so I sat on my soft leather sofa and made one up. After a few deep breathing exercises—I think I might have cleansed my karma, too—I picked up the phone and punched 911.
“I need the police. Yes, it’s an emergency. There’s a van parked outside my house. A black van. And there’s a, a, a
Negro
sitting in it. Maybe a whole bunch of, of
Negroes
. They’ve been there for hours. Maybe all night. No, I don’t know who they are. I think they’re criminals, why else would
Negroes
be in a white neighborhood. I want protection. That’s what we’re paying you people for.” I gave the operator the street location but not the address. “My name? I don’t want to get involved.”
I hung up the phone, watched and waited. I felt kind of crummy about the Negro BS and declared to the ceiling that I wasn’t a racist, I
only play one on the telephone. It didn’t help, but you have to admit, these days anything with racial connotations gets immediate action. Four minutes, count ’em, four minutes after I called, two squad cars painted navy blue and gray bracketed the van like parentheses, one front, one back.
I strolled—strolled, mind you—to my garage, started up the Jeep Cherokee and drove away, using a remote control to close the garage door behind me. The cops had two black men, one sporting a mustache, leaning on the hood of the van when I shot past, picking up speed, although I had nowhere important to go.
“Napoleon Cook is dead,” Bobby Dunston said.
“Someone killed him Friday night,” Clayton Rask added.
“Whoever it was threw him off the balcony of his apartment in downtown Minneapolis,” Bobby continued.
“Twenty-seven floors,” said Rask.
“Straight down,” Bobby added.
They were beginning to sound like a vaudeville team.
“Perhaps he jumped,” I offered.
“If he did, he cut off his genitals first and stuffed them in his mouth.”
“Ouch.”
So that’s why two homicide cops were standing in my living room on a Saturday evening. Uninvited. When their knock first sounded on my front door I jumped three feet, instantly flashing on the black van. I had searched carefully when I arrived home—trust me on this—only it was not to be found, neither the van nor any other out-of-place vehicles. Beretta in hand, I carefully made my way to the door. Some might have accused me of being paranoid.
“Can I offer you anything?” I asked them. “Coffee? A beer?”
They shook their heads. Rask glanced around the living room. It
contained only two chairs and Bobby slumped into one of them. I had eight rooms excluding bathrooms, but only four were furnished—my bedroom, the room my father slept in, my kitchen and the “family room,” which contained my large-screen TV and about a hundred video tapes and DVDs, my CD player with over six hundred discs, and my PC. Months earlier Shelby had toured the place. “Congratulations, Mac,” she had told me then. “You’ve taken a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house and turned it into an efficiency apartment.”
“How ’bout a sno-cone?” I asked.
“Sno-cone?” said Bobby.
“Nobody wants a damn sno-cone,” Rask barked. He would have said more but he was distracted by the music on my speakers—I had at least two in every room.
“What is that?”
“The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos.”
“It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Who asked you?”
“Have you done something that’s tugging on your conscience, McKenzie? Is that why you’re listening to this crap?”
“Do you think I killed Cook?” I asked.
“If I could prove it, you’d be in cuffs.”
“Then why are you here?”
“You followed Cook to Rickie’s last night,” Bobby reminded me. “You followed him when he left.”
Nina,
I told myself.
And after all we’ve meant to each other.
“We have video taken by a security camera of you checking Cook’s address in the foyer of his building,” Rask added. “Nice, crisp images.”
“Doesn’t mean I did it.”
“Doesn’t mean you didn’t,” Rask replied.
Bobby said, “You’ve been known to manufacture a little justice of your own from time to time, Mac.”
“Not like that.”
“So you say,” Rask told me.
“Screw you.”
“Now, Mac …”
“You too, Bobby. You guys come into
my
house accusing
me
of murder—I offered you sno-cones!”
Rask took a small, thin plastic bag from his suit pocket. Inside the bag was a business card. My business card. With my cell number written on back. He waved it under my nose and my first thought was that he shouldn’t be handling evidence that way—the bag should have been logged in at the cop shop.
“Talk to me, McKenzie. Talk fast.”
I told when and where I met Cook and I told him what he spoke about. I omitted the part about slamming his face into the wall.
“You followed him,” Bobby said sharply. “Why?”
“To see where he went and who he talked to, why’d you think?”
“Why would he go anywhere or talk to anyone that would interest you?”
I didn’t answer.
Rask crossed his arms and shook his head like he was disappointed in me. “Keep talking.”
“I can’t believe you guys are accusing me of murder.”
“No one’s accusing you,” Bobby assured me.
“Keep talking,” said Rask.
“The last time I saw Cook was around nine last night when he drove his car into the underground garage of his apartment building. Just before that, at exactly eight-thirty, he met with some people in a black van. It was the same van I saw parked outside David Bruder’s apartment building in Richfield. The one he’s renting to the Family Boyz.”
“Who are the Family Boyz?” Rask asked.
“Not that again,” said Bobby.
I told Rask everything I knew about the Boyz, then I spun around to face Bobby.
“Did you get a search warrant like I suggested?”
“Tommy Thompson killed the request.”
“Well, gee whiz!”
“Any other startling news you’d care to impart at this time?” Rask asked, sounding like a wise guy.
“Yeah. I never gave Cook my business card.” I pointed at the plastic bag he still held in his hand. “That’s the card I gave Jamie Bruder.”
There were many more questions. Most centered around the relationship between the Family Boyz, Bruder, and Cook, and their possible involvement in Jamie Carlson’s death. They were questions without answers. Rask wasn’t satisfied until I announced, “You now know everything I know.”
“Isn’t that a pity. We’ll be speaking, again.” He went for the door, reached it, spun toward me. “McKenzie, your fingerprints are on dead bodies all over the Twin Cities.” It was a statement of fact, yet sounded like a threat just the same.
After Rask left, Bobby relaxed his head against the back cushion of the soft leather chair and closed his eyes the way people do when they’re trying hard not to fall asleep. He looked tired and I told him so.
“I am tired.”
“Tired people make mistakes.”
He didn’t reply.
After a few moments, he opened his eyes and said, “I don’t think you killed Cook, just in case you’re wondering. When I learned he was dead I called Rask and told him Cook might be connected to my case and one thing led to another.”
“How did you know I followed Cook to Rickie’s Friday night?”
“The owner told us.”
“How did you know to ask?”
“Jeannie went there to check on Bruder—oh, you’ll love this. I said before that Bruder seemed to be having an affair. He was. With his wife.”
“Jamie?”
“They would meet at hotels and out-of-the-way restaurants. Meet like lovers instead of married people. Sometimes couples that have just had children do stuff like that. It’s kinda romantic when you think about it.”
“Did you and Shelby ever do anything like that?”
“No.”
“Romantic love. Doesn’t exactly fit the profile of a serial killer, does it?”
“Maybe, maybe not. His absolute last credit card purchase was for dinner at Rickie’s on the evening Jamie was killed. He dined with a woman who was obviously not his wife.”
“Who?”
“The woman Nina Truhler calls Hester Prynne.”
“The same woman who met Napoleon Cook.”
“We’re going to have to find her.”
“Does the ME have a firm time of death?”
“Between eight and midnight. We know Bruder was at Rickie’s at seven forty-five. That’s the time that was recorded on his receipt. But we don’t know where he went after that. That’s why we would need to find the woman.”
“So, it’s possible that Bruder not only killed Jamie, he cheated on her, too.”
“We don’t know for sure that he was cheating.”
“I’ve seen the woman. He was cheating.”
“If you say so.”
Bobby closed his eyes again. While his eyes were closed, he said, “I wish you hadn’t given your keys to Shelby.”
“To my lake home? Why wouldn’t I?”
He didn’t reply.
“Bobby?”
He still didn’t answer and in a flash it all seemed perfectly clear to me.
“You sonuvabitch.”
That got him to open his eyes.
“You weren’t going to take Shelby up north. You were going to take someone else. Who?”
“Mac …”
“Your young, beautiful, and smart as hell partner? Dammit, Bobby. You were going to cheat on your wife—on Shelby—at my lake home.”
“You’re obsessed with cheating, you know that? You have cheating on the brain.”
“Tell me it’s not true.”
“It’s not true.”
“Don’t lie to me, you sonuvabitch.”
“McKenzie, you don’t know anything about it.”
“Go ’head. Enlighten me.”
“I’ve been married for twelve years. Twelve years with the same woman, while you were always with somebody different.”
“Somebody, but never someone.”
“Oh, please. Make me feel sorry for you. Poor little rich boy. You don’t have a clue, McKenzie. You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know this. You’re going to ruin your life because you’re bored. Why don’t you do what Bruder did if you want adventure. Meet Shelby in hotels and out of the way restaurants. Have sex on the fifth hole of the Como Park golf course like you did with what’s-her-name when we were kids.”