Highway 61 (19 page)

*   *   *

It took a full half of an hour to drive my way out of downtown Minneapolis and across the river into St. Paul. I had a choice to make when I came to the I-94–Highway 280 interchange: Go home or go to Rickie’s. I chose Rickie’s, partly to proclaim my undying devotion to Nina and partly to mooch a free meal.

Five minutes later I took the Dale Street exit, coming to a stop at the top of the ramp. I was the fourth car from the traffic light. A shabbily dressed middle-aged man wearing glasses that were too big for his face approached each of the vehicles in front of me. He was holding up a handwritten sign—
WILL WORK FOR FOOD
. The way he looked into each driver’s side window and then moved on, I guessed he wasn’t having much luck. I powered down my window and reached into my pocket for cash. I was peeling off a twenty by the time he reached me.

“How you doin’?” I asked.

“Not bad, McKenzie,” he said. “How ’bout you?”

I turned my head so quickly to look at him I nearly gave myself whiplash. I didn’t know any homeless people, did I?

The man grinned broadly. His teeth were yellow, and his beard was three days old.

“Is that for me?” he asked.

He reached in and took the twenty from my hand. He stepped back and waved the bill triumphantly over his head for everyone else to see.

“You always were a generous guy, McKenzie,” he said.

I couldn’t help staring.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

He grinned some more and lifted his glasses so I could get an unimpeded look at his face.

“Ruben?” I asked. “Ruben Barany?” I had worked with him out of the Eastern District when I was with the police. He had five years on me, a good guy to go to for advice. “What the hell happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? Will work for food? What happened to Patti, what happened to your pension?”

“Patti’s good. I’ll tell her you said hi.”

“Ruben?”

“McKenzie?”

Ruben placed both hands on the windowsill of the Jeep Cherokee and leaned in.

“We’re running a seat belt sting,” he said. “Earning a little extra scratch for the state general fund. I think the law libraries get a cut, too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Cars come to a stop—we’ve been manipulating the traffic lights, by the way. Cars come to a stop, I look inside the waiting vehicles, identify the drivers who are in violation of the mandatory seat belt law, and alert officers down the road. We have Ramsey County and the State Patrol working with us.”

“No way.”

“The guys call me Homeless Harry.”

“This is so wrong for so many reasons.”

“It’s pretty insensitive to the homeless, I admit. On the other hand, the state makes one hundred and eight bucks a citation and so far today we’ve written out a hundred and twelve. I’m happy to see you’re wearing your belt, McKenzie.”

“Sometimes I’m glad I’m not on the job anymore.”

“I know what you mean. We’ll be here all week. Be sure to tell your friends.”

Ruben beat a rhythm on the roof of the Cherokee.

“Good to see ya, McKenzie,” he said. “Don’t be such a stranger.”

He slapped the roof of the vehicle one last time and started walking back toward the corner. The traffic light turned green, and the cars ahead of me surged forward. I followed, calling out the window as I passed him.

“Hey, Ruben. What about my twenty?”

*   *   *

I had just completed dinner, for which I received no check yet left a tip equal to the price of the meal—curried chicken satay with fresh mint-soy vinaigrette. I took a great deal of pleasure from teasing Monica and had every intention of continuing to do so in the near future, but my God, the woman could cook, not that I would admit it to her.

Now I was sitting at the bar drinking Summit Ale and working my iPhone. If Denny Marcus had given Vicki Walsh my cell number as promised, she hadn’t bothered to call it. I had received several replies from the e-mails and voice mail messages I had sent earlier to her friends yet learned nothing that I didn’t already know. I was surprised that Vicki’s friends had been so forthcoming. Only one person refused to answer my inquiries until I explained who I was and why I had contacted her. The question was, now what?

There’s an art to finding a missing person, and as with most artistic endeavors, to do it well requires an enormous amount of effort. You start with the person herself, assembling every known fact about her from her style of dress to her hobbies and interests to her education to her spending habits to her employment record to her friends and family to her—well, you get the idea. The reason for all of this work was simple: People are creatures of habit. After spending a lifetime doing a specific thing in a specific way, it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to change. It was her past that would lead me to Vicki, except that she was so young her past was not that deeply ingrained. Also, she had not been gone for so long that she might feel the need to reach out to someone she might have cared about, although apparently she had reached out to Denny Marcus.

Damn, this is going to be hard
, my inner voice told me.
Maybe you should just wait until she demands more money from Truhler, only this time hire an army of investigators to help follow it.

While I was thinking it over Nina joined me.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

“Nope. I need at least a nickel.”

“You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“Long day?”

“Very long.”

“Your face looks much better.”

“As compared to what?”

“This is turning into a scintillating conversation.”

“Sorry. I’m just fried. I thought I’d give you a long, heartfelt kiss and then go home.”

“Are you sure? Connie Evingson is singing tonight.”

“She wasn’t scheduled, was she?”

“No, but the trio that was scheduled was involved in a car wreck this morning outside Milwaukee. Connie graciously agreed to fill in.”

“I’ve always liked Connie,” I said.

“Just as long as you like her from afar,” Nina said. She then batted her long eyelashes to tell me that she was kidding—sorta.

“I think I’ll pass tonight,” I said.

“You really are tired. I was thinking of coming over to your place after closing.”

“I appreciate the thought, Nina, but you should probably stay away for a while. You and Erica. The guys who thumped Jason last night know where I live. I don’t want you walking into harm’s way.”

“Jason knows who they are, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does.”

“Why doesn’t he tell the police?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I bet it isn’t. I bet it’s a very short story. Women.”

“I hate keeping things from you,” I said.

“As long as you don’t make a habit of it.”

I was thinking that I wasn’t
that
tired after all when Monica came out of the kitchen wearing a white chef’s jacket trimmed with red.

“McKenzie, you’re just the person I want to talk to,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” Nina said.

“What?” I asked.

“Monica has been experimenting with donut recipes all day.”

“How’s that going?” I said.

“I am dissatisfied,” Monica said.

“Want to pay me the fifty bucks now or later?”

“I haven’t given up, McKenzie. I never give up. It’s just that I have been unable to replicate the mouthfeel of these donuts of yours. The answer could be in the shortening, the temperature, baking time, or something in the batter itself.”

I spread my hands wide and shrugged. “Yeah?”

“I want you to do me a favor,” Monica said. “That’s what you do, right? Favors?”

I answered slowly. “Yeah.”

“I want you to get the answer for me,” she said.

“The answer?”

“The recipe.”

“How would I do that?”

“By any means necessary.”

“Wait a minute. Are you asking me to go up to Grand Marais, break into World’s Best Donuts, and
steal
their donut recipes?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Lady, I think you’ve had a little too much cough syrup, if you know what I’m saying.”

“How hard can it be? I looked them up online. Their bakery looks like a shack.”

I flashed on Bobby Dunston and the lecture he delivered the day before.

“Monica,” I said, “no. Absolutely not. I mean, a guy’s gotta draw the line somewhere.”

TWELVE

I slept in the next morning and felt guilty about it, although I didn’t know what else I should be doing. I saw Marvelous Margot through my kitchen window while I was making coffee. She was standing on her side of the pond and throwing dry corn to the ducks. She was wearing a gray hoodie with the emblem of the Minnesota Vikings on the front and blue shorts. She had terrific legs for a woman her age. ’Course, I never said that to her—woman your age, I mean. A couple of minutes later I walked a mug of coffee out to her. She drank greedily.

“How come your coffee is so much better than mine?” she asked.

“I have a seven-hundred-dollar coffeemaker.”

“You and your gadgets. How long do you think the ducks will stay?”

“I spoke to my pal with the DNR,” I said. “He said they’ll stay until the weather changes.”

“When is that going to be?”

“Hard to tell. It’s an El Niño year. The central and eastern tropical Pacific waters become warmer, which translates into a warmer winter for the northern states.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea, but for a second there it sounded like I knew what I was talking about, didn’t it?”

“You should be very proud.”

Margot drank more coffee.

“How’s Erica?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Is she? The other day she seemed pretty upset about her father.”

“What do you know about her father?”

“Only what Erica told me. She loves him; I don’t suppose there’s anything she can do about that. She doesn’t like him, though, and she doesn’t trust him.”

“That has to be tough, having a father you don’t like.”

“Not everyone can have an old man like yours.”

“He was an awfully good man, wasn’t he?”

“He reminded me of my father. That’s why I liked him so much. It’s probably also why I divorced all my ex-husbands. They didn’t remind me of Dad.”

“You know, Margot, that might be a little unfair, insisting all these guys live up to your father.”

“I don’t think it’s unfair to ask someone to be trustworthy, to be honest. Do you?”

“No, I guess not.”

“You’re a lot like your father, McKenzie.”

“I wish.”

“It’s true.”

“Except for the time he was with the First Marines in Korea, my father never purposely hurt anyone. Ever. Instead, he spent most of his life helping others. If you ever needed a favor, my dad was the guy you went to.”

“That’s you.”

I slapped my chest with the flat of my hand.

“I’m wearing a bulletproof vest,” I said. “Kevlar. I’m carrying a nine-millimeter handgun on my hip. The round under the hammer is alive.”

“You’re helping people, that’s the main thing. You’re just doing it a different way than your father.”

“That’s what I used to tell myself, Margot. Only the more I do it—I’m just not sure anymore.”

Margot handed me the empty coffee mug and then gave me a hug, the coffee mug between us.

“I’m sure,” she said.

Then again, she didn’t know everything I knew.

Margot kissed my cheek.

“I’ll see you later, McKenzie,” she said.

As I watched her walk to the back door of her house, I heard my iPhone play “Summertime.”

*   *   *

Steve Ritzer was sitting on the front steps of his mother’s house when I drove up. He had a lighter in his weathered hands, one of those chrome pocket jobs that most smokers carried before plastic disposables became the rage. He opened the top and ran his thumb over the thumbwheel. The rough surface rubbed against the flint, creating a spark that ignited the fuel-saturated wick. He waited until the flame flared brightly before flicking his wrist to snap the top shut and extinguish the flame. He repeated the process over a dozen times while I watched from my Jeep Cherokee. Yet the show wasn’t for my benefit. He was taunting the two plainclothes Minneapolis police officers that were sitting in an unmarked car across the street and three houses down and watching Bug intently.

I would have preferred that there be no witnesses to any conversation I had with Bug, but I hadn’t noticed the cops until after I drove up, and by then it was too late. They were already running my plates. I could feel it.

I slid out of the Cherokee and approached Ritzer’s home. There were iron bars and reinforced screens mounted over every window as well as the front door. A low cyclone fence surrounded the tiny yard. I stopped at the gate and called to him.

“Mr. Ritzer, may I have a word?”

When Chopper called me earlier, he made it clear—“Do not call the man Bug. He doesn’t like it.”

“Who you?” he asked.

“McKenzie.”

“You Chopper’s friend?”

“Yes.”

He waved at me with the lighter to come ahead. I took a deep breath, pushed the gate open, and started moving across the crumbling concrete sidewalk toward him. I knew he was over sixty, but he looked twice as old. His clothes and hair were disheveled; his unshaved face carried the marks of a hundred street brawls; his breath reeked of stale beer. It was the eyes that got me, though. They were so hideously bloodshot they looked like they were bleeding. I felt better knowing that the cops were there.

Chopper was right, Bug was bad people. After he gave me Ritzer’s real name, I paid the extra bucks to have my sources with the MPD pull his jacket. I could have done it myself for a lot less money. An individual’s record of arrests and contacts made by the Minneapolis Police Department can be purchased in person or by mail for twenty-five cents a page, five dollars for color booking photos. You don’t even need to identify yourself. However, it would have taken a lot more time, and I’m impatient by nature. Plus, the report would have been incomplete.