Highway 61 (33 page)

“Situation normal, all fucked up.”

“Is this McKenzie?”

I was surprised he knew my name.

“Yes,” I said.

“Our mutual friend called earlier. She also used the code word. She said that if you called, I should tell you that the information concerning Jason Truhler could be removed from the files if you wish. Do you want the information removed?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

*   *   *

Bobby Dunston asked me to come up to his office on the second floor of the James S. Griffin Building, headquarters of the St. Paul Police Department, located in a neighborhood of the city old-timers used to call the Badlands. I declined. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew. I didn’t want to answer any more questions than necessary. Instead, we gathered at a coffeehouse not far from the state capitol building. It seemed as if I had been spending a lot of time in coffeehouses lately. Coffeehouses and parking lots.

I was sipping a simple dry-roasted brew when Bobby entered. He was smiling when he walked to my table.

“Your voice,” he said. “The tone of your voice on the phone. I’ve heard it before. Something interesting is about to happen, isn’t it?”

I set the purple BlackBerry on the table in front of him.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the My Very First Time prostitution ring,” I said. “The owners, the girls, the clients, the money, the whole shebang.”

“Who does the phone belong to?”

“A young woman named Vicki Walsh.”

“Where can I find her?”

“I have no idea. How long have the banks been open?”

“A couple of hours, why?”

“If you’re going to look for her, you better start now, because I suspect she’ll soon be long gone.”

“You found her.”

“She wasn’t hiding that hard when I was looking. Now she is.”

He held the phone up and waved it at me.

“People will want to talk to you,” Bobby said.

“I have nothing to say, and I don’t care who asks. If you guys can’t make a case with the files on the phone, there’s nothing I can do to help anyway. Oh, by the way—I’m led to believe that everything you find on the phone will be soon uploaded on the Internet if it hasn’t been already.”

“Oh, that’s great, just great. Are you responsible for that, McKenzie?”

“C’mon, Bobby. I’m lucky I can program TiVo.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be around.”

Bobby called to me over his shoulder as he walked through the coffeehouse door.

“You should get some sleep,” he said. “You look like hell.”

“It’s always a pleasure to see you, too,” I said.

*   *   *

Marvelous Margot was standing on her side of the pond, her hands on her hips, a determined expression on her face, when I returned home. I assumed she was wondering about the ducks until I realized that there were no ducks. Apparently they had decided to take flight while I was away. The problem was, I didn’t know if they decided to fly south on their own volition or if they were driven out. That’s because there were now thirteen—count ’em—thirteen wild turkeys gathered around the pond, each big enough to feed a family of twelve.

“Where the hell did they come from?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Margot said. “I came back to see the ducks and there they were. What do you call a bunch of turkeys, anyway?”

“A flock, I think.”

“They don’t seem to be particularly fearful.”

They certainly weren’t. I was able to walk right up to them, and while they shied slightly, they neither ran away nor attacked me.

“I heard that they’re becoming like deer,” Margot said. “As they lose their natural habitat, more and more turkeys are migrating to the suburbs.”

“I thought that was all that lived in the suburbs.”

“You should know, McKenzie. You’re a resident. What should we do with them?”

“Feed them, I guess.”

So we did, tossing to them the dried corn that we had previously fed the ducks. Afterward, I called my pal Doug Clausen with the Minnesota DNR.

“You didn’t feed them, did you?” he asked.

“Well, I had all this dried corn left over…”

“Oh, McKenzie. You look at these birds and you think, how cool, I have wild turkeys living in my backyard. So you feed them, encourage them to stay. It’s all swell until the turkeys claim your home for their own; until they start roosting on your roof or your deck or in your trees, until they start damaging your property, until their droppings start to accumulate, until they become aggressive and chase you and your neighbors and your neighbors’ kids. Then it’s not so much fun.”

“What should I do?”

“Leave them the hell alone. People want to be helpful, I appreciate that, but more often than not they just make matters worse. Sometimes, the best thing you can do to help is nothing at all.”

“If only I could learn to do that,” I said. “If only I could learn to do that one thing.”

Just So You Know

Not all homicides are solved. Hell, not all homicides are even investigated. Cops look at a murder and determine what the chances are of clearing that specific crime versus all the other crimes they have on their desks, then allocate their limited resources accordingly. Case in point—the Joes. They were found dead in the trunk of a smoldering Buick in a vacant lot on the North Side of Minneapolis. The only way the cops were able to identify their badly burned bodies was by tracing the ownership of the car. It was believed that a pyromaniac known as Bug, who held a grudge against the Joes, might have had something to do with it. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack two weeks after he was incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater, and the Minneapolis cops didn’t have a chance to interview him, so they lost interest. Eventually a forensic pathologist at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension managed to connect the murders of two young men outside a coffeehouse in Edina to two suits who were found dead at a motel in Hastings, using ballistic evidence taken from guns and bullets found at the scenes. He then matched the bullets found inside the suits to a gun found inside the burned Buick. That allowed all the law enforcement personnel involved to close their various investigations—such as they were—with a clear conscience.

This information was relayed to me while I was having drinks with Officers Dailey and Moulton. None of us laughed over it or chuckled or even smiled. We didn’t make a toast to justice. We didn’t talk about the ends justifying the means. Come to think of it, we didn’t talk much at all.

A few days later, Bobby and I were sitting on the brick patio that we built together in his backyard a few years ago, having one last beer before Bobby stored his furniture in the garage for the winter. The myveryfirsttime.com case was still in the news. That was pretty much how the news media referred to it, by the Web address. As far as they were concerned, the fact that the case so closely utilized the Internet was what made it news; otherwise it would be just johns and whores, and we’ve all heard that before.

“I tried to do the right thing,” I said. “I really did.”

“Stop beating yourself up,” Bobby said. “You did fine.”

“Prosecution has been a mess.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Better a messy prosecution than no prosecution at all. All that Internet exposure didn’t help. On the other hand, it made sure that a lot of johns are being held accountable that probably would have skated otherwise. I know some divorce lawyers that are very happy.”

“All they got was fines and probation.”

“You didn’t think anyone was really going to jail, did you?”

“Roberta did.”

“A three-year jolt in Shakopee; she’ll be out in eighteen months with a nice payday. She was a good little soldier. Kept her mouth shut, refused to name names even when the names and pictures were set in front of her. You know the big boys will take care of her. My favorite was Caitlin Brooks. I like how she gave the media a lecture on the courthouse steps about the place of call girls in history.”

“She got nine months.”

“That’s only because the judge ruled she demonstrated a clear lack of remorse for her crimes. I wish we could have found Vicki Walsh. I would have loved to hear what she had to say. I wonder where she is.”

“God knows,” I said.

The cops found my rented Altima in the parking lot of the American Bank on the corner of Snelling and University in St. Paul five days after Vicki stole it. She could have taken the bus from there to Cleveland Avenue and jumped on the Amtrak. I shared that possibility with Bobby. There were a few others that I kept to myself. I didn’t want Vicki found.

Bobby pushed his chair back and put his feet on the patio table.

“It’s funny,” he said before taking a long sip of beer.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“How in all the photos and videos on her cell phone Vicki’s face was out of focus or turned away from the camera or in shadow or just plain pixelated.”

“You’ll notice Vicki had different hair colors and styles, too,” I said. “She was trying disguises on for size.”

“Interesting girl.”

“She was that.”

“Too bad about Jason Truhler, though.”

“Yeah, too bad.”

There were many more prominent names revealed during the prosecution of the case than Jason Truhler’s, yet he seemed to get most of the attention. That’s because while we might all snicker at the johns, drug dealers are no laughing matter, and that’s how Truhler was portrayed, as a major drug dealer. It wasn’t entirely true, of course, and for a long time I thought hanging Truhler out to dry was Muehlenhaus’s way of getting back at me. If it was, though, it worked against him—or, I should say, it worked against Muehlenhaus’s many acquaintances, because unlike Roberta, Truhler had no intention of taking one for the team. He was happy to name names, thrilled even. He cut a deal with the prosecutor, giving up every single one of his friends and customers in exchange for a token sentence at the Level 1 minimum-security prison in Lino Lakes, about a half-hour drive north of the Cities.

Erica was desperate to help her father, of course. She kept asking me if there was anything I could do. I kept telling her it was out of my hands, at the same time I was terrified that she would somehow learn that I had the chance to cover up her father’s many sins and chose not to.

“He’ll need a lawyer,” she said. “I have money saved.”

“That’s for college,” Nina said.

Erica didn’t care. She offered the money to her father, and he took it, even though his case never actually came to trial. As a condition of his plea agreement, Truhler was forced to allocute fully in open court. Erica sat in the back row and listened intently to every word while her father explained his involvement with drugs and prostitution. She did not react to what she heard, at least not physically. Emotionally—she never spoke of it, not to her mother and not to me except to ask once, “What happens to people?”

“They change,” I said. “Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

After Truhler was sentenced, he asked Erica to visit. She said she would, but it would be difficult since she was going to Tulane University in New Orleans in the fall. All nine colleges that she applied to had accepted Erica. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that Tulane was the one farthest away from Lino Lakes.

I finished my Summit Ale and set the empty bottle on the patio table.

“It just wasn’t worth it,” I said. “Erica asked me to do a favor for her father, and I agreed because I wanted to help her, but what help did I give? It all turned out to be just one monstrous SNAFU.”

“A what?” Bobby asked.

“Never mind.”

Also by David Housewright

F
EATURING
R
USHMORE
M
C
K
ENZIE

The Taking of Libbie, SD

Jelly’s Gold

Madman on a Drum

A Hard Ticket Home

Tin City

Pretty Girl Gone

Dead Boyfriends

F
EATURING
H
OLLAND
T
AYLOR

Penance

Practice to Deceive

Dearly Departed

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

HIGHWAY 61
. Copyright © 2011 by David Housewright. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Housewright, David, 1955–

Highway 61 : a McKenzie novel / David Housewright.—1st ed.

       p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-64230-3

  1.  McKenzie, Mac (Fictitious character)—Fiction.   2.  Private investigators—Minnesota—Fiction.   3.  Millionaires—Fiction.   4.  Extortion—Fiction.   I.  Title.   II.  Title: Highway sixty-one.

PS3558.O8668H54 2011

813'.54—dc22                                               2011005106

First Edition: June 2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-6993-2

First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: June 2011