The Devil May Care (7 page)

“What does that mean?”

“It means he left in a helluva hurry. Except…”

“Except what?”

“His car is still there, too. A BMW 328i convertible.”

Riley nodded her head as if she knew it all along.

“Does he own another car?” I asked.

“No, just the Beamer. Does that mean—do you think Juan Carlos was kidnapped?”

“I might have thought so if there weren't so many other people looking for him, too.”

“I don't understand.”

“Someone is watching his house, watching the restaurant. That's one.” I hesitated, then decided there was no need to bring the Mexican Mafia into the conversation just yet. “There's another. Navarre's partner, his partner at Casa del Lago, Mary Pat Mulally, said that a private investigator came around asking questions and threatening her when she refused to answer them.”

“Who? Who threatened Mary Pat? Who would dare?”

“Ms. Mulally thinks it's your grandfather.”

Now it was Riley's turn to take a few moments.

“That doesn't make sense,” she said at last.

“Not to us, maybe. The thing is, Riles, I don't think Navarre is missing. I think he's hiding.”

“Why?”

“Are you sure you really want to know?”

“What does that mean?”

“Navarre went poof for a reason. Finding him might not be to his advantage. More to the point, it might not be to your advantage.”

Riley came out of the chair and moved to her window. From the window the city below looked like an intricate maze put together by an imaginative child, streets and lights and buildings and bridges all thrown together to create something both wonderful and bizarre. She stood there for what seemed like a long time yet was only a few moments. She turned abruptly, her back to the view as if it meant nothing to her.

“Find him for me,” she said. “I can pay. I have plenty of money.”

“I bet you do.”

“You don't need money, do you, McKenzie?”

“No.”

“You're probably the only person I know who can make that claim.”

“Your grandfather.”

She chuckled at the suggestion. “He needs it most of all,” she said. “He needs it like the rest of us need oxygen. It's what keeps him alive, the source of all his power. Please, McKenzie, what can I do to convince you?”

It was against my better judgment, but I answered her just the same. “All you need to do is ask.”

“Will you find Juan Carlos for me?”

“I can try.”

“Thank you.”

“Don't thank me yet, Riles. I'm not promising you a happy ending.”

“I know.”

“Tell me about his friends. Someone who might have helped him.”

“I don't know … he doesn't have—Juan Carlos is new to America. He's only been here … he hasn't had time to make any real friends except for … well, there's Mrs. R.”

“And you.”

“If he's in trouble, why doesn't he call?”

“Maybe to keep you out of trouble.”

“Do you think?”

It seemed like a good time to change the subject, so I told Riley about coming across the yearbook from Macalester College at Navarre's house and suggested that he kept it because it contained a photograph of her.

“Really? Why would he…?” She paused while she pondered the question and then shook her head as if she didn't like the answer. “I went to Macalester to please my mother. After my freshman year I transferred to the University of Minnesota and entered the Carlson School of Management to please my grandfather. No one wanted me to go to Harvard or Yale. It was like they didn't want me out of their sight.”

“It must have been hard, must still be hard growing up Muehlenhaus.”

“You have no idea. Although…”

“Hmm?”

“Juan Carlos seems to understand.”

I decided that Riley was looking for a prince to rescue her and at that point in her life any prince would do, even an enigma like Juan Carlos Navarre. I also decided there was nothing to gain by discussing it.

“For what it's worth, Irene Rogers is on your side,” I said.

That made the young woman smile for the first time since I entered her condominium. She was still smiling when I left.

*   *   *

Greg Schroeder was smiling, too. I found him sitting on the hood of the Audi when I exited Riley's building. His arms were folded across his chest. He unfolded them when I approached to let me see that his hands were empty, a show of professional courtesy I appreciated very much.

“That's a sixty-five-thousand-dollar, high-precision driving machine you're using for a park bench there, pal,” I said.

“This piece of shit? I heard that the driver might be wanted for questioning concerning a pile-up on Highway 7.”

“What are you talking about?”

Schroeder continued to smile as he explained it to me. “That kid you were racing, he clipped the back bumper of a car while trying to keep up with you. Spun it out. Caused a five-car melee. I nearly got caught in it myself.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Couldn't say, although an ambulance was summoned to the scene.”

“Dammit.”

“If I were the county cops, I'd be tempted to take a look at the footage from the state's highway cameras, see if I could find someone to blame.” He slid off the Audi and patted the quarter panel. “What comes from fast cars and loose women. Speaking of which—how's Nina these days?”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Schroeder meant no disrespect to Nina. He was just trying to give me the business. I had known him for nearly four years. He was a trench-coat detective, one of those guys who wore white shirts and shoulder holsters under rumpled suit coats, a cigarette dangling from his lips while he asked for just the facts, ma'am. He drank his coffee black and his whisky neat and for all I knew he carried a photograph of Humphrey Bogart playing Sam Spade in his wallet. He had saved my life twice. The second time it cost me $10,000—in cash. The first time he had been working for Mr. Muehlenhaus.

I opened my eyes.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You just happened to be in the neighborhood…”

“I was following the kid who was following you,” Schroeder said.

“Why?”

Schroeder shrugged and smiled some more. You had to give it to him—few people enjoyed their work as much as he enjoyed his.

“You didn't pay Mary Pat Mulally a visit earlier, did you?” I asked. “You or one of your operatives?”

He shrugged again as if he were deliberately keeping secrets from me and didn't care if I knew it, although … When I first started out with the cops I actually believed that I could look into the eyes of a suspect—any suspect—while he answered my questions and tell if he was lying; that my gut instinct would take over and I would know the truth beyond a doubt. I soon learned different. Some people I can read, of course. Anyone can. Others are such gifted and experienced liars that even a polygraph can't find them out—which is why the test results are still inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I kept doing it; kept looking for the truth in their faces. Staring at Schroeder, I was able to detect a flinch, a tiny one, at the corners of his smile—if I hadn't been watching so intently, I would have missed it. Yet it told me that he had no idea what I was talking about and not knowing alarmed him as much as it did me.

“Why are you here, Greg?” I asked.

“Boss wants to chat with you,” he said.

“Mr. Muehlenhaus?”

“Not this time.”

*   *   *

Margaret Muehlenhaus floated on long dancer's legs and dancer's feet down the steps of the portico of her splendid house and across the front lawn. Sunlight reflected off the threads of her burgundy sundress and the lenses of the reading glasses that she wore on a silver chain around her neck. Her eyes were brown and flashed without help from the sun. The few streaks of gray in her otherwise chocolate hair were artfully arranged.

“Welcome to the Pointe,” she said. After introducing herself she looked me over as if I might possibly be a salesman hawking encyclopedias door to door. Did people still do that? Probably not, but she was old enough to remember when they did.

“You are McKenzie, correct?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Funny, you don't look like a syphilitic sonuvabitch.”

“How is Mr. Muehlenhaus these days?” I asked.

“He doesn't want you setting foot inside his house.”

“So, he's the same, then?”

She laughed at the question. “Come inside. I have fresh strawberry lemonade.”

“Your husband said…”

“Oh, pooh.”

Mrs. Muehlenhaus hooked her arm around mine and led me across the lawn, up the steps, and past the gleaming white columns that held up the porch. It was then that I realized this was the house that Juan Carlos Navarre had been watching through his telescope.

Once inside she shouted, “Agnes.” A moment passed and she added, “Aggie.”

“Ma'am,” a voice called from another part of the house.

“We'll be in my room.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Mrs. Muehlenhaus continued to hold on to my arm as she maneuvered me through the mansion. Despite her age, she carried herself with the erect authority of someone that had been both powerful and handsome and still remembered how it felt.

“The house has twenty-three rooms,” she told me. “I haven't set foot in some of them for years. This room…” She paused in front of a large mahogany door, smiled more to herself than me, turned the knob, and pushed it open. “This is where I spend most of my time.”

I stepped inside. Dozens of books had overflowed from the many bookshelves onto the furniture and floor. The walls not supporting bookshelves were filled with original paintings that seemed to have nothing in common except that the owner liked them. There were sweaters tossed here and there, and a white silk blouse that looked like it had been discarded quickly and then forgotten at the foot of a CD player. A cabinet next to it was filled with CDs ranging from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Sarah Vaughan to U2, Rufus Wainwright, and Loreena McKennitt. Other CDs were stacked on the floor. There was also a 56-inch HDTV, a DVD player, and hundreds of movies, some of them in neat, alphabetical piles and some scattered haphazardly. Mrs. Muehlenhaus seemed particularly fond of Barbara Stanwyck.

I liked the room very much. It reminded me of my place on Hoyt. All it needed was a couple of hockey sticks and an equipment bag in the corner near the door. I turned to look and found a golf bag instead.

“In my world appearances carry great weight,” she said. “I promise you, McKenzie, I am quite adept at playing the perfect wife of the powerful man. It is a role I both relish and enjoy. However, when I am not onstage, I prefer to retreat to this room. It's my secret lair. My girl cave. No one is allowed inside without my permission.”

Mrs. Muehlenhaus sat on the leather sofa while I sat in a matching chair across from her.

“The staff is forbidden to clean in here.” She reached down, picked a dirty dinner plate off the floor, and set it on the table in front of the sofa. “In case you're wondering.”

There was a knock on the door. Mrs. Muehlenhaus said, “Enter,” and a maid walked in carrying a silver tray with a crystal pitcher and two crystal goblets. She set the tray on the table and picked up the dirty plate. Her eyes cast about as if she expected to find others.

“Shoo shoo, shoo shoo,” Mrs. Muehlenhaus said.

The maid left reluctantly. Her head swiveled back and forth as she made her way to the door until she found a dirty cup and saucer sitting on one of the bookshelves, dashed over to grab it, and hurried from the room before Mrs. Muehlenhaus could stop her.

“It's tough getting good help these days,” I said.

“Tell me about it.”

Mrs. Muehlenhaus poured the strawberry lemonade into the crystal goblets and handed one to me. It was delicious.

“I'd offer you something a little more robust,” she said. “Only we don't know each other well enough to get sloshed in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Here's looking at you, kid,” I said before taking another sip.

“
Casablanca
. Good for you. My very first date with a boy—I was thirteen—we went to see
Casablanca.
I wept at the end, and the boy laughed at me. I have not seen him since.”

Mrs. Muehlenhaus waved at her piles of DVDs.

“I have a copy around here somewhere,” she said. “Do you know that Riley has never seen
Casablanca
? I spoke to some of her friends when she was in college. They hadn't seen it, either. They didn't know who Ingrid Bergman was. Or Vivien Leigh. Or even Kate Hepburn. One of Riley's classmates told me she refused to watch black-and-white movies. How terribly sad.

“On the other hand, Riley reads an enormous amount. When she was younger, she'd sneak in here and sit for days at a time reading one book after another. She is a much more serious young woman than she pretends.”

It's not possible for her to be more serious than she pretends,
my inner voice said.

“Mrs. Muehlenhaus, why am I here?” I asked aloud.

“I want us to be friends.”

“Okay.”

“And because our mutual friend Greg Schroeder tells me that you're searching for Juan Carlos Navarre at the behest of my granddaughter.”

“Mrs. Muehlenhaus, I am shocked by the company you keep.”

“I like Mr. Schroeder. He reminds me of Dick Powell in
Murder, My Sweet.
Have you seen it?”

“I have,” I said. I didn't see the resemblance between Schroeder and the actor, though, a thought I kept to myself.

“Do you know what Walter calls him? The dependable Mr. Schroeder.”

“Ahh,” I hummed.