11
THE MORNING WAS BRILLIANT, a bluebird sky with a breath of breeze from the south, and a lick of humid gulf air that meant there’d be thunderstorms in the afternoon.
Lucas woke at six, cleaned up, and went to the phones. Nordwall said he was moving people into the bean field even as they spoke; the Rochester chief of police said his guys had come up empty the night before. “You sure he was here?” the Rochester cop asked.
“Unless Ma Bell is lying to us,” Lucas said. “You got a place for us to get together?”
“Yup. We’re getting quite a few calls, too. The sheriff did some kind of District Six hot-line thing. You know where the government center is, downtown, right on the river? We’re gonna use the boardroom.”
“I know it. See you at ten. Get some coffee and doughnuts—the state will spring for it.”
“Jeez—no wonder the legislature is back in session.”
SLOAN SHOWED UP a few minutes after seven o’clock, dragging. He looked better than he had the night before, but only because he was standing in daylight. Lucas told him about Grant’s visit the night before and their talk about the possibility of a second man. “A second man?” Sloan wondered.
“Or a woman.”
“Could be a woman, I guess. Another nut. They had a problem at St. John’s with male and female patients getting together . . .”
“We had a report on that: they keep the sexual predators away from the mixed-gender units,” Lucas said. “Charlie wouldn’t have met a woman there.”
“But what if he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a woman . . .”
They talked about inmates at St. John’s, about the phone call from Charlie Pope, and about Mike West, the missing schizophrenic, as they finished the coffee. Lucas had decided during the night that he wanted to talk to Pope’s mother, who lived in the town of Austin, south of Rochester.
“You’re better at talking to old ladies than I am,” Lucas said. “I thought as long as we were down there . . .”
“Yeah, sure.”
When they finished the coffee, Lucas stood at the kitchen sink and rinsed the cups and said, “You don’t look so good.”
“Ah, I took about four orange Nyquils. I oughta be okay,” Sloan said. He didn’t look okay: his eyes were rimmed in red, and he occasionally gurgled. He’d brought a box of Kleenex with him.
“Your call,” Lucas said.
“HOW ABOUT ‘BEAST OF BURDEN’?” Sloan asked, on the way out of town.
“That’s one too many Stones songs,” Lucas said. “Besides, what’s-her-name covered it, and I never liked the cover.”
“How about Def Leppard, ‘Rock of Ages’?”
“On the possible list, but down a way.”
“You know what you oughta do? You oughta make a worst song list from the rock era. That’s something nobody’s seen before.”
Lucas considered the possibilities for a second, then said, “Wouldn’t work. You’d play ‘American Pie,’ followed by ‘Vincent,’ and then any normal human being would throw the iPod out the window.”
THEY TOOK THE TRUCK, because the Porsche’s paint job didn’t like gravel, heading south again, down the four-lane to Mankato, through town, out to the Rice farm. They’d just gone through town when Weather called from London.
“You sound like you’re up,” she said.
“I just went through Mankato. I’ve been up since dawn.”
“Something broke!”
Lucas told her about it, and about Sloan figuring out a murder, and the press conference. She told him about revising the burns on the face of a little girl who was messing around with the white gas in her brother’s camp-stove set.
“At least we’re both staying busy,” Lucas said.
“What about the music list?”
“We were just talking about it. I’ve got about a million songs,” he said.
“You know, for a few more bucks . . .”
“That’s not the point. The point is the discipline. The best one hundred songs . . .”
“Have you considered ‘Waltz Two’ from the Jazz Suite by Shostakovich?” she asked.
He wasn’t sure whether she was joking; sometimes it was hard to tell. “Uh, no.”
“Well, I know you liked the music.”
Lucas smiled into the phone. “Weather, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I never heard of the thing.”
“You know, it was the theme music in Eyes Wide Shut, when what’s-her-face took her clothes off.”
He remembered. Clearly. “Ah . . . that was a nice piece.”
“I thought you’d remember . . .”
She said she missed him; he said that he missed her; Letty, their ward; and Sam, the kid; and even the housekeeper.
“Three more weeks,” she said. “This is great, but I gotta get back.”
WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the farm, they found two cop cars in the driveway, one of them just leaving. Lucas pulled onto the lawn and got out of the truck. Nordwall got out of the passenger side of the cop car that had been rolling down toward them.
“What happened?” Lucas asked, as they crunched toward each other on the gravel drive.
“Took about twenty minutes to find it,” the sheriff said, hitching up his uniform pants, looking back over his shoulder at the bean field. “You see the tape over there? Right in there . . . Right where Pope said it would be. And exactly what he said it would be—an aluminum baseball bat.”
“You already pick it up?”
“Yeah. We had our crime-scene guy photograph it, and he’s driving it up to your lab right now. He said there’s some hair stuck to the end of it, gotta be the kid’s, but we want to nail it down. We don’t want some smart-ass saying it was a practical joke.”
“It never felt like a joke,” Lucas said. They both looked out at the field with the tape strung over the bean plants, the cops tromping up and down the rows. Then, “You coming over to Rochester?”
“Yeah—but that’s not for a couple hours. I gotta stop back at the house. I haven’t had breakfast yet.” A man who didn’t miss many meals.
“You see the paper?”
“Yes. Pope scares the shit out of me,” Nordwall said. “I told my guys to shoot first, ask questions later.”
“See you in Rochester.”
THEY CUT CROSS-COUNTRY; the trip took an hour. They rolled down a long hill, the towers of the Mayo Clinic in the distance. Sloan sniffed and said, “Look at the f*ckin’ golf courses; just like a town full of doctors.”
“Bigot.”
“Ruin a perfectly good cornfield,” he said. “What do you want to do? We got some time.”
“Let’s look at that pay phone. Maybe we can shake something loose.”
“Like what?”
“Security camera?”
“Yeah, right,” Sloan said. “F*ckin’ waste of time.”
“Hey, something could happen.”
“And Snow White might come over to my house and sit on my face,” Sloan said. His voice was nasal, stuffed.
“Okay. So let’s sit around with some cops and drink coffee and talk about pensions.”
Sloan sighed, pulled out a sheet of Kleenex, and blew into it. Lucas winced. “Okay,” Sloan said. “We look at the phone. And don’t look like you’re trying to crawl out the side window.”
ROCHESTER WAS DOMINATED economically and socially by the Mayo Clinic; but there was still a piece of the old downtown stuck to the south side of the hospital district—exfoliating brick and patched concrete block, halfhearted attempts at rehab, streets emptier than they should be in a town jammed with cars; streets from an Edward Hopper painting.
The phone was on a wall of an out-of-business gas station, the only outside phone they’d seen in the city. “Must’ve known where the phone was,” Lucas said. He pulled into the parking area and killed the engine.
“Probably a doc at the Mayo,” Sloan said. “Most docs are a little whacko.” The words were just out of his mouth when he remembered that he was talking to the husband of a surgeon. “I hope you took offense at that.”
“I didn’t,” Lucas said. “I tend to agree.”
They got out of the truck and looked up and down the street. “Two slim possibilities,” Sloan said. “The grocery store or the bookstore. Take your choice.”
“I’ll take the bookstore,” Lucas said.
“Maybe they got some poetry,” Sloan said. He looked across the street toward the grocery. “Park’s Grocery. With any luck, Park is a Korean. They tend to stay open late.”
SLOAN WALKED ACROSS the traffic-free street; Lucas headed down the sidewalk toward Krim’s Rare and Used Books. The store occupied a twenty-foot-wide retail space with a single large window and a door to the side. The window was rimed with dust and showed two dozen fading hardback covers under an arc of hand-painted black letters: KRIM’S: THE COLLECTOR’S PLACE.
An overhead bell tinkled when Lucas went through the door, and he was hit by the odor of paper mold: not unpleasant, he thought, if you liked books.
Inside, two men huddled together over a book that sat squarely on the counter between them. The book’s dust jacket was carefully covered with protective cellophane; collectors did that, Lucas knew.
“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter was overweight, blond, with smooth, ruddy cheeks. He filled a pink golf shirt as though he’d been poured into it; squinted at, he resembled a strawberry milk shake.
“Are you the owner?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm-hmmm.” He nodded, friendly.
Lucas glanced at the second man, who was the physical opposite of the owner—reed thin with dark-plastic-rimmed glasses perched on a knife-edge nose, and under the nose, a mustache that looked like it had been sketched in with a pencil. He wore a seedy gray suit and yellow-brown shoes. A tie hung around his neck like a cleaning rag.
Lucas held up his ID: “I’m an investigator with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Do you have a security camera in here?”
The owner’s eyebrows arched, and he shook his head: “No. Not much to steal. Never had a break-in. What’s going on?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lucas saw the thin man casually lay his arm on top of the book that he and the owner had been looking at, then slip it off the counter and out of sight. “Just doing a check,” Lucas said. “What time do you close?”
“Five, usually?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, five o’clock. Nothing down here after five.”
“Okay . . .” Lucas stepped back toward the door, then paused. Never hurt to ask the question. “What was the book you were looking at when I came in . . . if I might ask?”
The thin man was nervous. “Just a thriller.” He flashed it up and down.
“Could I look at it?” Lucas asked. He put a little thug into his voice. “I like thrillers.”
“Uhhh . . .” The thin man glanced at the store owner, who shrugged. The thin man said, reluctantly, “I guess.”
He handed over the book: Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met O. “I read this guy,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Block’s name. “Who’s O?” He flipped through the book: Was there something hidden inside?
As he did it, there was a quick intake of breath by the thin man, who said, “Please . . . you’ll break the binding. That’ll cut the value in half.”
“What’s special about it?” Lucas asked, frowning at the book. “It’s just a commercial—”
“Please.” The thin man took the book back, closed it carefully. His glasses had slipped down his thin nose, and he pushed them back up with a forefinger. He nearly whispered it: “Printed in France. An edition of five hundred in English, five hundred in French. A hundred dollars a copy at the press, they go for a thousand dollars now.”
“Well, maybe,” the store owner said. He was skeptical. “If you can find somebody to pay the thousand.”
“In a big metropolitan area . . .”
“There’s one right up north of us,” the owner said. “If you want to go try.”
Lucas: “What? It’s dirty or something?”
“No,” the thin man said, offended. “It’s sophisticated.”
“Huh. Who’s O?”
The thin man shook his head: “There was a famous book, The Story of O. If you haven’t read it . . . well, I can’t explain. You’d have to get into the literature.”
The owner changed the subject: “So what’s going on with the security camera?”
Lucas shrugged and let the book go. “We’re trying to find somebody who might have taken a picture of that phone across the street. Guy we’re looking for might have used it.”
The owner snapped his fingers, then pointed a finger-pistol at Lucas: “I’ve seen you. You were on TV. You’re looking for the killer, right? The crazy guy from Owatonna?”
Lucas nodded: “Yes.”
The owner looked out the window, as though Pope might suddenly pop up in the window, like a Punch puppet. “You think he made a call from across the street?”
“We think he might have. Last night, about eleven.”
The owner’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t here at eleven. Long gone. But have you talked to Mrs. Bird upstairs?”
“Mrs. Bird?”
“She sits up there and looks out the window all day and night,” the store owner said. “Says she’s waiting to die. If she didn’t die last night, she might’ve seen something.”
Lucas nodded: “Thanks. I’ll go ask.” As he went out the door, he looked back at the thin man with his Burglar book: “Sophisticated?”
The thin man nodded. “European.”
MRS. BIRD WAS TOO OLD to look thin—she looked wasted; she looked like she was going away for good. Lucas thought she might be ninety-five. She peeked at him over the chain on her door, pale blue curious eyes over lightly rouged cheeks. When Lucas showed her his ID, she opened the door.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to a policeman . . .” She was a small woman with narrow shoulders, wrapped in a polyester housecoat printed to resemble a quilt, with peacocks and cockatoos on the quilt squares. She had short curly hair, like a poodle’s, but silvery white, and looked at Lucas through cat’s-eye glasses that might have been briefly fashionable in the fifties. A television rambled in the background, a shopping channel selling used Rolexes.
But she’d seen a man by the telephone. “I do remember that; yes. A man in a white shirt. That phone is not used very much.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?” Lucas asked. He edged inside the door; she apparently had three rooms, a living room overlooking the street, a bedroom, and a small kitchen. Lucas couldn’t see a bath, but he could see a half-open door in the bedroom, and thought that might be it. The place smelled of Glade deodorizer.
She frowned, was uncertain. “Well, I don’t know . . . He was only there for a minute or two.”
“Would you mind if I looked out the window?”
“Please do,” she said. He crossed her living room in three steps, looked out the window. The phone was directly across the street and only fifteen feet from a streetlight.
“Did you see more than one man last night?” Lucas asked.
“No, not last night,” she said.
“Did you see a car?”
Again she frowned. “Yes, I did. He got out of a car, he parked just over there . . .” She pointed a bony finger just up the street from the phone. “A white Oldsmobile.”
“An Oldsmobile.”
“I think so.”
“New? Or old.”
“New, I think.”
“You say, you’ve said, you think. You’ve said it several times . . .”
“I was watching television. That’s all I do now, watch television and look out the windows, except on Mondays and Wednesdays when the social lady comes and takes me to the store. But I wasn’t paying too much attention to the telephone . . .”
“Okay . . . If we showed you some photographs, could you see if you recognize the man? Or the car?”
She smiled; she had improbably small, white, pearly teeth. “I could certainly try, but I’m pretty old.”
“Mrs. Bird, I’ll be back in a minute, okay?” Lucas said. “Just give me a minute or two.”
“I’m not going anyplace. I hope.”
WHEN LUCAS GOT back to the street, Sloan was just coming out of the bookstore, wiping his nose with a Kleenex: “They said you were upstairs.”
“The woman upstairs said she saw a guy . . . I need your photo spread,” Lucas said.
“What else did she see?”
“She said he’s driving a white Oldsmobile. A new one,” Lucas said.
Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “That could be something.”
Sloan got his briefcase from the car and together they went back up the stairs. As they walked up the stairs, Lucas said, “Try not to get too close to her. You give her that cold, you could kill her.”
“Goddamnit.” Sloan was offended.
“No, no—I’m not kidding.”
MRS. BIRD OPENED THE DOOR for them. She was more animated now than when Lucas had first knocked; excited.
“We need a place for you to sit and look at these and see them all at once,” Sloan told her.
They all looked around. In the kitchen, a single wooden chair faced a small oval table the size of a pizza pan, and on the table, a paper rose poked out of a glass bud vase. Lucas and Sloan wouldn’t fit at the table.
“Could I move your end table around in front of the couch, maybe?” Lucas asked.
“Of course.”
Mrs. Bird sat in the middle of the three-cushion couch. Lucas took some old Reader’s Digests off the table and moved it in front of the couch. Lucas and Sloan sat on either side of Bird, and Sloan spread out ten five-by-seven color photographs. One of the men was Charlie Pope. The other nine, all of whom met the general description of Charlie Pope, were cops.
She looked at them for a moment, then said to Sloan, “I saw this on television once.”
“It’s pretty important . . .”
She looked back at the pictures, and then reached out and touched Charlie Pope’s face. “This is the man, I believe.”
THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said to Lucas, “We need to make out an affidavit and bring it back here.” Unspoken: the old lady might die in the next fifteen minutes.
“We’ll get somebody with Rochester to do it, and we can bring it back here after the meeting.”
They explained the procedure to Mrs. Bird, who nodded and said, “I’ll wait for you. I was just going to watch TV anyway.” Then she did a little dramatic, girlish shiver: “You don’t think I’ll be in any danger, do you?”
Lucas thought, Not unless you shake hands with Sloan. But at the same time he smiled and shook his head, No.