“Let me come back to this thing about your marital problems,” Lucas said. “You say your husband might have been . . . I think you said ‘boinking’ his assistant. That means he was sleeping with her?”
“Possibly,” Austin said.
“Possibly? Weren’t you a little upset by that?”
Her forehead wrinkled, and she thought about it, shook her head and said, “I suppose. But not too much. It wasn’t like she was a threat. If we’d gotten divorced, it’d have been because our partnership wasn’t working anymore. But that part—the partnership—was okay. We had the same interests, the same friends, we both got a lot of pleasure out of our work and our home. If he was having an affair, that was just . . . part of this thing he was going through. It was serious, but not critical, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t,” Lucas said. “If Weather had an affair . . .”
He trailed off, and she jumped in: “You’d what? Shoot her? Beat her up?”
"No . . .”
“Of course not. You’re civilized,” Austin said. “So you’d shout at her and go storming out of the house. If you were deadly serious, you’d hire some Nazi attorney and pound her in the divorce. But . . . what if you didn’t care about sleeping with her anymore, but you still liked her, and you saw it all coming on? Then you might wind up like Hunter and I did. The sex didn’t completely stop; it just wasn’t central anymore.”
“What was his assistant’s name?” Lucas asked.
“Martina Trenoff.”
“Smart? Pretty?”
“Smart, pretty, big boobs, hustled all the time. Available twenty-four /seven. She did a lot of his work for him, I think, toward the end. She was a junior-level exec when he took her as his assistant. MBA from St. Thomas. She knew some stuff. And he groomed her.”
“I’m not all that clear on what your husband manufactured,” Lucas said.
“High-tech machine parts. Essentially, a tool-and-die place that also made one-off final products. They have a lot of defense work.”
“You still own it?”
“We controlled it until we had to liquidate to pay the taxes—we owned about thirty-two percent of the stock,” Austin said. “When he died, five percent went to charity, we got the rest, and when the feds and the state were finished with us, we had lots of money and no stock.”
“How about Martina?” Lucas asked. “What happened to her after Austin died?”
“She kept working there, at least for a while. She was there when we cashed out, but I didn’t track her,” Austin said. “She wasn’t too popular, by the time he died. She was telling the other top execs what Austin wanted done, and sometimes, what she wanted done. So they may have parted ways.”
“Okay. So: the affair wasn’t too important,” Lucas said.
“Well—important, but not critical.”
They sat there for a moment, and he thought, It’d be critical to me, and then he slapped his open hands on his knees and said, “I’ll talk to some people.”
“You’ll really make an effort?” She showed her skepticism, as he’d showed the sigh.
“I can’t promise unlimited time—and I could get pulled for another job,” Lucas said. “We’ve got the Republican convention coming and I’m on the security committee. But I’ll talk to some people.”
She snarled at him, “Fuck a bunch of Republicans. Find my daughter.”
4
The interview, he thought as he rolled back out the driveway, hadn’t been as bad as he feared. No talk of planets, no cards, no chicken guts. And the problem was interesting. Rich people, infidelity, missing knives. Blood on the wall.
He got back on the highway and headed north through St. Paul, and then west to Minneapolis, splashing through the dwindling puddles, whistling as he went, thinking it over. Tiniest of cracks in the winter gloom, he thought—not in the climate, but in his own.
The minneapolis city hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.
Lucas had spent half of his career going in and out of the place. He’d been sworn in as a street cop there, had moved up through the ranks, and wound up as a politically appointed deputy chief; and he still walked through every few weeks, for meetings, to visit with friends, to hang out.
He found a cops-only parking spot at the curb and put the BCA tag under the windshield; but enough cops would recognize the Porsche that he hardly needed the tag. Inside, he walked along to homicide, as he had five thousand times before, except that nothing smelled like nicotine anymore. A guy coming out let him in: “Hey, dude.”
Harold Anson was sitting at his desk, synchronizing an MP3 player with a laptop, deeply involved, unaware that Lucas was coming up behind him.
Lucas said, “I didn’t know there were that many polkas.”
Anson jumped, turned, clapped his hand to his heart, and said, “Jesus Christ, man, don’t sneak up on me.”
“You look guilty,” Lucas said. “You stealing that stuff?”
“Of course not,” Anson said. “I could be investigated by the FBI.”
They both laughed, and Lucas asked, “You’re working the Ford murder?”
Anson perked up a bit, punched the computer out, swiveled his chair around. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“The governor is a friend of Alyssa Austin’s,” Lucas said. He propped himself on an empty desk. “He’s squeezing me to talk to a couple of people. I don’t want to step on your toes.”
“No skin off my butt,” Anson said, yawning and stretching. “You oughta mention it to Whistler.”
Whistler was the lieutenant in charge of homicide.
“I called him, he said it’s no skin off his butt, but I should run it past you,” Lucas said.
Anson shrugged: “So—no butt skin. Welcome to the big time. We copied everything over to Jim Benson.”
“I took a look at it,” Lucas said. “He’s dead in the water, on Austin. He’s not even sure the kid is dead.”
“She’s dead,” Anson said flatly. “You only think she’s not dead if you think about it too much.”
Lucas agreed. Frances Austin was dead. “You guys got nothing on Ford?”
“We’re not oversupplied with clues,” Anson agreed. “We’re still talking.”
“I’m going to talk behind you,” Lucas said, pushing off the desk. “If I get anything, I’ll give you a call.”
“Do that,” Anson said. “Listen, how much do you think Benson makes over there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe seventy-five in an average year,” Lucas said.
“Yeah? He doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the dishwasher.”
“He’s okay,” Lucas said.
“So what would a guy have to do . . . ?”
They bullshitted about job openings for a while. Anson was coming up on twenty-two years with Minneapolis and was looking to double-dip on a pension. “Unfortunately, my only expertise is in street proctology. ”
Macy’s was a ten-minute walk from homicide, through the underground tunnel to the government center, up to the Skyways, and through the maze of bridges and hallways to the heart of the shopping district. Lucas stopped and bought an ice-cream cone, stopped again to talk to a couple of uniforms who were frog-marching a shoplifter down to a squad car.
The shoplifter was dressed exactly like a movie shoplifter, in wrinkled gray-cotton slacks and stained parka, set off with a five-day beard and fuzzy, aging Rasta braids. Half-hanging from the arms of the cops, who were wearing yellow rubber gloves, he said, “Hey . . . Davenport. ”
“That you, Louis?” Louis didn’t look so good. His weight was down fifty pounds, and maybe more, since the last time Lucas had seen him.
“It’s me,” Louis said.
“You look sort of fucked up,” Lucas said, licking the cone.
“Got the AIDS, man.” His eyes turned up to Lucas, and
Lucas could see that the whites were going yellow.
“Ah, Jesus, Louis.”
“Gonna get you sooner or later,” Louis said. Louis wasn’t exactly gay, but he was for sale.
“Don’t plead out. Take the jail time,” Lucas said.
Louis was insulted: “Hey, whacha think I’m doin’ getting caught?”
Lucas said, “Don’t pass it on, man. You get in there, you sleep on your back.”
Louis’s eyes turned back to the floor: “What’s gonna happen, gonna happen. What it is, is what it is.”
“We’ll talk to the sheriff’s guys,” one of the uniforms said.
Lucas nodded and ambled on, looking in store windows, said hello to a salesman at the Hubert White men’s store, let himself get pulled inside to look at an Italian summer suit, a steal at $2,495, and then crossed Nicollett Mall on the skyway bridge to Macy’s, and found cosmetics. A woman in a white jacket, behind the Dior counter, was staring into space. He walked through the space and she didn’t blink. “Charlene Mobry?”
Now she blinked, took him in, sighed, and turned and looked down the counter at another woman in a white jacket, who was rearranging a shelf of eau de cologne bottles. She called, “Charlene? You got a customer.”
Charlene Mobry was dishwater-blond, thirty pounds too heavy, puffy lips, green eyes, and small fat hands with tiny polished nails and rings on each thumb. She said, “Help you?”
Lucas took out his ID and unfolded it on the counter. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, about Dick Ford.”
“Ohh . . .” Her lower lip trembled and she looked sideways, as though she might run for it. Then she came back to him, with her eyes, and he realized how deeply sad she was. “Did you find . . . who did it?”
“I’m with the state,” Lucas said, as he shook his head. “We’re doing a parallel investigation: we really want to get this guy. Whoever it is. Don’t have him yet.”
Mobry nodded and called to the spaced-out woman to whom Lucas had first spoken. “Mary. This guy’s a policeman. I’ve got to go talk to him about Dick.”
“Okay,” Mary said.
Mobry led the way across the store, behind a counter into a stock-room, steel racks filled with shoe boxes. A couple of plastic chairs were pushed into a corner; the shelf next to the chairs held an old radio, unplugged, and an ashtray with four snubbed-out filter-cigarette butts. They sat down and Lucas took a notebook out of his breast pocket and asked, “You were dating Mr. Ford?”
“We hung out,” she said. “Like we’d go to dinner. We weren’t a hundred percent a couple, but we sorta were.”
“You told the Minneapolis police that you didn’t have any ideas at all about who might have done this,” Lucas said.
“An asshole,” she said.
“Have you heard anything at all, since you talked to Minneapolis? Any thoughts about Mr. Ford? Anything?”
“Just gossip. Everybody says the Goths must’ve done it, but I know quite a few of them, and most of them are pretty nice. I never met a Goth who’d have done it.”
“You’re not a Goth?”
“Do I look like one?” she asked.
“Well, after work . . .”
“No, I’m not. It used to make me laugh. It’s too dramatic.”
“But Mr. Ford was a Goth.”
“Sort of. Yeah, he was. But you know, it comes and goes. Like it was pretty big twenty years ago, and ten years ago, and now here it comes again. . . . Dick was really into it ten years ago, but then not so much, and he wasn’t so into it this time. He changed. He stopped smoking dope, he stopped drinking, he started saving money, he was taking a class in bookkeeping. He wanted to start his own club, and I think . . .” Her voice went squeaky: “. . . I think he might have done it, if some asshole hadn’t killed him.”
Lucas paused, waited for her to pull back together; the smell of the old cigarette butts closed in around them. “You saw him the night he was killed. At the A1.”
“Yes.” Her head bobbed and she bit her lower lip, holding it together. “I went over after work. I had a beer and a cheeseburger, and we talked for a couple of minutes, but it was pretty busy, so I went home. We were going to a play the next night, over at Loring Park. I never saw him again. . . . I went out of the bar and I turned around and waved and he waved back and that was the last I saw of him forever.”
“That’s tough,” Lucas said.
“Yeah.”
“You said there was more gossip . . .”
She looked away, then back. “A friend of Dick’s, named Karl, said there was a Goth girl around, a fairy . . .” As she talked about it, her voice rose in pitch, and became squeaky with grief. “. . . and she was talking to Dick before closing. Not that there was anything going on, but nobody knew her.”
Lucas asked, “Did you tell the Minneapolis police about this?”
“No . . . Karl was supposed to.”
Lucas hadn’t seen anyone named Karl in the Minneapolis paper. “What’s Karl’s last name?”
"Lageson.” She spelled it, and added, “Karl with a K. He lives in Uptown. I don’t know where, exactly.”
Lucas noted it down, and asked, “So what’s a fairy look like?”
“Oh, you know. Skinny, small, big eyes, dark hair. Short skirts, long legs, ripped stockings. Everything black. Black nail polish, crimson lipstick. Black hair. I mean, not all fairies have black hair, but she did.”
“I don’t think Karl told anybody,” Lucas said.
“Oh, shit. He should have. He’s the one who saw her. Or says he did. But he’s sort of . . .” She put a finger up at her temple and made a few circles. “He’s smoked too much weed. He might have just thought it up. Or gotten it from one of his Goth comics.”
“Anybody else see her?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know. If you go down to the A1, they’ll be talking about it, if anybody saw her. I mean some hot fairy mysterious Goth chick, everybody would be talking. Goths gossip a lot.”
“A few weeks ago, a young woman, a Goth, named Frances Austin disappeared,” Lucas said.
“I know about it,” she said, nodding. “The blood in the hall. She and Dick knew each other. You probably knew that.”
“Did you know her?”
Her gaze fixed on him, but lost focus, as she considered the question. “I’m not sure. I saw her picture in the paper, and on TV, and people at the A1 were talking about it, because she’d been there the day before she disappeared. But I don’t know if I really remember her, or just remember the pictures on TV. I mean, I didn’t know her, but I might have seen her.”
“What was the nature of her relationship with Mr. Ford?”
“Well, he wasn’t sleeping with her, if that’s what you’re wondering, ” Mobry said. “It was more like, a bartender with a regular who’s an okay person, and they shared some things like the gothic. A person who doesn’t start trouble and is friendly and leaves a tip.”
“Did you and Mr. Ford . . .”
“Call him Dick. Mr. Ford sounds really . . . dead.”
“Did you and Dick talk about her?” Lucas asked.
“Oh, sure, right after she disappeared. The police came and talked to Dick, and he told them what he knew. Which was hardly anything. She came in and got fish ’n chips the day before she disappeared. She was with a couple of other Goths—the police have their names, I don’t remember them. But then the day she disappeared, she didn’t come in. I think it was in the paper that she and a friend had lunch that day somewhere else, like a bagel place.”
“That’s right,” Lucas said.
“So not at the A1. Anyway, she and Dick weren’t intimate—and I don’t mean sex. I mean, they didn’t share life stories. Dick was a bartender, so you know, he was a professional bullshitter. He didn’t even have any good bullshit about her.”
“Huh.” Lucas rubbed his nose. Goddamn stale cigarettes.
“Do you think the same person who killed Dick killed Frances?” Mobry asked.
&
nbsp; “I don’t know. We don’t even know if she’s dead,” Lucas said.
She sat with her hands in her lap: “You sound like you’re stuck.”
“I just started,” Lucas said. “I’m trying to get something going.”
“Why don’t you do some of that magic DNA stuff like you see on TV?”
“We did,” Lucas said. “The problem is, it’s not magic. Most of the time, you wind up proving that people who already said they were there, were there.”
“That doesn’t help,” she said.
They sat among the boxes, staring at each other for a moment, then Lucas asked, “Neither of you, you or Dick, had any bad vibrations from people, felt like somebody knew something, something was being held back?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing. I don’t even have a body. His parents came and got him and took him back to Rochester. The funeral’s Friday.”
He stood up. “All right. I’m really sorry for your loss. Dick sounds like an okay guy.”
“He was a good guy,” Mobry said, and the tears started again. “Are you going to find the fairy Goth?”
“Yeah, I am. Any ideas?”
“If she’s real, somebody at the A1 knows her. Some of the guys would have been following her around, if she looks like what she sounds like.”
“Anything else? Anything?”
She shrugged, wiped tears away with her fingertips, said, “Do the Austins have a butler? Maybe the butler did it.”
Then she cried, and Lucas patted her on the shoulder and asked if she’d be all right, and she said, “Yeah, I’d just like to sit here awhile,” and Lucas left.
She hadn’t had anything to do with the murder, he thought. In Lucas’s experience, women who killed their boyfriends suffered either from too much intensity or too much innocence; Mobry didn’t have either quality.
Like Austin, she was overwhelmed with sadness; all the sadness was getting him down.
5
Back out into the skyways, getting-out-of-the-office time, crowds jostling through to the parking ramps, a few of the younger women showing some pre-spring skin, the teen guys flashing tattoos over health-club muscles, their elders often with the competitive, fixed, dead-eyed, and querulous stare of people who were not getting far enough, fast enough, making enough, hustling all the time, working all the time, no time for an evening’s paseo, no time even for half-fast food. Scuttling people.
The Lucas Davenport Collection, Books 11-15 Page 73