Just a movie.
HE TURNED BACK to Lapstrake. “I’m gonna tell the TV people to hang around. When you get this documented, let them in, let them get some shots of you guys carrying the stuff out,” Lucas said. “And flash the cocaine, too.”
“Not me,” Lapstrake said.
“So get a front guy. Get Jones down here from dope, he’s good at this shit,” Lucas said.
Downstairs again, Del eased over and said, “I’m outa here—I’ll get a ride with one of the squads. We got maybe a kilo and a half of powder cocaine and a bottle of heroin, plus that weed. No crack.”
“What do you think about Shaw?”
“George is history,” Del said.
“Is there any possibility that any of this shit really could have gotten to Alie’e?”
“He’s not really in that high end of the trade,” Del said. “But who knows? I’ll talk to him again downtown.”
DEL AND LAPSTRAKE stayed out of sight while the entry team took George Shaw out to a car and put him inside, and when the cameras started following the head-down figure of Shaw, now dressed in dark slacks and tennis shoes, Del went out the back. Lucas followed the Shaw parade. As soon as the police car was moving, one of the TV reporters shouted his name, and he walked toward them. The reporters were accompanied by three cameramen, who refocused from the car to Lucas.
“Chief Davenport, we understand this raid was a direct reaction to the murder of Alie’e Maison this morning. Is that right?”
Lucas shook his head. “I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. I can tell you that we’ve found a substantial quantity of illegal drugs.”
“What drugs?”
“Both cocaine and heroin and a very large amount of marijuana,” Lucas said, looking into the cameras. “The marijuana looks like a stack of firewood.”
“We understand that cocaine and heroin may have been involved in Maison’s death.”
“I have heard that, but my source probably wasn’t any better than yours,” Lucas said mildly.
“Weren’t you at the death scene early this morning?”
“Yes, I was.” Reluctantly.
“And now you’re here investigating the exact same drugs that were found.”
“Look,” Lucas said, interrupting, “I don’t want to talk about the Maison investigation. Chief Roux is taking direct charge of that investigation, and all comment has to come through her.”
“But we understand that you are coordinating--”
“I really can’t comment, sorry. Excuse me.” Lucas pushed through the group, walking down toward the cars. The interview-on-the-scene was over, and the cameras went down, but the reporters tagged along behind.
“There’s gotta be more than that, Lucas,” one of the reporters said. She was an intense young woman with short dark hair and small, pretty features.
“I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t,” Lucas said. “I just can’t. But I’ll tell you what—if you hang around here, I’ll talk to Jim Jones, Lieutenant Jones from Narcotics, and I’ll get you inside the house. Marijuana might not be that big a deal, but it is when you’ve got a mountain of it, and there’s a mountain of it in there. And I’ll get them to show you the cocaine and heroin.”
“Alie’e was using heroin, at least in New York she was,” another reporter asserted. This one was a honey blonde, with a nose so tidy that it could only be explained as the product of surgery.
“Listen,” Lucas said, dropping his voice. “This has honest-to-God gotta be off the record, okay? I’m serious.”
The three reporters glanced at each other and nodded. “Alie’e had what’s called a short pop of heroin about the time she was murdered. I don’t know what they’re planning to say downtown, but that’s the truth. If you push them on it, they’ll confirm it.” He looked back at Shaw’s house—significantly, he hoped. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the blonde said. “You said, ‘short pop,’ is that the phrase?”
“Yeah, short pop.”
“That’s good. That sounds really, you know, ghetto,” she said. “And one more question, this can’t hurt anyone. When you saw Alie’e this morning . . . was she wearing a green dress?”
“A green dress?”
“Yes, a green dress with a narrow, dropped neck and--”
“This has gotta be off the record.” He couldn’t see how it could hurt.
“Sure. Of course. We just want to know,” she said.
“It was green. Kind of semitranslucent.”
“Excellent.” The cameramen had been drifting over to listen in, their cameras pointed away—this was off the record, and they knew the rules. The blonde picked out her cameraman and lifted a hand, palm up, and said, “The dress was green.”
They high-fived, and Lucas asked, “What?” The other reporters looked as puzzled as he was.
“Death dress,” the reporter said. “We got it on tape yesterday. It’s by Gurleon. A twenty-five-thousand-fucking-dollar shroud, and we got it on tape, with Alie’e in it. Are we fuckin’ good, or what?”
7
“. . . AND BECAME A beautiful filmy-green twenty-five-thousand-dollar shroud for the mysterious women with the jade-green eyes. Back to you, Henry.”
The first man hadn’t gotten any sleep; he paced his office, watching the TV. The blond reporter was smiling at him. Filmy-green shroud. She was proud of that. Filmy-green.
At the tips of his fingers, the man could still feel the soft skin of Alie’e’s throat. He hadn’t had any choice with her. She’d come along at the precisely wrong time in everybody’s life. . . .
Sandy Lansing was panicking, she was going to run. He’d had to talk with her, to discipline her: You did not run when there was business to be done. He’d reached out, intending to push her against the wall. Somehow the pit of his palm had landed under her chin, and when he pushed, her head snapped back, into a molding around a door. He’d actually felt her skull crack, the vibration through the heel of his hand—like feeling a raw egg crack on the edge of a china cup.
Her eyes had gone up, and she’d slipped down the wall, and he’d glanced back up the hallway toward the party. If the door opened . . . “Get up,” he said. “Come on, get the fuck up.”
He’d taken her arm and pulled, but her arm was deathly slack. And after a minute, he’d believed. He’d looked for a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat, but could find neither. He’d been seized by fear: Christ, she was dead. He crouched over the body, like a jackal over a baked ham, looking from her face to the still-closed door. He hadn’t meant to kill her.
But nobody knew. . . .
The body was next to a door. He pulled the door open: a closet, with a rack of cold-weather jackets and coats. He lifted her, her heels dragging, and shoved her into the closet. She wouldn’t fit; she kept slumping, and she had to be upright to fit. He was holding her by the throat with one hand, trying to get the door shut, when a voice said from a few inches behind his ear, “What are you doing?”
He’d almost had a heart attack. He turned and saw the green eyes; and the closet door finally clicked shut. Alie’e asked again, “Why did you put her in the closet?”
THE SECOND MAN heard about Alie’e’s death from his dashboard radio. At first, he thought he’d misheard; and then it occurred to him that he was crazy—that he wasn’t hearing this at all. But the radio kept talking, talking, talking . . . and when he changed stations they were talking, talking . . .
Alie’e this, Alie’e that.
Alie’e with lesbians.
Alie’e nude in a photo shoot.
Alie’e dead.
The second man swerved to the side of the road, pulled on the park brake, put his head on the steering wheel, and wept. Couldn’t stop: his shoulders shaking, his mouth open, breathing in stuttering gasps.
After a long five minutes, he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, turned, found a clipboard in the back, clipped in a piece of notepaper.
He wrote: Who did this? And drew a line under it.
And under that, he wrote the first name.
There would, he thought, be quite a few names before he finished the list.
8
ON THE WAY back to police headquarters, Lucas took out his cell phone, thumbed it on, and called Rose Marie Roux on her command line. She picked up and Lucas said, “We got the media fixed. The raid turned up a ton of grass, and a bunch of coke and heroin. I think they all bought it.”
“Good. Now we need a second act.”
“It’s like managing the media has gotten more important than finding the killer.”
Roux said, “You know the truth about that, Lucas. We’ll either get the killer or we won’t, no matter what the media does. But the media can kill us. And I don’t have anything else I’d rather be doing right now.”
FOR THE REST of the day, Lucas hung around the interrogation rooms, listening in. One item came up early—Alie’e didn’t have any dope in her possession, or any cooking equipment for the heroin, or a syringe or needles. Somebody else put the dope on her, but nobody at the party was admitting to the use of dope, and nobody knew anybody else who was using.
A question they asked everyone involved the scribble on Sandy Lansing’s wrist. They got the answer to that in the early afternoon.
“A woman named Pella,” Swanson told Lucas. “She’s going to England in December, for three weeks, and Lansing was going to get her a rate at a hotel. She said Lansing wrote her name on her wrist to remember to set it up.”
“This holds water?”
Swanson shrugged. “Does with me, I guess. Pella said a decent hotel in London is gonna cost her two hundred a night, but with Lansing’s connection, she can get the same room for one and a quarter. That’s something like fifteen hundred bucks in savings.”
“And this Pella doesn’t know anything about the dope?”
“She said she met Alie’e for the first time last night, and said three words to her. But she looks kinda wired. . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if she carried a little toot in her purse.”
“All we have to do is crack one of them,” Lucas said. “Get somebody to rat out her friend.”
Lester stopped by: “We grabbed Hanson’s computer, but most of what we’re getting is bullshit.”
“They talked about dope,” Lucas said.
“She said it was just rumors.”
“She’s bullshitting us.”
“Of course she is.”
TWO UNIFORMED COPS from St. Paul brought in a huge man named Clark Buchanan, who, improbably, told them that he was a model and, incidentally, a welder.
“Model what?” one of the interrogating cops asked skeptically. “Lunch buckets?”
“You know, clothes and shit,” Clark said. “I was the other guy in the Alie’e shoot. She was doing the clothes up front, I was making some sparks in the back.”
Clark didn’t know anything about drugs at the party. “I had some drinks, that’s all I saw.”
“Lotta drinks?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a half-dozen. Maybe ten. Vodka martinis. Goddamn. I’ll tell you something, guys—rich people make good fuckin’ vodka martinis.” He stayed at the party until one o’clock, then caught a cab and went home. He remembered the name of the cab company and that the driver’s name was Art. They asked a few more questions and cut him loose.
EARLY IN THE afternoon, Alie’e’s parents arrived with a group of friends and talked first to the mayor, and then the mayor walked them over to Roux’s office. Roux called Lucas, who went down to her office and stood in the back, with Lester, as the chief explained what was happening with the case.
Both Lynn and Lil Olson were dressed from head to toe in black, Lynn in a black-on-black suit that may have come from Manhattan, and Lil in a black lace dress that dropped over a black silken sheath; she also wore a black hat with a net that fell off the front rim over her eyes; her eyebrows matched the hat, severe dark lines, but her hair was a careful, layered honey-over-white blond, like her daughter’s. Her eyes, when Lucas could see them, were rimmed with red. Alie’e got her looks from her father, Lucas thought—the cheekbones, the complexion, the green eyes. Lynn Olson was a natural blonde, but his hair was going white. In the black suit, he looked like a famous artist.
The friends were dressed in flannel and jeans and corduroy; they were purely Minnesota.
“She was going to be in the movies,” Alie’e’s mother said, her voice cracking. “We had a project just about set. We were interviewing costars. That was the big step, and now . . .”
Rose Marie was good at dealing with parents: patient, sympathetic. She introduced Lucas and Lester, and outlined how the case would be handled.
Lucas felt a strange disjuncture here: Alie’e’s parents, who were probably in their late forties, looked New York, their black-on-black elegant against their blond hair and fair complexions. The words they used were New York, and even their attitude toward Alie’e was New York: all business. Not only was their daughter dead, so was the Alie’e enterprise.
But the sound of the language was small-town Minnesota: round Scandinavian vowels, “oo” instead of “oh,” “boot” instead of “boat.” And every few sentences, a Minnesota construction would creep out.
Rose Marie was straightforward. She mentioned the relationship with Jael—Lil said, “But that was just a lark, girls . . .”—and the possibility of drugs. The Olsons’ eyes drifted away from Rose Marie’s . . . and as Rose Marie was finishing, the door opened, and a heavyset man stepped in, looked around.
He wore jeans, black boots, and a heavy tan Carhartt jacket, with oil stains on one sleeve. His hair was cut like a farmer’s, shaggy on top but down to the skin over the ears. Lynn Olson stood up and said, “Tom,” and Lil stopped sniffling, her head jerking up. The big man scowled at them, nodded at the people from Burnt River, looked at Lucas, Lester, and then at Rose Marie. “I’m Tom Olson,” he said, “Alie’e’s brother.”
“We were just telling your parents what we’re doing,” Rose Marie said.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked Rose Marie.
“We handle this kind of--”
“You’re dealing with a nest of rattlesnakes,” Olson said. “The best thing you could do is beat all of them with a stick. They are sinners, each and every one. They are involved in drugs, illicit sex, theft, and now murder. They’re all criminals.”
“Tom,” Lil said. “Tom, please.”
“We’re questioning everyone who was with Alie’e in the past day,” Rose Marie said. “We’re very confident--”
Tom Olson shook his head once and looked away from her, at his parents. “So. After twenty-five years of abuse, she comes to this. Dead in Minneapolis. Full of drugs, the radio says, heroin—a short pop, the radio says—whatever that is. Some kind of evil they have a special name for, huh? We didn’t hear about that in Burnt River.”
Lester’s eyes flicked at Lucas, as Lynn Olson stood up and said, “Tom, take it easy, huh?”
Olson squared off to his father and said, “I’m not going to take it easy. I can still remember when we called her Sharon.”
“We need to talk to you,” Lester said to Tom Olson.
“To question me? That’s fine. But I know almost nothing about what she was doing. I had one letter a month.”
“Still . . . we’d like to talk.”
Olson ignored him, turned to his parents, shook a finger at them. “How many times did I tell you this?> How many times did I tell you that you were buying death? You even dress like the devil, in Satan’s clothes. Look at you, you spend more money on one shirt than good people spend on a wardrobe. It’s a sickness, and it has eaten into you . . .”
He was starting to foam, shaking not just his finger but his entire body. Lucas pushed away from the wall, and Lynn Olson got back on his feet and said, “Tom, Tommy. Tommy . . .”
“. . . people living in this nightmare, people encouraging this nightmare, willingly
doing the business of the devil . . .”
He’d turned to Rose Marie, who was watching him openmouthed, and for a moment he looked as if he was going over the desk at her. Lucas moved quickly, from behind the desk, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, man, slow down . . .”
Olson stopped talking, but continued to vibrate, then turned away and stepped to the back of the office and leaned on the door. After a moment, in the silence, he turned, with tears running down his cheeks. “Can I see her?” he asked.
DEL WAS WORKING down a line of junkies and dealers, trying to find the source of the drugs going through Silly Hanson’s apartment the night before. Lucas’s other guy, Lane, was working on Alie’e’s genealogy.
“I want all of her family, and I want a chart that shows how they’re related,” he told Lane. “I want all of her exhusbands--”
“Aren’t any.”
“--all of her ex-fiancés, ex-boyfriends, anyone else who might want to do her. Same with this other chick . . .”
“Lansing.”
“Yeah. I want the whole chart.”
“Listen, I think if we sorted through the people who were at the party last night, ran them--”
Lucas shook his head. “Homicide’s halfway through the list. I’ll get it tonight or tomorrow, if they don’t have a case by then.”
“Or working on the cat-burglar angle. I got some sources down there from when I was on patrol.”
“Lane—go with the genealogies. Homicide and Property are working the cat-burglar thing. We want stuff that Homicide won’t get around to right away. ’Cause if Alie’e getting killed isn’t a random thing, if it’s not a cat burglar, then it’s somebody who knows her well enough to have a motive, and it’s gotta be somebody reasonably close.”
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 8