“What?”
“When gay guys kill each other, it can be pretty rough: a lot of mutilation, a lot of anger. A lot of knives, for some reason. You see guys stabbed twenty or thirty times.”
“Passion turns to anger when things go wrong: Passion and anger are linked. What were these women like? Was it all very sexual, or was it less sexual and more something else?”
“That’s what I was worrying about. One of the women suggested that while it was sexual, it wasn’t aggressively sexual. She said it was more like cuddling. But there was a sexual act—stroking, oral sex. But it didn’t seem . . . crazy.”
“It might not have been. The cultural prohibition against lesbian sex is not nearly as strong as it is against male homosexuality. If a man becomes involved in gay sex . . . there’s a tremendous amount of stress, at least initially,” Elle said. “Women sometimes can go from friendship with another woman to occasional touching, to sex, and back to friendship, in a seamless way, without much guilt or stress. That’s why you don’t see so many violent lesbian murders. The stress isn’t so high.”
“All of the women involved were also involved with men. The relationships sometimes were simultaneous.”
“That’s not unusual. There are some women who are . . . How’ll I put this? Reflexively lesbian, that’s what they are. They are as interested in women as . . . well, as you are. But many women, especially young women . . . they may just drift along, having relationships with women as well as with men. There’s even a kind of fashionable element to it.”
“All right.”
“Have you looked at Alie’e’s family?”
“Somebody has. I met her folks. I don’t think they’d get the Good Housekeeping seal for parenting. . . . They dragged her all over the country since she was a baby, pushing her into showbiz. Living through her.”
“Mmm.”
“And she’s got a goofy brother.”
“That’s interesting—it suggests there must’ve been some serious stresses in the family.”
“Yeah. He’s a peasant preacher out around Fargo somewhere. Gives away his clothes.”
Elle said, “Not . . . Tom Olson?”
Lucas looked at the phone, then put it back to his ear. “Yeah. You know him?”
“He’s a saint. Oh, boy.”
“Oh boy” was rough language from Elle. “What?”
“He really is a saint. He’s an evangelical Christian, he believes the rapture is coming next month or next year or whatever, because he can see it coming. Rolling in, like a wave. He might be schizophrenic; he is definitely an ecstatic. We had a novice here, from out that way, the Red River. She went home to visit her folks. He was preaching at a bowling alley. She went to see him with some of her girlfriends—sort of a lark. She came back and quit the convent and quit the church and began wandering around the Red River preaching Christ’s gospel. I try to stay in touch with her: She told me that Olson sometimes gets the stigmata.” Her voice hushed with the word “stigmata.”
“You gotta be sh . . . kidding me.”
“No. I’m not.”
As a Catholic, Lucas was severely lapsed, but he nevertheless felt a chill crawl down his spine at the idea of the stigmata. Bleeding from Christ’s wounds in the hands, the feet, the side, even from the crown of thorns. “So he thinks he’s God?”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not,” Elle said. “He sees himself as a messenger, preparing the way.”
“John the Baptist, then,” Lucas said.
“I don’t think he’d put it that way. You’re being cop-sarcastic, and he’s a very serious man.”
“He was in the office today. He was . . . intense.”
“Where was he when the murder was committed?” Elle asked.
“In Fargo. Out there somewhere. That’s his story. But you think he could have done it?”
“I don’t know. Sainthood is generally a mystery, but it involves very deep emotional streams, and often something very dark. He may have very deep feelings about his sister. And because of his emotional condition, he might be very . . . demonstrative.”
“He was, with the chief.”
They talked for a few more minutes, Lucas filling in the details of the crime. Elle would think about them, and call if anything occurred to her. They said goodbye, and Lucas started back to the study. Halfway there, he turned, went back to the phone, and called the nunnery again. The same young depressive nun answered, and he waited the same two minutes for Elle to pick up.
“Something else?”
“You know what you said to me when you first came to the phone?”
“I don’t know. I was teasing you.”
“You asked something like, ‘What’s going on with the Alie’e Maison murder?’”
“Yes?” She was puzzled.
“Nobody ever asks about the other woman. Lansing. She’s like a piece of Kleenex that got used.”
“Mmm. To be honest, I haven’t thought of her,” Elle confessed.
“You know, when you were hurt . . . you were hurt because somebody was trying to distract me. And it worked for a while. With everybody saying Alie’e, Alie’e . . . I hope we’re not looking in the wrong direction.”
“As long as we keep that in mind,” Elle said. After a second of silence, she added, “I’ll think about her. Pray for her.”
LATE THAT NIGHT, as he sat on the bed taking off his socks, Lucas remembered Trick Bentoin—Trick the gambler, the man who wasn’t dead, who hadn’t been killed by a brand-new lifer out at Stillwater. Lucas had forgotten to call the county attorney, and so, apparently, had Del; they’d talked to each other a dozen times during the day, and neither had mentioned it again.
Lucas muttered a short obscenity to himself. Folks were gonna be pissed about the delay. Even though it was kinda funny.
But he wasn’t thinking about Trick when he drifted off to sleep. He was thinking about what he should wear to lunch tomorrow.
Lunch with Catrin.
EVEN LATER THAT night, not far from Lucas, but across the Mississippi in Minneapolis, Jael Corbeau heard a scratching ’round her door. Her eyes popped open, and she sat up. She was exhausted, but she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d taken a pill, but her body fought it. Alie’e: Amnon said she was infatuated, that Alie’e was nothing more than a willing reflection of Jael’s own need for a special kind of pleasure—for a languid, wicked, fashionable lover. A beautiful lover. And Jael feared it was true, that she was shallow, dissolute. Trendy.
The scratching on the door popped her out of the depressive cycle. She recognized the sound as soon as she heard it. Somebody was trying to get in.
Jael lived in a small house on the south side of the loop, not far from the Metrodome. Her bedroom was on the second floor; the first was occupied by her workshop—a throwing room, a glazing room, a kiln room with two big electric Skutts, and a wedging room where she stored clay and did the preliminary workups. The workups that’d built her arms and shoulders: The cops had asked her about that. One had taken her hand, told her to squeeze. She had, and he’d pretended to wince. Fucking with her. Trying to intimidate her. It hadn’t worked.
She wasn’t intimidated by the cops, and she wasn’t intimidated by the scratching at the door. During the worst of the crack years, the scratching would come every week or two. But crack was fading, burning out: She hadn’t had an attempt in a year or more.
Still.
She rolled out, knelt as if in prayer, and felt under the edge of the bed. Her fingers picked it up immediately: the cold steel of the barrel. She pulled it out, an old pump Winchester 12-gauge. Moving swiftly through the dark, she went into the bathroom to the barred, frosted-glass window over the tub. The window was double-hung, and the slides were waxed. She unlocked it, slipped it up.
Down below, a heavyset man in black crouched on the stoop, prying amateurishly at the lock. Bushes flanked the stoop, so he would be invisible from the street, unless somebody looked straight up the walk.
She spoke softly but cle
arly: “Hey, you, down there.”
The figure froze, then half-turned. She could see a crescent of his face in the ambient light from the street, like a sliver of the moon seen through a thin cloud, pale, obscure.
“I have a shotgun.” She pumped it, the old steel action cycling with the precise chick-chick sound effect heard in a thousand movies. “It’s a twelve-gauge. I’m pointing it at your head.”
The crescent of face disappeared. The man turned, quick as a thought, and bolted from the porch, down through the bushes, around the corner, and down the street, hands and heavy legs pumping frantically.
Watching him go, Jael allowed herself the first smile she’d enjoyed in twenty-four hours. But as she slid the window back down and locked it, a vagrant thought crossed her mind.
He hadn’t looked like a crackhead. Not at all.
He looked like some kind of redneck.
11
SUNDAY. THE SECOND day of the Maison case.
Lucas retrieved the Pioneer Press from his front porch, looked at the large dark headline: “Alie’e Maison Murdered.” And beneath that, the subhead “Strangled in Minneapolis.”
The headline, he thought, was smaller than the moon-walk, and possibly even smaller than reproductions he’d seen of the Pearl Harbor news flash.
But not much.
And he thought: Trick.
COUNTY ATTORNEY RANDALL Towson was not exactly a friend, but he was a decent guy. He took the phone call at his breakfast table and said, “Tell me we got everything we need.”
“What?”
“On the Alie’e Maison killer—who you’re calling to tell me you caught.”
“I have something much better. Honest to God.” Lucas tried to inject sincerity into his voice. “I’ve found a chance to serve justice.”
The attorney betrayed a cautious curiosity. “You’re bullshitting me. Sorry, darlin’.”
“No, no, I’ve found an innocent guy in the prison system. You can get him out. And then you can take the credit, and the grateful taxpayers will undoubtedly return you to office for the—what, fifth time?”
“Sixth,” Towson said. “What the fuck . . . sorry darlin’—I’m eating breakfast with my granddaughter. What are you talking about?”
“Del Capslock was at the Alie’e party the other night. He wasn’t there at the time of the murder, but he did meet an old friend of ours.”
“Who?” Suspicious now.
“Trick Bentoin.” Silence. Silence for so long that Lucas added, “Trick had gone to Panama to play gin rummy.”
Then, his voice soft and unshaken, Towson said, “This is a problem.”
“Yeah.” Lucas nodded, though there was nobody to see it.
“I’ve clearly identified it as a problem. Tomorrow, when I get to work, I’ll get my best people working on a solution.”
“That would be good,” Lucas said.
Another long silence. Then: “Great Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Davenport,” Towson screamed. And meekly added, “Sorry, darlin’.”
CATRIN.
What to wear to a Sunday lunch? She was married to a doctor, so she probably had some bucks. She’d be more comfortable with something neat, rather than something out on the edge: Boots and black-leather jackets were out. Lucas dug through his closet, through a stack of dry cleaning, and finally came up with what he hoped would be right—twill pants in a deep khaki, a crisp blue shirt, and a brown suede sport coat. He added dark brown loafers and his dress gun, a P7 in 9mm.
Checked himself in the mirror; smiled a couple of times. Nah. Better to can the little smile, he thought. Go for sincerity and pleasure at seeing her. . . .
ON SUNDAYS, CITY Hall was dead quiet. Not today. Lucas went straight for Roux’s office; the secretary’s desk was empty, but Rose Marie, dressed in slacks and a sweater with fuzzy white sheep on it, was in her office with two visitors. Dick Milton, the department’s media specialist, was a former newspaper reporter who’d once written an eight-part investigative series—Sunday through Sunday—on oak wilt. Angela Harris, a departmental contract shrink, was perched on the windowsill.
“What do you think?” Lucas asked as he stuck his head in the door.
“Media-wise?” Roux looked up. “Just about what we expected.”
“Been a little rough on George Shaw,” Milton said.
“That’s not rough,” Lucas said. He’d never liked Milton, even when he was reporting. “Rough is sitting in the county jail, waiting to go to Stillwater for ten years, which is what George is gonna do.”
“It’s not gonna hold, the connection between Shaw and Alie’e,” Milton said. He looked at Roux. “This whole lesbian business . . . they stayed pretty delicate about it last night, on the news shows, but I was on the Net and I saw a scan of the first copies of The Star, and they got a big sexy picture of this Jael Corbeau. She’s hotter than Alie’e, so it ain’t gonna stay delicate very long.”
“When’s The Star gonna get here?” Lucas asked.
“This afternoon, I guess. They got stories on the Net about how the Star editors tore the ass off a whole issue as it was going out the door, and turned it around to do an Alie’e issue. The Journal says all them other rags are suckin’ wind.”
“So it’s gonna pump everything up,” Lucas said. He looked at Roux. “You’re still working the press pretty hard?”
“We’re doing another press conference at ten o’clock, and then the Olson family and friends are supposed to be back around noon. They want the body as soon as they can get it. The funeral’s gonna be later in the week, up in Burnt River. Then we’ll probably have another press briefing around three o’clock, and if we need another, around seven.”
“Nothing came up overnight?”
“Nothing. Except this morning, Randall Towson called about Trick Bentoin.”
“I forgot to tell you about it,” Lucas said. “The murder washed it away. Del says Trick’s in a Days Inn down on 694, so we’ll pick him up tomorrow and get a statement. Towson is gonna call Rashid Al-Balah’s attorney, I guess, as soon as we get a statement from Trick.”
“Maybe nobody will notice?”
“We should announce it the day of the funeral,” Milton said. “If we can hold off until then.”
“I dunno,” Lucas said. “We really ought to get Al-Balah out of Stillwater as soon as we can.”
“Al-Balah?” Roux said. “Fuck him. But why don’t you get Bentoin today? Just in case.”
“Okay.” Lucas looked at the shrink. “What do you think about Alie’e? We got a crazy?”
She shook her head. “Too soon to tell. It looks more efficient than crazy, though. Of course, the man is disturbed in some sense.”
“He’d be more disturbed if I could get my goddamned hands on him,” Rose Marie said.
“Twelve of the people at the party have arrest records, and I’m looking at them for any sign of psychiatric involvement, but I don’t see any so far,” the shrink continued.
“Twelve?” Lucas asked, looking at Rose Marie.
“Talk to Lester—but it’s all small stuff. Shoplifting, petty theft, two misdemeanor domestic assaults, one street fight, a couple of ticket scofflaw cases . . . like that.”
Nothing.
A POST-IT NOTE was stuck to Lucas’s door: Come get me. It was signed, Marcy. He walked down to Homicide, and found the place full of cops—more homicide cops than he’d ever seen in one spot, at one time, on a Sunday. Lester was perched on a desk at the end of the room, talking to a cop with a notebook. He spotted Lucas and shook his head. Nothing happening.
Lucas stepped back to Marcy Sherrill’s desk. She saw him coming, said something into the phone she was holding, and hung up. “I’m really coming over?” She was a pretty woman in her early thirties; she liked to fight. She and Lucas had had a brief, intense affair, which everyone in the office had considered inevitable and overdue. After a couple of months, they’d called the thing off by mutual consent, to their mutual relief.
“Yeah
, at least for a while,” Lucas said.
“Good. I’m trying to track down more people from the party—I bet we’re missing forty people—but I’m not getting anywhere. I’m ready to bag it.”
“So you’re up? Right now?”
“I could be, if you whispered in Frank’s shell-like ear,” Marcy said.
“You remember Trick Bentoin?”
SHERRILL DIDN’T WANT to go after Bentoin, but if she could bring him into the state attorney’s office, he could keep Del free all day.
“So if I do this, I can work Alie’e for you?”
“We’re all working Alie’e after this,” Lucas said. “Maybe forever.”
Sherrill leaned back in her chair, locked her hands behind her head, and studied him.
“What?” he asked.
“You’ve got something going on, the way you look. You look sort of . . . snazzy.”
“Meeting an old friend for lunch,” Lucas said. No point in denying it. During the affair, Sherrill had learned to read his mind.
“Nice-looking, I’d guess.” She smiled.
“I don’t know. I really haven’t talked to her in twenty years.”
“Whoa. So what happened? She just came back to town?”
“No, she’s been living down south, on the Mississippi, somewhere down there.”
And she could read his mind. She rocked forward, her face serious. “Lucas, is she married?”
He shrugged. “She’s not entirely unmarried, as I understand it. Look, we’re just having lunch.”
“Oh, God. Don’t fuck her up, Lucas.”
He was offended, stiffened up. “I won’t. And you go get Bentoin, okay? Call me when you’ve got him.”
“Lucas . . .” Even more serious now. “Lucas, man, she’s your age, she’s married, she’s in the danger zone. You could seriously mess her up. I can tell by the way you’re acting.”
“Find Bentoin.” He turned and left. In the hall, under his breath, he said, “Fuck you,” and looked at his watch. Plenty of time for an errand.
CARL KNOX HAD taken a fine Sunday morning to look at a stolen Kubota 2900 tractor with a front loader and rear-mounted backhoe; an accessory mower was piled on the front of the trailer that held the tractor. While Carl looked, a freckle-faced, straw-haired, outraged thief was talking about the turf tires, practically unused—the goddamn machine had only 145 hours on it, came straight off the best golf course in southern Minnesota. What was this two-thousand-dollar shit?
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 11