“If she wants me, and can find me over there, then God bless her, because half the time, I can’t even find myself when I’m there.”
“You go there often?” Malone asked.
“All the time. My wife’s parents came from Newcastle, and my mother came from Dover and went to school in Calais. The east country is my favorite place in the world….”
Blah blah blah…
DALLAGLIO LOOKED LIKE a book editor or an accountant—tall, thin, harried, quizzical, with a caterpillarlike mustache on his upper lip. He did not look like a man who may have contracted a dozen hits. His wife, on the other hand, was short, rounded, and loud, and looked capable of doing any amount of killing. They had three armed bodyguards in the house: One of them, a former FBI agent, had known of Mallard, and said so. Mallard asked him, “You think you can cover him?”
“Nobody will get inside of twenty feet, but if Rinker has rifles…what can we do? We’ve told Mr. Dallaglio that.”
DALLAGLIO’S HOUSE WAS a neo-Baroque prairie-style gothic, Charles Addams out of Frank Lloyd Wright, with decoration chosen equally from the Renaissance and Miami Beach. He led them through the carved walnut double front doors, through a highly rugged interior to an indoor patio around a lap pool, offered them Cokes from a pool-side refrigerator, and sat everybody down on plastic gliders. “I have no idea why she killed Nanny. He was a good man—looked after his family,” Dallaglio said. “If he was involved in any wrongdoing, I wouldn’t know about it—our relationship was strictly business.”
But under the blah-blah-blah he was panicked, and so was his wife. His wife, Jesse, said, “We only met her because Nanny was involved in a couple of business relationships with John Ross, and she worked for John. And she was a friend of John’s wife, going back a while, when they both worked at his liquor warehouse. She was like a bookkeeper, but she was really outgoing, and that’s how we knew her. We were in Wichita once, after she quit working for John, and we went to her bar. It really wasn’t our style, but she seemed nice. That’s all we knew about her.”
“Are you friends with John Ross?” Mallard asked.
“Well, yeah. Sure. We do business with him all the time. He’s in trucking—we need his trucks, and we need stuff delivered on time. That’s no big secret. He’s a good guy. We go out with them, out to dinner, or maybe he has tickets to a concert or some shit like that, and they invite us. He was really better friends with Nanny, but we know him.”
The Dallaglios and Mallard and Malone went back and forth, and when they were finished, and Mallard had hinted that any help wouldn’t lead to further questions—that is, if Dallaglio had some kind of intelligence connection with the local underground, and if they found her and turned her in, there’d be no questions asked—they got up to leave. As they moved toward the door, Lucas said, “Could I talk to you guys for a minute? I mean…” He looked at Mallard and Malone, and grinned, as they’d agreed. “…without the FBI?”
“Lucas…,” Mallard said, as though reluctant. They’d worked it through on the way to the house. To Dallaglio: “Lucas has his own ways of working. We’re not bound by anything he says.”
“Just a minute to talk,” Lucas said.
The Dallaglios agreed, and Mallard and Malone went outside, Mallard shaking his head. When the door closed behind them, Lucas said, “Listen: I’m just a fuckin’ cop, okay? I’ve got no jurisdiction here, my boss just loaned me to the FBI because I got lucky once before, breaking Clara loose. If you talk to me, there’s no way anybody could take it to court.” He looked directly at Dallaglio. “And I’m telling you, no bullshit, I talked to a friend of Clara, and she’s gonna kill your ass. She’s gonna kill you, if we don’t get her. And get her now. If we scare her off, she’ll just go sit down in South America somewhere, and wait six months, until everybody relaxes, and then she’s gonna come kill you. She knows you set her up down in Mexico, that you agreed to try to kill her—”
Dallaglio put up a finger. “That’s not true.”
Lucas continued. “But she knows you did. What she knows might not be the truth, but she thinks it is. The reality of it doesn’t matter, because she’s gonna kill you because of it. Can’t stop her, can’t talk her out of it. She lost her baby. This is a woman who hardly had any friends that we can find, who was abused from the time she was a child, and then got turned into some kind of crazy robot killer, and you, she knows, killed the only man who ever loved her for herself, who was gonna marry her, and her baby.”
“Well, what the fuck are we supposed to do about it?” Jesse Dallaglio asked angrily. “You can’t stop her—we’ve got all these expensive bodyguards, and you can see they’re worried. I’ve got daughters. So you tell me, Mr. Chief, what the fuck are we supposed to do?”
“You can hide, is one thing,” Lucas said. “Mr. Giancati’s on her list, and he and his wife are leaving town. But if we don’t get her…she can always wait longer than we can.”
Jesse Dallaglio said, “So we can’t hide forever, you’re saying. Is this leading up to something, or is it all just bullshit?”
“What I’m saying is, if you know anything, tell me. I’m not gonna play games with you like the FBI. They want to get Clara, but they also see this as a chance to fuck up a whole bunch of you guys. That’s not my problem: I got my own assholes up in Minneapolis to worry about. I just want to get Clara. That’s all I want. Give me a name, somebody I can talk to. Give me an old hangout. Give me anything.”
Dallaglio walked away, slumped into a chair. “I’ll tell you, everybody acts like I’m some hoodlum or criminal, but I’m just trying to run a chain store. Just business. But Rinker…” He paused, cocked his head, thought for a moment, and then said, “Let me put it this way. If somebody was a hoodlum and wanted to hire Clara to do whatever, he wouldn’t hang around with her. He wouldn’t want anybody to even know that they’d talked. Maybe they wouldn’t talk, so the cops couldn’t draw any lines. So that if Rinker was picked up, she couldn’t say, ‘Well, I met with Nanny Dichter at the Balloon Ballroom on October 31, during the Halloween dance, and we made the deal.’ So she couldn’t say shit about who, what, where, and when. You see what I mean?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said.
“What I mean,” Dallaglio said, “is that this guy might not know shit about Clara Rinker. Not really.”
“Too bad for that guy,” Lucas said.
Jesse Dallaglio asked, “Where is Giancati going? Back to England?”
Lucas shrugged. “He just said he was leaving.”
She chewed her lip. “Maybe that’s the thing to do.” She looked at her husband. “You like the Old Country. We could go for a couple of months.”
“But if they don’t catch her,” Dallaglio said, “it’s like he says…she can wait.”
“But maybe they do catch her,” Jesse Dallaglio said. “I’d hate for you or me or the girls to be the last ones killed before they got her.”
ON THAT NOTE, with nothing more developing, Lucas said goodbye. Outside, Mallard said, “What?”
“Not much. Treena Ross may have known Clara. Might have been a friend.”
Malone said, “Huh.”
“Huh, what?” Lucas asked.
“Huh, nothing. I don’t see where that goes. We already knew that John Ross was a friend of Rinker’s. I’m not surprised that his wife knew her, I guess.”
“Well, it’s what I got,” Lucas said.
ROSS WAS WAITING for them behind his big desk. He had a half-dozen orchids this time, including one that smelled something like cinnamon. He wanted to talk about Levy. “I knew the guy, sure—but what’s this about telephones? Clara’s no electronics wizard. Where’d she think that up?”
Mallard shook his head. “We were hoping you might be able to think of something.”
Ross exhaled in exasperation. “I told you, I never knew about her. I didn’t know she was a killer, for Christ’s sake. I’m in some tough businesses, but we don’t kill people. It’s easier just to buy them out. An
d legal.”
“Sounds like you’re a little worried,” Lucas said, letting the amusement show.
“Yeah, well. Guns is one thing. Now I’m thinking, what if a rocket comes flying through the window? A phone bomb—that sounds like something the CIA would do.”
HE WAS SURPRISED to hear that the Giancatis were thinking of running.
“Off to merry old England again, huh? Home of the fruits and the nuts.” He reached out and took a peppermint candy from a crystal bowl, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth.
“And maybe the Dallaglios,” Malone added. “They may go back to the Old Country, whatever country that is.”
“You do what you gotta do,” Ross said.
Eventually, Mallard and Malone got tired of being stonewalled, and after another warning, got up to leave. Lucas went into this let’s-talk routine; Mallard shook his head and went out the door.
“So, what?” Ross asked.
“Like Mallard said, I’m not FBI. I’m a Minneapolis cop. I have no jurisdiction….” He went through the rest of it, feeling like a third-grader reciting to a skeptical teacher.
Ross said, “I can appreciate the fact that you get off on hunting Clara, and I hope you get her, but there’s not much more I can do to help. I told you that the last time. There are still some people at the warehouse who knew her, but I knew her as well as anyone. I could tell you where her old apartment used to be, I could tell you where she’d go for drinks, but you gotta remember—that was all before Wichita. This was years ago, and she only worked in the warehouse a couple, three years.”
“Did your wife know her?”
“Treena? Yeah, sure. Treena worked in the warehouse along with Rinker.”
“Could she tell me anything?”
Ross snorted. “She can barely remember her middle name, Mr. Davenport. She’s basically a great set of tits and a terrific ass being run by a brain the size of a cashew. I can’t imagine that she could give you anything useful on Clara Rinker. But you’re welcome to ask her. She’s around here someplace.”
“If that’s what you think, why did you marry her?”
“It gives me about three headaches a week, going over that. She’s got these tits, and I got these hormones…. You know what I mean. I should’ve stuck with the last one.”
“Number three.”
“Yeah. Number one was probably the best, number two was a rebound, three was pretty good, and four was another bounce. It never made any sense. I’ll think a long time about number five.”
“Somebody told me that number three died tragically.”
There was irony in Lucas’s voice, and Ross picked it up and seemed to darken. “She was killed in a hit-and-run. I was in New Orleans at the time.”
“Good for you,” Lucas said, smiling.
“Fuck you,” Ross said.
“If I weren’t working for the FBI, I’d pull you out a your chair and kick your ass,” Lucas said, still smiling. “Just so you’d know.”
Ross looked at him curiously. “You really think you could take me?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”
Ross leaned back, finally shrugged, and said, “Maybe we could try it someday. Be kinda interesting.”
Lucas nodded and they both sat, and then Lucas said, “So for now, you’re just gonna sit.”
“No, I’m not just sitting. I go out several times a week—we got three cars, we all go different ways, nobody gets out until we’re under cover, we look at the street before we go. And I got four good boys around all the time. I got the best alarms ever made. I can get on the TV with my remote control, any TV in the house, and look at any direction out of the house, through cameras on the roof. One of the boys has a night-vision scope that he watches with. If she gets me, she gets me, but I don’t think she can get in. Unless she’s got a fuckin’ rocket.”
“How long can you wait?”
He shrugged. “I’m a patient man. More patient than Clara.”
“If you’re so fuckin’ patient, what was all that about in Mexico? You could’ve just left her.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with anything in Mexico, of course,” Ross said. “But judging from what’s been in the paper, I’d say somebody made a big fuckin’ mistake, to use your adjective. A big, stupid mistake.”
“And she thinks it was you. Was it you?”
Ross shrugged again and smiled for the first time—an unpleasant smile that said Yes, it was his big fuckin’ mistake. What he actually said was, “I don’t know from Mexico. What happened, exactly?”
“Bullshit,” Lucas said. Then: “Are you going any place public this week? Any place that isn’t completely shut up?”
“If I told you that, that’d be a leak. I don’t even tell my boys when I’m moving.”
“Listen, if you’re going out, it’d be a hell of a lot easier if you told us in advance than if we have to have the cops pull over all three cars until we figure out which one you’re in—all the lights and sirens and so on. Because if you’re gonna act like cheese, we’d like to be there when the mouse comes out.”
Ross smiled at the image, then leaned forward, lifted a piece of paper from his desk pad, and said, “I’m going one place in public: Friday night, there’s a fundraiser for the St. Louis Chamber Orchestra at the botanical gardens. I’m one of the…pillars…of the chamber orchestra. And the botanical gardens, for that matter.”
“Chamber orchestra and orchids. A goddamned refined little thug, huh?”
“Fuck off,” Ross said mildly, and smiled again.
LUCAS GOT UP to leave. On the way to the door, a thought struck him, and he went back. “One last thing. You knew both Nanny Dichter and Levy. Are you as well protected as those two?”
“Nanny was a tough nut, but Levy was a pussy,” Ross said. “I was surprised when she got to Nanny so easy.”
“That’s not exactly what I was asking. What I’m asking is, are you a tougher nut than Nanny?”
The question seemed to interest him. He leaned back, put his hands behind his head, thought for a moment, then said, “Yes.”
“Would you have been tougher if she’d gone after you first? Could she have ambushed you as easily as she did Dichter?”
No thought this time. “No. As soon as the federal people started calling, even before Nanny, I had an idea of what was going to happen. I shut down everything I couldn’t run by remote control. If she’d called me for a meet, or wanted me to go somewhere to make a phone call, I would have told her to go fuck herself. No. I would have suggested that we meet somewhere that I’d control.”
“What if all the feds started running around screaming, and then nothing happened? How long before you would have relaxed? Would you do what you’re doing now, indefinitely?”
The question called for more thought. Ross played with one of his ears, tugged on the lobe, and then said, “Probably not. If she’d waited six more weeks, and if she’d been careful, she would have got me.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. That is kind of weird,” Ross said. “I’m almost insulted.”
ON THE WAY OUT, Lucas ran into Treena Ross in the hallway. She was wearing a lime-green dress and matching lime-green shoes with two-inch heels. She was carrying a dog the size of a walnut that seemed to have been bred to be frightened; it whimpered when it saw Lucas, and then Ross coming up behind. Treena said, “Oh, they’re nice men, Wiener.” Then to Lucas: “I don’t think I’ve met you. Are you working with John?”
“I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “Lucas Davenport. I saw you once before—you were going to play tennis.”
“I remember. And you’re working with John. That’s wonderful.”
“He’s not working with me,” Ross said. “He wants to kick my ass.”
“Really? Kick your ass? Why?” She looked wide-eyed at Lucas. She was a little top-heavy, Lucas thought, but she had a beautiful oval face and green eyes that seemed to be a promise of good times. He understood what Ross had said about hormones.
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“Never mind,” Ross said. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Off to Sophie’s.” She bent one of the dog’s tiny paws toward Lucas. “See? His teeny-weeny nails are all chipped. They have to be recoated.”
“We were talking about Clara Rinker,” Lucas said to her.
“That’s awful what’s she’s doing,” Treena Ross said. “She was always so nice when we worked together. She was very lively. She used to be a dancer.”
“Do you have…do you remember anything about her that might help us run her down?” Lucas asked. “Friends, anything like that?”
“I was her friend. And so was John. And for a while, I thought I was going to race her to see who got John,” she said, and she laughed, and took her husband’s arm. “He still won’t tell me if he ever slept with her.”
She was teasing, but Ross snapped, “I didn’t.”
“Now, see? Is he lying, Mr. Lucas? Anyway…her friends.” She pursed her lips and then said, “The only one I can think of…” She looked at her husband. “What was that Indian guy’s name? Running Horse, or something…”
“Tim Runs-Like-Horse,” Ross said. “I don’t think she’s staying with him.”
“Why?” Lucas asked.
“He’s dead,” Ross said. “He used to drink all the time, and when he was really drunk, he’d go out in the street with his jacket and play bullfighter with cars. Some redneck ran over him with a Chevy S-10.”
“Oh,” said Treena, a finger going to her lips. “I didn’t know about that.”
“Three years ago,” Ross said. “He was a good guy.”
“Huh. Well, too bad,” Treena said brightly. “That’s the only one I can think of. Old dead Running Horse.”
“Let me take you out,” Ross said to Lucas.
“Goodbye, Mr. Lucas,” Treena said.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 95