“Who’s to know who hasn’t gone?” Loren said. “When I’ve seen the boat, sometimes it’s all lit up and cheerful, like the Delta Queen, with the calliope playing, and sometimes it’s this dark little rotten boat with a red stern wheel… Who knows where it’s going?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving him off. “There’s nothing to do about it now.”
“Unless you see Frances, of course,” Loren said. “You have to be prepared.”
“Oh… bullshit. Bullshit.” Now she was angry; wine-angry, more wind than real violence to it. “You are nothing more than an illusion. I wonder what Xanax would do to you, if I got rid of a few anxieties for a while?”
Didn’t faze him: “You can take what you want, but your problem isn’t going away,” Loren said. “In fact, your problem has gotten worse. When you let Fairy out the other night, you let her out at exactly the wrong time.”
Alyssa leaned forward, elbows on her thighs, an empty wineglass in her hands. “Lucas Davenport,” she said.
“Yes.” Loren stood up, thrust his hands in his pants pockets, wandered around the room looking at the paintings, stopped in front of the landscape by Kidd. “You know, this landscape. Those are the bluffs over the Mississippi just downstream from St. Paul-right where the river turns.”
“That’s right,” Alyssa said. “It’s odd-it’s not completely realistic, but it’s completely real. The other odd thing is, that’s where the riverboats leave from. Oh, a little upstream, by the upper landing, but right there in that stretch of river. Weird that you should have this painting, hanging here.”
“Forget the riverboats!” Alyssa snapped. “We need to focus on Davenport. Something’s going on with Helen. Why’s he looking at Helen? Why’s he looking at Ricky?”
Loren walked away from the painting, around the table, sat down again, his eyes sliding past hers. “Maybe he found something. Maybe they had something to do with Frances. If they did, this is a serious problem, Alyssa. Right now, he thinks all four killings were done by the same person. If he decides that Helen or Ricky were involved with Frances… then why was that knife in Frank Willett’s apartment?”
“I have to think…” she said, dropping her face into her hands. “You have to think as Alyssa-not as Fairy,” Loren said. “Fairy is the impetuous one. She’s the one who wanted to do the car and knife in the same night. She almost blew herself up with the car.”
That made Alyssa smile. It had been one hell of a blast, all right. She’d been both frightened and exhilarated when she got to the top of the hill and ran toward the private plane hangars. “That was pretty amazing.”
“Amazing,” Loren said. “And she got away with it. But there was no need to do the knife that same night. If we’d had time to think, we could have directed Davenport at Frank, without giving up the knife. We would have been better with the ambiguity… but the knife is a hard fact. There has to be an answer to it.”
“Helen,” Alyssa said after a while. “Helen knew that I was sleeping with Frank. We used to come here in the afternoons, send her off to the other end of the house. But she knew what was happening.”
“Could we set her up if we need to? Point Davenport at Frank?” Loren wondered.
“He’s already looking in her direction. If he comes to us for more information-we give it to him,” Alyssa said. She refilled the wineglass, shook out the last couple of drops. “We tell him that she knew about Frank Willett. And this fifty thousand dollars that he’s been looking for… all of Frances’s important mail came here. Bank statements. Estate stuff. Who’d be better placed to intercept them than Helen?”
She frowned and asked, “Is Helen that smart?” A little drunk, answered her own question: “Maybe she is.”
Then, continuing, “So we can push him at Helen.” Loren said, “We can push him at Helen, but what if he doesn’t bite? There’s always the question of alibi. If Helen has a hard alibi for even one of the killings, then… that’s a big problem.”
Fairy: “A problem that we can take care of. We take care of Davenport.”ALYSSA: “There’s a bad idea. Lucas is good- looking and gentlemanly and all that, but one inch below the surface, there’s a thug. And he’s also a police officer.”
Fairy: “My impression of him is this: he’s doing this in his head. He’s running on instinct. He’s not filing the paperwork. He doesn’t have any paperwork. Paperwork is for other people. If he begins to suspect us and shows it-we pop him. Who could possibly expect that the beautiful Alyssa Austin, heiress and rich woman, could shoot a thug like Lucas Davenport and get away with it? Who’d believe that she could even think of it?”
“Shoot?” Alyssa said. “A knife won’t work,” Fairy said. “If he begins to suspect, he won’t let us get close enough. And like you said, he’s big and tough. He’s not some skinny Goth kid.”
“How then?"
"The best way would be to watch him and catch him when he’s going out at night,” Fairy said. “Do the jogger routine again. Shoot him, and run. One shot in the heart. It won’t make any difference how tough he is, he won’t live through that.”
Alyssa closed her eyes: “God, it gives me a headache, thinking about it. We’re much better off trying to tie it to Helen.”
Loren nodded: “Absolutely. But take Fairy’s point, with my point, and put them together-if Helen has a hard alibi, then it doesn’t leave a lot of candidates for the other three killings. There are people who have seen you, as Fairy, and he has talked to some of them. Eventually, he may get around to having them look at you. But he’s the only one who would do that. These other people, the Minneapolis cops, have no idea about you.”
“I could do it,” Fairy said. “I could do it just like I did the car."
"The car was just a lump of metal-it wasn’t big and mean, it wasn’t carrying a gun, it wasn’t alive,” Alyssa said. “I don’t care. I can do it,” Fairy said. “I’m not saying we should, I’m just saying that if worse comes to worse, I can do it.”
Alyssa, really feeling the wine now-the last glass had done it- looked at Loren.
“Well, what are you doing?” she asked. “What do you mean?"
"What are you doing? Right now?” He caught on, and smiled. “You want to go upstairs?"
"You might talk me into it.”
The sex wasn’t perfect-it never was, in her experience, there was always something not right, and in Loren’s case, it was that his body, including his tongue, was cold as ice.
But it was good enough for the moment, for an evening otherwise alone.
An evening where she would, she thought, inevitably have to think about Lucas Davenport. But for now, she didn’t think about anything.
For now, she let the pleasure flow. Davenport was for some other time.
22
Investigating Frank Willett was like chewing on a bad cheeseburger: the longer you worked at it, the worse the taste became. The crime- scene people pulled Willett’s apartment to pieces, and in addition to the knife, came up with one aging pack of High Wire Long hemp rolling papers that might have been there before Willett moved in.
Willett, in fact, had curled his lip at the suggestion: “Wires? We don’t need no stinkin’ wires,” he said, which had made Lucas laugh despite himself.
And that was it. The most worrying thing was that Lucas was sure that they’d find some sign of the fifty thousand dollars, but there hadn’t been a thing.
Willett, aside from the occasional stressed- out joke, was suitably desperate, but wasn’t giving any ground. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t know anything.
A call came, from a South St. Paul police officer named Janice Loomis- Smith. She said, “Hi, this is Janice Loomis- Smith, down in South St. Paul? I sat next to you at the symposium on tool mark evidence?”
“Hey, Janice, how are you?” He remembered her as a frizzy-haired piece of leather who’d spent two years in Iraq. Smart. “What’s up?”
“We got what you call your anomalous situation. We got this dud
e named Xai Xiong, street racer guy. His car burned up off Concord Street, this Honda Prelude, burned right down to the ground. Apparently arson-somebody filled it up with gasoline, and it blew; I guess you could see the fire for a mile, all the way across the river. Anyway, we tracked it down through VIN, and went and talked to Xiong. He swears that he sold it a month ago. There’s this informal sales lot down off Highway 36 near Stillwater-people park their cars with For Sale signs in them.”
“I know where that is,” Lucas said patiently. “It’s over where that apple orchard used to be.”
“Right. Anyway, he said he sold it to a woman who gave him cash, and he signed the papers and she took them and said she’d file them later. She never did-I mean, if he’s telling the truth. Anyway, the reason I’m calling…”
“Yeah,” he said, still patient. “… Is that he said the woman was the spitting image of this woman whose face has been in the paper. The fairy woman."
"Far out,” Lucas said. Though it sounded weak. “Give me his name again.”
Then Jackson, the photographer, called and said, “I got your Ricky Davis guy.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m sittin’ here with my dick in my hand-might as well drag some pictures around town.”
“Might want to wash your hands first,” Jackson said. EMILY WAU saw him as he walked into the bank and waved cheerfully. “I saw in the paper that you arrested the good- looking guy,” she said. “Dating him would have been a mistake, huh?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “But maybe not."
"You’ve got another picture?"
"One more-a guy named Ricky Davis."
"I don’t remember the name,” she said. Lucas handed her the photograph, and she looked at it for a long time, then her dark brown eyes flicked up at him and she said, “I opened an account for him last fall.”
Lucas recoiled in surprise, then smiled. “You’re sure."
"Yes. I’m sure.” She wandered back to her desk and sat down, elbows on the desktop, fingers massaging her temples for a moment. She looked up and said, “I don’t think he said his name was Ricky, but I can remember a little bit. I had the impression that he’d never opened a bank account before, or maybe it had been a while, though he’s not that old… he seemed really unsure about what he was doing. What’s important is-I mean, for you-is that I gave him a lot of literature inside one of these folders.”
She opened a bottom desk drawer and pulled out a slick- paper folder with a picture of a paddlewheel steamer on it, and “Riverside Banks, the Home- Grown Alternative.”
Lucas said, “That’s important? Why?"
"Because he seemed interested in all the financing options… farm financing, if I remember correctly,” Wau said. “I bet he kept it. If he kept it, my fingerprints will be all over it, and then we’ll know that he was the one.”
“You’re a pretty smart cookie,” Lucas said. “Thank you.”
Lucas thought about it as he drove back into town. Del, he thought, was probably at the apartment. If Siggy came in, he’d be running early-but he was coming, and the watch had gone full- time.
Lucas went that way.
Del was sitting at the desk, reading a thin paperback, when Lucas came through the apartment door. He glanced back at Lucas and then said, “Heather is putting stuff in a couple of suitcases.”
“Huh."
"Yeah. Those windows bother me, though. Wide open like that. If you’re gonna sneak out of town, wouldn’t you pull the blinds?"
"I would. I don’t think Heather has a modest bone in her body,” Lucas said. “It’s not modesty-if she’s gonna run, she’d want to keep it a secret,” Del said. He fumbled the paperback out of sight, but before it went, Lucas saw the title: Waiting for Godot. “She might be perfectly happy hanging her tits out the window, but packing a bag?”
Lucas picked up the binoculars and took a look. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s weird.”
They watched awhile longer, then Del said, “I didn’t think you were coming over. What’s up?”
“The Austin case may have just solved itself,” Lucas said. He explained about Ricky Davis.
“… so I’m pretty sure he’s the guy who opened the Frances Austin account. There’s the fifty thousand. His girlfriend, Helen, had all the access she needed. She’d have to figure out a password or something, but they could do that, one way or another. Then, all she had to do was call Fidelity with the password, and have a check sent to the address that Fidelity already had. No reason for them to suspect anything was wrong. Helen intercepts the mail-she’s there alone almost every day-and passes it to Ricky, who’d already set up the account.”
“Why’d they kill Austin?” Del asked. “Don’t know that yet-maybe Frances figured it out. You want to hear a scenario?"
"Go ahead.” Lucas pulled up another chair, sat, leaned back with his hands behind his head, feet up on the desk. “Frances is at home and decides to get some money from Fidelity. She sits down and makes the call, paying no attention to Helen, who hears her say the password, or maybe a couple of passwords. There it is-the money’s just sitting there. And- we’ll have to show this-Helen really needs the money. Or Ricky does. For some reason or another. So they come up with this scheme, and it almost works. But Frances, who is no fool, looks at an account statement, maybe a whole month later, if Helen worked it right, and she remembers… She remembers Helen being there, when she was on the phone to Fidelity.”
He continued: “But she’s not sure, so she goes to the house to confront Helen. They argue, it gets physical, there’s a knife, and Helen sticks her. Freak outs, calls Ricky, who comes in his truck, one of his trucks, and they move the body. Helen drives Frances’s car back to her apartment, and then… I don’t know. She takes a cab, or Ricky picks her up, they go back and get her car. Or Ricky parks someplace, after dumping the body, and walks in and moves her car. Anyway…”
“They work something out,” Del said. He added, “Works for me, but you ain’t gonna get a jury to buy it. Not on Lucas Davenport’s say- so.”
“Ah-but there’ll be some hard evidence,” Lucas said. “They bought something with the money. They paid something off. There was some residue on the body, or the sheet-some transmission fluid, and Ricky drove a wrecker. There might be some fingerprints… and I just thought of something else. Sonofabitch.”
“What?"
"When I found the missing fifty thousand, I was at the Austin house,” Lucas said. “I called up Alyssa and asked her about it, and she didn’t know where it went. When we were talking, Helen was right there. Then I called Anson, and I mentioned that I might go back to the A1 that night. And that night, man, that cowboy cocksucker shot me. Ricky wears cowboy boots.”
“Bonnie and Clyde,” Del said. “Ben and Jerry."
"Anthony and Cleopatra."
"Heather and Siggy.” Lucas looked across the street: Heather was packing, all right. The boom box came on with Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love.” Lucas wondered, Is that Heather’s problem?
“Anyway,” he said to Del, “what else you got going?"
"Nothing you don’t know about-except, did I tell you I’m trying to find George William Boyd?"
"George? Why?"
"He’s been selling Level IV assault vests out his back door, along with Kevlar helmets and the occasional Mini- 14 Ranch Rifle.” Lucas was annoyed: “What the hell is he doing?"
"Well, you know George,” Del said. “Yeah, but that was just paintball shit,” Lucas said. “What’s he doing now? Starting a war?"
"That’s the question I plan to ask him,” Del said. “Somebody said… hell, that some of the folks on West Seventh were getting antsy about the Republican convention.”
“Ah, shit, Del.” Lucas kicked his feet off the desk and came down on the floor with a smack! “We can’t have people down there with undocumented rifles. The goddamn president is going to be there.”
“So, we gotta find George,” Del said. “And tell the Secret Service,” Lucas said
. “If we tell the Secret Service, we lose George as a source."
"Jesus Christ, if we didn’t tell them, and somebody got shot, and they found out that we knew- we’d be living in Marion, Illinois, for a hundred years,” Lucas said. Lucas ran his hands through his hair. Too much to think about. “Listen, I’m gonna pull Jenkins or Shrake to take over here. They both want a piece of Siggy. I want you to help me close down the Austin thing.”
“What about Willett?"
"I got the bad feeling that Frank is telling the truth,” Lucas said. “Then how’d the knife get in his house?"
"That’s a problem.” A moment later, Lucas said, “You want a scenario?"
"Sure."
"The other people who were killed were all friends of Frances,” Lucas said. “Suppose that sometime during the confrontation between Helen and Frances, or maybe just from overhearing something that Frances has said, they come to believe that these three people knew something. They all knew something, even if they didn’t know they knew it. Maybe all three of them knew that she was looking for the fifty thousand, that somebody had stolen it, and that fact had to stay hidden. In fact, somebody told me that the first guy killed, Dick Ford, the bartender, was hoping that Frances would help him start a club
What if that’s why she looked at her Fidelity account? And found the money missing? Mentioned it to Ford, and maybe he mentioned it to Roy Carter, the kid…”
Del was shaking his head. “I buy the first scenario: they wanted money, they took it, they got caught, they killed her. Tried to shoot you when they thought you were figuring it out. But all these others… I mean, if your first scenario is right, Helen killed Frances because the knife was right there. If the knife hadn’t been right there, there wouldn’t have been a killing. Then, when they decided they had to do it again, they tried with a gun. These other three… the knife was a choice. A big deal. There’s a ritual going on there.”
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