by Fred Limberg
Gordon had been working the ‘History’ lecture Monday.
They’d screened Mr. Smith Goes to Washington that morning. No one took attendance for the class, he explained. You either mastered the material or not. There were over two hundred students registered for the class. He estimated that they almost never had more than a hundred and fifty in the lecture hall.
It surprised them both when they learned that Gordon knew who Stuckey was. He knew he was a transfer student from UCLA and shared Stuckey’s opinion that the U had screwed him out of a bunch of credits. Stuckey had taken a similar, harder class out west but the credits didn’t transfer for some reason. They’d had coffee once or twice after class. Gordon didn’t remember seeing him Monday but hadn’t been looking for him. He could have been there, he told them.
Sean Stuckey doesn’t have much of an alibi, Tony thought.
Tony spent the drive time back to the station buried his notes, trying to get everything straight for the session later in the afternoon, the case review. When the car stopped he looked up, surprised. They were parked in front of a clothing store.
He followed Ray inside, watched him shake hands with the men and women there. They knew him. This was where Ray bought the nice suits and jackets he was famous for. The haberdashery had a smell. It smelled like wool and linen. It smelled of mild tasteful men’s scents. It smelled of talcum and shoe leather and the toasty smell of a hot iron on cotton.
Ray chatted while a small bald man groped Tony, quietly relaying numbers to another small bald man. They measured his arms and neck, his chest and his waist twice. He gave Ray a questioning look across the store. Ray had his half-smile working and turned to the small bald men. He pointed toward a rack of suits.
Tony was ushered into a large dressing room and stripped to his boxers. The room was very warm. He was surrounded by mirrors. He tried on a blue suit, a dark navy single breasted jacket and gently pleated trousers. He slipped into a grey chalk stripe double breasted. The fabric felt like a whisper on his legs. The small bald men made marks on the cuffs and scurried to another room further back.
Ray shook his head at a brown suit and it vanished. Shirts appeared. Ties were paraded one after another. Tony would nod yes. Ray would shake his head no. A dark charcoal gray-almost-black sports jacket appeared. It fit like Sue Ellen, naked in his arms. Got to have that one, Tony thought. The small bald men looked nervous when he tried it on over the shoulder holster rig. The jacket hung just fine.
Black slacks and a jacket reflected from the mirrors. Tony felt pampered. He felt sleek. He’d never had clothes like this, had never been fit. He imagined walking up to Sue Ellen’s door, decked out like this, ready to take her to the Dakota to hear Rafe Bankston sing with Joel Shapiras’s quartet.
Trousers were brought out from the back. A plump woman with pins tucked like toothpicks in the corner of her mouth watched him slip on one pair after the other and made him turn around. Twice she grabbed at the fabric at his rump and clucked.
Plastic wrapped hangars appeared. Shirt boxes were stacked on the counter. Ties were gently folded in tissue paper and bagged. Tony surrendered his Visa Card. Fifteen hundred and eighty bucks later he and Ray were back in the car and headed for St. Paul. Tony was wearing the charcoal gray sport coat. The blue jacket with the hangar pleats was in the trash bin back at the store.
He thanked Ray several times.
Ray told him he was welcome.
Carol noticed the sport coat right away. De Luca looked good striding into the squad room behind Ray. She went over to him and rubbed the fabric. Tony thought he heard her purr. Vang and Ted showed up minutes later. The team was assembled.
Just as Ray was getting their attention and Carol was passing out her notes Jonny Kumpula banged into the room. He had stack of thick folders under one arm and was carrying a half-full jug of electric blue Gatorade.
“Hey everybody!” Kumpula grinned. Ray knew that grin meant he had something interesting.
“I would like to thank those of you who turned in your fingerprint cards promptly. They helped a lot.” Kumpula rifled through the folders, found the one he wanted, and looked up. “What? You guys just go ahead. I’ll raise my hand.”
“Why don’t you go first, Kump.” Whatever science Kumpula had in his files and notes would help later. Ray was afraid they didn’t have much to discuss otherwise.
“Okay. Lots of prints. No fibers we could find. No juices. It’s all detailed in the file.” He patted it, smiling. “I got some other stuff, though. You want the highlight reel?”
“Please.”
“Okay. The mister’s in the system. Scott Fredrickson spent a year and a day in the Ramsey County workhouse in…let me see…1977.” Tony sat straighter in his chair. “I called up the case. He pled guilty to assault third, knocked down from attempted murder.” They all knew that assault in the third degree meant it involved a weapon of some sort. “He beat the crap out of his wife. There were pictures.”
“Deanna?” The question slipped out of Tony’s mouth, but everyone else had it ready.
“Apparently the first wife…a Marjorie.” Ray’s eyes were locked on Kumpula.
“The weapon?”
“A lamp. He hit her with a lamp after he hit her several times with his fists.” Tony wanted to start writing down notes right then, record first impressions of the information, get some immediate questions on paper so he wouldn’t lose them. No one else was writing anything down, he noticed, so he set his pen back on the desk.
“Anything since then?”
Kumpula flipped a page. “Nope, not even a traffic citation.”
“Okay. What else?”
“You’re gonna love this one. Okay, de Luca doesn’t get me a comp card for the roommate, Stuckey. Not right away. So I’d put all the mystery prints out there, right? I got a hit on Stuckey this morning. If I’d had the comp card I might not have put it out on AFIS, least not right away.”
“Let me guess, LA?”
The LA trip was well documented. Sean Stuckey had transferred from UCLA, the University of California/Los Angeles. Tony hadn’t had a chance to share that with anyone but Ray as yet, and that only in passing. He thought this was damn interesting.
“Yup. LA. But it’s a weird deal. Very weird.”
“Define weird.” Ray said. He knew that ‘Kumpula’ weird could be another person’s truly bizarre.
“What I could pull up—he was arrested, okay, and booked. Then the case was dropped. Well, not dropped, exactly. It’s murky. I’m confused.”
“What was the charge?”
“See, that’s part of it. The charge was sexual misconduct. We don’t have anything like that here.”
Now it was Carol’s turn to sit up straighter. Her previous assignment had been in the Sex Crimes Unit. Minnesota didn’t have a ‘sexual misconduct’ charge. She wasn’t sure what that meant in California.
“So we don’t know if he was tricking, or pimping, or if he was picked up for lewd behavior, or diddling little girls, or what.” Kumpula took a swig of his blue drink. “I’ve only had it for a couple of hours, sorry.”
“No, this is good, Jonny.” Ray turned to Carol. “You got anyone you know out there that could help us?”
“I’ll have to check my files. I’ll find someone.”
“It could be important.”
Kumpula sorted through his pile and pulled another, thinner folder out. “We found a thumbprint and two fingers from Stuckey on the doorjamb of the master bedroom upstairs. At some point in time he was upstairs in the house.”
Tony remembered the graphite smudge on the doorframe from his last visit to the house, remembered wondering whose it could be. The vibe in the room turned even more serious. Quieter. Everyone was processing this information. All of them; Ray, Carol, and the others were trying to figure out what Stuckey might have been doing upstairs in the Fredrickson house. Ray finally broke the silence.
“I know you would have brought it up immediately bu
t I have to ask. Did you get anything off of the knife?”
“The handle was smudged. Now that’s interesting because it means it was wiped with a synthetic, most likely a nylon or rayon cloth. It could have been silk or a real lightweight wool blend, too. That would tend to leave a smear. Cotton or terrycloth, like a dish towel, would have wiped it clean.”
“That is interesting.”
“And then there’s the mug.” Tony remembered the mug in the sink with dried coffee stains. “It had been wiped too, on the outside. It was wiped completely clean, though. We’re thinking with the hand towel that was on the counter.”
“What about DNA from the coffee residue?”
Kumpula cocked his head at the rookie detective, impressed that he’d noticed the mug in the sink and remembered the details. Ray looked at him too. He’d missed that, or maybe it was in his notes or on the recording and he hadn’t placed any importance to it.
“Sorry, no.”
“It was probably the vic’s, anyway.” Ted Lipka wasn’t as close to the case as Ray and Tony. To him Deanna was just another victim. Tony wondered if by thinking of her always as Deanna that he was getting too close, too involved with her as a person. He’d have to ask Ray about that.
Ray, dug through a pile of papers on his desk, apparently found the one he was looking for, and his face darkened as he read. Worry lines sprouted across his forehead.
“What’s wrong?” Tony leaned over to see what had Ray so puzzled. It was the coroner’s report.
“Kump, try again on the DNA, okay?” Kumpula started to protest. If it wasn’t there it wasn’t there. “Deanna Fredrickson didn’t have any coffee in her stomach.” That stopped the whining. “Just try, okay buddy?”
“I’ll have to go off the reservation.” Kumpula meant he’d have to try to get the FBI involved. They had better toys.
“Wherever you need to.”
Kumpula nodded while he made a note on the folder, then he looked up. He wasn’t done.
“And there’s the Fontaine woman.”
Fontaine? None of the ‘Go Girls’ was named Fontaine. Tony was puzzled until Kumpula added, “Lakisha Fontaine.”
Tony watched Ray closely. He’d seen the two of them flirting. At least he thought it was flirting. Ray’s attitude didn’t change. He was engaged and curious.
“Lakisha Fontaine did three and a half years in Shakopee for manslaughter. ‘80 to mid ‘84.” Kumpula looked only at his notes while he told the story. “There was a bar fight. Minneapolis. Fontaine killed a woman named Tonya Reller. Reller was stabbed once in the chest. Fontaine claimed it wasn’t her knife. There was some gang connection that isn’t clear from what I’ve got so far. They took it through trial. Fontaine had a PD. They argued it was self- defense and lost. Since then…nothing.”
Ray remained stoic. If the revelation about Lakisha Marland affected him Tony couldn’t see it. Ray made a few notes before he looked up.
“What else have you got, Kump?”
“Boom Boom Bork used to get in a lot of fights. Big surprise. Hey, you think I could get anything on eBay for that comp card?”
Chapter 19
The case review ended up being a lot shorter than Tony imagined it would be. The senior evidence tech had put a lot of intriguing science and research in front of them. Kumpula headed back to the lab and the five detectives gathered round Ray’s desk.
“Okay folks, let’s get organized.” Ray flipped through his notebook. “Ted, Vang, I want you back in the neighborhood. Karen Hewes says she stopped by the house Monday morning. She thinks it was between 7:30 and 8:00. See if anyone can confirm that. She drives an Audi, a black A-4.”
“The next door neighbor, Mae, heard a car door,” Tony said, remembering his visit with her. “Maybe she can pin the time.”
“Maybe you should do it, check with her,” Vang suggested.
“I want Tony to have another chat with Mr. Stuckey. Tonight? No, tomorrow’s Friday. Tony, see if you can manage to run into him at that film class. I’ll go over how I want you to approach him later.”
Tony was pleased. Ray trusted him to approach Stuckey, who was now, at least in Tony’s opinion, a bona fide suspect. There was no denying that the coincidence of the ‘Go Girls’ trip to LA and Stuckey’s appearance in the Twin Cities could be important. And he’d been picked up for something called sexual misconduct. What was that about? Tony tuned back in when Ray gave Carol her assignment.
“Carol. I need you to find out all you can about Stuckey’s arrest. Kumpula’s not usually vague. What was it he said? It’s murky? He was arrested and taken far enough through their system that his prints are still there.”
“Maybe they screwed up. Maybe the case was dropped, the charges dropped…”
Ray interrupted her. “Let’s find out before we speculate too much. See if you can get the facts.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s a hell of a coincidence.”
Carol flipped her notebook shut and stood. “California’s two hours behind us. I’ll get started now if there’s nothing else.”
“You go ahead. And let me know as soon as you find out what’s going on out there. It’s going to make a difference in how we approach Stuckey.”
Vang and Lipka headed out too. Late afternoon was a good time to catch people coming home from work. Some detectives would have thought it was busy work. Tony was relieved he hadn’t drawn the assignment, but both of the older detectives knew that if you kept approaching the same people asking the same questions over and over, phrasing them differently, that it often led to something.
Scott Fredrickson was still at the hotel he’d retreated to after discovering his wife’s body. His son and daughter were in adjoining rooms. The son had been cleared. The daughter had too, courtesy of a park ranger that told them he had helped the grandmother find their campsite. Ray and Tony didn’t want to talk to them. They wanted to talk to Scott Sr.
Scott invited the detectives to join him on the balcony. He pulled out a cigarette. Ray noticed it was an English Oval, unfiltered and expensive. He had acquired a taste for them on a trip to Europe some years back.
There was a white noise on the second floor balcony, the sound of cars and trucks, both near and far away. It sounded like an urgent mechanical wind. Anemic October sun was hazed by thin high clouds. It had no color or warmth. Most of the trees had lost their leaves. Scott Fredrickson was pale and colorless too, still sad.
“I know why you’re here.” He got right to it. Ray had only asked a question with his eyes. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Still can’t, really.”
“You have some history, Mr. Fredrickson. Violence. Against a spouse.”
“History,” he said softly, taking a long drag on the cigarette. “I sure do. Want to hear it?” Ray just nodded.
“It was what? Thirty years ago. I was in school. I was married. We were broke. I drank a lot. Marjorie pissed me off about something. Money probably. I really don’t remember. We fought. It was thirty years ago.” He took another drag on the cigarette.
“Deanna and I never fought. I haven’t had a drink since I got out of the workhouse. That was the worst year of my life…until now.”
Tony listened closely, heard the words and felt the emotion of Scott Fredrickson’s words. He spoke in short, simple, factual sentences, pausing for a beat before each one.
“There’s liquor in the house,” Tony said, his tone matter-of-fact.
“Deanna would have a drink. We served drinks at parties, kept some beer for when the boys would come to watch a game. It didn’t bother me.” He looked up at Tony. There was a hint of something in his eyes. Defiance? Pride? “I haven’t had a drink in thirty years.”
Ray seemed to accept it. The man hadn’t even been in town Monday morning. Still, a history of violence carries a weight, a stigma. Tony worked through these thoughts and others.
“Felons aren’t allowed to have guns,” Ray said. Tony had forgo
tten about the .38 he’d found behind the nightstand. Ray hadn’t.
“Technically, it was Dee’s. We’ve had it for years, just for protection.”
“You have a good alarm system. It’s tied into the 911 operator.”
“Do you know how long it took for the first police to arrive when I called about Deanna? Six minutes, detective. Six minutes.”
“You’d be in real trouble if you ever used that gun.”
“If I’d ever had to use it, it would have been because of real trouble. I…we were willing to chance it.”
Fredrickson took out another cigarette and lit it after offering one to the detectives. Tony noticed that his hands were steady, his movements precise. He wasn’t nervous about the questioning. Sad maybe, having to relive another tragedy from three decades before, having to make excuses, to confess to a mistake he’d already paid for.
“Does this make me a suspect, Detective Bankston?”
“No.” Ray said after a moment. “But we have to check these things out.”
Tony thought about something Ray had said early in the investigation, the first morning when they were in the house with the dead woman. He said they were going to have to get into these people’s lives to solve this one. At the time Tony didn’t know how difficult and painful that was going to be.
The sun had disappeared by the time Ray and Tony pulled into the Marland’s driveway. It wouldn’t be light out for long. A coach lamp on a pole in the front yard had already come on. They hadn’t called ahead. Tony argued that Ray should take this one himself, see the woman alone. Ray told Tony that he was his chaperone. He’d laughed about it. In truth, Ray didn’t want to be alone with Lakisha, not until he knew more. He worried if he could be impartial. He had laughed because he didn’t want Tony to know how worried he was.
“Why Rayford, how nice.” Lakisha wore a beige colored, soft looking, fleece warm up suit and a broad smile when she opened the door. Then she saw Tony. “And uh, detective…”