“But he’s never done anything? Anything rough?” Lucas asked.
Ryan shook her head: “He gets his rub and goes on his way.”
The fourth woman came out of the back and said, “Okay, that was mean. You scared the poor guy half to death.”
“He’s gone?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, I let him out the back.” She was a thin woman, with an overtanned face already going to wrinkles, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and an out-of-style Farrah Fawcett hairdo. She looked at Lucas, then at Del: “So what’s up with the cops? You need a little shine?”
“We’re looking for John Fell,” Lucas said.
“I heard that,” she said. “I think he works at Letter Man.”
“What’s Letterman?” Del asked.
“A silkscreen place, up off I-35 by Stacy. I used to go by there, on my way to school. He came in wearing a Letter Man shirt, and I mentioned I used to live up there, and I like the shirt, and he said he could get as many as I wanted. He never did get me any, though.”
“When was this?” Lucas asked.
“A month ago, maybe . . . No wait, longer than that. Maybe . . . May. I remember thinking it was still a little cool for T-shirts. But he’s one of those stout guys, who doesn’t feel the cold.”
“Letterman is one word? Or two words?” Del asked.
“Two,” the woman said. “Letter Man. Like a man who has letters. You know, they do advertising T-shirts and hats and shit.”
“He ever get rough with you?” Lucas asked.
“No, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did,” she said. “He seemed like he might . . . like to, but was holding back. I think he could be a mean bastard.”
THEY USED THE PHONE in the massage parlor to call Letter Man, but it was apparently closed for the evening, and the woman who knew about the place didn’t know who ran it.
When the conversation ran down, Del looked at Lucas and said, “So let’s go see if Anderson got anything.” He gave the women his business card: “Don’t mess with this guy. If he comes in, call me. I won’t give you away, I’ll catch him later, on the street. But call. We’re thinking, he could be dangerous.”
Outside, Lucas said, “Dangerous,” and, “I gotta get some business cards.”
“I am getting a bad vibe from the guy,” Del said. “I’d just like to see him. Have a few words. I think you might be on to something.”
“We ought to go up to Stacy right now,” Lucas said. “We could be there in a half-hour, forty minutes. If we knock on enough doors, we’ll find the guy who runs the Letter Man place. We’ll be talking to him in an hour.”
“Anderson—”
“Anderson’s stuff will be there when we get back,” Lucas said. “Let’s go.”
“Checking Anderson will take five minutes, and we can have the comm center run down the Stacy cops for us—find out who we can talk to.”
“You think they got cops?”
“That’s why you check before you go,” Del said.
ANDERSON’S FILE SHOWED seventy-two charges to the Visa account over its lifetime, the last a month before, at the massage parlor. They scanned down the list of charges; a dozen or so were local, at what Del said were three different massage parlors. The others were apparently mail-order places scattered around the country.
“A bunch of them in Van Nuys, California, different places . . . you know what? I bet it’s pornography,” Del said. “I bet he’s using the card for sex stuff that he doesn’t want attached to his name.”
“Because why? He drives around in a van, he’s not some big shot,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know why, maybe he’s just embarrassed,” Del said. “But if it is porn, it’s another thing to throw in the pot. Porn addiction, goes to hookers . . . and you said Scrape denied that the porn you found was his.”
Lucas nodded. “Fell doesn’t know we’re checking on him,” Lucas said. “We talk to the post office guys, watch the box when he picks up the next bill.”
“Two weeks away,” Del said.
“But we know he’s up to something crooked.”
“Not good enough. I know two hundred people who are up to something crooked, but I can’t prove it,” Del said.
“All right. But if we know who he is, then we got something to work with,” Lucas said.
“Good point. You always want to know the players. Even if you can’t prove anything against them.” Del looked at his watch. “Let’s talk to the commo guys. Get up to Stacy.”
STACY DIDN’T HAVE COPS: the city was patrolled by the Chicago County sheriff’s office. The comm center got in touch with the night duty officer at the sheriff’s department, and between them they arranged to have a patrol officer meet Del and Lucas at County Highway 19, just off the I-35 exit.
They took a city car, and left Del’s truck parked: the tranny needed work, he said, and he didn’t trust it for the ninety-mile round-trip. The drive north took forty-five minutes, and just before they got there, the comm center radioed to say that the cop they were supposed to meet had to take a call, and he’d be a few minutes late. They turned off the highway and drove around town, looking for the Letter Man office; Stacy was a small place, a few blocks of houses this way and that, mostly new, ten or fifteen years old.
“People getting out of the Cities,” Del said.
“Long commute.”
“But pretty fast . . .”
They saw a guy walking a dog, stopped, and he told them that the Letter Man was a small storefront back on County 19. They drove back, found it. Dark, nobody around.
“This isn’t that much like the movies,” Lucas said, as they leaned back against the trunk of the car. “I’m thinking, ‘law school.’”
“Man . . .”
The sheriff’s deputy showed up five minutes later, introduced himself as Ron Howard, said he had no idea of who ran Letter Man, but knew who would: a local city councilman who knew everybody. They followed him to an older house, with a porch light on, where he knocked; a gray-haired man came to the door, saw Howard, smiled, and said, “Hey, Ron, what’s up?”
“Dave . . . these guys are with the Minneapolis PD. They need to talk to whoever runs Letter Man.”
“Rob Packard . . . what’d he do?” Small moths were batting around the porch light, and the older man moved his hand inside the door and turned the light off.
Del said, “Nothing, as far as we know. We’re looking for somebody who he might know, either as a customer or an employee.”
“He’s only got three or four employees, far as I know,” the man said. “His wife and daughter and a couple of girls.”
“Does Packard live around here?”
“Yeah, he lives up north of here. Let me get the phone book.”
They got an address and the deputy led the way north, eight blocks, into a circle of the newer, suburban, ranch-style homes. There were lights in the window, and they got out and knocked on the door.
Rob Packard wasn’t John Fell: Packard was a short, thin man, maybe fifty, wearing jeans and a University of Minnesota sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves, and he didn’t know a John Fell. Neither did his wife, but his daughter, whose name was Kate, said that judging from Fell’s description, she might.
“There was a guy who came around three or four times. He bought some shirts, asked me about getting some made,” she said.
Her father said, “Katie runs the front counter and does the design.”
Kate said, “I think he works around here. He sort of hit on me, but you know—I wasn’t interested.”
“Why not?” Lucas asked. He was checking her as she spoke: in her mid-twenties, he thought, but slender, and white-blond with small breasts: and he thought of the young Jones girls.
“He just was . . . I don’t know. Not my style,” she said.
“Creep you out?” Del asked.
“Oh, he never did anything. But, yeah, you know . . .”
Lucas: “Did he tell you jokes?”
r />
“Every time,” she said. “Really stupid ones.”
Lucas said to Del, “That’s him.” And to Katie: “A fat man?”
“Yeah, that too . . . sort of like a young Alfred Hitchcock.”
Del asked, “Do you have any idea where he works?”
“No, really, I don’t. I can tell you that he drives a black van, like a plumber or a contractor . . . but I don’t think he’s a plumber. Or a contractor. He sorta doesn’t talk like one.”
“How about a teacher?” Lucas asked.
She thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe. Yeah, maybe.”
“What kind of shirts did he want?”
“The first time, he said he was checking prices for a rock band, some stupid name, I forget.” She paused, her eyes floating up, then dropping back to Lucas: “No, wait: it was ‘Baby Blue.’ Or ‘Baby Blues.’”
“Never heard of them,” Lucas said.
“Neither have I, and I still haven’t,” she said. “He came in again, about that, about the band, then the next time he came in, he was asking about buying seconds. We’ve always got some seconds, that we sell cheap. The last time, I don’t know. I think he was just looking me over. He took some seconds. They were for Wyman Archery. Says ‘Wyman Archery’ in a target, with a hunting arrow under the words.”
“He’s an archer? A bow hunter?”
She shook her head, “No, it was kind of a wicked-looking shirt. He just pulled them out of the seconds basket.”
Lucas asked her about the Letter Man shirt he’d been wearing. “We have samples, we sell them at cost—four dollars. I don’t remember selling him one, but maybe I did. He did buy some shirts.”
She hadn’t seen him around town, didn’t know whether he was going east or west when he arrived. “What time did he come in?” Lucas asked. “Same time?”
“Middle of the afternoon,” she said. “Yeah. Every time, around two or three. Between two and three. It’s our slowest time of day.”
Lucas said to Del, “He might be doing factory work, going in to the second shift.”
Del asked Kate, “You get any feeling that he was watching you? You know . . .”
She was shaking her head: “I never saw him outside the store. He’d come in, he’d go away. I thought he was interested in talking to me, you know, but . . . he got the idea.”
“You never saw a black van around when you were out walking?”
“Now you’re scaring me,” her father said.
“I don’t remember any, especially, but . . . there are vans all over the place. I guess you see them all the time. You don’t even look at them.”
THERE WASN’T ANYTHING MORE—a bit of a description, but nothing significant. The Packards knew of three or four assembly plants in the area, mostly smaller places putting together electronics, the kinds of places that came and went every few months. And she hadn’t seen Fell for at least four or five months, Kate said.
On the way back to the Cities, Lucas said, “I’m coming back up here tomorrow. I’m going to hit every one of those factories. If we get a time card, there’ll be eight ways to track him, even if he’s not working there anymore.”
BUT HE DIDN’T DO THAT.
8
They spent the drive back to the Twin Cities speculating about John Fell. Lucas said, “He’s at least as good a suspect as Scrape. Look, think about this: Somebody needs a fall guy. Who’s better than a guy like Scrape, who can’t even defend himself, because he’s crazy? And he looks crazier’n hell, who’d believe him? So this guy tracks both Scrape and the girls, steals stuff that Scrape has used, like that box in the pizza dumpster, and then he calls nine-one-one to feed us the clues.”
“Sounds too much like a movie,” Del said.
“It does,” Lucas admitted.
“I’ve never known one of those movie plots to work out,” Del said.
Lucas looked out the window at the rural darkness, just a scattering of lights off to the west. “Neither have I.”
DEL HAD A LIST of eight more people he wanted to interview about Smith, with addresses. Though it was late, they found four of them with the lights on, but got no help. After the last one, Lucas followed Del back down the street to the car, and Del asked, “You know what the perfect crime is?”
“You’re gonna tell me, right?”
“It’s when you walk up to a guy you don’t know that well, because you want the crack in his pocket. You look around, there’s nobody watching. You pull your gun and Bam!, you kill him. You take the crack and you walk away,” Del said. “Nobody gives two shits about a crack dealer, so there’s not gonna be a big deal investigation. There’re gonna be two guys walking around with notebooks, for maybe a week. There’s a million potential suspects, and no real connection between the killer and the killee, and an hour after the killing, the evidence has already gone up somebody’s pipe.”
“But somebody could see you—”
“Eh—no. Or they turn away. Smith wouldn’t be standing out in the middle of the street, handing it off. That’s why dope dealers get killed. Get killed all the time. Because they’re vulnerable and they’re worth killing. The guys doing it are desperate for a hit, they don’t have a hell of a lot to lose, and they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. So, they don’t worry about it, they don’t talk about it, they don’t plan it. It’s just walk up, look around, pull out the piece, pop him, and go.”
“All right—but when was the last time you picked up a dead black crack dealer in the alley behind a bunch of houses where all the people are white?” Lucas asked.
Del held up an index finger. “That’s another reason I like your whole spontaneous, semi-accidental murder theory. It’s possible that our crack-freak killer doesn’t exist. At least, not this one. So we’re looking for the wrong dude. He doesn’t exist. Maybe your dude does.”
“My dude exists—he snatched the girls,” Lucas said.
“Unless Scratch did it,” Del said.
“Scrape.”
“Yeah, Scrape. The point remains: we are wasting our time, right now,” Del said. “We aren’t gonna hang the Smith murder on a neighborhood guy unless an eyewitness turns up, and even then, we’d probably need to kick a confession out of the guy. Because (a) there’s no link to follow, and (b) nobody gives a shit. There’s no logic to a crack killing. No puzzle you can figure out. Only hunger.”
“You got me convinced,” Lucas said. “But you gotta keep your eye on the other ball, too.”
“What ball?”
“The political ball,” Lucas said. “The ball that requires two white guys to be out roaming around the black community so it looks like somebody cares, when nobody does.”
“I don’t like that ball,” Del said.
AFTER A WHILE, when the lights started going out around the neighborhood, they went home. Lucas thought about the case while waiting for sleep to catch up with him. It was confusing, but in a pleasant way: it was intricate, like a puzzle, like a really magnificent game. You could make a million moves, and prove yourself a complete fool.
He was still sleeping soundly at eight o’clock the next morning when his phone rang. The comm center was calling to say that some woman was trying to get in touch, and she’d said it might be an emergency. Lucas dialed the number she left, not recognizing it, and the blue-haired Karen Frazier picked up.
“All right, Scrape’s name is all over the place and the whole street is all freaked out, and I was talking to a guy named Millard and he told me that he saw Scrape last night sneaking along the riverbank across from the falls. On the east side.”
“Where are you?” Lucas asked.
“Right there, on Main. I was looking around for him.”
“For Christ sakes, don’t do that,” Lucas said. “Even if he didn’t do it, he’s still nuts and we took a great big long knife off him. He’s probably got another one by now.”
“I thought of that. That’s why I’m calling you,” Frazier said. “You think he did it?
”
“I don’t know—there’s some other stuff going on, but there’s some evidence, too. Against him, I mean. So you sit tight: I’m coming over. Give me twenty minutes. I’ll meet you at the end of the bridge there.”
He’d planned to go back to Stacy, to look for Fell. Instead, he rolled out, brushed his teeth, skipped the shave, was in and out of the shower in one minute, and in two more, was dressed. He thought about calling in, as long as the phone was right there. On the other hand, if he picked up Scrape on his own . . .
He gave the phone a last look, and with only the slightest of misgivings, was on his way.
FRAZIER WAS SITTING on a bench south of the Central Avenue bridge. Lucas pulled in, flipped his “Police” card onto the dash, locked the door, and walked over. She saw him coming and stood up.
“Everybody’s scared,” she said. “The newspaper had this huge story about letting him go, and how maybe he stabbed some black man. And you guys are hassling everybody. People are running out of town—”
“We’re still thinking about the girls,” Lucas said. “There’s not much chance anymore, but we gotta try.”
She looked doubtful: “It seems more like you’re doing it for television, than really looking.”
“We’re really looking,” Lucas said. “And I haven’t rousted anyone. I’ve been working the Smith killing.”
She turned away and looked off down the river.
“Anyway,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy named Millard, right? Where is he?”
“I don’t want you to talk to Millard, because he’ll put two and two together, and figure out where you got his name.”
Lucas shook his head: “I gotta know. I’ll cover you. But I gotta talk to him.”
“I can tell you what he said. He said, Scrape was right under the bridge when he saw him, but then he started walking down the bank. Millard said there are a bunch of old cave openings and drains down there, that go up under the bank. He thinks Scrape is in there.”