Par Four, page 14
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
“Right.”
“As much as possible about the money, huh? What denominations, how many checks. I’ve got copies of the deposit slips and we can compare. Ask him was it on the desk or in the safe, anything like that we can go back and ask Scott. Babe said they cleaned out her purse; see if you can get him to tell you that. Rosie, pay close attention to his voice, eyes, manner, try to decide if you think he’s telling the truth.”
“I understand.”
“And listen, Bo, I know you want this guy for dealing crack, but unless he opens the door to that, just concentrate on the crime at hand, will you? Get this guy’s statement, put him away and have lunch, and when I get back we’ll talk to both of them again and see how they look for the murders.”
“Gotcha.”
Sometimes Bo’s laconic answers make me want to stick a firecracker up his ass, but I was grateful for them today because I was out of time. I ran down the back stairs and found the chief idling his motor at the top of the ramp. I jumped into the front seat beside him, then grabbed the door handle and said, “Oh, shit, I forgot to get the address.”
“Sit still, I got it.” He wheeled expertly into traffic. Frank was my trainer when I came on the force, and he nearly drove me bananas trying to make me as good a driver as he was. I think I got close, because it was that or throttle him with my bare hands, but there’s a level of quiet elegance to his car handling I never quite attained.
“I guess this is not gonna be a pretty crime scene, chief.”
“Why, what did Kevin say?”
“Everything broken up, and a lot of blood.”
“Well, you saw them at the river. What about it? Did they look like they’d been in a big fight?”
“Babe had a lot of cuts on her arms and chest, and Pokey kept saying he thought Babe was dead longer, probably before she went in the water.”
“But he thought the boy drowned?”
“That’s what he thought. Jimmy didn’t want to speculate. But that’s Jimmy.”
“What did you get from the two boys who robbed the bar?”
“Just finished the first one. The white kid, Scott Rouse. Bo’s interviewing the Somali guy now. We want to see if they tell the same story, first.”
“You don’t believe they’d work together?”
“Mostly I just don’t figure either one of them for an attack of conscience. So I’d like to find out why they’re in the police station copping to a felony.”
“So would I.” Frank hit the left-turn arrow just right and turned off South Broadway, drove through a couple of blocks of bars and small businesses and into a modest residential district. “Damn surprising about the Rouse kid. I used to play ball with his old man. Always seemed like an okay guy. Whaddya think about Scott?”
“He’s got the time wrong, for starters. He claims they robbed the bar Sunday night. Babe told me herself she was robbed while she was writing up deposits Monday afternoon. And he’s way too low on the money.”
“Like they stashed some, you think?”
“Maybe. But why confess at all?”
“Maybe they did something worse than robbery Sunday night and they want an alibi for the same hours.”
“Like killing Babe Krueger, you mean? Only we know they didn’t because I talked to her Tuesday.”
“True. Well, so what’ll we charge ‘em with, overzealous confessing?”
I laughed. It felt wonderful. “Tough one to figure penalties for.”
“Right,” he said, “and we wouldn’t use ‘em often.”
We stopped in front of a tan stucco bungalow with a honeysuckle hedge, where Stearns stood in front of the front door. He looked bored out of his skull, but to be fair he would have looked exactly the same way if six nubile maidens had been dancing naked on the lawn in front of his eyes. I asked Frank, once, “When was the last time you remember Stearns showing any emotion?” I thought I was making a little joke, but Frank replied, promptly and soberly, “Late fall of ‘78,” and then refused to discuss it any further.
Kevin Evjan was standing in the open doorway of the two-story house next door, talking to a woman wearing an extra large T-shirt and polyester pants so tight they were turning her ankles blue. She looked animated and seemed to be getting more so as she looked up into Kevin’s bright blue eyes.
Waiting for him in front of Babe’s house, I looked over the few scrawny begonias clinging to life in a dried-up flower bed by the step. Behind them, I could see through a half-window into a basement laundry, where a naked bulb hung over a mismatched washer and dryer. A steam iron stood upright on an ironing board with a badly scorched cover. Babe’s rewards for a life of hard work did not appear to have been large.
Kevin came over with the key, saying as he led us through the door, “The neighbor says there was a big fight here the day before last.”
“What time?”
“Late afternoon. She and her husband were watching the news on TV, she says, and even though he likes the sound turned high, they heard the fight.”
“Yelling, you mean?” Frank asked.
“And swearing, and a lot of crashing around. Look here–” The little house had no foyer; the door opened directly into a chaotic living room. “Watch the lamp,” Kevin said, moving in ahead of us. Just inside the door, fragments of a porcelain base lay on the shag carpet around a torn lampshade. We stepped over it to confront smashed pictures, two overturned chairs, and a TV set lying on its face.
“This is nothing,” Kevin said. “Come in the kitchen. Everybody got gloves?” We pulled them on. “Favor the middle of the doorway,” Kevin said. “There’s blood stains on the woodwork. Watch where you walk out here, blood on the floor too.”
We stepped carefully through the doorway and hopped over bloodstains and broken crockery to stand in the few clean spots we could find. Blood speckled the porcelain-topped table, the broken plates and cups, and the overturned chairs. A great smear of blood crossed the porcelain stovetop and continued onto the tile counter, slid down the cupboard door under the counter, and ended in a sticky pool on the floor One fine, graceful spray of blood arced across the ceiling, and a huge spatter pattern decorated the middle of the wall by the pantry. There was an almost perfect bloody hand print at the top edge of the spatters and a smudge of blood just below it.
“Kevin,” Frank said, “I think you better get back outside and talk to as many neighbors as you can find. We need to find out who heard this fight, whether they heard what it was about. See if anybody can say whether it was Babe and her son fighting. If there were other voices yelling that day, try to get them to describe them. I know it’s tough,” he answered Kevin’s dubious look, “but people surprise you sometimes, what they can remember. And Jake…Jake?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s the matter, you sick?”
“No. I used to know this woman.”
“Oh…well. You want off the case?”
No. What were you going to say?”
“That you’re right about BCA; we gotta get ‘em back here. My phone’s in the car–use that. Then let’s see if we can find the knife.”
I hopped carefully over islets of gore in the horrifying slaughterhouse that someone had made of Babe’s modest kitchen, crossed the living room, which now appeared almost neat to me, and stood blinking on the front step. Marigolds and zinnias bloomed in neat rows along the front walk of the house across the street, and a speckled cat sat grooming itself on the railing of the white-painted porch behind the flowers. It was hard to fit the sun-drenched cat and flowers into the same universe with the horror behind the door. Three doors east, I saw Kevin holding his badge in his left hand while he knocked at a door with his right.
Pokey rattled into the space behind the chief’s car, grabbed his bag, and came toward me, saying, “You gonna find a stiff every place you go today?”
“Haven’t got a body for you here. This house belonged to the dead woman you examined at the river. I want you to see the kitchen.” He opened his mouth and I said softly, “I know it’s not really your job, Pokey. But you saw how she was cut. I want you to look at this house and tell me if you think it happened here. Okay?”
He screwed up his foxy face and said, “Old Ukrainian asshole s’posed to do all the dirty work, huh?” I could see he was pleased.
I guided him through the rubble to a clean spot by the kitchen table. As soon as he was settled I went back outside and called BCA, and persuaded the operator to put me through to Jimmy Chang in the morgue. Jimmy protested when I asked him to come back. He had hours of work right where he was, he said, and then a class. “Get your own guys to do the fingerprints, and get a techie from the clinic to take blood samples. Somebody from the department can run them up to me.” But when I told him about the spatter pattern on the end wall he said, “Don’t let anybody touch it, Jake. Don’t even breathe on it! I’ll be there as soon as I finish these autopsies.”
“Bring Trudy,” I said, “this kitchen could be her masterpiece.”
In the house, Pokey stood silent on his bare spot, looking as busy and contented as a woman making jam. Every few minutes he turned a few degrees left.
Frank was prowling softly through cupboards and drawers. “Thought I might get lucky and find the knife,” he said.
“I’ll look around outside,” I said. I walked out the kitchen door onto a small entrance patio, a few stones set in the dirt with a little overhang protecting it. A rake and a spade leaned against a trellis alongside a couple of garbage cans. I lifted the lids. One held two bags of foul-smelling days-old garbage. I replaced the top quickly, hoping I wouldn’t have to go through that. The second can held only one trash bag, but it was filled with garbage so rancid and moldy it made me feel friendly toward the first two bags.
I put the second lid back and stared at the weedy grass of Babe’s small, empty back yard. I decided to divide it into imaginary corn rows and walk them slowly, scanning to either side as I moved. I began at the cedar slats of the left-hand fence, paced across the patchy turf to the metal posts and woven wire on the right-hand side, made a quarter turn, took two steps, and made another quarter turn. I was three steps back on the second row when something flashed in the sun, off to my right.
I went and looked at it, then stuck my head into the kitchen and said, “Chief? Think I found it.” Frank came out in the yard and walked across the grass where I led him.
“Chrissake,” he said. “Right here in the middle of the yard? What was he thinking?”
“Nothing much, I guess.”
“Not much of a knife,” he said.
“Good enough for impulse killing, I guess.” It was an old cheap butcher knife, the blade worn down from use, the wooden handle cracked along the rivets and chipped on the edge. A few hairs stuck to the smeared blade, and the handle was bloodstained.
I stared around the quiet neighborhood. “Kinda hard to believe, isn’t it? This terrible fight went on with people all around, and we never got a call.”
“People don’t like to interfere. Well…”He started toward the kitchen door. “Depends on the lab now. Hope the blood’s still good enough to test. No rain the last couple of days, that’s lucky. Been some dew, though.”
“It’s probably okay,” I said. “I’m going to get a marker tag out of Kevin’s car. I’ll just mark it and cover it with an evidence bag till the BCA crew gets here.”
“Good. And say, that reminds me, we need to send Jessica’s clothes back with them, too. You think you can get them to stop at the station?”
“I doubt it. Jimmy Chang will be ready to fly to St. Paul on a broom by the time he’s done with this job. I’ll send Kevin down to the station for them and give them to him here.”
“Okay. Listen, I better get back too. Wanna have lunch?”
“Sure.” I marked the location of the knife and went looking for Kevin, who was still knocking on doors. I got the house key from him, picked his brains about his survey so far, and sent him downtown, saying, “Get some lunch. Then check Jessica’s clothes out of the evidence room and bring them back here to Babe’s house, and I’ll meet you here in an hour.” I went back inside, walked into the kitchen and stood in front of Pokey. When I interrupted his line of sight he said, “What?”
“We’re gonna have lunch,” I said. “Care to join us?” I watched him morph from an inscrutable Asiatic sphinx into a jolly East European skin doctor.
“Hey, yah,” he said. “Lookin’ at all this gore makes big appetite, hah?” We picked our way carefully through the wreckage. I locked the house and told Stearns, “We should be back in an hour,” and he nodded a quarter of an inch without taking his eyes off the lawn. Pokey followed Frank’s car to one of the slick-menu places that line the highway east of town.
“Did Kevin get anything more from the neighbors?” Frank asked me after we’d ordered. Lunch should have been time out, but there was no chance we’d sit there not talking about the mess in Babe’s house.
“Musta been quite a fight,” I said. “They heard it four doors down on the left, and across the alley in back.”
“Anybody recognize voices?”
“Oh, they’re all firm about it; it was Babe and Randy.”
“And nobody else?”
“Nope. They all heard Babe and Randy. Yelling and throwing things, they say. Helluva fight that went on and on. Nobody remembers hearing any other voice.”
“Figures,” Pokey said.
“Why?” Frank said.
“Everything so broken up. Blood all over the place. Whole house says big anger, terrible rage.” Pokey smiled benignly. “Families do rage best of anybody.”
“Also soccer lessons,” I reminded him.
“And orthodontia,” Frank said. He has five children. He munched thoughtfully on a bread stick. “Whaddya say?” he asked Pokey, “That kitchen match up with the bodies you saw at the river?”
“Perfect match for the woman. Broken dishes, chairs tipped over, lotsa blood. Just what you’d expect, cut up like she was.”
“So deep, you mean, or what?”
“No.” Pokey shook his head. “Big cuts is when somebody just wants to kill and get it over. One or two deep stab wounds and then throat cut. But this woman had random slashes all over, like from fight…Probably got more cuts on her back, too, Jake, whaddya bet? I never could see that, they were tied together back to back and I had to leave ‘em that way for big cheese from St. Paul.”
Frank fixed his goggle-eyed blue stare on Pokey and left it there for ten seconds. He knew about the coroner’s resentment of outside help from BCA, but he didn’t want to hear about it. He appreciated Pokey’s coming out cheerfully at all hours, and he had heard me praise the quirky doctor’s intuitive leaps, but at the bottom of his commonsense soul he knew he could replace this man in a heartbeat. In a showdown, Frank would side with the pros from St. Paul and consider Pokey foolish for picking a fight he couldn’t win. I sat and watched while Pokey absorbed that information, took a big drink of cold water, and went on with his remarkable life.
“She had defense wounds, too,” he said, illustrating with a hand over his head, “just what you’d expect to see when somebody been attacked with knife. But her son…” He shook his head. “Kinda hard to say. Wounds mostly looked like they came from river. Big question is, why was he tied up to mama like that?”
“He didn’t have defense wounds?”
“Maybe some scratches. Hard to tell because of scrapes from river. Sure wasn’t cut up like mama. Nothing to die from. Looked to me like he drowned.”
“After he got tied to his mother or before?”
Pokey gave Frank a Mona Lisa smile. “Wouldn’t I be rich doctor if I could tell you that?” he said.
8
✜
Kevin was sitting on the front steps of Babe’s house when I got back, holding a one-sided conversation with Al Stearns, who occasionally indicated consciousness by blinking into the sunlight like an old lizard. I sent Stearns to lunch and asked Kevin, “Wanna see the knife?”
“What, the knife that caused all this mess? Where’d you find it?”
“Right in the middle of the back yard.”
“No shit?”
“Yup. Like the killer just stood in the back door and tossed it.”
“Jeez. You gonna be able to tell that one in court with a straight face?”
“You’re gonna help me. Come and look.” We went out back to my marker and stared down at the unimpressive old kitchen implement.
“Shee. Doesn’t even look very sharp,” he said. “And the handle’s cracked.”
My beeper sounded. “Damn,” I said. “I don’t want to use the phone in the house before it’s been dusted. I should have brought my car over here!”
“Use mine. Lessee, where is it?” We hopped together through the bloody kitchen and he found his briefcase in the front room. He fished out his phone and I called the station.
“Hold on,” Sally said, “I’ve got Clint Maddox on another line.” For one terrible moment, I couldn’t remember who Clint Maddox was. Then I remembered, and it seemed section three.
“Jake,” Maddox said, “how soon you think you’ll be able to get up here to the North End so I can show you some stuff?”
I bit my lip. When I agreed, mostly to get Frank off my back, that assigning one man to a troubled neighborhood was a good idea, I never intended to volunteer my services as mentor to the operation. Now Maddox seemed to think I was his advisor, and I had not had time to demand that Frank get him reattached to a squad leader. The POP mission had seemed only marginally useful to me on Tuesday morning, and now, compared to the horrifying crime smeared all over Babe’s house, it seemed even less urgent. I had touted Clint for this strange job, though, and it didn’t seem fair to dump him till I arranged for other support. So I said, “What’s happening?”
“Mostly, it’s what’s not,” he said. “At the pawn shop, and that adult book store?. They hardly do any business at all! And don’t seem to care!”
