Par Four, page 17
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
So Scott and Farah were telling the same lie about the money. They both said they robbed the bar on Sunday night, which I knew to be wrong. Both claimed they got the keys from Randy, which might or might not be true. They agreed they wore masks, but described them differently. What about…I paged back through Scott’s interview till I found what I was looking for:
JH: Okay. Then you went to Rowdy’s, used the keys Randy gave you…
SR: Yeah.
JH: Entered by the front door, back door…
SR: Front.
“Scott said they went in the front door,” I said. “Farah says they waited by the dumpsters in the back. He didn’t specify going in the back door, but–did you ask him which door he went in?”
“Um. No. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I took that for granted. Wrong, huh? See, I figured, they were there in the alley by the dumpsters. Why would they go around to the front?”
“No reason. But Scott said they did,” I said. “I’ll make a note to ask Farah.”
“Bo said you’d want to see this about the money, too,” Rosie said, and showed me the page:
BD: Was the money mostly cash?
FT: Yes. Only three or four checks.
BD: Can you describe any of those checks?
FT: There was one on the First National Bank for fifty dollars, I think…
BD: You remember the name?
FT: No.
BD: Anything else?
FT: I remember one curious check, for one hundred dollars. It was blue all over, and was signed in two places.
I pulled Babe’s deposit slips out of the file. On Saturday’s deposit, she listed an American Express traveler’s check for a hundred dollars and a fifty dollar check on a local bank.
“You know,” I said, “Farah’s starting to look good for this crime. I think I’m going to stroll over to the jail and ask him which door he went in, and maybe get him to describe to me how you overpower a victim and tape her up without saying a word. And why. Lessee, what time is it?”
“Six-thirty.” Rosie said.
“Aw, no kidding? Jeez, listen, you better run along. I’m sorry, I just forgot the time. I don’t want to burn you out your first week on the job.”
“I’m not tired,” Rosie said. “You mind if I come along? I’m new to interviewing. I’d like to observe how you do it, see how he responds to you.”
“Well…you sure? Okay. You carry the tape recorder, I’ll bring the files and a fresh tape.” We walked down the broad front steps of the building and out the tall front doors, crossing the courtyard in sunshine so hot and bright it felt like noon. I slid my ID card through the heavy brass lock and we entered the cool gloom of the jail, where time took a sudden lurch into evening. The empty supper trays were being collected. All the TV sets were turned on high, prisoners and guards moving as little as possible, trying to keep their eyes on the nearest set.
I asked the sergeant on duty to have Farah Tur brought out to the visitors’ room used for non-aggressive prisoners.
“He’s already in there with a visitor,” the sergeant said. “You can interrupt if you want.”
“I’ll see,” I said and walked into the gray-carpeted L-shaped room, where tables and seating arrangements were pushed around at random intervals. On the couch nearest the door, a set of tired-looking parents groped for words to say to their stone-faced son. A young woman, standing a few feet beyond them, wept quietly into a tissue while the prisoner who faced her pled for understanding. We stood quietly, trying not to intrude, and scanned the room for Farah. Suddenly, I became aware of a conversation going on somewhere behind me, in the short end of the L, around the corner from where we stood.
“–don’t give shit wha’chew want, dickhead,” a falsetto voice said. I knew the voice; it froze me.
“I will not allow my brother to do it,” Farah said.
“Not allow? Wha’chew mean allow? Where the fuck you think you are?” Incredibly, but unmistakably, it was the voice I had heard on Schultzy’s phone, saying he had a girl named Jessica. Why would Jessica’s kidnapper be visiting Farah Tur?
Holding one finger against my lips, I leaned across Rosie and pushed the start button on the tape recorder she was holding. I bent to her ear and whispered, “Don’t move,” pushed the door open just enough to slide out, and hurried to the sergeant’s desk.
“Floyd, you’ve got a Polaroid camera here, haven’t you?”
“Sure. You need it?”
“Could you bring it and help us a minute? Rosie and I are going to stand behind two guys at a table, and I want you to take our picture and get theirs too. Will you? Right now?”
“Sure,” he said, his heavy body suddenly quick and adept, reaching in a drawer, coming out with a camera and checking the film as he fast-walked behind me. We sidled in through the half-open door, and I grabbed Rosie’s elbow and whispered in her ear, “Laugh!” We chortled around the corner together as I cried merrily over my shoulder, “Aw come on, Floyd, how often does a guy get engaged? You can spare a coupla pictures!” Tugging Rosie’s elbow, I guided her on a semicircular path, till we were behind the table where Farah leaned toward the squeaky-voiced man. Then I threw my arms around her and yelled, “Cheese!” and Floyd shot three pictures without pausing, the first two tumbling out of the slot onto the floor while Farah and the other man stared.
The man with the strange, high voice began to get up. I said, “Oh, excuse us, folks, guess we got carried away,” and pulled Rosie away from him. Floyd scooped his first two pictures off the floor and moved ahead of us out of the room, asking Rosie over his shoulder, “What do you see in this bozo?”
“Good man,” I said softly in the hall, grabbing the pictures from Floyd, “I’ll call you.”
We trotted down the long, dusky corridor to the heavy front door. In the courtyard, where sunshine still blazed, I told Rosie, “That was very well done, Sergeant Doyle.”
“Thanks,” she said. “What did we do?”
“Got a picture of Jessica Schultz’s kidnapper, I hope. Why the hell is he visiting Farah Tur, though? Anyway, let’s go see if we got his voice on tape.”
We went up to my office and spread our treasures on my desk. Color was coming up nicely on the pictures. In the first two, Farah’s visitor was turned away from the camera, watching Rosie and me, but in the last one he had turned toward the camera and Floyd got a full-face shot. He was part African-American, copper colored, tall and big, with mostly European features, thin lips and nose, but kinky African hair.
We rewound the tape and played it. The high, breathless voice said, “You in the slammer, numb nuts. Where you think you comin’ from with this allow shit?”
“He is my brother and he will do what I say,” Farah said.
“That so? You think he gonna keep doin’ wha’chew say when I got his nuts in a vice, asshole? Huh?”
“If you touch my brother my father will kill you,” Farah said, and then my voice drowned his out with the nonsense about the picture.
“We got enough, I think,” I told Rosie Doyle. “Go home, Rosie. You did a helluva job. See you in the morning.”
I called Floyd, explained what the craziness with the camera was all about, and asked him, “The man visiting Farah Tur, you got him on the sign-in sheet, right? What’s his name?”
“Uh…lessee.” There was a long pause while he breathed and moved his chair around. Finally he said, embarrassed, “He signed in, Jake, but I can’t read his damn writing. We gotta be more careful about this! About twice a year we have a meeting about watching what people put on the sign-in sheet, then we’re careful for a while and pretty soon we start to let it slide again. Damn! I got his phone number, though.” He read it out to me, “555-574-2250.” He breathed again for a minute and said, “Damn. That’s not a Minnesota prefix, is it?”
“No. Where is it?”
He looked on his chart and said, “Tucson, Arizona.”
“I’ll try it anyway,” I said. “Thanks, Floyd.”
I called the number. It rang ten times before an operator came on the line, checked the number and reported it out of service. I stared out the window a couple of minutes. It can’t be the same man, I thought, I must be mistaken. Why would Jessica’s kidnapper go into the jail, of all places, to visit Farah Tur?
Still pondering, I called Schultzy’s house. She answered, speaking loudly from what sounded like a dance class in a machine shop.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Just the usual,” Schultzy said. “I need to come back to work, Jake; this family is too hard to take full time.” She tried to make it sound like a joke.
“How soon do you think you’ll be back?”
“Should be Monday. Jessie’s fine. She’s going back to my Mom for day care. They been having a love affair ever since Jessie’s big adventure. That’s what she calls it, ‘My big a’venture’ ”
“Will you be home tomorrow morning? You and Jessica?”
“Um, yeah, I guess so. Why?
“I want to show Jessica some pictures.”
“You want to show–you mean it’s possible you’ve got a suspect?”
Possible. Don’t go counting on it now.”
“I won’t.” But then she said at once, “Oh, Jake!” and I could tell she already had her heart set on it. “Honest to God? Where? How…?”
“Just got lucky. I can’t tell you any more or I’ll taint the identification. Don’t tell Jessica anything except I’m coming to ask her a couple of questions, okay? We don’t want to put any pressure on her to say she recognizes somebody if she doesn’t. You think she can take it?”
“Sure. She’s okay. She’s already bragging to the neighbor kids.”
“Good. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
“Oh, God, Jake, you just don’t know…Oh, wait’ll I tell Ernie! We’ve been afraid to let her outa our sight!”
“I know. It’s not for sure, now. But I hope I’m right. So, what time–?”
“Oh, whenever it’s good for you, Jake, we’ll be right here waiting for you.”
“Shortly after nine, then, probably. I’ll call if there’s a hitch.”
To make Jennifer’s ID legal, I needed five other pictures of youngish men, similar in appearance to the squeaky-voiced man. So, to begin with, they all had to be black. Booking photos would do, though. I called Floyd and asked him, “How many black guys’ pictures have you got in the current booking file?”
“Uh…lessee.” He slid a file drawer opened and made rustling noises. “Two, looks like. This Farah Tur that’s in here now, and that Eugene Soames you brought in from the car chase last week.”
“That’s all? Damn! Okay, thanks.” I checked the film in my Polaroid camera, and walked around the building in search of Art McGee, the night janitor. I found him cleaning the urinal on the third floor, delighted, as always, to be offered any distraction from his lonely job. He’s a great kidder, too, so it took five minutes to get a serious shot. Then I remembered an Ethiopian exchange student I know, who sometimes works evenings at the Library. I ran across the overpass, found him shelving books, got shushed a couple of times but got a second picture of a young black man.
I called the dispatch desk then and asked them, “Does Greg LaMotte work tomorrow morning?”
“Lessee. No. He’s marked up for a personal day. He’s here till nine o’clock tonight, though, if you want to talk to him.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Thanks.” I walked out to the big room where the support staff works. It was nearly all dark at that hour but showed one patch of glow where Greg LaMotte sat hunched over his big 4.2 gigabyte computer, motionless except for his flying fingers.
Greg was a wizard at several record-keeping functions, but his new specialty was image enhancement. He’s got software that allows him to pull a face out of a blurry old crowd photo, tweak it and tease it a bit, and produce a clear, recognizable portrait of a face you thought was lost in the sludge.
“Hey,” I said, “you’re working tonight? Outta sight. I need your help. Desperately.”
“Is there any other way? Whatcha got?”
“I got this Polaroid kinda by accident, see. But this guy here, the one getting up, I suspect is the kidnapper who snatched Jessica Schultz.”
“No shit? How’d you find the guy?”
“Like I said, by accident. But now if I could get his face lifted out of this picture, and put on a photo strip with five other black faces, I could try for an identification from the child. If she picks him out of the lineup I can get a warrant to pick him up.”
“Well, I can lift him out of that picture all right. No problem. What else you got to go with it? They have to be reasonably similar so you’re not leading the witness.”
“Well, I’ve got these two Polaroids–”
“They’ll work fine.”
“Okay, and Floyd says he’s got two booking photos of young black men; can you use those?”
“Yeah. They’re not enough alike to start with, but I can make ‘em close enough. Long as I’m not changing the image of the one you’re after, we should be okay.”
“That still leaves me short one shot. You know any other black guys working around the building tonight, besides Art McGee?”
“How about you?” he said.
“I’m not dark enough, am I?” I’m actually about the color of Bailey’s Irish Cream, but in Minnesota, a little skin color goes a long way. “And she’s going to be looking at me when I hand her the picture.”
“I’ll darken you up and lower your forehead and broaden your nose,” he said. “She won’t recognize you.”
“Okay, here.” I handed him the Polaroid and he took my picture.
“I’ll have this ready in a few minutes,” he said.
“Any chance you’d put it on my desk before you go home?”
“Sure,” he said, absent-mindedly, without looking up. I left him there, motionless in the dim light except for his hands, with the screen light dancing on his face.
Back in my office, I decided to plan tomorrow morning’s meeting. I turned a legal pad sideways, wrote the names of my six investigators along the double margin line of the page, and made columns under their names. I stared at the page for a couple of minutes, then changed my pen for one with a finer tip. I stared a couple of minutes more, got up and found a tissue, blew my nose, sat down again and lined up my desk blotter with the edge of my desk. Assigning work, I decided, was not as easy as it looked. There was a lot to consider and I was too tired to remember what most of it was. Outside my window, the last of the light was fading. Watching a Chevy Camaro pull out of the parking lot, I fell asleep, waking with a yelp when I started to fall out of my chair.
Feeling stupid, I did knee bends till I figured I could safely drive, then walked downstairs stiffly and got my car out of the parking garage. At the deli counter of the grocery on Broadway, I got chicken and potato salad and a bottle of Chablis. In front of the TV set in my living room, I ate hungrily while I watched an ancient “I Love Lucy” rerun. I made a game of leaving the sound off, deducing the dialogue from the body language. Lucy was funnier silent; I could even tell where she waited for the laugh tracks.
Holding my third glass of wine, I dialed Trudy’s number in St. Paul.
“Oh, Jake, hi,” she said.
. “Did you have a pleasant ride back to the Cities?”
“Nice and quiet. I don’t know what it is with Jimmy lately; he’s really having mood swings.”
“Megan seems to cope with him pretty well.”
“Off and on. Sometimes I think she’s part of the problem. Jimmy’s so sedate, you know, and she’s kind of a loose cannon. Good at her job, but you never know what she’ll say next. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me he gets testy as soon as she comes around.”
“Must not be much fun for you.”
“Oh, I’m just giving them plenty of space to work it out.”
“Good. Listen, I had an idea for this weekend,” I said. “Why don’t we drive up to the North Shore? Walk on the beach, maybe get lucky and pick up some agates. Watch the big oar boats come in. We’ll eat a nice big Kamloops dinner and afterwards sit on a rotten log in the moonlight, and do a lot of kissing and giggling.”
She gave me a wonderful sample giggle and said, “Oh, that sounds like fun!” But then, suddenly serious, she said, “But I can’t. I’ve got a bunch of jobs piled up for this weekend.”
“Jobs? What kind of jobs? Can I help?”
“Um, no. Not Saturday. But I’ll tell you what, if you mean it about helping, I’ve got some stuff to haul Sunday. Would you really be willing to get involved in that?”
“Of course. I’m a proven hauler as you know. You want me Sunday morning? Or maybe I should come up Saturday night, take you out for a meal, keep your strength up for all this extra drudgery.” Lechery, I feared, must be dripping off my chin.
“Well…I really can’t tell when I’ll be done with my chores on Saturday, so probably it’s better not. But if you can come Sunday, say ten o’clock or so? I’ll make pancakes.”
“Glorioski, pancakes,” I said, and she laughed.
“Bacon and eggs, then, how’s that? And around noon we can load all these things in the car and deliver them around where they belong. That sound okay to you?”
Actually it didn’t. Okay, for me, would have involved a Friday night drive to St. Paul, ending when Trudy Hanson opened her door, I wrapped her in my arms, and we spent the next forty-eight hours exploring the outer edges of our pleasure envelopes.
But I was still haunted by the nightmare of my disastrous marriage, which dissolved when my wife and I somehow turned life into a zero-sum game in which each mate’s gratification seemed to cost the other an equal amount of dissatisfaction. Determined to stay out of that box with Trudy Hanson, I had schooled myself to take only what was freely given. Never implore, I resolved when we began dating. Hold her so lightly she will have no bonds to chafe at. So I agreed, without further comment, to be at her house by ten, and she purred her appreciation and promised me a good breakfast.
