Par Four, page 18
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
Just before I hung up, though, my disappointment burst out, cravenly disguised as a silly joke. “If I finish my chores extra fast,” I asked her, “will you turn on the hose and let me run through the sprinkler?” There was a funny, puzzled silence, and then she chuckled amiably and said, “Sure,” and I hung up quickly.
9
✜
I woke up at five o’clock Friday morning with that feeling I get sometimes, that a large gray wolf is standing just outside my bedroom door, salivating. Pale-eyed and ravenous, this slavering carnivore has stalked my life at intervals since I was about nine years old. I don’t know where he stays when things are going well, but I know where he comes when he’s hungry, and his message is always the same: Your ass is in a sling again, Jake Hines.
I jumped out of bed and showered in three minutes, microwaved a bowl of oatmeal and ate it standing up. Dressing quickly in my neatest clothes, I drove to the government building by the shortest route. The wolf had sharpened my focus, as he always does. I was fiercely concentrated on the dung heap of disaster confronting me: a kidnapping and a double homicide had been added to the major problems confronting my department, just since Frank’s Tuesday morning tantrum about unsolved cases. Pernicious behavior was spreading unchecked. My sector’s efforts to fix blame and arrange for punishment were pitifully ineffective. Rutherford’s investigative team was looking like a bunch of schmucks.
Ed Gray looked up from his night supervisor’s charts, glanced at his watch and said, “Jeez, kid, you don’t have to earn the whole promotion in the first week.”
I said, without smiling, “May I have the key to the small meeting room?” Ed handed it over, looking at me sideways while I signed the sheet.
“Must be a full moon, is it?” he said. “Seems like everybody’s antsy tonight.”
“How long can I keep it?” I said.
“What?”
“The small meeting room.”
“Oh…” he waved his arms around, annoyed by confronting a question he ordinarily didn’t have to answer. “How long do you need it?”
“Today. Over the weekend. Monday?”
“Today, the weekend, sure. Monday…” he shrugged angrily. He is a tall, strong man with a commanding voice, who did not become the tyrant of the night shift by saying, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Check with the day shift. Or the chief,” he yelled after me as I walked away. I could feel him staring after me resentfully, thinking what a pain in the ass these jumped-up minority types are when they first get a taste of authority.
Two walls of the windowless meeting room had large white boards, with a supply of colored marking pens. I fiddled with the switches by the door till I got all the lights on and adjusted the rheostat to take the glare off the boards. I chose a red marker pen and wrote
Kidnapping in huge capitol letters on the left-hand board, and then Murder x 2 even bigger, across the right-hand one. I wanted everybody wide awake during this meeting.
I pushed the chairs and tables into an open vee facing the boards and turned off the Muzak. Back in my office, I printed the notes I had typed Wednesday night, put them on top of Rosie’s notes from Scott’s and Farah’s interviews, and took them all into the meeting room, along with the tapes. Using the legal pad I had set up the night before, I assigned jobs to each investigator, working from the notes and tapes. When I had the day’s work assigned, I started out the door to make copies. Then I thought, No, let them make their own lists. I went out to the supply cupboard, found six spiral steno tablets, and wrote crew names on the front covers.
Kevin poked his head in the door at seven forty-five, and I sent him out to round up the rest of the crew.
“Keep ‘em out of the break room–get ‘em in here,” I said. “We gotta move our butts today.” He was back with the whole crew in ten minutes. We demolished all existing departmental promptness records by starting an eight o’clock meeting at seven fifty-seven.
“We got these two big, bad cases, one on top of each other, this week,” I said, pointing at the lurid red titles on the white boards. “They’ve got to take precedence over all old business. There’s a lot of concern out there. The kidnapping scares parents of small children to death, and I don’t have to tell you how your neighbors feel about the double murder. Everybody’s asking you questions, right?” Six heads nodded ruefully. “So the chief’s taking heat from the media and the City Council, he’s passing it along to me, and you’re all gonna get a share. Get used to it; I’m going to be on your ass for a while.
“We’re gonna headquarter in this room till further notice. We’ll all be working together, sharing information as fast as we get it. Set the answering tape on your phones; don’t return calls till five in the afternoon. I’m going to hand out jobs, and you’re going to get as many answers as you can by noon, have lunch, and meet back here at one o’clock. We’ll share what we got, divide up what’s left and keep going.” I slid three notebooks down each table and they all grabbed.
“Write down your own assignments as we go over this together,” I said, picking up my list. “Make notes on the others’ assignments too, so you know where to go when you’re looking for help.
“Rosie first. Get all the financial records you can find for Rowdy’s Bar and for Babe Krueger personally. Talk to her bankers; see if they’ll cooperate without a subpoena. If not get on the horn with the legal staff and get whatever you need. Emphasize the need for speed with everybody. Tell them the public’s demanding to know. Also, search the bar itself. Get the keys from the evidence room. Bring in everything that deals with money: correspondence, register tapes, paid-out slips, ledgers. The bar office is in the basement, but you might find cash tapes under the counters upstairs, too.
“Babe must have an accountant; find him and talk to him. Also her attorney. You’re looking for signs of financial distress, fresh debt, refinanced equipment, dunning letters. I put Jack Pfluege’s phone number in your book. Talk to him. He keeps saying he’s just the cook but I have a hunch he knew most of what went on there. The bartender seemed to think the business was failing. See if Jack agrees. Ask Jack if Babe seemed to be discouraged. You’re going after both hard and soft information about Babe Krueger’s financial affairs, now, so don’t be too proud to listen to gossip.”
“And you want us back here at one,” she said, “whether we’ve got anything or not?”
“Yes. But have something.” She gave me a hot look and I gave her a cold one back.
“Now. Kevin. You talked to several of the neighbors around Babe’s house yesterday, so you’re a little bit acquainted in that part of town. I want you to go back out there today and talk to all the same people again, and as many more neighbors as you can find. Find out all you can about the personal side of the Kruegers’ lives. Nothing’s too personal or too trivial in a murder case. Did Babe have a lover? Did Randy? Are there relatives? Did they go to church? How about clubs? We don’t know anything about these people but where they worked; there has to be more than that.
“Ask Scott Rouse, who’s right here in jail, how long he’s known Randy, where they hung out, and who Randy’s other friends were. If your job overlaps with Rosie’s, feel free to consult each other.”
“I’m gonna start with the woman next door with the tight pants,” Kevin said, eliciting moans and a low wolf whistle from his peers, “she seemed like she wanted to talk some more.”
“Fine. Have fun but don’t forget how mad I’m gonna be if you don’t come back with useful information.” I made a check mark under his name and moved on. “Bo, look in your notebook.”
He flipped the cover. “Angus Ferguson?”
“Right. He’s an old-time engineer at Building & Safety. The chief recommended him, says he’ll know how to read the old maps for the sewer system in the North End. Call him and tell him about the hole in the cellar at the crack house where we found Jessica. Get him to help you figure out where her kidnapper might have gone from there.”
“You want me to go out through the sewer like the snatcher did?” His teammates chuckled and he gave them his icey-eyed look.
“Only if you have to. Ferguson can probably show you on the map where the nearest manholes are. Find them and look for signs of recent use.”
“What, like shit smeared around or that?”
“Yup. Or scrapes, tracks, anything recent.”
“Gotcha.” Days like this, I loved Bo’s short answers.
“Darrell.”
“Yo.”
“Take the yellow pages, find all the places in town that make copies of keys. Talk to them till you find one who remembers making copies of the keys to Rowdy’s Bar for Randy Thorson last week.”
“Wow,” he said, “must be a ton of them guys.”
“Yup. And they’re usually not freestanding. They’re in hardware stores, Home Depots, Mail Boxes, Office Depots, Insty Prints–mostly cash-and-carry businesses that don’t do a lot of record-keeping.”
“So I can’t ask by name, right? I gotta describe the guy?”
“Start in the North End, where they might know his name, and keep widening the circle from there. Use your instincts. Get lucky.” They all laughed and I said, “Why don’t you go up to Rowdy’s Bar with Rosie, first; help her bring back the tapes and ledgers that we’re all sure she’s going to find there, and get the picture of Randy that’s on Babe’s desk? Take it along; somebody might remember his face.”
“Right,” he said, brightening at the prospect of face time with Rosie. Far from developing a rivalry, the two were becoming my crew’s best buddies.
“Ray, the first thing I want you to do is sort of weird, but it’s important. Find the place upstream from the Second Avenue bridge where the river gets shallow.”
“Say what?”
“The river’s narrower and deeper north of town, right? Okay, and we know the two bodies we fished out of the river yesterday had to be put in shallow water, somewhere upstream from where we found them.”
“How do we know that?”
“Babe may have been dead before she went in the water, but Randy almost certainly drowned. Drowned bodies don’t float for weeks, sometimes months. If the water was deep enough where they went in, those bodies would have gone to the bottom and stayed there. They didn’t, though; they rolled and bumped among till they got to the Second Avenue bridge where we found them. So what I want to know is how much of a stretch of river does that give us to search?
“You want all the shallow spots or…?”
“Ray, listen to me. I want you to find out how far north from the Second Avenue bridge you can go on that stream before you start to find deeper holes, places where those two bodies could have gone down and stayed down. Then we’ll search the shallow segment till we find the spot where Babe and Randy were thrown in.”
“What’s that gonna do for us?”
“I don’t know. Find it first and I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll call my dad,” Ray said. “He and his uncles used to fish that river when the town was smaller. He’ll know.”
“Okay. Now, Lou. I want you to go to Planning & Zoning, the tax assessor’s office, and wherever else you have to go, for the answers to the following questions: One, who owns the building that Rowdy’s Bar is in? Two, did Babe own her own house or was she renting it? If so who owned it? Three, who owns the crack house? Four, who owns the tan hatchback we impounded at the crack house? By the way, has that been fingerprinted yet?”
“Don’t know,” Lou said. “Is it in the impound garage?”
“Yes. Find out and get it done if it hasn’t been. Now. Everybody listen up. If you can get what you need today by being polite, fine. If not, lean, push, get rude if you have to, but get what you’re after. Any complaints, send ‘em to me. See you all back here at one o’clock.”
They charged out of the room like a herd of hungry buffalo. My watch said twelve minutes to nine. I hustled back to my office, grabbed the picture strip off my desk, slid it carefully into my briefcase with the recorder and the tape Rosie and I had made in the jail, and ran down the stairs to the parking garage. I was on the street by six minutes to nine. Damn! Where did time go?
Schultzy’s house was in a sprawling suburb northeast of town, a big split-level with a yard that looked like a school playground. Jessica’s swings were in one corner, surrounded by a volleyball court, horseshoe stakes, hoops, and a trampoline. The garage held enough sports equipment to open a small fitness center.
Jessica was looking out the big front window when I drove into the driveway. Her blond ponytails whipped around her shoulders as she scooted off the couch, yelling back toward the kitchen. Schultzy opened the front door as I walked up to it, with Jessica standing beside her.
“Guess you two didn’t really meet formally, did you?” Schultzy said. “Jessica, this is Jake Hines.” We shook hands gravely.
“I’m the man who carried you down the alley,” I said.
“I’m sorry I kicked you,” she said, smiling winsomely. For the first time, I began to understand why Jessica Schultz was her family’s darling. A glowing apple-cheeked beauty, she was bright and charming this morning.
“Ernie and the boys are at work,” Schultzy said, “and I sent the big girls to the pool. We’ve got all the time we need, and no distractions. Coffee?”
“Good. Black. Over here?” We moved to the round table in the family room, and they sat on either side of me.
“What I’m going to ask you to do isn’t easy,” I told Jessica. “But you’re the only one who can do it. That man who took you the other day, you saw his face, right?” She bobbed her head, blinking nervously. “And you heard him speak?”
“Yes.” Her throat sounded dry.
“Okay. Then you can help me find him. You ready?” She looked up quickly at her mother, who nodded. She turned back to me and repeated her mother’s nod to perfection.
I laid my photo strip in front of Jessica.
“Look at the pictures on this strip, and tell me if any of them looks like that man.”
Her large pale eyes passed calmly over the first two pictures and stopped on the third. She pointed to it, then put her small, blunt-fingered hands up to her face in a gesture of distress rarely seen in children, and whispered, “That’s him.” Tears formed on her eyelashes.
“The man who took you to the house where we found you?” She looked up at me and nodded, and one tear ran down each cheek and trickled across her hands, which were still clutching her face.
“Good,” I said. “Hang on, Jessica. You’re doing a great job.”
“Can I see him?” Schultzy asked. I slid the picture strip in front of her, pointing to the third man. She sat staring down at him, looking shaken. “He looks so big and strong,” she said, incredulously, “but his voice–”
“Wait,” I said, “wait. Okay, Jessica, ready to go on?” She bobbed her head.
“I’m going to play a short section of this tape,” I said, looking from one to the other, “and I want you to tell me if there’s a voice on it that you recognize.” I punched the play button. The squeaky voice said, “You in the slammer, numb nuts. Where you think you comin’ from with this allow shit?”
Schultzy gasped. Jessica whimpered. I turned the recorder off and asked, “Was that a yes?”
Schultzy said, hoarsely, “Yes.”
Jessica leaned toward her mother and said, “Can I sit on your lap?”
“Sure,” Schultzy said. Jessica ran around the table and leaped into her mother’s arms.
They held each other. “Just give us a minute, huh?” Schultzy said. I nodded. We sat. “Have some coffee,” Schultzy said. I sipped.
Schultzy bent toward the yellow ponytails on her shoulder and murmured, “You’re doing really fine, honey, I’m proud of you. Do you think you can talk some more?”
Jessica sat up and shouted indignantly, “I was scared, Mama! That bad boy scared me!” The cups rattled in their saucers.
“Jessica,” I said, hoping to harness her anger before it burned out of control, “you’re right to be mad. And if you can tell me a few more things, I’ll put that bad boy in jail where he can’t ever scare you again.”
“I was all alone with him,” she roared, turning red. “There wasn’t anybody there to help me and I was scared!”
“We came as fast as we could,” I said, and for some reason that information seemed to catch her attention. She stopped yelling and stared directly into my eyes while the tears dried on her cheeks. “You did?”
I nodded. “We all tried really hard to save you. Honest. We even called out the dogs–weren’t they noisy?” She remembered the dogs; she asked, “Were they fighting?”
“No. They’re trained to bark like that whenever they find little girls that want to go home.” She smiled at that so I ventured, “Now, can you tell me a couple more things so I can catch this bad boy with the squeaky voice?”
She gave a long, shuddering sigh. Her mother wiped her nose. “Okay,” she said.
“First thing I want to know is how did he find you? Was he looking for you or–”
“I was in the yard, see, because, ” –she darted a little sideways glance at her mother–“I didn’t like that school where they took me.”
“I understand. Did the bad boy come in a car?”
“Uh-huh. He was driving along and he saw me and stopped.”
“He stopped the car and came over to where you were?”
“Uh-huh. And I said, ‘I wanna get out,’ and he said, ‘I’ll lift you out, okay?’ and I said ‘Yes!’ and he did it. And then he said we could go in the car, um, wherever I wanted to go? So I said, well, then, he could take me home, and he said he would.” Her face clouded ominously and she shouted, “But then he wouldn’t!” Jessica, the never-opposed darling of the Schultz clan, shook with outrage. “He took me to that other place!” Her world had been turned upside down by the discovery that there were people out there who didn’t care at all what she wanted.
