Triple Play, page 19
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“I’ve been working too hard,” I said. “Let’s do the towns and get giddy.” I told her I wanted to see as much of the Twin Cities as she could cram into one evening, eating and drinking whatever wonderful stuff we found as we went along.
“Sort of grazing, you mean?” she asked, and I said, “Exactly! How quick you are. Let’s graze.”
We started with oysters and champagne in a waterside place on the Mississippi Mile, where a Valkyrie-sized blond woman played show tunes on a piano by the window. We touched glasses and made a pact not to discuss law enforcement for the entire evening. I said I wanted to hear more about non-team sports, so she told me about taking a winter off during school to work as a waitress and be a ski bum in Colorado, and summers of resort work in Idaho and Montana, where she tried white-water rafting and rock-climbing.
“You kind of like risks, huh?” I asked.
“Not really. I like developing skills, seeing how far I can go with something. It’s a personal thing; I’m not interested in winning or losing.”
“So…where do you draw the line in this thrill-seeking?”
She shrugged. “Wherever I get scared,” she said, and smiled. It was fun talking to her; she never seemed to have any urgent need to make a point. You could agree with her, or not, without rocking her boat at all.
After the oysters we walked along the river while the lights came on and turned the water into a long Christmas tree. I offered her my jacket but she had a silky shawl that scrolled magically out of her bag. We strolled and talked trivia, books and movies mostly, and in a few minutes she said, “There’s a place up in Edina that makes Caesar salad to die for, you up for that?” We trolled through blocks of handsome real estate and eventually found a place with a lot of stained glass and candles.
“Are we going to eat or say Mass?” I asked her. Then a handsome young man wheeled up a cartful of gleaming carafes, and performed a sort of hand ballet. Lettuce, anchovies and an egg appeared; magic potions dripped out of glass jugs. Eventually, he laid two plates of glamorous-smelling romaine in front of us, smiled benignly, and wheeled away.
“I was almost right,” I said, “it’s some kind of cult thing, isn’t it?”
“Bet you don’t make any more jokes after you taste it,” Trudy said. After one cautious forkful, I shut up and snarfed it down to the last crouton.
“That was wonderful,” I said as we left. “You’re good at this guiding stuff.”
“Glad you’re pleased,” she said, “but the best is still to come. Wait, now, I have to use a map for this.” She directed me to the old part of St. Paul, where we negotiated several narrow alleys to the doorway of a nondescript-looking Italian restaurant where old guys in felt slippers sat on bent-wood chairs, contentedly insulting each other. We split a cannoli so good it almost made me cry.
“Now, Jake, be honest,” Trudy said, as we carried all those calories onto the sidewalk,
“aren’t you getting tired? Because after all you had surgery on that hand just a few days ago…”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I’m starting to get happy feet. Isn’t there a dancing portion on this tour?”
She treated me to one of her zillion-megawatt grins, then, and crowed, “Oh, hot dog! You like to dance!”
We talked about swimming and handball and fishing during the long drive back to south Minneapolis. There we found a jazz cellar with a dance floor so crowded it would have been condemned for any other purpose, where we danced like mad things until the band refused any more encores and began packing their instruments.
While the stars grew pale above Fort Snelling, we chattered and giggled our way back to her place. At the door she said, “Want me to make you a cup of coffee before you start that long drive home?”
“That sounds great,” I lied. I wasn’t going to push her, though. I helped her get the cups out of the cupboard, and we got as far as running some water in the pot. Then she turned away from the sink, suddenly, said, ” Jake…” and put her hand against my cheek. I kissed her till she made a little sound that said it all for both of us.
She took my hand. I followed her down a narrow hall to a small, fragrant bedroom. Like good children doing chores, we opened the window, turned down the quilt, and helped each other undress. Standing close together then, while a bird outside her window made the first soft sounds of morning, together we let down her golden hair.
A sample chapter from Par Four
Sequel to Triple Play
There was plenty to love about my roomy new office at the end of the hall, beginning with a gleaming brass nameplate on the door that said, “Lt. Jake Hines, Investigations.” I intended to take my time moving in, Tuesday morning, and get all my stuff put away before I worried about earning my pay raise. But Lulu Breske blindsided me before I even got my computer set up. I was crawling around behind the desk, trying to remember how the monitor plugs into the CPU, when she banged the door open and yelled, “Jake Hines! You in here?”
She startled me and I jumped. My head hit the corner of the desktop, and for a few seconds I thought maybe I’d gone blind.
“Jesus, Lulu.” I groped my way to my feet and rubbed my head, where a lump was rising. “What are you hollering about? I’m right here.”
“How’s come you never answer my messages?” She aimed her clipboard at me like an Uzi. “Three times, I called you yesterday. What’s the matter, you forget how to work your voice mail? Okay, your CID is set for seven-thirty tonight, sign here.” She pointed to the line with my name on it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. “What CID?”
“The drug bust, the high-speed chase, whatever that screw-up was Sunday night. That’s your name right there, isn’t it? Know any other Jake Hines in the department? So sign it and I’ll be outa here.”
“Aw, Lulu, that wasn’t my collar, I just happened to get in the way by accident.”
“Argue with the Chief about that. He says notify everybody on the list, I’m gonna notify everybody.”
“Well, I don’t have time for any meetings right now, Lulu. I’m just moving into my new job here, I’m buried in paperwork.” I waved my arm at my clean, empty desk. All the junk I usually keep there was still sitting in boxes on the floor.
Lulu stared at the shiny wood veneer for a couple of seconds. “Uh-huh.” She turned to the door. “So, you want me to put down here that you’re refusing your CID?”
“Of course not,” I said, indignantly. It hadn’t even occurred to me to refuse it. I was just trying to weasel out of it.
CID is copspeak for Critical Incident Debriefing. Conventional wisdom in the law enforcement community now says cops who encounter high-stress situations should debrief as soon as possible. We’re supposed to blow off any leftover emotions that might be hanging around, so we won’t turn into a bunch of crazies and self-destruct. Somebody noticed the high rate of alcoholism and suicide cops have, I guess, and decided we need counseling.
And not just cops. Firefighters after big fires, medical crews that work disasters, they’re all being encouraged to sit around afterwards and tell how it happened. They’re supposed to say how they felt about it, too, like, “I keep hearing that woman scream,” or, “I feel like I never want to eat again.” Sometimes, I’ve heard, they even hug.
“It’s an idea whose time has come,” an intern named Josh Hyde told me, beaming as if he’d just found gold in his sock. He helped with a jaws-of-leath extrication on the highway after an eight-car pileup. Describing the debriefing he attended afterwards, he said a couple of paramedics got into a screaming match, and a driver named Manahan cried.
“That made them feel better?”
“I don’t know about them,” he said. “But I sure got rid of a lot of baggage.” Josh picks up jargon fast.
CID’s are usually run by peers, volunteers who get extra training in counseling. You can tell when somebody’s signed up to be a debriefer. He starts toting books around, with titles like, “A Team Approach to Stress Management.” A guy whose conversation has reliably been along the lines of “How about those Twins?” will start using words like epiphany and sooner or later he’ll probably say, “We feel it’s helpful to get those feelings out in the open where we can deal with them.”
Which was just what I didn’t want to do. Dodging an occasional bullet is an inconvenience I can live with, but spilling my guts in public is not. I’m not a big hugger, and I got more than my share of counseling while I was growing up as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Now that I’m a grownup, I try not to let strangers mess with my head.
By accident, though, I got in the middle of a high-speed chase and a questionable arrest last Sunday night that left all the participants unhappy. When the Chief heard the details, he set up a CID. Lulu’s task, as his secretary, was to make sure I got word of the time and place. Mine, as I saw it, was to stay out of her sight till it was over or she forgot about me, whichever came first.
My phone rang. I pounced on it like a dog on a bone.
“Rowdy’s Bar’s been robbed,” Schultzy said, from the dispatch desk. I could hear the back- chatter from the other consoles nearby. “They say the owner’s taped up in the basement and the safe is wide open.”
“Anybody responded?”
“I sent two cars, Stearns and Donovan, but Ed says send an investigator. I can’t find anybody, where is everybody? Can you go?”
I opened my mouth to say, “I’m not even moved into my new office yet,” but Lulu was standing there with her list, so I said, “Sure. Hold on a sec.” I put the phone against my chest and said, “Got an emergency, Lulu. Robbery call, possible injury.”
“Fine. But I notified you about your CID, so now you know,” Lulu said. “Seven-thirty tonight in the small meeting room, go or don’t go, no skin off my nose.” She stomped out noisily on her tortured heels.
To the phone, I said, “You send an ambulance?”
“They don’t think they need one. You decide. You want the address? Fourteen–”
“I know it.” My second year in college, I dealt hamburgers off the arm at Rowdy’s Bar. “This owner, you mean Babe Krueger, right?”
“Uh . . . don’t have that information. It’ll be whoever’s in the basement wrapped up in duct tape, I guess.”
“You sent a fingerprint team yet?”
“No. You think?”
“Uh-huh. Soon’s you can get ’em up there.” Rowdy’s must have fingerprints going back to the Hoover administration. Getting a team there fast might make the exercise marginally less futile. Physical evidence in a bar is always a can of worms. Everything’s sticky and smells like secondhand beer. Rowdy’s has a restaurant and pool hall, too, so add fifty years of grease and chalk dust.
I checked an unmarked car out of the parking garage. Driving up the ramp, I opened the windows to dump the underground air. August street air flowed in, still with a high percentage of toasted petroleum and rubber, but suggesting mulch and lawn cuttings, too. The maple trees by the Second Avenue bridge stood motionless in midmorning heat, reflected almost exactly in the slow-moving water. Rutherford was having a hot, dry summer; the river was low. Where the stream turned, east of the bridge, a sand spit was growing out from the bank
I turned right, drove east four blocks and turned left again on Sixth Avenue, rolling past tidy red brick apartment houses with hedges around small front yards. North of Tenth Street, the houses began to get shabbier, and some of the lawns grew weeds and trash. At the intersection on Twelfth, one of the corner buildings was boarded up, and the house next to it had a broken window. I was driving into the failing neighborhood old-timers call the North End. Rowdy’s was just ahead.
I parked by the front door, where a thin man in a white apron was turning the “Closed” sign to read “Open.” He unlocked the door and said “Hi, c’mon in.”
I held up my badge, opened my mouth to ask for the owner and he said, “Oh. They’re all still downstairs. Go to the back and turn left.”
Rowdy’s looked pretty much the way I remembered it, not improved any in fourteen years but not deteriorating like the rest of the neighborhood either. Maybe the grease and smoke protect it. A massive old mahogany bar faced a few tables in front, with a lunch counter and booths behind. A long room full of pool tables adjoined through an open arch. Stairs at the back went down a short flight to the rest rooms, then doubled back into the basement storage area. I remembered the dim bare light bulbs, the woven wire enclosures full of booze and canned goods. The cramped office behind the stairs smelled of smoke and roach spray, money and sweat.
Babe Krueger was in her office chair. Duct tape bound her arms to the chair arms. Her legs were wrapped in tape to the thighs and then taped as a unit to one leg of the desk. Her mouth was taped shut, too. Little strangled sounds came out of her.
Stearns and Donovan were standing beside her, making tentative, unhappy moves.
Suddenly, Stearns reached across her face and ripped the tape off her mouth with one quick, gutsy move.
“Ah,” she said, sucking air. “Hoo.” She breathed while we watched, opening her mouth as wide as it would go, inhaling, exhaling, “Ah, hoo.” She rolled her tongue around behind her lips and said, hoarsely, “Could you get me some water, please? Right in there.”
I brought a glass of water from the bathroom and bent over her, holding it to her lips. Her cheeks were streaked with dirt and tears. Some gray hairs showed along the part in her sweat-caked hair. She gulped the water noisily, dribbling a little out of one side of the glass.
“Sorry,” I said, and Babe came up for air and said, “Shit, don’t worry about a little spilled water, Honey, I wet my pants twice since those freaks left me this way…” There was, I saw, a puddle under her chair. She squinted up at me suddenly and said, “Jake? Is that you?”
I’ve probably filled out a little since I was nineteen. She was changed, too; it made me sad to see how much. Guys used to come to Rowdy’s Bar just to look at her, a lively mover with a wonderful mane of red hair, and a what-the-hell smile that lit up the whole North End.
Her name was Babe Thorson then. She could carry nine hamburgers on one arm, and in my wildest dreams I used to enjoy guessing at some of her other skills. A steady stream of ardent boyfriends waited to take her out after work, but Babe surprised us all by marrying Art Krueger, the dour proprietor of Rowdy’s Bar. Five years later, after she dropped the charges from the last beating he gave her, Art signed a divorce settlement that gave her the bar. From what I’ve heard that’s the last good luck Babe Krueger had with men.
“Yup, it’s me,” I said. “Let’s see about getting you loose.” To Donovan I said, “Got some gloves with you? This duct tape will give us great fingerprints if we’re careful getting it off.”
“Forget that,” Babe said, “The guys who taped me up wore surgical gloves the whole time they were here.”
“Oh,” I said, “well.” Wincing, Mary Agnes Donovan reluctantly peeled a couple of inches of duct tape off Babe’s bare arm. Babe yelled in pain.
“How about we just cut it in enough places to get her out of the chair?” Stearns suggested, “and run her over to the emergency room? The Nurses’ll have stuff over there to make it easier.” His old-cop’s eyes said, “Find a way to bag this.” The stuffy crowded office already stank of rage and urine, and was getting worse fast as our anxiety added more sweat.
“No, piss on it, go ahead,” Babe said. “I need to get goin’! Just pull it fast so it won’t hurt so much, willya?”
We found a big pair of scissors and went to work. She grunted a couple of times through her set jaw, but she never yelled again. In five minutes, we had most of the tape off.
As soon as she was free she bolted for the bathroom. There was the sound of a lot of flushing, and then she came out and said, “Can you hang tough a couple of minutes while I change clothes? I stink like a damn sewer.” She took some garments out of a closet behind her desk and disappeared again.
“Well, no use all of us standing around here, I guess,” Al Stearns said, “You need any more help with this, Jake?”
“Better stick around till we’re sure she’s okay,” I said, “and then, yeah, you guys might as well roll. Can’t do much police work in a crime scene while they’re serving lunch in it.” I looked around the dingy office. “Is everything down here the way you found it? Except for the tape?”
“You were right behind us, Jake,” Donovan said. “We never had time to touch anything but her.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m going upstairs and talk to the employee who found her. Come get me, will you, when she’s ready to talk?”
The thin cook who had opened the door for me was shaking grease off a basket of french-fries as I slid onto a stool nearest the bar. He dumped the fries alongside a burger and set the plate in front of a white-haired man with a red nose.
“There you are, Neely, my man,” he said. “You want some more coffee with that?” He poured it, then came to my end of the counter and said, “Now, what can I do for you?”
I held up my badge again, said, “Jake Hines, Detective Division. Were you the one who placed the call?”
“Yup. She all right?”
“She seems to be doing okay. We got her out of the tape and she’s changing clothes. Were you the first one who found her?”
“That’s right. Came to work the way I always do, turned on the range and started some coffee–”
“Wait. Can we back up a little? Could I have your name, first?”
“Sure.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Have anything I got, I guess. Ain’t much, though. I’m just the cook. John Floogey, spelled P-f-l-u-e-g-e. Call me Jack.” He rattled off his address, phone number, social security.
“Okay, Jack, how’d you get in this morning? You have your own key?”
“Sure. Have to. I open up.”
“So…”
“So I walked in and went to work, same as usual.”
