Triple Play, page 21
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“What for?” She looked alarmed.
“I want to make copies of the weekend’s deposit slips. Will you make up a list of the money they took that wasn’t in a deposit? It helps to get as close as we can to the exact amount of the theft.”
“You mean, like, to make it a felony or something?”
“Robbery’s always a felony. No, I just mean, if we find some deadbeat making large purchases all of a sudden, the totals might fit.”
“Can’t you just make note of the totals? I don’t like the idea of everybody snooping in my business.” She was starting to feel the shock, I thought; her color was going bad. “Nobody’s going to snoop. I’ll make the copies myself, and I’ll get them back to you this afternoon.”
She gave me a long, hard stare, wrapped a big rubber band tight around the long tablet, and handed it over reluctantly. I crammed it into my already tortured briefcase, and drove back to the station pondering the probable hard knocks that had made a suspicious workaholic out of the once lighthearted Babe.
Milo Nilssen had his frayed Hush Puppies propped on my nice clean desk, taking a snooze.
“Don’t be formal, Milo,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”
“Nice of you to drop by, Jake.” He got up and stretched. He wasn’t really annoyed; Milo always needed rest. He worked for Ed Pearce, the handsome, showboating County Attorney of Hampstead County. Ed was legendary for running his staff ragged and taking all the credit.
Milo had been on a high lope all summer, wrapping up the details of a case his boss was determined to take to the Grand Jury on Thursday. “The Teen Drug Bust,” as Ed Pearce always called it when he talked to reporters, took place last spring near Madison High School.
“Why is the CA so excited about a few nickel bags of dope?” I asked Milo, back in May when they started putting the case together. “Does he really think high school kids never smoked marijuana before?”
“It’s Doris, I think,” Milo muttered, looking over his shoulder. He always got furtive when he mentioned his boss’s wife; he was convinced she had extrasensory powers. Mrs. Pearce took a keen interest in her husband’s career, and Milo dreaded her scrutiny. “Doris wants him to run for governor in two years.”
“She said that?”
“Well, not to me,” Milo peered around him, shooting his cuffs and ducking his head. “And don’t you tell anybody I told you.”
“How’s this little two-bit marijuana case gonna help him run for governor?” I asked him. “Why not a crack dealer, if he wants profile?”
“You got one in jail?”
“Well, no,” I admitted, “but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Sure. Maybe quite a lot of time. Crack dealers are tough and smart. Ed and Doris think this case will play well with parents and school boards, and it’s ready right now when they need it. Ed’s gonna talk to the jury about evil outsiders preying on our kids.”
“Outsiders? Pinky Predmore lives in Blooming Prairie, for Chrissake.”
“Still. He’s not from Rutherford. Ed thinks he can make it work.”
Now, in August, Doris apparently remained convinced that this case had the sweet smell of success clinging to it, and had urged her spouse to spare no effort. Doris’s urging being no laughing matter, shit was rolling downhill onto Milo, who had the case just about ready to go. Four high school students had been subpoenaed to testify to a jury how an evil dealer named Pinky Predmore had seduced them into buying cannabis in the school parking lot. And today I had pulled myself away from Rowdy’s Bar, where I really belonged, to take part in this interview. “I certainly hope,” Milo said, ostentatiously choosing a pen from the row of implements clipped to his pocket protector, “that I didn’t take you away from anything really important.” Lately, Milo had been groping for an attitude. Today he seemed to be working on irony.
“Just routine,” I said. “One more robbery in Section Three.”
“Aw, hell, what now?”
“Rowdy’s Bar. Looks like it started out as a straightforward burglary, but the thieves surprised the owner counting the money and taped her up.”
“The owner? You mean Babe Krueger? Aw, no kidding? She okay?”
“Seems to be. You know her?”
“Back in her party days she dated my older brother. They used to give me a ride to Little League practice. I never wanted to get out of the car.” He blushed, remembering. “She was always real nice to me,” he added, wistfully. Seeing me smiling at him, he slipped into defensive mode, shooting his cuffs, smoothing his hair and looking at his watch. “Well, let’s get at it, shall we?” he said, pulling forms out of his briefcase.
We went over the facts of the case again. Pinky Predmore, a layabout and loser from a small town west of Rutherford, had been apprehended in the parking lot at Madison High School in mid-May, selling, or attempting to sell, marijuana to students. No leaf had actually been found on the person of any student. Pinky had, in various pockets on his person, about a dozen nickel bags, which in Rutherford go for ten to twenty dollars, import fees being what they are. Buzz Cooper was the arresting officer.
“And Buzz got the complaint how, remind me?” Milo said, leafing through his notes.
“Lessee. Sally Hall was the call taker that day, passed it to Schultzy on dispatch, Schultzy called for the nearest car and Buzz answered.”
“Yeah, here it is, a nine-one-one call and Sally couldn’t understand the name of the caller. But a good address and description of the car, so Schultzy asked Buzz to check it out, and he scored. Longworth was backup. You ever find the identity of the caller?”
“Nope.”
“How come you interviewed the suspect, Jake? I thought Bo Dooley was your head narc now?”
“He is. Dooley and Anderson did all the interviews pertinent to your case. I talked to him because I was looking for a trade. Chief said I could offer him a little leverage on his drug charge for some skinny on three stolen cars. We thought the suspects might be customers of his.”
“Did he give you anything?”
“Nah. Pinky doesn’t know anything. That’s his problem. He’s way down at the bottom of the food chain, Milo; he probably got those few bags of dope from some dealer in a one-time purchase and was just trying to double his money. His usual shtick is swiping CD players out of unlocked cars. Boosting wallets, stuff like that. He even works sometimes.”
“No kidding, a solid citizen. Well, his next job’s gonna be making license plates, I guess.” Milo and I agreed on the final wording of my statement, and I was typing it up when the phone rang.
“Had lunch?” the chief asked.
“No. Is it noon?”
“Twelve-thirty. My wife sent too much food, how about helping me eat it up? I need to talk to you.”
“Well, fine. Thanks. Be there in a couple of minutes.”
Milo looked up from packing his briefcase, saw my face, and said, “Somebody gotcha, huh?”
“Chief wants to chat.”
Milo punched my shoulder. “It isn’t always more work,” he said, helpfully. “Sometimes it’s just a cut in benefits.”
Books in the Jake Hines Series
Triple Play
Par Four
Five-Card Stud
Six-Pound Walleye
Too Many Santas (Novella)
Seventh-Inning Stretch
Crazy Eights
McCafferty's Nine
The Ten-Mile Trials
Eleven Little Piggies
Sarah Burke Mysteries
Cool in Tucson
New River Blues
Kissing Arizona
Magic Line
Coming in 2014: Red Man Down
Short Fiction (Non-Mysteries)
Math (Single Story)
The Fountain (Short Stories)
Runaway (Novella)
Elizabeth Gunn
A one-time innkeeper with a taste for adventure, Elizabeth has been a private pilot, sky diver, SCUBA diver, and liveaboard sailor. Extensive travel in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe led to a second career as a free-lance travel writer, during which she began writing a series of police procedural mysteries set in southeast Minnesota, where she grew up. Her books contrast the sometimes gritty routine of police work with the idyllic rural scenes around a mid-size city in the upper midwest. Featured characters are a hard-working police detective named Jake Hines and his girlfriend, Trudy Hanson, a forensic scientist at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul.
In her new southwest series, Elizabeth follows Sarah Burke, a homicide detective dealing with cutting-edge problems in an ancient setting. The valley that holds Tucson, Arizona, was occupied by native Americans for thousands of years before the Spanish came questing for gold and glory. Folded into the U.S. by the Gadsden Purchase in 1852, this desert city reflects its border heritage, with a polyglot population constantly growing more diverse. Sarah must deal with a colorful mix of twenty-first century adventurers: big-time builders and small-time gamblers, cotton growers and cattle herders, drug-runners and people smugglers, copper miners digging for old-style wealth and bioscientists in search of some new bonanza. Undocumented immigrants scramble up from the south as retiring boomers bring their wealth and optimism down from the north. Naturally, these people don’t all mingle peacefully. Wherever their interests collide, that’s an ideal spot for a crime novelist.
You can find out more about Elizabeth and her novels at ElizabethGunn.com
Table of Contents
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A sample chapter from Par Four
Elizabeth Gunn, Triple Play
