Par Four, page 22
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
I leaned toward Bo and said, “Tell you what, you two stay with the prisoner a few minutes while I get one of the support staff to start going through that sex offender file. Maybe you can ask him some questions about his childhood till I get back.”
Bo and Darrell nodded solemnly. They didn’t understand exactly what Frank and I were doing, but they knew very well we didn’t go fishing for cases to hang around the necks of the prisoners we happened to have sitting around the station. I went out and found Frank, who said, “I believed his denial, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell then? The ransom theory’s bullshit, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well…he did it and we’ve got him, though, right? The ID is gonna hold up?”
“Yes. I’ll get Schultzy and Jessica in here Monday and do a live lineup and confirm it, but yeah, he’s our man all right.”
“Okay. What did Bo find in the files?”
“Theft and drugs. Couple years in St. Cloud for robbery. Since then he’s been picked up for dealing several times, but no convictions.”
“Uh-huh. He went to St. Cloud and got connected,” Frank said gloomily. “Ain’t it swell how that works?”
“Still, though. He may not know how to spell ‘pedophile,’ but he’s gotta know how child abusers get treated in prison. I say we put him back in his cell, give him no more phone calls and no visitors except his lawyer, and let him spend the weekend thinking about it. If he thinks we’re really building a sex-offender case against him he might decide to deal.”
“I agree,” Frank said. “It’s the best we can do.”
Back in my office, Bo was firing taut hostile questions at a mostly silent Alvin.
“All that time inside and you’re still not a crack smoker?” Bo asked him. “Come on.”
“Never had no use for it,” Bad Boy said.
“Whaddya use, then? H?”
“You looked at my arms?” He turned over two smooth forearms as big as fence posts. “No tracks.” He looked at Bo’s slender build condescendingly and flexed. “This body’s a temple, man.”
“Okay, guys, let’s get down to business,” I said, sitting down. “How long you had this weird thing for little kids, huh? You get off on boys, too, or just little girls?”
“I don’t have no weird thing for nobody! Why you keep saying that?”
“Because you snatched a little girl off the street and tied her up, put a gag in her mouth, and took her to a filthy house where she didn’t want to go. What am I supposed to think about that?”
He rocked his head, shrugged, raised his arms and let them fall – thunk! – onto the chair arms again. “S’posed to think you made a mistake and got the wrong man.”
“Bullshit again,” I said. “You just keep bullshitting me, Alvin, and in the meantime the afternoon is passing, and by Monday we have to decide what to charge you with. And it’s gonna have to be kidnapping and attempted rape of a child, unless you start to make sense.”
“No it don’t! What makes you so sure it was me? You got my record there, you see anything on there about me snatchin’ up children?”
“No, I don’t. But see, the two people who saw you and talked to you that day, the little girl and her mother, have both identified you positively.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got twenty minutes left, Alvin, before I have to put you back in your cell and get on with the day’s work. Now, do you really think in the next twenty minutes you can explain to me why anybody who wasn’t totally bananas, anybody but a nut case with an out-of-control urge to abuse a child, would take her out of a yard and carry her off to a crack house and tie her up? Be reasonable, Alvin. What sane person is gonna look on that as anything but the work of a berserk pervert?”
He stared out my window at the power plant and finally said, almost kindly, “When my lawyer gets here he’ll fix everything.”
We sent him back to his cell. Bo and Darrell went off to run checks on his gun and beeper. I took my tape recorder out to the support staff desk and left it for transcription over the weekend. Then I dialed Schultzy’s number, waited through three rings, asked a giggling teenybopper to put her mother on the line, and then yelled over the background din, “Will you tell Miss Jessica Schultz that her many admirers on the Rutherford Police Force just locked that Bad Boy up in a cage where he belongs?” Schultzy was so tearfully, fervently grateful that for a couple of minutes I loved my job so much I’d have done it for nothing. Then my tired crew began filing into the small meeting room, and I came back to earth and concentrated on winding down the week.
“Just say what you learned today,” I said, “but skip how you found it or we’ll be here all night. I’ll go first: we got a positive ID on the kidnapper from three people. Bo and Darrell and Clint Maddox went up to the North End and found him, and he’s here in a cell right now. Damn good day’s work. Now, let’s hear what else we got. Bo?”
“If you get into the sewer through the hole in the crack house cellar, you can be at an escape hole at the river in just over a block. Plenty of bushes growing all around the escape hole, too.”
“Darrell?”
“Randy Thorson had the keys to his mother’s bar copied at the Package Depot on Twelfth Avenue Northwest. It’s not the first time. He’s had several other sets of keys made there, before. Whatever he was up to has been going on for a while.” He turned to me and said, “Aren’t you gonna tell ‘em how we picked up the kidnapper?”
“Sure. After Farah Tur gave us a name and a probable address, Bo and Darrell went up to the North End with Clint Maddox and nailed our suspect coming out of a store with his arms full of groceries.” Everybody applauded, including the two who were in on the arrest. “I still have no idea why he did it, but maybe after a weekend in jail he’ll decide to tell me that. The toughest part of the kidnapping case is closed, now, and early Monday we should get most of the test results from BCA and begin to move ahead on the homicide. Very good news. Let’s finish up, here. Ray?”
“Well, as I told you earlier my dad showed me where the river widens and gets shallow, just north of the Adelaide Bridge. So I guess we’re in for a search of those seven blocks of shallow water between the Adelaide Bridge and the Second Avenue bridge. And I suggest we take a good look at the patch of woods that comes almost down to the water by the Adelaide Bridge.”
“Good. We’ll hope to get started Monday. Rosie, how’d your afternoon go?”
“The lawyer says it’s news to him if Babe Krueger was having trouble; she never asked him for any advice at all. The accountant says she was in a serious cash bind till early last year. Then she got a lot of group business–that’s what he called it, ‘all these groups on the weekends’–and paid all her bills, and she’s been fine ever since. Jack Pfluege says business has been poor for the last three years and getting a little worse all the time.” Rosie smiled and raised her hands above her shoulders with the fingers splayed like fans. “Which story do you like?”
“Which one do you like?”
“Jack Pfluege was there six days a week and he has no reason to lie. Otherwise, judging from the deposit books, I’d be inclined to believe the accountant. I’ll tell you more when I get the bank records Monday.”
“Good. Lou, you had a good day. Tell ‘em what you got.”
“Huh. What I found out is pretty damned odd. Which is that most of the low-rent housing in town, including Rowdy’s Bar and the crack house and Babe Krueger’s house–as well as Jake’s apartment–is rented by the same little girl who works in a two-bit office in the basement of the Kiowa Towers.”
The other five crew members stared at him. Finally Rosie said, “So?”
“She works for four different real estate companies, has four phones and four sets of keys and four ledgers to keep up. But all these properties get their taxes paid by the Cigna Corporation, which also owns that tan hatchback we impounded at the crack house the other day. The kidnapper’s car.”
“I’m starting to get a weird hunch,” Kevin said. “What’s the name of that girl in the office at Kiowa Towers?”
“Um…” Lou consulted his notes. “Tammi Fae Boe.”
“See, there you go,” Kevin said. “Isn’t that just the goddamnedest thing?” His Boy Scout face grew radiant; his eyes blazed with excitement and he bounced around on his chair. “I just can’t get over it!” he yelled. “It beats anything I’ve ever seen!”
“We’re all glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said. “Any chance you might share?”
“I told you I didn’t get much fresh stuff from Babe’s neighbors this morning,” Kevin said, “so I spent the afternoon talking to Scott Rouse and his father. The father’s not a whole lot of help right now; he’s so pissed at his kid he can’t think straight. He feels really screwed. He says he took a lot of time doing guy things with his son, ball games and fishing and hunting. And he felt sorry for Randy for not having a father, so he often included him, said he thought it was good for Scott to have a best friend. He says he has no idea why Scott would feel he needed to rob a bar, and you know what? I believe him.
“But Scott Rouse tells a completely different story, about how his father always wants to run everything, and Randy’s mother was stingy, and Scott and Randy never had enough spending money so they were practically forced to rob the bar. Listen, though, don’t laugh, there’s more to all this, something much bigger going on. I can feel it. Scott got right up to the edge of telling me about it this afternoon; he was dying to, but at the last minute he sucked up and backed off. Whatever it is, it involves Randy Thorson’s steady girl friend, a red-hot number by the name of Tammi Fae Boe.”
“Ain’t it beautiful when a case comes together?” Lou said. They all sat gabbing excitedly about the way these two cases kept merging, but nobody knew where to go with it yet and before long we began to repeat ourselves.
“Go home,” I said. “Enjoy the weekend. We’ll figure it out on Monday.” They filed out and I heard them in their cubicles for a few minutes, putting paperwork away and resetting their voice mail, and then the elevator sighed a few times and the section went quiet. I sat making notes for Monday while the shadows lengthened in the parking lot.
At seven o’clock my body started a bitching fit about working all day with no lunch, so I drove to a specialty deli that’s recently been added to a grocery store near my building and went mildly berserk. I selected a round loaf of bread full of raisins and nuts, found several pieces of wildly expensive cheese and a big slice of prosciutto, and at the last minute added a bunch of red grapes so elegant they could have been the centerpiece in a still-life. I stood in front of a shelf of Italian wines for some time, finally choosing a Chianti with a description on the back of the bottle that made me hear peasants chanting. I carried my pricey treasure straight home, and munched and crunched and quaffed while I watched a wrap-up of the week’s news. Our local station used the kidnapper’s arrest as the lead story. Frank had done a good job with them; the department got rave notices.
The weather prediction was good and then bad: most of the weekend would be fair, it said, but by Sunday night we would see rain, hail, lightening and high winds. “Summer’s going out with a bang,” said a kindly man in a sweater. “Better get your outdoor chores done tomorrow.”
The outdoor chore I had planned was no pleasure: I had a date to meet an insurance adjuster named Sven Torgerson in the vehicle storage yard of Joe’s Auto Repair. We were supposed to reach a settlement so that Joe could commence repairing my pickup. All week I had nagged the League of Minnesota Cities, which insures department vehicles, complaining that a pickup with a skewed axle, a crumpled truck bed, and two accordion fenders should be declared a total loss and replaced. “It’s never gonna track straight again,” I insisted. But Sven and Joe were adamant: my red sled could be returned to “Like-new” condition. I didn’t want “Like-new.” I wanted what I had waited twelve years for and finally got, the loaded Super-Cab 4×4 cherry-red cream-puff Ford XLT I had driven to the golf course last Sunday. Spotless. Flawless. New. Sven was sympathetic but going by the book.
I had made up my mind to fight to the bloody, bitter end for what I wanted, but when I came out of my house Saturday morning, I looked at the late-August sun pouring gold across asters and dahlias in the dewy yard across the street and suddenly thought, Screw it. It’s a beautiful day. Get this behind you and have some fun. I was too tired from the week’s work to make much headway against a professional haggler anyway.
So as soon as Sven had explained the deductible to me again, and I had groused about it and then persuaded him to include the cost of a new putter to replace the one I threw at Eugene Soames, I signed the forms he thrust at me and shook hands. As soon as he was gone I pried open the driver’s-side door of the truck and hauled my golf bag out of the back seat. I tossed it in the trunk of the department’s old Dodge Caravan, rolled down the windows and cruised the sleepy Saturday morning streets across town to the municipal course.
Ted Bunting was in the pro shop, so I stopped in to order a new putter. I chose a Taylor-Made with a midsize grip. “Lemme see your old one,” Ted said
I dragged my bag up to the counter and handed him the bent putter. “Does the pitch on this head match your stance pretty well? You want about the same offset?” He waited a couple of seconds and said, “Jake?”
I pulled my head out of my golf bag, stared at him a couple of seconds and said, “Yes. Fine. You got a phone I can use?” He passed a phone from under the counter. I found Bo’s number on my wallet card and dialed. He answered after four rings, “Dooley.”
“I need you,” I said, “just for a few minutes. Could you meet me somewhere?”
“I have to bring my kid,” he said.
“Not a problem.”
“Where are you?”
“Municipal golf course. Where the chase ended up.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I dragged my golf bag to the bench in front of the pro shop and waited there, sitting on the shady end of the bench with the bag touching my left foot. Bo pulled his Harley into the parking lot fourteen minutes later, set the kick-stand and lifted a small girl in a sunsuit out of a basket on the back of the bike. He helped her take off her adorable tiny helmet, picked her up and walked toward me carrying her. She had curly auburn hair growing close around her head, like his, and the beginnings of his overbite.
“This is Nell,” he said, and the toddler and I nodded. She seemed poised, like Bo.
“Look in my golf bag,” I said. He put the child down, said, “Stay by me,” bent over my golf bag, and looked inside.
“Why, Jake,” he said, “shame on you. What a place to keep your crack.”
“I’ve only ever seen it retail,” I said, “a little nugget in a twist of saran wrap. But this is what the big pieces look like, is it?”
“Sure enough,” he said, “we’ll have to test it of course but yes, this is by-God, sure-enough two wholesale portions of crack cocaine.” He beamed at me. “In your golf bag!” He laughed happily.
They were round, about the size of billiard balls, pale beige and slick-looking, with a pebbly surface. They were in a plastic food bag that was caught under the handle of one of my clubs. I went and got some gloves out of my car, pulled the clubs out of the bag, reached in and pulled the bag of crack out into the light. Holding it up, I saw the two balls were not really solid spheres, but tightly-packed wads of hundreds of irregularly shaped nodules, melded together like popcorn balls but ready to break apart again at the tap of a mallet. As I watched, a fingertip-sized chunk fell off the ball and dropped to the bottom of the baggy.
“I knew I saw that guy throw something away!” Bo crowed. “I kept saying it! You saw it too, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I didn’t know what I was seeing. What would you say the odds are of his hitting the opening of my golf bag with a blind toss like that?
“About a zillion to one.”
“More to the point, I guess,” I said, “what are the odds we can connect it to Eugene Soames now?”
“Well.” He stood and pondered. “We can try fingerprinting the plastic bag, of course. Might get lucky. And there’s the fact that he ran away; this gives him motive for that. Otherwise…a week after the chase? And we find it in your golf bag? Don’t bet the farm.”
“So Eugene’s home free?”
` “Oh, no. We know what we saw. The guy’s on the chase know. Soon’s I get his mug shots and descriptions up to the Cities all the cops in Minneapolis and St. Paul are gonna be watching Eugene. Sooner or later they’ll catch him dealing.”
“This confirms what you thought about Farah Tur, too, doesn’t it? If he was one of the kids around Eugene’s car that day, he was probably looking to make a buy.”
“Exactly. Helluva good reason to rob a bar.”
“Right. Well! You go on back to whatever you were doing, Bo, and I’m sorry I had to call you.”
“No problem,” he said. “Nelly and I kinda wanted a ride this morning anyway.” She was standing patiently by his side; at the mention of her name, she looked up and took his hand. “See you Monday,” Bo said and walked his self-possessed daughter to the parking lot.
I decided I wouldn’t feel comfortable enough to play golf until the crack was put away, so I put my golf clubs back in the car and drove downtown. Standing at the counter in the evidence room, filling out forms, on an impulse I picked up the paper evidence bag that now contained the crack and walked down the hall to Frank’s office. He wasn’t supposed to be working on Saturday, but this summer he had been even more snowed than I was and often came in on weekends.
I found him hunched over his keyboard, typing at high speed. I stood in his doorway till he peeled his eyes reluctantly away from his monitor screen and he said, “What?”
