Par Four, page 7
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
“Why’d he run then?” Sieverson asked.
“Oh, his lawyer says we just chased him because he’s black and we’re biased,” Todd said. “Eugene says he’s been abused before by the police and he panicked.” “They’re threatening to sue the city for harassment,” Mike said. “They say we endangered his life and wrecked his car for no reason.”
“There was a reason,” Bo said. “He had crack. He threw it away.”
“Okay, Bo,” Todd said. “If you’re so goddamn sure of that, you go out there and crawl around that golf course by yourself and find it. I’m sick of helping a guy who can’t even be civil.” To his own horror, then, his lips began to tremble. He picked up the only thing he could reach, a pile of Marty’s brochures, and flung them into the corner of the room. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered bitterly and blew his nose.
There was a terrible silence. Mike and Vince examined their hands. Marty got up and walked to the corner quietly, and began picking up brochures. Bo Dooley sat silently in his chair with his arms folded, expressionless. He has curly auburn hair that fits his head like a cap, and a neatly trimmed dark red beard. He was wearing very old blue jeans faded nearly white by many washings, and a gray sweatshirt so frayed it had threads dangling from the cuffs. The diamond earring in his left ear struck an odd, antic note above his threadbare clothing. His appearance always seems to walk some interesting line between scruffy and elegant. Sieverson looked down at his watch and sighed. “It’s almost nine. We’re not rigid about the time we allot to debriefings, but we’ve noticed that after about an hour and a half we start repeating. So unless anybody has anything vital to add…” He looked around and waited a couple of seconds. “Since you all seem quite dissatisfied with the results of this incident, I would suggest you consult your superiors and try to decide if anything should have been done differently. Not with a view to getting anybody in trouble but just to settle the matter in your own minds so it won’t keep eating on you. But that’s just my suggestion. You suit yourselves. As I told you, CID’s are not meant to evaluate performance.
“Marty’s got some brochures for you. One of them details the reactions that often follow stress, so you’ll understand that your own symptoms aren’t anything out of the ordinary. If you have trouble sleeping or lose your appetite, or if you start to have a lot of trouble at home with your family, we do urge you to ask for more help. We’ll be glad to stay, too, if any of you want to talk privately with one of us right now.
“The second brochure has lists of books you can read, to increase your understanding of what job stresses can do to you. Also lists of organizations that stand ready to help. There’s a lot of information on the Internet, too, and we’ve listed some of those addresses.” He looked around the table, nodded, and said, “Good luck, guys.”
We all drifted out except Zimmerman, who stayed to tell Marty and Norm about his nightmares. Todd went down the stairs fast and was outside unlocking his car by the time Vince and I got to the tall glass doors on the ground floor. Dooley was already pulling out of the lot on his Harley.
“Need a lift, Jake?” Vince asked me.
“Nah. I got a department car till mine’s fixed. Thanks.”
“This your first CID?”
“Yeah.”
“My third. I can’t seem to stay out of trouble.” He chuckled. “So…whadja think of it?”
“Oh…it was okay. At least you didn’t hug me.”
Vince’s gleeful cackle echoed in the empty hall. “Well, hey,” he said, “I was tempted, don’t think I wasn’t. Dooley, too, I really wanted to kiss him on the mouth.” He started out, turned back, and squinted at me in the dim light. “You aren’t really pissed about Sunday, are you?”
“Why? Just because you wrecked my new pickup and spoiled my golf game and almost killed me? Whaddya think I am, a sorehead?”
His laughter started the noisy echoes bouncing down the hall again. “Okay, then.” He hit my shoulder. “Long’s you’re not holdin’ any grudges.” He charged out the door into a fading sunset, letting in a swirl of late August air, heavy with the scent of barbecue grills and fresh-cut alfalfa.
4
✜
Some time Tuesday night, I began dreaming I was the only waiter in Rowdy’s Bar, and that the place was crammed full of noisy, hungry people who all wanted beers and hamburgers. Red and Jack yelled threats and insults because I wasn’t getting their food and drinks out, but the harder I tried to satisfy people, the slower I seemed to move. Bo Dooley, seated at a table with several other customers, began to heap contempt on my head as I got hopelessly farther behind with my orders. In the dream I got hotter and hotter, till finally I woke up flailing angrily in a sweaty sheet. For a few seconds I lay still, grateful to be out of the dream. Then I realized I really was hot and jumped out of bed.
The air-conditioning in my apartment building had quit. No air at all was coming through the vents. I played with the thermostat, but nothing changed.
The window in my bedroom seemed to be stuck It was always a little crooked and difficult. I hadn’t opened it since some time in June, and it must have warped a little since then. I dug out my tool kit, found a pry bar, and forced my bedroom window twelve inches up from the sill with a lot of grunting and swearing. I knelt by the opening trying to cool off.
The air outside felt only a few degrees cooler then my room. I leaned out as far as the screen would let me, longing for a breeze. Sweat dripped down my sides onto the floor. I turned the covers back and lay down naked on the sheet in the sticky air. I closed my eyes and thought about ice. My back stuck to the sheet. I turned over and thought about kayaking in Alaska. My chest stuck to the sheet. I peeked under my arm and saw that the luminous face of the clock by my bed said four-fifteen. What the hell, I decided, my office is air-conditioned and I’m always saying I need more time there. I took a long shower and dressed. Outside, the air near the ground was a little cooler. The sky in the east was getting light, and a couple of birds were trying out chirps. On the highway, I found a booth in the arctic chill of Ray & Ellie’s Truck Stop and ordered the Long Haul Special: sausage and a three-egg cheese omelet with hash browns. It’s a wretched excess I sometimes award myself when life begins to owe me.
I read the entire St. Paul Pioneer-Press, drank second and third coffees, and still got to work before six. In my office, I unpacked all the remaining boxes and put everything but the files away. I flattened the boxes and took them outside to the dumpster. Back inside, I began sorting case files into stacks for my crew. The routine burglaries could be divided equally between my two new investigators, Rosie O’Donnell and Darrell Betts. If they chose to see that as an invitation to sexual rivalry, I would not interfere while they busted their butts. I wanted Ray Bailey to continue working with Lou French for the scant year left before Lou’s retirement. Lou was a master of the messy cases: domestic abuse, assault, and rape. Ray seemed to have some of Lou’s avuncular air; maybe he could master tough love and be Lou’s replacement Bo, of course, would stay with vice and narcotics.
That left Kevin Evjan, whom I’d picked to be my second in command, because he was smart and energetic, and seemed good at pacifying people.
“I’m gonna want you to help with scheduling, answer a bunch of email and faxes,” I told him. “Handle outraged citizens. Put a lid on department whiners.”
“Somebody to sort the shit,” he said.
“Exactly.” He took it because he knew it put him in line for my job. With Kevin riding shotgun, I hoped, I’d have time to steer the toughest cases through the system, and we could all end up looking smart.
“It’s a hell of a plan,” Frank said when I described it to him. “As long as when the shit hits the fan you all work together.”
On the console by my desk I stacked case files to hand over to Kevin. Millicent Porter’s old, dog-eared file was on the bottom. I had exhausted the department’s resources trying to find her grandmother’s serving spoons; ever since the thief got away, she had been exhausting me with abusive phone calls.
I piled on several more recent files, the top one being another Section Three crime, the weekend burglary of Tom’s Liquors. I was a little sorry to let go of it. Tom Priebe was that rarity: a victim so likable you wanted to help him yourself.
The amount of his loss had been easy to determine, because the store was hit shortly after his monthly inventory on Saturday night. “I always inventory on the third Saturday of the month, after closing,” he said. “I do it at night so I can take Sunday off.” Rutherford still has Blue Laws; liquor stores have to close on Sunday. It’s one of those family-values gestures we hold so dear in the heartland.
So the time of the burglary was equally easy to fix: sometime between one a.m. and eight-thirty Sunday morning. “Which is when I stopped in to get my windbreaker, on my way to Mass,” Tom said. “We were gonna go on a picnic. We canceled that, of course, when I found my store cleaned out.”
There was nothing to indicate forced entry. Somebody appeared to have unlocked the back door, loaded up all the booze, locked up again, and left.
“But that can’t be,” Tom told me firmly, “because I only have one set of keys. My wife and I run this place together, just the two of us. We split the shifts between us. Nobody ever has the keys but Cindy and me.”
“You don’t have a cleaning service, a janitor, somebody who does routine maintenance?”
He kept shaking his head. “It’s a small store. We’re barely making it. Like it or not, we do everything ourselves.”
“You don’t have children? Never need to go anyplace together?”
“We got two boys and we need lots of things, including time off, but we have to get along without it till the loan’s paid off. Fourteen more months. Usually Cindy covers the hours when the kids are in school and I take the rest. Her mother helps out with the kids in the summer. I hate it but it won’t last forever.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then explain to me how thieves came in your store without disturbing the steel grating you lock across the front, and without putting a scratch of any kind on the back.”
“Beats the shit out of me,” he said. He looked about ready to cry. “I know the insurance adjuster would love to prove I’m in on this myself, but so help me I’m not. All I want in the world is to have everything go along nice and smooth till I pay off that friggin’ bank loan and get my wife some time off. We been really strugglin’. You realize what a crimp this puts in my cash flow? I have to front the money to replace the inventory till the policy pays off. I’ll have to put it on a card and pay interest on it for a couple of months.” He thumped his pencil disconsolately on his desk pad. “Probably sounds like small potatoes to you, but it’s serious shit for me,” he muttered. “I would certainly like to see somebody’s ass in jail for this.”
“I doesn’t sound small,” I said, “and we’ll do the best we can.” Privately I wasn’t optimistic. We clear between eight and ten per cent of burglary cases in an average year. We do a lot better with robberies, where the crime is person-to-person and there’s some kind of a description, however inaccurate, of the thief. But the person who enters your premises unlawfully and leaves with the booty without being seen has an excellent chance of enjoying the prize undisturbed.
“Tom, you own this building?”
“No, hell no. If I had money enough to buy my own place I wouldn’t be in this part of town. I got it on a sublet from Tony Marco; this used to be Tony’s Liquors, remember? He wanted to get out after his heart attack so he was willing to leave his deposit on the lease and let me take over the monthly payments. That’s how shoestring this is for me; I didn’t even have enough for the rent deposit when I moved in. Tony let me have three months to pay off the basic stock and Cindy’s Dad loaned us enough to live on while we got started. Been a squeaker all the way.”
“But you’re making it?”
“Have been. Till now.”
“Who’s your landlord?”
“Bestway Realty.”
“They take care of the building okay?”
Tom shrugged. “They don’t bother me and I don’t bother them. I send the check to the bank every month.”
“What do you do if you need something fixed?”
“The one time I had a drain go bad, I got sick of waiting for them and called a plumber myself.”
“And paid for it yourself?”
“Yup. And took the cost of the repair off the next month’s check. They never said boo.”
“Kind of a weird way to run a company,” I said.
“Uh huh. But as long as they don’t raise the rent, I’m living with it.”
I stared out my window now, thinking. The value of the missing merchandise at Tom’s store was close to eighteen thousand dollars. The apartment in Kiowa Towers that was emptied last week–what kind of values were being claimed there? I looked it up: A surprisingly substantial haul for a sleazy apartment. It was occupied by three or four college dropouts in their twenties, who seemed content to work odd jobs and live in sleeping bags in order to pursue their expensive hobbies. They had a burglar alarm to guard their loot: two racing bikes, bags full of photo gear, a closet full of ski equipment and a pricey entertainment center that filled one whole wall. They had all worked the mid-shift at a downtown hotel and partied the rest of the night, coming home early last Thursday to find their place cleaned out. The neighbors were unanimous: no alarm had sounded. There were plenty of marks and scars on their old front door, but the locks and the alarm were undamaged.
I put the Kiowa Towers file on top of the Tom’s Liquors file. The day shift was coming to work. Down the hall, Kevin Evjan was trying to unlock his door while holding onto a briefcase, a cell phone, and a full cup of coffee. I went out and held his coffee cup while he unlocked his door.
“Goddamn,” he said. “It’s not even eight o’clock yet, and you’re walking around the building carrying an armload of work. You going to start right out being a slave driver?” He pushed his door open and groped for the light.
“You got time to take some files from me?”
“Sure, hell, yes, why not? Might as well add ‘em to the mess. Look at this place.” His floor was still covered with cardboard boxes. He leaned his briefcase against his piled-up desk.
“Only take a minute. Never mind, I don’t need a chair.” Kevin is the lucky recipient of all the best genes from his Irish mother and Norwegian father. He has glowing blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the open face of an Eagle Scout. His career as an investigator has been greatly aided by his guileless appearance; people trust him on sight and all but the deeply depraved tell him everything he wants to know.
We stood side by side, leaning on his desk, passing files back and forth.
“You’ve heard me mention Millicent Porter, I think,” I said, passing him the dirty manila folder, soft from hours of handling and stapled all over with notes, cards, and phone messages.
“The spoon lady?” he laughed. “I heard you worked so hard to make lieutenant so you could off-load the spoon lady.”
“Damn right. I want you to call on her in person. Take all the time you need, go over the case in detail. Use your boyish charm. Do whatever you have to do to get her to stop calling me.”
“Shee. Boyish charm, what a crock. Okay, you got it.”
“Okay. The next two are more serious. These are first reports of burglaries that need follow-up right away.” I leafed through the Kiowa Towers and Tom’s Liquors folders, explaining a little about each case. I showed him six more folders, saying, “These I’m giving to Darrell and Rosie. Nothing very complicated about any of them, but I want you to ride herd on them and help them when they need it.” I pulled the last folder out from under my arm. “I’m not leaving the Rowdy’s Bar file with you. It was probably intended to be a burglary, but the guys who did it surprised the owner on-premise and taped her up, so it’s turned into robbery and assault. I want to show it to you, though, because of some of the similarities with Tom’s Liquors and Kiowa Towers. Three lucrative heists within a week, all in properties with good security systems, owned by careful people who lock their doors. None with any sign of forced entry. I’m thinking maybe we’ve got some real pros in town with very good tools.”
“Mmm. Or a fresh shipment of groceries just came up the Yellow Brick Road and all the crack heads got busy at once.”
“Ah, you’ve been talking to Bo. Well, whatever. After you’ve worked with these, check back with me and we’ll see how we’re all doing.”
“Sure. You think we ought to have a meeting a couple times a month? The whole crew?”
“Maybe. Let’s get some work done first so we’ll have something to talk about.” I hate meetings. Wasting time should at least be fun. I left Kevin looking for his desk calendar.
My desk was clear, now, except for a note I had written to myself when I first got to work. “Keep calling A to Z Rentals,” it said.
What more could I possibly say to that bloody tape? Maybe I should tell it that Jake Hines had died of a heat stroke in apartment 3-C last night. Say I was a concerned friend, and that I hoped the tape machine would send somebody to pick up the body before it got any puffier. I dialed the number. After the first ring a female voice said quickly, “A to Z Rentals.”
“You’re there!” I said. “In person! My God. What’s your name?”
“This is A to Z Rentals,” she said, coldly. “What number were you calling?”
“You! I was calling A to Z Rentals–don’t hang up! This is Jake Hines. Apartment 3-C at 2803….”
“Oh, Mr. Haynes.” Her voice changed suddenly, taking on the sticky sweetness of the answering tape. “Honestly, you must think I’m a terrible person! I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I hope you can understand that I’ve just been so busy here and…”
