Phantom prey ld-18, Page 5

Whistler was the lieutenant in charge of homicide. “I called him, he said it’s no skin off his butt, but I should run it past you,” Lucas said. Anson shrugged: “So-no butt skin. Welcome to the big time. We copied everything over to Jim Benson."

  "I took a look at it,” Lucas said. “He’s dead in the water, on Austin

  He’s not even sure the kid is dead."

  "She’s dead,” Anson said flatly. “You only think she’s not dead if you think about it too much.” Lucas agreed. Frances Austin was dead. “You guys got nothing on Ford?”

  “We’re not oversupplied with clues,” Anson agreed. “We’re still talking.”

  “I’m going to talk behind you,” Lucas said, pushing off the desk. “If I get anything, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Do that,” Anson said. “Listen, how much do you think Benson makes over there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe seventy- five in an average year,” Lucas said. “Yeah? He doesn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the dishwasher."

  "He’s okay,” Lucas said. “So what would a guy have to do…?” They bullshitted about job openings for a while. Anson was coming up on twenty- two years with Minneapolis and was looking to double dip on a pension. “Unfortunately, my only expertise is in street proctology.”

  Macy’s was a ten-minute walk from homicide, through the underground tunnel to the government center, up to the Skyways, and through the maze of bridges and hallways to the heart of the shopping district. Lucas stopped and bought an ice- cream cone, stopped again to talk to a couple of uniforms who were frog- marching a shoplifter down to a squad car.

  The shoplifter was dressed exactly like a movie shoplifter, in wrinkled gray- cotton slacks and stained parka, set off with a five- day beard and fuzzy, aging Rasta braids. Half- hanging from the arms of the cops, who were wearing yellow rubber gloves, he said, “Hey… Davenport.”

  “That you, Louis?” Louis didn’t look so good. His weight was down fifty pounds, and maybe more, since the last time Lucas had seen him.“It’s me,” Louis said. “You look sort of fucked up,” Lucas said, licking the cone. “Got the AIDS, man.” His eyes turned up to Lucas, and Lucas could see that the whites were going yellow. “Ah, Jesus, Louis."

  "Gonna get you sooner or later,” Louis said. Louis wasn’t exactly gay, but he was for sale. “Don’t plead out. Take the jail time,” Lucas said. Louis was insulted: “Hey, whacha think I’m doin’ getting caught?” Lucas said, “Don’t pass it on, man. You get in there, you sleep on your back.” Louis’s eyes turned back to the floor: “What’s gonna happen, gonna happen. What it is, is what it is."

  "We’ll talk to the sheriff’s guys,” one of the uniforms said. Lucas nodded and ambled on, looking in store windows, said hello to a salesman at the Hubert White men’s store, let himself get pulled inside to look at an Italian summer suit, a steal at $2,495, and then crossed Nicollett Mall on the skyway bridge to Macy’s, and found cosmetics. A woman in a white jacket, behind the Dior counter, was staring into space. He walked through the space and she didn’t blink. “Charlene Mobry?”

  Now she blinked, took him in, sighed, and turned and looked down the counter at another woman in a white jacket, who was rearranging a shelf of eau de cologne bottles. She called, “Charlene? You got a customer.”

  Charlene Mobry was dishwater-blond, thirty pounds too heavy, puffy lips, green eyes, and small fat hands with tiny polished nails and rings on each thumb. She said, “Help you?”

  Lucas took out his ID and unfolded it on the counter. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, about Dick Ford.”

  “Ohh…” Her lower lip trembled and she looked sideways, as though she might run for it. Then she came back to him, with her eyes, and he realized how deeply sad she was. “Did you find… who did it?”

  “I’m with the state,” Lucas said, as he shook his head. “We’re doing a parallel investigation: we really want to get this guy. Whoever it is. Don’t have him yet.”

  Mobry nodded and called to the spaced- out woman to whom Lucas had first spoken. “Mary. This guy’s a policeman. I’ve got to go talk to him about Dick.”

  “Okay,” Mary said. Mobry led the way across the store, behind a counter into a stock-room, steel racks filled with shoe boxes. A couple of plastic chairs were pushed into a corner; the shelf next to the chairs held an old radio, unplugged, and an ashtray with four snubbed- out filter- cigarette butts. They sat down and Lucas took a notebook out of his breast pocket and asked, “You were dating Mr. Ford?”

  “We hung out,” she said. “Like we’d go to dinner. We weren’t a hundred percent a couple, but we sorta were.”

  “You told the Minneapolis police that you didn’t have any ideas at all about who might have done this,” Lucas said.

  “An asshole,” she said. “Have you heard anything at all, since you talked to Minneapolis? Any thoughts about Mr. Ford? Anything?"

  "Just gossip. Everybody says the Goths must’ve done it, but I know quite a few of them, and most of them are pretty nice. I never met a Goth who’d have done it.”

  “You’re not a Goth?"

  "Do I look like one?” she asked. “Well, after work…”

  “No, I’m not. It used to make me laugh. It’s too dramatic.”

  “But Mr. Ford was a Goth.”

  “Sort of. Yeah, he was. But you know, it comes and goes. Like it was pretty big twenty years ago, and ten years ago, and now here it comes again… Dick was really into it ten years ago, but then not so much, and he wasn’t so into it this time. He changed. He stopped smoking dope, he stopped drinking, he started saving money, he was taking a class in bookkeeping. He wanted to start his own club, and I think…” Her voice went squeaky: “… I think he might have done it, if some asshole hadn’t killed him.”

  Lucas paused, waited for her to pull back together; the smell of the old cigarette butts closed in around them. “You saw him the night he was killed. At the A1.”

  “Yes.” Her head bobbed and she bit her lower lip, holding it together. “I went over after work. I had a beer and a cheeseburger, and we talked for a couple of minutes, but it was pretty busy, so I went home. We were going to a play the next night, over at Loring Park. I never saw him again… I went out of the bar and I turned around and waved and he waved back and that was the last I saw of him forever.”

  “That’s tough,” Lucas said. “Yeah."

  "You said there was more gossip…” She looked away, then back. “A friend of Dick’s, named Karl, said there was a Goth girl around, a fairy…” As she talked about it, her voice rose in pitch, and became squeaky with grief. “… and she was talking to Dick before closing. Not that there was anything going on, but nobody knew her.”

  Lucas asked, “Did you tell the Minneapolis police about this?"

  "No… Karl was supposed to.”

  Lucas hadn’t seen anyone named Karl in the Minneapolis paper. “What’s Karl’s last name?”

  “Lageson.” She spelled it, and added, “Karl with a K. He lives in Uptown. I don’t know where, exactly.”

  Lucas noted it down, and asked, “So what’s a fairy look like?"

  "Oh, you know. Skinny, small, big eyes, dark hair. Short skirts, long legs, ripped stockings. Everything black. Black nail polish, crimson lipstick. Black hair. I mean, not all fairies have black hair, but she did.”

  “I don’t think Karl told anybody,” Lucas said. “Oh, shit. He should have. He’s the one who saw her. Or says he did. But he’s sort of…” She put a finger up at her temple and made a few circles. “He’s smoked too much weed. He might have just thought it up. Or gotten it from one of his Goth comics.”

  “Anybody else see her?” Lucas asked. “I don’t know. If you go down to the A1, they’ll be talking about it, if anybody saw her. I mean some hot fairy mysterious Goth chick, everybody would be talking. Goths gossip a lot.”

  “A few weeks ago, a young woman, a Goth, named Frances Austin disappeared,” Lucas said.

  “I know about it,” she said
, nodding. “The blood in the hall. She and Dick knew each other. You probably knew that.”

  “Did you know her?” Her gaze fixed on him, but lost focus, as she considered the question. “I’m not sure. I saw her picture in the paper, and on TV, and people at the A1 were talking about it, because she’d been there the day before she disappeared. But I don’t know if I really remember her, or just remember the pictures on TV. I mean, I didn’t know her, but I might have seen her.”

  “What was the nature of her relationship with Mr. Ford?"

  "Well, he wasn’t sleeping with her, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Mobry said. “It was more like, a bartender with a regular who’s an okay person, and they shared some things like the gothic. A person who doesn’t start trouble and is friendly and leaves a tip.”

  “Did you and Mr. Ford…"

  "Call him Dick. Mr. Ford sounds really… dead."

  "Did you and Dick talk about her?” Lucas asked. “Oh, sure, right after she disappeared. The police came and talked to Dick, and he told them what he knew. Which was hardly anything. She came in and got fish ’n chips the day before she disappeared. She was with a couple of other Goths-the police have their names, I don’t remember them. But then the day she disappeared, she didn’t come in. I think it was in the paper that she and a friend had lunch that day somewhere else, like a bagel place.”

  “That’s right,” Lucas said. “So not at the A1. Anyway, she and Dick weren’t intimate-and I don’t mean sex. I mean, they didn’t share life stories. Dick was a bartender, so you know, he was a professional bullshitter. He didn’t even have any good bullshit about her.”

  “Huh.” Lucas rubbed his nose. Goddamn stale cigarettes. “Do you think the same person who killed Dick killed Frances?” Mobry asked. “I don’t know. We don’t even know if she’s dead,” Lucas said. She sat with her hands in her lap: “You sound like you’re stuck."

  "I just started,” Lucas said. “I’m trying to get something going."

  "Why don’t you do some of that magic DNA stuff like you see on TV?"

  "We did,” Lucas said. “The problem is, it’s not magic. Most of the time, you wind up proving that people who already said they were there, were there.”

  “That doesn’t help,” she said.

  They sat among the boxes, staring at each other for a moment, then Lucas asked, “Neither of you, you or Dick, had any bad vibrations from people, felt like somebody knew something, something was being held back?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing. I don’t even have a body. His parents came and got him and took him back to Rochester. The funeral’s Friday.”

  He stood up. “All right. I’m really sorry for your loss. Dick sounds like an okay guy.”

  “He was a good guy,” Mobry said, and the tears started again. “Are you going to find the fairy Goth?”

  “Yeah, I am. Any ideas?"

  "If she’s real, somebody at the A1 knows her. Some of the guys would have been following her around, if she looks like what she sounds like.”

  “Anything else? Anything?” She shrugged, wiped tears away with her fingertips, said, “Do the Austins have a butler? Maybe the butler did it.” Then she cried, and Lucas patted her on the shoulder and asked if she’d be all right, and she said, “Yeah, I’d just like to sit here awhile,” and Lucas left.

  She hadn’t had anything to do with the murder, he thought. In Lucas’s experience, women who killed their boyfriends suffered either from too much intensity or too much innocence; Mobry didn’t have either quality.

  Like Austin, she was overwhelmed with sadness; all the sadness was getting him down.

  5

  Back out into the skyways, getting- out- of- the- office time, crowds jostling through to the parking ramps, a few of the younger women showing some pre- spring skin, the teen guys flashing tattoos over health- club muscles, their elders often with the competitive, fixed, dead- eyed, and querulous stare of people who were not getting far enough, fast enough, making enough, hustling all the time, working all the time, no time for an evening’s paseo, no time even for half- fast food. Scuttling people.

  By the time Lucas got back to his car, the streets were snarled with evening rush- hour traffic, muttering along in a stink of exhaust and wet asphalt. He edged out into it, went around the block and down a few, to Washington Avenue, took the left, crawled a few more blocks, took the right turn across the Mississippi.

  Lucas thought: Goths, mysterious fairies, dead bartenders ripped through their abdominal aortas-much better than a dead woman with a beer- bottle- cracked skull and a boyfriend who claimed he’d been out driving around; or paperwork; or political chores.

  So he was whistling as he crossed the Hennepin Avenue bridge. He cheerfully chopped the nose off a Sprinter van, took the finger from the woman who was driving it, beat a red light by minus- fifteen feet, and dumped the car in a supermarket parking lot, leaving the BCA card on the dash.

  The A1 was a block away, a brick building painted white, the paint gone dingy and gray, with a miniature theater- style marquee hanging over the door. The marquee said Surf amp; Turf, $9.99 and Happy Hour, 5-, which was either supposed to be cute, or the second number had fallen off.

  Lucas ambled down the sidewalk, looking in the restaurant windows, checking the people on the street corners. The A1, when he came to it, looked respectably seedy; not a place where you’d go to start a fight, but not a place you’d propose to your girlfriend, either.

  Inside, the purple carpet felt damp and spongy under his shoes. An anonymous jazz- piano tune was scratching its way out of overhead speakers, and a dim yellow light drizzled from red- shaded lamps running down the wall on his left, over a row of booths. Four of the booths were occupied by couples, and one by a single guy trying to read a newspaper. Two more men sat at the bar, with beers, an empty stool between them.

  The bartender, a slope- shouldered, balding man with a rust- colored beard, was stacking wet glasses. Lucas leaned across the bar and asked, “Is Tom Harris in?”

  The bartender yanked a couple of paper towels off a roll and wiped his hands. “Nope. He should be in later tonight. Eight, nine, like that.” He cocked his head. “You a cop?”

  Lucas nodded. “I’m trying to get a line on a Goth woman. She supposedly was seen with Dick Ford the night he was killed.”

  “You think she did it?"

  "I’d just like to find her,” Lucas said. “Got any ideas?” The bartender shook his head. “I wasn’t here that night. Thank God. Might’ve been me.” “Anybody say anything about her…?”

  “Yeah, you know. Bar talk. There’s some confusion, about whether she was somebody we know, or somebody we’ve never seen.”

  Lucas said, “Run that by me again.” “There were three or four Goth women here that night,” the bar-

  tender said, leaning forward, forearms on the bar. “That’s not unusual. You guys already checked them out.”

  “I’m with the state, not Minneapolis,” Lucas said. “I haven’t checked out anybody.”

  “Then you oughta talk to Minneapolis,” the bartender said. “They figured out who the Goths were. People knew them. Then this rumor starts that there was another one. But we don’t know if there really was, or if somebody’s confused, and the rumor’s running on its own.”

  “Huh,” Lucas said. “All sounds like bullshit to me,” said one of the guys at the bar. He looked like a failing insurance man, in a brown suit with a green nylon necktie rolled up at the tip. He’d had a few.

  Lucas turned his head and said, “Yeah?"

  "The more I hear about it, the hotter this chick gets,” the guy said

  He hip- yanked his barstool around to face Lucas. “When you heard about her yesterday, nobody was sure who they were talking about. Now you talk to somebody, and she’s like what’s- her- name-the movie star with the big lips.”

  “She’s got big lips?"

  "That was just an example,” the barfly said. He took a cal
culated sip of beer, handling the glass carefully. The other man at the bar said, “Nobody said anything about her lips. They did say she had a terrific ass. They were sure about that."

  "I heard that, too,” the bartender said.

  “That narrows it down,” Lucas said. “Shit, if this was Wisconsin, it’d be a positive ID,” said the second barfly. “When did the rumor start?” Lucas asked. “I heard it yesterday afternoon, from the noon crew,” the bartender said. “Me, too,” the first barfly said, and the other one said, “Yup.” Lucas looked around, at the people in the booths. “Doesn’t look like a Goth hangout."

  "Things change about seven o’clock,” the bartender said. “The business guys get out and night people start showing up."

  "Oooo, scary,” said the second barfly. He burped. “Could you tell me even one name of somebody who actually thinks they saw her?” Lucas asked. The bartender sighed and said, “You really ought to talk to Tom.” The first barfly said, “Jesus Christ, Jerry. Dick got killed.” To Lucas, he said, “There’s a guy named Roy. He works at a liquor store over by Dinkytown. People say Roy talked to her.”

  Lucas took out his notebook, jotted it down. “Roy, liquor store in Dinkytown.”

  “Mike’s,” the bartender added. “Mike’s on Fourteenth?"

  "I don’t know, I’ve never been there,” the bartender said. “I just know that Roy works at Mike’s."

  "I’ve been there,” the second barfly said. “I don’t know the street, but it’s a hole- in- the- wall, kitty- corner from a Burger King."

  "Got it,” Lucas said. He knew the place, but had never been inside

  “How about a guy named Karl Lageson?” The bartender shook his head. “I don’t know that name."

  "I think that’s Lurch,” the first barfly said to the bartender. To Lucas: “Big tall pale white guy. Deep eyes, big forehead. Looks like he ought to have a bolt in his neck. Don’t know about him, though.”

  “I’ve seen him with Roy,” the second barfly said. “If Lurch is the guy you’re looking for.”

  “Getting back to this Goth with the good ass,” the bartender said. “I know the Goths that the Minneapolis cops talked to. None of them have got what you’d call an amazing ass. I mean, not so you’d go around saying what an amazing ass she had.”