A Hard Ticket Home (13 page)

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Authors: David Housewright

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled, #Private Investigators

BOOK: A Hard Ticket Home
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“Prostitution?”
“I got screwed over so often I figured maybe I should make some money at it.”
“Drugs?”
“That was a bum rap. I wasn’t dealing, not really. Sometimes I help a guy I know, that’s all. Anyway, I’m on the bus and I asked these black dudes if they want a taste and all of a sudden a guy’s got his arm on my shoulder. I didn’t know they had bus police, guys who ride undercover on the MTC. I didn’t know that. My PD, he says cop a plea and I’ll get probation, it’s my first felony so I’ll get probation, maybe some community service, but no time. So I cop. Wham, the judge gives me eighteen months, no probation. Don’t ever listen to no overworked public defender, that’s what I learned.
“So now I’m in Shakopee. People say Shakopee is like a summer camp or something. No fences and you’re allowed to walk around during the day and there are crab-apple trees and a wishing well and inside there’s a gymnasium with a weight room, and a dark room, and a pottery kiln, and a bowling alley. Only it’s no summer camp, no way. The first day I’m there, I’m trying to call Jamie, and this big bull dyke swings a twenty-four-pound fire extinguisher at my head cuz she wanted to use the phone. It was crazy. I decided right then I was going to keep a low profile. I was going to mind my own business and do my time and get the hell outta there and never go back. Jamie was a big help. She would visit and we would talk. Mostly she would talk and I would listen. Jamie was going to straighten me out. I was going to let her.”
The tears returned, flowed freely. This time Merci made no attempt to brush them away. I moved to her side and covered her hand with mine. She surprised me by not pulling away. Instead she rested her forehead on
top of it, her hair spilling across the table. I guess neither of us was as tough as we pretended to be. A moment later, I felt her body shudder. She jerked back her head abruptly, angry at her weakness and quickly brushed the tears from her eyes with the heel of her palm.
“Anyway, it’s like I always say. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”
“That’s original.”
“Oh? Has it been done before?”
I wanted to talk more about Jamie, only Merci had tired of the subject.
“This is a nice house,” she told me. “You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“How come a bachelor lives in such a big house?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
I finished my beer and went for another. I felt light when I moved. I hadn’t eaten and what little had been in my stomach had been washed off the fast-food joint’s asphalt parking lot with a hose. The alcohol was taking effect.
“You don’t talk much,” Merci observed.
“On the contrary,” I answered. “I can be a regular chatterbox.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Right now I need information. You never learn anything while talking.”
“You’re trying to learn stuff from me?”
“I want to find Jamie’s killer.”
“Why?”
“It’s what I do.” It’s what I’ve always done, I reminded myself. I concentrate on other people’s problems to keep from facing my own. It’s a form of cowardice, I know. At least I admit it. Every day I learn something new about myself, gain a little maturity. At this rate, I figure by the time I hit eighty I’ll be a full-grown adult.
“You remind me of a cop,” she told me.
“I was a cop.”
“Did you like it?”
“I loved it.”
“How come you’re not a cop now?”
“I quit.”
“Why?”
“It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Talking without saying anything.”
“It’s a gift.”
Merci actually smiled at me. “I like you.”
I wondered if she liked all men who punched her in the stomach.
“I like you because when you look at me, your eyes don’t look away much. Most men, I can spend an entire evening with them and they won’t know the color of my eyes. You know the color of my eyes.”
“They’re green,” I said, proving it. Someone much wiser than I once said that the eyes were windows to the soul. He never looked into Merci Cole’s eyes. They were as hard as marbles and revealed nothing of what was behind them.
“We’d be awfully good together,” Merci volunteered.
The remark surprised me, put me on the defensive. “I don’t sleep with hookers,” I said too abruptly.
Merci looked at me with an expression that could peel paint. “I tried brain surgery but I couldn’t hack the hours, too much time on my feet.”
“As opposed to your back.”
“I actually spend very little time on my back.”
“Your knees then.”
I didn’t mean to be insulting. The remark had just slipped out—blame the beer. Merci took it like she had heard it before. She smiled a
joyless smile and said, “All we need is a blackboard and some chalk. I’ll write down my personal history and you can tell me where I went bad. Then I pay you a hundred bucks and we schedule another session for next week.”
“You don’t have to be a prostitute.”
“You don’t have to be a sanctimonious sonuvabitch.”
Touché.
Merci finished her beer and gathered up her belongings. She reached for her Ruger, but I pulled it away.
“Can I have my gun, please?”
“You might hurt somebody.”
Merci made a face, a little girl’s face with her tongue protruding between her lips, and I found myself chuckling. Still, I kept the gun. She went to the front door. I followed her. She opened the door and stood gazing into the night. Without turning around, she asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“Damned if I know.”
It was cold Friday morning. Not heroic cold, not national news cold, not even local news cold, just plain middle of September in Minnesota winter’s coming cold, which is nothing to complain about, only something to get through. I powered up the windows on my Cherokee, closed the sun roof and actually flirted with the idea of activating the heater, but declined. In Minnesota, the longer you can go without heat, the more manly you are. Ask anyone.
The traffic was heavy as I caught I-35W south. Used to be “rush hour” was confined to seven to nine a.m. and four to six p.m., only that changed dramatically in just the past few years. A growing population and subsequent urban sprawl—and our ponderous mass transit system—have given the Twin Cities rush hour traffic around the clock. The worst of it probably can be found at the bottleneck known as the 35W-Crosstown Interchange, where a four-lane freeway suddenly narrows to three lanes and then splits off in three separate directions.
Traffic heading into it began to slow at 38th Street. By 48th it was stop and go.
As I drove I listened to Minnesota Public Radio.
“In local news, the massive manhunt for suspected killer David C. Bruder and his infant son continues … Elsewhere, authorities believe that the shooting in the Uptown area of Minneapolis late Thursday afternoon that left one man dead, is indicative of the escalating gang violence in the city …”
Unlike the newspapers, MPR didn’t mention my name and I made a silent vow to increase my contribution during its next membership drive. Yet when it segued into a liberal discussion about the appropriateness of making inmates in the county jail pay for their keep, I put Bonnie Tyler on my CD system and cranked the volume.
I drove east on Highway 62, leaving the bottleneck behind and increasing my speed to a brisk forty miles per hour—don’t you just adore freeway driving—until I caught the Portland Avenue exit. I went south, east, south, then east again, driving deep into the suburb of Richfield, until I reached the address Chopper had given me.
It was a three-story, white-brick apartment building set a respectful distance from the look-alike split-levels located on either side and across the street. I guessed six units to each floor, maybe another six in the basement. On the left side of the building was a parking lot filled with a half dozen older vehicles and two identical, brand-spanking-new black Chevy vans. Behind it there was an empty, unkempt field that extended a good hundred yards before butting up against a cyclone fence. There was a hole cut into the fence. A narrow path beaten into the ground ran the distance from the fence to the street.
The apartment building seemed to be in direct line with one of the runways at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport about a mile to the east. Planes flew so low over the neighborhood you could smell the fumes from their exhaust. They took off at thirty-second intervals. You could set your watch by them. The noise was so loud you felt it in
your teeth and I wondered what fool would build an apartment building there and what moron would live in it.
I parked down the street where I could watch the front and side of the building. There was a black man in the foyer leaning against a bank of mailboxes and watching out the glass door. A sentry. I took a pair of Bushnell 7 x 25 binoculars I keep in my glove compartment and gave him a hard look. He was cradling what seemed to be—“Geezus”—a Romanian AKM assault rifle. You could tell by the distinctive pistol grips, one behind the banana magazine and one forward.
Where the hell did he get that?
I asked myself. A moment later, he was joined by another brother who was also carrying an automatic rifle, this one an East German MPiKM. Warsaw Pact ordnance.
Chopper was right about the firepower. The Family Boyz were packed to the max, as the kids would say. I unholstered my last handgun, a Model 85 Beretta .380 with walnut grips and a single line eight-round magazine, and set it on the seat next to me. It didn’t make me feel any safer.
The brothers didn’t seem to have much to say to each other and a few minutes later the East German moved out of sight and the Romanian resumed his vigil. I turned on the AM/FM and tuned it to a classic rock and roll station. Joe Cocker was playing so I cranked it. He was followed by Bob Seger and I left the volume up. Next came a group called Tears for Fears. I turned the radio off. The noise was worse than the jet engines.
I watched the apartment building for another hour, only crime when it’s well run is boring and besides, the airplane noise was really starting to annoy me. “Why would anyone live in Richfield?” I asked myself as I fired up my Cherokee and headed home.
 
 
There were no messages on my voice mail so I got right to it, activating my PC and accessing my Internet provider. I have broadband so it didn’t take long.
Few government agencies in Minnesota post public records online. A notable exception is Hennepin County, which posts property information. I accessed its Web site. The home page offered several options. I clicked on
Property Address (Quick Search).
A new screen appeared, offering me a box in which I typed the Family Boyz’s Richfield address. Execute. The next screen provided me with the apartment building’s property identification number. Execute. I scrolled down the screen and discovered the building’s school, watershed, and sewer district numbers, construction year, tax parcel description, current market value, the date the building was last purchased and for how much, and an updated tax summary. I was also given the name of the building’s fee owner.
David C. Bruder.
 
 
My telephone rang.
“Yes?” I answered automatically, not taking my eyes from the computer screen.
“Are you deliberately trying to make this difficult?”
“Hi, Chief.”
“This kid you killed, Cleave Benjamn.”
“I had no choice.”
“I appreciate that, McKenzie, but it makes you a hard sell. The mayor and city council, they’re pretty open-minded folks—they hired a black police chief for a white community, didn’t they? Only a cop with three killings to his name? I don’t know.”
“Don’t put yourself out, Chief,” I told him, sadly accepting my fate. “I know how it works. A cop gets so much political capital to work with and no more. Don’t waste it on me. You might need it some day.”
“I didn’t say it couldn’t be done.”
“Even I wouldn’t hire me now.”
“Don’t say that. We’ll see what happens. By the time this gets to the
grand jury—Christ, two grand juries now—you might be hailed as a hero.”
“How could I not be?”
“Just do me a favor, will you? Stay home and play with your damn ducks.”
“I’ll try,” I told him and he hung up.
How did he know about the ducks?
 
 
Bobby Dunston sat on a bench in Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, eating the chili dog I bought for him from the vendor who worked the corner of 5th and Market. Unlike Yu, I didn’t know him by name.
“What’s so damned important?” Bobby wanted to know.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“I’m really not in the mood, McKenzie.”
I told him what I had discovered. He stopped chewing and slowly dabbed the corners of his lips with a napkin—Bobby could be so dainty.
“Landlord to the Boyz,” he said at last.
“How ’bout that?”
“I don’t suppose you saw anyone matching Bruder’s description in or around the premises in question?”
“I’d be happy to say I did if it’ll help you get a warrant, but you won’t need my statement for that. Just surveil the joint for about ten minutes and you’ll see enough to satisfy any judge. It’s a stash pad if I’ve ever seen one and I’ve seen plenty.”
“What do the Family Boyz have to do with this?” he asked himself. He seemed surprised when I answered.
“I find Jamie. Jamie’s husband’s hooked up with the Family Boyz. The Family Boyz try to kill me—twice. Obvious progression.”
“So obvious I can’t see it. Why would Bruder send the Boyz after you?”
“Because I found Jamie,” I repeated.
“So?”
“I don’t know.” I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall now, seeing if anything stuck.
“You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be. There’s no doubt that Katherine and Jamie were killed by the same man. I don’t have a formal protocol yet, but more and more it looks like Bruder.”
“Not Bradley Young?”
“Young was right-handed. The killer was a southpaw. Also, the ME vacuumed the bodies of both victims and found head and pubic hairs. He put ’em through a full SEM analysis. Thickness and length suggest a male, but not Bradley. Something else. There was no trace of semen inside or outside the body of either victim, but we did recover the remains of a cigarette at both scenes, what he used to burn them with. Saliva on the filters indicate a group A secretor. Bradley Young was not group A. Nor were the victims. But I checked with David Bruder’s doctor. Guess what?”
“He’s group A.”
“Move the man to the front row. When Bruder is found, the ME said he’ll go for a genetic fingerprint. He said that like it’s the most fun a forensic pathologist can have.”
“Huh.”
“Is that all you have to say? Huh?”
“Can you connect him to Katherine?”
“Yep. Turns out they were both members of the same club, the Northern Lights Entrepreneur’s Club.”
“Interesting.”
“Oh, it gets better. We’ve interviewed Bruder’s secretary, his employees, his friends, we checked his appointment calendar and his credit card receipts. It looks like our boy’s been having an extramarital affair for at least the past six weeks.”
“With who?”
“We don’t know, but Jeannie …”
“Your young, beautiful, and smart as hell partner that you haven’t introduced me to yet.”
“Is flashing Katherine’s photograph in the restaurants and hotels listed in Bruder’s credit card records to see if we can find a witness who saw the two of them together.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Everything has to be perfect with you, McKenzie. Yeah, we lifted latents in Katherine’s bedroom that match latents lifted in Jamie’s. We don’t know yet if they’re Bruder’s. That’s something else we’ll find out when we take him. The point is, there’s plenty of probable cause to arrest Bruder, but I don’t see where Young and the Family Boyz enter into it.”
“Maybe they’re hiding him.”
“Maybe they are. But why try to kill you?”
“Because I found Jamie.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It’s all I have.”
Bobby finished his chili dog.
I finished mine.
“Did you get a line on Bruder’s business associate?” I asked. “The one who was stopping for drinks the day Jamie was killed?”
“Napoleon Cook. He owns Bloomington Alarms out on the strip. He’s also a member of the Entrepreneur’s Club. He said he spent a half hour, maybe forty-five minutes at Bruder’s house, just enough time for a drink and to discuss The Entrepreneur’s Club Ball. He said everyone was healthy and happy when he left and we have no reason to doubt him.”
“The Entrepreneur’s Club Ball?”
“Each year the club throws a formal ball over at the Minnesota Club, invites a slew of young entrepreneurs like themselves. Getting an invitation is supposed to be quite an achievement. I’m surprised a rich fella like yourself hasn’t been invited.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Wonder what?”
“When Chief Casey described the Family Boyz to me, he called the gang a ‘covert entrepreneurial organization.’”
“McKenzie, a lot of these rich guys own property they’ve never even seen. They hire agents to take care of it for them. Bruder probably doesn’t even know who his tenants are.”
“He’s landlord to the Boyz. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Ahh, hell.”
Bobby slapped his napkin and chili dog wrapper into my hand and marched briskly from the park more or less in the direction of the police building a half mile away. He didn’t look back.
 
 
Napoleon Cook danced in front of his audience like one of those crazed infomercial hosts you see on TV, except his stage was a large meeting room in the Creekside Community Center on Penn Avenue and West 98th Street about a mile north of the City of Bloomington government offices. I had been directed there by a sign attached to the door of his business: BECAUSE OF INCREASED DEMAND, BLOOMINGTON ALARMS FREE SECURITY SEMINAR HAS BEEN RELOCATED …
Cook was all smiles and positive energy—I could feel it even where I sat way in the back of the room. From his unrelenting upbeat delivery, you’d think he was selling a food processor or a set of Ginsu steak knives instead of alarm systems designed to keep you or your loved ones from being raped and murdered in bed. “It’s something I wish there was no market for,” he claimed. “But today we need the Bloomington Alarm’s comprehensive emergency-alert system more than ever.” Not once did he refer to Katherine Katzmark or Jamie Carlson Bruder by name, yet from the way his audience nodded its collective heads, I
guessed the murders were foremost in their minds. Probably the reason for the “increased demand” from customers, I concluded.

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