Certain Prey (11 page)

“Well, hell, as long as he thinks her husband did it . . .”

“But it means we’ve got to get that goddamn tape,” Carmel said. “If Davenport ever got a whiff of that . . . I’ll tell you what, Pamela, he’s the one guy in the world who could run you down. The one guy.”

“As long as you’re on the inside, he shouldn’t be a problem.” Rinker shrugged. “And if he gets to be a problem, we take him.”

Carmel gave her a long look, and Rinker asked, “What?”

“You don’t know him,” Carmel said.

“Look, if a guy doesn’t know it’s coming, and if you spend some time watching him, and thinking about it—you can take him. You
can
.”
C
ARMEL
CAME SWINGING
down the hall to Homicide, spotted Lucas coming from the other direction, carrying a large clip-bound report. “Davenport, goddamnit, have you been stepping on my client’s rights again?”

“How are you, Carmel?” Lucas asked.

“What’s the big book?”

“Ah, the Perfection Commission.”

“Oh, my God. I tried to read about it in the
Star-Tribune.
I felt like I’d been anesthetized.” Carmel presented a cheek, and Lucas pecked it. He took one of her hands, lifted it and stepped back so he could look her over, and said, “You look absolutely . . . wonderful.”

“Thanks. How come we’ve never slept together? You’ve chased every other woman in town.”

“I only chase . . . No, that’s not right.”

“What?”

“I was gonna say I only chase women who don’t scare me,” Lucas said. “But they all wind up scaring me.”

“I heard you were dating Little Miss Titsy, the cop, but you broke up.”

“That would be Sergeant Sherrill?”

“What happened? She have a bigger gun?”

“Carmel, Carmel . . .” Lucas held the door for her. Carmel stepped through, and saw Hale Allen at the far end of the room, leaning against a green filing cabinet, deep in conversation with Marcy Sherrill. Marcy was standing a couple of inches too close to him, and was looking up into his eyes with rapt attention.

“Uh-oh,” Carmel said.

“By the way,” Lucas said, in a tone low enough that Carmel had to turn to catch what he said, “I’m told your client is dumber’n a barrel of hair.”

“But, God, he’s gorgeous,” she said. She ostentatiously bit her lower lip, sighed, and started toward Allen and Sherrill. Moving like a leopard, Lucas thought.
T
HEY
NEEDED
to cover some old ground, Lucas told Allen, because he was new to the case. He hoped it wouldn’t be inconvenient. “I understand your wife has been released by the county . . .”

“Yes, finally,” Allen said.

“
That
took way too long,” Carmel added. “I don’t understand why they had to do twenty different kinds of chemistry when the woman’s been shot seven times in the brain.”

“Routine,” Lucas said.

“Bullshit routine,” Carmel said, now in attorney mode. “You should give a little thought to what it does to the grieving survivors. You’re victimizing the victims.”

“All right, all right,” Lucas said. “This will only take a couple of minutes.”

“Where’s the other guy? Black?” Carmel asked.

“Doing something else,” Lucas said. He looked at Allen. “Tell me about your relationship with your wife.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Carmel said.

Ten minutes later, Lucas leaned toward Allen and asked, “How well did you know Rolando D’Aquila?”

Allen looked puzzled. “Rolando who?”

“D’Aquila. Also known as Rolo, I understand.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name,” Allen said.

“Never bought a little toot from him?” Lucas asked.

“No, I never.” He shook his head. “Toot?”

When Lucas mentioned D’Aquila’s name, Carmel slipped back a step and ran the numbers. They’d found the body, obviously. If they looked up D’Aquila’s history—and they would get around to that, if they hadn’t already— they’d find her name. They might wonder why she hadn’t mentioned it.

“Why are you interested in this Rolando D’Aquila?” she asked Lucas.

“He was murdered last night,” Lucas said. “He was killed the same way Mrs. Allen was—the method was identical.” He looked back at Allen: “So you never represented him, or one of his friends, either in a criminal court or in a civil legal matter.”

“No, no, not that I remember. I’ve represented thousands
of people in real estate closings, so maybe, but I don’t remember any Rolando.”

“Get off his case,” Carmel snapped. “He’s never represented Rolando D’Aquila in anything.”

“How do you know?” Lucas asked.

“Because Rolo only had one attorney.” Everybody was looking at her now, and she nodded. “Me.”
A
FTER
THE INTERVIEW
with Allen, as they got coffee from the coffee machine, Lucas said, “You were strangely quiet. That always makes me nervous.”

“I was gonna be the good cop, if you were gonna be the bad,” Sherrill said.

“I agree; he is
very
good-looking,” Lucas said.

Sherrill laughed and then said, “He’s got these really amazing brown eyes. They’re like perfect little puppy eyes.”

“He’s about as bright as a perfect little puppy, too,” Lucas said. “And he’s sleeping with his secretary.”

“A
secretary, not
his
secretary. Besides, he had a cold marriage, as I understand it,” Sherrill said. “And I think his intelligence might lie in other areas than . . .”

“Than what?”

“Than like in, uh, being smart.”

Lucas choked on the coffee and said, “Goddamnit, you almost made hot coffee go up my nose.”

“Good,” Sherrill said.

SEVEN

When Carmel got back to her apartment, Rinker was lying on the couch, a pillow behind her head, reading the
NBC Handbook of Pronunciation.
“Did you know that the French nudie bar is called the foh-LEE bair-ZHAIR?”

Carmel shrugged: “Yeah, I guess.”

“See, that’s what people get when they study French,” Rinker said, tossing the book on an end table. “They learn how to pronounce neat stuff. I had to take Spanish for my B.A., but there’s nothing neat in the pronunciation. Like in French—I always thought it was foh-LEE beer-zhair-AY.”

“I don’t know, I took Spanish, too,” Carmel said.

Rinker sat up, dropped her feet to the floor and asked, “What happened with the cops?”

“They asked Hale about Rolo. They found his body this morning—some junkie dropped by, looking for coke.”

“Did you tell them that you’d represented Rolo?” Rinker asked.

For a split second, a lie hovered on Carmel’s tongue. She rejected it and said, “Yeah, I pretty much had to. They would’ve found out.”

“All right. So now they can tie you to Rolo, but they can’t tie you to the crime, because nobody knows that you’re . . . involved with Hale. Not even Hale knows it. Have I got that right?”

“That’s right.” She wandered to a window and looked out over the city; it was a hot day, and a thin haze hung over the Midway area to the east. “If it weren’t for that fuckin’ tape, we’d be in the clear. I’m thinking maybe we should have
strangled
Rolo, instead of shooting him—then there wouldn’t be
any
tie. That was a mistake.”

“Didn’t think of it,” Rinker said. “The gun was just the natural thing to do, since we had it right there.”

“Yeah, well, they’re waiting for an analysis of the slugs. They can tell whether the bullets that killed Barbara Allen and the ones that killed Rolo came from the same batch of lead.”

“All right . . . gonna have to get rid of the guns pretty soon. Or buy a new batch of shells.”

“Did you come up with any ideas about the tape?” Carmel asked.

“Yes, I have,” Rinker said. She stood up, walked to a corner table and picked up Rolo’s address book. “For one thing, do you remember when he said he gave the tape to somebody named Mary?”

“Yeah—but there aren’t any names in the book, only . . .” “Initials,” Rinker said. “But I had a little time, so I started going through it. There are four sets of initials starting with M. So I walked down to your library, and looked in the cross-reference directories . . . and then I found out he was using a stupid little code on his phone numbers. He put the last number at the beginning. Like he’d have a number, say, that was 123 dash 4567 and he’d write it down as 712 dash 3456.”

Carmel was impressed. “How’d you figure that out?”

“Because some of the prefixes didn’t exist, and the
ones that did were all over the place. One of the numbers was for a dog grooming service. I mean, why would he even bother to write it in his book? So anyway, the assholes I used to work for did some jail time, and they told me how guys would use these simple codes. So I juggled numbers until I found one that gave me all good prefixes. And then, everything else worked out—all the codes were residential, and two of the names that began with M were women. Or probably women. One was Martha Koch, but the other was just initial M—M. Blanca. Where there’s just an initial, it usually means a woman living alone. Younger woman.”

“Mary?”

“No, it’s something else—I called, and a woman answered, and I asked for Mary Blanca and she said I had the wrong number. She had a little accent, maybe Mex. But I was thinking about how scared Rolo was, and how he came up with the name Mary. I bet when you asked him for the name, and you said,
Quick,
I bet her name popped into his head, and it almost got out, but he switched at the last minute. Could be Martha, or it could be this other M.”

Carmel was skeptical: “That’s a long chain of couldbe’s,” she said. “It could be some other M, or not an M at all.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have anything else.”

“Rolo’s name’s gonna be in the paper tomorrow,” Carmel said. “If this M doesn’t know he’s dead, she will tomorrow morning. Then she’s gonna look at the tape, if she hasn’t already.
Then
she’s gonna give it to the cops.”

“So let’s go talk to M. Blanca. And Martha Koch.”

“After dark.”

“Yup.”

“We’re hanging by a goddamn thread,” Carmel said.

• • •

M
ARTHA
K
OCH’S
LIFE
was saved by a baby shower; she never knew it.

“Lotta cars around,” Carmel muttered as she and Rinker started up the Kochs’ driveway; a dozen cars were parked along the street. The house was a neat, modest, tuck-under ranch across the street from a golf course. A curving line of flagstone steps led across a rising lawn to the front door. The porch light was on and the living-room curtains were open. At the top of the steps, Carmen said, “Uh-oh,” and stopped. Two women were hopping around the front room, laughing, and one of them was looking back and obviously talking to yet a third one, or more.

“Forget it,” Rinker said. “We’ll have to come back.”

They retreated down the steps, walked up the street to Carmel’s Volvo and left.

M. Blanca’s house was a long step down in affluence, one of a row of old asbestos-shingled houses just north of a University of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. Four mailboxes hung next to a single door.

“It’s an apartment,” Rinker said, her voice low.

“Lot of them are,” Carmel said.

“We gotta take care—there’ll be other people around. You got the money?”

“Yeah.” A few more steps and Carmel asked, “What do I look like?” Rinker was wearing her red wig; they’d both wrapped dark silk scarves around their heads.

“You look like one of those religious ladies who always wear scarves,” Rinker said.

“All right,” Carmel said. She added, “So do you.”

At the front door, Carmel pointed a pocket flash at the mailboxes. The box on the left said
Howell;
the next one showed a strip of paper, which had been peeled off. The third said in pink ink
Jan and Howard Davis,
with a green ink addition, in a child’s hand,
And Heather.
The fourth said
Apartment A
. She opened the left one,
Howell,
and found it
empty. The box with the strip of paper contained a phone bill addressed to David Pence, Apartment C. She skipped the Davis box, and checked the box on the far right. Empty.

“I think, but I’m not sure, that we want apartment A,” she whispered to Rinker. Rinker nodded and they pushed through the outer door into a short hallway. Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn bicycle was chained to the banister. “Not like my old Schwinn,” Rinker muttered.

Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.

The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, “What?”

“We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,” Carmel said quietly.

“She’s sleeping,” he said, and the crack narrowed.

“We’ve got some money for her,” Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man’s eyes were back at the crack. He didn’t argue. He simply said, “I’ll take it.”

“No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.”

“Oh.” He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and Carmel’s heart did a quick extra beat. “What happened to Rolo?”

“Quite a bit of money,” Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.

“Just a minute,” the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call, “Hey: Marta.”

“Marta Blanca,” Rinker muttered. “She bakes right.”

“What?” Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.

“Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca . . .”

Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened. He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, “Yeah. Come in.”

Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of
Hustler
magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.

“How much money?” the man asked.

“We need to ask . . .” Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. “Are you Marta?”

“Yeah.” The woman still looked sleepy. “What happened to Rolando?”

“He’s dead,” Carmel said flatly. “Somebody shot him.”

The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: “Dead? He can’t be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.”

“The cops found him this morning,” Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel’s shadow. “Was he a good friend?”

“He was he was he was . . .” she said, shakily.

“Her brother,” the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.

“Half brother,” the woman said. She dropped on a chair. “Ah, Jesus,” she said.

“It was on TV,” Rinker said.

“He said he gave you a tape to hold, and that if anything happened to him, we were supposed to come and get it, because if you keep it, somebody’s gonna show up here and hurt you,” Carmel said, squatting to look the woman
straight in the face. “He gave us an envelope to give you. Money.”

The man said, “We don’t got no tape,” but the woman said, reflexively, “How much?”

They had the tape, Carmel thought, and she felt a wire, tight in her spine, suddenly relax.

“Five thousand dollars,” Carmel said, speaking to the woman. The woman looked up at the man, who said, “I dunno.”

Carmel took the envelope out of her pocket. “If we could get the tape?”

The woman stood up, but the man put a hand out to her. “I think we should look at the tape first,” he said.

“Rolando said not to,” the woman said, nervously dry-washing her hands.

“We need to get that tape . . .”

The woman flipped her hands up, explaining to Carmel, “It’s one of those funny little tapes, you need to get a special holder-thing to run it . . .”

“We’re gonna look at the tape,” the man said, decisively. “If you show up here to give us five thousand . . .” He smiled brightly and said, “Then I bet it’s worth a lot more.”

“We really need the tape. Rolando wasn’t supposed to get it, and the people it belongs to, you really don’t want to mess with,” Rinker said. Her voice was flat, and sounded dangerous to Carmel’s ear. The vibration apparently went past the Latino.

He sneered at her. “What, the fuckin’ Mafia? Or the Colombianos? Fuck those people.” He turned to the woman. “We look at the tape.” And back to Carmel and Rinker, hitching up his pants. “You bitches can leave the envelope here. If it’s enough, we’ll give you the tape. If not, we’ll figure out a price.”

“Goddamnit, this isn’t necessary,” Carmel said, stepping
in front of Rinker. Out at the very edge of her vision she could see Rinker’s gun hand sliding out of her pocket.

“Yeah, it’s fuckin’ necessary,” the Latino man said, his voice rising. “What I fuckin’ say is necessary, that’s what’s fuckin’ necessary, right?” He looked at Marta. “Is that right?”

She looked away, and Carmel shrugged. “If you say so.” She took another sideways step and felt Rinker’s arm come up with the gun.