“Of course not,” Anson said. “I could be investigated by the FBI.” They both laughed, and Lucas asked, “You’re working the Ford murder?” Anson perked up a bit, punched the computer out, swiveled his chair around. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“The governor is a friend of Alyssa Austin’s,” Lucas said. He propped himself on an empty desk. “He’s squeezing me to talk to a couple of people. I don’t want to step on your toes.”
“No skin off my butt,” Anson said, yawning and stretching. “You oughta mention it to Whistler.”
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.”