Lucas went that way, thinking about the silver, about the video games, about the way the place was trashed, the credit cards not stolen… Superficially, it looked local, but under that, he thought, it looked like something else. Smith was getting the same bad feeling about it: something was going on, and they didn't know what it was.
Ronnie Lash was tall and thin, nervous-scared-a sheen of perspiration on his coffee-brown forehead, tear tracks on his cheeks. He was neatly dressed in a red short-sleeved golf shirt, tan slacks, and athletic shoes; his hands were in his lap, and he twisted and untwisted them. His mother, a thin woman in a nurse's uniform, clutched a black handbag the size of a grocery sack, stood with him, talking to John Smith.
“They always say, get a lawyer,” Mrs. Lash said. “Ronnie didn't do anything, to anybody, he loved Sugar, but they always say, get a lawyer.”
“We, uh, Mrs. Lash, you've got to do what you think is right,” Smith said. “We could get a lawyer here to sit with Ronnie, we could have somebody here in an hour from the public defender, won't cost you a cent.” Which was the last thing Smith wanted.
He wanted the kid alone, where he could lie to him.
Mrs. Lash was saying, “… don't have a lot of money for lawyers, but I can pay my share.”
Ronnie was shaking his head, looking up at his mother: “I want to get this over with, Ma. I want to talk to these guys. I don't want a lawyer.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “They always say get a lawyer, Ronnie.”
“If you need one, Ma,” the Lash kid said. “I don't need one. Jesus will take care of me. I'll just tell the truth.”
She shook a finger at him: “You talk to them then, but if they start saying stuff to you, you holler for me and we'll get a lawyer up here.” To John Smith: “I still don't understand why I can't come in. He's a juvenile.”
“Because we need to talk to Ronnie-not to the two of you. We need to talk to you, too, separately.”
“But I didn't…” she protested.
“We don't think you did, Mrs. Lash, but we've got to talk to everybody,” Smith said.
His voice had lost its edge, now that he knew he'd be able to sweat Ronnie, without a lawyer stepping on his act.
Lucas leaned against the hallway wall, listening to the exchange, mother and son going back and forth. The Lashes finally decided that Ronnie could go ahead and talk, but if the cops started saying stuff to him…
“I'll call you, Ma.”
At that point, Lucas was eighty-three percent certain that Ronnie Lash hadn't killed anyone, and hadn't helped kill anyone.
They put Mrs. Lash on a settee in the music room and took Ronnie into the parlor, John Smith, a fat detective named Sy Schuber, and Lucas, and shut the door. They put Ronnie on a couch and scattered around the room, dragging up chairs, and Smith opened by outlining what had happened, and then said, “So we've got to ask you, where were you this weekend? Starting at four-thirty Friday afternoon?”
“Me'n some other guys took a bus over to Minneapolis, right after school on Friday,” Lash said. “We were going over to BenBo's on Hennepin. They were having an underage night.”
BenBo's was a hip-hop place. Ronnie and four male friends from school spent the next five hours dancing, hanging out with a group of girls who'd gone over separately: so nine other people had been hanging with Ronnie most of the evening. He listed their names, and Schuber wrote them down. At ten o'clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
“A Cadillac SUV-I don't know exactly what they're called,” Lash said. “It was a couple of years old.”
Coming back to St. Paul, Ronnie had been dropped third, so he thought it was shortly before eleven o'clock when he got home. His mother was still up. She'd bought a roasted chicken at the Cub supermarket, and they ate chicken sandwiches in the kitchen, talked, and went to bed.
On weekends, Lash worked at a food shelf run by his church, which wasn't a Catholic church, though he went to a Catholic school. He started at nine in the morning, worked until three o'clock.
“They don't pay, but, you know, it goes on your record for college,” he said. “It's also good for your soul.”
Schuber asked, “If you're such a religious guy, how come you were out at some hip-hop club all night?”
“Jesus had no problem with a good time,” Ronnie said. “He turned water into wine, not the other way around.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Smith was rubbing his eyeballs with his fingertips. “Ronnie, you got a guy down the block from you named Weldon Godfrey. You know Weldon?”
“Know who he is,” Ronnie said, nodding. He said it so casually that Lucas knew that he'd seen the question coming.
“You hang out?” Smith asked.
“Nope. Not since I started at Catholic school,” Lash said. “I knew him most when I went to public school, but he was two grades ahead of me, so we didn't hang out then, either.”
“He's had a lot of trouble,” Schuber said.
“He's a jerk,” Ronnie said, and Lucas laughed in spite of himself. The kid sounded like a middle-aged golfer.
Smith persisted: “But you don't hang with Weldon or any of his friends?”
“No. My ma would kill me if I did,” Ronnie said. He twisted and untwisted his bony fingers, and leaned forward. “Ever since I heard Aunt Sugar was murdered, I knew you'd want to talk to me about it. It'd be easy to say, 'Here's this black kid, he's a gang kid, he set this up.' Well, I didn't.”
“Ronnie, we don't…”
“Don't lie to me, sir,” Ronnie said. “This is too serious.”
Smith nodded: “Okay.”
“You were saying…” Lucas prompted.
“I was saying, I really loved Aunt Sugar and I really liked Mrs. Bucher.” A tear started down one cheek, and he let it go. “Aunt Sugar brought me up, just like my ma. When Ma was going to school, Aunt Sugar was my full-time babysitter. When Aunt Sugar got a job with Mrs. B, and I started going to Catholic school, I started coming over here, and Mrs. B gave me money for doing odd jobs. Gave me more money than she had to and she told me that if she lived long enough, she'd help me with college.
No way I want those people to get hurt. I wouldn't put the finger on them for anybody, no matter how much they stole.”
Lucas bought it. If the kid was lying, and could consciously generate those tears, then he was a natural little psychopath. Which, of course, was possible.
Lucas felt John Smith sign off, Schuber shrugged, and Lucas jumped in: “So what'd they steal, kid?”
“I don't know. Nobody would let me look,” Lash said.
Lucas to Smith: “Can I drag him around the house one time?”
Smith nodded. “Go ahead. Get back to me.”
“We all done?” Ronnie asked.
“For now,” Smith said, showing a first smile. “Don't book any trips to South America.”
Ronnie's face was dead serious. “No sir.”
Out IN the hallway, Mrs. Lash was standing with her back to the wall, staring at the door. As soon as Lucas stepped through, she asked, “What?”
Lucas shrugged. “Ronnie's offered to show me around the house.”
She asked Ronnie, “They say anything to you?”
“No. They don't think I did it,” Lash said.
To Lucas: “Is that right?”
Lucas said, “We never really did. But we have to check. Is it all right if he shows me around?”
She eyed him for a moment, an always present skepticism that Lucas saw when he dealt with blacks, as a white cop. Her eyes shifted to her son, and she said, “I've got to talk to the police about Sugar. About the funeral arrangements. You help this man, and if he starts putting anything on you, you shut up and we'll get a lawyer.”
“What I want to know, is what these people took,” Lucas told Lash. “We know they took some electronics… a game machine, probably a DVD. What else?”
They started with the TV room. “Took a DVD and an Xbox and a CD player-Mrs. B liked to sit in here and listen to her albums and she figured out how to run the CD player with the remote, and also, it was off here, to the side, so she didn't have to bend over to put a CD in. The DVD was on the shelf below the TV and she couldn't get up if she bent over that far, Aunt Sugar had to do that,” Lash said. He looked in the closet: “Huh. Didn't take the games.” He seemed to look inward, to some other Ronnie Lash, who knew about the streets, and muttered to himself, “Games is same as cash.”