“Not a bad deal,” Lucas said approvingly. “What did Jennifer have to say about it?”
“She was unhappy, but she’ll go along. She’ll produce the McGowan interview. Some kid’s reporting it,” Daniel said. “To tell you the truth, I think she’s a little jealous. I think she wishes it were her, not McGowan.”
“Do you remember that awful poem you wrote to me when we first started going out? About having my baby?”
“That wasn’t so awful,” Lucas said, propping himself on one elbow. There was a little edge to his voice. “I thought it was rather intricate.”
“Intricate? It sounded like a bad teenage rock-’n’-roll song from 1959.”
“Look, I know you don’t particularly like my—”
“No, no, no. I loved it. I kept it. I have it taped to the pull-out typewriter tray on my desk, and about once a week I open it and read it. I just read it today, and I was thinking: Well, I really am having his baby.”
Lucas pressed his ear to Jennifer’s bare midriff.
“Am I supposed to be hearing anything yet?”
“Are you listening really closely?”
“Yeah.” He pressed down harder.
“Well, if you listen very closely . . .”
“Yeah?”
“You can probably hear that Budweiser I had before bed.”
Lucas arrived at the lake in time to watch the sun go down Saturday evening. Carla was gone on the bike, but arrived a half-hour later with a small bag of groceries and a bottle of red wine. Lucas spent Saturday night and Sunday, and most of Sunday night at the cabin. At two in the morning he kissed Carla on the lips and drove back to the Cities, hitting his own bed a little after five. He was late for the project meeting again.
“Whatever happened to the list of people we got from the Rice woman?” Lucas asked. Monday morning in the chief’s office. Half the detectives looked out of focus, tired from another weekend’s overtime. “You know, when we were checking about the maddog’s gun and who bought it from her husband?”
“Well, we checked everybody she could remember,” said Sloan, who had done the Rice interview.
“Nothing?”
“We didn’t actually interview everybody. We checked them. If they were way off the profile, we let it go. You know, women, old men, boys, we let them go. We did interviews with everybody that might come close to the profile, and came up dry. We were going to go back to the rest, but everything slowed down when Jimmy Smithe started to look good. Everything got thrown on that.”
“We should go back for interviews with everybody,” Lucas said, turning to Daniel. “We know that goddamn gun is critical. Maybe somebody bought it and resold it. I say we check women, boys, old men, everybody.”
“Get on it,” Daniel told Anderson. “I assumed it was done.”
“Well . . .”
“Just get it done.”
Lucas sat on the attic floor.
“Wednesday. I didn’t think we’d make it to Wednesday,” said the surveillance man. “He’s overdue.”
“Cold in here,” Lucas said. “You can feel the wind coming through.”
“Yeah. We keep the door open but there aren’t any heating vents. We’re thinking about bringing up a space heater.”
“Good idea.”
“Thing is, downtown doesn’t want to pay for it. And we don’t want to get stuck for the money.”
“I’ll talk to Daniel,” Lucas said.
“Car coming,” said the second surveillance man.
The car rolled slowly down the street, paused beneath them, and then kept going, around the corner.
“Get the plate?”
“Guy at the end of the street’s doing that, one of the cars. He’s got a starlight scope.”
A radio sitting beside the mattress suddenly burped.
“Get him?” the surveillance man asked.
“Yeah. Neighbor.”
“He slowed down outside her house.”
“Guy’s sixty-six, but I’ll note it,” said the radio voice.
“How’s it going?”
“Cold,” the car man said.
They went back to waiting.
“Action stations,” the surveillance man said twenty minutes later. “I get the scope.”
Lucas watched through binoculars. McGowan was wearing a frothy pink negligee and tiny matching bikini pants. She moved back and forth behind the eight-inch gap in the curtain, more tantalizing than any professional stripper.
“She’s gotta know,” the surveillance cop said.
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “I think she’s just so used to that gap in the curtains that she doesn’t notice—”
“Bullshit. Look at that, when she stretches. She’s showing it off. But she never shows all of it. She walks around without a bra, but you never catch her without her pants, even when she’s been in taking a shower. She’s teasing us. I say she knows . . .”
They were still arguing about it when the maddog did the cripple.
CHAPTER
18
The maddog got a flier at the county clerk’s office, a piece of pink paper handed to him as he walked out the door. He read it as he stood in front of the bank of elevators.
There was no attempt at a drawing and no real description. They said he was white-collar, possibly connected with the Hennepin County Government Center or Minneapolis City Hall. Fair-skinned. Southwestern accent, possibly Texas. Once seen dressed as farmer, but that was probably a disguise.
The maddog folded the paper and stood watching the lights on the elevator indicator. When it came, he stepped inside, nodded to the other two occupants, turned, and stared at the door. He hadn’t thought that he might have an accent. Did he? In his own ears, he sounded like everybody else. He knew talking to Davenport would be a mistake. Now he might pay for it.
The maddog’s mind slipped easily into the legal mode. What could they make of it? So he had an accent. Hundreds of people did. He was white-collar. So was most of Minneapolis. He frequently passed through the Government Center. So did ten thousand people a day, some with business in the Center, some passing through in the skyways. A conviction? No chance. Or little chance, anyway. Some leeway must be given for the vagaries of juries. But would he take a jury? That was something to be contemplated. If they got him, he could ask for a nonjury trial. No judge would convict him on what they had on the flier. But what else did they have? The maddog bit his lip.
What else?
As he worried, the need for another was growing. The law student’s face floated before him, against the stainless-steel doors. He was so taken with the vision of her that when the doors opened, he started, and the woman standing beside him glanced at him curiously. The maddog hurried off the elevator, through the skyways, and back to his office. His secretary was out somewhere. As he passed her desk, he saw the corner of a pink slip of paper under a file folder. He paused, glanced around quickly, and pulled it out. A flier. He pushed it back in place. Where was she?
He went inside his office, dropped his briefcase beside the desk, sat down, and cupped his face in his hands. He was still sitting like that when there was a tentative knock at the door. He looked up and saw his secretary watching him through the vertical glass panel beside the door. He waved her in.
“Are you okay? I saw you sitting like that . . .”
“Bad day,” the maddog said. “I’m just about done here. I’m going to head out home.”
“Okay. Mr. Wexler sent around the file on the Carlson divorce, but it looks pretty routine,” she said. “You won’t have to do anything on it before the end of the week anyway.”
“Thanks. If you don’t have anything to do, you might as well take the rest of the day,” he said.
“Oh. Okay,” she said brightly.
On the way out to his car, he thought about the innocent conversation. He had said, “Bad day.” He had said, “I’m just about done here, I’m going to head out home.” That’s what he thought he had said. Had his secretary heard, “Bayed day-ee”? Had she heard “Ah’m” instead of “I’m”? Was “head out” a Texas expression, or did they use that here?