"Cops say you found a bundle of money in there," Letty said to Del. "That right?"
"Just a rumor," Del said.
Dickerson, looking from Lucas to Del, asked, "What're you guys doing next?"
"Gonna talk to St. Paul, and maybe wander around some more," Lucas said. He looked back at the house. "This thing is getting interesting."
7
FREE OF LETTY and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. "Moose Bay?" Del asked.
"That's a big topic," Lucas said. "Why don't we talk to this Calb guy?"
They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.
Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clustered around the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, "What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?"
"I don't know… " Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, "Can we help you fellas?"
"We're with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. "We need to talk to Gene Calb."
"That's me… I'll be with you in just a second." He turned to one of the other men. "I don't know, Larry. I'd go after it with a grinder, and if you don't get good metal… we'll cut another piece off a wreck and weld 'er in. There's a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work."
"Looks like it's rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it," said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.
"Well, cut through it and find out."
Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. "The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver's side, just the passenger side. It's not rust, exactly, but it's rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years."
One of the other men said, "Cat pee? Cat pee'll rot holes in hardwood floors."
"Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?" Calb shook his head once more. "If I were you, Larry, I'd keep my hands out of it."
"You sure as shit can count on that," said the man called Larry.
TO LUCAS AND Del, Calb said, "C'mon this way, fellas. We'll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon? I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?"
"We're doing a little back-checking," Lucas said. "How well did you know Mr. Cash?"
They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.
"He worked for me," Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets-the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. "We weren't friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver's job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I'm not sure he was that much reformed. With what's happened, it looks like he wasn't."
"What do you think happened?" Del asked.
Calb said, "Well-you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn't none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it's gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that's what it's gotta be. Somebody back there."
"How about Jane Warr?" Lucas asked. "How well did you know her?"
"Not real well. She didn't hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn't much-she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I'm sure you know."
"So… were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?"
"They bought it, cheap-thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he'd once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it."
"There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino," Del said.
"I wouldn't know about that," Calb said, shaking his head. "Like I said, she wasn't that bright, but I don't think she'd be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That's why he was in jail. If he'd found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum."
"Mmm."
Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. "Then there's the whole thing about Joe. Joe's gone-and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn't. He was from KC, too."
"You think it might be possible that Joe did this? That there was some kind of an argument, and for some reason… "
Calb shook his head. "Nah. To tell you the truth, Joe just didn't have the grit to do this. Not hanging them, where he had to look them in the face."
"So maybe he just took off," Del said. "Or maybe… "
"Something else I thought of, after the other BCA boys was here," Calb continued. "If this whole thing didn't come out of the Kansas City jail-and that's gotta be it, in my opinion, but if it didn't-then you oughta get up to Moose Bay. That would be the place to look, along with KC."
"Why?" Del asked.
"The word around town is that Letty West saw them out there at the stroke of midnight," Calb said. "Is that right?"
Lucas nodded. "Close to that."
"Jane worked the three-to-eleven shift. She couldn't have got home much before half-past eleven, and last night, with that ground blizzard, it was probably later. If he took them up there to hang them at midnight, he must have grabbed her the minute she got home. So he was waiting for her-or followed her home."
Lucas and Del both nodded. They talked for another five minutes, and Lucas got the impression that Calb was genuinely confused by the killings. Cash had had some words from time to time with coworkers, but never anything serious, nothing that had even led to a confrontation. "Just that, you know, mechanics and guys like Deon don't mix. He thought he was a basketball star. One of those bad gangsta dudes, whatever they call them. That's what he thought."
OUTSIDE, WALKING BACK across the highway, Lucas said, "I thought about her getting off at eleven, and being hanged at twelve."
"I did too," Del said. "I was saving it up."
"Pig's ass," Lucas said. "Anyway, somebody thought of it."
"Maybe Warr was the target," Del said. "We've been doing nothing but talking about Cash."
"Got to get on her, get some background going. I'll talk to Dickerson."
"Gotta get up to Moose Bay," Del said. "How's the heater in the Olds?"
"Fine."
"Then let's take your car. Mustang heater wouldn't soften up butter."
MOOSE BAY WAS run by the Black River band of the Chippewa, on the banks of a river whose water was stained so absolutely black by decomposing vegetation that when it froze over, even the ice looked black. From Cash's house to the res was twenty-four minutes, nine minutes down to Armstrong, then another fifteen minutes through Armstrong and out the county road to the casino.