"I don't know where he hangs out, I just knew him from the neighborhood when I was working dope five years ago," Carrigan said uncertainly. "I could call a guy, Alex Drucker, works dope up here."
"Get him," Lucas said.
Carrigan glanced at his watch and chuckled. "Four-thirty. Drucker's been in bed about two hours now. He'll like this."
As Carrigan went back to his car, one of the crime-scene crew came over and said, "No cigarettes from tonight, just old bits and pieces."
"Forget it," Lucas said. "We're told she was dumped an hour ago. Might check the street from here back to… Nah, fuck it. We know who did it."
"We'll check," the crime-scene guy said. "Camels…"
"Unfiltered," Lucas said. He turned to the mother. "We need to send Dex downtown with an officer to make a statement, and maybe get him to describe this guy for an artist. We'll bring him back. Or, if you want, you can ride along."
"Ride along?"
"If you want."
"I better do that," she said. "He's not in trouble?"
"He's not in trouble."
Carrigan came back. "Nobody at Drucker's place. No answer."
"The guy's known around here-why don't we walk down to the corner and ask?"
Carrigan looked down to the corner, then back to Lucas and Connell. "You two are pretty white to be askin' favors from them."
Lucas shrugged. "I'm not going to sweat them; I'm just gonna ask. Come on."
They walked down toward the corner, and Connell asked, "Why can't I show him the picture? He could give us a confirmation."
"I don't want to contaminate his memory. If we get a sketch out of him, I'd rather have it be what he remembers, not what he saw when you showed him a picture."
"Oh." She thought about it for a minute, then nodded.
As they reached the corner, the crowd went quiet, and Carrigan pushed right up to it. "Some white dude just cut open a little girl and dumped her body in the bushes back there," Carrigan said conversationally, without preamble. "A guy named Lawrence Wright saw him. We don't want to hassle Lawrence, we just want a statement: if anybody's seen him, or if he's here?"
"That girl, black or white?" a woman asked.
"White," Lucas said.
"Why you need to talk to Lawrence? Maybe he didn't see nothin'."
"He saw something," Carrigan said. "He was right next to this white dude."
"The guy is nuts," Lucas said. "He's like that guy over in Milwaukee, killed all those boys. This has got nothing to do with nothing, he's just killing people."
A ripple of talk ran through the crowd, and then a woman's voice said, "Lawrence went to Porter's." Somebody else said, "Shush," and the woman's voice said, "Shush, your ass, he's killing little girls, somebody is."
"White girls… that don't make no difference… still white… What'd Lawrence do…?"
"We better get going," Carrigan said quietly. "Before somebody runs down to Porter's and tells Lawrence we're coming."
Lucas and Connell rode with Carrigan. "Porter's is an after-hours place down on Twenty-ninth," Carrigan said. "We oughta get a squad to do some blocking for us."
"Wouldn't hurt," Lucas said. "The place'd still be open?"
"Another fifteen minutes or so. He usually closes about five in the summertime."
They met the squad four minutes later at a Perkins restaurant parking lot. One patrolman was black, the other white, and Lucas talked to them through the car windows, told them who they were looking for. "Just hold anybody coming out… You guys know where it is?"
"Yeah. We'll slide right down the alley. As soon as you see us going in, though, you better get in the front."
"Let's do it," Carrigan said.
"How bad might this get?" Connell asked.
Carrigan glanced at her. "Shouldn't be bad at all. Porter's is an okay place; Porter goes along. But you know…"
"Yeah. Lucas and I are white."
"Better let me go first. Don't yell at anybody."
They hesitated at the corner, just long enough for the squad to cut behind them, go halfway down the block, then duck into the mouth of the alley. Carrigan rolled up to the front of a 1920s-style four-square house with a wide porch. The porch was empty, but when they climbed out of the car, Lucas could hear a Charles Brown tune floating out through an open window.
Carrigan led the way up the walk, across the porch. When he went through the door, Lucas and Connell paused a moment, making just a little space, then followed him through.
The living room of the old house had been turned into a bar; the old parlor had a half-dozen chairs in it, three of them filled. Two men and two women sat around a table in the living room to the left. Everything stopped when Lucas and Connell walked in. The air was layered with tobacco smoke and the smell of whiskey.
"Mr. Porter," Carrigan was saying to a bald man behind the bar.
"What can I do for you gentlemen?" Porter asked, both hands poised on the bar. Porter didn't have a license, but it wasn't usually a problem. One of the men at the table moved his chair back an inch, and Lucas looked at him. He stopped moving.
"One of your patrons saw a suspect in a murder-a white man who killed a white girl and dumped her body up in the park," Carrigan said, his voice formal, polite. "Guy's a maniac, and we need to talk to Lawrence Wright about it. Have you seen Lawrence?"
"I really can't recall. The name's not familiar," Porter said, but his eyes drifted deliberately toward the hall. A door had a hand-lettered sign that said Men.
"Well, we'll get out of your way, then," Carrigan said. "I'll just take a leak, if you don't mind."
Lucas had moved until his back was to a Grain Belt clock and where he could still block the door. His pistol was clipped to his back belt line, and he put one hand on his hip, as if impatient about waiting for Carrigan. A voice said, "Cops out back," and another voice asked, "What's that mean?"
Carrigan stepped down the hall, went past the door, then stepped back and pulled it open.
And smiled. "Hey," he called to Lucas, smiling, surprised. "Guess what? Lawrence is right here. Sittin' on the potty."
A whine came out of the room: "Shut that door, man. I'm doing my business. Please?"
The voice sounded like something from a bad sitcom. After a moment of silence, somebody in the living room laughed, a single, throaty, feminine laugh, and suddenly the entire bar fell out, the patrons roaring. Even Porter put his forehead down on his bar, laughing. Lucas laughed a little, not too much, and relaxed.
Lawrence was thin, almost emaciated. At twenty, he'd lost his front teeth, both upper and lower, and he made wet slurping sounds when he spoke: "… I don't know, slurp, it was dark. Blue and white, I think, slurp. And he had a beard. Shitkicker wheels on the truck."
"Real big?"
"Yeah, real big. Somebody say he had running boards? Slurp. I don't think he had running boards. Maybe he did, but I didn't see any. He was a white guy, but he had a beard. Dark beard."
"Beard," Connell said.
"How come you're sure he was a white guy?"
Lawrence frowned, as if working out a puzzle, then brightened. "Because I saw his hands. He was takin' a pinch, man. He was tootin', that's why I looked at him."
"Coke?"
"Gotta be," Lawrence said. "Ain't nothing else looks like that, you know, when you're trying to toot while you're walkin' or doin' something else. Slurp. You just get a pinch and you put it up there. That's what he was doin'. And I saw his hands."
"Long hair, short?" Connell asked.
"Couldn't tell."
"Bumper stickers, license plates, anything?" asked Lucas.
Lawrence cocked his head, lips pursed. "Nooo, didn't notice anything like that, slurp."
"Didn't see much, did you?" said Carrigan.
"I told you he was tootin'," Lawrence said defensively. "I told you he was white."
"Big fuckin' deal. That's Minneapolis outside, if you ain't noticed," Carrigan said. "There are approximately two point five million white people walking around."
"Ain't my fault," Lawrence said.
Red-and-white truck, or maybe blue-and-white, maybe with silver running boards, but then again, maybe not. Cokehead. White. A beard.