And Audrey seemed so genuinely nonplussed that Lucas, puzzled-why would she deny it now? Having helped stop him could only be to her credit, now, and he wasn’t around to strike back-backed away, and tried again. "Mrs. McDonald, how often did you visit the Kresge cabin?"
"Why, why…" She struggled to think. "It’s so hard to think with these things they are putting into me."
"You don’t have to answer these questions," Glass said. "And I would recommend that you don’t."
"You suggest that she not tell me how often she went to Kresge’s? Why wouldn’t she tell me that?" Lucas asked.
"Because you might try to make your pig’s ear into a silk purse, and there’s no reason to help you do that," Glass said.
"Maybe six times," she said.
"Mrs. McDonald, you don’t have to answer," Glass said. "In fact, I’m telling you: Keep quiet. Lucas-Chief Davenport-if you have any more questions about Mr. McDonald, ask me first. I may advise Mrs. McDonald to answer them. But she won’t answer any more questions about herself." Glass looked at the stenographer. "Could you read that back to me?"
"Sure, just a minute."
"No need to," Lucas said. "We got it, and I’m outa here. We’ll be checking the McDonald house. And we may be back with more questions." He looked straight into Audrey McDonald’s eyes, held them for a second, then turned and walked out.
Glass caught Lucas in the hallway. "what the hell was that all about?"
Lucas shrugged. "Bumping her along a little."
"Well, Jesus…" Glass scratched his head. "You don’t think she had anything to do with these things, do you? The killings? That old lady?"
"What do you think, counselor?"
"Don’t counselor me, butthead. This is J. B. fuckin’ Glass you’re talking to. What I want to know is, do I have to start thinking about a defense? Or were you just blowing smoke?"
"Mostly smoke," Lucas admitted.
"All right," Glass said. "How you been?"
"Not too bad… You heard about Weather?"
"Yeah, the bomb. Jesus. What do you think, a crazy?" Glass asked.
"We don’t know. We’ve got no theory."
"Shoot. Well, keep your ass down," Glass said, and slapped Lucas on the arm before he started back to Mc-Donald’s room.
"Hey, J. B.-how old do you think your client is, anyway?"
Glass spread his hands. "I never asked. Fifty… two?"
"She’s thirty-eight," Lucas said.
Glass looked at McDonald’s room, then said with a hushed voice, "No way."
"She’s got some hard miles on her, J. B. And she might not be quite what she looks like."
TWENTY
Lucas was sitting in McDonald’s study, flipping through a batch of American Express statements that went back, apparently, forever. Both Wilson and Audrey Mc-Donald were Platinum Card holders, upgraded six years earlier from the Gold. The most interesting statement involved charges on McDonald’s card in the days before Andy Ingall sailed off on Lake Superior and vanished.
"The day before Ingall disappears, McDonald spends four hundred bucks at Marshall Field in Chicago. That night, and the night before, he’s at the Palmer House," Lucas said to Franklin. "That means if he rigged the boat, he had to have done it at least a couple of days beforehand, or, if he came home that day, he had to go right up to Superior and rig the boat the night before. That seems tricky."
Franklin, enormous in a plaid shirt and jeans, had been going through the check stubs and investment papers. "I ain’t finding anything here. It’s all too general. They were pretty well off, though. He’s got a trust account at Polaris with about three-point-four million divided between stocks and bonds, heavy on the bonds. Plus an account at Vanguard worth another three million, all in the stock market. And if I’m reading it right, he’s got another nine hundred thousand in stock at Merrill Lynch. Cash in bank accounts, about twenty-four thousand, plus a money market account with a hundred and seventy thousand… that’s apparently a tax account." He put the papers down, and looked at Lucas. "I don’t know. With that much-that’s gotta be more’n seven million-you think he’d be killing to get even richer?"
"I asked the same thing," Lucas said. "The answer is, he was chasing power, not money. He was a bully in high school, he beat his wife, he killed people to eliminate competition for the promotions. He got off on power trips. He’d be running the lives of a couple thousand people if he took over the bank."
Franklin sighed: "I’d like to get a nice killer sometime."
A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: "You know how you told us to find that Jag?"
Lucas nodded without looking up. According to a file they found in the house, and confirmed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, Wilson McDonald owned a 1969 XKE, which was not in their three-car garage.
"We talked to McDonald’s old man," the uniformed cop said. His name was Lane, and he wanted to be a detective. "The car was in a downtown parking garage, already covered up for the winter. And guess what?"
Lucas looked up now. "What?"
Lane stepped fully into the room, held up a transparent plastic baggie. Inside, a small automatic pistol. "Ta-da."
"I don’t believe it," Lucas said. He took the bag, held it up, and peered at the gun. The caliber, 380, was stamped on the slide. "That’s the one… You touch it?"
"No, of course not. The safety’s on, and we just bagged it. Figured, who knows-if he didn’t shoot it much, maybe it’s got some of the same shells from the Arris or O’Dell deals."
"Get it downtown," Lucas said, handing it back.
"Do I get a medal?" Lane asked.
"Yeah. You’ll get a size eleven medal right in the ass if you don’t get it downtown."
Lane left, and a few minutes later, Franklin, who’d fallen into an odd reverie sitting in an overstuffed chair with the bank statements in his hands, staring at an English hunting print on the wall above McDonald’s desk, suddenly said, "I know what it is."
"I’m glad somebody does," Lucas said.
"You know what’s wrong with this place?"
Lucas looked around. "Looks pretty nice." "There are no fuckin’ books," Franklin said. He got up, walked around the study, checking the shelves full of ceramic figurines. "They even got a couple of bookends, with no books between them-they got these fuckin’ Keebler elves, or whatever they are."
"Hummels," Lucas said. "But they do have a computer." He nodded at the Hewlett Packard crouched on the desk.
"Ain’t a book," Franklin said. "I’m going to look around."
Lucas finished the American Express statements, extracted the statement that showed McDonald in Chicago, and stacked the rest on the desk. Slow going. He’d just gotten up when Franklin came back: "I could find five books in this whole fuckin’ house. A dictionary, a cookbook, a bartender’s guide, and travel books on California and Florida."
"Maybe they took turns reading the dictionary," Lucas said.
"You don’t think it’s weird?"
"The pinking shears thing with Del-that was weird," Lucas said. "No books? That’s not weird, that’s just a little unusual."
"I think it’s weird," Franklin insisted. "People with seven million, they oughta have books." He frowned, and said, "Hey, you know what else?"
He left the room, and Lucas trailed after him. "There’s no CD player. I don’t think they’ve got any CDs. They got no goddamn record player, Lucas."
"Yeah, well…"
Franklin turned and said, "These people are very strange." He looked around the room again, spotted a studio portrait of Wilson and Audrey McDonald smiling down from another knickknack shelf. The photo was so heavily retouched that the two of them looked like puppets. "Look at her eyes," Franklin said. Lucas looked. "They follow you. Man, they are very strange."