Easy Prey (13 page)

“And?”

“It's this other chick, Sandy Lansing. I talked to the manager at Brown's Hotel, and it turns out Lansing wasn't exactly a big deal. She was more like a female bellhop. She'd take rich people up to their rooms and show them around.”

“Not an executive?” Lucas said.

“No. She was making maybe twenty-five thousand a year. Enough to starve on. But, man, I talked to the guys from Homicide who were down at her apartment. She's got the cool clothes, she's got a decent car—Porsche Boxter?—and she hung out with all these rich people. And held her end up financially. She's gotta have money coming in from somewhere, but I can't find it.”

“It ain't coming from her old man,” Lucas said. “I just saw him. He looked like he doesn't have two dimes to rub together.”

“That's the impression I got,” Lane said. “So I was thinking. . . . She works at this hotel, greeting people. Maybe she's on the corner?”

“Any busts?”

“Not a thing. But at that level, it's more by introduction,” Lane said. “Some big sports guy comes through town, or big TV guy, and you go hang out. Then you go back to his hotel room and later you get a
gift.
Maybe the hotel knows, maybe not.”

“So let's get her friends, and push a little. Find out where the money came from.”

“I thought maybe you could do the hotel end,” Lane said.

“Me? I'm a deputy chief of police.”

“Yeah, but the hotel's assistant manager in charge of keeping things right is an old pal of yours.”

“Who's that?” Lucas asked.

“Derrick Deal.”

“You gotta be shitting me.”

“I shit you not, Deputy Chief of Police.”

 
 
ON THE WAY out of the building, Lucas passed Rose Marie Roux puffing down the hall. “ ‘Muff -Divers' Ball?'” she asked, hooking his arm.

“That's what the headline said,” he answered, mildly flustered.

“How many euphemisms do men have for the female sexual organ?” she asked.

“That's not a place you wanna go,” Lucas said.

“How long before we catch the guy?”

“Another place--”

She nodded. “--that I don't want to go.”

 
 
DERRICK DEAL HAD once been an assistant county assessor, more or less. His actual position was bagman for a city council cabal that was selling cut-rate property assessments. The cabal ran into trouble when Deal tried to hit up a machine-shop owner, who happened to be the uncle of a vice cop. The cop did some cop shit and got a tape of Deal soliciting a payoff.

Then the cop made a mistake. He believed that if he simply nailed Deal, that Deal's brother assessors would, in turn, punish his uncle by running up his assessments, even as Deal went off to six weeks in jail. So instead of arresting him, the cop let Deal listen to the tape, and told him to lay off. Deal misinterpreted the threat and ran to his city council protectors. They went to the chief—this was three chiefs ago—who squashed the vice cop like a bug. The vice cop found himself working traffic management on construction sites.

Then
he
rang in his brother cops—notably Lucas. Lucas set up a sting operation and Deal went to jail for nine months. His city council employers managed to slide, and Deal's brother assessors did the expected number on the machine-shop owner, whose taxes went up fifty percent.

When Deal got out of jail, he tried selling cars and then houses, but wasn't good at it. His skills lay in bureaucracy and blackmail, not sales. Lucas heard that he'd gone to California, and until Lane mentioned his name, assumed he was still there.

“Derrick Deal?” he asked himself as he walked across town.

 
 
BROWN'S HOTEL WAS a brick building a block from the IDS tower. From the outside, it barely looked like a hotel; you had to
know
it was there. Lucas nodded at the white-gloved doorman, who held the door for him, and turned right across the plush red carpet, around a circular seat with a spray of out-of-season gladiolas in the center, to the reception desk. A neat young woman stood behind the desk. She was black, with delicate bones in her face; she wore a conservative suit and a silver-and-turquoise necklace with small oval stones. “Yes, sir?”

“I need to see Mr. Deal? Derrick Deal?” Lucas said.

“Can I tell him who's calling?”

“No.” Lucas smiled to soften the answer, slipped his ID from his pocket, and showed it to her. “This is sort of a surprise. If you could just show me where he is?”

She reached for a phone. “I'll call the manager on duty.”

Lucas stretched across the desk and put his hand on the phone. “Please don't do that. Just show me where Mr. Deal works.”

“I'll get in trouble.” Her lip trembled.

“No, you won't,” Lucas said. “Believe me.”

She looked both ways, saw no help, touched her lip with her tongue, and said, “He's in his office . . . down the hall.” She looked to her right, a long narrow hallway off the lobby.

“Show me the door.”

She looked both ways again, as if the manager might spring out of the red carpet, and finally said, “This way.” She came out from behind the desk and started down the hall, walking swiftly. When they were out of sight of the lobby, she slowed. “Is he in trouble?”

“I have a question for him.”

“If he's not in trouble, he should be,” she said.

“Really?” Lucas asked.

“He's a jerk.”

“Wait a minute,” Lucas said quietly. They stopped in the hallway. “What's a jerk?”

“He hassles people,” she said.

“For money? Sex? Dope?”

“Not dope,” she said.

“You've had to fight him off?” Lucas asked.

“Not exactly. I'm a little too dark for him. And I told him that if he hassled me, my brother would cut off his testicles.”

“He believed you?”

“Yes. My brother came over and showed him the knife,” she said.

“Ah.”

“But we have all these little maids, a lot of them are Mexican, and maybe they don't have papers. It's this tight economy is the reason they hire them.”

“He puts the bite on them?”

“Yes. Sometimes sex—there are usually a few empty rooms around. Mostly it's money. The guests leave tips for the maids, ten dollars or twenty dollars. He might take out fifty dollars a day, all told. The maids are afraid to turn him down. All he has to do is make an anonymous phone call. He lets them know it.”

“Maybe they should bring their brothers up from Mexico,” Lucas said.

She shook her head. “Easy to say.”

“I know,” Lucas said. “All right. I'll go ask him my question, and then maybe later we'll figure out something to slow him down a little.”

“The hotel won't fire him,” she said. “He's very good at what he does.”

“Which is?”

“He fixes things. He gets tickets for shows and basketball games. If somebody gets sick, he gets a doctor.”

“Anybody could do that,” Lucas said.

“I mean, if a rock star gets sick . . .”

“Because he put something up his nose?”

“Or whatever. Or if there's a little lover's quarrel, and somebody gets beat up or cut up . . .”

“Okay,” Lucas said. “We could still have a talk with him about the maids.”

 
 
LUCAS WAITED UNTIL the receptionist was well back toward her desk before he quietly opened Deal's office door. The office was a collection of six shoulder-high fabric cubicles; the clacking sound of a computer keyboard came from the far corner.

Deal was a balding man with a long nose and heavy, petulant lips that he thrust in and out as he peered at his computer screen. He was wearing a dark sport coat, and sprinkles of dandruff decorated the shoulders and lapels. He was intent. He never saw Lucas coming.

Lucas picked up a visitor's chair from a neighboring cubicle and sat it in the aisle just outside Deal's. He sat down heavily, and now Deal, for the first time, realized he wasn't alone. He jerked around, pulled back, startled.

“'Lo, Derrick,” Lucas said, smiling. “Thought you were in California.”

Deal pulled himself together. “Goddamnit, Davenport, you scared the shit outa me. What do you want?”

“You heard about the murder? Sandy Lansing?”

“Nothing to do with us,” Deal muttered. He picked a piece of paper up from the desktop, squinted at it, and slipped it into a desk drawer, out of sight.

Lucas shrugged. “You know how it is, Derrick. We gotta nail everything down. And this Lansing chick, she sorta puzzles us. She's got no money—she's pulling down twenty-five from this place. But she's driving a Porsche, she's dressing outa those Edina boutiques . . .”

“We give her five grand a year for clothes,” Deal said.

“Party dresses?”

“No. Not party dresses,” Deal said. He turned casually to his computer screen, which showed a spreadsheet, pushed a couple of keys, and the screen blanked out. “The kind of dresses you see on the other women here. Upper-middle-class conservative matron clothes.”

“We thought maybe she was getting the extra money from taking the clothes
off.
You know, the matron dresses.”

Deal shook his head. “No.”

“Come on, man,” Lucas said. He waved his hand, meaning,
Look at this place.
“You got all kinds of jocks and movie stars and singers and theater people and rich guys. . . . I mean, what does a fixer guy like you do when one of them wants a blow job?”

“I tell him to go blow himself,” Deal said.

“Derrick--”

Deal put up his hands. “Listen, man. She was not fucking anybody for money. Not here, anyway. I knew about the car, I even asked her about it. She said something like, ‘I got my own money.' I figured it came from Daddy and she was working until she got married.”

“She was not a rich kid,” Lucas said.

Deal shook his head. “So maybe you should do some real investigation, so you can stop hassling innocent people.”

“Derrick, goddamnit, I'm trying to
like
you, but you make it so hard,” Lucas said. He put his hands on the arms of the visitor's chair, ready to stand up. “We know she's getting some extra cash, and sex is the only thing we can think of. I'd hate to think that Brown's is some kind of high-class bordello, but we're gonna have to send some people around to look at the records. Can we use your name as a recommendation?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Deal said. He picked up a telephone, punched in four numbers, listened to it ring once, then again, and then said, “Jean, could you come down here for a second?”

He hung up and said, “You oughta look into dope.”

“Why?”

“Because half the time, when Sandy came in, which was usually late in the afternoon, she was hungover. From partying. She was a party girl, and she had a real bad coke habit.”

“You think she was selling?” Lucas asked.

Deal opened his mouth, as if with a reflexive response, but his eyes flickered and he changed direction. “I don't know about selling. But she was using. And she wasn't getting any extra cash here, above the board or below it.”

He was lying about something, Lucas thought. He'd seen it in Deal's eyes, the momentary flicker. The office door opened, and they both turned toward it. A moment later, a young woman looked down the aisle to Deal's cubicle and saw Lucas. “Mr. Deal?”

Deal stood up and stepped past Lucas. “Yeah, Jean, down here.”

The woman walked toward them, and Lucas suddenly realized that she was extraordinarily good-looking. She was a little heavy, round, and had soft brown hair spiked with blond strands, a lush face with placid, pale blue eyes, and a slightly rolled underlip. She wore just a dab of lipstick. Her business suit was as conservative as the receptionist's, but with a difference—hers was cut deeply enough in front to show a soft slice of cleavage. She was, Lucas thought, maternal and sexy at the same time.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Would you take this pencil out to India at the front desk?” He handed her a yellow pencil.

She was puzzled, but compliant. “Yes, sir.”

When she was gone, Deal sat down again and said, with just a touch of sarcasm, “
That's
why Sandy Lansing wasn't dating our customers.”

Looking after the woman, Lucas thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “She wasn't enough.”

“Not nearly enough, for this place,” Deal said, comfortably. “And there are a couple more like Jean. Even better than Jean. Not that I'd know anything about private arrangements between staff members and our guests.” He folded his hands across his stomach and leaned back in his office chair. “Anything else, Officer Davenport?”

Lucas leaned into him, smiled, reached out, and tapped him on the kneecap. “Yeah. Lansing and drugs. Where was she getting them?”

“I don't know.” He squealed it; he sounded like a startled pig. “I don't know anything about any drugs, I don't do drugs. You know that.”

“Yeah, right.” Deal was lying about something. “You do assessments.”

“Well. I would be, if you hadn't fucked me,” he said. “Now I do hotels.”

“Like it better?”

“No,” Deal said. “I don't. I used to
be
somebody. Now . . .” He looked up between the rows of cubicles. “I'm in a goddamn rat cage.”

10

NOT MUCH MORE to do: There were cops out everywhere, working on everybody. Writing biographies on the party people; matching their stories, one against the next. Outside, TV trucks were beginning to pile up at the curb. He called Rose Marie, checked out, and went home.