Easy Prey (37 page)

“We don't need one. We just need to scare this guy.”

But Spooner wasn't in. Reed, the bank president, came out to see them and said, “I suspended him. With pay. I think he's innocent, but we don't want a question. I pray to God that he and Alicia understand that.”

“Who's Alicia?”

“His wife,” Reed said.

“We really need to see him. . . . You think he'd be at home?”

“He was earlier today.”

“Do you have his address?” Lucas asked.

Reed frowned, looked at the secretary, and then said, “Give him Billy's address.” Then, with just a hint of defiance: “And call Billy and tell him that these gentlemen are on their way.”

 
 
SPOONER LIVED A block from Highland Park, an affluent residential area ten minutes from the bank. The house was an upright, two-story, white-clapboard place set well back from the street, with oak trees in the front yard. Sloan pulled into the driveway and they got out; as they did, Spooner came to stand in the picture window, and for a second Lucas had the strange feeling that Spooner was somebody else—but who, he didn't know. When Spooner saw them, he headed to the door. A dishwater blonde replaced him in the window. She was wearing a pink blouse and a gold watch.

Spooner met them on the front steps, pulling on a coat as he stepped outside. He shut the door behind him.

“I've talked to my attorney, and he said that I shouldn't talk to you unless he's present,” he said.

“Well . . . shoot,” Lucas said. To Sloan: “A wasted trip.”

Sloan said to Spooner, “What does your attorney think about us talking to you—you not talking back?”

“I'm just not supposed to talk to you.”

“So tell your attorney we're here, and want to set up a meeting. The loan papers we subpoenaed are being reviewed by a bank examiner and an accountant right now, and we need to talk about it,” Sloan said.

“And tell your attorney that we're making the case against Rodriguez—for dope dealing and murder—and the more we look at him, the more we find,” Lucas said. “That the case on Rodriguez is a hell of a lot more serious than a little fudging around with loans, and that you're going to buy a piece of his prison sentence if we don't start seeing some cooperation.”

Spooner had his hands in his pockets, and he flapped his coat panels like wings. “Jeez, jeez, you guys, I don't want this. But you come on like I'm going to jail, what can I do but call my lawyer? So why don't you call him and talk to him? I'll come in. I'll tell you everything I know about Richard, but I've got to have some legal protection.”

“When?” Lucas asked. “When will you come in?”

“Anytime. Jeez . . . When do you want me to come? This afternoon? When? But I want my lawyer there.”

The blond woman was standing in the window with her arms crossed, peering out at them. “Is this your wife?” Sloan asked.

Spooner looked, then said, “Yes, she's really freaking out. My God, my job . . .”

Lucas was thinking: Lane had just gone to see the examiner, and they would want that opinion before they talked to Spooner. “So come in tomorrow. Tomorrow morning. Call your attorney, make an appointment with the chief's secretary. I'll be available anytime you are.”

“Okay.” Spooner shuffled uncertainly, opened the screen door as if to go back in the house, then said, just as Lucas and Sloan were turning away, “You know, I wasn't lying the other day. I still don't think Richard is involved with any of this.”

“You're wrong.”

“You're watching him. You know he's done this?”

“We're all over him,” Lucas said, “and there's not a lot of doubt. The question is, how much do you know? If you know enough . . .”

“I'll tell you everything, but there's just not much that I know. I mean, his loans, they were a little risky, but his record . . . Thinking that he's a dope dealer, I . . .” His mouth opened and closed a few times, as though he were flabbergasted. “I mean, I don't believe it. He's a
nice
guy.”

“Tell me something nice that he's done,” Lucas said.

“Well . . .” Spooner seemed to grope for something, then said, “I can't think of anything specific, but he's been to our
house
, and he's nice to my wife, and he's nice to other people. . . . I mean, he's just a nice guy to sit around and have a drink with.”

“Well,” Lucas said. “It's something to think about.”

 
 
IN THE CAR, Sloan said, “A nice guy.”

“Man, he's dealing dope. People who deal dope know about him—they pick him out of blind photo spreads,” Lucas said. “And if you look at those loans . . . the guy's a goddamn hustler.”

“Even if he is nice,” Sloan said.

“You remember Dan Marks?” Lucas said.

“Now, there was a
nice
guy,” Sloan said.

“Everybody agreed, until the trouble started and they took apart his garbage disposal,” Lucas said.

“I didn't know fingernails would do that,” Sloan said. They thought about fingernails, and headed back into St. Paul.

 
 
RODRIGUEZ WAS AT his office. Another patrol cop had been stuffed into a sport coat and left to keep an eye on him. They found him shifting from foot to foot in the Skyway, eating popcorn out of an oversized box. “Hey, guys,” he said when Lucas and Sloan stepped into the Skyway. He looked at the popcorn box in his hand and said, “Gift from the St. Paul guys. Their precinct is right inside.”

“What's he doing?” Lucas asked.

“Working on his computer. He went away for a while, and I lost him, but he came back.”

“In his car?”

“No, he walked back into the building somewhere. You see the building entrance . . . his office opens off that hallway. When he put on his coat, I ran down, but he was already out the door into the hallway. He was out of sight when I got there, so I went back to the parking garage and waited to see if he was coming out. . . . He never came out, and when I checked again, he was back in the office.”

“So he went someplace inside.”

“Yeah, but it's all hooked into the Skyway through there, so he could have gone anywhere. He was gone for maybe twenty minutes.”

“Put on his coat.”

“Yeah.”

They thought about that for a minute, but nothing occurred to them except that he probably hadn't been on his way to the can.

“Maybe we need a couple more guys,” Lucas said.

“If we're serious about him,” the cop agreed. “As it is, I've got my car parked down on the street, but if he comes out the ramp and turns the wrong way, I'm gonna be pretty obvious doing a U-turn fifteen feet behind him.”

Lucas looked at Sloan and said, “More guys.”

“And soon—my feet are killing me,” the cop said.

 
 
RODRIGUEZ WAS NOT what Lucas expected. He was not Latino: He didn't look Latino, or sound Latino. He didn't sound like a drug dealer, either. Most drug dealers had a streak of macho in them, or if not that, then a bit of backslapper bullshit.

Rodriguez looked and sounded like a white middle-class businessman who'd crawled up out of the working class, sweating the details of whatever kind of business he was in. He was a large guy, thick-necked, thick-waisted, round-shouldered. Maybe he drank too much, and if so, it'd be beer, or if not beer, something serious—vodka martinis with a pearl onion. Lucas had seen the same guy in car salesmen, machine-shop owners, bartenders, union officials. He saw it sometimes in lawyers who came from a working-class background.

And Rodriguez was mad: “What the fuck are you doing, what the fuck do you think you're doing, bustin' my reputation and my bidness dealings? I'll tell you what: I'm getting my lawyer down here right now”—he snatched up a telephone—“and we're gonna add this little patch of harassment to the lawsuit. I don't need no goddamn apartment buildings, because I'm gonna get rich suing the city of Minneapolis for about a billion bucks, and this ain't the first time you Minneapolis cops got nailed doing this kind of harassment bullshit and--”

“You're dealing drugs, Richard,” Lucas said. “We can prove that. We can prove you ran Sandy Lansing: We've got people who will stand up in court and say so. We can prove you got a bunch of bullshit loans that you supported with dope money, and the IRS is gonna come after your ass. We've got all that. The question is, can we get you for killing Alie'e? We know you did it, we just gotta fit the suit to you.”

“Bullshit. I never touched that bitch.” He'd been punching numbers into his phone set, and now he spoke into the phone. “Let me talk to Sam. The cops are here, hassling me. Davenport and some other guy.” He listened for a moment, then thrust the phone at Lucas. “Talk to him.”

“No. We're leaving,” Lucas said. “I just wanted to get a look at your ass. We're coming for you, Richard.”

“Fuck you,” Rodriguez said, and into the phone, “He won't talk to you. They're leaving. . . . Yeah, yeah.”

As Lucas and Sloan went through the office door into the hallway, they heard the phone clattering on the desk, and a minute later Rodriguez was in the hall behind them. “Let me tell you assholes something,” he said. “Let me tell you something. You and me. My goddamn mother was no better'n a whore in Detroit. I don't even know who my daddy is. Even my name is some kind of joke. My old man was probably a Polack or a Litvak or some other fuckin' Eastern European.” He was building steam as the words rattled out of his face. “I got outa Detroit by my fingernails, and I busted my ass every day of my life to get where I am. Now some two-bit fuckin' cops are saying I killed somebody. . . . I'll tell you what, I never killed anybody. I never killed
anybody.
I never even slapped anybody in the face. I just wanted to get out of that fuckin' Detroit and be somebody, and now I am, and you assholes--”

“Enough on the assholes,” Lucas snapped.

“You're an asshole,” Rodriguez said. “Both of you are. So why don't you slap me around a little, or something, huh?” He inched closer to Lucas. “C'mon, hit me, I won't hit you back. It'll just give me a little more to sue you with, you motherfuckers. You're ruining my bidness. . . .”

And suddenly, his face crinkled up and he said, “My bidness. You're ruinin' my bidness.” And he turned around and went back through the door into his office.

“Jesus,” Sloan said, impressed. “The guy was . . . I mean, those were tears.”

“Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head, then shrugged. “Let's go.”

“We're sure he's dealing drugs?” Sloan asked.

“Unless he's got an evil twin.”

 
 
THE RODRIGUEZ INTERVIEW put a blight on the day, and they drove, mostly in silence, back toward Minneapolis. “Drop you at the hospital?” Sloan asked.

“Nah. . . . I'm gonna . . . I don't know what I'm gonna do.”

“What if we're wrong about Rodriguez?”

“I've been sitting here thinking about that,” Lucas said. “But we're not. You know what we're doing? We've gotten to the place where we think dope dealers are automatically subhumans . . . but both of us could think of guys who push a little dope and aren't all that bad as guys. Love their wives.”

“Not a lot of them,” Sloan said. “Most of them are dirt.”

“Not a lot, but some. Some of them are human beings. You know what it reminds me of? Remember when you were interviewing Sandy Lansing's father, and he started off on ‘niggers' and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“He's the flip side of Rodriguez. Here was a guy who coulda played the nice old candy-shop owner on a TV show, but then he opens his mouth, and this bullshit comes out. Rodriguez is a dope dealer, and
his
story is this pathetic struggle to get out of the slums. Fuck, I don't know.” He thought about it for a minute, then said, “What I do know is, Rodriguez is a drug dealer, he was running Sandy Lansing, he was at the party where Sandy Lansing was killed, he denies all of it, and that's the only tie we've got.”

Del called. Sloan handed Lucas his cell phone and asked, irritably, “Why don't you turn on your fuckin' phone?”

“What's going on?” Lucas asked.

“I'm at Boo McDonald's, and I got some seriously bad fuckin' news,” Del said. McDonald was the paraplegic radio and computer monitor.

“All right.”

“You know that little rat who publishes
Spittle?
He's got a new story out, and it names Rodriguez.”

“Yeah, the little jerk. I'm going over to scream at him, scream at his parents. But Rodriguez's name is out.”

 
 
ROSE MARIE WAS livid. “You gotta tell me the truth, Lucas—this isn't the little push you were talking about?”

“No. Nobody got the name from me or any of my people.”

“Not from me, or anybody I know,” Lester said.

“There's gotta be fifty or sixty people in the department who know the names.”

“I've had about nine calls in the last half hour, and what do I say?” Rose Marie asked. “I can't say no, it's not Rodriguez, because it
is.
So I say, I can't comment on an ongoing investigation. And you know what that means?> That means,
yes.
And everybody knows it.”

“The
Spittle
kid's got a leak,” Lucas said. “We know this goddamn place leaks.”

“If I find the fuckin' leak, that guy will find himself out on his ass, and I'll spend the rest of my term trying to fuck his pension,” Rose Marie snarled. “I want you to put that word out—that I'm looking for the guy, and his job and his pension are on the line.”