Penance (16 page)

Louise was sitting behind the reception desk at C. C. Monroe’s campaign headquarters, paging through the latest edition of
Time
magazine, her eyeglasses attached to a gold chain and hanging around her throat like a necklace. She looked up when I entered, set the glasses on her nose and smiled. Apparently she hadn’t heard the bad news. Well, she wasn’t going to hear it from me.

I asked her if she remembered me. She said she did. “Did you ever reach Amy?” she asked.

“No,” I said. I told her I was worried. “When did she leave?”

“About eight forty-five. I guess she wasn’t feeling well.”

“Yet, she came in.”

“Amy is pretty dedicated. She arrived early, maybe a quarter to, and read the papers. It’s the first thing we do, see what they’re saying about Representative Monroe.”

“Then what happened?”

Louise seemed mystified by the question. “Nothing happened,” she said. “Why should something happen?”

“You said she wasn’t feeling well.”

“About, I don’t know, quarter after, she said she was feeling poorly and she was going to take a walk, get some fresh air. She asked me to cover the phones for her. She was quite pale.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know, toward the capitol. Why?”

“Then what happened?”

Louise shrugged in reply. “She came back, made a phone call; she still looked pale and shaky and I said she should go home if she was feeling poorly. She said she would.”

“That was about eight forty-five?”

“Yes.”

“Does Amy have a car? Did she drive?”

“No, she takes the bus.”

“Maybe a boyfriend picked her up,” I asked hopefully.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Louise replied quickly. “At least that’s what she said.”

“Another friend, someone who might have given her a ride home?”

Louise shrugged again. “I don’t think she knows too many people here, she’s from outstate. Anyway, she didn’t wait for a ride. She just left.”

I returned to my car. Sitting behind the steering wheel, I made out a quick timetable, noting the associated events surrounding Amy’s death:

7:45—Amy arrives at campaign headquarters, reads newspapers.

8:10—Amy takes walk.

8:45—Amy returns, calls me at office.

8:45—C. C. calls me at home.

8:50—Amy takes bus to duplex.

9:30—I arrive at State Capitol.

9:45—Amy calls me at office.

11:45—I arrive at coffeehouse.

12:00—C. C. arrives at coffeehouse.

12:00—Landlord leaves duplex.

12:15—Amy calls me at office.

1:30—Landlord returns to duplex.

2:30—C. C. and I leave coffeehouse.

3:00—I reach office, listen to messages.

4:15—I reach duplex.

The most important times were these:

12:15—Amy calls me at office.

1:30—Landlord returns to duplex.

Seventy-five minutes. More than enough time to die.

And where was I while Amy was being killed? I was sitting in a second-rate coffeehouse baby-sitting C. C. Monroe, supplying her with an alibi, waiting for a blackmailer that as far as I could prove didn’t even exist.

I returned to the campaign offices. Louise was still sitting behind the desk.

“Who else knew Amy was going home early?”

“What?”

“Who else knew when Amy left?”

Louise seemed confused. “I don’t know, anybody who worked here, I guess. It wasn’t a secret. Why are you asking me this? What’s going on? Is Amy all right?”

“Did anybody ask for her specifically?”

“No. Yes, well, she did get a phone call right after she left.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t recognize the voice. The caller asked for Amy. I told her she just went home. She thanked me and hung up. What’s the problem?”

“She?”

“Yes, a woman.”

Anne Scalasi and McGaney were entering campaign headquarters as I was exiting; I held the door open for them. I didn’t smile in recognition. They didn’t either.

“Taylor, you mess up this investigation I’ll have your ass,” Anne told me.

I ignored her.

I parked in a slot reserved for the representative from the district where I live and walked quickly from the ramp to the State Office Building. It was late in the day and most of the people who worked there were either gone or on their way out. I punched the blue elevator button and rode up to C. C.’s floor. A woman was standing at a desk near C. C.’s office, pulling a plastic hood over a word processor. I walked past her to C. C.’s door. It was locked.

“She’s not here,” the woman said to my back. “No one’s here.”

“You know where she is?”

“Duluth. She’s campaigning in Duluth.”

“All day?”

“She had a late start, didn’t leave until about three.”

“Marion Senske?”

“Is with her,” the woman answered. “You with the press?”

“Does it show?”

The woman looked me over, moving her eyes from my Nikes to my jeans to my sports jacket and white shirt. “Who else can get away with dressing so casually?”

I walked with her to the elevator.

“What do you do here?”

“I’m a secretary. There are about a dozen of us. We handle five, six reps each.”

“You screen her visitors?”

“C. C.’s? Sure.”

“Did she have any today?”

“No. She didn’t have any appointments scheduled because she wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“Maybe a young woman without an appointment, Amy Lamb, five-three, light brown hair?”

“I really couldn’t say. I only work half days when the legislature isn’t in session; I came in at noon. Representative Monroe wasn’t here when I arrived. And when she did come in, she only stayed a few minutes.”

The elevator doors slid open before we reached them and a member of the State Capitol Security Force stepped out.

“Evening, John,” the woman said.

“Ellen,” he said in reply, nodding to her and then to me. He walked past us down the corridor, shaking the knob on each office door as he went.

“What do you think of Representative Monroe?” I asked the secretary when we were in the elevator going down.

“You gonna quote me?”

“Nope.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“I think she’s a lightweight. If it wasn’t for Marion Senske, she’d be selling cosmetics door-to-door.”

“C. C. Monroe and Marion Senske killed both John Brown and Dennis Thoreau,” I said aloud as I drove I-94, taking the bridge across the Mississippi, heading back to Minneapolis. “They did it to silence them so C. C. could win the election. Amy Lamb figured it out when she read the newspaper articles about them. She confronted C. C. and Marion, but they blew her off. Amy decided to call me; she called the number on my card, my office number. C. C. and Marion beat her to me, calling me at home. They invented the blackmailer to keep me occupied and to provide C. C. with an ironclad alibi. Meanwhile, they sent someone to kill Amy.

“No, stop it! Stop it!”

Don’t fall into that trap
, I told myself.

I’ve seen it happen before; I nearly did it myself a couple of times when I was with Homicide. You want so desperately to be right that you make up the answer first, then arrange the facts to fit. Only, in the end, the answer you invent won’t make you any happier than not knowing at all. The trick is to keep everything in its true size, to not lose perspective. Failure of perspective is what nails you. Keep the crime separate from your life, don’t allow what’s going on around you to affect your judgment, don’t impose anything on the victim or the suspect that comes from somewhere else—keep it clean.

“Suck it up and do it right,” I told the reflection in my rear-view mirror. “Just this one last time, do it right.”

FIFTEEN

D
ETECTIVE WORK
isn’t mathematics—known variables adding up to a logical conclusion. It’s random, like a maze that more often leads to a dead end than to cheese. I’m the rat, scurrying along, running into walls, following my nose until I either find the meal or starve to death.

As soon as I reached my office, I removed the tape from my answering machine and replaced it with a fresh cassette. I sealed the cassette in an envelope, wrapped a thick rubber band around it and put it in my safe.

I fired up my PC and transcribed all my notes onto the hard drive, organizing them as best I could. When I finished I backed away from the machine.
Think about it
, I told myself. If I’d been at home I’d have gone out to the driveway and shot baskets. Instead I found a jazz station on the radio and sang along with Diane Schuur and Harry Connick Jr., cleaning as I sang, dusting all my nooks and crannies. I was particularly careful while dusting my hockey stick, the one Wayne Gretzky broke against the North Stars way back when he played for Edmonton. And the “homer hanky” I waved when the Minnesota Twins won the 1987 and 1991 World Series. And the framed photograph of me and Kirby Puckett—Kirby is the one in the Twins uniform; I’m the one with the stupid grin.

I remembered a few more details, formed a few more thoughts while I dusted, and keyed them into the system. I went to my windows, watched the lights of the city and shoppers strolling the Nicollet Mall.

The Nicollet Mall is our answer to New York’s Fifth Avenue except there is no automobile traffic. Only buses. People meander the winding streets, crossing with impunity, queuing up at the shops and restaurants, listening to the street musicians who play for the change the people toss into their open instrument cases. Periodically the cops will drive the musicians out, but they always return. One musician, a tall black man with tired eyes whom I call “the Saxman,” always plays the same corner, the one where Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat in the air at the beginning of her TV program. I once heard Sonny Rollins in concert and I swear this guy could give him a run. Maybe once, twice a week I’ll drop a few bills into his red felt case and listen to him play. He’ll see me and nod. I nod back. We never speak to each other. What’s there to say? “Man, why are you playing saxophone on a street corner?” “Man, why are you listening?”

The best time to be on the mall is at noon when thousands of young women scramble over the street, trying to get their shopping done before the lunch hour expires. Especially in the spring, when they shed their bulky winter garments and flit from shop to shop like butterflies in search of a place to land. The most attractive young women in America come from Minnesota’s small towns, filling the Twin Cities’ office towers with their freshness and exuberance, with their wholesome and wholly unaffected beauty. You can lean on the lamppost at Seventh and Nicollet and watch them—watch them while the Saxman plays soft and low, watch them as they move through their lives completely unaware of life’s cruelties and dangers. They fill the air with their sweetness; you can breathe it in and hold it like the bouquet of a fine red wine. Sometimes it’s enough to make you cry. And when the Saxman is really on, you watch the young women in their spring dresses and you pray that it will always be this way, that you’ll never find one of them lying spread-eagled on the hood of a car in a dark parking ramp somewhere, her body ripped, her beauty wasted. Like I have.

I thought of Amy Lamb and went back to my cleaning.

I was sitting at the PC, preparing a list of names and on-line directories to drag them through, when my telephone rang. The voice that answered my hello surprised me. It belonged to Cynthia Grey.

“I need to speak with you,” she said.

“Go ’head.”

“In person.”

“I’m busy.”

“It’s important.”

What was important to her wasn’t necessarily important to me, I decided. But I was just about finished in my office and the prospect of going home alone, of facing another lonely night, this one filled with images of Amy Lamb … I asked Cynthia where I should meet her and she directed me to a dive on Franklin near the freeway in Minneapolis.

“For someone who doesn’t drink, Counselor, you seem to spend a lot of time in bars.”

SIXTEEN

L
E CHATEAU
was a blue-collar strip joint located in a neighborhood where men slept in the open using newspapers for blankets and their hands for pillows. Rectangular, with a flat roof and no windows, it bore not even a faint resemblance to a French castle; the only daylight that ever made its way inside seeped through the spy hole in the thick metal door. Above the door a neon sign flashed L
IVE
N
UDES
L
IVE.
Inside another sign read T
ABLE
D
ANCES
$15. D
ON’T BE
O
VERCHARGED.
It was suspended from the ceiling by a thin chain. Beneath it a bored, overweight bouncer collected the cover.