Rules of Prey (25 page)

When Lucas pulled in, Carla was sitting in the yard, wrapped in an old cardigan sweater with a drawing pad in her lap. He got out of the car, walked through the dry leaves, deep-breathing the crystalline North Woods air.

“Great day,” he said. He dropped beside her and looked at the pad. She was drawing the forms of the fallen leaves with sepia chalk on blue-tinted paper. “And that’s nice.”

“I think—I’m not sure—but I think I’m going to get the best weavings I ever did out of this stuff,” Carla said. She frowned. “One of the problems with the form is that the best of it is symbolic but the best art is antisymbolic.”

“Right,” Lucas said. He flopped back in the leaves and looked up at the faultless blue sky. A light south wind rippled the surface of the lake.

“Sounds like baloney, doesn’t it?” she asked, smiling, her face crinkling at the corners of her eyes.

“Sounds like business,” he said. He turned his head and saw a cluster of small green plants pushing up through the dead leaves. He reached out and picked a few of the shiny green leaves.

“Close your eyes,” he said, holding his hand out toward her and crumbling the leaves in his fingertips. She closed her eyes and he held the crumbled leaves beneath her nose. “Now, sniff.”

She sniffed and smiled and opened her eyes. “It’s the candy,” she said in delight. “Wintergreen?”

“Yeah. It grows all over the place.” She took the crumbled
leaves from him and sniffed again. “God, it smells like the outdoors.”

“You still want to go back?”

“Yes,” she said, a note of regret strong in her voice. “I have to work. I’ve got a hundred drawings and I have to start doing something with them. And I called my gallery in Minneapolis and I’ve sold a couple of good pieces. I’ve got money waiting.”

“You could almost start making a living at this,” Lucas said wryly.

“Almost. They tell me a man from Chicago, a gallery owner, saw some of my pieces. He wants to talk to me about a deal. So I’ve got to get going.”

“You can come back. Anytime.”

Carla stopped drawing for a minute and patted his leg. “Thanks. I’d like to come back in the spring, maybe. You’ve no idea what this month has done for me. God, I’ve got so much work, I can’t even fathom it. I needed this.”

“Go back Tuesday night?”

“Fine.”

Lucas rolled to his feet and walked down to the dock, looked at his boat. It was a fourteen-foot fiberglass tri-hull with a twenty-five-horsepower Johnson outboard mounted on the back. A small boat, wide open, just right for fishing musky. There was a scum line around the hull. The boat had not been used enough during the fall.

He walked back up the bank. “I’m going to have to take the boat out before we leave,” he said. “It hasn’t been getting much use. The maddog has killed the fall.”

“And I’ve been too busy walking in the woods to go out on the water,” Carla said simply.

“Want to go fishing? Now?”

“Sure. Give me ten minutes to finish this.” She looked up and across the lake. “God, what a day.”

In the afternoon, after lunch, they walked back into the woods. Carla carried the pistol on her belt. At the base of the hill, firing at the cutbank from twenty yards, she put
eighteen consecutive shots into an area the size of a large man’s hand. They were dead center on the silhouette she’d sketched in the sand. When she fired the last round, she put the muzzle of the pistol to her lips and nonchalantly blew off the nonexistent smoke.

“That’s decent,” Lucas said.

“Decent? I thought it was pretty great.”

“Nope. Just decent,” Lucas repeated. “If you ever have to use it, you’ll have to make the decision in a second or so, maybe in the dark, maybe with the guy rushing you. It’ll be different.”

“Jeez. What’s the use?”

“Wait a minute,” Lucas said hastily. “I don’t mean to put you down. That’s really pretty good. But don’t get a big head.”

“Like I said, pretty great.” She grinned up at him. “What do you think of the holster? Pretty neat, huh?” She had sewn a rose into the black nylon flap.

Much later that night she blew in his navel and looked up and said, “This could be the best vacation I ever had. Including the next couple of days. I want to ask you a question, but I don’t want to ruin it.”

“It won’t. I can’t think of any question that would ruin it.”

“Well. First we have a preamble.”

“I love preambles; I hope you finish with a postscript. Even an index would be okay, or maybe—”

“Shut up. Listen. Besides being a vacation, I’ve gotten an enormous amount of work done up here. I think I’ve broken through. I think I’m going to be an artist like I’ve never been an artist before. But I’ve met men like you . . . there’s a painter in St. Paul who’s an awful lot like you in some ways . . . and you’re going to move on to other women. I know it, that’s okay. The thing is, when you do, can we still be friends? Can I still come up here?”

Lucas laughed. “Nothing like a little honesty to destroy an incipient hard-on.”

“We can get it back,” she said. “But I want to know—”

“Listen. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I have had . . . a number of relationships over the years and a lot of the women are still friends of mine. A couple of them come up here, in fact. Not like this, for a month at a time, but for weekends. Sometimes we sleep together. Sometimes we don’t, if the relationship has changed. We just come up and hang out. So . . .”

“Good,” she said. “I’m not going to fall apart when we break it off. In fact, I’m going to be so busy I don’t know if I could keep a relationship together. But I would like to come back.”

“Of course you would. That’s why my friends call it a pussy trap—ouch, ouch, let go, goddammit . . . .”

“You got a minute?” Sloan leaned in the doorway. He was sucking on a plastic cigarette substitute.

“Sure.”

Lucas had gotten back to Minneapolis so relaxed that he felt as though his spine had been removed. The feeling lasted for fifteen sour minutes at police headquarters, talking to Anderson, getting his notebook updated. He had wandered down to his office, the North Woods mood falling apart. As he put the key in his door, Sloan appeared up the hallway, saw him, and walked down.

“Remember me talking about this Oriental-art guy?” Sloan asked as he lowered himself into Lucas’ spare chair.

“Yeah. Something there?”

“Something. I don’t know what. I wonder if you might have a few words with him.”

“If it’ll help.”

“I think it might,” Sloan said. “I’m mostly good at sweet talk. This guy needs something a little harder.”

Lucas glanced at his watch. “Now?”

“Sure. If you’ve got time.”

Alan Nester was crouched over a tiny porcelain dish, his back to the door, when they walked in. Lucas glanced around.
An Oriental carpet covered a parquet floor. A very few objects in porcelain, ceramics, and jade were displayed in blond oak cabinetry. The very sparsity of offerings hinted at a storehouse of art elsewhere. Nester pivoted at the sound of the door chimes and a frown creased his lean pale face.

“Sergeant Sloan,” he said crossly. “I told you quite clearly that I have nothing to contribute.”

“I thought you should talk to Lieutenant Davenport here,” Sloan said. “I thought maybe he could explain things more clearly.”

“You know what we’re investigating, and Sergeant Sloan has the feeling that you’re holding something back,” Lucas said. He picked up a delicate china vase and squinted at it. “We really can’t permit that . . . Ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make that sound so severe. But the thing is, we need every word we can get. Everything. If you’re holding back something, it must have some importance or you wouldn’t hold it back. You see where we’re coming from?”

“But I’m not holding back,” Nester cried in exasperation. He stood up, a tall man, but thin, like a blue heron, and stepped across the rug and took the vase from Lucas’ hand. “Please don’t touch anything. This is delicate material.”

“Yeah?” Lucas said. As Nester replaced the vase, he picked up a small ceramic bowl.

“All we want to know,” he said, “is everything that happened at the Rice house. And then we’ll go away. No sweat.”

Nester’s eyes narrowed as he watched Lucas holding the small bowl by its rim.

“Excuse me for a second.” He crossed to a glass case at the end of the room, picked up a telephone, and dialed.

“Yes, this is Alan Nester. Let me speak to Paul, please. Quickly.” He looked across the room at Lucas as he waited. “Paul? This is Alan. The police officers came back, and one of them is holding a S’ung Dynasty bowl worth seventeen thousand dollars by its very rim, obviously threatening to drop it. I have nothing to tell them, but they won’t believe me. Could you come down? . . . Oh? That would be fine. You have the number.”

Nester put the receiver back on the hook. “That was my attorney,” he said. “If you wait here a moment, you can expect a phone call either from your chief or from the deputy mayor.”

“Hmph,” Lucas said. He smiled, showing his eyeteeth. “I guess we’re really not welcome, are we?” He carefully set the bowl back on its shelf and turned to Sloan. “Let’s go,” he said.

Outside, Sloan glanced sideways at him. “That wasn’t much.”

“We’ll be back,” Lucas said contentedly. “You’re absolutely right. The motherfucker is hiding something. That’s good news. Somebody has something to hide in the maddog case, and we know it.”

They called Mary Rice from a street phone. She agreed to talk to them. Sloan led the way up to the house and knocked.

“Mrs. Rice?”

“You’re the policemen.”

“Yes. How are you feeling?” Mary Rice’s face had gotten old, her skin a ruddy yellow and brown, tight and hard, like an orange left too long in a refrigerator.

“Come in, don’t let the cold in,” she said. It wasn’t quite a moan. The house was intolerably hot, but Mary Rice was wrapped in a heavy Orlon cardigan and wore wool slacks. Her nose was red and swollen.

“We talked to the man who bought the ivory carvings from your husband,” Sloan said as they settled around the kitchen table. “And we’re wondering about him. Did your—”

“You think he’s the killer?” she asked, her eyes round.

“No, no, we’re just trying to get a better reading on him,” Sloan said. “Did your husband say anything about him that you thought was unusual or interesting?”

Her forehead wrinkled in concentration. “No . . . no, just that he bought them little carvings and asked if Larry had any other things. You know, old swords and stuff. Larry didn’t.”

“Did they talk about anything else?”

“No, I don’t know . . . Larry said this man was kind of in a hurry and didn’t want any coffee or anything. Just gave him the money and left.”

Sloan looked at Lucas. Lucas thought a minute and asked, “What did these carvings look like, anyway?”

“I still got one,” she offered. “It’s the last one. Larry gave it to me as a keepsake when we were married. You could look at that.”

“If you could.”

Rice tottered off to the back of the house. She returned a few minutes later and held her hand out to Lucas. Nestled in her palm was a tiny ivory mouse. Lucas picked it up, looked at it, and caught his breath.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “Can we borrow this, Mrs. Rice? We can give you a receipt.”

“Sure. But I don’t need no receipt. You’re cops.”

“Okay. We’ll get it back to you.”

Outside, Sloan said, “What?”

“I think we’ve got our friend Alan Nester by the short and curlies, but I also think I know what he’s lying about. And it isn’t the maddog,” Lucas said gloomily. He opened his hand to look at the mouse. “Everything I know about art you could write on the back of a postage stamp. But look at this thing. Nester bought fifteen of them for five hundred bucks. I bet this thing is worth five hundred bucks by itself. I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at the expression on the mouse’s face. If this isn’t worth five hundred bucks, I’ll kiss your ass on the courthouse lawn.”

They were both peering into Lucas’ hand. The mouse was exquisite, its tiny front and back legs clenching a straw, so that a hole ran between the legs from front to back. “They must have used it for something, a button or something,” Lucas said.

Sloan looked up and Lucas turned to follow his gaze. A patrol car was in the street, almost at a stop, the two cops peering out the driver’s-side window at them.

“They think we’re doing a dope deal,” Sloan laughed. He pulled his badge and walked toward the car. The cops rolled
down the window and Lucas called, “Want to see a great-lookin’ mouse?”

The Institute of Art was closed by the time they left Rice’s house, and Lucas took the mouse home overnight. It sat on a stack of books in his workroom, watching him as he finished the last of the hit tables on the Everwhen game.

“God damn, I’d like to have you,” Lucas said just before he went to bed. Early the next morning he got up and looked at it first thing. He thought it might have moved in the night.

It took a while to find out about it. Lucas picked up Sloan at his house. Sloan’s wife came out with him and said, “I’ve heard so much about you I feel like I know you.”

“It’s all good, I expect.”

She laughed and Lucas liked her. She said, “Take care of Sloan,” and went back inside.

“Even my wife calls me Sloan,” Sloan said as they drove away.

A curator at the art institute took one look at the mouse, whistled, and said, “That’s a good one. Let’s get the books.”

“How do you know it’s a good one?” Lucas asked as he tagged along behind.

“Because it looks like it might walk around at night,” the curator said.

The search took time. Sloan was wandering through the photo gallery when Lucas returned.

“What?” he said, looking up.

“Eight thousand,” Lucas said to him.

“For what? For the mouse or for all fifteen?”

“For the mouse. That’s his low estimate. He said it could be twice as much at an auction. So if it’s eight thousand and the others are as good, Nester paid a man dying of cancer five hundred dollars for netsukes worth something between a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and a quarter-million.” He said “net-skis.”