The Last Kind Word (26 page)

“Then what? Do you want Harry to call you back?”

I was staring at Josie when I answered. “That would not be a good idea. How 'bout I meet you? You can pass on the information yourself.”

“Me? Fun. When? Where?”

“Rice Park. In front of the fountain.” I glanced at my watch. It was 11:53
A.M.
“Would six o'clock work?”

“How should I know?”

“If you're not there I'll assume something went wrong.”

“Wait till I tell Bobby.”

“I would prefer that you didn't. Boyfriends don't like me very much.”

Josie snorted when she heard that.

“I feel just like Veronica Lake in
This Gun for Hire,
” Shelby said, “lying to Robert Preston in order to help Alan Ladd.”

“Good-bye, sweetie. See you soon.”

I hung up and glanced at Josie.

“Sweetie?” she asked.

“I need to drive to St. Paul,” I said.

“I'm going with.”

“I thought you might.”

“I want to meet this trollop you're dealing with.”

“What do you want me to do?” Skarda asked.

“If you were Brian Fenelon, where would you be?” I asked.

*   *   *

If not for the sign, I wouldn't have known it was a strip joint. A brown, two-story clapboard building with white trim surrounded by a gravel parking lot—driving at fifty-five miles per hour on the county road, I nearly passed it without notice, probably would have if Josie hadn't cleared her throat and motioned toward the sign.
DANGEROUS LIAISONS GENTLEMAN'S CLUB OVER 21 WELCOME.
There were only four cars in the lot, and I parked next to them. A wooden staircase and a long, narrow handicap ramp led to the entrance.

“Coming?” I asked.

“I think I'll sit this one out,” Josie said.

A few moments later I was opening the door. Another sign told me Happy Hour Mon.–Thurs., Live Dancing Mon.–Sat., Wed. is Lingerie Nite! The first thing I noticed when I entered the building was a surprisingly large stage with two poles. A dozen stools abutted the stage, and a dozen small tables with two stools each bordered them. Booths large enough to accommodate private dances lined the walls. A large-screen TV hung above the bar. The bartender, his back turned to me, was watching a Spanish-language soap opera. The TV was the brightest light in the room.

“Excuse me,” I said. He didn't answer, so I tried again in Spanish. “Con permiso.”

He turned quickly toward me. The way his mouth curled downward suggested that he was surprised that I spoke the language and none too happy about it, like a chess player who had just lost an important piece.

“¿Qué pasa?” he asked.

“Perdone que lo interrumpa.”

“¿Qué quieres? Los bailes no comienzan hasta las cuatro.” In case I didn't get it, the bartender gestured at a table tent on the bar that announced that the dances began at 4
P.M.

“Estoy buscando a Brian Fenelon,” I told him.

He pointed toward a booth next to an open doorway. The neon sign above the door flashed
VIP ROOM.

“Gracias,” I said.

“Fenelon speaks lousy Spanish,” the bartender said.

“I'll talk slowly, then.”

Fenelon sat in the center of the booth. There were two empty shot glasses in front of him and a half-filled beer mug. He held a third shot glass filled with bourbon between his fingers and turned it slowly, expanding a circle of condensation on the tabletop.

“Hi, Brian,” I said.

He looked up at me. I could see the cut lip and the bruised chin even in the joint's dim light.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Looks like you had a long night.”

“Fuck you.”

I sat down without being asked. “I'm guessing you and your boss had a falling-out.”

“Why couldn't you keep your big mouth shut? Why did you have to tell him what I said?”

“So he wouldn't think I was conspiring with you to screw him over.”

Fenelon brought the shot glass to his lips but did not drink. Instead, he set the glass back on the table and fixed my eyes with his. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Let me tell you what's going to happen. After I risk life and limb to rob three armored trucks, Brand is going to rip me off. He'll give me the guns as promised. When it comes time to divvy up the swag, though, he's going to take it all for himself. Then he'll have Deputies James and Williams arrest Dave Skarda and me on fugitive warrants so he won't have to worry about retaliation. As far as Jimmy and Josie and the rest are concerned, there won't be a helluva lot they'll be able to do about it, will there?”

“I don't know why you don't just get the fuck outta here. Go up to Canada like you said.”

“Good question. I have one for you. Do you like it here, Brian?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Do you like it here? Up here in the frickin' nowhere northland. Would you rather be in the Cities? Chicago? New York? Would you like to take Claire somewhere nice? Get her away from that nitwit Jimmy?”

“She loves him.”

“Seriously?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I am surprised. I thought—”

“You thought she was my girl like everyone else. Well, she's not and she never was.”

“You sound unhappy about that.” The hard glare in his eyes told me he was
very
unhappy about that. “I know what he sees in her. What does she see in him?”

“Who knows?” Fenelon said. “Her own lost youth, maybe. Stability for her kid. How the hell should I know?”

I shrugged at that because I didn't know what else to do.

“Why are you here, Dyson?”

“I want nothing to do with John Brand. You're the one who brought him in on this. By the way, you shouldn't have done that. When I whacked you, remember, I said I needed someone who knew his way around. I meant you, not him.”

“You got it wrong, Dyson. I didn't tell Brand anything. If I had told him”—he tilted his face to give me a good look at it in the dim light—“do you think he would have done this? Brand's the one brought me to the cabin, not the other way 'round. He didn't know we talked, that we were working together, until you told him last night.”

“Dammit. I thought…”

“You thought I ratted you out.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I didn't. Now I'm paying the price for it. Way to go, Dyson. Doubt Brand will ever trust me again.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Fine, you're sorry. That means a whole helluva lot.”

Fenelon closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of the booth. He looked utterly defeated. I called his name, and his eyes snapped open again.

“That's another reason to get out of Dodge,” I said.

“What are you talking about, Dyson?”

“How much of the money is Brand going to give you? James and Williams will get a nice taste. What about you?”

“I doubt I'll get anything.”

“A quarter of a million dollars, Brian. How far do you think you can go on a quarter of a million dollars?”

Brand had not been impressed when I dropped that number on the table the night before. Fenelon clearly was.

“You're gonna give me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“Yes, I am.”

“What would I have to do?” Before I could answer, Fenelon held up his hand. “I won't go up against Brand. I'm not that stupid.”

“No, I wouldn't put you on the spot like that.”

“What are you talking about, then? The Mexicans?”

“What the hell do I care about the Mexicans? I want James and Williams.”

A smile crept slowly over Fenelon's face. “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

“If I take them off the board, Brand is likely to be more reasonable with the split, don't you think?”

“I don't know about that. I'd love to see those assholes in the jackpot, though. They're bent worse than a paper clip.”

“What I need is evidence so strong that even a crooked county attorney couldn't cover it up.”

“I'm not testifying…”

“I'm not looking for testimony. That's just he said, she said stuff. Besides, it'll put you in trouble with your boss, and we don't want him to know what we're doing, do we?”

“Uh-uh.”

“What I need is something you can hold in your hand.”

Fenelon drank some of his bourbon and followed it up with a sip of beer. “They don't just take cash payoffs,” he said. “Not that much cash around these days, you know? Sometimes they take merchandise. People's ATVs and boats and shit. They get Brand to fence it for them sometimes—that's how I know. Brand'll have me move it for 'im, get it to the right people in exchange for envelopes filled with money.”

Fenelon finished first his bourbon and then his beer.

“Go on,” I said.

“I know where they store the shit.”

*   *   *

A few minutes later I opened the passenger door of Josie's Ford Taurus. She turned in the seat and looked up at me. “Is he on our side now?” Josie asked.

“Brian is on Brian's side. Don't ever forget it.”

“Oh, I won't.”

“Do you know where a small lake, might not even be a lake—they call it Cody. Do you know where it is?”

“Yes. I sold some property over there a couple of years ago.”

“You drive.”

*   *   *

Josie had to backtrack toward Krueger and then turned east. That made it easier for me to memorize the route, knowing I'd have to drive it myself later, probably in the dark. We eventually turned down a dirt road that led to the lake. Josie slowed, not because it was hard to drive, but because we were looking for a little-used track that veered off of it. We found it easily and followed it to a clearing just big enough to turn around a car and trailer. On the edge of the clearing was a prefabricated pole barn. We left the car to take a closer look. There were no windows. A single door large enough for a small SUV to pass through was sealed with a cheap combination lock like the kind you find on high school lockers.

“This shouldn't be too difficult,” I said.

“How are you going to open it?” Josie asked. “Listen to the tumblers like a safecracker?”

“I need a can. A pop can. Beer can.”

When Josie saw me searching the clearing, she did the same, eventually finding an empty beer can that had been lying in the tall grass so long that its logo had faded. I asked if she had a knife. She did, handing me a pocketknife with the emblem of the Swiss Army on the handle that she carried in her glove compartment. I used the knife to cut a 1½-inch square of aluminum out of the can and then trimmed the square until it resembled the block letter
M.
I folded the top of the
M
down and the legs of the letter up to create a sturdy shim. I slid the shim in the space between the shackle and the body of the lock and pulled upward. The lock popped open easily.

“Ta-da,” I said.

“Where did you learn that?” Josie wanted to know.

“Public school.”

I dropped the shim where I could easily find it again, removed the lock, and swung open the large door. I stepped inside the barn. It was crowded with a bass boat and trailer, an ATV, a big-screen TV, some PCs, a couple of sets of tools, and a lot of boxes that I didn't bother to open.

“I bet they don't have receipts for any of this crap,” I said.

“What do we do now?” Josie asked.

I closed the door and relocked it. “Head to St. Paul,” I said. “I'll drive.”

Josie stood there, her hands on her hips, and watched as I circled the Taurus and opened the driver's-side door.

“What?” I asked.

“Aren't you going to tell me what you're up to?”

“Plausible deniability.”

“What's that mean?”

“You can't testify about what you don't know. Are you coming?”

 

THIRTEEN

I parked Josie on one of the cobblestone streets surrounding Rice Park and went on alone. The park was created in 1849, the same year St. Paul was named capital of the Minnesota Territory, and was flanked by the Romanesque Revivalist jewel that is the Landmark Center, the luxurious crescent-shaped St. Paul Hotel, the Renaissance-style Central Public Library, and the opulent Ordway Center for the Performing Arts—each building as rich in history as the park itself. It was a prime lounging area for the city's downtown worker bees, who were drawn there by the period streetlamps, benches, and honest-to-God grass, trees, and flower gardens. There were ice sculptures and trees laced with webs of light in the winter, and music, mostly jazz and blues, in the summer, and nearly every day of the year there was a vendor on the corner happy to sell you soft drinks, coffee, soft pretzels, hot dogs, and juicy Polish sausages from his umbrella-covered cart.

At the center of the park was a large round fountain. I didn't see Shelby, so I sat on the low brick wall containing the fountain and waited. The clock on the Landmark Center told me it was 6:07
P.M.
I started tapping the face of my watch, or rather the watch I had borrowed from Skarda. There was a bronze figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald near the street vendor and a clutch of statues depicting the Peanuts characters created by Charles M. Schulz, both St. Paul natives. I was debating which author had the greater cultural impact when I saw her zigging and zagging her way through what remained of the rush-hour crowd. Shelby was hurrying the way some women do when they're inexcusably late, eyes staring straight ahead, chin up, chest out, walking with quick steps just this side of a trot. I had never seen a man walk like that no matter how late he was. She was carrying a black bag by a strap draped over her shoulder and a manila envelope that she clutched to her chest. Her dress was black, low cut, and inexplicably tight and ended half a dozen inches above her knees. I had seen the dress before—on Nina Truhler.