The Ten-Mile Trials (7 page)

She could see Pete was afraid of them too but didn't want to admit it, and more and more he took his fear and uncertainty out on her and Tiffi.

She began looking around, considering her options. ‘But,' she said, with a quick sideways glance at me, ‘by then I'd started using a little meth, see, and that made it tougher to think about making a change.'

I knew this would be the hard part, talking about how much of what she had been using. Bo always said you should take whatever amount people admitted to and double it. I'd been careful not to press her about anything, hoping that talking would calm her down. When I asked questions she answered them willingly, but mostly I let her drift along, telling her story at her own speed. But now that we'd come to the story of her burgeoning meth habit, she became defensive and agitated, first insisting she wasn't really hooked and could quit any time, then scuttling sideways toward her fear that she couldn't quit, it was already too late for that.

‘I mean every day I feel like I don't need it at all until just when I get to the point when I
do
need it. Then I think, just this one time more. While things are so stirred up and crazy, I think I better have a little snort to steady my nerves.' She uttered a wild peal of laughter and said, ‘I hope that's perfectly clear.' Then she clutched her hair, said ‘Oh, God', and collapsed onto her own arms on the little desk between us, weeping uncontrollably again. ‘I mean you just don't know,' she blubbered. ‘Until you've tried it, you have no idea how fast it takes over everything.'

Now that, I thought, sounds like a true statement of fact. So while she seemed to be completely unnerved, with all her pretenses put aside for the moment, I leaned over her heaving shoulders and said, ‘OK, Gloria. You came up here saying you wanted some help finding your daughter, and now you seem to be saying you need some help fighting your habit. I can hook you up with people who'll help you with both those problems, as soon as you tell me the name of the dead man in the garage and explain how you and Pete came to kill him.'

She sat up wild-eyed, tears still streaming off her face, her mouth a round O of shock and terror. ‘Dead man, what dead man? We never – oh no, no, please no, what are you saying? Look, I know you think . . . I know we shouldn't have got involved with those guys, it's not right to sell meth and shit, but – there's a body? Please, Sergeant – oh, or is it Lieutenant?'

‘Captain,' I said. ‘Jake Hines. You're saying you didn't know there was a homicide at your house?' She nodded vigorously with tears flying off her face – yes, that's what she was saying. And the nutty part was I more than half believed her. ‘But how could you not know?'

‘The storm?' she said helpfully. ‘It made a lot of noise. And then . . . they were all in the garage and I was in the kitchen. Besides'– she looked miserable again and suddenly, like a piece of bad meat that's impossible to digest, a morsel of unpalatable truth popped out – ‘I was tweaking. My stupid brain wasn't working right. Oh, God.' Then she whirled on her little stool and faced the wall. Her shoulders heaved and she said again and again, ‘Oh, God. Oh, God, what have I done to my baby? Oh, God!'

I stood up and said, ‘I think maybe we've talked enough for one day.' I couldn't stay in that little room any longer, listening to her describe with devastating accuracy how much abject misery she had caused herself and her child. Let her dry out until Monday, I thought. And a sneaky corner of my brain added that then it would be Ray's job to listen to her.

But maybe one more thing . . .‘What was his name?' I asked her. ‘The dead guy.'

She grabbed a handful of tissues out of the box and mopped her face as she whirled back to face me. ‘I have no idea. I could never tell them apart and I couldn't understand their names and I don't know why any of them would kill any of the others except they always seemed ready to, any minute.'

‘How many of these guys were there?'

‘Four, I think. Or maybe five. I told you, I can't tell them apart.'

‘Always the same ones?'

‘I think so. They were so big and ugly and loud, I tried not to look at them, but . . . yeah, I think it was usually the same three at the house, two older and one young, and sometimes a fourth one that seemed like the boss.'

‘Which one hit you?'

‘Oh, that was Pete. They were making so much noise, they woke Tiffany up from her nap. So I yelled at him, told him to make everybody shut up, and he knocked me across the room.' She touched the bandage on her cheek, tentatively. ‘Those guys scared him and he always tried to act tougher when they were around.'

‘What were they fighting about that day?'

‘Oh, who knows?' She made a frivolous gesture, throwing up her hands and rolling her eyes. That stupid gesture made me suddenly furious – she'd held me in this steamy little room, listening to her ranting sobs, and now she couldn't be bothered to take my questions seriously. I stood up and pulled out my keys, thinking I would send her back to her bed in the infirmary. By tomorrow she'd be in a cell and I would be at home in the country, where I could forget about her miserable wasted life.

She had her face all dried off but when she saw me getting ready to leave, her eyes brimmed over and a fresh stream poured down her face. ‘Oh, no, please. Listen . . . please. I'm trying to think.' She reached out toward me, with a wet tissue still balled in her hands. ‘They were in the kitchen, the two biggest guys, mean and with the funny names. Yelling at Pete about the orders, always yelling. He called them the Brooklyn Dodgers, but I called them the Screamers.'

‘Why did he call them that?'

‘Oh, they claimed to be from Brooklyn, to have a whole big family there.' She made that waving away gesture again, the one that had made me so angry. This time I realized it was her default gesture to dismiss anything she couldn't understand, to try to make it seem ridiculous. ‘Maybe they were in Brooklyn before they were here,' she said, ‘but you only had to hear them once to know they were . . . foreigners.' She pronounced it ‘for'ners', and her upper lip grew a little sneer.

‘OK, so they were screaming about the orders. What about them?'

‘I think they were saying the money wasn't right for the last deliveries, it should have been more. And Pete said don't yell at me, talk to— What did he call that younger one? Sair . . . something. He was out in the garage, the young one, packing the weed in that picnic hamper he always carried. The rest of them were all in the kitchen arguing. Pete said, ‘I always make him' – he meant that Sair guy – ‘shake hands when I hand over the money, and Gloria here takes our picture so I can show you he agreed it was all there. Show him the picture from this week, baby, go on.' I said I can't look for any picture with my nose bleeding like this, and he said you better find it right now if you don't want some more of the same. So I went and found the stupid picture he'd just maneuvered that youngest thug into posing for. The picture had nothing to do with the money, just some contest Pete convinced him they were going to enter. He's always so
clever
, you know, always working his little scams on everybody. But I didn't say anything, believe me. I did not want to get in the middle between those yahoos one more time.

‘The two older Screamers looked at the picture, Pete and the young Screamer with their thumbs up, all smiles. After they looked at the picture, the older guys swore and went out to the garage.

‘The wind had started blowing really hard a few minutes before. Tiffany was still crying because they woke her up and she was hungry, and I didn't have anything in the house to feed her. I told her to wait till the wind stopped and I'd go get her something. That made her cry even harder, and Pete said make her shut up and went out into the garage. So then I couldn't stand any of it a minute longer – so yes, I admit, I went in the other room and had another hit off the bong. So OK, there's some time there that's kind of vague. Very, very vague, actually. They were all arguing in the garage but the noise kind of blended in, I couldn't tell how much was Screamers screaming and how much was Tiffany crying, and then there was storm noise on top of everything. There was a big roll of thunder and then two of them ran in from the garage and out the front door. They slammed it all shut behind them, the inside door and the storm door, but Pete came right behind them, he was yelling too, something about you're not gonna leave that mess here for me to clean up. He pulled the inside door open and left it open and when he turned the handle on the outside door it went flying, the door and him with it, wind blowing everything all over the house.

‘Tiffany ran to me, terrified, and jumped into my arms. I carried her into the bathroom, I always heard that's the safest place to be in a wind storm. I put a wet towel on my face and closed the door. We sat in the tub and I sang to her. Then I heard all these other people come stomping in . . . Was there a dog?'

‘Yes.'

‘I thought maybe I dreamed that part. Then they took my baby away.'

She started to puddle up again but the thought of the dead body in the garage had settled her down some, she knew her life was at stake now. She held her hands up, palms toward me, saying, ‘Wait, I'll stop crying, I promise.' She made some hiccuping noises, and after a few seconds she took a deep breath and started over.

‘Here's what I have to say. I admit I like my pot in the evening and now I'm about halfway to being a meth freak, but I can beat both of those. I know I can, if you'll get me some help. I absolutely know I can do that and get my baby back and take care of her. The other thing I
absolutely
know is that I never killed anybody. I did not do that, no, that is not something I would do.

‘So will you . . .?' She looked up at me quite matter-of-factly for a few seconds, as if she was asking to borrow a cup of sugar. Then the magnitude of the trouble she was in seemed to sink in a little deeper. She swallowed a couple of times, took another deep breath, and said hoarsely ‘Please help me!' Her throat dried up completely then, and her last word came out in a terrified squeak, ‘Please?'

FOUR

‘
G
od!' Kevin Evjan said Monday morning, ‘I had such a good weekend I can hardly raise my arms.' He flopped into the spare chair in front of my desk, stretched out his long legs until the whole front of my office looked done over in gray flannel, and sighed happily.

Kevin is a winning swimmer in the world's gene pool – his Norwegian father passed along broad shoulders and a noble chin, and his Irish mother added bright-blue eyes and a dazzling smile. Not surprisingly, his good looks are only exceeded by his high self-esteem. I would not be able to tolerate him in the same building with me except that his exceptional energy and cockiness allow him to manage the dismal slog that is Property Crimes, year in and year out, without throwing himself in front of a bus.

His smug self-regard now enabled him to go right on describing his days off, despite my obvious lack of interest. ‘Somebody told me the slab crappies were really biting on Little Boy Lake, up by Longville. So I took a personal day Friday and put the arm on my cousin Henry. Henry's got a cabin up there, you know – well, you don't know, but trust me, it's a nice snug little place.'

I couldn't seem to turn him off, but I found his story so far from riveting that my brain had started to run through the powers of two . . . 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 . . . Math games get me through boring patches, though I usually quit the powers of two around 4096, when it starts to be more work than fun.

‘But I didn't want the whole three days to be just about fathead minnows and sunburn, you know?' Kevin stretched again, luxuriously. ‘So I persuaded that black-eyed girl from Victims' Services – Francesca, you know her? Yeah, the one with the—' He made a gesture that made me wish my door was closed. ‘I talked her into coming along.' He chuckled. ‘Fran-CHESS-ka . . . Truly, as Hemingway would say, Italian names are just designed to turn guys on, aren't they?'

‘Ray and I caught a homicide and worked both days,' I said.

‘Too bad.' He didn't even slow down. ‘You should grab some time up there, Jake, it's beautiful. Pack up Trudy and the baby and spend a couple of days on the water. Do you both a world of good.'

‘Uh-huh. You bring home plenty of crappies?'

‘Well . . . some.' The self-satisfied smirk broadened on his handsome face, where I was beginning to dream of planting a lemon chiffon pie. ‘Actually, we never got a line wet till the second day.' He chuckled again. ‘Watch out for that Francesca, she's a fox.'

‘I will. And I'm glad you had fun, because now you're going to have to bust ass for a while.'

‘Oh?' He recrossed his legs and settled the crease in his pants. ‘What's up?'

‘The chief announced budget cuts on Friday. Twenty percent across the board, every section, no exceptions. Ray doesn't get to replace Bo Dooley, I don't get my new recording system, and you have to cut two detectives by the fifth of July.'

‘The fifth of— Jake, that's the week after next.'

‘I know.'

‘Well, come on, that's ridiculous! I've already scheduled the next two months, it's too late to— Why do you keep shaking your head?'

‘How long have you been gone? Are there no TV sets in Northern Minnesota? Surely you're aware that we're in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?' I was beginning to sound like Frank McCafferty and it felt pretty good. I can manage the gravitas when I need to, I thought, and went on to my next punishing news. ‘Also, have you talked to your weekend crew chief yet? They had another rash of break-ins on the far Northwest side. Phones ringing off the hook all day yesterday, and it's worse this morning. A lot of gold jewelry, coin collections, electronics . . . small stuff with high value. Sounds kind of targeted. Better get on it.'