The Twelve Crimes of Christmas (28 page)

She smiled triumphantly. “Anyone can tell, smarty.
There are
two
dirty glasses by the bottle, and
one
of them has lipstick on it.”

“Nathan’s got a gir-ul, Nathan’s got a gir-ul.”
That was Paul. God, they were cute! Suddenly I wished Roy would hurry up.

I picked up Amy and swung her over the counter.
You want to have your soup,” I growled, “or shall I cook
you
up for the
rest of us?”

She screamed and laughed, and I put her down. “Soup’s
ready,” I announced. They all ran to the table, which Howie, to my surprise,
had set. That’s why he hadn’t been in the kitchen earlier, uncovering my sins.

While I was in the kitchen making more
sandwiches, there was a pounding on the door, and a deep, grim voice said
deadpan, “Police.”

Howie ran to the kitchen and looked at me wide-eyed;
I said, “It’s no use. Let them in, and I’ll give myself up.” Howie opened the
front door dubiously, and Lieutenant Pederson walked in, grinning, Roy a step
behind him.

After “Mr. Pederson” was re-introduced to the
kids, and I’d served the sandwiches and the last of the soup, Pederson looked
up and said innocently, “Things are kind of slow at the station. How would you
like to tour it, and see the jail and the lab?”

They had their coats on before he had even
pushed back from the table.

When Roy and I were alone I said, “Now that’s
above and beyond the call of duty. What gives?”

Roy looked much happier with life. “Jon didn’t
feel the police investigation would turn anything up very fast, so he offered
to baby-sit for a couple of hours while we check out some possibilities.”

“Great. Do we have any?”

“Possibilities? Not many. We can’t question
Petlovich till someone finds out where he is. His parole officer hasn’t seen
him in a while.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Sounds dubious. How long
till we can get ahold of him?”

“Maybe this afternoon. We’ll be seeing Gillis’s
woman.”

“Long-standing?”

“Same one as when he helped us send up Petlovich.
Her name’s Mary Jordan. Two shoplifting convictions and a bad-check charge,
dropped later. Otherwise, she’s clean—not hard to be cleaner than the men she
hangs around with. She might know where Petlovich is.”

“Fat chance.” I said, pulling on my stocking
cap. Cartley looked at me oddly.

“You’re not going to shave?”

I shrugged. “We need to look tough. I always
cut myself.”

He shrugged back. Out we went.

Gillis’s apartment was on the east side of 35W,
not too far south of downtown. Farther down, in the plusher residential areas,
along Minnehaha Creek, there were sound fences on either side of the highway,
painted a tasteful, unobtrusive green. Up here, they wouldn’t have put a fence
up, and someone would have stolen the paint.

Roy and I climbed up two flights of bowing,
scarred stairs to a splintered door. The hallway had visible piles of dirt in
the corners and along the baseboards. It looked like any other walk-up, only
grimier. The baseboards had shrunk away from the linoleum, and I didn’t blame
them.

Roy pounded on the door. We both had enough
sense to stand aside. Inside there was a scuffling, and the volume on TV
chortled appreciation.

Roy said with no patience, “Miss Jordan, we’re
investigators, Cartley and Phillips. We worked with Gam a couple of years back—”

The laughter was cut off and a couple of
seconds later the door was jerked open. A black-rooted redhead with booze
breath and smeared mascara looked at us. “Come on in. I’d make you some eggs,
but I only got fresh ones.”

Roy walked in, first looking through the crack
between door and wall to see if anyone was waiting. I glanced out the window at
the fire escape. Roy said, “I didn’t expect you to love us, but I didn’t expect
you to be drunk in front of the TV today, either.” He was red-faced.

As I came in, she walked over to the encrusted
sink-and-stove in the room’s corner, picked up a half-empty flat pint bottle,
and stared at it argumentatively.

“Did you hear what he said?” she demanded of
it, swaying. “He thinks I shouldn’t drink you.” Then she tipped it up and took
a long pull. She giggled as she set it down. She had to be her own laugh-track
now.

Cartley looked irritated. He opened his mouth,
but I winked at him and he shut up as I said, “Don’t listen to him, lady—drink
up. Gillis wasn’t worth staying dry for—why waste an afternoon crying for a
down-and-out stoolie with just enough brains to get killed?”

I ducked, but shouldn’t have bothered. The
glass went over me by three feet.

“Wait a—” Roy said and stopped as another glass
flew by me, low and to the right. Two more tries, and there was nothing within
her reach but the bottle. She hefted it, glared at me frustratedly, then took
another drink.

Roy sounded like sweet reason itself. “Young Nate,
here, came along with his own ideas, ma’am. I came to see if I could track down
who killed Gillis.”

She looked at him, startled, and wiped her mouth
on the back of her hand. “Petlovich.” If she had any doubts, they weren’t in
her voice. “Nobody else would have killed him. Who would have wanted to?”

“I would,” I offered, keeping in character. “You
would have, too, if he hadn’t been your meal ticket.”

She nearly did throw the bottle. “He ain’t
given me a dime, you lying bastard. I paid for this place and our food
and—hell, he ain’t even taken me out for dinner in two or three months.” She
stopped, probably realizing that he wouldn’t, ever again.

Roy said quickly, “All I want is Petlovich’s
address, Mary. Nothing else. You want him to go up for it, don’t you?”

She knotted her hands into spindly,
white-knuckled fists. “You bet I do.” She pointed at me suddenly. “And I’d send
him up, too, if I could!” She ran into the apartment’s tiny bathroom and
slammed the door. It was loose in the frame; we could hear her weeping.

Roy said quietly, “Maybe it’d be better from
here if you waited outside, Nate. Thanks for priming her.”

“You’re less than welcome.” I meant it. “I’m
tired of playing the bad guy.”

On my way out I stopped and looked at a pair of
polyester trousers with pulled threads poking out of them, draped over a chair.
I glanced toward the bathroom door, then checked the trousers pockets.

No wallet—that had been on the body—but the
right front pocket held his checkbook. I flipped idly but quickly through the
stubs. For a man that lived off his woman, this guy had been living pretty high
lately.

He had written three checks to good
restaurants, one to a department store and one for a couple of hundred, marked
simply “cash”—all dated within the last three months. He had the deposits
recorded in the back. They had been made, one for each check, barely in time
and barely enough to cover the amount.

I put the checkbook back. As I did, the
bathroom doorknob turned. I gave a quick nod to Roy and edged out to the hall.

Through the door, I could hear him mutter and
her snuffle and spit. I shuffled from one foot to the other, idly trying to
guess what color the walls had been twenty years ago. I felt like taking a
bath.

When Roy came out, he gave me an address in Saint
Paul, and away we went. I told him about the checkbook.

“Oho!”
he said. “So she was lying about the money.”

“Or else she didn’t know about it.”

Roy looked dubious. “How much were those
restaurant checks again?” I told him. “It’s an odd amount, so you can bet he
wasn’t cashing a check. Could you eat your way through forty-five dollars and
thirty-eight cents’ worth of food at any of those places? Never mind—
you
probably could.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t—not alone. Or with a
friend, either, unless I was in the money or thought I was going to be.”

“I know.” He grabbed the armrest as I took a
right turn. “She found that address pretty fast, too. Well, we’re headed to see
Petlovich, aren’t we?” Roy was cheerful again. On the way to Saint Paul, he
made three rotten jokes and yelled at my driving at every other turn. It wasn’t
fair. I had signaled at most of those turns, or meant to.

Saint Paul was a bust, a waste of time. We came
up the stairs, we knocked from beside the door, we heard a scrambling in the
room, we stood back. A slug ripped through the door; Roy let go of the knob,
and we both flattened against the wall. After a minute of silence, Cartley
threw the door open and we charged in, heads down and guns up.

There was nothing much in the room—a battered
suitcase, a sack of groceries, a newspaper and some mail. The window was open,
and the shade, jerked down, roller and all, hung half in the window and half
out. I looked out. Ten feet below the window were the deep tracks where he had
hit, and the footprints of a man sprinting away.

We turned back to the table. Cartley went for
the mail and I checked the newspaper. He tossed the letters down in disgust. “Bills!”

“No Christmas cards? Funny, I thought he was on
my list.”

“I haven’t gotten one from you either.” Cartley
stared at the mail again. “If Petlovich has money, he isn’t paying off debts
with it. I wonder why he waited so long to leave town. If the cops didn’t come
for him, a collection agency would.”

“I don’t know about his bills, but I know why
he didn’t blow town till now.” I showed Roy the Minneapolis
Star,
afternoon edition. In the lower right-hand
corner of the front page was a human-interest story about the body that had
been found hung by the chimney in an unnamed Minneapolis home. The article said
the police suspected one Willem Petlovich, former second-story man.

Roy stared at it woodenly. “That shouldn’t have
spooked him. He had to know he’d be a suspect.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But the paper ties him in
explicitly. Maybe he figured he’d have a day or two before anyone knew where to
look for him.”

“He’s that dumb?”

“He’s got caught once. By you, even.”

“By you, too. All right, quit the kidding. He
got caught because he was ratted on.” We holstered our guns and left.

On the way back, I asked, “Want to report the
shooting to Pederson?”

“And catch hell for playing cops without badges
or a warrant?” He sighed. “Guess we better. Jon won’t like this. He didn’t take
care of the kids so we could go break laws.”

“Yeah. Say, why don’t you drop me off at home? I
ought to feed Marlowe, and—”

“Sure. Right
after
we talk to Jon.” He considered. “No. I’ll wait
for you while you feed him now. Nate, I’d really appreciate it if you’d sack
out on the couch at my house tonight. Bring your gun.”

It made sense. “Uh, yeah. Roy, while you talk
to Jon, can I make a phone call?”

He grinned then. “Okay, coward. But after you
talk to that woman nobody’s supposed to know about, you can come in and catch
hell like a man.”

I ran a stop sign, unintentionally for once. “Damn
it, is everyone on my private life? I suppose the kids told you while I was in
the kitchen.”

He leaned back and hitched at his belt. “If you
can’t fool visitors, you couldn’t fool your partner.”

“Yeah?” It wasn’t much of a crack, but it was
all I had left.

The next morning I opened my eyes and found a
pair of cool blue eyes, framed by blond bangs, not more than six inches from my
face. I closed my eyes and tried to think. Wasn’t the hair sandier?

Then I remembered where I was and that only
made it more confusing. I opened my eyes again and, after a few tries, focussed
on the face around the eyes. I pulled the blanket up over my chest, feeling
embarrassed and then silly about it.

“Oh! H’lo, Amy.” She was standing beside the
sofa. “Sleep well?” She nodded.

I hadn’t. This house had more creaking boards
and rattling windows than the House of Usher. “Had breakfast yet?” She shook
her head. “What’s the matter, don’t you talk in the morning?”