Blizzard Ball (18 page)

“Maybe this Roddy dude thought he could take advantage of the New Year’s holiday and blow the jackpot ticket by the Lottery officials,” Tyler offered. “But my guess is that he didn’t know the tickets in his possession were counterfeits, thought he had the real deal. I think somebody set him up. Somebody really good— the entire batch is visually perfect.”

“Then the winning ticket is still in play,” Kirchner said in an attempt to add some investigative thinking.

“Sure is, have you checked your mailbox lately?”

“What?”

“It’s all over the news,” Tyler said. “People have been receiving winning lottery tickets in the mail from an anonymous sender. And from the reports we’re getting, most of these people have a hardship story. The media is all over it, playing up the Robin Hood-Good Samaritan angle.” Tyler read him some of the headlines. “Young mother with cancer receives $50,000 in lottery tickets. Widow in Fergus Falls surprised with $10,000. Homeless shelter showered with hundreds of winning lottery tickets.”

The media had also caught wind that the winning lottery tickets being sent out had been issued at the Cash and Dash. This fueled the speculation that the yet-unclaimed $750 million ticket could land on someone’s door step, à la Ed McMahon.

“How many tickets did you estimate were associated with the winning ticket ‘wheel,’ as you called it?”

“Over fifty thousand,” Tyler said. “Most of them seven, four, and three-dollar winners, but hundreds of those tickets are worth ten thousand each.”

Kirchner stared blankly into a neon beer sign behind the bar. Still unsettled from the bomb blast, the pieces of the investigation rattled around in his brain like loose shrapnel. He took a stab at ordering the information, more for his own sense of grounding than anything else. “Whoever’s behind this scheme knows we’re watching for those redemptions. This act of charity is a hoax. They’re willing to give up the short money, probably to mask the big winner. Some little old lady’s going to show up with the winning $750 million ticket, claim she received it in the mail, and walk out with the money. When the dust settles, she’ll get a nice payday and the masterminds of this caper will be down the road with millions, leaving a pile of bodies in their wake.”

“Nice police work there,” Tyler said smugly, knowing he had another card to play. “But I think your little old lady and mastermind may be a Mexican woman in her twenties.”

Kirchner strained to keep his temper in check toward the smart-ass analyst. “Whattya got?”

“Turned up a positive ID from the car hit by the pig truck in Luverne. An Alita Torres. She co-signed as a relative on the car’s purchase.”

“The bank teller.” Kirchner felt a flash of recognition.

“My guess,” Tyler ventured, “is she probably observed large amounts of cash being transacted through the bank from the Cash and Dash and tipped off her relatives to an easy score. In the robbery attempt on the convenience store, her amigos stumbled into the lottery tickets and a resistant clerk, who they killed. In the process they also pissed off the Canadian lottery ticket resellers, as their winning jackpot ticket was likely included in the theft.”

“What’s this Alita’s address?” Kirchner pulled out a small note pad. “Time to pay her a visit. In the meantime, dig up everything you can find on Alita Torres.”

He clicked off with Tyler and snapped open a losing pull tab. Although he felt overwhelmed by an undefined criminal enterprise spreading like an unchecked virus, he was certain of two things: this case would have legs as long as the winning jackpot ticket remained unclaimed, and this Alita was in a world of trouble.

Abe Weisman, the attorney hired to assist in the lottery ticket claim, called Gisele at the hotel where Roddy had dropped her off. He told her about the bomb blast and the reported counterfeit scheme. The police were on their way to visit him. He suggested she leave the country, pronto, as her client privilege had vaporized.

Startled by Abe’s account of the lottery hostage siege, she hastily checked out of the hotel, fearing Abe had already given her up. She walked directionless down West Seventh Street, shouldering her overnight bag, past antique stores, sex shops, and beer joints. She walked in order to do something other than think—walked until her wet, frozen feet rebelled and steered her into the warmth of a Laundromat.

Perspiring from the sauna heat of the Laundromat, she loosened her coat. Her eyes stung from the sudsy air. She called Claude in Vancouver. “I got big fucking trouble,” Gisele said into the phone.

“What’s the thumping noise?” Claude asked.

“My shoes.” Gisele glanced at her shoes pitching against the glass porthole of a front-loading dryer.

“Don’t know what kinda trouble you churned up in the states, but the guillotine’s about to drop here.” The U.S. Customs was pressuring the normally toothless Canadian provincial government to shutter Lotto2Win’s operation. “Figure we got less than twenty-four hours.” Gisele could hear Claude’s raspy inhale of a cigarette. “The bank accounts have already been seized.”

“What did I do to deserve this bullshit?” Gisele shouted into the phone, trying to compete with a mother yelling at her brat to quit crawling in the washing machines.

“The police are looking for you on this end. More questions about the Professor’s death,” Claude said. “I’ve pulled the hard copy of all the phone logs and destroyed them, along with just about every other document in the place, but they’ll eventually get to the electronic records. C’est la vie, ma cherie.”

“Claude, I’m losing it.” Gisele slumped into a molded plastic chair bolted to the floor, with the open phone held against her chest. She had dropped her daughter off with her ex-husband, the former banker now a fry cook, with the understanding that she would be back from Minnesota in three days. There was no doubt her ex would use the slightest deviation from the scheduled exchange time, not to mention an inquiry from police regarding foul play, as proof she was an unfit mother.

The toddler who had been crawling in the washing machines waddled up to her knees, looked at her bare feet, and curiously watched the tears leak from Gisele’s face. Gisele brought the phone back to her ear. “Please help me. I’ve got to get home.”

“I’ll check in with your ex,” Claude offered. “See if I can cover for you. But no way will you get past airport and border security.”

“Who are these robbers and counterfeiters?” Gisele’s fear swung to rage. “They’ve got our tickets, my money, my out. I’ll kill ’em.”

Claude reluctantly gave Gisele the phone number and apartment address Roddy had used to locate the convenience store ticket thieves. Gisele pulled her hot, curled-up shoes out of the dryer and called a cab.

Alita contacted Brian after her chance encounter with the woman who received the gift of lottery tickets from Eduardo and Rafie. He insisted she return to the farm in Albert Lea. She agreed but only after a visit to St. Paul to gather up her belongings. The real reason for visiting the apartment was evident in the things her cousins left behind: three bottles of beer in the refrigerator, a socket set, the circled employment ads, and a strip of pictures of the three of them taken in a photo booth at the mall. These were the only touchstones to the memories she had of her cousins. Rafie and Eduardo were her armor. With their loss she felt abandoned and terrified. She put on a jacket left behind by Eduardo, her heart aching, the jacket, his shroud.

A firm knock drew Alita’s attention to her apartment door just as an envelope slid across the threshold. It was a utility bill with her name on it. Another insistent knock.

“Sorry to bother you.” A woman’s muffled voice from the hallway could be heard through the closed door. “I got your mail by mistake, along with a package. I’ll leave it outside the door.”

Alita looked through the door’s wide-angle peephole into the hallway but saw no one. She cautiously cracked opened the door to retrieve the promised package. A blast of hair spray stung her face. A woman charged into the apartment wildly swinging a sock loaded with rolls of quarters. Alita stepped back in an attempt to avoid the attack, but caught a blow to the ribs. The strike knocked her into the kitchen table and onto the floor, spilling the wastebasket on the way down. The woman scrambled on top of Alita and clutched her throat, digging Alita’s gold cross into her windpipe.

“Where’s the goddamn lottery tickets?” Gisele shouted, “Where?”

Blood ran out of Alita’s nose down into her eyes and mixed with tears. Flailing on the trash-strewn floor, Alita’s hand found a beer bottle. The crack of glass against Gisele’s head froze both women. Gisele moaned. Her eyes rolled and disappeared into the folds of her eyelids. Her head thumped to the floor as blood seeped through her matted hair.

Alita scrambled to her feet with the broken beer bottle in hand and waited guardedly for movement from the motionless crazy woman. “Please don’t die here. Not another dead person, please God.” Alita cautiously folded the intruder into a seated position and propped her up against the wall. She then dashed to the sink, ran a rag under cold water, formed a compress, and held it against Gisele’s gushing head wound.

Bursts of words in languages Alita did not understand erupted from the injured woman. It sounded like the babble of Pentecostal missionaries who spoke in tongues.

In the strobe light delirium of her blackout, Gisele could see her daughter moving off to the horizon, getting smaller and smaller until she was gone.

“Bring my daughter back,” Gisele moaned, grappling with unconsciousness, feeling the grinding pull of a rip-saw across her brain.

“You’re insane. I don’t have your daughter.” Alita said.

Gisele, through sobs and fits, tried to explain how she’d been forced to come to Minnesota to redeem the winning lottery tickets and coerced with the threat of involving her in a murder she didn’t commit. “Now, Roddy’s dead and the police are after me for your murderous counterfeits. I can’t go home.”

“How many more crazies are coming?” Alita demanded.

“No one. The lottery operation is being shut down.”

Alita left Gisele on the floor. She stood by the sink and massaged her bruised ribs. Gisele tried to focus, dizzy from the concussion. Mutual resignation formed in their silence. Two exhausted women led down paths not of their own making, yet each owning some responsibility for the journey. Alita brought Gisele a glass of water, changed the compress, and sat across from her on the kitchen floor.

“The lottery tickets are gone,” Alita said in a soft, apologetic voice. “I gave them away.”

“The jackpot winner?”

“No, I can’t account for that ticket. Maybe it was with my cousins, maybe shot up, blown away. I don’t know.”

“Oh, my God, what am I going to do?” Gisele sobbed. The lottery tickets were both her undoing and her salvation—her way back.

Alita managed to help Gisele off the floor and moved her to the sofa, propped a pillow under her head, and went into the bedroom. Gisele could hear Alita talking on the phone.

“Did you call the police?” Gisele asked upon Alita’s return.

“I don’t think that would benefit either of us at this point. If you can get safely back into Canada, can you get your daughter?”

“I think so. Claude, from work, said he’d help me.”

“Do you have a picture of your daughter?” Alita explained she had a friend who could create passports, along with supporting identification that would allow her to get back into Canada and then wherever.

“Why would you help me?”

“I’m helping myself.” Alita picked up her purse from the kitchen table. She opened it, pulled out a lottery ticket, and handed it to Gisele. Gisele instantly recognized it as a Match 4 number plus the BlizzardBall, worth $10,000 dollars. “I was saving this to buy something for myself: clothes, shoes, purses, jewelry. I got my cousins killed because of these damn tickets and I’m thinking about shopping. Pretty pathetic, huh?” Alita looked up at the crucifix and made a Sign of the Cross. “The tickets are a curse, but maybe it will get you back to where you belong.”

Kirchner sat in his car outside Alita’s apartment. A headache gripped him in a tight band just above his eyes. He fished out a bottle of aspirin lodged in the ashtray, shook four loose, and washed them down from a half-finished bottle of cranberry juice, left over from breakfast. He took two deep breaths and opened the car door.

The apartment building caretaker attempted to dismiss Kirchner until he produced a photo ID and a badge.

“Keeping track of the tenants ain’t my job,” the caretaker said, leading Kirchner down the hall to the jingle of keys. “She’s been in and out, but I haven’t seen those deadbeat roommates, always with the hood up, fixing some wreck in front of the building, darn eyesore.” The caretaker knocked on Alita’s door, turned the key in the lock, and peeled off back to her own apartment. It looked like the door had been jimmied with a pry bar at some point and poorly repaired.

“Hello, police.” Kirchner gave a precautionary warning as he pushed the apartment door open. A toilet flushed in the unit above, otherwise the apartment was silent. Underfoot he felt the grinding of broken glass, and he stepped over a broken beer bottle with bloody strands of hair attached to it. A lumpy sock was lying in the corner. He picked it up. Quarters tumbled out like winning coins being spit out of a slot machine. A pizza box blotched with grease sat on the Formica kitchen table. He stuck a finger into a slice. It was cold and shriveled.

The smell of cleaning fluid drew him to the living room. “What the hell?” Kirchner froze at the sight of a maroon smear arced across the living room wall. For a moment he considered it an interesting, albeit strange, abstract. But he quickly refocused and saw an unsuccessful attempt to clean up a bloody mess.

He twisted the handle on the Venetian blind to let some afternoon light into the dimness of the garden-level apartment. The wall smear now looked ugly, and he noticed small pockmarks. With his Leatherman tool knife he dug into the pitted sheet rock and extracted a pellet. Rolling it between his fingers, he recognized it as number six shot, probably from a twelve-gauge shotgun at close range. On an adjacent wall a crucifix hung at a tilt. He pushed aside a broken coffee table, reached down to inspect the bloodstained carpet, and found confetti-like bits of pink paper. Straightening up and careful not to disturb potential evidence, he moved into the first of two bedrooms off the living room. It had two twin beds. An empty beer case sat between them holding a lamp and a full ashtray. One of the beds had the sheets stripped off, exposing the worn mattress ticking. The walls were bare except for a makeshift cardboard shade leaning against the wall. The other bedroom was well kept. The windows were draped with sheer curtains and the walls were painted a soothing goldenrod. Kirchner studied the prints in cheap frames hung around the room. The vibrant, lifelike colors of Diego Rivera’s Nude with Calla Lilies momentarily drew him in. On another wall a poster of the murdered rock star Selena hung above a small table with a votive candle.