Penance (30 page)

“There are probably two hundred full-time bookies working the Twin Cities,” O’Connell told me after we were out of earshot. “I don’t think any of them is tied to organized crime.”

“I know,” I admitted.

O’Connell began to laugh, a deep, rich Irish laugh that shook his whole body. “The Mafia. I don’t believe it, the Mafia …”

TWENTY-NINE

I
STOOD ON THE
free-throw line I had painted across my driveway and faced the hoop attached above the door to my garage. I was poised to shoot, a Kevin McHale autograph-model basketball raised slightly above my head. Yet, I did not shoot. It was my habit when I was alone with too much on my mind to crash the boards, even in winter. Shooting baskets helped clear my head; it brought me comfort. Only now it seemed absurd, what with Amy dead and Sherman and now Randy.

And the men I’ve killed …

Four men, all of them with a lifetime of priors: one hundred seventeen arrests, eleven convictions, twenty-two years served, combined. Two had been shot, one killed with a knife, one blown to hell-and-gone with a hand grenade. The oldest was forty-two; the youngest seventeen; their average age was twenty-four. One was married, the others were single; they had five children among them. Three were black, one was white. Three of them were trying to kill me when they died, and the fourth … The fourth died because I could not think of a reason, any reason, for allowing him to live.

And that was how I chose to live with my sins, reducing them to mere statistics, notations in a box score.

In each case I was exonerated by a review board for “acting within the course and scope of my employment.” How nice for me. And each time the verdict had come in, I’d crashed the boards.

I let the ball bounce to rest on the asphalt and sat against the garage door.
Maybe it would be better all around if I just quit the business and became an appliance salesman for Sears; Lord knows I don’t seem to be very good at this job.
I had let a twenty-four-year-old college kid play me like a flute and now Randy was dead. And it was my fault. I had let C. C. Monroe and Amy Lamb and all the rest distract me. I would have seen it coming if I hadn’t been distracted; I would have been able to deal with the problem properly. Randy had depended on me and I had let him down.

“Do one job, do it well, and then move on.” Who said that? Probably my father. He was always saying things like that and I always ignored him. I wondered what he would say if he were here now. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
Yeah, that’s what the tough do. But Dad, tell me, what if you’re not tough? What do you do then? Shoot baskets?

I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when Anne Scalasi drove up. She stopped her car at the end of the driveway and walked toward me, pausing to retrieve the basketball. She dribbled it.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I set the Minnesota State High School League record for assists in a single game?”

“Frequently,” I told her.

Anne set and fired. The ball banged off the rim and caromed onto the lawn. From the expression on her face, Anne had needed that shot. She sighed and sagged down next to me.

“Sean told me about Randy,” she said.

“What was it he used to say? ‘Easy come, easy go’?”

“That’s what he used to say.”

“He was a big boy, he knew the risks of his profession.”

“Yeah, he did,” Anne agreed. “No sense getting upset about it.”

“None at all.”

“It was probably inevitable,” Anne ventured.

“Remember the time the uniforms saved him?” I asked. “He cut off this guy’s line of credit, claimed the guy was into him for something like twice his yearly salary. The guy punched his lights out; nearly killed him. If the squad hadn’t happened by Randy would have bought it right then and there.”

“True, that’s what would have happened and then we would’ve had to solve the case.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” I said. “You know, we didn’t solve crap.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ninety percent of the murders we investigated were so dumb, we usually knew who did it before we even arrived at the scene. How many times did we find the killer standing over the body, covered with blood, practically begging to confess? We got guys who killed people over ice cream cones, over which program to watch on TV, over whose turn it was to take out the fucking garbage. Yeah, we needed to be real detectives to solve those.”

Anne took my hand and gave it a squeeze. We were friends again, just like that. All that was required to repair our relationship was to simply ignore the events that had damaged it in the first place. We could do that easy.

“We’ve been through a lot, you and I,” Anne reminded me.

“Too much.”

“Way too much.”

“Speaking of which, how are you and your domestic associate doing?”

“We’ve decided to go our separate ways.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s been coming for a long time now.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“Me, too.”

“How are the kids taking it?”

“They actually seem happy, especially my oldest. She thinks it’s the smartest thing her father and I have done in years. Who knows? I tried to talk to them, but I think they’re hiding their feelings, trying to put the best face on things. Either that or they don’t know what they feel yet. I certainly don’t.”

“Anything I can do …” I volunteered.

Anne squeezed my hand again. “You can pay the fifty bucks you owe me.”

“What fifty bucks?”

“The bet you made,” she reminded me. “The nine you dug out of your wall
did not
match the bullets that killed Brown or Amy Lamb.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid about bullets.”

“Then who was shooting at me?”

“Damned if I know,” Anne answered as she stood and walked to the basketball. She fired it from the lawn. Swish. An honest three-pointer. I rebounded and dished off to her. Swish. Another three-pointer.

I said, “Double or nothing you miss the next shot.”

“You’re on,” she replied and put it up again. The ball banked high off the glass, caught the front of the rim and fell in. “In your face, Mama!” Anne exclaimed, pumping her fist.

“Luck, all luck,” I said and passed the ball back to her. She missed her fourth attempt. I rebounded, dribbled away from the hoop, spun and dropped a ten-footer. Anne rebounded for me.

“It looks like Sherman’s suicide is going to hold up,” Anne said, bounce-passing the ball to me at the line.

“No way,” I told her.

“The medical examiner believes the wound, the area where the body was found, the fact that Sherman was a fugitive—he believes it all fits a pattern of a self-inflicted type of thing.”

“The ME is nuts.”

I took a jumper and missed.

“He said it was a problem of interpretation,” Anne said. “He said the evidence could support suicide a lot more easily than murder. If I’m going to persuade him it was a killing, I need to give him more.”

“What about the gun?”

“It fired the bullets that killed Brown and Amy Lamb.”

“Surprise, surprise, surprise.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“What about Amy’s tape?”

Anne’s skyhook hit nothing but net.

“The ME figures she could have been referring to Sherman; there’s nothing to suggest she wasn’t.”

“So that’s it?”

“That’s it,” Anne said, holding the ball.

“There’s always Reverend Hoppe,” I said without much hope.

“He has no alibi for Thoreau, but the good reverend claims he can prove he was in bed when Brown took it.”

“Witnesses?”

“Yep.”

“Vivian Olson?”

“Nope. Brenda Clark.”

“‘Hell hath no fury …’” I quoted as Anne passed me the basketball. The foibles of man and woman never ceased to amaze me.

“I wish I’d found C. C.’s videotape when I searched Thoreau’s house,” Anne said. “I don’t know if it would have made any difference, but I wish I’d found it.”

“You mean you didn’t?”

“I told you I didn’t,” Anne reminded me, shooting a layup and passing me the ball.

I froze at the line and pondered her words. They didn’t make sense. If Anne really hadn’t found the tape, hadn’t left it for me to find … I started dribbling the ball.

“Taylor?” Anne called. “Taylor!”

I stopped dribbling.

“You’re zoning out on me.”

“Sorry. I have a few things on my mind.”

“Don’t we all.”

THIRTY

A
FTER
I
SHOOED
Anne out of my yard, I called Paul Aasen. He picked up, answering smoothly, “Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, this is Paul Aasen. May I help you?” He hung up when I identified myself. I called back.

“You have sixty seconds,” he barked after I begged him to listen to my story.

“Answer this question first: Heather’s gun, was it a nine-millimeter?”

“Yes, it was. She claims her father gave it to her several years ago, that she never used it before, that as far as she knows it has never even been fired. You have fifty seconds.”

“All right, consider this: Heather shoots Randy in her apartment, claiming self-defense. Physical evidence at the scene, the presence of a weapon, for example, seems to corroborate her story …”

“You have forty seconds.”

“Plus, there’s testimony confirming her claim that Randy was, in fact, threatening her over a considerable sum of money.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Now, perhaps she can explain why she made no effort to return the money. Perhaps she can explain why she did not call the police when she knew he was coming; why she waited for him in her apartment; why she shot him six times.”

“Twenty seconds.”

“However, can she explain why she tried to kill me and another woman two nights before?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How much time do I have left?”

“Forget that. Repeat what you just said.”

“Late Wednesday night someone shot at me and a lawyer named Cynthia Grey in my home. At first I thought the shooting was connected to something else I’m involved in. Now I know better.”

“Can you identify Miss Schrotenboer as the assailant?”

“No.”

“Can the lawyer … Miss Grey?”

“No.”

“Quit pulling my chain, Taylor …”

“I have something better than an eyewitness. Something unshakable.”

“What?”

“I have a bullet fired from her gun.”

That stopped him. After a few moments of thought Aasen asked, “Where is the bullet?”

“Sergeant Mankamyer of the St. Paul Police Department has it.”

“He is their forensic firearms specialist?” Aasen asked.

“Hmm. Did the St. Paul PD recover the bullet?”

“No, I pulled the bullet out of the wall myself and brought it to them.”

Aasen said, “The constructive-possession rules …”

“They don’t apply,” I insisted, cutting him off. “Maybe you can’t prove that the bullet came out of my wall. But you certainly can prove that the bullet came from her gun. Put her in front of a grand jury and ask her how that’s possible if her gun was never fired before, if it never left her possession. I’m curious to hear her answer.”

“So am I.”

“Something else. Heather once told me she wondered what it was like to kill a man. Question her friends, her classmates. I bet you’ll find she made the same kind of statement to others.”

“I don’t know if that is enough to convict her for killing Mr. Sullivan.”

“Probably not. But it’s enough to arrest her and once she’s in custody, you know how it works, we might find out that she’s not as smart as she seems.”

“I will arrange to secure the bullet from St. Paul and have our own forensic experts compare it to the bullets removed from Mr. Sullivan’s body. If there is a positive match we will proceed from there.”

“Sounds reasonable to me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Taylor.”

“Thank you, Mr. Aasen.”

Freddie slept in a king-size bed with a Victorian canopy and silk sheets; both were the color lingerie manufacturers call peach though it doesn’t resemble the fruit at all. Still, the color contrasted well with Freddie’s complexion. I sat at the foot of his bed and watched him sleep, playing with the Colt Commander he had left on the small marble-topped table next to the bed. Freddie owned a condominium in Uptown Minneapolis, not too far from Lake Calhoun; you could see the lake from Freddie’s balcony. The condo was on the eighth floor of what was advertised as a “security building,” but Freddie and I both knew better and I found myself wondering why a man in his line of work wasn’t more careful. On the other hand, my house wasn’t exactly Fort Knox, either.