Service Dress Blues (21 page)

“Look,” Fox said then, “I'm in a bit of a fix here. I'd like to talk to you about it in depth, privately, so we can really get into what's going on.”

“Of course. I can stand the smoke if you need another cigarette. I don't think there's any danger of anyone here paying much attention to what we say. Otherwise, I'm sure we can find a quiet place somewhere in the stadium.”

“I do want to grab another smoke before I go back to the Babysitters Club, and then I'm going to have to hustle because we have one more routine to do before the top of the ninth. I hate to ask this, but could you maybe wait 'til the game is over so we could hook up and really have a little heart-to-heart?”

Melissa hesitated for a moment. Fox was asking her to make the same kind of reckless, grandstand play that she'd threatened to smack Rep for if he pulled it. But the risk seemed manageable. She was in a baseball stadium with tens of thousands of other people, including an array of what seemed to be thoroughly competent security officers. Besides, whatever felonies and misdemeanors Fox may have abetted, the woman in front of her seemed scared and vulnerable—and, equally important, ready to talk.

“Sure,” Melissa said. “I'll meet you outside the prep room as soon as I can get there after the last out.”

“Great,” Fox said, a fresh cigarette already headed for her lips. “I really appreciate it.”

There were already two outs in the bottom of the seventh by the time Melissa got back to her seat. Her colleagues had long since gone home, and the crowd as a whole was steadily thinning. When the inning ended a couple of minutes later the early exodus of fans hoping to beat the traffic and confident of victory accelerated. The kids with the plastic cannons hustled out and shot more t-shirts into the crowd. That was it for in-game distraction. Nine outs later, with only a walk and a double-play for the sake of variety, the game was over.

She made her way back to the prep room. Fox was waiting for her just outside, holding the door slightly ajar to keep it from closing and locking. The other Diamond Dancers had apparently left. Fox gave her a semi-conspiratorial nod and pushed into the room ahead of her. She flopped wearily into a chair near the door while Melissa found a seat on a bench across the room.

“Do you know what ‘bundlers' are?”

“In general terms,” Melissa said. “They're people who pull together political campaign contributions, supposedly from individuals associated with a business, and put the money together in one big pot. The idea is to make influential donations to politicians on behalf of the business without violating the legal limits on contributions.”

“Right. Well, apparently the law can be pretty rough on these guys. If they don't obey a lot of ticky-tacky little rules exactly, they get treated almost like racketeers.”

“That's because they are racketeers. It's dirty business even if you play by the rules. If you break them, it's a combination of extortion and bribery.”

“Whatever,” Fox said. “Anyway, the guys involved in it can get pretty rough—especially if they think someone is scamming them on some of their contributions.”

“Rough enough to kill Ole Lindstrom?”

“Rough enough to crease up Laurel Fox is all I care about. Something happened. Some not-my-department kind of thing. I don't know what it was. But if they think I'm mixed up in it, I could be in pretty big trouble.”

“Aside from suggesting that you get a lawyer and go to the police, I'm not sure how I can help.”

“Tell me what
you
know. 'Cause if your husband is involved enough in this to have someone listening in on his phone calls, then you know a lot more than I do.”

“Most of what I know we learned confidentially from other people. I don't feel comfortable disclosing it—especially if it might get them crosswise of thugs like you've been describing.”

Melissa's phone chirped. Seeing Kuchinski's number, she mouthed an apology to Fox and answered.

“You were absolutely right,” Kuchinski boomed, as Melissa realized too late that, in this quiet room, the voice was easily loud enough for Fox to her. “The flag wrapped around Ole had forty-nine stars.”

“Walt, I'll call you back in about ten minutes,” she said hastily. “I can't talk right now.”

“Got it.”

The line went dead. Melissa looked up, preparing to offer Fox a verbal apology. The words choked in her throat like an inconvenient fish bone. Fox was pointing a small, silver-plated and ivory-handled automatic at her chest.

“It'll be more than ten minutes,” she said. “Slide your phone over here along the floor.”

“Well,” Melissa sighed as she moved to comply, “that's what I get for bad manners.”

Chapter 27

“Okay,” Fox said, checking her watch, “here's the way we're going to work it. First of all, I don't want to kill you.”

“You mean I've been practicing perfect Acts of Contrition for nothing?”

Melissa's glib pose was spurious, and it seemed so transparent to her that she thought Fox had to see through it. In reality, the muzzle pointed at her chest terrified her. She felt a cold, yawning void in her belly. Her right calf started to shake and it took a conscious effort of will to stop it. Her throat felt blocked, as if she were about to vomit. She knew that if she unclenched her fists her fingers would tremble. She was putting on the act because she figured it was her only shot at survival, but she had to deploy every atom of concentration she could muster to manage even the pathetic semblance of poise she was showing now to Fox.

“Just listen, okay?” Fox demanded crossly.

“I'm listening.”

“Security will be spending the next half-hour shooing the fat cats out of the luxury suites. The TGI Friday's restaurant in the left-field stands is open for another two hours, and the guards will concentrate on the main concourses until it closes. They won't get around to a final check on this room until then.”

“You obviously know the routine.”

“I've filled in as a Diamond Dancer before. I've also ‘filled in' inside some of the luxury suites, if you know what I mean.”

“Thank you for sharing.”

Fox glanced at her watch.

“In thirteen minutes, you and I are going to walk out that door and meet somebody. The three of us will go upstairs and then leave the stadium through the Club/Suites entrance, like stragglers from one of the luxury suites. We'll do all of this very quietly and without drawing attention to ourselves—understand?”

“Don't worry about me,” Melissa said. “I'll be a perfect lamb.”

“You'd better be. Because the other way to handle it is for me to club you over the head with this gun while my friend holds you, so the two of us can walk you out as if you were drunk or strung out on bad downers or something.”

“Could you repeat the part about how I'm not going to get killed? I liked that.”

“Only you and I will know my little Glok Twenty-three is there. I'll use it if I have to, but as long as you don't yell for help or make a break for it I won't have to. And there won't be any point in running for it because I know this stadium a lot better than you do and unless you stumble over a guard, which you won't, I'll track you down—and when I find you I'll be very cranky.”

“So if I cooperate I get to go on living until we're a mile or two away from the stadium, somewhere in the Menominee River Valley, right?”

“No one wants to kill you.”

“Even to stay out of prison?”

“We're not worried about some low-rent campaign finance rap. We want the information you have because there are very nasty people who think my friend and I have scammed them, and we have to show them that we haven't. Murder would just screw things up.”

“It already has,” Melissa said.

“What, Ole? No way. My money is on Wolf for that one. If it wasn't her it was Lena or Gephardt.”

“It was Gary Carlsen. The friend you've been talking about.”

“No way. Ole was a meal ticket for Gary. That Gephardt thing would have kept Gary in latte grandes for ten years. It might even have gotten him to the big time.”

“There were forty-nine stars on the flag, Laurel. Not fifty.”

“So what?”

“The only time the American flag had just forty-nine stars was the seven-and-a-half months from January 3, 1959, when Alaska was admitted to the union as the forty-ninth state, and August 21, 1959, when Hawaii was admitted as the fiftieth.”

“If the Brewers ever do a geography trivia promotion, you should come back out for it.”

“Fifty years later, there aren't many forty-nine-star flags lying around outside Alaska. But one of them was hanging in Ole Lindstrom's club room. The governor of Alaska had a forty-nine star flag flown over the Capitol on the day Alaska was formally admitted, and sent it to Ole to thank him for getting Kennedy behind the Alaska statehood bill.”

“And you're telling me this because…why?”

“Because it proves that Ole was killed in the club room in his home in Loki, not in Milwaukee—killed by someone he knew and trusted enough to get close to him; someone who could have snuck out the safe deposit box key sometime when Ole wasn't looking. The crime scene was relatively clean because the blood and tissue from the death blow spattered on the flag hung on the wall behind his desk. Carlsen wrapped Ole's body in the flag and moved it to Milwaukee to cover up the fact that the murder happened in Loki, and to throw suspicion on Laurel Wolf. Before he moved the body, he took one of the other flags stashed in the club room and used it to replace the forty-nine-star flag on the wall.”

“But this supposed killer couldn't expect that to work. Sooner or later, Lena was bound to count the stars on the displayed flag and she'd know that it couldn't have been the one this political hack from Alaska sent to Ole.”

“That's why Carlsen talked Laurel Wolf into torching the place. I don't know whether he told her that Ole had evidence tying Native American political movements to illegal campaign finance activity or something else. Whatever it was, though, it worked. She set a fire that destroyed the decoy flag.”

“It sounds like he was really scrambling,” Fox said sarcastically. “Apparently it wasn't a very well-planned murder.”

“It wasn't planned at all. Carlsen suddenly found Ole threatening a neat little campaign finance scam that he'd put together. He had to improvise.”

“Ole wasn't any boy scout,” Fox said, shrugging. “Everything in campaign finance is dirty one way or another.”

“Maybe—but it only turns into a scam when you don't stay bought.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Carlsen was trying to sell the tribes the same Persian carpet twice. Chenequa Gaming thought Gephardt was bought and paid for by the donations it made to the Wisconsin Policy Project. They even had a receipt for their purchase, in the form of the formal recognition she provided in the program for her domestic violence symposium. I'm betting that some smooth talk between Carlsen and Randy Halftoe played a role in that.”

“No scam so far. That's just salesmanship. Seduction isn't rape.”

“The scam came when Carlsen injected Indian gaming as an issue into the Gephardt's nascent campaign for attorney general. That was pure extortion. He was telling the tribes that Gephardt wouldn't stay bought—that they just had to keep paying and paying and paying, until he had all he wanted. He used you to drug Midshipman Lindstrom and steal his military i.d., service dress blues, and safe-deposit box key so that he could get the back-up disk with the critical donor information on it. His plan was to keep taking payoffs in the form of ‘contributions' to his political action committees. When he figured he'd milked that for all it was worth, he'd have Gephardt drop the gaming issue and focus on something else. He could have told her the polling was skewing south on it or something. She's a political naïf with suite-smarts instead of street-smarts, so she would have believed him.”

“That's nothing to kill anyone over. That's almost legal. That may actually
be
legal.”

“His problem wasn't the feds, it was Ole. Ole found out about it. That's what Lena meant when she said that Ole wasn't trying to bleed anybody. He wasn't in it for the money. He just wanted another chance to play at the big table, as Lena put it. He summoned Carlsen to a meeting in Loki and confronted him about it. There was an argument. It turned violent. Carlsen hit Ole on the head with something, and suddenly he had a corpse on his hands.”

“If anyone hit Ole on the head, it was Lena,” Fox said. “After all, she has a history of doing that.”

“The first assault on Ole was also by Carlsen. The safe deposit box required two keys. He had Harald's but he had to sneak Ole's out as well. He'd managed that and then, after he'd gotten the disk, he snuck into the house to put it back before Ole missed it. Ole came home before Carlsen expected him to. He knocked Ole out in order to make his getaway, then drove back up and called nine-one-one just in time to pin the assault and battery on Lena.”

“Whatever, I guess,” Fox said, rolling her eyes in unfeigned boredom.

“Aren't you getting the picture here, Laurel? You're already on the fringes of one murder and you're about to get up to your eyebrows in another one. There's no way Carlsen can leave me alive. No matter what I tell him he can't prove he wasn't scamming the bundler-thugs because he
was
scamming them.”

“I won't let him kill you,” Fox said, her gaze suddenly focused and intense. “No one's going to pin a murder rap on my cute little ass.”

“Laurel Wolf probably wasn't planning on having one pinned on hers, either, but cops from two counties and the FBI are looking for her. Carlsen's aiders and abettors don't come out well.”

Melissa thought she saw a shadow of doubt cloud Fox's face for a moment. She wondered if she was kidding herself.

“That's not going to happen,” Fox said, looking again at her watch. “No killing, unless you force the issue. Okay, time for us to go. Just keep your cool, walk right in front of me with a nice, steady pace, and don't try anything.”

Fox stood up. With the barrel of her pistol she summoned Melissa over toward the door, standing to one side so that she could position herself just behind her and slightly to her left. Melissa stood up. She felt her gut quiver.

Never mind
, she told herself.
You've got one shot. Don't blow it. Focus
.

She took one deliberate step forward and then managed another. Muscle memory took over from there and without excessive quaking she moved toward the door. Melissa was a professor in her mid-thirties who could have lost five pounds without hurting anything, and Fox was an impressively athletic entertainer in her late twenties. Professor versus athlete in a fair fight—Melissa had a pretty good idea of how that one would come out. She had, at most, one chance and she had to make it count.

She reached the door. She sensed Fox slipping behind her. She imagined that she felt the pistol's muzzle against her spine, but the rational synapses still functioning in her brain told her that Fox almost certainly had the weapon concealed. She felt two irritating rivulets of sweat coursing from her shoulder blades toward her waist.

“Now, open the door and walk slowly through the doorway.”

Melissa grasped the doorknob and turned it. With surreal clarity she heard the knob's tongue click out of the jamb and recede into the doorknob itself. She started to jerk the door open, but Fox said, “Easy now,” as if she were reading Melissa's mind. Melissa took the hint and pulled more tentatively on the knob. She got the door a little more than one body-width wide and stepped through it, with Fox crowding on her heels.

Ten feet away, in the dim recesses of an otherwise empty corridor, Melissa saw Carlsen. He looked seriously wired. He started striding forward.

Melissa stepped across the threshold with her right foot. As she began to move her left, she turned her head slightly so that she could talk over her shoulder to Fox.

“You know that phone of mine you took? I hit
REDIAL
before I slid it over to you. It's been connected all this time to a lawyer's number, recording everything we said on his answering machine.”

“What?”

Fox snapped her head down as she reached for Melissa's mobile phone stashed in the pouch of her hoodie. Planting the ball of her left foot and leaving her left leg extended, Melissa twisted decisively to her left. She grabbed a fistful of hoodie near Fox's shoulder with her right hand and snatch of sweatpants near the dancer's hip with her left. She jerked and shoved. Hard. With a yelp like a cat in heat Fox tripped over Melissa's leg and sprawled on the concrete floor.

Carlsen raced forward, preparing to block any flight by Melissa, but Melissa had no intention of fleeing. She stepped back into the prep room and slammed the door. It took a moment of sweaty fumbling to find the button that locked the door from the inside, but she managed it.

“Goddammit!” she heard instantly from outside the door. “You
lied
to me, you bitch!”

Melissa thought that Fox was in a poor position to be making moral judgments, but she figured she'd save the one-liners for later. There was a black phone on top of the counter above mini-refrigerator. She grabbed the receiver and punched zero.

“Hello!” a cheery voice chirped. “Thank you for contacting Stadium Administration at Miller Park! For operating hours during the National League Championship Season, say, ‘Hours' or punch One. For—”

Melissa hit nine-one-one.

“Invalid entry,” a different voice, not nearly as cheerful, said.

“Open this door!” a male voice barked from outside. “If I have to blow the lock off, you won't like what happens next!”

Melissa hit one on the phone.

“During the season, regular—”

“Help!” Melissa yelled.

“I'm sorry! I don't recognize that instruction!”

Melissa heard a fingernails-on-chalkboard scratching sound behind her. She spun around. The front edge of a credit card was sticking through, in between the door and the jamb. Detective stories she read referred to this as “ 'loiding a lock,” and it almost invariably worked in fiction. She wasn't sure that it worked in the real world, but she had a sick feeling that she was about to find out.

Two against one, they have at least one gun, and I don't have any. I don't like the odds.

She flung the receiver in frustration at the wall. Instead of a satisfying plastic-on-cinderblock smash, this gesture produced a hollow
thonk!
The receiver had hit the barrel of one of the t-shirt cannons.