The Weatherman (10 page)

“This stuff is legal,” Andrea reminded him, as the man in the video pulled out and ejaculated over the woman’s belly and breasts. Disgusted, she turned her back to the television set and raised her voice a notch. “Jack, will you shut that stuff off. I thought you were a religious man. Do you have some other story in mind for me?”

He ignored her request. “You’re a poli sci major. Tell me everything you know about Per Ellefson.”

At last there was a break in the action. A couple in clothes appeared on the TV screen and exchanged some lifeless banter.

Andrea rattled off everything she’d seen and read about Ellefson. “He’s a successful businessman running for governor. Wants the Republican nomination. Probably won’t get it. The party has been taken over by the religious right.” Napoleon flinched when she said that. Andrea enjoyed the shot. She took another.

“Personally, I’ve never met a born-again Christian who wasn’t a born-again hypocrite.” Napoleon’s face was turning red. “Ellefson’s not one of them,” Andrea went on. “Too moderate. He opposes abortion but also opposes the death penalty-a cause they’re zealous about. He’s tall and handsome, looks good on television. Of Norwegian descent. Married. I think he has two daughters. Latest polls show him beating all Democrats. His problem is getting the nomination. I wouldn’t mind covering his campaign, at least through the primary. It’ll give me some badly needed credibility. I think the stories I’ve been doing have been too soft.”

The news director was biting his lip. His breathing was growing louder, either his asthma or his anger. Jack Napoleon eyed the woman standing over him. He regained some of his composure, then returned his attention to the TV screen.

Andrea, too, turned to watch. Had she pushed too hard? The couple with their clothes on soon had their clothes off. They joined another naked couple in front of a fireplace. Andrea Labore had never seen so much sucking and fucking in her entire life. By her own admission she had poor taste in men-the ugly curse of beautiful women. Her head was swimming with confusion and anger. The intense weather didn’t help. Was she being forced to watch this stuff? She thought this was a form of sexual assault. He’s as good a raping me.

As the men in the video worked their magic, fast and furious, the women began to scream with pleasure-primal screams of raw sex before the flames. Lightning lit up the room. With that bolt Andrea remembered that Jesus Christ, on his way to heaven, was looking over her shoulder. Her eyes fell on the door. She couldn’t shake the haunting feeling that they were being watched, that some evil force in the newsroom knew what was going on.

Andrea started for the door. She was going to fling it open when Jack Napoleon finally spoke up, stopping her dead in her tracks.

“Yes, Per Ellefson would be a good assignment for you. You can move to the political beat next week. But you watch your mouth, Andrea,” he warned with a malevolent voice. “I don’t like uppity women. I won’t have them working for me.”

Andrea opened the office door and left the news director to his dirty videos.

The newsroom was dark but for the occasional flash of lightning. Police calls echoed over the assignment desk. Andrea’s police instinct still told her something was amiss. Up across the news set the weather center appeared to be bathing in the dancing brilliance of the northern lights. Again she saw a shadow breeze across the wall. It wouldn’t hurt to check on the storm before she ventured home.

But Andrea Labore found Weather Center 7 abandoned. Ghostly. There was no weatherman to explain the thunderstorms moving across the bright green radar screens, no meteorologist to interpret the red fluorescent numbers emanating from the chrome instruments. The glowing computers had only each other to converse with. The overnight man wouldn’t arrive until midnight-another twenty minutes. A printer sprang to life. Andrea jumped.

She grabbed her heart. Strange, she thought, that Dixon Bell would leave his station in the middle of a storm. A bathroom break, perhaps; or maybe he had gone to the roof to measure the storm in his own special way. He was like that.

The new political reporter for Channel 7 filed her suspicions in the back of her mind. She noted the time. Then she started for the Sky High parking ramp, grateful she was parked in out of the weather.

“Three-ten Able. Metrodome Municipal Ramp. On the roof. Report of one down. We ‘ll start ambulance.”

It was just past midnight and raining so hard headlights couldn’t cut it. Cloud-to-cloud lightning illuminated the tempest. Thunder was a bass-drum rumble. Lieutenant Donnell Redmond brought the unmarked squad car to a halt in a bumper-to-bumper crop of downtown traffic at the foot of the
IDS
Tower. The Twins had beaten the White Sox in extra innings. Fans fresh from the game sprinted from bar to bar. Cars snaked slowly through the flooding streets. The lights of Minneapolis blurred in the storm. The lieutenant had his window cracked open, allowing the weather to slip in and Captain Les Angelbeck’s cigarette smoke to slip out. Redmond put up with it. They inched through traffic, talked, and listened to police calls in the rain.

“Car four, make twenty-one-seventeen Lyndale on a domestic assault. Husband, wife. He’s beating her with something.”

Like the windshield wipers, the two cops were working overtime. “When I made lieutenant I thought I finally had a nine-to-five job.”

“Sorry, Donny. I was sure our boy would be there tonight.” Angelbeck brushed ashes from his raincoat.

The street corner was turning swampy. Redmond, a tall, imposing man, arrested a mosquito and smashed it against his window. ‘That man we’re after tonight ain’t nothing but a glorified bookie anyway. Don’t hardly seem worth the effort.”

“Gambling here used to be restricted to sleazy kitchens off back alleys,” said Angelbeck, reminiscing. “Now it’s a two-billion-dollar concern and a whole new criminal division. Minnesota has more casinos than Atlantic City. We’ve had horse racing and dog racing. We’ve got pull tabs and lotteries. We’ve got riverboat gambling paddling up the Mississippi. We lead the nation in the number of dollars spent per person on gambling. What other scheme could politicians possibly devise to take from the poor and give to the rich, and tell them they’re having fun while it’s being done?”

“Cock fighting and pit bulls.”

The old captain laughed. “That’s what it’s coming to.” The rain intensified, pounding the car. Straight-line winds sent waves of water racing down the busy street. “Don’t you own a raincoat?”

“All squads. Report any closed streets due to flooding. City works will be notified. All squads at O-fourteen.”

They were moving again, slowly parting the waters. They rolled by Solid Gold, a high-priced strip joint. The doorman, torn umbrella in hand, was opening the door to a limousine.

“Yeah, I own a raincoat.”

“And how long have you been living here now?”

“Almost twenty years.” Donnell Redmond had come to Minnesota from Florida to play basketball. The university boasted it didn’t recruit for four years, it recruited for forty. Despite the hyperbole, it was often true. They came, played, and then they stayed.

“I’d think by now you’d have learned to dress for the weather.”

“I watched the weather,” Redmond told him. “The man said chance of sprinkles. He didn’t say nothing about monsoon season.”

“What channel did you watch?”

“Five.”

“See, there you go. Watch Channel 7. That guy is right on the money. Every day.”

“Channel 7 is a white-ass conspiracy. They haven’t had a black face on their news in two years. Just stuck-up, uptight, funky white bitches, hairdo white guys, and that big fat white weatherman with the baby face. You don’t seriously watch them, do you?”

“They’re number one now.”

“I’d rather drown.” He clobbered another mosquito on the dashboard.

Angelbeck coughed, then cleared his throat. “I’m old, Donny. We old people have to know the weather.”

“Right, yeah. You watch the weather like a goddamn weatherman so you can dress right and not get the sniffles, then you blow two packs of smokes every day. That cough of yours ain’t gettin’ any better, raincoat or none.”

“Speaking of raincoats and cigarettes, look at that billboard.”

The tall lieutenant bent his head over the steering wheel. “Looks like our boy Splat Man got another one. Your hero, too.”

Under bright lights above the street the Marlboro Man was riding through the rain. But his head had been blown off and his horse was bleeding profusely. They’d taken two hits: one fluorescent orange splat to the cowboy’s face and a bright yellow splat to the horse’s neck. In the copious rain the dripping paint took on the hue of surreal art.

They worked their way past the stadium and started for the freeway. Angry cops in black raincoats directed traffic. It was the seedy end of town: parking lots and vacant lots, railroad tracks and decaying shacks. The nasty weather only added to the gloom. Angelbeck glanced at the rearview mirror and saw a red blur of flashing lights leave the county medical center. The siren could barely be heard above the storm.

“Three-ten Able.”

“Three-ten.”

“Metrodome ramp. We need a supervisor on the roof. Cancel the ambulance. Call eleven-ten. Suspect is
GOA
.”

Donnell Redmond hit the brakes. “Man, we just passed there.”

“Turn around. Let’s have a look.”

To most people the police chatter that night was just routine mumbo jumbo, mostly weather-related. But to cops, newsrooms, and scanner freaks the message was as clear as the night was stormy. A supervisor was needed to seal the scene. Cancel the ambulance because the victim is dead. Eleven-ten was homicide. Suspect was gone on arrival.

Redmond raced the car in circles up the parking ramp. Water was already tumbling down the levels and spilling through the walls. He drove back into the torrential rains

on the blackened roof and parked next to the one-man squad known as three-ten Able.

Les Angelbeck buttoned up his raincoat and threw his cigarette at the weather. Donnell Redmond grabbed a newspaper off the seat and draped it over his head. They walked over to the patrolman and looked down at where his flashlight shined. They had to shout to be heard over the storm.

“Who called it in?”

“Anonymous caller. Hung up on the dispatcher,” he told them. “I bent down to check her. I could move her head around with my pinky.”

The victim was on her back, peering up at the wind and rain, her innocent eyes not quite closed. “This girl’s not out of her teens,” Angelbeck declared. “What’s that uniform she’s wearing?”

“Looks like a vendor,” the patrolman answered. “There was a Twins game tonight. I think they park free if they park on the roof.”

The newspaper Lieutenant Redmond held over his head disintegrated. He threw the wads of worthless ink to the floor and swore. “Bitchin’ rain is washing everything away, man.”

Another Minneapolis squad pulled onto the roof of the parking ramp. A supervisor arrived. There was little talk, though they were all thinking the same thing. Soaked with anger and drenched with frustration, Donnell Redmond leaned into Les Angelbeck so tight the others couldn’t hear. “That’s two of them in less than a month. This kind of thing ain’t supposed to happen here.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“C’mon, Captain, you gonna even suggest this wasn’t the same animal that did this?”

“It’s not our case.”

“Yeah, well, when this sicko gets tired of parking ramps in Minneapolis and starts St. Paul, or Bloomington, or some place like that, it’s gonna be our case. You jive?”

“I jive.” Angelbeck glanced up at the dark bulbs of the ramp lights. “Find out if the storm took these lights out.” He stared down the street at the spooky orange glow of the inflated Metrodome. Lightning broke over it. “Damn indoor baseball. Game would have been canceled tonight.”

A Channel 7 News van pulled slowly up to the roof. A Channel 4 car came right behind. A cop rushed down to stop them.

The collection of policemen was standing in water up to their ankles now. Purple streaks of motor oil circled their pant legs. Curtains of rain blew across the ramp.

“Man, we’re gonna have to call Roto-Rooter in on this one.”

Then the dead girl’s body began to rise, slowly lifting off the concrete floor and floating before them as if on a rolling cloud. Her broken neck flopped backwards and her young face, frozen in fright, disappeared beneath the oily water.

Old Jesse was a black man who pushed a broom. The job paid him little, but the work was all that he knew. The long stone hallways were his home. The boys were his family.

It was said among those boys that Old Jesse had once killed a man. Nobody was sure of the circumstances, only Jesse himself. Rumor had it was a white man he killed in a fight over a black woman-back in the days before civil rights, when murder among blacks didn’t count for much. But killing a white man had cost Jesse twenty-five years.

This was the peaceful part of the night. The boys were in their bunks. He could push his broom for an hour and not talk to a soul. As he worked his way down B-East he saw the boys had forgotten to turn off the television set in the day room. Channel 7 reran the local news at 1:00 A.M. Old Jesse stopped to watch. He needed a break. The fortress was like a brick oven. He turned up the sound, just a hair.

“It’s a horrible feeling … We come to work, and we don’t even know if we’re going to make it home. I just kept driving around the block… What are my options? ... Where do I park?”

The janitor shook his head, sincerely sorry for the woman.

“Police officials,” said a red-haired news lady, “are holding daily briefings for the press, calling the murders two separate investigations, while at the same time acknowledging the similarities. Tonight the Minneapolis chief of police was openly musing for our cameras.”

“This is a head scratcher … what can you tell people? If you say there are no similarities between this homicide

and the other, you can assure people there isn’t a serial killer out there… but that means there are two killers out there. We ‘re trying to find out if this is a copycat or a serial situation, or just a coincidence.”