‘Booster Liss?’ I asked Leo the next morning as I climbed aboard his sparkling silver Dodge Ram van. It smelled strongly of chlorine.
‘Full cleanse,’ he said, grimacing. ‘All those naked old people …’
‘I understand.’
‘I don’t,’ said Leo, the most optimistic of men. ‘They said they wanted to do field trips to the zoo, the Arboretum, Chicago Botanic, Ma and her lady friends, even that guy—’
‘The one I saw in the pool – the one without his suit?’ I asked, unable to resist. ‘The guy who I then saw exiting this very vehicle, again without his—?’
He groaned. ‘I’d only stepped out into the hall for a minute, to take a call, when up walked the lizard that runs the health center. He’s with two sour-looking fellows. I smiled nicely, thinking the sour guys were considering membership. They walked into the pool area and I went back to talking on the phone. Next thing, I heard shouting. I ran back into the pool area. What did I see? It isn’t Ma who’s doing the yelling, or her lady friends, or even the old gent whose applesauce I suspect they’re dosing with Viagra. No, it was the sour guys. They were going ballistic, yelling, pointing at Ma and her friends in the pool. They pushed me aside in a panic to get out. One of them was on the phone, calling the cops. Turns out the two sours were from the government agency that approves funding for senior rehabilitation facilities.’
‘Ma and her friends: they were, ah …?’ There really was no delicate way to probe.
Leo nodded. ‘Buck naked, the lot of them. Especially the old guy in all his chemically re-erected glory. Ah, jeez.’
‘I still can’t believe the cops busted them.’
‘Public lewdness. They said they had to because those two sours were federal representatives.’
‘Now what?’
‘I hired the Barracuda. He fixed it.’
Jerry Lopes, the Barracuda, was one of Cook County’s most flamboyant lawyers. He’d gotten rich representing Rivertown’s lizards, though he rarely entered a courtroom. He worked the dimmer parts at the backs of the courthouses, passing cash.
‘How much?’
‘Five grand because there were multiple defendants, but he got the case dismissed.’ Then he asked, ‘You don’t think leaving your Jeep at the sheriff’s garage is provoking them unnecessarily?’
‘Amanda’s worried about that, too.’
His face relaxed into a smile for the first time. ‘Spending more time together, are we?’
‘We flew out to Reeder and Laguna Beach yesterday,’ I said, sidestepping his nose. ‘I needed to leave the Jeep where nobody could plant something inside.’
‘Baloney. You’re taunting that Sergeant Bohler. And when she arrests you I’ll have to get you a lawyer.’
‘Call the Bohemian, not Jerry Lopes, though I don’t think either will be necessary. Remember, Booster did a cleanse for me, too.’
He raised his nose to sniff his own chlorine-scented air and nodded knowingly. ‘What else is Amanda worried about?’
‘Timothy Wade.’
‘Just because he was the fourth musketeer?’
‘She genuinely likes the guy. Plus, she thinks I’m poking at a very powerful future presidential candidate, someone with resources to hit back hard.’
‘I’m with her. I don’t know Wade but I like him.’
‘I think Marilyn Paul suspected him of something. She planted the bones and the axe in the silo.’
‘Jeez!’
‘That was Amanda’s reaction, too.’
We turned the last corner and headed to the impound garage down the street.
‘Actually, it’s Halvorson who bothers me the most,’ I said. ‘I can’t get a lead to where he’s been for the past twenty years.’
‘If Bohler asks I’ll vouch that you have trouble figuring things out,’ he said, trying for light.
He slowed. ‘My God. The Jeep. The top has gone green. And look what’s on the bumper.’
It was Sergeant Bohler on the back bumper, sitting, waiting. She knew we were coming.
‘I didn’t think to look for a tail behind us,’ I said as Leo pulled to a stop.
‘Would it have changed anything?’
‘No.’
Bohler scuffed the cement with the heel of her sensible cop shoe and stood as I walked up. ‘My cop friend in Laguna Beach says I should play along for now,’ she said, reaching into her jacket pocket, ‘but first, a DNA sample.’ She pulled out a small kit sealed in plastic and a pair of thin latex gloves.
‘You got usable DNA off Marilyn Paul, even though she’d been banged around, submerged, at the dam?’
She took a long cotton swab from the kit. ‘Don’t forget, she scratched at you before she died. Lucky for us, you were nice enough to put the poor woman in a really thick, big plastic bag. The bag stayed watertight and preserved her fingernails. God bless thick plastic, and God bless you, Elstrom, for being such an idiot.’
I’d squinted at enough police dramas on my four-inch television screen to know the procedure. She swabbed the inside of my mouth and put the swab inside a long plastic container. Everything then went in a plastic bag and back in her pocket.
She gestured at the Jeep. ‘Cute, you leaving the insult of a Cheese Whopper wrapper stuffed in the dash,’ she said, ‘along with two entire Whoppers, though cheese-less, under the front seats.’
‘Ah, jeez,’ Leo muttered from a couple of feet behind me.
‘I knew I forgot to eat something,’ I said to Bohler. It was a lie; I’ve never forgotten to eat anything. Along with the wrapper, I’d left the burgers to foul the noses of any interested dogs, though my confidence in Booster Liss’s cleansing protocol was supreme.
‘You might be able to fool one of our dogs but not us two-legged cops, not forever,’ she said. ‘Anyway, in the spirit of friendship, I repositioned your Jeep several times while you were gone, to keep your burgers warm under the fullest force of the sun. Everyone likes hot, festering burgers, right?’ She offered up a smile. ‘Especially raccoons, those nocturnal foragers who can slip into cars if their doors have been carelessly left open by someone like me. Nothing’s ever wrong with raccoon noses, that’s for sure.’
I opened the driver’s door and released the stench of the sergeant’s vengeance. Raccoons had found the hamburgers. Worse, they’d lingered long enough to complete their full digestive processes before leaving.
‘As for me, Elstrom,’ she went on, smiling, ‘from now on, I’ll have to keep an eye on you from afar. The Paul murder was transferred, officially, to our detectives.’ She started toward the door of the garage.
‘Time for the grown-ups to investigate?’ I called after her.
‘Damn it, Dek!’ Leo whispered, moving up right behind me. ‘She’ll arrest you just on the basis of your attitude.’
Bohler stopped and turned around. She’d heard. ‘Tell your friend not yet,’ she said. ‘In fact, I didn’t tell our dicks anything about you, because I’m reserving the honor of arresting you for myself.’
She turned back around and went into the garage.