I went back to my car, sat behind the steering wheel, and thought about Hannah Braaten. Could she have made all this up just to entertain the audience at her reading?
If she did, how do you explain Kayla Janas and all those other psychics at the Twin Cities Psychic and Healing Festival? my inner voice asked. And Leland’s haunted house?
A lightweight, Toy had called her.
Still …
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said aloud just to hear the words.
What do you believe?
I believe that Leland Hayes stole $654,321.
And hid it where?
I pulled my notebook from my pocket again and reviewed what I had written there.
What are you looking for?
Stuart Moore. LaToya said that he was a friend of Leland’s, yet I don’t recall seeing his name listed in the insurance company’s case file.
Maybe he’s a ghost, too.
I started the Mustang and drove back to my condominium to find out.
Smith and Jones were working the security desk. I thanked them for finding the footage of the red Toyota Avalon and sending it off to Bobby Dunston. They asked if anything had come of it.
“Not that I heard,” I said. “But then the cops don’t necessarily confide in me.”
“You’re saying you and Detective Shipman aren’t bosom buddies?” Jones asked. “What’s that about, anyway?”
“She’s jealous of my storied exploits,” I said.
“Aren’t we all?” asked Jones. “What about the psychic medium thing? How’s that working out?”
“I’m no further along than when I started.”
“So we didn’t miss anything,” Smith said.
“I’ll keep you posted,” I told them.
I bid good-bye to the boys and took the elevator to the seventh floor. I went directly to my computer after entering the condo and fired it up. I skimmed all the Midwest Farmers field reports while carefully searching for names. I found two that I had already entered into my notebook—Fred Herrman and Ted Poyer, plus their addresses from twenty years ago. I couldn’t find Stuart Moore no matter how hard I tried, so I Googled his name. There were sixteen matches in Minnesota. I narrowed that down to six within the greater Twin Cities area. Using Facebook, LinkedIn, and a couple of other social media sites, I was able to reduce that number to two, one in Minneapolis, one in St. Paul.
What are the odds that a friend of Leland Hayes is intimate with the legal system? my inner voice asked.
Pretty good, I decided, which was why I accessed the website of the Minnesota Judicial Branch. A couple of clicks brought me to a page designated as Minnesota Public Access, which allowed me—or anyone, for that matter—to search through most of the court records in the State of Minnesota Court Information System. I clicked on the tab labeled MINNESOTA DISTRICT (TRIAL) COURT CASE SEARCH, accepted the terms and conditions, and was sent immediately to a page that allowed me to choose the types of case records I wanted to search. I selected criminal/traffic/petty and was sent to still another page with blank information fields that the website wanted me to fill in. All I had was a name, so I entered the one belonging to Moore in Minneapolis and hit SEARCH.
A second or two later, I was told that Moore had been charged and convicted of four, count ’em, four traffic violations in the past nine years—failure to obey a traffic control signal, parking within five feet of an alley or driveway, passing a parked emergency vehicle on a two-lane street without moving to the far lane, and violating a winter parking ban.
Clearly a menace to society.
I also discovered that he was thirty-two years old, which meant he wasn’t the hardened criminal I was looking for. So I repeated my search, this time using the name of Moore from St. Paul.
My, my, my …
Stuart Moore had been a jerk in three different counties. The search engine told me that he had been convicted of multiple counts of domestic assault, disorderly conduct, driving under the influence, pawning another’s property, and obstructing the legal process with force, earning him a bunch of fines and a few jolts in various county jails. Then came a big fall: criminal sexual contact in the second degree. He had copped a plea, which suggested that the evidence must have been pretty compelling—ninety months in Stillwater and registered as a sex offender when he got out, which occurred about a year ago.
The fact that he was registered meant that I could look him up online, and I did, first by accessing the website of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Next, I clicked on the SEARCH FOR OFFENDERS AND FUGITIVES tab, followed by the PUBLIC REGISTRANT SEARCH bar. I typed in Moore’s name and was immediately told where he lived in Ramsey County as well as his age, color of his eyes and hair, height, weight, build, and ethnicity, none of which was necessary because, in addition, the site featured colored mug shots. The page also gave me Moore’s MNDOC offender ID and offense information:
Offender engaged in sexual contact with victim (female, age 16). Contact included penetration. Offender gained access to victim by following her home after she exited a city bus and asking to use her phone. Offender gained compliance through threat of physical force. Offender was not known to victim.
I headed for the door. And stopped.
What did they teach you in the Boy Scouts before kicking you out for having a problem with authority? Oh yeah—be prepared.
I crossed the condo to my bookcase, pressed hard, listened for the click, and swung open the massive door. I stepped inside the secret chamber, moving to the gun cabinet. I retrieved the nine-millimeter SIG Sauer and holstered it on my hip. I didn’t know if that fit the other parts of the Scout motto, the ones about keeping myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Sixty years ago, the East Side of St. Paul was a virtual boom town unto itself. Ten thousand multiethnic employees earned a comfortable middle-class living from their jobs at three thriving neighborhood businesses—Theo. Hamm Brewing Company, Seeger Refrigeration Company, which later merged with Whirlpool, and 3M, formally known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company and called “the Mining” by the East Siders. Dozens of shops, banks, drugstores, barbers, restaurants, and bars thrived along Arcade Street, Payne Avenue, and East Seventh Street. You could get anything you needed within a six-block radius. Only, the national recession that closed out the sixties pounded the local economy into dust. Plant closings and layoffs became regular news. 3M moved. Whirlpool shuttered its Arcade Street plant. Hamm sold out. One by one the little shops and restaurants closed their doors. Crime soared, property values plummeted, infrastructure crumbled. Still, it was better than Ventura Village. Here, at least, you only had a one-in-thirty-two chance of being a victim of a crime per year.
Stuart Moore lived in the heart of the East Side in one of those small, affordable bungalows built during the Great Depression that had walls loaded with asbestos and lead. Several of the homes surrounding him were decorated for the holidays; his was not.
Stuart’s front door was only a couple of steps from the boulevard, which was only a couple of steps from the street. He was sitting outside in a white plastic lawn chair despite the cold and sucking on a cigarette. I knew from the court documents that Stuart was sixty-six, yet he looked as old as his house. He also looked as if he wanted to pick a fight with someone, anyone.
I pulled to a stop in front of the bungalow and stepped out of the Mustang.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.
“Mr. Moore?”
“You deaf, boy? I asked you a question.”
“I’d like to talk to you, if you’d allow it.”
“I don’t talk to no fucking cops.”
“Hey, man,” I said. “Do I call you names?”
That caused Stuart to laugh, which caused him to cough, which prompted him to take a long drag of his cigarette. By then I had crossed the narrow boulevard and stood a few feet in front of him.
“I don’t like fucking cops,” Stuart said.
“There are days when I don’t care much for ’em myself.”
“Who you?”
“My name’s McKenzie.”
I watched closely to see if he recognized my name, only his wrinkled face gave me nothing. I didn’t offer my hand; I didn’t think he’d shake it anyway.
“Do I know you?” Stuart asked.
“We’ve never met.”
“Whaddaya want?”
“Leland Hayes.”
“Fucker’s dead.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Got his head shot off twenty year ago up over t’ Lake Phalen, can’t be more than a mile from here.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.”
“Whaddaya wanna talk ’bout him for?”
“Actually, what I want to talk about is the money he stole before the cops put him down.”
Stuart laughed some more, which brought on another coughing fit followed by still another drag from his cigarette.
“Fuckin’ one of them treasure hunter types, ain’t ya?” he said.
“You could say that.”
“You askin’ me where the money is? If I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t tell you. I’d go dig it up myself.”
“Did you dig it up yourself?”
Stuart gestured at his modest surroundings; his winter coat looked as if he had bought it from the Salvation Army.
“Fuckin’ look like it?” he asked. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than a week or so without thinkin’ of all that cash, fuck. Wanna know what I think?”
“I do.”
“I think them Feds took it.”
“The Feds?”
“F-B-fuckin’-I, yeah. Sayin’ they can’t find it after all these years—you believe that shit?”
I squatted down next to Stuart, setting a gloved hand on the arm of his plastic chair to steady myself.
“Maybe they did,” I said. “If they didn’t, though—you say you’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You knew the man. What do you think he did with it?”
“Who says I knew the man?”
“A woman named LaToya Cane.”
“Where have I heard—oh, yeah, the bitch what lived next door to Hayes back then. She remembered me?”
Careful, my inner voice said. You’re not going to get the intel you came for by calling out the sonuvabitch. Save it for later.
“Apparently you made an impression on her,” I said.
“Yeah, I remember her, too. Good-lookin’ but racist. Wanted nothin’ to do with no white man.”
I wonder why?
“She was right, though,” Stuart said. “I knew Hayes. We had some business dealin’s and whatnot.”
I took a guess on the whatnot based on what I knew of his criminal activities.
“Pawned some stolen property, I heard.”
Stuart Moore spread his arms wide and grinned. “We didn’t steal nothin’,” he said. “We found it. Prove it ain’t so.”
Remember, you’re on his side.
“Something falls off the back of a truck, what are you going to do?” I asked. “Let it just sit there in the street? It’s a traffic hazard, man.”
Stuart smiled at me and patted my knee. At the same time, a car rolled slowly down the street. Stuart watched it creep past. I couldn’t see a face, but I could feel the driver’s eyes on us.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at!” Stuart shouted.
The car picked up speed and moved halfway down the block to park. A woman got out of the driver’s side carrying a white plastic bag with the red Target logo on it. She hurried to the front door of her house and let herself in.
“You better run,” Stuart said. “Bitch. Like any man wanna touch you.”
Keep pretending.
“Do you get that a lot?” I asked.
“Fuckin’ courts. Bad enough I gotta tell the cops where I live, they gotta put my name and photograph on a list you can get off the internet. Busybodies like that bitch down the street look it up and spread the word, so now everybody looks at me funny.”
“What are you? Level Two?”
“Yeah, fuck. It’s all bullshit. Little bitch wanted me to come into her house. Then, when mommy and daddy found out, it was all ‘he raped me, he raped me’ so she wouldn’t get into no trouble.”
Yeah, that’s why you copped a plea instead of arguing that the sex was consensual like ninety-eight percent of the other assholes.
“You know,” I said aloud, “it seems to me that a piece of all that money Leland stole would improve your life dramatically.”
“How big a piece?”
“Half?”
“What I gotta do?”
“Just remember, man. You know, the statute of limitations has expired. Even if you were in on the heist, the cops can’t say boo after all these years.”
Stuart patted my knee again. “I remember better when I’ve had a drink,” he said.
“I passed a place up on Payne Avenue coming over here. Everson’s. What is it? A block away?”
“That’ll do. But you know what? Why don’t I meet you there in a little bit? I gotta step inside and take care of some shit.”
“I can wait.”
“No, no, no.” Stuart patted my knee some more. “I’ll see you there in a minute.”