Bobby Dunston’s call caught me just as I was stepping out of the shower. I was dripping water all over my bedroom carpet when he told me, “I pulled the information you wanted.”
“Thank you.”
“Why don’t you come downtown about twelve-thirty and I’ll give it to you. You can buy me lunch.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“You can do a favor for me, too.”
“Sure.”
He hung up before I could ask him what favor.
Jerry Jeff Walker was on the CD player, singing about getting off that L.A. freeway without getting killed. I hummed along while I drank my coffee and read the newspapers.
Both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune were filled with stories about the brutal slaying of Katherine Katzmark. They emphasized that she had been an attractive woman. They remarked on the three businesses she had owned. They also made mention of the fact that she was the only female among the eight founding members of the Northern Lights Entrepreneur’s Club, a growing organization of young businesspeople that was challenging The Brotherhood—as the Twin Cities’ more senior movers and shakers were known—for political and economic dominance. It was just-the-facts-ma’am reporting, but there was an interesting if not insidious edge to it that disturbed me. The papers seemed to suggest that Katherine had been raped, tortured, and murdered because of her looks, her three businesses, and her involvement in the club—that her brutal death was punishment for having the audacity to shine in a male-dominated world.
Or maybe it was just me.
Without thinking, I reached for the phone. I was going to call Kirsten to ask if she had the same take on the articles as I did but then I remembered—we don’t have a relationship anymore. I cursed softly and returned the receiver to its cradle.
I was surrounded by eight large windows arranged in a semicircle in the breakfast nook that I had added to the house, each window overlooking my backyard. The yard was nearly a hundred feet deep and at the back of it was a small pond with a fountain in the center that my father had installed—I had told him we could pay someone to build it for us, but he was a guy who liked to do things himself. In the pond I could see five baby ducks frolicking under the watchful protection of their parents.
The mallards had arrived in the early spring at just about the time my father died and had somehow discovered the pond despite the fir trees that shaded it. Soon after, the five ducklings appeared. I told my father about the ducks while he lay in a hospital bed and he made me
promise to take care of them. He was a guy who took care of things, of people. If you needed a ditch dug, a roof shingled, furniture moved; if you needed a few bucks or a shoulder to cry on; if you needed a volunteer, you called my dad. I learned from him.
I began by feeding the ducks from a distance, but eventually they took dried corn out of my hand. I called the adults Hepburn and Tracy. The kids I named Bobby, Shelby, Victoria, and Katie after the Dunston family and Maureen after my mother. They seemed quite content in my backyard and I dreaded the day they would all fly south for the winter. I asked a friend at the Department of Natural Resources about it and he told me if they survived the trip the ducks would probably return in the spring to establish new nests.
“In a few years you could be up to your butt in mallards,” he said.
That was fine with me. I liked the ducks. One of the things I liked most about them: They mated for life.
The St. Paul Police Department is located across from the Tastee Bread Company in downtown St. Paul, I-94 cutting a valley between them. I parked neatly in the visitors section of the asphalt lot after dodging a half dozen vans and panel trucks that were parked any which way the drivers pleased. The trucks were emblazoned with the logos and call letters of local TV and radio stations. Reporters for the stations as well as the two Twin Cities daily newspapers and assorted weeklies milled together in the foyer, standing apart from the officers who came and went, while they waited for someone in authority to make a statement. Most of the officers viewed the reporters with derision if not outright contempt. I recognized some of the cops from my eleven years on the force. Some of them recognized me.
They were friendly enough. They slapped my back and shook my hand and joked about the times we shared and how bad things were getting in
the department and how lucky I was to have left when I did and said we should all get together and raise some hell. Only I knew nothing would come of it. I was no longer a member of the fraternity. I had quit. Pulled the pin and walked away. I might have gone back if someone invited me, only no one did. So, I stood by myself in the foyer, waiting for Bobby. It was the curse of the self-employed—or unemployed, as the case might be. Working alone you often become lonely. There’s no one with whom to discuss last night’s Twins game or politics or even the weather.
“I feel like a kibitzer,” I told Bobby later as we left the building, walking south on Minnesota Street.
“You are a kibitzer,” he said abruptly.
“Thank you for understanding.”
“What do you want me to tell you? That you’re an integral member of the St. Paul Police Department? You’re not.”
There was anger in his voice and since I was reasonably sure I hadn’t put it there, I asked, “What’s going on?”
Bobby threw a glance over his shoulder at the TV vans.
“In about ten minutes, Deputy Chief Tommy Thompson is going to blow my investigation to hell and gone.”
“How?”
“He’s going to tell the media that Katherine Katzmark’s boyfriend is our only suspect.”
“Is he your only suspect?”
“So far.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“Hell, no! Right now there’s plenty of evidence to prove that he was in Kansas City when the murder took place and absolutely none to prove that he wasn’t. He’s the one who discovered the body. He’s the one who called 911. He’s cooperating. He’s answering questions. But once he hears what Thompson has to say, you just know he’s gonna lawyer-up and then I won’t get jack from him.
“Bastard Thompson—he wants his fifteen minutes of fame so bad. I begged him, Mac. I actually begged him not to mention the boyfriend. ‘But we have to give the media something,’ he says. Yeah, right. Something that’ll get him on the evening news before the chief comes back and takes over.”
“Where is the chief?”
“Fishing. In Florida.”
“Lucky him,” I said.
“You know what this means, don’t you? From now on I’ll be expected to prove that the boyfriend killed Katherine. Forget developing other leads or investigating other suspects, just get the boyfriend.”
“Maybe he did it.”
“What do we know? We know that Katherine was a white, upper-class female who was killed in one of the safest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, so right away we figure she was killed by someone she knew.”
I had the distinct impression that he was talking more to himself than he was to me.
“We know that in spite of everything the bastard did to her, the ME says she was strangled—manual strangulation—which means the killer probably had a strong personal attachment to her.
“We know that the killer was unafraid of discovery. He did nothing quickly. He spent hours in that house, which indicates that he knew something of her habits. What’s more, everything he used came from Katherine’s kitchen—the twine, duct tape, steak knife—he knew it was available to him before he arrived.”
Bobby was on a roll now.
“And we know the way he hacked her body, the way he displayed it, concealing nothing—he wanted people to see what he had done to her. That indicates rage. A crime of passion. And yeah, all that would seem to indicate the boyfriend.”
“He wouldn’t be the first killer to”—I quoted the air—“‘discover’ the body.”
“Except he was in Kansas City for a convention. He flew down there Thursday morning and we know he flew back early Sunday afternoon. In between …” Bobby shrugged. “Kansas City is four hundred fifty miles away. That’s a lot of hard driving there and back in the amount of time he had.”
“Unless he flew.”
“Doesn’t matter. Fly or rent a car, he’d still need a credit card—after nine-eleven no one’s accepting cash. We’re checking. So far nothing. But we’re still looking. In the meantime, I sent Jeannie down to KC to interview hotel employees and any conventioneers she can find, check his alibi.”
“Who’s Jeannie?”
“My new partner. You haven’t met her yet. You’ll like her. Young. Beautiful. Smart as hell.”
Bobby stopped walking. I was two steps past before I realized it and turned toward him. He was pointing a finger at me.
“I’ll tell you one thing—I don’t care what Thompson tells the media. I will not play favorites. I’m not going to arrest just any dumb moke to clear the case. I’m going to get the right person for it and I’m gonna put him away forever.”
I draped my arm over his shoulders and led him across 10th Street. I tried to recall my first impression of Bobby Dunston and failed. I couldn’t remember how or when we met—probably school. It seemed we were always in the same class together, always played on the same baseball teams and hockey teams. We even went to the same college—the University of Minnesota—each selecting the school independently, not at all surprised to learn the other had made the same choice.
“We’ve sure come a helluva long way since we played ball at Dunning Field,” I told him.
“Naw,” he said. “It just seems long.”
We continued walking together in silence. Finally, I asked, “Where are we going?”
Donahue’s hadn’t changed much since the early 1950s when the purple neon sign above the door blinked HOME COOKING. The sign was still there although the neon had long since burned out. So were the original booths and tables, just as worn with age and use as the sign. The walls were adorned with a series of Chinese landscapes that seemed as out of place now as they had fifteen years ago when I was introduced to the restaurant. I was still on probabation and Colin Gernes, my supervising officer, sat me down at the counter and announced, “Got a rook here, Liz.”
Liz was a big-busted woman of indeterminate age, dressed in a black and white uniform. “Fresh meat,” she said contemptuously. Five minutes later she slid a platter of sliced roast beef served with mashed potatoes and gravy in front of me.
“This one’s on the house, Rook, with some advice,” she said. “Find another line of work while you still can.”
“Too late,” Gernes told her. “He busted a suspect for B and E this morning and he liked it. He’s a thirty-year man for sure.”
I learned later that Liz had a husband who put in twenty-six years with the cops before he was killed in the line of duty by a seventeen-year-old coke-head. You’d think she wouldn’t want anything to do with cops after that, but she did. She took her husband’s pension and insurance and bought Donahue’s, where she dispensed good food, hearty laughter, caustic advice, and simple wisdom to the men and women who worked at the St. Paul Police Department three blocks away. That and a strong shoulder to cry on. When her huge heart finally burst at the age of seventy-two, they fired exactly seventy-two shots over her grave. Four hundred active and retired officers attended her funeral. No governor, no mayor, no councilman, no police chief was allowed to speak a word.
“I haven’t been here in years,” I said when we found a booth under a faded print showing a dozen Chinese peasants trapping a tiger beneath the Great Wall. I didn’t know they had tigers in China. The restaurant was half full. Most of the cops had stopped coming after Liz passed. I read the menu the waitress gave me. I don’t know why. I already knew what I was going to order. “Hot roast beef with mashed potatoes.”
After the waitress took our orders, Bobby told me that there was no paper on Carlson, Jamie Anne—she hadn’t ever been arrested for anything, not even a traffic summons. He had run the name through DMV. The only match was sixteen and brunette and living in Minneapolis—the doctor’s daughter, I presumed.
“What about Merci Cole?” I asked.
Bobby gave me a folded sheet of paper.
“My, my, my.”
Merci had a long list of prostitution gripes, one DWI, a couple of dis cons and one Class A felony—possession with intent. She did eighteen months at Shakopee and was released six weeks ago. Her last known address was on Avon near University Avenue in St. Paul, a neighborhood with abysmal property values.
I refolded the sheet and stuffed it in my pocket.
“I appreciate this, Bobby.”
“No problem. You can do me a favor, though.”
“Sure.”
“I’d like to use your lake home … .”
“Of course.”
“When this is done …”
“Anytime you want.”
“Get away for a few days.”
“It’s yours. In fact, I’ll tell you what. I’ll get you a set of keys. Whenever you want to use it, don’t even ask. Just go.”
“That’s decent of you.”
“Think of it as a resort. Use the boats, the tackle, eat the food, drink the beer—don’t worry about anything. It’s on me. And hey, if you and Shelby want to go alone, have a nice weekend of passion, huh? I’ll be happy to take the girls.”
“Nice weekend of passion,” he repeated quietly, nodding his head like he could already see it. And then, “How’s Kirsten?”
“It’s not my turn to watch her.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“It looks like we’re through. She says she wants to see other people.”
Bobby nodded.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“The head nodding, what does that mean?”
“It means I’m not surprised.”
“Oh, really?”
“She’s money, man. She’s Lake Minnetonka, she’s Vassar, she’s opera.”
“I have money.”
“Yeah, but she was born to it, she was raised by it. You just lucked into it. Answer me this. Would she have gone out with you if you were still a cop living in Merriam Park?”
“I like to think so.”
Bobby shook his head.
“Don’t get me wrong, I liked Kirsten when I met her. But the thing is, this is a girl who never rode on a city bus, not once in her life, while you and me, we’re the guys who tried to sneak on and off without paying, who slipped slugs into the doohickey that collected the fares.”
He had a point.
“You’ll find another girl,” he added.
“You think?”
“God, I hope. I’ve been living vicariously through your sexual exploits for years.”
“What sexual exploits?”
“C’mon, Mac. You’ve got it made.”
“I do?”
“All these women who put off getting married, who put off having families while they were establishing their careers, suddenly they’re our age and they’re looking around for eligible guys and there just aren’t any.” He pointed at me then. “Except for a few guys like you.”
“Like me?”
“You’re good-looking, not as good-looking as me, but presentable.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Plus, you have money. But what makes you a catch is what you don’t have. You don’t have an ex-wife. You don’t have kids. You don’t have debts. You don’t have a chemical problem. You don’t have a criminal record. You’re not a jerk. Mac, you don’t have baggage. Intelligent, accomplished, independent career women like Kirsten, geez, Mac, they fall all over guys like you. I only wish I was in your place. You are so lucky.”
I thought that was pretty funny. Bobby asked me why I was laughing. I flashed on Shelby and his two daughters.
“Because I was going to tell you the same thing.”
Merci Cole’s last known address was a dilapidated apartment building that looked abandoned except for the silver Lincoln parked in front. Several screens had been punched or kicked out, a few windows were broken, and the sidewalk was littered with broken glass. CRIPS, the name of an L.A. street gang transplanted to the Twin Cities, was written across the sidewalk with red spray paint. A black man dressed in a white silk suit, white silk shirt, and white silk tie moved along the sidewalk, boogeying to some private riff, not a worry in the world, oblivious to everything around him. You’d think a man in his line of work would be more careful.
I once asked Colin Gernes why most pimps are black.
“For the same reason most basketball players are black,” he replied, scarcely believing how dumb I was, wondering where the department found so many dumb rookies. “It’s an inner city game and there are more blacks in the inner city.”
Oh.
I saw no one as I locked my Jeep Cherokee and crossed the street to the apartment building, yet I could feel eyes from at least a dozen windows and I could hear them: Who is this white man with his expensive sport utility vehicle and what is he doing in our neighborhood? Good question.
I opened the door to the building and hesitated. There were mailboxes just inside the hallway, all of them jimmied open. The overhead light had been broken recently and shattered slivers of bulb were scattered across the floor. There was enough light from the street to prove that the hallway was empty so I went inside. Most people will do anything to avoid a fight and the fear it produces. I’m one of them. On the other hand, you have to accept a certain amount of risk in everything you do. I started climbing the stairs, touching my hip where my gun would have been if I had thought to bring it.
Along with the camaraderie, you know what else I miss about being a police officer? The backup.
According to Bobby’s file, Merci Cole’s apartment was on the fourth floor. I never reached it. When I was midway between the third and fourth floors, a well-muscled black man wearing only blue jeans burst from his apartment, an aluminum Lady Thumper softball bat in his hands. He swung at my head and I jumped backward down the stairs, the barrel of the bat missing my chin by inches and smashing a hole into the thin plaster wall. I grabbed for the railing as he swung again. I lost my grip and fell, tumbling down to the third floor landing as his bat bounced off the wall where my head would have been if I had kept my balance.
He followed close behind. I hit the landing with my shoulder, rolled, jumped to my feet. He pulled the bat back. I did a little hop and stomped his knee with the flat of my shoe. He cried out, an animal in pain, and dropped the bat. It rolled down the stairs, going thump, thump, thump as it fell to the next landing. He grabbed his knee. I hit him in the face. He threw a long, complicated, and entirely filthy curse at me. I hit him again. As I hit him I thought, This is what Kirsten must have meant by associating with “wrong people.”
“No more, no more,” he moaned, doing a fair impersonation of Roberto Duran. Apparently, he didn’t like pain any more than I did.
“Why did you come after me?” I was snorting, my breath coming hard and fast.
“Are you a cop? You look like cop. You a cop you gotta tell me, that’s the rules.”
“You swung on me because you thought I was a cop? What are you, a moron? The police would’ve blown your brains out you swing on them like that.”
“No, no, man. They got new rules. They can’t just shoot people, no more. They gotta bring in counselors and shit. I read ’bout it.”
“Hey, pal. Don’t believe everything you read. It’s healthier that way.”
“You’re not a cop? You look like a cop.”
“Have it your own way. Where’s Merci Cole?”
“Hey man, you not a cop? Fuck you, then.”
“Wrong answer.” I raised my fist menacingly, giving him a good look at it. Normally, I abhor violence, except I had a hard time getting past the fact the sonuvabitch tried to bludgeon me with a woman’s softball bat.
He brought his shoulder up to protect his face.
“She’s gone, man.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you know?”
“She got outta Shakopee a month ago, longer.”
“Okay.”
“Right after, she and another bitch come by lookin’ for some clothes and stuff she stashed here before she got busted. Then they took off.”
“She didn’t say where she was goin’?”
“She didn’t say nothin’ except scream ’cuz most of her shit was gone. What the bitch expect, man?”
“Does she have any friends here?”
“Nobody’s got any friends here.”
“Where did she hang out before she went inside?”
“Cheney’s. When she wasn’t workin’ she was there. Cheney’s, you know, like the vice president.”
I was amazed he even knew who the vice president was.
“Tell me about the other woman. What did she look like?”
“A good lookin’ piece. Nice ass, tits out to—”
I hit him again.
“What the fuck, man?”
“I don’t need an anatomy lesson.”
“What you want me to tell ya?”
“What did she look like?”
“White girl, looked like Cole.”
“Hair?”
“Real blond, almost white.”
“Eyes?”
“Didn’t see ’em. She was wearin’ shades.”
“Height?”
“Same as Cole, man. Look, Cole stashed her stuff in the trunk and they split, that’s all I know.”
“Tell me about the car.”
“It was a Beamer, man. Fuckin’ white BMW convertible. Wait, now I remember. James Bond.”
“What?”
“Merci called her James, the other one. Called her James and I was thinking what the fuck kinda name is that for a woman. James. Then I see the license plate. It had a JB on it.”
“JB what?”
“Just JB, man. You know, one of those vanity plates.”
“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful. Only listen. For what it’s worth, I do believe this life doesn’t suit you. You should work for the government, work for the state. Get one of those orange vests and walk along the interstate picking up trash. Think of the job security.”
“Fuck you.”
When I was a kid, the Midway Shopping Center on Snelling and University was just a dinky little thing. It had a Kroger’s where my parents bought groceries, a G. C. Murphy’s where I bought comic books, and a hobby shop where Bobby and I sometimes raced model cars on Saturday mornings. Now it was a huge, sprawling enterprise saturated with national retailers, grocery chains, and fast food joints that covered several city blocks. About the only thing that remained from the old days was a locksmith. I stopped off there to have copies made of the keys to my lake home. Since I was in the neighborhood, I also picked up a small gift.
I knocked on the front door, opened it, and stuck my head inside.
“Shelby,” I called.
“In the kitchen,” she called back.
Shelby was about an inch shorter than I was, only you wouldn’t have noticed just then because she was bent over a counter wrapping chunks
of beef, cubed potatoes, sliced carrots, assorted spices, and a tab of butter with rectangles of pastry.
“Hey, Rushmore. What are you doing here?”
She raised her cheek to me. I kissed it and said, “I brought over the keys.”
She straightened and brushed hair the color of butterscotch off her forehead with the back of her hand. Her eyes were the color of rich, green pastures at sunset.
“What keys?”
“For my lake home.” I set three keys on the counter in succession. Each was a different color. “Red is for the house, blue is for the boat house, and green is for the garage.”
“Why are you giving me your keys?”
“Bobby didn’t tell you? He wants to use my lake home after he clears the case he caught.”
“He didn’t mention it.”
“Perhaps he means to surprise you with a weekend of passion.”
“That would be a surprise. He hasn’t surprised me for almost a month now.”
“Okay, that’s more information than I need to know.” I was embarrassed by her remark and something else—the suggestion that my best friends were having marital problems frightened me.
“Bobby didn’t tell you we’ve been having our ups and downs?”
“There are subjects we don’t discuss.”
“Politics and religion.”
“Actually, we talk about politics and religion all the time. It’s what we do in the privacy of our own homes that we tend to keep to ourselves. Ahh”—I raised a finger, anxious to change the subject—“I have a present for you.”
I handed her a small gift bag that I had kept hidden when I entered the kitchen. She took it gingerly. “Rush … ?”
I flicked my hand at her.
Shelby opened the bag and fished out a plastic snow globe of Mount Rushmore. She laughed, as I had hoped she would. She shook the globe and watched the tiny white specks fall around the plastic monument.
“Whenever I look at it I’ll think of you.”
“That’s the plan. Listen, I have to go. I’m doing a favor for a guy.”
“Bobby told me. Don’t rush off. Sit down. Talk to me. Better yet, stay for dinner. The girls’ll be home from school in a few minutes. God knows when Bobby will be home.”
“I can’t.”
“The girls will be sorry they missed you. You’ve become their all-time favorite person.”
“Seriously?”
“Ever since you announced that they were the heirs to your fortune.”
“Someone has to be. Besides, I’m not above buying affection from women.”
Shelby held up the snow globe. “I noticed.”
“I’ll see you later.” I kissed her cheek and made my way to the front door. She followed me. When I reached the door and opened it she was standing there, cupping the snow globe in her hands.
“Don’t be a stranger,” she said.
“Tell me something, Shel.” The words spilled out; I’m still not sure where they came from. “Just out of curiosity, if I had been the one who spilled the drink on your dress back when we were in school instead of Bobby, do you think you and I would have been the ones to get involved?”
“We are involved, Rushmore. Don’t you know that?”
A moment later I was in the Cherokee. She was still standing in the doorway. I waved to her. She waved back. I slipped the Jeep in gear and drove off even as I screamed at myself. What’s wrong with you, asking a question like that? What were you thinking? She’s the wife of your best friend. What a jerk!
The e-mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles told me the same thing that Bobby had. The only Carlson, Jamie Anne, with a driver’s license in the state of Minnesota was a sixteen-year-old brunette living in Minneapolis. I put my four dollars down and requested another search, this time for the owner of a vanity plate with the initials JB.
Just as I hit the “send” button, the telephone rang.
“It’s me,” Shelby said.
“Hi.”
“I want you to know that you are my good friend and I love you, but you shouldn’t be asking questions like you asked and you shouldn’t be giving me gifts, even goofy little things like the snow globe, except on my birthday and at Christmas.”
“I know.”
“I’m married.”
She’s married, she’s married, she’s married—to your best friend, you moron!
“I know.”
“Well, then, I’ll be seeing you soon.”
“Sure.”
She hung up and I told myself: Don’t ever do that again, you dumb schmuck.
If you believe the crime statistics—and we all know how reliable they are—there are about 150 full-time prostitutes in St. Paul and three times that many in Minneapolis. The bars, saunas, hotels, convention centers, and private parties—where a working girl can get shelter from the rain—belong to women with valid twenty-one-year-old IDs. The streets belong to the children. The average age of a street hooker in the
Twin Cities is sixteen. You see them waving at the cars that cruise Frog-town, a decidedly blue-collar community north of University Avenue and west of the State Capital, and in East St. Paul, especially in the Arcade-Payne Avenue neighborhood where Cheney’s is located.
“Are you looking to party?”
Maybe they’ll hop in the cars and find an alley somewhere, or take their customers to the hot-bed hotel up the street renting rooms at twenty bucks a half hour. Or maybe they’ll walk the john around back, kneeling on the asphalt, slipping the wallet out of the john’s sucker pocket while he’s slipping it in—what’s he going to do, call a cop? A few minutes later they’ll be back on the corner, looking for another willing customer with clean blood.
It’s a tough way to make a living. Yet while I can sympathize with prostitutes, johns are a mystery to me. I have no idea what motivates them. Especially those who buy young girls off the street, paying forty bucks to abuse a child. I only know that when it comes to prostitution, we usually arrest the wrong people.
It was still early evening when I arrived at the bar. Three hookers sat together at a square table in the back where they could see the comings and goings of all of Cheney’s patrons. When they saw me, one of the women said something to the other two and stood. Time to go to work.
The woman, wearing a short, tight, purple skirt and purple blouse with a plunging neckline, intercepted me at the bar.
“You looking to party?” she asked, exuding all the charm of an X-rated movie.
“Damn right,” I said, slapping the bar top with my hand. “Innkeeper! I just hit the Pick Three. Gimme the most expensive beer in the house.”
The bartender took a Heineken from the cooler and approached with a wary eye.
“Fine establishment you have here,” I told him nice and loud in case there was someone in the joint who hadn’t already noticed me.
“We like it,” he said, placing the bottle and an empty glass in front of me. I poured the beer myself.
“So, honey,” I said to the woman hugging my side. “What’s your name?”
“What name do you like?”
“Cloris,” I told her.
“You’re kiddin’ me.”
“Would I do a thing like that? So listen, Cloris, did you hear the one about the blind man who walks into a bar and starts swinging his dog over his head by its tail? The bartender asks, ‘What are you doing?’ And the blind man says, ‘Just looking around.’”
“Oh, brother.”
“I got a million of ’em.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. What’s your name?”
“What name do you like?”
“You’re a real peach, you know that?”
“Peach is good, you can call me ‘Peachy.’ What are you drinking, Cloris?”
“Rum and coke.”
“Innkeeper,” I shouted and pointed at the woman. He nodded and moved toward us. “Did you hear about the woman who calls this guy one night? The woman says, ‘This is Mary. Remember me? We met at a party two months ago and you said I was a good sport. Well, I’m pregnant and I’m going to jump off the Lake Street Bridge.’ And the guy says, ‘Gosh, Mary. You are a good sport.’”
It went on like that for a couple of hours, me buying drinks and telling completely tasteless jokes. After a while, the other two hookers joined us. Most of the prostitutes I’ve met have been very pleasant to talk to and these were no exception. I was actually enjoying myself and the women seemed to appreciate my company as well. Yet they did not let me interfere with business. They worked out a rotation and whenever
they spotted a likely looking customer, one of them would leave, do a bit of work, and return. A woman with a tired face that might have been pretty once tried to join the party, but the others chased her off. She was an amateur, one of those women who gave it away, using sex like a prescription drug. It might have been good for what ails her, but bad for a working girl’s business.
Not everyone approved of me. Two overweight women and an undernourished man sitting in a booth looked on with genuine disgust. You could bet that if they had hit the number they wouldn’t be wasting their winnings on a bunch of barroom layabouts, no siree. As it was, they were busy pulling tabs and discarding the losers in a plastic laundry basket. They had built up a sizable pile. Whenever they ran out of money, one of them would use the cash machine next to the rest rooms—it’s illegal in Minnesota to purchase pull tabs or lottery tickets with a personal check, so some joints install ATMs.
All the while, I watched the door, waiting for Merci Cole.
“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar and the bartender says, ‘What is this? A joke?’”
I had reached the subbasement of my joke collection and was rooting around for a trap door when Merci arrived. I recognized her by Molly Carlson’s description—tall, blond, with green eyes. She had gone to high school with Jamie which made her about twenty-five. But she seemed so much older than that, her cheeks puffy, her eyes flat and lifeless. Still, she was considerably more attractive than the usual prostitute. If you don’t believe me, punch up the St. Paul Police Department’s Web site. The SPPD regularly posts photographs of the hookers they arrest and you’ll never find a less enticing group of women—which is another reason prostitution baffles me. If hookers all looked like Julia Roberts and Laura San Giacomo, that I could understand. But why pay money to have sex with an ugly woman?
I gestured toward Merci. “I want to meet her.”
“Are you serious?” Cloris replied. “You would turn me down for her? I was ready to give it up for free.”
“Cloris,” I said with mock indignation. “I do believe you have misunderstood my intentions.”
“Screw you.”
“That’s what I mean. Where would you get an idea like that?”
Merci Cole sat at the end of the bar, chatting with the bartender. The bartender whispered something to her as I approached.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, yourself.”
“Busy?”
“Depends,” she answered in a professional voice, waiting for the magic words that proved I wasn’t a cop.
“I’m not a cop.”
“If you say so, officer.”
I set a fifty-dollar bill on the bar in front of her, a very uncoplike thing to do.
“What do I get for that?”
Satisfied, she went down the menu. “I get ten dollars for a hand job, twenty for a BJ, and forty if you want the motherlode. Anything else is negotiable.”
“How ’bout conversation?”
“You want conversation, dial a nine hundred number, two-fifty a minute.”
I pushed the fifty closer to her.
“Are you serious?”
“Let’s take a walk.”
“Why not?” She snapped the bill off the bar.
“Wait.”
“What the hell … ,” she said to my back as I juked and jived to the table where the three hookers sat scanning the crowd. I peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills and dropped them on the table.
“Ladies, it’s been a pleasure,” I announced and waved bye-bye. I was about to become a part of hooker folklore. “Did you hear the one about the trick who paid three girls a hundred bucks each just for listening to bad jokes?”
Merci Cole waited at the door, posing more than standing, a puzzled expression on her face. A few moments later we were walking.
“What do you want to talk about?” Merci asked.
“Why did you become a prostitute?”
“What are you, a social worker?”
“No.” I held up a second fifty. “But I have another one of these.”
Merci reached for it, but I pulled it back.
“You’re Merci Cole.”
“What about it?”
“I’m looking for Jamie Carlson.”
“Who?”
“Right, you never heard of her.”
“I haven’t seen Jamie in seven years,” she told me. If it wasn’t for the description given to me by the brother with the Lady Thumper, I might have believed her.
“Then who was the woman who drove you to the apartment on Avon so you could get your stuff?”
“That was someone else.”
Calling Merci a liar wasn’t going to get me anything, so I decided to cut to the chase. “I need to find Jamie Carlson and I’ll pay you to tell me where she is.”
“My friends aren’t for sale.”
“A hooker with a heart of gold.”
She went for my face but I grabbed her hands before she could dig her nails into me.
“Let me go,” she snarled.
I stepped back, waiting for her to resume the attack. She didn’t. Instead she stared at me with eyes wide with hate.
“Merci.” I spoke soft and low, trying to sound sincere. What is it they say? Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you have it made. “Jamie’s parents asked me to bring her home.”
“Yeah? Well screw ’em. Like they really care after all these years.”
“Stacy is sick. She might die.”
“Little Stacy?”
I was astonished by how suddenly her manner changed from contempt to genuine concern. It was like she had flipped a light switch.
“She has leukemia.”
“Little Stacy?”
“Her parents want Jamie to come home. They need her to donate her bone marrow. Otherwise, Stacy will probably die.”
“Oh, I get it. They want to use her. Yeah, that sounds familiar.”
“I don’t know why you’re angry about this and I don’t care. Just tell me where Jamie is.”
“No way. I’m not going to tell you about her. I might tell her about you, though, next time I see her.”
“Fine, do that.” I was getting nowhere fast and arguing would only make it worse. “You don’t have to tell me where she is. Just give her this.” I gave Merci my card. “Tell her about Stacy. Tell her to call me and I’ll explain. No problem. No hassle for anyone.”
Merci read the card slowly.
“Will you do that? There’s another fifty in it. Make it a hundred.”
Merci smiled. And to prove just how concerned she was for Stacy’s well-being, she tore the card in half.