TWENTY-FIVE

“WOULD YOU LIKE some coffee, Mr. Taylor?” Dot Ladner asked.

“Thank you.”

“Decaffeinated all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I can’t drink the other stuff no more. I get nervous.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dot filled a generous mug, set it in front of me and waited for me to taste it. I did. It wasn’t anything special.

“Delicious,” I said.

“Cookies?”

“No, thank you.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“Thank you, no, ma’am.” I patted my stomach. “Have to stay fit.”

“Oh yes, of course. I’m sorry, what did you want to know?”

“How long has Ms. Chakolis been residing here?”

“Eight years come January.”

“And you’ve been caretaker the entire time.”

“Oh yes. Like I told you before, the building is owned by my nephew so I have plenty of job security.”

“Was she living alone during the incident with Joseph Sherman?”

“Meghan? Yes, except when her husband was visiting.”

“Her husband?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dennis Thoreau?”

Dot shrugged. “Dennis was his first name, I didn’t know his last name. I always figured it was Chakolis. You know, when I was a girl, you took the husband’s name and you kept it.”

“Yes, ma’am. However, my information suggests that Ms. Chakolis and Dennis Thoreau were divorced in March of 1980.”

“Mine, too.”

“You knew that?”

“I knew they were divorced, I didn’t know when.”

“Yet, Thoreau stayed with her?”

“Personally,” the old woman said, leaning close, “I think he was trying to patch it up with her.” Then she leaned back and added, “Very nice boy, well mannered.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, six years ago. Back, like you said, when that business with Joseph Sherman took place. He left right afterward. I was sorry to see him go, too. I could have used his help.”

“You and Dennis were friends?”

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Mr. Taylor.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Dennis was young enough to be my own son.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Although he was as cute as the dickens.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We would talk is all and watch the soaps together. Sometimes he would bring doughnuts. He was very concerned about Erica.”

“Erica?”

“Erica Kane. On ‘All My Children.’ Are you sure you won’t have some cookies?”

“No, thank you. Why did Dennis leave? Did he tell you?”

“Meghan threw him out.”

“Is that what he said?”

Dot took a bite of cookie and answered through the crumbs, “That’s what she said.”

“Did she say why?”

“No, but I think it was pretty sudden. One day they were a happy couple, the next he was packing.”

Meghan Chakolis led me down the tunnel that connected the State Office Building with the capitol. The tunnel was brightly lit with video cameras and emergency call boxes every hundred feet.

“Tell me about Dennis Thoreau,” I told her.

“Why?”

“You were married to him.”

“Is that a question?” Meghan asked.

“No. You were married to him.”

“And divorced. A long time ago.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“Many times.”

“When was the last time?”

“The night he was killed. I went to his place after work, we had sex and I left. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Flabbergast” is an interesting word. It’s eighteenth-century slang meaning “to make speechless with amazement; astonish.” And boy, was I flabbergasted. I stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel and gawked at her like she was the Eighth Wonder of the World.

“I have nothing to hide,” she told me.

“Apparently not.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Can you prove that?”

“No,” she admitted. “Fortunately, I don’t have to.”

She had me there.

“Anything else you want to know?” she asked. The smile told me she was more than willing to cooperate. Why shouldn’t she?

“Tell me about you and Thoreau,” I said.

“Dennis and I were married right after high school graduation,” Meghan volunteered. “It was a foolish thing to do, to get married so young. We went on a glorious honeymoon, rented a cozy bungalow in Minneapolis, bought a lot of stuff we couldn’t afford, began fighting and divorced. Dennis took off—I think he went to Oklahoma that time. I went back to school. He returned and I discovered that I still cared for him. Men like Dennis, you can’t stay angry at them. It’s like carrying on a vendetta with the rain. Besides, he was so much fun. The most fun I’ve ever had in my life. So, he would come and he would go and that’s the way we lived.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem very distraught over his death.”

“I do mind, Mr. Taylor. I mind very much.”

We were standing at the capitol end of the tunnel, where the State Capitol Security Force was headquartered. Through the window I could see a bank of TV monitors and a uniformed officer scanning them. Conan stood next to the officer. But he was watching Meghan and me. I nodded at him and led Meghan past the window.

“Dennis was living in your apartment while you were managing C. C. Monroe’s first run for the House,” I reminded her.

“For a time.”

“You threw him out.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He was cheating on me,” Meghan said.

“With whom?”

“Carol Catherine.”

Lord, she was just full of surprises.

“Yet you’re still her friend.”

Meghan sighed. “Carol Catherine and I always will be friends no matter what happens, no matter what one does to the other. Don’t you have a friend like that?”

I thought of Anne Scalasi. “One or two,” I said.

“Well, then …”

We walked some more.

“We were roommates at the University of Minnesota,” Meghan said. “We shared everything, even boyfriends. It didn’t surprise me that Carol Catherine thought the arrangement also included husbands. I don’t blame her. I blame Dennis. Besides, Dennis and I weren’t married at the time. What is it they say in basketball? No foul…”

“No harm, no foul.”

“‘No harm, no foul,’” she repeated. “Anyway, quitting Carol Catherine would not have been in my best interest.” (There was that phrase again.) “I agreed to manage her campaign for the House of Representatives for the same reason she agreed to run: to make contacts. As luck would have it, we were both very successful. She won the election and I was appointed to this position.”

We were standing in the rotunda beneath the State Capitol’s massive dome, near the center where a huge, eight-pointed star was imbedded in the marble floor. A troop of Cub Scouts leaned against the second-floor railing and looked down, half listening to a tour guide with a red, white and blue tie. Above, huge murals depicting various saints earning their sainthood graced the dome walls. Below, battle flags from the Civil War and miscellaneous Indian campaigns unfurled behind glass. Included among them was the bullet-torn flag of the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment, the regiment that saved the Union’s bacon on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, losing two hundred fifteen out of two hundred sixty-two soldiers in the process. It was displayed next to Frank B. Kellogg’s Nobel Peace Prize, earned for his work as coauthor of a pact renouncing the use of war as an “instrument of national policy.” The pact was signed August 27, 1928, by sixty-two nations. All sixty-two participated in the World War just eleven years later. Well, at least Frank had tried.

“I’ll miss this place when I leave,” Meghan said.

“Are you leaving?”

“Eventually, I suppose. I guess I’m more like Dennis than I care to admit. I like to move around.”

“You could stay and get an appointment from Carol Catherine if she’s elected governor,” I suggested.

“You mean when, don’t you?” Meghan asked, and then shook her head. “Marion is Carol Catherine’s chief of staff and she doesn’t like me much; she thinks I’m a bad influence on Carol Catherine. When we were in school, we used to party pretty hard.”

All right, I decided, now’s a good time to let her have it, to kick down the wall of indifference she was hiding behind. “Did you know that Dennis and Carol Catherine made a pornographic movie together?”

“Sure.”

You really know how to shake up a client, don’t you, Taylor?

“Carol Catherine told me about it six years ago.”

“You weren’t upset?”

“Of course I was upset. That’s why I showed Dennis the door. But like I said, it was six years ago. It requires too much energy, too much concentration, to stay angry over something that happened six years ago.”

“Have Dennis and Carol Catherine been together since they made the tape?” I asked.

“Absolutely not!” Meghan’s answer was vehement to the point of startling me.

I had to wait a few beats before asking my next question, “Are you aware that Dennis …”

“Attempted to blackmail Carol Catherine? Of course. Carol Catherine told me everything. And in anticipation of your next question, Mr. Taylor, no, I do not believe she had anything to do with his death.”

“What do you believe?”

“I believe the newspaper’s explanation that Dennis was killed over drugs. I could see him getting involved in that; he was foolish enough.”

Meghan Chakolis was starting to annoy me the way Barry Bonds annoyed National League pitchers: She was getting good wood on everything I served up. I decided to throw her an inside curve, see if I could move her off the plate. “Dennis was endangering Carol Catherine’s campaign for the governor’s office. Perhaps Marion Senske had him killed.”

“Oh, Mr. Taylor. I’d hardly think so,” she said, smiling at my suggestion. Then she glanced at her watch and told me it was time she returned to her office. Her heels made a pleasant echo on the marble floor as she walked away; I listened to them long after she was out of sight.