THIRTY-TWO

IN NO TIME THE joint was crawling with the blue uniforms of the State Capitol Security Force, the maroon uniforms of the Minnesota State Patrol, and the dark suits of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. One of the suits escorted me from C. C.’s office to the State Capitol Security Center. We went through the tunnel. A photographer was snapping shots of Galen Pivec’s fallen body. I refused to look.

When we arrived at the Security Center, a disheveled C. C. Monroe—looking as if a Hollywood makeup artist had mussed her hair and a costume designer had artfully ripped her clothes—was charming nearly a dozen uniform and plain-clothes officers; they pressed around her, hanging on her every word. One of them handed her a cup of water and she smiled at him. He smiled back. Another draped his coat over her shoulders and she smiled at him, too, while all the others looked on enviously. C. C. told her story calmly and quietly while absentmindedly trying to brush Conan’s rich red blood off her dress. One officer sighed, actually sighed. Oh, if only he were a glove on that hand …

As I predicted, in C. C.’s version of the events she and Marion were innocent victims of a psycho villain.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Mr. Taylor, I’m so glad you’re all right,” she said, smiling. “I thought he killed you, too.”

“No such luck, honey,” I said. The officers were greatly offended by my remark. Call Carol Catherine Monroe “honey”? I half expected one of them to grab a rope.

“Galen shot Mr. Taylor in the head,” C. C. told the officers and they looked at me skeptically.

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” I countered. But one of the suits touched the side of it with his handkerchief, sending a bolt of lightning through my brain. He held it up for the crowd to see. The cloth was stained with blood. My blood. The officers all nodded and decided to forgive my boorishness.

The suit took me into a separate office and I gave him my statement, complete and unabridged; gave it to him while a paramedic performed maintenance on my skull. They made me wait after I’d finished. I waited a long time. I fell asleep waiting. When I woke, a man was standing in the doorway, the light streaming past him. He was calling my name. When I answered he introduced himself as an assistant to the attorney general. He did not give his name, only his title.

The assistant AG wanted to review my statement. He said he had a few problems with it. He asked me questions about the statement for well over an hour. By the time he was finished, I didn’t believe a word of it either. Eventually, he suggested that I should go home and rest for a few days, rethink my story. In the meantime, I should keep my allegations to myself—at least until I was in a position to produce corroborating evidence to support them. And as a personal favor to me, the assistant AG would contact the Department of Public Safety and inquire as to the status of my license. He was sure that with his recommendation, my application for renewal would sail through without any problems. I nearly started laughing. Here was another guy threatening to take away my license, my livelihood. Well, get in line, pal. Get in line.

I thanked the assistant AG and left. No one paid much attention as I walked through the Security Center. Outside the center, Marion Senske, her arm in a sling, was conducting a hushed conversation with the attorney general. He smiled at me. He looked like a man who made his living playing cards and right now held a fistful of aces. Marion did not smile. She had already used up her allotment for the day.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me,” she said.

“What could that be?” I asked her.

Marion came forward and whispered so the AG couldn’t hear. “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” was her bid.

I glanced sideways at the AG. “No sale,” I said.

“We’ll talk,” she called to me as I walked past her and down through the tunnel. The tunnel was clean; there was no indication at all that Galen Pivec had been killed there. There wasn’t even a chalk outline to show where he had fallen.

It was very late or very early, depending on your point of view.

I found Louise’s address in the telephone book. She lived not too far from Amy, in a small, unassuming white house on a dead-end street near a park built for small children, a park with swings, sandboxes, monkey bars and a merry-go-round. I woke her with my incessant pounding. She opened the front door after identifying me through the spy hole.

Louise was wearing a tired blue robe that she held closed at the throat with one hand. The robe covered a white cotton nightgown that brushed the top of ridiculously large slippers made up to resemble alligators, their long red tongues flapping up and down as she moved.

“How do you feel?” I asked as if she had been ill and I was bringing her Tupperware filled with chicken-noodle soup.

She didn’t answer.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” I told her.

She turned away from the door and I followed her inside. The living room was immaculate; you could eat off the floor if you didn’t mind blue and white carpet fibers with your food. Pillows were placed at exact angles on the chairs and sofa, magazines were fanned evenly on a highly polished coffee table, even sections of the newspaper were stacked neatly on the sofa where she had been reading them. On an end table was a photograph framed in silver, a photograph of an old, white-haired woman and a much younger, much livelier woman who was dressed in late-sixties style: bell-bottoms, tie-dyed T-shirt, long hair that fell to her waist. The young woman was beautiful. The young woman was Louise. What had happened? I wondered. What had transformed that vibrant flower child into the woman she had become, a woman who refused to walk barefoot in her own home for fear she would leave a mark?

Louise pivoted toward me. The neck of her robe fell open but she quickly closed it again, pinching the lapels together with her right hand. She patted her hair with her left hand. She did not speak.

“The man who killed Amy Lamb is dead,” I said.

She did not respond. Maybe she was afraid of interrupting me.

“Galen Pivec did it,” I continued. “He was shot to death this morning by the State Capitol Security Force after he killed Meghan Chakolis and wounded Marion Senske. You’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

Louise nodded. Other than that, she did not move.

“I’m telling you about it now because the paper won’t say anything about Amy,” I added. “It’s possible that Pivec will never be accused of Amy’s murder. Joseph Sherman had already been blamed for it and the attorney general … Anyway, Pivec did it. He told me so before he died. I just thought you should know.”

Louise nodded again.

“Sorry to bother you so late,” I repeated.

“Do I owe you anything?” Louise asked. “Money?”

I shook my head and for the first time realized it was unlikely I would be paid for any of this.

“Thank you,” she said and drifted toward me, dropping her hand, letting the top of the robe fall open to reveal the unadorned neckline of her white gown. “Would you like to stay a while? I can make coffee.” Her voice was hopeful.

“Thank you, I can’t.”

“You were right, what you said, about being lonely,” she said. “I’m not a homosexual. When I kissed Amy … I was just pretending.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Do you know what it’s like to be someone like me? When I come through that door each night, I know I’ll be alone. I know I’ll eat alone, I know the phone won’t ring. When I go to bed at night, I’m alone. When I wake up in the morning, I’m alone. That’s the worst part, waking up alone. Sometimes I whisper ‘I love you’ even though there’s no one to hear me. Sometimes I pretend there’s someone else saying the words to me. I just want to belong to someone. Can you understand that?”

I flashed on Laura’s face. And Anne Scalasi’s. And Cynthia Grey’s. “Yes, I can,” I said softly.

Then I said, “Tell me why you killed Dennis Thoreau.”

Louise did not seem surprised by the question. She merely shook her head and moved to a walnut desk shoved up against the wall next to the kitchen door. She opened a drawer and took out a videotape. She handed it to me.

“He put something in Amy’s drink. Then he made this movie. He offered to sell it to her for one thousand dollars. Amy didn’t have the money. She came to me. She told me about the movie because … because she didn’t have anyone else.”

That’s pretty much what I had figured. I knew C. C. didn’t kill Thoreau and Meghan had convinced me she hadn’t done it, either, although I had every intention of framing her for it. Conan had claimed he didn’t know Dennis Thoreau and I believed him. He was in Mankato when Thoreau was killed, playing chauffeur for C. C. and Marion. And Sherman hadn’t known Thoreau even existed until I told him. That left Louise. A wild guess? Not really. She had come after me when she thought I hurt Amy. Why not Thoreau? Besides, McGaney said Thoreau was killed with a .25, the same caliber as the gun I took off Louise in my office.

“Sometimes, the people we love, we just want to protect them in the worst way,” I mumbled and I slipped Louise’s Ruger out of my pocket; I had kept it in my trunk. I set both the Ruger and the video on the coffee table and told Louise, “If I were you, I’d get rid of these.”

“You’re not going to tell the police?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I’m just too damn tired to argue with them.”

“Thank you, Mr. Taylor.”

“Don’t thank me, Louise,” I told her, recalling my own sleepless nights. “I’m not sure I’m doing you a favor.”

“Thank you, Mr. Taylor,” she repeated.

“Good-bye, Louise. I hope you find what you need.”

She did not answer. I left. The door closed softly behind me.