Could be Martha, or it could be this other M.'
Carmel was skepticaclass="underline" "That's a long chain of could-be's,' she said. 'It could be some other M, or not an M at all.'
'Yeah, but we don't have anything else.'
'Rolo's name's gonna be in the paper tomorrow,' Carmel said. 'If this M doesn't know he's dead, she will tomorrow morning. Then she's gonna look at the tape, if she hasn't already. Then she's gonna give it to the cops.'
'So let's go talk to M. Blanco. And Martha Koch.'
'After dark.'
'Yup.'
'We're hanging by a goddamn thread,' Carmel said.
Martha Koch's life was saved by a baby shower; she never knew it.
'Lotta cars around,' Carmel muttered as she and Rinker started up the Kochs' driveway; a dozen cars were parked along the street. The house was a neat, modest, tuck-under ranch across the street from a golf course. A curving line of flagstone steps led across a rising lawn to the front door. The porch light was on, and the living-room curtains were open. At the top of the steps, Carmen said, 'Uh-oh,' and stopped. Two women were hopping around the front room, laughing, and one of them was looking back and obviously talking to yet a third one, or more.
'Forget it,' Rinker said. 'We'll have to come back.' They retreated down the steps, walked up the street to Carmel's Volvo, and left.
M. Blanca's house was a long step down in affluence, one of a row of old asbestos-shingled houses just north of a University of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. Four mailboxes hung next to a single door.
'It's an apartment,' Rinker said, her voice low.
'Lot of them are,' Carmel said.
'We gotta take care – there'll be other people around. You got the money?'
'Yeah.' A few more steps and Carmel asked, 'What do I look like?' Rinker was wearing her red wig; they'd both wrapped dark silk scarves around their heads.
'You look like one of those religious ladies who always wear scarves,' Rinker said.
'All right,' Carmel said. She added, 'So do you.'
At the front door, Carmel pointed a pocket flash it at the mailboxes. The box on the left said Howell; the next one showed a strip of paper, which had been peeled off. The third said in pink ink, Jan and Howard Davis, with a green ink addition, in a child's hand, And Heather. The fourth said Apartment A. She opened the left one, Howell, and found it empty. The box with the strip of paper contained a phone bill addressed to David Pence, Apartment C. She skipped the
Davis box, and checked the box on the far right. Empty.
'I think, but I'm not sure, that we want apartment A,' she whispered to Rinker.
Rinker nodded and they pushed through the outer door into a short hallway.
Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn bicycle was chained to the banister. 'Not like my old Schwinn,' Rinker muttered.
Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal
B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.
The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up, off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack, and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, 'What?'
'We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,' Carmel said quietly.
'She's sleeping,' he said, and the crack narrowed.
'We've got some money for her,' Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man's eyes were back at the crack. He didn't argue. He simply said, 'I'll take it.'
'No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.'
'Oh.' He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and
Carmel's heart did a quick extra beat. 'What happened to Rolo?'
'Quite a bit of money,' Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.
'Just a minute,' the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call,
'Hey, Marta.'
'Marta Blanca,' Rinker muttered. 'She bakes right.'
'What?' Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.
'Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca…'
Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened.
He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, 'Yeah. Come in.'
Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine-yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.
'How much money?' the man asked.
'We need to ask…' Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom in the back. She was tucking her blouse into the back of her jeans. 'Are you Marta?'
'Yeah.' The woman still looked sleepy. 'What happened to Rolando?'
'He's dead,' Carmel said flatly. 'Somebody shot him.'
The woman stopped in her tracks, the blood draining from her face: 'Dead? He can't be dead. I just talked to him yesterday.'
'The cops found him this morning,' Rinker said, stepping out of Carmel's shadow.
'Was he a good friend?'
'He was he was he was…' she said, shakily.
'Her brother,' the man finished. Rinker flicked a look at Carmel, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Her hand moved in her pocket.
'Half-brother,' the woman said. She dropped on a chair. 'Ah, Jesus,' she said.
'It was on TV,' Rinker said.
'He said he gave you a tape to hold, and that if anything happened to him, we were supposed to come and get it, because if you keep it, somebody's gonna show up here and hurt you,' Carmel said, squatting to look the woman straight in the face. 'He gave us an envelope to give you. Money.'
The man said, 'We don't got no tape,' but the woman said, reflexively, 'How much?'
They had the tape, Carmel thought, and she felt a wire, tight in her spine, suddenly relax.
'Five thousand dollars,' Carmel said, speaking to the woman. The woman looked up at the man, who said, 'I dunno.'
Carmel took the envelope out of her pocket. 'If we could get the tape?'
The woman stood up, but the man put a hand out to her. 'I think we should look at the tape first,' he said.
'Rolando said not to,' the woman said, nervously dry-washing her hands.
"We need to get that tape…'
The woman flipped her hands up, explaining to Carmel, 'It's one of those funny little tapes, you need to get a special holder-thing to run it.. .'
'We're gonna look at the tape,' the man said, decisively. 'If you show up here to give us five thousand…' He smiled brightly and said, 'Then, I bet it's worth a lot more.'
'We really need the tape. Rolando wasn't supposed to get it, and the people it belongs to, you really don't want to mess with,' Rinker said. Her voice was flat, and sounded dangerous to Carmel's ear. The vibration apparently went past the Latino.
He sneered at her. 'What, the fuckin' Mafia? Or the Colombianos? Fuck those people.' He turned to the woman. 'We look at the tape.' And back to Carmel and
Rinker, hitching up his pants. 'You bitches can leave the envelope here. If it's enough, we'll give you the tape. If not, we'll figure out a price.'
'Goddamnit, this isn't necessary,' Carmel said, stepping in front of Rinker. Out at the very edge of her vision she could see Rinker's gun hand sliding out of her pocket.
'Yeah, it's fuckin' necessary,' the Latino man said, his voice rising. 'What I fuckin' say is necessary, that's what's fuckin' necessary, right?' He looked at
Marta. 'Is that right?'
She looked away and Carmel shrugged. 'If you say so.' She took another sideways step, and felt Rinker's arm come up with the gun.
The man stepped back, a little surprised, but still smiling slightly. 'What, that's supposed to scare me?'
That was the last thing he said: Rinker shot him in the center of the forehead, and he dropped in his tracks. The woman, Marta, clapped both hands to her face in disbelief, and before she could scream or make any other sound, Rinker panned the gun barrel across to her face and snapped: 'If you scream, I'll kill you.'