“How so?”
“Your tip to Ed Teeters, it paid off.”
“No way!”
“He put a team on Irene Brown. She left her house an hour after sunset and drove to a Dumpster behind a fast-food joint. They have a videotape of her throwing a box into the Dumpster. Guess what the box contained?”
“No way!”
“A pair of LA Gear Air System running shoes, size ten.”
I started to laugh at the improbability of it all.
“We’re working on this sucker for seven months, and you break it in one day,” Anne said.
“Actually, I did it in half a day,” I told her and laughed some more.
“You’re a lucky sonuvabitch,” Anne repeated.
“Hey, I’m a trained professional. Luck had nothing to do with it. As the great pioneering criminologist Edmond Locard once said—”
“Give me a break. I lend you one lousy book on forensic detection, and all of a sudden you’re quoting dead Frenchmen.”
“I thought he was Belgian.”
“Trust me. Anyway, Irene Brown had been waiting seven months for someone to catch her. Winnie the Pooh could have done it.”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Do I detect envy? Jealousy, perhaps, of my unparalleled skills?”
“Screw you, Taylor.”
“God, I’m loving this, Annie.”
“It’s not over yet. Teeters said that Irene Brown confessed that she followed Alison home the evening she disappeared. Brown said she was going to give Alison a piece of her mind.”
“Does she have any to spare?”
“She said Alison met her at the front door with a small gun in her hand. She said Alison told her to leave, and that’s what she did. Brown insists Alison was alive when she left.”
“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” I told Anne.
“Brown claims that she didn’t tell the police because she was afraid they would accuse her of killing Alison.”
“Did she admit to making the harassing telephone calls?”
“Yes, and the flowers and dead cat, too. She also claims that Raymond Fleck had nothing to do with any of it.”
“I wonder.”
“Yeah, I do, too. Is she still protecting Raymond?”
“The running shoes. They were men’s shoes,” I reminded Anne.
“Teeters said that Brown insists they were hers, that they fit her better than women’s shoes.”
“Why did she keep them all this time?”
“She said she had no reason not to. She said she never imagined that she left a print.”
“Unbelievable. What does Teeters say?”
“Teeters is ecstatic. He’s so happy, he’s actually speaking in complete sentences. He figures this will get the media off his back.”
“Now the big one: What does the Dakota County attorney say?”
“I’m getting this all secondhand, you have to remember. The way I hear it, Dakota County is impounding Brown’s car and having forensics conduct a search. If they find any blood, any hair samples, any physical evidence at all that puts Alison in the car or in any area where the suspect had access, the CA will go for a murder indictment even if he can’t establish corpus delicti. If not, I don’t know. Without Alison’s body, without corroborative physical evidence, he’ll have a helluva time proving that a homicide was even committed. The defense could argue that Alison decided to become a blackjack dealer in Vegas—”
Or take a trip to Bermuda, my inner voice whispered so softly that I barely heard it.
“—and you know juries; they like to see a dead body in a murder case.”
“Still, if he pushes it, Brown might cop a plea, go for manslaughter,” I suggested.
“Depends on her attorney.”
“Or Fleck might open up.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me know?”
Anne sighed deeply. “How ’bout I buy you lunch tomorrow. W. A. Frost.”
“Annie, my gosh.”
“Yeah, well, you did a nice job.”
“Thanks, Annie. But like you said, she spent the past seven months teetering on the edge, waiting for someone to shove her over.”
“Probably, but you’re the one who nudged her, not us. Make it eleven-thirty?”
“See you then.”
I turned off the phone, collapsed the antenna, and set it on the coffee table. Cynthia was watching me from a wing chair, smiling.
“All right, I’m waiting,” she said.
“Waiting?”
“For the self-congratulations.”
“Cynthia, you wound me.”
“Uh-huh.”
I locked my fingers behind my head and leaned back. She continued to watch me, continued to smile.
“The other day you asked why men enjoy sports,” I reminded her. “It’s for the same reason I enjoyed being a cop, the same reason I like being a private investigator now. Yeah, there’s plenty of greed and fraud and ignorance and stupidity and corruption, and sometimes you wonder why you’re wasting your time. But if you stay with it, occasionally you’ll be rewarded with moments of pure joy, like when Kirby Puckett hit a home run to win the sixth game of the 1991 World Series or when Black Jack Morris pitched a ten-inning shutout to win game seven—”
“Or when Holland Taylor solved a seven-month-old murder before lunch,” she added.
I grinned. “God, I’m good.”
nine
I was late to my office the next morning. It was such a beautiful day, I stopped at the University of Minnesota driving range on Larpenteur to hit a bucket of golf balls. It took me over an hour. I would have finished sooner except that I took time to admire the female golfer who was hitting seven irons from the tee next to mine. Absolutely gorgeous form. Her swing wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, my ogling came with a price that I was forced to pay when I called my answering service.
“It is un-ac-cept-able,” the operator told me, sounding a bit like Anne Scalasi in a bad mood. “We will not tolerate that kind of behavior from our clients. If there are any further incidents, we will terminate our relationship.”
Gulp.
I tried to explain to the woman that it wasn’t I who had called four times between eight and nine A.M., making angry references to various parts of the operator’s anatomy when I wasn’t there to answer the phone. However, she didn’t see it that way, and I was forced to promise that I would “speak” with Mr. Truman. Either that or dig my old answering machine out of the closet.
But first I fortified myself with a cup of Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee—I grind my own beans—and sorted through my mail. Except for a large brown envelope from Publishers Clearing House, nothing excited me. I turned my attention to my newspapers. I get both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune. Most people read newspapers starting with the front page and work in. I always start with the agate type listing the transactions in the sports section and work out. No particular reason; it’s just how I do things. I noticed immediately that the Oakland As had brought up a middle-relief pitcher just in time for their series with the Minnesota Twins. They’ll need him. My Twins were hot, having won nine of their last eleven, including a three-game sweep of Cleveland. It was still early, of course. Too early to get excited about a pennant race. And given the team’s payroll … Still, every time my boys start playing well, I remember ’87 and ’91, and a little tingle creeps up my spine. True, ’87 and ’91 are starting to be a long time ago. But what has your team done lately? Not much I bet.
I was studying the stats of today’s probable pitchers when the phone rang. I let it ring six times before I answered, knowing it was Hunter Truman.
“What the fuck is going on?” he wanted to know.
“Pertaining to what?”
“Goddammit, ain’t you working for me? I gotta get my news from the fucking radio, from some greaseball on TV?”
“Are you referring to Irene Brown?”
“What the hell you think I’m referring to? Jesus, Taylor.”