“No,” she said. “I can tell you that for sure. He left his wallet, watch, and iPhone on the bathroom counter. I promise you, Barry would never leave his wallet and cell phone behind, if he was planning to take off. There was a hundred and forty dollars in his wallet, and all his IDs and credit cards.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Barry come into any money lately?”
Her eyes drifted sideways and Jenkins said to Virgil, “That looks like a big yes.”
“I don’t know where he got it, but he bought some neat new shoes last month-he likes shoes. I looked in his wallet and there was more than a thousand dollars in cash in there,” Ortiz said. “We had an argument about it. Oh… his shoes are still here. He didn’t take any of them, except his running shoes.”
“He ever mention the tigers to you? The missing tigers from the zoo?” Virgil asked.
Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my God. Is that what this is about? You think Barry helped steal them?”
“We would like to talk with him,” Virgil said. “See if he had any ideas about what might have happened to them.”
“I don’t think Barry… he’s not the kind of person who could organize a thing like that. You know, stealing the tigers. Barry can be nice, when he tries, but he’s not the sharpest knife in the dishwasher.”
“Did he spend any time watching the news about the tigers?” Virgil asked.
She bobbed her head. “Oh, yeah, I guess. Everybody has been, right? Especially if you worked at the zoo.”
“Do you know… has he had any new friends? Anybody you thought might be a little unusual?”
“No, but he has his own friends. I don’t hang out with them much. The boys, you know, go drinking with the boys. I go out with my girlfriends.”
Shrake: “You didn’t talk about the zoo, about the tigers?”
“Only about how terrible it was, the tigers being stolen. Anything more, he hasn’t said a thing to me. Not a thing.”
–
King wasn’t saying much to the Simonians, either. He lay face-down in the RV and bled into the carpet, and occasionally groaned.
One of the Simonians had talked to Hamlet and Hayk Simonian’s mother, who’d given them two names: Larry King, who she said worked at the zoo, and Simpson Becker, who’d hired them.
Her mistakes with the names occurred because Mother Simonian had been born and raised in Iran and had fled when the revolution made things difficult for Christian Armenians. Surrounded by family in California, speaking Farsi and Armenian, she’d learned only basic English-but she had watched a lot of television, Larry King and The Simpsons included; she in fact may have unconsciously modeled her blue-tinted hair on Marge Simpson’s. When her elder son called and said she should take down a couple of names, “just in case,” he said Barry King and Winston Peck, and she heard Larry King and Simpson Becker.
The Simonians in the truck had managed to identify Larry King as Barry King by searching references to zoo employees, but hadn’t yet located any doctor named Simpson Becker.
Still, Barry King was a start. When he went for his morning run, they’d pulled him into the Simonian RV and proceeded to question him. When he failed to cooperate, they beat the shit out of him. When that didn’t work, the youngest and most violent of the Simonians suggested breaking his fingers, one by one, but one of the older men rejected the idea.
“I can’t stand that sound, you know? That popping, cracking sound.”
–
King let them beat him and never admitted a thing, except to moan and proclaim his innocence. He knew, from television news, that Hamlet Simonian had been murdered, and he suspected that Peck had done it. If he admitted any knowledge of it, he believed the Simonians would throw him off a bridge or some even more colorful Armenian equivalent, like off a bridge in front of a train.
He took the pounding and eventually the Simonians got tired of doing it, gave him a paper towel to wash off his face, and dropped him off on St. Paul’s East Seventh Street with a wad of toilet paper to block up his bloody nose.
As they let him go, the young, violent Simonian asked, “Why you got a fly tattoo on your neck?”
King said, around the toilet paper, “I thought it looked cool.”
The Simonian said, “You ever go to Amsterdam?”
“What? No, I never go any farther than Wisconsin. Amsterdam?”
“The Amsterdam airport, all the urinals in the men’s rooms got flies like that, right down in the bottom. You’re supposed to aim at them. You got a piss-pot fly on your neck, man.”
“Goes with the daisy tattoo I got around my asshole,” King said.
The Simonians all laughed and slapped him on the back and said he wasn’t a bad guy, but if they found out he’d had anything to do with Hamlet, of course, they’d find him again and kill him.
“Got that,” King said. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you first.”
–
Once free, King walked to a convenience store, told the clerk that he’d been mugged, and the clerk reluctantly allowed him to use the house phone. He called home, and Ortiz told him that the state cops had been looking for him. He told her to collect his clothes, shoes, phone, wallet, and car keys, and bring them to him at the convenience store.
“You’re gonna get me in trouble, aren’t you?” she asked. “Did you steal those tigers?”
“Of course not. I was home with you when they were stolen,” he said.
Ortiz agreed to come get him. She did, in his car.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
He told her: “A total mistake. I had nothing to do with those tigers. They must be going around picking up zoo employees and beating them up.”
Ortiz figured he was lying. He was in the backseat, as they drove across town, and she watched him in the rearview mirror as he got dressed and stuffed little twists of toilet paper in each nostril.
He had her pull over six blocks from the house, took the driver’s seat, and told her to walk the rest of the way. “I’ll call you when I’ve got this straightened out,” he said.
In the six-block walk back to the house, Ortiz gave the situation serious consideration. Somehow, she thought, King was involved with the tiger theft, and at least one man involved with the tiger theft had been murdered.
Ortiz was a hairdresser with a wide breadth of knowledge involving men, lying, and criminal justice that beauty shops generated through their daily panel discussions. If the cops busted King for any aspect of the crime, they might get him for the murder as well. They would take a long look at her, too, to see if she was an accomplice. She was sitting out there like a clay pigeon, she thought, totally ignorant of the crime, but also totally exposed.
She got Virgil’s business card out of her bureau drawer and called him.
“I found out what happened to Barry,” she said. “Some guys in a big RV picked him up off the street and beat him up.”
“Big RV? He’s there now, with you?”
“No, he took off.”
“What kind of car is he driving…?”
–
Virgil got off the phone with Ortiz, called the duty officer, and told him to call the local emergency rooms in case King went to one of them. Then he got the registration for King’s car from the DMV and put the make, color, and license plate out to Twin Cities police agencies and the highway patrol. He cursed himself for not getting the make and license plate of the Simonians’ RV.
But the Simonians had landed on King, which meant they knew something. They’d had at least one name, so they might have more.
He called his Simonian contact. When Levon Simonian answered the phone, Virgil could hear traffic sounds in the background: they were in the RV.
“We need to get together and chat,” Virgil said.
“We’re going fishing in Wisconsin,” Simonian said. “We will call when we get back.”