For another…” He paused.
Smith said, “For another?”
“Well, for another, I didn't do it.” Lucas smiled. “You did.”
“Fuck you,” Smith said. He dipped into the bottom file drawer and pulled out a file, looked at the flap. “Here's a file that says Antiques.'“ “Bullshit,” Lucas said.
“Man, I'm not kidding you…”
Lucas took the file and looked at the flap: “Antiques.”
Inside, a stack of receipts. There weren't many of them, not nearly as many as there were in the furniture file. But one of them, a pink carbon copy, said at the top, “Widdler Antiques and Objets d”Art.”
He handed it over to Smith who looked at it, then looked at Lucas, looked at the pink sheet again, and said, “Kiss my rosy red rectum.”
“We got them with Toms and Bucher, and we know that their good friend actually worked with Donaldson, and they pulled off a fraud. That's enough for a warrant,” Smith said.
“At the minimum, we get Leslie to lift up his pant legs,” Lucas said. “If he's got bite holes, we take a DNA and compare it to the blood on Screw. At that point, we've got him for attempted kidnapping…”
“And cruelty to animals.”
“I'm not sure Screw actually qualified as an animal. He was more of a beast.”
“Can't throw a dog out a car window. Might be able to get away with an old lady, but not a dog,” Smith said. “Not in the city of St. Paul.”
Lucas was a half block from his house when Jenkins called from Wisconsin. He fumbled the phone, caught it, said, “Yeah?”
“Got 'em,” Jenkins said.
The whole story was so complicated that Jane Widdler almost couldn't contain it.
She wrote down the major points, sitting at her desk while Leslie was upstairs in the shower, singing an ancient Jimmy Buffett song, vaguely audible through the walls.
Jane wrote:* No way out* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Prison forever Then she drew a line, and below it wrote:* Arrested* Disgraced* Attorneys* Time in prison? Then she drew a second line and wrote:* Save the money The last item held her attention most of the afternoon, but she was working through the other items in the back of her head.
Davenport, she thought, was probably unstoppable. It was possible that he wouldn't get to them, but unlikely. She'd seen him operating.
She nibbled on her bottom lip, looked at the list, then sighed and fed it into the shredder.
If he did get to them, could Davenport convict? Not if Leslie hadn't been bitten by the dog. But with the dog bites, Leslie was cooked. If she hadn't taken some kind of preemptive action before then, she'd be cooked with him.
From watching her stepfather work as a cop, and listening to him talk about court cases, she felt the most likely way to save herself was to give the cops another suspect. Build reasonable doubt into the case. As much reasonable doubt as possible.
As for the money…
They had a safe-deposit box in St. Paul where they had more than $160,000 in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. The cash came from stolen antiques, from four dead old women and one dead old man, each in a different state. The Widdlers had worked the cash slowly back through the store, upgrading their stock, an invisible laundry that the mafia would have appreciated.
With Leslie looking at a china collection in Minnetonka, Jane, after talking to Anderson, had gone alone to the bank, retrieved the money, and wrapped it in Ziploc bags. Where to put it? She'd eventually taken it home and buried it in a flower garden, carefully scraping the bark mulch back over it.
Amity Anderson, Jane knew, was on the edge of cracking. One big fear: that Anderson would crack first, and go to the cops hoping to make a deal. Anderson knew herself well enough to know that she couldn't tolerate prison. She was too fragile for that.
Too much of a free spirit. All she wanted was to go to Italy; look at Cellini and Caravaggio. Amity believed that if she could only get to Italy, somehow, the problems would be left behind.
Magical thinking. Jane Widdler had no such illusions. The victims had been too rich, the money too big, the publicity too great. The cops would be all over them once they had a taste; and Davenport had gotten a taste.
Still, Jane could pull it off, if she had time.
Leslie called, said he was on the way home. Jane hurried over to the shop, opened the safe in the back, and took out the coin collection and a simple.38-caliber pistol.
The coin collection came from the Toms foray, fifty-eight rare gold coins from the nineteenth century, all carefully sealed in plastic grading containers, all MS6through MS69-so choice, in fact, that they'd been a little worried about moving the coins. They still had all but two, but if necessary, she could take them to Mexico and move them there.
The coins went deep in a line of lilacs, behind and to one side of the house, halfway to the creek. She dug them six inches down, covered them with sod, dusted her hands.
If she didn't make it back… what a waste.
The pistol went into her purse. She'd never learned not to jerk the trigger, but that wouldn't matter if you were shooting at a range of half an inch.
She wondered where the jail was. Would it be Hennepin County, or Ramsey? Somehow, she thought it might be Ramsey, since that's where the murders occurred. And Ramsey, she thought, might be preferable, with a better class of felon. Surely they had separate cells, you were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if Leslie had passed away, the house would be hers to use as a bond for bail…
She went inside. Leslie was perched on the couch in the den, wearing yellow walking shorts and a loose striped shirt from a San Francisco clothier, pale blue stripes on a champagne background that went well with the shorts and the Zelli crocodile slippers, $695. He said, “Hi. I heard you come in… Where'd you go?”
“I thought I saw the fox out back. I walked around to see. But he was gone.”
“Yeah? I'd like a fox tail for the car.”
“We've got to talk,” Jane said. “Something awful happened today.”
When she told him about Davenport visiting the shop, about his question about a white van, Leslie touched one fat finger to his fat nose and said, “He's got to go.”
“There's no time,” Jane said, pouring the anxiety into her voice. “If he was asking about the van this afternoon, he'll be looking at all the files tomorrow. Once that gets into the system…”
Leslie was digging in a pocket. He came up with a pack of breath mints and popped two. “Listen,” he said, clicking the mints off his lower teeth, “we do it tonight.
Just have to figure out how.”
“I looked him up,” Jane volunteered. “He lives on Mississippi River Boulevard in St. Paul. I drove by; a very nice house for a cop. He must be on the take.”
“Maybe that's a possibility,” Leslie suggested. “If he's crooked…”
“No. Too late, too late… The thing is, have you seen him with that gun? And he's going to be wary, I'd be afraid to approach him.”
“So what do you think?” Leslie let her do most of the thinking.
“If you think we should do it, I suggest that rifle. God knows it's powerful enough.
You shoot from the backseat, I drive. We'll ambush him right outside his house. If the opportunity doesn't present itself, we go back tomorrow morning.”
“If we see him in a window-a.300 Mag won't even notice a piece of window glass,” Leslie said.
“Whatever.”
“If we're going to do it, we've got things to do,” Leslie said cheerfully. The thought of killing always warmed him up. “I'm gonna take a shower, clean up the gun. Take my car, I'll sit in the back. We'll need earplugs, but I've got some. What's the layout?”
“We can't park on River Boulevard, it's all no-parking. But there's a spot on the side street, under a big elm tree. It looks sideways at his garage and front door.
If he goes anywhere…”
“Too bad it's summer,” Leslie said. “We'll be shooting in daylight.”
“We can't go too early,” Jane said. “It has to be dark enough that people can't read out faces.”