“I won’t tell you the man who gave me the gun,” she said, her lower lip quivering.
“That’s okay. I talked to him last night and that’s all worked out,” Lucas assured her. “We do need to know everybody else.”
“There aren’t very many. I mean, we never had a lot of friends, and then one or two of them died. When Larry got his cancer, some of the others stopped coming around. Larry had to wear this bag come out of his side, you know . . .”
“Yeah,” said Lucas, wincing.
“There’ll still be quite a few people,” said Sloan. “ Mailmen, neighbors, any doctors or medical people who came here . . .”
“There was only a nurse,” she said.
“But those are the kind of people we’re looking for.”
Lucas listened for a few more minutes as Sloan worked to relax her, then broke in.
“I have to leave,” he told Rice. “Detective Sloan will stay and chat with you, but I have a couple of quick questions. Okay?” He smiled at her and she glanced at Sloan and then back and nodded.
“I’m looking for a white man, probably about my size, probably works in an office somewhere. He might have an accent, kind of southwestern. Kind of cowboy. Probably well-to-do. Does that jog anything in your memory? Do you remember anybody like that?”
She frowned and looked down at her hands, at Sloan, and then around the kitchen. Finally she looked back at Lucas and said, “I don’t remember anyone like that. All our friends are white. There haven’t been any colored people in here. Nobody with a lot of money that I know of.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, an impatient edge to his voice.
“I’m trying to remember,” she said defensively.
“That’s okay,” Lucas said. “Did your husband have people here that you didn’t know about?”
“Well, he put a sign in the window for some things he wanted to sell. He had some of those little doll things he brought back from the war against the Japs. Those little carvings? Somebody bought those. He got five hundred dollars for fifteen of them. They were real cute things. Like little pigs and rats, all curled around.”
“You don’t know who that was, who bought them?”
“Oh, I think so. I got some kind of receipt somewhere.”
She looked vaguely around the kitchen again.
“Did you ever see the man who bought them?”
“No, no, but I think he was older. You know, Larry’s age. I got that idea.”
“Okay. Try to find that receipt and give it to Detective Sloan. Was there anybody else?”
“The mailman would stop and talk, he’s a younger fellow, maybe forty. And a young fellow came out from the welfare. We weren’t on welfare,” she said hastily, “but we had some medical assistance coming . . .”
“Sure,” said Lucas. “Listen, I’m going to run. We appreciate any cooperation you can give Detective Sloan.”
Lucas went out through the kitchen door, let it close behind him, and walked down the steps. As he passed the kitchen window he heard Rice say, “ . . . don’t like that fellow so much. He makes me nervous.”
“Quite a few people would agree with you, Mrs. Rice,” Sloan said soothingly. “Can I call you Mary? Detective Davenport is . . .”
“Pushy,” said Rice.
“Lot of people would agree with you, Mary. Look, I really hope we can work together to catch this killer . . .”
Lucas smiled and walked out to his car, opened the door, looked inside for a moment, then shut it and walked back to the house.
Inside, Sloan and Rice were looking at a steno pad on which Sloan had written a short list of names. They both looked up when Lucas came back in.
“Could I use your telephone?” Lucas asked.
“Yes, it’s right . . .” She pointed at the wall.
Lucas looked in his notebook, dialed and got Carla Ruiz on the second ring.
“This is Lucas. How many times were you in the courthouse on the divorce?”
“Oh, four or five. Why?”
“How about before you were attacked? Right before, or when?”
“Let me go get my purse. I keep an organizer . . .”
He heard the receiver land on the table and looked over at Rice.
“Mrs. Rice, this guy from welfare. Did you have to go down to the county courthouse to see him, or did he come out here, or what?”
“No, no, Larry was disabled when we found out he could get some medical, so this fellow came out here. He came out twice. Nice boy. But I think Larry knew him from before, from work.”
“That’s a county job. I thought your husband worked for the City of Minneapolis.”
“Well, he did, but you know, people go back and forth all the time, between City Hall and the courthouse. Larry’s job, he knew everybody. Every time something went wrong, they called him because he could fix anything. He used to see . . . the police officer who gave us the gun down in the cafeteria.”
Ruiz was back on the line.
“I was over there three weeks and four weeks before,” she said.
“Before you were attacked.”
“Yes.”
“Thanks. Listen, see you at six, but try to remember everybody you saw in the courthouse, okay?”
“Got something?” asked Sloan when Lucas hung up the phone.
“I don’t know. You got the phone number where this Lewis woman worked, the real-estate office?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Sloan got out his project notebook, ran down the list, and gave Lucas the number. He dialed and got the office manager and explained what he wanted.
“ . . . So did she go down there?”
“Oh, sure, all the time. Once a week. She carried a lot of the paperwork for us.”
“So she would have been down there before she was killed?”
“Sure. You people have her desk calendars, but she hadn’t taken any vacation in the couple of months before she died, so I’m sure she was down there.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said.
“Well?” said Sloan.
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Two of the women were in the courthouse shortly before they were attacked. Even the woman from St. Paul, and it wouldn’t be that common for somebody from St. Paul to be over in the Hennepin County courthouse. And Mr. Rice was there all the time. It would be a hell of a coincidence.”
“One of the other women, this Bell, the waitress-punker, was busted out at Target on Lake Street for shoplifting. It wasn’t all that long ago. I remember that from our notebooks,” Sloan said. “I bet she went to court down there. I don’t know about the Morris woman.”
“I’ll run Morris,” Lucas said. “It could be something.”
“I got her house number, maybe her husband’s there,” Sloan said. He flipped open his notebook and read out the number as Lucas dialed. Lucas let it ring twenty times without an answer, and hung up.
“I’ll get him later,” Lucas said.
“Want me to check on this welfare guy?”
“You might take a look at him,” Lucas said. He turned to Rice. “Did the welfare worker have an accent of any kind? Even a little one?”
“No, not that I remember. I know he’s from here in Minnesota, he told me that.”
“Damn,” said Lucas.
“Could be a Svenska,” said Sloan. “You get some of those Swedes and Germans from out in central Minnesota, they still got an accent. Maybe this Ruiz heard the accent and thought it was something like southwestern.”
“It’s worth a look,” Lucas said.
At the office, he called Anderson and got Morris’ husband’s office. He answered on the first ring.
“Yes, she did,” he said. “It must of been about a month before . . . Anyway, she used to work out at a health club on Hennepin Avenue, and about once a week she’d get a parking ticket. She’d just throw it in her glove compartment and forget about it. She must have had ten or fifteen of them. Then she got a notice that they were going to issue a warrant for her arrest unless she came down and paid and cleared this court order. So she went down there. It took most of a day to get everything cleared up.”
“Was that the only time she was down there?”
“Well, recently. She might have been other times, but I don’t know of any.”
When he finished with Morris, Lucas called the clerk of court and checked on Lucy Bell’s appearance date on the shoplifting charge. May 27. He looked at a calendar. A Friday, a little more than a month before she was killed.