“Bobby told me you and he used to do a lot of stuff together,” Liska said. “Go fishing, play catch. He misses that. He misses you.”
His eyes rimmed red and he looked away from her, embarrassed he might cry in front of her.
“You need each other,” Liska said. “That’s the way you heal each other.”
She got up from the table and put a business card down near Wayne Haas’s hand, then walked away, feeling ashamed of herself for using the emotions of a broken man to get information about his own son.
At least she hadn’t left any scars. Guys on the job could bully a witness or a perp, scare them into cooperating. Being small and female, she was better off relying on gentler, sneakier ways of getting information. Not having a penis was, every once in a while, to her advantage.
Jerome Walden’s home was her next stop. The lovely and pleasant Mrs. Walden answered, hungover, wearing last night’s makeup, a leopard-print see-through wrap over a zebra-striped bra and panties. She should have been arrested for crimes against fashion.
Liska showed her ID through the screen door.
“What now?” the woman complained. “Is this about Ray Malone? I don’t know nothing but that he’s a son of a bitch, and he owes me money.”
“He give you that shiner?” Liska asked, referring to a black eye that was only just beginning to purple.
“I ran into something.”
Like a fist, Liska thought, but she didn’t pursue the issue.
“Is your son home?”
The woman looked suspicious. “Why?”
“Because I asked.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I’m giving you,” Liska said, annoyed. That women like this one were allowed to have children was beyond her. “I shouldn’t give you that much. The state this house is in, I should be calling social services.”
“Oh, fuck you, Little Miss Tweed Blazer.”
“You can answer one goddamn question, or I’m on the phone to report you,” Liska said forcefully. “Your kid gets taken away from you, so do the family aid checks.”
Jerome Walden’s mother scowled at her, trying to decide if Liska was bluffing, or maybe considering how the loss of that AFDC check would crimp her lifestyle.
“He’s not home,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“Like I’m supposed to know that? He’s practically an adult.”
From somewhere in the background came a loud male voice. “Hey, babe, where are you? Come suck my dick!”
Liska arched a brow. “Duty calls.”
The woman gave her the finger and slammed the door in her face.
What could she expect from a woman who mixed her animal prints?
With a mother like that, it was a wonder Jerome Walden wasn’t already on the most-wanted list.
But the larger question that loomed in front of her as she got back in her car and headed downtown was where Jerome Walden and Bobby Haas were and just what the hell were they up to.
46
CAREY TRIED the phone again. Still nothing. She kept pressing buttons to keep the phone illuminated, and tried to use it as a flashlight. She’d found nothing in her reach to use as a weapon once her abductor stopped the car.
As she moved the cell phone to the right, the light reflected off something. The plastic cover of one interior trunk light.
She felt around the cover, trying to find a way to pry under it, to pull it loose. She dug at it, pulled at it, broke two fingernails.
Closing her eyes, she took her phone and used the end of it like a hammer, beating at the plastic until it cracked.
Pulling the shattered cover apart, she felt around inside. Her fingertips snagged on something.
Wires.
To the taillights? The turn signals? Many a criminal had ended his career with a traffic violation.
Carey pulled the wires loose and prayed for a ticket-happy cop.
47
LISKA WALKED INTO the war room, feeling troubled and anxious. She had called in a BOLO for Bobby Haas and Jerome Walden and for Wayne Haas’s Chrysler. There wasn’t much else she could do on that front. She couldn’t figure the boys for the abduction of Judge Moore. That had pro written all over it. But she kept moving the puzzle pieces of Bobby Haas’s life around and around in her mind, not liking any of the pictures she came up with.
The women in Bobby’s life hadn’t fared well. His mother had killed herself in front of him. The first Mrs. Haas had fallen to her death. The second Mrs. Haas had been murdered. Judge Moore had been assaulted, would probably have been killed if not for the car alarm scaring off the perpetrator. And now she was gone, vanished.
The idea of the boy’s being involved in any of that made Liska’s skin crawl. He looked so sweet, seemed so polite, so vulnerable. The fact that he had had so much sadness and tragedy in his life tripped the Mother switch in her and made her want to put an arm around him and comfort him. He wasn’t much older than Kyle, her firstborn. It was difficult for her not to look at Bobby Haas and see Kyle, and want to protect him.
He had told her Rebecca Haas had died of cancer.
The lie was like a stone in her shoe-small but irritating, something she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Why would he have lied?
Because he thought telling the truth to a cop would arouse suspicion?
Or was it just as Marcella Otis had said, that maybe Bobby didn’t want to think about his first foster mother’s violent demise? Lieutenant Dawes had suggested the boy might have felt like less of a freak saying his mom had died of cancer than being known as the kid with multiple violent deaths in his life.
“You’re just in time for the movie,” Tippen said.
Liska joined him, sitting on the end of the table as Elwood stuck a videotape in the VCR and turned the television on.
“Why so glum?” Tippen asked.
She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that every day of my life is about death and depravity and the decline of a once-great civilization.”
“Oh, stop whining,” Tippen said. “It could be worse. You could be the sheriff’s deputy who didn’t cuff Karl Dahl to the gurney.”
“Any word on him, Dahl?”
“Nada. He’ll probably resurface years from now, found to be working as director of a shelter for homeless women and children in Milwaukee. Credited with orchestrating the decline in the numbers of street people.”
“Well, that cheered me up,” Liska said. “Excuse me while I go slit my wrists.”
Elwood hit the play button, and the television screen filled with black-and-white snow, then a bird’s-eye view of the lobby bar in the Marquette Hotel, date and time superimposed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. The tape was clean, the picture sharp enough to easily make out faces. He hit fast-forward, racing through the tape to the time in question.
“There’s David Moore and his amour,” Tippen said, using a laser pointer to touch the screen.
“Eeww!” Liska said, wrinkling her nose at the sight of Moore ’s junkie whore girlfriend crawling all over him. “Get a room!”
Elwood goosed the tape ahead until Edmund Ivors joined the party, then goosed it a little more.
“Here he comes,” Liska said.
Slender guy on the small side, dressed in black, fine blond hair almost to his shoulders. He could definitely have passed as a woman, from a distance.
He walked up to the table, leaned down, and shook David Moore’s hand, presenting his profile.
Tippen sat up straighter. “I know that guy! That’s Long Donny. Long Donny Bergen.”
“Who’s Long Donny Bergen and why do they call him that?” Liska asked.
“He’s a porn star.”
“Oh, gross!” Liska jumped off the table and looked at Tippen with disgust. “Don’t tell me you’re a fan! I don’t want that in my head!”
“What?” Tippen asked, shrugging his shoulders. “The man is a star in his own right.”