"Nothing in the notebooks," he said. "I've been through them."
"There must be something, somewhere."
"Mmm."
"Why did the Crows kill Larry? They must have known that it would be counterproductive, in the political sense. And they didn't have to kill him-he wasn't helping us that much."
"They didn't know that. He was on TV after the raid on the Crows' apartment… Maybe they thought…"
"Ah. I didn't think of that," she said. Then she frowned. "I was on TV the other night. After Larry was cut."
"Might be a good idea to lie low for a while," Lucas said. "These guys are fruitcakes."
"I still can't figure Larry," she said. "Or this other guy, Yellow Hand. Why kill Yellow Hand? Revenge? But revenge doesn't make any sense in this kind of situation, against one of your own people. It just muddies things up. And they never mention those shootings in their press releases…"
"I got no ideas," Lucas said. After a moment he added, "Well, that's not quite right. I do have one idea…"
"What's that?"
"Why don't we sneak back to the bedroom?"
She sighed, smiled a sad smile and said, "Lucas…"
When they talked about it later, Lucas and Lily agreed that there wasn't anything notable about the time they spent in bed that afternoon. The love was soft and slow, and they both laughed a lot, and between times they talked about their careers and salaries and told cop stories. It was absolutely terrific; the best of their lives.
"I've decided what I'm going to do about David," Lily said later in the day, rolling out to the edge of the bed and putting her feet on the floor.
"What are you going to do?" Lucas asked. He had been putting on his jockey shorts, and he stopped with one foot through a leg hole.
"I'm going to lie to him," she said.
"Lie to him?"
"Yeah. What we've got going, David and I, is pretty good. He's a good guy. He's attractive, he's got a nice sense of humor, he worries about me and the kids. It's just…"
"Keep talking."
"There's not the same kind of heat as there is with you. I can look at him sometimes and I get a lump in my throat, I can't even talk. I just feel so… warm toward him. I love him. But I don't get that kind of driving hot feeling. You know what I mean?"
"Yeah. I know."
"I was thinking about it the other night. I was thinking, Here's Davenport. He's large and he's rough and he makes himself happy first. He's not always asking me if I'm okay, have I come. So what is this, Lily? Is this some kind of safe rape fantasy?"
"What'd you decide?"
"I don't know. I didn't decide anything, really. Except to lie to David."
Lucas got fresh underwear from his chest of drawers and said, "Come on. I'll give you a shower."
She followed him into the bathroom. In the shower she said, "David wouldn't do this either. I mean, you just kind of… work me over. Your hands are… in everything, and I… kind of like it."
Lucas shrugged. "You're hurting yourself. Stop talking about David, for Christ's sake."
She nodded. "Yeah. I better."
When they got out of the shower, he dried her, starting the rough towel around her head and slowly working down her legs. When he finished, he was sitting on the side of the bathtub; he reached around her and pulled her pelvis against his head. She ruffled his hair.
"God, you smell good," he said.
She giggled. "We've got to stop, Davenport. I can't handle much more of this."
They dressed slowly. Lucas finished first and lay on the bed, watching her.
"The hardest part of lying to him will be the first ten or fifteen minutes," he said suddenly. "If you can get through the first few minutes, you'll be okay."
She looked up, a guilty expression on her face. "I hadn't thought of that. The first… encounter."
"You know when you bust a kid for something, a teenager, and you're not sure that they did it? And they get that look on their face when you tell them you're a cop? And then you knowl If you're not careful, you'll look like that."
"Ah, Jesus," she said.
"But if you can get through the first ten minutes, just keep bullshitting along, you'll stop feeling guilty and it'll go away."
"The voice of experience," she said, with the tiniest stain of bitterness in her voice.
"I'm afraid so," he said, a little despondently. "I don't know. I love women. But I look at Sloan. You know, Sloan's wife calls him Sloan? And they're always laughing and talking. It makes me jealous."
Lily dropped onto the foot of the bed. "Let's not talk about this," she said. "It'll put me in an early grave. Like Larry."
"Poor old Larry," Lucas said. "I feel for the sonofa-bitch."
The next day was sunny. Lucas had on his best blue suit with a black wool dress coat. Lily wore a dark suit with a blue blouse and a tweed overcoat. Just before they left Lily's hotel room, TV3 had begun live coverage of Larry Hart's funeral. The coverage opened with a shot of Lawrence Du-berville Clay arriving at the funeral. Clay spoke a few cliches into a microphone and went inside.
"He thinks he's the fuckin' president," Lucas said.
"He might be, in six more years," Lily said.
The Episcopalian church was crowded with welfare workers and clients, cops and Indian friends and family. Daniel spoke a few words, and Hart's oldest friend, whom he'd called brother, spoke a few more. The casket was closed.
The cortege to the cemetery shut down traffic in central Minneapolis for five minutes. The line of funeral cars ran bumper to bumper through the Loop, escorted by cops on motorcycles.
"It's better out here," Lily said as they walked into the cemetery. "Churches make me nervous."
"This is the first place 1 ever saw you," Lucas said. "Bluebird's buried here."
"Yup. Weird."
Gravestones were scattered over twelve acres of slightly shaggy grounds, beneath burr oaks. Lucas supposed it would be a spooky place on moonlit nights, the oaks looming like shadows cast by the Headless Horseman. Anderson, stiff in a black suit, looking more like an undertaker than the undertaker, wandered over to stand beside them.
"This is where Rose E. Love is buried," he said after a while.
"Oh, yeah? Where'd you find that out?" Lucas said.
"I found it in some notes with the old coroner's files. There weren't any relatives handy when she died, so they made a note on the death certificate about the funeral home and cemetery, in case somebody came looking for her."
"Hmph."
"Bluebird too," Lily said.
"Mmm."
After a while, Anderson wandered away, edging around the accumulation of funeralgoers. Film crews from all the local television stations and several foreign and national news services stood as close as seemed circumspect, as the cops rolled out their most martial ceremony. When it was over, they passed a folded flag to Hart's mother and fired a military salute.
When the service ended, Anderson strolled up again.
"She's right along here," he said.
"Who?"
"Rose E. Love. I had them look up the gravesite in the cemetery office."
Lucas and Lily, pulled along by Anderson's interest, followed him a hundred yards to a gravesite under the boughs of an aging oak, a dozen feet from the wrought-iron fence surrounding the cemetery.
"Nice spot," Anderson said, looking up into the spreading oak tree with its hand-size leaves still clinging to the branches.
"Yeah." The grave had been kept up spotlessly; on the oblong pink granite stone was inscribed ROSE E. LOVE, in large letters, and below that MOTHER, in smaller script. Lucas looked around. "The grave looks a lot better than the other ones around here. You don't think maybe Shadow Love stops by and works on it?"
Anderson shook his head. "Naw. The cemeteries don't allow that. They'd get all kinds of shit going on. Me and my old lady bought our plots, you know, a couple of years back. They had all these care plans you could sign up for. Give them two thousand bucks now and they'll take care of your grave in perpetuity. It's called Plan Perpetual. You can put it right in your will."