Penance (12 page)

I
WOKE EARLY
without much enthusiasm for the sunshine that streamed through my bedroom windows. I’d had a difficult night of it, tossing and turning, dozing more than sleeping. But not because of Dennis Thoreau. Unlike the other dead men who invaded my sleep, Thoreau did not belong to me. None of it belonged to me. I had wandered into it, like a neighbor who inadvertently intrudes on a domestic dispute. It wasn’t my problem and if I was polite I’d say, “Excuse me,” and get the hell out of there; give the tape to Anne Scalasi—anonymously, of course, since removing evidence from a crime scene is a felony in this state—and walk away, letting Annie figure it out. Only now I was curious. The questions I had formed last night were still nagging me. Besides, good manners never were one of my virtues. And I did not like being trifled with.

But was I willing to take on the expense of continuing the investigation, of dragging Thoreau’s name through my databases without a client? No, not really, I decided, regretting my expensive gesture of the night before. Yet, as the nuns at St. Mark’s Elementary School were fond of telling me, the Good Lord always provides a way.

In this case He provided it in the form of a telephone call from Carol Catherine Monroe. She was desperate for my help. Or so she claimed. I replaced the receiver and rolled out of bed, pleased to have a reason to get up in the morning, and padded downstairs.

I did not recognize Conan at first. He was standing next to the information desk in his State Capitol Security Force uniform, the uniform tailored to fit his well-muscled body.

But he recognized me. He moved quickly, taking several long steps, positioning himself between me and the elevators.

“Something, yes?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed, his lips curled into an ugly snarl; I expected him to growl or at least bark. He did neither. Instead, he stepped away without a word, returning to the desk. If he was trying to get my attention, he did a helluva job. I backed into the elevator, watching him until the doors swished shut.

The State Capitol Office Building has eight floors, two below ground, six above. The floors are color coordinated; don’t ask me why. I took the ancient elevator to Blue. The doors opened onto a reception area. The legislative session had ended the first Monday following the third Saturday in May as prescribed by our state constitution and no one was on duty at the desk, which is probably why C. C. had asked me to meet her there instead of at campaign headquarters. I walked down a long corridor dotted with a half dozen unoccupied desks and a dozen office doors. The doors were all closed and presumably locked, except one on the left, toward the end of the corridor.

C. C. Monroe was not in her office when I arrived at 9:30. She’d had a breakfast fund-raiser scheduled and Marion Senske had told her it was best she keep to her routine. That meant I was forced to sit with Marion and wait. I didn’t mind waiting and Marion’s attitude toward me had shifted. Yesterday she wanted me out of her life. Today she wanted me on her side.

“You must think I’m an awful bitch,” she volunteered.

“Not at all, I think you’re very good at it.”

“Practice, practice,” she said and smiled—sort of.

“I’m surprised you allowed C. C. to call me,” I told her. “Wasn’t your friend at the St. Paul Police Department available?”

Marion ignored my question. She slipped a wad of bills out of the desk drawer and handed them to me. “These belong to you,” she said. I stuffed them into my jacket pocket without counting them.

Marion was nervous. She tapped her foot relentlessly and the tapping started to work on my nerves. I looked for a distraction. I asked how the campaign was progressing.

“Good,” she replied. “We took in nearly a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars last night alone. That gives us two million. We’re putting it into TV and radio spots that will saturate the market during the final two weeks before the election.”

“That’s a lot of money, two million dollars,” I told her.

She disagreed. “The opposition has more.”

“Tell me something. Carol Catherine’s performance last night, her angry tears? Did you script that?”

“Goddamn it, where is she?” Marion asked, standing up, glancing at her watch, then the clock on the wall. “She’s never been on time a day in her life. I keep telling her …” Marion stopped and stared out the window. “You make do with what you have,” she sighed.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” When Marion did not respond, I asked, “Does C. C. ever do anything without your help?”

“Occasionally, I’ll let her sign her name to something.”

C. C. stepped through her office door on Marion’s words. “Are you talking about me?” she asked.

“Where the hell have you been?” Marion wanted to know.

C. C. ignored her, shutting and locking the door after first poking her head out into the corridor and looking both ways. She was obviously scared silly and kept pulling at her hair. Fifteen minutes before she’d called me, she said, a man had called her, a man who identified himself only with his demand: ten thousand dollars in tens and twenties.

“What exactly did he say?” I asked when C. C. was sure we were not being spied on.

She answered in a conspiratorial voice just above a whisper. “He said, ‘I know what you did and so will everyone else unless you pay me ten thousand dollars.’ He said, ‘Bring the money to Loni’s Coffee House on Cleveland Avenue across from the university’s St. Paul campus at noon today.’ He said, ‘Come alone.’”

“He said ‘I’ and ‘me’? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t say ‘us,’ he didn’t say ‘we’?”

“No.”

“Did you recognize the voice? Ever hear it before?”

“I don’t think so. It didn’t sound muffled or anything.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said not to call the police.”

“Yes, well, he would, wouldn’t he? Did you receive the call at campaign headquarters?”

“No,” C. C. said. “He called me at home; he had my unlisted number.”

I acknowledged that fact in my notebook. It may or may not be significant. Give me a half hour, I could get her unlisted telephone number, too.

“Do you think he has the videotape?” Marion asked.

“No,” I said, and then almost explained how I knew. Dumb, real dumb. Fortunately I checked myself. “Maybe,” I added. “I don’t know. He didn’t mention it, did he? He merely assumed Carol Catherine knew what she was buying. It could be a completely different matter.”

It could be Joseph Sherman.

I turned toward C. C. She had spoken to Sherman and then denied it. A couple of days later, he was wanted for murder.

C. C., her eyes unblinking, said, “What?”

“I was just wondering if there was something you haven’t told us.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Perhaps Dennis Thoreau had a partner,” Marion suggested.

“Perhaps,” I agreed. I hadn’t forgotten about the camera operator.

“Perhaps Thoreau and his partner had a falling out,” Marion continued. “Perhaps the partner thought Thoreau wasn’t going to share the blackmail money. So, the partner kills Thoreau and takes matters into his own hands—the amount the caller is asking for is the same amount Thoreau wanted.”

I liked it. I turned on C. C.

“Tell me about the movie,” I asked her. “Who else was there?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you filmed it, who else was involved?”

“No one!” C. C. exclaimed, utterly astonished that I would ask such a thing.

“No one was operating the camera?”

“Certainly not! What kind of person do you think I am?”

I let her question slide and continued asking my own. “Did a friend of Thoreau’s …”

“I never met any of Dennis’s friends,” C. C. insisted.

“Did Thoreau have your unlisted telephone number?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice.

“A partner!” Marion cried out in triumph and slapped the desktop; it must be wonderful to be right all the time.

“Who was Thoreau’s partner?” I asked C. C.

“I don’t know.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

“What should we do?” Marion asked.

“You could always call your friends in the police department,” I suggested again.

Marion didn’t reply. She pursed her lips and tapped her toe and rubbed her hands together. Pontius Pilate came to mind.

“You already called your friend, didn’t you?”

“She asked me if I wanted to press charges. When I declined she said there was nothing she could do. That’s what she said the first time.” Marion shook her head. “I asked you a question. What should
we
do?”

“I think we should meet this alleged blackmailer, don’t you? Find out what he has for sale.”

“And if he’s selling the tape?”

“If he knows about the tape, then he’s probably also a killer and we should turn him in.”

Marion Senske tapped her toe some more and thought it over. “Do you know what the newspapers …”

“This has nothing to do with the newspapers,” I interrupted her. “This has nothing to do with politics. This is about doing what’s right.”

“I agree,” C. C. chimed in almost cheerfully. “We have to do what’s right.”

“Shut up, Carol Catherine,” Marion told her.

C. C. bowed her head and kept quiet, a dutiful child.

“You’re not a police officer anymore,” Marion reminded me. “You’re not obligated to enforce the law, you’re obligated to protect your client. Carol Catherine Monroe is your client.”

“I think we had this conversation once before,” I said. I was fast losing interest in C. C.’s problems and part of me wanted to forget the whole sorry business and move on. The other part? It’s like watching a bad movie; you hang in there only because you want to see how it ends.

“So, what are we going to do?” C. C. asked.

“Meet your friend for lunch,” I answered.

“I’ll get the money,” Marion volunteered.

“Wait a minute,” C. C. said. “I don’t want to go … I mean, can’t … People will recognize me.”

C. C. was wearing a burgundy turtleneck sweater and a long, full skirt of the same color; both matched her fingernail polish. They also made her hair seem brighter, richer and hard to miss.

I glanced at my watch. “We have plenty of time,” I said. “I’ll take you home and you can change. Jeans, sweatshirt; we’ll put your hair under a hat. You’ll look like a college kid.”

“I … Can’t you go for me?” she asked Marion.

“I think the blackmailer would see that she isn’t you,” I told C. C.

“Besides, I have a meeting with the media people,” Marion reminded her. “And I have to rearrange your schedule. The Minnesota Farm Bureau is expecting you in Duluth; I have no idea what I’m going to tell them.” Marion consulted her watch, made a few silent calculations and sighed. “We really haven’t got time for this.”

“Nobody cares about me,” C. C. said weakly, staring down at her folded hands.

Marion smoothed C. C.’s hair with a gentle hand. “It will be all right, Carol Catherine. We’ll deal with this and in three weeks we’ll be governor.”

C. C. looked up at the older woman and they both smiled brightly. For a moment they forgot about Thoreau, forgot about the blackmailer.

Governor. The word hung in the air like a gas, like helium—something they’d been breathing for so long that it made them light-headed, made them dizzy. They weren’t thinking straight.

ELEVEN

M
ARION OPENED
the desk drawer and slipped out an envelope containing ten thousand dollars, the same envelope she had given me yesterday. This time she gave it to C. C. She took it like it weighed half a ton.

“I just had a terrible thought,” Marion said, turning toward me. “What if there is more than one copy of the videotape?”

“What if…” I repeated. “Let’s worry about the original first.”

C. C. put the envelope into her purse, hung the purse over her shoulder, slipped a charcoal coat over her arm and stepped into the corridor, which was now occupied by a handful of secretaries stationed at the desks outside the offices. C. C. acted like she was walking her last mile, ignoring the greetings that followed her to the elevator.

We entered the elevator and sent it to the ground floor. When the doors slid open, she took my arm and we proceeded across the lobby. Conan noted our passing with an expression of grave disapproval. No doubt he thought she could do better.

We found her car on the second floor of the capitol parking ramp, a two-door Nissan Sentra.
A politician who’s not concerned about buying American, now there’s a switch
, I thought. I held the driver’s door open for her, told her she would drive to my car, I would then follow her home. Only she did not get in. She turned her back to the car, turned to look at me, the door between us, her fingers brushing mine where they rested on top of the door frame. She was close enough to kiss. I stepped back, putting distance between us. She frowned.

“All this is happening because I wanted a job with the PCA,” she said.

“You should have sent a resume like everyone else.”

We found my Monza and I followed her out of St. Paul. C. C. lived in the suburbs, in the north end of her district not too far from the freeway. Her house was in the middle of a long block, on the same side of the street as the mailboxes. It was a small split-level, yellow with blue trim and shutters. The attached garage had a thirty-foot-long asphalt driveway leading to it. She signaled and pulled into the driveway. I parked on the street. She was unlocking the front door when I reached her.