Practice to Deceive (25 page)

T
HE
M
INNESOTA SECRETARY
of state’s office was located on the ground floor of the Minnesota State Office Building, a few hundred yards from the state capitol. The woman behind the counter was very helpful. I gave her twenty-five dollars, and she gave me a copy of the Certificate of Partnership for Willow Tree, LP.

Prove Levering Field was dirty, Cynthia had said. Prove he was a thief and had stolen Mrs. Gustafson’s retirement fund. To do that I had to follow the money. And the money led to Willow Tree.

I
T WAS A
long walk across the capitol mall to where I had parked my car at a meter. At least it seemed that way, hobbling along on my crutches, fighting pain with each step. That’s when I saw the man approach—small, thin, dressed in a black suit, black tie, and white shirt. He was carrying a Bible in his hand, a red ribbon marking his place. I stopped, my hand moving to the Beretta on my hip.

“Have you been saved?” he asked matter-of-factly.

“Many times,” I answered, my eyes locked on the Good Book. It made me more nervous than a .44.

He stuck a red sticker to my lapel without asking, white letters popping out of the red, proclaiming
JESUS SAVES.

“The Lord be with you,” he said.

“And with you,” I replied.

He continued toward the capitol; I went to my car. On the way I found myself admitting that Michael Zilar could have killed me a dozen times by now. Then asking,
Where is he? Why hasn’t he made a move? Is he really out there?

“Maybe the Lord
is
with me,” I said aloud as I unlocked my car door.

When I was secure in my new Colt, I studied the Certificate of Partnership. It listed as “agent of service and process,” Peter Dully, President, JPD, Inc., a general partner for Willow Tree, Limited Partnership. It also listed JPD’s address: a Wayzata office building. I called 411 for a phone number, using the cell phone Sara had lent me. But directory assistance did not have a listing for JPD. So I called the building’s management office. A pleasant woman with a high-pitched voice informed me that JPD had closed its doors several months earlier; there was a waiting list of businesses that wanted their space, so the building management hadn’t held JPD to its lease. I asked her what JPD did, but she didn’t know.

“Damn,” I said aloud after deactivating the phone. I glared at the State Office Building. “Damn, damn, damn,” I repeated.

I lumbered back to the secretary of state’s office at a much slower pace than before. For some reason I carried this image of one-legged Long John Silver trudging across Treasure Island. I can’t tell you why. Long John was a nimble fellow whereas I was about as agile as a hippo on skates. Probably looked it, too, considering how much exercise I’d been getting lately.

Another twenty-five dollars later—I paid by check this time—I had the Articles of Incorporation for JPD. It listed two officers: Peter Dully, president, and Joan Dully, vice president/treasurer. They lived at the same address in Golden Valley.

A
FTER COMPLETING MY
therapy I drove out to Golden Valley. The house was strictly nouveau riche—a two-story brick job with a distinctive roof that rose from gently sloping sides to a spectacular peak. What wasn’t brick was glass—you live in this house, you don’t throw stones.

I parked, slid out of the car, and looked around as the dusk turned to night. My car was the only one I could see. The street and driveways were empty. Nor was there any sight or sound of children or pets or electric motors. No one was walking. No one was working in their garage with the door up, their radio on. The only sign of life came from the light that streamed from nearly every window of every house. These people conserved energy the way Don King conserved hair spray. And the houses, while they were all of different designs, seemed strangely similar. It was as if they were all constructed of the same materials by the same builder at the same time. You could bet that come summer, the height of each lawn wouldn’t vary so much as a quarter inch from yard to yard.

I used both crutches to negotiate the cobblestone sidewalk and the three steps that led to the Dullys’s front door. The doorbell was lit. I pressed it twice. A few moments later the porch light flicked on. “Who is it?” a man’s voice inquired from beyond the closed door. I identified myself, and the door opened. Peter Dully surprised me by inviting me inside without first asking why I was there. Either he already knew, or he was anxious to get me off the street before his neighbors noticed.

“What happened to your leg?” he asked as though we’d been buddies since the third grade.

“I was shot,” I answered.

“Dangerous job, your profession,” he declared.

“Not usually,” I told him.

He said, “I guess it’s true what the life insurance salesman says: ‘We’re all going to die, we’re all going to die’.” And then he started laughing.

The inside of the house was very sleek, very sophisticated, with cedar floors, posts, and beams. A large fireplace stood in the center of the living room, triangular in shape with glass doors on each side. White sofas and chairs and glass-topped tables were arranged in front of two sides of the fireplace. The third side faced five cedar steps that led to an elevated dining area featuring what looked like a black marble table.

“Let’s go in here,” Dully said, leading me through sliding cedar doors into a large den. The den also had a fireplace—this one was working—with a sofa facing it. Off to the side was a mahogany desk, papers of various sizes and colors piled on top. A PC, set on an ergonomically correct work station, and a fax machine, set on a small table, were positioned where Dully could reach them both by swiveling his desk chair around.

As we walked in, Dully began noting the heads of the dead animals he had mounted on his walls. “Got this ram in Wyoming, got this moose in Canada, got this elk in Montana.” Above the fireplace was the head of a large buck with a magnificent ten-point rack. “Ever see antlers like these?” Dully wanted to know. “I got ’im in Wisconsin. One hundred yards with the three-oh-eight.”

“Impressive,” I admitted. But, not to be out-done, I added, “I once took a twelve-point buck in northern Minnesota, up near McGregor.”

A pained expression crossed Dully’s face. “The hell you say! What’d you use?”

“’79 Chevy Monza.”

“What?”

“I hit him with my car.”

“The hell you say!” Dully was laughing again. His was a rough, deprecating laugh that knew neither courtesy nor tenderness. “How’d it happen?”

“It was dusk,” I told him. “I was driving Highway 65, about ten miles over the limit. He jumped out of the ditch, I hit him.…”

“That’s funny,” Dully said, laughing some more.

“Smashed up my car; damn near killed me.”

“Funny story. A ’79 Chevy. I gotta remember it.”

Dully was still chuckling when he sat on the sofa in front of the fireplace, motioning me to the chair beside it. There was just too much of him. Too much voice, too much size, too much money spent on clothes—too much effort to impress someone he’d never seen before and probably would never see again.

“Private investigator,” he said, looking straight at me. “PI, gumshoe, shamus, rubber heel, dick.” He gave the last word too much emphasis for my taste, but I tried not to show it. “You’re here because of Willow Tree. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

“You sound like you’ve been expecting me.”

“Hell, yes. Well, not you specifically. But someone like you. Joannie and me—Joannie, that’s my wife and partner—Joannie and me figured someone would be along. Someone representing a disgruntled investor who doesn’t like the way things went. Hell, we don’t like how it went, either. But what are you going to do? It’s business.”

“How
did
it go?” I asked.

He answered, again without taking his eyes off me. “The politicians, the social workers, everybody talks about the need for low-income housing. Low-income housing for the elderly. Low-income housing in the ’burbs so we can get the minorities out of the inner city. But when it comes to putting up or shutting up, suddenly everyone’s a mute. We were working with six separate counties, putting up the money for environmental impact studies and community presentations and God knows what else. But when we were ready to go, the counties weren’t. They stalled us. Let’s wait until the spring. Let’s wait until after the elections. We couldn’t get the zoning, the proper building permits. And while we were waiting, construction materials and labor costs skyrocketed.” Dully shrugged. “We ran out of money, couldn’t find additional investors.… Say, you want a beer or something?”

Dully was being surprisingly candid, and I suspect most people would have found his straightforwardness disarming. Not me. As my dear old dad used to say, never shoot pool with a man named after a state, and never trust anyone who looks you straight in the eye and never looks away.

“No, thank you,” I said to his offer. “What I would like is to see your business records.”

“What for?”

“Oh, Peter,” a woman’s voice called. “I think the answer to that is quite obvious.”

We both turned.

Joan Dully had the look of a woman well-acquainted with the pleasures that money could buy. She stood just inside the doorway, removing a deep-brown beret, careful not to muss her hair. The beret matched her pencil-slim skirt and contrasted well with her two sweaters, a blush pink job with jeweled neck under a fitted long-sleeve cardigan. She might have been returning from an evening swapping tales with Hemingway and the gang at some Parisian café. The clothes were tight on her; she was a few pounds overweight. But she had dark, handsome eyes and legs that reached well into your imagination.

Dully and I were both on our feet. He skipped around the sofa as she moved deeper into the den, taking her hand like he was going to shake it.

“This is Holland Taylor,” he introduced me. “He’s a private investigator.”

She extended her hand after freeing it from Dully’s grasp. It was soft to the touch. “A pleasure, Mr. Taylor,” she said as if she actually meant it. “Excuse me just a moment,” she added and stepped outside the study. I watched her as she opened the closet nearest the front door and hung her hat on a wooden peg. Hanging on the peg next to it was a red hooded scarf.

Joan Dully returned to the study and sat in the spot formerly occupied by her husband, crossing her arms and her legs. “If I may impose on you, sir, could you tell us which of our many long-suffering limited partners has solicited your services?”

I nearly missed the question, distracted by her magnificent legs. “Mrs. Irene Gustafson,” I replied, then hesitated. Had I meant to say that? Didn’t matter, I decided, adding, “She was a client of Levering Field.”

Joan turned to Peter, who was hovering above her, just behind the sofa. Peter shook his head slightly, and Joan returned her attention to me.

“Mr. Taylor, does this have anything to do with Ring’s murder?” she asked.

“Mrs. Gustafson is an eighty-five-year-old widow living in Fort Myers, Florida,” I said in reply, careful now, not wanting to give anything away. “Mrs. Gustafson lost everything when Willow Tree went bust,” I added.

Joan closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly, I am.” Then she opened her eyes again. “She shouldn’t have put everything into the business. Was that Levering’s idea?”

“You tell me.”

“I have no idea,” Joan said. “We solicited limited partners to sell them on Willow Tree, on what we were trying to accomplish. We spoke with Levering Field for some time. He seemed enthusiastic, said he had a few clients who might be interested in Willow Tree. But that’s as far as it went. He didn’t name names until he bought the LPs.”

“Did you know Levering well?” I asked.

“Not well.”

“How did you meet?”

Joan turned to her husband. “How did we meet?”

He shrugged. “Someone must have given him our name. I don’t remember who.”

“A guy knows a guy who knows a guy.…” Joan told me.

“You didn’t know him before you started Willow Tree?”

“No,” Joan said. She then added, “This does have something to do with his murder, doesn’t it?”

“This has to do with Mrs. Gustafson,” I replied. “Field can’t answer my questions, so I need to get information where I can.”

Joan and Peter nodded simultaneously. But that didn’t mean they believed me.

“How did Levering react when Willow Tree went bust?”

“He was angry like everybody else,” Peter claimed. “Well, maybe not quite as angry. After all, it wasn’t his money.”

“I see.”

“No, Mr. Taylor, I don’t think you do,” Joan told me. “Willow Tree was a good idea, a smart investment. It should have worked. It would have worked if it had not become embroiled in Roosevelt County’s financial affairs.”

“Roosevelt County?”

“Roosevelt County Housing and Redevelopment Authority was in deep trouble,” Peter volunteered, still hovering above his wife. “It was facing a large balloon payment on a debt for a housing project similar to the one we were proposing. We lent them the money to cover it.”

“If you read the newspapers back then, you know what happened,” Joan added.

“The authority went bankrupt,” Peter said.

“And so did we,” Joan said.

“I would still like to see your business records,” I told her.

Joan smiled, uncrossed her legs. “Mr. Taylor,” she said, “Peter and I fully appreciate that some of our disgruntled investors are going to sue us. We’ve been expecting it. But if you think we are going to help them, you’re crazy.”

“I’ll settle for a list of your limited partners,” I said.

“Not a chance, Mr. Taylor,” Joan told me. “We will, of course, respond to the demands of a court order. But unless you have one, you’re wasting your time. We have no intention of voluntarily turning over our records to someone who is merely seeking grounds to sue us. Would you?” Then she shook her head. “No one wants to take responsibility for their actions anymore. Everyone dreams of being rich, but few truly appreciate what the dream can cost. And fewer still are willing to pay it.”