“Throw it in a car, drive down to Miami, sayonara.”
“It's got names and monograms…” Lucas suggested.
“Polish it off. Melt it down,” Smith said. “Wouldn't take a rocket scientist.”
“Maybe it was too heavy?”
“Dunno…”
Lucas wandered on, thinking about it. A hundred pounds of solid silver? Surely, not that much. He went back to the dining room, looked inside the built-in cabinet. Three or four sets of silverware, some bowls, some platters. He turned one of the platters over, thinking it might be gilded pewter or something; saw the sterling mark. Hefted it, hefted a dinner set, calculated… maybe forty pounds total? Still, worth a fortune.
A uniformed cop walked by, head bent back, looking at the ceiling.
“What?” Lucas asked.
“Look at the ceiling. Look at the crown molding.” Lucas looked. The ceiling was molded plaster, the crown molding was a frieze of running horses. “The crown molding is worth more than my house.”
“So if it turns up missing, we should look in your garage,” Lucas said.
The cop nodded. “You got that right.”
A couple of people from the ME's office wheeled a gurney through the dining room and out a side door; a black plastic body bag sat on top of it. Peebles.
Lucas went back to the silver. Where was he? Oh yeah- must be worth a fortune. Then a stray thought: Was it really? Say, forty pounds of solid silver; 640 ounces… but silver was weighed in troy ounces, which, if he remembered correctly, were about ten percent heavier than regular ounces. Sterling wasn't pure, only about 90 percent, so you'd have some more loss.
Call it roughly 550 troy ounces of pure silver at… he didn't know how much. Ten bucks? Fifteen? Not a fortune. After fencing it off, reworking it and refining it, getting it to the end user, the guys who carried it out of the house would be lucky to take out a grand.
In the meantime, they'd be humping around a lot of silver that had the dead woman's initials all over it. Maybe, he thought, they didn't take it because it wasn't worth the effort or risk. Maybe smarter than your average cokehead.
Another gurney went by in the hall, another body bag: Bucher. Then a cop stuck his head in the dining room door: “The Lash kid is here. They've taken him into the front parlor.”
Lucas went that way, thinking about the silver, about the video games, about the way the place was trashed, the credit cards not stolen… Superficially, it looked local, but under that, he thought, it looked like something else. Smith was getting the same bad feeling about it: something was going on, and they didn't know what it was.
Ronnie Lash was tall and thin, nervous-scared-a sheen of perspiration on his coffee-brown forehead, tear tracks on his cheeks. He was neatly dressed in a red short-sleeved golf shirt, tan slacks, and athletic shoes; his hands were in his lap, and he twisted and untwisted them. His mother, a thin woman in a nurse's uniform, clutched a black handbag the size of a grocery sack, stood with him, talking to John Smith.
“They always say, get a lawyer,” Mrs. Lash said. “Ronnie didn't do anything, to anybody, he loved Sugar, but they always say, get a lawyer.”
“We, uh, Mrs. Lash, you've got to do what you think is right,” Smith said. “We could get a lawyer here to sit with Ronnie, we could have somebody here in an hour from the public defender, won't cost you a cent.” Which was the last thing Smith wanted.
He wanted the kid alone, where he could lie to him.
Mrs. Lash was saying, “… don't have a lot of money for lawyers, but I can pay my share.”
Ronnie was shaking his head, looking up at his mother: “I want to get this over with, Ma. I want to talk to these guys. I don't want a lawyer.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “They always say get a lawyer, Ronnie.”
“If you need one, Ma,” the Lash kid said. “I don't need one. Jesus will take care of me. I'll just tell the truth.”
She shook a finger at him: “You talk to them then, but if they start saying stuff to you, you holler for me and we'll get a lawyer up here.” To John Smith: “I still don't understand why I can't come in. He's a juvenile.”
“Because we need to talk to Ronnie-not to the two of you. We need to talk to you, too, separately.”
“But I didn't…” she protested.
“We don't think you did, Mrs. Lash, but we've got to talk to everybody,” Smith said.
His voice had lost its edge, now that he knew he'd be able to sweat Ronnie, without a lawyer stepping on his act.
Lucas leaned against the hallway wall, listening to the exchange, mother and son going back and forth. The Lashes finally decided that Ronnie could go ahead and talk, but if the cops started saying stuff to him…
“I'll call you, Ma.”
At that point, Lucas was eighty-three percent certain that Ronnie Lash hadn't killed anyone, and hadn't helped kill anyone.
They put Mrs. Lash on a settee in the music room and took Ronnie into the parlor, John Smith, a fat detective named Sy Schuber, and Lucas, and shut the door. They put Ronnie on a couch and scattered around the room, dragging up chairs, and Smith opened by outlining what had happened, and then said, “So we've got to ask you, where were you this weekend? Starting at four-thirty Friday afternoon?”
“Me'n some other guys took a bus over to Minneapolis, right after school on Friday,” Lash said. “We were going over to BenBo's on Hennepin. They were having an underage night.”
BenBo's was a hip-hop place. Ronnie and four male friends from school spent the next five hours dancing, hanging out with a group of girls who'd gone over separately: so nine other people had been hanging with Ronnie most of the evening. He listed their names, and Schuber wrote them down. At ten o'clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
“A Cadillac SUV-I don't know exactly what they're called,” Lash said. “It was a couple of years old.”
Coming back to St. Paul, Ronnie had been dropped third, so he thought it was shortly before eleven o'clock when he got home. His mother was still up. She'd bought a roasted chicken at the Cub supermarket, and they ate chicken sandwiches in the kitchen, talked, and went to bed.
On weekends, Lash worked at a food shelf run by his church, which wasn't a Catholic church, though he went to a Catholic school. He started at nine in the morning, worked until three o'clock.
“They don't pay, but, you know, it goes on your record for college,” he said. “It's also good for your soul.”
Schuber asked, “If you're such a religious guy, how come you were out at some hip-hop club all night?”
“Jesus had no problem with a good time,” Ronnie said. “He turned water into wine, not the other way around.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Smith was rubbing his eyeballs with his fingertips. “Ronnie, you got a guy down the block from you named Weldon Godfrey. You know Weldon?”
“Know who he is,” Ronnie said, nodding. He said it so casually that Lucas knew that he'd seen the question coming.
“You hang out?” Smith asked.
“Nope. Not since I started at Catholic school,” Lash said. “I knew him most when I went to public school, but he was two grades ahead of me, so we didn't hang out then, either.”
“He's had a lot of trouble,” Schuber said.
“He's a jerk,” Ronnie said, and Lucas laughed in spite of himself. The kid sounded like a middle-aged golfer.
Smith persisted: “But you don't hang with Weldon or any of his friends?”
“No. My ma would kill me if I did,” Ronnie said. He twisted and untwisted his bony fingers, and leaned forward. “Ever since I heard Aunt Sugar was murdered, I knew you'd want to talk to me about it. It'd be easy to say, 'Here's this black kid, he's a gang kid, he set this up.' Well, I didn't.”
“Ronnie, we don't…”
“Don't lie to me, sir,” Ronnie said. “This is too serious.”
Smith nodded: “Okay.”
“You were saying…” Lucas prompted.
