Chapter Four
Lucas felt light: psychologically light. Nothing left to lose.
He hadn't spoken seriously with a woman since his break-up with Marcy Sherrill.
And he felt good: he'd been working out, shooting some hoops, running through the neighborhood, though he could feel it in his knees if he did more than five miles. Age coming on…
Money in the bank. All bills paid. The job under control, except for the
Cultural Commission. Even that had a calming effect on him. Like a boring concert, where the music never changed, the commission gave him three hours a week in which he had to sit still, his brain in neutral, his motor idling. He couldn't get away with sleeping during the meetings, but he'd managed to catch up on his reading.
Earlier in the year, before the Forty Days and Forty Nights, he'd felt himself on shaky ground, poised between sanity and another bout of depression. Marcy
Sherrill had changed that, at least. He felt as good as he could remember, if somewhat detached, disengaged, floating. His oldest childhood friend, a nun who was also a professor at St. Anne's College, had gone on a summer mission to Guatemala, giving thanks for a successful recovery from a terrible beating; half of his friends were on vacation. Crime, improbably, was down across the board.
And it was summer: a good one.
Lucas had been working four days a week, spending the three-day weekends at his cabin in Wisconsin. Five years past, a Northwoods neighbor, a flat-nosed guy from Chicago, had stocked a pond with large-mouth bass. Now the pond was getting good. Every morning, early morning, Lucas would walk a half-mile over to the
Chicago guy's house, push an old green flat-bottomed John boat into the water, and throw poppers and streamer flies at the lily pads until the sun got high.
The weight of the world dissolved in the mirror flashes of the smooth black water, the smell of the summer pollen, hot in the sun – the sun on his shoulders ? Eand the stillness of the woods.
Barbara Allen had been killed on a Thursday. Lucas tucked the memory of her sightless, upside-down body into a large mental file stuffed with similar images, and closed the file. On Thursday night, he left for the cabin. He missed
Friday's paper, but saw a Pioneer Press in a Hayward store window on Saturday morning: The main Page One story was headlined, 'Husband Questioned In Heiress
Slaying.'
On Sunday, the Star-Tribune's front-page piece started under a headline that said, 'Allen Murder Baffles Police' while the Pioneer Press went with 'Allen
Murder Puzzles Cops.' Lucas said to himself, 'Uh-oh.'
On Monday morning, he walked, whistling, into City Hall and bumped into Sherrill and Black. 'You were gonna keep me updated,' he said.
'That's right,' Black said, as they clustered in the hall. 'We were. Here's your update: we ain't got dick.'
'That's not entirely true,' Sherrill said, with an edge of impatience. 'There's a really really good chance that Hale Allen did it. Paid for it.'
'Well, good,' Lucas said, jingling his office keys. This was somebody else's job. 'Ship his ass out to Stillwater. I'll call ahead and reserve a cell.'
'I'm serious,' Sherrill said. 'We looked at him all weekend and we found out three things. One, the first thing he did after we talked to him is, he called
Carmel Loan.'
'Ouch,' Lucas said. He knew Carmel. If you were a cop pushing a marginal case, or a difficult one, you didn't want Carmel on the other side.
'Which doesn't make him guilty of anything but common sense,' Black observed mildly.
'Second,' Sherrill said, 'He's gonna inherit something like thirty or forty million dollars, tax free. So much that we can't even find out how much it is.
Her parents say the marriage was in trouble and that divorce was a possibility.'
'Nothing solid on the divorce?' Lucas asked. 'The way you said that…'
'Nothing solid,' Sherrill said grudgingly.
'The thing is, if Hale Allen is convicted of killing his wife, he can't inherit.
The money would probably go to her parents, who don't need it, but would definitely like it,' Black said. 'Can't ever be too rich or too thin, as the
Duchess of Windsor once told me, in a personal communication.'
'The money didn't come from them in the first place?' Lucas asked.
Black shook his head. 'Nope. The great-grandparents were timber barons here and land speculators in Florida. The money comes down through a whole bunch of trusts. It's hers. Her parents got theirs the same way. Hasn't one of them worked a day in their lives.'
'Third?' Lucas asked, looking at Sherrill. He added, 'The first two weren't so good.'
Sherrill said, 'Three, he's fuckin' a secretary in his firm. He's been doing it for a couple of years, and push was coming to shove. She was gonna go see the old lady, and tell her about the affair. Allen was stalling, but the hammer was comin' down.'
Lucas looked at Black. 'Now that's something.'
Black shrugged. 'Yeah. That's something.'
'Though they usually kill the girlfriend, not the wife,' Lucas said, going back to Sherrill.
Sherrill shrugged it off. 'Not always.'
'You look at the girlfriend?'
'Yeah. She was working when Barbara Allen was hit. Taking shorthand in a conference about some guy's will. She's got about six hundred and fifty dollars in her bank account, so we figure she probably didn't hire a pro.'
'Maybe she saw a movie,' Lucas said.
'Or read one of those Murder for Dummies books,' said Black.
'What about Allen? You hit him with the girlfriend?' Lucas asked.
'Not yet,' Sherrill said. She looked at her watch. 'We're gonna do it in about ten minutes.'
'By the way,' Black added, 'We should also update you on the Feebs.'
'The Feebs? Are they in this?' Lucas' eyebrows went up.
'Maybe. They want a meet, so we're walking over this afternoon,' Black said.
'Got some guy in from Washington.'
'The nation's capital,' Sherrill said.
'You wanna come?' Black asked. 'We could use some of that deputy-chief bullshit.
That special shine.'
'They love you so much anyway,' Sherrill concluded.
'Give me a call,' Lucas said. 'I'll be around all afternoon.'
Carmel Loan, wearing bloody-red lipstick, arrived at City Hall to find Hale
Allen sitting in the homicide office, across a grey metal desk from Black and
Sherrill. The homicide office looked like a movie set for a small-town newspaper.
'Why are we here?' she asked, taking charge. She dropped her purse on Black's desk, pushing aside some of his papers; a calculated move – she was the important one here. 'I thought we covered everything on Friday. And when are you going to release Mrs. Allen? We need to make arrangements.'
'We'll release her as soon as the chemistry gets back, which should be this afternoon or tomorrow,' Black said. 'We're rushing it.'
'You know the sensitivity of the issue,' Carmel said, leaning into him. She had an effect on most men. Black was a not-quite-out-of-the-closet gay, and the effect was blunted.
'Of course,' Black said, with equanimity. 'We're doing everything we can.'
'So why're we here?' Carmel pulled a chair over from another desk, sat solidly in the middle of it, turned to Allen before Black or Sherrill could answer, and asked, 'How're you feeling?'
He shrugged. 'Not so good. I can't catch my breath. We need to get something going on the funeral.' He was absolutely gorgeous, Carmel thought. The weariness around his eyes added a depth he hadn't seemed to possess before; a certain fascinating sadness.
