And things got out of control.
“Okay,” said Broker, “I’ll give it a try tomorrow.”
“Good,” said Lorn Garrison. “I thought you’d do the right thing, once you were in the picture.”
39
Over a late lunch at a Perkins in Amery, Wisconsin, Broker handed Garrison the hate letters. Garrison read them, handling them carefully by the edges. When he raised his pale blue eyes, Broker said, “I think those came from the same place that hundred-dollar bill came from.”
“Say again?” Garrison squinted.
Broker’s turn to narrow his eyes and lean forward. “The bill? We found it in the glove compartment of the rental car Caren drove up north. The Cook County sheriff called your St. Paul office, they said send it certified mail.”
“When?” The Kentuckian wasn’t faking.
“Before Christmas.”
“I was hitting those pizza joints,” he mumbled.
Patiently, Broker explained the sequence of events. James coming to his house, not saying a word about the tape, refusing to reveal where Caren was, the fight with Keith, putting James and Kit out of the way in the workshop. The choking incident.
“Why didn’t you say something about this?” Garrison asked.
“Because you guys never asked me.”
“I’ll personally make sure they go over these letters. I know the exact machine to match them to,” Garrison promised.
Then, patiently, he answered questions about James-how James had said Caren wanted him along to buffer her approach to Broker. How she wanted advice about how to proceed with the tape.
“Because of what was on the tape, she didn’t trust anyone Keith worked with. She didn’t even trust us. She wanted you to be her advocate,” said Garrison.
And how she panicked when she found out Keith was at Broker’s place. So James volunteered to go ahead, to make sure Keith was gone before bringing her forward. So, yeah, he was probably being manipulative, going along for the ride, to get the scoop.
“If he’d a been a trained man he wouldn’t have left her alone in that lodge. But he wasn’t trained. He was just a reporter, in over his head. Then it went to hell and he got shot.
Which scared him shitless. So he made the best deal he could to get free.”
Garrison paused, making no attempt to disguise the speck of doubt in his pale eyes. “But he never said anything about a baby choking, or seeing money in the car. And I’d think, for a reporter, that would be pretty hard to forget.”
Broker drove to his motel on Highway 36 in the rush hour twilight, anonymous in the stop-and-go accordion of headlights and taillights.
He called Sally Jeffords, who told him that Kit was fine.
Jeff wasn’t home yet. Was there a message. No. Not yet.
Broker hung up and paced. He chewed an unlit cigar. The walls were too thin, he could hear people in other rooms talking, hear the traffic on the highway.
Garrison clearly did not take being left out of the loop lightly. Something was funny, and Broker needed to fill in the blanks. Experience had taught him to trust a woman’s powers of observation over a man’s. Just that a woman would give him about two hundred more details than he needed. But a trained woman, who’d broke his bed sixteen years ago…
He called the St. Paul Police switchboard and asked for Mary Jane Cody’s extension. No one answered phones anymore. He got the answering machine. Janey’s voice sounded the same, except for a slight infusion of rank- weighted gravity.
Captain Mary Jane. And that made it slightly dicey because, like his old partner, J.T. Merry-weather, Janey had scored lower than Keith on the captain’s test and had been promoted over him.
“If you need to reach me in an emergency,” said Janey’s recorded voice, “page me at…”
Broker hung up and punched in the page.
He paced for a few more minutes. Decided it was a long shot. The phone rang.
“Who paged this number?” Janey’s no-nonsense voice sounded slightly out of place with a tidal surge of classical music in the background.
“Janey, it’s Broker.”
“Aw shoot.”
“What’s that in the background?”
“Aw shoot. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I’m at a concert.”
“What’s wrong with this picture,” said Broker.
“Hey, screw you-when we worked the streets, our snitches hung out in bars. Now they hang out in the mayor’s office and at the symphony.”
“I appreciate you calling back.”
“I didn’t know who I was reaching. Now that I do, hey, Broker-I can’t talk to you. I heard J.T.’s having lunch with you tomorrow, and I advised him not to. This thing with Keith is so dirty, it’s got like-yuk-tentacles going everywhere…”
“C’mon, Janey, it’s me.”
“Right. Who is on Keith’s visiting list. Look, we arrested a lot of crack dealers after Keith came back from the FBI THE BIG LAW/231
Academy. Big busts. Now the word is, some slimy lawyers are getting hot to reopen those cases because of the rumors coming out of the U.S. attorney’s office-that we went after people based on illegally obtained information. Keith’s new pals went around torturing people. They pull tongues out.
“There’s another thing, when I got promoted I protested in writing, strictly on the merit of passing over Keith. Now that’s been twisted around somehow. Sometimes I think
“That’s just nuts.”
“Broker, there’s talk about huge amounts of money being thrown around, everybody is scared and paranoid. We’ve never had a scandal like this before.”
“Okay, what about Keith?”
“What about him, he went nuts. He killed Caren-I’m sorry Broker, I should have said something earlier…”
“No, I understand.”
“No you don’t. We all saw it start to fall apart. She stopped talking to everybody. Should have known when they bought that haunted house in Afton. We knew about his drinking and that she was seeing a shrink. I heard she lost it after her last miscarriage, when she found out Keith went and got snipped.”
“A vasectomy?”
“Right. Look, he went nuts, okay. Then the booze just made him unstable. He’d be trashing the chief, and Dobbs would be twenty feet away, getting on an elevator. We all started avoiding him. Talk had already started about doing an intervention. But, I don’t know, he’d run over so many people-everyone sort of wanted to see him take a belly flop…”
“Janey, could we have a cup of coffee, meet somewhere?”
“Sorry, lover. Your name on the visitors list in Washington County gave you galloping leprosy as far as St. Paul cops are concerned.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That several million alleged dollars are unaccounted for and Caren was headed for you with a videotape. Some people-like people over at BCA who never did like you and your independent ways too much-have speculated you may be mixed up in this thing.” Broker did not reply to that and she said, “I know, it’s the new tabloid morality.
