Heat Lightning

The thoughts all tumbled over each other, and he got nowhere. He cooled out by thinking briefly about God, and considered praying that there wouldn’t be another murder and another middle-of-the-night call. He decided that praying wouldn’t help, and went to sleep, and dreamed of the fisherwoman with strong brown arms and gold- flecked married eyes.

VIRGIL WAS picking the day’s T-shirt, undecided between Interpol and Death Cab for Cutie, when he remembered to check his cell for messages-there were none. Maybe Hawn hadn’t made the connection, or maybe the Chinese didn’t care, or maybe the request was bouncing around the halls of bureaucracy like a Ping-Pong ball, to be coughed up after Virgil was retired. He’d think about calling again later in the day.

He slipped into the Death Cab for Cutie shirt, a pirated model sold by street people outside shows, checked himself in the mirror, fluffed his hair, and headed out into the day.

Early and cool. Jenkins and Shrake would be helping with the surveillance on Warren, but they wouldn’t be around until 10 A.M. or so, and Del Capslock had suggested an early start with a real estate consultant named Richard Homewood, who, Del said, would be at his office anytime after six in the morning.

Homewood worked out of a business condo on St. Paul ’s west side, off the Mississippi river flats beside the Lafayette Freeway. Virgil called ahead, mentioned Del’s name, and Warren’s, and Homewood, who might have provided the voice for Mr. Mole in Wind in the Willows, suggested that he stop at a Caribou Coffee for a large dark with plenty of milk, and come on over.

Virgil got the coffees, and found Homewood ’s office by the street number: there was no other identification. He rang, and Homewood, who could have played Mr. Mole-he was short, chubby, bespectacled, long-haired, and bearded-answered the door, took the coffee, sipped, said, “Perfect,” and invited him in. The office was a paper cave, with bound computer printouts stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves that completely covered the walls except for two windows and a gas fireplace. The center of the big room was taken up by three metal desks, each with a computer and printer and office chair, but there was no sign that anyone worked there but Homewood.

Homewood sipped, pointed Virgil at an office chair, asked, “How’s Del?” but didn’t seem too interested when Virgil told him about Del ’s wife being pregnant; and then he asked, “Are you really looking at Ralph Warren?”

“Yes-but not the way you probably think,” Virgil said. “This is not a corruption investigation.”

“Then what?”

Virgil said, “I can’t give you all the details, but a group of men went to Vietnam a long time ago, when they were still young, and this group is now being murdered. The men whose bodies are being left at the veterans’ monuments.”

“The lemon murders. The lemons in the mouth.”

Virgil frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Television, last night, and this morning. The papers must have it. The lemon murders.”

“Damn it. We’d held that back,” Virgil said.

“Well-it’s on the news now. So, Warren, how’s he tied in?”

“He was one of the guys,” Virgil said.

Homewood leaned forward, hands on his knees, intent. “Wait a minute. You think Warren ’s a killer?”

“We don’t think anything, other than this killer is killing these guys. There are only two left alive, and I’m going to talk to Warren. Del told me you might have some background that I couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Homewood leaned back, looked around the jumble of the office, and then waved a hand at it. “I’m a real estate consultant, Virgil. Nobody knows as much about real estate in the Twin Cities as I do. I know what the values are, what the values should be, what the values will be. Ralph Warren has made a living by selling pie in the sky to a dozen city councils. Bullshitting them into providing taxpayer financing, buying council votes when he had to, buying planners and inspectors, threatening people. Makes a hash out of my values: I tell you, I can see what’s going to happen. He sold the city on one deal, twenty years ago, it’s now in its twelfth refinancing; the city’s still on the hook for eight million dollars, sixteen million if you count all the interest over the years, all so Ralph Warren could take out a mil. I mean, the guy-if you’d told me that he’s a killer, I’d say, probably.”

“Who’s he threatened? That you know for sure?”

“Me,” Homewood said. “I testified for the Minneapolis Planning Board against a ridiculous, absurd proposal for low-income housing-and I’m in favor of low-income housing, don’t misunderstand me, but this was a fraud. A straight-out fraud. We came out of the hearing and Warren was laughing, and he came over to me, joking, and he said, ‘Don’t fall off no high bridges,’ like it was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. I kept a gun in my desk drawer for six weeks after that. Every time I heard a sound at night, I jumped.”

“But he never did anything,” Virgil said.

“People don’t believe me when I tell them what’s going to happen,” Homewood said. He shrugged. “ Warren figured that out. If I’m not going to have any effect, why worry about me? People believe what they hope will happen, and that’s what Warren peddles to them-hope that something good will happen. Something good does happen, but only for Warren. And then the taxpayers wind up holding the bag, just like they have with Teasdale Commons.”

“So he’s an asshole,” Virgil said.

“More than that.” Homewood shook a finger at him. “He’s a criminal and a sociopath. How often do you have one of those, in the same… environment… as a bunch of crazy awful murders, and he didn’t have anything to do with them?”

“That’s a point,” Virgil said. “That’s a point.”

JENKINS AND SHRAKE were throwing a Nerf football around the BCA parking lot when Virgil pulled in, and Virgil took a pass and the three of them threw it around for a few more minutes. The NFL preseason was around the corner, and as they headed inside, the three of them agreed that the Vikings were screwed this year.

Inside, they borrowed Davenport ’s office again and Virgil briefed them on Ralph Warren. “I’m going to get Sandy to research him, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re going to find anything in research. We’ll find it in some kind of action. He’ll do something. So we watch him. If nothing happens for a couple of days… we might try a sting.”

“What do we have to sting him with?” Jenkins asked.

“I’ve got some photos from Vietnam, of him raping a dead woman. Or a dying woman, anyway,” Virgil said. “If somebody were to call him, and offer them for sale, and if that guy were an out-of-town hoodlum like Carl Knox might hire… it might have enough credibility to get him to act.”

“Yeah, and if he’s as bad a dude as you think, his action might be to blow somebody’s head off,” Jenkins said.

“There’re ways around that. We could work that out,” Virgil said. “But we’d have to work it so that he talked about it.”

“So let’s watch him for a while,” Shrake said. “Just the three of us?”

“Just the two of you, for today,” Virgil said. “I’m running around poking sticks into things. You can talk to Lucas and see if he can give you somebody else.”

“What’re you poking your stick into?” Shrake asked.

“I’m going to ask a woman up to Davenport ’s cabin for the day and I’m gonna try to get her on the couch so that…” He spun and looked at the big map of Minnesota on Davenport ’s wall.

Jenkins said, “You gonna get this chick on the couch so that… what?”

“So I can betray her,” Virgil said. “I need to get some stuff out of her about her father. Without her knowing what I’m doing. So I can fuck with her old man.”

They all thought about that for a while, then Shrake said, “Well, shit. We’re cops.”

18

MAI WAS HAPPY to hear from him: “I’m standing outside an ice cream parlor on Grand Avenue, thinking about eating a giant ball of fat and sugar, so my ass will blow up to the size of a dirigible.”