“Could be he was all those things. Prison messes a man up.”
“What about his face? How’d you read him? Was it for real or an act or some of both?” I asked.
“Shit, man,” Grisnik said. “I start out believing they’re all liars, everyone one of them. Rice was no different. He was definitely playing us at the beginning. At the end, when you suggested his wife was cheating on him, he was one seriously pissed-off fat man.”
“Yeah, but was he telling the truth about being afraid? All that crap about I couldn’t help him because he was in a federal prison and I was just a city cop. You suppose he was trying to tell me something?”
“Like what?”
“He said his problems are federal, all the way around. Maybe he’s not just afraid of his fellow inmates. Maybe he’s afraid of someone on my side of the aisle,” I said.
“Like your FBI agent who is buying his house and his car and who you want Rice to believe is also boning his ex-wife.”
“That’s one way to read it,” I said. “My squad has put a lot of people away. It wouldn’t be hard to make a connection with one of them, buy a favor now, and pay for it later. Make Rice’s shower-room nightmare come true.”
We were crossing the Missouri River again, passing from Kansas back into Missouri, the Platte City water tower announcing our arrival. The highway and the river ran roughly parallel the rest of the way back to Kansas City, though we wouldn’t see the river again until it turned east for its last leg across Missouri, where it would disappear into the Mississippi River just outside St. Louis.
“Could happen that way,” Grisnik said. “But it takes time to set something like that up. Hard to keep the circle of knowledge small. More people you have to bring in to get it done, the more likely it is that someone talks to someone, buys his own favor, or gets paid back the same way as Rice. Inmates keep killing each other, sooner or later the guards are bound to notice.”
“You have another explanation?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do. By now, everyone on Rice’s cellblock knows he had visitors today. The only visitors on Thursdays are cops and we don’t make social calls. Inmates don’t care what really happens when someone talks to us. They assume a guy like Rice snitches and they’ll kill a snitch just for practice. Hell, just by coming to see him, you probably caused him more trouble than that poor slob can handle. I was him, I’d be afraid, too.”
“What about his face? You think you can tell if someone is lying just by looking at their face?”
“We try to do that all the time,” Grisnik said. “Doesn’t mean we get it right, but we do it. Suspect acts scared, we assume it’s because he’s guilty. Doesn’t answer our questions, looks the other way, licks his lips. All kinds of shit like that. First thing we say, the asshole is guilty, why else would he look like that?”
“What if he’s cool about the whole thing? Smiles, chats you up, or has the perfect poker face.”
“That’s what the polygraph is for. Hard to beat the machine even if the courts won’t let us tell the jury about it,” Grisnik said.
“I don’t know. I don’t trust faces. People have too many masks. That’s what bothers me about Rice. He had enough for everyone at a masquerade ball.”
“Hold him up against what you do know. Ask yourself: what did he say that you can prove was the truth or a lie? Only thing he really told us is that it was none of our business what his wife did with the house and the car. He didn’t admit or deny anything. All you did was scare him. I don’t think we learned a damn thing.”
“Rice isn’t a career criminal,” I said. “He screwed up big-time, that’s for sure. But he didn’t grow up to be a cocaine dealer.”
“But that’s what he became, so what’s your point?” Grisnik asked.
“Rice understands money. He’s going to get half the proceeds from the sale of a house worth close to a million bucks if his wife sells it for what it’s worth. He invests his share well and he’s set when he gets out. She’s about to take his future away from him. He ought to be a hell of a lot more scared and pissed about that than what he’s going to tell his cellmate about why we came to see him. On top of which, he’s a salesman. He’s in the bullshit business. He’ll come up with something to satisfy any suspicious inmates.”
“Bottom line?”
“Rice has no reason not to talk to me unless someone has already gotten to him.”
“You could check the visitor records. See who’s been to see him,” Grisnik said.
“I can’t, but you can. I don’t want Detective Funkhouser’s good name to be dragged into this mess any more than it already has been,” I said.
“I’m having a hard time thinking of a reason why I should. I’m the one who’s going to have to explain about Detective Funkhouser, not you. Only reason I agreed to bring you up here was you promised that Rice could help me with my case. I didn’t hear either one of you mention Oleta Phillips or her son.”
“I didn’t promise you anything. I said that Rice might know someone who knows something about Oleta. I’m not wrong yet. I know I’m working this case ass-backwards, but it’s the only way I can go at it right now.”
“How is that supposed to make me feel any better?” Grisnik asked.
“Try finding out who has been to see Rice since he’s been in prison and find out if he called anyone after we left. That might make both of us feel a hell of a lot better.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Grisnik took the Fifth Street exit off I-70, a street that runs through the heart of Strawberry Hill. At the south end of Fifth, just after we came off the highway, there was a low-slung bar wearing a faded coat of red paint. Narrow windows offered a peek into a dimly lit interior while a dyspeptic neon sign over the door irregularly blinked its gospel of FREE BEER TOMORROW. Cars were parked at the curb, probably belonging to faithful customers who were hoping that today was the day. A sign bolted to the roof said it was Pete’s Place.
Next to the bar was a restaurant, painted from the same can, a companion sign on its roof reading Pete’s Other Place, the neon promise over its door pledging Good Eats. A barrel barbeque cooker sat on the sidewalk, the tangy smell of smoked sausage mixing with rising smoke. Grisnik slowed and rolled his window down, breathing deep. I followed his lead, the enticing smell convincing me that this was one promise Pete kept.
“In the early days, the whole area was covered with strawberry fields. That’s where the name comes from. But I’ll take the sausage any day. It’s Pete’s secret recipe. Kind of a Croatian kielbasa.”
Post-World War II brick and stone houses with well-kept front porches; tidy, narrow yards; and single-car garages lined the steep hills that explained the other half of the name. Grisnik waved to a white-haired couple, the husband relaxing in a rocking chair on his porch, the wife tugging at weeds peeking through the concrete walk. They waved back, calling him by name.
“Petar and Maja Andrija, my godparents. They own the bar and the restaurant,” he explained. “Their daughter, Tanja, runs the bar and their son, Nick, makes the sausage and the povitica.”
“Sausage, I understand. What’s povitica?”
“Croatian cake bread. Lots of different?avors, like chocolate, walnut-anything you can think of. Can’t have a holiday or a party around here without it.”
Farther north at the intersection of Fifth and Ann, a Catholic church framed in limestone stood on the corner, its steeple aimed at heaven, its painted-glass windows catching the fire of the early afternoon sun. A small herd of young children, dressed in parochial blue and white, chased a soccer ball across the fenced, paved playground affixed to the hip of the church.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Your alma mater?”
Grisnik laughed. “My neighborhood, my people.”
“What’s next? The drive-in theater where you lost your virginity?”
“Nope. That would be the back room of the bar.”
“The daughter?”
He grinned. “She had a way of looking at you that made you forget everything holy.”
“But you didn’t marry her.”
Grisnik shook his head, the grin receding. “Oh, I asked Tanja enough times, starting when I was fifteen. She kept saying no, said she was moving to New York as soon as we graduated high school. I heard she got married,
