one weirdo at his apartment in Paris.
All of them had money, Smith said. While Aunt Connie's inheritance would be a nice maraschino cherry on the sundae, they already had the ice cream.
Lucas had three long interviews over the two days, and twice as many meetings.
The first interview went badly.
Kathy Barth had both tits and ass: and perhaps a bit too much of each, as she slipped toward forty. Her daughter, Jesse, had gotten her momma's genes, but at sixteen, everything was tight, and when she walked, she quivered like a bowl of cold Jell-O.
While she talked like a teenager, and walked like a teenager, and went around plugged into an iPod, Jesse had the face of a bar-worn thirty-year-old: too grainy, too used, with a narrow down-turned sullen mouth and eyes that looked like she was afraid that somebody might hit her.
At the first interview, she and Kathy Barth sat behind the shoulder of their lawyer, who was running through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo: “… conferring to see if we can decide exactly what happened and when, and if it really makes any sense to continue this investigation…”
Virgil Flowers, a lean, tanned blond man dressed in jeans, a blue cotton shirt with little yellow flowers embroidered on it, and scuffed black cowboy boots, said, “We've already got her on tape, Jimbo.”
“That would be James' to you, Officer,” the lawyer said, pretending to be offended.
Flowers looked at Lucas, “The old Jimster here is trying to put the screws to Kline.”
He looked back at the lawyer. “What'd you find? He's got some kind of asset we didn't know about?” His eyes came back to Lucas: “I say we take a research guy, pull every tax record we can find, run down every asset Kline has got, and attach it. Do a real estate search, put Kline on the wall…”
“Why do you want to steal the rightful compensation from this young woman?” the lawyer demanded. “It's not going to do her any good if Burt Kline goes to jail and that's it. She may need years of treatment-years!-if it's true that Mr. Kline had sexual contact with her. Which, of course, we're still trying to determine.”
“Motherfucker,” Flowers said.
The lawyer, shocked-shocked-turned to Jesse and said, “Put your hands over your ears.”
Jesse just looked at Flowers, twisted a lock of her hair between her fingers, and stuck a long pink tongue out at him. Flowers grinned back.
“She's hot,” Flowers said when they left the house. They had to step carefully, because a yellow-white dog with bent-over ears, big teeth, and a bad attitude was chained to a stake in the center of the yard.
“She's sixteen years old,” Lucas said, watching the dog.
“Us Jews bat mitzvah our women when they're fourteen, and after that, they're up for grabs,” Flowers said. “Sixteen's no big thing, in the right cultural context.”
“You're a fuckin' Presbyterian, Virgil, and you live in Minnesota.”
“Oh, yeah. Ya got me there, boss,” Flowers said. “What do we do next?”
The second interview was worse, if you didn't like to see old men cry.
Burt Kline sat in his heavy leather chair, all the political photos on the walls behind him, all the plaques, the keys, the letters from presidents, and put his face in his hands, rocked back and forth, and wept. Nothing faked about it. His son, a porky twenty-three-year-old and heir apparent, kept smacking one meaty fist into the palm of the other hand. He'd been a football player at St. Johns, and wore a St. Johns T-shirt, ball cap, and oversized belt buckle.
Burt Kline, blubbering: “She's just a girl, how could you think…”
Flowers yawned and looked out the window. Lucas said, “Senator Kline…”
“I-I-l d-d-didn't do it,” Kline sobbing. “I swear to God, I never touched the girl.
This is all a lie…”
“It's a fuckin' lie, he didn't do it, those bitches are trying to blackmail us,” Burt Jr. shouted.
“There's that whole thing about the semen and the DNA,” Flowers said.
The blubbering intensified and Kline swiveled his chair toward his desk and dropped his head on it, with a thump like a pumpkin hitting a storm door. “That's got to be some kind of mistake,” he wailed.
“You're trying to frame us,” Burt Jr. said. “You and that whole fuckin' bunch of tree-hugging motherfuckers. That so-called lab guy is probably some left-wing nut…”
“Here's the thing, Senator Kline,” Lucas said, ignoring the kid. “You know we've got no choice. We've got to send it to a grand jury. Now we can send it to a grand jury here in Ramsey County, and you know what that little skunk will do with it.”
“Oh, God…”
“Just not right,” Burt Jr. said, smacking his fist into his palm. His face was so red that Lucas wondered about his blood pressure. Lucas kept talking to the old man: “Or, Jesse Barth said you once took her on a shopping trip to the Burnsville Mall and bought her some underwear and push-up bras…”
“Oh, God…”
“If you did that for sex, or if we feel we can claim that you did, then that aspect of the crime would have taken place in Dakota County. Jim Cole is the county attorney there, and runs the grand jury.”
The sobbing diminished, and Kline, damp faced, looked up, a line of calculation back in his eyes. “That's Dave Cole's boy.”
“I wouldn't know,” Lucas said. “But if you actually took Jesse over to Burnsville…”
“I never had sex with her,” Kline said. “But I might've taken her to Burnsville once.
She needed back-to-school clothes.”
“They wear push-up bras to high school?” Lucas asked.
“Shit, yes. And thongs,” Flowers said. “Don't even need Viagra with that kind of teenybopper quiff running around, huh, Burt?”
“You motherfucker, I ought to throw you out the fuckin' window,” Burt Jr. snarled at Flowers.
“You said something like that last time,” Flowers said. He didn't move, but his eyes had gone flat and gray like stones. “So why don't you do it? Come on, fat boy, let's see what you got.”
The kid balled his fists and opened and shut his mouth a couple of times, and then Kline said to him, “Shut up and sit down,” then asked Lucas, “What do I gotta do?”
“Agree that you took her to Burnsville. Agent Flowers will put that in his report and we will make a recommendation to the county attorney.”
“Dave Cole's boy…”
“I guess,” Lucas said. “Neil Mitford would like to talk to you. Just on the phone.”
“I bet he would,” Kline said.
On the street, Flowers said, “I don't like the smell of this, Lucas.”
Lucas sighed. “Neither do I, Virgil. But there's a big load of crap coming down the line, no matter what we do, and there's no point in our people getting hurt, if we can confine the damage to Kline.'' “And the Republicans.”
“Well, Kline's a Republican,” Lucas said.
“Fuck me,” Flowers said.
Lucas said, “Look, I've got loyalties. People have helped me out, have given me a job chasing crooks. I like it. But every once in a while, we catch one of these.
If you can tell me who we ought to put in jail here-Burt Kline or Kathy Barth-then I'll look into it. But honest to God, they're a couple of dirtbags and nobody else ought to get hurt for it.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Flowers was pissed.
Lucas continued rambling. “There's a guy I talk to over at the Star Tribune.
Ruffe Ignace. He's a guy who can sit on a secret, sit on a source. I'd never talk to Ruffe about something like this-I've got those loyalties-but we go out for a sandwich, now and then, and we always argue about it: Who has the right to know what? And when? And what about the people who get hurt? Is it going to help Jesse to get her ass dragged through the courts?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Flowers said again.
“So I gotta go talk to this Cole guy, down in Dakota County,” Lucas said.
“Sounds like another in a long line of assholes,” Flowers said.
“Probably,” Lucas said.
