'Is that your boyfriend's Sportster outside?' Del asked, friendly.
'It's mine,' Clark said shortly.
'You ride? Far out,' Del said. 'And you smoke a lot of dope?' He stood in front of the balcony doors, looking out at the river. He was wearing a long-sleeved paisley shirt under a jean jacket, and dirty black jeans with a silver- studded black biker's belt.
'I don't…' Clark, dressed in her white nurse's uniform, sat rigidly on her couch. Her eyes, sunk deep in her pale face, were underlined by black smudges. She looked at Lucas. 'You said…'
'Don't bullshit us,' Del said, but in a friendly voice. 'Please. I don't give a fuck about the dope, just don't bullshit us. You could get a goddamn contact high off these things.' He flicked the curtains with his fingers.
'I don't…' she started, then shrugged and said, '… smoke a lot.'
'Don't worry about it,' Lucas said to her. He sat on the couch himself, half turned toward Clark. 'You had a relationship with Michael Bekker.'
'I told the first officer. It was almost nothing.' Her hands fluttered at her chest.
'He's under investigation in the murder of his wife. We're not accusing him, but we're looking at him,' Lucas said. 'You seem like an intelligent person. What we need from you is… an assessment.'
'Are you asking me…?'
'Could he kill his wife?'
She looked at him for a moment, then broke her gaze away. 'Yes.'
'Was he violent with you?'
There was a moment of silence, and then she nodded. 'Yes.'
'Tell me.'
'He… used to hit me. With his hands. Open hands, but it hurt. And he choked me once. That time, I thought I might die. But he stopped… He'd go into rages. He seemed unstoppable, but he always… stopped.'
'What about sexual practices? Anything unusual, bondage, like that?'
'No, no. The thing is, there almost wasn't any sex.' She looked up at Lucas to see if he believed her.
'He's impotent?' Lucas asked.
'He wasn't impotent,' she said. She glanced at Del, who nodded, encouraging her. 'I mean, sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn't, but he didn't seem driven so much by sex as…'
'What?'
Clark's fear of them had slipped into the background and she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, interested despite herself. 'He needs to control things. He'd make me do… you know, oral sex and so on. Not because it turned him on, I don't think, but because he liked to make me do it. It was the control he liked, not the sex.'
'Did he ever use drugs while you were around?'
'No… well, he maybe smoked a little marijuana. You know, though, I think he might have used steroids. He has a very good body…' She dropped her eyelashes. 'But he had very small testicles.'
'Small?'
'Very small… almost like marbles,' she said. 'You know, he lifts weights, and weightlifters sometimes use steroids. Testicles can shrink with prolonged use of steroids, so I asked him, and he got angry… That was the time he choked me.'
'Did you ever see him dance?' Lucas asked.
'Dance? His dance?' Clark pulled back. 'You've been watching him…'
'So you've seen it,' Lucas said. Del was frowning at him, confused.
'One time, he beat me up,' Clark said in a rush, bouncing on the couch. 'Not bad, I mean, nothing showed, but I was hurting, and crying, and all of a sudden he started to giggle and jump up and down. I couldn't believe… it was like a dance. It was a dance, a jig…'
'Jesus Christ,' Del blurted. 'A jig?'
Lucas nodded. 'I've seen it. It's gotta be dope. You should talk to your people, see if he's buying on the street.'
Del looked at Clark and asked, 'Why'd you go along with him?'
She looked up at him and said, 'Because he's beautiful.'
'Beautiful?'
'He's beautiful. I'd never had a beautiful man.' She looked between them, looking for understanding. After a moment, Del nodded.
They left her ten minutes later.
'She knows something else,' Lucas said. 'She didn't tell us something, and she thinks it might be important.'
'Yeah. But there's no way to tell how important it is.' Del scratched his head, looking back at the apartment house door. 'And if we squeeze, she'll either crack like Humpty-fuckin'-Dumpty or call a lawyer…'
'Which is worse…'
'Yeah.'
They were walking along the sidewalk to the car. 'Where's your wife?' Lucas asked suddenly. 'I heard she split.'
'Yeah. More'n a year ago.'
'You gettin' laid?'
'Only by Lady Fingers,' Del said, with a dry chuckle. 'Look at me, man, I'm a fuckin' wreck. I'm stoned half the time and I'm walkin' around with a gun in my armpit. Who'd go out with me? Other'n maybe a couple of hookers?'
'Yeah.' Lucas looked at the other man. 'You know what? She kind of liked you. Clark did. Talking about bikes and all. I mean, she's a rider and you're… like you are.'
Del shook his head. 'Man, I can do better'n her.'
'You haven't been,' Lucas pointed out. 'And doing better won't tell us what she knows.'
'I'd say twelve or thirteen of them are straight-out nutcases, and we didn't want to bother you,' the dispatcher said, handing Lucas a stack of call slips. 'I've marked those. Six of them wouldn't identify themselves at all. You can judge for yourself, but they're a waste of time… There are a half-dozen you ought to get back to. People who knew the Bekkers or Armistead and say they might have a piece of information for you. None of them thought their information was particularly urgent.'
'All right. Thanks.'
'That last one, she said it was personal.'
Lucas looked at it. Cassie Lasch.
He thought about not calling. An easy way out, if you didn't call for long enough. He went home and ate a microwave dinner, aware of the telephone out on the edge of his vision. He lasted an hour before he picked it up.
'You didn't call,' Cassie said.
'I'm working. Give me a little time.'
'How much time does it take to call? Where do you live?'
'St. Paul.'
'Why don't I come over?' she asked.
'Ah…' Lucas felt himself freeze for a moment, an impulse to push her away. He was looking at the kitchen table, piled with newspapers and unopened mail, books, some read, some not, a couple of unopened cereal boxes, a stack of unwashed bowls…
He wasn't doing anything. He was barely alive.
'You know where Mississippi River Boulevard is?'
CHAPTER 13
Cassie was muscular and intense, and fought him, wrestling across the bed. When they were done, she lay
