'Yeah, I pretty much had to. They would've found out.'
'All right. So now they can tie you to Rolo, but they can't tie you to the crime, because nobody knows that you're… involved with Hale. Not even Hale knows it. Have I got that right?'
'That's right.' She wandered to a window and looked out over the city; it was a hot day, and a thin haze hung over the Midway area to the east. 'If it weren't for that fuckin' tape, we'd be in the clear. I'm thinking maybe we should have strangled Rolo, instead of shooting him – then then there wouldn't be any tie.
That was a mistake.'
'Didn't think of it,' Rinker said. 'The gun was just the natural thing to do, since we had it right there.'
'Yeah, well, they're waiting for an analysis of the slugs. They can tell whether the bullets that killed Barbara Allen and the ones that killed Rolo came from the same batch of lead.'
'All right… gonna have to get rid of the guns pretty soon. Or buy a new batch of shells.'
'Did you come up with any ideas about the tape?' Carmel asked.
'Yes, I have,' Rinker said. She stood up, walked to a corner table, and picked up Rolo's address book. 'For one thing, do you remember when he said he gave the tape to somebody named Mary?'
'Yeah – but there aren't any names in the book, only…'
'Initials,' Rinker said. 'But I had a little time, so I started going through it. There are four sets of initials starting with M. So I walked down to your library, and looked in the cross-reference directories… and then I found out he was using a stupid little code on his phone numbers. He put the last number at the beginning. Like he'd have a number, say, that was 123 dash 4567 and he'd write it down as 712 dash 3456.'
Carmel was impressed. 'How'd you figure that out?'
'Because some of the prefixes didn't exist, and the ones that did were all over the place. One was for a dog- grooming service. I mean, why would he even bother to write it in his book? So anyway, the assholes I used to work for did some jail time, and they told me how guys would use these simple codes. So I juggled numbers until I found one that gave me all good prefixes. And then, everything else worked out -all the codes were residential, and two of the names that began with M were women. Or probably women. One was Martha Koch, but the other was just initial M – M. Blanca. Where's there's just an initial, it usually means a woman living alone. Younger woman.'
'Mary?
'No, it's something else – I called, and a woman answered, and I asked for Mary
Blanca and she said I had the wrong number. She had a little accent, maybe Mex.
But I was thinking about how scared Rolo was, and how he came up with the name
Mary. I bet when you asked him for the name, and you said, Quick, I bet her name popped into his head, and it almost got out, but he switched at the last minute.
Could be Martha, or it could be this other M.'
Carmel was skeptical: 'That's a long chain of could-be's,' she said. 'It could be some other M, or not an M at all.'
'Yeah, but we don't have anything else.'
'Rolo's name's gonna be in the paper tomorrow,' Carmel said. 'If this M doesn't know he's dead, she will tomorrow morning. Then she's gonna look at the tape, if she hasn't already. Then she's gonna give it to the cops.'
'So let's go talk to M. Blanco. And Martha Koch.'
'After dark.'
'Yup.'
'We're hanging by a goddamn thread,' Carmel said.
Martha Koch's life was saved by a baby shower; she never knew it.
'Lotta cars around,' Carmel muttered as she and Rinker started up the Kochs' driveway; a dozen cars were parked along the street. The house was a neat, modest, tuck-under ranch across the street from a golf course. A curving line of flagstone steps led across a rising lawn to the front door. The porch light was on, and the living- room curtains were open. At the top of the steps, Carmen said, 'Uh-oh,' and stopped. Two women were hopping around the front room, laughing, and one of them was looking back and obviously talking to yet a third one, or more.
'Forget it,' Rinker said. 'We'll have to come back.' They retreated down the steps, walked up the street to Carmel's Volvo, and left.
M. Blanca's house was a long step down in affluence, one of a row of old asbestos-shingled houses just north of a University of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. Four mailboxes hung next to a single door.
'It's an apartment,' Rinker said, her voice low.
'Lot of them are,' Carmel said.
'We gotta take care – there'll be other people around. You got the money?'
'Yeah.' A few more steps and Carmel asked, 'What do I look like?' Rinker was wearing her red wig; they'd both wrapped dark silk scarves around their heads.
'You look like one of those religious ladies who always wear scarves,' Rinker said.
'All right,' Carmel said. She added, 'So do you.'
At the front door, Carmel pointed a pocket flash it at the mailboxes. The box on the left said Howell; the next one showed a strip of paper, which had been peeled off. The third said in pink ink, Jan and Howard Davis, with a green ink addition, in a child's hand, And Heather. The fourth said Apartment A. She opened the left one, Howell, and found it empty. The box with the strip of paper contained a phone bill addressed to David Pence, Apartment C. She skipped the
Davis box, and checked the box on the far right. Empty.
'I think, but I'm not sure, that we want apartment A,' she whispered to Rinker.
Rinker nodded and they pushed through the outer door into a short hallway.
Stairs led away to the right, and a high-tech Schwinn bicycle was chained to the banister. 'Not like my old Schwinn,' Rinker muttered.
Down the hall, on the left wall, was a pale yellow door. Another door, this one a pale Paris green, was at the end of the hall. The first door had a large metal
B on it; the Paris-green door had an A. Rinker put her hand in her pocket, where the gun was, and Carmel stepped forward and knocked on the door.
The knock was answered by deep silence; Carmel knocked again, louder. This time, there was an answering thump, like somebody getting up, off a couch or a bed. A moment later, the door opened a crack, and a sleepy Latino man peered out through the crack and said, 'What?'
'We need to talk to Ms. Blanca,' Carmel said quietly.
'She's sleeping,' he said, and the crack narrowed.
'We've got some money for her,' Carmel said quickly. The crack stopped narrowing, and the man's eyes were back at the crack. He didn't argue. He simply said, 'I'll take it.'
'No. Rolo said we were only to give it to Ms. Blanca, if anything happened to him.'
'Oh.' He thought it over for a minute, as if this somehow made sense; and
Carmel's heart did a quick extra beat. 'What happened to Rolo?'
'Quite a bit of money,' Carmel said. She wanted to sound nervous, and she did.
'Just a minute,' the Latino man said. The door closed and they heard him call,
'Hey, Marta.'
'Marta Blanca,' Rinker muttered. 'She bakes right.'
'What?' Carmel looked at Rinker as though Rinker were slipping away.
'Better biscuits, cakes and pies with Marta Blanca…'
Carmel shook her head, bewildered, then the man was back, and the door opened.
He looked them over for a second, made a judgment, and said, 'Yeah. Come in.'
Carmel led the way into the apartment, which seemed to be decorated in brown; one lamp with a nicotine- yellow shade was turned on, the shade at a tipsy angle over a stack of Hustler magazines. The odor of marijuana hung around the curtains.
'How much money?' the man asked.
'We need to ask…' Carmel started, but then a woman came through the kitchen, apparently from a bedroom
