Del shrugged. 'I talked to him, but I didn'tarrest him. I didn't have anything to arrest himon. He told me he was checked into the Days Inn down on the strip, and when I snuck out and checked, hewas. But the next day, when we went down to pick him up, he'd checked out. We just missed him.'
Lucas said, 'The problem is, he might've gone back to Panama. The guys in the county attorneys office don't want to hear any of this 'Del saw him' shit. They want to seeTrick.'
'What are you telling me?' Laziard demanded. 'What'
The door opened in the back wall, and they all turned. Rashid Al-Balah stepped into the room, a guard a step behind him. Al-Balah was a shaved-head black man with a heavy face and two-day beard. He glowered at Lucas, gave a few seconds of hate to Del. The guard pointed him at a bench. Al-Balah sat down and asked Laziard, 'How much longer?'
'We're trying to figure that out,' Laziard said.
'What? What're you trying to figure out?' Al-Balah's voice was rising. 'Get me the fuck outa here.'
'There's a problem,' Lucas said. 'Trick went away, and the county attorneys office is being a stick-in-the-mud about it. They want to actually see his ass before they do anything. I'm sure we'll find him, sooner or later.'
'Sooner or fuckin' later?' Al-Balah shouted. 'I packed my shit this morning. I'm ready togo. Right now, motherfucker.'
'This is not going well,' Del muttered to Lucas.
'What? What'd you say?' Al-Balah was getting angrier.
The guard snapped, 'Cool down.' Al-Balah looked at him, and the guard took a half-step forward and set his feet. 'Just cool down. Keep your place.'
Al-Balah sagged on the bench. 'I packed my shit,' he said to Lucas. 'You're supposed to get me the fuck out of here. I packed my shit up, man.'
'We're doing what we can,' Del said. 'I'm the guy who brought the whole thing up, you know?'
Lucas jumped in. 'I didn't actually come out here myself to talk about cutting you loose. I actually came out with a question.' He looked at Laziard. 'A question for your client.'
'A question?'
'You know about the Alie'e Maison case,' Lucas said to Al-Balah. 'There was another woman killed the same night, the same place.'
'Yeah, yeah, I been seeing it on my TV,' Al-Balah said.
'This woman, Sandy Lansing, she was dealing. But she was just the street hookup, we don't know who was running her. We'd like to find out, and we thought you might know. You know all that shit.'
Al-Balah shook his head. 'Fuck you.'
'All right.' Lucas stood up. 'I figured there wasn't much chance.'
'When you gonna get me out of here?' Al-Balah asked.
'Soon as we find Trick. We've got some staffing problems with this Alie'e thing, but we can probably spring a guy on it. You know, half-time, anyway. As soon as the Alie'e thing is done with. If Trick hasn't gone back to Panama or something. I mean, I'll bet you're out by spring. Summer at the latest.'
Al-Balah almost got up this time, and the guard stepped away from the wall: 'Spring? Fuckin' spring?'
Lucas shrugged. 'It's this goddamn Alie'e thing. We can't catch a break. We're working on it.'
'Richie Rodriguez,' Al-Balah said. His lawyer said, 'Stop!' but Al-Balah continued. 'The bitch was run by Richie Rodriguez, who gots a place in Woodbury. He gotta a whole bunch of apartment buildings or some shit.'
Del looked at Lucas and said, 'There's a Richard Rodriguez on the party list.'
'That's him. Richard,' Al-Balah said. 'You call him 'Dick' if you want to piss him off.'
'Goddamn it,' Laziard said.
Lucas looked at Al-Balah and said, 'Thanks. We'll push the Trick Bentoin thing. We owe you.'
'You owe me, and you gotta get me outa here. I'm fuckin'innocent .' Al-Balah was pleading now.
'Yeah, well more or less,' Lucas said. He took a step toward the outer door, following Del.
Laziard asked, 'Will I hear from you this afternoon?'
Before Lucas could answer, Del, who'd opened the door, said,
'Whoa!' He reached out and, a second later, pulled Trick Bentoin into the room by his shirtsleeve.
'Hi, guys,' Bentoin said, shining like the fuckin' sun.
'You pricks,' Laziard said.
Al-Balah was stunned, but after gaping at Bentoin for a second, he started to laugh, and a minute later, was laughing so hard that he had to lean on his attorney for support. So hard that Lucas, Del, Laziard, and Bentoin started to laugh, and finally, even the guard.
On the way back to town, Del's phone rang. He answered, listened for a second, and said, 'Yeah, he's right here. He just hasn't turned his fuckin' phone on.' He handed the phone to Lucas. 'It's Frank.'
Lester was calling with three pieces of news. 'We're rolling on this multiple-personality idea. The Olsons were murdered, dude. The shrink called it. Mrs. Olson's head was ontop of some blood spray from her old man, and from the way the spray hit her face, she was looking toward him when she was shot. When her body was recovered, she was looking straight up toward the ceiling.'
'So he was killed first,' Lucas said.
'Absolutely But the gun was next to him.'
'All right,' Lucas said. 'What happened to that Bloom guy we were checking out?'
'Black checked him, and isn't getting anyplace. The guy seems really straight.'
'We got a better name,' Lucas said. 'A Richard Rodriguez. He's on the list.'
'How good?'
'Very good. Have you seen Lane around there? He should be back from Fargo.'
'Yeah. He's here,' Lester said.
'Get him on the Rodriguez guy. Full bio. We'll be back in half an hour.'
'See you then.'
'How's Marcy?' Lucas asked.
'Same, I guess. I checked this morning when I came in, and nobody's said anything else.'
'Half hour,' Lucas said.
Things were beginning to move, like watching the ice go off the river in spring. Nothing happening, nothing happening, and then boom; breakup.
When they got back, they walked Trick over to the county attorney's office, left him, and headed back to City Hall. Lane was waiting outside Lucas's office with a wad of paper in his hand. He saw them coming, and walked down the hall waving the paper.
'He's our guy. He's a dealer, anyway. Moved here from Detroit eleven years ago, got busted a couple of times for vagrancy. Now he owns a bunch of small apartment buildings here and in St. Paul and out in Washington County, through a real-estate investment company in Miami.' Lane was talking at a hundred miles and hour, and they were swirling around each other in the hall, looking at pieces of paper. 'He lists himself as an apartment manager on his state tax returns. I looked at the returns going all the way back, and he showed up nine years ago at twenty-two thousand, and now he's up to ninety, but he never lists his ownership anywhere. He doesn't have to.'
'Goddamnit, this looks good,' Lucas said.
Del nodded. 'Hiding the money. But I wonder why he's still selling dope if he's got the apartments?'
'He pyramided them, I think,' Lane said. 'He can't stop yet. Maybe he's got a pal at the bank who knows he has another income, 'cause it looks like he bought the first apartment with a cash down-paymentand nobody asked any questionsthen used the equity in that one to finance the next one, paid on that a while, then used the equity in the two of them to buy the third, and then the equity in the three to buy another one, and kept doing that until he got where he is now. The total assessed value in twelve buildings is nine point five million, and they're really worth twelve or thirteen. But his own money, he's got maybe a million into them.'
'The rents don't cover the payments?'
'Oh, they cover them, barely, as long as he never has a vacancy,' Lane said. 'But you're never a hundred percent in apartmentsnot for long, anyway. What he's doing is, if somebody moves out, he keeps paying the rent out of the dope money until he gets another tenant. I bet he's getting a lot of his maintenance done on the underground economy, paying in cash. So the dope money is invisible. It just goes away.'
