Escape Clause

12

With the break on Hamlet Simonian, Virgil called Frankie and said he wouldn’t be making it home that night. “Something could happen up here-we’ve got this guy’s face on every TV set in the state.”

“I know, I saw him. Anyway, go ahead and stay,” she said. “Me ’n’ Sparkle and Father Bill and Rolf are playing canasta. You be careful.” Rolf was her oldest son.

“I will. See you tomorrow, probably.” He didn’t mention the afternoon chase with Maxine Knowles and Toby Strait.

Virgil bagged out at the Radisson Hotel at the Mall of America, and a few minutes after midnight, he’d been asleep long enough to be deeply annoyed when his phone rang.

The BCA duty officer: “Landlord over on West Seventh says he’s got a renter who he’s pretty sure is Simonian. He says it’s ninety-nine percent.”

“Jenkins and Shrake still out?” Virgil asked.

“Probably. It’s early for those guys.”

“Roll them over there, if you can find them,” Virgil said. “Call St. Paul, tell them to wake up the judge and get a warrant. I’ll be there in half an hour: give me the address.”

–

Shrake called him twenty minutes later, as Virgil was passing the airport. “Me and Jenkins are over on West Seventh. I hope your suspect is a dirtbag.”

“He shows all the signs,” Virgil said. “Why?”

“His apartment’s above one of those twenty-four-hour car washes. I don’t know how in the hell anybody could sleep up there. No lights on, that I can see. Anyway, it’s the kind of place only a dirtbag would wind up.”

“Where are you guys?”

“Parked on Snelling right at the bottom of the hill. We’re talking to St. Paul, they woke up Van Dyke and got him to sign the warrant, and they got a key from the landlord. They’re sending a car over.”

“Good. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

–

Jenkins and Shrake were sitting in Jenkins’s aging Crown Vic. Virgil drove up the hill, did a U-turn, and pulled in behind them. He crawled into the Crown Vic’s backseat and Shrake said, “Good thing that St. Paul cop isn’t here, he would have ticketed your rural butt for the U-turn.”

“Already been through that today,” Virgil said. He looked through the front window at the car wash. “What do you see over there?”

Jenkins pointed at a line of barred windows above the wash and said, “Nothing. No movement. The plan is, I pull the car into the car wash, which starts the noise up, to cover the approach. Then you and Shrake and Bowers go up the side stairs, kick the door, and bust Simoleon.”

“Simonian,” Virgil said. “A ‘simoleon’ is money, in obsolete British slang.”

“Whatever,” Jenkins said. “If you guys don’t fuck this up, I get a clean car on the company’s nickel and we’re heroes because we bust the tiger thief. If you do fuck it up, I should be available for backup, right after the no-spot rinse.”

“The side stairs are what? Metal? Concrete? Wood?”

“Concrete. We did a quick turnaround in the parking lot to check it out. Everything over there is concrete-it’s one solid concrete-block building. There are two apartments, front and back. He’s in Apartment One, which is at the front.”

The St. Paul cop called a minute later and said he was on his way, the warrant in hand. The landlord, he said, rented the place furnished, by the week, and Simonian had been there for three weeks. He’d told the landlord that his name was Gus Smith. “I mean, hey, somebody’s gotta be named Smith.”

–

Jenkins and Shrake were both large men, in overly sharp suits and nylon neckties. Both had thin webs of scars beneath their eyes, from being punched; both had fluorescent teeth, having had their real teeth knocked out while still young.

“We heard you had some excitement over in New Ulm this afternoon,” Shrake said, as they waited for the cop. “What happened?”

Virgil told them about the chase and the arrest of Maxine Knowles. “There’s gonna be an ocean of paperwork.”

Jenkins said, “Yeah, but at least you had some fun. Nothing good like that ever happens to us anymore. Shrake hasn’t hit anybody since, what, June?”

Shrake was probing his large ceramic teeth with a toothpick, took it out to say, “Don Carmel. Wayzata.”

“Okay, since two weeks ago,” Jenkins said.

“A pretty long dry spell for you guys,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, not much you can really do about it,” Jenkins said. “Gotta be patient, wait them out.”

–

The St. Paul cop showed up in an unmarked car and parked behind Virgil. They all shook hands and the cop, Bowers, asked, “You don’t think they got the tigers in the apartment, do you?”

“There’s a question that hasn’t been asked,” Shrake said.

“No, I don’t. The two tigers together weigh more than a thousand pounds. Even if they were dead, getting them up to a second floor, without an elevator, is gonna be a load and a half,” Virgil said.

“That’s good, because I really don’t have my tiger-shooting vest with me,” Bowers said.

“Enough bullshit, let’s get it on,” Jenkins said.

–

Jenkins and Shrake took the Crown Vic across to the car wash. Shrake got out and put his back to the wall under the stairs and Jenkins took the car into the car wash, which started up with a roar.

Virgil and the St. Paul cop crossed the street and parked on the side of the wash unit, where they couldn’t be seen from the apartment. They joined Shrake next to the staircase, and Shrake asked Virgil, “You got your gun?”

Virgil patted his hip. “Right here.”

“Try not to shoot anybody with it; I mean, one of us.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”

They went up the stairs walking quietly, in a single file, and found Apartment One at the front of the building. The apartment had a steel door and the two visible windows were barred with fake ornamental wrought-iron window guards. There were no lights on.

“Okay, so nobody’s gonna get through the iron bars,” Shrake muttered under his breath. “My question is, how do you get out if there’s a fire?”

“What’s gonna burn?” Virgil asked. “The whole goddamn place is made of concrete.”

–

They listened at the windows and at the door and heard nothing at all, though it was hard to hear anything over the noise from the car wash. Shrake whispered, “What do you want to do?”

Virgil shrugged. “The key. He won’t hear it with the car wash running.”

Bowers dug it out of his pocket and passed it over and Shrake slid it into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open one-handed, while keeping his back to the wall. No sound, no reaction.

Virgil, on the other side of the door opening, reached around the wall, groping for a light switch, found it, and turned on the porch light, which fully illuminated all of them. “Damn it.” He turned it off, and found another switch, and turned it on.

Virgil backed up to the window. He could see the interior of the apartment now that the light was on, and it appeared to be empty. He could see a dark hallway leading to another room.

“Don’t think anybody’s home,” he said. The car wash suddenly went silent, and Virgil said into the sudden silence, “Let’s clear it.”

They did. The apartment door opened directly on the living room, and Shrake led the way in, both he and Bowers pointing their weapons at the hallway to the back. Shrake found a light switch that turned on the hall light; the hallway led to a small bedroom and a motel-style bathroom, tight and cheap, and both empty.

Jenkins had come up the stairs to join them, and now said, “Look at that fuckin’ TV set.”

They all looked at it.

“Lucky guy,” Shrake said. “Having an appliance like that. Football season coming up.”

The TV occupied most of the middle of the living room and must have been seventy inches across, perched on two metal folding chairs with a cable leading to a cable box that sat on the terrazzo floor under the chairs.

Bowers, who’d been wandering around the apartment, said, “Here you go.” Without touching it, he pointed at a paper map of the Minnesota Zoo, sitting on the breakfast counter.

“Okay, he’s the right guy,” Virgil said. “Wonder if he took off?”

“If he’s got any brains, he did,” Jenkins said. “Shrake and I were sittin’ in a bar…”

“No…”

“We must’ve seen his face twenty times between nine o’clock and the news. If he was here, watching that thing”-Jenkins waved at the giant TV-“he couldn’t have missed seeing himself.”

Virgil looked around at the bleak little apartment, the dirt-stiff ten-year-old chintz curtains, the dusty, rugless terrazzo floors, the few pieces of furniture, the near total absence of dinnerware: two cups that he could see, a glass, a couple of spoons, one knife, and a fork in the sink. “Let’s take the place apart. We need any kind of hint we can find about where he hid the tigers. Anything.”

–

What they found was an apartment that was little lived in. Almost everything looked like it came with the apartment, except the television, a few pieces of clothing hung in the single bedroom closet, and some underwear and socks packed into the single chest of drawers. A pair of new, unworn pointed-toe black dress shoes, with white sidewalls, lounged next to the chest.

“Guy must like to boogie,” Shrake said.

A green plywood box sat at the end of the bed, with a Master padlock fastened through a simple latch.

“It’s an old army footlocker,” Virgil said, touching it with his toe.

“I got a bolt cutter in the car,” Bowers said. “I’ll run and get it.”

He did, and they cut the padlock off.

–

Inside, they found a lot of junk-earphones; an old Apple iPod filled with music of a style Virgil was unable to identify; a short-barreled Smith & Wesson.38 that looked to be a hundred years old, though loaded with fresh cartridges; a short stack of printed porn, plus some car magazines; and at the bottom, a thin address book that contained no addresses, but did contain a list of what appeared to be passwords.

“This could be useful,” Virgil said. “If we can find his computer. If he had a computer.”

“I don’t see anything like a router,” Bowers said.

“I don’t think he lived here and I don’t think he expected to stay long,” Shrake said. “Looks like he came here for the job and planned to go back home when it was done.”

“Should have left sooner,” Bowers said.