Pale Kings and Princes

16

I was having a cup of coffee at the counter in Wally’s Lunch when Lundquist came in, the winter sun glinting off the polished leather of his holster as he opened the door. He sat down beside me.

“Cup of tea, please,” he said to Wally. Wally scowled. Lundquist smiled at him. “I know it’s more trouble than coffee,” he said, “but I just like it better. Little lemon too, please.”

Wally got to work on the tea.

“Rogers was shot twice in the head from behind with a forty-one-caliber firearm,” he said. “We assume it was a revolver because we didn’t find any brass, though the perpetrator could have cleaned up afterwards.”

“Forty-one caliber?” I said.

“Yeah, an oddball,” Lundquist said.

“How many of those are registered?” I said.

The tea came. Lundquist squeezed the wedge of lemon into the cup, jiggled the tea bag a little, studying the color. Then he took the bag out and set it soggily into his saucer.

“Sugar, please,” he said. I passed the cup of sugar packets to him. He opened two at once, lining them up and ripping off the tops. Then he poured the sugar in his tea and stirred it carefully.

“There are no forty-one-caliber guns registered in the state,” he said.

“Anything else?”

“There might be some tire tracks behind Rogers’s car. But so what? Place is out of the way but people park there. Ground was frozen. There’s not enough for a cast.”

Lundquist picked his cup up and blew softly over the surface and then sipped some tea. He made a face, and shook his head slightly. “Not good,” he said. “Water wasn’t hot enough and it was a mass-market teabag.”

“Suppose Wally’s got a tea cozy back there someplace?” I said.

Lundquist smiled and shook his head. “Mrs. Rogers says her husband left the house that morning and went off to work like he does every day. She says that’s the last she saw him. He never came home. She wasn’t all that worried, she says, because he was often out late on police business. Sometimes all night.”

“In Wheaton, Mass.?” I said.

“I thought about that myself,” Lundquist said. “M.E. figures he was shot sometime in the early evening, but the cold weather complicates it, and it would be nice to know the last time he ate.”

Lundquist drank some more of his tea. Wally came down the counter and put a bill in front of us, and went away.

“So he went up there probably in the early evening, after dark, and met somebody he knew and they sat in the car and talked. And one of them shot him in the back of the head.”

“Why do you think more than one?” Lundquist said.

“One person would have got in the front seat beside him. There were at least two. One got in front with him. The other one sat in the backseat.”

Lundquist nodded. “People he knew,” Lundquist said. “No cop is going to let two strangers in his car, one in the backseat, while he’s sitting on his piece.”

“But people he didn’t want to be seen with,” I said.

“Or why would he go up to the top of an empty street on a cold night after dark to sit in the car and talk,” Lundquist said.

“Could be a date?” I said

“With two women? One of whom is carrying a forty-one-caliber weapon?”

“Not impossible,” I said. “They make a forty-one-caliber derringer, and it could have been two women who were confronting the man who’d been cheating between them.”

“Possible,” Lundquist said. “Not likely.”

“Or he could be crooked,” I said. “And he was meeting the bagman and it went haywire.”

“More possible,” Lundquist said.

“You know something about Rogers?” I said.

“No. But he’s the head cop in a town that’s noted for cocaine trafficking.”

“And Felipe Esteva runs the cocaine,” I said.

“You think so.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I think so too,” Lundquist said. “But neither of us has proved so yet.”

“Maybe one of us will,” I said.

“Yeah, and maybe we’ll find out who killed Valdez.”

“Or maybe we won’t,” I said. “And maybe it won’t be what we think it is if we do.”

“It’d be cleaner if there wasn’t this sex thing. The fact that Valdez was castrated.”

“Maybe to confuse us,” I said.

“Maybe. If so it’s working. Every cocaine explanation can also be a jealousy explanation,” Lundquist said. He took a last swallow of tea and stood up. Half the tea was still in his cup.

“You got this one?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m on expenses.”

“Thanks,” Lundquist said. He hitched his holster slightly forward on his hip and went back out into the bright cold sunlight. I paid the tab and left Wally half a buck and went back to my motel.