Secret Prey

FIVE

Damascus Isley was a very smart fat man with a taste for two-thousand-dollar English bespoke suits that almost disguised his size. Lucas spotted him at a back table at the Bell Jar, hovering over a chicken breast salad that had been served in what looked like a kitchen sink. Lucas told the ma?tre d’, "I’m with the fat guy," and was nodded past the velvet rope.

"Lucas," Isley said. He made a helpless gesture with his hands, which meant, I’m too fat to get up. "Are you coming to the reunion? Gina asked me to ask."

Lucas shook his head, and took a chair across from Isley, who was sitting on the booth seat. "I don’t think so. I’ve busted too many of them."

"Mary Big Jo’s gonna be there," Isley said.

"Fuck Mary Big Jo."

"I certainly did," Isley said cheerfully. "Made all the more glorious by your abject failure to do the same."

Lucas grinned: "No accounting for taste," he said. Isley was six-five, a bit taller than Lucas. He’d once been a rope instead of a mountain, a basketball forward when six-five was a big man; Lucas had been hockey, and they’d chased several of the same women through high school and college.

A waitress stepped up behind Lucas, slipped a menu in front of him, and said, "Cocktail, sir?"

"Ah no, I just want…" He thought for a second, then said, "Hell, give me a martini. Beefeater, up, two olives."

"I could give you three olives, if you need more vegetables in your diet," the waitress said.

"All right, three," Lucas said; she was pretty in a dark-Irish way.

The waitress went to get the drink, and Isley, following her with his eyes, said, "The way she looked at you, something would be possible. Maybe you’d have to come back a couple of times, get to know her, but it’d be possible." He looked down at the vast salad, the chunks of chicken breast, avocado, egg, tomato, cheese, and lettuce, covered with a bucket of creamy herb dressing, then back up at Lucas. "You know how long it’s been since that was possible with me? With all this fuckin’…" He couldn’t say "fat" "… lard?"

Lucas tried to put him off: "So you work out for a couple months."

"Lucas… when I was playing ball, my last year, I weighed two-oh-five. So I go to this fat doctor and say, ‘Give me a diet I can stay on, something simple, that’ll get me back to two-oh-five.’ He says, ‘Okay, do this: Go to lunch every day and eat one Big Mac with all the fixings. And as much popcorn as you want, all day. Nothing else.’ I say, ‘Jesus Christ, I’ll starve.’ He says, ‘No you won’t, but you’ll lose a lot of weight.’ "

Isley looked at Lucas. "You know how long he said it would take to get to two-oh-five?" Lucas shook his head. "A year and a half. A fuckin’ year and a half, Lucas…"

"I’ll tell you what, Dama," Lucas said bluntly. "You’re either gonna lose it, or you’re gonna die. Simple as that."

"Not that simple," Isley said.

"Oh yeah it is," Lucas said. "After all the bullshit, that’s what it comes down to."

"I don’t even like food that much… and I’d like to live awhile longer," Isley said wistfully. "I’d like to quit the company, go to London and study money… find out what it really is."

"Money."

"Yeah, you know. Money," he said. "Not many people really know what it is, how it works. I’d like to spend some time finding out."

"So start hitting the McDonald’s," Lucas said.

"Fat chance."

The waitress arrived with the martini, and Isley’s wistfulness disappeared, replaced by the steel-trap investment banker. "So what’s going on? Starting another business?"

"No." Lucas sipped the martini. "When you took my company public, we ran some of the money stuff through Jim Bone over at Polaris. You seemed to know him pretty well. He was hunting with Kresge when Kresge got shot, and I need a reading on him. Bone, I mean. And Susan O’Dell, if you know her. And Wilson McDonald."

Isley’s face went cautious: "Is this official?"

"No, of course not. I’m just trying to get a reading. Nobody’ll be coming back to you."

Isley nodded. "Okay. I know them all pretty well- socially and business, both. Either Bone or O’Dell has the guts to shoot Kresge, but I don’t think either one did. These people are very smart and very serious. If they’d wanted to lose Kresge badly enough, they would have done it another way."

"What about Robles or McDonald?"

"Robles is a software genius. He does the math. But he’s more of a technician than a manager. He also doesn’t have the motive. With his math, he could go about anywhere. McDonald…" Isley looked away from Lucas, pursed his fat lips, then turned back. "There are McDonalds who are good friends of mine-same family. Not Wilson, though. There’ve been rumors…" Again, he paused.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"No comebacks?"

"No comebacks."

"There’re rumors that he occasionally beats the shit out of his wife," Isley said. "I mean, she goes to the hospital."

"Huh."

"Alcohol, is what you hear," Isley said. "He’s a binge drinker. Sober for two months, then has to take a few days off."

"Smart?"

"Pretty smart. Not world-class, but he got through law school with no problem."

"I didn’t know he was a lawyer."

"He never worked at it. He’s always been a salesman, and a damn good one. Knows everybody. Everybody. Access to all the old money in town-his family built a mill over on the river, hundred and some years ago, and eventually sold to Pillsbury to go into banking and real estate. Like that."

"Okay," Lucas said. "So here’s another question. Everything I’ve heard about him says McDonald’s rich, he comes from an old family, and all that. Why would he kill Kresge, just ’cause Kresge’s gonna merge the bank? He’s got all the money in the world anyway."

"No, not really," Isley said. He dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin, tossed the napkin aside, and made a steeple out of his fingers. After a moment of silence, he said, "He’s maybe worth… seven or eight million. The older generation was a lot richer, relatively speaking, but there were a lot of kids, and a lot of taxes, and the money got cut up. After taxes, and including his after-tax salary, I’d imagine his real expendable income is something in the range of a half-million. If he doesn’t dip into his capital, and assuming he puts aside enough to cover inflation."

"Well, Jesus, Dama, that just aboutisall the money in the world," Lucas said.

"No, it’s not. It’s a lot by any normal standard, but having ten million dollars is nothing compared to being the CEO of a major corporation. Being an American CEO is like being an old English duke or earl." He paused again, his eyes unfocusing as he looked for the right words. "Say you have a spendable income of a half-million a year, and your wife likes to fly first-class to Hawaii or Paris every so often. You can spend fifteen thousand after-tax bucks flying a couple first-class to the islands. You go out of town a half-dozen times a year-Hawaii, the Caribbean, Europe- you can spend a hundred and fifty grand, no trouble. And it’s all out of your own pocket. Plus you’ve got big real estate taxes, you’re probably running a couple of fiftythousand-dollar cars… I mean, you can spend a halfmillion a year and feel like your collar’s a little too tight. But if you run a business the size of Polaris, screw first class-you’ve got your own Gulf-stream waiting at the airport. You’ve got several thousand people kissing your ass day and night. You’ve got people driving your cars, running your errands. From everything I can tell by watching it, this all must feel better than anything in the world…"

"So even if he had a lot of money, a guy might have reason to waste old Kresge."

"Especially McDonald. Bone, O’Dell, and Robles are essentially hired guns. They are very good at what they do, but they’reheremostly by chance. They could go anywhere else. But everything Wilson McDonald is is tied to the Twin Cities. In New York or L.A. or even Chicago, they could give a rat’s ass about a Wilson McDonald."

"Do you think Bone would talk to me about McDonald? Off the record?"

Isley shrugged: "Maybe. If the idea appealed to him. He played a little ball at Ole Miss."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Good quick guard. Probably not pro quality, but he would’ve been looked at. Called him T-Bone, of course. If you want, I could give him a ring. Just to say you asked about him, tell him you’re okay."

Lucas grinned. "Maybe I’m not."

Isley said, "Ah, you’re okay… if he’s innocent. And I’m pretty sure he is."

"Anybody mourning Kresge?"

Isley had been about to stuff a slice of chicken in his mouth, and stopped halfway to the target. Shook his head. "Not a single person that I know. He spent his life fucking people in the name of efficiency." He stuck the chicken in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. "Why would you do that?" he asked. "I know all kinds of people who do, but I can’t figure out why."

"Make money."

"Hell, Lucas, I’ve made a pile of money, and I don’t fuck people. You made a pile, and your ex-employees think you’re a hell of a guy. But why would you do things in a way that you’d end up in life with a pile of money, but not a single fuckin’ friend?"

"Maybe you figure that if you get enough money, you could buy some."

Isley nodded gloomily. "Yeah, probably; that’s the way they think."

Lucas finished the last of the three olives, and the last of the pleasantly cool martini, and said, "Listen, Dama. I got a pickup game once a week, bunch of cops, couple lawyers. You start eating those Big Macs and I’d like to get you out there."

"Goddamnit, Lucas…"

"Feel good, wouldn’t it? Playing horse in the evening. Down on Twenty-eighth?"

Isley tossed his fork in the salad bowl. "Get out of here, Davenport."

Lucas stood up. "Call Bone for me?"

"Yeah, yeah, soon as I get back." He looked at his Patek Philippe. "Give me twenty-five minutes."

Lucasgot back to the office, stuck his head into Administration, and said, "Got anything for me?"

The duty guy said, "Computer’s down."

"How long?"

"I don’t know, it’s not just us. Some state road guys cut a major fiber-optic. Half the goddamn city’s down."

"Road guys?"

"Shovel operators."

James T. Bone’s secretary suspected Lucas of making sport of her. When she told him, peremptorily, on the phone, that Mr. Bone was making no new appointments, Lucas had answered, "Go tell Mr. Bone right now that a deputy chief of police wants to talk to him, and if he says no, I’ll have to come down and shoot him."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I think you heard me," Lucas said. He almost added, "sweetheart," but decided that might push it too far.

She went away for a moment; then another voice came on, feminine, cool: "Mr. Davenport? This is Kerin Baki, Mr. Bone’s assistant. Can I help you?"

"I need to talk to Mr. Bone."

"When?"

"As soon as possible."

"Come over, and we’ll get you in," she said.

Baki was a chilly northern blonde, with an oval face and pale blue fighter-pilot eyes. She met him without any softening smile. In the spring, Lucas thought, she probably had genetic dreams of turning her tanks toward Moscow…

She led him through into Bone’s office, said, "Mr. Bone, Mr. Davenport," and left them, shutting the door behind her.

Bone was dressed in a subdued single-breasted wool suit with a crisp white shirt and an Italian necktie; but somehow the ensemble came off as a wry comment on Yankee bankertude. He had a telephone to one ear and a foot propped on the N-Z volume of theNew Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which lay flat on his desk. He waved Lucas in, and as Lucas dropped into a bent-oak chair across the desk, said into the phone, "Two? That’s as good as you can do? Last week it was one and seven… Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll get back to you, but I think we might have to talk to Bosendorfer or Beckstein… Yeah, yeah. By four."

He hung up, made a notation on a legal pad, and said, "I can give you all the time you’d need this evening, but if you gotta talk now, you gotta talk fast. And this is all off the record at this point, right?"

Lucas nodded. "Yes. If we need an official statement, we’ll send you a subpoena and get a formal deposition."

Bone leaned forward. "So?"

"So do you think McDonald did it?"

"If one of us did it, it was McDonald. I didn’t do it. Robles, no motive. O’Dell, too smart. Unless I’m missing something. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s McDonald. Way down at the bottom, I don’t think he’s got the grit to pull it off."

"Then why’s he running the place?"

"He’s not. He’s only speaking for it. And that’ll only last until O’Dell and I get the board sorted out. Then it’ll be one of us."

Lucas said, "Huh," and then, "Have you ever heard of George Arris? Does the name ring a bell?"

"Yes, of course. He was a famous case around here, around the bank. He was murdered-this must’ve been a few months or maybe a year or so before I came here. Must’ve been back in ’85."

"How was it famous? The name doesn’t ring a bell with me…"

"It was over on the St. Paul side of the river. Somebody started shooting white guys who were walking in the black areas-there were like three or four of them in a few weeks, shot in the back of the head."

"Ah, jeez, I remember that," Lucas said. "Never solved. And Arris was one of them?"

"Yup."

"What’d he do here?" "Worked with the trust department, setting up portfolios for rich folk."

"Would he have worked with McDonald?"

Bone said, "Probably. I’d have to look up the exact dates, but they probably overlapped. They certainly both went through that department. I don’t really know the details. I wasn’t here yet. I just heard about the killing later."

"Okay. How about Andrew Ingall?"

"Andy? He was a vice president, also in the trust department, but he died a few years ago in a boating accident up on Superior. You think Wilson had something to do with it?"

"Why would he?" Lucas asked.

Bone leaned back, then spun his chair in a circle, stopped it with one foot, reached into a desk drawer where he apparently had a stereo tuner hidden. A Schumann piano piece, simple, easy, elegant, and sweet, sprang into the office, and Bone said, "Schumann," and Lucas said, "I know-Scenes from Childhood," and Bone said, "Christ, we’re so cultured I can’t stand it," and Lucas said, "A friend of mine used to play them. Why would McDonald do Andy Ingall?"

"Because they were both candidates to run the operation. Then Andy sailed out of Superior Harbor one day, just moving his boat up to the islands. He never got there. No storm, no emergency calls, nothing. Just phhht. Gone. The theory was that he had a leaky gas tank-he had some kind of old gas engine, an Atomic, or something like that-and gas leaked into the bilge, and he fired up the engine out on the water somewhere, and boom. He was gone before he could call for help. That was the theory, but nobody ever knew for sure. No wreckage was ever found."

"So McDonald got the job."

"Well, no. When Andy disappeared, everything was screwed up for a while; then we had a general shuffling around, and McDonald wound up as a senior vice president in the mortgage company."

"Huh," said Lucas, and Bone said, "Yeah," and asked, "Can’t you get this stuff from the FBI or somewhere?"

"Probably not. Besides, the computer’s down."

"You too? Christ, it’s chaos downstairs…"

"Did you ever hear that McDonald might whack his wife around from time to time? Pretty seriously?"

Bone nodded. "I heard it. I went out with a lawyer lady for a while, old family, she knows that whole country club bunch; and she said something to me about it. She might have some details… You could talk to her if you want."

"That’d be good…"

Bone scratched a name and phone number on a piece of notepaper and pushed it across the desk. "Sandra Ollsen, two l’s. That’s her office phone over at Kelly, Batten."

"What kind of law?"

"Estate planning, wills, trusts." He looked at his watch and said, "Listen, I’ve got to go to a meeting, but I can talk to a guy who’s gonna be there, and find out if there was anything between Wilson and Arris."

Lucas said, "Thanks," stood up, and as they shook hands, said, "I understand you used to play a little ball."

"Yeah, a little," Bone said.

"How well do you know Dama Isley?"

"Reasonably well-I heard he played for the Gophers, back when. Hard to believe."

"Yeah. Listen, next time you see him, take a couple of minutes and talk a little ball, old-time stuff, like college days."

Bone shrugged. "Sure. Why?"

"Private project," Lucas said. "You still play?"

Bone, grinning, said, "I still shoot around a little bit on Saturdays. Always a couple of kids trying to take advantage of me."

Lucas said, "A banker? Playing for money?"

"Good grief, no," Bone said. "Not for money. That’d be illegal."

On the way out, Lucas paused in the open door of Bone’s office, saw Kerin Baki talking to the secretary, and said, loud enough for her to overhear, "I’m probably going to want to talk about McDonald again."

Bone, already settling back into his desk, distracted, missed the double-directed comment, nodded, said, "Okay," and Lucas pulled the door shut. He smiled at Baki on the way out and said, "Thank you."

By the time the elevators reached the bottom floor, he thought, the word on McDonald would be out. If Baki was as efficient as she looked, she could never pass on the chance to screw one of her boss’s competitors.

Like Bone, Sandra Ollsen was really too busy to talk to Lucas; but he mentioned Bone’s name and was admitted to the mahogany offices of Kelly, Batten, Orstein & Shirinjivi. Ollsen was a tall, coordinated woman who looked as though she might once have played some ball herself.

"How’s Jim?" she asked casually as Lucas settled into the chair across her desk.

"Looks fine; something of a power struggle going on over there," Lucas said.

"Yes. With Susan O’Dell. I hope she kicks his butt."

"Really?" Lucas asked.

"Really," she said. Lucas, bemused, watched her for a moment, waiting, and then she said, "He sort of dumped me."

"Ah. I know the feeling," Lucas said.

She looked him over. "I don’t think so," she said after a minute.

"You’d be wrong," Lucas said. "Anyway… he seems to think of you as a friend."

"Right." She rolled her eyes. "Actually, I don’t think he was actually looking for friendship when he started squiring me around. He was looking…" She grinned at him, not a bad smile at all. "Why am I telling you this?"

"Because of my open face and genuine curiosity?"

" ’Cause you’re a trained interrogator, that’s why. When I was in college, we called you pigs."

"When I was in college, I called us pigs," Lucas said. "So what was he looking for when he started taking you around?"

"Sex," she said, ingenuously. "Any place, any time… Some of the girls around the bank call him the Boner, if you know what I mean."

"All right," Lucas said. "Listen, the reason I came by…"

"Bet nobody would ever call you that," Ollsen said. "The Boner."

"Only ’cause I carry a big leather sap in my pocket," Lucas said. "I’d beat the tar out of them."

"Oh, it’s a sap. And I just thought you were happy to see me."

Lucas held up his hands: "All right, you win the war of wits." And they both laughed. "But listen, the real reason I came around: You know about the Kresge killing, of course. We’re investigating it, and I’m wondering how well you know Wilson McDonald?"

A sudden wariness appeared in her eyes, and she put a hand to her throat. "You think Wilson did it?"

"No, we don’t think anything, just yet. But he was one of the four people up there when Kresge…"

"Bit the bullet?"

"Exactly the words I was looking for," Lucas said. "Anyway: How well do you know McDonald?"

"My parents knew the family quite well…"

"Does Wilson McDonald beat his wife?"

"Ah, Jesus," she said, softly. "I wondered what Jim told you. What are you going to do, blackmail him with it? Wilson?"

"Domestic violence is not my department," Lucas said. "I’m just trying to get a reading on him, what kind of a guy he is."

Again, she hesitated, and Lucas added, "This is all informal. There won’t be any record of what you say."

"But you could subpoena me."

"If it got to that point, you’d be morally obliged to tell us anyway," Lucas said.

She thought about that for a moment, then said, "I was at a pool party last summer-Rush and Louise Freeman, he runs Freeman-Hoag."

"The advertising agency."

"Yes. Wilson got drunk. He was getting loud and he went into the pool with his clothes on-Audrey said he fell, but I saw it, and he looked like he was jumping in. Anyway, we got him out, and Audrey walked him around the house out toward their car, and they started arguing. And Louise went over to Rush-I was talking to Rush- and she said something like, ‘Rush, you better go around, they’re starting to argue.’ Something about the way she said it. So Rush went around the house, and I followed, and we both came around the corner just in time to see Wilson hit her right in the head. He just swatted her and knocked her down. Rush ran over and they started arguing, and I thought Wilson was going to fight him. But Audrey got up and said she was all right, and I got between the two guys. And they went off."

"Nobody called the police?" Lucas asked.

"No."

"I thought that was the correct thing to do," Lucas said. "I mean with the lawer-doctor-advertising set. No violence."

She nodded. "I’ll tell you what, buster. If any guy ever hit me like that, his ass would be in jail ten minutes later. But… sometimes things are more complicated. Audrey didn’t want it. She said he was drunk and didn’t mean anything."

"So that was the end of it."

"Yes. Then, anyway. I was talking to Louise afterwards, and she said that he’d beaten her up before. A couple of times a year."

"And she’d know?"

"Yes… She’s a little younger. Louise is. She’s Rush’s second wife, used to be his secretary. She knows Audrey’s younger sister pretty well, I don’t know how. The sister told Louise that Wilson beats up Audrey a couple of times a year. Sometimes pretty badly."

"Do you think Wilson McDonald could have killed Kresge?"

"Yes," she said. "Not just because I saw him hit Audrey. I was always a little afraid of him. I knew him when I was little-he was five or six years ahead of me at Cresthaven, and my brother knew him. He’s big and fat and mean; he’s got those little mean eyes. He’s a goddamned animal."

Lucas nodded: "Okay."

"Even if he did it, you won’t get him. He’s pretty smart, but most of all, he’s a McDonald," she said. "The Mc-Donalds… they’ve got this family thing. They don’t care what a family member does, as long as he doesn’t get caught at it." She stopped: "No, that’s not quite right: they don’t care what he does, as long as he’s not convicted of it. In their eyes, not being convicted is the same as not doing it. That comes from way back. The first McDonalds were crooks, they stole from the farmers with their mill. The second or third generation were still crooks, and they made millions during the Depression with real estate scams that they ran through Polaris. And they’re still crooks. And they’ve got very good legal advice."

"But don’t quote you."

"Subpoena me first," she said. "Then you can quote me."

"Do you think Louise Freeman would talk to me?"

"Probably. She’s the kind who’d have all the dirt, if I do say so myself."