The Cold Nowhere

47

Maggie made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Minneapolis in less than two hours in her rented inferno-orange Corvette. Driving the sports car, she began to wonder if it was finally time to give up her Avalanche and buy something that was built for speed. The growl of the engine, and the vibration under her seat as she hit ninety miles an hour, made her horny. Or maybe it was the pain medication. Or maybe it was Ken. She couldn’t be sure.

She exited I-35W near the Metrodome and made her way east to the Seven Corners area. This was her old stomping-ground. She’d spent her college years at the University of Minnesota, where she was a Chinese exchange student majoring in criminology. As she drove, everything on the street reminded her of those years. The students on the sidewalks looked exactly like her, except for their cell phones and iPads. Crazed Minneapolis bicyclists still did fearless battle with the cars. She saw pro-Palestinian graffiti on the brick wall of an apartment building — different era, same politics. She passed a 24-hour greasy spoon where she’d spent hundreds of hours gobbling up American hamburgers with her nose buried in her books.

She never partied back then. She never drank. She didn’t have sex. She just studied. She would have had more fun if she’d gone to school now.

Maggie found a parking place in front of a Chinese restaurant near 19th and Riverside. The parole officer for Djemilah Jordan had told her that Fong Dao’s ex-girlfriend was now a hostess at the Lucky Pearl, and it looked like the girl had gone clean after her stint in prison. Maggie got out and plugged the meter. The drab concrete towers of the Riverside Plaza loomed behind the low roofs of the retail strip. She smelled stir-fried beef through the vents of the restaurant, and it smelled good. She realized she was hungry.

Inside the restaurant, most of the tables were empty, except for a couple students hanging out over cold tea. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. A black woman of about thirty, with beaded hair and a nose ring, looked up from an accounting textbook.

‘Table for one?’ the woman asked, smiling behind thick lips. She was tall and bony, and she wore a Lucky Pearl T-shirt and drainpipe orange corduroys.

‘Yeah. Way in the back, okay?’

‘Sure.’

The woman led her to a table in a dark, deserted section of the restaurant, near the door to the kitchen. Maggie felt warm steam and heard Asian voices chattering behind the swinging doors. There were fake gold masks hanging on the walls and cheaply framed posters of Tiananmen Square.

Maggie waved away the menu. ‘Give me some salt and pepper chicken wings. Do you do shrimpcake with baby bok choi?’

‘Uh huh. It’s real good.’

‘That’s what I want.’

‘You’re easy,’ the woman said, smiling.

‘I get that a lot. So are you Djemilah Jordan?’

The woman’s smile vanished. ‘Cop?’

Maggie flipped the lapel of her leather jacket to reveal her badge. ‘Duluth.’

‘Duluth? I ain’t been there in years.’

‘I know. I’ve got some questions that go way back.’

‘I’m straight now. I’m in college.’

‘So I hear. Good for you. I still have questions. Your parole officer assured me you would be a model of cooperation.’

‘About what?’

‘First, chicken wings,’ Maggie said. ‘I’m starving.’

Djemilah disappeared behind the doors of the kitchen. She returned five minutes later with a plate of salt-and-pepper wings, steaming hot, with chunks of chopped jalapeno and pepper flakes clinging to the crispy skin. Maggie disassembled one of the wings and gnawed meat from the mini-drumstick.

‘These are great,’ she said. ‘Have a seat, Djemilah. Let’s chat.’

The woman eyed the front of the restaurant. There were no customers. She pulled out a chair and sat down, positioning herself so she could watch the door. ‘What do you want?’

‘Tell me about Fong Dao,’ Maggie said.

Djemilah frowned. ‘He’s dead.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m talking to you. You were his girlfriend back then, right?’

The woman dug into her pocket for her wallet and pulled out a wrinkled photograph and slapped it on the table. The picture showed a young boy, ten or eleven years old, with cropped black hair and a serious face. ‘That’s my son. Maybe you want to come back to my apartment and explain to him how you people killed his father.’

‘Fong was never getting out of prison,’ Maggie said. ‘I feel bad for you and your son, but when you shoot a woman in the head, your life is over. Fong did this to himself. If he had a kid, he should have known better.’

‘Fong didn’t kill that woman,’ Djemilah said.

‘I’m not here to argue with you. I just need information.’

‘Yeah? Why do you even care after all these years?’

‘Back then, we thought Fong did this all by himself. Now we think he had an accomplice. Probably more than one. We need to know who.’

‘You’re wrong.’

Maggie sighed. She had a photograph in her coat pocket, and she showed it to Djemilah. It was a close-up of the diamond and emerald ring that had hung around Cat’s neck for years. ‘You ever seen this ring before?’

‘Pretty,’ Djemilah said. ‘No, I never seen it before.’

‘It belonged to the woman who was killed in the home invasion. Ten years ago, this ring was in the possession of a man named Marty Gamble. Does that name mean anything to you? Did you or Fong know him?’

‘No.’

Maggie removed another photograph from her pocket. ‘This is Marty Gamble. Does he look familiar?’

Djemilah shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Take a good look.’

The woman picked up the photograph and studied it. ‘Never seen him. If he had the ring, then he must have killed that woman, not Fong, right? That’s what I’ve been telling you.’

‘This man worked construction in the Duluth area. Did Fong ever do anything like that to pick up extra money?’

‘Construction? No way. Fong wasn’t made for shit like that. He was small. Smaller than me.’

‘Who did Fong hang out with?’ Maggie asked.

‘He didn’t have a lot of friends. He was quiet. I liked that, you know? Me and him, we hung out alone most of the time.’

‘Where did you hang out?’

‘My place, mostly. I lived with my aunt.’

‘Did you go to bars? Did you ever go to Curly’s?’

‘Are you kidding? That’s a good way to get a bottle in the head, you know? I wasn’t into that. Neither was Fong.’

Maggie picked up another chicken wing, but she found that she was losing her appetite. Plus, her neck was throbbing, and she had a headache behind her eyes. ‘Djemilah, I’m not trying to hang anything on you. It sounds like you and Fong were close. I’m sure he wanted to protect you. The thing is, Fong didn’t do this job alone.’

Djemilah leaned across the table. The beads in her hair clicked together. ‘He didn’t do it at all.’

‘We found jewelry and cash from the burglary at his place. Plus the gun.’

‘You guys planted it.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Come on? Seriously? That’s your story?’

‘Well, somebody did. Fong was framed. He didn’t do it.’

‘Fong did a year for half a dozen identical burglaries in the Cities before he moved to Duluth.’

‘Not with a gun,’ the woman retorted. ‘He never used a gun. He never even owned a gun. I would have known.’

‘Six months before the Keck shooting, there were two unsolved burglaries in Duluth. We found merchandise from those crimes in Fong’s apartment with his fingerprints on them.’

Djemilah sucked her lower lip between her teeth. ‘Okay, look, that summer, I found out I was pregnant. Understand? We were barely making ends meet with the two of us. So Fong, yeah, he did those couple jobs, just like you said. I didn’t know. He was looking for money to make it easier for us, and when I found out, I blew my top. I said if he ever did anything like that again, I’d kick him to the street with one of my heels up his ass. I’m telling you, you don’t want to see me mad, and I was mad. He swore he would never do it again, and he didn’t.’

‘So he committed the first two burglaries, but not the third?’

‘That’s the way it was.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Sounds to me like he kept you out of it when he planned the Keck job. He didn’t want you getting mad at him again.’

‘Hey, I did get mad after he was arrested! I figured he was guilty, but he swore up and down he didn’t do it, and I believed him. Somebody set him up.’

‘Even assuming that’s true, who could have done that to him? Did he give you any names?’

Djemilah shrugged. ‘It could have been anybody. Fong had a job at the hospital, you know? People at the hospital, they all knew about his past. Doctors, nurses, staff, whoever. It was easy to blame him. Somebody gets robbed, everybody looks at the ex-con.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ Maggie said. ‘Most of them reoffend sooner or later.’

‘Not Fong. He was done with that. And definitely not with a gun. Let me tell you something: if I thought he did what you people said, I’d spit on his grave. I wouldn’t lie for him. My life went to hell after he got locked up, and I’m only digging out now. But you people were wrong.’

Maggie held up the photograph of Marty Gamble. ‘Look again, Djemilah. This man was involved in the burglary that killed Rebekah Keck. If Fong is guilty, then he had ties to this man. If Fong is innocent, then this man knew enough to pin the crime on him. Somehow their lives intersected. Do you have any idea how they could be connected?’

The front door to the restaurant banged. Two Asian college students came inside and waved. Djemilah stood up from the table.

‘I gotta go,’ she said, ‘and the answer is no. I don’t know that man, and neither did Fong.’