Par four, p.1
Par Four, page 1
part #2 of Jake Hines Series
Elizabeth Gunn
Par Four
A Jake Hines Mystery
◈Desert Mist Press◈
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual situations or real persons living or deceased is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999-2013 Elizabeth Gunn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
Cover design by Bret Norwood. Photo: Gino Santa Maria/Photos.com
Third ebook edition 2013
First hardcover edition published in the United States by Walker & Co, 1999.
Walker & Co Hardcover: 0-8027-3324-7
Dell Paperback: 0440226368
Acknowledgements
When I began this book, John Sibley, deputy chief of police in Rochester, Minnesota, since retired, was my key resource in law enforcement. Besides his patient guidance, I got generous help from Roger Peterson, who was lieutenant in charge of the detective division when Par Four began, advanced to deputy chief while I was writing it, and has just been named chief of police for Rochester. Others who have earned my sincere thanks are: Lt. Ron Wegman, a literate and kindly practitioner of critical incident debriefing; Officer Mike Beery, one of the first POP officers in Rochester and an eloquent champion of the program; Sgt. Louis Bode, the vice detective who illuminated the murky world of the drug trade in the heartland; Lt. John O'Neil, tactical commander of the Emergency Response Unit, and the several members of his team who treated me to an unforgettable overview of their gear and procedures; Gary Kaldun, head scientist at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul, an affable guide to the wizardry of forensic sleuthing; and Officer Greg Meyer in whose company I experienced the breathtakingly unpredictable world of the street cop.
1
✜
There was plenty to love about my roomy new office at the end of the hall, beginning with a gleaming brass nameplate on the door that said “Lt. Jake Hines, Investigations.” I intended to take my time moving in, Tuesday morning, and get all my stuff put away before I worried about earning my pay raise. But Lulu Breske blindsided me before I even got my computer set up. I was crawling around behind the desk, trying to remember how the monitor plugs into the CPU, when she banged the door open and yelled, “Jake Hines! You in here?”
She startled me and I jumped. My head hit the corner of the desktop, and for a few seconds I thought maybe I’d gone blind.
“Jesus, Lulu.” I groped my way to my feet and rubbed my head, where a lump was rising. “What are you hollering about? I’m right here.”
“How’s come you never answer my messages?” She aimed her clipboard at me like an Uzi. “Three times, I called you yesterday. What’s the matter, you forget how to work your voice mail? Okay, your CID is set for seven-thirty tonight, sign here.” She pointed to the line with my name on it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. “What CID?”
“The drug bust, the high-speed chase, whatever that screw-up was Sunday night. That’s your name right there, isn’t it? Know any other Jake Hines in the department? So sign it and I’ll be outta here.”
“Aw, Lulu, that wasn’t my collar, I just happened to get in the way by accident.”
“Argue with the Chief about that. He says notify everybody on the list, I’m gonna notify everybody.”
“Well, I don’t have time for any meetings right now, Lulu. I’m just moving into my new job here, I’m buried in paperwork.” I waved my arm at my clean, empty desk. All the junk I usually keep there was still sitting in boxes on the floor.
Lulu stared at the shiny wood veneer for a couple of seconds. “Uh-huh.” She turned to the door. “So, you want me to put down here that you’re refusing your CID?”
“Of course not,” I said, indignantly. It hadn’t even occurred to me to refuse it. I was just trying to weasel out of it.
CID is copspeak for Critical Incident Debriefing. Conventional wisdom in the law enforcement community now says cops who encounter high-stress situations should debrief as soon as possible. We’re supposed to blow off any leftover emotions that might be hanging around, so we won’t turn into a bunch of crazies and self-destruct. Somebody noticed the high rate of alcoholism and suicide cops have, I guess, and decided we need counseling.
And not just cops. Firefighters after big fires, medical crews that work disasters, they’re all being encouraged to sit around afterwards and tell how it happened. They’re supposed to say how they felt about it, too, like, “I keep hearing that woman scream,” or, “I feel like I never want to eat again.” Sometimes, I’ve heard, they even hug.
“It’s an idea whose time has come,” an intern named Josh Hyde told me, beaming as if he’d just found gold in his sock. He helped with a jaws-of-death extrication on the highway after an eight-car pileup. Describing the debriefing he attended afterwards, he said a couple of paramedics got into a screaming match, and a driver named Manahan cried.
“That made them feel better?”
“I don’t know about them,” he said. “But I sure got rid of a lot of baggage.” Josh picks up jargon fast.
CID’s are usually run by peers, volunteers who get extra training in counseling. You can tell when somebody’s signed up to be a debriefer. He starts toting books around, with titles like, A Team Approach to Stress Management. A guy whose conversation has reliably been along the lines of “How about those Twins?” will start using words like epiphany and sooner or later he’ll probably say, “We feel it’s helpful to get those feelings out in the open where we can deal with them.”
Which was just what I didn’t want to do. Dodging an occasional bullet is an inconvenience I can live with, but spilling my guts in public is not. I’m not a big hugger, and I got more than my share of counseling while I was growing up as a ward of the State of Minnesota. Now that I’m a grownup, I try not to let strangers mess with my head.
By accident, though, I got in the middle of a high-speed chase and a questionable arrest, last Sunday night, that left all the participants unhappy. When the Chief heard the details, he set up a CID. Lulu’s task, as his secretary, was to make sure I got word of the time and place. Mine, as I saw it, was to stay out of her sight till it was over or she forgot about me, whichever came first.
My phone rang. I pounced on it like a dog on a bone.
“Rowdy’s Bar’s been robbed,” Schultzy said from the dispatch desk. I could hear the backchatter from the other consoles nearby. “They say the owner’s taped up in the basement and the safe is wide open.”
“Anybody responded?”
“I sent two cars, Stearns and Donovan, but Ed says send an investigator. I can’t find anybody. Where is everybody? Can you go?”
I opened my mouth to say, “I’m not even moved into my new office yet,” but Lulu was standing there with her list, so I said, “Sure. Hold on a sec.” I put the phone against my chest and said, “Got an emergency, Lulu. Robbery call, possible injury.”
“Fine. But I notified you about your CID, so now you know,” Lulu said. “Seven-thirty tonight in the small meeting room, go or don’t go, no skin off my nose.” She stomped out noisily on her tortured heels.
To the phone, I said, “You send an ambulance?”
“They don’t think they need one. You decide. You want the address? Fourteen…..”
“I know it.” My second year in college, I dealt hamburgers off the arm at Rowdy’s Bar. “This owner, you mean Babe Krueger, right?”
“Uh…don’t have that information. It’ll be whoever’s in the basement wrapped up in duct tape, I guess.”
“You sent a fingerprint team yet?”
“No. You think?”
“Uh-huh. Soon’s you can get ‘em up there.” Rowdy’s must have fingerprints going back to the Hoover administration. Getting a team there fast might make the exercise marginally less futile. Physical evidence in a bar is always a can of worms. Everything’s sticky and smells like secondhand beer. Rowdy’s has a restaurant and pool hall, too, so add fifty years of grease and chalk dust.
I checked an unmarked car out of the parking garage. Driving up the ramp, I opened the windows to dump the underground air. August street air flowed in, still with a high percentage of toasted petroleum and rubber, but suggesting mulch and lawn cuttings, too. The maple trees by the Second Avenue bridge stood motionless in midmorning heat, reflected almost exactly in the slow-moving water. Rutherford was having a hot, dry summer; the river was low. Where the stream turned, east of the bridge, a sand spit was growing out from the bank
I turned right, drove east four blocks and turned left again on Sixth Avenue, rolling past tidy red brick apartment houses with hedges around small front yards. North of Tenth Street, the houses began to get shabbier, and some of the lawns grew weeds and trash. At the intersection on Twelfth, one of the corner buildings was boarded up, and the house next to it had a broken window. I was driving into the failing neighborhood old-timers call the North End. Rowdy’s was just ahead.
I parked by the front door, where a thin man in a white apron was turning the “Closed” sign to read “Open.” He unlocked the door and said “Hi, c’mon in.”
I held up my badge, opened my mouth to ask for the owner and he said, “Oh. They’re all still downstairs. Go to the back and turn left.”
Rowdy’s looked pretty much the way I remembered it, not improved any in fourteen years but not deteriorating like the rest of the neighborhood either. Maybe the gr
Babe Krueger was in her office chair. Duct tape bound her arms to the chair arms. Her legs were wrapped in tape to the thighs and then taped as a unit to one leg of the desk. Her mouth was taped shut, too. Little strangled sounds came out of her.
Stearns and Donovan were standing beside her, making tentative, unhappy moves.
Suddenly, Stearns reached across her face and ripped the tape off her mouth with one quick, gutsy move.
“Ah,” she said, sucking air. “Hoo.” She breathed while we watched, opening her mouth as wide as it would go, inhaling, exhaling, “Ah, hoo.” She rolled her tongue around behind her lips and said, hoarsely, “Could you get me some water, please? Right in there.”
I brought a glass of water from the bathroom and bent over her, holding it to her lips. Her cheeks were streaked with dirt and tears. Some gray hairs showed along the part in her sweat-caked hair. She gulped the water noisily, dribbling a little out of one side of the glass.
“Sorry,” I said, and Babe came up for air and said, “Shit, don’t worry about a little spilled water, honey, I wet my pants twice since those freaks left me this way.” There was, I saw, a puddle under her chair. She squinted up at me suddenly and said, “Jake? Is that you?”
I’ve probably filled out a little since I was nineteen. She was changed, too; it made me sad to see how much. Guys used to come to Rowdy’s Bar just to look at her, a lively mover with a wonderful mane of red hair, and a what-the-hell smile that lit up the whole North End.
Her name was Babe Thorson then. She could carry nine hamburgers on one arm, and in my wildest dreams I used to enjoy guessing at some of her other skills. A steady stream of ardent boyfriends waited to take her out after work, but Babe surprised us all by marrying Art Krueger, the dour proprietor of Rowdy’s Bar. Five years later, after she dropped the charges from the last beating he gave her, Art signed a divorce settlement that gave her the bar. From what I’ve heard that’s the last good luck Babe Krueger had with men.
“Yup, it’s me,” I said. “Let’s see about getting you loose.” To Donovan I said, “Got some gloves with you? This duct tape will give us great fingerprints if we’re careful getting it off.”
“Forget that,” Babe said, “The guys who taped me up wore surgical gloves the whole time they were here.”
“Oh,” I said, “well.” Wincing, Mary Agnes Donovan reluctantly peeled a couple of inches of duct tape off Babe’s bare arm. Babe yelled in pain.
“How about we just cut it in enough places to get her out of the chair?” Stearns suggested, “and run her over to the emergency room? The Nurses’ll have stuff over there to make it easier.” His old-cop’s eyes said, “Find a way to bag this.” The stuffy crowded office already stank of rage and urine, and was getting worse fast as our anxiety added more sweat.
“No, piss on it, go ahead,” Babe said. “I need to get goin’! Just pull it fast so it won’t hurt so much, willya?”
We found a big pair of scissors and went to work. She grunted a couple of times through her set jaw, but she never yelled again. In five minutes, we had most of the tape off.
As soon as she was free she bolted for the bathroom. There was the sound of a lot of flushing, and then she came out and said, “Can you hang tough a couple of minutes while I change clothes? I stink like a damn sewer.” She took some garments out of a closet behind her desk and disappeared again.
“Well, no use all of us standing around here, I guess,” Al Stearns said, “You need any more help with this, Jake?”
“Better stick around till we’re sure she’s okay,” I said, “and then, yeah, you guys might as well roll. Can’t do much police work in a crime scene while they’re serving lunch in it.” I looked around the dingy office. “Is everything down here the way you found it? Except for the tape?”
“You were right behind us, Jake,” Donovan said, “We never had time to touch anything but her.”
“Fine,” I said, “I’m going upstairs and talk to the employee who found her. Come get me, will you, when she’s ready to talk?”
The thin cook who had opened the door for me was shaking grease off a basket of french-fries as I slid onto a stool nearest the bar. He dumped the fries alongside a burger and set the plate in front of a white-haired man with a red nose.
“There you are, Neely, my man,” he said. “You want some more coffee with that?” He poured it, then came to my end of the counter and said, “Now, what can I do for you?”
I held up my badge again, said, “Jake Hines, Detective Division. Were you the one who placed the call?”
“Yup. She all right?”
“She seems to be doing okay. We got her out of the tape and she’s changing clothes. Were you the first one who found her?”
“That’s right. Came to work the way I always do, turned on the range and started some coffee–”
“Wait. Can we back up a little? Could I have your name first?”
“Sure.” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Have anything I got, I guess. Ain’t much, though. I’m just the cook. John Floogey, spelled P-f-l-u-e-g-e. Call me Jack.” He rattled off his address, phone number, social security.
“Okay, Jack, how’d you get in this morning? You have your own key?”
“Sure. Have to. I open up.”
“So…”
“So I walked in and went to work, same as usual.”
“Anybody else here?”
“No. Well, Babe was downstairs, but I didn’t know that. All the lights was out, the air conditioning was off, I figured I was the first one in. Turned everything on, started the grill up, made the coffee.
“Then Dozey come in, he’s the dishwasher. Peeled some potatoes while I cut up cabbage for slaw.”
“He have a key too?”
“Nope. I left the back door unlocked for him, like always. You wanna talk to him? He’s swampin’ out the johns.”
“I’ll see him next, thanks. Then what?”
“Bartender come in. Then we all started sayin’, ‘Well, where’s Babe?’ Time she got the tills out, set up the registers. We’re supposed to open by eleven. I needed some sugar and catsup out of the storeroom. I said I’ll go get that and then if Babe’s not here I’m gonna call her.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, put his hands over his mouth and breathed through them like a man fighting frostbite.
“I still can’t hardly believe this next part,” he said softly. “I turned on the lights ahead of me as I went downstairs. Had a bus box in my hands, for carrying stuff back up. The office lights are on the same switch, but the door was closed, so I didn’t pay no attention to the light under the door…but when I went by it I heard these funny noises comin’ out of there. Like to made my heart stop. I told myself, must be a rat, but it didn’t sound like no rat. I tried the door, holding the box out in front of me, ready to hit whatever come at me, but it was locked. So I knelt down and looked through that screened vent in the middle of the door. Boy, my ol’ heart was just goin’ like this, y’know? And then, hell’s fire, there was Babe’s eyes starin’ right at me. An’ her fastened up every which way to the desk and the chair, and doin’ her best to holler through that tape.”
“Did you try to get her loose?”
“I couldn’t! I don’t have the keys to her office!” Jack raised his arms, palms up in an I-give-up gesture. “I’m just the cook….” It seemed to be his mantra. “I hollered through the door, ‘I’ll call the cops, Babe, hang on!’ and I run back upstairs to the phone. Dialed nine-one-one, answered all the questions they asked me, best I could, and hung up and run back down and told her help was on the way. She nodded her head a couple times and rolled her eyes towards upstairs. So I said, ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll get ‘er open,’ and that’s what we done, Dozey and me and Red, he’s the bartender. Only we still ain’t got no money to work with. Lucky we only had a couple of regulars so far, we’re just gonna have them sign chits till Babe gets some new tills ready.”
