Madman on a Drum Read online

  I let the comment slide, although she was right. You don’t see many luxury sports cars in the parking lot of the St. Paul Police Department. I thumbed my key chain to unlock the doors. When we were both safely inside the Audi, Karen said, “I wish I had a car like this. How much does a car like this cost?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Well, maybe someday.”

  I snapped my seat belt into place, and Karen did the same.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “You know, we could make this a lot easier on ourselves. Just make some phone calls, call the house, call Scottie’s employers, call his mom…”

  “Where to?”

  Karen sighed significantly. “His job first,” she said. “See if he’s been in today. Then the halfway house.”

  I fired up the engine.

  “Do you have a gun?” Karen asked.

  “I can get one.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No guns.”

  “What if …?”

  “No guns,” she repeated.

  “You’re the boss,” I said.

  “Since when?”

  I pulled away from the curb. Bobby and Shelby were watching from the window as I drove off.

  Karen directed me to I-94 and told me to take the Dale Street exit and hang a left. As I drove, she said, “If you’re not a cop, what are you doing here? Why are you doing this?”

  “Call it a favor for a friend.”

  “A favor?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You do a lot of favors like this, McKenzie?”

  “Depends on how you define ‘a lot.’ ”

  “Don’t go all Bill Clinton on me,” she said.

  “Yes, I do a lot of favors for friends. Usually it’s no big deal. Sometimes it involves an element of, ahh…”

  “Danger?”

  “Uncertainty.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can’t do it for themselves and I can.”

  “They can’t call the cops? They can’t call—”

  “An officer of the court?”

  Karen hesitated for a beat and said, “I guess I had that coming.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I told her. “You’re just trying to do your job, and your job has rules.”

  “I’m guessing that you’re the guy who bends them.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me why people call you for favors. You didn’t tell me why you do them.”

  “I used to be a cop. I quit when I became independently wealthy. Only the thing is, I liked being a cop. I liked helping people. I saw a lot of terrible things when I was in harness; I was forced to do some of those terrible things myself, yet I always slept well at night. When my head hit the pillow and I looked back on the day, no matter how crummy the day was, I could always say, ‘The world’s a little bit better place because of what I did.’ It made me feel good; made me feel useful. I used to tell people that I liked being a cop so much that I would have done it even if they didn’t pay me. Now they don’t have to.”

  “So you help friends, even at the risk of your own life, because you think you’re making the world a better place?”

  “Sounds pretentious as all hell, doesn’t it?”

  “Depends on how you define ‘as all hell.’ ”

  I am embarrassed to admit I was glad to finally leave Shelby’s home. It was as if a heavy, wet canvas tarp had been lifted from my shoulders. I felt like I could move again; I felt like I could breathe. When we hit the freeway, I powered down all the car windows and let the warm autumn air slap my face and ruffle my hair. Karen put her hand on the top of her head to keep her own hair from blowing about and gave me an impatient look. I ignored her. I understood Bobby’s frustration at sitting helplessly in his home. Only I was out and about, now. I was being useful.

  We took the Dale Street exit and turned north toward University Avenue. In the old days, this had been one of the most notorious intersections in St. Paul. When I first broke in with the cops, it embodied 20 percent of the city’s adult businesses, including all of its sexually oriented bookstores and movie theaters. It also accounted for over 70 percent of its prostitution arrests. That made it a political issue. To appease voters, the city bought out the X-rated Faust Theater for $1.8 million, and it eventually was transformed into the Rondo Community Outreach Library. The gay-oriented Flick Theater was replaced by a shopping mall. R&R Books was bought for $600,000 to make room for a commercial development, and a strip joint called the Belmont Club became the Western District headquarters of the St. Paul Police Department. Now neighbors don’t find as many condoms on their lawns and sidewalks as they used to, there are fewer sex acts performed by prostitutes and their johns on the street and in alleys, and girls going to school and young women coming from work aren’t as likely to be propositioned. Still, I kind of miss the old neighborhood. It had color, and St. Paul was becoming less and less colorful as we went along.

  I followed Karen’s directions and pulled into the parking lot of a store that sold and mounted brand-name tires under the banner of a well-advertised national chain. Before we left the car, Karen told me that she would do all the talking. I told her to be careful not to use my name.

  A bell chimed when we stepped into the store, and a black man dressed in a blue work shirt looked up at us from the paperwork he was reviewing. He set down a pen and put both hands on the chest-high counter in front of him. Years ago, I took a course that taught officers how to identify drug couriers by observing their facial expressions and body and eye movements. The man smiled when he first saw Karen. Then he raised his upper eyelids showing fear, thrust his jaw forward displaying anger, wrinkled his nose in a sign of disgust, and let the corners of his lips drop down portraying sadness—I’ve known very few people who could burn through so many emotions so quickly.

  “Karen,” he said and extended his hand.

  “Mr. Cousin,” she answered and shook the hand.

  “Did one of my boys go astray?” he asked. The sadness in his voice matched his expression.

  “One of your boys?” I said.

  “Who are you?”

  “He’s with me,” Karen told him. To me she said, “Mr. Cousin has been very good to us. He’s given work to a lot of parolees over the years. A good man.”

  Cousin shrugged off the compliment. “Just trying to help them make it,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Cousin studied me hard. “You’re a cop,” he said.

  I didn’t answer—if he wanted to believe that, it was fine with me.

  Karen flicked her thumb in my direction. “He’s observing,” she said.

  “Is he now?” Cousin wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but he didn’t press it.

  “How many boys do you have?” I asked.

  “Eight. All of my employees are on parole. I try to… Listen. A man, any man, who’s been in the system, I don’t care if he’s guilty or not guilty, I don’t care if he’s been acquitted or exonerated or pardoned or what, I don’t care if he’s just a kid who screwed up or a repeat offender, if you’ve been in the system, you’ll never be considered innocent again. You’ll never be given the benefit of a doubt. People look at you; to them you’ll always be a thief.”

  I had a feeling he was talking about himself, so I asked, “How long have you been out?”

  “Twenty-three years, seven months, eighteen days.” Cousin recited the numbers like a recovering alcoholic who knows the exact moment when he had his last drink. “It took me so long to get a decent job. I started applying when I was in stir. Back then you had to have a job or be assured of getting a job before you got parole. I only responded to the want ads that had a post office box. You don’t make collect calls from Stillwater. I’d tell them they’d never have an employee who would work harder. ‘So what?’ they’d say. ‘We’ll be getting a thief.’r />
  “The jobs I did get, they treated me like a leper, like I had a communicable disease. Or worse. One employer tried to blackmail me, said he was going to accuse me of stealing from the company unless I boosted some TVs for him. I turned him in. Nothing happened except that I had to get another job. When I became manager here, I figured I might be able to help some guys who were like me, guys who did stupid things when they were young and paid the price and now were trying to live it down. The owners, they didn’t care as long as sales were solid, as long as there were no complaints about service. Now I am the owner.”

  “Good for you,” I said, and I meant it, although I doubt it sounded that way.

  “Why are you here?” Cousin asked.

  “Scottie Thomforde,” Karen said.

  “What about him?”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “He’s gone. His shift ended a couple hours ago.”

  “Was he here?”

  “Yeah, he was here.”

  “For his entire shift?” I asked.

  Cousin pressed his lips together, a sign of determination. Or anger. Or both. “What did Scottie do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that he did anything,” Karen said. Her voice was carefully neutral, as if she wanted Cousin to know her presence in his store wasn’t personal. “I was conducting a home visit. He wasn’t where he was supposed to be. You know how that makes me nervous.”

  “Karen, how many guys have gone through here over the years, ex-cons looking for a chance? Got to be forty or fifty. I should add it up someday. Of those guys”—he held up four fingers—“that’s how many violated. That’s how many couldn’t stay away from the bad thing.”

  “You’re a shrewd judge of character,” I said. Again, I was trying to be complimentary. Again, he took it differently.

  “If I pull your tail off, will it grow back?” he asked.

  Karen stepped between us. “About Scottie,” she said.

  Cousin was staring at me when he answered. “I gave Scottie the afternoon. He left at about one. You can check his time card if you want. He said he had some personal matters to deal with.”

  “What personal matters?” Karen said.

  “I didn’t ask. He didn’t tell.”

  “Mr. Cousin, you know better than that.”

  “He’s a good kid.”

  “Would any of your other employees know where he went?”

  “You could ask.”

  We went through sound-resistant glass doors into the back. Three men were working on two cars. They were reluctant to help us for fear of jamming up their co-worker, or because they just didn’t like us, or both. I doubt they would have spoken to us at all if not for the encouragement of Cousin. We didn’t learn much except that Scottie tended to keep to himself—which was a lot different than the Scottie I used to know—and that he had the name “Sticks” stitched to the pocket of his work clothes. In between screeches from the air wrenches, a man with far too many tattoos that had nothing to do with art told us, “I saw him at Lehane’s a couple weeks ago. It was a Saturday.”

  The name alone was enough to send a ripple of fear coursing through both Cousin and me. Lehane’s was a bucket of blood on the East Side that the city had been threatening to close for years. More murders and assaults with deadly weapons have occurred in and around there than in any other one place in the Twin Cities.

  “What the hell were you doing at Lehane’s?” Cousin wanted to know.

  “Do we need to spend more time discussing the terms of your release?” Karen asked.

  The man shrugged and smiled the way some people do when they’re caught doing something they shouldn’t.

  “I take it you’re not the head of the local Mensa chapter,” I said.

  “What’s Mensa?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Shut up,” Cousin told me.

  I shut up.

  “Scottie at Lehane’s—was he with someone?” Karen asked.

  The man grinned. “It’s not the kind of place you go into alone,” he said.

  “Who was he with?”

  “I don’t know. White dude. Had some size to him, like he did a lot of weight lifting, body building.”

  “Did you get a name?”

  “Not then, but the next day I said, ‘Hey, Scottie, who was that woman I saw you with last night?’ You know, tryin’ to be funny. Scottie said, ‘That was no woman. That was T-Man.’ ”

  Cousin winced at the name.

  “Something,” I said.

  Turned out that around the same time, Cousin had invited Scottie to lunch only Scottie begged off. “I have to see the T-Man,” Scottie told him.

  “T-Man?” Karen asked.

  “Yes,” Cousin said.

  “Do you have any idea who that is?”

  “No, but…”

  “What?”

  Cousin said, “Back in the old days, when Elliot Ness was chasing Al Capone, that’s what they used to call agents of the Treasury Department. T-men.”

  “That went well,” Karen said when we were back in the Audi. “Do you think you could have been any more condescending?”

  “I thought I was the soul of restraint,” I said.

  “Is that what you call it. God, once a cop, always a cop.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know, McKenzie, there’s a big difference between being on parole and being on probation.”

  “Is there?”

  “If a man is out on parole, it’s because he did his time. He paid the price for his mistakes, and now he’s trying to make the transition from prison life to real life. But you cops refuse to give him a break. You confuse him with offenders who are serving probation, offenders who were convicted of crimes but instead of being sent to prison or jail are slapped on the wrist and told to ‘be good.’ I don’t blame you if you’re pissed off at them.

  “There are twenty times more criminals on probation than in prison. That’s because ninety-six percent of the felony convictions in Minnesota are achieved through guilty pleas and seventy-eight percent of those convictions result in probation—so, yeah, I can understand why you might get frustrated, you and the cops. Especially since thirty percent of the criminals are going to keep on offending and not much bad is going to happen to them. They’ll commit one offense and get probation and then commit another offense and get probation and then another and another. Seven out of ten offenders are going to go straight; they’re going to learn their lesson. But that thirty percent—I knew one offender who was serving twenty-two probations simultaneously, all of them theft related. The judges who sentenced him just didn’t believe the nature of his new offenses warranted time.

  “That’s just the way it is. In Minnesota only the most nefarious offenders go to prison. The state legislators set it up that way. Maybe they did it because it costs over forty thousand dollars to send an offender to prison for a year and only eighteen hundred to monitor an offender who’s on probation. Maybe they’re just too cheap to spend the money to build more prisons to make room for all those offenders. I don’t know. I only know it’s not my fault and it isn’t the fault of my parolees, so cut it out. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but only to maintain peace in the car, only to secure Karen’s future cooperation. See, it wasn’t an offender out on probation that kidnapped Victoria Dunston. It was one of her parolees. Besides, two out of five ex-cons return to prison for one reason or another, I don’t care how well they behave while on parole, so what difference did it make?

  At Karen’s direction I hung a right on University and headed east. On the way I called Harry on my cell. Probably I should have called Special Agent Honsa since he was in charge, but I didn’t know him. I told Harry that we hadn’t learned much so far, only that Scottie Thomforde had had the entire afternoon free to kidnap Victoria.

  “Something else,” I said. “He has a friend called T-Man. I don’t have anything more on him except that he apparently showed up a
couple of weeks ago.”

  “About the time the white van was stolen,” Harry said.

  “He’s big from weight lifting.”

  “Big enough to carry a squirming eighty-pound girl to a waiting van, I bet.”

  “Maybe he did his body building in prison.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first.”

  6

  As we drove toward the state capitol campus at the far end of University Avenue, it occurred to me that St. Paul was fast becoming the most boring city in America. Take the name. The city was originally called Pig’s Eye Landing after its founder, Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, a notorious and thoroughly likable fur trader turned moonshiner, until a French priest came along and decided it wasn’t PC enough. That was just the beginning. St. Paul had always been a city of neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods used to have names with character: Beanville, Bohemian Flats, Frogtown, Swede’s Hollow, Cornbread Valley, Oatmeal Hill, Shadow Falls. Sure, some people still use those names, old-timers mostly, only you’ll rarely see them in official documents. That’s because in 1975, St. Paul formed community councils in seventeen districts and charged them with creating new “neighborhoods” whose boundaries were influenced more by streets and traffic flow than by shared identity and communal history. These districts were given politically acceptable names like Como, Midway, Summit Hill, and Battle Creek. Take “the Badlands.” That’s a name now known to only a few people who actually grew up there and a handful of researchers at the Minnesota Historical Society. Yet at one time, the Badlands was as prosperous a neighborhood as any in St. Paul. ’Course, that was before Interstates 94 and 35E carved it into pieces and scattered them among the conservatively named Thomas-Dale, Downtown, and Dayton’s Bluff districts.

  Karen directed me northeast from the capitol to a residential street near the Gillette Children’s Hospital, where we found a sprawling two-story building shaped like a horse shoe with a courtyard at the center. It had once been a hotel, considered quite swank, that was rumored to have been the last hideout of Dillinger accomplice Homer Van Meter before he was gunned down by cops at University and Marion Street, about half a mile away.