The Last Kind Word (Mac McKenzie #10)

The Last Kind Word (Mac McKenzie #10) Page 74

I parked Josie on one of the cobblestone streets surrounding Rice Park and went on alone. The park was created in 1849, the same year St. Paul was named capital of the Minnesota Territory, and was flanked by the Romanesque Revivalist jewel that is the Landmark Center, the luxurious crescent-shaped St. Paul Hotel, the Renaissance-style Central Public Library, and the opulent Ordway Center for the Performing Arts—each building as rich in history as the park itself. It was a prime lounging area for the city’s downtown worker bees, who were drawn there by the period streetlamps, benches, and honest-to-God grass, trees, and flower gardens. There were ice sculptures and trees laced with webs of light in the winter, and music, mostly jazz and blues, in the summer, and nearly every day of the year there was a vendor on the corner happy to sell you soft drinks, coffee, soft pretzels, hot dogs, and juicy Polish sausages from his umbrella-covered cart.

At the center of the park was a large round fountain. I didn’t see Shelby, so I sat on the low brick wall containing the fountain and waited. The clock on the Landmark Center told me it was 6:07 P.M. I started tapping the face of my watch, or rather the watch I had borrowed from Skarda. There was a bronze figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald near the street vendor and a clutch of statues depicting the Peanuts characters created by Charles M. Schulz, both St. Paul natives. I was debating which author had the greater cultural impact when I saw her zigging and zagging her way through what remained of the rush-hour crowd. Shelby was hurrying the way some women do when they’re inexcusably late, eyes staring straight ahead, chin up, chest out, walking with quick steps just this side of a trot. I had never seen a man walk like that no matter how late he was. She was carrying a black bag by a strap draped over her shoulder and a manila envelope that she clutched to her chest. Her dress was black, low cut, and inexplicably tight and ended half a dozen inches above her knees. I had seen the dress before—on Nina Truhler.

When she reached the fountain, I said, “What the hell, Shelby?”

“Sorry I’m late.”

“I don’t mean about that. I mean the dress.”

“Do you like it? It’s Nina’s.”

“I know it’s Nina’s. Why are you wearing it?”

“I’m the mother of two teenage girls. I don’t have any femme fatale outfits.”

“You’re not supposed to look like a femme fatale. You’re supposed to look like you work for the DVS. Wearing that dress, every man and most of the women within a three-mile radius are watching you this very moment.”

“You think so?” Her face brightened like someone impressed by the prize she found in her Cracker Jack box. “Are you being watched?”

“Not anymore.”

“I should sit down.”

“No,” I said, only Shelby wasn’t listening. She nestled next to me on the stone wall, her skirt riding dangerously up her thighs. I averted my eyes, fixing them on the street vendor.

“Bobby is going to kill me,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. He promised that was going to happen. Right after Nina gets through with you.”

“You told him?”

“Of course I did. I tell Bobby everything.”

“Nina, too? Why did you involve her?”

“Because I needed to borrow a dress. She wants to know why you didn’t call her, by the way. So does Bobby.”

“I couldn’t remember her phone number.”

Shelby began to laugh. She laughed so hard and vigorously that I was afraid she’d fall backward into the fountain.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said.

“All right, all right…”

“I want to be there when you tell her.”

“Is that envelope for me?”

“Take a good look, McKenzie. You are never going to see this dress again.”

“This is what comes from trying to be a good citizen.”

“I’m going to have them carve that on your tombstone. Honest to God, McKenzie…”

Shelby handed me the envelope. It was unsealed. I reached inside and pulled a sheaf of documents halfway out and looked them over.

“Chad, the guy from the ATF, he said the report with the paper clip in the center is the one you want.” I found it, studied it without separating the pages from the others. “If you think Bobby and Nina are miffed—those guys, Chad and Harry, oh my.”

“You spoke to them?”

“They were both there when Chad gave me the envelope. Mostly I listened as they shouted at each other. Chad kept saying everything would be fine. Harry was pretty sure it wouldn’t be. He kept saying, ‘It’s McKenzie, it’s McKenzie,’ as if that alone should warn Chad how bad things can get.”

“Harry’s just cranky because the FBI moved its headquarters from downtown Minneapolis to Brooklyn Center. A lot of crime in Brooklyn Center—150 percent above the state average, something like that.”