The Price of Blood pb-1 Read online

  “I know where that is,” said Nina.

  “We have a problem, there’s this thing called the Right to Financial Privacy Act. We’d need a subpoena, a search warrant. I could start that rolling if I had an open case going…”

  He reached for the phone again and called a college friend in Stillwater who ran a travel agency and who owed him a few favors. Broker explained to Don Larson at Larson’s Travel that he might be needing some tap-dancing on the scheduling computer.

  Larson asked was it national or international.

  Broker winked at Nina and pulled his passport from his back jeans pocket and slapped it down on the table. Casually he told Don to check on two round trips to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Nina laughed and held up her palm for a high five.

  Larson reminded him to make sure that his passport was current, to contact the Vietnamese embassy for visas, and to check with the travel clinic at Ramsey Hospital in St. Paul for recommended shots.

  Then Broker had him book a Northwest flight to New Orleans from Detroit early tomorrow morning and a return trip to Minneapolis the following morning. He left it to Don to find him a room. And another flight from Detroit back to the Twin Cities for Nina. She could grab a room at the airport Holiday Inn and wait until he returned from New Orleans. Then he asked Larson to expedite two visas. They’d mail the applications to his office. Larson groaned.

  Nina checked the slim local yellow pages and found a photo shop that took passport photos. They needed two each for the visa forms. They both sat down and filled out the paperwork.

  “Port of entry?” asked Nina.

  “Hanoi. Never been there.”

  “Purpose of visit?” asked Nina straight-faced.

  “Vacation,” said Broker, just as straight-faced.

  He winced at his thumb, which ached, and went back to the phone and checked with Tom again. Two more calls had come into the switchboard at the Best Western for Bevode Fret from LaPorte’s number in New Orleans. And Fret had used a police phone to call LaPorte before they took him to the county jail.

  Then Broker dug in his closet and dressed casually in a light sports coat, jeans, loafers, and a summer shirt. He tossed an extra shirt, a change of underwear, and a travel kit in his overnight bag and retaped his thumb. He changed from his hideout holster to a break-away shoulder rig that fit neatly under his left armpit and stuffed in the Colt.45.

  Nina watched him pack in silence. He set his bag aside and rummaged in his dresser drawers and became agitated. Christ. Did I lose it? Ha. He took out a pendant on a fine yellow chain. She held out her hand to inspect it.

  The tiger tooth was tipped and mounted in yellow metal and discolored from years in the drawer. She pressed her thumbnail into the metal and made a slight dent.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “Luck.” Broker hung it around his neck and tucked it into his shirt. Then he took out his wallet and unfolded the note with Tuna’s scrawled handwriting. He pointed to Trin’s name. “He gave it to me.”

  On the way to the airstrip, they stopped at the photo shop, had pictures made, checked in with Jeffords, and left Tuna’s note and LaPorte’s original map and sonar graphic in his safe in a plain envelope. Next they stopped at the post office, where they express mailed the visa forms with their passports to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Broker wanted to stop for a quick haircut but Nina counseled against it. Keep the ponytail. It would fit in better with the New Orleans scene. An hour later they were winging east, skirting the storm over Superior in a Cessna.

  It was raining when they landed in Ann Arbor and continued to rain as they cabbed into town. From Nina’s cramped student apartment, Broker reconfirmed his appointment with the warden’s office at Milan. Nina drove her Volkswagen Horizon over the familiar route to the prison. Broker toyed with the tiger tooth through his shirt.

  Milan was a three-story brick structure and could have been a big trade school except for the apron of concertina gleaming in the rain on the chain link outer fence and the rifle towers dotting the inner walls.

  They signed in at the bubble, a guard station walled by thick bullet-proof glass. Broker showed his badge and checked his weapon. Access into the visitors’ area was regulated from the bubble through a heavy-barred electrically controlled door. Waldo would be escorted through this sally port and patted down by the guards. After the interview he would be strip searched.

  Beyond the sally port, Broker detected the low grumble of institutional uneasiness. He believed that a prison was a thousand-eyed animal that could intuit a cop through steel walls. He imagined the malice beading and starting to drip.

  Broker had requested extra privacy, so they were led down a corridor past the regular visitors’ rooms. The guard walked them through another locked door and out onto a patio that was like an aviary, surrounded on three sides and partially roofed beyond the overhang with chain link fencing.

  The guard jerked his head. “How’s this for out of earshot?”

  Broker nodded. The guard pointed to a small table with several chairs in a dry spot out of the rain under an overhang. They walked to the table and waited. Out in the mist, cars with their low beams on slowly traveled a slick black road in the emerald gloom of the Michigan countryside.

  24

  Waldo Jenke’s stiff white brushcut scraped the top of the door frame and he oozed toward them with the Silly Putty gait of a Don Martin cartoon from old Mad magazine in size-sixteen tennis shoes. Somewhere around 350 pounds, Broker’s head would just reach and fit into the hollow of the convict’s massive armpit. He wore a freshly laundered baby blue sweatsuit. He had showered recently and Broker could clearly smell corn starch on his skin in the damp air.

  He had mild pink eyes and very white skin, a killer albino rabbit who could bench press six hundred pounds. His doughy face was blank. “What’s this about?” he rasped.

  Then he saw Nina and his eyes eloquently explored her face and roved her body. She had put on khaki slacks, a Madras blouse, sandals, and a scarf that matched the blouse to conceal the bruises on her throat. Jenke’s eyes stopped on the bruises on her forearms, then they slid down her body and fixed on the hard flesh of her bare ankles. He motioned to the guard watching through the window in the door. The guard entered. Jenke whispered to him. The guard turned to Broker.

  “He’s got a book in his cell he wants to give the girl. What do you think?”

  “Fine,” said Broker.

  The guard nodded. “Take a few minutes to fetch it.” He went to the door. They heard him speak to someone in the hall.

  Jenke’s watery eyes finished their rove over Nina and then fixed on Broker and stopped at his taped thumb. He studied the discolored, stitched flesh with interest. His blunt rabbit nose nuzzled the scent of the wound.

  He smiled slightly. His yellow baby teeth were imbedded in massive gums, like crooked kernels of new corn stuck in a cob of bubble gum.

  “You know what this is about,” stated Broker.

  “I ain’t saying shit,” Jenke replied with great deliberation. Then, in a display of elaborately guarded reflexes, he removed a single cigarette from the pack in the kangaroo pocket of his sweats and lit it with a plain matchbook. His big white fingers fluttered. Elegantly long, the fingernails were manicured and dusted with talc.

  Minutes passed. Nina untied the scarf and retied it. Jenke showed two inches of gum in a horrible grin when he saw the bruises on her throat.

  Then he crushed out his smoke and lit another and leaned back, a torpid mountain of flesh. His lips puckered and his chest jerked. Wreaths of smoke rings floated on the damp air and softly tore apart in front of Nina’s face.

  “You notice how I talk funny?” he asked her.

  “I noticed,” she said evenly.

  “Reason is, when I was a kid Andy Devine was my favorite actor. He talked like that because when he was a kid he got stabbed in the throat with a fork.” He grinned. “So I stabbed myself in the throat with a fork.”


  The door opened and the guard came through. He had a battered, water-damaged, blue softcover book in his hand. Broker saw the embossed crucifix on the cover and recognized it as an old Armed Forces New Testament. Jenke took the book and said to Broker in a gravel whisper, “Get the screw out of here.”

  Broker jerked his head at the guard, who nodded and went through the door and watched through a heavy glass window reinforced with mesh. They were alone on the patio.

  As if conveying an object of ceremony, Jenke placed the Bible in the middle of the table. He opened it and pointed to the faded name written on the flyleaf: S. Sgt. James Tarantuna. Again the inquisitive gaze, prompting. Broker nodded.

  Jenke opened the Bible to the place marked with the photograph of Nina. Her college graduation picture. He removed the picture and held it face up in his palm. Then he leaned forward.

  Jenke smiled and flicked the picture in his long fingers, turning it over with almost magical speed. They both read the note printed on the back in blocky ballpoint pen: If he stole it, why’s he buried with it?

  Nina drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Porcupine sweat stabbed the muscles of Broker’s chest where the cool, gold-tipped arc lay, prodding his banging heart.

  Buried implied dig as in dry land. That’s what Tuna’s grave-digger fixation was about.

  He glanced at Nina and saw the same thought ignite in her eyes. They both crouched forward, ready to race from the prison like it had just caught on fire.

  “We’re cool,” said Broker, dry-mouthed.

  “Absolutely,” said Nina in a steady voice.

  Jenke watched their reaction, not particularly impressed, and then prompted with his eyes. You got it. Broker nodded. Yes. Jenke withdrew the picture and artfully, beyond the guard’s line of sight, tore it into quarters, which he hid in his spacious palm as he raised his cigarette to his lips. Quick as a snake he fingered the pieces into his mouth and methodically chewed and then swallowed. Then he nodded a final time. Their business was concluded. His favor to Jimmy Tuna was discharged. Broker didn’t care to think about how it had been incurred.

  Abruptly Jenke got up, turned and lumbered to the door. He nodded to the guard and never looked back. The door opened and Waldo Jenke disappeared.

  The guard came to the table and pointed to the Bible. “He told me that’s for the lady. Because she used to visit Jimmy. No good to Walls. He’s terminally dyslexic. He can’t read word one. All TV, that guy.” The guard paused. “Ah, you all right, miss?”

  “Oh yes,” said Nina. Her eyes glistened. “Just fine.”

  25

  They sat on the floor in Nina’s apartment halfway through a deluxe Domino’s pizza with excitement smearing their eyes as hot as the grease on their fingers. Broker took in the reins on his runaway imagination. When you’re charged up, you overlook things.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Where’s that Bible?” He got up and washed and dried his hands. When he picked up the Bible, Nina squirreled in close and recited, “Everything Jimmy Tuna does is for a reason.”

  “Need a sharp knife,” said Broker.

  With a small paring knife he slit the plump water-swollen back cover and peeled away the mildewed cardboard. He removed a square of folded paper.

  “Bingo,” said Broker.

  “What is it?”

  “Follow the money.” He unfolded the paper and held it up for her to see. “It’s a customer consent form from the goddamn bank allowing Nina Pryce to see his records.”

  “He’s playing games with us,” mused Nina. “Poor Jimmy, sitting on a fortune, then-do not pass go, do not collect ten tons of gold, go directly to jail and get cancer.”

  Abruptly Broker looked her in the eye. Their visit with Waldo had nudged him toward her conspiracy theory. “Nina, this ‘poor’ guy might have killed your father.”

  Nina went out on her small balcony and stood in the light rain for a few minutes. She returned more sober and said, “During the inquiry, it came out. The radio call. They were damaged and setting down for repairs. Remember?”

  Broker remembered. “Tuna testified they didn’t land.”

  “They made an emergency landing.”

  “Maybe,” said Broker.

  “They did, and they dumped my dad with it.” On their knees, bumping foreheads, they unrolled LaPorte’s Xeroxed nautical map. Broker studied the familiar coast of central Vietnam-Quang Tri Province below the old DMZ. Where he’d been. LaPorte had marked the wreck off the coast of the next province to the south, Thua Thien, where Hue City was located.

  Broker shook his head. “That’s for a boat. We need a one to fifty thousand grid, a tactical map. Then what have we got? We could draw an arc around Hue based on a loaded Chinook’s probable flight time. And it was rainy, humid; that affects a chopper’s lift. To handle a ten-ton load they probably cut back on fuel. And it was hit by ground fire. So how do we estimate the air speed or even if they were flying in a straight line? It could be anywhere, north into Quang Tri Province, south. Hell, they could get to Laos. Even if we find him, if he doesn’t have a precise location we’re screwed.”

  But they were getting close.

  Nina’s brow bunched in concentration. “So how do we find him?”

  “It has to be in his banking records. That’s your job.” Broker waved his pizza slice at the consent form on the coffee table. “I go to New Orleans and get reacquainted with Cyrus LaPorte.”

  “I don’t like splitting up,” she said.

  “It’ll save time.”

  Nina studied him carefully and backed off before it became a test of wills. “Okay,” she said.

  Broker nodded. “Up till now it’s been mostly talk. Once I call LaPorte the thing’s in motion.”

  “How are you going to play it?” she asked.

  Broker shrugged. “Burned-out cop starts doing an old war buddy’s daughter a favor and sniffs a stash of found money to which he has a peculiar link. He has a map with a location. He sees a once in a lifetime blackmail angle to parley that map into an early retirement bonus.” Which wasn’t that far from the truth.

  “And me?”

  Broker grinned. “I think you’re the nutcase albatross hanging around everybody’s neck. LaPorte’s playing philanthropist. I’ll appeal to his charitable side to get you some help: Expensive long-term therapy. How’s that sound?”

  “Kiss my rock-hard buns.”

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  Nina reached for the phone and handed it to Broker. “Let’s do it.”

  Broker nodded and punched in the New Orleans number. LaPorte’s screening machine was purely utilitarian. “You have reached…leave a message.”

  After the beep Broker said in his best judgmental cop voice: “This is Det. Lt. Phillip Broker from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We’re old asshole army buddies. Right now I have a fugitive from an Elvis lookalike contest named Bevode Fret cooling it in a jail cell. He keeps getting calls at his hotel room from this number. I also have Ray Pryce’s daughter, who can charge Fret with felonious assault. Let’s talk.” He left Nina’s number.

  The call from New Orleans came back in ten minutes. A callow young voice, “So why should General LaPorte talk to some Yankee copper?”

  “Ask him what doesn’t fly anymore and sits in a hundred feet of water. I’ll be on LaPorte’s doorstep tomorrow at three P.M. Put me first on his schedule.”

  There was a pause. Then, “I’ll pass it on.”

  “Three o’clock in the afternoon, cornpone.” Broker hung up and smiled.

  “You’re having a good time.”

  “Absolutely.” Then Broker pawed in his wallet for the flight numbers and times he’d gotten from Larson. He called J.T.’s home in St. Paul and left a message on his machine. “Calling in a chit. Nina is arriving at Minneapolis-St. Paul on Northwest 97 from Detroit at five-thirty P.M. on Monday. Need you to meet her at the airport. Appreciate it if you could keep an eye on her till I get back in tow
n.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Nina reminded him.

  “I know. I’m just old fashioned.”

  The phone calls completed, Broker leaned back and sighed.

  “Good. What else?”

  “We’re set,” said Nina.

  “My flight leaves Detroit at nine-thirty in the morning.”

  Nina nodded. “I should get you to the gate by nine A.M.”

  “By eight. I need to play credentials with airport security about that.” Broker pointed to the.45 laying in its holster on a chair. “Enough. We need some sleep.”

  26

  Broker took a shower, changed the dressing on his thumb, and swallowed two Tylenol. Leery of using too many antibiotics, he’d left them behind in Minnesota.

  The rain had stopped and now a sweet, warm June breeze teased in through the open windows and balcony door. Nina’d laid out sheets for him on the couch so he draped a sheet toga-fashion around his waist and shoulders and scanned her one-bedroom digs.

  The refrigerator held a barky-looking bottle of V-8 juice, some yogurt with expired labels, and three cans of Vernor’s ginger ale. He opened one of the cans and roamed her space. The books on her desk had titles that suggested she had been taking graduate studies in business administration. No television set. No stereo. No magazines and no houseplants. Like she hung herself in the closet like a bat.

  A scalloped, varnished wooden edge that protruded from between two textbooks caught his eye. He pulled it out. A plaque. A trophy statuette holding a pistol was affixed in gilt relief. And the inscription:

  Captain Nina Pryce, U.S. Army

  45 Caliber Pistol, Second Place,

  50 Yard Slow Fire

  National Inter-Service Match

  1992. Camp Perry, Ohio.

  Reverently, Broker, who barely kept his police qualification at twenty-five yards with his Beretta, tucked the award back between the books. Outshoot her with a rifle, he told himself.