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“You should have told us,” Lucas said.
“I was scared. Mr. McCarthy said . . .” They both turned and looked at McCarthy.
“It was too much all at once. You were grilling him, everybody was ru
“Well, we sure made a mistake doing it this way,” Smithe said. “My family knew I was gay, my parents and my brothers and sisters and a few friends back home, but most people in my high school didn’t, most of the people around the home place . . .”
He suddenly sat down and started to sob. “Now they all know. You know how hard it’ll be to go back to the farm? My home?”
McCarthy stood up and kicked his chair.
In the lobby of the detention center, Lucas stopped at a phone and made a single call.
“Lucas Davenport,” he said. “Can you meet me someplace discreet? Quickly?”
“Sure,” she said. “Name the place.”
He named a used-book store on the north side of the loop. When she arrived, he thought how out-of-place she looked. With her perfect hair and faultless makeup, she wandered through the stacks like Alice in Wonderland, stu
“Lucas,” she whispered when she saw him.
“A
“What I’m going to tell you now must be kept a secret. You must give me journalistic immunity or I can’t tell you,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. Introduction to Method Acting 1043, two credits.
“Yes, of course,” she blurted. Her breath smelled like ci
“This gay fellow arrested for the maddog murders? He didn’t do it,” Lucas whispered. “He has two excellent alibis that are being checked out even as we speak. He should be released late this afternoon. No one, but no one, knows this outside the police department, except you. If you wait until three-thirty or so, you can probably catch his attorney—you know McCarthy, the public defender?”
“Yes, I know him,” she said breathlessly.
“You can catch him outside the detention center, signing Smithe out. Better stake the place out around three o’clock. I don’t think it could happen earlier than that.”
“Oh, Lucas, this is enormous.”
“Yeah. If you can keep it exclusive. And I’ll give you another tip, but this also has to come from ‘an informed source.’ ”
“What?”
“These women were supposedly raped, but nobody ever found any semen. They think the killer may be using some kind of . . . foreign object because he’s impotent.”
“Oh, jeez. Poor guy.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“What kind of object?”
“Uh, well, we don’t know exactly.”
“You mean like one of those huge rubber cocks?” The words came tripping out of her perfect mouth so incongruously that Lucas felt his chin drop.
“Uh, well, we don’t know. Something. Anyway, if you handle this right and protect me, I’ll have more exclusive tips for you. But right now I’ve got to get out of here. We can’t be seen together.”
“Not yet, anyway,” she said. She turned to go, and then stepped back.
“Listen, when you call me at the station, they’ll know who my source is if you keep leaving your name. I mean, if you can’t get me.”
“Yeah?”
“So maybe we should use a code name.”
“Good idea,” Lucas said, dumbfounded. He took a card from his wallet, wrote his home phone number on the back of it. “You can call me at the office or at home. I’ll be one place or the other when I call you. When I call, I’ll say ‘Message for McGowan: Call Red Horse.’ ”
“Red Horse,” she whispered, her lips moving as she memorized the phrase. “Red Horse. Like the horse in chess?”
More like the fish, the red horse sucker, Lucas thought. McGowan stepped forward another step and kissed him on the lips, then with a flash of black eyes and fashionable wool coat was gone down the stacks.
The store owner, an unromantic fat man who collected early editions of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, appeared in the dim aisle and said, “Jesus, Lucas, what’re you doing back there, squeezin’ the weasel?”
Lucas stopped at Daniel’s office and outlined Smithe’s alibis. Together they went to the homicide division and outlined them to Lester and Anderson.
“I want everybody off everything else, I want this checked right now,” Daniel said. “You can start by going over to the welfare office, see about this in-service training. That’ll give us a quick read. Then look at these tickets, make a few calls. If it all checks, and I bet it will, we’ll set up a meeting with the prosecutor’s office. For like one o’clock, two o’clock. Decide what to do.”
“You mean drop the charges,” Lester said.
“Yeah. Probably.”
“The press’ll eat us alive,” Anderson said.
“Not if we play it right. We tell them that Davenport was the only guy Smithe would trust, told him the stories, Davenport came to us, and we realized our mistake.”
“Sounds like a lead balloon to me,” Lester said.
“It’s all we got,” Daniel said. “It’s better than having McCarthy shove it down our throats.”
“Christ.” Lester’s face was gray. “I made the call. They’re going to be all over me. The fuckin’ TV.”
“Could be worse,” Daniel said philosophically.
“How?”
“Could be me.”
Lucas and Anderson started laughing, then Daniel, and finally Lester smiled.
“Yeah, that’d be un-fuckin’-thinkable,” Lester said.
Lucas spent the rest of the morning in his office, talking to contacts around the Cities. Nothing much was moving. There were rumors that somebody had been killed at a high-stakes poker game on the northeast side, but he’d heard a similar rumor three weeks earlier and it was begi
• • •
“It all checks,” Daniel said. “We faxed a photo out to New York, had the cops run it over to the hotel, and the bellhop remembers him and remembers the rat. He couldn’t remember the exact date, but he remembers the week it was in. It’s the right week.”
“How about the in-service?”
“Checks out. That’s the clincher, because there isn’t any question about it. As soon as we asked the question, word was all over welfare that we fucked up. It’ll be all over the courthouse by tonight.”
“And?”
“We’ve got a meeting with the prosecutor and the public defender at two o’clock,” Daniel said. “We’re going to recommend that all charges be dismissed. We’ll have a press conference this evening.”
“He’s going to sue our butts,” Anderson said.
“We’ll ask for a waiver,” Daniel said.
“No chance,” said Lucas. “The guy is freaked.” He looked at the chief. “I don’t think I ought to show at the press conference.”
“That might be best.”
“If anybody asks, you can tell them I’m on vacation. I’m going to take a couple of days off and go up north.”
Lucas left City Hall at three and wandered down to the detention center, stopping only to pick up a box of popcorn. A