Chapter 17
Del Capslock lived in the Highland Park area of Saint Paul, not far from Lucas but in a smaller, early twentieth-century house that had two notable characteristics: it had been built on what amounted to a spring, so after wet weather, there was a constant flow of water from under the overhead-door of his tuck-under garage; and a serious lack of insulation in his roof that would take a major renovation to fix.
The insulation problem meant that his roof was warm when it shouldn’t be, and snow melted as quickly as it fell.
The eaves, however, were not warm, because they hung out over the house.
That meant the melted snow water trickling over the eaves tended to refreeze, creating weighty icicles that threatened to crack the roof supports.
When Lucas and Sherwood arrived at his house, Capslock was in his yard, wrapped in a parka and ski mask, trying to knock the twenty-pound icicles off the eaves with a shovel. When he saw them pull into the driveway, he leaned the shovel against the house and walked down his lawn to meet them.
Lucas: “How in the hell did you get icicles like that, when we haven’t had any snow?”
“We had enough, and I let it go,” Capslock said.
“You need a flame thrower,” Sherwood said.
“I need to sell the house to some other chump when the ice melts.”
“That, too,” Lucas said. He added, “This is John Sherwood, he’s a spy who works for the CIA. If you’ve got a Russian, he’ll come with us to chat with them.”
“I’ve got two Russians,” Capslock said, as he shook hands with Sherwood. “They stay up later than I do, so they should both be home. Until noon, anyway.”
“Where are they?” Lucas asked.
“One is here in Saint Paul, the other’s in Bloomington.”
“Saint Paul first?”
“Let me change coats and get a different hat,” Capslock said. “I’ll tell you about them on the way over. I got something a little extra going on.”
They followed Capslock inside, said hello to his wife, who was sitting at the kitchen table writing bills; the kitchen smelled of onions and other plants. She said, “Del tells me he’s going to get you all in trouble this morning.”
“Hasn’t mentioned any trouble,” Lucas said.
“Because he thinks it’s funny. I don’t think it’s funny, I think Internal Affairs is going to get you all fired. I’d like to see him make it to full retirement.”
“Ah, no. What’s he done?”
“I’ll let him explain it. I mean, he’s so proud of himself.”
Capslock came back dressed in jeans with a blue sport coat over a black shirt.
His hair was combed and held down by something greasy.
He wasn’t large, but had the crooked face of a boxer, with sharp eyes and a well-bent nose.
He limped, having been shot by old people who were smuggling altered, full-auto AR-15s to Mexico.
“You’re all dressed up,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, we’re gonna go see a guy.”
“What for?”
“Pick up a search warrant for the first Russian,” Capslock said.
“I don’t think we have enough—”
“All taken care of,” Capslock said.
On the way out to the car, Lucas asked, “How did it get taken care of?” To Sherwood, he said, “We don’t have any evidence for a search warrant.”
Capslock said, “We’re gonna go see Rob Barbier.”
“I thought he was—”
“Rob Junior got over his head with some cocaine a couple of months ago, at Briscoe’s.
His heart got wonky and I dragged his ass over to Regions.
Daddy told me to come see him if I needed something someday.
I called him this morning and he said, ‘Happy to do it. Those Russians sound like scum anyway. ’ ”
Lucas said to Sherwood, “Briscoe’s is a dive bar. Barbier is a district court judge. Now I see how we could get in trouble, if anyone finds out about the free search-warrant deal.”
“God, I love this,” Sherwood said. “I’m starting to wish I had a badge.”
Capslock said, “You could probably get one. Somebody would have to break your nose, to get you looking right.”
“You’ve both had your noses broken?”
“More than once,” Capslock said. He touched his nose. “Even better, we both got our noses broken in the same fight. The guy was an orangutan.”
“But you won the fight, right?”
“Only because I managed to get hold of his barbeque grill, and beat him with it until he quit,” Capslock said. “Lucas was under him, holding him down.”
“I was under him getting the shit beaten out of me,” Lucas said. “While I was holding him down.”
“Marvelous,” Sherwood said. Made Lucas laugh.
· · ·
Lucas and Sherwood waited outside Barbier’s courtroom while Capslock picked up the warrant.
The first Russian lived only ten minutes out of Saint Paul’s downtown, in a mixed retail-residential strip on Grand Avenue; his name was Rick Thompson, Capslock said.
Thompson lived in an older two-story house next to a children’s toy store, and, Capslock had been told, in his calls the night before, had divided the place into three apartments.
He lived on the bottom floor, and the two second-floor apartments were occupied by escorts.
Lucas: “Rick Thompson? We’re looking for Russians.”
“He is a Russian. He changed his name from something else. His friends call him Oly, which is short for something Russian,” Capslock said.
“American citizen?” Sherwood asked.
“I asked, couldn’t get an answer,” Capslock said. “Now, the thing I’ve been told about the escorts is they’re nothing like the ones you see on TV, those super-villain chicks with big makeup and the tight dresses. These girls look like they just drove in from Wayzata.”
Lucas said to Sherwood, “Wayzata’s a nice higher-end suburb for blond people.”
Sherwood: “Blond, physically fit…”
“Shapely, well-dressed, well-groomed,” Capslock said. “Your mom would be impressed, but suspicious.”
“Sounds exactly like my mom,” Sherwood said.
“They’re not straight-up hookers,” Capslock continued.
“It’s not like they’re living in a whorehouse, taking on all comers.
A downtown dress-up early-evening cocktail party might cost you a grand, with dinner afterwards.
Dates for younger sons. You want more, you can get it, but it’ll be another grand, or more, depending on your inclinations. ”
“In the meantime, you can pick up a girl outside the Target Center for a hundred bucks and a half bottle of Everclear,” Lucas said. “If you have a full bottle, you might not need the hundred bucks.”
“Completely different market,” Capslock said. After a moment, to Sherwood, “You wouldn’t drink the Everclear, you’d pour it on your dick, hoping to get a little antiseptic action after you’d parted ways.”
“Sounds like certain old-timey bars in Juarez, except they use tequila,” Sherwood said.
Capslock: “Really?”
Sherwood: “Really. You’d go into the bar and order a twofer. They’d have the tequila ready when you came out of the back. One shot to drink, one shot to pour on your dick.”
· · ·
Thompson’s house was as Capslock had been told, older, but well kept. A wide front porch spanned half the width of the house, and the steps up to the porch looked new, as did the railing around the porch. A two-person swing hung on one side of the porch, but looked unused.
Capslock led the way up the steps to the door and pushed the doorbell twice. They could hear trudging footfalls from inside, and after a minute, the front door opened, and a short, round-faced woman peered out at them. “Who are you?” she asked.
Lucas said, “U.S. Marshals Service. We need to speak to Mr. Thompson.”
She frowned and said, “I’m not sure he’s here. I’m the housekeeper. His bedroom door is still closed.”
“He’s here,” Sherwood said. “We can see him on our cameras. Go knock on his door.”
The woman took a half step back, said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the back of the house.
“I gotta use that cameras line,” Capslock said to Sherwood. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem.”
They heard the housekeeper knocking, heard a man’s voice, and then she came back and said, “Come sit in the front room. He is putting on his trousers.”
The three of them stepped inside, into a short hall that opened onto a living room, to the left, and a set of stairs that went to the second floor, on the right. Everything looked new, and recently painted. The place smelled of root vegetables and bread.
Thompson appeared a moment later. A tall, paunchy man, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, he had a three-day beard, going white, dressed in a black V-neck tee-shirt, gray sweatpants, and pomegranate-colored slippers.
He appeared to be about forty. He said to the housekeeper, “Marie, why don’t you finish in the kitchen. I’ll talk to these men here.”
The housekeeper went trudging off; Lucas, Sherwood, and Capslock hadn’t sat down, and Thompson asked, “You wanna sit down?”
The words were right, but colored with an accent.
They all sat, on a brown leather couch and two leather club chairs, and Thompson asked, “Marshals Service?”
“We’re checking with local, uh, Russian nationals with connections,” Capslock said. “We got your name from people familiar with your business interests.”
“We’re perfectly legitimate,” Thompson started.
Lucas broke in: “We’re not interested in your legitimacy.
Or the girls you’re running. We’re trying to track down a Russian hit team that killed a Russian woman a couple of days ago and shot her husband.
We know you guys are shipping a lot of cash back to the motherland and you couldn’t do that without government contacts.
We expect you’ve been tracking all this through the news, and we thought you might have additional information from back home.
Something that could give us a lead to the hit team. ”