Easy Prey

a little on how long, but if he was in a hurry, we could lay them off on a real estate investment trust in a couple of weeks. But unless we were lucky, he’d take a hit.”
    “How big a hit?” Lucas asked.
    “Can’t tell. Could be two hundred thousand dollars. Right now, after his mortgages are paid off, Richard could take out a couple of million. If you take two hundred off the top of that, he’s down to a million eight. Then you’ve got to take capital gains and state taxes out, plus our commission. He’d wind up with something like a million three, walk-away.”
    “Lot of money,” Lucas said.
    “Sure. But that two hundred thousand is purely thrown away—a little bit would go to taxes and commission and so on, but he’s basically taking a fifteen percent hit by trying to sell it quick. Two hundred thousand, in the context of a million three, is a big chunk.”
    “What’d he say?” Lucas asked.
    Smalley came back with his own question. “Why’re you investigating him?”
    “There’s a possibility that he’s using large amounts of drug money to make up the difference between actual rents, on one side, and his mortgage and maintenance payments on the other,” Lucas said.
    Smalley considered that for a moment, then said, “You mean he cooked the books? But he cooked them up ? I never heard of that.”
    “That’s what we think. It’s a form of money laundering,” Lucas said. “The investigation is in the context of the overall investigation of the Alie’e Maison murder.”
    “Holy shit.” Smalley was impressed. And he was a smart guy. “You think he did it? Strangled Alie’e?”
    “I can’t tell you that—we’re conducting an investigation,” Lucas said. “So answer my question. What’d he say when you told him about the hit?”
    “He said, ‘Sell it.’ I said, ‘Listen, Richard’—he doesn’t like to be called Dick—I said ‘Listen, Richard, if you could give us two months,’ and he just cut me off and said, ‘Dump ’em.’”
    Then it was Lucas’s turn to think. After a moment, he asked, “If you’d heard about this investigation unofficially, what would you do?”
    “Do? I’d drop the deal like a hot rock,” Smalley said. “We don’t need to mess around with Alie’e Maison and all of that. We sure as hell don’t need to peddle a couple million bucks’ worth of real estate to a REIT”—he said “reet”—“and then have them come back and tell us that we sold them a bunch of cooked books. That’s not the kind of reputation you want to build.”
    “So do what you want,” Lucas said.
    “Drop him? You want us to drop him?”
    “I don’t care what you do,” Lucas said. “Drop him, if that’s best for your company. This is an official call—you’ll be subpoenaed in the next day or two. But if you were to call him and drop him, we wouldn’t object, certainly.”
    Smalley scratched his chin, looked at the telephone, then back at Lucas. “You’re using me to fuck with him.”
    “I’m just trying to uphold the law, Mr. Smalley.”
    “Right. I almost forgot.” They sat together for a few seconds, contemplating the law, and then Smalley said, “I’ll call him tomorrow morning.”
     
 
LUCAS TOOK DALE Street down to I-94 and got on the interstate heading west. He was inching toward his own exit at Cretin, then, at the last second, moved back left and continued across the Mississippi River bridge, into Minneapolis, and down south to Jael Corbeau’s studio. Lucas rang the bell and a voice fifteen feet away said, “Go on in, Chief.”
    Lucas jumped. “Jesus, I thought you were a bush.”
    “I feel like a fuckin’ bush.” Then, sotto voce, on a radio: “It’s Davenport.” As Lucas pushed through the door, he said, “Tell dickweed it’s his turn out here.”
    Two more bored cops were sitting in the studio, watching a portable TV that was set up on the floor, plugged into a DVD. When Lucas walked in, one of the cops paused the picture; they were watching The Mummy.
    “Whichever one of you is the dickweed, I’m supposed to tell you it’s your turn out there.”
    One of the cops looked at his watch. “Bullshit. I got fifteen minutes yet. You looking for Jael?”
    “Yeah.”
    “She’s upstairs, reading.”
    “Is she decent?”
    “Aw, man, don’t ask me that. It gives me a hard-on.”
    “Let me put you down for sensitivity training. We have it every Saturday morning at six.”
    “I’ll be there. Count on it.” The cop