Easy Prey

Detroit. I don’t even know who my daddy is. Even my name is some kind of joke. My old man was probably a Polack or a Litvak or some other fuckin’ Eastern European.” He was building steam as the words rattled out of his face. “I got outa Detroit by my fingernails, and I busted my ass every day of my life to get where I am. Now some two-bit fuckin’ cops are saying I killed somebody. . . . I’ll tell you what, I never killed anybody. I never killed anybody. I never even slapped anybody in the face. I just wanted to get out of that fuckin’ Detroit and be somebody, and now I am, and you assholes--”
    “Enough on the assholes,” Lucas snapped.
    “You’re an asshole,” Rodriguez said. “Both of you are. So why don’t you slap me around a little, or something, huh?” He inched closer to Lucas. “C’mon, hit me, I won’t hit you back. It’ll just give me a little more to sue you with, you motherfuckers. You’re ruining my bidness. . . .”
    And suddenly, his face crinkled up and he said, “My bidness. You’re ruinin’ my bidness.” And he turned around and went back through the door into his office.
    “Jesus,” Sloan said, impressed. “The guy was . . . I mean, those were tears.”
    “Yeah.” Lucas scratched his head, then shrugged. “Let’s go.”
    “We’re sure he’s dealing drugs?” Sloan asked.
    “Unless he’s got an evil twin.”
     
 
THE RODRIGUEZ INTERVIEW put a blight on the day, and they drove, mostly in silence, back toward Minneapolis. “Drop you at the hospital?” Sloan asked.
    “Nah. . . . I’m gonna . . . I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
    “What if we’re wrong about Rodriguez?”
    “I’ve been sitting here thinking about that,” Lucas said. “But we’re not. You know what we’re doing? We’ve gotten to the place where we think dope dealers are automatically subhumans . . . but both of us could think of guys who push a little dope and aren’t all that bad as guys. Love their wives.”
    “Not a lot of them,” Sloan said. “Most of them are dirt.”
    “Not a lot, but some. Some of them are human beings. You know what it reminds me of? Remember when you were interviewing Sandy Lansing’s father, and he started off on ‘niggers’ and all that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He’s the flip side of Rodriguez. Here was a guy who coulda played the nice old candy-shop owner on a TV show, but then he opens his mouth, and this bullshit comes out. Rodriguez is a dope dealer, and his story is this pathetic struggle to get out of the slums. Fuck, I don’t know.” He thought about it for a minute, then said, “What I do know is, Rodriguez is a drug dealer, he was running Sandy Lansing, he was at the party where Sandy Lansing was killed, he denies all of it, and that’s the only tie we’ve got.”
    Del called. Sloan handed Lucas his cell phone and asked, irritably, “Why don’t you turn on your fuckin’ phone?”
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked.
    “I’m at Boo McDonald’s, and I got some seriously bad fuckin’ news,” Del said. McDonald was the paraplegic radio and computer monitor.
    “All right.”
    “You know that little rat who publishes Spittle? He’s got a new story out, and it names Rodriguez.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah, the little jerk. I’m going over to scream at him, scream at his parents. But Rodriguez’s name is out.”
     
 
ROSE MARIE WAS livid. “You gotta tell me the truth, Lucas—this isn’t the little push you were talking about?”
    “No. Nobody got the name from me or any of my people.”
    “Not from me, or anybody I know,” Lester said.
    “There’s gotta be fifty or sixty people in the department who know the names.”
    “I’ve had about nine calls in the last half hour, and what do I say?” Rose Marie asked. “I can’t say no, it’s not Rodriguez, because it is. So I say, I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. And you know what that means?> That means, yes. And everybody knows it.”
    “The Spittle kid’s got a leak,” Lucas said. “We know this goddamn place leaks.”
    “If I find the fuckin’ leak, that guy will find himself out on his ass, and I’ll spend the rest of my term trying to fuck his pension,” Rose Marie snarled. “I want you to put that word out—that I’m looking for the guy, and his job and his pension are on the line.”
    “That’s a little strong,” Lester said. “I’m not sure they’ll believe it.”
    “It’ll give them something to think about,” she said.