Easy Prey
table: two police recorders, backing each other up, and Plain’s hand-sized Sony.
Sloan had gone into good-cop mode, and said, pleasantly, “If you’ll just tell us where you were and what you did, and who you saw last night.”
Plain dipped into a jacket pocket and took out an orange-covered notebook and flipped it open. “I got to the party a little after ten o’clock—as close as I can put it, about ten minutes after ten. Before that, starting at about eight o’clock, I’d been at the New French Café with friends. The friends were . . .”
He listed the friends. In the next five minutes, he gave a nearly minute-by-minute account of his evening, with each friend he encountered along the way.
What about Sandy Lansing?
Plain shook his head. “I don’t know. If I saw a picture of her, maybe I’d recognize her, but I don’t recognize the name. The party was open . . . to a particular crowd.”
“What crowd?”
“The art-money hip crowd,” Plain said.
“Any dope around?”
“All over the goddamn place.”
“You use drugs?” Sloan asked it mildly enough, but there was a snake in the question, which everyone could see. Plain did not hesitate.
“No. I don’t use any chemicals. I did, for two years, when I was a teenager. I used cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, LSD, peyote, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, and a couple of other things. Hypnotics. Quaaludes. I found out that each and every one of them made me stupider than I already was, and I decided I couldn’t afford that. So, eleven years ago, I stopped.”
“Aspirin?” Lucas asked. A little sarcasm.
“I still use aspirin and ibuprofen. I’m not a moron.” His tone of voice showed no reaction to the sarcasm, and somehow left Lucas feeling that the sarcasm had been juvenile. Plain was ahead on points.
“So what happened next?” Sloan asked.
At about midnight, Plain said, he left the party at Sallance Hanson’s and went back to his studio in St. Paul’s Lowertown with a friend, Sandy Smith, where they met an employee, James Graf, to look at scanned negatives from that morning’s photo shoot. After half an hour of looking at the negs, Smith left for his home while Plain and Graf continued to work with the negatives.
“What were the pictures of?” Lucas asked.
Plain tilted his head. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Some investigation,” he said to the brown-haired man. Then: “I spent all yesterday morning and the early part of the afternoon doing a fashion shoot with Alie’e.”
“Did you have a personal relationship with Alie’e?” Sloan asked.
“What do you mean, personal? You mean, was I fucking her?”
“Or anything else,” Lucas said.
“No. I wasn’t fucking her. I wasn’t interested in her. She was a dummy. She was like a toy that you plugged your dick into. Or, if you were a woman, that you stuck your tongue into. She was interested in feeling good, and that was about it,” he said.
“Your sister was involved with her?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah. They were gobbling each other, or whatever women do. Sticking heroin in their arms, putting coke up their noses.”
Sloan said, “Hmph,” and Lucas asked, “I was talking to some woman who was at the party, and she said you were so jealous of the relationship between Alie’e and your sister that you might kill Jael if you had the chance. Which suggests that Alie’e was more to you than just another model.”
Plain tipped his head, regarding Lucas with some curiosity, and said, “You’re lying. Nobody told you that. But that’s interesting. You apparently got hold of something, somewhere, and you don’t know quite what it is.”
“Get a lawyer,” his friend said from the corner.
Lucas grinned involuntarily. He’d been caught—and that made him curious. “Tell me why you think I’m lying.”
“Because you got it just backwards,” Plain said.
“What?”
“I wasn’t jealous because my sister took Alie’e away from me. I’m a little jealous—I admit it—because Alie’e took Jael away from me.”
In the immediate silence, the brown-haired friend said, “Oh shit,” and Lucas and Sloan looked at each other, trying to figure out what Plain had just said. Plain, picking on Sloan because he was the straighter-looking of the two cops, leaned toward him and said, “Yup. I was fucking my sister.”
“NOW, THAT WAS an interview and a half,” Sloan said when they’d finished and Plain and his friend had gone. They
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