Heat Lightning

bed.”
    “Your health?”
    Sinclair tapped his chest. “Had a nuclear stress test yesterday morning. Starting to show what the cardiologist calls ‘anomalies.’ I eat eggs, I eat bacon, I drink milk. They want me to eat air with some plastic spray on it.”
    “So how bad? Bypass?” Virgil asked.
    “Not yet—but that could be down the road. We’re gonna do an angiogram and figure out what to do. They could put a stent in,” he said. “That’s why Mai’s up here—she’s trying to get me to go home to Madison, where she can keep an eye on me.”
    “Hmmph. Makes me nervous just hearing about it. I do like my bacon,” Virgil said. Then he asked, “Why are you here, anyway? In St. Paul? You’re a big shot in Madison.”
    “A couple reasons. Teaching, mostly. I was drying up in Madison. I had this gig, I’d do my gig, and it was like I was teaching from reflex. Grad students, small classes.” Virgil was listening, but thought it all sounded rehearsed. Scripted. Sinclair was saying, “So I had this seminar, and one day we sat working through class, and every one of the students yawned at one time or another. I started noticing. So—I took a year’s leave. Got a teaching job here: I teach nothing but freshmen and sophomores, they ask off-the-wall questions, they push me around, they’ve got no respect. It’s working—it’s like fresh air.”
    “Why would the University of Minnesota be any different than Wisconsin? Except that we don’t smoke as much dope?”
    “I’m not teaching at Minnesota. I’m teaching at Metro State,” Sinclair said, amused. “I went way down-market.”
    “All right,” Virgil said. “You said a couple of reasons. What’s the other one?”
    “You know Larson International, the hotels? Headquarters down in Bloomington?”
    “Sure. I’ve got a frequent-guest card for Mobile Inn,” Virgil said. “Owned by Minnesota’s fourth-richest billionaire.”
    Sinclair nodded. “They’re trying to build some big resort hotels in Asia—Vietnam, Thailand, maybe even China. I’m consulting with them on the Vietnam project. I’ve still got a bit of a reputation there. The idea is, I can help them with government contacts and so on.”
    “Can you?”
    “Yes. I speak the language and I know how things work,” Sinclair said. “You know, who gets greased, and how heavily. So they get their money’s worth.”
     
 
MAI CAME BACK and took a chair, swiveled it back and forth with her excellent legs. “I looked it up on the Net—WWTDD. What Would Tyler Durden Do. Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.”
    Virgil and Sinclair looked at each other, then Sinclair turned back to his daughter, a puzzled look on his face. “What are you talking about?”
    “Aww . . .” She looked at Virgil. “I really need to go dancing,” she said. “I signed up for a dance class here, but it’s all . . . dance. I need to go to a club. You know the clubs?”
    “I know a few.” Also a few that he’d have to stay away from, like the ones that Janey went to. “You ever do any line dancing?”
    She was stricken. “Oh, no. You are not serious. . . .”
     
 
VIRGIL GOT AROUND to asking Sinclair where he was the night of Utecht’s murder, and Sinclair got up, came back with a leatherette calendar, put on a pair of reading glasses, paged through it, and said, “Same thing as with last night’s. I was here, asleep.”
    “The best alibi of all,” Virgil said.
    “Why’s that?” Sinclair asked, his crystal blue eyes peering over the top of the half glasses.
    “Because it can’t be broken,” Virgil said.
    Sinclair looked at Mai. “He’s smarter than he looks.”
    “Thank God,” she said. “He looks like he ought to be waxing his surfboard. If they’ve got surf in Iowa.”
    Virgil laughed again, said, “Y’all are pickin’ on me.”
    “I like the way that hick accent comes and goes,” Sinclair said to Mai. “It’s like a spring breeze—first it’s here, and then it’s gone.”
    “Okay. The hell with it. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.” Virgil pushed off the chair, but Sinclair held up a hand. “So Sanderson and this other man were executed? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “That’s what it looks like.” Virgil hesitated, then said, “One other thing—they both had lemons stuffed in their mouths.”
    “Ah . . . shit.” The word sounded strange, and peculiarly vulgar, coming from Sinclair, with his