Hidden Prey

doughnuts. “Karen will stay at the counter,” she said. “What else can I get for everybody?”
    Marsha Spivak sat heavily in a folding chair, dabbed at her face, took a jelly doughnut and said, “Maybe a little milk to wash down the doughnuts?”
    “Oh, sure,” and Janet darted away to get a carton of milk.
    Bob and Carol Spivak came in, two walking fireplugs, twin brother and sister. They both looked at Carl Walther, and then Bob stooped to kiss his mother, who burst into tears again, finished her first doughnut, and took a second.
    Nancy Witold Spencer came in: “Hi, Mama.” She didn’t speak to her father or look at him, but he said, weakly, “Hi, Nance.” She nodded, abare acknowledgment: they’d had a financial falling-out over a loan to her dance studio.
    “Everybody got a seat?” Rick asked.
    Everybody had a seat; the men, in plaid cotton shirts and blue jeans, the women in jeans and pastel blouses and cardigans with the sleeves pushed up. Leon Witold, working his way through a doughnut, said, “Boy, them are good, gimme a little more of that coffee, will ya, Janet?” They were using small paper cups and she gave him a refill and he said, again, “Boy, them are good doughnuts. I gotta get down here more often.”
    “We could use the business,” Rick Svoboda said.
    “Ah, bullshit, Rick, you’re richer ’n Bob Dylan.” Bob Dylan had been born and raised in Hibbing, and was the local standard for obscene wealth.
    “I sure wish.” After arranging the chairs, Svoboda took an electronic box out of a paper sack, pulled out an antenna, and walked around checking for bugs. He didn’t find any. He never had; the only thing he’d ever detected was transistor radios. “Okay, guys—Marsha called for this and she is going to tell us what happened last night.”
    “First things first,” Leon Witold said. “I want to know about Carl, before we talk.”
    Grandpa Walther cleared his throat and said, “When it was time to decide, Grandma and I told him about the early days, and he was a good student. He wanted to hear. So we told him. You know Jan and Ron were breaking up, and Carl was living with us, so he began to . . . understand that something else was going on. That things were not exactly as they seemed. So, when he was far enough along, we told him: five years ago. And he is a believer. A believer on his own. A good boy. We haven’t forced it on him.”
    Carl was nodding during this, and he said, “I made up my own mind.”
    They all looked at him for a moment and then Leon said, “I hopeto God that’s the truth, because you could hang all of us. And your mom, for that matter.”
    “She’s not one of us,” Carl said.
    “But she knows, and anyone who knows would be in as deep as the rest of us.”
    “If the kid is in, he’s in,” said Rick Svoboda. “Can’t go back now.” He looked at Carl for a moment, then nodded, and turned to Marsha Spivak. “So tell us what happened with Anton.”
    Marsha Spivak started leaking tears again and muttered around, trying to find a start, and then she sighed and lifted her heavy head and said, “Yesterday, the police came. They knew about the meeting in the back. Anton tells me that they had a receipt from this Russian, who has so many names now that I can’t keep track. Remember the Russian puts all the drinks on the American Express. So stupid. Why? Why? Why did we let him do that?”
    “He wanted to put it on the card so he’d have the extra unaccountable cash to go to Wal-Mart.” Svoboda said.
    “But he said he had all that money . . .”
    “Not his money. He had to account for it,” Svoboda said. “He was chipping off a couple hundred bucks, and probably a few more here and there. The stupid thing wasn’t putting it on the card—the stupid thing was keeping the receipt.”
    “He didn’t know he was going to die,” Leon Witold said. “But to get back to Anton . . .”
    Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: “He told them nothing. They went away, they knew nothing. They knew only what they had on the receipt, that the Russian paid for drinks. Anton tells them that he’d never seen anybody before, he thought they were fishermen stopping on the way to the border.”
    Grandpa Walther nodded. “That’s reasonable, anyway.”
    “Of course it is.” Spivak sniffed. “They went away, but then this other man came. He sat in the bar late, the last one, and when Antonsays it’s closing time, he says that he wants to