Phantom Prey

corner; the shelf next to the chairs held an old radio, unplugged, and an ashtray with four snubbed-out filter-cigarette butts. They sat down and Lucas took a notebook out of his breast pocket and asked, “You were dating Mr. Ford?”
    “We hung out,” she said. “Like we’d go to dinner. We weren’t a hundred percent a couple, but we sorta were.”
    “You told the Minneapolis police that you didn’t have any ideas at all about who might have done this,” Lucas said.
    “An asshole,” she said.
    “Have you heard anything at all, since you talked to Minneapolis? Any thoughts about Mr. Ford? Anything?”
    “Just gossip. Everybody says the Goths must’ve done it, but I know quite a few of them, and most of them are pretty nice. I never met a Goth who’d have done it.”
    “You’re not a Goth?”
    “Do I look like one?” she asked.
    “Well, after work . . .”
    “No, I’m not. It used to make me laugh. It’s too dramatic.”
    “But Mr. Ford was a Goth.”
    “Sort of. Yeah, he was. But you know, it comes and goes. Like it was pretty big twenty years ago, and ten years ago, and now here it comes again. . . . Dick was really into it ten years ago, but then not so much, and he wasn’t so into it this time. He changed. He stopped smoking dope, he stopped drinking, he started saving money, he was taking a class in bookkeeping. He wanted to start his own club, and I think . . .” Her voice went squeaky: “. . . I think he might have done it, if some asshole hadn’t killed him.”
    Lucas paused, waited for her to pull back together; the smell of the old cigarette butts closed in around them. “You saw him the night he was killed. At the A1.”
    “Yes.” Her head bobbed and she bit her lower lip, holding it together. “I went over after work. I had a beer and a cheeseburger, and we talked for a couple of minutes, but it was pretty busy, so I went home. We were going to a play the next night, over at Loring Park. I never saw him again. . . . I went out of the bar and I turned around and waved and he waved back and that was the last I saw of him forever.”
    “That’s tough,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah.”
    “You said there was more gossip . . .”
    She looked away, then back. “A friend of Dick’s, named Karl, said there was a Goth girl around, a fairy . . .” As she talked about it, her voice rose in pitch, and became squeaky with grief. “. . . and she was talking to Dick before closing. Not that there was anything going on, but nobody knew her.”
    Lucas asked, “Did you tell the Minneapolis police about this?”
    “No . . . Karl was supposed to.”
    Lucas hadn’t seen anyone named Karl in the Minneapolis paper. “What’s Karl’s last name?”
    "Lageson.” She spelled it, and added, “Karl with a K. He lives in Uptown. I don’t know where, exactly.”
    Lucas noted it down, and asked, “So what’s a fairy look like?”
    “Oh, you know. Skinny, small, big eyes, dark hair. Short skirts, long legs, ripped stockings. Everything black. Black nail polish, crimson lipstick. Black hair. I mean, not all fairies have black hair, but she did.”
    “I don’t think Karl told anybody,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, shit. He should have. He’s the one who saw her. Or says he did. But he’s sort of . . .” She put a finger up at her temple and made a few circles. “He’s smoked too much weed. He might have just thought it up. Or gotten it from one of his Goth comics.”
    “Anybody else see her?” Lucas asked.
    “I don’t know. If you go down to the A1, they’ll be talking about it, if anybody saw her. I mean some hot fairy mysterious Goth chick, everybody would be talking. Goths gossip a lot.”
    “A few weeks ago, a young woman, a Goth, named Frances Austin disappeared,” Lucas said.
    “I know about it,” she said, nodding. “The blood in the hall. She and Dick knew each other. You probably knew that.”
    “Did you know her?”
    Her gaze fixed on him, but lost focus, as she considered the question. “I’m not sure. I saw her picture in the paper, and on TV, and people at the A1 were talking about it, because she’d been there the day before she disappeared. But I don’t know if I really remember her, or just remember the pictures on TV. I mean, I didn’t know her, but I might have seen her.”
    “What was the nature of her relationship with Mr. Ford?”
    “Well, he wasn’t sleeping with her, if that’s what you’re wondering, ” Mobry said. “It was more like, a bartender