Silken Prey

Lucas said.
    Lucas ambled back to Clay and said, “You’re toast. We got the DNA. Why’d you do it? You get paid? Or was it because it looked easy?”
    “What’d I do?” Clay asked, and Lucas got the impression that he really was confused.
    “Gimme a break,” Lucas said. “You been around. You know what the deal is. You’re a smart guy—you killed that old lady and you took her purse and her other stuff. What’d you do with the gun?”
    Clay’s eyes had widened, and he shook his head. “What are you talking about, man? I never killed no old lady. What the fuck you talking about?”
    “Up on the north side? Middle of the night? This coming back to you, now? One shot, right in the heart? Did you think she was like, attacking you? That she had a gun?”
    “What? I never killed nobody. Nobody.” He looked from Lucas to Del and shook his head.
    “Where you living, James?” Del asked. “You living with your mom?”
    “I gotta place. Look, I’m doing all right. I got a part-time gig with this guy. . . . I didn’t kill nobody. I don’t got a gun.”
    Lucas pushed him, and Clay said he took messages around town for some guy, whose name he didn’t know. Translated, that meant that he was delivering dope; in any case, he had a job.
    “When we go up to your place, we’re going to find the other glove, won’t we?” Del asked.
    “Other glove? Hey . . . you got my glove?”
    “You’re missing one, right?” Del asked.
    “Yeah, I missing one. How’d you know that?”
    “A little birdie whispered it to me.”
    “Somebody took my glove. Or maybe I dropped it,” Clay protested. “I was wearing it up to Smackie’s. I was walking home, it gotten cold, I takes my gloves out, and I only got one. I say, ‘What’s this shit?’ I go back to Smackie’s, but there’s no glove, and nobody saw it. . . . You saying you found my glove?”
    “Yes. Under the old lady’s body,” Del said.
    “Man, you’re crazy. You’re fuckin’ insane, man.” He looked at the two of them, then said the magic words: “I wanna lawyer.”
    Del looked at Lucas and said, “Turk’s gonna be pissed.”
    •   •   •
    C OCHRAN WASN’T COMPLETELY UPSET with the preemptive interrogation for the simple reason that he had the glove with the DNA, and a glove with DNA was about all a jury required. He and another cop picked up Clay, listened to Lucas’s unformed doubts, said “Thank you,” and headed off to the Hennepin County jail.
    “What’re you going to do?” Del asked.
    “Probably piss off Turk some more. I’m going to talk to Jamie Moore, see if he’ll get Clay to talk to me again.”
    When Turk was gone, Del started back to Smackie’s.
    “Where’re you going?” Lucas asked.
    “See if the bartender knows about that glove,” Del said.
    “Good.” Lucas went along.
    The bartender, however, didn’t know about the glove. “But I’m behind the bar. You have to ask Irma.”
    “The waitress?”
    “Yeah, the waitress.”
    “You got a phone number?” Del asked.
    He did, and they got it, and went outside to make the call.
    Irma was on a bus, on the way to work. Lucas put her on the cell-phone speaker, identified himself, and said, “We just arrested one of your customers, a guy named James Clay,” Lucas said.
    “I don’t know that name,” she said.
    “He’s a short guy with some scars on his face, tattoo around his neck, deals a little dope,” Lucas said.
    “Colored guy?”
    “Yeah. Got cornrows,” Lucas said.
    “Okay, yeah, I know who he is.”
    “He says the other night, he was in your place, and he lost a glove in there, and didn’t find out until after he left, but then he went back to look for it. You remember anything like that?”
    “Well, yeah. He asked me if I seen a glove on the floor, but I didn’t.”
    “Okay. How about this? Was there a guy in there, maybe five-ten, six-foot tall, sort of blond, blond mustache?”
    “Oh, yeah. All the time.”
    Lucas’s heart jumped. But: “All the time?”
    “Hey, this is Minneapolis. I see about thirty guys like that. All the time.”
    That wasn’t good. Irma said she’d be at work in forty-five minutes, and Lucas said he might stop by with a photograph.
    •   •   •
    O N THE WAY BACK to Lucas’s house, he told Del what he’d learned about Grant’s bodyguards, and explained why he hadn’t involved Del from the start: the danger of messing with politicians.
    “I appreciate the thought, but I can take care