"Yeah. He was running. I used just enough violence to restrain him," Lucas said. "He got an owie on his wrist."

"Coulda got hurt," Clay said.

Bennett ignored that and said to Lucas, "I don't want to hear any bullshit about who did what to whom. Listen to what he has to say and take off. I got other things to do."

"We'll listen, anyway," Lucas said.

She nodded at Lucas, then said to Del, "Those look like last month's jeans, Del. You forget to change on the first?"

Del said, "Don't be a twit."

"A what?"

"A twit."

She showed a sliver of a smile. "Well played."

CLAY, ACCORDING TO CLAY, had spent Saturday evening, from around eight o'clock until the next morning, at a recreational facility called Joan What's-Her-Name's, and Del asked, "The red house?"

"That's it."

"How many people were there?"

"You know ... coming and going," Clay said.

"How many were staying?"

"The usual ones. The one called Mike, and Larry. Larry was there, lost his shoes somewhere, spent the whole time walking around in his socks. Chuck. This really, really white guy named Joe. He was so white it hurt my eyes to look at him... . A guy named Dave went through, he was a white guy, too, another guy named Bill was passed out on the couch the whole time. A couple of chicks ..."

They were playing cards, he said. They tried to get the chicks to play strip poker. "She strips and then you poke her, heh-heh."

Nobody else laughed, so he shrugged and said, "They didn't play, they just wanted to, you know, get high."

He'd been there all night, he said. He'd gotten high with what he brought with him, because he didn't have any money, and then went to sleep on the floor in a back room. There was somebody else in there with him, but he didn't know who. "All I know is, I was sleeping under a window with a crack at the bottom and when I got up in the morning, I was freezing and it felt like my bones was breaking."

Larry was still there when he woke up, still high; Bill was still passed out, and might have been dead. Somebody should check. Chuck was lifting a weight in the kitchen: it was a dumbbell, and there was only one, so he was changing hands with it, and was drinking Campbell's Tomato Soup straight out of the can.

They pulled as many details as they could from him, and when they were done, Lucas turned to Bennett and said, "We're going to check on this. See if the deputies will put him in the drunk tank by himself, at least until we go into this place. Tell Jamie we'll send him a note."

"You believe him?"

"He's pretty obviously a miserable dirtbag liar and a piece of low-life scum, but, he had a lot of detail," Lucas said.

Clay said, "Hey, I'm sitting right here."

Lucas said, "Just kiddin'."

BACK OUTSIDE, Del called a friend on the Minneapolis narcotics squad and asked about the chance of a raid that evening on Joan What's-Her-Name's, and was told that it'd be a problem: too many people were off, and overtime and everything. Del asked if Minneapolis would mind a BCA raid, and after a little talk, everybody agreed that it would be okay. One of the Minneapolis guys, who was working anyway, would ride along.

Lucas told Del, "Set it up. Late as you can-we'd like to get the same cast of characters, if we can."

"Probably go for eleven o'clock," Del said.

Lucas went home for supper and found Virgil Flowers sitting at his kitchen table, a black felt cowboy hat to one side; he was drinking a Leinie's.

"How was Albuquerque?" Lucas asked. Flowers should have been arriving there in an hour.

"You got me a ticket on Delta," Flowers said. "What do you think happened?"

"The plane broke?"

"Exactly. They're bringing another one in from Chicago. Revised departure time is ten o'clock, assuming that the replacement plane makes it this far. They're probably bringing it in on a truck. Anyway, I won't be interviewing anybody tonight. Since your house was close by ... and I hadn't had dinner ..."

"We're having meat loaf," Weather said.

Flowers said, "Mmmm, mmm."

AT DINNER, Weather asked Lucas for a summary of the case. He put his fork down and said, "Nothing's clear. One of Grant's bodyguards, or both of them working together, probably killed Tubbs and probably killed Helen Roman."

"Are you going to clear it up tomorrow?"

"No. I might know something tomorrow, but whether I'll have a court case ... whether I'll ever have a court case ... that, I can't say."

"If you find out tomorrow before four o'clock, call me," Weather said. "Otherwise, I'm going to vote for Taryn Grant."

"I already did," Flowers said. "I mailed in my ballot last week."

Lucas said, "The thing that plagues me is, she might know something. She might even be involved."

"Do you care that much? You're as cynical about government as anyone I've ever known," Weather said.

"I'm not that cynical," Lucas said. "I'm cynical about the fact that there are so many little payoffs going around all the time, so many little deals, that the legislature is greased by corruption."

"I think you overstate the problem."

"No, he doesn't," Flowers said. "The legislature runs on corruption. But a killer in the U.S. Senate ... an actual murderer? The prospect is the tiniest bit disturbing."

CHAPTER 21