Outside the air was clear and the morning haze lifting. The sun was going to win today. I walked at a steady pace, heading downtown.
It took me forty minutes.
Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring. There were skyscrapers and bridges, but no Empire State Building or Golden Gate, and if you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests. OK, so if he knew a little bit more then maybe he would know that the city has the largest connected network of skyways in the United States. On the way to the intersection at Nicollet and 9th Street I passed beneath one of them, a glass-and-metal bridge that linked shopping malls and office complexes, a place where people gathered to seek shelter when the temperature dropped below zero in the winter or rose into the nineties in the summer.
I entered the little pet store. A customer was being served. Sounded like he wanted a bigger cage for his rabbit. Sometimes you still overhear something that restores your faith in human nature. I stood in front of one of the aquariums and when the assistant came over to me I pointed to one of the little fishes swimming about inside and said, that’s the one I want.
“Dwarf puffer fish,” he said as he scooped up the green fish with a little hand net. “A good aquarium fish, but not for the beginner. The water quality must always be tip-top.”
“I know,” I said.
He slipped it into a plastic bag full of water and tied it closed. “Mind your cat doesn’t eat it. And don’t eat it yourself. It’s a hundred times more poisonous than—”
“I know. You take cash?”
Then I was back out in the street again.
A black-and-white car came cruising in my direction. On the door was the MPD emblem and motto—To protect with courage, to serve with compassion.Maybe they got some kind of feeling about me, the policemen sitting behind those darkened windows. But they wouldn’t stop me. After all the criticism in the media for the unmotivated and ethnically biased cases of stop and search, MPD police chiefs had announced a change of policy, and from now on, gut feeling was no longer a valid reason for stopping a man like me.
The car passed, but I knew they’d seen me. Same way as I knew I’d been picked up by all the surveillance cameras along Nicollet Avenue and 9th Street, more of them around here than anywhere else in town.
And one other thing I knew.
I knew I was dead.
3
Dinkytown, September 2022
I open my eyes again. I’m back in the taxi, back inside my own head. Now of course I can’t know for certain whether I was really in the killer’s head, really thought his thoughts as he made his way down Nicollet Avenue six years earlier. If he thought that thought, that he was going to die. What I do know is that he was on Nicollet Avenue at the precise moment in time, that’s a black-and-white fact, recorded by a surveillance camera and by means of binary code translated into a digital recording that places the matter beyond all doubt.
I tell the driver to take me to Dinkytown.
The sun is rising as we cross the river and glide into the low-rise neighborhood. This is a world apart from Jordan. Dinkytown is where the students live. The people with a future. The ones who will occupy the shiny bank buildings, the granite blocks of city hall, the school staff rooms and the $350 seats at the U.S. BankStadium. When my cousin and I were old enough we often came here to drink beer in the dives. For me there was something bohemian and thrilling about Dinkytown. The smell of marijuana and testosterone, the sounds of youth, good music and boy meets girl, the sense of some—but not too much—danger. The place to swing through that little arc of freedom that exists between being young and being adult, and not wild enough to stop the squares landing securely on our feet, the way I did. Once my cousin’s girlfriend brought a friend along with her, and she and I sneaked out of the bar and smoked a joint in one of the alleyways before having what was probably a pretty forgettable bout of sex but which I always remember anyway because of that—to me at least—exotic setting.
Now I hardly recognize the place. It looks like a page from an exercise book in which the teacher has corrected all the grammatical mistakes and removed all the obscenities. We pass the place that was once a coffee bar and where the owner swore blind that Bob Dylan had made his very first appearance when he came down from Hibbing to study. Now some vast building is on its way up. I ask the driver if he thinks the purple facade is a tribute to the town’s other great musical son, Prince. The driver just chuckles and shakes his head.
“But Al’s Breakfast is still here,” I say and point to the door of that little warren of a place where—if the empty seat was down at the front—you had to press your way between the customers crowded at the bar and the sweaty wall.
“The day they try to close Al’s there’s going to be riots here,” the driver says and roars with laughter.
I tell him to stop at the bridge over the railroad tracks. I get out of the car and glance down at the tracks. The occasional freight train used to run on that line, and judging by the weeds growing between the rusty tracks, traffic hasn’t increased much since then. I cross the street and head toward the corner where it still says Bernie’s Bar on the wall, try the handle of the locked door, cupmy hands against the glass next to the poster advertising that the premises are for rent and peer inside. The bar is still there, but otherwise there isn’t a stick of furniture left.
Now I have to get inside the policeman’s head.
So I try to imagine how it might have been, what was said and done in here on that morning six years ago.
4
Oz, October 2016
Bob Oz hissed through his teeth and put the empty shot glass back down on the bar. Looked up and saw his own reflection in the mirror between the bottles on the shelves. A new guy at work had asked him yesterday why the others called him One-Night Bob. He told him it must be because he always solved his cases in just one night.
Bob looked at One-Night Bob. He’d turned forty, but wasn’t that the same face he’d been staring at for the past twenty years now? He wasn’t exactly a good-looking man, but like his father he had the kind of face time didn’t seem to sink its teeth into. Well, okay, chewed up a little bit. At least chewed away the puppy fat of youth to reveal the mature man’s good or his bad genes, all depending on which way you looked at it. White skin of the type that only got sunburned, never brown. A thick and unruly thatch of red hair on the kind of head that got Scandinavians nicknamedsquareheads,back in the day when his ancestors emigrated here from Norway. A relatively healthy-looking set of teeth, a pair of blue eyes that had gotten more red in the whites since his separation. His eyes bulged slightly, but at least according to one of his one-night-stand ladies that was no bad thing since it gave the impression he was listening closely to whatever they said. Another had said that as soon as they met she had the feeling of being a Little Red Riding Hood and wondering why the wolf had such big eyes. Bob Oz rounded off the stocktaking by sitting up straight on his barstool. When he was young he wrestled and swam. Though never a champion in either field it had given him a good body that the years had done little to change. Until now, that is. He put his hand on his shirt, beneath his trademark yellow coat. A nasty little potbelly. And this despite the fact he had never eaten less than in the three months that had passed since he and Alice had split up. And it couldn’t be the pills, because he wasn’t taking those anymore. But he was drinking more, no doubt about that. A lot more.
The name One-Night Bob came from a colleague early on in his career, before he met Alice and became One-Woman Bob. It was back in the days when he and his colleagues celebrated every triumph, great and small—and, in a pinch, their defeats too—at the Dinkytown bars, when they were young enough to shake off the hangovers and Bob would more often than not wake up with a woman lying next to him. What especially impressed his male colleagues was the way this pallid, red-haired guy could pick up women even when he was so drunk he could hardly stand. Anyone who asked what his secret was always got the same answer: that he tried harder. That he didn’t give up. That some of these womenpesteredhim to take them to bed. When you haven’t the looks, the money or the charm then you have to work harder than the competition. End of story.
“Another?”
