“That’d be about right,” Jepson agreed.
They talked for a while longer, then Jepson asked, “If this turns into anything, do I get a piece of that five million reward?”
“Not up to us,” Lucas said. “But we will keep track of your name.”
“So I have one last embarrassing question,” Virgil said. “We were told that you sold custom dildoes…what was all that about?”
Jepson laughed. “Man, the guy who ratted me out reallydidknow me, didn’t he?”
“I guess so,” Virgil said. “Anyway…”
“You ever hear of these chicks back in the early rock ’n’ roll days, called the Plaster Casters?”
Lucas: “Sure. They get to the rock stars, and you know, they’d do whatever they needed to do to get an erection, and then they’d make a plaster mold of the guy’s dick. I guess they got quite a collection…”
“Bunch of them, yeah, Jimi Hendrix, I think,” Jepson said. “So we had this entrepreneurial chick here in the Cities did the same thing with all kinds of celebrities—sports guys, rockers, movie stars, whoever she could get. Then, she’d make silicone casts with a vibrator inside. She’d sell them through us guys on the Hennepin strip, bartenders. You know, you’d get the Vikings quarterback…”
“We get the picture,” Lucas said. “Did the caster make any money at it?”
“I guess,” Jepson said. “I sold probably ten or twenty of them for fifty bucks up to a hundred, depending on who the model was—sort of a novelty, you know? I sold almost all of them to guys, not women. She’d take half. I wasn’t the only one selling them. I believe she must have sold hundreds of them.”
“Keeping Minneapolis classy, huh?” Lucas said.
—
On the wayback to the car, Lucas said, “Forget about the dildoes. We got the tail of something here. We need to do a little political research, find this Stan guy.”
“You know who’d probably know off the top of his head? Henderson’s weasel…”
“Mitford.”
“Yeah, bet he’d know.”
“I’ll call him now,” Lucas said, as they got into the truck. Virgil looked out the side window at Loco’s and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Jepson was walking back into the body shop and Virgil got out and caught him, took him aside and they talked for a minute, then he turned around and walked back to the truck.
Lucas was on the phone with Mitford, said, “Thanks,” and clicked off. “He didn’t have a name, but said he’d check around. A pol or former pol or wannabe pol named Stanley. Can’t be that many.”
“We’re operating,” Virgil said.
“What’d you tell Jepson?”
“I suggested he call up one of the true-crimers and stake a claim to the money. Or a share of it. Tell them what he had.”
Lucas scratched the back of his neck, thought about it, smiled his wolverine smile and said, “Okay. Shit storm. That could work for us. The BCA won’t be pleased, but then, I don’t work for the BCA.”
13
Roger Jepson got hit in the mouth by a squirt of transmission fluid, wiped it away with a shirt sleeve, spitting, got some blue paper towels to mop up around his chin and neck. Nobody laughed, because it had happened to all of them, and it wasn’t that funny. Jepson went into Loco’s restroom, washed his face with the gritty yellow soap that was all they currently had, looked at his wet face, neck, and tee-shirt in the mirror, and said, “Fuck it.”
Five minutes’ research on the office computer got him the number of the biggest true crime site working the Doris Grandfelt murder, along with the phone number of a woman named Anne Cash.
He went back outside where one of the other employees was drinking a beer and said, “Roy, borrow me your phone. I gotta make a call.”
Roy was sullen, as always, but not a bad guy. “Use your own phone. I ain’t got the minutes.”
“I’m not gonna make a call. I’m gonna record one I’m making on my own phone.”
