"You buy," Del said.

The bartender drifted over, pulled two beers, gave Lucas change on a five. Lucas laid his badge case on the bar and said, "We're cops. We're looking around for one of your regulars."

"Yeah?" The bartender was friendly enough. "I seen you on TV once or twice. You the Minneapolis guy?"

"Yeah. We're looking for Larry Lapp," Lucas said. "You know him?"

"Larry?" The bartender was surprised. "What'd he do?"

"Nothing, really. We need to talk about a friend of his."

"I wondered. He's a good guy… He was here tonight, must've left two hours ago. He only lives two or three blocks away, I think, but I don't know where, exactly."

"Couldn't find him in the phone book," Lucas said.

"He's got an old lady, I think it's her house." He spread his hands apologetically. "All I know about her is that her name is Marcella."

Del nodded toward the back of the bar. "Any of those guys know him?"

The bartender looked. "Those guys?" He thought about it. "Yeah, maybe."

Lucas and Del collected their beers and walked to the back, where the two guys were watching the basketball game; they were painters, Lucas thought, still in paint-spattered jeans. Both were in their mid-twenties; one was wearing a Twins baseball hat and the other a Vikings sweatshirt with a plastic football on the chest. Lucas and Del watched the game for a minute, then Lucas said to the guy in the baseball cap, "We're police officers. We're looking for a friend of yours."

The two men looked at each other, then the guy in the baseball hat shrugged and said, "Who? What'd he do?"

"Larry Lapp, and he didn't do anything. We just need to talk to him about a woman he used to know."

"Oh, jeez… You're talking about that girl that got killed?" the Vikings fan asked.

They nodded, and Del asked, "You knew her?"

"Knew who she was," the Vikings fan said. "She was from the neighborhood, until her folks moved out-state somewhere. She knew some other kids from over here."

"I understand she was… seeing this Lapp guy," Lucas said, giving a little extra to the "seeing."

"Oh, man, I don't think so-and you could get Larry in big trouble with his wife, talking that way," the guy said. "Him and this girl went back a long way, you know, to junior high or something. They weren't doin' nothing, but Marcella ain't gonna believe that if you go knockin' on her door."

Del said, "Mind if we sit for a minute?" and pulled around a chair without waiting for an answer. Lucas pulled one up for himself, leaned on the table, and said quietly, "We were told that this girl… might have been selling it. Hundred bucks a throw. Nobody's gonna get in trouble for talking about it, or even going with her-we're just trying to get some traction on the murder. Either of you guys ever hear anything like that?"

"That's bullshit," said the baseball cap, sitting back. "Whoever told you that is an asshole."

"Never heard nothing like that," the football-shirt guy said, shaking his head. "She was a nice kid. Shy. I mean, if she was selling it, she could've sold it to me, and she never offered or even let on that, you know, it might be possible."

The baseball cap said, "Same with me. We get a pro in here every once in a while, and it's not like you don't figure it out pretty goddamn quick."

"Look around," the football shirt said. They looked down the bar at the cheap stools, at the used booths sloppily cut into the new space, at the crap littering the floor. "You think you're gonna find a hundred-dollar girl working this place? Twenty-nine-ninety-five is more like it."

"This Lapp guy," Del said.

"You're gonna fuck him up if you talk to him with his wife around," the baseball cap said. "He has a troubled marriage."

"If you want, I could go get him," the Vikings guy said. "He's only two blocks from here."

"That'd be cool," Lucas said. "If I could get your names first… for the notebook."

"In case we decide to run for it?" the baseball cap asked. He grinned at Lucas.

"Well. For the notebook, you know."

LARRY LAPP WAS short and square, wore a heavy, short, square dark coat, and a Navy watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He followed the painters into the bar, nodded at the bartender, and continued back to the table where Lucas and Del were waiting. He nodded, quickly, and sat down, hands in his coat pockets. He had a flat, wide face and a day-old beard that looked like it was made of nails. "What's this shit about Julie?"

"We're trying to follow up on some information."

"If somebody told you she was selling it, that guy oughta be investigated, because he's full of shit," Lapp said. He was angry, his face tight and white despite the cold. "She was one of the nicest goddamn girls you could want to meet."

Lucas shook his head apologetically. "I'm sorry, we just heard… actually, we heard that you were the recipient of some of her favors, but that you'd had to pay."

"You heard this?" Lapp asked, his voice rising. "About me? How could you hear this about me? What'd you hear? Who told you this?"

"I can't tell you where the information came from, we just got it from one of our intelligence guys… she said that Julie was selling, ummm, oral sex at a hundred bucks a time."

"Blow jobs?" Lapp whispered hoarsely. He looked from Lucas to Del, unbelieving, then at the two painters, and he said to the painters, "You know who they were talking to? That fuckin' Haack."

The baseball cap nodded judiciously and said, "Yup. Bet it was."

"Who's Haack?" Del asked. He looked at Lucas, then back at Lapp.

"Gerry fuckin' Haack," Lapp said. "He saw me in here a couple times with her-this must've been last year, right after he got out of jail-and the last time he said something about me getting a blow job from her. I told him to shut his mouth or I'd pull his fuckin' nose off."

"He's got a thing about blow jobs," the football-shirt said. "Always hearin' that this chick gives head or somebody was caught gettin' some head."

Lucas scratched his forehead. "Ah, shit."

Del asked Lapp, "What do you know about art?"

"Art who?" Lapp asked with apparent beetle-browed sincerity, and when Del started to laugh, said, "What?"

"Did you actually date Aronson?" Lucas asked.

"Hell no. I knew her way back when," Lapp said. He shook a brown cigarillo out of a cardboard box and lit it with a Zippo. He blew a stream of smoke and said, "We went to kindergarten together and the same schools up to eighth grade, and then they moved away. She came in here with a couple of other friends from the neighborhood, and that's when I saw her again. But we were doing nothing. Nothing. I'm happily married." The baseball cap guy snorted, and Lapp turned and looked up and said, "Fuck you, Dick, this is serious."

"Was she dating anybody that you knew of?" Lucas asked.

"Is this the first time you guys… I mean, how come you don't know this shit already? She disappeared more'n a year ago."

"We never knew about the St. Paul connection," Lucas said. "We were just checking out a random tip."

"Well, she said she was going out with an artist guy-is that the art you meant?-I think maybe over where she worked or something. I think they were… in bed."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because he was taking these pills. She told me this, we were laughing about it." He looked at the baseball cap. "What do you call them? That new cholesterol drug? Lapovorin? Is that it? Anyway, she said he'd told her that the pills had weird sexual side effects. They made you come backwards."

"Come backwards?" Del asked. He seemed fascinated by the concept. "How can you come backwards?"

"Beats the shit out of me," Lapp said, leaking more brown smoke from the cigarillo. "But that's what she said. He said that he had to quit the pills, because instead of coming, he went."