“Thank you,” said the cop.
The old man left, and a few minutes later, so did the officers. They promised to keep an eye on G. K.’s house for a few days, but I knew that wouldn’t amount to much more than watching it when they drove past.
“You look like hell,” G. K. said when they left.
“I don’t feel much better.”
She took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom and turned on the light.
The entire left side of my face was bright red and purple and swollen, including my ear. My eye was little more than a slit, and there was a visible knot on my forehead. Touching anything caused red explosions between my eyes. I lifted my shirt. My back on the right side of my spinal cord was the same color as my face—the man must have broken a thousand blood vessels. In a couple of days I was going to be just one giant black and blue bruise.
“I’ll get ice,” G. K. said.
A few minutes later I was sitting on her sofa, an ice pack pressed against my kidney. I held another against my face. “Thirty minutes on, thirty minutes off, repeat as needed,” my hockey coach once told me.
“I’m impressed,” G. K. said.
“By what? That I can take such an awful beating?”
“That you can take such an awful beating and then come rushing to my rescue.”
She was sitting in a stuffed chair across from me, her feet again tucked beneath her. She was nursing what looked like a vodka and orange juice.
“If you had answered your phone I might not have,” I told her.
“Yet you did come. Beat up like you were, all you could think of was me.”
“I’m a helluva guy. Ask anyone.”
“I can see that for myself.”
“Tell me what happened to you.”
G. K. took a long sip of her drink. “I took a shower when I came home from work—was taking a shower.” She took another sip. “A lukewarm shower because it’s been so hot. I was washing my hair, and I heard a pounding. I stopped and listened. The pounding stopped, and then it started again, and I . . . I left the bathroom. The upstairs bathroom. I threw on a nightshirt and came downstairs. The pounding was coming from my front door, and I looked through the peek hole and I saw him. He was—he looked awful. Frightening.”
“Yes,” I said, and shifted the ice pack to my forehead.
“I shouted through the door—no way I was going to open the door. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see me. I asked him who he was. He didn’t answer, just kept pounding on the door. I told him to leave or I would call the police, and the pounding stopped. I went to my window”—she gestured with the glass at the plywood—“and looked out. He was watching me and smiling, and I realized that the nightshirt—I was still wet from the shower and the nightshirt was clinging to me and he could see my body outlined in the shirt, he could see . . .”
G. K. took another long pull of her drink.
“He said things to me. Vile things. And I . . . I just stood there listening. I couldn’t move. I don’t know why. I just. . . Then he shouted that I was to stay away from Merodie Davies or he would come back and he and I, we would have a party. He said he might come back anyway. That was when my neighbor came out of his house. When the man saw my neighbor, he picked up a planter I had outside my front door and threw it through the window.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No, the planter, the glass—I wasn’t hurt. But it made me—That’s when I called the police and ran upstairs to put on clothes. He was gone by the time I came down again.”
“It’s over now.”
“No, it’s not,” she said.
“I knew you were going to say that. So we’re still on the case, then?”
“Of course we are. Aren’t we?”
“We are if you say so. Just tell me one thing. Is it you talking or Mr. Muehlenhaus?”
“You know about him?”
“We’re old friends.”
G. K. finished her drink and made another. She had offered me one before, but I had turned it down. Mixing alcohol with a possible concussion didn’t seem like a good idea. When she returned to her chair, she said, “Mr. Muehlenhaus told me to contact you.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, well, try to make it simple. I have a headache.”
G. K. drank more orange juice and vodka. “I became involved because I was Merodie Davies’s attorney when she was busted for the discon. To be honest, I was going to blow her off. I didn’t owe Merodie anything. Then Mr. Muehlenhaus called. I don’t know who brought him into it or why. I think it might have been Rollie Briggs, but that’s just a guess.”
“Rollie Briggs,” I said. “He’s the assistant county attorney in Anoka County under David Tuseman.”
“Yes.”