Green Monster Read Free

to circulate. If somebody complained to the cops about the noise spilling out onto Hennepin Avenue—well, everybody in the band was, or had been, a cop. In addition to Sam and Marcus, drummer Stu Winstead patrolled a beat in Nordeast; bassist Bear Olson was a vice cop; and keyboard player/singer Jean Dubrovna was an investigator with the juvenile unit.
    Sam had been their colleague until resigning as a homicide detective in April. Thanks to a generous payment he’d received for some emergency detective work at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, he’d applied for a private investigator’s license and opened a practice in White Bear Lake, an old-money beach town just north of St. Paul. There was no reason to ask clients to find a place to park in Minneapolis just so they could visit him in an overpriced downtown office building. Besides, most of the detective work people seemed willing to pay for was happening out in the suburbs.
    He had some money now, but he still played the same ’59 Strat through the same Deluxe Reverb amp, and he still lived in the same bungalow in South Minneapolis. Sometimes old things were better things. But after furnishing his office, he allowed himself two indulgences: He bought a new Mustang convertible, and he joined the White Bear Yacht Club, a 1927 Donald Ross golf course on the edge of the lake. It was the club where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived in 1922, until being evicted for throwing too many drunken parties. His office was a five-minute commute to the golf course.
    He performed two Friday nights a month with Night Beat at the Boom Boom Room, played golf three times a week at WBYC, and spent the rest of his time working on the stray cases that came his way—mostly divorce and missing-persons stuff. Nothing to get excited about, but enough to keep from using up the nest egg. He was not working all that hard at generating new business; he placed an ad in the Yellow Pages, let his former cop buddies know he was available for hire, then waited to see who rang the phone or walked in the door. At the rate it was going, he figured he could stay in business at least another year before he’d have to start hustling up clients or give up the White Bear membership. That would be incentive enough to work harder.
    His knee—surgically repaired after a shooting while he was a cop—still hurt like hell on rainy days, but it was as good as it was ever going to get. He knew he should be working out more, but as long as he walked 18 holes three times a week, he was able to keep his weight around 180 and his legs in reasonably good condition. There wasn’t a lot of running involved when you were staking out a cheating husband.
    Now that he was no longer subject to the police department’s rules, his sandy blond hair had grown out, as his cop pals continually reminded him. It wasn’t rock-band long yet, but it was getting curly and harder to keep under his golf hat. He meant to go to the barber more often, but now that he didn’t have to, it kept slipping farther down the priority list. He still kept himself clean-shaven, however. His golf tan accented his pale blue eyes and helped divert attention from the bridge of his nose, which was crooked from an old break.
    He’d flown to Tucson in August to visit Caroline, the woman he’d met at the Masters. She’d gone back to using her maiden name after divorcing her golf-pro husband—a hopeful sign—but the rest of the picture was still cloudy. She had sold the ostentatious house at the private golf club that she used to share with her ex, and had stopped smoking—with a few backyard lapses—when she moved into her new house. She had a new job, too, working for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on border issues. Caroline was enjoying her life for the first time since long before her marriage broke up. She needed more time, she’d told Sam, to figure out what she