Twin Cities Noir Read Online Free

it.”
    Benito showed her the photograph.
    “This is your uncle?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “Pa Chou Song?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “It is not the man who came here that day. The man who beat you.”
    “You saw him beat me?”
    “I saw—”
    “Did you, Benito?”
    Benito glanced at the open window and back at Mai-Nu.
    “I saw,” he said.
    “And you told my brother?”
    “I know now that you wanted me to tell Cheng what I saw.”
    “Did I?”
    Benito nodded.
    “There is no evidence of that.”
    “Evidence?”
    “Did I tell you to go to my brother?”
    “No.”
    “Did I tell you not to speak to my brother?”
    “Yes.”
    “That is the evidence that the court will hear, should you go to court.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    Mai-Nu brushed past Benito and retrieved the law book from the coffee table. She hugged it to her breasts.
    “In Laos, women are expected to submit,” she said. “Submit to their husbands, submit to their fathers, submit to their uncles. Not here. Here we are equal. Here we are protected by the law. I love America.”
    “Who was the man who came here that night?”
    “A friend, Benito. Like you.”
    She reached out and gently stroked Benito’s cheek.
    “You must go now,” she said.
    A few minutes later, Benito returned to his bedroom. Dark and menacing storm clouds were rolling in from the northwest, laying siege to the sun and casting the world half in shadow. Mai-Nu’s lights were on and though it was early morning, he had a good view of her living room.
    He did not see her at first, then Mai-Nu appeared. She moved to the window and looked directly at him. She smiled and blew him a kiss. And slowly lowered her shade.

IN MY EYES
    BY B RUCE R UBENSTEIN
    North End (St. Paul)
    L loyd B. Jensen’s funeral cortege wasn’t scheduled to leave the State Capitol for an hour, but a throng of thousands already lined University Avenue for a glimpse as it passed. The November sun wasn’t doing much to warm them so they’d crowded together instinctively, three deep, all the way to the police cordon at Rice Street. It gave them a huddled-masses look appropriate to the occasion. A cynic might say that in this year of our Lord 1934, anybody who advocated the redistribution of wealth could draw a crowd, even if he was dead. As for me, I voted for him once, and I’d have done it again if the iron crab hadn’t taken him down. I wasn’t there to freeze my toes for a peek at his corpse though. I opened the door of The Criterion. It was warm inside, a few bar flies were gathered around their Manhattans, and somewhere in the murk a client was waiting.
    Margaret Thornton phoned me after someone steered her to Slap Madigan, who’d recommended my services. The meeting place was my suggestion, but as soon as I laid eyes on her I could see it was a mistake. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man should rendezvous with at a nightclub in mid-afternoon. She said I’d recognize her by the black hat she was wearing, and there she was in a corner booth, veil pinned back over one ear. The rest of her outfit, cloth coat, a glimpse of skirt before I sat down, echoed the darkness of the place as well. That didn’t strike me as a good sign a year after her husband’s murder, but she looked fine in widow’s weeds. Her face might have hardened a bit since it graced the front pages, but there was still a girlish softness about her.
    I introduced myself. She nodded nervously. She had raven-colored hair, pale, luminous skin, and a few freckles around her nose that were barely visible in the dim light. Her slender, ringless fingers fidgeted on the table. One of them was chewed to the quick. I ordered a beer, and she turned down a refill on the Presbyterian she’d been nursing. I felt like a heel for arriving stylishly late. The poor kid had probably never been in a joint like this before, at least not alone.
    I was in my mid-thirties then, she was about ten years younger, so these weren’t fatherly feelings I