Chasing a Blond Moon (20 page)

“Rig Walter,” she said. “I'm gonna fish.”

Walter's initial casts were clumsy, and like most beginners with a fly rod, he broke his wrist like he was trying to throw a ball. Service showed him how to point his forefinger down the rod and to lock his wrist. “It's a lever,” he explained. “The weight is in the line, not the fly. The line takes the fly out to the target. It's like a slap shot. The trick is timing, not back swing or force.”

“
Yessss!!!
” Nantz shouted.

She had a fish on and was letting it run, enjoying the tug.

“You don't have to exhaust it,” he reminded her.

She laughed. “It's gonna be in our bellies in an hour. This is catch-and-digest night.”

He loved watching her fish. She took it seriously, learned quickly, and over time had become a pretty good caster.

Walter hooked a small brook trout after about fifteen minutes of trying. His son fished with a singular focus and made corrections without comment. The trout slashed at a Size 18 royal stimulator, a dry fly that did not mimic a particular insect. He played the fish pretty well and got it to his leg. “It's a trout,” the boy said, “maybe eight inches.”

“Let it go,” Service said. “Let's shoot for ten-inchers.” He looked over at Nantz. “How big was yours?”

“Big enough,” she cackled.

Service never rigged his rod. He watched Walter and Maridly and coached, and they groused and laughed, but in an hour they had six fish gutted and ready for the grill.

He sprinkled them lightly with brown sugar, inside and out, salt and pepper, and set them aside on tin foil. He fried bacon slices in a small pan until the bacon was beginning to firm up, then put one strip inside each trout and another on top. He cut lemons into thin slices and put slices inside and on top of the fish and pinned them with twigs he had whittled. When the fish were ready, he put them on tin foil on the grill.

Walter and Nantz continued to fish, releasing what they caught.

“Smells good!” Nantz shouted. “There's wine in the cooler.”

He opened the cooler and dug around. Not wine, but champagne, Taittinger. There were also three glass flutes.

“Three?” he called over to her.

“His first fish with a fly rod. We're gonna celebrate as a family. Firsts matter.”

“Why the brown sugar?” his son asked as he stared at the trout on his paper plate.

“Takes out the iodine flavor.”

The boy inhaled the two fish and wanted more. “Cook a couple more if I get 'em?” he asked his father.

Nantz poked Service. “Sure,” he said, “but they aren't always so cooperative.”

It took the boy fifteen minutes to catch two more of the right size and clean them.

Service cooked them, then sat back with Nantz and watched the boy eat.

Nantz poured champagne and handed out the flutes. “To your first fly-fishing success,” she said, raising the glass. “May this be the first of many!”

“I
really
like this,” Walter said, staring at the reel. “Can I take a rod back to school?”

“Season closes end of the month,” Service said.

“I want to practice casting all winter.”

“Take the one you're using,” Service said. The champagne bloomed nicely in his belly and made him feel warm. Nantz leaned against him and kissed his neck. “If it was earlier we'd slip into the woods,” she whispered.

He kissed her and ignored the pain in his lip.

“I did good,” she said, “didn't I?”

“Always,” he said.

“All ways,” she added. “I'll find that photo for you,” she said. “Has Simon seen the old man?”

Service shook his head. “Not yet.”

“That's not good,” she said.

She was right about that.

“I loved watching you guys,” she said. “You were really patient.”

“He learns fast,” Service said.

“Like his old man,” she whispered.

15

Limey Pyykkonen grabbed Service by the shoulder, thrust him into an office with a half brick and glass wall, facing into an open bay, and slammed the door behind them. Veins stood out in her neck and her face was bright red. “Just play along,” she said, her voice in total contrast to her body language. “Sit.”

He sat down across the table from her, his back to a yellow cinderblock wall. He saw Sheriff Macofome in the office bay, his arms crossed, watching.

She swept her hands upward in a flamboyant motion and slammed a fist on the table, causing him to jump. Her voice said, “Macofome's wife knows about us. She's kicked him out. Now he's all over my ass about the Pung case.”

“What's part A got to do with part B?” Service asked.

“The chief also found out about Shark. He wants to move in with me and I told him no.”

“Getting a little messy,” he said. “Why the dramatics this morning?”

“Macofome is crazy jealous and he doesn't want you around. All of this will work out,” she said, gesticulating again. “But as long as I'm in the office, he's going to hover, so I think we should get the hell out of here.”

“For lunch?”

“This has wiped out my appetite. There's a complaint I need to follow up on.”

“Related to Harry Pung?”

Her facial expression hardened. “No. I've been ordered to ream your ass and to tell you to stop interfering in county law enforcement matters.” Her hand swept dramatically up again. “Do you feel duly chastised?”

“Totally humiliated and duly warned,” he said.

“Okay, leave and I'll meet you outside the coffee shop across from Shark's place. Now get the hell out!” she roared, her voice suddenly rising.

It had been the strangest meeting he could remember. He sat in the Yukon and lit a cigarette before heading for the rendezvous. Initially he smiled when he thought about her theatrics. The detective's proclivities had landed her in a mess, but he couldn't help but admire her style, especially her cool. He also couldn't help wondering again if her style got in the way of her work and the thought made the smile fade.

She pulled up alongside him and told him to jump in with her. “Don't bother with questions,” she said as he buckled his seat belt. “I've been down this road before.”

“Lansing?”

She nodded solemnly. “There was a city councilman. There had been kidnap-murder of a kid, the daughter of a friend of his. He promised the friend he'd put pressure on the department.”

“Did he?”

She rolled her eyes. “He was a practitioner of honey. We had coffee, we had meetings. Later it was dinner and drinks. He'd stop by my office, call me at home, send flowers. It went on for weeks, and I had to admire his sheer persistence. He asked me to take him to the crime scene, a motel. We ended up in bed.”

“In the room where the killing took place?”

She sighed. “It just happened. He wore me down.”

“And the wife found out.”

“Everybody found out. The motel manager had illegally crossed the police line and reinstalled a videotape for the motel security system. We were stars. Word got around and the wife found out. The manager's tape disappeared and I got canned.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“The media never got the real story, but his wife was given a copy of the tape and she divorced him. He didn't get reelected.” She looked over at Service. “I make no apologies. We were consenting adults and sometimes you just do what you do. It didn't affect the investigation.”

“Except to interrupt your focus.” She didn't like the comment and he decided to back off. “They get the guy who killed the kid?”

She nodded. “I got a tip from a snitch after I got canned. I passed it on and they found the guy. He had some of the girl's clothes in his apartment. He was a student taking a semester off and working at a store where the kid went to buy pop.”

“And, of course, you got the credit,” he said sarcastically.

“It wasn't about credit, Service. It was about taking down a dirtbag. Then I moved up here with the boyfriend and I made another bad decision and he lit out. Macofome was a lieutenant when we first hooked up.”

“When he made sheriff, you got promoted.”

“I know it looks fishy,” she said, “but I was also the most qualified. I just hoped the thing would end differently.”

“Where are we going?” he asked, noticing that they were driving south.

“We're short of people—like all cop shops these days. I have homicide, but we all have to do vake fills. There's a complaint from a woman who lives just inside the city limits. The city could handle it, but I don't want to be in the office. The woman claims there's been a lot of kids in and out of a house near her. The old suspicious activity call.”

“School liaison gets you the short straw.”

“You've got it.” She looked over at him. “You're probably wondering about your friend, Shark. He's a great guy,” she said, “but he's also totally consumed by his fishing and stuff. It is what it is,” she said. “Am I being clear?”

Service wondered if Shark could handle it. His friend tended to go all out with anything he got interested in.

“Not my business,” he said.

“Bull,” she said. “You penises always stick together,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“That's a kinky metaphor,” he said.

The complainant was in her late forties, severely thin, well dressed and pleasant in an oily way.

“I don't know if it's anything, but traffic down the road at the yellow house has been pretty unusual,” she explained. “Nights mostly. Kids. They don't raise the dickens or nothing. They're just there.”

“Do you have kids?” Pyykkonen asked.

“Grown up, gone,” the woman said, with a tone suggesting she was relieved that they weren't around for this.

“You recognize any of the kids?”

The woman shook her head.

Service was skeptical.

Pyykkonen made notes, didn't ask a lot of questions. The woman had obviously gotten herself worked up, but she was organized and gave them some license plate numbers, and times of activity—a lot more detail than normally came with complaints. Whatever the house's draw, it had been underway for just over two weeks.

“Why didn't you call us earlier?” Pyykkonen asked.

“Din't want to make trouble, hey. I thought it would go on for a weekend and that would be that. You know how kids are. But it din't stop, so I started thinking something's just not so right at da yellow house, hey.”

“Who lives there?”

“Don't know. It's a rental. The owner's Maggie Soper.”

“From Painesdale?” Pyykkonen asked.

“Ya, youse know her?”

Pyykkonen nodded and glanced at Service, who nodded to let her know he'd also picked up on the name.

“You don't know the renter?”

“No. I just got back from Duluth couple weeks ago. My sister's sick. Before that I was in Montana all summer, with my son and 'is wife. The place was empty when I left.”

They thanked the woman and drove by the house. It sat on Portage Lake, just west of where Torch Bay angled sharply. Further south, just above Chassel, the shipping canal cut southeast through to Keeweenaw Bay and the open waters of Lake Superior. Ore boats had once used the canal to steam east to the Soo locks so they could deliver their cargoes to lower Great Lakes ports.

The house was a small yellow cottage with an addition that didn't blend well. There was green mildew on the white shutters and roof. An aluminum dock was out front in the water and an orange plastic buoy beyond the dock. The lawn was torn up by tire marks. Several beer cans flashed in the grass in the early afternoon sun.

“I think we should wait until tonight, see what goes down,” Pyykkonen said. “If we approach now, somebody is liable to see us.”

“Pung rented and bought his house from the woman in Painesdale.”

“This probably doesn't have anything to do with Pung.”

“Let's call the landlord,” he said.

She looked at him. “Better yet, let's go see her,” Pyykkonen said, checking her wristwatch. “We've got time.”

Copper was discovered on the Keeweenaw Peninsula thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Early explorers found primitive mining pits that were later dated back five thousand years. The Chippewas did not use copper, but respected it for the spirits contained in the reddish ore. The real copper boom began in the middle of the nineteenth century when ore was discovered in the rugged greenstone spine of the peninsula, stretching north and south of Houghton. The area below was known as the Copper, or south range, the area above and across the shipping canal as the Keeweenaw, or north range. The activity below Houghton had been centered in what became the village of South Range, whose houses were old, the weary remnants of Copper Range Company structures built more than a century before.

Painesdale was the village below South Range, different from its neighbor only in size.

Maggie Soper lived in an original mining house across from old Painesdale Jeffers High School. The house was distinguished from surrounding houses by its faded red barn paint. The battered yellow cowling of a snowmobile lay on its side in the yard among broken and bent brown weeds. There was no lawn.

The owner came out on the porch and showed no interest in inviting them inside. She was short and plump with a silver pixie haircut and wire-rimmed glasses. She had long, manicured fingernails, freshly done, and small soft hands.

“Mrs. Soper,” Pyykkonen said.

“It's Miss,” the woman said. “I never had time to marry.”

“I'm Limey Pyykkonen,” the Houghton detective said. “We talked on the phone.”

“About the professor. I remember,” the woman said.

“You sold your house to him.”

“I tolt youse that,” the woman said.

“Do you own other rental properties?”

“Do I need my lawyer?”

“No ma'am, we're just doing follow-ups. This is Detective Service of the DNR.”

Maggie Soper didn't bother to acknowledge him.

“Do you own other properties, Miss Soper?”

“What do you mean by ‘properties'?”

“Real estate, houses, cabins, that sort of thing.” Service admired Pyykkonen's patience.

The woman didn't pause as she ticked off the list: “Da house in Freda, 'nudder in Redridge overlook da dam on da Salmon Trout. Two here in town, two more in South Range, one in Atlantic Mine, three in Houghton, two in Lake Linden.”

Twelve, Service counted. It seemed like a lot of real estate for an old woman whose home looked ready to collapse under the next snowpack.

“Are all of them occupied now?”

“All but da one the professor bought. How long you tink it take for da probate and da will? Somebody gonna get da house?”

Service understood. The woman's life was money. She'd sold high and now hoped for a cheap buy-back so she could rent or sell again.

“Do you have the names of your renters?”

“All public record.”

“What about the house on the canal in Houghton?”

“What's this about?”

“Like I said, we're just doing routine follow-ups.”

Maggie Soper looked skeptical. “I rent dat to such a nice, polite boy. His name is Terry Tunhow.”

“Korean?”

The woman curled a lip. “Dey all look alike to me, but he's polite. 'Course he doesn't speak our language too good. Got da heavy accent.”

“When did he start renting?”

“July.”

“What does he pay?”

“Tousand a month.”

“Seems like a lot.”

“You've seen da place?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“If it's on da wadder, dey'll pay it and I'll take it.”

“Cash?”

“Twentieth of the month. He's always on time. He comes to da house, hands me cash money, and dat's it.”

“Did he pay for August?”

“Right on time. He'll be back twentieth of dis month.”

Pyykkonen turned to Service. “Any questions?”

“You've got a lot of real estate,” he said.

“Just like a man to wonder how a woman gets her money. I'm frugal and I know real estate. I buy some places and fix them up. Others I build, do all da work myself.”

“You've got a contractor's license?”

The woman puffed up. “If dere's nothing else, I've got work.”

Pyykkonen and Service bought pasties and coffee at Mother's Load in South Range and ate in the car.

“I doubt she's ever held a hammer,” Pyykkonen said. “You see her hands?”

He had and he was encouraged that she had noticed them too.

“Terry Tunhow,” he said. “Tunhow Pung went by Terry. Maybe we're catching a break here. Not too clever using two first names.”

“I don't know,” Pyykkonen said. “There's something going on in all this,” she added. “Some kind of undertow, but I can't tell if it's pushing us or pulling us.”