Frag Box (14 page)

Chapter 17

The Law of the Range

The sheriff was a collection of middle-aged sags and bulges squeezed into a heavily starched, too-tight uniform. He also wore cowboy boots, a Smokey Bear hat, and about thirty pounds of weaponry and gear. His name was Oskar Lindstrom, and he seemed as much in denial as in charge.

“You know, for a long time I thought I was going to retire from this job without ever having a murder to handle.”

“That’s really too bad.”
I’m sure the murderer did it just to spite you.

“We got a coroner in Virginia, don’cha know, but if I want a crime scene crew, I’ll have to either ask for help from Duluth PD or call the BCA, over to Bemidji.”

“I think you ought to have a crime scene crew, Sheriff.”
Do I have to make the call for you, too?

“Well, yeah, I guess so. I’ll maybe just have a preliminary look myself, though, anyhow. You said you and your wife were here to see the victim?”

“She’s n…” Anne stomped on my instep, hard, and gave me a penetrating look with a tiny shaking of her head. I didn’t know if her pantomimed “no” applied to telling the sheriff she wasn’t my wife or telling him she was a reporter, so I did neither.

“She’s what, you say?”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I tripped on the step, there. I was going to say she’s just along for the ride, Sheriff. I came here to tell Mr. Victor that his son is dead.”

“You call him Mr. Victor? Hell, he wasn’t anybody special.” He put on a pair of leather gloves before trying the doorknob. The door swung away from him easily, without needing the knob turned. He walked into the tiny kitchen, stomping snow off his fancy boots, and I followed.

“I don’t know his first name. The street address was all I had.”

“Jim. Or James, I guess. His name was James Victor. I’ve known him all my life. He was an asshole, I don’t mind saying. The kind of guy would pick an argument with a post, just to stay in practice. And now he’s messing my life up again, giving me a murder case. So, you couldn’t leave notifying him up to the authorities, then?” By which he clearly meant himself.

“His son was a homeless man. I’m sure the police have no idea who his next of kin was.”

“So that’s what became of him, huh? Turned into a bum? Doesn’t surprise me, I got to say. But you knew where to find his next of kin. Why was that, I wonder? And who the hell said you could follow me into the house, here?”

“Oh, wasn’t that all right? I’ll be careful not to touch anything.” Sure, I would. Anything I wasn’t going to take, that is. “I just thought we could all get in out of the cold.”

“It isn’t in out of the cold, just out of the wind. Looks like the furnace hasn’t been lit for some time. That half a cup of coffee on the counter is froze solid.”

The card in the dead man’s hand looked identical to the one they had taken off Charlie’s body, but I was obviously not going to get a chance to look at it closer. Meanwhile, Anne had her little camera out and was holding it waist-high, partially hidden by her purse, shooting everything in sight. Not that there was much to shoot, other than the body. I couldn’t tell if the rest of the place had been trashed or if Mr. James Victor was just a terrible housekeeper. Either way, it was a mess.

And so was he. There wasn’t much left of his face, but what I could see looked as if he had been beaten before he was shot. He was also tied to the chair, and there was blood on the floor that didn’t look as if it had anything to do with the gunshot wound.

“Why was that, again, that you came all the way from down Minneapolis?”

“St. Paul, actually.”

“Same damn thing. Now you’ve had time to think up an answer, so what is it, then?”

“I wrote a bail bond for Mr. Victor’s son once, and I sort of befriended him. I figured if I didn’t come and tell the old man, nobody would.”

“You couldn’t call him, then?”

“That would be pretty cold, Sheriff,” said Anne. I liked that better than what I had been going to say. Obviously this was a woman who could think on her feet. She had put the camera away now and was easing her way back toward the door and making gestures that said, “let’s blow this pop stand.”

“Yeah, okay, I guess it would a been, at that. Now get on out of here. This is a crime scene, ya know.”

“Happy to help out.”

“Wait on the porch a minute, though. I need your name and address before you go. I would say ‘don’t leave town,’ like they do in the cop movies, but hell, you can’t hardly go across the street here without leaving town. That’s a little joke, see?”

I smiled politely and gave him one of my cards, both of which seemed to make him very happy. I wrote my license number on the back of it for him, and he wrote “Mr. and Mrs.” ahead of my name on the front. Then he shook my hand and gave Anne what might have been a salute, and herded us off the porch.

“Charlie said his father worked in the mines,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know what he did, exactly?”

“He’s been retired for a lot of years now,” said Lindstrom, crowding us further off the porch. “I think he used to drive truck, though. One of those big off-road monsters, you know? A Euclid or a Cat, or something.”

“Oh really? So, not underground work, then?”

“You kidding? There haven’t been any working underground mines on the Range for forty, fifty years. Used to be, you could take a tour through the main shaft of the first one, at Tower-Soudan. But open pit was the wave of the future, don’cha know, except there’s not even much of that anymore. The ones who cashed in their pensions before it all went to hell, like Jim there, they were the lucky ones. So what makes you ask, then?”

“Just curious.” I tried for a nice, sincere-looking shrug. “Nice meeting you, Sheriff.”

Back in the car, Anne said, “Do you suppose he really will call the BCA and get a proper investigation going?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. He seemed awfully glad to finally be left alone at the scene. You’re in the newspaper business. Do you know anybody on the Duluth paper?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Maybe you should call them up and give them an anonymous scoop. If our sheriff has press coverage, I’m sure he’ll do everything by the book.”

“I like it.” She dug her phone out and started scrolling through some kind of list. “What was all that business about the underground mines, by the way?”

“There was hardly anything in James Victor’s house that didn’t look as if he got it at a rummage sale fifty years ago.”

“I would agree. So?”

“So why did Mr. Victor, who never was an underground miner in the first place, have a shiny new pickaxe leaning against the wall in a corner of his kitchen?”

“I give up, why?”

“How soon do you have to get back to St. Paul?”

“Where are we going instead?”

“Tower-Soudan.”

“Is that all one place?”

“I have no idea.”

Chapter 18

Night Life on the Range

I took Minnesota 169 back to the interchange on the west edge of Virginia and headed north again. I thought about going into the town to buy some hiking boots and some flashlights, but the day was already getting late, and I didn’t know how much more of Anne’s time I could burn.

“Why did you want to let the sheriff think we were married, by the way?”

“Did that make you uncomfortable?” said Anne. “I’m sorry.”

“Not uncomfortable, just perplexed.”

“If I had told him I was a reporter, then I’d have had to cover the murder story.”

“I suppose you would have, yes. What would be wrong with that? I’d have waited for you.”

“I’m not actually supposed to be here, is the thing.”

“You said your editor told you to back off the story, knowing that you wouldn’t.”

“That was before. What he told me later, when I was filing my column, was to pursue it if I thought I just had to, but strictly on my own time. So if I admit I’m here, I have to take a vacation day.”

“Do you have one to take?”

“I never seem to have any to take. I use them up as fast as they accumulate, nursing hangovers and working on the Great American Novel.”

I looked over to see if she was putting me on. She gave me an open face and a palms-up gesture.

“A hard-drinking novelist? That’s actually respectable, in some quarters. Do you shoot elephants and write about bullfights and wars?”

“No, I shoot pictures and write about bail bondsmen with mysterious pasts.”

I shot her another look and was met by twinkling eyes and a mouth on the verge of a huge smile.

“Made you look,” she said.

“Twit.”

“Now tell me about Iowa.”

“Never happen.”

“Why?”

“It’s too boring.”

“You’re a bad liar, Herman.”

Maybe so, but I can stonewall with the best of them.

Tower-Soudan turned out to be two places. You come to Tower first, and if you blow right on past it because it’s so small, you come to Soudan less than a quarter of a mile later. And to your amazement, you find that Soudan is even smaller. Somebody once told me that you can estimate the population of a small town by counting the number of blocks on Main Street and multiplying by one hundred. If that’s true, then Tower had about three hundred people and Soudan didn’t have any. But it had a big monument telling us we were in the right area.

The mine that Sheriff Lindstrom had talked about was on the north side of Soudan, and it wasn’t nearly as closed-looking as he had implied. In fact, it had been turned into a state park. The skeletal framework of the pit-shaft hoist tower, unsheltered from the weather, poked maybe sixty feet up in the air, looming over an assortment of buildings and platforms and trails that meandered down a steep embankment.

The whole park complex looked bigger than the town on the other side of the road. A sign said that the underground mine tours were closed for the season just then, but there were lights on in the buildings, and the complex was obviously still staffed and open. As far as I could tell, the underground mine and a couple of open-pit ones beyond it were still in operation, even. I pulled into the outer parking lot, which was neatly plowed, and stopped but did not get out.

“I’m afraid I’ve dragged you off on a wild goose chase,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“What were you expecting, Herman?”

“Something abandoned and boarded up. Charlie was an old tunnel rat. If he was going to hide a box of money around here, I figured he would pick a place that was underground. And I was hoping the new pickaxe was what he had used to break in, and we could follow the scratch marks or some such.”

“I see,” she said. “And where did his father fit in with all that?”

“Well, there was a gap or two in my theory yet.”

“Hmm.”

“I really am sorry.”

“Well, it’s not as though you’re the first person who ever wasted my time. And I got the story of the second murder, anyway, for a tie-in. Tell you what: find a place to buy me a dinner that doesn’t include lutefisk, and we’ll call it even.”

As she spoke, the windshield began to get spotted with the first flakes of another snowfall. It wasn’t exactly a blizzard yet, but it was enough to make the visibility rotten for the trip back to St. Paul. I sighed.

“Swell,” I said.

“Looks nasty, doesn’t it?”

“It looks like we’re cursed, is what it looks like.” I flipped on the wipers and switched the duct control to full defrost.

“Let’s wait it out, then. We’re far enough into the Range to get blizzards that can stop a sled dog. The world will not end if I don’t get back until sometime tomorrow. I’ll say I was covering the cranberry harvest in Brainerd, or something. You can use my phone to call your office in the morning, if you want.”

“Does Brainerd have a cranberry harvest?”

“It does now. Look for a motel that doesn’t predate the Second World War.”

I sternly pushed aside the thoughts that were gleefully crowding into my consciousness.

“We’re not going to find any four-star resort hotels, you know,” I said.

“Then we’ll have to find some other kind of attraction, won’t we? Think like a reporter, Herman; learn to take advantage of what’s around you.”

Unbelievable, the straight lines people give me.

***

We went to a little strip mall on the outskirts of Virginia, to buy a few things. I went into a drugstore and bought a throwaway shaving kit and a toothbrush, and Anne went I don’t know where and bought I don’t know what. Then we drove back to Eveleth and took adjoining rooms at a motel whose only commendable feature was that it was an easy walk to the place where we had eaten lunch.

If we were about to become lovers, we weren’t admitting that to ourselves yet. And the more I thought about it, the worse idea I thought it was, anyway. Sooner or later, people who are physically intimate become intimate in other ways, too. And of all the people I could not let that happen with, a newspaperwoman was close to the top of the list. But that was no reason we couldn’t have a nice dinner.

But then, she said it first. Even to myself, I’m a bad liar.

The snow was getting thicker by time we hiked back to the main street. The temperature wasn’t really bitter, but the wind made it feel worse than it was. We hunched into our coats and hurried. Fortunately, it was only three blocks.

The cafe was a lot livelier than when we had last been there. A folding partition had been rolled back to open up a much bigger dining room, with a bandstand, a bar, and a small dance floor. We took a booth in a corner, and a cheery fortyish waitress whose nametag said she was Madge brought us menus.

“Friday night,” she said, “so I guess you know what that means, then.”

“Um,” I said.

“Let me guess,” said Anne. “The special is all-you-can-eat fish fry.”

“You got it, honey. Beer-battered walleye. And the Paul Bunyan drinks until eight o’clock, of course.”

We ordered drinks and studied the menus. Over in the opposite corner of the room, a trio with matching black slacks and embroidered vests was pumping out schmaltz. A tallish blonde played a button accordion, accompanied by a bearded guy with an acoustic guitar. The third member of the combo looked like a refugee from a sixties jug band. He played a washboard with an assortment of bells and horns attached to it and sang into a microphone. Out on the dance floor, a few couples were doing something that might have passed for a waltz.

“The pretzels are zalty, the beer flows like vine,” sang Mr. Washboard, in a faux accent that was probably supposed to be German. “After sixteen shmall bottles, the band she sounds fine. Ve laugh und ve dance und ve haff a good time…”

To my amazement, they really didn’t sound too bad.

“Do you dance, Herman?”

“Only after the aforementioned sixteen small bottles or so. And by then, I would probably just fall down.”

“I could teach you.”

“You could get very frustrated trying, anyway. Where did you learn?”

“Political rallies.”

“Get out of here.”

“No, it’s true,” she said, shaking her head. “My father was a state senator from northern Wisconsin. He’d go to fundraisers in roadhouses and dance halls in little towns out-state, and the party faithful would listen to speeches and drink beer and dance the polka. I was too young to drink, so I had to learn to dance. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had anything to do at all.”

“Where was your mother all this while?”

“Sitting home, mostly, disapproving. She refused to go out on the campaign trail. I’m not sure if she thought it was immoral or just undignified. Sometimes I think she was a closet Methodist. But she loved my father deeply, so she just sulked a little and kept quiet about it.”

“That’s a nice story,” I said, meaning it. “Does that somehow lead to a career in journalism?”

“Partly, maybe. I surely saw plenty of reporters doing it badly. But even when they were sloppy with their stories, they seemed about as independent as a person can get and still be drawing a salary. It looked like fun.”

“How come you never went into TV news? With your looks and poise, it seems like a natural evolution.”

She shook her head again, though now she was smiling and blushing a bit. “That’s not real journalism,” she said. “I guess when it comes to my profession, I’m a curmudgeon, too. In my world, you’re just not an honest-to-god reporter unless you write for a paper.”

The waitress brought us our drinks then, a gin and tonic in a huge old-fashioned soda-fountain glass for Anne and a Scotch with a short beer for me. She asked if we were ready to order, and Anne told her to bring us some munchies for now, onion rings and spiced bull bites.

“Is that okay?” she said to me.

“Sure. Just what us health-food nuts always order.”

“I figured as much. So. Pay me back for my nice story. Tell me about your father.”

I sighed. “You just never give up, do you?”

“Not me. Bulldog Packard of the Mounties.”

I took a sip of scotch and tried to think what I could tell her that would be consistent with rural Iowa.

“I don’t remember my father,” I said, which was the truth. “My mother claimed he died in the Korean War, but I don’t recall her ever getting a government pension check. I think he just split.”

“I’m sorry for you. Did you blame yourself for that?”

“Not really. I didn’t come to that conclusion until I was fairly old. When I was a little kid, I thought it was cool to have a father who was a war hero.”

“Even though he was dead?”

I shrugged. “I had plenty of friends who wished their fathers were dead. They probably envied me.”

“And your mother?”

“My mother.” I took another sip of scotch. “What can I tell you about my mother? She waited tables at a blue-collar bar, where she was probably also one of the best customers. She put…”

I had been about to say she put me in an orphanage when I was eleven, but then I realized that small towns probably don’t have orphanages.

“She put?”

“She didn’t want me around. I spent a lot of time with my uncle, out on a farm.”

“Was that nice?”

I thought about running the phones for Uncle Fred and finding that I had a lot of money.

“It was okay,” I said. “It was interesting.” And I was amazed to realize how much of what I had just told her was true.

“And you never married?”

“Well, I hadn’t ever seen a marriage up close that worked, you know? I couldn’t figure out why people wanted it. What about you? Your ring finger doesn’t look like it’s ever worn anything.”

“I guess I never saw one that worked, either.” But her eyes wandered when she said it, and she toyed with a phantom ring on her left hand, telling me the real story. I touched her glass with mine and gave her what I hoped was an understanding smile.

Our food came, and we laid into it. We liked it so well, we ordered more of the same, plus some stuffed potato skins, rather than what she called “an honest meal.” And we had more drinks, of course. And after fewer than sixteen but more than I could easily count, she really did get me out on the dance floor. I don’t know if the dance I wound up doing had a real name or not. But just as the singer over in the corner had promised, we danced and we laughed and we had a good time. She was an easy person to be with.

It was past midnight when we walked back to the motel, leaning on each other. The wind had died down and the snow had changed to puffy, floating flakes that actually managed to make the dirty old town look postcard-pretty. We indulged in a very chaste goodnight kiss and let ourselves into our respective rooms.