Past Imperfect (14 page)

XVI

McIntire was up early the next morning, after a night spent in long hours of wakefulness relieved only by a fitful sleep plagued with visions of Cindy Culver's angel face staring, cold and ghastly, from a slime covered pool. The rain that had remained entrapped in the clouds all the previous day had been unleashed around sundown and had fallen steadily throughout the night, no doubt effectively washing away any physical evidence that might have led to Cindy or her killer. About the time the first fissure in the darkness showed at the windows, McIntire had begun mentally compiling a list of all known information concerning the deaths of both Cindy Culver and Nels Bertelsen.

He was now seated at the kitchen table committing his list to paper, a neatly printed column for each of the deceased. Reducing the violent deaths of his neighbors to a tidy chart of black on white temporarily alleviated some of the sickness and horror he felt, and he entered into the task with the same zeal with which he attacked the Sunday crossword. After assessing the results, he used the side of the butter dish as a straight edge to draw a heavy line connecting information included in both columns, to wit: the early morning hours of the deaths and a relationship to David Slocum.

Possibly an association with Warner Godwin, too. Lucy had mentioned the lawyer as one of the few people, along with the “Indian chief,” Charlie Wall, that Nels got along with. He could have been Nels' attorney. Here McIntire drew a dotted line.

He had taken a fresh sheet of paper and was heavily involved in making a second list, this one detailing the personality characteristics of both victims, when a thunderous knocking nearly jolted him out of his skin and sent him scrambling for the door. A red-eyed Sheriff Koski leaned against the jamb.

“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you'd still be in bed. Hope I didn't wake up your wife.”

“Oh, no chance of that. Yesterday was the first time I've seen Leonie up before ten since our wedding day. It's not likely to happen two mornings in a row. What can I do for you?”

Koski had come with a request that McIntire join him in interviewing the Culver family.

The Culvers lived at the terminus of a dead-end road in a house that had started life some sixty-five years earlier as two modest log cabins. They were now united at right angles to make a single, no less modest, home. It was built in the Finnish mode—the logs planed square, with tightly fitting dovetailed corners. The entry was sheltered by an awning style roof supported by rough-hewn posts, which made a sort of porch across the front and around one side of the structure. The entire conglomeration was covered with patched asphalt roofing in various shades ranging from a dusky red to black. Spreading limbs of a maple overshadowed the house, and a tangle of lilac bordered the path to the ramshackle privy.

All in all, the dwelling would have presented a charmingly picturesque scene if the rope strung between two nearby birch trees, draped with forlornly dripping diapers and undershirts, hadn't proclaimed that this was no rustic hunting lodge but a year-round home to a family of ten—now nine.

McIntire followed the sheriff across the cracked concrete slab that made up the floor of the porch, through an obstacle course of three-wheeled wagons and armless dolls, past a wringer washer, to the front door. The washing machine appeared to serve as a symbol of either social status or optimism; no electrical lines entered the cottage.

Even in her present state, Sandra Culver, shed of her heavy outerwear of the day before, was, without question, the most exquisite woman McIntire had ever seen, on or off the silver screen. He lagged behind the sheriff and tried not to gawk at the honey-colored skin and the short waves of hair that fit her perfectly shaped head like a helmet of molten bronze and ended in charmingly captivating curls at the nape of her neck. She was dressed in a rumpled too-large shirt and faded baggy shorts, exposing suntanned legs that made Betty Grable look like an underfed stork by comparison. The full lips were set in a hard line and the deep amber eyes…if the eyes are the window to the soul, Sandra Culver's shades were drawn. She mumbled a terse, “How do you do?” and shook McIntire's hand. He was relieved that the situation precluded further social pleasantries.

Sandra stood near a wooden table littered with bowls of various colors and sizes, most half filled with milk in which overlooked Cheerios floated soggily. She was surrounded by seven sober-faced children, testimony that her legendary fierce disposition softened at least a little from time to time. They ranged in age from the boy of about sixteen, whom McIntire recognized from yesterday's search, to the toddler brother in his arms. At a word from their mother the entire flock scattered and disappeared like chicks fleeing the shadow of a hawk. Sandra led the two men into the living room.

It was dim, with a ceiling so low that McIntire felt it would ruffle the hair on the top of his head, had there been anything much to ruffle. The floor was covered in a blue-patterned linoleum with worn black ridges delineating the uneven boards underneath. It sloped precipitously towards a wood burning heater fashioned from a fifty-five gallon oil drum. The stove was a cold and dormant hulk now, belying its ability to transform itself into a lethal red-hot demon. McIntire absently rubbed his forearm where it still bore the scars of his own childhood barrel stove encounter and stepped forward to shake hands with Earl Culver, who had just emerged from the narrow stairwell at the far end of the room.

Earl was not a large man, but he had the muscular arms and barrel chest of one who spent his winters skidding logs out of the woods to sell for pulpwood. It was obvious that the morose aspect that he habitually presented for the amusement of his friends as accompaniment to his pitiful tales of spousal persecution had born no resemblance to genuine suffering. His thin face was a study of anguish and helpless dismay. He was dressed in a double layer of flannel shirts and bib overalls faded almost white at the knees, and carried a pair of cracked leather boots and a newspaper.

“We'd like to ask a few questions,” the sheriff stated without preamble. “We'll try not to take up too much time.”

“I don't have much time.” Earl crossed to the window and spoke with his back to the room. “I need to go look for my little girl, and you should be doing the same.”

Koski ignored this and deftly herded both of the bereaved parents to a lumpy davenport, where they obediently sat down at opposite ends. He and McIntire took the only other chairs in the room. McIntire tried in vain to picture the entire Culver clan gathered here on a frosty winter's evening.

Earl extracted a single sheet from the newspaper and proceeded to fold it precisely in half, but was checked in his project by a cough and a frown from his wife.

“Were you expecting your daughter to be on that train yesterday morning?” Koski began. McIntire wondered if he should have had his notebook with him. The sheriff didn't appear to intend to write anything down; he had brought no equipment to do so.

“Of course not. You already know that.” Sandra's Culver's tone of voice was in keeping with her reputation. “If we had known she was coming, Earl would have gone to pick her up. We live six miles from town. She wasn't walking toward home, anyway. She was obviously going somewhere else, to see somebody else.”

“Had she ever done that before?”

“Done what?”

“Come back to St. Adele to see someone outside of her family?”

Sandra looked at Earl, but continued to do the responding. “No. Why would she?”

“I don't know,” Koski answered. “I wish I knew why she did it yesterday. But,” he questioned, “could she have met somebody here—or somewhere else—in the past without you necessarily knowing about it? Did Warner Godwin let you know whenever Cindy left his home?”

Earl's eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”

“I'm only trying to find out why your daughter was on that train yesterday morning, and,” he added, “who knew that she would be on it. Now, tell me about Cindy's work schedule. Did she get regular time off?”

“She was off Thursday afternoons and every other weekend,” Sandra replied.

“Was she off this past weekend?”

Earl and Sandra looked at each other. Sandra hesitated before answering. “I'm not sure. She didn't always come home on weekends. She liked to stay in Chandler where her friends are. You know how it is with young girls.”

“I surely do,” the sheriff acknowledged glumly. “Did Mr. Godwin let you know when Cindy was leaving his house? For overnight, I mean. Do you know for sure that when she didn't come home on her weekends off, that she stayed at Godwin's?”

Earl made a sudden move to rise to his feet, but Sandra slid closer and put a hand on his arm.

“If Cindy was coming home she sent a letter or a postcard,” she said. “Other than that we don't—didn't hear too much from her. She liked being in town. Her work at Godwin's wasn't hard and she had plenty of free time.”

“Too damn much free time.” Earl didn't look at his wife, but his voice boiled over with accusation. “I knew we should have brought her back home for the summer. Who knows what kind of ideas she picked up in town?” He folded the newspaper into a thick pad, gave it a thunk with his fist, and stuffed it into one of the worn boots.

McIntire considered that it was supposedly Cindy's “ideas,” and her propensity for acting on them, that had gotten her sent to town in the first place. He cleared his throat. “Whatever happened to Cindy happened
here
, not in Chandler.” Three sets of perplexed eyes turned to him. “I mean,” he explained, “that she wouldn't have had to come back here to meet somebody from Chandler. She must have been with someone from St. Adele.”

Sandra Culver turned to him with ice in her eyes and vitriol in her voice. “Don't beat around the bush, we know what happened to Cindy, and we know who did it. Now you get out of here and find that boy, and make the son-of-a-bitch tell you what he did with my baby!” Tears at last began to well up into her eyes, and she turned away. “It rained so hard last night…”

XVII

Koski drove directly from his meeting with the Culvers to Warner Godwin's office in Chandler. He made no mention of dropping McIntire at his house. He seemed to have almost forgotten the constable's presence, and that someone would eventually have to drive him back to St. Adele. McIntire didn't remind him. He really wasn't quite sure why the sheriff had sought out his company that morning. It couldn't be that he thought McIntire would be of help in getting information out of Earl and Sandra. Koski knew that he wasn't well acquainted with the Culvers. And although the pair didn't have a lot to say, when they did speak it was in perfectly understandable English.

Koski might have read his thoughts. “I find it's a good idea to have two people in on an interview, and we're spread pretty thin right now. You don't mind?”

McIntire assured him that he didn't mind.

“Just to have another person to listen. You don't need to ask anything.”

McIntire assured him that he'd keep his mouth shut.

Godwin's offices occupied a single-story wood frame building just a half-block from the waterfront. McIntire remembered it as Tony's Cigar and Tobacco Shop. Before they went inside, Koski paused to make a slow circle around the jaunty Jeep wagon parked near the door, squinting as he examined the rugged tires and running an admiring hand over the gleaming wood paneling.

The attorney's receptionist announced their arrival ceremoniously and escorted them into the inner sanctum with a reverence that might have been more in keeping with an audience in the Oval Office.

Warner Godwin was round. From his naked balloon-shaped head balanced on his orbital torso to his circular spectacles perched on his ball of a nose, he was a collection of perfect spheres. In his black three piece suit, he resembled nothing so much as a snowman bridegroom, or maybe, “how to draw a bear starting with circles.”

He stood to reach across his desk, an imposing lawyerly affair incongruous in the tiny room with its dingy mint-green walls and flowered curtains covering a window looking onto the street.

The handshake was firm, and his voice had a deep timbre not at all in keeping with his comic-page appearance.

“I don't have a great deal of time. I have to be in court in half an hour,” were the first, but by no means the last, words out of his mouth. “Has she been found?” he asked anxiously, and continued without waiting for a reply, “I haven't told my daughter yet. She was crazy about Cindy. I don't know how she'll take it, first…her mother and now this. You're sure she's really dead? Not just run off, or been…taken somewhere?”

He had a disconcerting tendency to pause in mid-phrase, a practice which might well have been a survival skill, since he seldom stopped long enough between sentences to draw breath, or to allow anyone else to get a word in.

“Was Cindy the kind of girl that might have run off?” Koski asked.

Godwin appeared to give this question some thought before answering. “Who knows these days?”

“Did she ask you for permission to leave yesterday morning?”

“Oh yes,” Godwin assured him. “I took her to the train myself. It's not far from the house, but you have to be there by about five to get the early train, so I gave her a ride. She said that an aunt from Milwaukee was visiting her family and she wanted to see her. Not true I suppose? I didn't mind letting her go. She stayed most weekends, and hasn't asked for extra time off before. Annie spent the day…with some neighbors. She's there today too. They have a child her age so it works out well for everybody. She's used to being left with sitters. Her mother worked, too, sometimes.”

Koski laboriously dragged the train of conversation back onto the track. “Didn't you wonder why Cindy was so dressed up, just to take the train home? It's possible that she was wearing a dress that belonged to your late wife. Had she done that before, worn your wife's clothes when you were around?”

For the first time Godwin seemed at a loss for words, but recovered quickly enough. “I didn't see what she was wearing. I mean she had a coat on. It was forty degrees, for God's sake. She had on high-heeled shoes. I noticed that because it made her taller. You say she was wearing Nina's clothes? When she died?”

“You did give her some of your wife's belongings?”

“Yes.” His billiard ball forehead crinkled slightly. “Yes, I did. Last winter. I decided to start off the new year by clearing out some of the old reminders. But they were much too old for her. I didn't really think they were anything a young girl would care for. I thought maybe she would pass them on to her mother. The family is very poor, you know. Well, with all those kids, who wouldn't be?”

“Where did you go after you dropped Cindy at the train? Back home to bed?”

“No. I had a dentist appointment at ten-thirty in Marquette. I left right away and I didn't get back until…early in the afternoon. I'm sure my girl told you that yesterday.”

The man was awe-inspiring; he answered Koski's next question without even waiting for it to be asked. “Of course I didn't take my daughter to the neighbors that time of the morning. We have a system. If Annie gets up and no one is home, she knows to have a bowl of cereal and go straight to the Butlers'. They're only next door, and Annie is very dependable. Mrs. Butler was expecting her. She'd check if she wasn't at her house by seven-thirty or so.”

“What time did Cindy say she would return?” McIntire's breaking of his vow of silence brought with it the element of surprise, enabling him to catch Godwin off guard and jump in.

“By the afternoon train. It gets in about six-thirty. It's about a ten minute walk from the station, so I wouldn't have expected her until about six-forty-five. Of course I heard that she was missing long before that, so I wasn't expecting her at all. I just told Annie that Cindy had to stay away a little longer. I expect I'll have to tell her tonight that Cindy isn't coming back, and maybe get the Jarvi girl in to look after her. She baby-sat before I…hired Cindy, but of course she didn't stay evenings, and I do need to work evenings quite often. I have an office at home, but you still can't expect a five-year-old to fend for herself every night while Dad's upstairs writing briefs, now can you?”

“No, you sure can't,” Koski agreed hastily. “Now, if you would just answer a few more quick questions we'll be on our way. Has Cindy seen or communicated with David Slocum that you know of?”

“David?…oh, you mean the young man that Earl was so…no, unless he gave an alias, he never came to the house. Of course he could have telephoned when I wasn't home.”

“Couldn't he have
visited
when you weren't home?” McIntire asked.

“Not without my hearing about it later. Annie's not one for keeping secrets.”

“So,” Koski observed, “she could probably tell us the names of some of Cindy's other friends, who she ran around with, where she went, things like that?”

A flush crept up Godwin's chipmunk cheeks. “I hope you won't be wanting to question my daughter, Pete. She's just a child, and she's had more than her share of tragedy. No. No, I'm afraid I can't allow that. If you—”

“We'll try not to upset her, but a girl is missing and we have to get all the information that we can. Now I wanted to ask a few questions about Nels Bertelsen's estate and then we'll be off. You were his attorney, weren't you?”

Godwin displayed no curiosity about the implied connection between Cindy Culver and Nels Bertelsen. “Odd that you should mention Nels. As you see, I was just looking at some of his records. Mr. Petworth sent them over, but I'm afraid I'm going to need some help.” The ledgers that McIntire had seen in Wylie's kitchen were stacked on one side of the desk. Godwin drew the top one off, opened it, and pointed to the lines on the yellowed page, still as sharp and legible as the day they were written—in Norwegian. He chuckled and pushed a button to summon his gray-haired “girl,” who promptly responded with the Nels Bertelsen file. McIntire idly picked up the ledger. Its brittle pages exuded a scent of mold and India ink.

Godwin patted the folder in front of him, Nels Bertelsen's life reduced to a two-inch pile of papers. “What would you like to know? I'll tell you what I can, but of course you realize that some information is confidential.”

“Did Bertelsen leave a will?” the sheriff asked.

“Yes,” was the attorney's uncharacteristically terse reply.

“And what were the terms of that will?”

Godwin didn't hesitate. “He left everything to Lucille Delaney.”

McIntire smiled. “That will be a relief to her. She's been fretting about being thrown out into the street since the minute she heard he was dead.”

The startled look on Godwin's dumpling face was impossible to miss.

Koski leaned forward. “Do you think,” he asked, “that Lucy knew she would inherit?”

Godwin seemed about to deny any such opinion, but then made a subtle adjustment to a gold cufflink and admitted, “She was with Nels when he signed the will, right here in this office.”

“Just how much is ‘everything'?” the sheriff asked.

“Approximately less than nothing. Nels borrowed money against the home and orchards to have that boat built and set up his fishing business. Fishing hasn't been too great the last couple years. He was just breaking even, managing to keep up payments, but lately it's the income from the orchards that's been keeping the fishing business afloat—in a manner of speaking—and that can't last much longer. Competition from the western states is just too great. If it was anybody but Wylie Petworth handling the fruit business it would have gone to pot right after the war. He was more or less doing it as a favor to Nels. There's no guarantee he'll want to keep it up with Nels gone.

“Lucy might be able to sell the boat and nets, but the way things are she isn't likely to get anywhere near what Nels paid for them. So unless she's got another sugar daddy waiting in the wings, she could very well end up out in the cold anyway. Somehow I can't picture her netting herring. And of course the will has to go through probate before Lucy will be awarded anything. There could be other claims against the estate.”

McIntire looked at the opening page of the ledger and read the inscription that began the family saga that had reached its finale with Nels Bertelsen's death. The venture into the apple business had apparently been financed by a bequest to Christina Bertelsen from her mother. When Sigrid passed away in that little village on the Norwegian Sea, she had given her daughter the means to begin a new life. She had also set in motion the chain of events that had eventually led to the extinction of the entire family—at least in the United States.

“So,” Koski was saying, “we're going to need to have a look at Miss Culver's room.”

“The door's open. Annie's still at the Butlers', so just go in.” Godwin stood up. “I hope you get your man soon. Although if it drags on long enough I might have the satisfaction of nailing the bastard myself. I've filed for county attorney, you know.”