Service Dress Blues (10 page)

Front Street, such as it is, runs about two-hundred-fifty paces, from Wells to Mason. Roughly halfway along this modest distance, just past the Safe House entrance, it stops pretending that it's a real street and admits that it's really just a wide alley. Unless you're driving a delivery truck, you're not supposed to park there.

Carlsen had. By the time Rep got outside, Carlsen had reached the open passenger-side door of his SUV and was gaping at the interior. Fox stood a few feet away, vacant eyed, seemingly oblivious to the cold and to the cigarette—now lit—hanging from the first two fingers of her drooping left hand.

Halfway expecting to see a body inside the SUV, Rep walked over. Instead of a body, he saw a Buck hunting knife. Its satin black hilt picked up highlights from the street lamps shining through the windshield. Four inches of gleaming steel blade glinted in the eerie glow of blue and green lights on the dashboard. The blade's other four inches were buried in and under a folded newspaper that the knife pinned to the passenger seat.

Pressing closer, Rep saw that the paper was turned to the upper left-hand side of an inside page. The only words he could make out were in boldface:
Veronica Gephardt.

Chapter 11

Friday, January 16, 2009

Joe Sieman jogged into the north end of Juneau Park on the east side of downtown Milwaukee just after seven the following morning, as pale, dawn-pink light was giving way to more robust sunshine. Unconsciously he picked up his pace a bit. The south end of the park at Mason and Prospect lay only about a third of a mile away, and that's where he'd finish his three-mile run, across the street from the Cudahy Towers Condominiums where he lived.

He wore a Green Bay Packers-logo stocking cap and a gray hooded sweatshirt, but made no other concessions to the twenty-five-degree weather. No gloves, and his shorts left his legs bare from well above his knees. Under-Armor and Thinsulate hadn't existed when he'd done his Army stint forty-plus years ago, and he wasn't going to deck himself out in wimp-gear like that with the temperature over twenty and no real wind coming off the lake.

Breathing hard now, he ran past a replica of Solomon Juneau's log cabin, the first permanent European structure in what Indians called “the Gathering Place of the Waters”—which had sounded to Juneau like “Milwaukee.” Someone so inclined could have thought of the cabin as the first small footprint of white imperialism in Wisconsin, but Sieman wasn't much given to introspection and he didn't.

Twelve healthy strides beyond the cabin brought him to a statue of Leif Erikson. This was a concession to Milwaukee's Scandinavian community, which insisted that the Vikings had gotten here first, even though they hadn't bothered building log cabins and, in fact, had pretty much just passed through. The sculpted Leif looked oddly feminine, even gay, in a micro-mini skirt and with no weapon but a dinky little curved knife that no self-respecting Viking would have bothered to loot from a slain enemy.

Perhaps a hundred yards past Leif stood the park's namesake, Solomon Juneau himself. That was a little more like it. Juneau basked in French grandeur on a massive stone pedestal, with his musket gripped firmly in his right hand and his eyes gazing confidently west.

Still twenty yards away from the Juneau statue, Sieman frowned. His eyes weren't what they used to be, but he could make out something on the ground in front of the pedestal that bothered him. It looked like a big American flag lying in a heap, and if that's what it turned out to be Sieman was going to be pissed off. You don't like the war, don't like NAFTA, don't like the World Trade Organization, don't like this or that, fine: hunt up a picket sign and parade around outside the federal building or city hall; chant some slogans; slap a bumper-sticker on your car; write a letter to the editor. But leave the flag out of it. People had died for that flag, and some of them were friends of his.

Shifting into the closest thing to high gear he still had at sixty-six, he hurried toward the red-white-and-blue bundle. He pulled up short as he got there, for the flag wasn't just lying on the ground. It was wrapped around something—something big and lumpy.

After a moment's hesitation, Sieman squatted and pulled back the top fold of the flag wrap. He wasn't squeamish. He'd been a farmer and a soldier before he went into sales and finally started making money. Grisly stuff happened on farms and around heavy weapons. Whatever was here, he was pretty sure he'd seen worse.

He was wrong.

In a few seconds he found himself looking at what was left of Ole Lindstrom. He was dead. And he'd been scalped.

Chapter 12

If Milwaukee ever was the placid, crime-free place that people like Siemen think they recall from a memory-gilded past, it isn't anymore. But it isn't Detroit, either. A mutilated corpse found across the street from the priciest condominiums in the state qualifies as breaking news.

The news broke into the banter of Jagler and Mueller, WTMJ's morning guys, at seven-thirty-six
A.M.
Melissa heard it as she was pulling into her UWM faculty parking space. Rep had told her about the knife through the newspaper, so the reporter's solemn intonation about “the brutal murder of an elderly man from rural Wisconsin just discovered on Milwaukee's east side” sent a premonitory shiver through her gut. The reporter confirmed her fears in his next sentence, when he gave Ole Lindstrom's name. The story wrapped up with a promise of “more at the top of the hour.” Melissa turned the radio off and thumbed Kuchinski's speed-call number on her mobile phone.

“Have you heard the news?” she asked after his voice, echoing through cyber-space with a highway-hum in the background, answered her ring.

“Yeah. Lena's back in jail. I got messages from Rep and her both last night while I was driving home from the airport. I've been on my way to Appleburg since before dawn.”

“That's not what I mean.” She told him about Ole.

“Whoa. Scalped?”

“That's what they said.”

“Wow. Okay. Hmm.” Eight silent seconds followed these distracted syllables before Kuchinski spoke again. “Listen. Thanks. Sometime in the next forty miles I'm gonna have to put this all together, and I'm not real clear on how to do that.”

“All right. Good luck.”

As Melissa ended the call and got out of the car she saw Veronica Gephardt about forty feet away, striding briskly toward Janssen Hall and looking rather elegant in winter blue against the gray-white, featureless sky. She was wearing overlarge sunglasses and walking with her head down, as if deep in not very happy thoughts. Melissa wondered whether Gephardt had read her icily polite email, sent just before bed last night. She'd had to go through four drafts to ratchet the thing down from angry to bitchy to grumpy and finally to just chilly. Impulsively, she hustled to intercept Gephardt.

“I picked up your message on my Blackberry last night,” Gephardt said in a flat, featureless voice as Melissa approached. “You should know better than to believe everything you read in the papers, but I understand your feelings. And of course I respect your decision.”

“I've changed my mind,” Melissa said, falling into step beside the other woman. “I'm willing to stay on the program and make the presentation.”

Gephardt stopped and looked at Melissa. With the sunglasses hiding a good part of the upper half of her face, only a minuscule upward tug at the left corner of her lips hinted at any emotion.

“Even though I'm ‘using you to promote my pursuit of public office,' as you put it?”

“Your political ambitions are your own business. If I'm being used—well, I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself.”

Gephardt resumed walking as she spoke again.

“Thanks, then. That eliminates one headache for me. Just out of curiosity, why the change of heart?”

The truth wouldn't do.
The guy pushing your candidacy just got killed, he was my husband's client, and this mess has been hassling me like a low-grade fever for a month. Walking away suddenly doesn't seem like such a hot idea—
that would definitely qualify as excessive candor. So Melissa pretended to be out of breath as she rifled her brain for a genteel lie. She came up with something she hoped was plausible.

“The homily I heard at mass last Sunday mentioned a poster that Kofi Annan had in his office when he was UN secretary general. It showed an eight-year old girl in Africa who was starving to death. The caption read, ‘She would love to have your problems.' It seemed like an admonition to keep personal irritations in perspective, so I've been trying to do that.”

“I wouldn't have taken you for a church-goer.” For the first time in the conversation Gephardt's tone was at least companionable, if not quite friendly.

“It's a fairly recent thing.”

“Husband?”

“Student. It's a long story.”

“Well, it's none of my business,” Gephardt said. “I shouldn't be prying.”

They had reached the overhang outside the main entrance to Janssen Hall. Gephardt continued toward the door while Melissa stopped. As Gephardt stepped into the deep shadow, she kept her sunglasses on. For just a moment, catching Gephardt's profile in the changing light, Melissa thought she glimpsed the border of a red and purple bruise peeking out from underneath the edge of the right lens.

***

Kuchinski actually needed just twenty miles to re-map the legal landscape radically altered by Ole Lindstrom's murder. Once he'd accomplished that, visiting Lena Lindstrom dropped to number two on the day's agenda. Just past Fond du Lac, keeping one eye on Highway 41, he went to the GPS system touchscreen on his dash and changed his destination from the Sylvanus County Justice Center to the Lindstroms' home address in Loki. The sultry female voice provided by the system's computer chip petulantly acknowledged the new instructions.

***

“Remember me?” the woman asked Rep at eight-twenty-five as he strode toward the Germania Building's elevator lobby. “I'm the Laurel who doesn't smoke.”

“Sure. Photographer for Future-Cubed, right?”

“Yeah. Do you have a couple of minutes?”

“Of course. Come on up to my office.”

“That's okay, we can talk down here.” She held out a large brown envelope. “Gary wanted me to give this to you.”

“What is it?”

“A picture of Randy Halftoe handing you a bagful of money.”

Rep gave her a blink and a puzzled frown. He didn't take the envelope.

“I know you didn't accept the cash and that you made him take the bag back. Gary knows that too. Randy isn't the sharpest tomahawk on the rez, but he's not dumb enough to play games with walking-around money. He explained what happened and got the delivery right on the second try.”

“Then what's the point of giving me the picture?”

“It's Gary's way of saying he made sure there weren't any misunderstandings. He just wanted you to know.”

“Okay.” Rep shrugged and took the envelope. “Thanks.”

“Listen. Gary told me about that thing last night. With the knife and everything. Would that be, like, attorney-client privilege or something?”

“No. He's not a client, and last night I wasn't an attorney. I was a witness.”

“So if the cops ask about it, you'd have to tell them?”

The question didn't quite stun Rep, but it surprised him. In the second or two that it took to recover, he realized that she must not have gotten the news about Lindstrom yet.

“I guess you haven't heard, and I'm sorry to have to be the one to break it to you,” he said. “Ole Lindstrom's body was found this morning. He was murdered and then scalped. If the police don't call me by nine o'clock, I'm going to call them. I'd be willing to bet that Lindstrom spent most of his last day on earth chatting up political contacts—like the reporter who wrote the Veronica Gephardt item that ended up pinned to Carlsen's front seat with a knife.”

Wolf's right hand went to her throat and then to her mouth. Her eyes darted in apparent confusion to her right.

“Listen,” she said, her voice sounding tentative and confused. “Maybe we should go up to your office after all.”

“Okay.”

Rep escorted her up to his quarters. For the fourth time that week he noticed that the third shelf on his book case was still sagging a half-inch or so at the near end, even though he'd moved
Nims on Copyright
and a couple of other weighty tomes to the bottom shelf. For the fourth time that week, he made a mental note to buy a new pair of shelf brackets over his lunch hour.

Then he remembered he had a guest. He turned to offer to take her coat, but Wolf had already shrugged out of it and sunk uninvited into a chair in front of his desk.

“Do you know what the expression ‘pay to play' means?” she asked.

“If you have to deal with politicians, it helps if they've written notes thanking you for your campaign contributions. Am I close?”

“Yes. That applies pretty much across the board, but Indian gaming is heavily regulated and politically touchy. So the casinos write lots of checks. Tribal casinos are a favorite whipping boy for a lot of people. When casinos get what they want, people assume it's because of the checks.”

“Imagine that.”

“It isn't fair,” Wolf insisted. “The casinos don't make the rules. They're just playing the game the same way everybody else does. But that's the way it is. It's sitting right there in case some politician is looking for an issue.”

“Ole Lindstrom, for example—with Gary Carlsen's help. They were setting Veronica Gephardt up to run on exactly that issue.”

“Sure. But that wouldn't really bother the casinos. A state attorney general isn't that big a deal. No one is going to outlaw Indian gaming, even if they could. People love to gamble and it makes tons of money for the government. The Gephardt stuff is just par for the course.”

“You're saying the campaign issue would just be out there to fool the rubes and no one would kill Lindstrom to nip it in the bud.”

“Right. And no casino thug would have done that knife thing to warn Gary off.”

“They'd just shovel some money at Lindstom's political action committee,” Rep said. “As they tried to do through me.”

“Like I said,” Wolf shrugged, “that's the way the game is played. So what this looks to me like is that someone killed Lindstrom for some other reason and is trying to lay it on the tribes. I'll give you four to one the talk-jocks on rant-radio are screaming about it right this second.”

“I'd double-down,” Rep said, “but in the long run the house always wins.”

“
I'm
not a casino girl,” Wolf protested.

“It's just an expression,” Rep said. “Sorry.”

“I work for Gary and I like him a lot. That California cool act of his gets a little old, but he has real talent and he's built a thriving business in a tough market. Plus, he can be sweet when he wants to be, and he's straight with me.”

“Fair enough. So why did Gary send you to shut me up about the knife warning?”

“He said it would just be a distraction. He was even afraid people might think he'd staged it himself to try to bring attention to Gephardt's candidacy.”

Rep leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

“I saw him when he got a look at the knife sticking out of his front seat. His shock and fear looked real enough to me—but maybe he's just a good actor.”

“If he's that good then he's hiding his talent under a bushel in Milwaukee. He should be in Hollywood. Still, the police can be skeptical about…things like this.”

Rep thought he heard
things like…insinuating pictures
implied in her tone. He wondered if he were imagining things.

“Can't be helped,” he said. “I'm going to tell the police about the knife business. I'd suggest that Gary do the same thing.”

“I'll pass that on,” she said as she stood up and folded her coat over her arm.

She didn't thank him for his advice.

***

Sylvanus County tends to be a little anal about speed limits, but even so Kuchinski managed to reach the Lindstrom home before nine-thirty—just in time, as it turned out.

“Morning!” he called genially to the cops—one in uniform and two in civvies—who were fussing around with the front door as he jumped out of his car.

They didn't try to hide their irritation, but one of detectives worked up a passable smile while Kuchinski mushed across the front lawn snow from the curb where he'd parked.

“Good morning, counselor,” the smiler called. “If you're wondering about a warrant, we have one.” He flourished an unfolded sheet of legal-sized bond.

“To search for evidence of bail-jumping?” Kuchinski asked as he approached the porch. “What would that be, I wonder? Rand-McNally maps? Passports?”

“Got it,” the other detective said as the front door swung open.

“You don't mind if I tag along, do you?” Kuchinski asked.

“We weren't expecting you,” the first speaker said.

“Don't worry about it,” Kuchinski said, weaving through the three men and sidling into the house. “My feelings aren't hurt.”

The cops shrugged. All three of them. At the same time.

Kuchinski could tell that they knew what they were doing. They got the search done in less than forty-five minutes. As far as he could see, they didn't miss anything and they didn't find much, bagging up only a few bulging, window-envelopes from a mail-sorter on the kitchen counter. They weren't looking for the same things Kuchinski was, he figured, but he didn't find anything either. No fresh blood stains on the living room carpet, no heel marks from a body being dragged through the kitchen or across the garage floor, and he couldn't see anything different in the club room: electronics still there, flags still there, chairs and tables still in place. If anyone had scalped Ole Lindstrom in this room, they'd made a pretty neat job of it. He accompanied the cops to the front door, doing his best to look sympathetic.

“Don't sweat the slim pickings, guys,” he said. “That warrant is a crock. You could have found Osama bin Laden lying under Jimmy Hoffa's body and it wouldn't have been admissible anyway.”

“No problem,” the detective Kuchinski now thought of as the spokesman said. “We're not working on commission.”

***

A little after one-thirty that afternoon, when Laurel Wolf saw the guy and the gal standing so close to her Ford pick-up that their white-puff exhalations could have fogged the passenger side window, she knew what was up. She continued walking steadily toward them, but she punched a quick number into her mobile phone and raised it to her head as she did so.