Service Dress Blues (11 page)

“I'm about to be arrested,” she said. “Downtown, so I'm guessing they'll be taking me to the Safety Building instead of one of the substations.” She clipped the phone back to her belt and smiled at the pair by her car. “Hi. Admiring my ride?”

“Laurel Wolf?”

“Yep.”

“You're under arrest for malicious destruction of personal property with a value exceeding five-hundred dollars, namely, the leather seat cover of a vehicle owned by Gary Carlsen. You have the right—”

“No sweat, I'm lawyered up. You have to cuff me?”

She had already turned her back to them and put her hands behind her back with her wrists parallel. She knew the answer.

Chapter 13

“I know,” Lena Lindstrom said in a resigned monotone. “One of the deputies told me. I guess he was trying to get a rise out of me.”

Those were the first words out of her mouth when the matron finally showed her into the interview room where Kuchinski was waiting at one-fifty-three
P.M.
They came as no surprise. The deputies at the Justice Center had jerked him around for over two-and-a-half hours after he'd gotten there, fussing about visiting hours and the shift being short-staffed because of this big semi wreck on County Highway M and a lot of other stuff he knew was nonsense. This meant that sometime during his drive from Loki, Sylvanus County had gotten the news about Ole.

“I'm sorry,” Kuchinski said. “Words aren't much good when something like this happens, but I am sorry.”

“Thanks. Much obliged.”

She sat down on the window side of a square wooden table and turned sideways, so that she could lean her right elbow on the back of the chair. Her eyes were dry, and a poker player would have admired her face. A stranger to the upper Midwest might have thought her stoic. Kuchinski knew better. She had the vacant eyes of someone who senses something inside them ebbing away and fears it will never come back. A palsied tic he hadn't seen before twitched almost imperceptibly at the bottom of her right cheekbone. He waited.

“Well,” she said briskly, “you didn't drive all this way to watch me feeling sorry for myself. Let's get to it.”

“We don't have to do this now.”

“No, let's get at it. It won't get any easier.”

“Fair enough.” Kuchinski sat down across from her. “Yesterday, before Ole's death, the DA got me word that he was going to upgrade the charge against you to attempted murder. That means he thinks he's found a motive.”

“I thought the motive was that Ole slapped me around a little.”

“Unless I miss my bet, he's working on a more complicated theory now. Something that goes way beyond a little spur-of-the-moment spousal flare-up.”

“What are you saying?” Lena demanded. “What's the new and improved case against me?”

“It's guesswork, but I'm good at guessing. Ole pulled something that made you want to kill him. This is the DA talking now, not me. So you picked a fight over Harald to provoke him into the slap. That way, you could carry out a killing you'd planned for other reasons, and sit in the dock as a sympathetic defendant facing an involuntary manslaughter charge.”

“Are you serious?” Lena's eyes suddenly gleamed with the remembered spark of an old activist, spoiling for a fight and looking forward to every second of it. “You think he's going to tell a jury that my husband beat me
and I had it coming?
That's quite a reach, even for Sylvanus County. Every woman who isn't a Stepford Wife will be picketing the courthouse. Every crime commentator on cable news will have him on toast.”

“Except Nancy Grace.”

“Maybe not Nancy Grace, you've got a point.”

“Unless he's actually found something,” Kuchinski said. “He thinks he has. We have to talk about what it might be.”

“It might be anything, I guess. I don't have the first damn clue what, though.”

“They executed a search warrant at your house this morning. The only things they took away looked like bills or bank statements or something. Any idea what they might have been?”

Lena looked sharply at him, the bravado evaporating from her expression. What it left behind wasn't fear, exactly, Kuchinski thought. More like very unpleasant surprise. She turned her face away from him and directed her next words at a Blaine's Farm & Fleet calendar on the wall.

“Why'd they have to kill him?” she asked in a reedy voice as she shook her head slightly. “He wasn't going after the money. He didn't care about it. He wasn't going to bleed anybody. All he wanted was one more time at bat. One more bunch of all-night strategy sessions in war rooms, one more season on the edge of the limelight. One more statewide campaign. One more victory lap.”

“Not much to ask.”

“No.”

“Is there anyone you want me to tell? Clergyman or something?”

“No. Ole wasn't much of a one for church. Me either. They wouldn't let me call Harald, but I wrote him a note. I have a friend, Sarah Flanagan, who's been through some wars with me. She's coming in to help, so I can talk to her about the arrangements.”

“Okay.”

Kuchinski waited. No sense going back to investigation of criminal charges yet. Not 'til Lena was ready.

“Do you think they'll let me out to attend the…you know?”

“I'll work on that.”

“Much obliged.” She turned her attention back to the wall calendar.

He felt like walking around the table and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder, letting her cry on his chest if she wanted to. He didn't do it. He sensed that she'd despise pity, lash out in anger at him and herself. He sat there as unobtrusively as someone his size could sit anywhere, shifting his position just a bit from time to time as minutes seeped by. Finally, turning her whole body around in the chair, she folded her hands and put them on the table.

“All right, you wanted to know about the envelopes.”

“We can give it a while longer, if you like.”

“No, it's better for me to face it. I need something to work on. Something to set my mind to.”

“I'm ready,” Kuchinski agreed.

“I handle the household checking accounts, but Ole took care of the political action committee accounts. He spread them around, mostly among banks in the Fox River Valley.”

“Okay.”

“He kept one account, though, at the Mercantile Bank in Milwaukee. One of the things he had there was a safe deposit box.”

HELLO
, Kuchinski thought.

“Two keys?” he guessed.

“Right. We kept one here. Harald had the other.”

“Must have been a pretty special box.”

“It held the family jewels, as far as Ole was concerned. A few thousand in ready cash, but more important the money list. The real contacts who could get serious checks written at unions, organizations, corporations—”

“Indian tribes?” Kuchinski suggested.

“Those too.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened.”

“Yesterday morning I stumbled over the statement for December. It must have come in January, but I hadn't paid any attention to it. There was a safe deposit box access charge on it.”

“Why was that a big deal?”

“The access was for Harald Lindstrom. Ole had shoehorned that boy into some fundraising scheme that was way over his head, when he knew I didn't even want Harald's picture taken for a campaign brochure. That's why I jumped bail. I went down to Milwaukee to have it out with him.”

“Got it,” Kuchinski said. He said this as if Lena had just told him that she'd put the brakes on as soon as she saw the yellow light but just couldn't stop before it turned red—as if he were fighting a six-point citation in traffic court instead of possible life without parole.

“I got to his hotel room about three in the afternoon. He always stays at the Pfister, and he always leaves a key at the desk for me in case I come down.”

“Did you have it out with him?” Kuchinski asked quietly.

“No. He wasn't there. I had it out with
her
.”

“‘Her' being?”

“Gephardt. She was in the room, and she wasn't dressed for a board meeting, either. I'm not the girl I used to be, but I got in one good punch and a first class backhand. Then I called Ole and reamed him a new one with a message on his voice-mail. After that I headed back.”

“The police report says the highway patrol stopped you just short of the Sylvanus County line at seven-forty-two. So that has you leaving Milwaukee at, what? Five-thirty? Six?”

“Not long after five, actually. Traffic was bad going north 'til I got out of Milwaukee County.”

“Did you stop for gas along the way?”

“No. Why?”

“I don't know what time Ole was killed. But whatever time it turns out to be, I'd really like you to have an alibi for it.”

***

About forty-five minutes south of Appleburg, when Kuchinski called in to check his office voicemails, the longest one was from Rep. After listening to it twice, he dialed Rep's number and managed to reach him on the first try.

“How sure are you that the news of Lindstrom's murder really came as a shock to Ms. Wolf?”

“As close to a hundred percent as you can get without losing the minimum lawyerly skepticism required under the ABA by-laws. She said she wasn't ‘a casino girl.' We could check that.”

“You've got a point there. She's not necessarily the only Native American with a tomahawk to grind in this powwow. The casinos have plenty of skin in the game, so to speak.”

“I thought everyone agreed that Lindstrom's act was just a nuisance at worst—that there's zero risk of Indian gaming being outlawed in Wisconsin.”

“That's absolutely right. But
expanding
gaming so that even palefaces can run casinos is a different proposition altogether. The Chenequa feel like they have more than enough competition from the Potawatomie and Ho-Chunk tribes already, without whitey getting into the act.”

“Maybe,” Rep said dubiously. “Anything you'd like me to do until you get back?”

“Just transfer me to Her Serene Highness.”

Kuchinski waited impatiently through the five seconds it took Rep to patch the call through to the tart-tongued, vastly competent woman who for thirty years had worked as Kuchinski's receptionist/secretary/office manager/apparatchik.

“What is it now?” she bawled.

“Memo to the Brady Street Ski Club,” he said, listening to her keyboard clack as she addressed an email to Rudy Markowski, Splinters Marcinski, Vince Topolewski, and Harry Skupnievich (honorary member). “Gentlemen: Need to know ASAP whether one Laurel Wolf, Native American living and working in Milwaukee, is known to the police, including the FBI and anyone else who carries guns on the job around here, and if so how, and for how long, and for what.”

He paused. He figured he'd have to ask the group for something else pretty soon. He'd want Mercantile Bank's surveillance tape for the first Saturday in December, and he didn't expect Mercantile Bank to cough it up voluntarily. When it refused he'd have to use the Brady Street Ski Club for creative motivational purposes. That was bound to happen eventually, so why not just do it now?

No, he decided, he'd at least give the bank a chance to do things the easy way.

“Anything else?”

“Not for now,” he said. “Just add ‘Regards, K' and send it out.”

Chapter 14

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

“Sarah told me that Lena wanted ‘a tame Lutheran who's not a Republican,'” the Reverend Thor Soederstrom said with a self-deprecating smile to Rep, Melissa, Kuchinski and Sarah Flanagan, the friend who had taken charge of memorial service arrangements at Lena's request. “I'm as close as she could come. I'm a born again non-denominational, but I got one of my degrees from the rock-ribbed Lutherans at Concordia University and I've voted for more Clintons than Bushes.”

“Works for me.” Kuchinski scowled as he looked—again—through the Schaeffer Funeral Parlor's large south window at the governor of the state, who was—still—talking to television cameras in the parking lot. The service was at least half-an-hour behind schedule, and the first premonitory hints of winter twilight were beginning to challenge the bright afternoon sunshine.

“Getting impatient?” Melissa asked.

“It's bad enough that they held Ole's body for over a week while Milwaukee County and Sylvanus County arm-wrestled over jurisdiction. Now they're holding up the memorial service to make sure the governor finishes his photo op before Lena shows up in handcuffs.”

“At least they're letting Lena come,” Flanagan said, eyes glinting behind gold wire-rims.

“Oh, they
want
her to come,” Kuchinski said. “Cops love to watch spousal suspects pay their last respects to victims. Once in Milwaukee a husband suspected of killing his wife threw himself on the casket sobbing, ‘I'm sorry, honey, I'm so,
so
sorry.' You better believe the jury heard about that. But today oughta be about Lena saying goodbye to the man she was married to for almost fifty years, not about proving a murder charge they might never bring in a county where it might never be tried.”

“You mean they haven't decided yet where the murder was committed?” Rep asked.

“Nope. They know the body was moved after death and they know the scalping was post mortem too. No surprises there. But they haven't pinned down where he got killed yet, and they're a little shaky on when as well.”

“Didn't you say the Lindstrom home looked pretty clean for a murder site?” Melissa asked.

“Yeah, but cause of death was blunt force trauma. If you hit someone hard enough on the head you can kill him without necessarily splattering a lot of blood around. Even so, if Ole got killed in that house my prime suspects are Martha Stewart and Felix from
The Odd Couple
, because whoever did it found a very creative way to clean up the mess.”

Soedertstrom folded typewritten notes into a leather-bound book that was way too thin to be a Bible and stuck it under his right arm. A very light brown beard marked his cheerfully pudgy face, and sparkling blue eyes lent his features a look of serene contentment. He wore a caramel colored, corduroy sport coat over an open-necked white shirt and a black sweater-vest, as if he were trying to seem vaguely clerical without rubbing anyone's nose in it.

“How about the original charges against Lena for braining Ole with that frying pan?” he asked Kuchinski. “Is Sylvanus County going ahead with that prosecution?”

“They're stalling,” Kuchinski said. “They stepped that one up to attempted murder. An acquittal on attempted murder would make it tougher to convict her of actually murdering him even if they stumble over some evidence—which they haven't, by the way.”

With that he sketched an
excuse-me
nod and broke away from the group. A glance through the window told Rep why. The governor's SUV and chase car had just pulled out of Schaeffer's parking lot onto Christiana Avenue, while flashing red and blue lights cleared downtown Appleburg traffic from the path of a Sylvanus County Sheriff's patrol car that was swinging in. Kuchinski was going to meet his client.

“I'll have to remember to be discreet about Mr. Kuchinski's comments,” Soederstrom said, self-deprecating this time with a chuckle instead of just a smile. “Spreading his remarks around could influence potential jurors.”

“I'm sure that's the last thing Walt would want,” Rep said, resisting the temptation to wink. “I see Gary Carlsen over there near the door. I'd better go have a word with him before he gets buried too deeply in his Blackberry. I heard that Laurel Wolf was arrested after she talked to me and I'd like to find out how she's doing.”

With grudging admiration, Melissa watched her husband's deft getaway. She knew that Kuchinski had recently told Rep a lot more about Laurel Wolf than Carlsen would be likely to impart.

She surveyed the room while Soederstrom took up the conversational thread with Flanagan. Most of Loki seemed to be milling about uncertainly. The vague expressions on many faces suggested that the people felt they ought to be there but weren't sure what they should do. There was no food, so this wasn't a wake. Instead of a casket and a cross there was an urn full of ashes with a flag and a bunch of political pictures around it, so it didn't seem like a visitation, either. There was no grieving widow in place yet to receive their condolences. They couldn't eat, pray, or commiserate, and their experience hadn't equipped them with any variations for this type of occasion.

Huddled in the room's far corner, beyond the urn and display, Melissa saw six elderly men, the youngest in his late sixties and the oldest past eighty. They were talking with each other. They occasionally threw an appraising look over the rest of the crowd, but their body language shut everyone else out. In the diagonally opposite corner near the intersecting outside windows, Melissa surprised herself by spotting Veronica Gephardt, standing with two other people and listening instead of talking.

She didn't bail out with the other politicians before Lena showed up. Give her credit for that.

“We're doing selections from John Donne for the service,” Soederstrom was saying then in a confidential tone, tapping the leather-bound volume. “Sometimes religious sentiments go down more easily if they come from a poet instead of a priest.”

“John Donne was both,” Melissa pointed out. “And he was doing riffs on Saint Paul when he wrote
Death Be Not Proud.
”

A modest stirring in the crowd and a collective inhalation signaled Lena's entrance, uncuffed but between two beefy cops in mufti. Dressed in her own clothes instead of jail orange, she still moved with the hesitant jailhouse shuffle of someone who'd gotten used to walking irons. It took a few seconds for the deer-in-the-headlights look to leave her eyes as she came deeper into the room. The cops walked her past rows of folding chairs up to the front and stationed her on the window side of the room, perhaps ten feet from the urn display and at a right angle to it. Flanagan scurried over to give her a quick hug and stand as close to her as the cops would allow. Medium brown hair in a gentle, right-parted cut framed Flanagan's oval face, and a smile of sisterly concern softened her features. A wary gleam in her eyes, though, suggested that if the cops pushed Lena too far they'd get some push-back from her.

Lena glanced uncertainly at each of the cops, as if asking permission. Then she turned her face to the room with a look of uncertain expectation and stood, waiting.

Nothing happened.

The quiet buzz of low-key conversation had stopped. Everyone was looking at her, but for something like thirty painful seconds they all seemed frozen in place. Her neighbors, people who had known Ole and her for decades, stood in indecision, paralyzed by the anomaly of a widow who was also a suspect and a receiving line that was fifty percent stone-faced, foot-shuffling cops. Fidgeting, Soederstrom looked toward the podium near the urn, apparently thinking of doing something to force the issue.

Before Soederstrom could act on this instinct, Melissa saw a disgusted,
the-hell-with-
THIS
expression darken the face of the man nearest her in the elderly group. He strode across the room with his arms swinging briskly at his sides, twenty years seeming to drop from his age as he made the trip. A dozen determined paces brought him to Lena.

“I don't know if you remember me, Ms. Lindstrom,” he said, firmly enough for everyone in the quiet room to hear him. “It's been many years. I'm very sorry for your loss.”

“Of course I remember you, Tom Koehler,” Lena said, taking his right hand in both of hers as her eyes came alive and her face suddenly seemed to glow. “You were there when we elected Bill Proxmire to replace Joe McCarthy. You truly were present at the creation. It means so much to me that you could be here, and I know it would mean a lot to Ole too.”

The others in the elderly group came over to line up behind Koehler. Slowly but with steadily growing conviction, the Loki contingent moved toward the lengthening queue.

As Koehler finished his condolences and began to move away, the cop on Lena's right took her wrist and pulled it toward him so that he could see the inside of her hand, in case Koehler had snuck something to her. Flanagan bristled. Koehler turned back, contempt and amusement competing for control of his features.

“You're quite right to be careful with this formidable lady, officer,” he said—or, rather, boomed. “During the police riot at the Democratic Convention in 'sixty-eight I saw her go toe-to-toe with a couple of Chicago's finest, and she gave them all they wanted.”

A titter skipped lightly along the line. The cop glared but had the good grace to blush as well.

“Excuse me,” Soederstrom said then, touching Melissa lightly on the elbow. “Now that the line is finally moving, I think I'd better go up and make a brief announcement about the peace tree.”

She had spotted the “peace tree” earlier. It was a twenty-inch abstract sculpture of a Wisconsin birch, with jagged iron spikes for branches. Slips of paper holding Bible verses and preprinted prayers on peace themes lay at the base. Those attending the service would be invited to pick one, add something to it if they wished, and impale it on one of the spikes. Melissa nodded at Soederstrom and sidled toward Koehler, who was heading for the back of the room.

“That was really quite wonderful, what you just did,” she said after introducing herself.

“We liberal antiques have to stick together,” he said. “In the early 'fifties the Wisconsin Democratic Party consisted of a handful of fossilized old hacks who figured the farmers would always vote Republican, so why break a sweat in a statewide campaign? Their idea of electioneering was to sit around waiting for Roosevelt or Truman to win the presidential election and then pick up Wisconsin's share of the patronage crumbs. Ole and Lena were in the trenches with people like Tom Fairchild and Bill Proxmire and John Reynolds who decided to change all that. My cronies and I came along a little later to ring doorbells and pitch in on lit-drops, but they were the real heroes, not us.”

“You must have known them very well.”

“I did, and it was a privilege,” Koehler said with a fervor that was oddly wistful. “Lena was always more of a true believer. Ole was in it as much for the fun of the game as any policy stuff.”

“He must have been good at it.”

“He had a natural instinct for it, even in his twenties. I was talking with Lena about Ole's tiny little gem-like role in helping Jack Kennedy get the presidential nomination in 1960. I still get a charge just thinking about it.”

“I remember my husband describing a personally inscribed picture of President Kennedy when he told me about the mementoes in the club room at the Lindstrom home,” Melissa said.

“There must be a hundred pictures in that room, and there's a great story behind most of them.”

“Do you live here in Appleburg?”

“No, I'm down in Milwaukee. Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at MSOE.”

“It was very nice of you to come all this way.”

“It wasn't really that much of a strain. I'm retired now. About the only things on my calendar for the next three months are this event and some boondoggle at a Brewers game that they couldn't find anyone else to cover.”

“Not that Ask-the-Professor promotion?” Melissa asked.

“That's it. I'm not looking forward to it.”

“Not much of a baseball fan?”

“I love the game but I'm not into the minutiae. I'm no good at ‘what pitcher gave up Robin Yount's three-thousandth hit?' and stuff like that. I'm hoping for trick questions along the lines of, ‘What's the major league record for put-outs by a left-fielder in a single inning?'”

That sounded like minutiae to Melissa until her memory inexplicably coughed up the trick answer.

“Three, right?” she asked.

“
Very good.
Each team gets three outs per inning. There are nine innings in a game, and there are only nine positions that can get credit for any of the outs that are made. The major leagues have been playing twelve-hundred to two-thousand games a year for over a hundred years. Statistically, there must have been many times in those literally millions of opportunities when the same fielder was responsible for all three outs in the inning. You can sometimes win a bar bet with that one, if it's late enough at night—but if it's a working class bar you'd better have the engine running on your car outside when you try it.”

***

Rep at that moment, and for many moments leading up to it, was watching Carlsen's thumbs dance with dazzling rapidity over his Blackberry's keypad. When Carlsen finally glanced up from the miniature screen, Rep nodded to get his attention.

“Oh, hi,” Carlsen said. “Sorry. This thing is more addictive than nose candy. I feel like a
schlub
fooling with it here, but it's like CDO. Do you know what CDO is?”

“No.”

“It's OCD, except in alphabetical order.”

“I'll remember that one. How is Laurel doing? The one who doesn't smoke.”

“Oh, she's fine. Very, very fine. She was in custody a grand total of thirty-seven minutes.”