Service Dress Blues (5 page)

Melissa sagged back in her chair. This didn't sound like a problem that Walt Kuchinski or anyone else could handle very well from Milwaukee.

“What about the retired sergeant?” she asked then. “Do you think he'd be willing to talk to a lawyer here, just to get the ball rolling?”

It was Frank's turn to pause. Instead of prompting him, Melissa prudently waited the seconds out. She knew that he felt manipulated, that she was exploiting his desire to impress his little sister. He had been striving to impress her for decades now, and she knew that if she just waited patiently his psyche would do all the work for her.

“I know him,” Frank said at last. “He ended his active duty career at the Academy, and his last year overlapped with my first year teaching there.” Another pause. Again Melissa waited until her brother finally spoke again. “I guess I could give him a call.”

“I'd really appreciate that.”

“You're a spoiled brat. You know that, don't you?”

“Let's just say this isn't the first time I ever heard that.”

Chapter 6

Thursday, December 18, 2008

“Good stollen,” Kuchinski told Lena Lindstrom in her kitchen as he stabbed another forkful of pastry that looked like it had arm-wrestled a fruitcake and won. “By the way, you have
not
been charged with attempted murder.”

“That's what Deputy Doofus arrested me for. Attempted murder.”

“Cops don't prefer charges, they file criminal complaints. District attorneys decide what charges to bring. They didn't say ‘attempted murder' at your bail hearing, did they?”

“They just said some numbers. I didn't pay a lot of attention to that part. All I cared about was that Ole wasn't dead and could he get me out.”

With the hand that wasn't forking German pastry, Kuchinski pushed his computer printout of the criminal complaint in
State v. Lena Lindstrom
across the almost spotless birch table. With his index finger he tapped a statutory reference highlighted in yellow on the page.

“Were these the numbers?”

Lena fished tiny, half-moon glasses from her skirt pocket and parked them on the bridge of her nose. She then leaned forward to squint at the document.

“They were, I guess. ‘Wisconsin Statues section nine-forty-point-nineteen-paren-three.' If that's not attempted murder, what is it?”

“Aggravated battery: intentionally causing substantial bodily harm to another. What it boils down to is, you did a major number on someone and you meant to do it.”

Lena studied the criminal complaint with a vaguely puzzled expression, as if it were an unusually challenging acrostic.

“Why didn't he charge me with attempted murder, do you suppose?”

“I asked the assistant DA that when I stopped by to see him before I came out here. He said he doesn't think a jury would believe you were trying to kill Ole. Besides, aggravated battery is a Class D felony. Maximum sentence of twenty-five years. That's plenty.”

“I guess so. For someone my age, that's the same as life anyway.”

“You'd be looking at something way south of the maximum, but there'll still be some time on the inside if you're convicted.”

Kuchinski chewed meditatively on another forkful of stollen. A twenty-five year maximum sentence generally got clients' attention, but Lena still seemed to be floating serenely above the battle, as if this were happening to someone else. Amateur perps often did, at first.
People like me don't go to prison. Prison is for losers and druggies and punks in the 'hood and creeps who download kiddie-porn on their computers.
He always had to slam the cell door a few times to get their attention. So far, Lena didn't seem to be hearing the clang.

Moving away from the table, she retrieved a mug of steaming coffee from the counter next to the sink and gazed out the window at an expanse of snow and a large, cylindrical, silver propane tank in the backyard. After glancing at her watch for the fourth time since Kuchinski had arrived, she took two plastic, bottle-green pill jars down from the top shelf of the cupboard just to the right of the window. She gobbled one pill from the first jar and two from the second, washing each one down with a swallow of coffee.

“Ole and I did the 'sixties together,” she said then with a quiet wistfulness. “The 'sixties didn't hit Wisconsin until about 1966, so we were a little old for it. Almost thirty. But we did them all the same. Summer of love, tie-dyed jeans, rainbow shades—all that stuff. The Milwaukee Police Department had a Red Squad back then, to keep track of lefties, and I'll bet they had a three-by-five file card on each of us. We did the drug thing, although we did it in a wholesome, Midwestern way. No speed or acid, just a little pot. I felt like fourteen kinds of fool the first time I smoked marijuana. Did the radical politics thing, did the hippie thing, did the off-the-pigs thing, marched on the Pentagon, got our silly butts arrested in Chicago in 'sixty-eight, got a whiff or two of tear gas in Madison, demonstrated outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee when we couldn't afford a bus ticket to Washington. You know?”

No, I was busy getting shot at by the Viet Cong about that time
. That's what Kuchinski wanted to say.

“I know what you're talking about,” he answered instead.

“But we never did the free love thing.” Lena pivoted spryly to face Kuchinski. “No nubile groupies for Ole. No radical studs for me. We really loved each other. We always have.”

“You're saying you didn't conk him.”

“That's what I'm saying.” Lena spoke the words with weary resignation, as if she didn't really expect Kuchinski to believe her. “I've been madder at Ole Lindstrom than I ever was at Nixon—and there were times when I would've killed Nixon without a second thought if I'd gotten the chance. I've hit Ole more than once in our forty-eight years together, and I got my money's worth when I did. I've thrown ashtrays at him, and I've gone after him with rolling pins and carpet beaters and God knows what. But I'm not the one who brained him that night.”

“So no pleading this one down to simple battery with a year's probation and forty hours of anger management classes.”

“Not likely. And no battered wife defense, either.”

“Fair enough.”
Wonder if she'll feel the same way on the courthouse steps.

It takes two hours to drive from Milwaukee to Appleburg, where Kuchinski had stopped to see the assistant district attorney handling Lena's case before driving out to Loki for his first interview with Lena. He'd spent that time trying to work out some way for the intruder theory to work. He'd needed every minute of it.

He'd started with a punk, teenage male, sixteen or seventeen, looking for easy pickings that he could turn into quick cash to feed a drug jones, or maybe just out for some thrills. This hypothetical perp figures the Lindstroms are at a bar. Saturday night in rural Wisconsin, that's a safe bet. So he decides he'll pop in for a little low-risk snatch-and-grab. Uses the back door into the kitchen. Maybe the Lindstroms left the door unlocked, so that's why there's no forced entry. Okay. He's still inside when he hears Ole come back and decides he has to hammer him to get away.

Kuchinski had hit a mental wall right there and it had taken him seven miles of Highway Forty-one to get past it. No way the hit-and-run theory works. The punk nailed Ole with a frying pan, so he had to be in the kitchen when he decided to attack, and Ole got hit in the living room. Which means the perp had a clear way out through the back door without hitting Ole and would only have increased his risk by trying to sneak up on him.

So why
did
he hit Ole instead of just running for it? Because he hadn't gotten what he came for yet and needed time to look for it. That meant this wasn't just a snatch-and-grab by some random juvenile delinquent but a hunt for something specific by someone who had a reason to believe it was there. If he didn't find it,
that
explains why nothing was missing. Plus, it would account for the perp still being there when Lena got back well after Ole did. And if the perp was looking for whatever he wanted in the club room, and panicked when Lena returned, he could have made the noise Lena said she heard while he was making his belated getaway.

By the time he saw the sign saying
APPLEBURG NEXT 5 EXITS
, Kuchinski had convinced himself that he might have something he could say with a straight face to a jury. He hadn't convinced himself it was true, necessarily, but he wouldn't be deciding the case so he didn't see where that entered into it.

“Any chance I can take a look around the house and yard?” he asked Lena now.

“Sure.”

Kuchinski followed Lena into the dining room and stopped there while she continued into the living room. He looked around deliberately. A good two feet of hardwood floor outside each edge of the worn, beige carpet under the table and chairs. Less than four feet of clearance between the table's near corner and the china cabinet. He tried to imagine someone unfamiliar with the house coming through this room in the dark without making any noise or banging into anything.

Can't see it. Ole had been drinking and maybe he'd passed out. But if he was passed out, why would the intruder bother to hit him?

He walked into the living room. Funny looking piano. Couch and chairs and coffee table that would have looked like they came from IKEA except they also looked like they'd been made before IKEA was selling much of anything stateside. Big, flat picture window right out of
Leave it to Beaver
. TV ditto. Great big honking console in a walnut cabinet that must have weighed a ton, set flat on the floor. Was the damn thing actually a Philco?

“The television is mostly a prop,” Lena said, as if she were reading his mind. “We watch in the club room if there's something we want to see. But the club room is supposed to be a home office for tax purposes, and the IRS might not swallow that if we didn't have a TV in the living part of the house.”

Kuchinski's ears pricked up. He knew just enough tax law to be dangerous, but he was pretty sure you had to have a bigger income than this modest house with its forty-year-old furniture suggested to make a home-office deduction worth worrying about. That wasn't what got his attention, though. He was trying again to reconstruct some plausible version of events that night.

What do you do after you've smacked your wife in public? If you're any kind of man at all you're either so mad you can't see straight or you're awash in shame and remorse. And you're worried that this time you've gone too far and you've lost her for good. So maybe you take a couple of stiff drinks, except he didn't see a wet bar or a liquor cabinet in here, and the police file the ADA had turned over to him this morning didn't say anything about a glass on the floor or an open bottle in the room. Maybe you veg out in front of the tube just to take your mind off the whole thing. But Ole would have done that in the club room, not here.

Play the piano or whatever it was as a stress reliever? Maybe. But the deputy had found Ole lying not far from the front door, head toward the door as if he'd been facing it, standing up, when he was hit. Why?

“Was the front door open when you walked in and found Ole?”

Apparently surprised at the question, Lena squeezed her eyes tightly shut for three or four seconds and frowned.

“I think it was, now that you mention it. I don't think I even noticed at the time.”

“In the middle of the night in December?”

“You're right,” Lena said, “that's odd. But I remember now I didn't have to go open it to let the deputy in. He just barged right through.”

“Did Ole play the piano?”

“Harpsichord. Not for twenty years. He has a perfectionist streak that keeps him from having the patience for it. Used to be he'd play beautifully for sixteen bars or so and then he'd hit a wrong note and get so frustrated he'd start cussing and stomping on the floor. He finally got to where he wouldn't play at all.”

“Was the light on in the living room when you came in?”

“No. I came back to the house on full boil, ready to have it out with him. I gunned the Ford up the driveway, screeched to a stop, slammed through the back door, flipped on the kitchen light on my way through, flipped on the dining room light as I stepped into the living room, and then turned on the light in here. That's when I saw him.”

“So when he was hit,” Kuchinski said, “he was apparently just standing here, in the dark, facing the open front door.”

“Unless the intruder opened the front door to get out.”

“But you heard the intruder make a noise in the back part of the house just before you walked in here.”

“That's true,” Lena conceded thoughtfully. “It doesn't make much sense, I guess.”

“Sure it does. Ole opened the door so that he'd be sure to see you drive up. He left the inside lights off so he'd have a clear view outside. He might have been worried that you wouldn't come home at all. If you did come home, he wanted to be ready as soon as you arrived. I don't know if he wanted to be ready to say how sorry he was or ready for round two, but it was one or the other.”

“You think Ole will remember it that way?”

When I get through with him he will
. Kuchinski left this thought unvoiced. No sense giving away trade secrets.

“How about a look in the back, where you heard the noise from?”

“Follow me.”

Kuchinski marched obediently behind Lena back to the club room. He saw the array of flags against the back wall and sliding glass doors. He walked over to verify that the doors opened onto a weathered deck, the boards splintered and turning gray. But only a patch of snow here and there showed up on it.

“Do you and Ole keep this deck shoveled off?”

“Ole does. He goes out there when he smokes, so it won't bother me. He keeps the deck clear so he can go out when he feels like a smoke without putting his heavy boots on.”

“Does smoking bother you? The police report said that you asked the deputy for a cigarette.”

“I did, I guess. I quit twelve years ago. It was my sixtieth birthday present to myself. I only cheat every once in awhile, in what you might call your high-stress situations.”

“And you've gotten to where you hate it?”

“Just the opposite. I love the smell of cigarette smoke. Ole takes it outside because he doesn't want to undermine me. He knows if I had to walk around smelling the stuff all day I'd relapse.”

Kuchinski went up on tiptoes so that he could glance over the tops of the flags, through the sliding door glass. A snow shovel leaned in the corner where the deck met the angle of the house.

“What was the fight about?” he asked abruptly.

“At the bar? Of course at the bar. What other fight would you be asking about?”

Kuchinski waited. He figured the question had taken Lena by surprise, and he sensed that she was stalling.