Triple Play, page 16
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“Plenty of gloves and bags, tell ‘em,” I heard him say, “and a van, and dusting gear. Bring another camera, plenty of film. Oh, and listen, make sure they check the batteries on their Streamlights. We’ll be doing the basement, too, and it’s gonna be dark in the yard before long.”
He banged up the phone, said, “Ready?” to me, and strode out to the car without looking back. “Better get running shoes, Jake,” Pokey called after me. He loves watching Frank in flat-out management mode.
Frank and I started in the garage as soon as we got back. It was scrupulously neat, the way you’d expect Dornoch’s garage to be, with a jack and some tools hanging on their hooks on the wall. The stall in front of Dornoch’s car was empty. The second stall was occupied by a dark blue cargo van, with signs on both sides of the cab that said, “Parks and Recreation, Rutherford, Minnesota.”
“It fits the description Mrs. Condon gave me of the delivery truck,” I told him. “Dark. Mudguards, and a Tommy-lift tailgate.” I flipped the heavy metal hasp across the back, pushed the vertical bolts up out of their sockets, and we each took one wide metal door and swung it open.
The truck bed was empty, except for a tall two-wheeled moving cart, fastened upright to the right-hand wall of the interior with canvas straps.
“It all seems to be falling into place,” Frank said. “God damn. I still don’t believe this.”
“Let’s take a look in those cupboards,” I said, pointing to the far end of the garage. We closed up the truck and walked over. They were padlocked. We wasted a few minutes trying to jimmy the lock, till Frank said, “Oh, what the hell,” took a tire iron down from the wall and knocked the metal strip off the door.
A couple of shelves held paint cans and brushes, jars of nails and screws, a stack of drop-cloths. Two flat cardboard boxes occupied the middle shelf. I pulled out the top one and lifted the cover. It held a couple of old striped softball uniforms. I slid the top shirt out of its plastic bag. Size Medium. No name, front or back. It had that same stale smell I’d noticed on LaPlante’s body.
“Does it match?” Frank asked.
“Looks the same to me,” I said. “I’ve got pictures downtown to compare it to, and we’ll have the other two back from Jimmy in a day or two. But yeah, I’d say it matches.”
The second box held a beat-up fielder’s glove, and a pair of old leather softball shoes with metal cleats.
“Like the shoes on Wahler and LaPlante,” Frank said.
“Yup.”
The extra squads began arriving, with the van and pickup and about a ton of equipment. “Get these things bagged and tagged, will you?” Frank said. “I’m going to start one crew searching the house, and the other one digging up that vegetable patch.”
Dornoch had measured out rows and marked them with stakes at each end. Waxed string was pulled taut between the stakes to keep the rows straight. On the rows he’d already planted, the brightly illustrated paper seed bags were shoved onto the stakes for reminders. Putratz and Hisey, good farmer’s sons, stood reluctantly at the edge of the neat garden, holding their spades, till Frank said grimly, “Come on, guys, losing a few seeds isn’t going to bother Dornoch today.” Then they stacked stakes and string neatly at one side and started digging, but gingerly, as if time might reverse this nightmare and they’d be asked to put everything back to rights..
They found La Plante’s clothes first. They were just as his mother had described them: jeans, a blue T-shirt, a dark green windbreaker. Hisey’s spade hit the tight ball, a couple of feet under the carrot seeds, and slid off. An electric difference seemed to come over the crew, when he pulled the green jacket out of the hole. They quit feeling like marauders in a neat man’s garden, and turned into grim cops looking for evidence.
Even so, sunlight was long gone, and two of Rutherford’s finest were sweating hard in the concentrated glare from three Streamlights, by the time they unearthed Wahler’s stuff. It was on the opposite side of the patch, beneath the tomato seedlings. We didn’t have a description of Wahler’s outfit, but Dornoch had conveniently buried the victim’s wallet along with his clothes. It wasn’t going to be much help to Tammy, I saw; Wahler had been down to his last eleven bucks.
By then, I’d gone back over the cargo truck. There was a padlock in the glove compartment, alongside a late-model Polaroid camera. The three-foot wire cable from the padlock was coiled up under the driver’s seat.
Under the passenger’s seat, I found a burlap bundle. I laid it on the hood of the truck, and opened it carefully. It contained something heavy wrapped in white rags. Reluctantly, I unrolled the rags, and found a hunting knife, cleaned and oiled.
“No blood on the knife,” I said when I showed it to Frank, “Naturally Dornoch would clean his knife. I didn’t see any on the rags either, but BCA might find something.”
“Guess that kind of wraps it up,” he said. “For tonight, anyway. Bag it and tag it. All this stuff. And then let’s get it down to the station and call it a night. I’m gonna call Sheila and ask her to cook something. Wanna come eat with me?”
“Boy, do I,” I said. I raced to the station to get my evidence checked in ahead of the digging crews.
Half an hour later, Sheila McCafferty set down a big blue platter, filled with bacon and eggs and potatoes enough for at least four Sumo wrestlers, in the middle of the McCafferty kitchen table. Frank and I ate every morsel. We were too hungry for much conversation, which was just as well since the whole house vibrated with rap music, arguments, and phone conversations. Frank’s kids are uninhibited.
We took our second beers out to the back yard, fished a couple of lawn chairs out of the clutter of bikes and sports equipment there, and sat in the fragrant dark, listening to the windows rattle. Frank shook his head.
“I swear it’s all going to come down some day,” he muttered.
He fiddled with a twig off his birch tree. Finally he said, “You believe this about Dornoch?”
“It doesn’t seem real to me yet. But…we have to believe our eyes, I guess, don’t we? That hand…and the buried clothes and all the rest of the stuff in the garage…”
“Uh huh. I guess. I keep looking for some other explanation. It just doesn’t fit with anything else I know about him.”
“You known him a long time?”
“All my life, I guess,” Frank said. “I’ve been trying to think. I certainly don’t remember ever meeting him. He was always just there. We were never best friends or any of that. Just…we grew up in the same neighborhood, our parents knew each other a little, just to nod to. We were in the same Scout troop, once, and it seems to me we played on some of the same teams in school. I never paid particular attention to him. But yeah, he was always around.”
A phone rang, in the house; Sheila answered it and called, up the stairs, “Katy?” A shreiking argument took place at the head of the stairs, followed by a great thumping of heels. Then Katy’s voice, with the charm turned on full bore, carolled, “Hello? Oh, hi!”
“Katy’s turning into a star,” I said. Frank made a face.
“Tell me about it. Damn shame, too, she has the potential to be a really good basketball player.” Frank’s theories of parenting seem to center on vigorous team sports. He sat listening to his daughter’s teasing laughter for a minute, then heaved himself out of his chair and went in to get us another beer. He said something to Katy in passing, and got a vigorous head-shake and a very Frank-like glare in return. Back outside, he settled his big body into his creaking aluminum chair and groaned.
“Man, what a day, huh? Christ, I hope this is the end of this mess. It’s funny, though…All week I’ve been yelling at you for answers, just find me some answers. Now we have found some answers, and I swear I feel worse than ever. It just doesn’t seem right…” He stared into the blackberry bushes at the foot of his lawn, punishing the turf under his chair with his big feet, and then turned toward me, his pale eyes staring anxiously in the reflected light from the kitchen window.
“I always had it a little easier than Andy, I guess,” he said. “My Dad was a cop, my family was always on short cash but we had the necessities. Dornoch’s Dad never seemed to have a steady job, and he drank some. Even in grade school, Andy was always working, after school, weekends, summers. He joined the marines the week we graduated from high school. Served eight years. Did a tour in Nam, I think.” Another silence. “He’d grown a lot, when he came back, otherwise he seemed pretty much the same. Quiet–well, you know what he was like.”
“Reasonable, I always thought. Had high standards for himself, but easy enough to work with.”
“Exactly,” Frank said. “Reliable–hell, you could set your clock by him, almost. He got that job with the city, got a little maroon Chevy coupe, you could see him going to work every morning at seven-forty-five exactly, back home for lunch at twelve-oh-five, and away again at twelve-fifty. Five days a week without fail. He got one of those plaques after ten years, for never missing a day.”
A rattletrap sedan, with a base-to-the-max tape deck rattling the doors, pulled into the McCafferty driveway. The driver honked, and Andy McCafferty, sweater and sneakers flopping, flew out of the house. He exchanged four or five screamed insults with the occupants of the car, jumped in, and they roared off. The Chief looked after them thoughtfully.
“Andy brought Loretta back to Rutherford with him, when he came back from the marines. He’d met her while he was stationed at Camp LeJeune. Sweet girl. Seemed like they got along real well. They had a lot of trouble starting a family. Loretta lost three or four babies before she had Miranda. Mandy, they always called her. Pretty little thing. But she got kind of…oh, sort of demanding I guess you’d say, when she got older. Little bit spoiled, I suppose. Only natural. She just meant the world to them.
“In high school, she pretty much got out of control. Got in with a real wild bunch.
And besides, she got into that dieting craze that some teen-aged girls start now, just wanted to be real thin. But she wanted to party, too, and of course that combination’s dangerous. In the spring of her senior year, it seemed like she just kind of…wilted. Quit going to school, laid in bed all day and wouldn’t eat. They had to drag her out for treatment, and nothing worked. Anorexia nervosa, that’s what the doctors told them. And that summer, one day while they were both at work, she took a lot of pills, a whole bottle of tranquilizers that the doctor had prescribed for her, and a bottle of aspirin besides. Wouldn’t get up at all for dinner, but they were sort of used to that by then. Towards morning they heard her breathing funny and called an ambulance but she flat-lined on the way to the hospital and they lost her.
“Andy took it hard of course, but Loretta, well, she never could seem to think about much of anything else after that. I suppose, being the mother, she blamed herself. She’s never been a whole person since. This isn’t the first time Loretta’s had to be hospitalized. She just can’t snap out of the depression.
“So…but…would that explain something like this, these two murders? You ever hear of such a thing before, Jake? A normal hard-working person like Andy Dornoch who gets pushed over the edge by bad luck and turns into a monster?”
“No,” I said, firmly. “And when you put it that way I don’t believe a word of it, Frank. There has to be more…”
“What, more? How do you mean?”
“I don’t know.” I stood up. “And I can’t even guess at it tonight. I’m going to go in and kiss your wife, and thank her for the best meal I ever ate, and then I’m going to drive home, and hope I get there before I fall asleep.”
“Oh, hey, do that. And listen, Jake, you take tomorrow off, you hear me? Go fishing, or play golf. I can’t have you burning out on me. Nothing useful you can do on Sunday anyway. But then, Monday? I hate like hell to say this, but I think you oughta be at that autopsy with Pokey and them after all.”
“Right. Agreed. All the same big pile of garbage now, isn’t it?” I was halfway up the back steps when he called after me, “By the way, that Chang fella called this afternoon, and they put him through to me. He said to tell you that he did get Trudy Hanson assigned, for the fingerprints and pictures Monday morning.”
“Oh, good,” I said, without turning around, “that’ll save some time.”
After that, I wasn’t so sleepy anymore, so when I got home I called Ralph Noonin.
“Hey, Noons, “ I said, “Weather’s supposed to be perfect tomorrow. Whaddya say we float the boat?”
Ralph and I each own half of a seventeen-foot Lund Pro-V, which he keeps at his place because he’s got a two-car garage and a tolerant wife.
“Your turn to buy the gas,” Ralph said. He’s an accountant, what can I say?
“Okay,” I said, “so you’re gonna bring lunch, right? And the beer–”
“I’ll bring lunch,” Ralph said, “and we can buy the beer at the Circle K next to the bait shop. You up for going early? Beat some of the traffic on the road…”
We thrashed out all of the tough decisions that go with fishing trips. I went right off to sleep then, after one more beer and the last half of an ancient detective movie starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Efrem solved the case by recalling a couple of lines from the victim’s last book of poetry. Something to think about.
11
✜
“Gimme two scoops of those fathead minnows,” Noonin said. The bait shop was already crowded, even though the sun was just above the trees. At the store next door, we bought a twelve-pack and crushed ice, and two big cups of coffee to take along. Ralph insisted on buying the Sunday paper, too. I told him I didn’t want any part of it, but after I got back in the car I managed to fish out the funnies without looking at the front page. He was busy swearing at traffic by then; Highway 63 was full of cars trailering aluminum boats like ours.
We launched at the first ramp on the south side of Lake City, and motored east across Lake Pepin, which is a wide spot on the Mississippi created by the Alma Dam. Noons claims that Walleye and Sauger are more plentiful on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi in May, and for all I know he may be right. My fishing technique has been picked up mostly from barroom bragging and the literature on the backs of tackle packages. I really have no idea why fish do what they do.
Ralph killed the outboard and let the boat drift while we baited up.
“How come you’re fishing without a sinker, Jake?” he said, as I started stringing my minnow on the hook. “You got some new theory about where the fish are?”
“I’m not!” I said, “Am I? Aw, Jeez…” I threw the bait back in the bucket and began untying the leader from the swivel. I groped around in my tackle box till I found the three-cornered lead sinker, strung it on the line and reassembled the whole business. The first fishing trip of the year is always like this, for me; I spend the first hour or two trying to remember the little I know about fishing, including why I thought it was fun. Then I settle into it and never want to go home.
“I wouldn’t think it was too surprising if you were just a tad distracted,” Ralph said. “You’ve had quite a week with all this Hillside Strangler-type crime wave, haven’t you?” He was hoping for some inside kinky stuff to tell the guys at work tomorrow, I could see. I didn’t want to talk about it on my one day off, though, so I said, “Oh, you know, you get used to the way guts stink after a while,” and after that he didn’t ask me any more.
Ralph started the little trolling motor, and settled himself on the high swivel seat forward, where he could control the motor with his foot. The sun was still low enough so that the trees on shore cast long shadows. We drifted through alternating patches of brightness and shade. One minute it’d be cool, almost chilly, then we’d move into sunshine and I’d be squinting against the glare on the ripples and thinking about taking off my sweatshirt.
I tore open the twelve-pack, dumped it into the tub, and began pouring the sack of cracked ice over it.
“Hey, kinda early, isn’t it?” Ralph protested. He’s a great protester.
“It’ll be good and cold by the time we want it,” I said. “You want any more coffee? I brought a thermos.”
I’m the new guy in this boat. Noonin advertized for a partner, a couple of years ago when his last partner left town. I answered because Nancy had been complaining we never saw anybody but law enforcement people. I thought maybe she’d get together with the other boaters’ wives and do girl stuff while we fished, and maybe meet us for picnics later, with jolly red-checked napkins in straw hampers. I’m good at creating pleasant images like that. But Ralph’s wife always visits her family when he goes fishing, and the other guy we sometimes asked along wasn’t married. In the end, my wife came to resent the boat almost as much as the department. One good thing, there was no argument about who kept my share of the boat when we split.
Getting to be partners in a boat with Ralph was a good deal for me; he’s an experienced fishermen. He landed a ten-pound Walleye, last year, and got it mounted for the wall of his family room. Actually that’s all you can do with a Walleye that size; you wouldn’t dare eat it. The headwaters of the Mississippi rise above the Twin Cities, and by the time that water gets down to the southeastern corner where we are, it’s full of PCB’s and other bad initials like that. Big fish that grow up in the Mississippi are good for trophies or for throwing back, take your pick.
“I always forget,” I asked Ralph, “what’s a PCB, anyway?”
“Uh…polychlorinated biphenyl. But don’t ask me what that means. All I know, you eat too many of them you glow in the dark, and after that you get cancer.” He poured the last of the coffee out of the thermos and nudged the boat a little closer to shore. “What made you bring that up? You in a bad mood or something?”
“Nah…I was just thinking about that trophy Walleye you got last year.”
Ralph beamed all over his smooth round pink face. “Wasn’t he a hummer though? Came up outa the water that first time like he was fired out of a gun, man…” We went back over the whole story then, replayed the entire catch from the first tug on the line to the weight of him in the net as he came into the boat.
