Triple Play, page 5
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“That’s the Forest Service, Mr. Grieve. Not the Police.”
“It’s all the Government, ain’t it? Better cut out the foolishness and get this fella locked up so the rest of us can have some peace, hear?”
“We’ll sure do our best, Mr. Grieve,” I said, “and hey, listen, thanks for everything.”
Mabel paged me as I turned north on Webster; when I answered, she gave me the number of Heilemann’s Dairy, and told me to ask for Lou Bjornson.
He came to the phone from some clanking distance filled with echoes.
“I found two guys from teams that played last night,” he said. “One of ‘em works here, and the other one’s across the street at Peese’s Lighting, and what we thought is, if you could meet us at that lab on our break time, we could all take a look.”
“Terrific, Lou,” I said. “When?”
“Fifteen-twenty minutes be okay?”
“Perfect,” I said, and changed to the left-hand lane to go back to the lab instead of straight ahead to the station. I sat in the lab parking lot waiting for them, dialing numbers off Mel Grieve’s list. Nobody was home, but I left two messages.
The three men came together, in Lou’s car. He made his usual Indy 500 approach, squealing his tires on the turn and then braking so hard for the stop that his passengers’ heads snapped forward. The man must have to replace his tires once a year.
It was hard getting the three of them through the front door of the lab; nobody wanted to go first. They got silent and started looking shocked as they approached the covered mound on the tall steel table, before they ever saw anything. Their features were tight with apprehension as the sheet was pulled away. But they all brightened up, in obvious relief, as soon as the dead man’s face was uncovered.
“Never saw him before,” Lou said, and the two others echoed him gratefully. This man had not been on their teams, they stated positively. He was nobody they knew. Don Pfluge had played in the early game, Jason Dooley in the later one. This man had not been in either.
“And by now, I’ve met pretty much everybody that’s going to play in the League this year, and I don’t know this guy,” Lou said. He was getting his cool back. His dread of finding a dead friend on the table was behind him, now, and I could see that he was beginning to realize he had a helluva barstool yarn to go with the beers after work.
I mentioned the unmarked uniform again. Neither Don nor Jason could remember seeing anybody play without his ID sewed into his shirt. When I described the old leather shoes with metal cleats, they shook their heads incredulously.
“Maybe in pickup games out in the smaller towns,” Dooley said. “But the City League? Plenty of guys practice hard all spring and still don’t make these teams. We’ve got some pretty heads-up players, Jake. Sharp guys. You see any of our play-offs last Fall?”
“I saw the semi-final between O’Toole’s Bar and Dan’s Electric,” I said. “I still think that double play in the fourth inning shoulda been one on and one out…” We left the building contentedly rehashing an umpire’s call from eight months ago. In Rutherford, old guys who can’t remember where they put the car keys can recall, precisely, close plays from their youth.
On the way back to my office, I left the padlock cable, in an unsealed evidence bag, with Pokey’s receptionist. My note said, “Could one of these have been the murder weapon?”
“Just please give it to him before his next patient, will you?” I asked her. “And then phone me his answer, yes or no.”
Back at the station, I took my ritual afternoon call from Millicent Porter.
“This is the third time today I’ve called you,” she said peevishly, “why aren’t you ever in your office?” She was beginning to think I was never going to find those hoodlums who had ransacked her house, she said; “my beautiful house that I’ve worked my whole life for, and now it doesn’t even feel like it belongs to me any more.” She bet those thieves were sitting around laughing at her, right here in Rutherford.
“And I mean, if a person isn’t safe in Rutherford any more,” Mrs. Porter asked me, “Well, what’s the use?”
I assured her that the partial thumbprint we had taken from her front door jamb was being forwarded to the FBI. The law was casting a widening net for her rugs and spoons. Yes, and the picture frames and the punch bowl, with her mother’s initials, yes, I would not forget.
By the time I hung up, I had a message from Pokey. It said, “Could be.” I clipped it inside my notebook, saw it was four o’clock, and called BCA. I asked for fingerprints division, waited a long time, and was just deciding to hang up when a voice said, “Angela.”
I said, “Jake Hines, Rutherford….” and she said quickly, “Oh, yeah, hold on a sec,” and gave me, at last, a break. They had a match on my prints.
“Your victim’s name is James Wahler,” Angela told me. “We had him on file here because he did a stretch in the Red Wing Juvenile Detention Center, let’s see, seven years ago. Pleaded to felony shoplifting in Minneapolis, did six months, got a conditional release to his mother in Rutherford. They used to still do that then, now they don’t even pretend the mothers can control ‘em. Anyway he was charged with car theft in Austin a couple of years later, but the charges were dropped. Nothing since. He was fingerprinted both times, and this set matches both of those. Three complete sets, all taken by professionals, so your ID is pretty close to a hundred percent. You want copies?”
“Please. And thanks for the quick job.”
Looking for support team help, I looked around the office and found Mabel Houser typing traffic citations into department records. It wasn’t hard to persuade her to take a break from that, and come help me run James Wahler’s name and prints through MINCIS, the Minnesota crime information system. We found no record of adult arrests in Minnesota.
“I’d like to start looking for relatives here in town,” I told her. “Will you go ahead and try NCIC?” It’s the national crime information center. Sometimes there’s a wait, and a lot of re-checking till your request gets through.
“Go ahead,” Mabel said, “I’ll stay with it.”
The Rutherford phone book listed five Wahlers, but no James. I started calling at the top of the list, with Arthur and Marilyn; Marilyn said there was no James in their household, no James in her family, no James Wahler in town that she knew about.
I called Constance, Joseph and Ralph, got one no-answer and two denials. I called Tammy. She answered my query with an odd little silence, and then asked, “Who’s this again?”
“Rutherford Police Department, Ms. Wahler. We’re looking for anyone who’s acquainted with James Francis Wahler–”
“Why?” she asked, “What’s he done?”
“Do you know him, Ms. Wahler?”
“Yeah, I know him. I’m his wife. Ex-wife, I guess you’d say. We been separated for a year, almost. So, has he done something stupid or what?”
“Ms. Wahler, I think it would be better if I came to your home to talk to you. Do you still live at…” She didn’t want me to come there. She wanted to know what was wrong, and she wanted to know it right away, and her anger increased as I evaded her questions. Finally, I said firmly, “We’ll be there in ten minutes, Ms. Wahler,” and hung up quickly, called a squad to take me to her address on Southwest Sixth, and stood in the doorway of her incredibly messy apartment with two big blue uniforms, Casey and Longworth, flanking me. A pale, cross-looking child clung to her leg, sucking a pacifier and whimpering.
Her ex-husband was twenty-three, she said, five-ten, with light brown hair and blue eyes. “Jeez,” she said, “hasn’t he even got his wallet on him? Musta been one helluva bender. What’s he in for, DUI? That schmuck. This one’ll cost him his license, and then how’s he gonna hold a job? That screw-up, he’s already two months behind on child support, too.”
“Mrs. Wahler,” I said, “we have a dead man downtown that we think may be your husband.”
You never know. Sometimes the angriest ones care most. The three of us watched her warily; would she cry, scream, have hysterics, faint? Her mouth formed a round “O” and she stood still in the doorway, her eyes going from one face to another. Then she stooped and picked up the fussing child, carried him to the window and stood looking out.
“Mrs. Wahler,” I said gently, “you suppose you could leave your baby with somebody for a few minutes? If you could come downtown with us, well then you could tell us if this is your husband’s body we’ve got…or not. Think maybe you could do that?”
She turned to stare at me blankly for a moment; then her eyes focused and she said, “Oh, uh…yeah. I can drop Donny at my Mom’s for a few minutes, I guess. Uh…you wanna sit down while I…” She gestured helplessly toward a couch piled high with laundry, a chair full of toys.
“We’ll wait in the car,” I said.
She was quiet on the ride downtown, staring out the side window at some reality of her own. In the lab, she stood calmly while the body was wheeled out of the cooler, unmoving while the sheet was pulled back. She looked a long moment at his face, nodded, then reached out to brush back a strand of hair that had fallen over his forehead.
“What happened to him?” she asked softly. “Was he in some kinda accident?”
Longworth looked quickly at me; I shook my head.
“Mrs. Wahler,” I said, slipping a hand under her elbow, “do you suppose you could take the time to answer a few questions for me? If we could just sit out here–”
She jerked her arm away from my hand; she was surprisingly strong. “What happened to him?” she demanded. Turning back to the table where her husband lay, she peeled the sheet back to his waist, revealing the great Y-shaped incision of the autopsy gaping there. She gasped sharply; the air hit the back of her throat and made her cough. Then with one sharp move she threw the covering back to his knees. There was a breathtaking moment of silence while she stared at the wounds where her husband’s genitals had been. Then she pressed her hands against the sides of her head, and began to scream.
The next half hour seemed long. Tammy Wahler bounced off all four walls of the room we were in, then ran shrieking down the brightly polished center hall of the lab. She crashed through the brass push-bar on the back door, and ran out onto a small private parking lot, where she began beating and kicking the doctors’ cars parked there. Longworth caught her once and tried to hold her in his arms; she broke his glasses and bloodied his nose. I ran and got a lab doctor, who protested that he couldn’t give her anything without an examination. But as he spoke, Tammy put all her berserk strength behind one elegant roundhouse with her purse, and broke the hood ornament cleanly off his pearl gray Lamborghini. He ran and filled a syringe, and with three cops helping him, got something into her arm that left her, in a few minutes, limp and sobbing.
We took her back to the house where she had dropped off her baby. Her mother came to the door carrying the whimpering child, took one look at her daughter slumped between Casey and Longworth, and shrieked, “What have you done to my baby?”
Tammy’s child cried louder; Tammy began to sob. I had to shout, finally. Over their wails, I yelled that I would call tomorrow, and pressed cards from Crime Victims’ Services into their unresponsive hands. I bellowed, above the general caterwauling, as much information as I could think of about the many helpful agencies whose services could be co-ordinated if they would only call this number. Nobody was really listening to me, so I gave up, finally, and escaped to the squad car.
“I was thinking of trying for a promotion to detective,” Tim Casey said on the way downtown, “but hell, it ain’t any easier than driving a squad, is it?”
“Man, that’s one strong woman,” Ted Longworth said, squinting near-sightedly above the Kleenex he had pressed to his nose. Fragments of his ruined eyeglasses were poking his chest through an inside pocket. “You ever see anything like the way she took out the hood ornament on that ‘Ghini? Jake?”
“Mmmm.” I stared unhappily at gridlocked five-thirty traffic on First Avenue. Having unhappy women yell at me again had sent my emotions ricocheting back into last year’s divorce court mode; I felt guilty and ashamed.
“I would say she was surprised, wouldn’t you?” I asked them. “When she pulled back that sheet?”
Longworth snorted through his bloody Kleenex. “Yeah, Jake, I’ll be glad to testify that the wife had a definite shock reaction.”
Back in my office, I found a note on my desk from Mabel Houser, “James Wahler has no arrest records on NCIC.” So, either James Wahler gave up on crime, as a grown-up, or he got better at whatever he was doing.
It was five forty-five, a good time to catch people at home. I got out my lists. But reaching for the phone, I felt the room rotate, and realized that fatigue was beginning to swamp me. The back of my tongue ached, and my eyes kept sliding out of focus.
I walked out of the building without speaking to anyone, and drove cautiously to a supermarket, feeling disabled. I got chicken and beans at the deli counter, grabbed a six-pack out of the cooler, and drove to my apartment with the scrupulous care and attention of a man walking a tightrope without a net.
While I ate, I watched TV news. Nothing seemed to make any sense except the report of a dead body found in Pioneer Park, and even that sounded vaguely unreal to me. I was thinking about opening a second beer when I fell asleep sitting up.
4
✜
“Chief wants to see you right away,” Russ Swenson demanded when I walked in Wednesday morning. Russ thinks his job as morning desk sergeant gives him a license to be an overbearing loud-mouthed arrogant nag, which unfortunately it kind of does.
“Sheesh, lemme get checked in before you yell at me, okay?” I said.
“Hey, take your time, Jake,” he said. “McCafferty just said to burn your ass if you weren’t in there in ten minutes.” He managed to say it so that I knew, beyond any doubt, that he really meant “burn your nigger ass.”
“Oh, good,” I said, “as long as there’s no hurry.” Russ fancies himself a master of the carefully calibrated ethnic slur. Actually, his little asides about fresh watermelon and slaps upside the head are about as subtle as a prostate exam. During my first couple of years in the department, I had recurring daydreams about mushing up his head with a rock. Eventually, I reasoned that since I didn’t know, myself, which races he might actually be slurring, it was a lot smarter to let his bigotry remain his problem. Now that I’ve worked all that out with myself, I’m looking for some other excuse to break his face.
I stuck my head in McCafferty’s door, saw Les Miller sitting ramrod straight in front of the desk, and began backing out. But McCafferty beckoned, saying, “Come on in, we’re just about finished.”
He turned back to Miller, saying, “She can run like a goddamn antelope, did you know that? Ran three marathons last year, won second place in one of ‘em. You know how long a marathon is? Twenty-six-and-something-goddamn miles, Les. Can you run twenty-six miles?”
“Last I heard I wasn’t training for no foot race,” Les Miller grumbled. “Do your job right, a police officer shouldn’t hafta run, usually. But she damn well better be able to shoot, Frank, now you know that as well as I do.”
McCafferty slapped printouts into a pile in a corner of his desk and said “Yeah, well, listen. Let’s put Harrison with Grass and Frisch with Baumgart. And then you take Win, and see what you can do, spend as much time with her at the firing range as you can. We need to save this recruit if it’s at all possible, Les, and you’re the most experienced Field Training Officer I’ve got. I think you can do it, and I sure as hell expect you to try.” Miller went out looking grouchy, and McCafferty watched his back thoughtfully.
“Three inductees finishing orientation and starting with FTO’s this week. One of them is that Vietnamese girl I told you about, remember? Amy Win.”
“I remember you mentioned a Vietnamese recruit,” I said, “but I thought you said her name was Un-Goo-Something.”
“Yeah, well, I probably did say it like that. It’s spelled N-G-U-Y-E-N. But turns out you pronounce it ‘Win.’ Well, she gets another little sound in there at the beginning, that I can’t seem to manage, but I said it back to her ‘Win,’ and she said ‘That’s close enough.’ Seems like a real straight kid.
“But now Les says she can’t shoot for sour apples. Damn disappointing,” he fumed, slamming some more printouts around, “You know I got royally racked in St. Paul, for not showing enough diversity on the force. Oversight committee said we should be ‘reflecting the population’ better. I said, ‘Shit, I can’t hire people that don’t apply,’ and they said, what’s that word they used? Outreach, we should be doing more outreach in the schools. Where the hell do they come up with words like that all of a sudden?
“So now I get an application from this Asian female with great marks in school, got her AA in Criminal Justice and all her tests indicate motivation up the ying-yang, and she finishes four weeks in Training Division with all reports satisfactory except she can’t shoot a gun? What kinda foolishness is that?” He took a long swig of coffee. “Hell, my Aunt Tilly can shoot a gun.”
“Tilly Walsh? You kidding?” I grinned at him. Frank’s Aunt Tilly brings oatmeal cookies to the department at Christmas time, and little jars of homemade apple butter.
“Damn right. I taught her myself, didn’t I ever tell you about that? She got concerned, here a few years ago, when we had that rash of burglaries, that Hench bunch. It was shortly after Uncle Leo died, and I guess she was feeling kind of vulnerable. I tried to talk her out of buying a gun, I was afraid she’d hurt herself. But then I saw it meant a lot to her to be independent, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll teach you myself,’ and you know something? She turned out to be a crack marksman. Had a natural aptitude for it. Only she screamed every time she squeezed off a shot, till I said, ‘Tilly, you keep screamin’ like that, the neighbors are gonna shoot you.‘ And she said, ‘Aw, heck, Franny, did I scream?’ ”
