The Taking of Libbie, SD Page 10

  “Some people love the sound of their own names,” I said.

  “Huh?” said Tracie.

  “Never mind.”

  We pulled into the lot outside the restaurant. The life-sized head of a bison hung above the door. I was surprised when it greeted us as we approached, its cartoon voice triggered by a motion detector.

  “It’s awfully lonely hanging by a nail up here all day,” the bison said. “If it weren’t for you nice people stopping for a chat once in a while, I don’t know what I would do. If only I had a female buffalo to talk to.”

  It started singing “Blue Moon,” switching the lyrics to lament that he didn’t have a dream in his heart or a bison of his own.

  “Somewhere Rodgers and Hart are spinning in their graves,” I said.

  “I think it’s cute,” Tracie said.

  “I’m sure that’s what they were going for when they wrote the song.”

  “You’re cynical, you know that, McKenzie?”

  Cynical and suspicious, my inner voice said.

  A sign just inside the restaurant door invited us to seat ourselves, and so we did, claiming a table in front of a large window with a view of the highway. The tables, chairs, and bar were all made of burnished redwood, yet they were covered by such a thick coating of polyurethane that they might as well have been plastic. A big-screen HD TV tuned to Fox News occupied each corner of the room. Thankfully, the volume was off.

  I was watching what little traffic there was on the highway while paper place mats, silverware, and water glasses magically appeared before us. A young and pretty voice said, “We just closed our breakfast buffet, so you’ll have to order off the menu.” It was only then that I noticed our server and she recognized me.

  “Small world,” I said.

  Saranne Miller blinked hard. “Too small,” she said.

  I took the menu from her outstretched hand. “How’d it go with the boyfriend this morning?”

  “Boyfriend?” Her pretty lips curled into a slight grimace, as if she knew a painful secret she didn’t wish to share. “He had his chance. Why? Are you looking to take his place?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What makes you different from every other man in this town?”

  “I’m not from this town.”

  “That’s the only thing about you I like.”

  Across the table, Tracie’s intense eyes moved from Saranne to me and back again as if she were watching a tennis match. I opened the menu.

  “What would you recommend?” I said.

  “Eat at home.”

  Tracie laughed, but the expression on Saranne’s face told me that she was perfectly serious.

  The first item that caught my eye was Grandma Miller’s World-Famous Third-Pound Burger with Bleu Cheese, Lettuce, and Tomato, so I ordered that, staying with potato chips instead of paying extra for the fries. Tracie ordered a salad with cottage cheese on the side—once a model, always a model, I guessed.

  “What was that all about?” she asked after Saranne left.

  “I met her this morning,” I said. “She was flirting with a kid in a coffeehouse.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s becoming the town slut.”

  “C’mon. She was flirting with a high school kid. What’s wrong with that? I did a lot of it myself.”

  “I hope you were in high school at the time. No, it’s not that. It’s—she’s starting to get a reputation.”

  “Because of her relationship with the Imposter?”

  “They were lovers.”

  “Miller says she was raped.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “How old is Saranne? Sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Then she was raped.”

  “I suppose.”

  “In any case, there were a lot of people taken in that were much older and wiser than Saranne.” I looked Tracie straight in the eye when I spoke. “Why pick on her?”

  “Convenience.”

  Saranne returned a few minutes later. She managed to serve us both without uttering a word, then swiftly disappeared. I took a bite of Grandma Miller’s World-Famous Third-Pound Burger with Bleu Cheese, Lettuce, and Tomato and realized that her recommendation that I eat at home wasn’t rudeness. Saranne had been simply warning me. The beef patty was burned along the edges yet cold in the center. The bun was dry, the lettuce wilted, the tomato this side of ripe, and the cheese tasted like something you spread with a dipper.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to screw up a cheeseburger,” I said.

  “Why do you think I ordered salad?” Tracie said. “You really don’t want to eat here until the evening shift.”

  “Then why did you bring me?”

  The answer came in a loud, braying voice. “You’re back.” It was followed by Miller, who appeared next to our table as if by magic. A blue sports coat over a powder blue shirt and blue jeans covered his large frame, and he might have been considered casual chic if not for the brown farm boots with leather laces.

  “That tells me something,” Miller said.

  The expression on Miller’s weathered face made it clear that he expected me to ask what that something was. I didn’t. I’m not sure why. Lack of curiosity, I guess. He soon grew tired of waiting.

  “I didn’t appreciate having to explain myself to your friends from the FBI,” Miller said.

  I didn’t have anything to say to that, either. My silence seemed to frustrate him.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Miller,” Tracie said. “McKenzie has a few questions.”

  I do? my inner voice asked.

  Tracie must have heard my inner voice, because she quickly added, “Mr. Miller is the mayor of Libbie.”

  Yes, I do.

  Still, I quickly recalled what he’d told me in the police station a few days earlier. Not I’m the mayor. Instead, he said, I own most of what’s worth owning around here.

  “That tells me something,” I said aloud.

  “Folks around here want someone running things that knows how to run things.” He chuckled lightly, as if he were relating the punch line of a private joke.

  Miller settled into an unclaimed chair, but only after he quickly surveyed the restaurant and the lawn outside the window. Probably he was looking for some small children to chase off, I told myself. Over his shoulder, I saw Saranne emerge from the kitchen, take one look at him, and retreat back inside.

  “First tell me,” Miller said. “Are you here to help catch the Imposter?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. I’ll answer your questions. Shoot.”

  “What did he take you for?”

  “Me? Not a dime.”

  “I meant the town.”

  “The town is fine.” Miller shook his head like a Boy Scout leader about to tell his troop the proper way to tie a knot. “You doom-and-gloomers. Libbie is going to be fine. Do you know why?”

  “The people,” Tracie said. “The people in South Dakota, especially this part of South Dakota, are tough. If you want to live here you have to be tough. Tough and caring. People here are good neighbors. We take care of our own.”

  Miller looked at Tracie as if she were from another planet.

  “No,” he said slowly. “It’s because we’re the county seat. It happened back in 1921 after they carved up Harding and Butte counties. That was a few years before my time.”

  Just barely, my inner voice said.

  “The old man told me about it. He was in on it. See, there was a convention. On the train ride to the convention, the boys from Libbie offered liquor to delegates who promised to vote for Libbie—this was at the beginning of Prohibition, and booze was hard to come by. Anyway, delegates got whiskey if they promised to vote for Libbie. That’s how we got to be the county seat. Now the outlying towns are shrinking; their schools are closing, consolidating. Where do you think they are going to build the consolidated school? In the county seat. In ten years there are going to be only
sixty-seven school districts in South Dakota. One for every county, plus an extra one for Sioux Falls. The same thing’s happening with health care, law enforcement, the courts, social services. Same with everything. A lot of people are unhappy about it. What are they going to do? One community gets consolidated; the other communities get smaller.”

  Miller smiled. “I saw it coming,” he said. “Saw it coming years ago. The big grain and livestock operations requiring fewer and fewer folks to operate them, crowding out the family farms, the small towns disappearing because they no longer have a reason to exist. Yeah, I saw it coming. That’s why I wasn’t all that surprised when Rush said he wanted to build an outlet mall here. Where else was he going to build it?”

  “Except there was no mall,” I said.

  “We were taken, pure and simple.”

  “You don’t seem too upset about it.”

  Miller smiled some more. He leaned in and spoke quietly. “If I picked you up and threw you through the window, would that prove how angry I am?” I didn’t say if it would or wouldn’t. He leaned back. “I’m too old to waste time crying over spilled milk. If you’re asking if I hold a grudge, yeah, I hold a grudge. Anyone knows that, it should be you.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “You mean, how did he play us?”

  “Yes.”

  “The usual way. First he dazzled us with dollar signs, then he threatened to take them away. The rest is a little complicated.”

  “Does it need to be?”

  “The national range for what is rated a regional shopping center is three hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand square feet. The syndicate Rush represented was seeking approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand square feet with room to expand. Parking is generally figured at three times the estimated floor area of the facility, so we were talking about eighty acres, total. Randisi—he’s the one who owned the land.” Miller gestured out the window toward the farmland across the highway. “Randisi refused to sell, wouldn’t even consider it. Rush said he and his syndicate were prepared to go elsewhere. We insisted that we could acquire the land through eminent domain. He said he doubted his partners would be willing to wait while the case worked its way through the political system, maybe even the courts. Also, there was no guarantee that an arbitrator would fix the sales price at the amount he and his partners were willing to spend. And then there was the cost of infrastructure—sewers and the like—which was sure to escalate. To assure Rush and his partners that they would get the land at their price, we agreed to put funds matching the current cost per acre into an account in the Libbie bank and pay them the difference, if there was a difference.”

  “How much?”

  “The average value of nonirrigated cropland in South Dakota is thirteen hundred and seventy-five dollars an acre. Eighty acres—we put up one hundred and ten thousand dollars, plus an additional one hundred thousand for infrastructure.”

  “That’s what he stole? I thought it would be more than that.”

  “That’s what he stole from us. I have no idea what other people in town might have put in.”

  “McKenzie,” Tracie said, “our yearly fiscal budget is set at five hundred and forty-two dollars per resident. With twelve hundred and twenty-one residents, that works out to six hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars.”

  “You bet a third of your operating budget on a mall?”

  “We weren’t betting anything,” Miller said. “We would have delivered the property at Rush’s price. We wouldn’t have lost a penny. Besides, do you have any idea how much income the mall would have generated for Libbie through property taxes? It would have funded most of our services. Hell, we would have been able to give folks free snowplowing.”

  While he spoke, Saranne emerged from the kitchen and began wiping tables and checking ketchup bottles.

  “I notice that the mall would have been built across from your own property,” I said.

  “What of it?”

  “Probably it would have increased traffic for your restaurant and service station and all the rest.”

  “So?”

  “Property tax aside, I was just wondering if you would have been as insistent about putting up the money if the mall had been built somewhere else.”

  “Do you have something to say, McKenzie, or are you just talking?”

  “I don’t want to call you greedy—”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Only I wonder if that’s why the Imposter picked this location. Because he knew he could count on your—let’s call it your strong entrepreneurial spirit—to make his plan work.”

  “Are you saying I had something to do with this?”

  Saranne moved closer to our table, obviously eavesdropping while pretending not to. I spoke a little louder for her benefit.

  “If you had said no, Mr. Mayor, none of this would have happened.”

  “I did what I thought was best for the town.”

  “Everyone on the city council thought it was a good idea,” Tracie said.

  “The Imposter was counting on that. I wonder how he knew that he could.”

  When neither of them replied, I filled in the silence that followed.

  “Miller, how much time did you spend with the Imposter?”

  “I know where you’re going with this, McKenzie. Chief Gustafson told me you thought Rush had an accomplice. Someone from Libbie. It ain’t me.”

  From now on, let’s not tell the chief any more than we have to, my inner voice told me.

  “The Imposter needed a password to loot the escrow account. You’re one of six people who knew the password.”

  “It ain’t me.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” I said aloud. “How much time—”

  “Very little. I spent very little time with him.”

  “Oh?”

  “We spoke. We spoke a lot. It’s not like we were friends, though.”

  “What did you speak about?”

  “The mall.”

  “What else?”

  “Just the mall.”

  “Did you ever have him over for dinner?”

  “Yes. Once.”

  “Did he meet the family?”

  “Leave my family out of this.”

  “What did you speak about then?”

  “The mall.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Are you going to pay the town back for any of the money that they lost on this deal?”

  “What? No. Why would I?”

  “Could you pay it back if you had to?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “We live in uncertain economic times. Maybe you’re overextended. Maybe you need extra cash.”

  “I told you—” Miller stopped himself and closed his eyes. I never saw anyone actually count to ten before. When he opened his eyes, he said, “I will not be provoked.”

  I didn’t believe him.

  Miller stood slowly. Saranne was several tables behind him. She abruptly turned her back and moved away.

  “You’re looking for an accomplice,” Miller said. “That’s fine. You keep doing that. You’ll tell me when you find him.”

  It was a command, not a question. Miller seemed surprised when I smiled disdainfully and shook my head.

  “What’s the magic word?” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No, but it’s close.”

  Miller’s eyes swept from me to Tracie and back again. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Here’s the thing, Miller,” I said. “I don’t work for you. I don’t like you. So either be polite, or fuck you.”

  “McKenzie,” Tracie said.

  “People don’t talk to me like that,” Miller said.

  “Maybe if they did, their town wouldn’t be on the brink of bankruptcy.”

  “McKenzie, please,” Tracie said.

  “I changed my mind,” Miller said. “I think you should leave Lib
bie. The sooner the better.”

  “I don’t care what you think,” I said.

  Miller stared at me as if I were an accident alongside the road. After a few moments, he shook his head slightly. “I will not be provoked.” He turned and walked away.

  “McKenzie, what are you doing?” Tracie wanted to know. “Mr. Miller is an important man in this town. Probably the most important.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say. What was the point of insulting him like that?”

  “Patience,” I said.

  Saranne didn’t return to the table until Miller was long gone. When she did, she immediately began retrieving plates.

  “How was the burger?” she said.

  “Lousy,” I told her.

  “You really have to come in at night. The old man actually pays for a real cook then. He has specials, the cook. I get to sample them, so I can tell you what’s good. Otherwise, you’ll want to order the ribs. Our cook makes great ribs. Rush said they reminded him of the ribs you can get at Taste of Minnesota.”

  “He said that?”

  “Uh-huh. Rush said every year around the Fourth of July he would go to Grant Park for Taste of Minnesota, and he always made a point of eating the ribs. You’re from the Cities. Do you ever go to Taste of Minnesota?”

  “Often.”

  “Are the ribs good?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “At least he told the truth about one thing.”

  “Did you spend much time with Rush?”

  “Not as much time as people say I did.” She glanced at Tracie. “Do you need anything else? Dessert?”

  “Do you recommend dessert?” I said.

  Saranne shook her head and smiled. “No.”

  “Well, then…”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Saranne was just out of earshot when Tracie spoke. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” she said. “That’s why you insulted Mr. Miller. To make an ally of his daughter.”