Dearly Departed Read online

“Shit,” he said, this time breaking the word into two syllables: shii-it.

  Freddie had turned his back to me. He was watching one of the college girls, who was watching him while pretending not to. “You got business, Taylor, you need air cover, you got my card. Otherwise, fuck it.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He smiled then. “I do believe supper’s on the table,” he muttered for my benefit.

  “Ladies!” he shouted and juke-jived his way to the college girls. Sixty seconds later he had them giggling hysterically. In another sixty seconds he was kneading the shoulders of the girl who had given him the eye. In two minutes more he was sitting at the table next to her, gesturing wildly with one hand to the beat of yet another seemingly hilarious story. What he was doing with the other hand under the table, your guess is as good as mine.

  I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. How come I can’t do that? I have charisma! I decided I hated Freddie. Decided I should have shot the surly sonuvabitch when I’d had the chance.

  I quickly settled my tab and left, considerably drunker yet no more cheerful than when I’d arrived. I was in no shape to drive. But I drove anyway. If I was busted for DWI on the way home, maybe Cynthia would defend me.

  The morning broke cold and gray and didn’t hold much promise for improvement. The woman on the radio said eighty percent chance of showers. It was a good day to stay in bed, I decided, and drew the blankets close to my chin. What with my pounding head and unsteady stomach, I could use the extra shut-eye, anyway.

  Besides, I was tired. So tired, it was difficult to even roll over and find a more comfortable position. Yet deep sleep did not come. Nor had it last night, despite the numerous beers. Nor the night before. Nor the night before that. I kept waking after only a few hours, from dreams that were all too vivid, filled with the shadows of ninety-six murder investigations, with the ghosts of men whose lives I’ve taken in anger.

  Whenever a case disturbs me, it seems like all my past troubles resurface and crowd around it. And this case disturbed me. In the beginning my desire to find Alison, to find her alive, tingled throughout my body like lust, making me aware of everything: the way my fingers caressed the keyboard of my personal computer, the way my chest heaved up and down with my breath—Cynthia had been right about that. Only now, twenty-four days after convincing Truman that Alison was alive, my passion was spent. I found I had no enthusiasm for the day, no energy. The search for Alison had stopped being fun, stopped being a game. It had become work, hard work at that, and I had begun to challenge the logic of it. Alison had not broken any laws, unless some overzealous prosecutor wanted to hang an abandonment rap on her—Cynthia had been right about that, too. And if her abrupt disappearance had made life difficult for Raymond Fleck and Irene Brown and Stephen Emerton and the rest, well, golly gee, that just broke my heart.

  Still, I was taking money for it, wasn’t I? Four hundred dollars a day. And expenses. What was the meter at now? Ninety-six hundred? Something like that. I found myself wishing I was broke, that I needed the job, needed the money. At least that would have given me an excuse for dragging my sorry ass to the office to resume the chase. It would let me pretend that I wasn’t looking for Alison for personal reasons.

  I stayed in bed until my headache shrieked for relief and the nausea in my stomach forced me into the bathroom.

  The yellow Post-it note said that two packages were waiting for me at the office next door; the receptionist who worked there had promised the UPS man she’d mind them. She was young and attractive and wanted to have her way with me. I could tell by the way she called me “mister” and interrupted her typing only long enough to point to the packages.

  One box contained the subscription list of Dog Universe magazine printed on mailing labels twenty to a page. The other held a floppy programmed with the complete mailing list for X-Country. X-Country had 447,000 readers, which seemed like a lot to me and I wondered if they padded their list for advertising purposes. Dog Universe had only ninety-three thousand. I checked both for Alison’s name, hoping she had been careless, hoping she had forwarded the publications to her new address. No such luck.

  I started with Dog Universe, X-ing out every label with a man’s name, every label with an address located outside North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin—the states where she had traveled in the course of her business. It took me fifteen minutes to get through the As and another five before I paused at Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin.

  It wasn’t the name that stopped me, it was the address. Deer Lake, Wisconsin. The same as Alison’s best friend, Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Then I assured myself, “Michael could be a woman’s name. What was the name of that actress who starred in The Waltons on TV? Michael Learned?”

  I fired up my PC, loaded the X-Country disk, reminding myself that fifteen hundred and fifty-seven people live in Deer Lake, and it shouldn’t be surprising if one of them liked dogs. I quickly discovered that Michael Bettich, 4001 Capitol Street, #314, Deer Lake, Wisconsin, also liked to cross-country ski.

  If you have a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan; if you’ve borrowed money from any business for any reason, you are listed with one of the major credit bureaus, probably all of them. Most of the information they’ve gathered on you, including your complete credit history, is restricted by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Which means not a helluva lot. The government claims it is cracking down on people who abuse the privacy laws, but there’s not much they can do about it. Still, conscientious fellow that I am, I try not to violate federal regulations unless I really, really need to. And this time I didn’t. The Federal Trade Commission ruled not too long ago that noncredit information such as name, address updates, DOB, social security number, etcetera, didn’t fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and it went online for people like me to access, for a price. And when I accessed Michael Bettich’s header information, I discovered:

  Name: Michael Bettich

  SS#: 398-91-0038

  DOB: 3/6/70

  Sex: Female

  MS: Single

  Address: 4001 Capitol Street, #314 Deer Lake, WI

  Employer: Rosalind Colletti Investments 2035 Broadway Avenue Deer Lake, WI

  “You couldn’t resist it, could you, Alison?” I said aloud, rereading the name of Michael Bettich’s current employer for the fifth time. “You just couldn’t let it go.”

  I got up and removed Alison’s photograph from the wall, careful not to leave adhesive when I peeled the tape from the corners. I examined it carefully. The eyes had lost their pain long ago. For some time now they had held a different expression for me—she looked like Bill Clinton had when he claimed he did not have sex with that woman.

  “Gotcha!” I said, more in relief than in triumph.

  Cynthia seemed surprised by the rain. After parking her car she glanced skyward, shook her head, turned up her collar, and trudged to my front door. I held it open it for her, and she came into the house. There was no warm hug, no inviting smile.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, slipping off her coat and folding it over the back of a chair.

  “I’m going to Deer Lake tomorrow morning to make sure it’s her.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it. Like I said on the telephone, it puts a period to the investigation.”

  “Is that so important?”

  “It is to me. I like things to be just so. What motivates me, besides my four hundred dollars a day and expenses, is a sense of order. Things ought to happen in a certain way. Like in baseball. Every batter gets three strikes. Every team gets three outs. The team with the most runs after nine innings gets the W. There are no ties, and you go from first to third at your own risk. When things don’t happen like that, when a player alters the rules to take advantage of another player, I feel compelled to do something about it.”

  Cynthia didn’t believe me. She said my answer sounded like I had rehearsed it, and she was right.


  “There is more,” I admitted.

  Her expression asked, What?

  “The other night, you said I wanted revenge because I had felt that somehow Alison had cheated on me. That’s not exactly true.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t want revenge. I don’t want to hurt her. Truly I don’t. I just want to ask her … why. And I want to see her face when she answers.”

  “Just like any man who’s been cuckolded.”

  I smiled. “Cuckold? That’s a little eighteenth century isn’t it?”

  Cynthia smiled back. “I’ve been working to improve my vocabulary.”

  We ate a couple of glazed turkey fillets I had simmered in ground ginger, Worcestershire sauce, and orange marmalade while we listened to the ball game on the radio. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Afterward, we watched the rain from opposite ends of a wicker couch in my three-season porch. Every time the thunder boomed and the lightning flashed, we moved a little nearer to each other until there was no distance between us at all.

  sixteen

  The Northland had grown considerably greener in the three weeks since I last drove through it, and the natives were dressed as if they actually believed the rumors that winter was over. I, for one, was skeptical. Some areas in the Northland reported snowfall on Memorial Day. I didn’t witness this event personally since I was visiting my parents in Fort Myers, Florida, a place where winter never comes, and spring is marked not with rain and slush but with the arrival of catchers and pitchers at the training camp of the Minnesota Twins. Still, I believed the reports. In the Northland, a snowball’s chance in July wasn’t all that remote.

  “The Northland” is the title given by advertisers—“Visit the Northland’s number-one used-car dealership”—to a rather vaguely defined region in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin noted for its countless lakes and forests. And if you hail from Des Moines, I could see how the place might seem to embody the sense of wilderness that the sobriquet implies. However, if you hail from the true north, from Fairbanks or Prince Albert or even Edmonton, the Northland seems more like a suburb of Kansas City. Certainly the traffic jam I joined when I approached Deer Lake had an urban familiarity. It took twenty minutes to creep from the city limits sign to the intersection at the center of town.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the county cop who was directing traffic. He growled at me and waved me through the intersection. I drove in the direction his hand pointed, obedient as any driver’s ed student, and followed the traffic without knowing where it was taking me until I came to the Deer Lake branch of the U.S. Post Office. I escaped the caravan and pulled into the parking lot.

  I noted the post office’s address: 4001 Capitol Street. I reread the address I had written in my notebook for Alison: 4001 Capitol Street, #314. A mail drop. Give the lady credit; she understood the value of a mail drop. Her mail comes to 4001 Capitol Street, P.O. Box 314. She then picks it up or it’s forwarded on to her; her identity and location are known only to the postal employees, who are legally bound to keep it to themselves. However, like I said before, Alison had genius but not experience, otherwise she might have known that the U.S. Postal Service Manual contains a provision that clearly states that the post office must disclose the street address of a boxholder to someone needing the address to serve process. You can make good money as a process server. I’ve done a little of it myself.

  I went inside and waited in the short line at the counter until it was my turn. The postal clerk spoke with a natural courtesy very few public employees possess. She was short and thin and black, probably the only African-American I’ve seen in the lily-white Northland outside of Duluth who wasn’t on vacation. She laughed at my surprise at finding her there and explained that she was the only black and one of the few women to work for the post office in all of Kreel County. “If I were gay I would fill the district’s entire minority quota all by myself,” she said and laughed again, without malice or bitterness. Listening to her infectious laugh and working to keep from breaking up myself, I found I liked her very much, this stranger—liked her more than some friends I’ve known for decades. But the laugh quickly died when I flashed my ID and lied to her, telling her that I was a process server looking for a deadbeat that my client wanted to sue, reminding her that my request was entirely legal.

  “I know my job,” she coolly informed me as her long fingers danced over the keyboard of her computer terminal.

  “Bettich, Michael J., 2035 Broadway Avenue, Deer Lake, Wisconsin,” she recited quickly.

  I didn’t write down the address in my notebook. It was the same as Rosalind Colletti Investments, Alison’s alleged employer. I waited for the clerk to look up from her computer screen.

  “Something more?” she said.

  “Where is 2035 Broadway Avenue?” I asked, wondering if she was this protective of all her addressees.

  “Do your own dirty work, gumshoe.”

  Gumshoe? Now there’s a word I hadn’t heard for a long time.

  “Sorry I ruined your day,” I told her, and I meant it.

  I asked for directions from a pump jockey working the twenty-four hour service station on the corner, who looked at me like I was the dumbest human being alive. His directions consisted of shaking his head and pointing a greasy finger at the small building across the street and up the block. There was no address on the outside of the structure, only the sign: KING ENTERPRISES.

  From a distance, it looked like an honest-to-God log cabin hewed with ax and saw. It wasn’t until I was up close that I noticed the nailheads. And it wasn’t until I opened the door to discover a polished interior filled with black leather, mirrored surfaces, and glass—not an earth tone in sight—that I realized the logs were merely a facade. Is nothing real anymore? Even the hair on the receptionist looked fake, a cascading waterfall of midnight that splashed over her shoulders and down her back. Against her pale face it looked like a wig displayed on a mannequin’s head.

  The name plate on her desk read ANGEL JOHANNSON, and perhaps there had been a time when the name applied. But no longer. Angel Johannson had lost the wholesome innocence usually associated with the species, her face taking on the mistrustful countenance of one who’s fallen from grace. According to the inscribed date, the high-school graduation ring she wore was only two years old.

  I guessed she was the daughter of the infamous Johnny Johannson and sister to the punk. How many Angel Johannsons could there be in Deer Lake?

  “May I help you?” she asked pleasantly enough.

  “I’d like to speak with Michael Bettich,” I told her.

  She hesitated before answering, “I’m afraid you must have the wrong office.”

  “Is this the address of Rosalind Colletti Investments?”

  She repeated herself, never taking her eyes off me. “I’m afraid you must have the wrong office.”

  “This is where the United States Post Office sent me.”

  “Perhaps you’d care to speak with Mr. Koehn.”

  “Does he know Michael Bettich?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Mr. Koehn can help you.”

  “Fine, I’d like to speak with Mr. Koehn.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Koehn is not in at the present time,” Angel informed me. “If you would care to leave a message …”

  This is going well, I told myself. “When do you expect Mr. Koehn? ” I asked.

  “I really couldn’t say. He’s at the rallies.”

  “Rally?”

  “Rallies,” she said, emphasizing the plural. “Some folks want the casino, some don’t. At the park,” she added, gesturing vaguely west with her hand.

  Along with my business card I gave her my best Arnold. “Tell Michael I’ll be back.”

  “I told you, she isn’t here,” Angel insisted.

  “How did you know Michael is a she?”

  The church, a small brick affair with glass doors and a steeple topped with a crucifix, was rooted in a large field on the rig
ht side of the county road. It left me feeling a slight pang of nostalgia. I hadn’t been inside a church since that bright autumn day when services were held for my wife and daughter, and won’t I catch hell about that the next time I see them.

  In front of the church was a small platform, perhaps two feet high. Not high enough for the anti-casino protesters in back to see the speakers, though, and many stood on tiptoe and craned their necks. What they didn’t see were two men, one sitting on a metal folding chair, the other standing before a single microphone. The man sitting was a priest. From a distance, he reminded me of the priest who had heard the confessions of my teammates and I when we were in high school. Right after practice the day before every football game, he would hear our confessions, and no matter what our individual transgressions, each one of us was given the same penance: five Hail Mary’s and five Our Father’s. We called him Father Minute Wash.

  The casino proponents were gathered in a park on the left side of the county road, the Augustus Eubanks Memorial Park, dedicated to the memory of the only Kreel County resident to fall in the Sioux Uprising of 1862—it said so on the metal plaque attached to the huge rock at the park entrance. The platform in the park was much higher, nearly ten feet. This time it was the people in front who had the most trouble seeing the speakers.

  About two hundred fifty people were in each camp, many of them holding signs that I couldn’t read from where I stood on the road. Dueling protest rallies in the heart of conservative Wisconsin. I had to admit, I was fairly impressed. They weren’t in the same league as the 1960s civil rights marches or early 1970s anti-Vietnam War rallies, still … Come to think of it, I hadn’t been this close to a protest rally since the Vietnam War, and even then I had only joined to meet girls. The draft had been abolished before I started high school, and I didn’t personally know anyone who was over there, so what the hell.

  From where I stood, I could hear the speakers who addressed both sides, their words wafting up from the amplifiers a full two beats behind the gestures that accompanied them. It reminded me of a badly dubbed Japanese movie: