Dead Boyfriends Page 13

  “Wait,” she said

  “Yes?”

  “It’s all right,” she smiled. “If your face is the last thing I see—that’s good enough for me.”

  That caused me to laugh. I couldn’t believe this woman.

  She climbed down the ladder. I watched her. When she got halfway, I called to her.

  “Hey, Benny?”

  She looked up.

  What the hell, I thought.

  “My name is McKenzie.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and continued her journey. A few moments later, she was crawling through the tunnel, using the measuring wheel to mark her journey. Her voice echoed up to me. She was singing.

  “McKenzie, I just met a boy named McKenzie, and nothing in the worrrrrrld will ever be the saaaaame—again.”

  I laughed some more. After her voice faded, I ran to the storm drain opening where I had lost my keys and waited for Benny to appear. The wait seemed interminable.

  “Benny,” I called into the sewer. “Benny, can you hear me?”

  There was no reply.

  “There are no alligators in the sewer system,” I called. “That’s just an urban myth.”

  A few moments later, Benny appeared beneath the grate.

  “What took you so long?” I asked.

  “I thought I heard . . . I thought I heard—something—but it must have been the rats.”

  “I wish you’d stop talking like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  “You’re not worried about me, are you, McKenzie?”

  “Why would I be worried? There are no alligators in the sewer system, and I don’t even know you. Now would you get the hell out of there.”

  “You are worried.”

  “Stop it.”

  “In a minute.”

  “And stop smiling.”

  Only Benny couldn’t help herself. She continued to smile even as the foul liquid she was digging in flowed over the top of her gloves and around her fingers. After a few moments of searching, she snagged my keys.

  “Found ’em,” she announced, holding them above her head. “Meet you at the other end.”

  I watched her disappear into the pipe. A moment later I heard the echo of a loud scream that might have been bloodcurling if it hadn’t been so obviously exaggerated. I waited, looking through the sewer grate, until Benny poked her head back out the tunnel.

  “Let me guess,’ I said. “It was him.”

  “No,” said Benny. “It was her.”

  “Her?”

  “Haven’t you heard about the giant anaconda that lives down here?”

  “Well, of course. The sewer snake. It was in all the papers.”

  A few minutes later I met Benny at the sewer entrance. She held the keys out for me. They were dripping with a brown liquid.

  “Eww,” I said.

  “Ahh, wait,” said Benny. She removed the bandanna from her hair.

  “Don’t do that,” I said, but Benny wiped off the keys anyway and handed them to me. “Terrific,” I said. I actually thought of giving her a hug, but Benny’s boots, coveralls, and hands were smeared with brown sludge, and she smelled like, well, a sewer.

  “I, ah, don’t know how to thank you,” I told her.

  “Take me to dinner tonight,” she blurted.

  “Dinner?”

  “I promise, I clean up real good.”

  “A date?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t want to be seen with a woman who works in a sewer all day.”

  “Of course not,” I said, then quickly corrected myself. “No, that’s not what I meant.” Benny was confusing me. I wished she’d stop smiling. “I mean I don’t mind if I’m seen with a woman who works in a sewer.”

  “Then it’s a date.”

  “No, Benny . . . Look, you seem like a nice girl.”

  “I am a nice girl.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you. I’m just coming off this relationship—”

  “The bitch.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who hurt you. Point her out. I’ll kick her ass.”

  “You’ll what?”

  “Never mind. Violence never solved anything.”

  I started to laugh again. Just about everything Benny said made me laugh. There was something about her delivery.

  “About dinner . . .”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Let me tell you what happened. This woman you were seeing, you dated her for how long? A year? Maybe more?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you discovered that you couldn’t trust her. You discovered that she couldn’t be depended on when the going got tough, that she wouldn’t be there when you needed her, that she was putting her needs before yours, am I right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But with us—you and me—you already know that you can depend on me. McKenzie, you don’t need a year to find out.”

  “I know this—how?”

  “Think about it. How many women do you know would crawl through a filthy, stinking, alligator-infested sewer pipe for you?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near Lake Nokomis. Only you can pick me up at the Nash Gallery at the U. Do you know where it is?”

  “No.”

  “In the Regis Art Center?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Rarig Theater? It’s on the West Bank.”

  “Rarig Theater? I’m not sure . . .”

  “Okay, now you’re scaring me. It’s next to the Wilson Library.”

  “I remember the library. Why there?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “Should I change, or do you think I can get by with what I have on?” she asked.

  I thought the question was awfully funny.

  The bartender at the Ski Shack liked what he saw—a good-looking woman in her early twenties, definitely not a working girl or junkie, with midnight hair and a face that looked like it had been exposed to books. At a distance her eyes were gray. They changed to a lovely pale green as she approached the bar and hoisted herself onto a stool three places down from where I sat.

  “Excuse me,” he said and hustled over to her without worrying whether I excused him or not. It took them a long time to decide that the woman wanted a vodka gimlet. Half a minute later, the bartender set the beverage in front of her and asked, “Do you want to run a tab?”

  The woman said she did. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t charge the drink to the house. After all, business was business.

  “I should card you,” the bartender said.

  “Don’t I look twenty-one?” the woman answered.

  The bartender paused before answering. Perhaps he was distracted by her honeyed voice. The sound of it raised goose bumps on my flesh, and she wasn’t even talking to me.

  “You look like the snow-capped mountains of Tibet,” he said. “You look like the Brazilian rain forest. Like the islands of coral off the shores of New Zealand.”

  “Oh, brother,” I said.

  The bartender turned toward me. From his expression, I doubted that he considered me a scenic wonder. He pointed his finger at the woman and said, “Hold that thought.” To me he said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Tap beer,” I said. He listed some brands. I picked one. He poured the beer quickly and expertly and set it in front of me.

  “I’m investigating an incident that occurred here a while back,” I said. “Were you working here sixteen years ago?”

  It was a silly question, and he quickly told me why.

  “Sixteen years ago I was playing bantam hockey. How ‘bout you?”

  “Probably looking for a job.”

  “I was a Brownie,” the woman said.

  “Brownie?” asked th
e bartender.

  “A very young Girl Scout.”

  “You don’t look like a Girl Scout.”

  The bartender was flirting now, leaning on the stick, supporting his weight with his elbows. The woman was flirting back. She also put her elbows on the bar and leaned in.

  “You don’t look like a hockey player,” she said.

  “That’s because I still have all my teeth,” he answered, giving her a good look at all of them.

  “Is the owner available?” I asked.

  “Huh? No.” The bartender stepped back from the bar.

  “Do you expect him?”

  “He went out for an early dinner. He should be back in a little bit. Ski. Michael Piotrowski. Everyone calls him Ski. He can answer your questions. Sixteen years ago he was here. Thirty years ago, too.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  The bartender shrugged as if he couldn’t care less what I did just as long as I stopped interrupting him. He turned all of his attention on the woman. For lack of anything better to do, I studied the bar. There weren’t many customers. It was late afternoon, but still too early for the quick-drink-after-work crowd. The few people in the Ski Shack looked like they had been there all day and didn’t plan to leave anytime soon. Some seemed interested in a rerun of a poker tournament on ESPN. The rest didn’t seem to be interested in much of anything. Mostly they looked like people who needed the company of other people, even strangers. It was a phenomenon I understood quite well. When you’re my age and single and essentially unemployed, you tend to spend a lot of time alone. Sometimes you get lonely.

  I flashed on Nina Truhler—she had kept the alone feeling at bay for a long time now. Thinking about her made me regret my date with Benny Rosas. You should be at Rickie’s begging Nina’s forgiveness, not chasing skirts at a U of M art gallery, my inner voice told me.

  “Benny—I bet she hasn’t even voted in three presidential elections yet.”

  “Did you say something?” the bartender asked.

  I pointed at my empty glass, and he refilled it with Summit Ale.

  I forced myself to drink slowly. I had been hitting it too hard the past few days, and if I kept at it—it’s like the man says, if you try to use booze to solve a problem, one day you’re gonna discover that you have two problems. Still, I wasn’t too concerned about it. Especially when I saw my reflection half hidden behind several rows of assorted bottles in the mirror that ran the length of the bar. I had the look of a man who knew what he was doing and was proud of himself for doing it. It was the same look I had when I was a member of the St. Paul Police Department.

  Only they took that away from you, didn’t they, I reminded myself.

  I had become a public relations problem after the Simbi shooting, the cause célèbre of every anticop faction in the Twin Cities, a symbol of corruption and arrogance and everything that was wrong with police departments everywhere. Most of my fellow cops were on my side, and those that weren’t—the politicians at the top who were worried about things like image—couldn’t fire me because of the grievance procedures guaranteed in the union contract with the St. Paul Police Federation. They didn’t have grounds. I hadn’t done anything wrong; the grand jury cleared me. But I had been on the fast track toward sergeant stripes, toward a gold shield, and suddenly I was nudged into pit row, going nowhere fast. The department couldn’t be perceived as rewarding a controversial officer that many citizens called a killer. So when I found Thomas Teachwell and the millions he embezzled from a national restaurant chain, I quit the department and took the reward offered by the insurance company.

  I was leaning on my elbows and moving my glass in ever widening circles, enlarging a wet smear on the dark wood, when I heard a man’s voice.

  “Man, it’s hot,” he said. “I almost melted out there.”

  Michael Piotrowski leaned across the bar in front of me. He was sweating.

  “You lookin’ for me?” he asked.

  Piotrowski was a big man, old and ugly, with a mouth twisted in a permanent frown. He had a harassed quality about him, as though he had many things to do and not enough time to do them.

  I introduced myself, then asked, “Do you remember a man named Robert St. Ana? He died about—”

  “Fuck yeah, I remember him. Fucker got hisself killed in a car accident and they blamed me for it just because he was drinking in my place.”

  I had met plenty of people like Piotrowski when I worked the streets of St. Paul, people who loved to give me both the play-by-play and color commentary. Accident, burglary, assault—it didn’t matter. I’d ask a simple question, “What happened?” and get six pages’ worth of answer in reply. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  “Fucker was sitting right where you’re sitting now, swear to God,” Piotrowski recalled. “Kept hammering those Long Island teas—that was all the rage back then, Long Islands, and he sure liked ’em. Had a half dozen easy. Now, he was a young guy, but he could handle his booze. You could tell he had been drinking illegal for years. I tell him after six, ‘Hey, you’re done.’ I cut him off. He said, ‘No problem. I’ll get a ride.’ I said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ and he goes over to that phone, right over there”—Piotrowski pointed at the pay phone on the wall between the two restrooms—“and he makes a call, comes back, says, ‘It’s okay, I have a ride.’ Fine with me, so I keep serving. An hour later, less than an hour, a woman comes in. The two of them, they sit at a table right over there, start talkin’. I’m at the end of the bar tending to some paying customers, so I don’t get a good look, okay? But the woman is kinda young-looking and I figure I’m gonna have to card her. That’s what I need—a drunk and a’ underage drinker. But when I look up, he’s following her out the door. End of story, that’s what I’m thinking.

  “Only, couple days later they find the guy dead. Drove his car off the road in a snowstorm, passed out in the car. Fucker dies of carbon monoxide. Who’s to blame? Him? Fuck no. The woman, whatever the fuck happened to her? No way. The goddamn blizzard? Uh-uh. Me.” Piotrowski poked himself in the chest. “I’m the guy. I killed him. Shit.”

  During the brief pause that followed, I asked, “This was sixteen years ago. How come you remember it so well?”

  “Cuz I got my ass sued, that’s why. You want another one?” He was pointing at my empty glass. I had another one.

  “Bitch sued me for wrongful death,” Piotrowski continued after he poured my beer. “A kid. Fuck. A sixteen-year-old kid sued me, claimed that this St. Ana fucker was the father of her child. She’s suing me on behalf of this child wasn’t even born yet. I get pissed just thinking about it.”

  “Do you remember the woman who picked up St. Ana?”

  “No, it was a busy night and I wasn’t payin’ attention. Christ, it would’ve saved my ass if I knew who she was.”

  “Do you remember what she looked like?”

  “A looker—a looker with long dark reddish hair. That’s all I ‘member.”

  “Not Merodie Davies?”

  “Know what? That was my first thought, cuz the kid, she had the hair. ‘Cept my lawyers said it couldn’t be, insisted the kid didn’t even have a fucking driver’s license. I mean, shit.”

  You were only fourteen when your father taught you how to drive a stick on the dirt roads Up North, my inner voice reminded me, but I didn’t say.

  Piotrowski paused for a moment to catch his breath, then started up again. “I wanted to fight, that’s what I told my insurance company. ‘Let’s go to court,’ I said. Not them pussies. They say, first, they only have my word that there really was a woman, like I made it up, right? Like I shoulda fucking asked her name, right? Shit. Then they say putting a sixteen-year-old unwed mother on the witness stand, crying all over the fucking place over this guy what was supposed to marry her and raise the baby, that’s what they call a ‘no-win proposition.’ So they settle out of court. Eighty-five thousand bucks, and me with a twenty percent deductible. Fuck. That’s all I can say. Why yo
u want to know all this shit for, anyway?”

  “The woman, the kid who sued you . . .”

  “Merodie fucking Davies,” Piotrowski said.

  “She’s in jail on a murder charge.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, good,” Piotrowski said.

  Vonnie Lou Lowman, Eli Jefferson’s sister, lived in a small, split-level house in New Brighton, a suburb just north of Minneapolis. The doors and windows of her house were closed and the drapes drawn, giving the place a murky look. Apparently, Vonnie Lou thought her efforts would keep the heat at bay. I admit, it was a few degrees cooler inside, yet the back of my shirt stuck to me just the same.

  Vonnie Lou offered Dr. Pepper, which I accepted greedily. The beers I had at the Ski Shack were working on me, and I didn’t want to be sloshed when I met Benny.

  “No. No. No possible way.” Vonnie Lou answered my first question. “I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother, either. Eli would never have abused Merodie, would never have hit her. I don’t know who told you that, but it’s just not true. He was the most good-natured man you would ever hope to meet. Sweet as honey, I’m not kidding. He liked women. Believe me.”

  “Were you and your brother close?”

  Vonnie Lou smiled at the thought. “We had our ups and downs,” she said. “Like I told you, he was a sweet man. He liked his liquor though, and when he drank he did stupid things. Not mean things, or dangerous things. Just stupid.”

  “Like sleeping with other women?” I asked.

  Vonnie Lou nodded her head then, sipped her pop. “This time I thought it would work out for Merodie,” she said. “I really did. Merodie hasn’t had a whole lot of luck with men.”

  “So I’ve been led to believe.”

  “They’ve either turned out to be assholes or they died on her.”

  “Let’s talk about that. I know about St. Ana.”

  “Robert St. Ana, the guy who got her pregnant. That was before my time, before I met Merodie.”

  “Did Merodie ever talk about him?”

  “Not really, although from what she did say, I guess he wasn’t exactly the nicest guy in the world. Beat on her some, Merodie said. Did other things. Then he got her pregnant and wouldn’t marry her. The way I figure it, the best thing that could have happened to Merodie was him dying like he did.”