Like to Die Page 4

  According to the origin story on her website, Erin’s journey began with “Potluck Fridays” at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she majored in business. Apparently her friends had decided it was a good idea to eat heartily before beginning a weekend of heavy drinking at what many people consider to be one of the most infamous party schools in America. Her most frequent contribution to the meal was salsa that she made from her mother’s recipe. Her classmates loved it and began referring to her as “the salsa girl.”

  Erin discovered it wasn’t all that much harder to make a lot of salsa than a little. At the urging of her classmates, she began producing large batches that she sold in jars out of the apartment she shared with two roommates and at Memorial Union and other spots around campus. On a whim, she brought her salsa to the Dane County Farmers Market in the square surrounding the Wisconsin State Capitol.

  I mentioned it to Nina, who was examining a hand-carved cribbage board made to resemble a battleship, complete with gun turrets and conning tower.

  “Remember that huge farmers market that we went to in Madison a few years ago?” I asked. “About two hundred vendors? That’s where Salsa Girl started her business.”

  “That’s nice,” Nina said.

  What happened, Erin showed up with about a hundred jars of her salsa and a card table. She didn’t know the rules, the biggest of which was that you had to be a member to sell your wares at the market and that there was a five-year waiting list. By the time she was discovered and ejected forcibly from the premises, however, she had nearly sold out. What encouraged her most, though, was that she heard that some of her customers had returned to the market the following week hoping to buy another jar from the salsa girl.

  Fortunately, there were other markets where Erin could sell her salsa, and she began doing so, to the detriment of her studies. One day she was taking a quiz dealing with business statistics when she asked herself “What am I doing here? If I want to learn how to run a business, why not start with this business?”

  She finished the quiz and handed in her paper, but never returned to class to learn how well she had done. Instead, she left school and went back to her home in Minnesota. She told her mother her plans. “She was furious,” Erin said both on her website and in an article published in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. “That changed, though, when I hired her because I was unable to keep up with the demand by myself.”

  It was at the farmers market on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis that Erin met Randy Bignell-Sax. Randy was a member of the Bignell family, who owned and operated both Bignell Bakeries and Minnesota Foods. He was so impressed by the quality of Erin’s hand-crafted product, which was now being sold in two flavors under the label Salsa Girl Salsa, that he invested enough working capital for Erin to be able to move to her first manufacturing plant—well, second if you counted her mother’s kitchen. From there Salsa Girl expanded to a third location, and finally the one where I found her that morning. She expanded to six flavors and quickly paid off her business loan from Randy, although he retained a 10 percent stake in the company.

  “That must be where Peterson/Sax Enterprises came from,” I said.

  Nina was inspecting a stereoview photograph through a stereoscopic card viewer. It allowed her to observe the two side-by-side photographs on the card as a single 3D image.

  “Wow,” she said. “You need to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “The ice palace from the 1887 St. Paul Winter Carnival.”

  I took a look. The palace was actually a castle made entirely of thirty-five thousand blocks of ice taken from the Mississippi River. At 217 feet long, 194 feet wide, and 140 feet high, it was, in a word, breathtaking.

  “They built this by hand, can you believe it?” Nina said. “Why can’t we build something like this? The ice palace they built for the Super Bowl was a tar paper shack compared to this. I’m going to buy these.”

  Nina took a box full of stereoview photograph cards to the register in the front of the store. In the meantime, I continued my internet search. There was little left to learn. I discovered a few more articles that appeared in local media outlets like City Pages and CBS Minnesota, yet they all told nearly an identical story. There was no mention of Erin’s mother’s name or where they lived in Minnesota, and no photographs of either her or Erin except for a shot of Erin and her production manager dressed in white lab coats and hairnets and standing in front of a mixing tank. Erin was barely recognizable.

  She didn’t have a LinkedIn page, and her Facebook page, listed under the name Salsa Girl, was used strictly to promote her business. Instead of a pic of her, it displayed the same likeness of Salsa Girl that appeared on the product labels and other company literature.

  “That surprises me,” I said.

  “What surprises you?” Nina asked.

  We were on the sidewalk and headed north. I told her about my findings.

  “Why would she post her photograph?” Nina asked. “Or her mom’s?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “I have a website. I have a Facebook page. Weekly email marketing, too. Have you ever seen my photograph? Or Erica’s? Have you read any personal information?”

  I hadn’t, except under the ABOUT US tab on her website where Nina mentioned that Rickie’s had been named after her daughter.

  “What we look like and where we’re from has nothing to do with what we’re selling,” Nina said.

  Still, it occurred to me that I knew nothing about Salsa Girl except for what I could find on her website. It made me wonder about my relationship with other friends as well, guys I’ve played hockey with for years. I was thinking to myself but spoke out loud: “What’s Andy Adams’s wife’s name? Does he have kids? Where does he work again?”

  “Who’s Andy Adams?” Nina asked.

  “Guy I play hockey with, always wears an old Minnesota Fighting Saints sweater.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “I barely remember him myself, and we had beers after we played the last game of the season just two weeks ago.”

  “You’re not having an existential crisis, are you, McKenzie?”

  “I might be working myself up to one.”

  “Wait until we get down the street first.”

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Isaac Staples Sawmill. Can you think of a better place to question if your life has any meaning or purpose than in an antiques store located in a hundred-and-seventy-year-old building?”

  * * *

  A few hours later, I was sitting on a sofa in Bobby Dunston’s man cave that I had helped him build in the basement of his house and drinking a Leinenkugel. Bobby had major league baseball on his HDTV. At least Kansas City was playing major league baseball; I had no idea what the hell the Twins were doing.

  Bobby and I had known each other since before kindergarten, and it was easy for us to sit together for long stretches without speaking. But as I watched the Royals hit a lazy pop fly to yet another one of Minnesota’s ever-expanding cadre of inadequate shortstops I had to say, “Do we really know anybody? I mean, do we even know who our friends are?”

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “Take Andy Adams, for example.”

  “What about him?”

  “What do we know about him? Really know?”

  “You mean besides the fact that he never passes the damn puck?”

  “I’ve been contemplating the nature of friendship.”

  Bobby stared at me for a long count, an expression of alarm on his face. Finally he stood and walked to the bottom of the staircase leading to his kitchen.

  “Nina,” he shouted. “Nina Truhler.”

  Nina appeared at the top of the stairs; Shelby Dunston was standing behind her.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What did you do to McKenzie? The last time I saw him he was perfectly fine; now he’s talking gibberish.”

  �
��He’s having a moment of personal reflection and self-doubt.”

  “That’s what I mean. I’ve known him for over forty years and he’s never had a moment of personal reflection and self-doubt. You broke him.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was Salsa Girl.”

  “Salsa Girl?” Shelby said. “I want to hear this.”

  Shelby hustled down the stairs, crossed the room, and sat next to me, her long legs tucked beneath her. She rested an elbow on the back of the sofa and rested her chin in her hand. Her wheat-colored hair fell across one eye, and for a moment she reminded me of Veronica Lake in all those 1940s gangster movies.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Salsa Girl.”

  “Oh, for—she asked me to do a favor.”

  “And?”

  “And I said yes.”

  “And?”

  “What do you mean ‘And’?”

  “You do favors for friends all the time. What’s the problem?”

  Nina answered for me. “The problem is, before she asked for the favor, Erin asked McKenzie if they were friends and he said yes.”

  “And?” Shelby said.

  “I’ve known her for about seven years,” I said. “We all have, but only because of Ian. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I realize that I know nothing more about her than what’s on her website. I’m wondering if it’s true. If we are friends. Not only her, but it’s occurred to me that half the people I know, the guys I play hockey with, the cops I worked with, the people I’ve done favors for—they’re strangers to me.”

  “That’s true of everybody,” Shelby said. “I have one hundred and seventy-seven friends on Facebook, and I think I’ve actually met about thirty of them in person.”

  “I have regular customers,” Nina said. “One of them put me down as a reference on her résumé. Some of the others, they behave as if we’re cousins or something. I don’t even know their names.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “I have friends”—I quoted the air with both hands—“with whom I’ve never had a meaningful relationship.”

  “Like who?” Shelby asked.

  “Erin Peterson.”

  “I’ve never been able to warm up to her,” Nina said. “She’s always friendly enough, yet at the same time—I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to care about anything except her business.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. She gives a lot of money to charity, mostly women’s groups—Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, Tubman, the Sojourner Project.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me. McKenzie,” Shelby said, “if you want to know something about the woman, why don’t you just ask her?”

  “Hey?” Bobby’s voice changed. If you didn’t know him you might not have heard it; the calm authority. “Exactly what does she want you to do?”

  I answered his question. He asked several more. Bobby was the best cop I knew, even better than I was. We started together at the St. Paul Police Department twenty years ago. I retired to accept a reward on a rather ambitious embezzler—$3,128,584.50 before taxes—that a financial wizard named H. B. Sutton had nearly doubled for me. The plan was to give my father, who raised me alone after my mother died, a comfy retirement. Unfortunately, he died six months later, leaving me both rich and bored. Meanwhile, Bobby stayed with the SPPD, eventually moving up to commander in the Major Crimes Division.

  “Who are you going to get to supply the surveillance equipment?” he asked.

  “I was thinking Marshall Lantry.”

  “Isn’t he a criminal himself?” Shelby asked.

  “He’s never been convicted,” I said.

  “Half the people McKenzie knows are criminals,” Nina said.

  “Yes, but are they his friends?”

  “In the meantime,” I said.

  Bobby knew what I was asking. “I don’t do favors for friends,” he said. “Not even for you. Especially not for you.”

  “Police officers are regularly assigned to patrol those areas where criminal activities are known to occur, and if the patrol commander of the Western District was made aware that—”

  “How would she be made aware of crimes that the victim has refused to report?”

  “Someone would need to reach out to her.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. McKenzie, in case you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a heroin epidemic sweeping the Twin Cities. I don’t have the time or the resources to waste safeguarding another one of your girlfriends. Explain it to him, Shel.”

  “Honey,” Shelby said, “what Bobby’s trying to say is that there’s a heroin epidemic sweeping the Twin Cities and he doesn’t have the time or the resources to waste safeguarding another one of your girlfriends.”

  “Exactly how many girlfriends does he have, anyway?” Nina asked.

  “There’s you, me, Heavenly Petryk…”

  “C’mon,” I said.

  “McKenzie,” Bobby said. “You know that Salsa Girl is lying about all of this, don’t you?”

  Both Nina and Shelby seemed outraged by the suggestion.

  “How can you say that?” Shelby wanted to know.

  “The sabotage of her building and trucks is obviously acts of retribution; it’s payback,” Bobby said. “It’s highly unlikely that she doesn’t know who’s behind it.”

  “Yet entirely possible,” I said.

  Bobby spread his hands wide and shook his head. He looked exactly like he did the other night when I bet my ace against his full house.

  * * *

  Nina seemed distracted after we left Bobby and Shelby’s house in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul and drove to the condominium we shared in Minneapolis. I knew why, too. The woman was suffering withdrawal symptoms. She had not set foot in her club since Saturday night, hadn’t even made a phone call to check up, and now she was wondering if the place might’ve been burned to the ground and her employees were too frightened to tell her.

  “When we get home, instead of going up, maybe I’ll drive over to Rickie’s just to make sure everything’s all right,” Nina said.

  “Everything is fine and you know it.”

  “Jennifer Grimm is singing in the big room tonight. It’s the first time we’ve had her. I’d like to make her feel welcomed.”

  I glanced at the illuminated digital clock on the dashboard of my Mustang.

  “The woman must be in the middle of her second set by now,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to drop in for a minute to say hello.”

  I would have argued with her, except Nina running off to the club left me free to wander over to the industrial park that housed Salsa Girl Salsa—just to make sure everything was all right.

  * * *

  I parked my Mustang in the far corner of the back parking lot. At my rear was a cyclone fence that separated Salsa Girl from a yard filled with dozens of semitrailers. On my left was a nearly identical fence that kept pedestrians from climbing down into the valley that was Interstate 94. There were trees along the fence and no lights. I picked the spot because it rendered my car virtually invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it; there were a few lights mounted on poles near the building and Pelham Boulevard, but they didn’t reach where I sat. It also gave me an unobstructed view of the Salsa Girl loading dock. True, I couldn’t see the front of the building, yet I could see the driveway that led to it. If anyone pulled in, I’d know it.

  Even though it was cold, I rolled down the Mustang’s windows so the glass wouldn’t cloud over. You’d think forty-five degrees would seem warm after a long winter, but it didn’t. I sat behind the steering wheel in my brown leather jacket, gloves, and stocking hat with the logo for the University of Minnesota, my alma mater thank you very much, and stared at the back of the building with a pair of binoculars that I kept in the glove compartment for just such occasions. The binoculars trembled in my hand because of the cold. I thought briefly of starting the car and turning the h
eater to high but ignored the suggestion. I was supposed to be hiding, remember?

  The thing about conducting fixed surveillance, it’s stressful. There’s the physical stress—shivering behind a steering wheel is not fun. Worse is the mental stress. You can’t listen to the radio or iPod, read articles or watch videos on your phone, or text your friends. Nor can you risk nodding off. If you did, you could very well miss the one thing you were there to see.

  To remain vigilant you play mind games—if this happens you do that, if that happens you do this. You study the environment, alert to those areas where a target might slip past unseen. You watch birds and squirrels, hoping the birds will fly and the squirrels will run because that means something is moving.

  The way I looked at it, surveillance was the same as hunting from a duck blind or a deer stand. You remained still, you watched, you waited. The problem was I had no idea what I was watching and waiting for. It was unlikely that a group of protestors carrying signs demanding the ethical treatment of tomatoes and jalapeños was going to convene in the parking lot. Nor did I have any reason to suspect that Erin’s vandals would return to the scene of the crime. I was there only because of the possibility that something might happen.

  And then it did.

  A black and shiny car drove up the driveway. I recognized the make and model even in the low light because I used to own one just like it: an Audi S5 that retailed for about sixty-five grand. The value of the car made me ask myself, What does Salsa Girl drive?

  Instead of heading for the front of the building, it pulled around back, moved to the loading dock, and stopped. The flicker of rear lights told me that the driver had put the vehicle in park. I stared at it through the binoculars. The headlights were extinguished; personal experience told me that the driver must have turned off the engine. The dome light flashed on as the driver’s side door was opened. For a moment I could see the driver’s face. Not Erin but a man I didn’t recognize, young, white. He slid out from behind the steering wheel and stood next to the car. He was wearing a long charcoal wool coat with the buttons undone and black gloves. That’s all I could see before he turned his back to me, shut the door, circled the Audi, and headed toward the loading dock.