Penance Read online

“We haven’t spoken recently,” I replied carefully.

  Marion nodded her head and smiled. “I understand,” she said.

  That made one of us.

  I was going to ask a question—as soon as I could think of a good one—but the office door beat me to it. It flew open, followed by the sound of a half dozen voices and a woman I recognized as the former anchor of a local TV news program whose ratings and career went south a few years back.

  “Excuse me, Marion,” she announced. “You wanted to see C. C.’s closing remarks for tonight’s debate as soon as I finished writing them.”

  Marion took the sheet of paper the woman offered and read it quickly. “This is too long. She only has two minutes.”

  “C. C. can read this in two minutes.”

  “She’s not supposed to read it. She’s supposed to be speaking from the heart. Excuse me, Mr. Taylor,” Marion said and hustled out of the office into the hubbub beyond, the former anchor following closely behind. After a moment I followed them to the door and looked out. C. C. Monroe was reading from the paper, Marion and the anchor timing her with wrist-watches. I closed the door and returned to my chair.

  “Annie, Annie, Annie,” I repeated softly as I searched the ceiling. “What are you up to?”

  None of us had been particularly pleased when Anne Scalasi came to the Homicide unit; each of us had different reasons why. One guy didn’t like it because she was a woman—well, actually, a couple of guys. Another detective took umbrage that she was an outsider, that she was coming from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension; he thought promotions should come from inside the department. Me? I wondered—aloud, I’m afraid—how anyone without street experience could be worth a damn in a murder investigation. I think I also said something derogatory about Angela Lansbury, but memory fails.

  The day she arrived, even before she had time to set photos of the husband and kids on her desk, Tommy Thompson had dropped a file in front of her. It was the Micka case. “See what you can do with that,” Thompson told her.

  “Sure,” she’d answered. Most of the detectives snickered behind their hands. I was pissed. Elizabeth Micka was a floater we’d discovered in the Mississippi six months earlier; we couldn’t clear the case and it annoyed me no end.

  The facts were these: Elizabeth Micka was twenty-four years old. Her body was discovered on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi River by a couple of kids playing hooky from school. She was wearing a bra, cutoff jeans and two cement blocks attached to her body with wire. The ME claimed she had died of strangulation.

  Elizabeth had last been seen cutting grass by neighbors late on a Saturday afternoon—she was housesitting for her parents, who were on a six-week vacation in Europe; one couple remembered she waved at them from the inside of the attached garage when she put the lawn mower away. We searched the house four times, videotaped every inch. There was no sign of forced entry, no struggle. We found the white shirt her neighbors remembered she’d been wearing. It was draped over a chair in her bedroom. And we found about one hundred grains of sand behind her bedroom door.

  Anne had studied these facts and all the others we had gathered, including transcripts of every conversation we had with the nearly two hundred people we interviewed. She studied them for three days. Then she announced, “It’s the lifeguard.”

  “What lifeguard?” I asked.

  “The lifeguard you interviewed.”

  “I didn’t question any lifeguard,” I insisted.

  Anne checked her notes. “Seventeen-year-old neighbor, lives five houses down, works as a lifeguard in the summer at Lake Josephine, likes to pump iron.”

  I recall being angry. “What’s his motive?”

  “Elizabeth used to baby-sit him when he was a kid.”

  “That’s a motive?”

  “Unrequited love, detective. That’s the motive.”

  I don’t recall what I said then, but I don’t think the words “Good job” passed my lips.

  Anne broke it down for me. “Elizabeth,” she said, “was strangled. Manual strangulation is a very personal method of killing someone. And the killer did not want the body found. Both facts indicate the killer not only knew Elizabeth, he had some personal attachment to her. Now, add these facts to the equation: The killer was not very sophisticated, otherwise he probably would have known that the gases that emanate from a decaying corpse would force the body to the surface of the river even with two concrete blocks attached to it. But he was organized—the blocks, the wire, getting the body down to the river. He was strong. And he wasn’t afraid of water. In fact, I’d bet water was a natural element to him. After all, he could have buried her. Most people, that’s their first choice.”

  I thought it over, tried to find a flaw, couldn’t, decided to dismiss her anyway. “You’ve got it all worked out,” I said contemptuously. Then I saw it. “The sand. The goddamn sand!”

  “I wonder if he saved anyone from drowning that day,” Anne said.

  “Let’s ask him.”

  We did. Anne, with her sympathetic smile and a demeanor to rival any grade-school counselor, held the kid’s hand and brushed the hair out of his eyes and asked simple questions until he spilled his guts. The kid confessed (had been wanting to confess for six months it seemed) that he had been infatuated with Elizabeth ever since she was his baby-sitter. While riding his ten-speed home from the beach, he passed the Micka house. He was surprised to see Elizabeth mowing the grass; she had moved out years earlier. He decided to say hello, remembered that Elizabeth’s parents were in Europe and changed his plans. While she was in the backyard, he slipped through the open garage into the house and made his way to her bedroom. He waited. She came into the bedroom, removed her blouse in preparation for a shower, draped it over the chair, saw him and screamed. He tried to make her stop, clutched her throat. It was all a terrible mistake.

  The kid pleaded to man-one. The judge gave him fifty-four months and some psych time at the security hospital in St. Peter. I apologized to Detective Sergeant Anne Scalasi—a difficult thing for me, but man, she was impressive—and offered to buy her a steak dinner. Only Anne doesn’t eat red meat and turned me down. I got her drunk instead.

  Marion Senske returned to the room. “Sorry for the delay,” she told me, circling to the far side of the desk. “You were saying that Anne Scalasi did not send you to me.”

  “Now that I have had time to reflect on it, I believe she did,” I decided.

  Marion smiled, actually smiled, if only briefly. “It would seem Lieutenant Scalasi has extremely well-developed political instincts,” she volunteered. “Well-developed, indeed. She appraises the situation, recognizes the risks of personal involvement, then seeks to minimize them by moving in the most discreet manner possible. Yes, good instincts. Perhaps we can work together one day.”

  Have you ever felt like you were invited for drinks while everyone else was staying for dinner?

  “Lady, I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about,” I told her.

  Marion studied me again. I began to feel like a laboratory rat. I promised myself I would give her a slow count to ten, then I was gone. I reached seven when she asked, “Are you discreet?”

  “Yes. It’s a job requisite.”

  She studied me some more. This time I got up to nine before she said, “I discovered long ago that the odds of a secret becoming known increase exponentially with the number of people who share it. Three people already share this one.”

  “That’s it, I’m out of here,” I announced and pushed myself upright.

  “Tell him,” a warm voice spoke behind me. I turned in my chair to see C. C. Monroe’s radiant smile. She stood with her back against the closed door, wearing an oversized black-and-cream sweater with a roll neck and padded shoulders. Her skirt was black and pleated; it swished when she moved toward me. I liked it a lot. When a reporter asked C. C. early in her career why she didn’t wear the traditional navy blue suit of Minnesota politicians, she answered, “I wasn’t
aware I was supposed to. I didn’t take political science in college.”

  “I am not convinced it would be prudent to tell him anything just yet,” Marion Senske said.

  “He’s here to help,” C. C. replied. “You are here to help aren’t you, Mr. …”

  “Holland Taylor,” I said, extending my hand. She shook it without hesitation. “It is a great pleasure to meet you,” I told her. I’m always gracious to prospective clients; it’s only after they hire me that I become surly.

  “I am Carol Catherine Monroe,” she said, proud of the fact. “Please sit, Holland.”

  I sat.

  “We could use your help and if you give me your word that nothing you hear will go beyond these walls, I will tell you why.”

  “You have my word,” I told her.

  “Oh God,” Marion moaned from behind the desk.

  Carol Catherine Monroe had been going nowhere fast until the day Terrance Friedlander was killed. She told me so herself, told me frankly while sitting across from me, our knees occasionally touching.

  “The truth is, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Friedlander,” she confessed.

  Friedlander was much loved in his district. The kids who played on his bantam hockey team called him “Mr. Terry.” To everyone else he was just plain “Terry.” He had won seven consecutive elections to the House by increasingly larger margins and it was said that whoever ran against him was a damn fool. Well, C. C. Monroe was not a damn fool. But she was bored silly shuffling papers for the DOT. She had been doing it for two years, since passing the bar. So she volunteered to oppose Friedlander, hoping that after the election the political contacts she’d make would help her move out of the Department of Transportation and into a more meaningful office, like the Pollution Control Agency or attorney general’s office. Since no other candidates were forthcoming, the party leaders shook her hand, patted her head, whispered “Good luck,” and got the hell out of there.

  Then Friedlander was killed.

  C. C. had not really wanted to go to the House of Representatives, had had no idea what she would do when she got there. Yet once she arrived she discovered, or so she said, “there was so much to be done, so much that I could do. I think it was good that I wasn’t a real politician, that I wasn’t beholden to special interests. I could see the possibilities.”

  She had also seen that she needed help. So C. C. enlisted the aid of Marion Senske, a private-practice attorney well known for her feminist activities who had lectured C. C.’s law class years before. Under Marion’s tutelage, C. C. soon became a star of the local women’s movement, preaching Marion’s doctrine that “Women are not to be dismissed or taken lightly anymore. They have power. They can make an impact.”

  C. C. was outspoken and she was quotable, although the words were nearly always Marion’s. Plus, she had great legs; her obvious sex appeal always guaranteed a larger share for the TV news programs and talk shows she appeared on. So that particular year, when the governor, who was running for reelection, and the mayor of St. Paul, who was trying to unseat him, turned into a couple of mudslinging Neanderthals who didn’t give a damn about women’s issues—galvanizing issues like poverty, education, child care and world peace—C. C. was the logical choice to carry the feminist banner into battle as a third-party candidate. “Beauty versus the Beasts,” one columnist called it.

  Still, no one had expected her to win, least of all C. C. Monroe. It was merely hoped that her presence in the race would force the governor and the mayor to address women’s concerns. Only the governor’s popularity was at an all-time low. Even his most ardent supporters on the Iron Range where he grew up—the Slavs, the Czechs, the Poles who worked the taconite mines—freely conceded that the governor’s third term in office was probably one term too many and were loath to give him another. Then there were the allegations that he was too cozy with the construction industry, a major contributor to his campaign. Two days before C. C. entered the race, The Cities Reporter broke a story accusing the governor of having an affair with the construction industry’s comely chief lobbyist; it ran photographs of him leaving the woman’s townhouse, supposedly after midnight. The governor, his ever-patient wife at his side, denied the allegation, claiming it was a vicious lie, saying it was based on false and misleading information. Before she resigned from her job and disappeared from view, “The Other Woman,” as she became known, also denied the allegations—I love that word, “allegation.” What was it Jesse Jackson once said? “I not only deny the allegation, I deny the allegator.”

  In any case, the minority party quickly called for a formal investigation by the state senate, suggesting that impeachment might be in order. The senate, which was firmly controlled by the majority party, blocked the move. So, the minority party demanded a criminal investigation by the attorney general’s office. Only the AG was also a member of the majority party and he had political aspirations of his own. Rumor had it that he offered the governor a deal: He would squash the investigation if the governor would agree to withdraw from the race and allow the AG to replace him on the ballot. This raised questions not only of propriety, but also of finances. Who would get the cash in the governor’s well-funded campaign chest if he withdrew? The AG? The governor vowed no. Technically, the money was his to do with as he pleased once his campaign debts were paid, and he said he would sooner donate it to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon than give it to a backstabbing opportunist like the attorney general. Besides, he was the party’s nominated candidate and he was not going to withdraw.

  Meanwhile, the mayor’s popularity had dropped like a stone. This is Minnesota, after all. We don’t like tattletales and nearly everyone believed the mayor was responsible for the mud dripping from the governor’s face. As a result, squeaky-clean Carol Catherine Monroe picked up a quick twenty percent of the voters in the newspaper polls when she entered the race and after a month was running dead even with the major candidates—plus or minus three percent, of course. More importantly, money was pouring in. It started as a trickle: five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills from her admirers. But when it became apparent that her candidacy was legitimate, the trickle became a flood. Well-heeled donors and national PACs thought nothing of writing out sixty-thousand-dollar checks—the state limit for individual campaign contributions. And they bothered little over C. C.’s position on the issues. They cared only that she win and remember them afterward.

  The receptionist was right, I decided after listening to the update. Carol Catherine Monroe could very well become the first woman governor in the history of Minnesota. Unless she, too, made a mistake. A mistake of biblical proportions.

  “I had a boyfriend,” she began.

  C. C. started pacing the office, reading her own campaign slogans off the posters on the walls. Marion continued to sit behind the desk, looking down, shaking her head.

  “His name was—is—Dennis Thoreau,” C. C. added, casting a furtive glance at Marion. “We were in love. At least I thought it was love. I was much younger then. Anyway, when we were together, we made a videotape.” C. C. said the videotape showed her in bed, showed her in various stages of undress, mostly with Thoreau, both of them playing to the camera, filling the lens. I had only one question.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it would be fun, kind of kinky; a lot of couples are doing it these days.”

  “Really?”

  C. C. was angry now. “Haven’t you ever done something stupid, Mr. Taylor? Something you regretted, something you knew you would regret even while you were doing it?”

  I recalled jumping off the roof of my father’s house while holding a bedsheet over my head, only I reminded C. C. that I wasn’t a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives at the time.

  “Neither was I. I wasn’t running for anything back then. I was still with the DOT. I still belonged to myself, not to the women’s movement. Anyway, it’s done. Now my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, is threatening to release the t
ape to the media unless we pay him ten thousand dollars. I doubt if the news stations would run it…”

  “They’d love to acknowledge it exists, however,” Marion said. “Show a few discreetly cropped stills.”

  C. C. nodded. “Especially Hersey Sheehan. It would be like winning the Triple Crown: first the governor, then the mayor and now me. The Cities Reporter. It’s a rag.”

  “It claims to be an alternative to traditional newspapers like the Minneapolis StarTribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press,” Marion said. “So it prints what the other papers won’t touch. It’s the only way it can stay in business.”

  “They should sell the damn thing at supermarket checkout lines,” C. C. said.

  “If they could, they would,” Marion added, and then they both grew quiet, as if contemplating the possibility.

  “So what do you want from me?” I asked when I became bored enough.

  Carol Catherine Monroe looked at me expectantly with eyes that were wide and moist, with full lips slightly parted. The look said, “Help me.” Or maybe I was projecting. Stick her on a bar stool and put a cocktail in her hand and it might mean something else altogether.

  “We want you to deliver the money, get the tape and run the bastard off,” Marion Senske said. “Isn’t that why Lieutenant Scalasi sent you?”

  “I thought I was here to get a line on Joseph Sherman,” I said, not believing it at all. Sending me after Brown to help Monroe? Anne Scalasi, my Anne Scalasi, could never be this devious.

  “I told you, we haven’t seen or heard from Joseph Sherman,” Marion assured me.

  I looked into C. C.’s aquamarine eyes.

  “That’s true,” she said. “But,” she added in a halting voice, “even if you did come for another reason, couldn’t you, wouldn’t you, do this one little thing for us? Please?”

  Ahh, what the hell. Since I was already in the neighborhood …

  C. C. had not seen or spoken to Dennis Thoreau for six years. Their relationship ended while she was running for her first term in the House. The reasons she gave me for breaking up with him were vague. “It just didn’t work out,” she said.