Pretty Girl Gone Page 9

  I thought of Tapia, the kid across the street at Fit to Print, who worked hard enough to own his own business at age twenty-three. Yeah, I could see how he was a threat to the community, and I laughed. It wasn’t a loud laugh nor did it last very long, but there were two kids about Tapia’s age and dressed in the coveralls of an auto mechanic. They noticed it and instantly took offense. They nudged the mechanic. The mechanic spun around and gave me a hard look. I went back to my burger.

  “Hey, you,” said the mechanic. “You think something is funny?”

  “Don’t mind me. I’m just passing through.”

  “You got a problem?”

  “Not at all. Go right ahead with your meeting.”

  “We’re fightin’ for the future of our community. Is that all right with you?”

  “Honestly, pal. I couldn’t care less. It’s not my town, it’s not my problem.”

  “No, but you’re gonna sit there smirkin’, thinkin’ we’re a bunch of dumb hicks who don’t know any better. We deal in facts here and we don’t like it when people, when outsiders treat us like the KKK or some-thin’, sayin’ we’re racist.”

  He took several steps toward me. At the police academy, I was taught that most people when they get worked up will display a series of behavior warning signals that indicate Assault Is Possible—head back, shoulders back, face is red, lips pushed forward baring teeth, breathing coming fast and shallow. The mechanic was burning through them like a highway flare.

  “The things you’re saying, it’s been said by Americans before.” I was trying to sound conciliatory, trying to defuse the situation. “That’s why I was smiling. Not because I think you’re a racist.”

  “Then you are sayin’ we’re racists.”

  There was no arguing with him because there was no substance to his complaints, only bitterness and defeat. How do you challenge that, and why would you? I gave it a shot, anyway. Silly me.

  “No,” I said. I could see his name stenciled in red above his left breast. I used it. “I’m not calling you a racist, Brian. It’s just that what you’re saying about the Hispanics, the Somalis, it’s what people said about the Irish in 1860 and the Scandinavians in 1890. It’s what they said about the Jews and the Germans and the Asians when they came here. Yet things somehow always managed to work out.”

  “You think we’re racists and idiots, then.”

  “I think you’re bored. I think that not much happens in a small town; there isn’t much to talk about, so you spend all your time talking about this—the Great Immigrant Invasion.”

  Okay, that wasn’t very conciliatory, but the mechanic was starting to piss me off with his racist talk. All I wanted was something to eat, not get dragged into his small town squabbles.

  He stepped forward. His face went from red to white, his lips tightened over his teeth, his hands were closed and he began rocking back and forth as his eyes darted from my jaw to my stomach to my groin—target glances we call them. I slipped off the stool wishing I had an OC agent, wishing I could Mace the sonuvabitch before he took another step.

  The men around him became still. Their eyes looked angry and their faces were rough and tired and disappointed. They seemed poised to take out their frustrations on someone—anyone—and were just waiting for a signal to strike. I was becoming very nervous.

  The door to the cafe opened. Officer Mallinger stepped through it. She seemed to understand the situation immediately.

  “Brian,” she shouted. “McKenzie.” Using our names, something I was also taught to do at the academy. “Look at me. I said, look at me.”

  We looked.

  “If you can’t do what you’re about to do in front of me, you better not do it.” The sentence seemed convoluted, but her meaning was clear.

  The mechanic said, “He’s an asshole.”

  “No law against that, Brian,” Mallinger said. “If there was, I’d have to arrest half the people in town.”

  Just like that, the tension in the cafe gave way to words, smirks, glares, and grumbles. I decided Mallinger was very good at her job.

  “Are you taking his side?” The mechanic spoke defiantly, but his posture had changed. His hands were in front of his body, palms out, and his head was slightly bowed—signals of submission. “You protecting this shithead?”

  “I’m protecting the peace,” Mallinger said. “It’s what they pay me for.”

  “Yeah, well, just remember interim chief—the job ain’t permanent yet.”

  “I know,” Mallinger said. “I’m hoping I’ll have your support and the support of all the rest of you, too”—she gestured at the mechanic’s audience—“when the city council votes next month.”

  Mallinger turned away from the crowd and looked at me.

  “Come here,” she said.

  She sat me down in a booth and leaned in close.

  “Chief, huh?” I said.

  “Take that stupid grin off your face.”

  I stopped smiling.

  “Everyone’s watching. Don’t look at them. Look at me. Everyone’s watching. They’re expecting me to tear you a new one because even though Brian’s an immense jerk, he lives in this town and you don’t. Nod your head.”

  I nodded.

  “Things are volatile enough around here. I got some asshole selling meth to high school kids. I got punks hassling citizens over the color of their skin. Yesterday I got a call to break up a knife fight at the meat plant. Two guys going at each other with these huge boning knives. Turned out they were fighting over a woman, but one was Hispanic and the other was white, so now it’s a racial issue. I don’t need this on top of it. I don’t need riots in the Rainbow Cafe. Nod your head.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you have business in Victoria?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you get up, pay your tab, and get to it. Nod your head.”

  I nodded.

  “Go.”

  I left the booth and I moved to the cash register. I gave the waitress a twenty and she gave me my change, along with some advice. “Why don’t you go someplace warm, and I don’t mean California.” Apparently, she didn’t like me. I couldn’t imagine why, unless she was pals with the mechanic, or she didn’t like outsiders causing trouble in her place, or she thought I should leave a bigger tip.

  I asked her, “Do you have a newspaper in this town?”

  “Victoria Herald.” She reached for a copy stacked next to the cash register.

  “No. I meant, where is it?”

  “Three blocks down and two blocks over,” she said, using her hands to indicate which directions were down and over.

  “Thank you.”

  “Go slip on the ice.”

  A few minutes later, I pulled into a small parking lot next to a flat, pale, one-story building. Inside, I found a chest-high counter made of blond wood. Behind the counter was a man who was my height and who even looked a little like me except that he was ten years younger. I, of course, was better looking.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I would like to look at some past issues of the Herald.”

  “How past?”

  “Back when the Victoria Seven won the tournament.”

  “Let me guess. You’re researching a book about the Seven, or maybe a screenplay like Hoosiers, the Gene Hackman movie.”

  “Do you get a lot of that?”

  “Not a lot, but enough that no one is surprised by it. I’m Kevin Salisbury.”

  “McKenzie.”

  “This way.”

  Salisbury led me across the small, cluttered newsroom to a door labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. Inside the windowless room, I found a series of wide, black-metal shelves shoved against a wall, each shelf stacked with past issues of the Herald. Three vending machines and two plastic trash containers labeled for recycling were arranged side by side against another wall. Baseball bats, balls, bases, and catcher’s equipment were dumped in one corner and a life-size cardboard cutout of Bart Simpson saying, “Don’t have a c
ow” was in another. In the center of the room there was a cafeteria-style table strewn with discarded newspapers and magazines and surrounded by metal folding chairs.

  Salisbury quickly located what he was looking for—two thick files of yellowed newspapers held together by what resembled a giant three-ring binder. “February-March” and the year was written on the cover of the first in faded marker and “April-May” was written on the other.

  “You’ll probably want to start with these,” Salisbury said. He set the files on the cafeteria table. “I’ve been telling the boss we should have put all these on microfiche years ago, but he doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I slipped off my bomber’s jacket, draped it over the back of a chair, and sat down.

  I opened the first thick book and tried to find March 15, the day Elizabeth Rogers was killed. Only the Herald didn’t publish on Saturday—only Sunday and Tuesday through Friday. I scanned the front page of the Sunday, March 16, edition. The cover story was all about how the Victoria Seven had upset Minneapolis North High School for the right to advance to the state basketball tournament the following week. There was no mention of the murder of Elizabeth until Tuesday, March 18. The headline read: Murder of Cheerleader Casts Shadow on State Basketball Tournament. The subhead claimed Victoria Seven Will Fight On Despite Loss. Both stories were wrapped around a shot of the basketball players, which included an impossibly young John Allen Barrett.

  A shot of Elizabeth, obviously her school photo, was tucked inside. The pose was typical, shoulders rotated slightly to the left, head turned to the right, chin up, eyes staring above and past the camera. Yet Elizabeth’s youthful beauty seemed to transcend the mediocrity of the photographer and the ancient newsprint. She had straight, light-colored hair falling to her shoulders, a self-confident, almost smug smile, and large eyes. The cutline beneath the photograph said her funeral had been scheduled for early Wednesday morning so the basketball team could attend before boarding the bus to St. Paul.

  I jumped ahead to the March 20 edition. There was extensive coverage of the funeral, yet again it was all about the boys, with plenty of photographs of them standing at the graveside looking uncomfortable and bored. It annoyed me that none of them appeared to be grieving. Included was a midrange shot of Barrett and a man the cutline identified as Coach Mark Testen. I was pleased to see what I thought were tears on Testen’s face, but closer examination revealed that it was merely two narrow bandages running from his left eye to the middle of his cheek.

  I returned to the Tuesday edition and began taking notes. Over twenty minutes passed before Salisbury spoke, startling me. I had forgotten that he was there.

  “The case was never solved,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They never found her killer. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it? Not the Seven, the murder.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Salisbury pointed at my notepad.

  “Like all good journalists, I can read upside down.”

  I glanced at the notepad. I had scribbled notes about Elizabeth, where her body was found, when, by whom, where she lived, and more. There was nothing about the basketball team.

  “It’s part of the story, isn’t it? The story of the Victoria Seven?”

  “I suppose it is,” Salisbury agreed. “I wrote a piece about it myself a few years ago during the Seven’s anniversary reunion.”

  “I’d like to read it.”

  “There’s nothing there that you can’t read here,” he said, indicating the binder. “Except my contention that the chief of police screwed up, and didn’t I catch hell for that.”

  “Chief?” I glanced at my notes.

  “Leo Bohlig. He had been chief since the beginning of time. He retired last year and Danny Mallinger took over.”

  “Danny Mallinger?”

  “Danielle. Know her?”

  So that’s what the D stands for.

  “We met on the road,” I said.

  “Anyway, Bohlig was still chief when I wrote the story. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions, wouldn’t even let me read the files. Since the case was still active”—Salisbury quoted the air with both hands—“he said the public had no right to see the files. Personally, I don’t know about that.” Salisbury shrugged. “He screwed up and I wrote that he screwed up and that almost got me fired.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a small town newspaper and I wrote a story that gave the small town a black eye and the owner didn’t like it. Simple as that. This paper—my boss doesn’t want negative stories about Victoria in it. Last week a couple of kids got busted doing crystal meth. Should have been on the front page. We had three paragraphs on page five.”

  “Tell me about Bohlig’s investigation.”

  “Elizabeth’s body was found in a ditch along County Road 13. Next to Milepost Three, they found her, not far from the Des Moines River. It was within the Victoria city limits so Chief Bohlig claimed jurisdiction. Normally, a crime like that would automatically go to the Nicholas County Sheriff’s Department regardless of where it was committed. Bohlig wouldn’t give it up. He was pretty adamant about it. Why the county didn’t just shove him out of the way, I can’t say. I figured Bohlig must have pulled some pretty stout strings, collected a lot of favors. Anyway, he ran the investigation and came up with nothing. No one was arrested. No leads were developed. No one was even questioned hard as far as I could tell. Eventually, he announced that the murder was committed by transients who were just passing through.”

  “You disagree?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I’m only saying that the investigation should have been handled by people who knew what they were doing, not some hick-town cop in a six-man department whose idea of a major crime was someone stealing fishing equipment out of a boathouse. There’s been only one murder committed in Victoria in its entire history. One. It remains unsolved. Bohlig blew it. That’s what I wrote. I was fresh out of JO school and just loaded with idealism, and I wrote that the city of Victoria’s police chief was less than he should be and they damn near fired me for it. ‘That’s not the way we practice journalism,’ they told me. I came down here hoping I could use the Herald as a stepping-stone in a long and storied journalism career. Now, I’m not so sure.”

  “Tell me what you can about the case.”

  Salisbury sat in the chair across the table from me. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Like I said, it’s part of the story of the Victoria Seven.”

  “I don’t think so. You’re on to something else.”

  I considered his hypothesis, couldn’t concoct a lie that would refute it in such short notice, so I told him the truth. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Elizabeth Rogers.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Then why should I help?”

  “There might be a story in it. Something big enough you might get a call from the Cities.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “Oh, I love deals.”

  “If I can solve the crime, or at least come up with a better explanation of what happened to Elizabeth than the one Chief Bohlig supplied, I’ll make sure you get the exclusive.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To solve the crime?”

  “No, I’m not. But I might have to solve it to get what I came to Victoria for.”

  “What is that?”

  “See, now we’re back to square one again.”

  “You can’t tell me,” Salisbury said.

  “No, but you weren’t that far wrong earlier when you said book or screenplay.” I hoped the lie would give him something to think about.

  Salisbury reached a hand across the table.

  “Done.”

  I shook his hand, then retrieved my pen and notebook.

  “What do you have?” I asked him.

  “Saturday, March 15—This is all i
n the newspaper, by the way; you can look it up yourself. Anyway, the day after the Victoria Seven upset Minneapolis North for a berth in the state basketball tournament there was a party at the house of the mayor. Everyone was there, including the coach and all seven of his players. Jack Barrett, captain of the basketball team, was dancing with Elizabeth Rogers, captain of the cheerleading squad, his longtime girlfriend. In the middle of the dance, they start arguing—now that’s something I developed on my own, it never was printed in the paper. Barrett and Rogers had an argument, and Barrett left the party early, leaving Elizabeth.”

  “Did Barrett leave alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Outside town about four, five miles. His old man had a farm off of County Road 13.”

  “Did he have a car?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did he get home?”

  “Walked.”

  “Four, five miles? At night? In the winter?”

  “This isn’t the Cities, McKenzie. There’s no bus service. People walk a lot, sometimes because they have to. Especially kids if that’s the only way they can get around. Distance doesn’t mean as much.”

  “What was the argument about?”

  “Argument?”

  “Barrett and Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, yeah, the argument. No one seems to know.”

  “What did Barrett say?”

  “Nothing as far as I know. If Bohlig interviewed him, he’s kept the conversation to himself. Anyway, Jack leaves, Elizabeth stays. This is around eight thirty, nine. The party goes on. Around eleven o’clock, which is late in Victoria even if you did just win a historic basketball game, Elizabeth leaves. Alone. Witnesses are pretty adamant about that.”

  “Where was she going?”

  “The assumption is that she was going home, but like most assumptions . . .”

  “Did Elizabeth live near the mayor’s house?”