by Chuck Logan
The rust-tinged water swirled down the drain and took with it the last ten years of his life. He’d paid all his bills on time and drove the speed limit and went soberly to the nice little office everyday where the people said “excuse me” instead of “outta the way, motherfucker” and he was a kind of artist like his mother had wanted and he went to groups to learn how to control his anger because it was the anger that had always got him in trouble. And the anger was worst when somebody tried to use him. And damn if Jesse hadn’t used him in the baddest way because he was willing to break all the rules for her.
Harry stared at the bloody drain and finally the revulsion came.
A sixteen-year-old kid lay dead by his hand and not twenty minutes before he’d pulled the trigger he’d been knocking around right next to the womb that bore him. And the locals were playing blindman’s buff.
The vertigo and nausea wobbled up his throat and he barely made it to a stall to vomit. That’s how Jerry found him, hugging the toilet bowl, coming down from the dry heaves, still gagging, with hot salty tears streaking his torn cheeks.
15
Maston County was governed from a one-story building of yellow masonry with a flat asphalt roof and opaque glass brick plugs for windows. The structure took up one of the four city blocks that was downtown Stanley. The county occupied the half of the building that faced the waterfront. The other half was the municipal liquor store.
Emery went into the building. Jerry waited as Harry took a look around. Older people mainly, carefully walking through 94 / CHUCK LOGAN
heaps of snow the plows had thrown up on the sidewalks. Several groups of orange-clad hunters hurried by. He did not see a single mother with a child.
A seagull stood sentinel on a lamppost overlooking a breakwater made of granite boulders. At the south end of town, the silent smokestacks of the paper mill were stapled against the sky, as incon-gruous among the granite, waves, and pine as a cement space platform that had toppled out of orbit. The gull cried. The gray, unhurried white-capped rollers of Superior sloshed ice cubes against the boulders. It could have been a dying town on the coast of Maine.
Across the street from the county offices, dusty windows in four brick storefronts caught the morning light. Military recruiters had set up in one of them. The Minnesota Department of Human Services had a sign in another. The third had been the County Gazette and was now a food shelf. The faded sign on the fourth advertised the Maston County Economic Development Coop and was empty.
The next block was doing a little better. It had the bank, the hardware store, the drugstore, a diner, and some antique stores.
Newer stuff, a tourist restaurant, the IGA grocery, a motel, and the Holiday station were up on the main highway.
Jerry nodded across the street. “Military’s the only ones doing any hiring these days.” His pale blue eyes traveled up the mass of Nanabozho Ridge. “Wolves are coming back though.”
Three Indian winos hobbled around the corner from the liquor store and engaged Harry with bleary curiosity. Must be the big event in town. Watching the cops take a man with a busted-up face and blood on his clothes from a police car to the station.
Jerry ushered him through a door with peeling stenciled letters: COUNTY SHERIFF. They crossed a lobby with a radio dispatch desk and went down a dim corridor of buckled green linoleum and walls of cheap imitation paneling. Mike Hakala popped out of an office and motioned them down the hall.
They took Harry into the lunchroom and sat on folding HUNTER’S MOON / 95
metal chairs at a Formica cafeteria table. There were crumbs on the table and a half-eaten ham sandwich curled on a crumpled paper bag next to a pint of milk and the last house fly in Minnesota buzzed in a drunken circle above their heads.
Harry declined to make a statement until his lawyer called. Hakala temporized, told him that no criminal charges would be filed. That it looked like self-defense under very tragic circumstances. A domestic, he called it. There might be a grand jury to review the incident and Harry could be called to testify.
Hakala asked him if he was considering charging Becky for clawing his face. Harry shook his head. He cruised right through. No hint that Jesse had said anything to complicate his story.
Hakala told him to sit out by the desk and wait for his call.
Harry waited on a cheap couch and stared at the frayed copy of Guns & Ammo that lay on the chipped plastic coffee table. A deputy brought him a cup of coffee as a succession of serious-looking people trooped in, tracking snow. He assumed they were the forensic techies from the crime lab. They conferred with Hakala and Emery in an office behind a glass partition that faced the radio dispatch desk.
Harry kept feeling his pockets. He must have lost his cigarettes at the hospital, probably in the bathroom. He looked up. The minister, Karson, stood in the doorway, watching him pat his pockets. Karson tossed him a pack of cigarettes.
“I just talked to Bud and decided I should look in on you,” said Karson.
“They let you talk to him?”
“What I do,” said Karson, sitting down on the couch. “I marry them and bury them. The rest of the time I talk to them. Mostly I listen.”
“You marry Bud and Jesse?”
Karson sighed. “No. The Honorable Judge Toyvo Hakala did that in his offices three weeks ago.”
“You going to bury Chris Deucette?”
“Yes, I suspect I will do that.”
96 / CHUCK LOGAN
Jerry walked past them and nodded to Karson with a civil smile.
His body language was dismissive: Tits on a boar. Karson nodded back with the superior, inhibited air of a vegetarian at a buffalo roast.
Harry and Karson smoked together for a few awkward minutes.
Then Harry motioned toward the office where Emery and Hakala were hunched over a desk. “What do you think they’re talking about?”
“Politics.”
“Why politics?”
“It’s called cover your ass and protect your political supply lines,”
said Karson.
“Explain,” said Harry.
Karson cleared his throat. “Well, Bud Maston was going to be the golden goose for this town and now he’s up the hill with a gunshot wound. Maston bankrolled Larry Emery’s run for office.
That makes Larry Maston’s man on the Hakala pirate ship. It would behoove Larry to look after Maston’s general well-being to ensure his own.”
The fine web of wrinkles tightened around Karson’s blue eyes.
“Except Larry has been falling down on the job. Last month, Chris Deucette, whose body is now in a little room in the hospital being dissected like a laboratory frog, walked into high school, late for class, and outrageously stoned. When his homeroom teacher took him aside, Chris pulled out a very large handgun and threatened the teacher’s life.”
Harry sat up and narrowed his eyes. “Where’d he get the gun?”
“Broke into Emery’s house, where he used to live, and stole it.”
Karson puffed on his cigarette and continued. “Well, everybody got called in, me included. We’ve never had a gun incident in our school. Mike hit the roof. He wanted Chris to do some kind of time for it. At least a stint in a drug-dependency program, with family counseling tacked on. Larry got Bud to convince Mike to let Chris off, put him
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in their joint parental custody. So now Mike’s nervous that that decision might come back on him.”
Karson flicked the ash from his cigarette. His voice flicked too.
“Larry Emery is a very advanced thinker. A troubled kid pulls a gun, so you take him out and teach him how to shoot a bigger, more powerful gun so he can go slaughter deer…” Karson shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe that spirit won the West, but it sure fucked up in this case.”
“You and Sheriff Emery aren’t real close, huh?”
“He hates my guts.”
“Guy looks pretty spaced out for a lawman from what I’ve seen today.”
&n
bsp; Karson chuckled ironically and his forehead furrowed with wrinkles. “Now we come to the interesting part that everyone, including Bud, seems to have neglected to tell you in all the confusion.”
“What?”
Karson’s lips jerked in a faint smile. “You killed Larry Emery’s bastard this morning. That’s why Hakala has him on such a tight leash.”
The walls of the police station started marching in and Harry felt a suffocation and a fear that didn’t pass with a few rapid breaths.
“Yes indeed,” said Karson, in a tone that conveyed sympathy with Harry’s goose bumps. “I have a feeling that if you didn’t work for a newspaper in the big city and weren’t Bud’s pal, Emery might have you down in the basement right now. He’s an expert with resisting arrest.”
“I’m not under arrest,” Harry said quickly.
Karson put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “That’s true and you won’t be.” Karson lowered his voice. “Nobody wants to dig into this. Look, Chris Deucette was a member of my congregation. All the danger signs were there. I tried, with both him and his mother, but Emery blocked me.”
Harry stared at the hand on his shoulder. Karson withdrew it and puffed on his cigarette. “They’re not charging you. Legally you didn’t do anything wrong…unless you want to
98 / CHUCK LOGAN
talk about breaking the Tenth Commandment…and, from what Bud told me, it isn’t the first time you did that.”
The Tenth Commandment was about not coveting your neighbor’s wife. Harry assumed he was talking about number six. Thou shalt not kill. Karson had his commandments mixed up. Or did he?
“Subtle guy like you wouldn’t be a local, would he?” asked Harry.
“Nope,” said Karson.
A third man joined Hakala and Emery behind the glass. Chubby fellow who rocked from foot to foot.
“Tony Camp. Our medical examiner. He’s the town undertaker, not a licensed pathologist,” said Karson as he stood up and ground out his smoke in the ashtray. He shook Harry’s hand. Then he produced a card. Reverend Donald Karson with a K. Trinity Lutheran Church. Phone numbers. “If I get down to Saint Paul maybe we could talk again.” His voice became a little too casual. “I assume you know some good reporters.”
“Karson. You here on your own?”
“Not exactly. The county retains me to counsel people in crisis.”
“Who do you talk to?” asked Harry.
“Well, people who—”
“No, I mean when you’re in crisis,” said Harry.
Karson looked Harry directly in the eye. “You maybe…”
Hakala waited in the hall and watched Karson leave. Then he gave Harry a firm, concerned public-servant smile. “Don get you all straightened out?” he asked.
“Seems like a good enough guy,” said Harry, putting on his own broad phony smile, a mask that he had learned from the Vietnamese.
The more nervous they got the bigger the grin.
“For a bleeding heart treehugger…” Hakala plopped down on the couch and put his beefy arm around Harry’s shoulders. He came on solid, part corner grocer, part big-league linebacker. His pale eyes managed to be deep, shrewd, and warm at the same time. “Let me tell you what’s happening.
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First of all, Bud’s fine, they’ll keep him for a couple of days to make sure there isn’t an infection. But he’s going to be all right.”
The deputy behind the desk yelled, “Mike,” and held up a phone.
Hakala excused himself. He spoke for a minute and then called Harry over. “Your lawyer,” said Hakala.
Harry picked up the phone. “Harry,” said a calm voice. “Gene Houston.”
“Hello, Mr. Houston.”
“Sounds like you’ve had a hell of a morning, son. But Hakala says that your version of things matches the facts so you can calm down.
I made a call to make sure this doesn’t pick up the wrong spin.”
“Anybody I know?”
The calm voice shrugged. “Bill Tully, he talked to someone up the street and they had a prayer meeting with Hakala.”
Harry took a deep breath and let it out. Tully was the chairman of the Democratic Central Committee.
Gene Houston went on in his calm voice. “You’re not under arrest and you’re not going to be charged. Hakala does have one question: they found a cleaning rod threaded together out where it happened.
If there’s a plausible explanation, tell Hakala. If there’s some reason you don’t want to discuss it, well, I’m prepared to hop a plane and fly up there.”
“He’s, like, standing right here,” said Harry.
“Your call, Harry,” said the attorney. “Hakala’s the DFL county chair. He’s not gaming you.”
“Okay…” said Harry. “It was a reflex, I guess. Bud was freaked out. He didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to give him something to hang on to till I got back with help. I didn’t know what else to do. His rifle was plugged with snow. So I cleared it, rammed it out real quick, and reloaded it.”
“Uh-huh,” said the attorney. “Let me talk to Hakala.” Harry handed over the phone.
Hakala spoke to Houston and nodded his head. “Yup. That’s pretty much what Bud said. BCA’ll run paraffin tests on Bud’s rifle but the chamber’s finger-clean. Looks like it 100 / CHUCK LOGAN
hadn’t been fired. Sure, Gene, no, I don’t foresee anything other than him having to take some time off work if there’s a grand jury.
Yeah. Justifiable. All the conditions are there.”
Hakala handed the phone back to Harry.
“Go ahead and give them your statement,” said Houston. “But if anything comes up that makes you uncomfortable, stop the interview and call me immediately. Dorothy and Tim are flying up to bring you home. So sit tight.” He gave Harry a phone number. Harry used a pen from the desk to jot it down on a piece of blotter paper.
“Thank you, Mr. Houston,” said Harry.
“On the contrary, Harry. I thank you, for Dorothy.”
Harry smiled and hung up. Hakala blew on his fingers and shook them. “Gene Houston. That’s some heavy legal artillery.”
They went back to the lunch room. Jerry ran the tape recorder.
Emery sat with his large arms folded, chewing a toothpick. His eyes were very quiet and still and meeting them, Harry experienced a pang from childhood. Fear of the dark.
Harry gave a succinct statement about the morning’s events. He did not seek out Emery’s eyes, but he didn’t avoid them either.
Hakala asked the questions. Did Chris exhibit any odd behavior prior to the shooting? Specifically, did the boy look like he was using drugs?
Harry mentioned Bud’s notion that Harry might talk to Chris about drug use. And, yes, Chris looked tense the night before. But it was hard to tell with hindsight fractured by the shooting, meeting new people, driving up through the storm. Harry let them guide the questions. Jesse’s name did not come up. And no one mentioned his police record in Detroit. Harry had been grilled by law enforcement types before. This was a walk in the sun and it was the first time he’d been in a roomful of cops with the powerful intuition that everybody present, not just him, had something to hide.
At the conclusion of the statement, Jerry, who now clearly HUNTER’S MOON / 101
had the role of watching Emery, shepherded his charge from the room. Harry stood alone in the hall with Hakala.
“That’s it for now, Harry. You’re free to go. The coroner and I agree. Open-and-shut justifiable homicide,” said Hakala with an appropriate touch of officious remorse in his voice.
“So I just walk?” asked Harry, pushing it a little.
“You’re a pretty stable citizen. Sound work record. Good people vouching for you—Ah, look. Some reporters from Duluth TV showed up. We could go to my office. Maybe they’ll go away.”
Harry smiled. He was still scared being in the same building with Emery, but he was curious now about the links between Jesse and
Emery and their crazy kid.
“Actually, there’s a favor I’d like to ask…privately,” Hakala said blandly.
“Sure,” said Harry. Hakala led him in back of the sheriff’s office and down another corridor.
“You know Houston’s son-in-law, Tim Randall, the writer?” kib-butzed Hakala.
“We go back a ways,” said Harry.
“Always meant to read his Pulitzer book.” Hakala nodded and stopped in front of a doorway with his name and title on a thin plastic strip. “He knew Kennedy, didn’t he?”
“He met Kennedy. He knew Matt Ridgway.”
“Who?” Hakala smiled politely.
“Forget it.”
Harry entered a corner office. Meager light filtered through glass brick. Hakala turned on the overhead lights. A new computer looked out of place among the antique furnishings. The desk was an enormous oak table. Everything was big, including the twelve-point buck mounted over the desk.
Harry inspected a broad, framed photo on the wall, set between Hakala’s academic degrees and a picture of the governor. Another antique. John L. Lewis, the bushy-browed president of the United Mine Workers, addressing a Depression-era crowd at the dedication of the monument to the Stanley Massacre.
102 / CHUCK LOGAN
Hakala sat in the swivel oak chair behind the desk and motioned Harry to take a seat. Then the beefy prosecutor turned and took a glass pot from the Mr. Coffee machine behind his desk. He poured two cups and placed one on front of Harry. “How’s the face?” he asked.
Harry smiled gamely and sipped his coffee. “Tell me, do you usually let someone involved in a shooting go so quick?”
Hakala assumed a dignified posture behind his enormous desk and gave Harry the official word. “Specific conditions must occur to excuse or justify the use of deadly force, Harry. The killing must have been done in the belief that it was necessary to avert death or grievous bodily harm. In this case, your judgment that Bud was exposed to grave peril has to be reasonable under the circumstances.
And your decision to kill must have been such as a reasonable man would have made in light of the danger apprehended. This incident matches the statute almost verbatim. A second-year law student would make me look like a fool if I were to charge you. Especially with Bud as a witness…and Chris’s history.”