What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel

by David Housewright

  “Life is so unfair,” she said. “But what are you gonna do?”

  Bobby knew the sergeant who was supervising the scene; he had worked with him many times. The sergeant was shaking his head sadly at the entire situation.

  “What a bunch of fucktards,” he said.

  “Shh,” Bobby hissed. “Not so loud.”

  “Hey. What’s this I hear about McKenzie? He took a round in the back? Is he gonna be all right?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “I remember working with McKenzie out of the Phalen Village Storefront in the Eastern District back when—God, we were both kids. We used to call him ‘Mac’ back then. He hated that.”

  “Still does.”

  “Do we know who shot him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Reason I bring it up—maybe you should know something. Maybe you already do.”

  “Know what?”

  “There’s a PI”—the sergeant quoted the air—“making inquiries about the shoot. Claims to be a friend of Mac’s.”

  “Is that right?”

  “What I heard.”

  “Did you hear a name?”

  “Something Schroeder works out of an office in Minneapolis.”

  * * *

  Nina Truhler moved through her club like a set of Newton balls, the desk toy that has five steel balls hanging from thin wires on a wooden or metal frame, also called a Newton’s cradle. When a ball on one end of the cradle is pulled away and then dropped, it hits the other balls, sending energy through the middle three and flinging the ball on the opposite end of the row into the air. That ball then swings back to strike the other balls again, starting the chain reaction in reverse that will eventually throw the first ball into the air, and so on and so forth, demonstrating the principle of the conservation of energy and momentum and making an obnoxious clickety-clack sound that never seems to end. At least that’s the way Jenness Crawford, Nina’s manager, explained it to me later.

  “It was like Nina was afraid to stop moving and take a deep breath,” Jenness said. “She wasn’t her usual pleasant self, either. Normally, she’s like the nicest boss on the planet. She gives orders as if they’re suggestions. ‘I was thinking this would be a good idea,’ she’d say or ‘You know what I’d like to see?’ and we’d all jump to it. Only when you were in the coma, it was like ‘Hey, dummy.’ Well, not dummy. She never actually said that or anything like that. It was just the tone of her voice, you know?”

  Actually, I didn’t know and I never asked Nina about it because once I had recovered enough that Nina felt comfortable raising her voice at me, we had plenty of other subjects to deal with, mostly regarding what she deemed to be my reckless and ultimately selfish behavior, even though none of what happened was actually my fault.

  Among the many things that knocked her emotions out of whack were the phone calls. The shooting was mentioned in the papers and on the radio and TV and that aroused the curiosity of a lot of friends and acquaintances. Most of the people that called Nina for an update were men, including the guys I played puck with. There were also a lot of women, though, including Perrin Stewart, who was executive director of the City of Lakes Art Museum. And Erin Peterson-Gotz, who presided over Salsa Girl Salsa. And Vanessa Szerto, who owned the Szerto Corporation. And Maryanne Altavilla, who was the chief investigator in Midwest Farmers Insurance Company’s Special Investigations Unit. And Genevieve Bonalay who became my lawyer after I helped her get a client off on a murder charge.

  “So many women,” she told me. She wasn’t particularly upset about it, though, because she had met most of them at one time or another and understood our relationships were, as a man once said, strictly business. Unfortunately, one name did cause her to stop and say, “What?” Penelope Glass, a songwriter I knew before Nina and I had officially committed to each other.

  “Did you sleep with her?” Nina asked.

  “She was the wife of an FBI agent,” I said.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “She had blue eyes. Not as blue as yours…”

  “She was very concerned about your health.”

  “I hadn’t seen her in seven years,” I said.

  “Then why would she be so concerned?”

  “I saved her once from some New York mob guys.”

  “Saving women seems to be a common occurrence with you.”

  “The only woman who ever saved me was you.”

  “I think that’s a non sequitur, but I like the sound of it.”

  It was while Nina was bouncing off the club’s furniture that Greg Schroeder entered Rickie’s. He moved to the downstairs bar, sat on a stool, and ordered a Jameson, neat. The bartender set the straight whiskey in front of him.

  “Ms. Truhler.”

  Schroeder spoke soft and low in a voice that demanded action, something he had perfected while watching black-and-white Robert Mitchum movies. The bartender hesitated only for a moment before taking the hint and going off to find the boss.

  Nina was not happy to see Schroeder. I don’t think she had anything against the man. The worst thing she had ever said about him was, “He’s all right.” Yet seeing him sitting in her place caused her already high level of frustration to edge upward a few notches.

  “Am I in danger?” Nina wanted to know.

  The question and the blunt way she asked it caused Schroeder to flinch.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Every time I’ve seen you here it was because McKenzie hired you to protect me from some hooligans that he had unnerved.”

  “Hooligans?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, Nina. You’re not in any danger that I’m aware of. I’ll be happy to post a few guys around if it’ll make you comfortable, though.”

  “It would not.”

  “It’d be no trouble. No trouble at all.”

  “What are you doing here, Greg?”

  “I like Rickie’s. I like the food, the music…”

  “Don’t banter with me. I’m not in the mood.”

  “I want to help find out who shot McKenzie.”

  “Bobby Dunston is already working on it.”

  “How far has he gotten?”

  “He hasn’t said.”

  “If he tells you anything, I want you to feel free to call me. Maybe I can help.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “If all you do is watch crime shows on TV, you’d think that the police and private investigators don’t get along. That’s not necessarily true. Most PIs used to be cops or worked in some other branch of law enforcement; that’s where they received their training and the six thousand hours of experience required before they can get a license. I used to be a cop in Minneapolis, myself. Twenty years. So, there’s a kind of loose camaraderie between the groups. I have a lot of friends who carry badges and vice versa. We help each other out all the time.”

  “Stop changing the subject, Greg,” Nina said. “Who are you working for?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Then I’ll ask you to leave.”

  “Nina…”

  “It’s not me and it’s not McKenzie and it sure as hell isn’t Bobby Dunston, so … There’s the door.”

  “Nina.”

  “Do I need to raise my voice? I ask because I’ve been wanting to scream at someone all day.”

  “I don’t suppose my client would mind me telling you. I know you’re friends.”

  “Who?”

  “Riley Muehlenhaus.”

  Nina shook her head as if she was surprised, yet just barely.

  “Riley doesn’t call herself that,” she said. “Her father’s name is Brodin; her name, too. Brodin-Mulally since she’s been married. Muehlenhaus is Riley’s grandfather’s name. She doesn’t care for it.”

  “No, but she’ll use it if it’ll help her get what she wants
.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants to know who shot McKenzie.”

  “She can’t wait for the police to do their job like the rest of us?”

  Schroeder made a production out of lifting his glass off the bar and taking a sip. Nina watched him do it.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  Schroeder didn’t smile or grin or make any facial expression at all as he slowly set the glass back on the bar.

  Nina muttered under her breath.

  “Riley, what are you doing?”

  “She owes him a favor,” Schroeder said. “For saving her life.”

  Another one, Nina thought, but didn’t say.

  “Not that big of a favor,” she said aloud.

  Schroeder merely shrugged.

  “There’s nothing I can give you,” Nina said. “McKenzie’s computer and his notes, his phone—I turned all of that over to Bobby.”

  “He was doing a favor for someone, wasn’t he?”

  “A guy McKenzie played hockey with named Dave Deese.”

  “What favor?”

  “It was personal. Something to do with Dave’s DNA and the people he’s related to. I don’t have any details. I didn’t even know that much until last night.”

  “Where does Deese live?”

  “St. Paul. He has a business. Deese, Inc. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  “Greg, tell Riley not to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what.”

  “Honestly, Nina, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  * * *

  Shipman was troubled by the video of the blonde. She watched it three more times after she returned to her desk in the Griffin Building and it still didn’t make sense to her. She wrote notes to herself on a yellow legal pad.

  Was the message meant to lure McKenzie to RT’s Basement?

  Envelope was not signed.

  Was the note signed?

  How else would McKenzie know who sent it?

  Shipman grabbed her landline and called the security desk at my building. Jones answered, although she didn’t know that at the time. Like me, she had a hard time telling the guards apart.

  “When McKenzie came down to get the message, did he ask who left it for him?” Shipman asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s not start that again.”

  “Yes, Detective,” Jones said. “He did.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just a sec.”

  Jones must have covered the mouth of the phone because Shipman couldn’t hear what was being said. After a few moments, Jones started speaking again.

  “After McKenzie read the note he asked, ‘Who sent it? Did you get a name?’ And we said we did. We said it was delivered by a small woman with short blond hair who said her name was Elliot. Like we told you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Shipman went back to her notes, crossing out the last two and rewrote them.

  The note was not signed. If it had been signed, McKenzie would not have asked security who sent it.

  Security told McKenzie small woman with blond hair delivered note.

  The blonde said her name was Elliot, but that was an afterthought. She hadn’t intended to leave her name.

  Is it possible sender was smart enough to know that cell phone or landline or email could be captured and traced; yet not sophisticated enough to use a burner phone?

  Is it possible she was too dim-witted to realize that whoever delivered the message would be filmed by condo security cameras? That guards would ask for a name?

  Shipman understood, of course, that it could have happened exactly that way. She knew what Bobby knew and I knew and the vast majority of people working in law enforcement knew; that most criminals were pretty dumb. That’s why they were criminals. Yet this didn’t seem dumb to her. It seemed deliberate, like the blonde was meant to be seen by the cameras.

  Something else nagged at her.

  If the note was unsigned, how could the sender be sure McKenzie knew who sent it without leaving a name?

  Was McKenzie expecting a note?

  Shipman crossed out the last line. She told herself that if I had been expecting a message telling me where to meet someone at eight P.M., I wouldn’t have made a date with Nina Truhler for seven P.M. Shipman continued writing.

  If sender had wanted to remain anonymous, why give her name when asked? Did she panic and simply say the first thing that came to her mind?

  Shipman circled the last sentence several times and picked up her phone. She called the SPPD impound lot located just south of Holman Field, the airport along the Mississippi River that served downtown St. Paul, and told the man who answered what she needed. He said he’d call right back.

  Shipman set her notes aside, slid the flash drive into her computer, and resumed translating and interpreting my notes.

  What happened next.

  MONDAY, MAY 18 (EVENING)

  Normally, it would have taken me thirty-five minutes to drive home from Northfield—I have a get-out-of-speeding-tickets-free card after all. Only by the time I reached it, the Twin Cities was in full-blown rush-hour mode so it took me nearly double that time. Along the way I thought about Elliot. Was she really the young woman with the ponytail as I suspected or was I merely being overly suspicious? I’ve been accused of that before. Still, I felt something wasn’t quite right. Blonde or brunette, Elliot seemed more interested in what I could do for her family than what she could do for me. That’s why I decided not to give her the benefit of the doubt and wait for someone to call.

  Instead, the moment I returned to my condominium I sat down at my computer and Googled “Elliot Carleton College.” I was given a whopping twenty-seven results. After eliminating all of the last names, I was left with six first names.

  I went to Carleton’s website and clicked on the “directory” link, but it refused to grant me access to student information unless I had an account with the school. It did, however, reveal names of its faculty and staff—Elliot Kohn was an administrative assistant and Elliot Prall was an instructor of both German and Russian languages.

  I continued surfing and discovered that Elliot Moua had received a “Congratulations” on Facebook from the Carleton College Mathematics and Statistics Department for his paper “Graphical Inference with Convolutional Neural Networks,” which received an honorable mention in the Undergraduate Statistics Research Competition sponsored by the American Statistical Association and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics. Good for him.

  Elliot James had a LinkedIn page, even though he wouldn’t graduate for another two years, that he used to help promote his summer job tutoring college athletes in computer science and mathematics.

  Elliot Robey, also a woman, was named Female Athlete of the Week in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference for winning six first-place titles—four individual and two relays—at the Rochester Invitational Swimming Meet in December. The photo of her holding up all of her medals revealed a tall woman with short black hair and a glittering smile.

  That left Elliot Sohm.

  The first thing that came up—Elliot Sohm wins the Samuel Strauss Prize for Humorous Writing for her short story “The Hippopotamus in the Room” from the English Department at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. The second—Elliot Sohm on Pinterest. The third—Elliot Sohm on Instagram.

  Instagram revealed instantly that Elliot was, in fact, the cute blonde with a round face, wide eyes, ready smile, and dimples that I had met at CakeWalk. But among her 182 posts was a pic of the young woman with auburn hair worn in a ponytail who was sitting behind us. In the pic she was eating the most flamboyant cupcake I had ever seen. I clicked on the image and was given a column of copy to read under the heading “Exploring Our Back-Up Careers.” Among the posts: “Making cupcakes and thrifting and real talks with my favorite cousin Emma King. #Em
ma&EllieForever.”

  In the back of my mind I heard my inner voice shouting, Aha.

  I switched my search parameters to “Emma King Carleton College.” The first thing that popped up was an article that appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press three years earlier. The piece listed the names and photos of all of the students who had finished in the top one percent of their high school graduating classes that year. Under St. Paul Academy it read:

  Name: Emma King

  Parents: Jenna King

  College: Carleton College, Northfield, MN

  Quote: “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”—Mark Twain

  This is where I would normally have performed a victory dance; imagine just about anyone who scores a touchdown in the NFL these days. Except, as often happens to me, the answer I found led me to yet another question that made me go “Hmm.” For example, I couldn’t help but notice that there was only one name listed under parents—Jenna King. That meant that Jenna did not list her husband’s name. This is supposing, of course, that Jenna had a husband when Emma was born and that his name was King and there was no reason to assume that other than current social norms. Which raised the question—who was Emma’s father? Was Charles K. her father? Did the K stand for King? Why wasn’t he listed? Is this what Elliot meant by things in her family going kerflooey?

  I searched for “Jenna King Orono Minnesota” and got one—count ’em, one—hit, an administrative assistant working for Medtronic, a medical device company based in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, she couldn’t have been Emma’s mother unless she gave birth at the age of nine. Still, I saved the contact.

  I kept looking and discovered 178 additional Jenna and Jennifer Kings in Minnesota. I tried to narrow the search by adding the name Emma, but that only made it worse.

  No one said this would be easy, my inner voice told me.

  I kept at it, finding nothing that identified a Jenna King living in Orono who was the mother of a young woman named Emma. There was an article that piqued my interest, though, that appeared in the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal under the title “40 Under 40—the most influential young people in business in Minnesota today.”