“What doesn’t make sense, Emma?”
“They seemed angry. I mean angry at us, me and Elliot. We told them about McKenzie and Marshall started lecturing us about involving complete strangers in family matters. I told him that McKenzie wasn’t a stranger, that he was family, and that we had met him and he seemed like a nice man. Is he a nice man?”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t matter. Not to Marshall or Mom. They said that McKenzie—he could open up a can of worms that could really hurt the family and I’m like ‘Can of worms? What the fuck does that mean?’ I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Nina said. “It’s not like I haven’t heard the word before.”
“It just didn’t make any sense to me. I kept asking, ‘What can of worms?’ They wouldn’t tell me. All I got—my mom said, ‘It happened before you were born.’ I’m like ‘What happened?’ She wouldn’t tell me. Only I wouldn’t give it up—McKenzie, I mean. Elliot and me, we said that we hadn’t actually involved him in anything. We didn’t tell McKenzie about Uncle Charles. My mom said, ‘Don’t. Don’t tell him.’ I said, ‘Shouldn’t we let Uncle Charles make the decision?’ After all—and this is important, at least I thought it was important. He’s the one who put his DNA up on an ancestry website in the first place in case something like this might happen.
“Marshall said, ‘You’re right, you’re right,’ like he agreed with me. He said that it was Charles’s decision and that he would tell him everything I had told him and Mom. That’s where we left it. Elliot and I had to get back to Carleton before quiet time. Only nothing happened. We didn’t hear anything from anybody. Not Tuesday. Not Wednesday. Then Wednesday night, last night, this policewoman showed up at school, a detective, and she told us that McKenzie had been shot and she blamed Elliot and then she said she was kidding, that she knew Elliot didn’t do it and I’m like, What is wrong with you, lady?”
“The detective, was her name Jean Shipman?” Nina asked.
“Yes. Do you know her? Is she always this mean?”
“I couldn’t say. McKenzie doesn’t like her, though.”
“I don’t either, but I started wondering about something she told us. Something unbelievable. She said that a woman delivered a message to McKenzie, delivered it to his building, and that the message might have been what lured him to the place in St. Paul where he was shot.”
“RT’s Basement on Rice Street?”
“Yes. She said, Detective Shipman said, that the woman who delivered the message had short blond hair and told the security guards that her name was Elliot. Only it wasn’t Elliot. She was in Northfield with me when all of this happened. We can prove it, too. Only that’s not what’s unbelievable. What’s unbelievable—I can’t believe I’m saying this or even thinking it.”
“What’s unbelievable?” Nina asked.
“My mother has short blond hair.”
“Your mother?”
“Jenna King.”
Nina took Emma’s hand in hers and spoke to her as if she were her daughter.
“Emma, honey, I need you to talk to someone for me,” she said. “A policeman.”
“A policeman? I … I … I … I can’t do that. It’s family.”
“McKenzie is your family, too,” Nina said.
She told me later that she had felt sympathy for Emma, for the position she was placing her in, but at no time did she consider telling the girl the truth—that I wasn’t her uncle. I told her that I would have done the same thing; that she was starting to think like me. Nina said that was a lousy thing to say and I should apologize. Anyway …
“My mom,” Emma said. “We’re talking about my mom.”
Nina gave the young woman’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
“You don’t really believe that your mother shot McKenzie, do you?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Some of the things she’s done lately because, because…”
Emma closed her eyes as if she was recalling some of the things and opened them slowly.
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it. Something’s going on…”
“Will you talk to my friend?” Nina asked.
“The policeman?”
“Yes.”
“Not Shipman.”
“No. No, no. His name is Bobby. He’s McKenzie’s best friend.”
“Will I have to go to the police station?”
“I think we can avoid that.”
* * *
The way they had left it with Dr. Tucker Hammel—“What you got here is an adverse patient outcome,” Chopper told him. “My advice, forget this one and move on to the next patient. Your practice is still intact, ’kay? I won’t have any more reason to mess with you unless you have reason to mess with me. ’Kay?”
Hammel didn’t respond one way or another.
A few minutes later, Herzog was driving the van south on Lexington Avenue toward I-94.
“We gonna deal with Jenna King ourselves or are we gonna pass her name to the po-lice?” he asked.
Chopper didn’t reply.
“Kinda quiet back there, partner,” Herzog said.
“Hmm? What?”
“Just askin’, are we going to call Bobby Dunston or take care of Jenna King our own way?”
Chopper still didn’t answer.
“Somethin’ on your mind, Chop?”
They were crossing University Avenue; a White Castle restaurant was located on the corner.
“Pull in here,” Chopper said.
“What?”
“Pull in, pull in.”
Herzog swung the van into the parking lot, found an empty slot and stopped.
“You won’t eat a plant-based burger but you’re happy to load up on sliders?” he asked. “Talk about extremes.”
“I need to think.”
“’Bout what?”
“The doc-tor—he wants us to kill Jenna King.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“He wants us to do his dirty work for him.”
“Chop…”
“He wanted us to have that name, Jenna King. He played the part like we was forcing it outta him, but ask yourself—if he didn’t want us to have the name, why would he have agreed to a meeting in the first place, at least one that we walk away from? Somethin’ else. This woman, Jenna King, who lives on Lake Minnetonka—you know what we’re talking about when we say a person lives on Lake Minnetonka?”
“Money.”
“Lots of it, too. So tell me—what’s a white woman from way out on the rich side of Minneapolis doing on Rice Street? A woman like that, it would be dangerous for her to go down to RT’s.”
“She was looking to get her prescription filled,” Herzog said. “She heard from somebody who heard from somebody that RT’s Basement was the place to go t’ get her Oxy, you know how it works.”
“Except that she already had Jamal doing home deliveries for her. One of his best customers, he said. So why would she go to RT’s?”
Herzog let that sink in for a few beats.
“She went there to see McKenzie,” he said.
“Why RT’s, though? If she arranged the meet, she would’ve picked a spot closer to home. People live on Lake Minnetonka; they don’t even cross the river to go to the state fair, man.”
“McKenzie picked the spot. You know how he likes his tunes.”
“He’s too upscale for a second-rate dive like that. ’Sides, RT’s doesn’t have music on Tuesday nights. What I’m thinking, maybe Jenna King doesn’t have anything to do with McKenzie. Maybe she’s a loose end of some sort that the doc-tor wants to snip and he decided to get us to do the snipping.”
“Or Jamal’s behind it.”
“Could be Jamal, only he didn’t want to give her up.”
“He acted like he didn’t want to give ’er up,” Herzog said.
“When we met the first time, Jamal said he didn’t even know McKenzie was shot until someone told him.”
“Unless he was lying. I thought
so at the time, remember. Got no reason to change my mind.”
“What we should do, we should find out more about this Jenna King before we do something maybe we regret,” Chopper said.
“How you want t’ go about it? Anybody we could call?”
Chopper gave the question a full-throated chuckle before answering.
“Usually,” he said, “I’d call McKenzie.”
EIGHTEEN
The final phone number on the list that had been given to her by the FSU belonged to Marshall Sohm, Jr., only he refused to meet Detective Jean Shipman at AgEc, Inc. or anywhere near the building where he worked in downtown St. Paul. He didn’t want to talk to her at all, didn’t even want to say “Hello,” and probably wouldn’t have—apparently he understood his rights as well as Justus Reinfeld—except that his daughter had told him about her interview with Shipman.
“You’re the one who accused Elliot of being involved in the shooting,” he said. He was angry when he said it.
“Here’s your chance to explain to me all the reasons why I’m wrong.”
Still, Marshall might have blown off the detective anyway except that when he started to hem and haw Shipman said, “A message was delivered to McKenzie by a woman with short blond hair who claimed her name was Elliot. Immediately afterward McKenzie received a phone call from this number, your number, the number we’re using now. Five minutes later, he left his building. The next time anyone saw him, McKenzie was lying on a sidewalk with a bullet in his back. You may refuse to cooperate with the police. That’s your right. I’m sure the Ramsey County prosecutor will understand. I’m sure a subpoena won’t be issued that would force you to testify in front of a grand jury. After all, McKenzie was a retired police officer and we never take care of our own.”
Marshall agreed to meet with Shipman at his home in Woodbury.
* * *
Unlike RT’s, Rickie’s actually had a basement and in it Nina had recently built a lounge complete with bar and small stage that she called—wait for it—the Lounge. She promoted it as an intimate hideaway perfect for private parties and small wedding receptions and she did quite well with it even though Erica and many of her employees insisted that it was haunted. Which is another long story I’ll tell you one of these days.
The Lounge was closed in the late afternoon; there was only Nina, Emma, and Bobby sitting at a square table away from prying eyes, away from the happy hour music and noise found upstairs. Despite the bar, no one was drinking, at least not alcohol. Nina had given Emma a tall glass filled with ice water that the young woman sipped from more to have something to do with her hands than because of thirst.
Like Nina, Bobby spoke to Emma as if he was comforting one of his daughters.
“How much time does Charles have, do you know?” he asked.
“It can’t be much more than a couple of weeks.” Emma’s eyes welled up with tears when she spoke about her uncle, yet she refused to let them fall. “That’s why it doesn’t make sense to me what my mom and Marshall are doing.”
“Do your mother and your uncle get along?”
“Oh, God, are you kidding? They’re like…” Emma wiped her tears away and smiled. “I was going to say they’re like brother and sister only they’re so much closer than that. Their father abandoned them when they were still young. My mom—Mom was sixteen and pregnant with me at the time. Instead of falling apart, though, they united. I don’t know how else to say it. My uncles were at Northwestern and they both transferred to the University of Minnesota to be near Mom and they’ve been taking care of each other ever since. My uncles made sure Mom didn’t drop out of school; made her go to college and she just excelled, you know? They motivated themselves to do well, too. To do fantastically. Meanwhile, the three of them raised me. I have no idea who my father was; Mom never told me; never told anyone as far as I know. That’s okay because I have two fathers and they’re both so damn”—Emma paused if she was searching for the perfect word and came up with—“fatherly. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, something you hear people say. Personally, I think Friedrich Nietzsche was full of crap. But the three of them are so strong, especially together. I think that’s why no one has married, yet.”
“Why would your mother want to arrange a meeting with McKenzie?” Bobby asked.
“I’m not sure that she did, I don’t care what that detective said. My mom doesn’t look anything like Elliot. You would never see them standing side by side and say, oh, they must be related, although—although she does have short blond hair and she is roughly the same size.”
“And she knows Elliot’s name,” Bobby said.
“She knows Elliot’s name.” Emma took a sip of water. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Honey?” Nina rested her hand on Emma’s. “I know this is very hard for you.”
Emma nodded.
“You love your mother,” Nina said.
“Of course.”
“You told me before that your mother was unable to take the tests to see if she was a compatible transplant donor…”
“Yes.”
“You also told me that you were anxious because—what did you say—because of some of the things that she’s done lately? Could you tell us about that?”
The tears returned as Emma took yet another sip of water.
“Mom hasn’t had an easy life,” she said.
“No, she hasn’t,” Bobby said, resting his hand on hers, proving that he was on Emma’s side.
“She got involved—involved with drugs some years ago after she had her social media business humming. I think she became bored, met some people, I don’t know. She kicked the habit, though. My uncles saw to that. They got her help. They gave her support. So did I. Now I think, I think she might be using again. There’s this man she’s been seeing. He’s black and he’s way younger than she is, only a year or so older than me, in fact. I don’t care about that. God. What I care about—she seems kind of dependent on him and that’s, that’s just not like her.”
“What’s his name?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. We’ve never been introduced. I’ve only seen him at a distance, which is something else that’s crazy.”
“Where is your mother?”
“I haven’t spoken to her today. She’s either at the lake or at home. My uncle Charles has this palace on Lake Minnetonka and my mom and Uncle Porter spend most of their time there; they even have their own bedroom suites, like a hotel. But they also have their own homes. Porter has a place in Linden Hills in Minneapolis and Mom has a house on Summit Hill here in St. Paul. It’s only a couple miles from where we are right now, actually. It’s where I grew up. Mom thought it would be better for me growing up there than in Charles’s palace on the lake. So we lived in St. Paul, just the two of us, all the time I was in school. A small house. Charles calls it ‘the little cottage’ although its way bigger than that. I told Mom that she’s not allowed to sell it; that if she doesn’t want it anymore she has to give it to me. It’s not like she needs the money. She became rich when she sold her business. All of the Kings are rich. Well, not all. I don’t even get an allowance. Mom pays my tuition and room and board, so poor, poor pitiful me, but I have to work a part-time job in Northfield for spending money. My family thinks it builds character.”
“Is it possible that your mother is at home now?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. I could call her.”
“No, but if you would be kind enough to give me the address…”
“So you can ambush her like Detective Shipman did with me and Elliot?”
“You said yourself that your uncle doesn’t have much time.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Please.”
“There are questions I need to ask your mother that she might not answer if you’re in the same room with us.”
Emma stared as if she was trying to imagine what those questions might be
.
“You mean about family secrets?” she asked. “About—about that can of worms?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not a child anymore.”
“You’re her child; that’s how she’ll look at it.”
“Do you have kids?” Emma asked.
“Two girls; both just a couple of years younger than you.”
“Do you keep secrets from them?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess—for their own good.”
“No, for mine.”
Emma found a spot on the wall to stare at for a few moments. While she did, Bobby heard her mutter a single word—“Mom.” Afterward, Emma glanced at Nina as if she was seeking her advice.
“Don’t look at me,” Nina said. “I need to go back to the hospital and check on McKenzie.”
“Will you call me?” Emma asked. “Will you tell me how he’s doing?”
“Yes,” Nina answered. “Where will you be?”
Emma spun back to face Bobby.
“Carleton College,” she said. “I have a midterm in the morning.”
* * *
They discovered Chopper’s geek-in-chief sitting behind Chopper’s desk like he owned the place when they rolled into the office in Minneapolis. He pointed at Chopper’s computer screen.
“You should see this,” he said.
Chopper stared wide-eyed at him as if he already couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Herzog chuckled.
What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel Page 26