Death Stalks Door County

by Patricia Skalka

  Maybe Eloise wasn’t the simple downtrodden wife she pretended to be, but would she commit murder to avenge herself on her husband? She had access to money, and if she was orchestrating a campaign to ruin Beck by torpedoing the festival, it was to her benefit to throw suspicion on others. But Otto had already been proven innocent. And Dutch was deceased. Cubiak was annoyed realizing that he might have just wasted an hour listening to local gossip.

  Ready for lunch and a cold beer, he drove to Sturgeon Bay and was backing into a parking spot when he spied Barry shuffling past the bank. Barry Beck, seventeen, almost good looking, almost intelligent. The long-awaited son. His parents had called him their bonus baby and heaped all their expectations on him, a heavy burden for an infant to bear.

  Cubiak caught up with the boy near the corner. “Long time no see,” he said.

  Barry shot him a nervous glance and kept walking.

  “We have to talk.” Cubiak maneuvered the sullen teen into an empty doorway.

  “Lemme be,” Barry said.

  “Not till you tell me what’s going on.”

  “About what?”

  “Let’s start with your job. The one you wanted so badly. I’ve had to get other people to do your work because you never show up.”

  Barry scuffed the ground with his expensive Topsiders. “I don’t need it,” he insisted.

  “But you wanted it before.”

  Barry was tight lipped.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  The boy’s face contorted. “The park is bad news for me,” he yelped.

  Cubiak took a guess. “Problems with your suppliers? That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Barry paled. “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t. But it might be useful if you did. You might tell me something that will help.”

  Cubiak let Barry consider the novel notion as he steered him down the sidewalk toward the waterfront. They sat on a bench near a small rose garden where a group of children ignored the large Do Not Feed the Birds sign and tossed popcorn and handfuls of crumbled bread to a flock of tame geese.

  “Why’s the park bad news?” Cubiak said.

  Barry looked up, surprised. “Oh, man, you gotta be kidding. Some guy who just happens to be wearing the same kind of jacket as mine falls off the tower. Then a girl wearing my jacket gets killed. What am I supposed to do, stand there with a bull’s-eye on my back?”

  “No, of course not,” Cubiak said, stalling. Alice had been wearing Barry’s navy blue jacket when she was killed. But Wisby’s jacket was black, wasn’t it? Cubiak cursed silently. The coat had been soaked from the rain; maybe it only looked black. He’d never seen it dry, and made a mental note to read Halverson’s full report.

  “Your deals went down at Falcon Tower?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t show that one day, why? You owe them money?”

  The boy turned a frightened face to him. “Promise you won’t tell my father. He’d kill me if he knew.”

  Barry’s story was the pathetic tale of a small-town kid who was in over his head to a couple of Milwaukee drug suppliers. He’d owed five thousand dollars at Christmas, and with help from Eloise he’d managed to pay off half by Easter. He’d promised full payment on the rest that Sunday morning.

  “What time were you supposed to meet?”

  “Five. But I didn’t go ’cause I didn’t have the money.”

  Bathard had estimated the time of Wisby’s death at about 6 a.m.

  “How long would they have waited?”

  “My phone rang a little after six. I didn’t answer. But I guessed it was them.”

  “No one else picked up the call?”

  “I got my own line. No one else would have heard it ring.”

  He’d stayed in the rest of the day, he told Cubiak, and then hung by his mother’s side for several more days. “They always found me before when I owed something. This time, I figured they gave up. I knew they were planning on splitting for Mexico—reconnaissance, they called it—and I thought maybe they just finally went. Then Alice was killed.”

  “And you thought they were after you again?”

  “Sure. Next day, I told my mother enough to get some more bread out of her. I got in touch with them and paid up.”

  “You met them here?”

  “No. Manitowoc. It’s midway.”

  “And now?”

  “They’re gone. I think. I hope.” Barry looked at Cubiak. “They said they’d be in touch later.”

  “I need names.”

  Barry nearly flew from the seat. “No way,” he said.

  Five minutes later, Cubiak had two names, probably aliases. “Where’d your mother get the money?”

  “She’s been squirreling away dough for years. Probably used some of that.”

  Cubiak offered the boy a ride home. “By the way, I saw your mother this morning,” he said as they drove from town.

  Barry tittered. “Quite a treat for Mom. Two visitors in one day.”

  Cubiak wasn’t going to let this pass again. “Ruby, wasn’t it?” he said, approaching a four-way stop.

  “Oh, right. The vestal virgin of Door County. Not literally speaking, of course. Nope. She doesn’t come to our house anymore.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Nobody you’d know. This old dude, Jocko Connelly. Used to be a ferry boat captain. Totally pee-o-ed, he was. Came down from Washington Island, drunk as a skunk and railing about some kind of harbor plan. ‘Top secret shit,’ Jocko called it. Mother didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Anyway, my dad shows up and sends her out of the room, me too, and then tears into the old man. What did he know? How’d he find out? Had he told anyone else? Jocko just kept raving that it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “I thought you were sent from the room.”

  “I listened on the intercom.”

  “Why was Jocko so upset about a harbor?”

  “Who knows? Just another local drunk, you ask me.”

  “What do you know about it, this plan Jocko was talking about?”

  “Nothing.” The boy rubbed his jaw. “My father doesn’t tell me or my mom anything. We’re shit on his list.” He paused. “Unlike you.” The sarcasm was obvious. “Security hotshot.”

  “You got that wrong. I work for the park.”

  “Not for long. Not if my father has his way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Barry shrugged. “Just something I overheard. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Beck has his reasons, Eloise had said, talking about how her husband had pulled strings to bring Cubiak to the peninsula. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

  Near Beck’s driveway, Cubiak pulled onto the shoulder. “By the way, where is your father?”

  “Green Bay, I think. He went to pick up a couple of foreign dudes. Probably for the golf tournament.”

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON

  Free from the congestion around Sturgeon Bay, Cubiak skated up the spine of the peninsula on the county’s two-lane back roads. The route was marked by cherry orchards and hay fields, by cows grazing lazily in open pastures, and by the weathered barns that denoted the failed farms and the occasional silo clusters that earmarked the ones that were prospering against all odds. He made good time. Near West Jacksonport he came up behind a mud-spattered, orange tractor pulling a wagonload of straw. The driver drifted onto the shallow shoulder, opening up the view of the road, and as Cubiak passed, the man raised a hand in greeting. Cubiak returned the gesture. A nice custom, he realized, and one he was coming to expect.

  Cubiak was on his way to the ferry at Northport Pier. Before Eloise aired her bushel of dirty laundry, she had tried to steer his interest toward Jocko, the retired ferry captain. Cubiak didn’t think anything of it until Barry mentioned the old seaman as well. Cubiak wasn’t sure how much credibility to award a vengeful recluse or a spiteful son, but it was clear that Jocko w
as pissed enough about something to trek from Washington Island to the mainland amidst the chaos of the area’s biggest festival to make his feelings known. And the something that upset him was linked to Beck. If Barry was right about the jacket and being the target of the attacks, perhaps there were dots to connect. Cubiak had to find out.

  He could have called Jocko but knew it would have been a wasted effort. Cubiak remembered seeing him in Amelia’s photo of the Survivalist Club. Jocko was the instructor. At the time the picture was taken, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but the fierceness of his eyes and the firm set of his jaw portrayed him as a man to be reckoned with. Before he left town, Cubiak had stopped to ask Bathard about Jocko and learned that during World War II, he’d parachuted behind German lines. Later, as a ferry captain, he was renowned for the ease with which he piloted vessels through ice floes. No, Jocko didn’t sound like the type who’d warm to a friendly telephone chat. Cubiak needed to confront him face to face.

  The road to the ferry landing wound past The Wood and then Ruby’s house before it dead-ended at the water. Northport wasn’t even a nub of a town, just a dock with a restaurant and a parking lot cut into the forest on a rocky stretch of Lake Michigan. At the water’s edge, a robust, red-haired man motioned for Cubiak to follow a beige van onto the ferry, a bilevel box that looked barely seaworthy to the ranger. In a leap of faith, Cubiak rolled over the loading ramp, pretending not to notice the boat’s shuddering. He squeezed the jeep between two cars and eased out as a group of teenagers wheeled their bikes past. One flight up, he made his way to the bow. Despite the bright sun, the air was cool. Cubiak pulled up his collar and jammed his hands into his pockets. He wished he’d worn a cap and hoped the Dramamine Bathard had given him would work. As a gas truck maneuvered over the loading ramp, the ferry shimmied in response. Cubiak grabbed the handrail.

  “First time across?” A heavyset man in a neatly patched denim jacket had joined him on the deck. “This ain’t nothing. You should see ’em pull on them double-deckered tour buses. Now that’s a hoot. Swear everybody on board thinks we’re going to capsize.” The passenger tapped the railing with a thick, rough hand. “But they’re built solid. For the cargo and the weather.”

  “Just hope nobody’s smoking.” The comment came from a tourist with a video camera.

  The first man harrumphed and shuffled away.

  In a sudden flurry of activity, the ferry was loaded. Then a horn shrilled, the mooring lines were freed, and the steel ramp was raised to a vertical position, sealing in the people and vehicles. The engine revved and the 150-ton craft slid away from shore toward the open water. The vista widened at surprising speed, leaving the dock and restaurant looking forlorn and lost, two shrinking white spots pinned against the expanding stretch of trees and cliffs that formed the rugged northern shoreline. Seagulls wheeled above their wake, and the wind, dormant while they hugged the dock, stung Cubiak’s face. Around him, conversations dropped off as the travelers took refuge in their own thoughts. Even the two teenagers draped over each other under the stairwell—thinking themselves hidden—pulled apart, their lust diminished by the great wash of water and open sky.

  Ten minutes out, the birds deserted the ferry and carried their screeching calls back to the mainland. On the lake, there was no sound but the keening of the wind and the steady churning of the ship’s engine. No world existed beyond the water and sky that stretched in every direction as they motored toward the harbor at Washington Island.

  Disembarking was efficiently routine. Passengers flowed from the upper level toward their vehicles and quickly slid off the ferry as a deckhand waved them forward. Cubiak was the eighth driver out.

  A waitress at the harbor coffee shop gave him directions to Jocko’s place. There was only one road from the harbor, and he followed it into the interior. Washington Island was home to several hundred year-round and seasonal residents, most of them on site only during the warm weather months when they were joined by hordes of day visitors who rode the ferries over from the mainland and back. Though only six miles from the peninsula, the island seemed remote and exotic, and the landscape rolled out lush and verdant. But nature’s bounty could not disguise economic hard times. Cubiak passed half a dozen homes and businesses that were boarded up and offered for sale. Under a grove of towering elms, a fifties-style drive-in sagged in glum neglect.

  At the second juncture, Cubiak veered left and passed through pastureland and thick woods before he ran into a patch of rocky coast. The road angled back sharply, pulling him away from the water, and then it bent toward a shallow inlet where a string of large frame houses and modest cottages hugged the shore.

  A half mile farther, the lane ended at the disheveled two-acre plot that was Jocko Connelly’s Tobacco Road estate. Belly-fat seagulls lined the weathered dock and spilled over into the yard, perched on discarded fishing dories and a junk dealer’s heaven of old stoves and refrigerators. There were three vehicles on the property: the cannibalized shell of an old John Deere tractor, a splotched yellow Edsel propped on cement blocks, and a shiny teal pickup, ostentatious in its freshness. Someone’s home, Cubiak thought.

  Picking his way through the bird droppings and past a crumbling picnic table that spoke of happier times, Cubiak approached the daisy-chain house, four wooden shacks stacked one against the other parallel to the cove. He pounded the door, surprised by its resonance. No response. He banged again. From deep inside came a muffled bark, followed by the slow shuffle of footsteps. The door yanked open. A face marked by deeply creviced and weathered skin jutted out at him.

  “Who’re you?”

  Cubiak gave Jocko enough information to keep him from slamming the door shut.

  “Ha!” The old seaman glared and then turned and wordlessly slipped into the interior. Cubiak followed down the narrow hall that linked the cubicles. To his right, a series of dirt-streaked windows gave way to spectacular views of the water, while on the other side one cluttered room followed after another. When they reached the kitchen, the terminus of the chain, Jocko stopped and confronted his guest. He had at least two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks and his breath was heavily perfumed with alcohol.

  “That old fool need someone to bail him out again?” The ferry captain waved a hand impatiently at Cubiak. “Johnson. Otto J.,” he hooted.

  “Otto’s fine.”

  Jocko maneuvered behind a wooden table littered with dirty dishes and empty gin bottles and dropped into a chair. He glanced suspiciously at Cubiak, then tilted toward the floor and spat a stream of black tobacco juice into a sawdust-filled coffee can.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said and visually skewered his visitor again. “Who sent you?”

  “No one.”

  “I ain’t so popular people go out of their way to visit. ’Specially strangers.” Jocko spoke deliberately, trying to outfox the slur that dogged his words.

  “You went to see Beck this morning. You were angry. Very foul tempered, I believe.”

  “You his stooge?”

  “Several people have died lately under suspicious circumstances. I’m trying to find out if they’ve been killed and if so, by whom.”

  “You a cop, too?”

  “Used to be a detective with the Chicago PD.”

  The ferry captain’s eyes narrowed. “Chi-town police? What’s any of this to do with me?”

  “Nothing, if you’re not the one harpooning tourists with hunting arrows.”

  Jocko cackled.

  “I understand you know something about a new harbor being planned.”

  The comment had a sobering effect. Jocko plunked the spittoon again and studied the dirt-encrusted table before he looked back at Cubiak. “Read a book about it.”

  “What book?”

  “A grandiose piece of fiction someone left laying around.”

  “Beck?”

  “Not him, but somebody he had with him. Someone I’d call a sand nigger if I wasn’t being polite.”

  �
�Recently?”

  “Could have been.”

  “You and Beck don’t get along?”

  “I don’t cotton to his kind.”

  “Why the fuss about this ‘harbor’ business? A modest condo development just south of Fish Creek is what I’ve heard.”

  “Hell it is,” Jocko retorted.

  Cubiak waited.

  Jocko took his time. “It’s like something in a fairy tale gone wrong,” he said finally. “The bastard intends to remake the whole north half of the peninsula. Fish Creek, Ephraim, and all the little towns north are gonna be wiped off the map. Like they never existed. Everything gone. Farms. Orchards. Cottages. Marinas. Even roads. Gone, just gone. He’s gonna plow it all under and plant it all with trees, like when the Indians were here, with room for a big golf course and an airport and a monorail train connecting it to some fancy-ass new resort up north at the tip. You should see the houses he’s gonna build there. Mansions, they looked like, with a goddamn castle in the middle. Who’s that for? Tell me that! Where are all the regular folks gonna go?” he said with escalating rage. “And the island? Jesus! Some kind of fucking hunting preserve.” Jocko’s face was red, the veins in his forehead and neck thickly corded.

  “What do you mean everything gone? That sounds impossible,” Cubiak said. Was the old man hallucinating or had he lost it completely?

  “For you and me, yeah, it’s impossible. But with enough money, you can do any goddamn thing you please. Beck aims to turn a whole chunk of the peninsula into a playground for the rich. You should’ve seen the people he had out with him. An East Coast pansy—I could just about hear the silver spoon clanging against his teeth—and a couple of foreigners whispering to each other in some weird language I ain’t never heard. These people eat, breathe, and shit money.”

  “When was this?”

  “Couple weeks ago. He chartered the passenger ferry for his little outing. Just happens the captain got sick that morning and his wife asked me to take the run. The look on Beck’s face when he seen me!”