Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  “Then the telephone calls started coming: at home, at work, night and day. Usually the caller would hang up when I answered. Sometimes a loud whistle would be blown in my ear. Sometimes nothing would happen as I repeated ‘Hello, hello, hello’ like an idiot. A box filled with dead roses was left on my desk. A dead cat was stuffed in my mailbox at home. A few days ago the tires of my car were slashed in a supermarket parking lot, which means someone followed me there, right? I knew it was Raymond.

  “I bought a gun. A .22. I asked for something bigger, but the man said a .22 was plenty big enough. I had it with me yesterday while I was in downtown Minneapolis. I was gripping it inside my purse when a homeless man came up and handed me an envelope. ‘Person paid me to give you this,’ he said and then walked away before I could ask him who. I opened the envelope. There was a piece of paper in it. On the paper someone had written the word Soon in crayon. Nothing else, just Soon.

  “Mr. Truman, I know he’s out there. I know he’s coming for me. It’s just a matter of time. The police can’t help me, and Stephen won’t. So, all I can do is wait. But I refuse to panic. And I refuse to run.…

  “It’s Wednesday, October sixteenth. I request that you accept this tape; lock it in your safe. A year from now, if I discover my fears have been greatly exaggerated, I’ll ask you to return it, and we’ll go to lunch, and you can charge me an exorbitant fee for your patience. Thank you for your consideration. Hey, you guys! Larry, Moe …”

  We sat silently listening long after the tape had stopped playing. Finally Truman ejected the cassette from the machine. He held it in both hands like it was ancient parchment instead of plastic.

  “Leave it,” I told him when he made a move to drop it in his pocket. He placed the cassette on the desk blotter next to Alison’s photograph.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Witnesses verify that Alison left Kennel-Up at five-fifteen. Give her fifteen minutes to reach her home. Her husband arrives at six-fifteen and finds Alison missing. No trace of her. When I learned about it, I gave the original cassette to the cops; this is a copy. They checked Raymond Fleck. He had an alibi. A woman who worked with him at Kennel-Up claimed that from about five till seven, they were fucking each other’s brains out. Excuse me, having carnal relations.”

  I waved off the apology; the color of his language no longer concerned me.

  “The cops thought that was awfully convenient and wouldn’t eliminate him as a suspect. Only, eliminate him from what? There’s nothing there, Holland. Nothing at all. No prints, no fibers … They put Alison’s photograph on TV, in the newspapers—‘Have you seen this woman?’ They even put her on those goddamn milk cartons. That was two hundred and twelve days ago.”

  “You counted the days?”

  “Every fucking one.”

  “What do you want me to do, Hunter?” Strange how we were suddenly on a first-name basis, the best of friends.

  “Find her.”

  “Find her?”

  “Find out what happened to her. Listen to what I’m saying: I know she’s dead, but I don’t know, I mean … I have to know what happened to her. I have to know. Even if there’s nothing we can do about it, even if—I have to know, Holland. Please.…”

  Why did it matter so much to him? I wondered. What was Alison to Truman besides a client? Was that the extent of their relationship? Or was there something else? I was betting on the something else. I had no reason to draw that conclusion except that Hunter Truman was the most unreasonable, unsympathetic, mean-spirited man I knew who wasn’t in jail. As far as I could tell he had never displayed so much as a modicum of concern for anyone. Yet he seemed to care deeply for Alison Donnerbauer Emerton. And suddenly, so did I.

  “There’s not much I can do that the cops haven’t,” I told him.

  “Give me your best guess. I’ll settle for that.”

  It was ten o’clock Monday morning, the first week in June, and the phone hadn’t rung for a few days. I told myself, what the hell, a buck’s a buck, and Hunter Truman wasn’t such a bad guy.… Yeah, right.

  “I’ll look into it, see if I can generate a few new leads. If not …” I shrugged.

  “You will?” Truman asked gleefully.

  “I get four hundred a day, plus expenses.”

  two

  Anne Scalasi was my best friend—maybe my only friend—and she proved it by ignoring my presence at her desk until she finished reading a memo that was one paragraph long. It took her several minutes.

  The office of St. Paul Police Department’s Homicide Unit hadn’t changed much since I labored there. Hell, except for the occasional computer terminal, it hadn’t changed much since 1972. Detectives still sat in metal chairs at metal desks, separated from each other by movable soft-sided walls. Empty metal coatracks stood guard outside each cubicle.

  From where Anne sat, she had a clear view of the erasable white plastic marker board covered with rows of names. It was a roster of this year’s homicides. Red was active. Black denoted cases where a suspect had been charged. There were only a few reds.

  “What do you want?” Annie barked at last.

  “I can always tell when you’re upset.”

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You’re sick, Taylor,” she informed me. “Sending a dozen long-stemmed roses to a woman on the anniversary of her divorce is a sick thing to do.”

  “I thought it was a kindly enough gesture,” I replied in my defense. “Telling a dear friend who’s down that someone cared.”

  “Oh, then that explains the card,” she said.

  “The card?”

  “The unsigned card. ‘Oh, baby, oh, baby, oh, baby, thank you for last night and all the nights that came before.’ Remember?”

  “I was joking about you going to the baseball game with me on such short notice,” I protested.

  “Yeah, right. My oldest—who isn’t too thrilled that I divorced her father in the first place—signed for the flowers. She read the card. She wanted to know if it was a message from my lover.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her the truth. It was from a sick friend.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Only when I told her the sick friend’s name.”

  I ignored the insult and insisted that I was only trying to be considerate.

  “Since when?”

  “It’s the new me. A man for the millennium: thoughtful, kind, selfless—”

  “What do you want, Taylor?”

  I held my thumb and forefinger in front of my eye and squinted through the quarter inch that separated them. “An itty, bitty favor.”

  Anne tried to look stern, eventually failed. Like most true friends, we had long ago surrendered to each other’s faults and foibles; prolonged anger between us was impossible. She shook her head and smiled. It was a dazzling smile, rarely seen by anyone other than her children and, occasionally, a pal. A few months ago a photographer for a local magazine spent the better part of a morning attempting to coax that smile from her and couldn’t, so zealously does she guard it. It was just as well. The headline above the accompanying article read: ST. PAUL’S ANGEL OF DEATH. It was not an image Anne approved of.

  Lieutenant Anne Scalasi was commander of the St. Paul Police Department’s Homicide Unit and therefore one of the most visible female law enforcement officers in the state of Minnesota. She rarely enjoyed the attention she received; press coverage of her divorce had infuriated her. Yet she loved the job. Many suggested—although they would not allow their names to be used in the article—that Anne’s promotion was merely a public-relations ploy by an affirmative-action-conscious police chief and mayor. I spent well over four years working in Homicide, nearly all that time as Annie’s partner, and I wholeheartedly disagreed. Anne Scalasi was the best cop I have ever known.

  She began life as an elementary schoolteacher in Anoka, a fact the magazine found particularly ironic. Just for th
e giggles she decided to join the local Ride-Along program and went patrolling with Anoka County deputies. That was all it took. She was hooked. Anne quit teaching, got a job as a night dispatcher for a suburban police department that same week, and attended the police academy during the day. And she married a cop. After earning a law enforcement degree, she became the department’s first female officer and, later, its first female detective. Eventually she was recruited by the state attorney general’s office. That was a political appointment, and as soon as she realized it, Anne quit, taking a position with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The BCA liked her so much, they sent her to the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia, where she was taught by the Behavioral Science Unit to investigate mass murders and serial rape killings. She scored first in her class. When she returned to the BCA, she requested that she be allowed to work with other law enforcement organizations that might require her expertise—which, of course, is why the agency was created in the first place. But the BCA began placing various bureaucratic restrictions on her, making her play second, third, and often fourth fiddle to their field agents. So she joined the St. Paul Police Department, which was happy to give her free rein.

  I remember when she arrived. We gave her the cold shoulder, my colleagues and I, calling her “Miss Betty” behind her back—Miss Betty being the name of the woman who taught Romper Room on TV. One day she leaned across my desk, smiled her dazzling smile, and announced: “The more violently the face of a murder victim is battered, the more likely the killer and the victim had a close relationship.”

  I told her I knew that.

  “And now you know that I know it,” she told me. “I know a lot of other things, too. So, you want to catch bad guys with me or what?”

  We caught a lot of them together.

  “Do you know the Dakota County sheriff?” I now asked.

  “Yes. Ed Teeters. Nice man.”

  “Nice enough to let a PI snoop around one of his investigations?”

  Anne gave me one of those here-we-go-again eye rolls and asked, “What are you into now?”

  “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton,” I told her. “She disappeared seven months ago. I was just hired to learn what happened to her.”

  “Good luck,” she said. “I worked the case …”

  I don’t know why I was surprised. Solving unsolvable murders is, after all, Annie’s specialty.

  “Teeters asked me if I could give him a fresh perspective. I couldn’t,” she admitted.

  She opened a lower desk drawer and took out a huge family photo album—her murder book, a grisly, gory, gruesome account of every homicide investigation she had ever worked, the investigations presented in chronological order with the most recent in front. Each account contained before-and-after photographs of the victim, a detailed description of the killing, a synopsis of the investigation, and final disposition of the case. Homicides that were solved had a blue tab; those that remained unsolved had a red tab. There were only a few red tabs, and most of these were near the front. Anne turned to the tab labeled #197. Case #197 differed from the others in that it was skimpier and didn’t feature a photograph taken after the victim’s body was discovered. The “before” photograph was a reprint of the one Hunter Truman had given to me that morning.

  “Theories?” I asked.

  Anne shrugged. “Assailant knocks, Alison answers; assailant pushes a gun in her face, forces her into a car, drives off. I put a stopwatch on it. From the mouth of the cul-de-sac to the driveway to the front door, back to the car and out; add thirty seconds waiting for Alison to answer the door: one hundred and sixty-seven seconds total. And that’s conservative.”

  “Who?”

  Anne consulted her notes. “Raymond Fleck.”

  “Based on what? The tape?”

  “No, his MO. He was convicted of rape eight years ago; what he did was knock on the woman’s door in broad daylight. When she answered, he pointed a gun at her, shoved her in, raped her, left.”

  “Does one conviction constitute an MO?”

  “He was convicted for one, but the arresting officers figured him for a half dozen others they couldn’t get positive IDs on. Victims wouldn’t come forward.”

  “Why take Alison with him?”

  “The one time he was convicted, he stayed in the house for five hours. Made himself lunch between attacks. This time he didn’t have five hours to enjoy himself; the husband was on his way home.”

  “If he did it for revenge, why not simply kill her and leave?”

  “Where’s the sport in that?”

  She had a point. Still, did she have anything that made it more than a theory?

  “He’s free, isn’t he?”

  “I asked a stupid question.” I admitted.

  Anne studied Alison’s photograph for a moment and then closed the album with a resounding thud. “Teeters brought me in because he was looking for an angle his people might have missed. I could convince him to let you in for the same reason.”

  “Would you?”

  Anne pushed herself away from the desk. Her swivel chair was on wheels, and she rolled it slowly to a bank of beige-colored metal filing cabinets. From the third drawer of the middle cabinet Anne retrieved a file maybe three inches thick, the pages held together with a metal fastener. The label on the file cover listed Alison’s name and the date of her disappearance. Anne dropped the file in front of me and started rummaging through the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. She came up with a brown grocery bag and slipped the file into it, but not before I peeked under the cover and read the first page: Case #97-050819 Dakota County Sheriff’s Department Alison Donnerbauer Emerton TABLE OF CONTENTS FELONY MURDER. The word COPY had been stamped in red several times across the page.

  Anne folded the bag and tossed it for me to catch, explaining that since technically it wasn’t a St. Paul or Ramsey County case, technically she wasn’t violating department regulations by lending me her file. Technically.

  “But I want it back. Without any rocket ships or baseball diamonds doodled in the margins,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to grease the skids for you with Teeters.”

  “You’re being awfully cooperative, Annie,” I told her.

  She leaned across the desk and spoke slowly between clenched teeth. “I do not like it when women are killed simply because they are women. It is UN-AC-CEPT-ABLE.”

  Now you know why Anne Scalasi is the best in the business. It’s not the training; it’s not the experience. It’s the outrage. She never lost it. The rest of us had. We were afraid of it, afraid of how it twisted our perceptions of the real world, afraid of the pain it made us feel. So we hid from it—hid behind bad jokes and out-and-out goofiness, hid behind booze and drugs and sex and macho behavior that bordered on the self-destructive until the outrage went away, leaving us numb. Not Anne. Anne did not hide from her outrage. She drew it like a gun.

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” she said but never did. That’s because she was interrupted by a detective, a black man whose reputation was also unfairly marred by an affirmative-action label.

  “Yo, mama!” Martin McGaney called as he danced toward us, waving a folded piece of paper like a baton before him.

  “Yo, mama?” I repeated quietly.

  “This better be good, Martin,” Anne warned as the detective approached. The warning was unnecessary. You could tell by the smile on his face.

  “Lookee what I have,” he said, drawing out the words, handing Anne the paper. It was an arrest warrant.

  “You finally found the guy who stole my ten-speed when I was in high school,” I ventured.

  “Taylor, you’ll appreciate this. You used to be a good investigator.”

  “Used to be?”

  “When you were young.”

  “Ahh.”

  “The bastard who raped and murdered that woman in front of her twelve-year-old daughter a couple weeks back? I got ’im!” He pumped his fist as he said it.

  The
case had made daily headlines since the crime occurred. A woman and her daughter had been driving home from a movie late at night when their car broke down. A “good Samaritan” stopped to offer assistance. Some assistance. He forced the woman and the girl into his car at gunpoint, drove to a secluded spot, and raped the mother, threatening to shoot the daughter if the woman resisted. When he was finished, he told the daughter she was next. The mother went to protect her child, and he shot her dead. In a panic, he shoved both mother and daughter out of the car and drove off. The daughter described the well-dressed assailant in detail but not the car, telling the police only that it was dark and “sporty looking.”

  “I took the daughter with me,” McGaney said. “She wanted desperately to help us find her mother’s killer. We cruised the car dealerships on the 1-494 strip, looking for a model she might recognize. We found it. A Ford Taurus GL.”

  “A Taurus is sporty looking?!”

  “She’s a little girl, what does she know from cars? Anyway, I obtained a list of every black or dark-blue Taurus in Minnesota from DMV, concentrating only on those vehicles owned by men who fit the age and general description the girl gave us. I found nineteen within five miles of where the woman’s car had stalled. I questioned each one, telling them I was investigating a hit-and-run and wanted to see their vehicles. One guy told me he’d sold his. Yeah, he sold it all right. The day after the murder he practically gave it away to a guy in St. Cloud. I drove the girl up to St. Cloud. She said it looked like the same car, but what clinched it was the radio. One of the buttons was still set for the station the guy was playing when he raped the mother—a station you can’t pick up in St. Cloud. The new owner allowed us to impound the car, and I had forensics do a search. They found bloodstains and strands of hair in the back seat. The samples were identical to the victim’s.”

  “Nice,” I told McGaney, and I meant it; he’d done a helluva job. “Very nice.”

  “Where is the daughter now?” Anne asked.

  “At home, waiting for me to call her about a lineup.”