“She was a bitch.”
“And Raymond wanted her, didn’t he?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You and Raymond were lovers, weren’t you? And then Alison came along and that changed. Isn’t that why you hated her so much?”
“No! No, I hated her for what she did to Raymond.”
“What did she do to Raymond?”
“She ruined his life.”
“You mean she ruined your life.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“How big are your feet, Irene?”
“Go to hell!” she retorted and strode swiftly from the cafeteria.
I chuckled quietly and made a few notes in the pad I carry, enormously pleased with myself. I had made it up. All of it. Made it up as I went along without thought or consideration, and damned if I didn’t uncover a viable suspect both Teeters and Annie had missed.
“Must be divine inspiration,” I mused.
“Beginning to annoy me,” Ed Teeters said over the telephone.
“Are you running surveillance on Irene Brown?” I asked.
“No.”
“Maybe you should put a team on her for a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“In case she tries to unload some incriminating evidence. A pair of running shoes, for example.”
There was a long pause on the other end, and I could almost hear the wheels turning inside the sheriff’s head. “Thought of that,” he muttered. “Tried to get paper for a search. Judge said no go. Said he doesn’t authorize fishing expeditions. I’m listening,” he said more loudly, and I told him of my conversation with Irene, told him that originally I hadn’t suspected her at all.
“I was trying to get her to open up about Fleck. Usually, you accuse someone of a crime they didn’t commit, and they’ll fall all over themselves trying to prove they’re innocent. I was hoping she’d talk about Fleck. She didn’t.”
“Means nothing,” Teeters concluded.
“I know. But here’s the thing. I pressed her for her shoe size. She wouldn’t tell me. Instead, she kept asking why I needed to know. I wouldn’t say, and that made her angry. Now, she’s going to think about it. She’s going to think about it long and hard. She’s going to realize we have a footprint.”
“Guilty, might try to dispose of the evidence. That the bet?”
“It’s a long shot,” I agreed.
He chortled. “Couldn’t possibly be that easy.”
six
I found Raymond Fleck kneeling in the dirt with a knife in his hand. He was trimming a roll of sod and using the strips he cut to fill a hole next to the sidewalk. Laying sod, digging holes, clearing brush piles: grunt work for a landscaper in North Minneapolis. Apparently it was the only employment he could find.
The knife blade reflected the sun as I approached. Despite the knife, Raymond did not look like Mr. Stranger Danger. He looked small and harmless in his dirty T-shirt and jeans, almost childish. And although he worked every day in the sun, his face had a gray tint you don’t see on a well man.
“Raymond Fleck?” I asked.
His whole body sagged at the question. He dropped the knife atop the sod and wiped his hands on his shirt. “It’s never going to end, is it,” he said in a sad voice. It wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. He was a man resigned to his fate, more pitiful than frightening.
Raymond was calm but watchful. His eyes looked around me, never at me, as if he were expecting someone else to come for him. He assumed I was a cop, but I corrected that assumption right away. In Raymond Fleck’s world, the cops were bad guys. I wanted him to believe I was the Lone Ranger riding to his rescue. So after showing him my ID, I told him I was working for a client who was convinced that Stephen Emerton had killed Alison. Fleck’s demeanor brightened considerably. At last, someone who believed.
“Alison hated her husband,” Raymond said. “She wanted a divorce, but she couldn’t get one because she came from a very strict Catholic family.”
“She told you that?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
He shook his head.
“Tell me about your relationship,” I urged.
“We loved each other.”
“Did you?”
“I thought we did.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything anymore.”
“Tell me what happened, Ray.” I gave his shoulder a reassuring pat.
“There weren’t any lightning flashes or fireworks or anything like that,” Raymond confided. “It happened slowly. She would touch my hand or look at me without speaking and then look away. I thought it was just my imagination; she couldn’t possibly be interested in a guy like me. Except she was. She told me so at lunch that first time, the first time we went together. She had invited me to lunch. She said she wanted to talk about—I don’t know—some project, only we didn’t talk about work. We talked about … I guess we talked about us. She told me she was unhappy in her marriage, but she didn’t know what to do about it, and I told her I was seeing Irene Brown, but I didn’t really care about her, and then she smiled and squeezed my hand and said at least we had each other, and we began to see each other on the sly. Mostly lunches. A lot of lunches, okay? Nothing came of it. I mean, they weren’t nooners or nothing. We didn’t make love. But the talking, it was almost better than sex. She was so fantastic. I couldn’t wait to see her, couldn’t wait to hear her voice, and when I did I couldn’t take my eyes off her, couldn’t stop listening.”
“Did Alison know about your prison record?”
Raymond shook his head sadly. “It’s not something you talk about,” he admitted.
“But she found out.”
“Yeah, that night.”
“Tell me about that night,” I prompted.
“She told me to park outside her house, and she would meet me after Stephen went to bed. I told her that was a dangerous idea, but she insisted. She said she had to see me. Had to see me,” he repeated as if he could scarcely believe it even now. “So I parked in front of her house, but Stephen saw me and called the police.”
“Stephen did?” I asked, knowing that Alison had made the call; she said so on the tape, and the police report confirmed it.
“Yes, and when they came—well, Alison had to deny she had invited me; she had to protect her marriage and her reputation; she was Catholic, you see. She told Mr. Selmi what happened for the same reason.”
“What did Selmi tell you?”
“He fired me. Had to, I guess. After what happened before.”
“What happened before?”
“People … people around the office, they suspected that Alison and I were having an affair, you know, and that was hard on her—a woman trying to make it in a man’s world, people talking behind her back, I mean. One day people were talking about it, around the coffee machine, I guess. I don’t know. And old-man Selmi overheard and asked Alison, ‘What’s this?’ What could she say? A good Catholic girl. So she said, you know, that I was harassing her, said it to protect herself. I understood that. Anyway, Old-man Selmi decided to have one of his fireside chats with me.”
“What did he say?”
“Said I shouldn’t dip my quill in the company ink well.”
“There’s leadership for you,” I said sarcastically. Raymond didn’t catch it. “What happened next?”
“Then Alison invited me over to her place; told me she wanted to explain why she said what she did. But Stephen called the cops. See, when the cops came that night, they checked my record, and Alison found out about—Anyway, that’s why she turned on me. God, how long am I going to have to pay for that? One mistake, one lousy mistake …”
Raymond began to sob at the injustice of it all. I was grateful for the chance to step away, to pretend to give him some privacy. How long would he have to pay for raping a woman? At least as long as she did, I hoped. I’d read the report; I knew what he had
done to her. How he rang her doorbell, and when she answered, he punched her in the face with the barrel of a gun and knocked her down and tied a gag over her mouth and raped her for five long hours, removing the gag only when he wanted her to wet his dick. Raymond had been arrested soon afterward, and when it became clear that the victim would testify, he pleaded down to second-degree criminal sexual conduct. He was sentenced to twenty-one months and served fourteen—it was his first conviction. And while in prison Raymond finished his education; several job interviews were waiting when he got out. He was fine. The woman still hasn’t recovered.
During the first few years after the attack, she was paralyzed with fear, actually carrying two knives with her when she moved through her apartment. She sold her home; she couldn’t live there anymore. Her TV was never off because she didn’t want anyone to know if she was awake or asleep. Her lights were never off, either. She slept with them on—not just one or two, but all of them—averaging about three to four hours’ sleep a night. She would get anxiety attacks driving home from work, panicking at every stoplight, desperate to reach her apartment before sundown. She never went out after dark. Never. Instead, she had holed up in her apartment with its reinforced doors and half-dozen locks and furniture arranged so that it was impossible to walk in a straight line, furniture with bells attached that rang when you bumped into it.
She found support from a small group of women who had also been raped. That had helped. And eventually time worked its magic, and she began to heal; she started to put that terrible day behind her. She started to go out. She started socializing again, although she still viewed each man she met as a potential threat. Then Alison disappeared, and Raymond Fleck’s photograph became a regular feature on TV and in the newspapers, and she was right back where she started.
And Raymond? Raymond got treatment. Raymond learned how to control his anger. In an effort to deflect accusations that he had killed Alison, he agreed to a newspaper interview. In the interview he talked about the therapy he underwent, the Transitional Sex Offender Program, and how it had made a new man of him. The reporter was very sympathetic and pointed out that the average rapist is charged with three or more sex crimes. But not Raymond. Raymond was cured. The system had worked. Praise the Lord.
Raymond was still weeping when I went back to him and put my hand on his shoulder. I was unmoved by his tears. I know a guy, whenever his contact lenses become dry, he forces himself to cry to rewet them; that’s how much I believe in tears.
“It’s okay, Ray, it’s all right,” I told him. What was it the political adviser said? “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Raymond rested his hand on mine for a moment and then brushed away his tears.
“What happened between you and Alison after you were fired?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t tell Alison you were going to get her?”
“No, of course not.”
“She received harassing phone calls.”
“Not from me,” Raymond insisted.
“The police pulled your telephone records. You called her several times at her home, at her office.”
“I called her only a couple times. I had to—you know—talk to her, but she always hung up.”
“You called her twenty-two times,” I reminded him.
“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I only called her a couple times. Three times, four times.”
“The records say twenty-two.”
“The records are wrong.”
“Could anyone else have called her from your phone?”
“No.”
“Irene Brown?”
“Why would she call?”
“I don’t know, why would she?”
Raymond didn’t answer.
“You were seeing her when Alison came along,” I told him.
“Yeah,” Raymond confirmed.
“And you started seeing each other again after Alison had you fired.”
“Irene was very kind to me; I didn’t know how good I had it.”
“Irene hated Alison,” I told him.
“No, she didn’t.”
“That’s what she said.”
“You spoke to her?”
“I have a question for you, Ray. When Irene volunteered to provide you with an alibi for the time that Alison disappeared, when she said she was going to protect you from the police, did it ever occur to you that she was actually providing an alibi for herself, that she was protecting herself?”
“What is this? You said Emerton did it. Why are you accusing Irene?”
“I didn’t say Irene—”
“You’re accusing Irene! You’re trying to get me to rat out Irene!”
“You have to consider—”
“Get away from me! I don’t have to talk to you, you’re not a cop. You just get away from me. Go on!”
Raymond scooped up the sod knife and threatened me with it. Oh, I was tempted, God knows. But I liked how this investigation was turning out, and I didn’t want to endanger it by breaking every bone in Raymond Fleck’s face.
“Some other time, Ray,” I told him as I walked away.
seven
“Only in Minnesota.”
I shook my head and stood dumbfounded outside the large and handsome split-level office building before me, home of the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District.
“Only in Minnesota,” I repeated.
Only in Minnesota, a state well-known for its ability to marshal together whatever resources were necessary to solve the least of our problems, would the legislature budget over ten million hard-earned tax dollars to kill mosquitoes. I am as opposed to the evil insect as the next fellow. But ten million bucks? Seventy-five full-time employees? A shiny new office building? Cars and trucks and helicopters? Say it ain’t so, Joe. But it is. Some well-meaning quality-of-life researchers discovered that on any given summer evening, the average Minnesotan is assaulted by four to five mosquitoes per five minutes. Upon hearing this news, our normally fractious state politicians rose as one: Forget the economy! Forget the environment! Forget the declining educational system! All work at the state capitol ceased until a bureaucracy was created— the seven-county Metropolitan Mosquito Control District—for the sole purpose of reducing mosquito attacks to only two bites per five minutes. Good Lord, how they must have celebrated that piece of legislation. Then they had the temerity to level the Midway Car Wash on University Avenue in St. Paul (where I worked as a kid) to make room for the damn thing. Is it any wonder that I was one cranky pup by the time a bored receptionist pointed me toward Stephen Emerton’s office?
I stood beside Emerton’s open door for a few moments, playing mental tricks to improve my disposition before I started questioning him. Anger and frustration creates a tense atmosphere, and a witness, sensing those emotions, will tighten up and shut up. It’s a problem I’ve grappled with most of my career. It’s the reason why Anne Scalasi conducted most of our interrogations while I stood in the background, looking surly.
“Mr. Emerton?” I finally asked, rapping softly on the open door and addressing the man inside.
“Aww, man!” he said, tossing a pencil on a map spread out on his desktop. “Not again!”
“Sir?”
“You’re a cop, ain’tcha?”
“Private investigator,” I replied and showed him my photostat.
“You work for that insurance company, don’t you?”
I would have told him no if he had given me the chance, but he didn’t, so I figured what the hell.
“What more do you guys want from me?” he continued.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions concerning your wife’s disappearance.”
“More questions? Christ, that bitch is gonna haunt me forever, isn’t she? Aww, man, I’m tired of it. I’m just so fuckin’ tired of it.”
I tried to mask my disapproval of him, convinced people would not say such stupefying things if
they could hear the sound of their own voices.
“We can speak another time,” I suggested, although I made no move to leave.
“No, no,” he answered, waving me toward a chair. “Now’s as good a time as any.”
Stephen Emerton was not the sharpest knife in the drawer by any means. Insulting a murder victim in front of an investigator wasn’t the brightest thing a suspect could do, for example—it tends to arouse suspicion. Still, he was tall and handsome and splendidly tanned; he looked like someone who measured his biceps twice a week. I could see how a lonely young woman might find him attractive. And then there was the paper displayed in frames behind him. Diplomas from the University of Minnesota. BA. MA. And a certificate declaring his membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Only he didn’t speak like a key holder. He spoke like a guy who spent his spare time calling talk radio programs.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Emerton told me. “It’s just that I am sick and tired of answerin’ questions about my wife, okay? I mean, I have problems of my own, okay? I can’t sell my house unless I practically give it away. The insurance company won’t pay off on my claim; one day it’s because without a body I can’t prove Alison is dead and the next it’s because they think I killed her—shit, make up your mind. And my friends, suddenly they’re all too busy to check out a ball game or go out for a beer, and you know why. It’s because of Alison, damn her.”
I felt the anger start in my stomach and work up. I fought to keep it down.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Emerton continued. “I’m sorry she’s dead. But hell’s bells, man, give me a break. People make out like she was Mary Poppins or somethin’. She was cheatin’ on me, you know? Forget that sexual harassment shit. She was sleepin’ with that little jerkoff, and when he started gettin’ serious, she burned him. That’s why he did her, man. Any idiot can see that. It’s not like she didn’t deserve it.”
I envisioned Alison’s photograph, which was sitting on the front seat of my car, and thought about the expression on her face, the look of incredible despair in her eyes. Then I thought about how much fun it would be to pop Stephen Emerton in the mouth. I stood up.
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