Dearly Departed

by David Housewright

  Cynthia said it had been a tough day, that her caseload was heavier than usual, that she was considering bringing a few more freelance attorneys on board to assist her. But she was sure she could find time for us—assuming I didn’t spend the rest of my life in northern Wisconsin.

  “I’ll be home soon,” I predicted.

  After a moment of silence, Cynthia said, “Irene Brown and Raymond Fleck were in the paper this morning.”

  “Were they?”

  “The Dakota County grand jury refused to return an indictment, and the county attorney was forced to release them. According to the paper, Irene and Raymond are leaving Minnesota. The paper said they’re getting married and moving to Oregon.”

  “Happy trails,” I said.

  “You’re off the hook.”

  “With them, maybe.”

  “How’s Alison?”

  “Still critical, last I heard.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then just to change the subject—I didn’t want to speak of Alison anymore—I asked, “What’s your favorite song?”

  “My favorite song?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think,” I urged her.

  “I … probably … I don’t know, ‘Misty,’ I guess.”

  “‘Misty’? Really? The old Erroll Garner tune?” I was expecting something by Jewel or Melissa Etheridge, somebody like that.

  “No, no,” Cynthia repeated. “Not Errol Garner. The song Johnny Mathis sings.”

  “Yeah, he covered it,” I said. “Garner wrote it. The music, anyway.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just something I thought I should know.”

  Deputy Loushine was not surprised by anything I told him concerning Jimmy Johannson.

  “The sadistic sonuvabitch never drew an honest breath in his life,” he told me.

  “He lied about not knowing Thilgen,” I said. “The question is, Does he have a reason for lying, or is he just doing it out of habit?”

  Loushine cursed. He had information that would bring Johannson to heel—Thilgen’s canceled checks—but he couldn’t use them because some big-shot private detective didn’t know shit one about the rules of evidence.

  “Hang it up for tonight,” I told the deputy. “We’ll get a fresh start in the morning.”

  I could hear him yawn.

  “Meet me for breakfast,” he said, naming a café in Saginau. “Seven-thirty,” he added.

  “I’ll be there,” I promised without complaining how much I hate getting up that early in the morning.

  My next call was to Duluth General Hospital. After a brief give-and-take, the switchboard operator directed me to the Intensive Care Unit. The nurse who answered the phone wanted to know how I was related to the patient before she would release any information. I couldn’t bring myself to lie and pretend I was a member of Michael’s family or that I was even a close personal friend. Instead, I lied and said I was Kreel County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Loushine. The nurse put me on hold while she checked her charts. When she returned, her voice had changed considerably. It was now low and rough and filled with exhaustion. And male.

  “Gary,” the voice said. “Is there something new?”

  “Um, sorry, Sheriff,” I said; I nearly hung up when I heard his voice. “It’s not Loushine. It’s Holland Taylor.”

  “Goddammit, Taylor,” Orman muttered.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” I told him quickly. “I just wanted to find out how … Michael is doing”

  “She’s still in a coma,” Orman told me.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  A moment of silence passed between us before the sheriff asked, “You really care about her, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I surprised myself by answering. I’d spent weeks examining every aspect of her life, so of course I cared about her—at least that’s how I justified my feelings to myself. “I only met her that one time, but it feels like I’ve known her all my life,” I added.

  “I feel the same way,” the sheriff admitted. Then he said, “I don’t want you calling here again.”

  I promised I wouldn’t and hung up.

  My next call was to Hunter Truman, whose reaction was surprisingly subdued as I told him that the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department was giving me carte blanche in finding out who had shot Alison and why. I guess he had been looking forward to the lawsuit.

  He asked how Alison was. I told him she was in a coma. His reaction surprised me again. Instead of being concerned for her well-being, he wanted to know if Duluth General Hospital—and the rest of the world—knew that she was, in fact, Mrs. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton and not Michael Bettich.

  “I think they’re catching on,” I told him.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” he told me.

  The Forks was located northwest of Kreel County at the intersection of two blacktops and three snowmobile trails. It was a flat, sprawling, ornate complex wholly out of place in the Northland; it had started small but had expanded every which way, until it could now boast 23 blackjack tables, 262 slot machines, and 36 bingo tables. It was simple enough to find. I just followed the bright glow in the sky—the casino had twin searchlights mounted in its parking lot, scanning the heavens for gamblers. I wondered if the Three Wise Men had felt the same way when they followed their celestial beacon to the King of Kings. Probably not.

  Along with gambling paraphernalia, The Forks housed a restaurant where you could get a drink but only if you also ordered food. The waitress, who was white, told me it was “a tribal thing.” The Ojibwa had suffered enough alcohol abuse in their history without promoting it themselves. I passed on the buffet. Buffets are for old people who need to see the food they’re ordering—my grandfather told me so. Instead, I asked the waitress what was good and went with her recommendation of prime rib. That’s when I discovered that The Forks served no Minnesota beers: no Pig’s Eye, no Landmark, no Summit Ale. I brought the obvious prejudice to her attention, and she reminded me with only a hint of impatience that I could drive to the Minnesota border in an hour if I kicked it. I settled for a Beck’s.

  The restaurant was elevated about eight feet and looked out over a handsomely carved railing to the gambling area. Like the protesters at the church in Deer Lake, I can’t bring myself to call it “gaming.” Watch the intense, humorless faces of the people sitting at the tables or perched in front of the slots, and then tell me it’s a game.

  Still, I’m fairly ambivalent about casino gambling. It’s not something I like to do. For one thing the odds are appalling; you’re six times more likely to catch malaria than you are to win the big jackpot on a typical three-wheel slot machine. For another, I believe we have only so much luck in our lives, and I’m loathe to squander it playing twenty-one. But, then, I’m a fully insured, independent contractor who likes his job and has a couple of hundred thousand dollars tucked away in various IRAs. Most people aren’t as fortunate. When they buy a lottery ticket or pump a quarter into a slot, they’re buying something that their lives don’t already give them: hope. Hope that lightning will strike, and they’ll become independently wealthy and won’t have to work that demeaning job anymore or put up with that terrible boss or go another year without a decent home or car or whatever. They’re buying a tiny chance on a kind of Reader’s Digest sweepstakes dream that they’ll gain complete control of their lives and live happily ever after. And who am I to ridicule their fantasy and the short-term pleasure that pursuing it brings them?

  Certainly there was at least one believer on the casino floor. I heard her shriek, “Five thousand dollars!” while I was waiting for my meal. The words cut through the crowd like a gunshot. Several hundred people became suddenly quiet; then a ripple of applause brought the volume back up as the woman danced around a dollar slot machine, hugging complete strangers who had encircled her to share her good fortune.

  “Double or nothing! Double o
r nothing!” a woman in the restaurant shouted. I turned to look at her. She was seated six tables away, and I could see her profile.

  “Hundred bucks says she blows it before the night is out,” she bet her companion and laughed again. It was a joyless laugh, high-pitched and forced. I think the laugh was more recognizable to me than the face. Both belonged to Eleanor Koehn, King’s wife, the “slush” Gretchen Rovick had pointed out during my first visit to Deer Lake.

  Her companion scanned the eyes of the restaurant patrons as they turned toward Eleanor, and he pulled in his head like a turtle.

  “What are you afraid of?” Eleanor demanded scornfully.

  Her date didn’t reply, and Eleanor slapped him hard. I could feel it even where I was sitting. He stared glassy-eyed at her for a moment, then swiveled his head around fearfully, looking for something, seeing nothing. She spoke softly to him, and he replied with a wide grin. She laughed again, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. While she was kissing him, she straddled his lap, her skirt hiked up to there. When she was finished, she laughed some more and called him, “My little doughboy.”

  “Enjoying the floor show?” the waitress asked, placing a platter in front of me.

  “Better than the afternoon soaps,” I told her, and she grunted. She must have alerted the management because a moment later a tall Native-American gentleman meticulously dressed in matching jacket and tie approached the table. He said something quietly, and Eleanor removed herself from her date’s lap. She smiled seductively and brushed the manager’s cheek with her fingertips as she returned to her chair.

  “Champagne!” she called, slapping the table, rattling the remains of their dinner. “A big bottle.”

  Her date bowed his head and said nothing.

  A bottle was brought to the table in a bucket of ice and opened expertly by the waitress, much to Eleanor’s obvious disappointment. She no doubt had wanted to try shooting out one of the overhead lights with the cork. Still, whatever the manager had said must have registered because although Eleanor poured liberally from the bottle, she remained comparatively quiet.

  I grew bored with the show by the time I had finished the prime rib and signaled for the tab, paying by credit card. That’s when a man entered the restaurant and approached Eleanor and her date like he had been expected all along. He was a big, soft-bellied man with gray hair that may or may not have been his own. It was King Koehn. I knew it without knowing him.

  After taking my receipt, I ordered another beer, deciding to wait for the second act. The waitress sniffed at me and turned away. Near as I could tell, she had no sense of humor. Perhaps she had never been unhappy enough to develop one. Either that or she simply didn’t appreciate the entertainment value of a good public brawl between husband and wife.

  King Koehn spoke with the clear, booming voice of a practiced politician. I could understand every word he said from fifty feet.

  “There you are,” he told Eleanor and slapped her date on his back. From the look on the date’s mug, it might as well have been the kiss of death.

  But whatever hope of maintaining his dignity that King might have entertained was dashed when Eleanor asked loudly, “What are you doing here? What do you want? Did Michael throw you out? No, no, wait. She’s sleeping with the sheriff these days. No, no, I forgot. Somebody shot her. An outraged housewife, you think?”

  Say what? Another suspect? I removed my notebook from my pocket and wrote Eleanor’s name under Gretchen’s. Then I crossed out Gretchen’s name. After a moment’s thought, I crossed out Bobby Orman’s, too.

  “Eleanor, please,” Koehn said. It wasn’t a plea. It was a warning. And it went right over Eleanor’s head.

  “‘Eleanor, please,’” the woman spit back at him.

  Bad move. I knew it and so did the other diners. Suddenly it felt like we were watching a tightrope walker who abruptly stops and begins to teeter back and forth, fighting to regain his balance. Suddenly it was no longer amusing. And while no one departed, you could see from the expressions that none of us were sure we wanted to see what would happen next.

  “It’s getting late,” the date said and attempted to rise.

  “Sit down, fat boy!” Eleanor screeched at him. The date sat. It was clearly a tossup as to who he was more afraid of, husband or wife.

  “Slut,” Koehn called his wife.

  “Prick,” she countered.

  “Whore!”

  “Queer!”

  “Bitch!” Koehn screamed and pulled the near-empty champagne bottle from the bucket by the neck.

  “No!” Eleanor screamed in reply and hid her head behind her arms.

  I anticipated the violence. With the first volley of insults I was on the move, and by the time Koehn raised the bottle above his head to crush his wife’s skull, I was in position to pull his arm back. I held it there for a moment as the champagne cascaded over the two of us then yanked hard, wrenching his shoulder and forcing the bottle from his grip. He grunted and tried to hit me with a backhand. I used the bottle to block him, and he hurt his knuckles against the unyielding glass.

  “You look ridiculous, Mr. Koehn,” I told him softly.

  “Huh?”

  “All these people watching, you don’t need this.”

  Koehn didn’t move his eyes so much as an eighth of an inch, yet he was suddenly aware of everyone around him.

  “He was going to kill me! He tried to kill me, you saw it!” Eleanor shouted to whoever might be listening.

  “You’re an important man in Kreel County,” I reminded Koehn. “You can’t act like this.”

  His nod was imperceptible to anyone not looking for it.

  “Call the police! We need the police!” Eleanor added.

  “Now’s a good time to take a walk,” I said. “Clear your head.”

  “Call the police!” Eleanor repeated.

  “She’s a whore,” Koehn told me. “She’s ruining my life.”

  I didn’t know if she was ruining his life or he was ruining hers, and I didn’t care, but I said, “Screw her. Life’s too short.”

  “Who are you?” Koehn asked.

  “Let’s just say I’ve had woman troubles myself and let it go at that.”

  Koehn nodded his thanks, stepped away from me, and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for disturbing your evening. I hope you will forgive me. Good night.”

  “Where are you going?!” Eleanor shouted at his back as Koehn moved away. He didn’t reply, didn’t turn his head. “Where are you going?!” she shouted again, louder. She was interrupted by the manager, who informed her that her patronage was no longer welcomed.

  “I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” she told him.

  The bouncers on either side of the manager quickly convinced her otherwise. One gripped her elbow and escorted her to the door. The second grabbed her date by his collar, yanked him up out of his chair, and pushed-pulled him in the same direction. In sixty seconds flat their table was cleared and prepared for more genial customers.

  I returned to my own table, brushing at the champagne that soaked my new sports coat, wondering what the hell I was doing helping King Koehn. The waitress was standing there. Next to her was the tall Native-American manager in the tailored suit and tie. His eyes were quiet and sure, a take-your-time kind of guy. He said, “Follow me.” I followed.

  He led me down a flight of steps to the casino floor and then to the door of a closed office tucked beneath the restaurant. We passed a man and woman loitering at a blackjack table as we went.

  “Give me ten dollars,” the man demanded.

  “I just gave you ten dollars,” the woman replied.

  “So? Give me some more.”

  “No.”

  “Bitch.”

  The manager opened the door and held it for me to enter. I did. The office inside was large and neat to the point where I was uncomfortable to be in it. Even the personal items were arranged with meticulous care and consideration. On the wall behi
nd the desk was an ancient photograph of a naval destroyer mounted in a wood frame. A small gold plate attached to the bottom of the frame identified it as the USS Johnston. I was familiar with the name but couldn’t place it. Sitting beneath the photograph was an elderly Native-American with the sun-drenched face of an outdoorsman. He looked as though he had been through a scrape or two in his time. He nodded at my companion, who nodded back and left the office, shutting the door behind him.

  “My name is Carroll Stonetree,” the man behind the desk said without offering his hand. “I sorta run things around here.”

  “Carroll?” I asked. The name seemed as inappropriate as his voice. He looked like the warrior who had lifted Custer’s baby finger for a souvenir following the Little Big Horn massacre, but he spoke with a high-pitched reedy voice that made you think he was putting you on.

  “Call me Chief,” he said. “That’s a naval title, not tribal. I served some years in the USN.”

  “She seems familiar to me,” I said, pointing at the photograph.

  “The Johnston? She was lost October 25, 1944.”

  “Now I remember. The Battle of Leyte Gulf …”

  “Halsey was suckered out into the North Pacific by the Japs,” Stonetree added quickly, as if he was anxious to recite the tale. “He thought he was chasing the entire Imperial Fleet. As it turned out, the entire Imperial Fleet was sneaking through the San Bernardino Strait on its way to launch a surprise attack against MacArthur’s forces on Leyte in the Philippines. Five battleships including the Yamato, ten heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, twelve destroyers.

  “The Johnston was part of a small task force that was supporting the landings, three destroyers and four escorts. It was ordered to intercept the Japanese. We engaged three heavy cruisers in succession: the Kumano, Chikuma, and Yahagi. We hurt them. Hurt them bad enough to scatter their ships and buy time for Halsey to regroup. Except they killed us. Fourteen-inch shells, six inchers— they fell on us like heavy rain. One officer said, ‘It was like a puppy being smacked by a truck.’ We fought until every gun was silenced. We lasted two hours. Of a compliment of three hundred twenty-seven, only one hundred and forty-one crewmen survived. But we did the job, we saved MacArthur’s ass; his and Halsey’s. I was seventeen at the time.”