“He’s recycling jugs from an apple cider mill?” I asked, reading the label on the jug we were carrying as we headed back to Phil’s place. Something else illegal—you weren’t supposed to put petroleum products in old cider jugs.
“It’s a sweet deal,” Kenny told me. “See, he has this orchard, so in the fall he puts up the apple cider and makes people pay him a deposit for the jugs. Then, when they bring the jugs back in, he fills them with kerosene—he’s got a huge tank next to his garage. He sells the stuff out here, and by the end of winter he’s got all these empty jugs, ready to be refilled with cider again.”
“Does he clean them first?” Alan and I asked at precisely the same moment.
Kenny frowned. “I don’t really know.”
“Kenny. Think about it. Of course he rinses them out,” Mark chided.
“I don’t know. The kerosene would sorta sterilize things, wouldn’t it?”
We filled the stove at Phil’s shanty and pushed the starter button and were rewarded with a blue flame and what felt like no heat whatsoever.
“Maybe he got up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and fell in the hole,” I observed, only half joking.
Kenny nervously shut the trapdoor.
“Sorry about the wasted trip,” Mark told me.
“Oh no. It wasn’t wasted at all,” I assured him.
* * *
After I dropped the boys and their truck off in Petoskey, Alan had an odd request: He wanted to go back to Boyne City. “Why?” I asked him. “I think it is pretty clear our man has flown the coop. I was thinking my next move would be to ask Strickland to check into good old Phil, find out his background. He’s our man. He sat on his personal stool and bought Nina Otis drinks and then grabbed her somehow.”
“Just humor me,” Alan suggested, as if talking to him wasn’t humoring him. Pretending he existed was humoring him.
So in the name of humor, we drove back to Boyne City. Just as we hit the outskirts of town, Alan asked me to slow down. I accommodated him, looking blankly around. Here the trees were as thick as on Strickland’s property—we were pretty close to his house, in fact. I wondered if I should stop by to make my request in person and find out how he felt about what a cold day it was.
“There,” Alan said.
I looked. I saw no there there, no there anywhere. “What?”
“Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“Go back.”
Feeling a lot less humorous, I nonetheless swung the heavy truck into a ponderous U-turn and went back up the road. “Stop right here,” Alan told me. Across the street, on the lake side, there was a mailbox nearly buried in snow, a plowed gravel driveway disappearing into the trees.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“The mailbox. See the name?”
I did see. “Rogan.” I thought about it. “You think this could be our dentist turned bar owner?”
“I don’t know why not.”
“Rogan’s a pretty common name.”
“Okay, sure.”
I put on my light bar so that people would know I was on official business and got out and crossed the road, opening the mailbox over Alan’s objections that I was committing a federal offense. The mail was all addressed to Wade Rogan.
“It’s him, all right,” I said.
“Do you think the house is on the lake?”
“Probably.”
“So why would Rogan tell us he didn’t know anything about Shantytown? If he lives on the lake, he’s looking at it all winter long.”
I thought about it. “Let’s see if he’s home and ask him,” I suggested.
“What? No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I drove down the driveway, which was shouldered with five feet of snow on both sides. Rogan lived in a two-story home with stained wood siding. A snowmobile was sitting uncovered but clean by the steps to his front porch—most people who leave their machines outside put heavy tarps on them when they’re not in use. I knocked on the door, but no one answered.
His driveway curled to the right to a detached garage, but there were tire tracks in the snow right down to the ice. I followed them on foot. Alan was right: You could see all of beautiful downtown Shantytown from Rogan’s place.
I decided to find out where the tracks led. It was hard but not impossible to see where to go once I was on the ice: Patches of packed snow bore the marks of several car trips, and anyway, they were headed in a straight line. I knew where we would wind up long before we got there: a newer model ice shanty, made of metal, a heavy padlock securing the door. “So not only does he spend all winter looking at this place…,” I mused.
“He has a shanty of his own,” Alan finished for me.
“He said ice fishing wasn’t his thing.”
“Right.”
“Why would anybody lie about that?”
“Obviously, to hide something,” Alan speculated.
“Hide what? That he likes to ice fish?”
I started my truck and headed home, glancing at the mailbox as I drove past it. I didn’t know what it meant that Alan read the name on the mailbox when I didn’t even notice it. Obviously, though, my eyes must have glanced at it without registering what I was reading—otherwise, Alan wouldn’t have seen it. So maybe it lodged into my subconscious, and my subconscious told Alan. Or maybe Alan was my subconscious.
“So we’ve got the M.E. who either lied or didn’t notice that Lisa Marie hadn’t been in the water very long and who didn’t report the semen or think it was strange she was naked. You’ve got the mayor of Shantytown who vanishes the minute he hears you want to talk to him about Nina Otis. And you’ve got Wade Rogan the bartender telling us he doesn’t know anything about Shantytown when, in fact, he’s a resident.”
“Rogan seems like the weakest suspect,” I suggested. “It’s a pretty big jump from not admitting you ice fish to being a serial killer.”
“There’s something else,” Alan advised.
“What’s that?”
“Remember when you showed Rogan the pictures of the missing women? When he saw Rachel Rodriguez’s photograph? He asked you who it was. Rachel Rodriguez, who Strickland told us isn’t dead. She’s in San Diego. Maybe the reason Rogan didn’t know who she was is because he didn’t kill that one.”
“Geez.” I rubbed my forehead. “Okay, but also Rachel Rodriguez was sort of the prettiest one. Maybe he was just reacting like any guy would, wanted to know who she was because he thought she was hot.”
“I wouldn’t react like that.”
“Okay, any guy but you, Alan.”
My cell phone rang. I reached down and answered it, enduring a sigh from Alan, who felt it was unsafe for me to talk and drive.
“Ruddy? Time to make good on our arrangement.”
It was William Blanchard.
25
Time to Kill Alice Blanchard
Blanchard was living in his vacation place on Lake Charlevoix, so I expected that he would want to meet nearby. My grip on the phone tightened, though, when he named the time and place.
“Eight a.m. Parking lot, Ironton Ferry landing,” he said, still affecting a tough-guy terseness. “Tomorrow morning.”
I was silent.
“Know the place?” he asked.
“Yeah. You’re serious. That’s where you want to meet.”
“Nobody around. Ferry’s obviously not running. Yeah. Got a problem?”
I couldn’t hear any guile in his voice, no sly taunt. He obviously knew nothing about my history with the place. “No problem,” I grunted.
“See you then.”
“Right.”
“And I’ll have your money.”
“Good.”
He was quiet for what seemed like a minute. “Okay,” he replied slowly. He hung up.
“Something happened at the very end, there,” Alan observed.
“I know. It’s like he thought of something, but I don’t know what.�
� I called Cutty Wells, and she picked up on the first ring. She wanted to meet at the state police station in Cadillac, Michigan, which was a forty-five-minute drive from Kalkaska but would put me an hour and a half away from the Ironton Ferry, so we decided we had to be there at five o’clock in the morning. When I say, “we decided,” I mean that Cutty told me what time to be there, like a coach stating what time practice began. She didn’t say please.
“That’s pretty early,” Alan the detective noted.
“They better have donuts,” I agreed.
* * *
The Black Bear was packed for Claude and Wilma’s send-off. Becky roasted a pig and brought in fresh pineapples and served mai tais. Wilma tried to teach the women to do the hula, standing underneath Bob the Bear in what a less cultured person might say was a somewhat incongruent juxtaposition.
Katie wasn’t there—the cold snap had layered a lot of black ice on the highway, and I didn’t want her to risk it. I told her how much it meant to me that she was willing to make the trip, and I could tell how pleased she was to hear it.
“I hope their hotel isn’t some rat-infested hole,” Alan murmured as he watched Claude improvise what he claimed was a “male hula.” Claude slid his hips sideways and then did a cobra movement with his upper body, arms flailing as if they’d lost their inner bones. Laughing, a half dozen men tried to imitate the motion, spilling their beers on Becky’s new wooden floors. If Schaumburg had been there to see what the men were doing, he would have been handing out antipsychotics like crazy.
“Yeah, but it’s Hawaii, right? Even if the hotel has a view of a junkyard, they can still get to the beach,” I replied. There was so much noise in the bar, no one noticed me talking to myself.
“Hope so.”
My eyes tracked two guys coming in out of the cold. One of them was bigger than I was and wore a plaid vest over a clashing plaid flannel shirt in a style I assumed Alan found distasteful. His brown hair matched one of the colors in one of the plaids, and even under the thick cloth I could see he had weight-lifter arms. The other guy was smaller and ferret-faced, with sharp features and jet-black hair. I knew him.
“Tony Zoppi,” Alan moaned.
* * *
Zoppi saw me wading through the people involved in the choreography, and smirked. I pushed a few revelers aside until I was standing in front of our new guests in front of the door.
“Nice party,” Zoppi greeted, sneering a little.
I knew the big guy in the bad plaid too, I realized. His nickname was Buck, and he played high school football a few years after I did. He eyed me carefully, sizing me up in a way I’d seen before in this very bar.
“Let’s go outside,” I suggested. I reached up to the hook by the front door and snagged my coat, shrugging it on. Zoppi watched all this, an amused expression on his face.
“Ruddy,” Alan murmured. “You sure this is a good idea?”
I wondered if Alan wanted me to sprint to the repo truck and summon Kermit with the emergency Batphone. We walked down the street half a block so that we were standing directly under a streetlight.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out who took my Jeep?” Zoppi wanted to know.
I was watching Buck’s hands, which were shoved into his pockets. I couldn’t be sure he didn’t have a weapon. “I assumed you would.”
“Well, I want it back.”
“So why tell me? Call the bank.”
“You know who I am?”
“Yeah, you’re the guy who skipped making his car payments and then helped me repo his vehicle.”
Buck took his hands out of his pockets then, flexing them, and I relaxed. No weapon. He looked tense, ready to get into it, wanting to get it over with.
“Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me and gets away with it,” Zoppi stated in an I’m-very-impressed-with-myself voice.
Under that streetlight, the odd orange glare bouncing off the snow, we could see each other very clearly. Good. Moving slowly, I took a single step forward, eyes on Buck, an expression on my face I’d learned to wear in the yard at Jackson State Prison.
After a moment Buck glanced away, and I knew he’d never done any time.
“You really want this, Buck?” I asked softly.
Buck seemed surprised. Probably he didn’t realize I would know his name. Then I read the glance he threw at Zoppi perfectly: He was trapped now, and was going to have to go through with this even though he was afraid. We were big guys and would probably hurt each other, but he and I both knew I would hurt him more.
“How do we know Zoppi doesn’t have a gun?” Alan worried. But I knew he didn’t—he wouldn’t have brought his big bad bodyguard otherwise.
I made a decision. “You want your Jeep? It’s parked out in back of the bank in Traverse City.”
Zoppi looked me up and down. “You think I’m stupid?” he asked.
“Well, you let me take your car when I didn’t have keys or a tow truck; you think I think you’re a genius?” Zoppi scowled and looked expectantly at Buck. “So that’s where it is. At the bank,” I told the bigger guy. “That’s why you came here, to find that out.” Buck blinked, absorbing it, and then nodded slightly. I looked at Zoppi. “So either we get some blood on the snow, or I go back to my party and you go pick up your Jeep. But I’m hitting you first, Zoppi.”
Zoppi’s face weakened, his mafioso fierceness collapsing like the facade it was. I stared at him, ignoring Buck. When neither of them said anything or tried to take a swing at me, I deliberately turned my back on the two men and returned to the Black Bear.
* * *
The mai tais did nothing to help me get out of bed in the morning when the alarm sang at four a.m. Only by gulping coffee from a thermos did I keep warm and awake enough to arrive on time at the state police post—a squat one-story brick building with patrol cars and three civilian vehicles in the parking lot—one of which I recognized as Strickland’s.
Proving it is better to be a psychosis than a real person, Alan had gone back to sleep as soon as I bid good-bye to Jake, who looked at me as if I’d gone insane. I didn’t even try to get him to go pee in the frigid darkness.
We all met in a back room with a large mirror on the wall. Strickland looked irritatingly alert, and D.A. Darrell looked irritatingly arrogant. Cutty Wells looked sleepy, but she’d put on her makeup, and her hair was perfect. Everyone was drinking coffee. I was introduced to two uniformed state policemen but forgot their names. One of them shoved a tray of donuts toward me, and I sighed in gratitude. As I took a bite, Alan woke up—right, I had to drive down here in the dark by myself, but he wakes up for the sprinkles.
“We got permission to enter the restaurant there. The…” Cutty turned to Donut Cop.
“Landing,” Donut Cop and I said together.
“Right. The Landing. It’s closed, but the owner’s a great guy and gave me a key last night. We’ll be inside, covering everything. Also have two unmarked SUVs that will take up position on M-66 after the target arrives. This is the camera,” Cutty continued, passing over a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. “Full video and audio. Point of view, so keep looking at him the whole time.”
“It’s the Tigers. I’m more of a Cubs fan, myself,” I objected.
Everyone stared at me. “Come on, guys; it’s a joke,” I explained. “Who in his right mind would be a Cubs fan?”
“I love baseball,” Alan informed me.
“I think what you’re not getting here is the seriousness of the matter,” D.A. Darrell lectured. I nodded and reached for another donut, taking a huge bite as he pontificated. “Conspiracy to commit murder. We need you to wrap this up perfectly.”
“You want me to wear a baseball cap and look at him. Check,” I said agreeably. It sounded like something I could probably handle.
“This is your backup. No camera, just audio,” Donut Cop said, passing over a stick of gum. “Put it in your coat pocket. It’s very sensitive, so try not to move around too much.”
“What happens if I chew it?”
The two cops in uniform grinned, but everyone else wore stony expressions.
“It’s what you get on tape that matters,” Cutty told me. “As much of the plan as possible. Try to get him to say he wants you to murder his wife. Sometimes it works to say something like, Any preference on how I do it? because he might respond that he wants you to shoot her. But draw him out. Talk about it with him.”
“She really is attractive,” Alan gushed.
“You’ll be good at this, Ruddy,” Strickland told me.
“And get the money. To convict,” the D.A. told me, pointing at my face, “it’s something of value for a contract to commit murder.”
I could tell by the expression on Cutty’s face that there was something about this that she didn’t precisely agree with, but she didn’t argue. Instead she gazed at me, her eyes intent. “Ruddy, two phrases. You get the money, the ‘thing of value’”—I detected a faint sarcasm—“you say bingo. That tells us to move in. But if there’s any danger, just say not good. My team will be on him in seconds.”
“Bingo for money, not good for trouble,” I repeated dutifully.
“Don’t screw it up,” D.A. Darrell warned.
“No, I’ll get something of value,” I agreed jovially. “About that. The money. It goes into evidence, right?”
“Right. To be presented at trial,” Hughes said.
“And then when does it get released? After conviction, or what?”
“What do you mean?” Cutty asked.
“How long before it’s no longer needed as evidence?” I elaborated.
Strickland was staring at me with a pained expression. “Ruddy … the government keeps the money. You don’t get any of it.”
I had been reaching for a third donut, but now I frowned. Everyone was nodding in happy confirmation.
“What did you think, that you would get the money?” D.A. Darrell chuckled in a derisive way that seemed to beg for someone’s fist to split his lips.
“Uh, are you maybe forgetting that I spent a few years talking to a bunch of convicts every day?” I retorted. “Half of those guys got paid money to set up their buddies for a fall or to give information leading to a bust; it’s what they do for a living when they aren’t being criminals. So yeah, Darrell, I thought maybe as compensation for getting my ass out of bed to drive to Cadillac at five in the morning and then wearing the hat and carrying the gum, that when you were done showing the jury what five thousand dollars looks like, I might just get to hang on to some of it. Like a reward. You can’t pretend you’ve never done something like that before. It’s how this works. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”
Repo Madness Page 24