by Glenn Ickler
“She really had a wonderful family life. A father who beat her—did you say on her bare ass?—and an uncle who mauled her.”
“Yes, I said bare ass. The bastard would pull her pants and panties down, lay her across his lap and smack her on the ass as hard as he could. I think he got off on it.”
Again, more information than I could print. “You don’t think Marilee’s dad might have killed her?”
“I have thought of that. I really did think that when they dug up the bones in the backyard the other day, but now they say it was a man?”
“It was. Any idea who it might be?”
“Not a clue. That’s really weird. All I can think of is maybe Jack killed somebody, but who? And why? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Could it be Jimmy?” I asked. “Could Jack have found out that Jimmy had knocked up his daughter and killed him?”
“Oh, shit, I hadn’t thought of that,” Lauralee said. “But in that case, what happened to Marilee?”
“As I said to my photographer buddy yesterday, only Jimmy could tell us.”
Lauralee sat in silence for a moment with her hands steepled in front of her face. “I haven’t been much help to you, have I?” she said at last.
“Oh, no, you’ve been a lot of help,” I said. “You’ve confirmed my suspicion that Marilee might have been pregnant and you’ve given me information about her father’s spankings, her uncle’s roaming hands, and her feelings about Jimmy.”
“But that doesn’t explain what happened to her. None of it does.”
“It gives me pieces that might make sense if I find another piece or two.”
Lauralee smiled, uncrossed her legs and slowly crossed them the other way, showing me further evidence that she might be naked beneath the robe. “Let’s talk about you for a while,” she said.
“Me? Why? I’m just a reporter doing his job.”
“Are you a married reporter?”
“For almost two months. I tied the knot with my longtime lover just before Memorial Day.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why do you say that?” Being a sharp-eyed, ever-observant reporter, I had an idea why.
“You’re a very attractive man. You’re tall and strong and virile looking, and I haven’t had a man in my bed for a long time.” She stood up and the robe spread open far enough for me to get a flash of her bellybutton and everything below it before she pulled it shut. I’d been right; there was nothing inside that robe but Lauralee.
“I suppose you’re the non-cheating type of newlywed,” she said.
At that moment, I wasn’t so sure, but I said, “You’re right. I am.” Another ribbon of sweat trickled down my forehead and I wiped it away with the back of my left hand. I could feel pools of water in my armpits.
Lauralee let the robe fall open all the way, revealing two suntanned breasts with dark burgundy nipples standing taught, and a flat tummy that tapered into a velvety-smooth, bikini-waxed V at the juncture with her equally well-tanned thighs. A gold stud winked at me from the top of the path to paradise. This was one smoking forty-year-old.
“Sure I can’t tempt you, Mitch?”
My whole forehead was beaded with sweat and I was feeling action where I shouldn’t have been feeling action. I rose from the chair and said, “You’re gorgeous and I’d love to be tempted, but I just can’t do it.” I started backing toward the door.
She pulled the robe together and shook her head. “Just my luck to get a man with morals. If you ever change your mind or your wife decides to dump you, you have my number and my invitation.”
“Thanks, I’ll remember that,” I said. I had reached the door and turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t open.
“I took the liberty of locking the door behind us,” Lauralee said. She walked past me, letting her robe flow freely in the breeze and giving me another whiff of her spicy fragrance as she went by. She unlocked the door, turned toward me, grabbed my face between her hands, pressed her lips against mine for about three seconds, and then released me and backed away. “Bye, bye, moral married man,” she said and opened the door. I almost tripped over my own feet going out.
“Come again when you can stay and play,” she said. The robe still hung open.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“No problem,” she said, lazily closing the door. Coming from her, I had no problem with that response.
* * *
“SO WHAT DID YOU do today, sweetie?” Martha Todd asked as we sat on our porch sipping our before-dinner ginger ale cocktails. Martha has no problem with booze and has been known to tip a glass of wine at dinner with friends or a party, but she rarely indulges in anything alcoholic when it’s just the two of us.
“Talked to a bunch of people who think they’ve seen Marilee Anderson,” I said. “I don’t think any of them have.”
“Weren’t you going to interview Marilee’s cousin today?”
“I was and I did.”
“What was she like?”
“Very cooperative.” I immediately wished I’d chosen a different adjective.
Martha’s back stiffened. “Oh? Cooperative in what way?” she asked.
“In the way of answering questions. She told me a lot about Marilee and Jimmy the store clerk, and about Marilee’s dad and her creepy uncle. The dad spanked her bare butt and the uncle groped it, along with everything else.”
“Nice home life.”
“That’s what Lauralee said.”
“What’s Lauralee look like?”
“Oh, you know. Your average forty-year-old female.”
“What do you call average?”
I saw I could be headed for trouble here. “Oh, you know. Average.”
“Am I average?”
“God, no. You’re a way-above-average, super-sexy, gorgeous female who doesn’t look a day over twenty-nine.”
“Did Al take pictures of Lauralee?” Martha asked.
“No, Al got sent out to the big crash on I-94. I had to go without a photographer.”
“So I won’t be able to see Lauralee’s face in the paper?”
“Afraid not.” And you won’t see her naked body in the paper, either, I thought.
“So I have to take your word for it that she’s average looking.”
“Afraid so.”
“Is she sexy?”
“Some men might think so.”
“But not you?”
“Hey, I’m married to the sexiest woman between St. Paul and Cape Verde.”
Martha got off her chair, leaned over me and kissed me on the lips. “Okay, you smooth-talking stud muffin, let’s go have supper.” I wiped the sweat off my forehead with my left hand and followed her into the house. I was glad that I’d washed up and changed clothes when I got home so Martha detected no lingering essence of Lauralee.
* * *
“WHAT DID I MISS yesterday?” Al asked as he brought coffee to my desk Saturday morning.
I noticed Corinne Ramey look up at the next desk. “Let’s take this coffee into the cafeteria and get some doughnuts to go with it, and I’ll tell you all about it,” I said. Corinne’s eyes returned to the press release on her desk as we walked away.
“You missed the photo-op of the century,” I said when we were seated at a table in a corner of the cafeteria.
“Oh, yeah? What did she do? Take off her clothes?”
“How did you guess?” I gave a minute-by-minute, inch-by-inch description of Lauralee’s strip show while Al interjected monosyllabic profanities. When I was finished, Al said, “And while you were watching a private strip show, I was spending two goddamn hours shooting bloody faces and mangled metal and mushed tomatoes out in the sun on a boiling blacktop road. Life is not fair.”
“I could set you up for a photo shoot with Lauralee. I’ve got her number.”
“And we’d explain this to Carol how?”
“Tell her that duty calls.”
“Seems more like booty c
alls.”
“Carol doesn’t have to know the naked truth.”
Chapter Seventeen
A Day of Rest
ON SUNDAY I ALWAYS—well, almost always—call my mother and Grandma Goodie. They are both widowed and live together on the family farm near Harmony, a small city in southeastern Minnesota. The milking stanchions in the old dairy barn stand empty, but the hay mow is still used for storage by a couple of neighboring farmers who rent the cropland and grow hay, corn, and oats.
I enjoy talking to my mother, who gives me a crop report—the corn was more than knee-high on the Fourth of July this year—and tells me what’s wrong with the Minnesota Twins—the manager knows nothing about handling prima donna athletes.
Grandma Goodie is another story. As she did at my birthday party, she usually zeroes in on her favorite topic, which is my absence from anything resembling a church every Sunday. Her concern for my salvation is touching, but her harping on the subject is aggravating. It was her insistence on a church wedding that persuaded Martha, who is as averse to organized religion as I am, and me to find a minister who would conduct the ceremony in a church. The fact that the only minister liberal and compassionate enough was Unitarian-Universalist didn’t sit very well with my more conventional grandmother, but she accepted it as being better than a justice of the peace in the Como Park Pavilion.
“Did you go to church this morning, Warnie Baby?” Grandma Goodie asked as soon as Mom passed her the phone.
“I think you know the answer,” I said. “I didn’t get there today.”
“Warnie Baby, you need to think of your immortal soul. You need to be right with the Lord when the Day of Judgment arrives.”
“You know I’m counting on your prayers to take care of me when that day arrives, Grandma.”
“Well, Warnie Baby, I won’t be around forever to ask the Lord for your salvation. I’ll be eighty-nine in December, you know, and the doctor says my heart isn’t the strongest he’s ever seen on an eighty-eight-year-old lady.”
“Yes, but your heart is in the right place.”
“A lot of good that will do when it stops beating.”
“I think you’ll make at least a hundred,” I said. “Maybe a hundred and five.”
“Oh, Warnie Baby, what an awful thought. With my aches and pains and whatnot.”
I quickly changed the subject to the Twins, who were also Grandma’s favorite target for constructive criticism, and the conversation was more pleasant until the end, when she closed with, “I expect to hear that both you and Martha have been to church when you call here next Sunday.”
I wanted to say, “Forgeddaboutit,” but I simply said, “Bye, I love you,” in my cheeriest tone of voice and hung up. I had in fact attended a Methodist service with Mom and Grandma about a year earlier and it wasn’t the best of times. The minister chose that Sunday to blame the press for most of the problems of both the religious and the secular worlds, and my post-sermon conversation with him had been as strained as the coffee in our cups.
“Let me guess,” Martha said. “Grandma Goodie wants you to go to church next Sunday.”
“Lucky guess,” I said. “But only half right. She wants you to go with me. She’s worried about your soul, too, Marty Baby.”
“She didn’t call me that.”
“No, but don’t faint if she does. Lucky for you, she never saw you in diapers.”
“Too bad for you that she saw you in your birthday suit.”
“How would you like to see me in my birthday suit?”
“Now? It’s the middle of Sunday afternoon.”
“Got anything better to do?”
Martha thought it over for about three seconds before grabbing my hand and towing me toward the bedroom. I offered no resistance.
* * *
MY FIRST CALL MONDAY morning was to Detective Lieutenant Curtis Brown. To my amazement, after the first ring I heard, “Homicidebrown.”
“Dailydispatchmitchell,” I said. “What’s new on Skeleton X?”
“Stubborn bastard still hasn’t told us his name,” Brownie said. “Toughest interrogation I’ve ever had.”
“Have you tried the extra bright lights and the rubber hose?”
“Lights don’t even make him blink, and he just gives the hose a big toothy grin.”
“With some of the teeth missing, according to the doctor of forensic dentistry.”
“We’ve got two guys on their hands and knees in the rose garden running dirt through a sifter like the archeologists use to see if we missed any.”
“Wow, that’s a great lead for my story: ‘Kneeling coppers seek skull’s choppers.’”
“Probably won’t get you a Pulitzer,” Brownie said.
“That’s why I’m putting the bite on you; I’m trying to extract something with more teeth,” I said.
“I can’t give you anything much to chew on, Mitch. Still haven’t determined a cause of death, either.”
“Are you getting any help from Skeleton X’s’ above-ground hosts?”
“You mean the Andersons? We’ll be talking to them today.”
“As suspects?”
“Negative. Not even as persons of interest. As of this moment we have nothing that would tie either of them to Skeleton X except the proximity of his gravesite. No prosecutor would hang a charge on that.”
“Are you working on the Bjornquist DNA?”
“I can’t comment on that at this time. All I can say is that basically we are now working on two cold cases, one of which was never hot in the first place. Have a good day, Mitch.”
I interpreted Brownie’s closing comment to mean that investigators had found no other missing person from that time-frame who matched Skeleton X’s size and age. That meant that all things were pointing to Jimmy Bjornquist as the late possessor of Skeleton X, subject to DNA confirmation. This could be done with his cousin’s cooperation. But it wouldn’t tell us who planted Jimmy in the rose garden. Was it Jack Anderson or still another missing person?
This question brought another bizarre scenario flashing like lightning through my clouded brain. What if, instead of Jimmy killing Marilee, Marilee had killed Jimmy and run away, leaving her parents to cover up for her by burying Jimmy’s body?
This was too much to deal with. I decided to leave the puzzle of Skeleton X to Brownie for the rest of the day and turned my attention to the list of people who’d thought they’d seen Marilee Anderson sometime in the last twenty-five years. Seven more names had been added overnight, but I wanted to follow up on one of the previous thirty-six. The woman who’d said she’d seen Marilee in a Catholic church wearing dark clothing had sounded sober and non-delusional when she left the message. Maybe she could provide me with some details.
Helen Hammersley lived in Newport, a suburb just south of the city. She answered on the third ring.
I told her that I’d like to hear more details about when she had seen the woman she thought was Marilee. She thought for a moment, and said, “It must have been in April, because I was taking care of my sister in her house in north Minneapolis. She’d had surgery and I was staying over to do the cooking and the housework for a few days. We’re both in our seventies, you know, and she lost her husband about two years ago so she’s all alone in that big old house. My husband wasn’t too happy with me being gone for almost a week but I told him family is family and what else can I do, you know?”
I now knew more than I wanted to know about Mrs. Hammersley’s family life, but I plunged ahead. “You went to church near your sister’s house in April?”
“Yes, I went to the second Mass there on Saturday night and met this woman on her way out from the early Mass. I noticed her especially, first because she was dressed in black, almost like a nun, you know, and second because of her blue eyes. The dark clothes—she had on a hoodie, you know—really set off her eyes.”
“You’re saying she was dressed so that she looked like a nun but that she really wasn’t a nun?” I asked.
“That’s right. She had on a black hoodie over a black skirt, you know. But when I saw the picture of that missing girl in your paper, the blue eyes made me think of the woman I saw coming out of the church that night. I tried to imagine the face in the picture with a black hood around it, you know, and I said to my husband, I’d better call the paper like it says.”
“What about her hair? Was she a blonde?”
“Oh, now I can’t really say. The hood covered up her hair, you know, so I couldn’t tell you if she was light or dark. I’m sorry about that.”
“That’s okay, Mrs. Hammersley. No need to apologize. You say you saw her just this past April? This year?”
“Oh, yes. That’s when I was staying with my sister in north Minneapolis because she had had surgery and needed help.”
“What was the name of the church?”
“It was, um, oh, gosh, now you’re asking hard questions of an old lady,” Mrs. Hammersley said. “It was, uh, Saint somebody, but then most of them are, you know. It was close to my sister’s house on Fifteenth Avenue North if that helps you any.”
“It does. I can look up which Saint somebody church is in that area.”
“Wouldn’t that be something if it really was the missing girl? I mean, after all those years to find her right there in Minneapolis.”
“Yes, that would be something. I’ll certainly follow up on this.”
“Is there any kind of a reward for helping to find her?” Ah, there was mercenary thinking behind the moral compunction to do what’s right.
“No, I’m afraid not, Mrs. Hammersley. The only reward would be knowing that you’ve done something nice for someone.”
“Well, I suppose that’s worth something, isn’t it? Anyhow, I’ll be watching the paper to see if that girl turns up in north Minneapolis.”
“You do that—keep reading our paper. And thank you very much for your help.”
“You bet,” she said. I gritted my teeth, but at least “you bet” sounded more Minnesotan than “no problem.”
I put down the phone and it rang immediately. Maybe it was Brownie, waiting on the line to tell me Jack Anderson had confessed to killing Jimmy Bjornquist.