A Cold Case of Killing

by Glenn Ickler

  “I hope KGB takes you first,” I said as Al pulled away from the fire plug. “I need as much time as I can get to change gears from rehashing my tussle with Mr. John Doe the Second to telling how we found the late Mr. John Doe the First.”

  “They must have given you one hell of a grilling,” Al said.

  “If I was a steak, I’d be too overcooked to eat.”

  “With all that, did they get to the meat of the issue?”

  “My answers left them nothing to beef about.”

  “Well done,” Al said.

  We arrived at the Falcon Heights police station at two minutes after four. In a loud, stern voice, Detective K.G. Barnes let us know that this was not acceptable before leading me into the interrogation room. I was mentally exhausted from the session downtown and my slowness in responding to some of KGB’s questions increased her anger. At one point she practically accused Al and me of committing the crime. When she finally finished, my head felt like a punching bag that had been knocked around by the world heavyweight champion, whoever that might be at the moment.

  It was a few minutes after six when Al’s session with KGB ended. On the way to the car he said that Carol’s orders were to bring me to dinner at their house. Left on my own, I’d have gone to bed without eating that night. I didn’t have enough energy to pick up a phone and call for delivery of a pizza.

  * * *

  IN AN IDEAL WORLD, I would have had Saturday off and could have slept until noon. In the real world, I had to be at work at 8:00 a.m. and wouldn’t be free to go home and crash until 1:00 p.m. After two physically, emotionally, and mentally high-stress days, I had the enthusiasm of a man going to the gallows as I slouched past Eddy Gambrell, the assistant city editor who sat at Don O’Rourke’s desk on Saturdays. I was hoping to slip past him and slump dumbly at my desk for a while before he realized I was available for an assignment.

  No such luck. Eddy spotted me, even though I was doing my best to look small. “Hey, Mitch, your buddy with the knife is being arraigned in fifteen minutes. Hustle up to the courthouse and see if he says anything worth quoting.”

  Hustle? I did my best. I hiked up the street to the courthouse and found the right courtroom just as two burly officers were bringing in my buddy “John.” He was dressed in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, his ankles were shackled, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. When he saw me, he drilled me with a look that drove deeper than his knife blade. I thought of the cliché “if looks could kill,” and realized that if this were true, I would be lying lifeless on the courtroom floor.

  The arraignment took all of three minutes. The prosecutor read the charges—assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping, threatening to commit homicide, resisting arrest—and the judge asked for his plea. Obachuma snarled, “Not guilty,” and the prosecutor asked that he be held on a million dollars bail until his next court appearance. Obachuma’s court-appointed attorney requested that he be released on a much smaller bond. The prosecutor recited the obvious facts about the seriousness of the crime and the defendant’s affinity for foreign travel. The judge set bail at $500,000 and impounded the defendant’s passport, and Obachuma was trundled out by his two muscular escorts.

  “Hi, Mitch,” said Obachuma’s lawyer as he walked past me on his way out. I recognized him as a member of the law firm where Martha worked. It made sense—Linda L. Lansing not only was noted for her work as a defense attorney but also employed a stable of high-powered defenders who were available for civic duty. Still, the irony of my wife’s colleague defending the man who’d almost slit my throat was hard to swallow, even with an intact throat.

  It didn’t take much more than three minutes for me to write the story of the arraignment. I put it in context with some rehashing of Obachuma’s visit to my apartment and sent it to Eddy.

  “He didn’t say anything else?” Eddy e-mailed back.

  “I wanted to ask if he still had a headache but they dragged him out too fast,” I replied. I heard Eddy laugh when he read it.

  I was about to get up and go for a cup of coffee when my phone rang. It was Lauralee Baker.

  “I’m just calling to see if you’re okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran out on you, but I wasn’t thinking about anything but getting as far away from that awful man as I could. I took off my heels so they wouldn’t make any noise and snuck out barefoot. I don’t even remember getting into my car, but once I got there I saw that the ambulance had me parked in so I just ducked down and laid low. I didn’t want to get dragged back in there, even by the cops.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “Have the cops talked to you?”

  “Oh, yes, I had to come down to the station and give them a statement. I’m downtown right now, in fact. Maybe you’d like to meet me for a drinky-poo somewhere.”

  “And then again, maybe I wouldn’t. I think the less we get together the better it will be for my marriage vows. But I do want to hear from you if you get any more threatening calls.”

  “I wish you weren’t such a goddamn old straight arrow,” Lauralee said. “I could really use a good night in the sack with a stud like you.”

  “A couple of years ago I’d have been on you like an oversexed rabbit,” I said. “The way it is now, it ain’t going to happen. But as I said, call me if you hear any more from the caller with the raspy voice.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll take no for an answer this time but the offer and my legs are always open for you.”

  “I appreciate your openness, but I’m afraid the subject is closed. Bye, Lauralee.” I hung up, amazed at what a good boy I’d become. I needed Martha to be home soon.

  Chapter Thirty

  Getting Nowhere

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I made my obligatory weekly call to my mother and her mother on the farm near Harmony. I always make these calls in mid-afternoon because Mom and Grandma Goodie often go out for lunch after being in the Methodist church from 10:30 a.m. until noon. During football season I wait until halftime of the Vikings game so that Grandma Goodie can walk away from the TV set without worrying about missing a crucial play.

  Mom had read my Friday morning story about being held at knifepoint and had called that day to make sure that my head and my body were still all of a piece. This meant that Mom could pass the phone to Grandma Goodie quicker than usual because we had already had our customary discussion of the uncertainty of the weather, the state of the corn crop, and the foibles of Minnesota politicians.

  My conversation with Grandma Goodie started as it always did, with her asking if I’d been to church and me saying I didn’t make it this week.

  “The way you stuck your neck out this week, I’d think you’d be in church thanking God you’re still alive and begging for mercy on your soul,” she said.

  “I’ve thanked the police who rescued me, and I don’t plan to stick my neck out in front of a knife again anytime soon,” I said.

  “I don’t suppose you planned it this time, but there you were with the knife at your neck then, and where do you think your soul would’ve gone if he’d used it?”

  “My point is that he didn’t use it, and I’m still alive and kicking and planning to stay that way.”

  “Remember what Robert Burns said about the best laid plans of mice and men, Warnie Baby.”

  “Yes, they ‘gang aft a-gley,’” I said. “But Burns actually said ‘schemes,’ not ‘plans,’ and I’m not scheming.”

  “Bosh. Schemes, plans, same thing,” she said. “You should be planning or scheming or whatever you want to call it about getting right with God so the next time somebody cuts your throat your soul will be safe in heaven’s hands.”

  “The next time somebody cuts my throat? Ever the optimist, aren’t you?”

  “You know what I mean, Warnie Baby. How many times has some lunatic attacked you in that crazy job of yours? How do you dare stay away from church?”

  I didn’t want to count the times. “I’ve always come out just fine, Grandma,” I said. “Now supp
ose we talk about something pleasant, like baseball.”

  “Nothing pleasant about the Twins,” Grandma Goodie said. “They’re not anywhere near first place.”

  “But they’re not in last place like they were last year,” I said. I veered away from the Twins to less hackle-raising subjects, and eventually we ended the conversation with mutual expressions of love—and a final plea for me to take better care of my soul. Thinking again about the knife blade sliding across my throat, I had to admit that she had a point.

  * * *

  MONDAY MORNING, I SAT down at my desk and looked at the mess in front of me. Unopened snail mail, unread newspapers, and unread memos to return phone calls were scattered all across the usual detritus that formed the base of the desktop clutter. My adventure at knifepoint and our day of discovery at the home of Al’s would-be informant had taken control of my life. The stuff of my daily routine had been cast aside since Thursday, as had our search for the answer to Marilee Anderson’s disappearance. We were no closer to learning Marilee’s fate than we had been a week earlier. We knew why she’d disappeared, but we still had no idea where she’d gone after apparently escaping from the pimp who’d bought her from her father. Nor did we know why she’d never returned home.

  Al arrived at my desk with coffee and we talked about getting nowhere on the Anderson case while I opened some press releases, put the past week’s newspapers into the recycle basket beside my desk and sorted through some other junk left over from the previous week.

  “Looks like our John Doe the First’s murder leaves us at a dead end on the blue-eyed lady,” Al said.

  “Don’t let a homicide kill your curiosity,” I said. “I’ll call Brownie. Maybe he’s dug up something more alive than Skeleton X.”

  I called Brownie and, as requested, held the line for a minute that stretched into 410 seconds. When he finally returned, I asked if he had anything new on the Marilee Anderson case and he said he didn’t. I told him why we had visited the late Henry Moustakas, and this inspired Brownie to deliver a lecture on why Al and I should have called him when Moustakas offered to lead us to the alleged Marilee lookalike. “Damn it, Mitch, you two always try to bypass the police and you always fuck it up,” he said.

  “Not always,” I said.

  “Okay, name one time that the suspect didn’t either get away or damn near kill you when you and your buddy with the camera tried to tackle him without police backup.”

  He had me there. Al and I had a perfect record of providing incentives for confessed killers to flee, and invariably one or both of us got injured in the process. On the other hand, we always got a great story with pictures out of the events that led to the flight of the accused, and they’d all been caught eventually. Okay, sometimes they were captured more than a thousand miles away from St. Paul, but what the heck—they all ended up in jail.

  I said as much to Brownie and his response could not be printed in a family newspaper. He offered to provide me with details of how much it had cost the taxpayers for police to pursue criminals that Al and I had spooked into long-distance flight, but I saw no news value in this so I did not accept the offer. I did point out that Henry Moustakas was a news source, not a suspected killer who would run away, and that police backup wouldn’t have restored him to life when we found him Friday morning. Our conversation ended with Brownie grumbling his usual, “Have a good day, Mitch,” and I went back to sorting out the layers of paper on my desk.

  It was the kind of day I needed after the horror of having a knife at my throat and the shock of discovering a blood-covered corpse on a kitchen floor. I rewrote a couple of press releases, returned a couple of phone calls that resulted in itsy-bitsy stories and went out to the West Side to interview a woman who had been chased into her house by a fox that was probably rabid. Really a big news day in St. Paul.

  When my phone rang shortly after two o’clock, I got a really bad feeling about the call. For no logical reason, I dreaded picking up the phone. My reporter’s intuition told me it would be Morrie or some other lunatic I didn’t want to talk to.

  I desperately wanted the ringing to stop, but it continued. I had just decided to let it go to voicemail when I saw Corinne Ramey giving me a “what-the-hell’s-wrong-with-you?” look. I gave up. I greeted the caller with a curt, “Daily Dispatch, Warren Mitchell.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Mitchell,” said a smooth male voice. “I’m calling you from Alaska.”

  “Alaska? Why are you calling the St. Paul paper from way out there?”

  “I think you’ll understand when I tell you who I am. My name is Jim Bjornquist.”

  So much for my reporter’s intuition.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Slick Situation

  MY RIGHT HAND scrabbled across my desk groping for a notepad and a useable ballpoint while my brain was trying to formulate a coherent response to this startling turn of events.

  “Well, hello, Jim Bjornquist,” I said after too long a pause. “Are you calling about Marilee Anderson?” Really dumb question. Why else would he be calling?

  “That’s right,” he said. “I saw in the National Enquirer that her case has been reopened and that her dad shot himself.”

  “It was in the National Enquirer?”

  “Oh, yah. Right on the front page. I saw St. Paul in the headline so I had to read it, and when I did I almost piss—uh, sorry . . . I almost peed in my pants right there in the checkout line. They even had a picture of Marilee’s house.”

  “So how’d you know to call me in particular? My name wasn’t in the Enquirer story, was it?” I had found both a pad and a pen and I was ready to write.

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” he said. “After I got home I went online and Googled the Daily Dispatch and found your stories about the buried body and her old man’s suicide.”

  This all seemed too easy. “And how do I know that you’re really Jim Bjornquist and not some kook calling to play a prank on the paper?” I asked.

  “Oh, yah, I suppose you get those, dontcha? Well, I can tell you some things about what happened that nobody else knows but me.”

  “If nobody else knows them, how can I confirm them?”

  “Oh, jeez, I never thought of that. Maybe I can think of something you can check on. Or maybe you can. Maybe something you know that you haven’t put in the paper.”

  I decided to take him at his word for the moment, and would try to trip him up somewhere along the way. “Okay, let’s say you really are Jim Bjornquist. Tell me something you think I don’t know.”

  “Well I don’t think you know that the first name of the pimp who bought Marilee from her old man was Slick.”

  “You’re right about that. Did he have a last name?”

  “Oh, yah, he probably did, but I don’t remember ever hearing it. I’ll bet if you ask some of the cops who were on the vice squad back then they would remember Slick. He was around the neighborhood a lot looking for young girls and I’m pretty sure the cops ran him in a couple of times.”

  Good start. This was one item I could use for confirmation that my caller really was Jim Bjornquist. I drew a big asterisk by that note. “Tell me more,” I said. “Tell me about you and Marilee. Were you two in love?”

  “I ain’t sure it was love,” Jim said. “But we were getting together and doing it every chance we had—if you know what I mean.”

  “You mean you were having sex?”

  “That’s the nice way to put it. We were screwing like a couple of bunny rabbits all spring and summer. Then she got knocked up.”

  “Also like a bunny rabbit. You didn’t use protection?”

  “We usually did. I mean, we sold rubbers at the store so it was no problem to get them, but we just got going too far a couple of times without one and wham.”

  “I believe the expression is ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.’”

  “Hey, you got that right,” Jim said. “I’d forgot that old joke.”

  “Okay, now Marilee was pregna
nt. How did you feel about that?” I said.

  “I was scared shitless. Uh, sorry. Anyway, I didn’t want no baby. I was only nineteen and didn’t have no money or nothing. So I said we should find a place to get an abortion. But Marilee, she said no way—that having an abortion was a bigger sin in the eyes of the lord than having a baby without being married.”

  “She was Catholic, right?”

  “Oh, yah, you bet she was. Not that she went to church all that much, but when it come down to having an abortion she wouldn’t go against her religion.”

  “So, then what was the plan? Or wasn’t there one?” I said.

  “Well, we knew her old man would beat the crap out of her if he found out she was pregnant, and probably come after me, too. So we decided to get out of town.”

  “If he’d really beaten her up it might have solved the abortion problem.”

  “Oh, yah, it might have, but there wasn’t no way I was going let her get beat up by that mean old son of a bitch,” Jim said. “I had an older cousin living out in Stockton, California, and I called her and told her what was going on. She said we could come out there and stay with her while Marilee was having the baby and I was looking for a job.”

  “So why were you two still in St. Paul the day Marilee disappeared?”

  “The problem was we didn’t have enough money to make the trip right away. We had to save up for three or four weeks—me from my paycheck and her from the scroungy little allowance she got from her mother. Please don’t put this in the paper, but I even snuck a few bucks out of the cash drawer to go with what the store was paying me. We’d actually got to where we were going to buy bus tickets and bail out for California the next weekend. Then her old man sold her to Slick.”