Anne had been napping under her coat, and now she poked her head out and looked around.
“Where are we?”
“Forty miles south of the town of Virginia. We’re all out of coffee, I’m afraid.”
“This is quite a road. It must have cost more to build than the total value of all the towns that it connects.”
“Maybe there was more to connect, back then. Now, neither the road nor the towns look like much.”
“No. And it takes fewer and fewer buildings to even qualify as a town.”
“Three,” I said. “I’ve been counting. Anything more than three, and it’s a town plus a suburb.”
“But there aren’t a lot of those.”
“No, there surely aren’t.”
To me, it felt like a good place to get away from, the kind of country that makes you appreciate a new set of rubber and a well-tuned engine. Because if your car ever died and left you to walk back to civilization, you could be in for one damned long trek across the windy steppes.
I put the pedal down a bit more and blasted past places with unlikely names like Zim and Cotton and Cherry. As we approached Eveleth, I could see a featureless pillbox called the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame perched on a hilltop, standing guard over an abandoned two-story motel with weeds and scrub trees growing out of its pavement. I took the exit off the non-freeway.
“Is this it?”
“No, this is Eveleth. Charlie claimed to have killed a man here once, in a VFW bar upstairs over an appliance store. I thought I would just go and see if there is such a place.”
“See if there’s such a place as a cafe, while you’re at it. Those politically correct doughnuts aren’t staying with me very well.”
“I’ll look for a sign that says ‘Bob Dylan ate here.’”
“Just look for a sign that says ‘Open.’ That’s as much as you’re likely to get on the Range.”
She was right. Eveleth wasn’t quite a ghost town yet, but the closed stores outnumbered the working ones by a big margin and the streets were almost empty of traffic. The only second-story bar we found was a BPOE, rather than a VFW, and it was over a union hall, not an appliance store. Both it and the hall looked closed. There was no sign of a Greyhound bus depot. Was that an indication, I wondered, of how close to reality Charlie’s stories came?
We found an open diner on Main Street, where we sat and looked at stuffed and mounted fish, old license plates, and display cases of antique carnival glass, while we ate “world-famous Taconite Burgers” and “authentic Cornish pasties.” They were surprisingly good. The pasties could be had “with or without,” and I had to be told that the commodity being referred to was rutabagas. I had mine without and did not regret the choice.
The waitress, a pretty, self-conscious girl who didn’t look to be more than nineteen, didn’t know where the bus used to stop, but she did know that the appliance store on Main Street used to have something else upstairs before they had a fire.
“That was back before I was born,” she said.
Things were looking up.
The cook, an aging black man who must have overheard our conversation, stuck his head out of the kitchen.
“The bus used to stop at the big front porch on the hotel, a block over east,” he said, pointing. “Not no more, though. The place ain’t even a hotel no more, got turned into a ’partment building, years back. There wasn’t nobody wanted to ride the bus no more, no how.”
“Did you come here on that bus?” said Anne. She took his picture.
“You’re a smart lady. Yeah, I come here on that bus. Got off at that hotel in nineteen and fifty-two. Lots of jobs down in the Cities then, but you had to come a long ways north before it wasn’t still the South, if you know what I mean.”
“We know, believe it or not,” I said. Anne gave me a look of surprise.
“Yeah? Anyway, so I come here and I been flipping them burgers ever since. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting to know where Bobby Zimmerman grew up before he got to be Mr. Hotshot Bobby Dylan and picked up some kind of accent ain’t nobody on the Range or anyplace else ever heard before.”
“Actually,” said Anne, “we couldn’t care less.”
“I was right; you’re some kind of smart lady.” He grinned broadly while she took one more picture of him.
***
I pulled back onto the highway and headed north again, checking my mirrors as I got back up to cruise speed. There was nobody behind us. Ten miles later, the road curved left to swing around the southwest corner of Virginia, which looked as if it might actually be a real city. I cruised up a big hill on its west side, ignoring the signs for skiing areas and mine tours, and took the exit for Highway 169, westbound. My next stop should have been Mountain Iron. If it was still there.
It was a diamond interchange, with a stop sign at the end of the ramp.
“Apparently we have to choose between new and old Highway 169,” said Anne. “On your map, I don’t see that distinction.”
“The new one looks like some more of the same wide, four-lane, non-freeways they have here. I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t even there when the address got written on the cigar box. I say we take the old road.”
“Spoken like a true investigative reporter.”
“Which I am not. That’s why I have one with me.” But I took the old road, all the same. We left the fringes of Virginia behind us very quickly and settled into a sedate fifty-five miles an hour on a narrow, two-lane highway that was built following the path of no resistance, making wide curves to avoid rock formations and gullies. Six miles out, it made a particularly sharp s-curve. A few dozen simple box-like buildings clustered around the road in crude rows, as if they had all fallen off the back ends of trucks that took the curve too fast. Since then, they had not been fixed up. I would have said they were all abandoned, except that some of them had smoke coming out of rusted tin chimneys.
“I think we have arrived at Mountain Iron,” I said.
“How can you tell?”
“It has a little bitty water tower and a post that used to hold up a stop sign. If that’s not civilization, I don’t know the stuff. We’re looking for Third Street.”
“This place doesn’t look as if it ever had three streets, and I mean back in its boom days.”
“You think they had boom days here?”
“Well, maybe an eventful afternoon now and then.” She had the tiny silver camera out again and was shooting as we drove.
The street signs were infrequent, to say the least, and were as badly rusted as the chimneys, but we found one that said Third and turned down a street that had exactly six tiny houses on it before it quit at a big pile of rocks and some stunted pine trees. I made a U-turn at the rock pile. Charlie’s father’s house, if that’s what it was, was the last one in the row.
It was maybe twenty-four by twenty feet, tops, with asbestos shingle siding in an indescribable color and a covered porch with empty flower boxes on the rails. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, but there were vehicle tracks in and out of the unshoveled driveway. Out in the back yard, half covered by snow, there were a couple of plastic lawn chairs and a barbeque made out of half a steel drum.
Next to the house was an ancient pickup, so rusted that its fenders wiggled in the light wind. It had tracks going to it, but not fresh ones. On the rear bumper were a couple of faded stickers that said “UNION WORKER AND PROUD OF IT” and “BAN IMPORTED STEEL.” I thought that was hilarious, considering that the truck was a Toyota.
“Chez Victor,” I said. “White tie optional.” I pulled up at the place where a curb might be buried, if there were any.
“You’re not going in the driveway?”
I shook my head. “That set of tracks is from some kind of vehicle with big tires and a lot of ground clearance. If I try to go in there, my undercarriage will bottom out on the snow and we could spend the rest of the day trying to shovel it out.”
> “Do you have a shovel?”
“No.”
“Good call, Herman. Park in the street, every time.”
The snow turned out to be mid-calf height, and by the time we got to the front porch, my sixteen-fifty shoes were candidates for the trash bin. There was a doorbell button next to the door, but it was hanging away from the wall by its wires, so I pounded on the door instead. Then I shaded my eyes and peeked in through the tiny glass.
“Anything?”
“There’s a light on in there, but I can’t see anybody moving around.” I pounded again, waited twenty seconds, then tried a third time.
“Maybe he’s in the study, working on his rare book collection,” she said.
“Books are probably all rare in a town like this. I think more likely, he just doesn’t want to talk to anybody. A lot of old people turn into hermits. Let’s have a look at the back door.”
We slogged through more of the deep snow, past the pickup and around to a porch that was smaller than the front one and had no roof over it. The combination screen-storm door was swinging in the wind, its spring broken or disconnected. The door and jamb behind it had both been badly gouged by some kind of heavy tool. Again, I shaded my eyes and peered into the gloom.
“Well, he’s there,” I said.
“So, aren’t you going to knock?”
“Do you have your phone handy?”
“Of course. Why?”
“See if you can get us a local sheriff of some kind. I think Charlie’s father is sitting in a kitchen chair, with his head half on the table in front of him.”
“What do you mean, his head half on the table?”
“I mean somebody blew his brains out.”
“Oh. Oh, dear Jesus.” She fumbled in her purse, then began punching buttons. I squinted to see better through the dirty glass. The light was pretty poor, and the line of sight wasn’t the greatest, but I could definitely see an ace of spades in the dead man’s hand. It looked as if it had been stuck there after he had died, just for somebody like me to see.
Chapter 17
The Law of the Range
The sheriff was a collection of middle-aged sags and bulges squeezed into a heavily starched, too-tight uniform. He also wore cowboy boots, a Smokey Bear hat, and about thirty pounds of weaponry and gear. His name was Oskar Lindstrom, and he seemed as much in denial as in charge.
“You know, for a long time I thought I was going to retire from this job without ever having a murder to handle.”
“That’s really too bad.” I’m sure the murderer did it just to spite you.
“We got a coroner in Virginia, don’cha know, but if I want a crime scene crew, I’ll have to either ask for help from Duluth PD or call the BCA, over to Bemidji.”
“I think you ought to have a crime scene crew, Sheriff.” Do I have to make the call for you, too?
“Well, yeah, I guess so. I’ll maybe just have a preliminary look myself, though, anyhow. You said you and your wife were here to see the victim?”
“She’s n…” Anne stomped on my instep, hard, and gave me a penetrating look with a tiny shaking of her head. I didn’t know if her pantomimed “no” applied to telling the sheriff she wasn’t my wife or telling him she was a reporter, so I did neither.
“She’s what, you say?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I tripped on the step, there. I was going to say she’s just along for the ride, Sheriff. I came here to tell Mr. Victor that his son is dead.”
“You call him Mr. Victor? Hell, he wasn’t anybody special.” He put on a pair of leather gloves before trying the doorknob. The door swung away from him easily, without needing the knob turned. He walked into the tiny kitchen, stomping snow off his fancy boots, and I followed.
“I don’t know his first name. The street address was all I had.”
“Jim. Or James, I guess. His name was James Victor. I’ve known him all my life. He was an asshole, I don’t mind saying. The kind of guy would pick an argument with a post, just to stay in practice. And now he’s messing my life up again, giving me a murder case. So, you couldn’t leave notifying him up to the authorities, then?” By which he clearly meant himself.
“His son was a homeless man. I’m sure the police have no idea who his next of kin was.”
“So that’s what became of him, huh? Turned into a bum? Doesn’t surprise me, I got to say. But you knew where to find his next of kin. Why was that, I wonder? And who the hell said you could follow me into the house, here?”
“Oh, wasn’t that all right? I’ll be careful not to touch anything.” Sure, I would. Anything I wasn’t going to take, that is. “I just thought we could all get in out of the cold.”
“It isn’t in out of the cold, just out of the wind. Looks like the furnace hasn’t been lit for some time. That half a cup of coffee on the counter is froze solid.”
The card in the dead man’s hand looked identical to the one they had taken off Charlie’s body, but I was obviously not going to get a chance to look at it closer. Meanwhile, Anne had her little camera out and was holding it waist-high, partially hidden by her purse, shooting everything in sight. Not that there was much to shoot, other than the body. I couldn’t tell if the rest of the place had been trashed or if Mr. James Victor was just a terrible housekeeper. Either way, it was a mess.
And so was he. There wasn’t much left of his face, but what I could see looked as if he had been beaten before he was shot. He was also tied to the chair, and there was blood on the floor that didn’t look as if it had anything to do with the gunshot wound.
“Why was that, again, that you came all the way from down Minneapolis?”
“St. Paul, actually.”
“Same damn thing. Now you’ve had time to think up an answer, so what is it, then?”
“I wrote a bail bond for Mr. Victor’s son once, and I sort of befriended him. I figured if I didn’t come and tell the old man, nobody would.”
“You couldn’t call him, then?”
“That would be pretty cold, Sheriff,” said Anne. I liked that better than what I had been going to say. Obviously this was a woman who could think on her feet. She had put the camera away now and was easing her way back toward the door and making gestures that said, “let’s blow this pop stand.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess it would a been, at that. Now get on out of here. This is a crime scene, ya know.”
“Happy to help out.”
“Wait on the porch a minute, though. I need your name and address before you go. I would say ‘don’t leave town,’ like they do in the cop movies, but hell, you can’t hardly go across the street here without leaving town. That’s a little joke, see?”
I smiled politely and gave him one of my cards, both of which seemed to make him very happy. I wrote my license number on the back of it for him, and he wrote “Mr. and Mrs.” ahead of my name on the front. Then he shook my hand and gave Anne what might have been a salute, and herded us off the porch.
“Charlie said his father worked in the mines,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know what he did, exactly?”
“He’s been retired for a lot of years now,” said Lindstrom, crowding us further off the porch. “I think he used to drive truck, though. One of those big off-road monsters, you know? A Euclid or a Cat, or something.”
“Oh really? So, not underground work, then?”
“You kidding? There haven’t been any working underground mines on the Range for forty, fifty years. Used to be, you could take a tour through the main shaft of the first one, at Tower-Soudan. But open pit was the wave of the future, don’cha know, except there’s not even much of that anymore. The ones who cashed in their pensions before it all went to hell, like Jim there, they were the lucky ones. So what makes you ask, then?”
“Just curious.” I tried for a nice, sincere-looking shrug. “Nice meeting you, Sheriff.”
Back in the car, Anne said, “Do you suppose he really will ca
ll the BCA and get a proper investigation going?”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. He seemed awfully glad to finally be left alone at the scene. You’re in the newspaper business. Do you know anybody on the Duluth paper?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“Maybe you should call them up and give them an anonymous scoop. If our sheriff has press coverage, I’m sure he’ll do everything by the book.”
“I like it.” She dug her phone out and started scrolling through some kind of list. “What was all that business about the underground mines, by the way?”
“There was hardly anything in James Victor’s house that didn’t look as if he got it at a rummage sale fifty years ago.”
“I would agree. So?”
“So why did Mr. Victor, who never was an underground miner in the first place, have a shiny new pickaxe leaning against the wall in a corner of his kitchen?”
“I give up, why?”
“How soon do you have to get back to St. Paul?”
“Where are we going instead?”
“Tower-Soudan.”
“Is that all one place?”
“I have no idea.”
Chapter 18
Night Life on the Range
I took Minnesota 169 back to the interchange on the west edge of Virginia and headed north again. I thought about going into the town to buy some hiking boots and some flashlights, but the day was already getting late, and I didn’t know how much more of Anne’s time I could burn.
“Why did you want to let the sheriff think we were married, by the way?”
“Did that make you uncomfortable?” said Anne. “I’m sorry.”
“Not uncomfortable, just perplexed.”
“If I had told him I was a reporter, then I’d have had to cover the murder story.”
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