Shay O'Hanlon Caper 04 - Chip Off the Ice Block Murder

by Jessie Chandler

  The desk was immaculate, devoid of anything except a yellow legal pad and a silver pen. Willie looked like a mess most of the time, and she often ran roughshod over customers who pissed her off, but the woman couldn’t do any work unless her office was in order.

  “How ’bout you tell me what’s going on?” Willie gazed curiously at me through watery green eyes.

  I ran her through the last twenty-four hours, ending with my failure to find Pete at Rudolph’s. During my recitation, she leaned back in her chair, hands clasped against her ample, saggy middle, and simply took my words in.

  She sucked in a contemplative breath and narrowed her eyes at me. I couldn’t help it. I squirmed like a naughty kid. The woman could intimidate a python into turning tail and slithering away.

  She said, “First of all, I haven’t seen your father for, oh, maybe three months. Seems like it hasn’t been that long, but when you get to be my age, time moves a hell of a lot faster than it used to.” Willie studied me again, and it seemed as if she were weighing her words before she spoke. “Regarding the trouble Beezer mentioned, I’m not sure what he may have been referring to. I do know that someone was pressuring Pete to give up the bar and the land.”

  I asked, “Do you know when this started?”

  “Well.” One side of Willie’s face bulged as she stuck her tongue between her molars and ran it up and down the inside of her cheek. The bulge disappeared and she said, “I think the first Pete mentioned it to me was early summer. Sometime last summer, anyway.” She thought some more. “There were threats. Some vandalism.”

  Good god. “Why didn’t he ever mentioned any of that to me?”

  Willie’s rheumy eyes followed the trail of emotions that ran across my face. “Now don’t you go getting your underoos in a twist, kid. You know how your father is. I’m sure he didn’t want to worry you.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I tried not to roll my eyes. “What kind of vandalism are we talking about? Did he tell you?”

  “Some graffiti, a couple broken windows. Pete went out one morning and found one of his tires slashed.”

  While I had a good idea what she was going to say, I was unprepared for the reaction my body had to the words. A pinkish haze floated behind my eyes, and that was never good. My irrational response to certain kinds of triggers long ago earned me the nickname Tenacious Protector. I fought an ongoing struggle to tame the urge to mete out justice O’Hanlon style when something tripped me off. Occasionally things I’d done in the grip of the red weren’t always on the right side of the law. Luckily both Eddy and Coop were good at talking me down, and JT was catching up fast. Right now, I was on my own to quell the rising tide. I rubbed damp hands briskly on the knees of my jeans and took a calming breath. The room came back into focus. Willie was watching me intently.

  “Okay,” I said. “Did he say if the vandalism was related to the guy who was pressuring him to sell the bar?”

  Willie shrugged her massive shoulders. “Don’t know.”

  After a bit more small talk, I thanked her and retreated outside to further calm the Protector and pull my head together.

  I sat in the Escape with my forehead on the wheel and concentrated on breathing.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  My emotions began to settle and rational thought crept back into my consciousness.

  Focus, Shay. Damn, how many times had I said that to myself in the past?

  Too many. I turned on the radio and cranked the volume, focusing on the driving beat of the music. I almost laughed aloud when I recognized the song. It was Shinedown’s “Cry for Help.” That was fitting in my moment of despair. I gripped the wheel and pushed myself back against the seat. Sometimes I swore there were multiple personalities inside me.

  Someone was obviously fucking around with my father, and I hadn’t known a thing about it. Or rather, I’d had a hint from the old man, but he never elaborated after that first mention, and I hadn’t followed up.

  Way to go yet again, Shay. Maybe if you’d been paying more attention you’d know what the hell was going on.

  I leaned against the headrest, put a hand to my temples, and squeezed at the ache that had settled in above my eyes. No, my dad was an adult. There was no way I could have forced him to tell me anything he wasn’t ready to share anyway.

  There was one last place I wanted to check before I powwowed with Coop. I gave my temples a final rub and exited the parking lot. I pointed the Escape down University, made a right onto Hennepin, and headed back toward Uptown.

  Lakewood Cemetery, where my mother was buried, was situated near the southeast side of Lake Calhoun. I didn’t visit her grave often. It was too hard and hurt too much. The only time my dad showed up was when he was in the depths of an alcoholic haze. The odds weren’t all that great that he’d be there, but I was pretty much out of options.

  On Sundays the gates were locked for the night at five and it was now almost six thirty. Not that those cemetery hours had ever stopped my father or me when we needed to spend some time talking to my mom.

  A black wrought-iron fence enclosed the cemetery. With a sigh, I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to hop it. It had been a few years since I’d felt the need to slither over the metal palisade after hours and sneak through the headstones to the grave that held my mom’s remains.

  The cemetery itself was huge. It was made up of more than 250 acres of tombs and yet-to-be plotted space that would one day become a final resting place for the dearly departed. There was lots of greenway in the summer, and fields of snowdrifts covered the plots in the winter. A web of narrow automobile paths was so vast the cemetery felt like a miniature city—a very silent city without the usual amenities offered by a settlement of living, breathing human beings.

  I killed the engine and looked around. There wasn’t anyone on the sidewalks at the moment, and vehicle traffic was light. I got out and pocketed my keys, then rummaged in the back for an old pair of mittens I kept for emergencies.

  With one more furtive glance around, I walked along the fence. I came to an area that was semi-dark, far enough between streetlights that their glow wasn’t reflected in the dirty snow. This was the location where I usually made my clandestine entry into the land of the dead.

  The daytime din of traffic had died down, and the silence felt strangely surreal. My muscles tensed and a shiver ripped through me. A car was coming and would pass in seconds. I clumsily pulled off a mitten, dragged my phone from my pocket, and put it to my ear, feigning a conversation. The car rolled past and continued on its way, taillights reflected in the snow. The driver braked and made a right onto the street that curved around Lake Calhoun.

  I shoved the cell back into my pocket and gave the area another careful gander. Seeing no one, I waded into the snow piled on the edge of the sidewalk and pulled my mitten back on.

  With a running start I launched myself at the fence. It was a good head taller than I was, and it took some careful scrambling and a bit of fancy maneuvering to clear it without impaling myself on the metal spikes that topped each post. Summertime was definitely a better season to do this kind of thing.

  Heart thundering, I dropped silently to the ground on the other side, my feet sinking shin-deep into pristine white snow that hadn’t yet been disturbed by anything other than squirrels and rabbits. “Goddamn it,” I grumbled quietly as snow fell into the sides of my tennis shoes. Once it melted into my socks, my feet were going to be very unhappy. Should have worn boots. And long johns. However, I never dreamed I’d be skulking around a closed cemetery when I’d gotten dressed this morning.

  After making sure no one had raised an alarm, I set off along the perimeter, about fifteen feet inside the cemetery. I knew that not far behind me was one of the main buildings, and I didn’t want to accidentally alert any workers—if there were any still on site—that an interloper was on the grounds. There were plenty o
f trees to use for cover, although if they had leaves they would’ve worked ever so much better.

  I made my way toward a pond that was within the confines of the graveyard. The only sound that broke the stillness was the crunching of my feet in the snow. The air was calm, and for that I was grateful. It was cold enough without dealing with a wind chill.

  Thinking about wind chills brought me back to thoughts of my dad. If he were here, he’d have to be damn cold, assuming he hadn’t already frozen to death. Of course if he was full of firewater, that’d help keep the blood flowing through his veins.

  I passed a turnaround and in a few more yards crossed a narrow road. My mom’s grave was a bit north of the pond on the west side. I mentally counted the rows between the service road and the pond and stopped at the eighth one. I turned to the right and counted down another six headstones. The seventh was a creamy marble marker—my mother’s final resting place.

  The snow around the stone was undisturbed. My father hadn’t been here.

  I let out a sharp breath, in both relief and frustration. My eyes were magnetically drawn to the inscription on the stone, and even after all these years, a lump rose in my throat.

  Linda Ann O’Hanlon

  1952–1986

  Loving Wife, Devoted Mother

  Every time I saw the words, her name spelled out with such finality on the cold rock, my heart broke again. It felt so impossible. Mom … dead? How could this have happened to us? To me? To her?

  The flashbacks started ripping through my mind. The sound of tires skidding across blacktop. Metal screeching, wrenching, twisting. Glass shattering. Screams. From me, or maybe from Eddy’s son, Neal. Maybe from us both. More glass exploding. Something piercing my abdomen, slicing skin and organs deep inside.

  After that I remembered very little. I didn’t know until much later that Eddy had dragged me from the wreck. Away from my mother, who’d been driving and was killed upon impact. Away from her only son, whose neck had snapped when his head slammed against the window. Eddy literally held my life in her hands as she desperately tried to keep my innards inside my body until help arrived.

  Back in the day, no one used seatbelts or car seats. That level of precaution wasn’t even on the radar. It was only years later, when they started enforcing the use of safety restraints, that I wondered what might have happened if everyone had been belted in.

  After that, all Eddy and I had was each other, and occasionally my father.

  The eerie hoot of an owl jarred me back out of the nightmare of my past. I forced myself to breathe deep, to ground myself in the here and now. Maybe I needed some therapy. The flashbacks seemed to be coming more frequently lately.

  I shook my head to clear it, and quickly looked around. I was still alone and my father was still not here. Goddamn him for dropping me back into another time and place—a place where I was out of control, again mourning for the mother I’d lost far too young.

  Time to check in with Coop and rethink my game plan.

  four

  “AGH,” I yelped. Blistering hot cheese and bacon squirted from between two burger patties to scald my tongue. I gingerly rolled the rest of the bite around my mouth until I could chew and swallow without further damage.

  Elsie’s Restaurant, Bar, and Bowling Center in Northeast produced one of my all-time favorite burgers, the Juicy Brucy. It was a loose cousin to my second-favorite burger, the Jucy Lucy, found at Matt’s Bar in Minneapolis, among others. The Juicy Brucy added chunks of bacon to the molten cheese sealed in the middle of the burger.

  “You,” Coop said, watching me grab my ice water and down a couple swallows, “always manage to burn yourself when you eat that.”

  The now tender buds on my tongue scraped against my front teeth. I hated the feeling, but I was always too impatient to wait until Elsie’s masterpiece was cool enough to eat. Served me right, I suppose. “I know, I know.” I stuffed another bite in anyway.

  Coop took a huge chomp of his grilled cheese, crammed it all to one side of his mouth, and chewed. “So what now?”

  “I called the Lep after extracting myself from the cemetery. Eddy assured me that things were running slick as a pig’s greased ass—don’t ask me—and she and Lisa are getting on fine.” I bit into one of my waffle fries. “Man, I don’t know what to think. I mean—Dad disappears, this dead guy shows up in a block of ice, Dad’s handgun is found with the body? The whole thing with being pressured to sell the bar and the threats … ” I trailed off and popped the last of the Juicy Brucy in my mouth.

  “I don’t know. But Shay,” Coop leaned toward me, suddenly earnest, “your dad no more iced that guy than I offed Kinky on the barge.” A little over a year earlier Coop’s boss had been killed on a floating bingo barge where Coop had been working, and for a while he thought the police had fingered him as the prime suspect. He wasn’t guilty, but it was quite the endeavor to get things straightened out in his favor.

  I drained my water and sat back in the booth. “I also got a hold of Johnny.”

  “Barboy Johnny? What’s he doing now?”

  Johnny was the steadiest bartender my father ever had. He’d been hired on before he was old enough to drink and had stuck by my father and the Lep throughout years of ups and downs while he went to college. I think my dad felt a little like Johnny was the son he’d never had. I didn’t feel slighted because Johnny was an all-around good guy.

  I said, “Remember Johnny graduated from college not too long ago?”

  “Yeah. Landed himself a nice job, didn’t he?”

  “Yup. But with the unstable economy, they laid him off. He decided to go back to school for his masters in urban planning.” I waved a fry in the air. “I don’t get how some people can keep going to school year after year after year. That would drive me nuts. On the bright side, Johnny’s school schedule has a lot of flexibility, and he’s agreed to help out.”

  “Maybe your dad can bring him on again for a while.” Coop pushed his plate away with a grunt. “That was good shit, man.”

  “Since there’s no one to replace Whale, that’s a fine idea, Mr. Cooper. I’ll run it by Johnny and see what he thinks. When Dad surfaces, he can deal with that fallout.”

  “Hey, thanks,” Coop said to the waiter who stopped by to top off our glasses of ice water.

  I turned my attention back to Coop. He grabbed his glass and guzzled the entire thing, using his front teeth to keep the ice at bay. My own teeth ached watching him. He banged the glass down on the tabletop and said, “Let’s go.”

  After waiting for Coop to speed-smoke in the bowling alley’s parking lot, I rolled into the Lep about nine thirty with Coop trailing along behind me. I wondered if Lisa had decided to hang around longer than she’d anticipated or if she had checked out. Couldn’t blame her if she had. It’d been a damn long weekend.

  The bar was actually quiet. A man and woman were seated in one of the back booths, and other than that the place was dead. I was reminded more of a weekday evening than New Year’s Day. At this point, I was too tired to care very much.

  Lisa was still behind the bar, leaning against the back counter with a dark brown bottle of beer in her hand. She looked so natural, like she’d been around the Lep all her life. I was struck by the fact that this woman I barely knew had pretty much taken over tending my dad’s bar and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

  What exactly did that say about me?

  Eddy sat perched on a stool in front of Lisa, arm raised as she made some important point. I wondered if she’d hit up Lisa yet to hook up with the Mad Knitters. The original purpose of the Mad Knitters—which was mostly comprised of elderly friends of Eddy’s mixed with some young blood (Coop and Rocky)—was to propagate the craft of knitting. Ha, right. Instead, the gang propagated poker. Or dice. Or dominos. Their latest game du jour was Mahjongg. At least it kept them off the streets.

 
Eddy turned to face us as Coop and I settled on stools alongside her. “You two look like someone didn’t even fill your water glasses half full. Any luck?” She scanned the immediate vicinity with great exaggeration. “Since I don’t see that scoundrel father of yours, Shay, I assume the answer is no.”

  “Not one sighting.” I shifted my butt into a more comfortable position. My dad needed to invest in some chairs with decent padding. But in light of his other, more serious issues, new seating was way down on the list. “Where’s the rest of the crew?”

  “Aggie took ’em home when things slowed down,” Eddy said. “Rocky got the itch to use some serious elbow grease spic-and-spanning that sorry excuse for a kitchen your father keeps. You should see the shine on those stainless counters and sinks.” Eddy’s expression morphed into frustrated consternation. “You know how that boy gets when he puts his mind to something. He wouldn’t stop till he hit every metal surface back there. I took some money out of the till for him, and you should have seen that round face of his beam. And that Tulip, she earned your father some greenbacks twisting balloons into New Year’s hats for five bucks a pop. That little gal is good, conning people into buying them after New Year’s Eve was plumb over.”

  When Rocky met Tulip, she was a street urchin working in New Orleans making balloon animals and other fun inflated shapes for both kids and adults. Since she’d come up here to Minneapolis and said the I do’s with Rocky, she’d shifted from working the streets to working the patrons at the Rabbit Hole. She occasionally scored birthday parties and bar or bat mitzvah gigs at customer’s houses.

  After the parties, the customers almost always returned to the Hole and raved about Tulip and her special way with kids, especially the kids who were challenged. She connected with young ones dealing with Asperger’s, autism, and Down’s syndrome. Maybe it was because she was like them in many ways. I didn’t know specifically what problems of her own Tulip dealt with other than her brain functioned much like Rocky’s, which meant you never knew what to expect from either of them. I really liked her, and she made Rocky glow.