Want to Play?

by P. J. Tracy

  ‘Oh yeah? You had a vision? What?’

  ‘Tax returns. First ones we had were thirty-some years ago, back when the Kleinfeldts were the Bradfords. They weren’t rich then. Newly married, probably, just starting out, low enough on the income ladder to deduct medical expenses. Big ones for that day and age, their fourth year in Atlanta. I figured maternity expenses.’

  Bonar straightened a little in his chair as his interest piqued.

  ‘So I called county records down there, asked for Baby Bradfords for that year, and there it was. Baby Bradford born to Martin and Emily Bradford, October 23, 1969.’

  Bonar seemed to hold his breath for a moment. ‘Wait a minute. The Kleinfeldts were killed on October 23.’

  Halloran nodded grimly. ‘Happy birthday, baby.’

  ‘Damn. DOB, DOD. The kid really did do it.’

  Halloran took a last drag and then dropped his cigarette into an empty Coke can. ‘Too bad you’re not the district attorney. That guy’s a hardnose. Wants fingerprints, witnesses, you know, the kind of forensic evidence we don’t have? The kid didn’t even inherit.’

  Bonar shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t carve up your parents’ bodies just because you want the money. He had something else going, and we aren’t going to like looking at it.’ He blew his cheeks out in a long sigh, pushed himself wearily out of the chair, and walked over to the window.

  Helmut Krueger’s farm was across the road, and he watched a line of Holsteins filing from the pasture toward the barn for evening milking, thinking that maybe he should have been a farmer. Cows hardly ever killed their parents. ‘You run the kid’s name through the computer yet?’

  ‘Got a problem with that. No name on the birth certificate.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The lady clerk I talked to said it wasn’t all that unusual. The certificate’s filed on the date of birth, and some parents just don’t have a name ready. Unless they call it in after they decide, it just stays blank. But the name of the hospital was there, and they gave me the name of the family doctor.’

  ‘You talk to him?’ Bonar asked.

  Halloran shook his head.

  ‘Don’t tell me. He’s dead.’

  ‘Alive and golfing. His wife said she’d have him call back tonight.’

  Bonar nodded, looked out the window again. ‘So we’re on our way.’

  ‘Maybe. You want to catch a bite before the doc calls? I gave his wife my cell number so we could get out of here.’

  Bonar turned and looked at him, a tired, massive silhouette blocking the last of the day’s light from the window. ‘I’ll meet you at your place. I’ve got to stop at the grocery first.’

  ‘We can go to the café.’

  ‘It’s the twenty-fourth, Mike.’

  ‘I know that . . . ‘Halloran started to say, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Oh, shit. Bonar, I totally forgot. I’m sorry, man.’

  ‘No sweat.’ Bonar had a sad, silly grin that forgave everything. ‘We’re getting too many October dead people, you know that?’

  ‘That is the truth.’

  But you shouldn’t have forgotten that dead person, Halloran thought a half hour later when he pulled into his driveway. He sat in the car for a moment and rode out the guilt, almost wishing he still believed just so he could go to confession and be forgiven.

  Technically, Bonar was a bachelor, but in all the ways that mattered, he’d been widowed since the October blizzard of ’87, when his high-school sweetheart had gone off the road and buried the nose of her father’s pickup in Haggerty’s swamp. Thirty-seven inches of snow had fallen over the next forty-eight hours, but the road past Haggerty’s was seldom traveled, so it was four days before the county snowplow finally got to it and found the frozen, unpretty remains of Ellen Hendricks.

  She hadn’t died right away, and that had been the worst of it, since she used the time to write Bonar a letter that wound all around the borders of a Standard Oil road map of Wisconsin. She’d been hurting, and she’d been cold, but there was no fear in that letter, just a dead certainty that Bonar would find her. She talked about their upcoming wedding, the three kids they were going to have, the two-seater Thunderbird that Bonar absolutely positively had to trade in because there was no room for children, and toward the end, when the pencil lines were starting to waver, she scolded him gently for taking so long.

  She wrote her last words on October twenty-fourth, and every year since Halloran and Bonar had spent that evening together, eating, drinking, and not talking about things that might have been. The tradition had become more a part of their friendship than a conscious tribute to a girl who had died a long time ago, but in some way they never tried to understand, the date remained important. He shouldn’t have forgotten it.

  ‘Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have forgotten the Kleinfeldts’ goddamned keys, either,’ he said aloud, and then he banged on the steering wheel until the side of his hand hurt.

  Hundred-year-old elms shaded the single acre that remained of his great-grandfather’s farm. He’d kept up the house and yard, but the old Dutch Colonial looked like an interloper in this new subdivision of tacky ramblers and split-levels. The house was much too large for a man living alone, but four generations of Hallorans had been raised in it, and he couldn’t make himself let it go.

  He got out of the car and walked across the lawn to the front door, tugging the open flaps of his jacket closed. The wind had picked up since he’d left the sheriff’s office just a few moments before, and dried leaves skittered and swirled away from his boots, heading for Florida if they had any sense. You could almost smell the coming winter, and Halloran remembered Danny’s prediction of an early snow yesterday, while he had been driving the young deputy to his death.

  He walked into the small entryway and heard his snowy childhood boots hitting the floor, and then his mother’s voice, silent for ten years now, reminding him to close the door, what did he think he was doing? Trying to heat the whole outdoors? In a gesture of defiance a decade too late, he left the door ajar for Bonar, wondering why most of his memories were of winter, as if he’d lived thirty-three years in a place with no other season.

  He hung his heavy jacket in the front closet, then placed his belt clip and gun on the shelf above.

  ‘How dumb is this?’ Bonar had asked the first time he’d seen him do it. ‘I’m a drug-crazed burglar, okay? And here you go, leaving your piece right here in the front closet so I can pick it up on my way in and shoot you in the gut when you come stumbling down the stairs in your skivvies.’

  But Emma Halloran would never permit firearms beyond the entryway of her house. Not her husband’s fifty-year-old Winchester, and certainly not her son’s department-issue 9mm. Ten years she’d been in the ground, and Halloran still couldn’t make himself walk past that front closet wearing his gun.

  There was a bottle of Dewar’s in the refrigerator, a criminal offense according to Bonar, but Halloran liked it cold.

  He poured healthy shots in two glasses that had once held grape jelly, then sipped out of one as he examined the contents of the freezer. He pushed aside a stack of frozen dinners and found treasure in a rectangle of butcher paper covered with frost.

  ‘Honey, I’m home!’ Bonar called from the front door, slamming it hard behind him. He stomped down the hall into the kitchen and dropped two grocery bags on the counter. Halloran looked skeptically at the greenery poking out of the top.

  ‘You brought flowers?’

  ‘That’s romaine lettuce, you numbnuts. You got anchovies?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Bonar started unloading the bags. ‘Never fear. Got the anchovies, got the garlic, got a sad and limp bunch of green beans here that are going to need life support . . . ’

  ‘I got Ralph.’

  Bonar sucked in a breath and looked at him. Ralph had been the last Angus Albert Swenson had raised before he sold his farm and moved to Arizona. They’d bought the young steer
together, feeding him out on corn and beer for the last two months of its life. ‘I thought we polished him off last time.’

  Halloran nodded toward the white package in the sink, then handed Bonar his Dewar’s in a jelly jar. ‘I saved the tenderloin.’

  ‘Praise Jesus.’ Bonar clinked his glass, downed his shot, and winced. ‘Man, how many times I gotta tell you? Cold mutes the flavor. You can’t keep this stuff in the fridge, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be drinking it out of old jars with cartoons all over them. Who is this? The Martian?’

  Halloran peered at the dark figure on his friend’s glass. A lot of the paint had worn away over the years, but part of the helmet was still identifiable. ‘Damn. I wanted the Martian.’

  Bonar snorted as he refilled his glass, then started to rub a clove of garlic around a wooden bowl Halloran had always thought was supposed to hold fruit. ‘Nuke Ralph on defrost for about three minutes, turn the oven as high as it will go, and get me out that big cast-iron skillet.’

  ‘I thought we’d just grill him outside.’

  ‘Well, you were wrong. We’re going to sear him on high heat and then finish him in the oven. Then I’ll add wine to the skillet drippings, reduce it to a glaze, throw in some morel mushrooms, and voilà.’

  Halloran rummaged in the silverware drawer for steak knives. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Of course I’m kidding. You ever try to buy morels at Jerry’s Super Valu?’

  ‘In the old days you would have stuck this thing on a stick and held it over a blowtorch. I wish you’d quit watching that cooking channel.’

  ‘Can’t help it. Those guys are the twenty-first-century clowns. Like Gallagher without the watermelon, remember him?’

  ‘The guy with a sledgehammer.’

  ‘He’s the one. God, I loved that guy. Is he dead?’

  Halloran drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Probably. Everyone else is.’

  Bonar was silent for a moment, and then started to chuckle. The Dewar’s was working.

  By the time Halloran’s cell phone chirped Ralph was a bloody memory on chipped white dishes and the kitchen was trashed. ‘Here we go,’ he said, flipping open the phone, wishing he’d had a little less to drink, trying to remember all the questions he’d wanted to ask the doctor. ‘Hello?’

  A man’s cultured voice soared through space and into his ear, slow and rich with southern heat. ‘Good evening. Dr LeRoux, returning the call of Sheriff Michael Halloran.’

  Good evening. Jesus, did people actually talk like that? He didn’t know what it was – the accent, maybe – but something about talking to southerners always made Halloran feel like a country rube, a farmer’s son, which he was; and an uneducated fool, which he was not.

  ‘This is Mike Halloran. Thank you for returning my call, Dr LeRoux. If you’ll hang up, sir, I’ll call you right back on my dime.’

  ‘As you wish.’ There was an abrupt click.

  Halloran folded up the cellular and went for the phone on the wall.

  ‘What’s he sound like?’ Bonar asked.

  ‘Like Colonel Sanders with an attitude. Hello, Dr LeRoux. Mike Halloran again. I’m the sheriff of Kingsford County up here in Wisconsin, and I’m trying to locate the heir of some patients you tended to years ago –’

  ‘Martin and Emily Bradford,’ South interrupted North. ‘My wife told me.’

  ‘That was over thirty years ago, Doctor. You remember them?’

  ‘Vividly.’

  Halloran waited a moment for him to volunteer more information, but there was only silence on the line. ‘You have an impressive memory, sir. You must have had hundreds of patients since then –’

  ‘I don’t talk about my patients, Sheriff, no matter how long it has been since I’ve treated them. As a law enforcement officer, you should know that.’

  ‘The Bradfords died earlier this week, Doctor. Confidentiality no longer applies. I’ll be happy to fax you copies of the death certificates, but I was hoping you’d be willing to take my word and save us some time.’

  The doctor’s sigh traveled over the wires. ‘What precisely did you need to know, Sheriff?’

  ‘We understand there was a child.’

  ‘Yes.’ Something new in the voice. Sadness? Regret?

  ‘We’re trying to locate that child.’ Halloran glanced at Bonar, then punched on the speakerphone.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Sheriff.’ The doctor’s drawl filled the kitchen. ‘I delivered the child, I treated Mrs Bradford and the child after the birth, and then I never saw them again. Or heard from them.’

  Halloran’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. ‘Doctor, we’re at a dead end here. Your county’s birth certificate was never completed. No name, no sex. We don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Halloran was stunned into silence. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The child was a hermaphrodite, Sheriff. And unless someone intervened on behalf of that poor creature, I doubt that he or she knows its own gender to this day. I tried to get Social Services involved down here immediately after the birth, and I have always suspected that those good intentions were responsible for the Bradfords’ sudden disappearance from the Atlanta area.’

  ‘Hermaphrodite,’ Halloran repeated numbly, exchanging a glance with Bonar, who looked positively stupefied.

  Doctor LeRoux sighed impatiently. ‘Asexual, or more precisely, duality of gender. There are variations of physical manifestation within certain parameters. In the case of the Bradford baby, testes and penis were partially internalized but nonetheless complete. The vaginal configuration was present but deformed, and whether or not the ovaries were functional was indeterminate.’

  ‘My God.’

  The doctor went on, warming to his subject. ‘It’s a rare occurrence – I can’t remember the statistics off hand – but even that long ago, it didn’t have to be a lifelong tragedy. When the genitalia and internal organs of both sexes are present, as they were in the Bradford baby, the parents simply choose the gender of their child based on the physical viability of the organs. The surgery to implement that choice is really quite simple.’

  ‘And which did the Bradfords choose?’ Halloran asked, and the doctor snapped back immediately.

  ‘They chose a living hell for their child, and for that, I hope they now find themselves in the same location.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Those . . . people,’ the doctor sputtered, ‘called their own child – and I’m quoting here, because I will never forget the phrase they used – “an offense to the eye of God. An abomination.” They believed its birth was divine punishment for some imagined sin, and that to interfere would somehow compound the sin and . . .’ He stopped and took an audible breath. ‘At any rate, in the short time they were under my care, the parents chose neither name nor gender for their child, and I tell you, Sheriff, even all these years later, my thoughts are haunted by what that child’s life must have been like. Can you imagine? They wouldn’t even give it a name . . .’

  Someone in the background was talking urgently to the doctor, his wife, probably, but Halloran couldn’t make out the words. ‘Is there something wrong, Doctor?’ He heard a dark chuckle.

  ‘Atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, a slight valve defect. At my age any number of things are wrong, Sheriff, and my wife worries about all of them. Tell me one thing, if you will, before we close this conversation.’

  ‘Anything I can, Doctor.’

  ‘In my part of the country, it is not generally within the purview of law enforcement to track down missing heirs. There is a crime involved, is there not?’

  Halloran looked at Bonar, saw him nod. ‘Homicide.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘The Bradfords – actually they called themselves the Kleinfeldts while they lived here – were murdered early Monday morning.’ And then, because the doctor had been forthcoming, and much more human than Halloran had expected,
he gave him what he knew he’d want to hear. ‘They were shot to death in church, while they were praying.’

  ‘Ah.’ It was more of a breath than a word, and there was the sound of satisfaction in it. ‘I see. Thank you, Sheriff Halloran. Thank you very kindly for that information.’

  The disconnect was loud on the speaker.

  Halloran went over to the table and sat down with Bonar. Neither one of them said anything for a minute, then Bonar leaned back in his chair, tugging his belt away from his belly. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘What say we just close this thing down and say the Kleinfeldts died from natural causes.’

  21

  Magozzi had never been in a war zone, but figured it couldn’t look this bad or no one would have stayed to fight the damn thing.

  The access road to the riverboat landing was clogged with emergency vehicles, news vans, and an amazing array of upscale SUVs and sleek sedans, some of them abandoned with doors open and engines running. News helicopters hovered overhead, sweeping the ground below with their big floods, rotors beating the cold night air with the rhythmic whomp of a war movie soundtrack.

  There were people everywhere: uniforms, plainclothes, crime scene, and a lot of tense-looking civilians milling about, the more determined ones barging through the brush on either side of the vehicle checkpoint to get to the landing.

  Magozzi maneuvered the Ford through the maze of people and vehicles and stopped at the booth Chilton’s men had set up. Through the windshield he saw the MPD uniforms and Red Chilton’s crew fighting a losing battle as they tried to keep civilians and the media out of the parking lot. The barriers had kept the news vans from driving in, but reporters and cameramen with handhelds were all over the place, shouting into their mikes to be heard over one another as they broadcast live back to their stations, interrupting regular programming for a special report.

  Barring an alien invasion from Mars, the Hammond wedding reception itself probably would have topped the ten-o’clock news. Throw in a murder and top billing was guaranteed. And in this news-junkie state, Magozzi guessed over eighty percent of the population was watching the circus live right now. And one of those eighty percent was probably the killer himself.