by Chuck Logan
Broker bit his lip. “It could work. We want to find him when he’s half in the bag, distracted in a public place. We want him in a goddamn trance staring at a blackjack dealer. That’s the way to approach him.”
Mouse hitched up his belt, cleared his throat, and said, “Wonderful. This has become competitive between you two.”
“Always was,” Broker said.
Broker had forty minutes to kill before his date with the statue. He figured Harry needed a support system so he might turn to Annie Mortenson again. He drove out of the basement ramp, eased through the back streets, worked around to the west of town, came down Myrtle Hill, turned left on North Fourth, and parked in front of the Stillwater Library. From here it would be a quick hop up Third Street to the old courthouse.
The Carnegie library was one of Stillwater’s jewels, with A.D. 1902 chiseled over the door. Broker picked his way through kids’ bikes that were strewn on the broad lawn like a snapshot from a happy childhood. He went inside, asked for Anne Mortenson at the curved front desk, and was directed downstairs to the reference desk.
Broker came down the marble stairs two at a time and saw her standing behind the desk in jeans and a maroon paisley blouse. She was younger than he expected, midthirties. His initial impression was: medium, in height, in looks, in intensity. Her brown hair was clipped in straight bangs across her forehead and fell on either side of her oval face in a lank pageboy. Her bookish brown eyes did not entirely conceal a dynamo of spinster energy that suggested her trim appearance would not change for the next forty years.
As he walked up to the desk, he sketched her quickly: She was independent, she owned a cat. She took long, solitary vacations and enjoyed them. She’d never marry. Men like Harry would always break her heart.
Broker came in fast with a stiff cop edge to shake her a little. “Anne, I’m Phil Broker. We talked yesterday about Harry.”
She blushed slightly. “My poor car. How could I be so dumb? The dealership gave me a loaner, which I will never let Harry Cantrell go near, ever.”
“Good. Because Harry’s being difficult. It would be a mistake to offer him any kind of encouragement,” Broker said.
She dropped her eyes, then recovered quickly.
Broker stepped in closer and said, “Are you and Harry . . .”
“Close?” She furrowed her eyebrows. “As in, do opposites attract?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“Not when he’s drinking.” She said it clear-eyed and emphatically, and she was lying through her straight, even teeth. “It’s a game with him, you know. Outwitting the sheriff. He thinks he can make a deal, get reinstated without going into the hospital. He doesn’t believe in alcoholism. The only thing he believes in, as far as I can see, is winning streaks.”
Broker picked up a slip of notepaper from the desk and a short, sharp #2 pencil and jotted down a number. “This is my cell. If Harry contacts you, call me,” Broker said in his best cop voice. He turned and left without saying good-bye. But as he stepped back into the sun, he was smiling. Maybe he had learned something. Maybe Harry wanted to make a deal.
Thinking he might actually be getting a break, he drove up South Third and parked next to the old Stillwater courthouse, a graceful storied building with Italianate arches and a cupola on the top. He walked down the sidewalk and up the steps and across the grass to the monument set in the corner of the lawn by the flagpole.
Broker knew this place well.
He reached up and patted the weathered bronze replica of a Civil War soldier who, rifle at the ready, leaned perpetually forward, advancing to the attack. Eighty-four years of heat, snow, rain, and cold had mottled the statue’s surface with pewter blues and grayish blacks and lacy green flourishes. Broker thought of the weathered metal as the color of history, like black-and-white photographs.
His dad had first brought him to this spot when he was six years old. He remembered only a fragment of what his father had explained to him. Mainly he had acquired the powerful impression that this was a statue of his great-great-grandfather Abner Broker.
Abner’s name was one of hundreds recorded on the broad plaque behind the statue. The names represented Washington County men who’d served in Minnesota regiments. Abner had left his logger job in the north shore pineries, moved to Stillwater, and joined up with the First Minnesota Regiment in 1861.
He had caught the train right here in Stillwater to go to Mr. Lincoln’s war to save the union and free the slaves. His journey included the rough afternoon of July 2, 1863, on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The regiment had charged an Alabama brigade and stopped them in their tracks. Only a handful of Minnesota boys came back from that fight, including a limping Abner. But they had bought General Winfield Scott Hancock the five minutes he needed to rebuild his collapsing line and perhaps save the country.
So, as six-year-old Broker would remember it, Grandpa Abner won the war.
Broker sat down, rested his arms on his knees, and watched black ants boil in the thick green blades of grass. He thought of the picture of Tommy Horrigan sitting all alone on Gloria Russell’s bookshelf. What did Tommy have to associate with being six? For sure, something far less secure than swinging on the resolute unbending arm of Grandpa Abner.
His cell phone rang. He popped it on.
“So did the priest deserve it?” Harry said.
“No, Moros was hounded out of Albuquerque by gossip. The local cops cleared him,” Broker said.
“That’s what I thought. So you and John have a real problem . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “The Saint has returned with bad target information.”
Broker shivered. Mocking the heat, a cold needle of adrenaline jabbed through his heart. “You know this how?”
“I keep this personal log of anonymous tips, stuff too flimsy to file a formal Initial Complaint Report. I clear them and delete them off my computer. But last week I found a pile of printouts in this drawer in a desk. Somebody had gone into my computer and retrieved my notes from the trash. Moros was on top of the stack.” Harry paused a beat. “I always had a problem emptying my trash . . .”
“Harry?” Broker was on his feet, squeezing the chunk of Samsung plastic in his hand as if he could force Harry’s voice back into the circuits. But the line was dead.
Chapter Twenty-five
Goddamn you, Harry—where are you?
Frustrated, Broker scanned the neighborhood. Just the still foliage of the trees and the shadows on the deserted streets. Harry probably wasn’t on foot . . .
Moving now toward the car. What about Annie Mortenson? She had been lying about helping Harry. . . . But by the time he reached the car, he’d decided he needed more help than Annie could provide. Annie didn’t really know Harry.
Harry had only wrecked Annie’s car. But he’d wrecked Gloria Russell’s marriage.
Ten minutes later, Broker was inside the government center, taking the elevator to the third floor. The receptionist, who had been hostile to him earlier, saw him coming, and her expression froze. Her eyes went wide, then filmed over, unfocused.
Broker had seen this response before, as a young operator in MACV-SOG doing fast ugly missions with the Provincial Reconnaissance Units. He remembered sweeping into Vietnamese hamlets, the villagers numbing their faces into empty smiles. Their eyes had escaped inward as fear bred the hope they could make themselves invisible.
When he slowed to take a good look at her, it struck him that she was a low-rent version of Gloria Russell. The same gym-rat tan. The same muscle tone. The same shortish hair, only hers was dishwater blond.
He continued down the hall and into Gloria’s office.
A slender guy in a blue shirt and tie was talking to her. He had a sheaf of manila folders in his hand.
“Sorry, but I got to talk to Gloria,” Broker said.
“Is this . . . ?” the guy said.
“Yeah, this is Broker,” Gloria sa
id.
“I can come back.” The guy turned and left the room.
Gloria pushed a Washington County edition of the Pioneer Press across her desk. “You see the paper?” she said.
Broker shook his head.
She handed it to him and said, “The story stripped down the right side.”
Broker scanned the headline: “Priest Found Dead in Stillwater Mission Church.” Under Sally Erbeck’s byline, the lead sentence read: “Foul play has not been ruled out in the death of Father Victor Moros.”
“The gossip jumped buildings this morning. Now I know why you want to deal Tardee up; he saw a woman in a Saints jacket go into the church about the time the priest died,” Gloria said. “You could have told me yesterday.”
“I just talked to Harry,” Broker said, evading her remark.
Gloria tensed visibly. “How is he?”
“Drunk. He has these two forward gears when he’s drinking. One is lucid. The other is . . .”
“I know, dangerously crazy.”
“So, can we talk straight?”
“Sure, Lymon filled me in. The priest was murdered in his confessional. He had a St. Nicholas medallion in his mouth.”
“And?”
“And . . . you’ve determined that the priest was not a pedophile. So somebody is playing games with the Saint’s calling card.”
“You know what Harry says?”
Gloria raised one hand in the stiff, dismissive gesture Gena Rowlands made famous in A Woman Under the Influence. “By all means, lay it on me.”
“Harry says the Saint is back with bad target information. He says somebody in-house has been retrieving his notes from the computer trash and has put together an erroneous list of child abusers.”
Gloria was careful not to bristle too much. “Ah, Jesus. I’ll make it simple for you. Harry Cantrell is brilliant but erratic. He had quite a juggling act going, but now he’s dropped his balls, as it were. Now he’s grabbing at straws. I know the man. We, ah, had a thing . . .”
“I heard.”
“I broke it off. Hell hath no fury like an old macho scorned.”
“He’s teasing me on the telephone. He won’t give me a name.”
Gloria cocked her head. “Okay, let me tell you about Harry. Do you know how we initially got onto Dolman?”
Broker shook his head.
“Sometimes cops go out to schools and talk to teachers about reporting child abuse, what to look for, stuff like that. So a year ago last spring Harry goes out to Timberry Trails Elementary and talks to the staff.
“There’s this one paraprofessional who’s got this chest like a shelf, right? This dish. So after he gives his talk, Harry starts putting the moves on her. Naturally, being the snake that he is, he uses the elements in his talk as an entrée.
“And this lady has a pile of these storybooks at her desk that kindergartners have written about themselves, and Harry is paging through them as he’s doing his thing. The kids draw self-portraits on the front of the books and write their names. The teachers help them with the text. And he comes across this book that looks different from the others. Instead of a happy smiley face, the face is all colored in. So he holds it up and asks, ‘What’s this?’
“And the lady answers, ‘Oh, that’s Tommy Horrigan; he always draws himself with his back turned.’ Harry opens the book and reads things Tommy has written, ‘The leaves are coming back’ or ‘Mommy plants tulips.’ He sees that Tommy does not put himself in his story.
“So Harry asks to meet Tommy Horrigan, and the rest is history.” Gloria shook her head. “Harry starts out trying to get laid and winds up detecting the trail of a child abuser.”
Broker looked her square in the eye. “And you started out with Harry, building a case against Dolman. And you wound up getting laid.”
Gloria pursed her lips, looked at the wall, and said, “You know, it really bothered me that a guy that old, with such lousy personal politics, could be so damn . . .” She mugged a smile, turned back to Broker, and said, “Is this what you came for?”
“You asked to have Harry taken off the case,” Broker said.
“Had to. When I took on Dolman, my marriage was on life support. The thing I had with Harry basically pulled the plug. But it was interfering with the work.”
“Enter Lymon,” Broker said.
Gloria leaned forward. “Don’t get distracted by the boy-girl and the racism. Bottom line: Harry has it worked around in his head that if he had stayed on the case Dolman would have been convicted.”
Broker studied her. She came across as bright, candid, and brave; plus sinewy in her armless blouse and raven crew cut. She looked as if she belonged on the front of a Patagonia catalog, scaling a sheer rock face. Gloria Russell conquers El Capitan over a long lunch.
“Do you know what it was like, losing that case?” Gloria said. “I was so mad at first that I stormed out of the chambers. But then I realized I had to go back . . .”
She drew herself up, and Broker watched it come, a memory like electrodes clipping onto her body, sending electric current up the corded muscles of her neck, into her face, and burning in her eyes.
“Because . . . I left that little boy in there alone watching Dolman grinning and pumping the hand of his attorney.”
She shook her head violently. “And we said we’d never leave him alone. We always said we’d be there to protect him.”
Gloria was tough. Gloria didn’t cry. She kept talking in a dead, level voice. But her body cried. It was like looking at a statue of grief and seeing the unmoving bronze eyes trying to water.
“We had to go back and explain to Tommy and his parents. How do you explain that to a six-year-old? Here we told him that we were going to protect him. . . . Christ, do you have any idea what we put that kid through? The physical examinations—our doctor, the defense’s doctor . . .”
And Broker watched her dissociate with the moment and retreat into a private limbo. Gloria spoke as if to Tommy Horrigan. “We told you we’d get the guy who did those things to you. But we didn’t get him. We didn’t do our jobs good enough, and he got away.”
In a purely visceral way Broker now understood why John had brought him in. Nobody who’d been close to the thing wanted to pick up this particular live wire.
“Worst day of my life,” Gloria said.
Gloria caught herself and looked across her desk. “I don’t have to be here carrying water in county, you know. I could be almost a partner by now in a legal money factory in St. Paul or Minneapolis, driving a Beamer, working seventy hours a week, and taking files on stressed-out vacations to wherever. I chose not to do that because I believe there’s more to life than making money. And I believe in being involved in this system out of self-interest, to protect all of us from people who will take the law into their own hands.”
“So Harry gets your vote for Saint,” Broker said.
An expression of painfully acquired revelation came over Gloria’s face. She said, “Just as I’m sure I get his. But Saint is much too kind a word. The next time you see Harry, take a good look at him. He’s the face of the mob.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Majority of U.S. Bishops Have Protected Abusive Priests,” declared the headline in the newspaper box at the front door to the county building.
Broker walked out into the heat with Gloria’s parting shot stuck in his mind. Fuckin’ Harry. He crossed the parking lot and kicked the Crown Vic’s tires. Fuckin’ Harry’s car. As he flopped behind the wheel, his phone rang. He whipped it open and braced for another Harry mind game.
“Mr. Broker, this is Annie Mortenson; I’ve been thinking about what you said and we should talk.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the library, but I’m through for the day.”
“I’ll meet you on the front porch in ten minutes.”
Eight minutes later, after scalding his hands on the red-hot steering wheel, he met her on the library steps. They sat down side
by side on a bench.
“Harry did contact me and asked me for a favor. Am I in any trouble?” Annie asked.
“No, no. What was the favor?” Broker said.
“He asked me to call you and give you this information anonymously.” She handed him a note written in concise Palmer penmanship: Broker’s truck can be found in the vicinity of County Road 97 and Merril Lane today after 3 P.M.
Broker took the note and tucked it in his chest pocket.
“Your truck isn’t going to wind up like my car, is it?” Annie said.
“I hope not,” Broker said as a shadow fell across them.
“Is this guy bothering you, Miss?” an amused voice said.
Broker looked up. The tallish man standing in front of him had calm, angular features and straight blond hair falling an inch over his ears. His powder-blue eyes ruminated behind wire-rim glasses.
Drew Hensen, Janey’s husband, had always reminded Broker of Garrison Keillor’s radio persona: congenial and wise in a cute way and several comfortable steps removed from the real world. Broker remembered him lanky in chambray shirts and faded jeans. Today the heat had him in a tank top and running shorts and flip-flops.
Taken by surprise, Annie put her right hand to her throat, then dropped it to the top button of her blouse. Self-consciously, she twirled the button with her fingers. “Drew? Oh no, we were just talking . . .”
Broker stood up. “Drew, how you doing?” They shook hands.
Drew shrugged. “Same old stuff, waging war against junk food and prime-time TV.”
“You two know each other?” Annie said.
“Sure, we used to work together,” Drew said.
“You two, really?”
“In another life. At the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I used to be a police artist,” Drew said. “Remember, I told you.”