Jelly's Gold

by David Housewright

  Bobby nodded. “Ms. Flynn, did you get a chance to walk through the apartment?” he said.

  Ivy nodded. “We walked through”—she pointed at Shipman—“but we didn’t see anything. I mean, there’s nothing missing that I know of. Josh and I didn’t have much that was valuable except for the computer and TV and stuff, but that all seems to be here. Only …”

  “Only?”

  “Only Josh’s notes, his research, in his office—it’s a two-bedroom apartment, and we use one of the bedrooms as an office—”

  “What about his notes?”

  “They’re all—Josh was very neat and very organized, but now his notes are scattered all over the room, on the floor. I have no idea what is missing, if anything is missing. The killer must have searched through the notes, don’t you see? That’s what he was doing when we returned to the apartment. He must have heard us. He must have panicked. Don’t you think that’s what happened?”

  “The fact that he walked away slowly suggests that he didn’t panic,” I said.

  The way Bobby’s head snapped around to glare at me, you’d think I’d just revealed the Colonel’s secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices to the Iranians.

  “These notes,” Bobby said. He turned back to Ivy. “Are they valuable?”

  “They tell about the gold.”

  “What gold?”

  “Jelly Nash’s gold,” Ivy said. “Tell them, McKenzie.”

  Bobby rose from his squatting position and stretched his back again. The expressions on his and Shipman’s faces were skeptical at best.

  “Well?” Bobby said.

  “This should be good,” Shipman added.

  I told them everything from the moment I received Berglund’s first letter to Ivy’s phone call just an hour earlier.

  “You’re kidding me,” Bobby said.

  “I wish I were,” I told him.

  “You gotta be kidding me. The man was killed for buried treasure?”

  “It could be buried.”

  “Buried fucking treasure?”

  Bobby had been a cop a long time. We broke in together just out of college, and while I retired a few years back, he went on to command the St. Paul Police Department’s Homicide Unit. He knew, as I did, that people slaughter each other for the most preposterous reasons—a man who works the night shift kills his neighbor for mowing his lawn at 9:00 A.M., a boy home from college kills his mother for giving away his Japanese anime while he was gone, a woman kills her mother-in-law for sneaking salt into her pot roast when she wasn’t looking. Yet this was new, even for him.

  I spent a lot of time talking about Ted and Wally and gave Bobby the license plate numbers of both the Trailblazer and the Aveo. “I can’t actually swear Ted and Wally were in the Aveo,” I said. “I never got close enough to see.” I failed to mention that Wally had a broken nose but did say that he carried a snub-nosed .38.

  “A revolver,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah. My understanding—and I can’t really prove this—is that Ted and Wally are working with a young woman with the unlikely name of Heavenly Elizabeth Petryk.”

  “Heavenly?” Ivy said. “You think Heavenly is involved?”

  “Do you know this woman?” Shipman asked.

  “She and Josh used to date, but it was over long before he and I started seeing each other.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Not meet exactly. Sometimes I answered the phone when I was at Josh’s apartment and it would be her demanding to speak to him. Once Heavenly came over while I was there, and she and Josh had an argument—they shouted at each other. I was in a different room and can’t say what it was about. Josh said she was a real head case, that she was stalking him. Once we came out of his apartment in the morning and found a note that she had left for him under his windshield. I didn’t get a chance to read the note—Josh tore it up—but I know it upset him.”

  “Did he report it?”

  “You mean to the police? I don’t think so. That was three weeks ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. ’Course, we’ve been living here; we moved in together at about that time. I don’t know if Heavenly knew that or not.”

  Tears started to fall again. Bobby patted Ivy’s hand even as he said, “Jean.”

  “Soon as we’re done here I’ll check her out,” Shipman said.

  Ivy spoke through her pain. “McKenzie, you say… you say Heavenly—she’s involved in the treasure?”

  “Heavenly told me that she’s the one who discovered the existence of Jelly’s gold,” I said. “She said that she shared the information with Berglund, that they were partners. She said Berglund betrayed her. She said that he stole her research and set out to find the gold without her, keep it all for himself.”

  “That’s a lie,” Ivy said. “Josh would never do that.”

  “I’m just telling you what she said.”

  “It’s a lie. It has to be.”

  Only I believed every word of it. I was convinced now that Berglund used Heavenly, he used Ivy, and he had tried to use me, getting me to frighten away Heavenly and her posse. The jerk.

  “We’ll speak to Ms. Petryk,” Bobby said. “Her friends as well. In the meantime, McKenzie, where were you tonight?”

  “Seriously? You’re asking me that?”

  “You’re hunting for the gold, too, aren’t you?”

  Ivy was outraged. “You can’t believe McKenzie had anything to do—”

  “Ms. Flynn, everyone is a suspect,” Bobby told her. “What about it, McKenzie?”

  “I’ve known you for a thousand years,” I reminded him. “We grew up together.”

  Bobby stared.

  “Seriously?” I repeated.

  He stared some more.

  I gave him a detailed account of my movements starting with when I left the Minnesota Historical Society. I told him how I deftly shook off the Aveo in the parking lot, but he didn’t want to hear that. I told him about picking up Nina at Rickie’s and about our travels afterward.

  “Nina will vouch for me,” I said.

  “Trust a woman foolhardy enough to date you—I think not,” Bobby said. “Jean, I want you to go over to Guardino’s and verify McKenzie’s story; see if this woman—Rosemary—remembers him. Also, McKenzie said he paid for his meal with a credit card, so they should have a receipt.”

  “I’m on it,” Jean said.

  “I can’t believe you’re checking my alibi,” I said. “That’s so cold, man.”

  “If the situation was reversed, I’m sure you would do the same for me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’d at least have the common courtesy to wait until your back was turned.”

  “Lieutenant,” a voice called from the doorway. It belonged to Fontana.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said.

  “The media is gathering downstairs. A couple TV types and the guy from the Pioneer Press. What should I tell them?”

  “Tell them I’ll make a statement in a couple of minutes.” Bobby pointed a finger at me. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, talks to the media on this one.” He turned the finger on Shipman. “Pass the word. I want it sealed. God knows what kind of madness we’ll have to deal with if word gets out that buried treasure is a possible motive. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in lunatics.” He glared at me. “Besides the ones we already have. So we keep it to ourselves. Got it? I catch anyone leaking intel to the media, I promise, it will not end pretty.”

  I flashed on Manning downstairs and Kelly Bressandes’s winning smile. Good luck, pal, my inner voice said.

  “Another thing, Loo,” Fontana said. “They’re ready to move the body.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  I followed Bobby to the door. We watched as members of the Ramsey County Coroner’s Office carefully lifted Berglund’s corpse, placed it on a gurney, and zipped it into a black vinyl body bag. There was nothing on the floor beneath it or anywhere near where it had fallen. Danko gave Bobby a plastic evidence bag.
>
  “This is all he had on him,” the ME said.

  The bag contained his wallet, loose change, and a pen.

  They started wheeling Berglund down the corridor.

  “I’m really upset about this,” I said.

  Bobby patted my shoulder like the good friend he was.

  8

  Someone was knocking on my front door, but I was floating in that gray area between sleep and consciousness, and for some reason I passed it off as part of a dream about a guy I used to know who played the drums. A few moments later, my phone rang. That jolted me awake. Blurry-eyed, I found my digital clock.

  “Who the hell is up at seven forty-two A.M. on a weekday?” I shouted to no one in particular. Then it occurred to me—just about everyone who has to work for a living is up at seven forty-two on a weekday. I pulled my pillow over my head and let my voice mail answer the phone.

  At seven forty-eight, it rang again. That got me out of bed. Only I didn’t answer the phone. Instead, I went to my window. I don’t know why. Probably it had something to do with an instinct for self-preservation left over from the time when our ancestors slept in trees that was working for me now, because parked in front of my house was a TV van. Kelly Bressandes was standing next to it, her hand pressing a cell phone against her ear. A moment later, my own phone stopped ringing and I watched her speak into her cell. When she collapsed her phone and dropped it into her pocket, I accessed my voice mail. Bressandes wanted to interview me—on camera or off, my choice—concerning a search for lost gold belonging to bank robber Frank Nash and its connection to the murder of Josh Berglund.

  “Oh, my,” I said aloud, “but Bobby is going to be pissed.”

  Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. This time I was in the shower. It rang twice more while I was getting dressed. I glanced through the window again. Bressandes and the van were still parked outside.

  I wondered who leaked the information. Manning? Fontana? One of Bobby’s detectives? Maybe Danko. You know he’s going to blame you, my inner voice said.

  Yeah, he is, I told myself.

  Well, if Bobby was going to take that attitude …

  Bressandes had left a number with her messages, and I punched it into my cell. I didn’t want to use my landline for fear that she had caller ID and would know where the call was coming from.

  Her voice was cool and professional. “Kelly Bressandes,” she said.

  “Ms. Bressandes, this is McKenzie,” I said. “I was just checking my voice mail and received your message.”

  “Mr. McKenzie, I would very much like to speak with you.”

  “I’m not at home right now. I’m still at the St. Paul Police Department. Would you like to meet here? Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes, on Grove Street.”

  “Why don’t you come over. I’m on the second floor in the homicide department. Tell the desk sergeant that Lieutenant Dunston said it’s okay for you to come up.”

  “I know Bobby Dunston,” Bressandes said. “I can be there in fifteen minutes,”

  Bobby Dunston? my inner voice said. How ’bout that?

  “I’ll be waiting,” I said aloud.

  I deactivated my cell and stood by the window, watching as Bressandes climbed into the van and drove off.

  “Pretty girl,” I said aloud. “Not too bright, though.”

  I have two toasters, one for bread and a Dualit Vario two-slice toaster hand-built in England exclusively for bagels that I paid way too much for—but I do like my gadgets. I split a bagel and was toasting it when I heard another knock on my door. I was thinking that Kelly Bressandes might not be as naive as I thought when I looked through the spy hole. Someone else was standing on my porch.

  “Heavenly,” I said when I opened the door.

  “You asshole,” she told me.

  “A good morning to you, too.”

  “You ratted me out to the cops.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Are you insulting me according to the alphabet? What comes next?”

  “Creep.”

  “Come on in.”

  Heavenly crossed the threshold and stood expectantly while I shut the door. She didn’t expect me to shove her backward hard against the wall, though. Her head hit with a thump, and while she was moaning about it, I spun her around and leaned heavily against her body. My hands went under her arms, along her waist, between her thighs, and down her legs. Satisfied, I pulled her bag off her shoulder and searched it. I stepped away from her, and she pivoted toward me.

  “What was that about?” she wanted to know.

  I tossed her bag to her; she fumbled it but managed to keep it from hitting the floor.

  “Just checking,” I said.

  “Did you think I had a gun?”

  “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”

  “I had nothing to do with what happened to Josh.”

  “So you say.”

  “You dick.”

  “D’s are easy. It’s the E°s that are tough.”

  “Excrement.”

  “I stand corrected. Want some breakfast?”

  I wasn’t thrilled about turning my back to Heavenly, but I didn’t want her to think I was afraid. Besides, she wasn’t armed. I didn’t really need to frisk her; she was wearing another body-hugging dress just like the one she wore the previous morning—this one maroon—and I would have noticed any unsightly bulges. Only what better way to let her know I didn’t trust her?

  “I was toasting some bagels,” I said. “Want one?” A moment later, she joined me in the kitchen. “I could make you something else. Eggs. Waffles. Sno-cone.”

  That stopped her. “A sno-cone? At nine in the morning?”

  “It’s not just for breakfast anymore.”

  “A bagel would be nice,” Heavenly said.

  “Strawberry, blueberry, or original cream cheese?”

  “Strawberry.”

  Right on cue, the halves of my bagel popped up. I slid them onto two small plates and smeared each with strawberry cream cheese. Meanwhile, I toasted two more halves.

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “Please.”

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Black.”

  “Thatta girl.”

  I poured two mugs, using my Vienna De Luxe automatic espresso and coffee machine, and gave her one.

  “Why do you have a fully loaded kitchen, yet not a stick of furniture in your living room?” Heavenly asked.

  “I’m fighting a battle against consumerism.”

  “You have a six-hundred-dollar coffee machine and a two-hundred-dollar toaster just for bagels.”

  “I didn’t say I was winning.”

  Still, it said something that Heavenly would know how much my gadgets cost at a glance. I regarded her carefully while she sipped the coffee. She looked more like hell than heaven. Her hair was unkempt and in need of washing; her dress was wrinkled and seemed not to fit her properly; her eyes were red and had trouble focusing.

  “Rough night?” I asked.

  “The police knocked on my door around midnight, got me out of bed—barely gave me time to throw on some clothes—and brought me downtown. You know, they actually said that, ‘We want you to come downtown,’ just like the movies. I was in an interrogation room for six hours.”

  “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you look so good.”

  “Fucker.”

  “We’re up to G now. Making progress.”

  Heavenly made mouth movements as if she wanted to insult me again but couldn’t think of an appropriate word.

  “Geek?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No fair helping.”

  The second bagel halves popped up, and I spread strawberry cream cheese on both. I gave one to Heavenly, and she took a large bite out of it.

  “Why are you here, Heavenly?”

  “I didn’t kill Josh.” She spoke aroun
d the bagel. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Okay.”

  “The police believe me.”

  “They let you go. That doesn’t mean they believe you.”

  “Whatever. I didn’t do it. But whoever did—I’ve been thinking about this all night, McKenzie—whoever did kill Josh, I could be next.”

  “Think so?’

  “They killed Josh for the gold. If they know about the gold, they know about me.”

  “That’s certainly a possibility.”

  “I’m very afraid.”

  Funny, she doesn’t look it, my inner voice said.

  “I need help,” Heavenly told me.

  “There’s always Ted and Wally.”

  “The cops were bringing them in while I was going out. From the expression on their faces, I don’t think they’re going to be of much use to me.”

  “Were they ever?”

  “McKenzie, I need you.”

  “Me?”

  “You can protect me. You can protect both of us while we get the gold.”

  “Is that why you came over? Because you want to partner up?”

  “With Josh gone, you have no one else.”

  “There’s Ivy.”

  “Ivy can’t help you. She’s just a hanger-on.”

  “There you go, insulting my friends again.”

  “I’m sure she’s a very nice person, McKenzie, but you have to know if Josh wasn’t going to share the gold with me, he sure as hell wasn’t going to share it with Ivy. Which means he wasn’t telling her everything he knew.”

  Heavenly’s probably right about Berglund, my inner voice said. He didn’t tell Ivy about her. Wonder what else he kept from her? It’s something to look into.