That was my cue to say something obnoxious like It needs salt or Could I get some ketchup? or The meat still has the marks where the jockey whipped it. She in turn would then threaten my life, and I would suggest she find a new line of work, auto mechanic perhaps—both of us counting on Nina to intervene. Only I couldn’t do it. The food was exquisite and made me embarrassed for every meal I had ever cooked for my friends. I told her so.
“But,” she said. It was obvious that she was waiting for a flash of sarcasm.
“But nothing,” I said. “It’s magnificent.”
Monica turned her gaze on Nina. “Did you tell him not to make fun of my food anymore?”
“Nope,” Nina said.
Monica turned on me again. “You really annoy me sometimes,” she said. She returned the trophy to Nina’s desk and left the office.
A moment later she returned. “McKenzie, tomorrow the special is seared sea scallops with brandade, heirloom tomato, and niçoise vinaigrette, and I expect to hear some smart-aleck remark. I mean it.” Then she was gone.
“That is the most temperamental woman I have ever known,” I said. “More temper than mental, I think.”
“She’s an artist,” Nina said, as if that explained it all.
Shortly after, Nina and I were sitting at a small table in the back of her main lounge, holding hands and listening to Prudence Johnson and Rio Nido playing jazz classics like “Hannah in Savannah,” “The Trouble with Me is You,” “Night in Tunisia,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” and “60 Minute Man.” It would have been a perfect evening if not for the young, sandy-haired man who was pretending not to watch us.
My sigh must have told Nina something. “What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t look, but there’s a young man sitting at the bar, blond hair, khaki slacks, blue shirt.”
Of course Nina looked. “What about him?” she said.
“If he’s smart, he’s paying cash as he goes so he doesn’t have to worry about the bill when he follows me out of here.”
“He’s following you?”
“Just in case, why don’t you ask one of your waitstaff if he’s running a tab on his credit card.”
“Screw that,” she said.
Nina rose from the table and walked to the bar and motioned for her head bartender. They chatted for a few moments, the bartender checked some receipts in his cash register, and they chatted some more. A minute later Nina was back at the table.
“You’re right,” she said. “He’s paying his bar tab as he goes—but he also had dinner, short rib tacos, and charged it to his credit card. His name is Allen J. Frans. Do you know him?”
“Not yet, but I will soon make his acquaintance.”
Nina raised an eyebrow.
“It can wait until tomorrow,” I said.
10
There was no sign of the Corolla when I left my house the next morning. At first, I thought that Allen was on to me, that he knew I had spotted him and had switched to another car. Or worse, he put together a full surveillance team to tail me. So I took my own sweet time reaching my destination, driving nearly twenty miles out of my way before I was satisfied that I wasn’t being followed.
Truth was, I was kind of miffed at Allen. Where the hell was he, anyway? I hoped he didn’t oversleep.
I took a few wrong turns, but eventually I found Genevieve Antonello exactly where she said she’d be, sitting on a curb outside Benson Great Hall, where the academic and student centers were located, looking lost. She was wearing a loose-fitting white cardigan over a blue dress shirt that was buttoned all the way to the top. The shirt was tucked into a khaki skirt that fell below her knees. Around her neck she wore a simple silver crucifix on a silver chain. For some reason she reminded me of sweet, crisp apples straight from the orchard.
She rose to meet me. “Mr. McKenzie?” she said. “I’m Genevieve.”
Her handshake was tentative, as if she didn’t spend a lot of time touching people. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding us,” she said.
“I’m afraid I took a right instead of a left inside the gate.”
Genevieve smiled a pretty smile. “You’ve already seen most of our campus, then,” she said.
“Pretty much.”
Bethel University was a distinctly evangelical Christian liberal arts university of fifty-six hundred students from all over the world that could trace its roots back to an 1871 Swedish Baptist seminary. There were over thirty buildings not counting athletic facilities, most of them rose-colored brick and new, scattered throughout a sprawling campus that was isolated from the rest of the city by walls of trees and various bodies of water. The campus itself resembled an upscale North Woods resort; there were nature trails and pedestrian bridges.
“Where would you like to talk?” Genevieve said.
“You decide.”
She motioned with her head toward a narrow sidewalk that rambled northwest of Benson Great Hall between a stand of trees and a lake. “We could go for a walk?”
“Sure.”
Genevieve moved at a nice pace, faster than an amble but not so fast that anyone grew short of breath—unlike Nina, who didn’t walk so much as she marched. I fell in alongside her. The trees lining the path were budding, and the grass, reeds, and shrubs that grew along the lake were turning from a dingy April brown to a luscious green. Occasionally we would be passed by her fellow students. I noticed that they were all attired as modestly as Genevieve—nothing tight, nothing revealing, an amazing thing for college students—and I wondered if Bethel had a dress code or if all evangelical Christians dressed that way.
Genevieve didn’t speak until the academic and student centers were far behind us.
“Josh and I would walk all the time,” she said. “Along Valentine Lake. Along the nature trails. Sometimes we would leave the trails and just stroll through the woods, follow the creek, holding hands.”
“Sounds romantic.”
Genevieve slowed to a stop. She ran both hands over the top of her head and down the back, stopping at her neck. Her hair was auburn with a touch of gold or golden with streaks of brown—you decide. Looking at it reminded me that light hair often darkens as people grow older, and I wondered if that was what was happening now, Genevieve’s genes battling to decide if she was an impulsive blonde or a sensible brunette.
“I didn’t think of it that way, romantic,” she said. “Not at first. Not until … We were walking around the lake. We were holding hands. We stopped and kissed, and then he—and I—and we … I had never done …”
She looked at me then. Her eyes began to well up as if she were remembering a particularly emotional moment. Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it, for a sweet eighteen-year-old girl who buttoned her shirts to her throat and wore crucifixes around her neck—of course it was an emotional event.
I was surprised by how outraged it made me feel. That lousy sonuvabitch, my inner voice shouted. Fucking Berglund. I bet he was proud of himself, too, a man seducing a child. I was so angry that if Berglund had still been alive there was a good chance I might have killed him myself.
Genevieve lowered her head and turned it away. I attempted to rest a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but she stepped beyond my reach. She pulled at the hem of her white cardigan and continued walking. “He’s gone,” she said. “He’s gone.” I had to step lively to catch up. “Who killed him?” she asked. “Why?”
“I was hoping you could help us find out,” I said.
“Me?”
“He told you to call me.”
“Yes, but like I said—I don’t know why.”
“What did he say? Do you recall his exact words?”
“Josh told me to get a pencil and a piece of paper and write this down—this being your name and number. He said, ‘If anything happens to me, call McKenzie.’ He said to tell you, ‘Don’t let the bastards get it.’ I asked him what he was talking about, but he just laughed. Then he said he’d call me later, except he neve
r did.”
“How long had you known Berglund?”
“Only a couple of weeks. No, less than that.” Genevieve stopped again and looked up and to her right, remembering. “Twelve days. It seemed—it seemed so much longer than that. It was as if—as if we were ancient spirits that had known each other for a millennium.”
“Berglund told you that,” I said.
“Yes.”
And Heavenly and Ivy, too, my inner voice said. That bastard.
“Where did you meet?” I said aloud.
“I volunteer at a nursing home in Arden Hills. Helping the staff sometimes, but mostly just being there for the residents to talk to. Some of those people—it’s like their families abandoned them, put them in the home and forgot that they’re alive. I talk to them and play cards with them, board games. Most of them are pretty old; some have Alzheimer’s. I’ve learned if we live long enough, and we’re all living longer and longer these days, half of us will get Alzheimer’s disease.”
“Frightening,” I said.
“It sure is,” she said.
Genevieve drifted away then, thinking, I was sure, terrible thoughts about dementia and the loss of memory and language. We took a few more steps before I prompted her again.
“You met Berglund at the nursing home.”
“Yes, yes I did. He was writing a book. He said it was going to be about the gangsters who ran things in St. Paul in the thirties. He said it wasn’t going to be salacious, that he wasn’t going to make heroes out of those men. He said he wanted to write a book that reminded people we all need to be vigilant in order to protect society, to keep such men from rising to power again.”
Sure he did, my inner voice said.
“He came to the nursing home because he learned that Uncle Mike lived there, and that’s when we met.”
“Tell me about Uncle Mike.”
“He isn’t really my uncle. He’s just this great old guy—he’s confined to a wheelchair, but he’s so lively. He’s ninety-five years old, yet you wouldn’t know it to talk to him.”
“He’s in good health, then.”
“Yes, no—Uncle Mike … his health is uncertain. Sometimes he seems fine, and sometimes … he has to take so many pills, and he gets tired easily, and he forgets things. He remembers years and years ago but has trouble with yesterday. Although”—Genevieve looked up and to her right again—“he always seems to remember me, so, I don’t know, maybe he remembers only the things he wants to remember.”
“What did Berglund want to talk to him about?”
“About the gangsters. Uncle Mike knew them all, I guess. He told Josh stories about them. What were their names? Harvey Bailey, Jimmy Keating, Tommy Holden, Carl Janaway—I guess there was like a fraternity of bank robbers.”
“How did Mike know all these people?”
“He was one of them. A bank robber. Mike used to rob banks. He robbed something like thirty banks before he was caught. They sent him to Stillwater Prison for twenty-five years. I guess I shouldn’t say that with such pride, but I really like Uncle Mike and that’s part of who he is. I asked him once, if he could live his life over again, would he do the same thing, and he laughed and said, ‘Sugar’—he calls me Sugar—‘I probably would, only I’d be more careful.’ Either that, he said, or get smarter about breaking out of prisons, like Frank Nash.”
That stopped me.
“Your uncle Mike knew Frank Nash?” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
We had reached the end of the sidewalk and were coming up on a rose brick chapel with huge bells extending from the wall.
“He was friends with Frank Nash,” Genevieve said. “Mike said he and Nash once stole some gold from a bank in South Dakota. Josh was very interested in that.”
I’ll bet, my inner voice shouted.
“I want to meet your uncle Mike,” I said.
“Oh, he’d like that very much. He doesn’t get a lot of visitors. Just about everyone he knew has been dead for many years. When would you like to see him?”
“How ’bout right now?”
Genevieve glanced at her watch and then up at the chapel. “I have a business class—Information Technology and Applications,” she said. “I suppose I could get a friend to take notes for me.”
The nursing home was located in Arden Hills just down the road from a strip mall. There was a chapel on the right as we entered and an office on the left that you could step up to like a counter in a deli. Genevieve waved at the woman behind the counter and announced, “A friend to see Mike.” That, and the way she led me by the arm as if I were a lost child being returned to his parents, seemed to satisfy the woman, who merely nodded in return. I was surprised by how quiet the home was as we walked down the carpeted corridor to an elevator and up to the second floor. I guess I was expecting a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—I couldn’t tell you why.
Genevieve left me in a room she called “the commons” and went off to fetch Mike. There were two doors, one in the front and one in the back. The room itself was large and also thickly carpeted, with plenty of tables, chairs, and sofas. There were shelves filled with books and games, and in the corner there was a big-screen TV mounted halfway up the wall; no one was watching. Two men and three women were playing hearts at a square table at the far end of the room. I wandered over to watch and accidentally slipped between the table and the window.
“Get out of the fucking light,” one of the old men said without bothering to look up. I apologized and moved away from the table.
A few moments later, Genevieve pushed a wheelchair into the room. The man sitting in the chair was smiling like a kid on a merry-go-round. He was wearing black slippers, black slacks, a black shirt, a gold cardigan sweater, and a jaunty yellow seersucker men’s dress cap like the kind golfers wore in the fifties. He had been tall once, and big, bigger than me, but he’d shrunk a few inches. All of his clothes seemed three sizes too large for him except the cap.
He looked up at me and said, “You’re a cop.”
“Uncle Mike,” Genevieve said, as if she had just heard him utter an obscenity.
“I used to be a cop in a previous life,” I told him. I offered my hand, and he took it; his bones felt like dry twigs, his skin like parchment. “I’m McKenzie.”
“Yeah, I could always spot a bull, McKenzie,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I like cops. I have more in common with them than hardly anyone else. My best friend was a cop, yes he was. Used to be with the BCA. I hooked up with him after I got out of stir. He had retired by then, but so had I. We used to get together every Sunday for brunch, play cards, watch the ball games. When that got too boring, we opened a bar in Minneapolis. The license was in his name. Who was going to give me a liquor license?” Mike laughed at the telling of it. “We were like a curiosity at a carnival. The cop and the bank robber. Everyone came to our place. Cops, crooks, lawyers—it was like a license to steal, that liquor license.” His face became red as he laughed, and his entire body shook. “When my partner died, I sold the joint. Made out like a bandit. How ’bout that, Sugar? Made out like a bandit.” He laughed some more.
“Oh, Uncle Mike,” Genevieve said.
“A bandit,” Mike repeated.
I decided I liked him. I liked them both.
“I’m sorry to see you in a wheelchair,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t really need it. I can still get around pretty good, can’t I, Sugar? Sometimes I’ll amble over to the shopping mall down the road just to prove that I can. Don’t need a walker, neither.” Mike began massaging his right leg with both hands. “ ’Course, the ol’ pins ain’t what they used to be, no sir. Can get pretty tired dragging this ol’ carcass around. ’Sides, would you rather walk or get pushed around by this sweet thing?”
Mike and I both looked at Genevieve. She blushed.
“Can I ask you some questions, Mike?” I said.
“See, a cop, what did I tell you, Sugar? Softens you up by showin’ concern for y
our health, then starts askin’ the hard questions.”
Genevieve shrugged.
“So, what’ll it be, copper?” Mike said. “Want to talk about the new days or the old days?”
“Old days,” I said. “What can you tell me about Frank Nash?”
“Jelly? We used to thieve together, me and Jelly. I remember this one time—wait.” Mike looked up at Genevieve. “Didn’t we just talk to some kid about Jelly just the other day?”
“Last week,” Genevieve said.
“Yeah. Some kid. Kept giving you the big eye. Stay away from that one, Sugar. He’s a weasel. I can spot a weasel from a block away.”
“I will,” Genevieve said.
“You live a life like I did, you learn about weasels.” Mike was looking at me again. “Now this one, Sugar, he’s a cop. Stand-up cop. You can tell. It’s in the eyes. McKenzie here, he’s got a cop’s eyes. That other one, that kid. His eyes were all wrong. Hear what I’m sayin’, Sugar? All wrong.”
“I hear,” Genevieve said.
“Don’t be sheddin’ no tears over that one.”
“I won’t.”
“So, you want to know about Jelly?” Mike said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Nah, you don’t. I bet you really want to hear about the job. The last job we pulled together. The South Dakota job.” “Yes,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what the kid wanted, too. He wanted to know about the gold. Thinks it’s still here, waitin’ to be dug up. Maybe it is. Only he wouldn’t admit it, no sir. Kept talkin’ about that book when everyone knew he was after the gold. A weasel. Well, copper, what about you? You’re lookin’ for the gold, too, ain’tcha?”
“You bet I am, and if you help me find it, I’ll give you ten percent of my share.” I pointed at Genevieve. “You, too.”
“Hear that, Sugar?” Mike said. “Like I said. Stand-up.”
Genevieve smiled slightly.
“Okay, copper. Where should I begin?”
June 7, 1933
Near Huron, South Dakota
Frank Nash spread the map over the hood of the black roadster. In the corner was the seal of Beadle County, South Dakota. Mike smiled at the sight of it. Jelly Nash walkin’ into the surveyor’s office as bold as brass and asking for the county’s road maps to help plan his getaway—wait until he told the boys over to the Green Lantern about that one. Amazing. Then touring the town. Wandering about, checking out the stores and shops around the bank, sizing up the folks behind the counters, buying the things they sold, just as pleasant as could be. “It’s a brand-new day,” he’d tell them, reciting the City of Huron motto.
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