by Glenn Ickler
“I’ll tape off the whole building if I have to,” Holmberg said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Ann said. “I’m sure the media will honor your request without a problem.” Oh, the naiveté of the governor’s new press secretary.
“You’d better tape off the lobby,” I said to Holmberg. “And have your deputy keep an eye on the short blonde from Channel Four.”
“The one with the big knockers who’s always up front?” he asked.
“That’s the one. She’s super aggressive. Your deputy might have to physically restrain her.”
“I’m sure that’ll break his heart.” The deputy, standing just outside our little huddle, grinned like the proverbial canary-consuming cat.
Holmberg had radioed for additional deputies to come and begin the search. While Ann was rounding up prospective Roxie finders, I quizzed Angie and learned that Roxie’s last name was Robideaux, that she was probably twenty-two years old and that her parents lived in the tiny town of Nisswa, just on the other end of Gull Lake. I incorporated this information into a brief story about her disappearance and the impending interviews to determine who she’d been with the previous evening. I did not explain the reason for her being with the man, hoping that most readers would consider it a normal relationship between two young people of the opposite sex. The time to report on her chosen profession would come later. It was still too soon to start damaging reputations—either Roxie’s or those of the men being questioned.
The sheriff’s tall, stern-looking deputy, whose name we learned was Leo, did close off the lobby with a long stretch of yellow plastic tape and the crowd was forced to watch at a distance as Ann Rogers brought the first of four men she had selected in through the back way and led him to the office door. Angie was in her station behind the registration counter where she could survey the men without being obvious. Photography of the interviewees had been strictly forbidden and Leo stood a step in front of the tape watching for any sign of a camera or a cell phone.
“Does that first guy look not too bad to you?” Al asked me.
“If I was a woman, I wouldn’t date him,” I said. “Not even for money.”
“Me neither. Look at the gut on the guy.”
“I think Ann went overboard. That one’s way beyond ‘kind of fat.’” I looked at the man again and realized that he was the state treasurer. I hadn’t recognized him dressed in faded jeans and a Viking sweatshirt and minus the crummy hairpiece he usually wore. I couldn’t imagine him being Roxie’s all-nighter.
Ann Rogers opened the office door and gestured for the state treasurer to enter. Ten minutes later he came out looking somber. Ann led him back to where he’d entered, followed him out and returned with a second man. This one would never pass as “not too bad looking,” but he was waved into the office. It looked like the score would be second down and two to go.
I took Al by the arm and pulled him out of the crowd. “I’ve got a better idea than standing here watching fat men go in and out of a room,” I said.
“What could possibly be more fascinating than that?” Al said. “Do you have a pan of fudge we could watch harden?”
“Way sweeter than that. Which cottage did you say Mari Gordon is in?”
“Oh, that is sweet. She’s staying down the beach, sort of out of the way of everybody else.”
“Take me to that cottage. We can talk to the sheriff about his interviews later.”
We quietly left the lodge and Al led me down the sidewalk that paralleled the beach. We passed a dozen cottages that faced the beach and then the sidewalk turned ninety degrees away from the shoreline, went up a short rise and dead-ended in front of the last cottage at the end of the path.
“To quote a famous Mormon, this is the place,” Al said.
“You’re sure?” I said.
“I watched Ann give her a hug and tuck her in.”
I went up the front steps and knocked gently on the door. “Who is it?” asked the female voice inside.
“Warren Mitchell and Alan Jeffrey from the St. Paul Daily Dispatch,” I said. “No microphones and no TV cameras. Can we talk to you for a minute about your husband?”
“Go away,” she said.
“The governor thought you might talk to us since we’re the hometown paper,” I said. This bodacious lie drew a shake of the head from Al.
“Anders said that?” Mari said through the closed door.
“Yes, he did.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Call him and ask him.” The ultimate bluff.
There was a pause and then the door opened. “Oh, shit, come on in. Quick, before the TV hound dogs get here.”
I resisted correcting her grammar and quickly entered the cottage. Al quickly followed. She quickly shut the door and threw the sliding bolt in addition to clicking the lock on the doorknob. She turned and waved us toward a loveseat in the sitting room, followed us in and sat in a small armchair facing us.
Mari Gordon was in her late forties, slender and almost six feet tall. She wasn’t pretty or cute, but she was attractive when she was gussied up for a public appearance. At this moment she was not gussied up. Her eyes were puffed from crying, she wore no makeup and her long, straight black hair was hanging in strings, as if it hadn’t been combed in the three days since she first got word of Alex’s demise. She was wearing baggy khaki cargo pants and a wrinkled blue denim shirt that wasn’t tucked in. On her feet was a bizarre pair of slippers that looked like big furry gray rabbits, long ears and all.
“Thank you for seeing us,” I said. “I’m sorry for your loss. We’ll all miss Alex a lot.”
“Really?” Mari said. “Alex said everybody in the press corps hated him.”
“Not everybody,” Al said. “We always got along okay.” Another lie, but a charitable one.
Mari looked at the camera slung over Al’s shoulder. “You’re not going to take my picture.” It was a command, not a question.
“Not without your permission,” he said.
“Well, you won’t get it. I know I look like shit.”
“You’ve had some rough days,” I said. “We don’t need your picture; just some information.”
“Like what?” Mari asked.
“Like do you know who, if anyone, really did hate Alex enough to, uh . . . do what they seem to have done to him?”
“I can think of a couple.”
“Good.” I took a small notebook out of my back pants pocket and a ballpoint pen out of my shirt pocket. “Name me some names and give me some motives.” I sat back and waited with the pen poised and ready.
Fifteen
Naming Names
Mari Gordon opened her mouth to speak, closed it to think a moment and then said, “Are you going to put what I say in the paper?”
“No, this is strictly background,” I said. “I’m looking for a place to start investigating. I suppose you’ve already given these names to the sheriff.”
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t talked to the sheriff since I’ve been here. From what I heard him say at the press conference, I don’t think he’s convinced that Alex was murdered.”
“Don’t be too hard on the sheriff. Alex’s death didn’t actually come together as a probable homicide until the autopsy report of the head wound was added to the discovery of the buried lifejacket. And right now the sheriff also has a missing woman to deal with.”
“Who’s missing?”
“A young woman named Roxie who had a date with somebody from the governor’s group last night. The sheriff is questioning several men right now to find out who that was.”
“What do you mean by a date?” Mari said. “Is Roxie one of those baby-faced whores who are rubbing their tits up against all the guys?”
“As a matter of fact, she is,” I
said. “I didn’t know whether you’d noticed them.”
“They’re not exactly subtle. I saw them working the room after dinner last night. It was pretty obvious what they were selling. Just look at how they’re dressed. I don’t know how the brunette gets into those jeans.”
“We know how guys do,” Al said.
“I’ll bet you do,” Mari said. “What did it cost you?”
Before Al could respond, I said, “What I’m trying to tell you is that the sheriff has been, shall we say, distracted from investigating Alex’s death by the immediate need to find out where Roxie might be. From the mess we saw in her cabin, it’s possible that he’ll have a second homicide to investigate.”
“God, what fun the Governor’s Fishing Opener has turned out to be,” Mari said.
“It sure isn’t the laid-back happy time we were expecting to cover,” Al said. “We planned on fishing for walleyes, not fishing for a killer or two.”
“Back to naming names,” I said to Mari. “You said you have a couple.”
“I do,” she said. “Number one would be Dexter Rice, the previous governor’s press secretary.”
I had worked with Dexter when he held that job. He was outspoken and temperamental but he didn’t seem like a man who would murder his successor. “Why him?” I asked.
“Dexter worked for the previous governor and he was sure he would be kept on when Anders, another Republican, was elected. When Anders hired Alex instead, Dexter was royally pissed off and told Alex he’d be sorry he took the job.”
“Now Dexter’s doing editorials on the evening news for Channel Five,” I said. “He should be over losing the PR job to Alex.”
“He’s not over it. He’s done everything he could to make Alex look bad in his editorials. And he told Alex in person once that he’d get him fired if he had to knock him on the head and give him amnesia.”
“Very colorful,” Al said. “Sounds like one of his editorials where he gets all red in the face and shakes his fist at what he calls the squishy-headed liberals.”
“He’s an asshole,” Mari said. “Alex always thought he wasn’t wound quite right, even when he was working for the governor.”
I remembered clashing with Rice over a story I had written after a governor’s press conference. Rice claimed that I totally misrepresented the governor’s position and quoted him out of context. “He could get right in your face if he didn’t like something you wrote,” I said. “He once accused me of making the governor look foolish and damn near exploded when I said the governor didn’t need my help to look foolish.”
“But how could Rice have clobbered Alex?” Al asked. “He’s back in the studio cranking out cranky editorials.”
“No, he’s not. He’s here,” Mari said. “I saw him with the Channel Five crew in the dining room. He made a point of not making eye contact with me.”
“Sounds like a good one to start with,” I said. “Who is your other candidate?”
“A man named Joe Weber who works in the secretary of state’s office,” Mari said. “I don’t know what his problem is with Alex, but he’s been sending Alex some really vicious, insulting e-mails. It might be a political thing; Weber’s a far left Democrat.”
“I don’t know Weber,” I said. “I wonder if he’s one of the administrative bunch up here for the opener.”
“Maybe Ann Rogers can tell us,” Al said.
“Good thinking,” I said. “We should get back to her and the sheriff to see what’s going on.” I turned to Mari and said, “Thank you for seeing us and for giving us this off the record stuff. Now is there anything you’d like to say on the record for my next story?”
“There is,” she said. “You can write that I was devastated by Alex’s death and now I’m even more devastated to learn that it looks like it wasn’t an accident—that someone deliberately killed him. Also that I’m grateful for all the kind messages I’ve received and I hope the rotten bastard who did this awful thing is caught and rots in hell forever.”
“The editor might bleep out ‘bastard,’” I said.
“How about ‘son of a bitch’?” Mari asked.
“I’ll keep that as a second choice.”
When we returned to the lodge the media crowd was breaking up. We didn’t see the sheriff but we spotted Ann Rogers and made our way upstream through the departing multitude to reach her. She informed us that all four men questioned had denied being with Roxie Sunday night, but that she knew of two more possibilities who were currently out on the lake fishing. The sheriff had sent Leo out in a boat to hunt for them and bring them in for questioning. Meanwhile, a dozen additional deputies and local and state police officers had arrived to begin checking the cabins and surrounding area for any sign of Roxie. “They’re looking for volunteers to help, if you’re interested,” she said.
“I’ve got a story to write, but we can join them when I’m done,” I said. I was relieved that she hadn’t thought to ask why we hadn’t heard the sheriff’s announcement. If Ann found out where we’d been and leaked the word that Mari Gordon had talked to us, every reporter and photographer at the resort would be demanding to know where Mari was staying, and they’d soon be beating on her door. I could envision Trish Valentine climbing in a window and reporting live from Mari Gordon’s cabin before my story was posted on the Daily Dispatch online edition.
Actually, I had two stories to write—one to update the Gordon murder story with the quote from the victim’s widow and another to update the story about the hunt for the missing woman. As I wrote the latter, I wondered whether one of the interviewed men had lied to the sheriff or if one of the fishermen being pursued by Leo had been Roxie’s all-nighter. And of course there was the possibility that Ann Rogers hadn’t brought in all the men who were kind of fat but not too bad looking. After all, Ann’s perception of a man’s shape and facial quality might not be the same as someone who looked at him as a potential purchaser of her services.
I finished my stories and sent them to the desk. Al had already e-mailed a couple of pix of the mess in Roxie’s cabin. We both called our homes in St. Paul and left messages for our working women to call us as soon as they got home. Neither of us was looking forward to receiving those return calls.
We were ready to join the search party, but first we had to find the sheriff to get directions. We decided to start the hunt at Roxie’s cabin, where we found Val Holmberg in the bedroom pointing out shots for his forensic photographer.
We greeted Holmberg and he responded with a grunt.
“I understand you didn’t have any luck with the four guys you questioned,” I said. “Are you sure they were all telling the truth?”
“The first three were for sure,” Holmberg said. “I’m not sure about the fourth guy. If the two that Leo is bringing in from lake clear themselves, I might go back to number four.”
“Can you give us a name?” I asked.
“Christ, no. You know better than that.”
I’d been hoping that he didn’t. “When are you seeing the other two?”
“Soon as Leo gets them off the lake and into the office.” Holmberg went to the front door and looked out at the lake, which was partially visible through the pine trees that lined the path between the cabins. “Looks like it will be pretty soon. That’s Leo herding them in.”
We looked where the sheriff was pointing and saw two boats close together approaching the dock. They were too far away to see whether either of the two men in the leading boat was kind of fat but not too bad looking. The sheriff left the cabin and started walking toward the dock. We followed a couple of steps behind.
“One of these guys has to be the one who was with Roxie last night,” Al said.
“Unless number four lied to the sheriff this morning,” I said.
“If we knew who he is we could go beat on him �
��til he told us the truth about Roxie.”
“For a married man, you’re awfully protective of Roxie. Did Mari’s talk about getting into her jeans make you feel horny?”
“No, it made me feel like a worried father. If Roxie’s really twenty-two, she’s only four years older than my daughter.”
As we neared the foot of the dock, Leo and the two fishermen climbed onto the far end of the dock from their respective boats and started walking toward us. From his gestures I could tell that one of the fishermen was giving Leo a hard time about being hauled in off the lake. They were met midway on the dock by Val Holmberg, where the angry man turned toward the sheriff and continued his harangue.
The angry man wasn’t too bad looking and had only a moderate bulge around the middle. I had a very bad feeling about him.
Sixteen
On the Trail
Apparently Al had the same feeling of foreboding because he quickly raised his camera, shot a couple of pictures of the quartet walking toward us on the dock and lowered the camera to his waist without have been seen by his targets. We stepped aside as Holmberg, Leo and the two fishermen walked past and stayed a few steps behind as we followed them into the lodge.
The lounge was empty, and we could smell food and hear babble from the dining room. I checked my watch and saw it was lunch time. We followed the quartet to the lobby entrance but were halted there by Leo, who turned around and raised his hands. “This is as far as you go, boys,” he said. “You can talk to the sheriff after he interviews these gentlemen.”
“Do you know who they are?” I asked.
“No, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Why don’t you fellas go sit in the lounge until the sheriff is finished?”
We mumbled in agreement and retreated. Looking past Leo, I saw that the man who gave me bad vibes was the first to go into the office with Holmberg.
“How’d you like to play bloodhound again?” I said when we reached the lounge.
“You mean follow that guy when the sheriff lets him go?” Al said.