Fishing for a Killer

by Glenn Ickler

  “How’s that again?” I asked.

  “Harry’s Haberdashery had a huge fire last night.”

  At first I was puzzled. “What’s Harry’s Hab . . . ?” Then it hit me in mid-query. “Oh, my god, that’s where I bought my wedding suit.”

  “That’s right. The suit in which you were to become my lawfully wedded husband three days from today is part of the pile of water-soaked ashes where Harry’s used to be. You need to get home now—today—and buy another suit and get it tailored.”

  “I doubt Don O’Rourke will accept that as a reason to abandon the story of a loony tunes fugitive who climbs trees and runs away from hospitals,” I said.

  “Why can’t Don send somebody else to take your place if he’s so dead set on covering that story?” Martha said.

  “Your choice of the word ‘dead’ reminds me of another reason for staying here. There is also an investigation of the murder of the governor’s top flack going on. Remember? The sheriff is questioning people again today and probably will have a press conference just in time for the evening TV news.”

  “So let Trish Valentine report live and somebody from your paper cover it by watching her, or by phone or by e-mail or . . . or . . . or by Facebook.”

  I couldn’t believe she said Facebook. Letting Trish Valentine stand in live for me was the most odious thing I could think of, but Facebook was the most ridiculous. “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “I am serious. What are you going to get married in?”

  “I could wear the old suit that shrunk around the waist. I could cover up the top button that won’t fasten with a cummerbund or something.”

  “Get real,” Martha said. “If you think I’m walking down the aisle beside you with your pants unbuttoned, you’ve got another thought coming.”

  “Would save time on the honeymoon,” I said.

  “Oh, stop being the clown for a minute. You need to get back here and go to a clothing store, pick out a suit and get it tailored to fit you in the space of two days. Call Don. Tell Don the problem. Plead with Don. Tell Don to send another reporter.”

  “Do I leave my best man here or plead for him, too?”

  “He’s got a little more time. And he at least owns a suit that buttons around his belly.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll run it by Don but I don’t expect a lot of sympathy from him. I may have to get married in the navy blue blazer and gray pants combo that I wear to funerals.”

  “It’ll be your funeral if you don’t get home pretty soon,” Martha said. “Let me know what Don says, okay?”

  “Okay. Talk to you later, my love.” We made kissy sounds and hung up.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Al asked.

  “There was a hot time in the old town last night,” I said.

  “What kind of a hot time?”

  “A fire that made Martha hot under the collar.” I gave him a rundown on what had happened in St. Paul. Al laughed and wished me luck with Don.

  Before I could call and verbally prostrate myself before our practically peerless city editor, the bedside phone rang. It was Ann Rogers spreading the word to all the media that Sheriff Val Holmberg would be holding a press briefing in ten minutes. I asked if that meant they’d caught Ronald Jones but she’d already hung up.

  My pleading with Don O’Rourke for a replacement would have to wait. We grabbed computer and camera and trundled off through the drizzle to the lodge, where we joined the crowd assembling in the meeting room. I worked myself into my usual spot right behind Trish Valentine.

  “Morning, Trish,” I said. “Are we still buddies?”

  “I never knew we were,” Trish said without turning her head even halfway in my direction.

  “Until this cockeyed murder and kidnapping mixture started our rivalry has always been friendly. Let’s call it even and start over.”

  She still looked straight ahead but she shrugged. “I’ve got no problem with that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then I won’t bop you over the head when you beat me to asking the first question.”

  “Trish Valentine reporting live,” she said. The cheery tone was back in her voice.

  Sheriff Holmberg appeared about five minutes later than scheduled and was greeted with a barrage of shouted questions. He raised his hands and waited for silence. When all the questioners finally realized that Holmberg really wouldn’t speak until everybody shut up, the room grew quiet and he spoke.

  “I’m here to report that the North Dakota State Police have found our fugitive and have him surrounded,” he said.

  “North Dakota?” somebody yelled.

  “North Dakota,” Holmberg said. “He stopped for gas in a town called Rugby, about 150 miles west of Grand Forks. The woman behind the counter had seen his picture on TV less than an hour before. She called the local police, and they called the state police, who set up road blocks on U.S. Highway 2 and State Highway 3, the two major roads out of Rugby. Mr. Jones encountered the western roadblock on Highway 2 and turned off the road into a farmyard. There he abandoned his car beside the barn and ran into a very tall silo, where he climbed up the ladder inside.”

  “Are you serious?” Trish said.

  “The guy sure loves to climb,” said Barry Ziebart.

  “Maybe he has friends in high places,” Al said.

  When the laughter subsided, Holmberg continued. “The silo is empty because its contents were used for cattle feed during the winter,” he said. “Mr. Jones is about thirty-five feet up and is threatening to jump to his death if the police don’t back off and promise to let him go.”

  “He’s gone out of his mind,” Trish said.

  “It was a short trip, believe me,” I said. I could still feel twinges of pain in the ribs that were cracked when he knocked me down onto the coffee table, and my cheek still wore a scab where his punch had broken the skin.

  “What are the cops going to do?” asked a man behind us.

  “They have called for a negotiator to try to talk the fugitive down safely,” Holmberg said. “They’ve also called for firefighters with a safety net. So far it’s a standoff, with the state police watching the fugitive and the fugitive repeatedly telling them to leave or he’ll jump.”

  “Damn,” said Al. “Would that be a great picture or what? I wonder how far away from here that is.”

  Trish Valentine asked that very question and Holmberg said it was about 350 miles by roadways, not as the crow flies.

  “He’s covered a lot of ground,” Trish said.

  “He’d been driving all night on straight, flat highways,” the sheriff said.

  Having grown up on a dairy farm, I could picture Ronald Jones hauling himself up the U-shaped steel rungs embedded in the concrete silo wall. It made my stomach flutter to imagine him standing on one rung and gripping another while looking down at a concrete floor littered with moldy remnants of the chopped cornstalks that had once filled the tower. Obviously we would never get to Rugby in time to see the stalemate end, either with a surrender, a spectacular safety net catch or a leap that left Ronald Jones splattered on the concrete slab. At that point I didn’t much care which way it went. I just wanted the fiasco to be finished so I could go home and buy a wedding suit.

  Holmberg brought the briefing to an end with the announcement that the State Highway Patrol was sending a helicopter to carry him to Rugby. Immediately every person in the room began yelling requests to hitch a ride on the chopper. “Oh, sure, I’m going to pick one of you over all the others,” Holmberg said. “Wouldn’t I be popular?”

  “We could draw straws to see who would be the press pool photographer,” someone yelled. “Like they do in a battle zone.”

  “Too late,” Holmberg said. “Hear that?” We did. It was the sound of a whirring rotor passing overhead at
treetop level. “He’s picking me up in the golf course parking lot.” The sheriff dashed out of the room with everyone but me in hot pursuit. I was busy with my cell phone, punching in 411 to get the number of the Rugby, North Dakota, Police Department.

  A woman answered the Rugby PD phone and identified herself as Officer Peterson. While wondering to myself how many Officer Petersons there were in Minnesota and the Dakotas, I told her who I was and asked if the local police were involved in the standoff in the silo. She said almost the entire Rugby police force was at the scene. This would have been a great time to rob the bank in Rugby—if there was a bank in Rugby.

  “Are you in contact with the chief?” I asked.

  “I’m in radio contact with him, yes,” she said.

  “Do you think he would call me on my cell phone?”

  “Would his name be in your paper?”

  “It would.”

  “He’ll call you.” I gave her my number, punched off and waited. Three minutes later I was talking to Rugby Police Chief Lester Wanamaker. He spelled his name for me, making sure that I understood it was Wanamaker with only one ‘N.’ I asked him how many officers were on the scene and he said at least ten North Dakota state troopers, the Pierce County sheriff with five deputies, and eight men from his department. The negotiator who would try to persuade Ronald Jones to come down the ladder had just arrived and was entering the silo.

  “How big a town is Rugby?” I asked.

  “About twenty-nine-hundred,” Wanamaker said. I heard him spit and wondered whether he was chewing tobacco.

  “Is it pretty much a farm town?”

  “Pretty much. Only thing we’re famous for is bein’ the geographic center of North America.”

  “Rugby is the geographic center of North America?”

  “’At’s right. Got a monument in town that says so.”

  “What kind of monument?” I asked.

  “Looks like a skinny pyramid,” he said. “’Bout twenty feet tall and mebbe six feet across at the bottom.” I heard another spit.

  “How long has it been there?” I asked.

  “Date on it says August 1932. Put there by the U.S. Geological Service.”

  “That’s very interesting. So, tell me what’s happening at the silo right now.”

  “Ain’t much of anything I can see from outside. The state cops’ negotiator is inside by himself tryin’ to talk the nut cake down off the ladder. I don’t need to see what happens if the nut cake decides to take a swan dive.” Another spit.

  “No, I don’t blame you,” I said. “It would be a real mess.”

  “Least my boys won’t have to clean it up, then,” the chief said. “We’re outside Rugby city limits so it’s in the sheriff’s territory. Oh, oh, I gotta go now. The state police captain is callin’ a meetin’ over by the silo.”

  “Please save my number and call me if there’s any change—like the nut cake coming down, one way or another.”

  “I’ll do that,” Chief Wanamaker said. “Nice talkin’ to ya, then.” I heard a final spit before the connection was broken.

  Al returned a moment after the chief’s closing expectoration. “God, what a scene,” he said. “Everybody wanted to get on the chopper. People were actually grabbing at it. One fool would’ve walked into the rotor if I hadn’t grabbed him. It looked like the evacuation of Saigon back in the seventies.”

  “Sorry I missed it,” I said.

  “So what have you been doing while I was standing in the rain shooting battle scenes?”

  I told him who I’d been talking with and said, “Did you know Rugby, North Dakota, is the geographic center of North America?”

  “Can’t say that I did, but that’s a middling good angle. I’ll bet Don will just jump right off the center of his chair when he reads that fascinating piece of folklore in your story.”

  “And I’ll bet neither Trish Valentine nor any other TV star will be talking about that fascinating piece of folklore when they’re reporting live tonight. It’s the little things like that that lift an otherwise mundane story out of the ordinary and make the reader feel fully informed, my friend.”

  “Well, if anyone knows about mundane stories it would be you,” he said. With friends like that, etc . . . ?

  We were back in our cabin and I was working on my extraordinary story when my cell phone sounded. The caller was Rugby Police Chief Lester Wanamaker.

  Twenty-Eight

  Party’s Over

  I answered the phone and thanked the chief for calling.

  “No problem, Mr. Mitchell,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that the party’s over.”

  “Is the guest of honor safely down?” I asked.

  “Yup. He come down peaceful as a lamb just a couple minutes ago. Funny thing was, he slipped off a rung and fell the last fifteen feet. Landed in some muck leftover from the silage and either sprained or broke his ankle. EMTs are lookin’ at it now.”

  “Is he in pain?”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s all wet and stinky and hurtin’ like hell.” A louder, lustier spit than any of those previously heard.

  I smiled and caressed my fractured ribs with my fingertips. My wish for a painful ending to the pursuit of Ronald Jones had been granted. “So what’s the next move?”

  “They’ll put the screwball in an ambulance and take him to the hospital in Minot, I guess The state police theory is that Minot was where he was headed because he has family there. Now the family can visit him in the hospital. Hope they chain him to the bed.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I asked the chief if he knew the name of the man who had persuaded Jones to descend the ladder. He did not, but at my request he corralled the state police captain who did know the name, which was Polish and contained an intricate combination of C’s, Z’s and W’s.

  “How’d you ever learn to spell that one?” I asked. He replied by spelling out his own name, which was also Polish and contained an intricate combination of C’s, Z’s and W’s. I thanked him for his help, and he gave the phone back to Chief Wanamaker, from whom I obtained the name of the people who owned the farm. This one was Irish and much easier to spell.

  I got the farmer’s number from 411 and had a nice chat with Molly O’Malley, who said her husband Sean was outside talking to the policemen. She said she’d been hiding in the house the whole time because she was afraid the crazy man would escape from the silo and do God knows what to anybody who got in his way. I asked her some questions about the size and products of their farm and even found out how many cubic feet of silage the silo would hold. It’s details like those that lift a story out of the ordinary and make the reader feel fully informed.

  “I can’t believe how friendly and cooperative these people are,” I said to Al after my conversation with Mrs. O’Malley. “They answer every question and act like they’re willing to talk to a reporter forever.”

  “Out there they don’t have to deal with clusters of TV microphones poked into their faces and having to answer the same dumb questions a dozen times,” Al said. “They haven’t learned to hate us yet.”

  “Good point.” I wrote by far the most readable story I’d produced all week and e-mailed it to Don. Al sent along some shots of the mob scene at the helicopter. Don replied with an e-mail saying the story and pix were just what he needed for page one, and that my including the bit about the geographical center of North America was a nice touch. I took a deep breath and prepared to ask him for permission to go home.

  I put together an impassioned but not panic-stricken request for a replacement at the Gull Lake scene, carefully explaining my need to get home and purchase a wedding suit to replace the one lost in the fire. I e-mailed it to Don and received an instant reply: “Has Al given his statement to the sheriff?”

  I e-mailed, “No. He’s scheduled fo
r this afternoon.”

  Don’s response was: “Stay on scene until he does. Then call me and you probably can come home.”

  “Hallelujah!” I said in a voice loud enough to have been heard by the walleyes swimming in Gull Lake.

  “Don’s letting you go home?” Al said.

  “He says we can both go as soon as you’ve had your turn with the sheriff this afternoon. Let’s pack our bags,” I said.

  “I’ll pack everything but the underwear I’ve got hanging in the bathroom.”

  “Martha would’ve burst a blood vessel if I’d had to tell her we were still stuck here for another night.”

  “In that case, you could have asked Martha to call Don and use her feminine wiles.”

  “Don’s been city editor for so long he’s immune to every kind of wily trick, feminine or otherwise.”

  “I can’t believe that any living, breathing male is immune to Martha Todd.”

  “Good point. But I’m glad that won’t be necessary. I suppose we could use the time we’ve still got here to continue helping the sheriff solve the Alex Gordon murder.”

  “So what do we have to base a solution on?” Al asked.

  “Damn little. We have two men who had both motive and opportunity. Dexter Rice lost his job to Alex and hated him for that. Joe Weber, who argued with Alex and thought he was a political troglodyte, has a history of using violence to settle political arguments. But we have no way of putting either of them in a boat with Alex last Friday morning. Also, the mysteries of how the lifejacket was buried and how the empty boat was left circling in the bay remain unsolved.”

  “So we’re up Gull Lake without a paddle,” Al said.

  “Paddle, schmaddle; we don’t even have a canoe,” I said.

  “And it’s too rainy to check out a boat. Hey, wait a second. How about the guy who checks out the boats? It’s possible he saw somebody with Alex that morning.”

  “That’s worth checking. Once again, I have to admit that you might be a good reporter.”

  “And once again, I have to admit that some day you might be a good reporter, too.”