Fishing for a Killer

by Glenn Ickler

  She thanked me and with some effort slid the card into the back pocket of those unbelievable jeans. I could see the outline of the card against her butt as she walked away.

  Roxie’s derriere was barely out of sight when the young man in scrubs came in, unlocked the wheels of my bed and wheeled me through a series of twists and turns until we found an elevator that took us to the top floor. Since I was the first arrival in the double room, I chose the bed by the window. I had traded my wet clothes for a dry Johnny and was sitting up pecking away at my story when Al was brought in via wheelchair with his right foot encased in a gleaming white plaster cast. Complaining loudly about the size and weight of the cast, he was helped out of the chair and into the bed by a nurse.

  “Looks like you got a club foot,” I said.

  “I’ll club you if you think this is funny,” he said.

  “I’ve already been clubbed once tonight. And I expect a verbal clubbing from Martha when she hears I’m stuck here until morning. How about loaning me your phone again?”

  “I’m not delivering it this time.”

  “So toss it. If you hit me in the numbers I can catch it.” I put the laptop on my bed table and turned toward Al. The phone arced across the space between us and hit me in the belly button. I managed to trap it with my hands and hang on.

  “Where are you?” Martha said by way of a greeting.

  “I’m in bed,” I said. “They’ve imprisoned me for the night because I have a concussion.” I prepared myself for an explosion.

  She surprised me. “Oh, no. You really are hurt that bad? Oh, you poor darling. What happened? Who hit you? What did he hit you with?”

  I really appreciated the “poor darling” bit so I gave her a condensed version of our encounter in the cabin, again stopping short of our journey onto and into the lake. I ended with, “They’re just keeping me for observation. The doctor is sure that I’ll be well enough to travel in the morning.”

  “Will you be able to stand up and say your vows?” she asked. “Should I be looking for a wheelchair or something?”

  “I will stand up and say my vows even if I have to lean on Al’s arm. On second thought, make that somebody else’s arm; Al has a broken foot.”

  “It really is broken? What did they drop on it?”

  I decided it was time for true confessions and said it was an anchor. This of course brought forth a stream of questions and I was in the process of telling almost the entire story when Al interrupted. “Hey, save me some battery,” he said. “I’ve got to call Carol and my charger is in my bag back in the car.”

  This was the perfect excuse to wrap up my story before reaching the part about being chucked overboard wearing a cement block around my neck. Martha and I exchanged loving goodnights, made kissy sounds and hung up. “Catch,” I said, underhand flipping the phone across the room. Weighted down by his plaster bootie, Al almost let it sail over his head. I was holding my breath when he speared it with his left hand, arm fully extended. “Good thing I played shortstop in high school,” he said.

  * * *

  Thanks to some potent pain pills I was able to sleep off and on between assorted wakeups for the taking of vital signs and the shining of lights into my eyes for observation of my pupils. Any moment of rest a patient gets during the night in a hospital is purely by chance.

  At 6:00 a.m., both Al and I were awake and ready to depart. I buzzed for a nurse. A woman with a name tag that said “Natalie” answered the call and told us that I could not be discharged until I’d been examined by a doctor. “So please get a doctor in here,” I said. “I have to be in St. Paul in time to get into some decent clothes and get married at one o’clock.”

  Nurse Natalie hustled off to see if she could find a doctor. I thought about getting dressed while I waited for the doctor but I had no idea what had happened to my clothing. I had entered the hospital wearing a T-shirt, jeans and undershorts that were all dripping wet. I doubted they would be completely dry, but it was either go home soggy or go home exposing my butt out the back of my Johnny. No-brainer; it had to be soggy.

  To Al, I said, “Did you rinse out your undershorts last night?”

  “No, I just had the nurse stand them up in the closet,” he said. “But at least mine are dry.”

  Twenty minutes passed before Nurse Natalie returned. “Doctor Hammersley has ordered another brain scan and he should be in at about eight thirty to examine you,” she said.

  I sat up quickly, which torched my ribs and sent a wave of pain blasting through my skull, waking up the drummer inside. “Eight thirty! Do I have to wait for Doctor Hammersley?” I said. “Can’t someone else check me out? We’ve got to get a taxi out to Gull Lake and we’ve got a two-and-a-half-hour drive from there.”

  “Who’s driving you?” said Nurse Natalie.

  Al and I looked at each other. “Who is?” Al asked.

  “I guess I’m stuck with it,” I said.

  “No way. I’m not riding with a guy with a concussion. Once again, we’re up the creek without a canoe.”

  “Guess you’re not in such a big hurry after all,” said the nurse. She turned and left the room before I could throw my half-empty water glass at her.

  “Okay, chicken, I’ll go alone and leave you here,” I said. “I can’t miss my own wedding.”

  “You can’t do that. You might pass out and kill yourself, or even worse, you might kill somebody else,” Al said. “I should have asked Carol to drive up to get us.”

  Angry and frustrated, I slammed myself down onto my back and paid a painful price when the lump on my head hit the pillow. Every expletive I could think of poured out of my mouth at high volume. A nurse passing in the hallway turned into our room and asked if we were okay. We lied and said we were just fine.

  “You don’t sound fine,” she said “Please be more careful with your language.”

  Somehow I swallowed an obscene response and uttered a meek, “Sorry.”

  Several minutes later another young man in blue scrubs arrived with a wheelchair and took me for my morning brain scan. When I got back to my room an aide came in to check my vitals. “Whooie,” she said when my blood pressure nearly blew away the cuff. For some reason it was at an all-time high.

  “That’s the highest blood pressure number I’ve ever heard,” Al said when she was gone.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Hey, speaking of high, I wonder if there’s a flight from Brainerd to the Twin Cities this morning.”

  “I’d Google it but my cell phone battery is dead,” Al said.

  “So are my chances of getting married today. And maybe forever. Why would Martha marry an idiot like me?”

  “I’ve never understood that,” Al said. “She seems extremely intelligent otherwise.”

  “This is no longer a joking matter,” I said. “I’m going to have to work up the guts to pick up that phone,” I nodded toward the bedside phone, “and call Martha with the news that the car won’t start and even if it did, neither one of us could drive it. If I was still drinking I’d kill a quart of vodka right now.”

  It was twenty minutes after eight when Doctor Hammersley walked in. “Good news,” he said. “The scan looks good. If your eyes are focusing you’ll be good to go. How are you getting home?”

  “We’re not,” I said. “We have no car and we have no driver.”

  “Oh, yes you do,” said a familiar voice from behind the doctor.

  Thirty-Nine

  Victoria’s Messenger

  In the final moments of Bertolt Brecht’s marvelous Threepenny Opera there is no hope for the loveable villain MacHeath, better known as Mack the Knife, who is about to be hanged as a thief, a murderer and a whoremonger. Macky is just a few steps away from the noose when the music flairs, a man bearing a scroll comes trotting down the center aisle and the chorus s
ings, “Victoria’s messenger riding comes, riding comes, riding comes . . .” Sure enough, the scroll is a letter of pardon for Mack the Knife, signed by Queen Victoria.

  I felt very much like MacHeath when I saw Sheriff Val Holmberg standing behind the doctor, dangling a set of car keys in his right hand. “Here’s the keys,” he said. “And I’m going to drive.”

  Al almost slid off the side of the bed. “Where’d you get those keys?” he asked.

  “We recruited a bunch of volunteers—guests of the lodge and some of the people who work there—and sent them out hunting through the woods, starting at sunrise this morning,” Holmberg said. “A little girl about ten years old found them hanging on a wild blackberry bush about forty minutes ago.”

  “Did I hear you say you were driving us to St. Paul?” I asked.

  “You did. Deputy LeBlanc will lead us in a squad car with all lights flashing and give me a ride back to Brainerd after the wedding. I am invited, aren’t I?”

  “Invited, hell, you can be my best man if you want to,” I said. “You can also be the first one to kiss the bride. In fact, the bride will probably kiss you when you deliver me to the church.”

  Doctor Hammersley stepped forward, shook my hand and said he would send in a nurse with the paperwork for my release. Al was already getting out of his Johnny and clumping his way to the closet to retrieve his clothes. Nurse Natalie walked in, saw a naked man, spun a quick one-eighty and ran out. “Come on back,” Al yelled. “I’m not bashful.”

  “I’ll come back when you’re decent,” the nurse said. “You could at least pull the curtain so everybody in the hall doesn’t see you.”

  “What about me?” I said. “What happened to my wet clothes?”

  “They’re hanging in the closet with your name on it,” Nurse Natalie said. “We ran them through the hospital laundry last night. Your shoes are still wet, though. We were afraid they’d shrink if we ran them through the industrial strength dryer.”

  My canvas tennis shoes were still damp and chilly but nothing could throw cold water on my mood at that moment. Victoria’s messenger, in the form of a north country sheriff, had riding come. He would get me to the church on time, a line which, come to think of it, is from another great musical called My Fair Lady.

  “What time’s the wedding?” Holmberg asked when we had settled into the Ford with me in the front passenger seat and Al in the back.

  “One o’clock,” I said. “But I need time to look for something to wear and change into it.” The digital clock on the dashboard read 9:18, and we had 130 miles to go.

  “Piece of cake,” Holmberg said. “We’ve even got time to grab ourselves some breakfast along the way.”

  We picked up breakfast sandwiches and coffee at a drive-through, and I dug my cell phone out of the door pocket where I’d left it the night before. “Guess what, we’re actually on the road,” I said when Martha Todd answered.

  “You mean I don’t have to grab some guy off the street to take your place as the groom?” she said.

  “Nope, no surrogates needed. The real groom will be there with bells on. Actually, I should say with sirens on. We have a uniformed chauffeur and we’re getting a real live police escort all the way from Brainerd to St. Paul.”

  “In that case, I’ll start getting dressed for a wedding. If it was just you and Al coming on your own I’d wait until I saw the whites of your eyes.”

  We’d barely finished making kissy sounds and ending the call when my cell phone, which was still in my hand, chimed. To my surprise, the caller was Don O’Rourke.

  “How are you?” Don asked. “I heard you got a pretty nasty whack on your funny bone. Are you going to be okay for the wedding?”

  “My skull, to which you refer in such a flippant manner, is bloody but unbroken,” I said. “I do have a concussion but I’ll be fine for the wedding. Thanks for asking.”

  “That’s not the only reason I called,” Don said. “I’ve got an assignment for you.”

  “An assignment? I’m on a week’s vacation as of today,” I said. “I’m getting married and going off to Niagara Falls for my honeymoon, remember?”

  “I do remember. In fact, that’s what my assignment is about. Before you go home or to the church or anywhere else you might go, I want you to stop at Artie’s All-American Rental Shop at University and Avon.”

  “Why should we stop there?”

  “We heard that your wedding suit burned up the other night, so because you couldn’t get home to get fitted for a new one we rented you a tux at Artie’s. He’s promised to do a fitting and an instant tailoring job while you wait.”

  “Who is the wonderful ‘we’ who ordered this?” I asked.

  “The Daily Dispatch, who do you think? We’re also paying for it,” Don said.

  “You’re kidding. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “Well, believe it. Some of us are coming to the wedding and we didn’t want to see you looking like a slob beside your beautiful bride.”

  * * *

  Thanks to Deputy LeBlanc’s flashing lights, we reached Artie’s All-American Rental Shop before 11:30 a.m. Artie, the owner, greeted me and steered me into a changing room, where I found a white shirt with ruffles, a black bow tie and a dark gray tuxedo on hangers. I emerged wearing these items, mounted a small wooden platform and watched Artie make everything fit with a few folds and a handful of safety pins.

  From Artie’s it was only a few minutes to the Unitarian-Universalist Church, where the minister had agreed to unite us two non-churchgoers. The sheriff dropped me off in front of the church and drove Al home to renew acquaintances with his family and change into wedding attire. I wondered if he would split the leg of his suit pants to fit over the cast on his foot, as a nurse at the hospital had done with the khakis he’d come home in.

  I actually had an hour to kill before the music would start and I would take my place in front of the Reverend Sarah Jefferson-Schneider to await the entrance of my bride. I used that hour to pace in circles around a small back room, growing more nervous and sweaty by the minute. The pain killer administered at the hospital began to wear off and the drummer inside my skull started to pound again.

  Al joined me ten minutes before the hour, and I observed that he, or probably Carol, had indeed split the lower part of his right pants leg and fastened the edges together with safety pins. He had acquired a pair of crutches that made it possible for him to walk without clunking the cast on the floor.

  “Sorry you had to sacrifice a good pair of pants to be my best man,” I said.

  “Carol says she can sew it back together when the cast comes off,” he said.

  Neither of us spoke further as the minutes ticked by and the tension grew.

  The door opened a crack and I jumped six inches off the floor. Sheriff Val Holmberg stuck his head in and said, “Five minutes.” I thanked him and said, “What is this, opening night at the theater?”

  “The bride asked me to check on you,” the sheriff said and closed the door.

  “You’d think we’d given Martha some reason to doubt our prompt presence,” Al said.

  “I’ll never understand women,” I said.

  At two minutes to one, the cell phone in my pocket rang. “Damn, I should have turned that off,” I said. “Think I should answer it?”

  Al shrugged, so I answered.

  “This is Grace Wong,” said my caller. “Is this a good time to talk?”

  “I’m due in front of the minister in less than two minutes,” I said.

  “Then I’ll make it quick. Ms. Todd’s grandmother can stay in St. Paul. Ms. Todd can call me later to get the details. Have a long and happy marriage.” I barely had time thank her before she broke the connection.

  The door opened and the sheriff popped his head in again and sa
id, “Time to go, boys.”

  “Yes, sir,” Al and I said in unison. With Al on his crutches and me keeping my head straight and level to avoid any jolts, we marched out of the little room, down the hall and into the main sanctuary. I was stunned to see how many people were seated there. We’d invited our immediate families and half a dozen close friends. At least two dozen more co-workers and friends had come to view the proceedings. Among them, seated beside Crow Wing County Sheriff Val Holmberg, was St. Paul Homicide Detective Lieutenant Curtis Brown.

  Al and I took our places at the Rev. Jefferson-Schneider’s left side and turned to face the people in the pews. My mother and Grandma Goodie were in the front row on the center aisle and Grandma was dabbing her eyes with a white cloth hanky. Zhoumaya Jones sat smiling like Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat in her motorized wheelchair at the end of the first row.

  The unexpected size of the crowd brought a practical problem to mind. I leaned close to Al and whispered, “How are we going to feed all these people?”

  Al leaned close to me and whispered, “Carol told me that some of the extra guests were bringing food.”

  I leaned close to Al and whispered, “You mean we’re having a potluck reception?”

  Al just grinned and nodded.

  My legs began to feel like they were about to fold like a sheet of origami paper. However, I managed to remain upright thanks to the Navy, where I was taught never to lock my knees during an inspection, and this was certainly the ultimate inspection. My armpits were soaked and a bead of sweat was starting to trickle slowly down my forehead toward the bridge of my nose. I was fighting the urge to brush my hand across my brow when the most gorgeous, smartest and funniest woman I have ever known appeared at the rear of the church on the arm of her father, Arthur Todd.

  My physical discomfort was forgotten as my soon-to-be father-in-law escorted my soon-to-be bride down the aisle at a pace that seemed slower than the proverbial snail. When at last he passed Martha to me and we joined hands to face the minister, it took every bit of strength I possessed to refrain from wrapping her in my arms and kissing her like a castaway who’d seen his first woman after six years alone on a desert island.