All the Dead Fathers

by David J. Walker

  The office was very small, and the woman at the first of two desks—no one sat at the other—looked up from her computer monitor. She was maybe fifty years old, with short gray hair and a bright, helpful smile. A copy of The Tao of Pooh sat on the desk, and under it a New Yorker magazine. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” Kirsten said. “Although I have to say I’m not looking to buy or sell any property.”

  The eyes took on a what-else-is-new look, but the smile faded only a trace. “Rent, maybe? We handle some nice fishing cabins along the river.”

  “Maybe next summer,” Kirsten said. She introduced herself and said she was a writer. “A freelance journalist, actually. I’m working on a story about the history of organized crime in Detroit, and about the homes in the country some of the gangsters used to have … to sort of get away from it all.”

  Before Kirsten had finished, the woman was up and walking across the little room to a coffeemaker on a table against the opposite wall. She turned. “Have a seat,” she said, and nodded to a chair beside her desk. “Coffee?”

  “That’d be great.” Kirsten sat down and noticed a game of solitaire on the computer screen. “No cream, no sugar.” She took the large white ceramic mug the woman gave her and sipped. “Wow!” she said. “That’s delicious.”

  “Thank you.” The woman sat down again and sipped her own coffee. “It is good. My name is Eleanor Baggs, and I don’t know a thing that could help you at all in your search.” She sounded refreshingly truthful, and not just trying to avoid something. “But that must be so interesting. To be a writer, I mean.”

  “I always thought so, too,” Kirsten said. “But truthfully? I’m not one.” She dug her ID out of her purse. “I’m a private investigator, from Chicago.”

  The woman stared, wide-eyed, at the card in the folder, then handed it back. “Oh my,” she said.

  Kirsten nodded. “Um … if you want to kick me out, Eleanor, wait until I finish this coffee, would you?”

  “The part about gangsters’ hideouts? That was true, right?”

  “Pretty much so.” Kirsten smiled. “But I’m looking for just one place. It’s a—”

  “Gangsters I’m not so sure of, but I moved here from New Jersey last year to help out my uncle, and found out they have more than their share of crazies around here. Militia groups, skinheads, extremists who think Armageddon’s around the corner.” Eleanor clearly felt like talking. “People say maybe it’s something in the soil, or the water. Remember Timothy McVeigh? The Oklahoma City bomber?” When Kirsten nodded she went on. “One of his buddies lived not far from here.”

  “Decker,” Kirsten said, knowing now why the name had seemed so familiar. The address on McVeigh’s driver’s license had been Decker, Michigan.

  “Yes. It’s a shame, too.” Eleanor shook her head and sipped her coffee. “A lovely little town, and the only thing the world knows about it now is—”

  “Memories fade,” Kirsten said. “But I’m looking for a farm where a woman named Morelli lived. The address is Waterton.”

  “Is she a gangster?”

  “Her brother was. I understand she had a place up here. At least she did until as late as four years ago. I’m told it’s been sold since then.”

  As Kirsten spoke, Eleanor started typing on the keyboard, her eyes on the monitor. “Is that M-O-R-E-L-L-I?” she said.

  “Yes. First name Angela.”

  Eleanor typed some more. “Can’t find any Morelli at all.”

  “Well…” Kirsten thought. “Maybe she got married … or divorced … Maybe your uncle would remember something.”

  “My uncle doesn’t remember things any more. He … he’s getting old.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kirsten said. “Well, are there other real estate agents in town? Maybe someone—”

  “There’s Cassie Jones. She’s the wife of the police chief, and she’s not very—”

  “Right. Well … how many farm sales could there be, anyway?”

  “I suppose I could find all sales of record, and then cull out…” Eleanor went back to her keyboard. “I take it you don’t have an address?”

  “What I have is ‘a rundown house on a rundown farm, near Waterton.’ That’s it.”

  Eleanor laughed. “We got lots of those. Is it north of here? South? What?”

  “I don’t know. Look, maybe I—”

  “Let me try something.” Eleanor seemed to be really into this search, maybe because it beat computer solitaire. “When was the sale?”

  “Two or … let’s see … make it within the last four years.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later Eleanor Baggs had printed out a list of nine farms with Waterton mailing addresses that were bought and sold within the previous four years. Five were working farms whose owners she had either met personally or knew by reputation. Two were purchased by the same large agricultural conglomerate. “Damn them,” Eleanor said. “They have no—”

  “Uh-huh.” Kirsten said. “What about the last two?”

  “Let’s see.” Eleanor typed and consulted the screen. “This one was purchased three years ago, by something called the Dearborn Hunt Club.” She typed some more. “And this one … ah … two and a half years ago. Seller was … First Bank of Waterton as trustee under trust number blah blah. Purchaser … Mapleleaf Bank of Toronto as trustee under trust number blah blah.”

  “Which means what?” Kirsten said. “Some Canadian bank holds the title, but just as a trustee? And whoever’s the beneficiary of the trust is the real owner?”

  “That’s right. That’s pretty common. Sometimes the beneficiary of the trust transfers his interest to someone else—essentially sells the property—and it won’t show up as a sale because—”

  “Because the owner of record stays the same, the bank.”

  “Which means,” Eleanor said, “that if this Angela Morelli’s farm was held in trust, she could have sold it to someone and I wouldn’t be able to find the sale.”

  “So,” Kirsten said, “I’d be better off looking around town for someone who actually knew Angela Morelli, and where her farm was.”

  “Maybe. But like I say, there’s a lot of oddballs out there that nobody really knows. Mostly they keep to themselves, do their shopping at some place like the Wal-Mart over at Saginaw. You’ll find plenty of places with fences and huge dogs and KEEP OUT signs, and you never know if it’s just an ornery farmer or someone building bombs in—”

  “So how many pieces of property are out there, big enough to be called a farm, that have a Waterton address?”

  “That’s a tough one. Around here a farm could be over a thousand acres, or just a few. People from the city see a house with a stand of corn along a country road and they call it a farm.”

  “So what are we talking about? Dozens of places?”

  “With a Waterton address, but outside town proper? I’d say dozens, easy. Fifty, maybe. George Kleeman might know. He’s the postmaster.”

  Postmaster, Kirsten thought. Duh.

  42.

  George Kleeman was a tall, slightly stooped over man, in maybe his midseventies. Quite thin, except under his belt, where he looked like he’d swallowed a beer keg. A long skinny neck stuck up from the collar of his white shirt, and long skinny arms stuck out from its short sleeves. His tie was dark blue and polyester and so were his pants.

  Kirsten sat across from Kleeman at a wooden picnic table under a shade tree beside the small, spotless brick post office on the north edge of Waterton. “I bought and paid for this table myself,” he said, “so’s my people could eat their lunch out here. You ever try and get somethin’ useful like this outta the postal service? Hah! We did better when it was the government.”

  Kleeman’s people were either out on their routes or inside, sorting mail or manning the surprisingly busy window. Kirsten had been waiting about a half hour and there’d been scarcely a moment when a car wasn’t driving away and another one pulling up.
<
br />   She asked, again, whether Kleeman knew of an Angela Morelli or her farm.

  “You asked me that three times now, cutie,” he said. He was studiously wiping his wire-framed glasses with a handkerchief.

  “I know,” she said, “but—”

  “I’m thinking, darn it. I’m not stupid, or forgetful. Hah!”

  “Sorry.” She sat back. “I just thought maybe you were wondering if you should answer. You know, concerned about confidentiality or something.”

  “So far you haven’t asked me what kinda mail she got, or how often, or who it’s from. What’s confidential about a person having a mailbox out in front of their house? Or the mail carrier going up their walk now and then?”

  “Right. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “Hah!” He put on his glasses, one wire earpiece at a time, squinting as though it were a pretty painful process. “If an Angela Morelli got mail through this office in the last thirty years,” he said, “I’d remember it. Doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be out there if I didn’t. Would just mean she never got mail that came through here. I’d remember it if she did.”

  “Well, then,” Kirsten said, “how about—”

  “Hah!”

  “What?”

  “Did I answer your question?” he asked.

  “Well, not really. But I thought—”

  “You thought I was some old fool out in the sticks didn’t know squat.” He smiled then, and she suddenly realized he was having a great time. Maybe, like Eleanor Baggs, he was taking a break from a game of solitaire. “Okay,” he said, “the answer’s no. I never heard of anyone named Morelli in my district, Angela or anything else.”

  She couldn’t help but like this guy. “All right, then,” she said, “how about a three-hundred-pound Italian woman who lived in a rundown house on a rundown farm near Waterton, and a few years ago went to a nursing home and her house was sold, and she died? How about that?”

  “Does she have to be Italian?” he said.

  “Are you putting me on again?”

  “Nope. There was a woman like you described, lived five miles north of here. Two, three years ago she got to where she couldn’t walk and had to go into a nursing home … or die. Said she didn’t have a dime. And no relatives. Somebody had to take her in, and Green Meadows did, because a lawyer came and said her place was sold and paid for two months on the spot. Said the payments would keep coming, each month in advance. And they did. Cash money. By mail. Hah! Who says you can’t trust the U.S. Postal Service?”

  “What was the woman’s name?”

  “She was pretty sick by then. Heart failure, mostly. Not talking much. The lawyer said her name was Anna Bergstrom. She had no identification, no Social Security number, no Medicare, no nothing. Never had a visitor and only lasted six months. When she died the cash came for a cremation.”

  “I’m just wondering,” Kirsten said. “How is it that you know all this?”

  “Hah! Made it all up!” He obviously enjoyed the look on her face and then said, “Actually, no, I didn’t. Thing is, I own Green Meadows Nursing Home, and a couple more, too.”

  She shook her head. She asked where the woman’s home was and who bought it, and Kleeman gave her directions and said the place had sat empty for a long time. He thought someone was living there now, but whoever it was never got any mail.

  “You about wrapped up with your questions?” he asked.

  “Almost. What was this lawyer’s name?”

  “Hah! Who said it was a ‘he’? It was a lady lawyer … if she was a lawyer. Kinda pretty, too, but big and strong looking. Too big for my taste, and she had this big phony smile on her face all the time. Like she thought someone was gonna take her picture.”

  “What about a name?”

  “Oh. ‘Jane Adams’ is what she said. Never left a phone number or an address. Even the cash came in an envelope with no return address. And that big old Anna didn’t look much like a Bergstrom, either. Truth is, she looked more like a Morelli, now that you mention it. Anyway, she’s dead now. And her bills were paid. Hah!” He stood up, obviously anxious to go.

  “One more thing,” Kirsten said. “If there was no way for you to contact this so-called lawyer, how did she know to send money for a cremation?”

  Kleeman rested his palms on the table and leaned toward her. “You know what? I always wondered about that myself.”

  * * *

  Kirsten had a difficult time finding her way, even with George Kleeman’s crude, hand-drawn map on the passenger seat. She went past cornfields and pastures, and the occasional farmhouse, and finally came to the abandoned railroad tracks marked on the map. Just beyond that she turned onto a side road—gravel and apparently not well-traveled—and about a mile later came to the place where “Anna Bergstrom” had lived.

  She had a vague notion of how big an acre was—“a little less than a football field,” Dugan had once told her—and the property looked to her to be several acres, surrounded on three sides by fields from which the crops—something growing low to the ground, like beans—hadn’t yet been harvested. She saw no corn on the property, but otherwise it was just the sort of place the Realtor Eleanor Baggs had described when she said city people see a house with a stand of corn along a country road and call it a farm.

  She approached from the west and drove on past the house until, about four-tenths of a mile east of it by the odometer, the road first rose a little and then dipped sharply down to an old one-lane bridge over a narrow river. There were lots of trees along the river’s banks, going off in both directions from the road. Past the river the road rose up again and then ended, making a T with a crossroad, also gravel.

  She turned around and drove back. Away from the river the land was flat with only an occasional tree, usually near the road. The house was set back about fifty yards at the end of a straight, narrow drive. There was no fence along the road, but the entrance to the driveway was built up over a metal culvert set into a deep drainage ditch that ran alongside the road, east almost to the river and west as far as she could see. The ditch, and a chain strung across the drive between iron posts, probably barred most vehicles from the premises.

  There were shade trees up near the house and, farther out, rows of evergreens that made a windbreak along the west and north sides of the property. Apparently this had been a working farm in the past, because she could see a barn—sagging now to one side, no paint at all on its weathered gray sides, a section of the roof caved in—and a few other equally tired-looking sheds. Farther out, in the corner where the two rows of evergreens met, sat a three-sided shed about the size of a two- or three-car garage, with a roof that sloped back from the open front. It lacked paint, too, but at least the walls stood up straight.

  If there were any tractors or machinery or vehicles on the property at all, they were inside the barn or one of the other buildings. There were no animals in sight, either. And no people.

  One indication the house was inhabited, though, was that the grass—or weeds or whatever—was mowed short all the way out to the farmer’s fields. She parked and walked over for a closer look at the barricade across the drive. It was a thick heavy chain, showing no sign of rust, with each end secured to its post by a large, sturdy-looking padlock. Not much short of a tank would get through or over that barrier, and it struck her that a person would have to be pretty strong just to lift one end of the chain to fasten it in place.

  She was wondering whether to walk up to the house when her cell phone rang, from the front seat of the car. She ran back and dug it out of her purse. “Hello?”

  “Kirsten?” It was Michael, talking way too loud. “Is that you?”

  “It is, and you don’t have to shout.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Much better. “I’m on the cell phone, out in my car so no one will hear. There’s … there’s a problem here.”

  “A problem? What problem?”

  “It’s Tony. Father Anthony Ernest. He always sleeps late and whe
n he didn’t show up for breakfast I didn’t think much about it. But now it’s almost eleven o’clock … and nobody knows where he is.”

  43.

  Michael told her that on the previous afternoon two FBI agents had shown up at Villa St. George. “They were checking our security arrangements,” he said, “but before they left they took Tony and me aside. They said it might be just a coincidence, but that the first letters of the victims’ last names so far were—”

  “I know. Spelling out the name ‘Kirsten.’”

  “Right! But why your name?”

  “It’s ‘Kirsten,’” she said. “It’s not necessarily me. But go on. Did the FBI say to do anything?”

  “They just told the two of us to be extra careful, and then they left. Oh, they made us swear not to tell anyone else—including the other priests, so they wouldn’t get careless. They don’t want it to get into the media, either, and—”

  “Let’s get back to Anthony Ernest,” she said.

  “Oh … well … it’s like that was the last straw for Tony. He was really scared. He’d have been better off not know—”

  “Michael, what did he do?”

  “He’s gone. That’s what I just said. Last night was Monday, my AA meeting night, and I told him I’d skip it and we’d stay together. But he said why make it easy for the killer to catch an E and the only N together in one place? He said if he hid somewhere, like John Ettinger—the only other E—he’d be safer. We’d both be safer, he said.”

  “But where would he hide?”

  “He … he said not to tell anyone, but I have to tell you. He has this friend—or not a friend exactly. It’s a man he helped a year or two ago when he was still assigned to St. Jeremiah’s in Rogers Park. The man was in the country illegally and worked as a janitor at a big apartment building across from the church, and lived in the basement. Tony says he’s still there and would take him in. I told him that was nonsense and he’s safer here, and I was sure I’d talked him out of it. But now … now he’s not anywhere around.”

  “Did you call the police? Have you told them about the man … the janitor?”