A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  “Why would she do that?” I asked. “You said they weren’t close.”

  “I don’t know,” Molly answered.

  “What happened after Merci was arrested?”

  “The Steele boy, his father is big over at the paper mill,” Carlson continued. “So you know the cops went easy on him once the old man replaced the money that was stolen. Merci they told to get out of town. They said if she wasn’t gone within forty-eight hours they were going to arrest her. So off she goes.”

  I nodded. It was a typical tactic of a small town police force. Whenever the rurals have a problem that isn’t worth their time and aggravation—or when the fix is in—they just tell the suspect to grab the next stage out of Dodge and don’t come back.

  “That was toward the end of June,” Carlson said. “Week or so before Jamie left.”

  “One thing has nothin’ to do with the other,” Molly insisted.

  “I didn’t say it did,” Carlson said.

  I jotted the facts down on the yellow pad along with a question: Was 18-year-old Jamie’s sense of justice so offended by the treatment of her friend that she would abandon her family and home?

  Molly shook her head at her husband, then gave me the photograph, a two-by-three high school graduation shot. It showed a young woman posed against a dark, marbled background. She was beautiful. Bright green eyes, hair like a palomino pony, skin—you knew not so much as a pimple ever dared blemish that skin. I looked from the photo to the Carlsons to the little girl playing quietly outside and then back to the photo. How did Richard and Molly Carlson ever produce a child who looked like this? Twice?

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Molly squeezed my hand. Again she said, “Thank you.”

  I shook hands with Carlson and went to my Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in their driveway. Stacy waved as I drove away. I waved back.

  Ten minutes later I parked in front of the Judy Garland Museum, Judy singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” on a weather-battered speaker, the ticket taker singing along. Kirsten Sager Whitson was leaning against the building, waiting for me.

  “Sorry I took so long.” I gestured toward the museum. “How was it?”

  “Okay,” she answered without enthusiasm. I reached for her hand. She pulled it away and filled it with her purse, making it seem like a casual gesture instead of the deliberate snub I knew it to be. She moved quickly to the passenger door of my SUV, opening it before I had the chance to do it for her.

  A visit to the museum—Judy Garland had been born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids; her family later moved to Duluth—had been Kirsten’s idea, an alternative to meeting one of my “cases.” Kirsten didn’t approve of my occasional forays into detective work and said so. She thought they were common, even used that word once. “Common.” I reminded her that I was eleven years a police officer. “How common is that?” Only that was before Teachwell and, in Kirsten’s world view, didn’t count.

  Teachwell’s company and insurance carrier had agreed to pay a finder’s fee of fifty cents on the dollar with the stipulation that I keep my mouth shut about the size of the theft—thus avoiding a possible Enron-like meltdown of the company’s stock. After the government took its 36.45 percent, I was left with approximately two million in income-producing mutual funds. Kirsten expected me to act like it. Only I had been unable to cast off the shackles of my blue-collar upbringing. She had used those words, too. “The shackles of your blue-collar upbringing.”

  “What do they want you to do?” she asked when we hit Highway 169 going south toward the Cities. I told her. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re going to find the girl.”

  “Sure, if I can. Why not?”

  “You don’t need to do this.”

  “No. I could turn the car around and go back to the cabin. You and I can spend another week fishing and swimming and lolling in the sun. But I thought it was starting to get a little old toward the end, didn’t you?”

  “No. What I mean is, you don’t need to do this. You could get a real job if you’re bored.”

  “Doing what? Making more money?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with making money.”

  “Of course not. Except I already make $170,000 a year just for getting up in the morning. I realize that’s not much if you’re a shortstop for the Texas Rangers. On the other hand, I don’t have coaches yelling at me or fans booing because I hit a single instead of a home run. Anyway, my needs are few and relatively inexpensive. I have more than I’ll ever need.”

  “I’m not talking about money.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “I’m talking about getting a job that you can care about, that has value, that gives you pleasure. Like, like …”

  “Like helping people with their problems?”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Kirsten, I was a cop for eleven years. It was the only real job I ever had. I liked it. I liked catching bad guys, I liked being a peacemaker, protecting the peace. But mostly I liked helping people. It got to be a habit with me.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that, either.

  During the 200-mile drive up from the Twin Cities Kirsten had been all chit-chat, conversing in depth on a number of topics that meant nothing to her. Same thing at the cabin. Now she sat in stony silence, staring out the passenger window. I didn’t push, yet by the time we hit McGregor, midway between Grand Rapids and the Cities, I was feeling anxious. I figured she wanted to tell me something and was having a difficult time getting to it. I also decided I definitely didn’t want to hear it.

  Kirsten agreed to stop for a sandwich, and I pulled off the main drag and parked in the gravel lot of a restaurant called Jack’s. Across the highway from Jack’s was a small office building. A few decades ago Jack’s was called Mark’s and the office building had been a mom-and-pop tavern called The Wheel-Inn. It was there that I had witnessed Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. My parents and I were returning from a camping trip not far from where my lake home is now and listening to the event on the radio. As the historic moment approached, my father stopped at the first public place he saw with a TV antenna. We sat in the tavern for over three hours eating hamburgers and drinking root beer while waiting for Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to leave their landing module. I don’t remember much about the historic moment—I was so young. But I remember the root beer and I remember my parents. Dad cried and Mom laughed.

  “Are you coming?” Kirsten asked.

  I closed my door and locked it with a button on my key chain.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  Kirsten’s mouth hung open for a moment and I thought I had guessed right. I was actually disappointed when she finally shook her head and said, “No.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hey.” I rested my hands on top of her shoulders, leaning in, and giving her my most reassuring smile. “It’s me.”

  She stepped back until her shoulders were no longer within reach. My hands fell away.

  “Oh right. Like suddenly you’re the Great Communicator.”

  I was surprised by the sharpness of her words. “Where did that come from?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “Kirsten?”

  “It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “What’s you and not me?”

  “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  I gestured toward 169 with my head. “We’re running out of highway.”

  Kirsten stepped away from the restaurant door and walked to the center of the parking lot. Gravel crunched under her feet.

  “Something’s changed,” she said.

  “What’s changed?”

  “Something.”

  I shook my head dumbly, my mouth open. I felt numb, except for my stomach—my stomach was suddenly very active, performing all kinds of gymnastics.

  “You spend too much time on the fringe, McKenzie,” she told me at last. “Th
e people you associate with—they live in rooms they pay for by the week.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “The coke-heads, the pushers, the prostitutes, the criminals and lowlifes and, and—two weeks ago we were supposed to go to the Guthrie Theater but we didn’t because instead you were parked outside a motel with a camera because a friend wanted to know if her husband was cheating on her.”

  “The woman was from the neighborhood; I knew her growing up.”

  “That’s what I mean. The people you deal with. In your world, in the world where you do these favors for people, everyone is so, so—wrong.”

  “A middle-aged couple from Grand Rapids is wrong?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I took the half dozen steps to my car door without realizing I had done it. The vehicle was now between us. I looked over its roof at Kirsten.

  “I don’t want to deal with it anymore,” she announced with a voice as hard as the look in her eyes.

  “Would you be happier if I was a stock broker?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “The artistic director for the Minnesota Opera Company?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t be those things.”

  “I think maybe we should start seeing other people.”

  “Are you already seeing other people?”

  “Oh yeah, right. Typical male reaction.”

  “Is that a yes or no?”

  Kirsten moved to the Cherokee, leaned against it. Her arms stretched across the roof toward me. I took both of her hands in mine.

  “I would never do that, Mac,” she said, softening her voice for effect. “I care for you too deeply. Besides, you carry a gun.”

  Kirsten smiled. I guess she thought she had made a joke.

  “If you tell me you just want to be friends, I might use it.”

  See, I can be funny, too.

  “You’ll always be more than that,” she said.

  “Then why are you dumping me?”

  Kirsten didn’t answer and I found myself gazing at the office building across the highway again. Suddenly, walking on the moon didn’t seem like such a big thing.

  I dropped Kirsten at her handsome Cape Cod located on the parkway that ringed the Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, the house with the Victorian-style gazebo in the backyard. She kissed me good-bye. Not one of those quick pecks people in a hurry usually give each other. This one lingered long enough to cause a stirring in the nether regions.

  Sure, I thought as she bounded away, her designer duffel bag over her shoulder. Break up with a guy and then kiss him to the depths of his soul so he knows what he’s losing. ’Course, Kirsten insisted that she wasn’t dumping me, that we weren’t breaking up. We were merely seeing other people. So there was still hope. Yeah, right.

  Twenty minutes later I reached my own home in Falcon Heights, a large English Colonial with a sprawling front porch. When I bought it, I thought it was located in St. Anthony Park, an exclusive, quiet, exceedingly old neighborhood of St. Paul tucked unobtrusively between the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis. It wasn’t until I made an offer that I discovered to my horror that the house was on the wrong side of Hoyt Avenue, that I had inadvertently moved to the suburbs. Still, I’m a St. Paul boy at heart and whenever anyone asks, that’s where I tell them I live.

  I parked in my garage and entered the house through the back door.

  The first thing I did—before flicking on a light, before opening a window, before checking my mail and newspapers stacked in a box on the porch—was to turn on my CD player. Immediately, the grandiose sounds of opera spilled out of nineteen speakers strategically placed in various nooks and crannies throughout the house—Maria Callas singing an excerpt from Madame Butterfly. There was a purity to the music that I rarely heard in any other form. Still, I wasn’t an opera fan. I listened to it because Kirsten listened to it. It was Callas, in fact, who had brought us together.

  I had attended a Christmas party in the offices of my accountant, where I had discovered a remarkably handsome woman arguing with a man I didn’t know. From what they said, I gathered that Callas had once been quite fat—as opera divas often are—when she first established her reputation. Afterward, she carefully and deliberately shed a third of her weight, turning herself into the sleek, fashionable woman who attracted the attention of Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, among others. The topic of debate was whether Callas sounded better when she was fat or when she was thin.

  “What do you think?” the woman asked abruptly.

  “It might be sexist,” I told her, “but things tend to sound better when they come from an attractive package. You, for example, remind me of a Mozart aria.”

  She laughed and told me that was the most original line she had ever heard. One thing led to another and there I was, listening to Maria Callas on a late Sunday afternoon.

  “Why do you need to see other people?” I asked the empty house. Its answer was no more satisfying than Kirsten’s had been in McGregor.

  I poured myself a Pig’s Eye beer and drank it way too fast. I poured myself another. I figured I had two choices. I could sit around and feel sorry for myself or I could work. I chose feeling sorry for myself. That lasted until the telephone rang.

  “Are you all right?” Kirsten asked.

  I was so surprised to hear her voice my heart skipped a beat and a voice shouting from the back of my head told me that it had all been a terrible mistake—of course she loves you.

  “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I thought you might …” After a long pause she added, “I knew you would be okay, I was just checking.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” I replied stoically. Sure, like I was going to tell her I was hurting.

  “Mac?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Mac, you’re not like anyone else I know. All the men I know, they have a-gen-das”—she sounded the word out—“they have plans, they have mission statements. You don’t. No, come to think about it, you do. You do have a mission statement. But yours is so simple and concise. Live well. Be helpful.”

  Why are you telling me that? I asked myself but didn’t say.

  “You’re a good guy,” she added. “There aren’t many like you out there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Umm, I have to—I have to go, now.”

  “Me, too.”

  She said, “I’ll talk to you later,” but it sounded like “good-bye.”

  And that was the end of that.

  I hung up and listened to Maria for a little while longer.

  “Screw this,” I announced. I went to the CD player and replaced Maria’s disc with another. A moment later Bonnie Raitt filled my house, asking, “What is this thing called love?”

  What indeed?

  I poured a third Pig’s Eye—promising myself this would be the last—and settled in with my telephone directories. It’s rarely that easy, but you have to begin somewhere and after seven years maybe Jamie wasn’t hiding very hard. It was seven when I started dialing, eight-fifteen when I finished. Everyone was home—it was Sunday night in Minnesota, after all. There was one honest-to-God Jamie Anne Carlson listed in the Twin Cities, only she was sixteen years old. Her father, a doctor, had given her a phone with the stipulation that she stay the hell off his. There were thirteen ‘J’ Carlsons in the Minneapolis white pages and eight ‘JA’s—including a Jean Autry—but no Jamies. The St. Paul white pages listed six ‘J’s and two ‘JA’s. None of them was the woman I was looking for.

  I returned the phone books to their proper place under the junk drawer in my kitchen and moved to what my father used to call “the family room,” just off the dining room. Boz Scaggs followed me, having replaced Bonnie Raitt in the ten-disc CD player.

  I fired up my PC and accessed the Web site of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. I found the screen for
motor vehicle information and completed the request form, asking for Jamie’s driver’s license information. The request cost four dollars, would take at least twenty-four hours to complete, and left me wondering what to do next.

  The concept of the right to privacy is a treasured hallmark of the American way of life, institutionalized early on by the founding fathers in the fourth and fifth amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It’s also a myth. In this era of advanced computer technology, guys like me can examine private information contained in vast databases that most Americans don’t even know exist. Give me a name—just a name—and in seventy-two hours I can learn if the guy’s married, his wife’s maiden name, the names of his children, where they go to school, and if he’s shacking up with some bimbo at the No-Tell Motel. I can obtain financial records including bank account numbers, deposits and balances, insurance policies, medical history going back ten years, employment histories, credit histories, court judgments, worker’s compensation claims, property records, even high school and college grades. I can learn which credit cards he carries, what magazines he reads, which restaurants he frequents, the charities he supports, the organizations he belongs to, as well as his long-distance and intrastate toll calls. If he’s online I’ll know which Web sites he visits and what chat rooms he hangs out in. I can even find out if he wears a toupee or bought the Mario Lanza CD that was advertised on television. Yet it all seemed like so much work for a guy who broke his promise and was now working on his fourth beer.

  Besides, there were two databases that might tell me everything I needed to know in a hurry if I could tap them—the National Crime Information Center and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s Criminal Justice Information System. I used to have a pretty reliable source in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department who would access this information for me—I paid him fifty, sometimes a hundred bucks a pop. But that was when he was a sergeant making thirty-nine seven a year. Now he’s a newly promoted lieutenant pulling down forty-four five and he’s above it all. Not only that, he threatens if he catches me using someone else in the department he’ll bust my balls—how soon they forget.