Tin City (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  “I hate farming,” Mr. Mosley said as he studied the sign through the passenger window of the Cherokee. “I used to work a farm like this one. When I was a youngster. They sent me there in ‘45, after they closed the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children—now, ain’t that a mouthful? It was kinda like an orphanage down near Owatonna, ’cept most of us, we wasn’t orphans. We was abandoned, signed over to the state by our parents like we was property, like we was nothin’. That’s the way we was treated, too. Kept in cottages, thirty of us to a room. Made t’ work in the fields. Workin’ on our hands and knees pullin’ weeds. Catch a whuppin’ if’n we didn’t work fast enough. They’d beat you with a radiator brush, man. Pour kerosene on your head. Somethin’ like two hundred kids died in the place ‘for they get around to closin’ it.

  “After they did, they sent me to a farm near Waseca. Foster care, they said it was. More back-breakin’ work for no pay is what they meant. I figure I learned everything there is to know about slavery from workin’ that damn farm. After I got some size, I ran off and joined the Marines. They sent me to Parris Island for training, said it was gonna be tough. Tough? Boy, after what I been through, the Corps was like heaven on earth. That’s where I met your daddy, in the Corps.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s right. You’ve heard all my stories.”

  “A couple of times.”

  Laughter rumbled out of Mr. Mosley’s throat. “Well, you’ll probably hear ’em again.”

  One can only hope.

  The house was old and small, a simple two-bedroom split-level with attached garage. Yet it seemed much grander than that, perched on top of a hill at the end of a long gravel driveway, surrounded by a huge green lawn and, beyond that, by acres of shrubs and prairie grass. What would you call it, I wondered as we approached. Not a hobby farm—there was no indication that any work took place there, except perhaps the work of mowing the lawn. A kid could retire on what he’d make mowing that lawn. Not an estate, either. Just a small house in the country, I guessed.

  I pulled off the county road and accelerated up the hill, stopping the Cherokee at the top of the driveway. We left the SUV and started toward the house. We didn’t take three steps before a man rounded the corner of the garage.

  “Freeze, assholes!”

  I saw the shotgun first, a dangerous-looking over-and-under 12-gauge with the barrel sawed off. Then the man’s enormous gut stretching the material of his gray polo shirt—he looked like the “before” picture of every diet ad ever printed. He was wearing black dress pants and a pair of black wing tips that seemed at first glance to be rooted to the ground. They weren’t. He stepped toward us, moving carefully, the shotgun leading the way.

  “Freeze,” he said again.

  His hair was the color of potting soil, and he was losing it starting in the front and moving back. His eyes were so dark brown that it was impossible to see his pupils. The expression on his face made me think he was entertaining a private joke and that it was on me.

  I flashed on the guns that I keep locked in the safe embedded in my basement floor, yet only for a moment. I could have been carrying as many weapons as a character in a Schwarzenegger movie and it wouldn’t have done any good. Crosetti had us cold.

  “Don’t move,” he screamed in case we didn’t know what “freeze” meant.

  “Whoa,” I said, showing him my hands. “There’s no need for that.”

  “Whaddaya want?”

  I was closer to him, but he wasn’t aiming the shotgun at me. He was pointing it across the hood of the Cherokee, glaring at Mr. Mosley with unblinking eyes as if willing him to melt.

  “I’m talking to you, nigger.”

  Ahh, fighting words.

  I stepped toward him.

  He swung the barrel in my direction. “You want some of this?”

  I showed him my hands again, both sides this time, making sure he could see that they were empty.

  “Mr. Mosley is your neighbor. We just dropped by to welcome you to Norwood Young America.”

  “Fuck that. Who sent you?”

  “No one sent us.”

  “What do you want here? Talk.”

  “We wanted to give you a couple jars of honey.”

  Mr. Mosley was behind me and to the right, the Cherokee between us. I don’t know what he did, but Crosetti didn’t like it. Again he swung the shotgun in Mr. Mosley’s direction.

  “Somethin’ funny, nigger?”

  I said, “Mr. Crosetti, please—”

  “You know my name. How you know my name?”

  Explaining to him that I looked it up on the Internet somehow didn’t seem like the wisest course of action at that moment, so instead I started backing slowly toward the Cherokee. I hoped Mr. Mosley would do the same.

  “Mr. Crosetti,” I said carefully, “I promise we mean you no harm. We’re going to leave now. And we’re not coming back.”

  “Don’t move.”

  I stopped moving. I stopped breathing. I stopped blinking my eyes. If I could have stopped my heart beating, I probably would have done that, too.

  “First the girl yesterday, now you. What’s going on? Tell me.”

  It was a cloudless day in mid-May, warm but not hot, yet Crosetti was sweating. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead and ran in rivulets down his temples and cheeks. His shirt under his arms and across his chest was wet. Suddenly it occurred to me that even though he had the shotgun, Crosetti was more frightened than I was.

  “The girl you mentioned is a student at the University of Minnesota.”

  I started to lower my hands, but he flicked the business end of the shotgun at me and I raised them again.

  “She was taking soil samples to test for traces of an insecticide called Sevin XLR Plus. The insecticide has been killing off the area honeybee population—”

  “You’re here because of some goddamn bees?”

  I heard the car before I saw it, heard the engine racing as it accelerated up the hill. I didn’t turn my head to look until Crosetti did. A yellow Mustang convertible, its top up, coming fast, tires pitching gravel and dirt behind it. It swung off the driveway, arced across the enormous lawn, and cut between Crosetti and the Cherokee. The driver was out of the Mustang before it came to a complete stop.

  “For God’s sake, Frank,” the driver shouted. Crosetti lowered the barrel, but he wasn’t happy about it.

  “What’s going on here?” Now he was shouting at Mr. Mosley and me. “Answer me.”

  I gestured at Crosetti

  “Get in the house,” the driver yelled. Crosetti didn’t move. “I mean it. Get in the house, now.”

  Crosetti gestured toward me. “Fix this.”

  “I’m going to fix it.”

  “You’d better.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m not worried. You’re the one better be fuckin’ worried.”

  “Get in the house.”

  Crosetti looked about to say something, thought better of it, and retreated back around the garage. I didn’t know whether he had left or was just lying in wait.

  “What do you want?” the driver asked. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie flecked with red and tied in a Windsor. I nearly asked what he was doing driving such a beautiful car in such an ugly color. Instead, I said, “Who are you?”

  “Never mind who I am. Who are you?”

  I introduced Mr. Mosley and myself. I explained about the insecticide and the bees.

  “Honeybees?” The driver made the word sound like a felony.

  I explained some more, told him about Ivy Flynn.

  “I’m sorry about the girl. But she was trespassing. So are you. Leave now. Do not return.” He spoke like a man who was used to having his own way.

  I glanced at Mr. Mosley.

  He didn’t say a word—hadn’t said a word during the entire incident. He opened the door and slid inside the Jeep Cherokee. I did the
same. I backed all the way down the driveway, watching the driver as much as the road behind me. He didn’t move until we were on the county blacktop heading east.

  We drove for what seemed like a long time without speaking. Finally Mr. Mosley said, “Once before a white man pointed a gun at me, called me nigger, and laughed. That was back in 1950. Know what I did?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. And I’ve been angry ’bout it ever since.”

  “You know, Mr. Mosley, it’s not 1950 anymore.”

  “Tell me about those lawyer friends you mentioned.”

  Sweet Swinging Billy Tillman, the fastest man alive, aka Tilly, aka Tilly the Swift, aka Wild Bill, had become an attorney—a fact that astonished all who knew him, including Tilly’s mother, because no one ever misspent his youth more recklessly. I remember dodging a bowling ball that he once rolled down the stairs at me when I visited his second-story duplex—I felt like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. On one memorable occasion, Tilly and his cabal of miscreants laid siege to a hamburger joint on Marshall Avenue with bottle rockets because the establishment refused to buy union lettuce. For three consecutive years he water-skied down the Mississippi River in nothing but swimming shorts, in February, evading ice floes for the benefit of a local TV station; I remembered because I drove the boat. Often he would travel to Wisconsin, where the drinking age was nineteen, purchase assorted alcoholic beverages, smuggle them across the border, then sell them out of the trunk of a car at grossly inflated prices to college kids in Minnesota, where the drinking age was twenty-one; I remember because I drove the car. Then there was his annual Pub Crawl. Tilly would rent a school bus, load it with thirty of his closest personal friends and a keg of beer, and direct it from one Twin Cities drinking emporium to the next until the occupants collapsed out of pure exhaustion and overindulgence. I most certainly did not drive on any of those occasions.

  Mr. Mosley allowed that these weren’t necessarily the qualifications that he sought in an attorney.

  “If you’re going to hire a lawyer,” I told him, “hire one who’s prepared to do almost anything.”

  A secretary ushered us into Tilly’s office. Introductions were made and greetings exchanged. I asked about Susan. Tilly showed me the picture he kept on his desk.

  Tilly had never been particularly handsome. In fact, the less generous among us might call him downright homely. His wife, on the other hand, made Catherine Zeta-Jones look tired, and I wondered not for the first time how he had managed to woo her. I’ve been told that most women are attracted to power and money, that they’re interested in a man’s personality, his education, his occupation, his ability to make them laugh—but that physical appearance is way down on the list of requirements, somewhere around seventh or eighth. I decided it must be true. How else could Tilly get such an attractive woman to marry him? Why else would I be able to get dates?

  “Have you seen this?” Tilly handed me a second photo. It was of a young girl with auburn hair and flashing green eyes.

  “Sheila?”

  Tilly nodded.

  “My Lord, how old is she now?”

  “Twelve.”

  Talk about feeling ancient. “The last time I saw her, she wasn’t even in preschool.”

  “You should visit more often.”

  I handed back the photograph. “She’s a very lucky girl. She looks like her mother instead of you.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Mr. Mosley said, “Can we get to it? I have to meet my man working the hives near South Dakota.”

  I don’t think Mr. Mosley meant to be rude. It was just that lawyers made him nervous.

  Tilly sat behind his desk. We sat in front of it.

  “So, gentlemen. What can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking for a little payback,” I told him.

  “Talk to me.”

  We told our story. Tilly didn’t hesitate before giving us his recommendation.

  “We can call the Carver County attorney—whom I play golf with, I might add—and have Crosetti charged with three counts of assault. Certainly there’s a reasonable fear that he was going to cause bodily harm to both of you and Ms. Flynn. The fact he used a racial slur might also give us access to the hate crime statutes. There was no posting of trespass signs that you could see, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s enough for criminal charges. It’s also enough to start civil proceedings for emotional distress. It’s weak, but you could probably do it.”

  “I don’t want to arrest him. I don’t want to sue,” Mr. Mosley said.

  “Well, sir. What do you want?”

  “I want him to know that he can’t push me around.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “How is that easy?” I asked.

  “We’ll send him a letter printed on my stationery in which we threaten to have him arrested and drag him into civil court unless he—unless he what? Unless he allows you to go anywhere on his property, at your convenience, and take soil samples without interference. What do you say, Mr. Mosley? Do you like the idea of Crosetti cussing you out from behind his window shades while you roam about his land doing exactly as you please?”

  “I like that very much.”

  “We’ll send the letter by messenger this afternoon.”

  Tilly smiled broadly, leaned back in his chair, and clasped his fingers behind his head.

  “I love the law,” he said. “It lets you get away with so much mischief.”

  Her name was Margot, and she was standing in the center of my pond. She was wearing a dazzling one-piece canary yellow swimsuit that barely contained her. I wore sunglasses when I approached so she wouldn’t see where my eyes were roaming, although I’m sure she guessed.

  Margot was five years older than I was, but she looked younger. Lately I’ve been thinking that everyone looks younger than I do. She was my neighbor. I inherited her when my father and I moved into the house shortly after I came into my money. The house was located on the wrong side of the street. I didn’t know that until after I had made an offer on it. I thought it was located in St. Anthony Park, one of the more fashionable neighborhoods of St. Paul. But because I was on the north side of Hoyt Avenue instead of the south, I actually lived in Falcon Heights. I had inadvertently moved to the suburbs, a fact I still refuse to admit publicly. I’m a St. Paul boy at heart, and whenever anyone asks, I say that’s where I live. Margot insists I should get over it. That’s easy for her to say. She’s from Minneapolis.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said when I reached the edge of the pond.

  “What have you been thinking?”

  “Oh, many things,” she cooed, arching her dark eyebrows at me. “But mostly I’ve been thinking that we need fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “I think the ducks would like to eat fish when they return.”

  “What kind of fish?”

  “I don’t know. What kind of fish do ducks eat?”

  “I don’t even know that they eat fish.”

  “Call that guy you know, the one with the DNR.”

  “Why should I call? It’s your idea.”

  “It’s your pond.”

  “Since when?”

  True, the pond was built in my backyard, but the far shore bordered Margot’s property and she had long ago asserted at least partial ownership rights, especially after the ducks arrived. There were only two mallards at first. I called them Hepburn and Tracy. Only the thing about ducks they breed. Soon there were five additional ducklings. I named them Bobby, Shelby, Victoria, and Katie after the Dunston family and Maureen after my mother and fed them dry corn from a plastic ice cream bucket. Margot fed them bread and crackers. Soon they would waddle up to each of us without fear, would even sit quietly next to us when we stretched out on lounge chairs, catching rays—but they liked me best.

  All the mallards flew off in late September, and I was afraid that would be the last we’d see of them. My friend with
the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said not to worry. If they survived the trip south, the ducks would probably return in the spring to establish new nests. Only it was May and still no sign of them.

  I used to hunt ducks with my dad. I can’t imagine doing it now.

  “Goldfish,” Margot said.

  “What about them?”

  “At the Japanese garden exhibit at the Como Conservatory, they have goldfish.”

  “Do ducks eat goldfish?”

  “I don’t know if they eat goldfish. I’m just saying goldfish is something to think about. Big goldfish. They look good swimming around. They looked very good swimming around at the Japanese garden exhibit at the Como Conservatory.”

  “I’ve never been to the Japanese garden exhibit at the Como Conservatory.”

  “You should go. You should look at the goldfish.”

  “Margot, why are you standing in the pond?”

  Margot tapped the top of the fountain that circulated the pond water. “When are you going to turn this on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should turn it on. Make sure it works.”

  “I’ll do that, but first—”

  “When are you going to turn it on?”

  “In a minute. Margot?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you standing …”

  “In the pond? I wanted to see how deep the water was.”

  I had cleaned the pond and filled it with a garden hose two days earlier. It was now at its ideal level, which was midway between Margot’s knees and the bright material of her swimsuit. Margot must have known I was admiring her thighs, because she splashed water at me.

  “See anything you like?”