The Taking of Libbie, SD

by David Housewright

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  A few minutes later, Saranne returned with the bill. She set it in front of me. Tracie reached across the table and picked it up.

  “I got it,” she said.

  “Whatever,” Saranne said. “You know”—she was talking to me now—“you should be careful how you talk to the old man. He’s mean.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Maybe it’s because he’s so old.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Over seventy.”

  “Must be tough for someone as young as you to have a father that old.”

  “His age isn’t what makes it tough. It’s not his time anymore, and it pisses him off. He wishes Reagan was still president, arming the Contras in Nicaragua and firing air traffic controllers and scaring hell out of the Russians.”

  “Long before you were born.”

  “That, too. My mother says he was a good person back then. She says he was happy back then.”

  “How well did he get along with Rush?” I said.

  “The other McKenzie? I don’t think he liked him. Rush wore expensive suits and real cuff links, and the old man thought that was way too la-de-da for South Dakota. My mother liked him, though, even liked the cuff links. When he came over for dinner that one time, they talked up a storm, mostly about the Cities. Mom was from the Twin Cities. ’Course, that just made it worse as far as the old man was concerned, them liking each other. I gotta go. If you come back for dinner, make ’em seat you in my section, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I watched as Saranne made her way back to the kitchen.

  “How to win friends and influence people,” Tracie said. “You should give lessons.”

  I left my chair and made my way to the restroom.

  “Leave a generous tip,” I said over my shoulder.

  I didn’t use the facilities, yet I washed my hands just the same. Afterward, I activated my cell phone and called a familiar number.

  “Hello,” Shelby said.

  “Hi, Shel.”

  “McKenzie, where are you? Are you still in South Dakota?”

  “I am.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not bad. Is Victoria around?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “Just a second.”

  A minute later, Victoria was on the phone. She spoke as if I had forced her to put her life on pause. “What is it?”

  “How would you like to make a quick fifty bucks?”

  “Do I have to do anything illegal?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the fun of that?”

  “I want you to go online and find out if there are any high schools in Chicago that call their sports teams the Raiders.”

  “Do you think the Imposter’s from Chicago?”

  “You’ve been to Taste of Minnesota—”

  “Where you can buy food from all those booths and they have free concerts.”

  “Do you remember where is it?”

  “Well, yeah. On Harriet Island, down by the river in St. Paul.”

  “The Imposter said it was in Grant Park.”

  “The place in Chicago where President Obama gave his victory speech after he won the election?”

  “Correct.”

  “I’m all over it.”

  “That’s my girl. One more thing. What’s your computer password?”

  “My password? I’m not going to tell you my password.”

  “What I meant—if you wanted to hack into someone’s Facebook account or something, what password would you use?”

  “I don’t know. Their name and birthday?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I met Tracie outside the entrance to Grandma Miller’s. The bison was waxing poetic about the vistas of South Dakota.

  Tracie said, “Where to now?”

  The bison started singing “Home on the Range.”

  I pointed across the highway.

  “Introduce me to Farmer Randisi,” I said.

  “I’ve never actually met the man.”

  “I thought you knew everyone around here.”

  “Randisi is a recluse. Or antisocial. I don’t know what. He has no family, as far as I know. No friends. You never see him in town except for Sunday morning services, and even then he’s in and out in a hurry, never stops to talk. He does his shopping—I don’t know where he does his shopping, but it’s not in Libbie.”

  My admiration for the Imposter was starting to grow.

  “He picked his targets well, didn’t he?” I said.

  Randisi kept his property like he was expecting company. He lived in a pristine white clapboard house on a low hill at the end of a groomed gravel driveway. A rich, manicured lawn surrounded the house, and green and purple fields of alfalfa bordered that. The outbuildings were recently painted, and what machinery I could see, although well used, looked like it had just come off the dealership lot. There was a turnaround at the top of the driveway. Large stones painted white bordered a small garden planted in the center of the turnaround. In the center of the garden was a flagpole. Old Glory flapped listlessly in the breeze.

  I parked the Audi between the flagpole and the farmhouse. We hadn’t been in the car long enough for it to cool properly, yet it was still far more comfortable than the heat that greeted us when we left it. The sun was now high in the cloudless sky, and it glared down on us as if it were bad-tempered. The faint breeze that caused the flag to sway brought no relief. I saw large birds circling off to my left, and I wondered if they were buzzards—they felt like buzzards. Sweat trickled down my spine to my waist as I headed toward Randisi’s back door. Tracie trailed behind.

  I knocked once, and the door flew open.

  Randisi was standing on the other side of it.

  He was pointing a rust-spotted, long-barreled .38 Colt at my head and smiling as if he had played an April Fool’s prank on me.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  I had been taking martial arts training on and off ever since the police academy. Some instructors were better than others, yet even the worst of them preached the same sermon—act without hesitation. Hesitation will get you killed.

  Randisi was holding the gun in his right hand. I slid to my left even as I seized the wrist holding the gun and angled it away so I was out of the discharge line. I stepped in closer, took hold of the barrel of the gun with my other hand, and pushed it toward Randisi, rolling it against his thumb—the thumb is the weakest point of the hand. The gun was now pointing at his chest, but I kept twisting it until he let go of the butt. I released his wrist and shoved him hard backward into the kitchen. He lost his balance but didn’t fall. He grabbed his thumb with his left hand and said something that sounded like “Huh?” I released the spring-loaded latch on the left side of the gun, swung out the cylinder, tilted the gun upward, shook out all six cartridges onto the kitchen floor, slapped the cylinder back in place, and handed the Colt butt first to Randisi—all in the time it took to say it.

  “Hi,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” I tried to keep my voice light and cheerful. I doubt I succeeded. My mouth was dry, my heart was drumming, and I suddenly felt out of breath.

  Randisi looked down at the gun that he now held with both hands and then back at me. He was a short, compact man with thick shoulders and a worldly face and eyes that looked as if they had seen things. It was easy to imagine him helping to pull a neighbor’s car out of a ditch in the rain.

  “How did you do that?” he said.

  “Practice,” I told him. “Do you always draw down on people who come to your door?”

  Randisi slipped the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “It’s legal,” he said. “State says I can carry.”

  “It doesn’t say you can shoot people
.”

  “What do you know about shooting people?”

  “Far too much.”

  “You a cop?”

  “In my misspent youth.”

  “What about this one?”

  He gestured at Tracie. I had forgotten about her. She was standing six feet behind me, blinking in the hard sunlight, her face flushed. Heat—I assume it was heat—had covered her body with a mist of perspiration; her skin glistened, and her eyes held an almost giddy light.

  “She’s a model,” I said.

  “Model?” he repeated.

  There’s something about that word that makes men silly. It transformed Randisi from a menacing recluse into a gleeful teenager. He quickly removed the Colt from his waistband, set it on the kitchen counter, and nudged it away. Almost simultaneously, he brushed past me, stepped outside of the farmhouse, paused, gave Tracie a slow, bold stare of appraisal, and extended his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi,” he said.

  Tracie smiled, only I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. She shook Randisi’s hand as if it were something she’d rather not touch.

  “Sorry about the gun,” he said. “I’ve been getting some threats lately, and a fellow can’t be too careful.”

  “Threats?” I said.

  Randisi gently set two fingers and a thumb on Tracie’s elbow and urged her toward the door. “You don’t want to be standing out here in this heat. Come inside now, where it’s cool.”

  Tracie gave me a look as if she expected me to wrestle Randisi to the ground and pummel him about the head and shoulders. Instead, I stepped back to give them plenty of room to enter the house. She gave me an NHL-quality elbow as they passed.

  Once inside, Randisi led Tracie to a chair in a living room that looked as though its furnishings had been lifted intact from a department store showroom. After proceeding down the list, offering her everything from water to Scotch, which Tracie politely declined, he stepped back against the wall so he could get a good look at her sitting in his chair in his living room.

  The man definitely needs to get out more, my inner voice told me.

  After a few silent moments, Randisi said, “I’m sorry. We weren’t properly introduced.” He crossed the distance to the chair and again offered Tracie his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi.”

  Again, Tracie shook Randisi’s hand reluctantly. She didn’t remind him that he had introduced himself just moments before, and I didn’t, either.

  “Tracie Blake,” she said.

  For a recluse, Randisi seemed awfully sociable.

  “I’m Rushmore McKenzie,” I said.

  I was standing near the entrance to the living room. Randisi looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “Tell me about the threats,” I said.

  “Why? Are you going to do something about them?”

  “I might.”

  From his expression, I don’t think he believed me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Randisi said. “I haven’t gotten any for about a week now.”

  Since the Imposter skipped town, my inner voice said.

  “What were they about?” I said aloud.

  “Ahh, people saying they were going to teach me a lesson; that they were going to run me off, burn me out, beat me up, bury me in a shallow grave. It was all talk. I got phone calls, I got letters, yet no one ever came near me and, as far as I know, no one ever set foot on my land.”

  “Did you never consider selling your property?” Tracie said.

  There was a note of admiration in her voice. Randisi smiled broadly when he heard it.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “I might’ve considered it if someone had actually made me an offer.”

  “Wait,” I said. “No one offered to buy your land?”

  “No.” Randisi shook his head vigorously in case I misunderstood him. “I didn’t know anyone wanted my land. Hadn’t even heard about that shopping mall that folks wanted to build out here until I started getting the threats.”

  “No one calling himself Rushmore McKenzie—”

  “I thought you were Rushmore McKenzie.”

  “Came to see you?”

  “No. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  I quickly explained.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Randisi said.

  I agreed with him.

  “I wonder,” Randisi said.

  “What?”

  “There was this fella—I remember a fella who looked a little like you. He drove up to the place a while back, got out of his car, walked around the car once, got back in, and drove off. I have no idea what that was about. I figured he was lost. Or nuts. Think it was him? Think he was looking the place over so he could claim he was here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Randisi,” Tracie said, “why didn’t you say something when you started getting the threats? Why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you come into town?”

  “I don’t do too good in town,” he said. “I have a touch of the agoraphobia. I’m pretty good out here, in my own house, on my own land. In town, in stores and restaurants and church, places that aren’t, you know, wide open, that aren’t easy to escape from, sometimes I get panic attacks. I know it’s silly, and I’ve talked to people about it. I’ve tried exposure therapy and cognitive therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy, only nothing seems to work all that well. Now they have me on sertraline, but that doesn’t do much for me, either. I can’t even make myself go into town to get my prescription filled, so there you are.”

  Randisi was visibly disappointed to see us go. He suggested that he might give Tracie a call sometime to learn how this business with the mall went, and Tracie said she thought that was a fine idea.

  “In a couple of days,” Randisi said.

  “A couple of days,” Tracie said.

  “Or maybe later today.”

  “Later today would be fine.”

  In the car, she said, “I like him.”

  “He’s not the person people thought he was,” I said.

  “He’s not the person I thought he was,” Tracie said, which was more to the point. “If he doesn’t call me, maybe I’ll call him. If you don’t mind.”

  “Why should I mind?”

  She didn’t answer, just looked out the window until we reached the end of Randisi’s long driveway and hung a right on the highway.

  “Now what?” Tracie said. “Do you want to meet the other city council members?”

  “Who was the first person the Imposter spoke to about the mall?”

  Tracie gave it a moment’s thought before answering. “Ed Bizek, the city manager. He’s also the city’s director of economic development.”

  “Rural flight,” Bizek said. “We’re fighting rural flight. Eighty-nine percent of the cities in the United States have fewer than three thousand people, and they’re getting smaller all the time. Six states, according to the numbers I last saw, six states—Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota—have lost over five hundred thousand residents, half of them with college degrees. Fighting rural flight. That’s what my job is all about. At least that’s what it was about.”

  “Was?” I said.

  “I expect to be fired at the next city council meeting.”

  “Why?”

  “Mistakes were made. Money was lost. Someone has to pay for that.”

  “You?”

  “The council sure isn’t going to blame itself.”

  He was probably right, I decided. Especially since City Councilwoman Tracie Blake was sitting in the backseat of Bizek’s car and didn’t say a word to dispute his theory.

  “You know, I did check him out,” Bizek said. “The Imposter, I mean. I called his office in the Cities. I went to the Web site. I interviewed his references. We had a conference call with Rush’s other investors. The city council was there. I even called a couple of the major retailers that Rush said were interested in becomin
g anchor tenants. They all said that they had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion, but no one set any alarm bells to ringing, either. There was no reason to believe, to not believe … Later, after Rush disappeared, I checked again. The investors were gone, and so were the references. The Web site had been taken down, the office phone just kept on ringing, and the retailers, they all had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion. Even then I couldn’t believe it.” He looked at Tracie’s reflection in his rearview mirror. “I guess I would fire me, too.”

  She didn’t so much as smile in reply.

  Bizek drove his car to a halt at a four-way stop. He surprised me by putting it into park and leaning back against his door.

  “Of course, it was too good to be true,” he said.

  I glanced through the back window of the car, looking for the traffic that he was blocking. There wasn’t any.

  “I think I knew it was too good to be true, even when Rush was telling me about it,” Bizek said. “He was projecting sales of four hundred to five hundred dollars a square foot, though. I had to listen, and the more I listened—it really would have improved our way of life. Right now people drive, some of them drive hundreds of miles, to go shopping for furniture, for appliances, for clothes and whatnot. Think of the difference it would make if people could get what they need right here. No long drives, no waste of time and gas. The revenue we’ve been losing to other communities, to Rapid City and whatnot, we would have kept that revenue. Everyone in town would have benefited.”

  “Not everyone,” Tracie said.

  Bizek looked at her in his rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, as if it were a topic not worth discussing. He sat straight in his seat, put the car in gear, and drove through the intersection.

  “Still, the town should be all right,” Bizek said. “Look.”

  He pointed to a blond-stone building to his left. The sign above the door read northern star nursing home.

  “We’ve got health care,” he said. “We’ve got assisted living. We just finished up an expansion of the Libbie Medical Clinic down on the end of First Street, which has two full-time and two part-time nurse practitioners and roving doctors. People will move to a small town to retire if you have the medical facilities.”