The phone rang.
“Yes?”
“We’re leaving.” It was Rowe characteristically reporting his every step.
“Good.”
“Sir—I mean, Sheriff—why am I doing this?”
“To be thorough.”
“Okay. Got it. Good. Later.”
Cubiak didn’t really expect the expedition to learn anything that would alter the circumstances in the Rec Room on the fateful night. Once the experts announced that they’d found nothing amiss, the blame for the first three deaths would be laid on the squirrels. And with Millard’s death attributed to his wife, the matter would be shelved. In the meantime, the sheriff had other business to attend to that morning.
In a packed meeting room in Fish Creek, angry merchants demanded that Cubiak arrest the loiterers at Founders Square. The business owners did not take kindly to his explanation of why he could not. Merely sitting around in a public arena is not illegal, he told them. Nonetheless, he’d beefed up car and foot patrols and encouraged the shop owners to do their own positive loitering.
“If you get there first, they’re not going to come and sit on your laps.” A ripple of laughter. “And one more thing,” Cubiak said. “Has anyone talked to them? They’re all locals, the sons and daughters of people you’ve known your entire lives. Don’t you wonder why they feel so alienated from the community?”
“Does it matter?” said Kathy O’Toole. The owner of the Woolly Sheep looked faint with fatigue; the dark circles under her eyes popped against the backdrop of her pale skin.
“I believe it does,” he said.
Later, at the Sturgeon Bay Coast Guard Station, Cubiak met with Gary Dotson, who was almost as agitated as the Fish Creek shop owners. The chief didn’t waste time on preliminaries.
“Everything’s fine for the actual launch itself. I talked to the general manager at Palmer Johnson this morning and the cutter will be ready on schedule. Senator Adamas will be here—he sponsored the ship’s commissioning—and his wife will do the honors with the champagne. Standard protocol. There’s some talk the governor might attend as well. And why not? Sturgeon Bay is up to be designated a Coast Guard City, a first for Wisconsin. We’ll have the mayor and all the local dignitaries. The shipyard will be open to visitors, and people will also be able to watch from the other side of the harbor. It’s the ceremony here,” he said, pointing out the window toward the lighthouse and the station grounds at the entrance to the canal, “that’s got me worried.”
“You don’t have room for everyone?”
“No, that’s not it. We had three thousand people here for the Tall Ships, so that’s not the problem. Come with me.”
Dotson led Cubiak to a small workroom where a couple dozen photos and several yellowed copies of Stars and Stripes lay on a table. “This is all we’ve got. I was told that there were boxes of material from the Aleutian Campaign in our storage room but we haven’t found much. Either someone was mistaken or the stuff has been misplaced. We looked everywhere. It’s been a long time and things can go missing. This photographer Charles Tweet was up there shooting for a while and he sent me some stuff, and I’d planned to ask the three old gents themselves for any souvenirs, letters, et cetera that they might have. Now I’ll have to ask their widows, but I hate to impose at such a time. The folks at the Maritime Museum are doing their best to help out as well, and of course eventually the exhibit goes on display there. I’m just worried that the overall effect is going to be far less impressive than what we’d hoped for and what the men deserved.”
Dotson turned toward the window and stood at parade rest, his legs apart, his shoulders tense, and his hands clasped waist-high behind his back. The station was eerily still but for the muted crash of waves against the concrete pier that ran out into the lake. Cubiak waited.
“Yesterday at the funeral you asked me if there was something else going on,” Dotson said after a pause. “I told you there wasn’t, but you were right, Sheriff. In fact, there’s something I need to show you.”
Back in his office, the chief pulled a manila folder from a locked file drawer and scattered the contents on his desk.
“They’re all addressed to me,” he said, surveying the six small envelopes that littered the blotter. He handed one to Cubiak. “Here, read it.”
Inside was a handwritten message scrawled in a mix of crude penmanship and printing and spelled out on a sheet of coarse, lined tablet paper. “No honor for dishonorable vets. Fuck all three.”
“And the rest?” Cubiak said.
“They’re all pretty much along the same lines. Mean and nasty and aimed at Huntsman and his pals.”
“They come from all over the state,” Cubiak said, checking the postmarks.
“Yes. Some from towns I never even heard of.”
“When did this start?”
“First one came in September. Last one in November.”
“You have any idea what this is about?”
The chief returned to the window but this time stood with his back to glass. “No idea. I’ve never heard a word uttered against any of those three men. Someone’s got a grudge, but who or why, I don’t know.”
“You think it’s linked to the missing archives?”
Dotson shrugged. “I don’t even know that there’s anything really missing. Someone could have been cleaning up twenty years ago and thrown the stuff away.” He tapped the desk. “Funny thing, they almost always arrived on a Monday.”
Cubiak looked at the envelopes again. “None of them were posted in Door County.”
“No, nothing closer than Stevens Point.”
“You mind if I take these with me?” the sheriff said, gathering up the letters.
“Be my guest. I’d rather never see them again if you want to know the truth. It’s just … I wonder what this means for the ceremony.”
“Probably nothing. But if it does mean something, whoever sent these did you a favor.”
“A favor? Sheriff, I …”
“We’ll both be on guard, and that’s better than being caught unaware.”
On the way out, they passed the dining room where two men were busy with rollers and paint. “Didn’t Rogers Nils work here, helping with the painting?”
“He did. Started sometime after Christmas. Then one day in February, he left and never came back. Too bad. He’s a hard worker. Nice kid, too.”
It was ten past three when Cubiak got back to headquarters and found Rowe in the conference room with the two HVAC installers. The men, thick bodied and ruddy, were drinking Cokes and bantering back and forth with the deputy. When Cubiak entered the room, the men both stopped talking and sat grasping the soft drink cans in hands that were rough and discolored by their work. Rowe introduced them and explained that they’d spent nearly an hour inspecting Huntsman’s space heater. “They went over it inch by inch, Sheriff,” the deputy said.
“And?”
The bearded man, who looked the older of the two by a few years, spoke up. “It’s an old unit. Not up to code. It looked alright when we checked it out but I’m guessing Huntsman had trouble with it at some point ’cause he replaced the vent pipe with his own jerry-rigged system.”
Cubiak remembered that the vent pipe had looked new. “What do you mean ‘jerry-rigged’?” he said.
“The valve or damper has an external control. A knob on the underside of the line, down near the floor.”
“Was the valve open or closed?”
“Oh, it was open.”
“You’re sure?”
The second man cupped his chin and nodded.
“Any chance the valve could have closed by itself ?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff. The wing nut that holds the knob in place is kinda loose but not really likely. Anyways, it was open. And if it had closed then how’d it open up again?”
“Maybe someone kicked the knob when they were trying to get the men out.”
The bearded man shrugged. “Anything’s possible, Sheriff
.”
Cubiak looked at the second installer. “Maybe,” he said, skepticism evident in his voice.
“And the pipe itself was clear?”
“That’s right, no obstructions. We checked that first thing,” the younger man said.
Cubiak figured the men had heard about the leaves in the vent but he repeated the story. “So you think it could have been squirrels?” he said.
“Yeah. Could be.”
“Happens.”
“An accident then?”
The installers nodded in unison.
“Can’t see it any other way,” the older man said. “Damned thing is, if they’d had a carbon monoxide detector in there this never would have happened.”
“So, it’s squirrels then?” Rowe said when he came back from seeing the men to the door.
“We can’t rule out problems with the valve, and the possibility that it was deliberately closed and then reopened. Which means we need to identify everyone who had been there Friday night or who might have had a key to the cabin. Ida claims she didn’t but she could be lying. Same goes for the other two women. And then there’s Walter.”
“But motive, sir? For murder?”
“I don’t know. But if the unit was deliberately tampered with, it had to have been done by someone with access to the cabin.”
“That makes all the card players suspects, too,” Rowe said.
“Especially someone who lost big. There’s Agnes as well. We have nothing to connect her to the deaths of the three vets. But she’s admitted to killing her husband and she referred to them as a unit—four of a kind. Why? If she had reason to murder one, would she have had motivation to murder all of them? Or the means? Like the other women, she says she didn’t have a key but if Joe did, she could have found it.”
Rowe tugged at his cuffs. “Right. So what do I do?”
Cubiak looked at his deputy. Rowe was a good cop who knew the rules and was fierce about enforcement, but he lacked the experience and instinct to follow a trail of clues, especially one so fractured and disjointed.
“I’ll be out of the office a lot the next few days. I’ll need someone to tend the store,” he said.
Rowe nearly saluted. “You got it, sir.”
Heading home, Cubiak detoured to Walter Nils’s garage. A-One Auto Repair was on the city’s west side, sandwiched between a self-service laundry and a hardware store. Walter conducted business far from the waterfront and trappings of a resort community, and business looked good. Several cars and an SUV crowded the small lot. Three more vehicles were lined up inside the dim interior, a high-ceilinged room piled with tires and smelling of axle grease and cigar smoke.
“Anybody here?” Cubiak called out.
A pair of scuffed work boots emerged from beneath a black Volvo as Walter rolled out from under the carriage. When he was free of the vehicle, he scrambled to his feet. Grime streaked his coveralls.
“Sheriff,” he said. The mechanic wiped his hand on a frayed rag and started to extend his hand and then thought better of it. “Sorry. Goes with the territory. One of the reasons my second wife left. Said she hated dirty fingernails.”
Walter laughed but Cubiak wasn’t sure if he was joking.
“I’ll be quick.”
“This still about what happened up there, at the cabin?” Walter said. He didn’t clarify if he meant the deaths or the graffiti and Cubiak didn’t ask.
“Right. Routine business. I need the names of the men who were regulars at the poker games. Not going all the way back but the recent players.”
“Oh god, Sheriff. I don’t know. They come and go. Besides, I’m hardly up there. You’d have to ask my mother and even then, I’m not sure she’d be able to tell you. What’s this about anyways?”
Cubiak ignored the question. “Another thing: who would your father call if he needed any work done around the place?”
This time Walter’s laugh was genuine. “No one. He did everything himself. Prided himself on self-sufficiency.”
The sheriff studied the array of tools above the workbench. “He installed the space heater?”
“No doubt.”
“And he’d take care of any repairs?”
“Probably.”
“He never thought to update it? Get a newer model?”
“Big Guy prided himself on keeping things running. As long as the heater worked, he’d use it. Why?”
“Nothing particular. Looks like you got your hands full here. Roger ever help you out?”
“He comes by every once in a while, but only to work on his old junk.”
“Does he live with you?”
“Used to. Got his own place in Valmy this winter. He’ll sleep upstairs if he’s been out with the boys and doesn’t want to make the drive.” Walter rubbed his dirty hands on his soiled pants. “What’s all this about Roger?”
“Curious, I guess. I like him, just trying to figure out why he left school.”
“Yeah, well, I sure as hell don’t know. We had plenty of arguments about it, too. But he’s a good kid. Just a little lost. Don’t worry about Roger. He’ll be okay.”
THURSDAY
Under a leaden sky, the air was chilled and the grass blanketed with a heavy dew that sent its cold wetness seeping through the soles of Cubiak’s shoes as he crossed the Huntsmans’ lawn in midmorning. A vast emptiness prevailed over the estate, mirrored by the flat open reaches of the wide bay. The gazebo furniture was stacked in a heap. At the dock, the vandalized boats were shrouded in ghostly off-white tarps. The only sound was the distant drone of a boat motoring north into deeper waters.
Approaching the house, Cubiak caught the faint aroma of cinnamon. Ida was waiting in the mudroom. Her manner was cheerful, and in contrast to the gloomy outdoors, she wore lipstick and a bright flowered bib apron over a pink shirt. “Come in, Sheriff. You’re just in time. They’ve cooled off enough to eat,” she said as he dropped his jacket over an empty peg. In the kitchen she motioned toward the table and then set down a mug of steaming coffee and two pastries layered with a thick coat of icing.
“They’re messy, you’ll need this,” Ida said, handing him a napkin and fork. She waited until he took a bite before she lifted her apron over her head and claimed her spot near the window.
“Good?”
“Delicious,” Cubiak said around a mouthful of viscous sugar. He felt like a kid again, sitting at a chipped red-and-gray formica table dunking one of his mother’s brittle peanut butter cookies in a glass of milk while she argued with his father in the next room.
“You said you needed to tell me something,” Ida said, bringing him back to the cozy yellow kitchen.
“Yes, about the space heater.”
“Oh.” Her spirits seemed to sag.
In vague terms he explained what he’d learned from the furnace installers. “It may not mean anything but I need to look into this further.”
“Of course,” she said.
Ida tried to sound complacent but a thin worry line creased her forehead, and Cubiak remembered that her brow had been similarly furrowed the morning he’d met her, the morning her husband and his friends had been found dead in the cabin. “Have you had any more trouble?” he said.
“No. I told you, it was nothing. Just some kids.” Again Ida pretended nonchalance but there was something guarded in her tone.
“It’s possible someone had a grudge against your husband or one of the other men,” Cubiak said.
“They were good men, Sheriff. Civic leaders. They won awards for their work in the community. Why would anyone have a grudge?” Ida’s voice was fueled with indignity.
“Even good men have enemies,” he said. Then, after a pause, he added, “Perhaps one of the men who played poker with them. Do you know who they were?”
“Lots of men were invited to the games.” Ida carried the empty cup and plate to the sink. “Big Guy would mention a name now and then but it wasn’t something I paid much attention to.”
“Not ev
en the regulars?”
“I’m sure I can come up with a name or two, but it won’t be much,” she said.
“I’d like a list of clients, as well.” Cubiak spoke over the sound of the running water.
Ida abruptly shut the faucet. “What in heaven’s name for?”
“Routine. Maybe there’s a disgruntled customer.”
“I don’t see the point of it. Big Guy didn’t have disgruntled clients.” She dried her hands on a striped dish towel. “Eric and Jasper were independent businessmen, as well. I assume you’re following the same line of reasoning with them.” She tossed the towel on the counter, not waiting for an answer. “You realize you’re not making this any easier for me. For any of us.”
Cubiak started to apologize but Ida cut him off.
“I’ll have the names for you this afternoon, card players and customers.” She smiled, but he thought the smile was forced.
As he pulled away, Cubiak thought about Ida’s reaction to her husband’s death. Her apparent calm acceptance, her alacrity in removing his clothing from the house, her lack of concern about the graffiti and the disparagement of Huntsman’s name and reputation. She seemed to have readily accepted his death. Was it her age or religion that comforted her in the face of loss? Perhaps she was in shock or denial. Or the pain of loss was too intense to confront directly. People grieved in different ways and were not to be judged by anyone, certainly not by someone like him who’d made of mess of his own mourning.
The road leading away from the Huntsmans’ estate was deserted. At Esther and Clyde Smitz’s tidy house, the shades were pulled against the larger world. Next door, the Millards’ rundown cottage was ringed by yellow police tape. In the front yard, the willow tree looked barren without the heavy chain that had encircled its trunk. What had become of the dog? It was hard to imagine anyone wanting that nasty creature.
Death at Gills Rock Page 10