by Julie Kramer
“What a beauty! A fish of a lifetime.” He introduced himself as Russell Nesbett, the president of the local chamber of commerce. “But call me Russ. I’ve been following your story closely.”
Suddenly a new motive for taking Big Mouth Billy came to mind.
“That prize money you’re offering, seems like very attractive bait,” I said. “What if the thieves aren’t animal rights activists but just stole Big Mouth Billy to rig the contest?”
Russ pooh-poohed that theory fast. “Some of the top bass anglers in the world will be here competing. What do you think it would do to our credibility if we had lax security?”
“You have security?” I asked.
“Absolutely. No contraband fish are getting into this competition.”
He explained that every boat and cooler would be inspected at manned entry points to ensure no bootleg fish were smuggled in. Fish police would also patrol the shorelines to make sure no one parked a lunker under a dock.
“It’s part of our insurance contract,” Russ said. “Lloyd’s of London is making us.”
He seemed proud of all the precautions they were taking, some of which I promised to keep secret, and he even showed me an X-ray machine to ensure that the winning fish hadn’t been loaded with lead weights.
“More ways to cheat than I could ever imagine,” I said.
“You’d be surprised. What’s a little fish fraud when a half a million bucks is at stake?”
We both shared a nice laugh while Shep panted like he was in on the joke.
“Maybe I’ll get myself some fishing gear before the competition and join you,” I said.
He shook his head and explained that organizers capped the roster at one hundred anglers, and it was full. White Bear Lake, about 2,400 acres in size, was the second largest lake in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area.
“If we let too many boats in, the lake gets crowded. This way it’s also more exclusive and we can justify the one-thousand-dollar entry fee.”
That seemed like a lot of money to sit in a boat all day. But I didn’t want to debate those merits with him.
“I’d love to do a preview story,” I said. “Can I get a list of the entrants?”
“Oh I can tell you off the top of my head who the big names are,” he answered. “One of them is your news anchor, Tom McHale. He’s such a big bass fan, he entered to show his support for the competition.”
“That’s great, but I can’t really interview Tom because he and I work together. Also, I’d like to talk to some ordinary folks, those whose entire lives could be changed by just one fish. A half a million bucks would mean more to them than to Tom.”
“That’s true,” Russ said. “He’s entering it more for the honor and legacy that comes with landing a record fish. We all dream that dream. Landing a champion brings immortality.”
He weighed the pros and cons of releasing contestants’ names, such as privacy, but I dangled the idea that a preview story would pay off with a little extra publicity for my new hometown, White Bear Lake. Wink. Wink. A few minutes later, Shep and I left with a computer printout of potential suspects in Bassgate.
ON OUR WAY back to the station, I answered my cell phone reluctantly because the caller showed as RESTRICTED on the screen. RESTRICTED or UNKNOWN usually meant the newsroom assignment desk. TV stations like blocking their phone numbers so folks on the other end don’t know it’s the media calling. I feared being hijacked by the desk to cover breaking news or a reporter out sick. But this call was actually welcome.
“Hey, that flower you’ve been asking about,” Ozzie, the assignment editor said, “it’s blooming and word is it smells blooming awful.”
“The corpse flower?” I asked. “Great. It emits the odor of rotting flesh. But it only lasts about eight hours.” I felt like I owed it to Jean Lefevre to pay the famed flower a visit. “It’s really quite rare.”
“So we hear. Since you know so much about it, how ’bout you do a live shot while you’re there?”
Hard to back out now. But going live meant finding a bathroom and putting my contacts back in. Noreen didn’t like viewers seeing me in my brainy-girl glasses.
“I have to bring my dog along,” I said.
“Keep him out of the shot this time.”
The line to view the horticultural celebrity stretched outside the conservatory. A Como Park security guard kept the flower crowd under control. My media pass got me to the front, but my dog almost kept me out. Once I explained that Shep was a K9, we were inside. From there, locating the plant was as easy as following my nose.
The closer we got, the worse the stench. I tried taking short, shallow breaths. But I still felt like barfing. Shep appeared immune—infatuated, even, by the smell of death. He strained on the leash to try to get a closer inspection, but another guard kept the crowd behind a ribbon barrier.
The plant stood a little over two feet high in a pot much too large. Purplish interior leaves unfolded slightly from a straight green trunk with narrow white streaks. No mistaking the source of the odor.
“This assignment stinks.” Malik met me with his camera gear, claiming he drew the photographer short straw. Then he complained about the nauseating working conditions he was exposed to. “Give me a sweatshop any day.”
My nose adjusted to the smell, but my throat felt sore, like the plant pollen was burning it. During the next few minutes Malik shot cover of a kid plugging his nose and a red-hat lady racing to the door with her hand over her mouth. Then we grabbed a few quick man-on-the-street sound bites from conservatory guests lamenting the pungency.
An academic type came over to make sure I knew that Amorphophallus titanum, the official name for the corpse flower, was Greek for misshapen giant penis. I didn’t know. But once he said it, that’s all I could think about.
“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll make sure the newscast producer gets that information. But we’re on deadline now and need to go outside and put together our story.”
Besides, the corpse flower was starting to attract flies.
XIONG WAS PACKING up to leave when Shep and I finally got back to Channel 3. He made a sharp remark in his native Hmong language that sounded unkind when I showed him the list of bass fishing contestants and explained what I wanted.
Besides doing computer work for the station, Xiong also produced newscasts, so he was growing irritated with all the extra cyber tasks I was throwing his way this sweeps month.
“I know, Xiong, I’m sorry. Of all the stories I’m chasing, this fish caper is the one I care least about, but Noreen cares most.”
“This list contains one hundred names,” he said. “And none of them have dates of birth, middle initials, or addresses. I do not have time for this. You want it done, you do it.”
Normally, Xiong is territorial with his computer databases. He’d married birth records with death records with crime records with vehicle records with hunting records with voting records with property records and any other electronic public files he could convince the station to buy. And he doesn’t like anyone messing with his creation. So I was surprised at his reaction.
He showed me where to type in each of my fishing entrants to see what background information popped. When he felt certain I could be trusted not to wreck his genius, he left me on my own. With Shep curled at my feet, asleep.
Xiong was dressed edgier than normal. Instead of a Mister Rogers sweater he wore a denim jacket. And when he said good night, he had a nervous smile on his face. I suspected he had a date and I felt a flash of envy.
I looked at the calendar hanging over his desk and recalculated again how many days I’d gone without sex.
TYPING ONE HUNDRED names was the easy part.
A couple of hours later, after sorting through dozens of nicknames and middle names to match people to addresses and ages, my eyes were blurry. Folks from out of state made up about a quarter of the list. So the computer run was useless for them. Of the rest, I printed a lot of data, but didn�
�t know what it meant. A few had criminal records, but nothing screamed fish thief.
ince I remained in computer-think mode the next morning, I worked at home a few hours, trying to ignore Shep chasing red squirrels from window to window.
I made a list of all the hard data I had about both the fish case and Jean Lefevre’s suicide. Sometimes that technique helped me better organize information or see it in a different way.
Even though Noreen opposed probing the woman’s death, and might even blame me for it, I couldn’t just forget about Mrs. Lefevre. When you meet someone one day and see them dead soon after, you need to make sense of the violence. Unfortunately, most of the time it’s senseless.
My eyes still hurt from looking at the fish-contestant names, so I put that file aside and reached for the suicide. I looked through the notes of my impressions about Madeline, her family, and all the other players I’d met. I also scanned the e-mails Xiong found in Mark’s laptop. The correspondence from the best man and old girlfriend still seemed the most promising leads.
Then I noticed the background check revealing Mrs. Lefevre’s erstwhile parking habit. The wave of tickets dated back a couple of years and seemed to cluster in St. Paul, across the river from her home and business in Wisconsin, making them more difficult to enforce.
Curious for a such a seemingly God-fearing, law-abiding mom. What had she been up to?
XIONG CAVED TO my pleading, and because it involved a new task that interested him, he agreed to plot out the tickets geographically. An hour later he showed me the results. Three locations on the map, near and around downtown St. Paul, seemed most popular.
“I guess I better drive over and see what’s there,” I said. Sometimes there’s no substitute for hitting the streets to follow a lead.
“Wait a minute,” he replied. “Let us try this first.”
“What is it?”
“Just watch.”
After a few minutes of downloading, then clicking and dragging across his computer screen, Xiong positioned a satellite map of the city over the clusters of parking-ticket images. The aerial view of downtown was amazing. The state capitol, the Cathedral of St. Paul, the First National Bank building, and the Mississippi River gave me perspective.
And I knew immediately where to head next.
I thanked him and made a big show of hugging him tight. The assignment editor even glanced over from his perch in the newsroom to see what was happening. Xiong beamed at our success.
Two of the ticket clusters were near hospitals. I ignored those, figuring them to be business stops for flower drops. The other location was familiar to me.
“SHE WAS ONE of the last souls I would have expected to commit suicide.”
“Why is that?” I was talking to Father Mountain about the death of one of his parishioners: Jean Lefevre.
“It’s unusual when someone so devout takes her own life.” He spoke freely because he didn’t consider me a reporter, rather one of his flock. By happenstance, Mark’s mother and I had my childhood priest in common.
“Does that mean she can’t be buried in a Catholic cemetery?”
“No, Riley, that’s still a common misconception, especially among the elderly… and those who only attend Mass on Christmas and Easter.” He gave me a judgmental look. “But canon law was changed about twenty-five years ago. While the Church doesn’t condone suicide, we believe victims may not understand their actions and that their families deserve compassion.”
“She didn’t seem suicidal when I interviewed her,” I said. “And she specifically mentioned believing that suicide was against her faith when I asked whether her son might have taken that route.”
I told Father Mountain about my investigation into Mark’s disappearance and how his mother’s trail of parking tickets brought me to the door of his church.
Then Father Mountain dropped a bit of a bombshell.
He was at Madeline’s botched ceremony, waiting along with everyone else for the musicians to play the wedding march and the bride to walk down the aisle.
“The prairie grass there reminded me of my rural parish days, back when I baptized you, Riley, and started you on a path to knowing God.”
Madeline was Lutheran and wanted to exchange vows outdoors. Mrs. Lefevre insisted on a priest being present to give a Catholic blessing. I already knew how that story ended. No groom. No ceremony. No blessing.
But at least I now had a neutral eyewitness I trusted.
“What did Mrs. Lefevre say when Mark was a no-show?” I asked. “Was she angry? Worried? Embarrassed?”
Father Mountain wasn’t nearly so chatty now. I pressed him, why not?
“Things were said in confidence.”
“Confidence?” I echoed. “She’s dead now. What difference would telling me make? Except maybe to clarify things.”
“She shared a personal secret with me.”
Everybody in this investigation had secrets. Madeline. Mark. Now even the mother of the groom. Luckily, I’m in the business of outing secrets. Other people’s secrets, that is. My own, I like keeping cloistered.
“Do you think it’s a secret she wanted to take to her grave? Maybe she told me her secret already, but I didn’t grasp the significance.”
“I don’t think so.” Father Mountain made the sign of the cross. Probably to keep away the media demon.
I decided to use church law to make my case. “Was her secret shared during the sacrament of reconciliation?”
I could tell Father Mountain was giving serious thought to my question.
“Unless there was a confessional out in the woods,” I continued, “I don’t think you’re obligated to keep her secret. I think you should ask yourself what she would have wanted now. After all, she was cooperating with my story.”
I didn’t tell him her cooperation was a little fluid—obviously she’d made a decision the other day to keep something back from me. But Father Mountain apparently decided disclosure would not mean betrayal.
“She and Mark had a fight the previous night, just before the rehearsal,” Father Mountain said. “He was remarking that it was too bad that his dad and Madeline’s couldn’t see them get married. He told her that they were including a special prayer honoring their deceased fathers.”
“Okay, what’s to fight about?” I asked.
“Mrs. Lefevre isn’t a widow. Her husband didn’t die. He ran off and left them when Mark was little. Deserted his family. She told him his father didn’t deserve a prayer.”
“So she lied to him all these years about his father being dead?”
“Yes, she concocted a story about him being killed in a car accident out west and them scattering his ashes in the mountains. That was to explain why they never left flowers on his grave.”
Mrs. Lefevre was beginning to sound more like a professional liar than a sweet little old lady. I wondered if she had laid any whoppers on me. “Seems like a bad plan destined to get worse.”
Father Mountain nodded. “She felt like she was protecting her son emotionally and physically when he was young. Apparently her husband was abusive and gave Mark that scar across his face. So she never tried finding him and moved around enough so he couldn’t find them.”
“Why didn’t she get a divorce?”
“Divorce was out of the question for her because of her faith.”
“Then I guess she’s lucky he left.”
I could understand Mark being upset about being misled. Madeline had money. He didn’t. Madeline had looks. He didn’t. Madeline had youth. He didn’t. Growing up fatherless was something they had in common. Although Mark might have read more into that connection than Madeline did. I didn’t want a long drawn-out discussion with Father Mountain about her obsession with her fiancé’s face.
If she had been infatuated with her own face, that would be the sin of vanity. And I’m sure he’d have plenty to say about that. As to face blindness, I figured Father Mountain wouldn’t have much insight there. So instead, I presse
d further on the history of Mark’s missing father.
“Why would any of that make Mark leave his bride at the altar?” I asked.
“After the rehearsal dinner, Mark told his mother that if his father couldn’t be at the wedding, he didn’t want her there, either.”
“Seems an overreaction.”
“That’s what she thought. So she showed up thinking they’d work things out. But they never got the chance.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Only God knows his fate,” Father Mountain said. “At first Mrs. Lefevre blamed herself: he didn’t show up because she did. Then she started thinking maybe he went to look for his father. Later she worried like father like son, did he leave Madeline the way his father left her?”
Neither of us had much to say after that. Jean Lefevre had plenty of reasons to be a troubled soul.
“Okay, Father, you’ve convinced me. She killed herself. I just hope I didn’t push her closer to the edge.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Men of God have no special powers to anticipate tragedy, why should you?”
To lighten the mood he told me a joke about Pope Benedict getting bird flu from the cardinals. Father Mountain collected church jokes and liked to weave them in his homilies. He started to tell me how much Mark appreciated his humor.
Just then I got a text message from the Channel 3 assignment desk: CAUS OF DTH N WIS CASE CHNGD 2 MRDR.
I flashed the screen at Father Mountain, explaining that I needed to leave to meet my photographer at the news conference.
“Just as well,” he replied. “I have a funeral to plan.”
THE SHERIFF STOOD at a podium with the seal of the state of Wisconsin on the front. Sheriffs are elected officials so anytime they get a chance to appear on TV on their terms, they generally take it. He indicated that he would read a statement, but allow no questions.
“New evidence has caused us to reclassify Jean Lefevre’s death from suicide to homicide.”