“Do you? If you’re going to tell me I’m stupid—”
“No, I’d never say that. But I think you believed the whole crazy story because you wanted to. You came up here expecting to find a bunch of Trump-loving racists. Pretty soon a cross gets burned on my lawn. Then maybe you actually encounter a Trump-loving racist—yes, we have a number of them here—who says something that confirms your worst suspicions. So when the Serenader starts whispering conspiracy theories in your ear, you’re very receptive. They must be true because we’re all no-good people here anyway who hate Blacks and liberals and immigrants and well, you name it.”
“Spare me the chamber of commerce bullshit,” Cassandra said as a waiter arrived and took my order for a Jack straight up. “Maybe everybody here isn’t a racist, but you’d have a hard time convincing me of that. It’s not like I’ve been welcomed with open arms. A lot of people here look at me like I’m from outer space.”
“Well, you are from Chicago. That’s outer space as far as most people here are concerned. Anyway, how about we get back to yesterday’s events? I assume the Serenader, or whoever you talked to, convinced you to go out to Pembroke Woods.”
Cassandra nodded and gave her drink another swirl. “Yes. He said I could find evidence there that would prove who was behind Peter Swindell’s disappearance.”
“Did he say what kind of evidence?”
“No, but he gave me exact directions about how to find it. The plan was to turn it over to the BCA so they could arrest the conspirators. Once that happened, the Serenader said he’d reveal himself.”
“You shouldn’t have gone into those woods by yourself,” I said. “Not in a million years.”
“Well, I did,” Cassandra said. “I had to know the truth.”
“Okay. What happened next?”
“I drove out there. The parking lot was empty and there was no sign of anyone. I started walking along the trail, following the directions I’d gotten. But give me at least a little credit. I was suspicious and I had my gun, which you’d better believe I know how to use. I was in the middle of the woods when I saw the guy in black. He was trying to sneak up behind me but I heard him. I turned around and saw him coming right at me, maybe twenty yards away. That’s when I fired a shot, not at him, but to scare him off. He got the message and he started backing away fast. You know the rest. I ran into you and then mister ski mask gave us a wave and vanished.”
“Well, you were lucky. He might have killed you.”
“I wasn’t lucky. I had a gun and I was ready to defend myself.”
“Okay, Annie Oakley, whatever you say. But then I came along, one of the supposed co-conspirators. I’m surprised you didn’t shoot me.”
Cassandra’s dark brown eyes, usually hard and unreadable, seemed to soften. She shook her head slowly and said, “I guess I had one of those ‘aha’ moments. I can’t really explain it, but I could sense you were there to help me. That you were my friend.”
“Sounds like a religious experience,” I said.
“Maybe it was. There’s also the fact that ninja guy scared the shit out of me. Remember that text message I got as we were leaving the woods? All it said was, ‘Sorry I missed you. See you again soon.’ It really creeped me out.”
“I can see why. It’s pretty obvious he’s watching you. So let me ask you this: if you suddenly realized the Serenader was a big fat liar and maybe was even threatening you, why didn’t you tell Arne the truth? You told him nothing happened in the woods.”
“Look, I’m willing to put my trust in you right now but no one else. I still think the sheriff may be involved in some bad things here. Maybe that Moreland guy is, too. So here’s the deal. How about the two of us find out what’s really going on? Screw the authorities. We don’t know if they can be trusted.”
She had a point, although I reminded her that I was, technically at least, one of the dreaded “authorities.”
“But I heard you’ve recused yourself from the case,” Cassandra said.
“‘Kicked off’ would be a better way of putting it,” I said. I studied Cassandra’s face for a moment. I saw strength, resolve, courage and a hint of obsession. She would make a formidable if possibly unpredictable partner.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said. “Where do we start?”
27
“We can start with some things I’ve already found out,” Cassandra said. “I know who my birth mother is. Her name is Patricia Gordon.”
“Well, that’s big news. How did you manage that?”
“I hired a private detective in Chicago last week. He’s done work for our firm over the years. He’s a big Albanian guy, a cousin of John Belushi or so he claims. Everybody calls him Jocko, although that’s not his real name. He used to be a process server and he really knows his way around the Cook County Courthouse. He got a look at my adoption records.”
“They weren’t sealed?”
“Tight as can be, or so Jocko informed me. But it’s Chicago, if you know what I mean.”
“I take it money changed hands.”
“Large amounts. Jocko has a source in the clerk of court’s office and after a couple of days of digging around he was able to locate the file through my birth date and the names of my adoptive parents.”
“It must be wonderful to know who your birth mother is.”
“I guess so, but I don’t know. It’s strange because I doubt I’ll ever be able to see her or talk to her. But I do have an old mug shot of her Jocko found. She was really beautiful.”
“A mug shot? So she had a criminal record?”
“Yes, mostly for prostitution. Anyway, my Albanian stalwart tracked down quite a bit of information about her. She was born in nineteen-fifty-four in Chicago, mother seventeen years old, no known father. Arrested three times for prostitution and once on a simple assault charge after some sort of altercation in a bar. Her last arrest was in nineteen eighty-two, the year before I was born, at the Blackstone Hotel, which is a very posh place. That tells you she had a high-class clientele.”
“Sounds that way. Any idea what happened to her?”
“Well, I know she didn’t die in Chicago because there’s no death certificate on file for her in Cook County.”
“Is it possible she’s still alive? We have only the word of whoever wrote you that fake letter that she’s dead.”
“I suppose it’s possible. She’d be sixty-three now, but prostitutes lead dangerous lives and they don’t tend to live to a ripe old age. Besides, Jocko says she went off the radar in the mid-nineteen-eighties. I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”
“How about your father? What did the adoption papers say?”
“Father unknown, according to the records. But I’m certain now Peter Swindell is in fact my father.”
“How so?”
“Just like you, I did some detective work. I asked Jocko if Peter could have been one of Patricia’s customers. A little jungle fever and all of that. But he said the cops didn’t bother arresting johns back in the eighties, especially if they were rich. A payoff usually took care of the problem. But when Jocko sent me the arrest records, I noticed something interesting. Patricia’s case in nineteen eighty-two, the one at the Blackstone, was ultimately dismissed for lack of probable cause. The lawyer who represented her was named Richard Seymour. On the court documents he was listed as having a phone number with a Minneapolis area code. That struck me as peculiar.”
“Because why would a lawyer from Minneapolis be representing a hooker from Chicago on a run-of-the-mill prostitution charge?”
“Exactly. I wasn’t sure if Seymour was dead or alive, but it didn’t take long to get an answer. Jocko traced him through his old law firm in Minneapolis. We found out Seymour is retired and living with his daughter in Evanston, just outside Chicago. He said he’d be happy to visit with me, so I flew down to see him. He’s in his
eighties but very sharp. We had a nice talk, during which he casually mentioned he’d also represented Peter Swindell in an adoption proceeding in Chicago.”
It took a second—I’m getting old and slow—before I realized what Cassandra had just told me. “Your adoption,” I said.
“Right. In nineteen eighty-three. Seymour was pretty stunned when I told him who I was. He said Peter never actually admitted he’d fathered me by Patricia Gordon, but it was obvious what had happened. As Seymour put it, why would Peter have hired him otherwise?”
“Okay, so there can’t be any doubt Peter’s your father, just as that letter you received claims. But where does that leave us? We still don’t know who wrote the letter. I really doubt it was Dewey. Maybe it was the Serenader but we don’t even know who he is or what he’s up to besides sowing chaos. And how does the fact you’re Peter’s daughter connect to his disappearance or Dewey’s murder for that matter?”
“I have an idea about that. Seymour told me something else that really caught me by surprise. He said he’d heard Peter became involved in another adoption case a year or two after mine.”
“In Chicago?”
“No. Seymour said the case was somewhere in Minnesota. A small town, he said. He couldn’t remember the name of the town so I threw out a suggestion to see if it might jog his memory.”
“Pineland,” I said.
Cassandra flashed a big smile. “However did you guess? There’s more. Seymour said he’d had a few brief contacts with the lawyer in Pineland handling the adoption. He remembered that the lawyer had a funny name. It started with a zee.”
“Holy shit. It had to be my father.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. What was his first name again?”
“Phillip. He knew Peter, of course, so it would have made sense that he represented him. Do we know who the mother of the child here was?”
“No, but we have to find out.”
Cassandra was usually all business with me, so I was stunned by what happened next. Without warning, she began to cry. Something old and deep had welled up inside her and poured out in tears before she could contain it.
“Fuck,” she said, grabbing some tissues from her purse.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” she said, daubing at her cheeks. “I apologize. Just a little episode. Nothing to worry about.”
“No need to apologize. Who doesn’t want to cry now and then?”
She said, “I had a sudden intuition. I have a feeling about Peter’s adoption case here. It could be very significant. We need to look at it, the sooner the better.”
“Okay, but this isn’t Chicago. Bribery’s not a way of life here, so getting access to a sealed court file won’t be easy, if it can be done at all, as you’ve already discovered. Let’s see. Your adoption proceedings were in nineteen eighty-three, right?
“Yes. So we’d be looking for an adoption that occurred in eighty-four or maybe eighty-five. I assume the records would be at the courthouse here. I’ll see what I can find tomorrow morning.”
I could imagine Cassandra rummaging through files in the county clerk of court’s office, probably pissing off any number of people in the process. “I think that would be a bad idea,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because once you show up at the clerk’s office, the news will be all over town in five minutes, and everybody will start wondering what the uppity Black lawyer from Chicago is looking for. Let me see if I can locate the file. Even just getting a file number might help. There’s also another place I can hunt for information. My father’s legal files are still stored in his old office here and maybe they’ll reveal something.”
“All right, but promise me you’ll start looking right away.”
I said I would. I knew why Cassandra was so interested in Peter’s second adoption case, but I didn’t think it would lead anywhere. If Peter did have another child by Patricia Gordon, it seemed highly unlikely Cassandra’s lost sibling would have been born in Pineland, where a pregnant Black mistress would definitely have caused a stir.
Cassandra said, “By the way, that asshole sheriff of yours gave me a hard time today and I finally had to tell him to back off.”
“You had a formal interview with him, I take it. What did you tell him?”
“As little as possible. In fact, I pretty much stonewalled him as to why I was out in the woods. All I admitted was that my gun had discharged accidentally. Anyway, he was very unhappy with me. But as you know, I don’t trust him.”
“That may be wise,” I said, and recounted my conversation with Marty Moreland and how he believed Arne had threatened him over the Jill Lorrimer case.
“So it sounds like I’m right. The sheriff’s dirty.”
“Maybe. All I can say for sure is that you need to be cautious around him, at least for now.”
“I will be. What about the BCA? Won’t they investigate him?”
“Don’t hold your breath. I’m not sure the BCA agents here know what they’re doing. Pineland’s a mystery to them. They might as well be in Outer Mongolia.”
“I know the feeling,” Cassandra said.
We talked for a while longer and I ordered another Jack. Cassandra was drinking Glen Moray Scotch, which is far out of my price range, and had a second drink as well. The extra alcohol seemed to loosen her up a bit. She leaned back and looked me over, as though inspecting some exotic specimen of homo sapiens, and said, “So what did you do before losing yourself in Pineland?”
“I’m not lost,” I protested. “Just confused, as usual.”
“But you were a hot-shot lawyer in the Twin Cities for quite a while, weren’t you?”
“‘Hot shot’ wouldn’t be the right term. But yeah, before I became a public defender I was a partner in a small firm with a guy named Geoff Armbruster. Care to guess what our advertising slogan was?”
“No, tell me.”
“Armbruster and Zweifel: We meet your legal needs from A to Z.”
“Wow. Did you come up with that yourself?”
“Pure genius, if you ask me.”
“What kind of law did you practice?”
“Well, despite our silly slogan, we knew we needed a niche. The high road wasn’t available so we went low. We started representing clients accused of DWIs and other serious driving offenses. The two of us were pretty creative and managed to get a lot of our clients off, so word began to spread we were the guys to see if you were caught drinking and driving. We handled some bigger felony cases as well. Armed robbery, assault, that sort of thing. We also did some civil stuff. In other words, we did whatever we could to pay the bills.”
“So the firm was a success?”
“For a while. I made close to two hundred thousand in our best year, but it didn’t feel good. One guy we’d got off on a DWI went out three months later and plowed his SUV head-on into a minivan. Killed a woman and her six-year-old daughter. He was drunk of course. It still makes me sick to think about it.”
“But it wasn’t your fault. You were just doing your job.”
“Sure, but if you start to feel bad about what you’re doing, you need to stop doing it. So I left the firm and decided I should try something else. I got a job as an assistant Ramsey County attorney in St. Paul. I didn’t like that either. Too much bureaucracy and I hardly ever got to try a case. Everything was a plea deal.”
“And then you switched sides again to become a public defender?”
“Right, in Minneapolis. I liked the work but it was exhausting. I had a ridiculous number of cases and most of my clients were real lowlifes. But every once in a while I’d get some poor guy who really was innocent, and that gave me a chance to fight the good fight on his behalf. I always liked that feeling.”
“But you quit that job and came up here to Pineland. Why?”
“It’s a long story, but the short version is that my father was dying and I came back to shepherd him off to the great beyond.”
“I’m sorry,” Cassandra said. “I didn’t know. It must have been very difficult for you. Were you close to your father?”
“No.”
“And your mother?”
“Dead, a long time ago.”
“You’re not really interested in getting into all of this, are you?”
“Correct,” I said. “And to save time, I’ll tell you I’m divorced and don’t have any children.”
“So, you’re a man on the loose here in beautiful Pineland. Do you have a girlfriend in town?”
“I don’t know if I’d call her that, but there’s a wonderful woman I hang out with on occasion. How about you? Is there a man in your life?”
Cassandra stared a moment at her expensive Scotch and said, “No, but there is a woman.”
That got my attention, but I didn’t know what to say other than, “That’s nice. Are the two of you married?”
“No. Maybe one day. I must say you look a little surprised.”
“A little, but I’ll survive.”
“I’m sure you will,” Cassandra said with a bemused smile. “Well, maybe we should call it a night. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
She jotted down her cell phone number on a napkin and handed it to me. I gave her my cell number as well. “We should stay in touch every day from now on. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said and downed the last of my Jack. Another one would have been lovely, but I resisted the urge. Too much liquor always sends me to the devil’s workshop, and I preferred to be on the side of the angels, assuming I could find any in Pineland.
28
The next morning I went to the clerk of court’s office. The clerk is a bilious little man named Carl Stock, who is best avoided. Fortunately, he’s known to take a long coffee break every morning at half past ten, and it was five minutes after that time when I wandered into his office. Wanda Swanson, the deputy clerk, is always far more helpful than Carl, not to mention more ripe with gossip, and I was pleased to see her alone behind the counter. Wanda’s in her early fifties, heavyset, a bit of a flirt, but very capable.
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