Pineland Serenade

by Larry Millett

  “Morning, Wanda,” I said in my friendliest voice. “Looks like you’re holding down the fort by yourself. Is Carl getting his coffee fix?”

  “No, he’s out of the office today. Some sort of virus.”

  “That’s too bad. I trust he’ll have a speedy recovery.”

  “Right,” Wanda said with no evident enthusiasm. She wasn’t fond of her boss. “So how are you, handsome?”

  “My life certainly isn’t dull these days. There’s a lot going on.”

  “No kidding. It’s scary what’s happening, isn’t it? You wonder who’ll be murdered next or have their house burned down. Do the police have any idea who’s behind all of this?”

  “I don’t think so, but they’ll find out. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “Well, I hope so. I want my quiet little town back.”

  “Me, too,” I said, then got down to business. “So, Wanda, I have an odd little request. An issue has come up regarding an old adoption case, and I’d like to see if I could find the file number. All I know is that the case went through the courts in nineteen eighty-four or eighty-five. Is there any easy way to look it up?”

  “Not really. Everything was paper then. But if you want to go through the register for that year, be my guest. We still have it in the back. You know, of course, that adoption records are usually sealed, so—”

  “I’d need a court order to see them. No, I just want to get a case number and any other paperwork that might be public.”

  “No problem. Just give me a minute.”

  Wanda went into the back bowels of the office and returned with a pair of outsized, leather-bound volumes, one for 1984 and the other for 1985. Each book contained a listing of all the criminal and civil cases filed in the Paradise County courts for that year. Cases were recorded by name and number, in the kind of elegant handwriting that used to be required of every court clerk. I slogged all the way through the books and found just one adoption case, filed in July of 1985, that looked promising. Its title, “In re the Matter of Baby Doe,” told me the child was a boy.

  I jotted down the case number and asked Wanda to see if the file contained any documents not under seal. She returned with a slim folder. “This is all I can give you,” she said.

  The folder contained a single sheet of paper in the form of a court order, dated July 26, 1985, stating that a hearing would be held on August 5 regarding Baby Doe. The order was signed by Judge Marshall Moreland, Marty’s father. One other name appeared on the order—that of the attorney of record in the case, the Honorable Phillip Zweifel.

  “So how do we get a look at that file?” Cassandra asked after I called her with the news.

  “What did you have in mind? A break-in?”

  “No, but there must be a way. Money’s no object, if it comes to that.”

  “As I recall, bribery is still against the law in Minnesota, and I’m not going to be part of any Chicago-style skullduggery, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “At least we can get things done in Chicago,” Cassandra said, sounding displeased that a certain level of honesty appeared to prevail in Pineland. “So what about a court order? It might be worth a try.”

  “We’d need some good grounds to convince a judge, and I don’t know what they’d be.”

  “I could figure out something. I’m good at making shit up.”

  “Every good lawyer’s most important skill,” I agreed. “But I really doubt it would work in this case. Besides, I’m not very popular with the local judiciary at the moment. Our best bet now might be to have a look at my father’s office records. I’m not sure what kind of shape they’re in so it might take a while to get through them.”

  “I could help,” Cassandra offered.

  “Let’s wait and see. I’ll start digging into the records tomorrow and then let you know if I need help.”

  Doug came into my office that afternoon bearing the latest edition of the Tattler.

  “Tommy’s really on top of things,” he reported with something close to glee. “Looks like he’s got all the dirt that’s fit to print.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “More dirt is always helpful.”

  I dismissed Doug and sat down to read Tommy’s lead story, which didn’t wallow in as much gossip and speculation as I expected it would. Instead, the story offered plenty of solid information, although most of it wasn’t news to me. Near the end of the story, however, I found an eye-opening paragraph.

  “The Tattler has learned that the flash drives accompanying all of the Serenader’s messages contain in addition to an unknown piece of music the voices of a man and a child. The BCA reportedly has been able to determine what the voices are saying but is not revealing that information to the media at this time.”

  It was a tantalizing detail. I believed an old grievance lay behind all that had happened over the past two weeks. Was it a grievance that went all the way back to childhood? If so, the child’s voice on those mysterious audio files could be the voice of someone who grew up to be a murderer.

  When my father died, he left me the old Zweifel family home on Eden Street. My grandfather the Klansman built it in 1910. It’s a very late Victorian sporting towers and turrets and a wraparound porch decked out with every manner of turned, twisted and sawn woodwork its builders could devise. The house is also one giant pain in the ass to maintain, which is why my father encased it years ago in vinyl siding to avoid the onerous chore of painting every few years. The vinyl turned out to be a mistake—it faded and warped—and the house, shorn of most of its Victorian garb, now has the woeful look of an old starlet done in by bad cosmetic surgery.

  My grandfather, who more or less designed the house himself, incorporated a spacious office on the first floor where he conducted his law practice. Presumably, he kept his white robe and peaked hat elsewhere. After my father inherited the practice, he kept the rent-free office but moved out of the drafty old house, which he subdivided into three rental apartments. I’m now the landlord. My tenants—two older women and a retired couple—enjoy the benefit of very reasonable rents, since I’m content to break even on the house rather than try to milk a big profit.

  Even though my father moved to Las Vegas in the 1980s, he liked the idea of collecting rent so he didn’t sell the house. But in his hurry to depart he never bothered to clear out the old office. Instead, he just locked it up and left it as a kind of Zweifel Legal Museum complete with cabinets full of old files, a desk and chairs, and an assortment of antiquated office equipment including typewriters, dictating machines, dial telephones and even a vintage TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack.

  I was thirteen when my father moved away, and before he left he invited me to the office for a brief farewell address. He was wearing his usual three-piece suit, a fat gold watch chain dangling from one of the pockets, and as always he was formal and distant, Father talking to Son. He promised he’d see me whenever he came back to town, although he didn’t know when that would be. He said my aunts were doing a wonderful job of raising me and so had no worries about my future. Maybe, he added, I’d even come out to Las Vegas for a visit when I was older. That didn’t happen—he’d been gone from my life so much I hardly knew him—and in any case he’d killed my mother, so screw him, I thought. It would be twenty years before I saw him again.

  I suppose because of that rotten leave-taking I never had much interest afterwards in seeing the office, although I rummaged through it one day after the house came into my possession, just to see if I could find any family photos. There were none. I didn’t bother to look at any of the old files, which I assumed had little to offer except the dry dust of forgotten litigation. Yet even dust can sometimes have a voice, and so on Saturday afternoon I went to the office in search of Baby Doe.

  One of my tenants, Agnes Miller, was just leaving as I came up to the front door and we chatted a bit before she went on her
way. I went inside and unlocked the only door to the office, which smelled of old books and lost lives. A massive oak desk first used by my grandfather occupies the center of the office like a giant family totem, and I set my coat there before going to work.

  I had hoped the files would be a model of clarity and order. Not so. The Zweifel office filing system, if it could be called that, had been the work of many secretaries, each of whom was apparently a law unto herself. There were files sorted alphabetically by client name, files sorted by year, files sorted by judicial case number, and even files sorted by nothing other than what looked to be secretarial whim. The good news was that the files appeared remarkably complete, documenting minor legal matters going all the way back to my grandfather’s day.

  I waded into the morass and eventually located all the files from the 1980s. They were sorted by year but I found no adoption cases listed in the 1984 or 1985 files. I checked 1986 and 1987 just to be certain and again came up empty. Then, in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, I came across a fat folder labeled “Miscellaneous Cases (Unpaid).” Baby Doe was there.

  The file didn’t have a great deal to offer. Nothing pointed to the baby’s identity, but I did find two letters from Peter Swindell disputing my father’s bill, which apparently had come to just over two thousand dollars. Peter thought that amount was excessive. A letter from my father begged to differ, but Peter apparently never paid the bill in full. The only other document in the file was a copy of the court order setting a hearing date for the Baby Doe matter. It was the same order I’d found in the file at the courthouse, except that it also contained a brief note scrawled in pencil, possibly by my father. The note said, “Earl Bradley, Freedom Beach,” followed by a phone number with Pineland’s area code.

  Both Earl Bradley and Freedom Beach were familiar names to me, and to many others in Paradise County. It was all very curious. I took the file with me, drove home and called Cassandra. She’d be very interested, I knew, in the story of Freedom Beach.

  29

  We met again that night at the Tropics Bar. Cassandra, who must have traveled with trunks full of clothes, was in purple—an elegantly cut jacket over a tight, knee-length skirt. When the waiter came by, I ordered a margarita. She settled for a glass of Sauvignon blanc.

  “I thought you were a Jack Daniel’s man,” she said.

  “Not always. We’re in the Tropics Bar, so I might as well go with the theme tonight.”

  “Didn’t you mention once you had problems with alcohol?”

  “Big problems. It’s under control. Or I should say I think it is. But I know for sure that if I have more than two drinks, I’m gone for the night. It’s like a magic line I can’t cross or the demons appear. I suppose you could say I’m a part-time alcoholic.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Me neither. Maybe I’m just kidding myself and one of these days I’ll go off the deep end again and stay there. But as of this evening, I remain a model of sobriety.”

  “Well, stay that way. I need you to be sober. Now, tell me about this Earl Bradley fellow and Freedom Beach,” she said, so I did.

  The story of Freedom Beach began in 1962, when Bradley, who owned a plumbing and heating business in Minneapolis, made a deal to buy ten acres of land on Fortune Lake, a clear, deep body of water at the southwest corner of Paradise County. As it so happens, the supper club where my father and mother went drinking the night she died was near the same lake. Small world, as they say.

  The lake was already well developed by the 1960s, with cabins and houses along much of its shore. No one thought much of the deal Earl Bradley had struck until a story in the old Pineland Pioneer revealed he was Black and that he intended to build several cabins on the property, to be used as summer rentals by families of color from the Twin Cities. Minnesota in 1962 had laws that made public accommodations such as resorts open to all. But Blacks rarely felt welcome at lake resorts, which catered to an almost exclusively white clientele. Bradley, a striver of the old school who had overcome all manner of bias on the way to building his successful business, believed Black families needed a summer retreat of their own where they could relax free of any racist hassles.

  He looked for lakeside property for months before he learned of the land on Fortune Lake. The acreage was part of a farm owned by a crusty old Norwegian bachelor named Einar Gimmestad. Approaching seventy, Gimmestad was preparing to retire and wanted to sell off the lakeside portion of his farm to raise some cash.

  Bradley went up to visit Gimmestad and the two men, perhaps to the surprise of both, immediately hit it off. Unlike most of his neighbors on the lake, Gimmestad had no particular attitudes about Black people, and he agreed to sell the property to Bradley. “I see no reason why I shouldn’t sell to him,” Gimmestad later told the Pioneer. “He’s a good, hard-working man and there’s nothing wrong with his money.”

  Pretty much everyone else on lake, however, objected to the proposed sale and tried to block it through their property association. The group ginned up a lawsuit in district court that was clearly motivated by nothing more than naked prejudice. The sale, it was claimed, would violate various county land use regulations relating to lot size, drainage, septic systems and anything else the association’s clever lawyer could think of.

  That lawyer was my father, then just beginning his practice in Pineland. But not even the fine legal mind of Philip Zweifel could make sausage out of shit, and a judge threw out the case. Bradley eventually built ten cabins on the property, which he named Freedom Beach.

  “It’s still going strong,” I told Cassandra after I’d spun out the tale. “Families from as far away as Chicago own the cabins now.”

  “So it sounds like your father was a racist, too,” Cassandra said. “Interesting.”

  “I don’t know that. He certainly wasn’t a KKKer like dear old granddad. He didn’t argue the case on racial grounds, from what I know.”

  “Okaaaay,” Cassandra said, drawing out the word in a way that left little doubt what she thought my father must have been. “I’ll take your word for it. So, what do you make of Earl Bradley’s apparent connection to Baby Doe? Is it possible he may actually have been the baby’s father, rather than Peter Swindell?”

  “I doubt it. I’m guessing that by nineteen eighty-five Bradley would have been in his late sixties or early seventies. A little old for siring kids, don’t you think?”

  “Probably. Besides, that lawyer I talked to, Seymour, was definitely under the impression Peter had fathered another child here in Pineland.” Cassandra leaned back and thought for a minute, then said, “Am I safe in assuming there weren’t many Black folks around here in nineteen eighty-five?”

  “You are. I’d bet there were even fewer then than now.”

  “You know what I’m thinking?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, but tell me.”

  “Well, I’m thinking maybe the reason Earl Bradley became involved with Baby Doe is that the baby was Black. Or at least had a Black mother.”

  “And that could well be Patricia Gordon if Peter was the father.”

  Cassandra nodded and said, “It looks like I might have a brother. Jesus, it’s strange. I’m not sure I can believe it.”

  “Well, we don’t know for sure. But if you do have a brother, he could be in Pineland right now, name unknown, and he has to be the person who sent you that letter pretending to be Peter. That would also mean he’s very probably the Serenader and maybe a murderer as well. This isn’t good, Cassandra. I don’t think he has a happy family reunion in mind.”

  “Doesn’t seem that way, does it?” She was shaking her head, still trying to make sense of the situation. She took a sip of wine and said, “He must look white. Otherwise he’d stand out here.”

  “He definitely would.”

  “Shit. This is all too goddamn crazy.” She paused, then said, “I s
uppose Earl Bradley must be dead by now.”

  “Seems likely.”

  “Do you know if he had a family?”

  “No idea, but I’m sure we could find out. He must have been a well-known figure in Minneapolis’s Black community, and I’m guessing the fight over Freedom Beach drew some attention in the Minneapolis newspapers.”

  “Makes sense. I’ll call Jocko and have him do some digging. He’s a genius at tracking down people, dead or alive. If Earl Bradley has surviving family members, they shouldn’t be too hard to locate.”

  “I wish you luck,” I said, “and please, please, be vigilant.”

  “I will. How about you? What’s next?”

  “I don’t know. The way things are going, I feel like Wile E. Coyote down at the bottom of the canyon, waiting for the next anvil to drop.”

  “You’ll be all right. I think you’re quick enough to dodge an anvil or two.”

  “Let’s hope so,” I said.

  After I finished my margarita, Cassandra left to return to her room—she had some work to do for her law firm—and I headed out to the parking lot. I wasn’t in a mood to go home so I drove into town to the Dead Lumberjack. The place was packed. A less-than-stellar country western band was at work on a small stage at the rear, grinding through a song about bad whiskey and worse women, or something to that effect. I looked around for Kat but didn’t see her behind the bar. The band was just finishing their song when I spotted Kat in a booth, talking to Ed Boudreau. I went over to join them.

  Kat saw me coming and directed me to her side of the booth.

  “You’re just in time,” she said. “Ed’s been telling me a secret. It’s about Peter.”

  Ed didn’t look drunk—I’d never seen him that way—but he was enjoying a nice buzz, not to mention his favorite pastime of staring at Kat’s bosom. He said, “As you know, I consider Miss Berglund a fine person who can be trusted to keep whatever I tell her in the strictest confidence until she passes it on to everybody at the bar. Care to share in our little secret, Paul?”