A Double-Pointed Murder

by Ann Yost

  “She thinks you lied to her. You told her you hadn’t seen Cricket in three years but apparently you left a pair of jeans at Sofi’s place and she found Cricket’s phone number scribbled on a napkin in one of the pockets.” He looked away from me and my heart sank.

  “I can explain that.”

  “Can you also explain why I found your new phone number on an envelope in Cricket’s bedroom?”

  Lars jammed his fingers into his already disheveled hair and muttered a soft expletive as he dropped back onto the bare mattress.

  “Yeah, all right. I was in contact with her. It’s not what you think but I wanted to keep it hidden. Sofi and I were on the path to reconciliation and this could have derailed it.”

  I must have had a horrified expression on my face because he hurried to explain.

  “Cricket called me in mid-December. It was right after the St. Lucy murders. I should have hung up but, for whatever reason, I didn’t.”

  I understood. We were raised to be polite. Witness my distress at my incivility to Mrs. Paikkonen.

  “She wanted to get together?” He nodded.

  “Not because of any personal interest in me. She wanted to hire my services. She’d heard I was a P.I. and she needed some information.”

  “Well, for cripes sake, Lars, why didn’t you turn her down?”

  “I did. More than once. She said she was desperate. She’d lost her job at the Black Fly and she was trying to get her life on track. She said she didn’t need much, just a simple, local job and she’d be out of my hair forever. I don’t know, Hatti. I just couldn’t keep saying no.”

  “I get it,” I said, and I did. Yoopers value independence but we are reared in a tradition of pitching in to help one another regardless of the inconvenience to ourselves.

  “There was another reason I agreed to do the job, too. Cricket wanted background on a local family. She wanted an expanded family tree, you know, where people lived during the last century, who they married, what the connections were. I figured if anyone was going to dig that stuff up it had better be me.”

  “Whose family was it?” I asked, but I knew. A ripple of unease made its way down my spine.

  Lars shrugged.

  “Yours. All the branches. The Lehtinens, the Ristos, the Makis, your mother’s people, the Ahos, the Suutulas, the Makis. Cricket wouldn’t tell me why she wanted the info just that if I didn’t find it someone else would. I had to make sure she wasn’t going to find anything she could use for blackmail.”

  I sat still for a moment.

  “Did you get it for her?”

  “I got it. I never gave it to her. I think that’s why she was at my cabin on New Year’s Eve. I think she came out there with her partner-in-crime. I think they broke in to the cabin and when they didn’t find what they were looking for, he killed her and left her in my bed.”

  “He?”

  Lars shrugged. “It’s a pretty good guess. I can’t see Cricket hooking up with a female. She was excited about the guy and she was jacked about her ship coming in. She was like a kid, Hatti. She believed in Tinkerbell and Cinderella and fairytale endings.” He seemed to remember then what had happened. “She finally paid the price.”

  I thought about that for a minute.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, though. Who would benefit from Cricket Koski’s death? She didn’t have any money or connections. I can see someone using her as a pawn to get what he wanted but it would be much easier to pay her off or make a promise he had no intention of delivering than to risk killing her.”

  “Unless the promise was marriage and he either didn’t want to marry her or couldn’t. Killing Cricket would get that monkey off his back and shut her up at the same time. And the cherry on top was being able to pin it on me.”

  “But you hadn’t seen her in three years,” I said.

  “You’re forgetting I’d seen her recently and we’d exchanged phone numbers. You and Sofi figured that out. How long do you think it will take the sheriff to do the same?”

  I could hear the front door opening and figured we were about to get interrupted.

  “Did you find anything in your investigation of the family?”

  “Nothing worth writing home about. A few divorces. Your dad took off when you were a baby. No criminal records or suspicious deaths. Nothing that would benefit a blackmailer.”

  “What about Ernst Hautamaki?”

  “Who?”

  “A young Finnish military diplomat stationed in Munich in 1942. There’s speculation that he retrieved a valuable painting, a piece of Nazi loot, and had it sent to his aunt who was visiting here at the time.”

  “That’s new to me,” Lars said, rubbing his bristly chin. “Think it’s relevant?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look, you could have avoided all of this by leveling with Sofi, you know.”

  “About my contact with Cricket? Are you crazy? She’d never have understood. You know your sister. She’s not big on forgiveness.”

  I thought about the baby.

  “You should talk to her, Lars,” I said, as I slipped out of the cell. I’d have to exit out the back and circle the block to get back to the Jeep. “She loves you, you know. And she’s got some news.”

  * * *

  I found Harry Dent behind the wheel gnawing on a bit of Trenary toast.

  “You got a dentist out here,” he asked. “This stuff is hard enough to crack a tooth.”

  “You’re supposed to soak it in coffee.”

  “Well, hell. Vesta didn’t tell me that.”

  “Why are you behind the wheel?”

  “I figured you’d like a break. And I’m good in snow. I live in the Hudson Valley.”

  “That up in New York?” I was intrigued. He nodded but said nothing else. “Is that where you keep your art collection?”

  “I’ve got a small, climate-controlled gallery in my basement.”

  “So you have to go down there to look at the paintings?”

  He glanced at me and smiled.

  “Masterpieces, like the Waterlilies, don’t usually hang on the living room wall where someone just walks by them a hundred times a day. If you are lucky enough to have that kind of art, you devote a lot of time to it. I can spend hours just sitting on a bench in the gallery gazing at the work. It absorbs my soul.”

  I felt a sudden, fierce envy. What would it be like to have something extraordinary that would take you out of yourself?

  “It must be like meditating. Or praying.”

  He nodded.

  “How did you get it? Are you independently wealthy?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah. My old man was a vice president in one of the major auto companies. But I’d never have had enough to buy a Monet. This one was uncovered in a bust the art theft squad did. The owner was an old man, alone in the world. The painting had gone missing twenty years ago. He didn’t want it to go to a museum where people would just walk by. He wanted someone to own it, to cherish it. For some reason he took a liking to me and wound up leaving it to me in his will.”

  I gave him the directions to the interstate and L’Anse.

  “How’d your talk go?”

  “It was kinda weird.” I told Harry about Cricket contacting Lars to provide information on my family. “He didn’t find anything very interesting. Just the same old, same old, that we’re all related if you go back far enough.”

  “One of the original tight-knit communities, huh?”

  “Hm. So tightly night that we’ve all lived within a few blocks of each other for generations. In fact, we’ve all wound up living on Calumet Street. Aunt Ianthe and Miss Irene, Elli’s B and B, the Maki Funeral home and my folks’ place. Four houses and four attics.” I looked at him. “There’s another coincidence. Attics. I mean, that’s the name of your television show.” I grimaced. “I must sound crazy.”

  “Not crazy. I think your instincts are right but I don’t know yet what they’re trying to tell us.” Harry said stared through t
he snowflakes at the road ahead. No lane lines were visible, neither were the shoulders.

  I shifted around in the seat until I was staring at his profile.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Just that while the five of us got to the B and B at the same time, we didn’t travel together. We joined up at the Hancock airport and took the shuttle to Red Jacket, but we were coming from different places.

  “Seth flew from Detroit Metro to Petoskey then took the morning puddle-jumper to Hancock. Vincent and Helena Tallmaster left from Flint’s Bishop Airport and spent the night in some motel or other in Escanaba.” He was easily negotiating the snow on the road but his brow was furrowed in an effort to remember. “Serena wanted to stop at a couple of textile shops in Ohio and southern Michigan so we drove together out from New York. Started on December 26th.”

  “You rented a car?”

  “Yeah. Some kind of SUV.”

  “And where did you stay on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Some little no-count motel on M-28. The proprietor said we were lucky we didn’t hit anybody because we were at a magical section called the Seney Mile and on New Year’s Eve drunken revelers like to see if they can make it across before they get hit by a car.”

  “It’s called the Dreaded Dash of Death,” I said, diverted.

  “We didn’t see a damn soul. Not even a deer.”

  “It sounds like you’ve thought about this before. I mean, you know all the details of all the travel arrangements.”

  “I’m a professional detective. Given a situation, like a murder, my mind automatically starts making connections.”

  “Why would any of you want to hurt Cricket?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, but if there’s one thing I’ve discovered in thirty years of investigating, the truth will emerge.”

  Chapter 17

  The L’Anse Bay Ojibwe Reservation, located at the base of the peninsula, is divided into two non-adjacent tracts of land that hug the Keweenaw Bay. It is a total of some three-and-a-half square miles, an area twice the size of the Copper Eagle Reservation that is home to my grandfather-in-law, Chief Joseph Night Wind.

  The L’Anse Bay community has its own school system, council, fire department and tribal police and, like the Copper Eagle, it has, for some years, owned and operated a casino.

  “I thought the casinos were supposed to line the pockets of the folks on the reservations,” Harry said, as we drove along a curb-less street, past a bank of shabby looking businesses, including a laundromat and a pawn shop and a couple of empty storefronts. “Where are all the riches?”

  “The UP casinos face the same problem of other tourist attractions up here,” I said. “Not many people want to drive a few hundred miles to play slot machines. And there are restrictions on how the tribe can spend any profit it makes. The biggest advantage to having a casino is that it provides some jobs.” He looked at me.

  “You’re an expert on Indian casinos?”

  “My husband represents tribes and individuals in law cases. A lot of them have to do with casino issues.”

  “He’s an Indian?”

  “Half. The clue is in the name: Night Wind. His mom was from the rez near Red Jacket. She left as a teenager and Jace and his half brother grew up in Canada. Oh, pull over there, will you,” I asked, as I spotted a tiny post office. “Somebody will know where Cloud lives.”

  I was laughing when I returned to the Jeep.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “There are approximately 1,200 people living on this reservation and thirty of them are named Cloud but I think we got it narrowed down to the right one.”

  “Let me guess, Cloud Two Crows.”

  “Miller,” I said, correcting him. “Cloud Miller. Take a right up at that corner. She’s at number 52, about half way down the road.”

  Number 52, like the other dozen houses on Rural Route 12, was a mobile home. The structure looked shabby but tidy with a huge, thick blanket of snow covering the yard.

  “One reason there are so many mobile homes on reservations is because the land is communally owned. A family owns the home itself but not the land it is on which means they can’t borrow using that land as collateral. And there’s less incentive to invest in the property when it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “And so all this poverty is as simple as communally owned land?”

  “No. It’s more complicated. It’s not easy for non-Indians to set up businesses on the rez because the normal regulatory practices are different here, as are the police and courts. Generally speaking there’s no economic base.”

  “The same problem you have on the Keweenaw for different reasons,” he said, pulling up in front of Cloud’s house and turning off the Jeep. “It can’t be easy to scratch out a living here. Why do people stay?”

  “We stay because it’s home,” I said.

  “You say that as if home is the Holy Grail. What is home compared with adventure and riches and excitement?”

  I grinned at him. “C’mon, Harry. You’re just playing devil’s advocate. You know you have a home in New York.” He shook his head.

  “It’s just a place to hang my hat.”

  “And your Monet.”

  “The point is, I don’t miss it. I don’t miss any place.”

  “How about people?” He shook his head.

  “Don’t miss them, either.”

  I felt a sudden stab of compassion and I reached over to touch him on the forearm.

  “You know what I think? I think you need a family.”

  “Hmmm,” he murmured, noncommittally. “You may not be the first person to have mentioned that. But you know what I think? I think we’d better talk to Cloud Miller and get back up the interstate before we get snowed in down here. After all, you promised Mrs. Paikkonen you’d switch places with her tonight.”

  The woman who opened the door to us was about my age, on the short side and solidly built. Her moon-shaped face was framed by thick, black hair pulled into a braid and she wore a flannel shirt open over a worn-looking but clean white tee shirt. She had on jeans and a pair of fawn-colored moccasins. A sleeping baby was hiked up on her shoulder and her dark eyes were soft but serious.

  I introduced myself and Harry and told her why we were there.

  “Please come in,” she said, stepping back so we could crowd into the small, rectangular-shaped living room where two small boys sat cross-legged on a thin carpet watching cartoons on a tube television with foil-covered rabbit ears. One of the kids turned to look at us and, as if our arrival was some sort of signal, he jammed his elbow into his brother’s side and the room rang with the sounds of cries and punches as they wrestled, seemingly to the death. My heart leapt into my mouth but their mother remained perfectly calm.

  “Calvin, Jack, get your snowsuits and boots,” she said, quietly. They stopped fighting, apparently more interested in going outside than in killing each other, and Cloud handed me the baby while she zipped and buttoned them.

  “You should have seen your face when Calvin let out the banshee cry,” Harry whispered. “You looked like you were on the verge of a panic attack.”

  “I don’t spend much time around kids.”

  He eyed the picture I made with the baby on my shoulder.

  “You look pretty natural to me.”

  The baby squirmed against my neck, made a little burping sound and settled back to sleep. I grinned at Harry.

  “This is the easy part. When my niece was a baby and I was ten, I was in love with her when she was asleep. When she was awake, I was always tempted to fling her out the window. It takes more patience than I’ve got to be a mom.”

  “Or,” Harry said, “more patience than you had at age ten.”

  The baby was still on my shoulder, when we three adults sat at the scarred wooden table in Cloud’s kitchen and sipped herbal tea. He smelled wonderful, like clean laundry, and he was keeping me warm, too. I was so relaxed I was in danger of falling asleep. Harry
seemed to know it and he took over the questioning.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” he began. “It’s obvious you have your hands full.” He indicated the sleeping baby. “This one a boy, too?”

  “Yes. Three boys.” She sounded proud. “They keep me busy. Luckily, my mother lives next door on one side, my sister on the other. When these guys are outside, there are eyes on them all the time.” He laughed, appreciatively. “Do you have any children?” He shook his head, regretfully.

  “I’m afraid my marriage didn’t last long enough.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  Harry grinned at me. “Hear that Cupcake? Play your cards right and you could have one just like that.”

  The words struck me hard, not because they’d been spoken by the charming Harry Dent but because I was on track to miss the whole motherhood experience. And because he was right. If my marriage had worked out better, I might have a dark-haired, creamy-skinned baby just like the one on my shoulder. And I might have the patience to deal with him. I shifted the child into my arms and focused on why we had come.

  “We’re trying to find out who killed Cricket Koski,” I said. “I found your name on a Christmas card she’d kept under her pillow and thought you might be able to tell us something about her family and her childhood.”

  “I knew she’d died,” Cloud said, a sad expression on her kind face. “Thank you for telling me she kept the card. We didn’t see each other but we talked on the phone once in awhile. She really wanted to be done with the rez but things just didn’t work out for her.” She settled back in her chair. “You want to know her background? I’ll tell you what I can. Mainly, she’s alone. No family. She was fostered with an elderly Ojibwe couple during high school. They were kind enough but she didn’t fit in at the rez high school. A few of us tried to be friendly with her but she resisted.”

  “You must have tried harder than anybody else,” I said.

  Cloud smiled. “I’m stubborn. And my mom pushed me. She felt sorry for Cricket.”

  And then I remembered to ask her about Cricket’s real name.

  “It was Caarina,” Cloud said.