May Day Page 13

  “But Lartel was family. Jeff might have told his family. For all I know, he’s the reason Jeff came to town. He had been looking up some info on Trillings online.”

  “Maybe,” Gina said doubtfully. “But Lartel has been planning this trip for months. That’s why they hired you, you know. It’s the first vacation he’s taken since he started at the library. Besides, why would he want to kill his own cousin? Playing with dolls doesn’t make him a murderer.”

  “I don’t know, Gina. Obviously he’s unstable, and he’s got a thing for Kennie. Maybe his perpetual jealousy finally snapped. Or maybe he is holding a grudge because Jeff wouldn’t play in the last football game at state.”

  “A high school football game is not a reason to kill, Mira. Tony’s ass, on the other hand . . .” A smile played at the corner of her mouth.

  I rolled my eyes. Gina had expended all of her available serious attention.

  “Hey, Gina, you’re up!”

  “Oops, back to darts. You wanna play?”

  “No thanks. I think I’ll go home, take a shower with some steel wool and lye, and get some rest. I suddenly feel very exhausted.”

  Gina gave me an impulsive hug. “Promise me you won’t go back to Lartel’s house. And you know, you should probably tell the police what you know.”

  “Yeah, probably.” I gave her a wan smile. For all I knew, Gary Wohnt had made the death threat against me. I was going to lie low until I had something more substantial, something that I could take to the real

  police.

  “Bye, chickie!” Gina started to wander back into the writhing mass of beer-greased hormones, but I remembered something important and pulled her back.

  “Not so fast, chickie.” I looked her in the eyes, and hers were bloodshot. “Don’t you want to know how my date with the Moorhead prof went?”

  She didn’t even have the grace to act sheepish. “I know he wants more head.” She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

  “I think he’d have to ask his mother first. Do you know he mentioned her eleven times over lunch? And he talked about the diet he was on? What sort of man diets? He was not right.”

  “Hmm. You’re so judgmental, Mira. Most people wouldn’t even notice that stuff. He’s a college professor, for gawd’s sake, and it’s not good for you to wallow in depression. Anyhow, you’ll have a chance to let him down easy over lunch on Saturday. He’ll pick you up at work at noon.” She winked at me, and as she walked away, she said over her shoulder, “He really likes you, Mir. You should see the e-mails he sent. You must remind him of his mother.”

  I imagine she was cackling, but I couldn’t hear her over the bar din. I thought about navigating through the crowd to pull her hair, but I suppose this was my instant karma. I should have told Professor Jake that he wasn’t my type when I had the chance, and that would have been that. I pulled out Jeff’s field book and put “dump professor” on my Saturday to-do list.

  I bought a bottle of vodka on my way out.

  “Hello?” I had the cordless phone in my hand before I was fully awake. There was no immediate answer on the other end, and I felt a surreal jolt as I tried to place myself. For a second I thought I was still jammed to the thinly carpeted floor in Lartel’s house, struggling to pull myself upright. The obnoxious sound of birds singing, coupled with the squeaky springs of my bed, assured me that I was safe in Sunny’s doublewide. “Hello, hello, hello!” I said. I hate crank phone calls and usually just say my one hello and wait. It always throws freaks off. Their kick is altering the norm, so if you do it first, they have nothing left.

  “You are still answering the phone, eh Mira?”

  I sat back on the pillows. “Hi, Ron,” I said, recognizing the voice of the Battle Lake Recall’s editor in chief.

  “Hello, Mira! So how about it? ‘Murder in the Midwest’? ‘Former Star Battler Loses the Big Game’?”

  “Hunh?” I looked at the digital clock next to my bed. It wasn’t even six a.m.

  “Your article! What are you going to call your article on the Wilson murder? It’s a scoop, you know. I have papers as far away as Duluth asking me what I know, asking to run whatever story we write.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair until I got to the snarls. I must have tossed and turned all night. “I’m working on it, Ron. I’ve got some leads I’m following up on.”

  “I have to have something by tonight for the Monday paper, Mira. We need to get something in the paper, some details. What luck, that you interviewed him before he died, and then his body turned up at your work! What luck!”

  I scowled. “With luck like that, I should stay in bed most days, Ron. I’ll have something for you by tomorrow, ’kay?”

  “OK,” Ron said, “but no later than tomorrow. I’m saving half the front page. And get me another recipe. That phony abalone was

  delicious!”

  I hung up without a goodbye. Ron wasn’t much for small talk and neither was I, which suited our relationship but didn’t really help us as reporters. Fortunately, the Recall was just a small paper. I thought about the article I was working on appearing in newspapers around the state. It didn’t excite me. At this point I needed to find out what happened for peace of mind.

  I stretched and heaved myself out of bed. I hadn’t actually taken a shower last night because Lartel’s dolly land had rattled me enough that I didn’t want to be naked for a while. I still felt that way this morning, so in lieu of a shower I splashed water on my face and pulled my hair up and back in a ponytail bun. I darted a toothbrush over my teeth, dabbed some sandalwood oil in my armpits, got dressed, grabbed a banana, and was out the door.

  I was in my car before I remembered that I hadn’t filled the bird feeders since last weekend, and here it was Friday. Now was not the time to let the bird kingdom turn against me. I walked back to the feeders, the frost-tipped grass crunching under my feet. I could actually see my breath this morning.

  My poor garden. I had gambled that there wouldn’t be another freeze until fall, and I had lost. Tonight I would have to do some serious green nurturing.

  Once in back of the house, I took the brick off the garbage can that held the feed and seed mix and hoisted the bag up to fill the feeders. I envisioned the birds watching me in the trees, Godfather-style, shaking their heads.

  Back at my car, I had to use the side of my hand to scrape the rime off the window. I had an ice scraper in the back somewhere, but I was not going to use it out of principle. It was not unheard of for there to be a last frost or two in May, even snow in June, but I wasn’t going to legitimize it with an ice scraper.

  My radio turned over with my engine and startled me. I must have left it cranked when I shut the car off last night, and now Robert Plant was trying to convince me that he really did have a whole lotta love.

  I believed him, but I wasn’t in the mood. I clicked the radio off and headed out the driveway. I was actually just being proactive, as my radio has a tendency to pick up screeching static pockets on cold mornings, usually just as I envision myself slinking to the beat in a cat suit through an admiring crowd. I cranked the heat, putting the still-icy hand I used to scrape the windows in front of the registers.

  It was early enough that I hoped I could catch Bev Taylor at Ben’s before she got busy. It was still a week shy of fishing opener, so the bait business would be pretty slow, but Ben’s rented videos and sold newspapers, tourist trap toys, T-shirts, souvenirs, and fishing and hunting gear, so they appealed to a diverse crowd. The danger of coming here over my lunch break was that the front would be lined up with old-timers or part-timers telling stories, and I didn’t want an audience for my questioning.

  Fortunately, the only car in the parking lot when I got there was a battered Chevy pickup, the rust accenting the original green paint surprisingly evenly. I assumed this was Bev’s truck. I pulled my old Toyota in next to it, thinking the two vehicles would have a lot to talk about if they could get past the language barrier.

  Th
e bell tinkled merrily as I entered, and the unique and inviting smell of bait welcomed me. Fish stink; bait smells like a warm, clean aquarium. It’s one of the mysteries of Minnesota. I walked straight over to the bait tanks and peered at the wriggling sacrifices. The little minnows were my favorite. I couldn’t look at them without feeling a tickling flutter in my hand. Holding a minnow is like holding a butterfly with the lease to its life. I strolled to the end of the bait tanks, the denizens getting progressively larger until the bait began to look like keepers to me. I should have come here for Curtis Poling’s fish.

  I always wondered what people caught with the big shiners. I looked around at the mounted fish lining the store, the muskies snapping their razor teeth into perpetuity, the walleye so big they looked like googly-orbed sea monsters, and even some sunnies that seemed ready to explode with their own superfish girth. I had never seen fish this big actually caught, so I preferred to view them as illusions to titillate the tourists, similar to the jackalopes at Wall Drug in South Dakota or the uni-goat at the Renaissance Festival. These glandular mounted fish, I surmised, were just the biggest bait in the store, set up to catch vacationers.

  A short, solid woman in her late thirties with black hair cropped close to her ears, thick glasses, and a questioning smile came up from the back room. “Can I help you?”

  If this was Bev, I bet she was always at the bottom of the cheerleading pyramids. They always stuck the chick with glasses at the bottom. “Are you Bev?”

  “Ah-hunh. What can I do for you?”

  I considered asking her what she thought of the name Norman’s Baits for a bait shop, but sometimes my humor only served to make people uncomfortable, which was the opposite of what I was after. “My friend Gina Sorensen said I should talk to you. I’m looking for some information on Kennie Rogers.” I figured I’d start out small.

  Bev dragged a stool underneath her, plopped herself on it, and put her elbows on the cracked glass of the counter. She rested her chins in her hands and looked at me eagerly. “What do you want to know?”

  I could tell this woman and I were going to get along just fine. “I’m not sure exactly. I’m doing a story on Jeff Wilson, and I know he and Kennie dated back in the day. I also know that he had some conflicts with Gary Wohnt and his coach back then, Lartel McManus. And people say Kennie and Gary are ‘together’ now. I just don’t know any details or how to piece it all together.”

  Bev played with the masking tape holding one of the bigger counter cracks together and studied the reels in the case below her. They needed dusting. I could see a smile push at the corners of her mouth, and I knew she had been waiting a long time for someone to ask her this. She was going to tell it right. A waxworm peeked at me out of its sawdust container by the cash register and then tucked its shiny slug body back under. I looked away and pretended not to be nauseated.

  “Where to start?” Bev asked the waxworms rhetorically. “Well, Kennie was a royal bitch. She had that perfect blond curled hair, perfect teeth, perfect blue eyes, perfect little body. That was fine—she couldn’t help what she was born with. She just let it go to her head, is all. First day of cheerleading practice, she told all the big girls that they best get used to being on their knees.”

  Mmm-hmm, I said to myself. Big girls with glasses on the bottom. This is why I had avoided cheerleading in high school. I was never overweight, but I was never particularly popular either, and five pounds one way or the other could make or break you if you were in the fringe crowd. No reason to exploit myself even further by putting on a short skirt, tight sweater, and fake smile once a week. Part of me always bought into the myth of the cheerleader mystique, though. Thank God I could hide it under my natural sarcasm.

  “But that was a long time ago,” Bev said, as if reading my mind. “I try not to hold grudges. Jeff, on the other hand, was the nicest guy in the world. I don’t know what he ever saw in her beyond her good looks. I think he saw a potential in her, some real person under all the makeup and hair, and figured he could help her. They just kind of fell in together when they were freshman and stayed together after that. It made sense, what with him becoming a star football player and her being the beauty queen.”

  “Did she really do all that beauty pageant stuff?” I was grotesquely fascinated.

  “You know it. Her mom carted her off to all the local contests. She had a regular makeup chest that she carried everywhere, and I hear she got real good at twirling a baton.” Bev let out a raucous laugh. “She did pretty well, too. Got as far as Miss Teen Minnesota the year before we graduated.”

  “Did Kennie have any other admirers?” I asked, thinking of Lartel.

  “Just every guy in school and most of the gals as well. Gary had a real thing for her, though, moping around after her, sending her ‘secret’ love notes.”

  “Gary Wohnt?”

  “But Gary ‘Will’ for Kennie,” she said, laughing again. “That’s what we always used to say.”

  “So Gary and Jeff were rivals?”

  “That’s just it. Jeff was too nice a guy for that. He always bent over backward to be nice to Gary, inviting him out and to parties or whatever. Shit, he even bowed out of the last high school football game of his life so Gary would have a chance to shine.”

  “That’s why Jeff didn’t play for the state title in ’82? Because he wanted Gary to have a chance to play?”

  “Gary would have played regardless. He was a real good running back, it’s just you couldn’t tell with Jeff doing everything better than right. Jeff knew he already had a full ride to college, he knew it was just a high school football game, so he pretended he was sick so Gary would have a chance to shine out of his shadow.” Bev tapped the side of the waxworm container and Sleepyhead, or it could have been Sleepybutt, looked out at her again. “Everyone knew he wasn’t sick, though. Everyone knew why he did it. McManus was furious.”

  Ick. Hearing that name made me feel like I had just found a blond hair in the last bite of my supper. Make that a yellow toenail. With a piece of Band-Aid stuck to it. “So Lartel and Jeff weren’t real close at the end?”

  Bev looked at me. “How much do you know about Lartel

  McManus?”

  “I know he was Jeff’s second cousin and football coach, and I know he is one weird dude.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “He’s related to Jeff, and really wasn’t much older than us back when he was coaching. He was our math teacher, too. He was hell on wheels as a coach, and I saw it when we would practice our cheers while the players were practicing. We used to call him ‘Lartel McMeanest.’ He just couldn’t control his temper, or his eyes.” She paused for dramatic effect.

  “He had a wandering eye?”

  “I wouldn’t say it wandered. It always landed pretty good on Kennie. After that last football game, he just lost it. They didn’t win, of course, not without Jeff. Lartel was furious and rode home alone. He stopped coaching and teaching end of that year. The official word was that he quit, but everyone knew he was let go. We just didn’t know why. It had something to do with Kennie and Jeff, though. Jeff moved away right after graduation, and Kennie stayed behind. She was supposed to go with him, to some cosmetology school out East, but she never went. She started hanging out with Lartel, of all the people in the world.”

  “Kennie and Lartel?” I was incredulous. I had never once seen them together.

  “Oh, that was a long time ago. Then something must have happened, because Lartel just dropped out of sight. No one saw him for over a decade. He showed up about five years ago and started work at the library. Him and Kennie don’t interact that I can see. He doesn’t interact with much of anyone, and if you have kids, you tell them to avoid Lartel McManus like the boogeyman.”

  Sound advice, I thought. “So would any one of those three have a reason to kill Jeff?”

  Bev sucked on her teeth. “Killing I don’t know about. This was just high school stuff. Who hangs on to high school stuff that lo
ng?”

  The doorbells jingled behind me, and in strode a gruff-looking man. “Hey, Bev. How much for some large leeches?” Apparently he was used to interrupting women, because he didn’t even acknowledge my presence.

  “Same as it was last weekend, Mike,” Bev said, laughing flirtatiously. “We don’t got no leech sales going on.”

  Mike winked. “A man’s got to be ready. Why don’t you give me one large.”

  Bev turned to the fridge and pulled out a see-through plastic container, the kind Chinese restaurants use for carryout soup. It was full of leeches dancing their worm dance, struggling over each other’s bodies to get to the top, just to end up on the bottom again. Ah, the life of the leech. There could be something philosophical about it if they weren’t so damn repulsive.

  The worst part was that during walleye season, you could find a container in most fridges around here. If you were at a friend’s house and they offered you a beer, you let them get it or risked seeing black bloodsuckers squirming next to the margarine and eggs or, worse, next to the thawing hamburger.

  Mike and Bev were chatting it up, so I walked over to the candy. Ben’s Bait is a treasure chest of unique candy. My favorite was the Lemonheads. I sucked the gritty, sour yellow coating off and spit out the tasteless white ball in the center. I grabbed two boxes of those and one bag of old-fashioned Tart-n-Tinys. When I got back to the front, Mike was on his way out.

  “If you hear any new gossip, Bev,” I said, lining up my purchases on the counter, “can you give me a call over at the library? Otherwise, you can call me at home. I’m staying at Sunny Waters’s farm, and I haven’t changed her phone number.”

  “I thought I recognized you,” she said. “Yeah, I can call. Don’t quit your day job, though. This town has gotten pretty quiet since the murder. Don’t anyone want to believe it was one of us.”

  I nodded and slid her some cash. “Thanks for your time. Say, did you get Snatch in yet?” I asked, eyeing the racks of videos.

  “Nope, one of the Christianson boys took it out and hasn’t returned it. I need to give him a call. We’re going to have to order another copy if we don’t get it back soon.”