Madman on a Drum

by David Housewright

  “What about?” Orrick said.

  “He wants to know what you’re trying to do to him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This man that you sent to him, he paid DuWayne in marked money, money that ties DuWayne to a kidnapping. Now the FBI is on his ass, and he wants to know why you’re trying to jam him up.”

  “I ain’t trying to—”

  “You wanna know what’s really got DuWayne pissed? He gave the money to his mother to fix her house. Now the FBI is trying to jam her up, too.”

  “Oh God.”

  “You know how much DuWayne cares about his momma?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “God ain’t gonna help you, pal.”

  “What can I do?”

  “DuWayne wants to know who the man is. He wants to know the man’s name, and he wants to know where to find him.”

  Orrick hesitated. “Who are you?” he asked. His voice was cautious and unsure, and I was afraid I might lose him.

  “I’m the guy DuWayne sent because he couldn’t come himself.” I raised my voice just loud enough to attract the attention of the guard seated in a high wooden chair at the end of the corridor; then I deliberately lowered it. “He can’t come because the Feds are watching him. He can’t use the phone because it’s probably tapped. He doesn’t want to contact you in person anyway, you dumb fuck, because he’s afraid of trading a kidnapping rap for a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. But you know what? You have every right to be cautious. You have every right to look out for yourself. I suggest that you send DuWayne a letter, because when I was in his mother’s house in North Minneapolis this morning watching him eat his Cocoa Puffs, do you know what he said to me? ‘That Donny, he doesn’t call, he doesn’t write. Maybe we ain’t friends anymore.’ ”

  “Thomas Teachwell.”

  “What?”

  “Dude calls hi’self T-Man. That’s his real name. Thomas Teach-well. He reached out the other day, said he needed someone dependable to handle something for him—something sensitive. I sent him to DuWayne. You gotta tell ’im, though. I didn’t know nothin’ about what Teachwell was doing…”

  It went on like that for another minute or two, Orrick trying to clear himself with DuWayne without actually saying anything that could be used in a court of law. Only I wasn’t listening. I felt as if I had been slapped upside the head with a two-by-four; the face reflected in the prison glass was ashen, the jaw slack, and all I could hear was Shelby Dunston’s voice.

  Is it because of you, McKenzie? Did they kidnap my baby to get back at you, to get back at you through us?

  21

  Sometimes I had the feeling that the Twin Cities produced the world’s longest-running movable traffic jam just to slow me down. Lord knows it seemed to anticipate my every turn. It was late afternoon, and most of the traffic was moving out of the Twin Cities. Yet that didn’t deter vehicles driving in from clogging every major artery I wanted to use. I tried not to let it rile me. It wasn’t easy. I felt a rage so intense that I nearly choked on it.

  Thomas Teachwell had targeted my friends, Bobby and Shelby and young Victoria and Katie—my family!—because I had arrested him. Because I had profited from arresting him—three million, one hundred twenty-eight thousand, five hundred eighty-four dollars and fifty cents—half of the money that I had recovered, half of what Teachwell had stolen. He killed Scottie Thomforde to get back at me, and probably Scottie’s brother. He terrorized Joley Waddell. He put a price on my head that resulted in the death of two, maybe three other men.

  Thomas Teachwell.

  T-Man.

  He wanted revenge.

  I vowed to teach him all about it.

  At the same time, I laughed at myself over the list I had given Harry, the one with all the names of people who might want to see me dead. It had never occurred to me to include Teachwell.

  Both sides of I-394, from the Dunwoody Institute on the outskirts of downtown Minneapolis west to the Ridgedale shopping center, were nothing more than giant strip malls—six and a half miles of hotels, motels, restaurants, fast-food joints, clubs, bars, coffee shops, retail outlets, new and used car lots, gas stations, and office buildings. Yet once you got past the I-494 cloverleaf and the interstate became Highway 12, all of that disappeared. You were in God’s country now, where the rich people lived, and they didn’t allow the working class into their neighborhoods even to work. Instead, their highways, county roads, and streets were lined with pristine lawns, rolling hills, and unbroken forests. There wasn’t even a Starbucks to blemish the countryside.

  I took a county road and followed it around Lake Minnetonka into Orono. I was hoping for a bar to work off some of my rage; I’d even welcome one that sold bottled beer at ten bucks a throw. Unfortunately, the only businesses I encountered were marinas that serviced the yachts of those not wealthy enough to own estates actually located on the water. A few more turns and I was on a long, private blacktop that led to a huge house on the west arm of the lake.

  To say the area was exclusive would be redundant. Lake Minnetonka was actually a collection of sixteen interconnected lakes and heaven knows how many bays and inlets, and it was all exclusive—all twenty-two and a half square miles of it—and the impression it radiated was that nothing bad could ever happen here. ’Course, Virginia Piper might disagree.

  Before I reached the house, I stopped the Cherokee, opened the back, and pulled out my Kevlar vest. I put it on and checked my guns. The nine I holstered on my belt at my left hip, positioning it for a quick cross-draw. The .380 I slid between my belt and spine. Only then did I drive up to the house where Thomas Teachwell once lived.

  I followed the circular drive in back of the house until the nose of the Cherokee was facing out in case I needed to make a quick getaway. There were no other vehicles in the driveway and no people. I knew there were neighbors, but not close—I couldn’t see their houses through the trees that dotted the property. I stepped out of the vehicle. A gentle breeze floated up from the lake and stirred the leaves. It was so quiet I could hear my heartbeat. A splendid isolation.

  There’s a lot to be said for exclusivity, my inner voice said. You could afford to live here. Well, yeah, except the people on the lake weren’t the kind that attended the Minnesota State Fair, and if they went to a ball game, they watched from the comfort of a luxury suite. I doubted I’d fit in. Besides—I pulled the nine from its holster and cautiously approached Teachwell’s home—I wasn’t house hunting.

  I approached the house in a crouch that strained my back and caused my ankle to throb. I let the Beretta lead the way while I watched the doors, watched the windows, watched for movement of any kind from anywhere. It was still. It was quiet. I poked my nose above windowsills. Rooms were laid out like the photo spreads of House Beautiful. There was no one lounging on the sofa eating Cheetos and watching Oprah, no one sitting at the table cutting coupons. I took a chance and rang the front doorbell. It echoed through the house like a ship’s bell over a calm and empty sea and went unanswered.

  I moved cautiously around the house. A multi-tiered lawn, landscaped with stone walls and gardens, sloped for the length of a football field to the shore of the big lake. Jutting into the lake was a wide wooden dock; a bass boat, a speedboat, and a luxury yacht were tethered to its pilings. A stone boat house about half the size, yet twice as opulent, as my own house was set a few yards back from the shore. A tall, slim, blond woman in an oversized white turtleneck stepped out of the boat -house. I watched her stroll the length of the shoreline to the dock and over it to the bass boat. She pulled out two life jackets and started back to the boat house. I holstered the Beretta and marched across the lawn. The sight of me startled her. She dropped the life jackets and moved backward, nearly stepping into the lake. I called to her. She recognized me then, halted, and held her ground. Her jaw was set and her fists were clenched when I reached her.

  “What do you want, McKenzie?”

  “I’m looking
for your husband.”

  She gestured at my hip. “With a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought he would be here?”

  “Where is your husband, Mrs. Teachwell?”

  “Ex-husband.”

  “Ex-husband, then.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Be sure, Mrs. Teachwell. Be very sure you don’t know.”

  She glared at me for a few moments. “I haven’t seen him,” she said.

  I wondered briefly if she was the “babe” that Victoria had overheard the T-Man speaking to on his cell phone. “You can lie to me all you want, Mrs. Teachwell,” I said. “Not to the FBI. They’ll subpoena phone records, they’ll confiscate your computer—”

  “I haven’t seen him since—oh, why are you here, McKenzie? Thomas and I are divorced. Do you understand? Divorced. I’m not a part of his life anymore. He doesn’t want me to be part of his life. He’s—he’s changed.”

  I’ll say, I thought. “I need to find him,” I said aloud.

  Mrs. Teachwell pressed her fists against her hips in defiance and shook her head.

  “It’s serious, Mrs. Teachwell.”

  “It wasn’t before?”

  “He kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl. He committed murder.”

  Mrs. Teachwell shook her head again, only this time it was as if she wanted to shake my words out of her ears.

  “Mrs. Teachwell—”

  “It isn’t true.” She turned and faced the lake. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  Mrs. Teachwell folded her arms in front of her in self-defense and lowered her head. Her shoulders trembled for a few moments, and I thought she was going to weep. It wasn’t the reaction I expected from a divorced woman who’s had no contact with her ex.

  I waited for a few beats, then asked again, “Where is your husband?”

  She shook her head violently.

  I could have comforted her, I suppose. Rested my hand on her shoulder and told her that it would be all right. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She had been in love with Thomas Teachwell. I had the impression that she still was. That made her my enemy. I listened to her make some throat sounds, but the tears I expected didn’t come. She spoke to me over her shoulder.

  “Mr. McKenzie,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I have coffee,” she said.

  She led me to the boat house, which could have sheltered a family of four. It had a toilet and shower, a Murphy bed, cable TV, a stereo CD player, a PC, plenty of furniture, a bar with a refrigerator, a small stove, and a brick patio all around. Mrs. Teachwell filled two china cups from a gourmet coffeemaker that was far superior to the one I owned. “Sugar, cream?” she said. “Black,” I told her. I was surprised and a little disappointed when she gave me the cup without a saucer.

  “This is the only boat house I’ve ever been in that didn’t have boats,” I said.

  “There’s a locker in the back for equipment,” Mrs. Teachwell said. “I use the rest of it mostly for parties. Why did you come here, Mr. McKenzie? Thomas and I are divorced. We were divorced before he was arrested. You know that. So why did you come here looking for him?”

  “Because I never believed it, the divorce, I mean. You were always there for him. At the jail, at the hearings, later when he elocuted following the plea agreement. Ex-wives, as a rule, don’t behave that way. Something else. When I found your husband in the cabin up north, he was waiting, had been waiting for a couple of days. He could have slipped across the Canadian border anytime. That was his plan—cross the border and escape to Rio de Janeiro. He had it all worked out. It was a good plan. The plan would have worked. Instead, he waited. I think he was waiting for you.”

  Mrs. Teachwell took a chair facing a pair of French doors and Lake Minnetonka beyond. I watched her from where I was standing near the mahogany bar. I would have liked to sit, too, and rest my back and ankle, but she didn’t offer a chair, and I couldn’t impose.

  “I was devastated when we divorced,” she said. “I never saw it coming; couldn’t believe it when it did come. There was no explanation. Thomas simply said, ‘I’m divorcing you,’ and walked out. He was so generous with the settlement, too. Gave me nearly everything. The house. Cars. Savings. Investments. He didn’t even take his golf clubs. I thought there must have been another woman. There wasn’t. For a brief period, I actually thought there must have been another man. Not that, either. It made no sense to me. Then it did.

  “Thomas had been embezzling money for years. Millions of dollars. I didn’t know it. It was the only secret he ever kept from me. Later, he told me that he originally did it to demonstrate to the board that it needed to take safeguards. Then he did it because it was fun. Then he did it out of habit. That’s what he said. Of course, it was more than that. I believe Thomas had a Walter Mitty–like view of the world. He was never satisfied being a CFO. He wanted to be a swashbuckler. A pirate. He wanted to be Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. He wanted to be Han Solo and Indiana Jones.”

  Don’t we all? my inner voice said.

  “It was a kind of daydream,” Mrs. Teachwell said. “It became painfully real only after the financial scandals at Enron, Tyco, World-Com, and all those other companies. Thomas was a smart man. He knew what was coming long before it got here. I’m talking about the independent financial audits that many shareholders began demanding from their boards. He divorced me. He divorced me and gave me everything to protect me. Then he waited. When his firm finally hired an independent auditor to examine the books, he took what money he had accumulated and ran. He asked me to go with him.”

  “You said no.”

  “I said yes, Mr. McKenzie. I would have gone to Rio with Thomas. I would have gone anywhere. Only I couldn’t get away. The police were watching me; I was being followed. I was terrified that I would lead them to Thomas. So I stayed put. Thomas could have left the country. Should have left the country. Contacted me once he was safely in Brazil. You were right. He waited for me. Because of that, you were able to catch him.”

  “And then?”

  “And then prison. Prison for him and a sort of prison for me. It isn’t easy being involved with a jailbird. That’s what some of our friends— ex-friends—called him. Jailbird. I didn’t mind. I still had the house, the money; I had what he had given me. I visited him in St. Cloud. I told him that it all would be there waiting for him—that I would be waiting for him—when he was released.”

  “And then?”

  Mrs. Teachwell nursed her coffee, kept staring at some distant point on Lake Minnetonka.

  “He changed,” she said. “Both physically and emotionally.

  Physically—Thomas had never been an athlete…”

  “Yes,” I said, remembering the doughy, overweight man I had trapped in the cabin on Lower Red Lake.

  “In prison he became lean and strong from working in the weight room. At first it was attractive. Afterward, he became so big—it is possible to have too many muscles, Mr. McKenzie. While his body was changing, so was his demeanor. Thomas had been a soft-spoken man, timid and shy. As he became stronger and harder, he became louder. The guards would make him quiet down during our visits because he would shout. On a couple of occasions they returned him to his cell because he wouldn’t quiet down. Over the years he became very angry. It frightened me how angry he became. He was incensed with you, of course. Soon his anger included the entire world. Me as well. He decided that I had caused his downfall, that I had ruined his life. Because he stole for me, he said, and because he had waited for me and I didn’t come. He told me to get out of his life. He told me this many times. Finally, I did.

  “It was prison,” she said. “Prison changed him. Jeffrey Skilling defrauded millions of people, hurt millions of people, while he was CEO of Enron and he received a comfortable life in a converted college dormitory in Waseca, no bars on the window, no locks on the door, good food. Thomas, all he hurt was an insurance company, and he was condemned to a maximum-security pris
on with the worst scum on earth. That would change anyone.”

  “You haven’t seen him since he was released?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “He hasn’t tried to contact you in any way?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to get his golf clubs back?”

  “Not even for that.”

  “If he does contact you, will you tell me?”

  “He won’t.”

  “He might.”

  Mrs. Teachwell turned in her chair to face me. Tears had welled up in her eyes again, and she brushed them away with her knuckle. “Why would he?” she asked.

  “He’s in serious trouble,” I said. “When I’m in trouble, I seek out the people who love me best.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then said, “He won’t come here.”

  “Will you tell me if he does?”

  “No.”

  “Your husband is a fool, Mrs. Teachwell.”

  “Ex-husband,” she said.

  I liked Mrs. Teachwell. I liked that she stood by her man even though he really wasn’t her man anymore. Others might censure her as some kind of Tammy Wynette throwback, a relic from an era that existed before women were given the right to vote. Not me. I think we all pray for such loyalty from the people we love. I wondered briefly if Nina Truhler possessed that kind of loyalty. Sure she does, my inner voice told me. She’s proven it many times.

  I dumped my Kevlar vest and guns in the back of the Jeep Cherokee and drove away from Mrs. Teachwell’s house. I stopped when the driveway intersected with the main drag and made a phone call. The new cell didn’t have Harry’s direct number on speed dial, and I was forced to go through the switchboard. “Special Agent Brian Wilson,” Harry said.

  “It’s McKenzie.”

  “McKenzie,” Harry said. “I’ve been wondering where you’ve been off to.”

  “Orono,” I said.

  “What’s in Orono?”

  “The residence of Mrs. Thomas Teachwell.”

  “Teachwell? The embezzler?”