Dark Coulee

by Mary Logue

  10

  Leonard Lundgren was leaning over an old truck in his backyard, tinkering with it, when they arrived; his broad back covered in red-and-black-checked flannel looked as big as a blackboard. He stood up and faced them as he heard the patrol car pull up behind him, no hand raised in greeting as they got out of the car. But neither did he appear overly hostile.

  Claire was glad he was outside. She didn’t like barging into people’s houses.

  “We need to look around your place, Mr. Lundgren, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to impound your Toyota.” Claire handed him the search warrant.

  He took the piece of paper and looked at it as if he could not read. For a moment Claire supposed it was a possibility, then she saw him glance down the page, and he read out loud, “You’re looking for knives. Fuck, what guy who lives around here doesn’t have a shitload of knives'?”

  “That was the weapon used on Jed Spitzler, who died yesterday of a knife wound to the abdomen.”

  Leonard Lundgren wiped off his hands on the tail of his flannel shirt. “That little worm. I wouldn’t have bothered to step on him if he were in my path.”

  Since he was talking, Billy proceeded to push him a little further. “We’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “You guys really think I had something to do with this. Who’ve you been talking to? Lola. So I can have a lawyer if I want to.”

  Billy nodded.

  Leonard laughed. “I’m not paying nobody nothing when I haven’t done a thing. They just want your money. I have nothing to hide. Ask your questions.”

  Claire decided to go for it. The man seemed forthcoming. “You didn’t like Jed Spitzler, did you?”

  “No, but neither did anyone else around here. The man kept to himself, never helped out a neighbor, never joined in when something needs to be done, got his kids half scared to death. Sure, I know it’s hard, your wife dies on you and leaves you with three kids to raise, but he doesn’t even know enough to ask for help.”

  “But you particularly didn’t like him because he was seeing your ex-girlfriend, Lola.”

  Leonard lowered his head and shook it with a sense of weariness. “I guess that would be true.”

  “You were at the dance Saturday night?”

  “I was.”

  “You were seen next to Jed after he was stabbed.”

  “I was there. But not right after. Not soon enough to see what happened to him. You know what I mean—who did it and all.”

  “Did you stab Jed Spitzler Saturday night?” Claire decided to ask the direct question.

  Leonard shuffled in his heavy work boots and kicked at something on the ground. “I don’t understand all the rules here. What I can say, what I can’t say. I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing the wrong way, and then you’ll think you’ve got me. So let me be as clear as I can be. I didn’t stab Jed Spitzler. I’d thought about it in the past, but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t think he and Lola were going to be together that much longer. Jed ain’t really Lola’s type. She thinks she wants to settle down and play house, but that’s really not what she wants. She’d be bored of ironing and cooking before too long, and she’d be finding her way down to the bar without Jed.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Lundgren. Can I ask you to go sit in the back of the patrol car while we search your house and outbuildings?”

  “Awfully polite and all. Sure, I’ll go sit in the patrol car. Help yourself. Everything is open. I got nothing to hide. Try not to make too big a mess.”

  Billy walked Lundgren to the patrol car and put him in the back.

  Claire proceeded to the house, a small, tidy clapboard dwelling that sat on the edge of a hill. When she walked inside, she was struck by how neat it was. But on closer examination, she noticed that it wasn’t spotless.

  Two bedrooms, one upstairs, one down. A small bath with a shower and a galley kitchen. Nothing special about it, but every room was so well organized. Every thing had a place and was in it: the newspapers all stacked in a wooden box next to the couch and close to the fireplace, fireplace tools all hung up next to the mantel, slippers placed right at the doorway, boots lined up in the closet. It reminded her of the word shipshape.

  She wondered if he had been in the military. She didn’t remember that being in his record.

  He had been right about the knives. She found a number of long-bladed knives in his kitchen drawers and then more in the utility closet by the back door. As she found them, she placed them in evidence bags. By the time she was done with the kitchen, there were over a dozen bags sitting on the counter.

  The crime lab truck showed up about a half an hour after she and Billy had started searching the place. Clark Denforth, whom she had worked with before, was in charge. She asked them to do Lundgren’s truck. If they were going to find any trace evidence, it was going to be in that vehicle. She wanted the experts to go over it.

  A few minutes later, Denforth walked into the kitchen, holding an evidence bag with a knife in it. “Look what I found.”

  Claire pointed at all the bags with knives in them on the counter.

  “All very nice,” Denforth said, “but this one has blood on it. You can see it in the hilt. Might be something.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “Tucked right under the front seat.”

  “Why wouldn’t he get rid of it?”

  “I just find evidence. I don’t claim to understand the criminal mind. That’s up to you detectives.”

  She had Billy finish up the house while she looked through the outbuildings—a woodshed with wood stacked tidy as Lincoln Logs, another shed that housed a riding lawn mower, a snowmobile, and an old motorcycle. Men and their toys.

  Then she opened the door to the last outbuilding and found herself in Lundgren’s woodworking shop. The room was entirely paneled with warm old pine. A dark Jodul woodstove sat on a hearth of red bricks. Above the long workbench hung row after row of tools. She didn’t know the names of half the instruments that hung from the wall. She would have to bag some of them—the ones that resembled knives.

  She was starting to feel like they were headed down the wrong road. Lundgren hadn’t acted like a murderer, facing them evenly when they drove up in the patrol car, not fussing when he was put in the backseat. And she knew it was not smart to make decisions based on intuition, but she just had a hard time believing that someone who took as much care as he did with his tools would bloody one of them by stabbing it into Jed Spitzler’s guts.

  She looked through every drawer in the workshop and bagged every knifelike tool she found. She bet they were leaving this man’s property with over thirty knives. What a haul. But, from the looks of it, most of them, except the one found under the seat of the car, were spotless. The lab would find out.

  Before going to the car, she checked in with Denforth. His crew had the truck ready to be towed back to Eau Claire. He felt that the place had been gone over thoroughly. “Might get lucky on this one,” he said. “That knife looks very promising.” He told her he hoped he would have something for her in the next day or two.

  Claire got into the patrol car, and Leonard turned to look at her from the backseat. “So you’re going out with Rich Haggard?” he asked.

  “I’ll ask the questions.”

  “He’s a nice guy. Not too many of them around.”

  She agreed with him silently. “What about that knife under the seat of your truck?”

  “I figured you’d find that. I just remembered that I left it there. I forgot about it after it happened.”

  “Well?”

  “I killed a deer with it.”

  “You killed a deer with a knife? Whatever for?”

  Lundgren made a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. “This stupid woman hit a deer. This is a couple days ago. I’m coming home from work. It’s dusk. Like right about now. And she’s driving in front of me. A deer jumps up on the road in front of her, and she clips him in the rear. The deer flies into the
ditch, the woman pulls over, and so do I. Just to check it out. Anyhow, this woman is hysterical. Bawling. She can’t even get out of the car. The deer is flopping around in the ditch. There’s nothing to do about it but put it out of its misery. I take my knife and slit its throat. End of story.”

  “Did you know the woman?”

  “Never saw her before in my life. She had a Minnesota license plate, probably just a dumb tourist.”

  It was a good story. Claire didn’t know if she believed it or not, but she had enjoyed it. “Nice place you’ve got here. You sure are a good housekeeper.”

  “That’s the way I like it.”

  Claire mentioned something else she had noticed about his place. “You don’t have a single animal here. Not even a dog.”

  “I don’t like animals. I know that everybody else does. But I think they’re a waste of food and time. And they make a mess. I hate a mess.”

  Claire wondered how he could tolerate Lola. She also wondered why he was taking this all so calmly.

  Gloaming. She had always liked that word, the way it filled the mouth. Liked it in the poems of Robert Burns. But now her world seemed to be in perpetual twilight. Little light. Half-light. Encroaching dark.

  Ella Gunderson sat in her rocking chair and didn’t bother to turn the lights on yet. It was nearly dark, but she was using this time to think about what she should do about Jed Spitzler’s death. She believed in acting, and yet she did not like to think about what her actions might lead to. She felt like there were many layers to what had happened to him, and she was only aware of a few of them. Was that enough?

  The phone rang, and Ella Gunderson stood up to get it. She didn’t need to see where it was; it always sat right on the edge of her kitchen counter. She could find it in the dark, or in the gloaming.

  “Good evening,” she said into the phone.

  “Mrs. Gunderson, Pit Snyder here.”

  “Well, hello, Mr. Mayor. To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?” She had wondered if he might not call. He had been in her fifth-grade class thirty years ago. Nice boy. Stubborn, but fair. She had always liked him. It tickled her no end to call him Mr. Mayor. Like Mr. President.

  “Another beautiful day.”

  “Yes, it was indeed. I have heard that we are to have a mild fall. That’s what the weatherman has been promising.”

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  She knew he hadn’t called to discuss the weather with her, but it was good manners to start a conversation with such a discussion. It allowed people to gather their thoughts. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m worried about those Spitzler kids,” Pit Snyder said.

  “Yes, I am too.”

  “I thought you might be. You know they’ve got no one. No family, no nothing. I hate to think of them all alone up at the farm without anyone to talk to or watch over them. It doesn’t seem right.”

  Ella Gunderson wondered where he was going with this all. “They are resourceful young people.”

  “Yes, they are. But they are still kids. They’re too old for us to force them into foster care, plus I don’t think that’s how this should be handled. But it occurred to me that you might be able to go up and stay with them for a week or two. Just to get them over this hump. Make sure they don’t fall apart. Talk to them about what has happened. You know. You’re good at that.”

  Ella stretched her head back as she thought. She hated to leave the comfort of her own home. She knew every step of this place by heart and didn’t need to worry about what she could see or not see. But in a big old farmhouse, it would be more difficult for her.

  “I could try it for a day or two.”

  “That would be just great, Mrs. Gunderson. Maybe that’s all they would need. It sure would make me feel more comfortable about their situation. Do you want me to call them and see if it would be all right?”

  “No, I’ll do it. I’ll talk to them at the funeral. It’s tomorrow. Are you going to it?”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “I suppose I should. I didn’t like the guy, myself.”

  Ella bent her head at his words. “I understand. But he’s gone now. I don’t think we go to funerals to say anything more to the dead; we go to give our love and comfort to the living.”

  Rich knew it was important that they find someone to plow the streets this winter. But they had been discussing this issue for the last hour and seemed no closer to resolving it. Board meetings were supposed to end at nine, which was only five minutes away.

  What irked him was that the board just didn’t want to pay anyone enough money to do a good job of it. But they would be the first to complain when the idiot they did hire did a lousy job. He would do it himself if they would pay him ten bucks an hour. But it was an insult to offer someone six dollars an hour to work out in the cold in the early morning to plow everyone out. He had already had his say on it, they hadn’t listened to him, and now he’d let them try to find someone for that insanely low amount.

  This was his second year on the board, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he wanted to sit on it. It wasn’t like he was so busy that he didn’t have the time, and he did believe it was his civic duty, but he never felt he was much good at it. He tended to disagree with everyone else on the board, except Stuart. Then, when he didn’t get his way, he would just clam up and let the other members hash the problem out.

  What he had come to see about himself was that he didn’t like working with other people. He found them slow and thoughtless. Usually irritating. He just wasn’t a company man. A loner was what he was.

  Lou Johnson, the youngest board member, spoke up. “Hey, guys. I’d plow the roads myself for eight bucks an hour.”

  Rich decided it was time to step in. “Let’s hire him. Enough said. Eight bucks an hour is a bargain, and we know Lou will do a good job.”

  Lou turned, not sure that he had actually heard a compliment coming from Rich Haggard. A goofy smile spread across his broad face. “I will do a good job.”

  “And we’ll know where to find him, if he oversleeps,” Stuart added.

  Everyone laughed at that remark. Stuart was good at saying the right thing at the right time and making everyone come together on an issue.

  “But it’s more than we have in the budget,” Lester Krenz, the mayor, pointed out.

  “I think there’s some flexibility there, Lester,” Stuart said. “We might not even get much snow this winter. If we do, I think we can dip into the campground funds to help out. After all, we’ve been talking about raising the camping fees.”

  “But we need a motion.”

  Rich was pleased to see it carry. Lou wore a grin the rest of the meeting. They adjourned just after nine o’clock. Stuart walked out the door with Rich and asked him if he wanted to go get a beer at the Fort.

  “Not tonight.”

  “You seeing Claire tonight?”

  “Don’t think so. She’s working a case.”

  “Spitzler?”

  “Yeah, you read about that in the paper?”

  “Hell, who needs to read about anything when the postmaster knows everything before it happens.”

  “Did you know Spitzler at all?”

  “Couldn’t even tell you what he looked like. I don’t think he frequented my establishment.” Stuart ran the bakery in town.

  “Probably not. His farm is about ten miles away from here. He’d go into Durand for baked goods.”

  “So it’s keeping Claire busy.”

  “I guess.”

  As Rich walked away, he wondered if there’d be a message from her on his machine. They had only been seeing each other a couple times a week, but after Saturday night he found himself wanting to talk to her more often. He wondered how sleeping together would change their relationship. Usually it was the woman who wanted to move in and get close and comfortable. But he thought with Claire it might well be different.

  He walked the half mile back to his farm along Highway
35. There wasn’t much traffic at night, and the late-summer air was still warm, but the first smells of autumn were in the air. A slight tang of leaves falling. A bit of a snap in the air. The softness of summer was leaving.

  When he was down the driveway from his house, he noticed that there was a dark pile of something sitting on his front steps. He couldn’t make it out. He tried to make it a pile of leaves, which didn’t make any sense. Maybe a bird had flown into the window of his back door and landed in a pile of feathers on the stoop. But as he walked closer, he saw a hint of color. Red. Something red.

  He came to the bottom of the steps and saw what had been placed in front of his door.

  A bouquet of roses. Red roses. In a glass vase.

  There was only one person who would have done that.

  No woman had ever given him flowers.

  He lifted the roses up into his arms and smelled their dusty sweetness. His heart lifted up in his chest from happiness. He was in love with a generous woman.

  Then he saw the note: “Rich, can’t see you for a while. Real busy with case. Claire.”

  If only I hadn’t become a police officer.

  If only I had never met Bruce.

  If only I had gotten the mail, my husband wouldn’t have walked out to get it, the truck wouldn’t have hit him, he’d still be alive.

  I know this all sounds utterly absurd.

  But what scares me the most is when I say, It should have been me who got hit by the truck. It should have been me that took a bullet in the chest.

  It makes this whole thing we’re doing, this life we’re living, seem a game. I feel like if I had moved two steps in a different direction at a certain time, everything would have turned out differently. Do you know what I mean?

  Yes, of course I do.

  Do you feel that?

  It’s close to despair. I do feel it sometimes.

  I don’t know if I told you, but I’m seeing someone. We’ve been friends for a while, and now we’re getting closer.

  And I realize I don’t know if I can do it.

  The other night I thought, for a second, that maybe if I gave Rich up, if I promised not to see him anymore, then I could get my husband back.