by Glenn Ickler
“He cleaned out our savings account—every last dime—and then took out cash loans on both of our credit cards. I tried to talk sense into him. I even went to Eddie and had Eddie talk to him. But it wasn’t any use. There was just no stopping him.
“It was like Jack was sick with a terrible disease that he couldn’t cure and didn’t really want to cure. I tried to block the door one day when he was starting to leave for the track and he threatened to knock my head off if I didn’t get out of his way. The man never once hit me in all our married years, but I think he would have done it that day if I hadn’t given up and stood to one side. That’s how sick he was.”
She paused and looked up at me, turning her head from side to side. “That happens to a lot of people,” I said. “A gambling addiction can be as bad as alcoholism or being hooked on dope.”
Jill nodded and looked past me to Edward, who still had his back toward us. “That’s the way it was,” she said. “An addiction. There was no stopping it. No cure for it. When he’d maxed out the credit cards, he started skipping payments on bills. Pretty soon we had calls about the electric and the water and even the mortgage. I was about out of my mind, but Jack was still going to that damn track every chance he had and telling me he was going to win it all back and get us out of debt.
“I didn’t know it, but he also borrowed money from some people he met at the track. People who charged a big rate of interest and who made sure they always got paid back. I found out about that when one of those people came around one Thursday night just before supper time and had a session in the garage with Jack. After the man left, I wouldn’t give Jack a second’s peace until he told me what was going on.
“Marilee heard us going at it and she got into it, too. She and Jack were always fighting, so naturally she jumped in on my side. That made Jack even madder—so mad that he finally told us that he owed the guy twenty thousand dollars and that the guy was coming to collect on Saturday.
“Of course we didn’t have twenty thousand dollars. Hell, I doubt if we had twenty dollars in cash by that time. But Jack said not to worry, that he’d made a deal with the guy that didn’t need cash. We both asked him over and over again what the deal was but Jack wouldn’t tell us. He finally told us both to go to hell, walked out of the house and drove away, probably to the goddamn track.”
Jill paused and looked up, and I saw tears beginning to flow from both eyes. I wanted to say something but couldn’t find any words that seemed appropriate. She pulled a white hanky with blue flowers around the edges from her jeans pocket and wiped away the tears.
“Jack didn’t come home until after I was asleep that night, and he was late coming home from work on Friday. I did not speak to him at all that night and neither did Marilee. We had eaten supper before he got home and I didn’t offer him anything. I went up to bed early and was sound asleep when Jack finally came up.
“I didn’t know what to expect Saturday morning. Marilee and I were in the kitchen when Jack came in and began to apologize for the way he’d been acting. He like to broke down crying he was so sorry about the whole thing. We finally all settled down and Jack gave Marilee some money and asked her to go to the store to pick up some things. She went out the door and . . . she never came back.”
The tears were running like twin rivers down Jill’s cheeks now, and she tried to dam the flow with the flower-rimmed hanky. I could feel my eyes growing moist in the corners but I refused to acknowledge this by drying them. I just told myself that reporters do not cry.
Edward broke the silence. “I suppose you’re gonna bring out all the rest of the shit now.” He had turned around and was glaring at us, his wrinkled face screwed into a scowl.
“I am,” Jill said. “Like I said, it can’t hurt Jack and I don’t give a good goddamn about myself anymore.”
“What about me?” Edward asked. “What can happen to me?”
“You’re not involved,” Jill said. “You didn’t find out what Jack had done until days afterward, and you don’t even know the worst of it.”
“What do you mean the worst of it?” he asked.
“Why don’t you just shut your mouth and listen,” Jill said. “You’ve got a big, nasty surprise coming.”
Edward shrugged and sat down in a chair beside the bay window. “Okay, spill your stupid guts. We’re both listenin’.” He stretched out his legs and folded his arms.
Jill looked at me again. “You know a lot about what happened in the next few days. You’ve written about it in the paper. How Jack went looking for Marilee and how we both were crazy with worry all day and how the cops ignored us for a while because Marilee had taken off without telling us a couple of times before. But what you don’t know, and Eddie here doesn’t know, either, is what happened that Saturday night.”
“So what happened?” Edward said.
“I’m about to tell you,” Jill said. “Jack and I were in the kitchen. I was making a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches for our supper and Jack was honing one of the big butcher knives he used at work, when the door opened and the man who wanted the twenty thousand dollars came charging in. He was raving mad, hollering that ‘the bitch’ had gotten away and was hiding somewhere and he couldn’t find her. He kept yelling about ‘the bitch’ being gone and that if she was hiding here in this house he wanted her back right now.
“Jack told him that ‘she’ wasn’t here and that he had no idea where ‘she’ was. The man said if that was true, he wanted his twenty grand, and walked up to Jack with his hand out. Jack had that big sharp butcher knife in his hand and he swung it right across the man’s neck. Like to almost cut his head off . . .”
Edward was out of his chair, yelling, “Jesus Christ, you mean Jack killed that man?”
“Faster than you can say the words,” Jill said. “Just like that the man drops to the floor and blood goes flying everywhere, all over the floor and the cabinets and the stove. I was so shocked I actually peed in my pants.”
“And you guys never told me about that?” Edward said.
“What would you have done if we had?” Jill said. “Would you have called the cops on us?”
“God, no,” he said. “I’d have kept your secret.”
“Maybe,” she said. “And maybe it would have got to be too much for you, like it has for me right now. Jack said right away we shouldn’t say anything to anyone, especially to his brother, because his brother could never keep his mouth shut.”
Edward slumped back into the chair. “I can’t believe it. Jack killed a man. Right here in this house. Cut his throat right here in this house.”
“What happened next?” I asked. I was beginning to see where this was going and I needed to get Jill back on track.
“We stood there looking at the mess on the floor for a while, Jack with the knife in his hand and me with piss dripping down my legs,” Jill said. “When I finally could talk, I asked Jack what the crazy fool was talking about. Who was ‘the bitch’ that he was looking for? Jack told me to sit down. I asked him why and he said to just sit down and he’d tell me.
“When I sat, Jack put the knife in the sink and started the water running to wash away the blood that was on the blade. Then he turned and looked at me and said that the bitch was Marilee. He had given our daughter Marilee to that awful man to cover his twenty-thousand-dollar debt.” She stopped talking and dropped her chin back down onto her breast.
“My God, what did you do?” I said.
“At first I didn’t know what to do. Then I exploded. I went up to Jack and I started hitting him with my fists and screaming at him and calling him terrible names. He just stood there and took the beating until my arms got so tired I couldn’t hit him anymore. Then he put his arms around me and held me while I cried, and he said everything would be okay because Marilee had gotten away, and she’d be coming home after hiding out from this guy for a while. Then he said what we had to do real quick was hide this creep’s body and clean up the kitchen so’s there wouldn’t be
any blood when Marilee got home.
“When I couldn’t cry no more I realized that he was right, that we had to do something with the body and then clean up the mess. I asked Jack, ‘what if someone comes looking for this guy,’ and Jack said, ‘we’ll say we don’t know where he could be.’ The guy was just a sleazy crook who’d come to Minnesota from out east somewhere and no family was going to be missing him, Jack said.
“Anyhow, Jack had a big blue sheet of plastic in the basement that he’d used for a drop cloth when we painted the house, so he brought that up and we rolled the guy up in it and lugged it out to the garage and stuffed him into the trunk of Jack’s Buick. I was glad he was a skinny guy because he was still awful heavy. Then we stayed up all night scrubbing up every speck of blood we could find in the kitchen. We thought we covered every square inch, but even so I’d find a spot somewhere for the next couple of weeks. If the cops had ever searched the house, I’m sure they’d have found enough blood spots to put us in jail for life.”
“Maybe not, if they didn’t know a man was missing and didn’t find a body,” I said. “How and when did the body get from the car trunk to the backyard?”
“We didn’t know what to do with it. We knew we couldn’t keep it in the car very long because it would start to stink pretty quick in the hot weather. Jack said we had to bury it somewhere but we couldn’t think of a safe place where nobody would see us or find the grave.
“I actually came up with the idea of digging up a garden plot and burying the body there. I’d always wanted a rose garden and the idea just kind of popped into my head. So on Monday, between talking about Marilee to the cops and the reporters and the neighbors, we dug up part of that big plot in the back where they found the skeleton last week. I suppose we raised some eyebrows starting a rose garden in July, but people looked at us as kind of strange anyways because we weren’t all that sociable. By Tuesday night we had dug up a spot big enough to bury the body without it looking funny, so we lugged him out there at two o’clock in the morning and put him in and covered him up. Not deep enough, I guess.”
“And then you planted roses on top of him?” I asked.
“Yup,” Jill said. “We’d bought a whole bunch of plants and we put them in real close together all over that piece of ground. You can’t say we didn’t decorate that bastard’s grave.” She actually chuckled at that.
“Oh, my God, Jill, that’s sick,” Edward said. “I can’t believe you guys did such a gross thing. My own brother . . .”
“What else could we do?” Jill said. “Can you imagine telling the cops we’d killed a guy that Jack had sold our daughter to?”
“Self-defense,” Edward said. “You could have pled self-defense. Didn’t you say the guy came at Jack?”
“We weren’t about to risk that,” Jill said. “We just wanted to get everything cleaned up and out of the way for when Marilee came back home.”
“But she never came,” Edward said.
“That’s the only thing I feel bad about,” Jill said. “Looking back at it now, I’m not a bit sorry that Jack killed that son of a bitch.”
“You’ve really never heard anything at all from Marilee?” I said.
“Never,” she said. “Not one word. Either something bad happened to her or she was so mad at us she didn’t want to come home. I hope it was that, but I’ve always been afraid that some other pervert found her and did something awful to her. It’s hard to believe that she would stay away from her family this long if she was alive.”
I had been scribbling notes like crazy in case the tape ran out. I finally put the notebook down by my side and clicked shut the ballpoint pen. I couldn’t think of another question to ask Jill.
Edward rose and walked up to me. “So, what are you going to do now, Mr. Newspaperman?”
“I’m going to write a story about what I’ve just heard, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to run the facts past the chief of homicide as a courtesy before the story goes into print,” I said. I could imagine Brownie’s reaction if this bombshell appeared in the paper without his prior knowledge. I’d have to go back to covering art fairs and writing obituaries because I’d never get another word out of him or anyone else in the St. Paul PD.
“That means they’ll be comin’ after Jill,” Edward said.
“They’re planning to talk to her anyway about Jack’s suicide,” I said. “This will just give them a little broader subject matter.” Yes, I thought, the conversation will broaden to such topics as accessory to murder, unlawful disposal of a body, and conspiracy to conceal a criminal act. She would need a very good lawyer and I had one in mind. I pulled my billfold out of my rear pocket and withdrew a business card.
“I’d recommend calling this law firm before you talk to the police,” I said, laying the card on top of the manila envelope on the coffee table. “Ask for Linda L. Lansing. She’s the best there is at helping people who need a strong defense. Tell them I told you to call.”
“I don’t really care if I go to jail,” Jill said.
“I think you’ve already been punished enough,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to go to jail, but you probably will if you don’t have the proper defense. I’ll tell Linda you’ll be needing her services. And thank you so much for trusting me with your story.”
Jill rose from the sofa and reached out for my hand. I dropped the ballpoint onto the coffee table and took her hand in mine. Her grip was much stronger than I expected.
“You’re so very welcome,” she said. Ah, there was a woman with proper manners, even under duress.
* * *
I WAS FLYING HIGHER than a space probe when I got back to the Daily Dispatch newsroom. I told Don O’Rourke what I had and he almost jumped out of his chair and kissed me. “Get it done now,” he said. “This is amazing after all these years.”
“I’ll have to run it past Brownie,” I said. “He’ll kill me if we drop it on him without any warning.”
“Tell him you’re making no changes,” Don said.
“Of course. It’s just a courtesy call.”
“Has your twin got any shots of Jill Anderson?”
“He got some the day we borrowed Marilee’s picture.”
“I’ll go see him,” Don said. “You get writing.”
I wrote the story almost word for word as Jill had told it, practically floating on air above my chair as I pecked away at the keyboard. When I finished, I sent a copy to Don and picked up the phone.
“Homicidebrown,” said Brownie.
“Dailydispatchmitchell,” I said. “I am about to e-mail you a story we’ll be running on page one. I’d suggest you sit down while you read it. If you have any comment to go with it, give me a call. I’ll be here the rest of the day.”
“What the hell is it?” Brownie said.
“I had a chat with Jill Anderson this morning. You’ll be very interested in what she said.”
“She actually talked to you?”
“She did. For quite a long time, as you’ll see.”
“Okay. Send it along. Have a good day.” I wanted to say that I was having a wonderful day, but he’d already put down the phone.
My phone rang ten minutes after I’d sent the e-mail to Brownie. Looking forward to his reaction, I picked up the receiver and said, “So, how’d you like it?”
“It’s Morrie,” said the dreary voice. “I don’t like it.”
I wanted to scream, but I kept my voice down to about ninety decibels. “Goddamn it, Morrie, I don’t have time to talk right now.”
“But the Russians are beaming their radar at me. You need to write about it.”
I had to get rid of him quickly. “Listen, Morrie, go into the kitchen and eat a sandwich,” I said.
“Why a sandwich?”
“It will confuse the Russians. They’ll think it’s lunch time and turn off the radar and go eat some borscht.”
“That’s a great idea. I’ll make a ham sandwich right away.”
“Put Russian dr
essing on it if you’ve got some. Bye, now.” I slammed down the phone.
Corinne Ramey was staring at me from the next desk. “Who’s going to eat borscht?” she asked.
“The Russians who are beaming their radar at Morrie,” I said. “It’s a diversionary tactic.”
“Sometimes I think you’re as nutty as he is.”
“Oh, really? Next time I’ll transfer the call to you.”
“Never mind. You’re the man, Mitch, you’re the man.”
My phone rang again. This time it was Brownie.
“How the hell did you ever get that woman to spill her guts like that?” he asked.
“Her guts just couldn’t hold the crap inside anymore and I was the lucky person on hand to collect the contents,” I said. “Do you have any printable comments to go along with it?”
“Not really. You can put in a sentence that says that I said we’ll be talking to her if you want to. Other than that, the less I say about it right now, the better.”
“I’ll add that tidbit. Anything else?”
“No. Oh, wait! Did she happen to give you the dead guy’s name?”
“No, she didn’t. I doubt if she knows it, but you can ask her.”
“Believe me, I will. We thought old Jack knew a lot more about Skeleton X than he was telling us but we couldn’t get him to crack. I am amazed that the woman let it all come rolling out. Anyway, thanks for the head’s up and have a good day.” He hung up while I was saying, “You’re welcome.”
* * *
WHEN I GOT HOME at a few minutes after five, I practically ran into the apartment to tell Martha about my amazing day. I bounced into the living room ready to shout out my story, but throttled down my excitement level when I found our next-door neighbor Zhoumaya Jones sitting in her wheelchair in our living room. Even though her expression hinted that this was not a pleasure-filled occasion, I remembered my manners enough to greet her and say, “To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?”
