by Glenn Ickler
“You stole money from the store?”
“Oh, yah, but I paid them back years ago. I sent the money to Bert Love.”
“He told me he’s never heard from you,” I said.
“I sent it anonymous, cash with no name,” Jim said. “You could ask him if he ever got fifty dollars in an envelope with no name on it. Probably about two years after I left town.”
Another point of confirmation. “I’ll do that. We’ll see if he remembers getting something like that more than twenty years ago.” I drew another big asterisk by that note. “You left the day after Marilee vanished. Did you go to your cousin in Stockton?”
“No. After what happened with Slick, I didn’t want to get her involved with me. I took a train to Seattle instead, and got a job on a fishing boat.”
“Okay, so tell me: what did happen with Slick?”
There was a long silence before I heard Jim suck in a deep breath and blow it out into my earpierce. “It’s hard to talk about it, Mr. Mitchell. But here goes.” He took another deep breath before he started. “I was behind the counter in the store that morning and there weren’t any customers, so I was just kind of staring half asleep out the front window when I saw Marilee coming on the other side of the street. That kind of woke me up, and I watched her come across and walk toward our front door.
“Then, I don’t know where he came from, but all of a sudden Slick was beside her and he grabbed her arm and started yanking her away from the door. Marilee yelled something at him and tried to pull away, but he was way stronger than she was and he started hauling her up the street. Well, I knew who he was and what he was and I wasn’t going let him take my girlfriend away and start selling her ass on the street. So I went around the counter and ran out the door and yelled at him to let Marilee go.
“Well, of course he didn’t. He just said for me to fuck off and kept pulling Marilee along. She was screaming and fighting something fierce and I was running after them, and he all of a sudden smacked her across the face with the back of his free hand. That really pissed me off, and when I caught up to them I grabbed the arm he was holding her with and tried to yank it off of her.” I noticed that Jimmy wasn’t apologizing for his language any more.
“Well, he swung at me with his other hand but I ducked under it and I bit him in the arm he was holding Marilee with. I mean I really sank my teeth into that arm. It was hairy and sweaty, and I can still feel it and taste it now that I think about it. Anyhow, he was so surprised that he let go of Marilee and I quit biting him and yelled at her to run like hell and get away.
“She took off like a shot, and Slick started to chase her but I tackled him and we went down on the sidewalk. He must have hit his head because he was laying on his face for a minute without moving and I jumped up off of him. I was standing there, wondering what to do next, when he rolled over and sat up and pulled a big old knife out of his belt. I knew what to do then, and I took off running for the store. He took off after me, yelling that he was going to kill me, but I beat him to the door and slammed it in his face and snapped the lock.
“Slick stood outside, yanking away on the door and waving the knife and saying he’d be waiting for me and that he’d kill me when he caught me. I yelled back that I was going to call the cops and I went to the phone behind the counter to do that. Before I could punch in the number, Slick took off running, so I didn’t make the call. Later, I wished that I would have.”
He paused for breath and I asked, “Why is that?”
“Because then we might have found Marilee,” he said. “I went back to the front window and looked all around but I didn’t see her anywhere, so I figured she must have run home. Then a couple of hours later when her old man came in looking for her, I found out that she hadn’t gone home. But I didn’t have no clue where she went, and as the day went on and her old man didn’t find her anywhere in the neighborhood, I didn’t know where else to look for her.”
“Didn’t you tell her father and the police that you hadn’t seen her at all?” I asked.
“Oh, yah, I sort of lied to him about that because I was scared that he was mad at her and that he’d give her a whipping for not coming home with whatever he’d sent her to the store to get. I didn’t know that he’d actually sold her to Slick and was faking not knowing what had happened to her. The rotten bastard used to beat her on her bare ass, you know. Got off on it, I think. Anyhow I figured she must be hiding ’til it was safer to go home so I told him she hadn’t come into the store, which actually was the truth because she hadn’t. Then later when the cops asked me, I had to tell the same thing to them.”
The whole story sounded weird to me. “So you didn’t know for sure where Marilee was, but you packed up your stuff that night and took off for Seattle the next morning?” I said.
“I called their house that night and disguised my voice and asked for Marilee, and her mom said she wasn’t there. I didn’t know where to look for her. I mean, the neighbors and the cops had been looking all day. The only thing I knew for sure was that Slick would be coming after me with that knife as soon as he had a chance, so I threw some clothes together, went to the depot early in the morning and caught the first train heading west, which was going to Seattle. When I got there I called the Andersons’ house again and asked for Marilee, and her mom said she’d disappeared. Then I figured either Slick had come back and caught her, or she’d taken the chance to get away from home and was hiding from her old man somewhere.”
“But you never came back to St. Paul to look for her?” I said.
“I was scared to come back at first, because of Slick,” Jim said. “I didn’t know her old man had killed him. Then I met a girl in Seattle and we had a baby together before she left me for a guy with more money. By that time I’d forgotten all about Marilee and I decided to move to Alaska and look for a better job.”
“Did you find one?”
“Don’t I wish? I’m still working on a goddamn fishing boat, only at least this one’s my own.”
“Why haven’t you ever contacted your family back here?”
“My folks died in a car crash when I was little so I was living with my grandma, who really didn’t want me. I did call her from Seattle off and on. Then I called one day and a stranger answered and told me that Grandma had dropped dead in the kitchen of a massive heart attack. There wasn’t nobody else there that I could talk to after that.”
“No brothers or sisters? What about your cousin Roger?” I asked.
“Roger’s wife said he was in the army in Afghanistan, and I’m an only child. Like Marilee. That’s one of the things we had in common,” Jim said.
“What were some of the others?”
He was silent for a moment before he said, “We both hated our home lives and we both really liked to screw.”
“She was underage. You could have done jail time if her parents had found out.”
“I know. I never thought about that at the time.”
“Would you be willing to tell all this to the St. Paul police? Maybe leaving out the part about having sex with a fifteen-year-old?”
“Oh, yah, I suppose so. Everything except the sex and maybe the part about taking the fifty dollars.”
“I won’t mention either one if you don’t.”
“You don’t think they’ll come after me for lying to them way back then, do you?”
“I’m sure the statute of limitations on lying to an officer is long past. Now, give me a number where I can reach you after I check out what you’ve told me. I’m not writing a story until I’m convinced that you’re who you say you are.”
“I can give you what my parents’ first names were and what my grandma’s name was, along with her address and her birthday. You can check those things out. I wouldn’t know that kind of stuff if I was just some wingnut calling in to make you look foolish, would I?”
“Probably not,” I said. He recited that information, and I wrote it down and drew a really big asterisk next to it. He fo
llowed up by giving me his phone number, his e-mail address, and his street address in Ketchikan.
“I’m on Facebook, too,” he said. “If you want to, you can ‘like’ my page.”
“I like you very much,” I said. “And you’ll soon be hearing from a detective named Brown who will like you even more.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Fact Checking
JIMMY BJORNQUIST!” Don O’Rourke shouted it so loud that every head in the newsroom turned his way. “You just talked to Jimmy Bjornquist?”
“He claimed to be Jimmy Bjornquist and he sounded authentic,” I said.
“What did he say? Can we get his picture? Where is he?” Don said.
“In Ketchikan, Alaska. Want to send Al up there for pix?”
“Buy me a plane ticket and I’m on the way,” said Al, who had come running out of the photo department when he heard Don yell out Bjornquist’s name.
“Don’t you wish?” Don said. “Damn, I was hoping he was right here in town.”
“Has he got a cell phone up there?” Al asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s got e-mail.”
“If he’s got a cell phone, you could ask him to shoot a selfie and e-mail it to us,” Al said.
“Great idea,” Don said.
“I’m not so sure he’d be up for that,” I said.
“All you can do is ask,” Don said.
“Okay, I’ll try,” I said. “But first I need to check out some things to make sure it really was Jimmy and not some smartass playing games with the paper.”
“Well, get busy checking,” Don said. “Then call him and ask him for a selfie and get started writing that story.”
I decided to begin by finding out if anybody in the police department remembered a pimp named Slick. I called Brownie and got the usual, “Homicidebrown.”
“Dailydispatchmitchell,” I said. “I bet you’ll never guess who I just talked to on the phone.”
“How should I know? Was it Mickey Mouse? The Tooth Fairy? The ghost of Skeleton X?”
“Even better than Exie’s ghost. The living, breathing body of Jimmy Bjornquist.”
A moment of silence, and then, “Are you shittin’ me?”
“Have I ever done that?
“Yes, lots of times.”
“Okay, but this time I’m not. The guy said he was Jim Bjornquist and he sounded very authentic. I need to check some things to verify that it was him, and one of them involves the police department. I need you to ask around and see if anybody who was working vice when Marilee disappeared remembers a pimp named Slick operating in that part of town.”
“Slick? Slick what?”
“Jimmy never knew the guy’s last name, but he says that Skeleton X is a pimp named Slick.”
“Okay, I’ll ask around. Anything else? Do you have this guy’s phone number so that I can talk to him?”
“I do, and I’ll give it to you on the condition that you won’t talk about this to any other reporter until my story—assuming there’ll be one—hits the paper.”
“Fair enough. I’ll call you back if I find out anything about Slick. And I want a rundown on what Bjornquist told you before your story hits the paper.”
“Fair enough. Happy hunting for Slick. And here’s the phone number.”
Brownie copied the number and said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“I’m glad you said that. I hate it when I thank somebody and they say ‘no problem.’ Have a good day, Mitch.” How about that? An unexpected comrade in etiquette arms.
I was smiling when I put down the phone, which prompted Corinne Ramey to ask what I was so pleased about.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said. “It’s an inside issue.”
“Okay, no problem,” she said. Apparently nothing was a problem for this woman.
The information the caller had given me about Jimmy Bjornquist’s parents and grandmother checked out. I even found a news clip about the accident in which his parents were killed—a head-on with a pickup truck on an ice-slicked road in freezing rain. The date was appropriate; Jimmy would have been three years old. I also found an obit for his grandmother. Again, the date was appropriate. Jimmy would have been living in Seattle when she died.
The only asterisk left to check out was my note about fifty dollars being sent to Adelbert Love. I hoped I could do this one by phone rather than make another trip to the senior care center. I called the number, identified myself, and asked the woman who answered if it would be possible to speak with Mr. Love. She put me on hold and I listened to some music from the fifties while she was away. When she returned, she said she would transfer my call to a phone that Mr. Love was holding in his hand.
“Hey, sonny, what’s up?” said Adelbert Love’s cheerful voice. “You’re cuttin’ into my card game, you know.”
“Are you playing Solitaire?” I asked.
“Heck no. Cribbage. And Ellie’s beatin’ my butt again.”
“You’re still playing Cribbage with Mrs. Miller?”
“That’s right. Ellie and me have been playin’ every day since you told me about her. Sometimes I have to introduce myself again because she forgot who I am overnight, but she ain’t forgot how to play a wicked game of Cribbage. So what can I do for you?”
“I need you to think back about twenty-three years,” I said. “Do you remember ever getting an envelope in the mail with fifty dollars in it and no return address or note?
After a silence so prolonged that I was afraid the connection had been broken, Love said, “Yeah, now that I think about it, there was a piece of mail like that way back, about that time. I wondered about where that fifty bucks came from for a long time. How’d you find out about it?”
“I talked to the sender this morning. It was Jim Bjornquist. He told me that he’d anonymously returned fifty bucks that he’d taken from the store.”
“Well, I’ll be dipped,” Love said. “So that was from Jimmy. And you say you talked to him today? Where the hell is he?”
I told him where Jimmy had gone originally, where he was currently, and what he was doing in Ketchikan.
“He was a good boy,” Love said. “Kind of lazy, but all kids that age were. Never realized he’d swiped fifty bucks from the till. He could’ve kept it and I’d never have known the difference. Anything else I can tell you?”
“No, sir, you’ve helped verify that the man who called me really was Jim Bjornquist. I’ll let you get back to losing your card game. Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. Ah, yes, a true gentleman.
I had enough verification to start on my story without waiting on word from the police department. I was on about the tenth graf when that word came on a call from Brownie, who’d found a veteran vice squad officer who remembered a pimp called Slick.
“Slick Jackson was his full name,” Brownie said. “Operated kind of as a team with a loan shark named Moneybags Mahoney. Eddie says they were a couple of really vicious bastards. Says Jack Anderson did society a favor by cutting Slick’s throat.”
“Great,” I said. “Everything else checks out. I’m going to call Jim right now and ask him if he’ll send us a selfie. After that I guess you can call him any time. Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome.” How I love to hear those words.
To my amazement, Jim Bjornquist agreed to send us a selfie. When it arrived, we compared it to a picture in the Daily Dispatch files that had been acquired from Jim Bjornquist’s grandmother a day after Marilee Anderson vanished. The two faces were similar enough to give us another point of verification. Bjornquist’s cheeks had fattened and his hairline had retreated a bit in the ensuing twenty-five years, but there was no doubt about who he was.
I went back to my computer and finished my story, which I then sent to Don O’Rourke. I called Brownie and gave him a nutshell version of what Bjornquist had told me, omitting the underage sex and the borrowed fifty dollars.<
br />
It was after six o’clock when I sat back in my chair, feeling incredibly pleased and satisfied with myself.
“You look like the cat that ate a whole cage full of canaries,” Al said as he came by my desk to say good night.
I grinned like a carved Halloween pumpkin.
“I haven’t felt this good about a story in years,” I said.
“I don’t blame you. It’s a great story. It’s only missing one thing.”
I couldn’t imagine what I’d left out. I stopped grinning and asked, “What’s missing?”
“Where did Marilee Anderson go after she got away from Slick?”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Getting Warmer?
NORMALLY I DO VERY little talking at my Monday night Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. But many in the group had read the story of my encounter with Robert Obachuma, so on this Monday night I was asked question after question about those awful minutes. Without realizing what I was doing, I eventually rambled from a description of the feel of a knife at my throat to a confession of my desperate desire for a drink. This led to more intense questioning, and in excruciating detail, I poured out the whole episode of the wine bottle and my rescue by Martha’s just-in-time phone call. When I finished, my face was running with sweat, my armpits were drenched, and my body felt like it had followed the wine down the sink drain.
My face was still moist when the session ended, which caused Jayne Halvorson to ask if I had enough energy to indulge in our usual post-meeting ginger ale at Herbie’s Bar. I thought a jolt of sugary drink would help me get home safely, so I made the trek to Herbie’s on slightly elastic knees.
After a couple of swigs of ginger ale, I found the strength to speak. “I don’t know which hit me harder, remembering the knife at my throat or telling the group about my close call with the wine.”
“They were both pretty traumatic,” Jayne said. “But I’m betting it was harder to talk about the wine.”
“I think you win that bet. I never meant to mention the wine at all. I just sort of slid into it, and then everybody was asking questions and there was no going back.”
