“Berglund messed with Sugar,” Mike said. “Now you’re messin’ with her, too.”
“You think of Genevieve as family,” I said.
“All the family I got left.”
I kept glancing from his face to the gun. He held it loosely in his hand, continued to point it at the center of my chest; it didn’t waver.
He’s a ninety-five-year-old man, my inner voice screamed. How come his hands aren’t shaking?
“You’ll die in prison,” I said.
“Gotta die somewhere.” He tightened his grip on the gun.
“Just tell me one thing, Mike,” I said. “Will you answer just one question?”
“Huh?”
“Did Frank Nash play golf?”
“What? No.”
I turned and leapt sideways behind a chair. Mike rushed his shot. There was a high-pitched crack, and a small-caliber bullet plowed harmlessly into the arm of the chair—harmlessly unless you happened to be the chair. I moved quickly in a low crouch past the chair and past a sofa, making my way toward the large door leading to the corridor. He moved to his left, covering the wide gap between the furniture and the door. He fired again, but it was just to remind me that he was there. I grabbed a large pillow, thinking I could distract him. I raised my head to see above the sofa.
Mike used both hands to level the gun at my face.
I flung the pillow as hard as I could at him and moved toward the corridor.
Mike tried to bring his hands up to take the blow, but he moved too slowly. The pillow caught the old man square in the face. The force of the blow was enough to send him staggering backward. He stumbled, tripped. He seemed to fall in stages, first his legs, then his rear, then his back, then his head. I heard the air escaping from his lungs.
A voice called out.
“Uncle Mike!”
Genevieve rushed into the room from the door nearest the elevator. She knelt at Mike’s side. I did the same thing. She gently cradled his head in her hands; the hat had fallen away, leaving a ring of wispy white hair. I yanked the gun out of his fist.
Mike gasped and wheezed and shook; his face was a ghastly white, and his eyes seemed to roll back into his head.
“Mike, Mike,” Genevieve chanted. “I’ll get help.”
Mike grasped her wrist in his frail hand. “No,” he said.
“Why not, Mike? You’re hurt.”
I sat on the arm of the chair that Mike had shot, the gun in my hands. It was a .25. I looked down at him, and he looked up at me.
“Fucking copper,” he said.
“Convict,” I said.
He was so old, his body so susceptible to damage, I wondered if the fall had killed him. Yet even as I watched, the color returned to his face and he began to regain his breath.
“Anything broken?” I said.
“I don’t think so.” He tried to rise, but it was too much effort and he slumped back against the floor. “Got taken out by a pillow. I don’t believe it.”
“It was a hard pillow,” I said.
“It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is.”
“Just rest easy,” I said. “Genevieve, why don’t you go for help. We’ll make sure Mike is all right and then we’ll call the police.”
“The police?” she said.
“Goin’ all the way, huh, copper?” Mike said.
“You have your code, convict. I have mine.”
“What are you talking about?” Genevieve said.
“Ahh, Sugar,” Mike said. “I killed that weasel Berglund. I knew what he did to you, knew how he treated you, so I shot him. I was gonna shoot the copper, too.”
“Why?”
From the expression on his face, Mike seemed surprised by the question. “Cuz you’re family,” he said.
“How did you kill Berglund?” I said.
“Wasn’t hard. He gave me his business card, so I knew where he lived. I just walked over to the shopping mall and grabbed a cab to a place not far from his apartment.”
“You walked,” I said.
“Gotta draw you a picture?”
I remembered what Ivy had said about Berglund’s killer. He walked so slowly, and he used the wall for support, like he was sick or something.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, when I got there, to the apartment, the door was wide open. I called, but no one answered.”
Whitlow, that putz, my inner voice said. He didn’t close and lock the door before he left.
“I went inside,” Mike said. “Didn’t take me long to understand that this was a woman’s apartment—the furniture, the clothes. I realized then that Berglund had not only messed with Sugar, he was cheating on his own woman. So I waited. Waiting made me think how foolish it all was, made me think I was getting too old for this kinda ruckus. I decided to leave. Only when I opened the door, Berglund was standing there.”
“Why did you shoot him?” I said.
“Way I saw it, he was standing between me and my freedom.”
Old habits die hard, my inner voice said.
“Where did you get the gun?” I said aloud.
“Had it for years,” Mike said. “Kept it hidden from the keepers.”
“Do you have a license for it?”
“McKenzie, please.”
Foolish question.
“It just keeps getting better and better,” I said. I made sure the safety was engaged and slipped the gun into my pocket.
“What happens now?” Mike said.
“That’s up to the courts,” I said.
“No,” Genevieve said.
“He killed a man,” I said. “He has to pay for that.”
“You get caught, you do the time, Sugar,” Mike said. “That’s how it works. Me and McKenzie, we know the rules.”
“Besides,” I said, “my friend is on the spot for it.”
“The friend you told me about,” Genevieve said.
I nodded.
“Yeah, I’m sorry ’bout that,” Mike said from the floor.
“But, but…” Genevieve chanted.
“There are no buts,” I said.
“You said—you told me that you were trying to help your friend. When we were on the phone, remember?”
“I remember.”
“Could you, would you … McKenzie, can you help Mike?”
“Why would I do that?”
“He’s my friend.”
I looked down at the ancient gangster. He was smiling as if he already knew my answer. The sonuvabitch tried to shoot you! my inner voice reminded me. Yet something about him, or maybe about Genevieve—or maybe I just wanted to redeem myself for hurting both Genevieve and Ivy unnecessarily … I shook my head at the wonder of my own generosity.
“Ahh, hell, Sugar,” I said. “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine.”
22
I don’t know what I was feeling when I entered Rickie’s. Happy, sad, angry, frustrated, embarrassed—all of the above. I had called Ivy after I gave my statement to Bobby Dunston and Jeannie Shipman at the James S. Griffin Building—they let me in after all. I told her that Uncle Mike had confessed to shooting Josh Berglund and produced the murder weapon in case there was any doubt. I told her that I had hired G. K. Bonalay to defend him. I told her that she had nothing more to fear. I expected Ivy to be thrilled, and I suppose she was. Even so, her response to the good news was to point out how wrong I had been about her.
“I told you I didn’t do it,” she said. “I told you, but you didn’t listen. You were my friend. You should have believed me.” She hung up before I could defend myself.
A few minutes later, she called back. “I’m sorry,” Ivy said. “You are my friend. You tried to look out for me, and I’m grateful. I really am. I only wish you would have believed me in the first place.”
“So do I,” I said.
She hung up again.
“I don’t blame Ivy for being upset,” Nina told me. She had a folded section of the morning St. Paul
Pioneer Press that must have been important, because she kept waving it.
“I don’t, either,” I said.
“What about the gold?”
“Yeah, about that.”
I explained about Kathryn’s missing letter and the Guardian Life Insurance Building and the fact that it was all a pile of rubble somewhere—maybe the gold had been crushed along with the concrete, maybe it hadn’t. “Heavenly and Whitlow are probably searching landfills even as we speak, if you want to join them,” I said.
“I wonder,” Nina said.
“What do you wonder?”
“Does it have to be an office in a building where he worked? I mean, couldn’t it be an office in his home? A home office. I have one. You have one—sorta.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Remember in Kathryn’s letters she complained about the mausoleum that Messer built for her?” Nina slid the folded newspaper toward me. “The Ramsey County Historical Society is conducting tours today of a house at 337 Summit Avenue, her old address. Someone had turned it into apartments in the mid-seventies, but the new owners paid a lot of money to have it restored to its original condition and are letting the society use it for fund-raising.”
I scanned the article but was too dim to see Nina’s point. “What does that have to do—”
“McKenzie, look.” Nina pressed her forefinger on the fourth paragraph of the piece. “Here,” she said.
The Presswood House was named after Robert Presswood, the lumberman and state senator who lived there for over thirty-five years. Presswood bought the house in 1936 immediately following the death of the original owner, famed architect Brent Messer, who designed and built the house for his wife, Kathryn, in 1928 …
Summit Avenue had always been St. Paul’s showcase, its most prestigious address. It curved for four and a half miles from the St. Paul Cathedral to the World War I monument located in the tiny park where Summit met the Mississippi River, and it had been the home of many of the city’s most illustrious citizens, from railroad tycoon James J. Hill to F. Scott Fitzgerald. What made it unique was that it had managed to retain its essential personality throughout decades of urban renewal. The great mansions still stood and were lived in; the houses, churches, and schools that had been slowly added since the first home was built in 1855 had all been constructed with an eye toward preserving the avenue’s Victorian charm and integrity. Bicyclists, Rollerbladers, joggers, and strollers all moved more slowly on the avenue than on any other promenade; rubbernecking tourists snarled traffic. When you were on Summit, you could feel the pull of the city’s glorious past.
Take the Presswood House. Brent Messer built it on the bluff side of Summit Avenue overlooking the valley descending to the Mississippi River. There had been a fifty-year-old Italian villa on the property when Messer bought it. He tore it down to make room for the house he designed personally for his young bride. Instead of embracing the building styles favored by his contemporaries, Messer reached back to the late nineteenth century for a Romanesque motif, the same style as James J. Hill’s monumental residence. While Hill’s house was singularly unattractive—it reminded me of a medieval castle; all it needed was a moat—Messer managed to build a house that projected not only strength and stability but also delicacy and warmth.
That’s what I was thinking while Nina and I waited for the tour to begin. Unfortunately, we weren’t alone.
Boston Whitlow was already at the house by the time we arrived. He was leaning against one of the posts holding up the striped canopy that protected the front entrance—apparently the county attorney had decided not to hold him for lying to the cops. He didn’t speak, but I could read the obscenity in his eyes. Meanwhile, two middle-aged women armed with clipboards greeted us cheerfully. We had not reserved a place ahead of time, so we were asked to “donate” twenty bucks each for a ticket; the women made it clear that the event was a fund-raiser for the Ramsey County Historical Society. We were each given a gold sticker, with RCHS stamped in black, that we dutifully positioned above our breasts and were promised that there would be refreshments and hors d’oeuvres on the patio following the tour, along with a presentation by the architects and remodelers who restored the mansion.
“Can’t wait,” I said. I was loud enough that Whitlow must have heard, but he pretended to ignore me. “Where’s Heavenly?” I said. “Don’t tell me you kids had another falling-out.” He ignored me some more.
I saw the question in her eyes, so I leaned down and told Nina in whispers who Whitlow was. She glanced at him once, then pretended to ignore him, too.
The parade was just beginning. A black limousine pulled up, a door opened, and Allen stepped out. He saw us instantly. His reaction was to bend down and speak earnestly to someone inside the car. A moment later, Timothy Dahlin emerged. He studied Nina, Whitlow, and me for a hard ten seconds, then decided to disregard our presence. While he approached the canopy, Heavenly arrived, smiling happily as if she knew her birthday wish was about to be granted, swinging her purse as she hustled up the avenue. She saw us, stopped, spun around, and showed us her back for half a minute before turning again and advancing toward the house. This time she looked as if she had failed to blow out all the candles.
Eventually the six of us were huddled near the front door, behaving as if we were all strangers.
“I’m guessing everyone here reads the St. Paul Pioneer Press,” I said.
No one replied.
There were several displays trumpeting the services of both the architectural firm and the interior designers who were responsible for renovating the Presswood House; brochures and business cards were available to whomever wanted one. Dahlin skimmed a brochure while he spoke, his voice flat, quiet, and without emotion.
“The gold belongs to me,” he said. “It’s my inheritance.”
“I thought you didn’t want the gold,” Heavenly said.
“If you had to, could you walk into a courtroom tomorrow and prove your relationship to Jelly Nash?” I asked. Dahlin didn’t reply. “How ’bout Brent Messer? Robert Presswood?”
“I’m the one who found out about the gold,” Heavenly said.
“No, it was me,” said Whitlow.
Allen stepped in front of them. “You did it while you were both employed by Mr. Dahlin, don’t forget,” he said.
Both Heavenly and Whitlow ignored him.
“It’s mine,” she said.
“It’s mine,” he said.
“Technically, it belongs to the United States Treasury Department,” I said.
“Screw you,” Whitlow said. “You knew about Messer’s home office. You were holding out on us.”
“Us,” Heavenly said. “When did it become ‘us’?”
“What’s it going to take to make you people disappear?” Dahlin said.
“Let’s not start that again,” I told him.
“I’m not leaving,” Heavenly said.
“Neither am I,” Whitlow said.
“Oh, for goodness sake, what are you, children?” Nina said. “Didn’t you learn anything in kindergarten? Didn’t you learn to share?”
That silenced us for a few beats.
“I have a suggestion,” I said.
Dahlin knew what I was going to propose before I proposed it. He threw up his hands and said, “Fine. I’ll go along.”
“Go along with what?” Whitlow said.
“An equal split—four shares,” I said.
“An equal split,” Heavenly repeated, but she wasn’t giving in.
“What alternative do we have?” I said. “We all know where the gold is—at least we think we do. No one is willing to leave it to the others.”
Heavenly covered her face with her hands, inhaled between her fingers, and held her breath like a little girl desperate to get her way. When she exhaled she found Whitlow’s eyes. The two of them stared at each other, communicating without speaking, until Whitlow said, “What about it, Hep?”
“Agreed,” she
said, although it sounded like she was agreeing to a flu shot.
Heavenly extended her hand, and Whitlow shook it. I shook Dahlin’s hand. Pretty soon everyone was shaking everybody’s hand.
“Wow, man,” I said. “We got the band back together.”
Finally a young woman dressed in all natural fibers led us forward. She was very pleasant and very knowledgeable and spoke with a nice, melodic voice, and she drove me nuts. Apparently she was under the impression that the group—we had swelled to over a dozen by the time she took us in hand—was actually interested in the building’s architecture and elegant furnishings. I blamed Nina and Heavenly because of the way they oohed and ahhed over every little thing. In the dining room there was a meticulously constructed cabinet built to store wineglasses that resembled a dollhouse.
“Isn’t it darling?” Nina said.
“Look, it has different rooms for different types of glasses,” said Heavenly. “Oh, how cute.”
“For God’s sake, keep your eyes on the prize, wouldja?” I said.
For the most part, they ignored me.
The tour actually started in the basement, where Messer had built an enormous German beer garden. It had a large, environmentally controlled wine cellar, an exquisite handmade pool table, and a mahogany bar that was bigger than the one at Rickie’s. Upstairs we toured an immense kitchen, a breakfast nook, a dining room, a library, a music room with a grand piano and a hired pianist, seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, three sitting rooms, a solarium, and a game room that had stained glass skylights facing north so the sun wouldn’t warm the place—after all, there was no AC when Messer built his dream house. It was stunning to think that after Kathryn left him he had lived in it all alone.
There were several decorators strategically placed throughout the house, and they and the tour guide emphasized that each room had been restored to it original condition for purposes of the tour. (It was suggested that the new owners would bring in their plasma TVs, PCs, CD players, and microwave ovens after we all left.) The Bellini landscapes on the wall had belonged to Messer, as well as most of the books on the shelves and the crystal and china in the dining room. There was a line drawing of a child building a house out of cards in the corridor with the legend LE PETITE ARCHITECTE that Messer was supposed to have received from his bride on their wedding day.
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