Legally he had no real link to the little girl or her mother, but his heart was stolen by her, and every time he saw the little girl he wondered how much of his son was in her burgeoning personality. He had known his only son for only a short time, the boy a product of his only marriage. When he was being entirely honest with himself, he knew the real question was how much of himself had gone through his son to little Maridly. Only rarely did he allow himself to dwell on what sort of children he and Maridly Nantz might have had. They had never married, never had a kid; she was dead, and they would never have a kid, and in his life of priorities the past was worthy of only the briefest of glances. Why dwell on what you can’t change? But Lori was right, this would be a good opportunity to visit Karrylanne and Maridly. He wrote down the lawyer’s phone number and office address.
“Is this Frosty person expecting a call from me?” he asked the former governor.
“No, but you could surprise her.”
Surprise her? Why would that be? Is Lori telling stories about me? Damn meddler.
He called the woman moments later, expecting to get an answering machine. He was surprised when she picked up on the first sound. “Law Offices of White, Kobera, Moody, Moody, and O’Halloran, this is Frosty.”
“Sorry to call so late. This is Grady Service. Lori Timms spoke with you.”
“She did. We’re old friends. You and I need to meet. My office is in Houghton, but how about breakfast at the Kaleva in Hancock? It’s on Quincy Street.”
“I know the place, what time?”
“Not intrusively early. I have a quite heavy real work load right now. Shall we say 0700?”
This wasn’t too early? He and the crew would have to be on the road by 0400. “It’s midnight now,” he said, hoping she’d take the hint.
“You’re right. Let’s make it 0715,” she said, “and before we disconnect, tell me how much you know about someone named Stafinski, first initial W. He may have owned land in what now is the Mosquito.”
“Don’t know diddly,” he told her, “but this is the second time in a short while that name has come up.”
“The W is for Walenky,” she said.
“You win the Trivia game, good for you.”
He heard an odd snorty sound. “You think this is a . . . game?” she asked, and hung up.
Good start, he told himself. You’re smooth as broken nails on a wall top. Did the sudden hang-up mean meeting, or no meeting? Do I call her back or not? No, you go and act like the meeting is on and if she doesn’t show, you’ll understand and you’ll also know she’s a kook. Either way, you win . . . not counting the 0400 departure time.
*****
His crew finished off a two-quart thermos of coffee as he drilled across the U.P. on dirt roads before swinging up to US 41/28 and making his way through Houghton across the lift bridge to Hancock. The two towns faced each other across the Portage Shipping Canal, but were invariably described as a single place: Houghton-Hancock. Every time he crossed the bridge onto the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula, he was reminded of the story of a ship’s captain who had been drunk and bounced his ship off one of the bridge pilings. There was a day in this country, where such behavior would hardly warrant a second look, and it made him wonder what being a game warden had been like a hundred years ago.
The other two men, having inhaled all the coffee, went to sleep and spent the trip trying to outdo each other’s snoring, both of them so loud he considered getting his ear protectors out of the JoBox in the truck bed.
He hadn’t been in the Kaleva Café in years and thought he’d heard it had gotten new owners a few years back. If so, they’d made no external changes.
He could see the three-story building from a block east, “Kaleva Café” in huge white letters on an old brick wall, “Café” in a gaudy script. A new sign over the front door advertised “Fresh Hot Pasties.” Inside were rows of tables and booths, red chairs with metal frames, salmon and odd yellow walls. There were red condiment boxes on the tables with words in white, “Start Your Day at the Kaleva Café.” Not a new slogan, or a catchy one, unless this was 1954.
They were met inside by a waitress with a name tag that said Lilach. “Officer Service,” she greeted them. “Em Ess O’Halloran awaits your party in the meeting room.”
“Em Ess?”
The waitress rolled her eyes. “You know, it’s like the mizzzzzz thing? She fries butts if we don’t get it right. Says it’s a matter of common courtesy. Ask me, it’s a matter of her being uppity. This is the U.P., not DeeeTroit.”
“She finds Em Ess acceptable?” he asked.
Lilach grinned. “Not so much, hey, but it’s technically correct and everybody knows us Yoopers don’t talk so good, eh. This stops her from going all high-horse with the new owners.”
Service smiled. The people who now owned the restaurant would still be referred to as the new owners until they sold the place twenty-five years from now, at which time the purchasers would inherit the “new owner” label. Same way if one moved to the U.P. from somewhere else, you remained new, no matter how long you lived up here. Not born here? Then you’re not from here.
“Patty, she works here too,” Lilach went on. “Patty says it’s a passion-aggression thing, ya know, like wet spaghetti? Youse can’t even push it, hey. Is everyone nuts these days?”
The meeting room wasn’t a separate room. Rather it was a corner of the main dining room, and there a woman sat like a professional gambler with her back to the wall. Scarecrow-thin, dishwater blond, thirtyish, jutting jaw, little makeup, no jewelry. She wore a Finlandia University sweatshirt over a yellow shirt and black jeans. The shirt was emblazoned with the letters F U, which made him wonder if the lawyer had a quirky sense of humor.
“Service?” she said, glancing up.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Sit,” she ordered, and then to the waitress, “My guests will have breakfast, Lilach.”
“Yes, Em Ess, would the gentlemen have coffee to start?”
Treebone and Allerdyce winced, and Tree asked where the men’s room was. Service told her he’d have a cup.
“Full stuff or half ethel?” the waitress asked.
“Both,” the lawyer asserted. “Bring urns. We don’t want any interruptions.”
“Me,” Allerdyce said, “Wunt mind da tea, hey.”
“Half and half in the urns, or an urn of full and an urn of half, and a separate pot of tea?” the waitress asked, and Service guessed she was showing her own “passion aggression.”
“Whatever,” O’Halloran said.
The waitress said, “Yes, Em Ess, whatever,” and with that she was gone.
He knew he had just watched one small battle in one very small war, the stuff of daily life in small towns.
O’Halloran looked at the old poacher and said, “Sit down, old man, before you end up back in jail.”
“Youse got no cause talk me dat way, girlie.”
The lawyer said icily, “Don’t you dare call me girlie, you pitiful, duplicitous, pompous, frivolous, homicidal savage. You are the poorest excuse for a human being in the entire Upper Peninsula, which offers a lot of candidates. Sit your scrawny corpus down and do not speak unless spoken to. I’ll need two showers after just sitting at the same table with you.”
“Okay den,” Allerdyce said, sat down, and added, “girlie.”
The woman gave Treebone such an evil eye that he immediately fled to find the men’s room.
The lawyer said nothing more until the waitress came with her tray and Treebone returned. They all placed breakfast orders, and when the waitress was gone, the attorney said, “The three of you together, two old-timey head-knocking dicks and an ex-con deer-stealer—not exactly the holy trinity.”
She looked at Treebone, “How many times have you been suspended by Metro?”
“I never counte
d, is it important?”
O’Halloran turned her attention to Service, who shrugged and said, “What?”
She looked back to Treebone. “I am shocked that the city of Detroit allowed you to retire. With a record like yours, an indictment might have been more to the point.”
Service saw his friend’s eyes light up, but it was Allerdyce who spoke. “What got youse all righty-tighty, girlie?” It was his high-pitched voice, the one that came as a prelude to physical action.
“I told you to zip it,” the lawyer said, glaring at him.
“Youse can piss up da ropes,” Allerdyce snapped at her. “Dese guys ’n’ me we don’t take no shit offen no fools. You mind dat mout’ or I take you in da bat’room, wash dat nasty mout’ out wit’ da Mule Team.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” O’Halloran said.
Service saw she was clearly horrified, and that she had turned pale and shaky, but he couldn’t figure out why the edge and such in-their-faces nastiness. Any lawyer, like any cop, needed to have very thick oil in their feathers. You heard crap from people all the time, including threats, and you learned to let them wash over you, or found another career. He didn’t know why, but he reached over and touched her arm. “All right, enough, you wanted this meeting and we left at oh dark hundred to get here on time.”
“Correction,” she said. “Our mutual friend wanted this meeting, not me. And, if you must know, I objected most strenuously, but relented solely because that’s what one does with friends of a certain political magnitude. If you must know, I do not like people and I do not like to work with them. I never go to court. My job is thinking, which is the only job I want.”
He wanted to ask if her favors were granted based on some sort of friend rating system, but kept his mouth shut. She was clearly agitated, and making it worse would only waste more of their time. “All right,” Service said as self-appointed peacemaker. “We’re here, so let’s get on with this. We’re all busy.”
She wasn’t ready to get to the point yet. The woman sniggered. “You’re . . . busy. Good god, sir? You are suspended without pay by the state.” She looked at Treebone. “That one is retired and spends all his time hiding in his camp in Chippewa County, while that old and reprehensible creature is marking time until they put him back in prison.” The woman got up, turned her back to them for a few seconds and sat down, her hand shaking violently. Service saw she was sweating. Her upper lip looked pasted against her teeth. She fumbled with her purse, tore paper off a tube of hard red candy, put several pieces in her mouth, bit hard and chewed vigorously and loudly, kept crunching and added two more. After a while she said weakly, “Sorry, I’m diabetic, my sugar’s down. Too much work, not eating right, all my fault. I’m so sorry about this. I know better.”
With that declaration Service knew she was someone they could like, and he now understood why she was Lori’s friend. “You eat here a lot?” he asked her.
“Every morning,” she admitted.
“And sometimes you’re in dire need of food?”
She nodded. “Worse, I’m not a morning person.”
“Do you need insulin?” Service asked.
“No,” she said, “I thought I had glucose tabs in my purse, but all I could find are hard candies. They work, not as well as glucose, but they work. Thanks.”
Waitress Lilach brought their meals and coffee and tea and stared at the lawyer. “You okay, Em Ess O’Halloran?”
The attorney said wearily, “Yes, fine. Thanks.”
To the men, she commanded, “Eat,” and Service realized she had not ordered anything for herself. He stood up, whistled, and waved Lilach back. “Does Em Ess have a regular breakfast she orders?”
“Youse betcha,” Lilach said.”
“Bring that,” he told her. “Please.”
O’Halloran said, “I forgot to order? God, I hate it when I get like this. And I know you’re wondering about the Em Ess thing. It’s like a word knife. It’s so typical up here. If you insist on civility and common courtesy, some people get entirely bent out of shape. I grew up here, hated the place, couldn’t wait to get out, and said so. They all remember that, and up here, once something is said, it never goes away.” She patted a folder with her hand.
“Let me tell you the reason for this meeting. Researching Stafinski, certain rumors suggest that at one time he owned a series of properties that would become part of the heart of the Mosquito Wilderness Tract. This is, like most rumors, not entirely true. But it’s also not entirely off base. He apparently did own several eighties but never more than that, never anything like that entire area.”
“Source?” Service asked.
“Plat book, but not backed up by any known official state records. Those, unfortunately, were among the Conservation Department records that burned in 1950. For some reason, the state register of deeds was then storing all its archival material in that doomed facility, and this has been the source of nothing but problems since then regarding mineral rights claims, some of which are very contentious, let me tell you. Now we have Mr. Kalleskevich’s lawyer claiming his client owns a company that holds the deed to the mineral rights.”
“An actual deed?” Service asked.
“We don’t know.”
“What’s the date on this alleged evidence?” Treebone asked
“Also unknown, but I started further back and asked myself if W. Stafinski is real or not. Assuming the plat book is real, the answer is that he is real and not a fictional character created by the claimants.”
“And?” Service said.
“Again, it’s not crystal clear. The plat book certainly says W. Stafinski, which means there was a real landowner by that name, but no other record corroborates that. I’ve looked at the state office of deeds, at births and deaths, marriages, everything. The man’s a blivet. Familiar with that word?”
Service thought he knew but didn’t want to guess. Limpy stared at his tea. Treebone scowled.
“A blivet is a nothing that looks like something—a kind of optical illusion some call ‘an impossible fork.’ The painter M.C. Escher used such visual tricks in his bizarre creations, which is to say, they look real until you really see what’s there. On closer examination, you learn you’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing.”
Service was having trouble tracking her, thinking perhaps her flux in blood sugar was maybe causing some screwy thinking. He’d run across this now and then, but not often, and his first impulse was always to think it was bullshit, but it was real enough. He’d had one case where a man claimed that too much sugar made him kill deer illegally. The jury laughed through the trial. The gambit had not worked. Too much sugar could make certain people wacky. Too little could have similar effect. Finally he gathered his thoughts and asked, “If Stafinski is a so-called blivet, what the hell does that mean?”
The attorney tilted her head. “Incisive question.”
“Is there an equally incisive answer?”
“I’m not altogether certain,” she said. “The governor found a source who pointed her to a grave in Lakeview Cemetery in Calumet.”
Service let her talk and tried to listen to her reasoning and decided eventually that what he was hearing was real, not sugar-talk. He knew her type. She was driven with an intensity few mortals could understand, most couldn’t tolerate, and even fewer could match or accept.
“Here’s what we know from the graves registration and what additional information they retain, most of which is now at the university. The family immigrated to the United States, to the Copper Country, attracted, it seems, by mass advertising in newspapers in Europe, in this case the paper in Poznan, in Poland. The family name was Stafocyzyki. They arrived in Red Jacket in 1890. Red Jacket is now called Calumet. Son Walenky was born in 1892, and the boy’s father was killed underground in a mine fire in 1898.”
Frosty O’Halloran stopped,
took a sip of water, and resumed her recitation, all from memory. “His mother died of consumption in 1911. Both father and mother are buried in Lakeview Cemetery outside Calumet. When the big strike began in 1913, young Stafocyzyki lit out for Detroit where Henry Ford was offering five bucks a day to his auto workers, a lot more than unskilled labor miners could make on their best day. And people weren’t being shot by those opposed to auto plants.”
She paused again. “We have records that show he got a job with Ford, but by then he had changed his name to Stafinski. He apparently found the regimentation and routine in the auto plant even worse than mining and moved back to the U.P. to live with a distant relative named Philomon Staffoneski, in Michigamme. Staffoneski was originally Stafocyzki. Walenky started by working in the woods, and later became a builder of houses and other structures. Walenky disappeared from Michigamme in the winter of 1972, age eighty, senile and prone to wandering. His remains were found in the McCormack Wilderness the next summer. He was identified by his rifle and dental records.”
Allerdyce suddenly became animated. “Hey dere, dat sound like old man Wally Staff we call’t ’im. Change name short get rid all da Polack gunk. Was real good guy, loopy at da end. Had no real fambly.”
Service stared at the old poacher, whose knowledge was forever surprising him. “You know this how?”
“Yah sure, I go school Michigamme when I go school. Wally Staff he dere in town den. I din’t like school.”
He continued, “My ma she got us cabin Witbeck Rapid and dem days I start work on own, go school sometime, build cabin, help Wally Staff, yah. Michigamme onny seven mile or so crowfly from ma’s cabin.”
Bad Optics Page 17
