The Big Law pb-2

by Chuck Logan

  The reporter had done her homework and pieced together a story from interviews with cops and medics who had been involved in the rescue at the Kettle. She depicted Caren running for her life from her current husband to the protection of her previous husband. The TV bullshit incensed Broker deeply.

  Especially the nuance of unrequited romance that connected him to the story like black crepe crime-scene tape.

  The first night was the worst. Caren visited his sleepless thoughts as he lay awake listening to the rise and fall of Kit’s breathing in the crib next to him. He imagined Caren, perfectly preserved, in a time capsule of ice water, deep within the granite folds of the earth, or five miles out, gently turning in the crystalline bowels of Superior.

  Her blue lips stuck on the request: Phil, I need your help.

  But then, he could reduce it to a much simpler, visceral knot in his stomach: Kit turning blue, choking, and that smug weasel, James, knowing why.

  The feds pulled a curtain of official silence over the death at Devil’s Kettle. After a few calls to the federal prosecutor in Minneapolis, Hustad, the new Cook County attorney, saw it was futile to build a case against Keith Angland. Tom James was unavailable, held incommunicado in federal custody.

  The word drifting up the cop jungle-telegraph to Jeff was: Witness Protection for James. Caren’s death was lost-but not forgotten, the feds insisted-in the shadow of something big.

  The story rolled from Duluth downstate and washed against an official stonewall at the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office and lost momentum. After a few days, the pilgrims stopped coming to the Kettle. Caren’s story, like all news stories, ended.

  America shopped toward Christmas. Life went on at the decibel level of a radio commercial written for third grade comprehension.

  Sound bite metaphysics.

  Caren was dead.

  Shit happens.

  Blip.

  Unconcerned, the Kettle sucked the Brule River underground as it had done since the glaciers piled up the ridge, too powerful and unapproachable to give up its secret.

  Broker walked back down the trail, rolling his shoulders, working out the kinks. He snipped a soggy inch off his cigar and stuck it back in his mouth.

  Jeff called that night: Quick, turn on the tube. Duluth.

  Channel 13. With Kit under his arm, Broker tapped the remote. The opaque gray screen turned into the Minneapolis U.S. attorney. He stood at a podium in front of a phalanx of Cheshire-smiling feds. He said that Caren Angland had not died in vain. She had provided taped evidence-through the intercession of Tom James-to a federal investigation.

  Based on that evidence, her husband, Keith, was being questioned by a federal grand jury for conspiring to murder a federal informant.

  The conference veered out of control when the U.S. attorney confirmed that, yes, a human tongue had been delivered in a fake bomb to the FBI office in the St. Paul Federal Building a week ago. He termed this “a taunt from the Russian mob.” He added that the presumed-dead informant’s name and return address were on the package. And that the man’s car and some of his clothing had been found in the Saint Croix River, near Scandia, Minnesota.

  Testing at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, confirmed that the tongue belonged to a male.

  Then the U.S. attorney introduced a federal strike force prosecutor, a dapper, short man named Joe Sharkey, from Chicago. Sharkey explained that Keith was just one target of his investigation, and a minor one. A Chicago mobster captured talking to Keith on Caren’s tape had copped a plea and turned federal witness.

  “How big is this?” asked a reporter.

  “Big as Sammy Gravanno. We’re looking at an interlocking case involving the Italian and Russian Mafias.”

  The report added a local follow-up, querying a spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department about Keith Angland.

  “That’s a federal matter, no comment,” said a dour department media representative.

  As soon as the report ended, Jeff called back. “Holy cow.

  Keith trafficking in human tongues? Two flavors of Mafia?

  She ever mentioned a tape?” he asked.

  “This is the first I heard,” said Broker.

  “She must have wanted you to see it. Why?” asked Jeff.

  “Don’t know. But James does. He knew about the tape.

  He had to be talking to the FBI. How else could they come out of nowhere so quick.”

  “And I was right there, big as a barn, wearing a badge. If I’d of known what kind of danger Caren was in…,” mulled Jeff.

  “Probable cause, at least,” said Broker.

  “You bet. I’d have cuffed Keith before he cuffed me. And I would have put some people around Caren-fast.”

  “But you couldn’t, because we didn’t know where she was.”

  “James could have told us. But he didn’t,” said Jeff.

  “Yeah, I think maybe he started out working on a story and ended up working on something else,” said Broker.

  “Like what?”

  “What did Kit choke on?”

  “Hmm…,” said Jeff.

  “It’s about money,” said Broker.

  The books were all read. The tippy-cup finished. He sat in the rocking chair with the weight of the child on his shoulder.

  Her vulnerable breath rose and fell against his throat, magically clean and innocent. Broker rocked and thought.

  On a night fourteen years ago, in this very room, which was smaller then, just a shack, Keith Angland showed up to go hunting without his gear. No rifle, no hunting clothes.

  “The strain is getting to her, you working all this hairy undercover stuff. You’re never there. You never talk to her.” And finally. “I love her and you don’t,” he’d said. “What you love is the action.” And he’d been right. Then.

  In fourteen years, the world had turned upside down. Keith had been too rigid to bend with the times. He had cracked wide open and madness and murder had gushed out. And Broker…

  Broker rose slowly from the rocking chair, carefully balancing the sleeping baby on his shoulder, and walked the length of the spacious living room to the windows overlooking the lake. The cabin where he and Keith had their showdown over Caren was now a three-bedroom lake home.

  And it did resemble a mead hall, complete to the detail of the snarled dragon’s head over the fireplace. One huge high-peaked room, pinned with beams, sited parallel to the shore.

  The wall that faced the lake was all thermal glass, banks of windows. Opposite the windows three bedrooms and a bath.

  The tall fireplace dominated one end of the long room, an open kitchen filled the other. He’d never used the big fireplace and was saving that for Christmas. Kit’s toys, books, and a rocking chair sat next to an old Franklin stove raised on a dais of tile between the living room area and the kitchen.

  Where they lived, by the fire.

  His hideaway.

  By recent occupation, Kit’s father was, by some accounts, a pirate.

  Now, like a pirate, he brooded from his granite point, down on the rising northwest wind that herded white-plumed six-foot waves into his rocky cove. When the lake whipped up, he fondly remembered illustrations in romantic books for boys: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Wind-swept crags. Tempest seas.

  Another issue Caren had with him. Never growing up.

  Chasing adventure.

  Two years ago, he had done exactly that. Now he paid his bills with a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Bangkok.

  For runaround cash he used a VISA attached to a numbered account at the Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. Funds seeped via electronic interbank transfers into his account in the Grand Marais Bank, always less than $10,000 a transaction.

  Rebuilding this house called for real money, so, last year, he’d declared a half million in taxable income. Broker’s nest egg was a ton of Vietnamese imperial gold bullion and ancient Cham relics, tucked in a bank vault in Hong Kong.

  Broker had found i
t, dug it up and smuggled it out of Vietnam. His treasure hunt had also turned up a mate. And a child. Had bought him freedom. Room to get away. But it hadn’t stopped the world from coming in on him.

  He carried Kit to her crib, gently lowered her to her blankets and stuffed animals.

  What the hell. A man should be able to handle whatever was in front of him. Kill an enemy, field dress a deer, fix the plumbing, read a rectal thermometer and stay up, worried, all night, with a croupy baby.

  Back in the kitchen, he glanced at Nina’s picture pinned to the bulletin board. You stayed on the Widow Maker without getting bucked off, this is your life.

  Across the length of the dark living room, the dragon glinted in tightly wound contortions against the chimney stones. And this too is your life. And there was room in his life to find out what really happened out there at the Kettle.

  He owed Caren that much. Two men could tell him: Keith Angland and Tom James.

  But the privateer in him counseled that something vital had been missing from the feds’ news conference: Buried in this tragic human riddle there had to be a hell of a lot of money.

  28

  In the morning, after Kit was changed and fed, he dressed her in layers of Polarfleece, mittens, a scarf, hat and stuck her feet in lined, black rubber boots decorated with raised reliefs of chunky dinosaurs.

  Outside, the day was overcast, crisp. They barely cast shadows. The thermometer on the porch pointed to twenty-six degrees. First, he carried her through the motions of filling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds.

  “Dees,” piped Kit.

  “Right, gotta feed the dees.” She liked to watch the chickadees zoom around the feeder he’d planted outside her bedroom window.

  Then, he opened the door to the workshop, let Kit waddle inside, shut the door, turned on the light and checked the bench and the floor for stray pieces of hundred-dollar bills.

  Nothing.

  Squatting, he tugged Kit’s scarf down, so her face was more than an eye slit and said, “I don’t suppose you want to tell me why Tom James gave you a hundred-dollar bill to choke on, do you?” Kit exuded a trickle of foggy breath. He picked her up and carried her outside.

  “Okay. Here’s the thing. I dropped that chewed lump of money around here just before it snowed and we’re going to find it. Ordinarily, I’d shovel the snow, but today we’re going to do something different.”

  Broker went into the garage and returned with a regular rake and a leaf rake. Kit sat down and began pawing at the snow. She raised a snowy mitten and tentatively touched it to her red tongue.

  Broker raked; he figured the piece of currency would look like a clip of frozen broccoli.

  “I don’t really expect to find it. But if I did find it, and if I find Tom James, I’d show it to him and ask him how he thinks it got stuck in your throat.”

  Kit pushed another handful of snow at her mouth. Broker paused and studied her round face.

  “It’s called making a start,” he explained. There was a person in there, but some of the books said kids didn’t have memories from this age. She wouldn’t remember choking.

  She wouldn’t remember Tom James.

  When her mother came home at Christmas she probably wouldn’t remember her, either. At least not right off. Broker went back to sifting and searching with his rake. Kit continued to eat snow.

  That’s how Jeff found them when he drove up. He got out of his Bronco and said, “Why didn’t I think of that instead of spending five hundred bucks on a Toro.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I give.”

  “This is where she spit out that hunk of hundred-dollar bill.”

  Jeff squinted. “As I recall, you were the lousiest investigator of the bunch. What you were good at was letting Keith talk you into carrying a raw steak into a den full of starving lions.

  That was more your speed.”

  “I wouldn’t have lost it except I had to run in the house when you started yelling.”

  Jeff cleared his throat, walked over and picked up Kit.

  “This kid is freezing to death. Her lips are blue.”

  “Don’t change the subject. She’s tough. Just eating snow.”

  “So, what if you find it?” asked Jeff.

  “It’s money.”

  “Well, sure it’s money,” said Jeff.

  Broker stopped raking and stood up. “Keith is accused of doing some heavy-duty crime. Where’s the motive? The Mafia doesn’t give out merit badges. It had to be for a lot of money.”

  “Hmmm,” said Jeff.

  “And what did Kit choke on?”

  “I can only handle one hypothetical at a time,” said Jeff.

  He turned, walked with Kit in his arms along the house, down to the end of the point. High waves had swept the snow from the ledge rock. Garlanded with lichens, the shiny black granite gleamed like the skulls of sperm whales. Broker came up behind him and said, “We have to find James.”

  “We, huh?” Jeff repositioned Kit in his arms and said in her ear, “Once, a long time ago, your great-grandfather and my grandfather had a fishing boat and they shipped out of this cove. It was during Prohibition and times were pretty rough. Sometimes your great-grandfather would talk my grandfather into sailing their boat up to Canada, to Thunder Bay, and picking up a load of contraband whiskey. Then they’d land it here and sell it to people who’d drive up from as far as the Cities.

  “They didn’t smuggle all the time, just when times were hard. ‘A little here and there,’ Grandpa used to say. And it was always the Broker who talked the Jeffords into going on the little adventures. Like what your dad is trying to pull on me right now. That’s how it goes, Kit. North of Grand Marais.”

  He turned to Broker. “So where should we start?”

  Broker smiled. “People will talk to you. You have such an honest face. And nobody has ever heard you swear.

  Make some calls. Find out what’s on that tape.”

  “I can do that,” said Jeff.

  Down the street from Grand Marais’s one stoplight, Cook County housed its sheriff’s department in a flat-topped, one-story cement bunker made of opaque glass brick and dirty cornmeal-colored cinder blocks. Like Truth or Consequences, the other tenant of the building was the Municipal Liquor Store.

  Broker, with Kit slung in the crook of his elbow, walked under the stark sign that said COOK COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT, opened the door and entered a grim antechamber.

  Wanted posters hung on a bulletin board. A brochure on a plastic chair invited: Join The Border Patrol.

  The smudged wall of bullet-proof glass that fronted the dispatcher’s station was the only window you could see through in the whole place. An exhausted plastic Christmas wreath drooped in one corner of the window.

  Madge, the robust dispatcher, buzzed him in. He handed Kit to her. “Teach this kid to type will you, she needs to learn a trade to fall back on.”

  “So you already got her college picked out, eh?” asked Madge.

  “You kidding. She’s going to be a waitress in Two Harbors.

  Probably marry some strong-back guy who cuts pulp and lives in a trailer. That way I don’t have to waste money on piano and ballet lessons.”

  He continued down the cramped corridor and entered Jeff’s office, which looked more like a storeroom: second-hand steel desk, industrial shelves piled with equipment and stacks of cardboard boxes.

  A topographical wall map of Cook County filled an open space between the shelves. The crude poster on the wall behind Jeff’s desk was an early-generation computer graphic stamped out of a dot-matrix printer, the images formed by overprinted letters in the shape of a scoped rifle.

  The slogan under it announced:

  LONG DISTANCE: THE

  NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE

  RAMSEY COUNTY SWAT

  But Jeff never had the spit-shined swagger required for extended SWAT work, and the poster was more joke than nostalgia. Notations and telephone numbers were slo
wly filling it up.

  “God, at least paint this place,” said Broker.

  Jeff grunted. “Why? The county board will only send over buckets of puke yellow paint. All they seem to have.”

  “So what happened?” asked Broker.

  “John Eisenhower says hello.”

  “How is John E?”

  “Keeping the beds in his new jail full. Keith’s in one of them.”

  Washington County Sheriff John Eisenhower had this new, overbuilt, twenty-first-century jail in Stillwater that boarded a lot of high per-diem federal prisoners.

  Jeff said, “John E feels lousy about Caren. Like everybody.

  He also said he talked to the marshals who brought Keith over. And this marshal said he talked to an FBI guy who talked to a lawyer in the U.S. attorney’s office who saw the tape.”

  “Ah,” said Broker.

  “Yeah, well; it’s two million bucks. The guys on the tape gave Keith two mil. Hundred-dollar bills in a suitcase. Keith apparently has been running interference for huge cocaine shipments. He also gave them a picture of an FBI snitch who’d penetrated the Russian mob. And Keith’s on the tape saying he’ll get rid of the snitch. That Gorski guy. The one the feds say had his tongue mailed to the Federal Building.

  Good sound, clear pictures. Caren hid a video camera in her laundry room pointing out to Keith’s den in the basement.”

  “Anybody hear what happened to the money?” asked Broker.

  “Nope.”

  “Anybody have any idea why Caren was coming to see me with the tape?”

  “No again.”

  A cry in the hall interrupted them. Madge walked in and handed an aromatic Kit to Broker, who still had the diaper bag over his shoulder. “Sorry,” said Madge. “Don’t do diapers at work.” She left the office.

  Broker laid Kit down on Jeff’s desk, removed her boots, snow pants, unsnapped her Onesie, positioned a fresh Huggies under her and pulled the tabs on the sodden one she was wearing.

  “Fierce green poop,” admired Jeff.