The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

  This Big D Sports camping package can be all yours, Nikki Liska! Or would you rather have a BRAND-NEW CAR?!!

  I’d take the car, she thought. Camping was one of the few things Speed did well with regard to his boys. Nikki’s idea of roughing it was a hotel room with no mint on the pillow at bedtime.

  Crowding around Duffy and his moose pal was the crew, there to shoot a Big D commercial wherein Duffy would take ad time to talk about his brother’s case. And gathering around that crowd was the KTWN news crew, shooting the footage of the production in order to use pieces of it in their news segment. Crowding around all the cameras were the lunch-hour shoppers at Big D Sports, as goggle-eyed to see their local celebs, Big Duff and Melvin D. Moose, as they would have been to see actual movie stars. Nikki wanted to pull an arrow out of the quiver in the display beside her and stab herself in the eye.

  The point of the ad, and the news segment they would be shooting, would be for Big Duff to announce the increased reward money for information leading to the arrest of his brother’s killer. A good idea on paper, but the reality of a big reward on a cold case was usually a lot of false leads that tied up investigators’ time and yielded nothing. If no one had come up with a viable lead for fifty thousand dollars in the last twenty-five years, chances were not good of anything real materializing now.

  Still, Nikki knew that any publicity for the renewed effort at solving the crime held some slim chance of reaching the ear of the right person with the right piece of information. She had to take the opportunity no matter the odds. She should have been glad Thomas Duffy was willing to spend his company’s money and ad time asking for information from the public. This wouldn’t be just a sixty-second segment on the news that people might blink and miss while they were passing the potatoes at the supper table. People loved Big Duff and Melvin D. Moose. They would pay attention to the ads. Still, it rubbed her the wrong way. It was still a commercial for Big D Sports with a “By the way, if you happen to know anything about my brother’s murder . . .” thrown in; a “Hey, we’re offering this big-ass reward . . . and THE LOWEST PRICES IN THE TWIN CITIES!” kind of a thing.

  She watched the show, standing at the edge of it, her arms crossed, foot tapping, her expression set in stone—a stark contrast to the delighted faces of the shoppers around her. They were loving it. Take after take after take. The moose kept messing up and then falling into comic antics that had the crowd in stitches. Nikki wanted to step in and beat him like a cheap piñata.

  Finally the set was restaged for the interview. They all sat on camp stools around a fake campfire, looking like characters in a piney woods Fellini film: the news reporter and Nikki in business attire, Big Duff still in costume, and the stupid fucking moose. Theater of the absurd, Minnesota style.

  “. . . and how do you feel about Big Duff’s efforts to promote the case, Detective?” the reporter asked.

  “Anything that might bring attention to the search for Ted Duffy’s killer—”

  “That’s right!” Big Duff interrupted, trampling over Nikki’s airtime. “We want people to remember! My brother was a decorated police detective! If anyone can remember any detail about that day, call the hotline! The reward for information leading to a conviction of my brother’s killer is up to one hundred thousand dollars! One hundred thousand dollars!”

  By the time the fiasco was over, Nikki’s head was throbbing to the point that she wanted to grab a camping hatchet and put herself out of her misery.

  “Mr. Duffy,” she started as the news crew packed up and the moose went to the customer service area to sign autographs. “I need to speak with you privately—”

  “Yeah, sure.” He didn’t look at her. “Thanks, Melvin!” he called out, waving to his cohort. “Kids! Be sure to get your picture with Melvin!”

  “Mr. Duffy,” Nikki started again.

  “Great ad, don’t you think?” he said, still more interested in his customers than in her. “I think we might get something off that.”

  She wanted to ask if he meant sales or information. “It’s possible—”

  “People love that damn moose! They’ll pay attention because of that damn moose!” He laughed, amused at his stroke of genius in creating the character of Melvin.

  Nikki wanted to kick him in the balls to get his attention on her. He was her least favorite kind of man: the kind who only talked, and who never listened to a woman. A woman’s part in a conversation with this Neanderthal was as a placeholder, a blah-blah-blah while he thought of the next brilliant thing he wanted to say.

  He chuckled to himself. “That goddamn moose!”

  Nikki waved a hand in front of his face. “I don’t give a shit about the fucking moose,” she said, loud enough that several shoppers in line for autographs turned with expressions of shock and disapproval.

  Duffy looked down at her as if she had just sprung up out of the ground like an unpleasant little forest gnome in his surreal camp scene.

  He frowned at her. “I heard you had an attitude.”

  Nikki forced an unpleasant smile. “I can’t imagine where you heard that. Do you have an office we can go to, Mr. Duffy?”

  He led the way to the back of the store, pulling his hat off to reveal thinning black hair shot through with gray. They passed the restrooms and the employee break room, which smelled of reheated chili and microwave popcorn. At the end of a hallway, Duffy opened a door and walked into the office ahead of her.

  “I’ve told this story a hundred times to a dozen different cops,” he said, rounding his messy desk to drop into the well-worn leather executive’s chair.

  The store was the Big D flagship off 494, near the Mall of America, a bright, modern building, but the office chair looked like it had been with him from the early days. The wall behind him was dominated by a stuffed blue marlin and a poster of a pair of scantily clad sex kittens posing with hunting rifles.

  Nikki sat down across from him. He was a big man, on the flabby side, his face heavy with the beginnings of jowls. With the goofy cap off, the makeup he was wearing for the television camera stood out: clownish red rouge, eyebrow pencil and mascara, black powder to darken his five o’clock shadow.

  “And now we have to start all over again with you,” he said, none too pleased about it.

  “I continue to be confused by the low standard everyone involved in this case seems to have,” she said.

  He gave her a look that said she should know better. “It’s been twenty-five years.”

  “You think the case can’t be solved? Is that why you doubled the reward? Because you don’t believe you’ll ever have to cough up a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “Every detective in the city was on this case when Ted was killed,” he said. “Are you better on a cold case than every detective in the city on a fresh case put together?”

  “You don’t know that I’m not,” she said, “despite what Gene Grider might have told you over your Corn Flakes this morning at Cheap Charlie’s.”

  He sat up a little at that, frowning at the idea that he might have underestimated her. Clearly Grider hadn’t gotten through to him with the news that she had seen the two of them together.

  “I keep hearing how close you were to your brother,” she said.

  “I loved my brother. He was my best friend every day of my life since before we were born. And every year, at this shitty time of year, I get reminded that someone killed him and he’s never going to be in my life again. And that sucks like nothing else I’ll ever know.”

  “Then you ought to be rooting for me.”

  “I don’t have any reason to believe you can do what nobody else has done in twenty-five years,” he said. “All you’re going to do is upset my wife and family. You’re just going to ask the same damn questions and get the same damn answers every other cop has.

  “Isn’t that what you came in here to do?” he asked. “Where was I the day my brother died? Was I having an affair with Barbie? Did we kill him for the insurance money
? Blah, blah, blah. The same fucking five questions over and over. Excuse me for not being excited about that or excited about you.”

  Nikki considered what he said as she looked at the calendar of UFC ring girls hanging on the wall above a tall filing cabinet. Thanksgiving weekend was X’d out for his annual hunting trip.

  Nothing changed. Every year was another year his brother was dead with no resolution to his murder. Every year on the same weekend in November he went to Wisconsin to hunt. Every year he and his buddies probably sat around the fire at the cabin and toasted his absent twin. And every time his brother’s case got dragged back out, the same questions and the same theories were raised, with no result.

  If Thomas Duffy had been telling the truth all these years, he had nothing new to offer. If he had been lying all these years, why would he stop now?

  “You know, you’re right,” she conceded. “There’s no point in me asking you the same questions every other detective has already asked you over and over. You’re not going to tell me anything you didn’t tell anyone else. And the same answers aren’t going to get this case solved. It’s Einstein’s definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

  “So I’m not going to ask if you killed your twin brother to collect on the insurance so you could sink the money into the business,” she said. “Or if you killed him because you were fucking his wife. Or both. You wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

  “I didn’t.” The desk chair groaned as he leaned back and spread his hands. “So, what’s the point of you being here?”

  “I like to know exactly who I’m dealing with,” she said. “And I want you to know exactly who you’re dealing with.”

  “Am I supposed to feel threatened or something?”

  “Not unless you’ve done something wrong.”

  “I’ve got some parking tickets I haven’t paid,” he said with a self-amused smirk. “You probably know some meter maids. Maybe you can take care of that for me.”

  “Boy, those meter maid jokes never get old,” Nikki said, putting the thinnest veneer of amusement over a pained smile. “Feel free to call me if you come up with any more of those gems.”

  She stood up, took a business card out of her coat pocket, and placed it on the blotter in front of him.

  “In the meantime, I’m going to do everything I can to solve your brother’s murder. I’m going to look for things nobody else thought to look for. I’m going to talk to people nobody else bothered talking to. Because those are the people who see things—the ones nobody notices. And maybe they haven’t talked before because nobody asked them, or maybe they haven’t talked because they didn’t realize they had anything relevant to say.

  “That’s who’s going to solve this case,” she said. “Me, and someone nobody ever thought about—a clerk at a convenience store, a neighbor looking out a window, a child nobody paid any attention to.”

  “Yeah?” Duffy said, clearly bored with her. He picked up her card and tossed it on a pile of junk mail. “Well, you be sure to call me when that happens.”

  “You’ll be the first to know. Maybe you can give the reward to that person here in the store, give them one of those giant checks. They can get their picture taken with the moose. Great publicity.”

  He made a face that looked like he had a toothache.

  “You have a nice day, Mr. Duffy,” Nikki said. “Don’t forget about those parking tickets. They have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass. The past always does.”

  * * *

  TED DUFFY’S ELDEST DAUGHTER, Jennifer, now thirty-four, worked as a librarian at the Pierre Bottineau Library, five minutes northeast and across the Mississippi from downtown Minneapolis. Single, she lived in an apartment within walking distance of her job.

  Seley’s research had returned nothing remarkable on Jennifer Duffy. She had graduated in the middle of her class in high school and in the middle of her class in college. She had never done anything to make herself stand out in any way. Her mother had talked about her extensive history of therapy, to deal with the aftermath of her father’s death, but if she had ever taken her troubles in the direction of drugs or alcohol, she had done so quietly. She had no police record of any kind.

  A pair of the beige brick-and-stone Victorian buildings on the campus of the old Grain Belt brewery complex had been beautifully renovated to house the library. When the brewery was in operation, the neighborhoods around it were populated largely by working-class people of Eastern European descent. In recent years, urban renewal had brought an influx of young professionals and artists. Other brewery buildings, warehouses, and old bank buildings had been converted to apartments, offices, studios, galleries, restaurants, and taprooms.

  In good weather the area was an interesting place to explore. In the constant cold drizzle, Broadway and Marshall was just another busy intersection as would-be shoppers and diners passed by on their way elsewhere.

  Nikki parked on Marshall and walked through the archway and up the brick path to the library. All warm wood and floor-to-ceiling windows, the place had a cozy feel, full of nooks and crannies and private alcoves for reading or surfing the Internet.

  Jennifer Duffy emerged from an office on the other side of the main desk. She was a younger version of her mother: blonde, slender, pretty; smartly dressed in a mid-calf green wool skirt with tall brown boots and a brown sweater set with a pretty silk scarf cleverly tied around her throat.

  “Can I help you?” she asked in a perfect librarian tone, a polite smile on her face.

  “Jennifer Duffy?”

  The smile immediately faded. “Yes.”

  “I’m Sergeant Liska. I’m a detective—”

  “I know who you are,” the woman said, frowning at the ID Nikki held up. She glanced around surreptitiously, clearly worried that someone might notice she was talking to a cop. “My mother told me you’d be calling,” she whispered. “I don’t have anything to say to you. I was nine years old.”

  “I understand that,” Nikki said. “I just want to have a conversation with you. I promise I won’t take up much of your time.”

  “I don’t see the point. I don’t have any information for you.”

  “You don’t know what questions I have.”

  “You have the same questions as every other detective.”

  “From what I’ve read in the reports, no one ever bothered to ask you much of anything.”

  “Because they knew I don’t have anything to say!”

  She spoke too emphatically, drawing the attention of several people browsing the stacks. A tall elderly gentleman in a fisherman’s sweater took it upon himself to butt in, stepping toward the desk.

  “Is everything all right, Jennifer?” he whispered, giving Nikki the eye.

  Jennifer Duffy’s cheeks turned red. “Yes, Mr. Weisman, I’m fine. Thank you.”

  He drifted back toward the shelves reluctantly.

  “I’m not going away, Miss Duffy,” Nikki whispered. “Just sit down with me for fifteen minutes. Then I can write my report and cross you off the list, and I will never bother you again. Please. I’m just trying to do my job.”

  She still wanted to say no, but she didn’t turn away.

  “Look, I don’t want to make a problem for you,” Nikki pressed. “But my loyalty in this is to your father. He doesn’t get to ask you to help. I have to do it for him. And I will be like a dog with a bone, so you might as well sit down with me and get it over with.”

  Looking annoyed and worried, Jennifer Duffy huffed a sigh. She turned and said something quietly to another librarian working behind the desk, then turned back.

  “Not in here,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

  They walked in silence through the drizzle to a mostly empty coffeehouse within sight of the library. They ordered at the counter and then sat down at the farthest table, next to the window, away from curious ears. Nikki took the corner seat out of habit, so she could have the b
est view of the room and the people in it. Jennifer Duffy sat across from her, huddled in her raincoat, looking sullen.

  “I don’t need everyone at work knowing my business,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “If you understood, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Nikki sighed. “Why do I seem to care more about finding your father’s killer than everyone else in your family combined?”

  “Because you haven’t lived with it for practically your entire life,” she said. “It’s new to you. It’s like a shiny new toy,” she said bitterly. “That’s the way it always is, every time someone thinks they’re going to be the person to crack the case and nothing ever comes of it, and we’re all left to deal with our feelings all over again.”

  She had a point. Nikki had yet to become disillusioned with the attempt to solve Ted Duffy’s case. Jennifer Duffy had been disillusioned again and again.

  “It’s like having someone ransack your house over and over,” Jennifer Duffy said. “They never stay to put it all back together.”

  “I’m sorry no one has ever been able to give you closure on this,” Nikki said. “I sincerely hope this will be the last time.”

  “I hope so, too,” she said, though she had clearly run out of hope for that a while ago.

  The waiter brought them their coffees. When he had walked away, Nikki said, “Your mom told me it was especially hard on you when your dad died. You were close to him?”

  “No. I don’t have that many memories of him, to be honest. He was working all the time. So was my mom. One was gone or the other one was gone.”

  “How was it when the family was all together? Did your parents seem happy?”

  “I’m not going to trash my parents’ marriage,” she said. “I’m not going to tell you my mother was having an affair with Big Duff or anyone else. Or that my dad was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. That’s the bush you’re beating around, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know the answer. I was a child.”