A Hard Ticket Home (Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels)

by David Housewright

  I considered several other likely candidates who could help me and settled on Detective Sergeant Robert J. Dunston of the St. Paul Police Department. I called. The phone rang five times before a woman answered, “Hello.”

  “Hi, Shel. It’s me.”

  “Rushmore.” She’s the only person who gets to call me that. “When are you going to take me away from all this?”

  “From all of what? What’s going on?”

  “Bobby’s in one of his moods again. Right now he’s upstairs lecturing the girls because they didn’t turn on the porch light.”

  “Put him on the phone.”

  A few moments later Bobby was telling me what he told his two daughters.

  “How many times do I need to say it? Keep the front door locked, keep the back door locked, turn on the lights. How many women need to be raped, how many need to be killed before they catch on? Do they need to see pictures, ’cause I have pictures.”

  “Crime scene photos? You’re going to show crime scene photos to an eight- and ten-year-old girl?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “Bob, you’re losing it.”

  “Am I?” He took a deep breath. “Maybe I am.” Slow exhale. “It was awful. The worst I ever caught. What he did to her.” His voice dropped several octaves like he was afraid someone would overhear him. “Mac, he removed one of her breasts with a steak knife, the other he peeled the way you would fillet a fish. Cigarette burns all over her body, a knife protruding from her vagina. He tied her to the bedposts with twine and sealed her mouth with duct tape … .”

  I closed my eyes at the horror of it. Sometimes I didn’t miss police work at all.

  “I never saw one that bad before, not even in training,” Bobby added.

  “Who was she?”

  “Katherine Katzmark. Know her?”

  “Name sounds familiar.”

  “She was an entrepreneur. Rich. Owned a catering service and a chain of kitchenware stores that sold imported place settings, cutlery and that sort of thing—you know, Worldware—and something else, I don’t remember. By this time tomorrow I’ll know everything about her.”

  I didn’t doubt him for a moment. Bobby was an extremely thorough investigator.

  He added, “I only came home for a few hours of sleep,” in case I thought he was sloughing off—the first twenty-four hours in a murder investigation are crucial.

  “High profile case,” I volunteered.

  “Tell me about it, the media is already …” He paused, sighed some more. “You try not to take it home with you, you know? But I pull into the driveway and the light’s not on.”

  “I know.”

  He paused for a moment and then asked, “What did you want, anyway?”

  “I was going to beg a favor but I’m embarrassed now, what with your other troubles.”

  “But not too embarrassed.”

  Of course not. I told him the reason I called and he recited the department line concerning the unauthorized use of criminal records along with a lecture centering around the fact that he was far too busy to do my favors for me. I agreed with him and apologized.

  “Ahh, screw it, I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  “Bobby?” I asked before he hung up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you pull Merci Cole, too?”

  “Sure. Why not? It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  I then asked him to put his wife back on the phone.

  “Rushmore?”

  “What the hell, Shelby. You and the girls can’t be bothered to lock doors and turn on lights … ?”

  2

  Bobby Dunston’s call caught me just as I was stepping out of the shower. I was dripping water all over my bedroom carpet when he told me, “I pulled the information you wanted.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why don’t you come downtown about twelve-thirty and I’ll give it to you. You can buy me lunch.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “You can do a favor for me, too.”

  “Sure.”

  He hung up before I could ask him what favor.

  Jerry Jeff Walker was on the CD player, singing about getting off that L.A. freeway without getting killed. I hummed along while I drank my coffee and read the newspapers.

  Both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune were filled with stories about the brutal slaying of Katherine Katzmark. They emphasized that she had been an attractive woman. They remarked on the three businesses she had owned. They also made mention of the fact that she was the only female among the eight founding members of the Northern Lights Entrepreneur’s Club, a growing organization of young businesspeople that was challenging The Brotherhood—as the Twin Cities’ more senior movers and shakers were known—for political and economic dominance. It was just-the-facts-ma’am reporting, but there was an interesting if not insidious edge to it that disturbed me. The papers seemed to suggest that Katherine had been raped, tortured, and murdered because of her looks, her three businesses, and her involvement in the club—that her brutal death was punishment for having the audacity to shine in a male-dominated world.

  Or maybe it was just me.

  Without thinking, I reached for the phone. I was going to call Kirsten to ask if she had the same take on the articles as I did but then I remembered—we don’t have a relationship anymore. I cursed softly and returned the receiver to its cradle.

  I was surrounded by eight large windows arranged in a semicircle in the breakfast nook that I had added to the house, each window overlooking my backyard. The yard was nearly a hundred feet deep and at the back of it was a small pond with a fountain in the center that my father had installed—I had told him we could pay someone to build it for us, but he was a guy who liked to do things himself. In the pond I could see five baby ducks frolicking under the watchful protection of their parents.

  The mallards had arrived in the early spring at just about the time my father died and had somehow discovered the pond despite the fir trees that shaded it. Soon after, the five ducklings appeared. I told my father about the ducks while he lay in a hospital bed and he made me promise to take care of them. He was a guy who took care of things, of people. If you needed a ditch dug, a roof shingled, furniture moved; if you needed a few bucks or a shoulder to cry on; if you needed a volunteer, you called my dad. I learned from him.

  I began by feeding the ducks from a distance, but eventually they took dried corn out of my hand. I called the adults Hepburn and Tracy. The kids I named Bobby, Shelby, Victoria, and Katie after the Dunston family and Maureen after my mother. They seemed quite content in my backyard and I dreaded the day they would all fly south for the winter. I asked a friend at the Department of Natural Resources about it and he told me if they survived the trip the ducks would probably return in the spring to establish new nests.

  “In a few years you could be up to your butt in mallards,” he said.

  That was fine with me. I liked the ducks. One of the things I liked most about them: They mated for life.

  The St. Paul Police Department is located across from the Tastee Bread Company in downtown St. Paul, I-94 cutting a valley between them. I parked neatly in the visitors section of the asphalt lot after dodging a half dozen vans and panel trucks that were parked any which way the drivers pleased. The trucks were emblazoned with the logos and call letters of local TV and radio stations. Reporters for the stations as well as the two Twin Cities daily newspapers and assorted weeklies milled together in the foyer, standing apart from the officers who came and went, while they waited for someone in authority to make a statement. Most of the officers viewed the reporters with derision if not outright contempt. I recognized some of the cops from my eleven years on the force. Some of them recognized me.

  They were friendly enough. They slapped my back and shook my hand and joked about the times we shared and how bad things were getting in the department and how lucky I was to have left when I did
and said we should all get together and raise some hell. Only I knew nothing would come of it. I was no longer a member of the fraternity. I had quit. Pulled the pin and walked away. I might have gone back if someone invited me, only no one did. So, I stood by myself in the foyer, waiting for Bobby. It was the curse of the self-employed—or unemployed, as the case might be. Working alone you often become lonely. There’s no one with whom to discuss last night’s Twins game or politics or even the weather.

  “I feel like a kibitzer,” I told Bobby later as we left the building, walking south on Minnesota Street.

  “You are a kibitzer,” he said abruptly.

  “Thank you for understanding.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? That you’re an integral member of the St. Paul Police Department? You’re not.”

  There was anger in his voice and since I was reasonably sure I hadn’t put it there, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  Bobby threw a glance over his shoulder at the TV vans.

  “In about ten minutes, Deputy Chief Tommy Thompson is going to blow my investigation to hell and gone.”

  “How?”

  “He’s going to tell the media that Katherine Katzmark’s boyfriend is our only suspect.”

  “Is he your only suspect?”

  “So far.”

  “Are you going to arrest him?”

  “Hell, no! Right now there’s plenty of evidence to prove that he was in Kansas City when the murder took place and absolutely none to prove that he wasn’t. He’s the one who discovered the body. He’s the one who called 911. He’s cooperating. He’s answering questions. But once he hears what Thompson has to say, you just know he’s gonna lawyer-up and then I won’t get jack from him.

  “Bastard Thompson—he wants his fifteen minutes of fame so bad. I begged him, Mac. I actually begged him not to mention the boyfriend. ‘But we have to give the media something,’ he says. Yeah, right. Something that’ll get him on the evening news before the chief comes back and takes over.”

  “Where is the chief?”

  “Fishing. In Florida.”

  “Lucky him,” I said.

  “You know what this means, don’t you? From now on I’ll be expected to prove that the boyfriend killed Katherine. Forget developing other leads or investigating other suspects, just get the boyfriend.”

  “Maybe he did it.”

  “What do we know? We know that Katherine was a white, upper-class female who was killed in one of the safest neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, so right away we figure she was killed by someone she knew.”

  I had the distinct impression that he was talking more to himself than he was to me.

  “We know that in spite of everything the bastard did to her, the ME says she was strangled—manual strangulation—which means the killer probably had a strong personal attachment to her.

  “We know that the killer was unafraid of discovery. He did nothing quickly. He spent hours in that house, which indicates that he knew something of her habits. What’s more, everything he used came from Katherine’s kitchen—the twine, duct tape, steak knife—he knew it was available to him before he arrived.”

  Bobby was on a roll now.

  “And we know the way he hacked her body, the way he displayed it, concealing nothing—he wanted people to see what he had done to her. That indicates rage. A crime of passion. And yeah, all that would seem to indicate the boyfriend.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first killer to”—I quoted the air—“‘discover’ the body.”

  “Except he was in Kansas City for a convention. He flew down there Thursday morning and we know he flew back early Sunday afternoon. In between …” Bobby shrugged. “Kansas City is four hundred fifty miles away. That’s a lot of hard driving there and back in the amount of time he had.”

  “Unless he flew.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Fly or rent a car, he’d still need a credit card—after nine-eleven no one’s accepting cash. We’re checking. So far nothing. But we’re still looking. In the meantime, I sent Jeannie down to KC to interview hotel employees and any conventioneers she can find, check his alibi.”

  “Who’s Jeannie?”

  “My new partner. You haven’t met her yet. You’ll like her. Young. Beautiful. Smart as hell.”

  Bobby stopped walking. I was two steps past before I realized it and turned toward him. He was pointing a finger at me.

  “I’ll tell you one thing—I don’t care what Thompson tells the media. I will not play favorites. I’m not going to arrest just any dumb moke to clear the case. I’m going to get the right person for it and I’m gonna put him away forever.”

  I draped my arm over his shoulders and led him across 10th Street. I tried to recall my first impression of Bobby Dunston and failed. I couldn’t remember how or when we met—probably school. It seemed we were always in the same class together, always played on the same baseball teams and hockey teams. We even went to the same college—the University of Minnesota—each selecting the school independently, not at all surprised to learn the other had made the same choice.

  “We’ve sure come a helluva long way since we played ball at Dunning Field,” I told him.

  “Naw,” he said. “It just seems long.”

  We continued walking together in silence. Finally, I asked, “Where are we going?”

  Donahue’s hadn’t changed much since the early 1950s when the purple neon sign above the door blinked HOME COOKING. The sign was still there although the neon had long since burned out. So were the original booths and tables, just as worn with age and use as the sign. The walls were adorned with a series of Chinese landscapes that seemed as out of place now as they had fifteen years ago when I was introduced to the restaurant. I was still on probabation and Colin Gernes, my supervising officer, sat me down at the counter and announced, “Got a rook here, Liz.”

  Liz was a big-busted woman of indeterminate age, dressed in a black and white uniform. “Fresh meat,” she said contemptuously. Five minutes later she slid a platter of sliced roast beef served with mashed potatoes and gravy in front of me.

  “This one’s on the house, Rook, with some advice,” she said. “Find another line of work while you still can.”

  “Too late,” Gernes told her. “He busted a suspect for B and E this morning and he liked it. He’s a thirty-year man for sure.”

  I learned later that Liz had a husband who put in twenty-six years with the cops before he was killed in the line of duty by a seventeen-year-old coke-head. You’d think she wouldn’t want anything to do with cops after that, but she did. She took her husband’s pension and insurance and bought Donahue’s, where she dispensed good food, hearty laughter, caustic advice, and simple wisdom to the men and women who worked at the St. Paul Police Department three blocks away. That and a strong shoulder to cry on. When her huge heart finally burst at the age of seventy-two, they fired exactly seventy-two shots over her grave. Four hundred active and retired officers attended her funeral. No governor, no mayor, no councilman, no police chief was allowed to speak a word.

  “I haven’t been here in years,” I said when we found a booth under a faded print showing a dozen Chinese peasants trapping a tiger beneath the Great Wall. I didn’t know they had tigers in China. The restaurant was half full. Most of the cops had stopped coming after Liz passed. I read the menu the waitress gave me. I don’t know why. I already knew what I was going to order. “Hot roast beef with mashed potatoes.”

  After the waitress took our orders, Bobby told me that there was no paper on Carlson, Jamie Anne—she hadn’t ever been arrested for anything, not even a traffic summons. He had run the name through DMV. The only match was sixteen and brunette and living in Minneapolis—the doctor’s daughter, I presumed.

  “What about Merci Cole?” I asked.

  Bobby gave me a folded sheet of paper.

  “My, my, my.”

  Merci had a long list of prostitution gripes, one DWI, a couple of dis cons and one Class A felony—posse
ssion with intent. She did eighteen months at Shakopee and was released six weeks ago. Her last known address was on Avon near University Avenue in St. Paul, a neighborhood with abysmal property values.

  I refolded the sheet and stuffed it in my pocket.

  “I appreciate this, Bobby.”

  “No problem. You can do me a favor, though.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to use your lake home … .”

  “Of course.”

  “When this is done …”

  “Anytime you want.”

  “Get away for a few days.”

  “It’s yours. In fact, I’ll tell you what. I’ll get you a set of keys. Whenever you want to use it, don’t even ask. Just go.”

  “That’s decent of you.”

  “Think of it as a resort. Use the boats, the tackle, eat the food, drink the beer—don’t worry about anything. It’s on me. And hey, if you and Shelby want to go alone, have a nice weekend of passion, huh? I’ll be happy to take the girls.”

  “Nice weekend of passion,” he repeated quietly, nodding his head like he could already see it. And then, “How’s Kirsten?”

  “It’s not my turn to watch her.”

  “Trouble in paradise?”

  “It looks like we’re through. She says she wants to see other people.”

  Bobby nodded.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The head nodding, what does that mean?”

  “It means I’m not surprised.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “She’s money, man. She’s Lake Minnetonka, she’s Vassar, she’s opera.”