The Devil May Care

by David Housewright

  When did you give Nina your key? my inner voice asked, but I didn’t answer.

  “Have you been there?” I asked. “To his house?”

  “I went this morning,” Riley answered. “I knocked, rang the doorbell. There was no answer. I didn’t go inside.”

  “Why not?”

  For a moment her eyes lost their color.

  “I understand,” I said.

  I took the key and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Thank you,” Riley said.

  I hesitated for a moment before I had her send all the information she’d gathered on Navarre to my smartphone. In the beginning I had zealously guarded my cell number from all but a few close friends, yet slowly it escaped my grasp. Now it seemed as if everyone knew how to reach me, including a few nonprofits and political organizations seeking financial support.

  I also had her send me a photo of Navarre.

  “This is the best one I have,” Riley told me. “He gets upset when people take his photo. I don’t know why.”

  Some people might have found that suspicious. Not me. I don’t like to have my photo taken, either. I have pretty much bought into the belief held by some primitive civilizations that a camera has the ability to steal your soul.

  The photo Riley sent displayed a handsome young man wearing a pink polo shirt and standing in front of a cabin cruiser emblazoned with the name Soñadora. His dark hair was tousled by the wind, his dark eyes half closed against the bright sun, and he was grinning sheepishly as if he were caught doing something that embarrassed him. He didn’t look like an immigrant, Hispanic or otherwise. He looked like a kid who worked for Goldman Sachs. Maybe that’s why he was embarrassed.

  “If I find Navarre, what do you want me to tell him?” I asked.

  “That I love him,” Riley said. “That I want to see him. That he should call me.”

  “What if he says no?”

  “Then I’ll be wrong about him. And my family will be right.”

  The way she said it, I got the impression that she was more fearful of the latter than the former.

  A few moments later she left Rickie’s. Nina and I watched as she crossed the floor and passed through the doorway. Riley was an accident of family and wealth, and I wondered briefly if she would be able to survive it.

  “Do you think she’s pretty?” I asked.

  “She’s an interesting-looking girl,” Nina said.

  “Is she pretty, though? She doesn’t seem to think so.”

  “If you’re told something long enough, you start to believe it. I’ve been told, for example, that I’m the lovely Ms. Truhler.”

  “That’s what I heard, too.”

  “Do you think Riley was telling the truth?”

  “About you being lovely?”

  “About Juan Carlos. About her family.”

  “No. Not all of it, anyway. But then people seldom tell you all the truth.”

  “She loves him. I think that’s true.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell me—was it love at first sight when you met me?”

  “No.”

  Nina’s downcast eyes told me she was disappointed in my answer.

  “No, it was a few days later when I saw you at the Minnesota Club,” I added. “You were wearing a long, sleek, searing-red evening gown. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You pushed that thug down a flight of stairs.”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s when I knew you were the woman for me.”

  “You’re such a romantic. That’s why you’re going to help Riley, isn’t it? Because you’re a romantic.”

  “That and to annoy Mr. Muehlenhaus.”

  That fucking McKenzie, my inner voice said.

  “You think that’s a good idea? Before when you messed up his plans it was kind of an accident. It wasn’t personal. They just got in the way of what you had set out to do. This time, though, it’s his family.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s something to think about.”

  TWO

  The glacier that carved out the 11,842 lakes located in Minnesota was particularly kind to Lake Minnetonka—or “big water” if you speak Dakota. Actually, it’s less a lake than it is a sprawling maze of interconnected bays, inlets, channels, peninsulas, and islands. The water surface covers about 23 square miles, yet its shoreline stretches for 125 to 150 miles depending on whom you talk to. It takes two hours to drive all the way around it by car—assuming you push the traffic laws—and when you do, you’ll be passing through some of the most affluent zip codes in Minnesota. Half a million bucks might buy you a shack with a view of the water. Not that I saw any for sale the next morning while I was searching for Navarre’s house.

  Navarre lived on the northeastern shore of Crystal Bay. To reach it, I had to drive west a third of the way around the lake and then follow North Shore Drive east through the village of Saga Hill, down along West Arm Bay, and past a cobweb of narrow and poorly marked roads. I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice to say I got lost. Twice. The first time was my fault. I turned left when I should have gone right. The second time I was thrown off by the sign planted at the mouth of the cobblestone driveway—FOR SALE REHMANN LAKE PLACE REAL ESTATE. I drove past it, realized my mistake, and worked my way back. I parked illegally on the main road across from the driveway while I checked the GPS app on the instrument panel of my Audi S5 against the directions Riley had sent to my smartphone. Yep, this was the place.

  A young man watched intently from a ten-year-old red Nissan Sentra that he had parked—quite legally—on the other side of the road. I couldn’t make out the details of his face. He seemed to be scowling, though. I gave him a smile. He took a long last pull on a cigarette and flicked the butt out the window toward me. You drive a $65,000 car, you get that sometimes.

  I crossed the main road and followed the long driveway to a huge two-story house with white cedar shakes and blue wood shingles. It sat in the middle of an equally immense emerald lawn that sloped gently to the lake. I remained in the Audi for a few beats, just staring at the structure. I had seen high schools smaller than this. I went to the door and rang the bell. When that failed to rouse anyone, I knocked. There was no answer. I circled the house, moving clockwise around the attached three-car garage. A porch ran along the entire length of the rear of the house. I mounted the stairs and followed it from one end to the other, dodging white wicker chairs with brilliant blue cushions and white wicker tables with glass tops as I peered through the windows. Nothing moved inside the house or out.

  A gazebo painted white with chairs and tables that matched those on the porch stood between the house and the shoreline, and I crossed the neatly trimmed lawn to reach it. Four speakers were mounted in the rafters, and for a moment I pictured myself and Nina sitting there with a bottle of wine, listening to some tunes, and watching the sun dip across the lake.

  “Nice,” I said aloud.

  I walked the rest of the way to the lake; the morning sun made the waves on Crystal Bay sparkle like diamonds. The shoreline was braced with a wall of enormous boulders that stretched for a hundred feet. It was divided in half by a wide wooden dock; its planks were covered with water-resistant polyurethane. I stepped out onto the dock. It was equipped with both electricity and fresh-water hookups, although no boat was moored there.

  There were plenty of boats dotting the huge bay, though, yet not nearly as many as during the summer, and I was reminded that it was the first day of October. It seems half of the people in Minnesota launch their boats—and ready their golf clubs, for that matter—on Memorial Day and then begin storing them away again right after Labor Day as if they can’t wait for winter to begin. Meanwhile, given the length of our notoriously merciless winters, the rest of us strive tirelessly to stretch summer out until the very first snowfall, and sometimes longer. The folks still out on the lake were my kind of people.

  I didn’t see any bodies floating facedown in the l
ake, so I went back to the house. I made my way to the front door and used Riley’s key to open it. I called Navarre’s name when I stepped inside. A house gives off a certain vibe when it’s unoccupied. I felt it as I closed the door behind me and stepped deeper into the foyer. “Navarre,” I called again, but I was thinking “Wow.” It’s not often you see your face reflected in white marble when you enter a house. I called out yet again. When Navarre didn’t answer, I stepped past the foyer into a living room. This time I actually spoke the word aloud. “Wow.”

  The living room was filled with white furniture; white rugs were strategically positioned on the gleaming hardwood floor. I walked around the rugs for fear of soiling them. Even the baby grand piano in the corner was white. The lid was open, and the way sheet music was arrayed above the keyboard suggested that it had been played recently.

  The living room flanked a formal dining room, where I found a table that could easily seat two dozen beneath an honest-to-God crystal chandelier. The dining room opened onto an immense kitchen that was so opulent and so clean that I would have feared to cook anything in it. There was a door next to the refrigerator. The three-car garage was on the other side of it. A BMW 328i convertible was parked there, and nothing else—no rakes, no shovels, no lawn mowers, and no snow blowers; nothing that you might expect to find in a garage in Minnesota. I checked the Beamer. It was this year’s model; there couldn’t have been more than a few hundred miles on the odometer.

  On the far side of the kitchen I found an informal dining room—it sat only eight—which led to a sunroom filled with more wicker furniture. Thick panes of tinted glass stretching from floor to ceiling served as walls and faced south and west. A family room lay beyond and featured both leather and upholstered furniture arranged in front of an HDTV just slightly smaller than the scoreboard at the Xcel Center.

  Every surface in the house was fastidiously cleaned, dusted, vacuumed, or polished; every pillow, tapestry, quilt, comforter, and rug was artfully arranged; every collectible, antique, artifact, and work of art was displayed to maximum effect. There were no newspapers, magazines, or books littering sofa cushions or tabletops; no jackets, sweaters, or sweatshirts draped over the back of chairs; no mail, umbrellas, shoes, or keys discarded near doorways—nothing to suggest that someone actually lived there. The wastebaskets were empty, and so was the dishwasher. Even the food in the refrigerator looked as if it had been meticulously organized by an art director guiding a photo shoot.

  I wandered up to the second floor. The staircase divided the upstairs more or less in half. I went to my right and discovered four bedrooms and three baths, each so pristine that at first glance you would have doubted that they had ever been used. I looked closer, however, and discovered that the bathroom off of what I assumed was the master bedroom contained a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash, shaving cream, a razor, extra blades, shampoo, conditioner, hair spray, deodorant, cologne, and other articles needful to a man who prized personal hygiene. Yet it all felt new and was so neatly arranged on shelves and in drawers that I suspected the owner suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  That theory was reinforced when I examined the bedroom. The king-sized canopied bed was perfectly made; the coverlet was so smooth it looked as if it had been ironed. Across from the bed was a polished bureau. Eight watches with brand names like Hublot, Omega, Glashütte, and Breguet were carefully arranged across the top according to the color of their wristbands. The drawers contained mostly socks, boxers, handkerchiefs, and short-sleeve polo shirts made by Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, and Fight Club, all immaculately folded. In the bottom drawer there was an orange sweatshirt with the name Macalester College emblazoned in fading blue letters across the front; its cuffs and neckline were frayed. It looked as if it had been worn every day for the past ten years, and if it hadn’t been so neatly stored away I might have thought there was hope for Mr. Navarre yet.

  The walk-in closet had more of the same. High-end suits, costly sports jackets, dress slacks, casual pants, jeans, dress shirts—all on wooden hangers, all arranged by color, and all with approximately two inches of space between them as if Navarre were frightened that they would somehow contaminate each other if they should ever touch. Dress shoes, boots, sneakers, and Top-Siders were just as precisely organized and set on the floor against the far wall of the closet, the back heel of each hard against the molding. Above the shoes were shelves filled with dozens of folded dress shirts; the shirts were also arranged by color. None of them looked as if they had ever been worn before. In fact, the only thing I discovered that seemed to have any age to it at all was a creased and scuffed gray leather satchel with the silver initials CBE riveted to the side. I assumed the initials indicated the name of the manufacturer, yet I wrote them down in a small spiral notebook I carried just the same.

  I moved to the rooms to the left of the staircase. There I found a fourth bathroom. This one featured a large walk-in shower and a whirlpool bath. Fluffy white towels, each impeccably folded and smelling as if it had been washed with lemon-scented soap five minutes ago, were stacked on a white shelf. A door between the shower and bath led to a fully equipped exercise room that smelled of applewood. There was another white shelf with more white towels.

  I left the exercise room and followed the corridor to an office. Riley Brodin had said that Navarre was an entrepreneur. If so, he conducted all of this business without the use of paper. Or computers either, for that matter, although I did find a couple of cable outlets in the walls and a router. I searched the room and discovered only two things that interested me. The first was an empty silver—and I mean real silver—picture frame lying facedown on the desktop. It was the only thing in the room that seemed askew. The second was a seven-year-old yearbook. Like the sweatshirt, it was from Macalester College, an expensive, private liberal arts school in St. Paul.

  I tried the trick of opening the book and letting it fall to see what page it landed on. That didn’t work unless Navarre spent a lot of time reliving a speech Walter Mondale had delivered to the student body. I searched for his name and came up empty. I tried Riley Brodin and discovered her name and photo listed under “Freshmen.” Her hair was longer then and dark brown, and her expression was so damned serious it made me smile.

  Just for giggles, I checked for a name that fit the initials CBE, but there were no matches to either students or teachers.

  I left the book as I found it and continued down the corridor until I discovered a room that was empty except for a Celestron NexStar telescope set near a large window. Careful not to jostle it, I peered through the eyepiece. The telescope was trained on a large estate on the far side of Crystal Bay. Like Navarre’s place, the estate was predominantly white and built to recall the architecture of the antebellum South; there were six Greek-like columns flanking the front door. The house commanded a bluff that overlooked a couple hundred feet of shoreline. There was a dock with slips for four boats; one of them had to be at least sixty feet long. A purple flag flew from a high pole at the end of the dock, and I thought it might carry the emblem of the Minnesota Vikings or maybe even Northwestern University, but no, it was just a purple flag.

  I studied the estate the way Navarre must have. All in all, it made his place look like a starter home in the suburbs. It was because I was so occupied that I didn’t hear her until she shouted, “What are you doing here?”

  I must have leapt three feet into the air. When I came back down, I spun to face the woman. I took two steps backward and one to the side. My hand went to the spot behind my right hip where I would have holstered my gun if I had thought to bring it.

  She stood in the doorway. Her fists were pressed against her hips. Her hair was reddish blond, her eyes were hazel, and she had an ample bosom that she accentuated beneath a crisp white shirt and dark blue blazer. Her skirt matched her jacket and ended a tasteful half inch above her knees. Her face was artfully made up to look younger than it actually was. I might not have noticed ex
cept she was trying awfully hard to appear assertive if not downright stern. Still, I could detect just a hint of alarm behind her eyes.

  “I’m a friend of Navarre’s,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “What are you doing here?” she repeated.

  “Looking for Navarre.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I can see that. Who are you?”

  “How did you get in?”

  I reached into my jacket pocket. The woman’s body tensed and then visibly relaxed when I withdrew the key and held it up for her to see. “Juan Carlos gave me a key.” The use of Navarre’s first name seemed to mollify her a bit.

  “He gave you a key?”

  “Actually, Riles gave me the key. Riley Brodin, Navarre’s girlfriend.” The woman didn’t speak, but her eyes widened with recognition, so I kept on. “Do you know Riles?”

  “I know of her.”

  “She’s Walter Muehlenhaus’s granddaughter.” She looked away for a moment, and I wondered if the name Muehlenhaus had that effect on everyone. “Navarre gave the key to her, and she gave it to me because Navarre didn’t have any other extras. I was supposed to meet him here.”

  “Did Juan Carlos give you the code to the alarm system?”

  That slowed me down. I hadn’t actually thought of that—I had a security system at my house; surely Navarre must have had one, too. Yet I didn’t see a console when I entered the house. I wondered briefly if I had tripped a silent alarm when I unlocked the door, then dismissed the idea. I had been in the house far too long without being shot at for that to be true.

  “He never said anything about an alarm system,” I said.

  “I checked when I arrived. It’s been turned off.”

  “Not by me.”

  “By whom, then?”

  “I don’t know. Ask Navarre.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I know he’s not. Who are you, lady?”

  “Anne Rehmann.”