The Taking of Libbie, SD

by David Housewright

  “Listen, sweetie,” I said. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Nothing at all. Right, Chief?”

  The chief nodded and said, “Yes. I promised.”

  “But Sara, I need you to tell us the truth. It’s important.”

  Sara nodded her head and folded her hands on top of the table. I think she knew what was coming.

  “The night that the Imposter disappeared,” I said. “Tuesday night. You called him, didn’t you? You called his hotel room from your home.”

  Sara nodded.

  “You told him to meet you at Lake Mataya.”

  Sara nodded again. Her hands began to tremble, and tears formed in her eyes.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I wanted—because of what he did to me, I wanted—I wanted to kill him.”

  The chief’s entire body flinched, yet he continued to stare out the window, continued to remain silent.

  “You didn’t kill him, though, did you?” I said.

  Sara shook her head vigorously. Tears fell and splattered against the tabletop. She gripped her hands more tightly. The chief exhaled as if he had been holding his breath.

  “It’s okay,” I said and patted her hands. “No one thought that you did.”

  “I was so angry,” Sara said. “After what happened at the hotel; the way he laughed. It was already all over town, and other people were laughing, too. Even my father laughed. And he accused me, my father accused me of, of—you know what he accused me of. He said I damaged his reputation. His. I hated him. Rush. I hated Rush and I wanted—I wanted…”

  “It’s okay,” I said again.

  “No, it isn’t. Being that way; wanting to kill someone. I still shake when I think of it.”

  “Everyone has black and evil thoughts. Everyone knows lust, malice, envy, greed, hate. There is no shame in owning these—these what? Instincts? The shame is giving in to them, giving them dominance. You didn’t.”

  “I wanted to. I wanted…”

  Sara’s tears flowed more freely, yet I noticed that she had relaxed her hands.

  “What happened?” the chief said. His voice was gentle. He didn’t look at either of us.

  “I…”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I called Rush like you said. I asked him to meet me at the lake; I didn’t know any other place where I wouldn’t be seen. He asked why. I told him—I told him that since everyone already thinks we slept together we might as well—we might as well…” Sara sighed deeply. “I told him to meet me in the clearing. There’s a clearing in the trees about halfway around the lake. I don’t know if you’ve been there.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “I told him to meet me in the clearing, and I waited. When he arrived—when he arrived, I pointed the gun at him.”

  “What gun?” the chief said.

  “My father’s, one of my father’s guns. He laughed at me just like he did in the hotel room. He said—Rush said I must be kidding. Then he stopped laughing. I don’t know why. I didn’t say a word to him, nothing at all. I just started walking toward him with the gun, pointing the gun at his face, and he started backing up. There’s a kind of low bench, a bench made of the trunk of a tree, and he kept backing up until his legs hit the bench and he tumbled over. He fell over and he covered his head with his hands and he started—he started begging, I guess. He said he was sorry. He said…”

  Sara sighed again.

  “I wanted to shoot him. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make my finger squeeze the trigger. I tried so hard. Then I started crying. I was crying because I felt so helpless. I was crying louder than Rush was. Then I ran away. I ran back to the car and I drove home.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “McKenzie, why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  I rested my hands on top of hers, and she smiled slightly.

  “At what time was this?” the chief said.

  “Ten o’clock,” Sara said.

  “Were there any other cars in the parking lot?”

  “Cars? No. Well, there was Rush’s car and mine, that was all.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No, Chief, I didn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything. Are you going to arrest me?”

  The chief grinned. He turned his head and looked her in the eye for the first time.

  “There’s no law against not shooting someone,” he said. “Not even for not shooting a louse like Rush.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sara,” I said, “when you went home, did you tell your mother what happened?”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said. “I was so embarrassed and hurt and—only I couldn’t stop crying. She came into my bedroom and hugged me and asked me what was wrong and it just came out—everything—including what happened at the hotel, what really happened. She said the same thing you did.”

  “What?”

  “It’s okay.”

  And then she took the blame, my inner voice told me. She said that she lured the Imposter to the clearing, substituting a tree branch for the gun because, let’s face it, who would believe that she’d be unable to squeeze the trigger?

  “I like your mother,” I said aloud. “I didn’t before. Now—she’s all right. Tell her I said so. Tell her I said, ‘Pretty good for an Edina girl.’”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I didn’t think it was my place to explain it to her, so I simply shrugged as I pushed my chair back and rose from the table.

  “You’ll have to ask her,” I said. I gestured at the chief with my chin. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  “Is that all?” Sara said. “Is that all you wanted to know? Is that why you came here?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I,” said the chief.

  “Patience,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Patience.”

  Dawn Neske was wearing a thin, filmy red short-sleeve robe that ended just above her knees, and nothing else that I could see, when we opened the door to her apartment.

  “Did you forget something?” she said. She saw the chief and me standing behind her husband in the doorway and quickly pulled her robe tighter. “Perry, geez.”

  “They stopped me in the corridor,” Perry said. “They wouldn’t let me go to work.”

  We pushed our way deeper into the apartment and closed the door. The rooms were sparsely furnished, and I noticed that there were several boxes stacked against the walls. Either the Neskes were just moving in or getting ready to move out.

  “I should get dressed,” Dawn said.

  “Don’t bother on my account,” I said.

  Dawn pulled the collar of her robe up and glared at me. “What do you want?”

  I fished the cell phone out of my pocket and dialed up the photograph that Greg Schroeder had sent me. I showed the video display to Dawn.

  “Is this Nicholas Hendel? Is this the man who called himself Rushmore McKenzie?”

  Dawn nodded. I pivoted toward Perry and held up the video screen for him to see. He looked at the face on the screen, glanced at Dawn, and edged closer to the front door. The chief deliberately made a loud thud as he leaned against the door, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Is this Nicholas Hendel?” I said again.

  “Yes,” Dawn said.

  “Are you sure? It’s a high school yearbook photo. A few years old, not very good—”

  “It’s him.”

  I glanced at Perry. He shrugged as if he didn’t know whom I was talking about.

  “Where is he?” Dawn said.

  “I’m not exactly sure, but I have a good idea.”

  “Where?”

  “You took an awful chance coming to me, Dawn. Did you really think that if I found Nick, I wouldn’t also find his sister?”

  “His sister?” the Chief said.

 
I dialed up another photo and held it up for everyone in the room to see. It was Dawn, the photo taken six years earlier when she was in high school. I spoke to her.

  “You told me that you and Perry worked in a call center in Franklin, a town just down the road from where you lived. A database search for Nicholas Hendel revealed that at least one person by that name had lived in Ashton, Illinois. While he was here, Nicholas made a slip. He told someone that in high school he had been a Raider.” I made air quotes around the name. “He also left a clue that suggested he was from Illinois. So we checked all the high schools in Illinois and discovered that the nickname for Ashton-Franklin was the Raiders, Ashton-Franklin being a consolidated high school drawing from towns just a few miles apart. Yesterday, I had an investigator take a look at the Ashton-Franklin yearbooks. When you think about it, it was all really quite simple.”

  I gave a triumphant glance at Chief Gustafson.

  “Was that what you had in mind when you dragged me here?” I said.

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I knew it,” Perry said. He was speaking to his wife. Dawn slowly sat in one of the few chairs in the apartment and lowered her head. “I knew this would happen. I told you so.”

  “I thought you didn’t know who Nicholas Hendel was,” the chief said.

  Perry looked at the door the chief was leaning against, wishing he were out the door and down the street.

  “You were Nick’s shills, both of you,” I said. “You helped set up the town for him, picked Mike Randisi as a target—because of your job, Dawn, you knew about his agoraphobia. You slept with Ed Bizek to keep close to the money. It was his wallet that you told me about, the one you searched; that’s where you found the account numbers and password.”

  “We have the right to—”

  I interrupted Perry before he could say any more.

  “Shut the hell up,” I told him. “You pimped your wife for money. That means you don’t get any rights. Not from me. So you just stand there and shut up.”

  Dawn looked like she was about to say something, but I cut her off, too.

  “Please don’t,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Honest to God, we haven’t got the time.”

  “Time for what?” Perry said.

  “I said shut up.”

  I moved close enough to Dawn to see the goose bumps on the flesh of her bare arms and thighs.

  “It’s all true,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  She lifted her head to look at me.

  “We didn’t steal the money,” she said. “We don’t have it.”

  “I know you don’t.”

  That caused Chief Gustafson to push himself off of the door.

  “They don’t?” he said.

  “Nope. They have no idea what happened to Hendel or where he went. They don’t know what happened to the money, either. That’s why Dawn came to me, why she took the risk of giving up her brother’s name. They were hoping I could find out. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” Dawn said.

  “Did you hear from your brother the night he disappeared?”

  “He left a voice mail message,” Dawn said. “Nick told us that his car broke down at the lake and he needed a ride. But Perry was working and I…”

  “You were with Ed Bizek.”

  “Yes. We didn’t hear the message until the next morning. Later we heard”—she glanced briefly at the chief—“that Nick had skipped town with the money, only that didn’t make sense.”

  “That’s because you never gave him the password, did you?”

  Dawn shook her head.

  “But you see—” She turned in the chair to face the chief. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t take the money. We don’t know what happened to Nick. We’re innocent.”

  “Hardly innocent,” I said. “How long did it take you to put the scam together, anyway?”

  “Two years,” Dawn said.

  “That long?”

  Despite my threats, Perry started talking again. “It took us a while to figure out how to put it all together. Creating a company, the Web site, recruiting actors to play investors—it was really complicated.”

  “I’m sure it was,” the chief said.

  “Perry, geez,” Dawn said.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Please. Why me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you pick my name?”

  “I liked it.”

  “You liked it?”

  “Yes. I liked the sound of it, Rushmore McKenzie. I read it in the paper in the Twin Cities. It was right after you helped find the gold that the gangsters hid back in the 1930s. We were there with Nick to work out our plans before he came to Libbie. We went online and discovered that there was enough information about you so that people would know that you were legitimate and that you were trustworthy, enough so that people would be satisfied without digging any deeper. We were always afraid that if people dug deeper they would learn things that would prove that Nick wasn’t you. Only they never did. One more thing, something important—there was a description of you online that matched Nicky, but no picture of you.”

  “As simple as that,” I said.

  “As simple as that,” Dawn said. “Except—” She smiled briefly and shook her head. “If we had taken the trouble to dig deeper, if we had found out who you really were, we would never have used your name.”

  “Okay,” I said. I tried to hide my disappointment. All this time I had expected, I had hoped, that something momentous had gone into the selection process. Instead, it was pure chance. How did the country-western song go—if it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all?

  “What are you going to do?” Perry said.

  The chief looked at me as if he were waiting for an answer.

  “Contact your officers,” I told the chief. “Have these two escorted to the sheriff’s department in Mercer.”

  Dawn hopped out of the chair so quickly that the top of her robe fell open, letting me know exactly what it was that Ed Bizek had seen in her.

  “What charge?” she said.

  “Hold them as material witnesses,” I told the chief. “The county attorney may charge them with conspiracy to commit fraud or he might not, but it’s likely he’ll need them to build his case.”

  “What case?” the chief said. “Against whom?”

  “Against the person who stole all that money, of course. Hurry up, will you? We’re running out of time. Oh, one more thing. Call Sheriff Balk and ask him to meet us.”

  “Where?”

  By the time we arrived at the lobby of the First Integrity State Bank of Libbie, the free donuts left for the customers were stale and the coffee was burned. There were several customers queued up at the teller cages and another sitting in a chair across the desk from a customer service rep. I sat on the cotton sofa beneath the chandelier and propped my feet on the polished coffee table. The older woman sitting across from me was reading a magazine. She peered at me over the top of her reading glasses. I had no doubt that she was silently questioning my mother and father’s parenting skills.

  The customer sitting at the desk finished his business, and while he was slipping out the front door, the service rep moved to the lobby area.

  “Mrs. Franklin?” he said.

  The woman dropped her magazine on the table and stood. She stared at the rep. The message in her expression was unmistakable.

  “Sir,” the rep said. “Please remove your feet. This is a bank, not a living room.”

  I removed my feet. The woman smiled in triumph. She followed the rep to his desk. As soon as her back was turned, I propped my feet back on the table, crossing my legs at the ankles.

  “Comfortable?” the chief said.

  I examined my watch.

  They’re late, my inner voice said.

  A few moments later, Jon Kampa joined us, his eyes sweeping first over me, then the chief, then back to me a
gain. He was no happier that I was abusing his furniture than the old woman had been but said nothing about it. He adjusted his red tie. It was the same tie that he wore when we first met, the same charcoal suit.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he said.

  I glanced at my watch again.

  Dammit, Harry.

  “You could confess,” I said, “but in a few minutes, it really won’t be necessary.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kampa said.

  “You looted the city’s account. You killed Nicholas Hendel. Nick Hendel was the Imposter’s real name, by the way. You probably didn’t know that.”

  What surprised me was that Gustafson seemed more surprised by my revelation than Kampa. The chief turned a deep crimson and started breathing in and out as if he had just completed a marathon. Kampa, on the other hand, didn’t display any emotion at all. He spoke as if he had been practicing the phrase—“I will not answer any of your questions without my attorney present.”

  “That’s okay with me,” I said. “I don’t have any questions.”

  From his expression, the chief, on the other hand, had many, many questions.

  “Think about it,” I said. “The Imposter was last seen alive at about 10:00 p.m. According to your report, Kampa said that the city accounts were looted at about midnight. Now I have been told since I started this investigation that just about everybody had access to the account numbers and password. I don’t believe that’s entirely true. For example, the Imposter didn’t have access. He didn’t have the password. His accomplices didn’t steal the money, or they wouldn’t have taken the risk of trying to help me find Hendel; they were just as surprised when he disappeared as you were. Who does that leave? It leaves the one person who knew that Hendel wouldn’t be around to ask what happened to the money; the one person who knew that, because he had disappeared, Hendel would be blamed for looting the account.”

  I pointed at Kampa.

  “The man who killed him,” I said.

  “You can’t prove anything,” he said.

  “It’s not my job to prove it. It’s theirs.”

  By then, finally, the front door of the bank had flown open, and a dozen men and women dressed in suits entered, spreading out across the interior like a SWAT team, moving swiftly to the cashier cages and to the computers on top of the desks. Kampa took half a dozen quick steps toward the door. The chief grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back beneath the chandelier. More suits poured into the building. The old woman screamed. A man standing near the cashier cages raised his hands into the air. Apparently he was surrendering to a tall, silver-haired man who found a spot in the center of the bank and addressed the bank employees and customers in a loud, formal voice.