Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “I calm Dwayne and you promise to lead the hunt; is that what I hear you proposing?” Johnstone countered.

  Damn her. “Hunt and apprehend.”

  “But you will lead,” she said, and he could hear the satisfaction in her voice. It made him wonder if she’d sent Dwayne to the meeting just to provoke this response. Geez, I’m becoming paranoid.

  “All right, yes—but find your kid and tell him to stop pounding the damn war drums.” While he had her on the line he found out where she was staying and gave the location to Denninger, asking her to go visit and verify it.

  “Officer Denninger will swing by to visit and will maintain contact. If you relocate, you inform her. One violation of this and the deal is off.”

  Service had radioed Treebone and Noonan and told them to hike out to Arvon Road, where they piled into Denninger’s cramped Silverado. She dropped them at their vehicles on Huron River Road. Allerdyce had headed back the way he came, on foot, they said, and without explanation. Service had a pretty good idea what the old poacher was about. He was fascinated by the strange animals.

  “Good you called us,” Treebone said. “We were gonna bump you and ask for a ride. See, Noonan here can’t handle backwoods treks.”

  “I find no joy in a potential broken arm or leg with every slippery step,” Bluesuit complained. “When I gotta be out there, no problem. But if I don’t gotta be out there, then fuck all this back-to-nature shit.”

  Service told them that if they wanted to head home for a break, they were free to do so, but to report back by January 10, latest. Neither man indicated what he would do. They had already missed Christmas and any New Year’s celebrations.

  Service drove to Friday’s house where they spent a quiet night with no talk about any of the cases.

  The next morning, she’d elbowed him awake before dawn. “Can we talk now, oh manly mute one?” she asked.

  “You mean after?” he countered.

  “You know how loopy I get afterwards,” she said. “There isn’t going to be an after this morning. Self-indulgence isn’t a luxury we can afford.”

  “Okay,” he said sleepily. The bed felt good.

  “I went to Lamb Jones’s house on Green Garden Road yesterday afternoon,” Friday told him. “Jen Maki assured me that she gave it a good going-over, but something kept nagging at me to go back over there and look less for forensic evidence than for something else. Malcolm Quigley called me yesterday morning and told me he wants to take a murder case forward on Daugherty, and I told him I don’t see Terry for this thing. You want to go with me to see Terry? Afterwards, we’ll hit Green Garden again. There are some things I want you to see. I’ve got some ideas, but I want your reaction first.”

  Working New Year’s Day. That fits.

  Malcolm Quigley was the county prosecutor. Barely fifty, he had silky silver hair he brushed back into wings and wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles with quarter-size lenses, suggesting he needed to see only small portions of anything that crossed his desk. He looked more professor than prosecutor but had earned a reputation as a no-nonsense hard-liner with criminals. Surveys by the Michigan Bar Association showed Quigley’s sentences to be consistently the harshest in the fifteen counties above the bridge, and third overall in the state.

  Quigley had once taught constitutional law at the Cooley Law School in Lansing, had clerked with the Michigan Supreme Court, partnered in a moderately prominent firm in Troy that worked exclusively for automobile clients, and had come north to get prosecution experience to prepare him for a state or federal bench appointment, Marquette being just another career merit badge for the man. His brother Montgomery “Monk” Quigley commanded the Detroit police division that included SWAT and other special operations. Monk was overly aggressive, entirely tactless, overweight, overbearing, muscle-bound, and over-armed. Malcolm was trim and calm, smooth and diplomatic. Both brothers were political creatures with little sense of anything beyond self-promotion, poor models of so-called public servants. Sleazebags, Service thought. Self servants, not public servants. He couldn’t stand either one.

  Service took Shigun to Friday’s sister’s place, told her they’d pick him up by 4 p.m. at the latest, went back to Friday’s, parked his Tahoe, and jumped in with her.

  Daugherty and his wife lived in an old homestead on the west side of the Kona Hills, south of Marquette. During the Great Depression desperate people had fled cities, thinking they could prosper by living off the land in a U.P.’s alleged Eden. Reality dictated otherwise: Most couldn’t handle the way of life, and they either died or headed south. The land here was spiny, the weather relentless, and most economic immigrants had lasted less than two full winters. Oddly, the old cycle was being replayed as the current economic woes of the state and nation crushed people. They still ran north—which remained a stupid choice eighty years later. Daugherty’s place was left over from the first wave of economic refugees in the 1930s, one of many decaying homesteads spread around the U.P., testifying to the land’s dominance.

  Last time Service had seen the deputy’s place, it was barely standing. Now it looked pretty solid, and it was obvious Terry and his wife had put some effort and cash into modernizing the place.

  Celia answered the door, her eyes red and puffy.

  Mrs. Daugherty had been pretty once, but life up here came only in jumbo size and tended to pound everyone. She was considerably younger than her husband, though that wasn’t obvious at first glance. She was tall and sincere, with stringy blonde hair and a pockmarked ego. She worked as a teller for a drive-in bank near Harvey.

  “Can we come in, Celia?” Friday asked.

  The house was sparsely furnished, testimony to Daugherty’s previous financial obligations. There had been a kid by a first wife, now in Rhinelander, and two by a second, a local gal. A large part of the deputy’s paycheck was being garnished for alimony and child support. The house’s interior suggested Celia was trying to maintain some level of dignity for them and hold up her end of the marriage.

  Daugherty sat morosely on the couch, looking even worse than his wife, who followed behind them, saying, “He told me everything—all about what him and Lamb done.” Her words trailed off and she sobbed. “Everything . . .”

  “You said you’d help me,” Daugherty said, looking at Friday. “I got a call that charges are coming down.”

  “Nothing’s changed, Terry. It’s in Prosecutor Quigley’s court. You know that.”

  Daugherty sniffled and rubbed his eyes with his shirtsleeve. “Can’t you do nothing?”

  “If a warrant’s issued, someone will have to serve it,” Friday said.

  The deputy gulped and groaned, his words deliberate and slow. “But I didn’t do it.”

  “He couldn’t,” Celia said, coming to her hubby’s defense.

  Friday looked Daugherty straight in the eye. “Bottom line, there’s enough circumstantial evidence to make a case, Terry. C’mon, you know what the hell is going on. Quigley has certain political goals, needs feathers in his cap, and we’ve got too many unsolveds around here right now to let one go if he thinks he can get a fast verdict and put one in the win column. And you’re a cop. There’s no bigger feather than a dirty cop.”

  “I’m not dirty!” the deputy insisted, but looked away, took a deep breath, and said, “So that’s it: I take the fucking fall, no matter what the truth is? What happened to justice?”

  “Terry,” his wife said softly, trying to calm him.

  “It’s all right,” Friday told him. “I told Quigley the evidence alone won’t carry this case.”

  “Jesus,” Daugherty said with a moan, “what did I ever do to that asshole?”

  Celia suddenly shook a fist in her husband’s face and her own face flushed. “Did you do his goddamn wife?” she yelped.

  Daugherty fell back against the seat back and blinked. “Did I do his wife?”
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br />   “She wanders,” Celia said. “Both of ’em do. God, I thought everybody in town knew!”

  Service nudged Friday. It would be comic under any other circumstances, but Celia and Daugherty had just brought something to the surface they’d not heard before. Daugherty’s response to his wife’s charge indicated that perhaps he had diddled the prosecutor’s wife, which might explain Quigley’s aggressive stance on this case.

  “What am I going to do?” Daugherty asked Friday.

  “Get a lawyer,” she said. “The biggest prick you can afford.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” he said, sobbing.

  Celia walked them to the door. “Terry can’t help himself, really he can’t. He just likes women, is all. I knew that when I met him. It’s like diabetes. You don’t stop loving somebody because they’ve got diabetes,” she said. “Do you?”

  “You hear that about the Quigleys?” Service asked when they got out to Friday’s vehicle.

  “Rumors—but you know how it is up here. It never even crossed my mind to connect Daugherty and Margaret Quigley, Miss Arm-Candy Trophy Wife.”

  “And now?”

  She puffed. “Good God, Grady. I just don’t know. Let’s go look at Lamb’s house.”

  •••

  The house was relatively new and small, built on two or three hundred yards of frontage on the Chocolay River, a weathered cedar deck facing the river with a great view of all the sweepers hanging out over deep riffle water along the west bank. Yellow police tape still ringed the house: police investigation—do not cross or enter.

  They found everything dumped on the floor. Service said, “Was it like this yesterday?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Doesn’t look like kids,” he said.

  “Agreed,” Friday said. “Somebody wanted to find something.”

  “Something you saw yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and pointed him toward Lamb’s bedroom.

  Closets had been gutted, drawers turned over, clothes everywhere. “Got your camera?” Friday asked.

  “Yeah. Let’s both take shots.”

  He got out his digital, set the lighting for cloudy day, and began shooting for the record. “Robbery?” he asked.

  “Possible, but it somehow doesn’t feel like that to me,” she said.

  “In this economy, B and E’s like a plague,” he said. You could almost measure the health of the local and state economies by the number and rate of camp break-ins. He stood looking at a pile of underwear—silk, sleek, scanty, everything so small it would compress into less than a handful—not the sort of thing you ordered from the Sears catalog.

  “Lingerie,” he said out loud.

  Friday looked over at him and arched an eyebrow. “Point?”

  “Lingerie—that’s froggy for frilly scanty panties and such, not for everyday underwear. You know this sort of stuff’s mostly for messing around, the other stuff for workaday. There’s gotta be thirty sets of scanty pants here. Where’s her other stuff? Most women I know, they’ve got maybe a coupla scanty-pants getups, but this?”

  Friday said, “You know most women and the difference between lingerie and underwear?”

  “That’s a cheap shot,” he complained.

  “Good observation, Grady. I had the same one yesterday.” She went into the closet and came out carrying a pile of catalogs: victoria’s secret, frederick’s sex on satin, amorous undies. “There’s a whole arsenal of sex toys on the floor in there, too,” she added.

  “Well, someone was in here looking for something, and I’ve got to believe whatever it is, it is in this vein, so to speak. When you can’t easily find what you want, you know what your next step is?” he said to Friday.

  “Stop and think?”

  “No, start ripping the shit out of everything.” Which he did, with gusto.

  An hour later they had a shoe box he’d found inside a tackle box, hanging from a nail in the cellar. It contained three savings account books and a safety deposit box key stuffed into bubble wrap, and a small red teddy bear with escanaba upper peninsula state fair 1992 embazoned on its chest. The accounts held $68,000 as of last month, at least two years’ worth of Lamb’s state income. Nobody could save that much and buy a house with frontage on one of the Upper Peninsula’s best steelhead and salmon streams. Most of the deposits were in cash. One entry for five hundred was monthly, going back two years.

  And there were photos. Mostly old Polaroids, one with Malcom Quigley posing nude with a nervous smile, his small erect penis twisted sideways like a diminutive Leaning Tower of Pisa. Service laughed out loud. There were other men, none Service recognized, all of them equally busted in flagrante. In one touristy photo with Quigley, outside, there was a sign in the background, distant but readable: calumet theatre. It was the old opera house from a century ago.

  Who was Lamb Jones—really?

  Friday looked at him, tapping one of the account books on the heel of her hand. Celia had said that both Malcolm and Marge Quigley wander. “We’re gonna get ahead of this right now,” Friday announced.

  She placed a call to Limey Pykkonnen in Houghton, and put it on speaker. “This is Tuesday and Grady,” she said. “Can you get us a number for the woman who runs the curling club up in Calumet?”

  “Sure—Elle Papatros, nice gal, and married to a good guy” the Houghton detective said, then told Friday the number, and asked why.

  “Not sure yet; maybe nothing,” she said.

  She looked over at Service. “Here’s the deal. I know Quigley and his wife were separated once—at least, that’s what people around town claim, two or three years back. We need confirmation. The Quigleys curl over in Calumet. I heard that at the cop house.” Friday punched in the phone number and put the phone on speaker.

  “Mrs. Papatros, I’m Detective Friday over in Marquette, and I’ve been asked to contact you regarding some personal information about Margaret Anne Quigley. I’ve got you on speakerphone because I have a sinus infection and can’t hear very well. Some of the women over here are thinking about giving her an award for her volunteer work in the community, and they want to make it a big deal, but there’s a bit of a concern.”

  “Yes, of course. How may I be of help?”

  Friday paused. “There’s no easy or tactful way to get at this. We’d like to involve Malcolm, but we’re in a bit of a quandary. We’ve heard, and I’m afraid I can’t tell you the source, but we’ve heard . . . well, we’ve heard the Quigleys are having some serious marital difficulties. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Nonsense. My husband and I had dinner with Malcolm and Margie a couple of nights ago. Who’s saying this about them?”

  “Not important, but you know they were separated a while back, and we heard this and we just didn’t want to embarrass anyone. We’re trying to do the right thing. This is strictly between us.”

  “I understand fully,” the woman said in a conspiratorial tone.

  Service was aware that most people enjoyed gossip and intrigue, especially if they thought they were on the inside, or at least on the short list of those in the know. It was a human frailty cops often leaned on.

  “I mean, they were separated before, so there’s a precedent. We just had to be sure,” Friday said.

  “Oh, that ended a long time ago,” the woman said.

  “Two years, right?”

  “More like three. It lasted almost three months.”

  “There was a girlfriend?”

  “I wouldn’t know for certain about that,” the curling club president said, and lowered her voice, “but I did hear something about it . . . I guess we all did,” she added. “I really don’t know what’s true. I know Marge flew down to Orlando and stayed with her mother, but she came back eventually and they patched things up, and it’s been fine since then. I’m sur
e the rumor’s just that. Every marriage crosses some rocky patches, if you know what I mean.”

  “Three years. That long ago?” Friday asked.

  “I remember she missed two months of curling, December and January. I had a terrible time getting substitutes.”

  “I must be getting old,” Friday said. “My memory . . .”

  “It gets us all,” the woman said sympathetically.

  Tuesday Friday closed the phone.

  “Scary,” Service said. “Why do people tell perfect strangers anything?”

  “Therein lies the premise for so-called reality shows,” she said. “Which aren’t. And besides, a cop isn’t a perfect stranger. Our badges imply trust and neutrality in gathering information.”

  Friday looked at the back of one of Lamb’s snapshots. “Eight p.m., December twentieth, no year. Portage View Retreat House.” Service knew this to be a relatively new B&B near Michigan Tech, a little on the fancy side price-wise, aimed at well-heeled alums.

  Friday called Pykkonnen again. “Sorry to bother you again.”

  “Yalmer’s ice-fishing,” the Houghton detective said.

  “Can you get someone to check the guest registry of the Portage View Retreat House—find out if a Lamb Jones was there on December twentieth, three years ago this month?”

  “Lamb, huh? Terrible thing. Good gal. You making any headway with the case?”

  “Not as much as we’d like,” Friday said.

  “Sorry to hear that. Hang tight, I’ll be back at you in a few minutes.”

  “That fast?”

  “The manager’s one of Yalmer’s fishing chums.”

  This rationale explained a lot of social and political connections in Upper Peninsula social circles.

  The call-back came twenty minutes later. Friday answered on speaker. “She was there, Tuesday; registered in her own name.”