The Nail Knot

by John Galligan

  Lumen Bostock, the trout-poaching milk truck driver, had appeared next to contest the fine he received for using his jake brakes inside village limits. The president noted that traffic tickets could not be contested before the village board. Bostock then revised his challenge to the anti-jake brake ordinance itself. Another lengthy discussion ensued, with Bostock trying to challenge the concept of noise pollution as the sort of “politically correct” nonsense Jake Jacobs had brought to Black Earth. He proposed a “no ponytails on men” ordinance. At this point someone named Shelly Milkerson had been forcibly removed by Bud Lite from the meeting room. Further discussion was re-directed to the public comment period.

  None other than Junior made herself memorable next. Fourth on the agenda. She wanted a Deaf Child sign put up on County K, a quarter-mile north and south of her farm—to protect her Daddy. And she wanted the speed limits enforced. This drew an irate response from the president, who pointed out that Junior had made exactly these same demands at the last meeting, then reiterated that the village had been so busy responding to lawsuits filed by Jake Jacobs over the dam that it hardly had time to process the water and sewer requests for the new subdivision homes, let alone worry about “people wandering in the road.”

  I imagined Junior sitting down, stony-faced, steaming—but read into the record. I sipped coffee and watched Ingrid Jacobs take a phone call. She replied to something rather tersely and hung up. I wondered about Jake Jacobs’ funeral. Drownings … accidental or otherwise … the cops did autopsies, toxicology tests, I knew that all too well. The results came slowly, a week or more. But the body somehow wasn’t part of it. The body came back almost too soon—tissues sampled, fluids drained, bones scanned, a life and a death reduced to measurable quantities in a lab, waiting in line. Ingrid looked at me. She lip-smiled. I went back to the meeting minutes.

  Next, a visitor, County Supervisor Ronald Hellenbrand, spoke to the economic potential, tax base- and recreation-wise, of keeping the water in Lake Bud—and as just one example, he reminded people of the upcoming Jet Ski Jamboree, which would draw a hundred or so people the following weekend. Thanks for coming, said the president.

  Ronald Hellenbrand. There was a new name.

  Then came the President’s Report. Bud Bjorgstad announced the chartering of a new tax-exempt organization to be called the Friends of Black Earth People—pointedly replacing the Creek in Jacobs’ Friends of Black Earth Creek. “It’s about people, not water and fish,” spoke the President into the record. He displayed membership papers, including one set with Jacobs’ name already filled in. The membership fees would be waived for Jacobs, Supervisor Hellenbrand put in. If Jacobs wanted to join the people. At nine twenty-seven p.m., the president entertained a motion to adjourn. Dickie Pee in a Bag (Richard P. Johnsrud, Treasurer) appeared suddenly in the record to second the motion.

  I took another sip and sat back to ponder. If Jacobs had indeed fished the yellow sally hatch and died during the meeting, then what I was looking at was a list of potentially motivated people who nevertheless could not possibly have dunked him in the creek, then hacked off his ponytail and stuffed it his mouth. And that made it simple. Dad did it. Just like he said he would. And Junior was lying. Or kidding herself. And paying me to help.

  But that just wouldn’t stick. Junior may have been working me in some way—the Dog clung stubbornly to as much ugliness as he could—but it still didn’t make sense that Jacobs would have been on the stream instead of at the meeting. His wife had needed him. The stream had needed him.

  So, on the other hand, what if Jacobs’ killer had been clever enough to dunk him at, say, five o’clock and re-rig him with a yellow sally? Someone that clever could then pull the ponytail trick to implicate old Melvin O’Malley and follow that with a bit of grandstanding at the village board meeting. If that were the scenario, then what I was looking at was a list of suspects, Lumen Bostock and President Bud at the top, with a surprise showing by “Richard P. Johnsrud, Treasurer.” Two elements of the death scene—the yellow sally, the ponytail in the mouth—made the alibi complete, but Junior had scotched that. And so the killer was uneasy now, unprotected, on the move.

  Maybe.

  The crux was to know whether or not Jacobs’ fly had been re-tied after his death. But how? Since Junior had snatched it off, there was nothing to go on. Dickie Pee told me Ingrid Jacobs had her husband’s gear. Would she let me see it? If so, what would I be looking for? How could I tell whether or not Jacobs had tied on his own final fly?

  Over-caffeinated and anxious, I rose and poked about the margins of the room. Ingrid watched me. Self-consciously, I inspected the display of small artworks and photos around the walls, soon discovering from the photographs something I hadn’t noticed when I had seen Jake Jacobs as a dead man. As a live human being, Jacobs was a strong-looking character. He wasn’t big or burly. But he was about six-feet tall and wiry, with a lightness in his carriage that suggested a background in athletics and probably some mid-life martial arts. And while the Dog was ignorant on the question of whether women dig men with ponytails, I was pretty certain that the rest of Jake Jacobs was okay by women. He was handsome, dark-skinned and well-featured, with playful green eyes. When he held up a trout to the camera, the trout looked lucky.

  I went to the counter and paid the lovely widow seven dollars from a fifty. Then, gambling, I said, “I was the one who found your husband.”

  If her smile had been a blandly perfect cast over nothing, her expression now snapped to and came down on live water. I nearly glimpsed her teeth.

  “You what?”

  “I found Jake.”

  “You—?”

  Her eyes widened. They were a deep, exotic brown, and slowly they seemed to let in light and take on depth, seeing me. She was suddenly eager to talk.

  “Then you must have noticed Jake’s ponytail in his mouth. Didn’t you?”

  “No,” I lied. “I didn’t look that closely.”

  “I heard Junior was there.”

  I admitted that.

  “When I saw the body at the morgue, I knew it,” said Ingrid Jacobs, gripping a rag in her elegant hand and staring across Main Street toward the Lunch Bucket Café. There was something about her mouth when she spoke—a funny crinkle—and I fixated on it. “I was at the meeting before last,” she said. “I heard Mel O’Malley say he would kill Jake. He threatened to do it, and he did. I’ll bet Junior took the ponytail out of Jake’s mouth to protect her dad. And B.L.’s too much of a dumb-ass to figure it out.”

  Her eyes returned to me. I have a blank Boston stare, which I gave back to her. Actually, things were moving a little fast for the Dog. I hadn’t planned on more than getting a first feel for who she was. But we had crossed some line, and I said, “From what I’ve heard, there were a few other people with a reason to kill your husband.”

  “Like who,” she demanded, and quickly rolled her lips inward.

  I suggested poachers, but she dismissed that with a slightly inelegant huff. Nor did she go for Junior’s theory that Bud Bjorgstad wanted Jake out of the way badly enough to kill him—and that setting up Mel O’Malley gave the president access to Junior’s farm, now that he had forced through its annexation into the village. That idea made her turn away from me and stare once more toward the window.

  “Jake’s killer could have been anybody,” I said, “anybody with an interest in keeping Black Earth the way it is. Your husband wanted to change things, and—”

  “Look,” she stopped me. She tossed her perfectly messy black hair. “You don’t understand. Jake died about eight o’clock. Everybody in town who hated Jake was at the village board meeting—except for Melvin O’Malley—”

  It was my turn to stop her. “I thought the coroner could only place Jake’s death within a six hour range. I imagine that’s because of the cold water, which makes the body—”

  I saw her careful, closed-lip smile reappear and head back over blank water. Calmly, crinkle-mouthed, she said,
“B.L. gave me Jake’s stuff. Jake had a yellow sally on. So he was fishing at eight o’clock. That’s when Mel O’Malley drowned my husband. And Junior took the ponytail to cover for him.”

  I stared at her a minute, wanting to be sure I heard right.

  “You’ve got your husband’s rod?” I said. “And there’s a yellow sally on it?”

  She nodded.

  Slowly and carefully, watching her mouth, I tucked forty-three dollars change back into my billfold. Tying another sally on Jacobs’ line was a cheap trick that nevertheless had a certain shrewdness to it. Only Junior or I could expose this fraud. But in doing so, Junior herself was exposed—her tampering with the crime scene was forced into the open—and thus the finger would point straight at Junior’s dad.

  Somebody was clever in Black Earth. I had to admit that. I felt another chunk fall out of my ugly attitude. Then I moved straight ahead. “But Jake would have been at the meeting too—not out fishing. I’m sure he planned on being there. And given that everyone in town seems to know that the yellow sally hatches at eight o’clock, couldn’t someone have killed him at four and then just retied his fly?”

  That cracked it—her smile. It came open. Her lips split apart—slowly, reluctantly, with a lot of friction—into an open-mouthed grimace until I could see what was inside them.

  Braces.

  The lovely Ingrid Jacobs wore braces. Straps and bands and full-out Soo Line tracks from one corner of her pretty mouth to the other.

  She gaped at me, flushed and fierce-looking. Her lips strained to close over the braces and finally made it. She spoke from the back of her throat.

  “Who are you?”

  There followed a weird exchange of energies. The Dog had worked hard to be no one. And before me was a woman who I gathered had worked just as hard to be someone. We stood there stalemated, intersecting in some no-man’s land of personal identity. It was no accident, I guess, that Junior jumped to mind right then—so absolutely sure of herself. So absolutely sure the world had order. So absolutely sure the killer was not her Dad. Now that Jacobs’ fly line had a yellow sally on it again, she had to be right.

  Didn’t she?

  “Just a trout bum,” I repeated to Ingrid Jacobs. “Just passing through.”

  Her skin flushed and her lips strained and she looked like an angry child.

  “You’re working for Junior,” she accused me.

  When I didn’t answer, she began to wipe a milk steamer. Her cheeks appeared red-hot.

  “Look, Ingrid, can you show me the fly on Jake’s line? Maybe I can help you.”

  I felt stupid as I said it. The old, gullible, Dog—everything to everybody. But Ingrid took my offer and flounced away with a huff. Startled, the big orange cat bolted from the fly tying bench. In the cat’s wake, a few duck feathers swirled and settled.

  Ingrid went upstairs. I heard her walking above me. In a minute she returned with her husband’s pricey bamboo rod. Sure enough, the fly on Jake’s line was the upside-down tie, the Jake’s Yellow Sally, by Dickie Pee, the same type of fly Junior had snapped off and tossed in the creek. But this had to be a second, different Jake’s Sally. The knot was crude. It looked like a few hasty, chubby-fingered half-hitches.

  “See?” said Ingrid.

  “I see.”

  Reaching out, her hands shook. I gave back the rod. “Melvin O’Malley killed Jake,” she said. “Just like he promised.”

  “Junior’s just as sure that somebody set up her dad. Somebody who had it out for Jake and Mel Senior.” She rolled her lips in.

  “What if somebody did set this whole thing up?” I asked. I watched her. She scowled. “Who might do that?”

  She tossed her hair and turned away from me. “I don’t know.” “Tell me about Dickie P. Johnsrud.”

  “What about him?”

  “He have anything against Junior and her dad?” “They sued him,” she answered. She looked at her husband’s rod as if she couldn’t remember how it had come to be in her hands. “Over the hunting accident. They lost. But I guess Junior stayed after him. She got that house-arrest cuff put on him. For drunk driving. He can’t go out after dark. He has to be home for the computer to call him.”

  “What about Dickie and Jake? Didn’t they work together?”

  She held the rod and looked away toward the window, where B.L.’s cream-and-gold patrol car cruised by. “Jake and Dickie had a big fight. Dickie got all these memberships for FOBEC, and he wanted to be paid for it, but Jake said FOBEC was a volunteer organization. Dickie raised membership prices on his own and started taking a cut. Jake told Dickie FOBEC didn’t want his help anymore.”

  I chewed on that a minute. As I did so, Lumen Bostock’s silver milk truck hissed to a stop and the mini-Abe Lincoln sprang out and strutted toward the Pêche Tôt. Ingrid Jacobs leaned the rod on the counter, tapped coffee into a tall paper cup and capped it. She met Bostock at the door. They exchanged neither money nor words. I could only guess that they knew each other pretty well. As Bostock stalked off with his triple espresso, Ingrid drifted back to the counter.

  “When did B.L. give you Jake’s rod?”

  “About ten last night. When he came to tell me about Jake.”

  “He say anything?”

  “He said Jake was killed and he was sorry.”

  “Funny,” I said. “That he’d give the rod to you. With a sally on it. You’d think he’d have the sense to hang on to it.” She didn’t say anything. “In a fishing town like this,” I said, “where everybody knows the hatches, it seems obvious he’d keep that rod to help him with the time of death.”

  Ingrid shrugged lamely. “I just noticed the sally this morning and I called him. I thought it might help. But B.L. was real quiet. He sounded kind of dumbfounded. I don’t think he saw it before. He called back about five minutes before you got here and said he had to go to the county courthouse to get some warrants, then he’d be by to pick up the rod.”

  I nodded. Tying on a second yellow sally—that was a cheap trick. But who was playing it? We both stared out at Main Street for a while. It looked hot. For the time being, I decided to let Ingrid Jacobs think the yellow sally on her husband’s line was authentic. Or to let her think that I thought it was authentic. I wondered where the rod had been before ten o’clock last night, when B.L. dropped it off. On the stream bank—but after that, where? And who, aside from Jake and Ingrid Jacobs, had access to the second floor of the Pêche Tôt?

  “One problem with the Dickie Pee idea,” I said after a minute, talking mostly to myself, “is that the man’s in a wheelchair.”

  Ingrid didn’t respond. She had become still, her face divided by the angle of the fly rod.

  I asked her, “Did you sleep here last night?”

  “We … I have a house … on Depot Street.”

  She seemed astonished at the sound of her own words. We had become I. She seemed about to slip into wholly convincing tears at the realization, but just then the phone rang. She jumped to it. “Pêche Tôt,” she said tightly and gave the caller what I figured was about half a sentence.

  “No,” she said. Her voice was hot. “I don’t need you today. I didn’t ever need you. Give me back the apron and anything else you borrowed and pick up your stuff.”

  She set the phone on the counter. “I’m sorry,” she told me. “I’m closing. You’ll have to leave.”

  Ingrid Jacobs turned her back to me. She wiped at a coffee grinder for a moment or two. Then her shoulders shriveled. She fought the shakes. But she kept wiping.

  “I’m at the campground,” I said. “In the RV.”

  She turned. The wash cloth snagged across her forearm. A wet slug of coffee grounds dropped from its folds. “Yeah?” She made a big gasp. “Well, you’re next.”

  “I’m next what?”

  No answer. She turned her back. Many things needed wiping suddenly. Too many for words. She was weeping now. “I’m at the RV in the campground,” I said again, “in case you want to tell me
anything.”

  I pushed through the heavy door. Outside, in Black Earth proper, in the heavy heat of an August morning, I turned to look back.

  The wife of the dead man was locking up behind me.

  Dickie Pee

  The address on Dickie Pee’s business card read 26 Cynthia Street. I walked west on First and found Ann Street, then Bernice Street, and then Cynthia Street. Twenty-six, Dickie’s place, was in the middle of the second block. Ahead were another two blocks of small, square houses—Dorothy and Eve streets—and then a very thirsty cornfield.

  But Dickie Pee’s place brought my gaze back. In Boston, in another life, I had followed the New England Patriots, and few sights raised more hair on the Dog’s neck than the green-and-gold of the Green Bay Packers. For one thing, no fan seemed more insane than a Cheesehead. But I had never imagined a house painted in Packers colors—cheese-gold siding with green doors, a giant cheese-gold G on the green garage door, all of it fading and peeling and the full effect blocked by a raw-looking wheelchair ramp that took three switchbacks to reach the front door. The lawn was scorched and rocky with dog turds. Dickie’s blue panel van was in the driveway.

  A haggard woman in a sweat suit answered the door. As she yelled for “Richard,” I rolled my wrist and checked the time. It was eleven o’clock.

  “I bought some flies this morning,” I explained, trying to assuage the woman’s irritation. Was she Dickie’s wife? His mother? She was more used-up than old. “I thought I’d drop off the money.”

  “Richard!” she screamed again. Then she disappeared down a dim hallway and shut a door behind her. The house, dismally small and plain and neat to the point of exhaustion, smelled of ashtrays and air freshener. A large-screen TV dominated the living room. Then a second door in the hallway clicked open. Chatter from a different TV leaked out. “Easier if you come in here,” called Dickie Pee.