A Carnival of Killing

by Glenn Ickler

  “Obviously Mr. St. Claire had nothing to do with last night’s attack on Ms. Toni Erickson in a restroom at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. We questioned Ms. Erickson about that incident this morning, and she believes the attempt on her life may have been inspired by the fact that she told several people in the crowd that she thought she knew who killed Ms. Nordquist.

  “As you know, Ms. Erickson’s attacker was dressed in a Vulcan costume. This lends credence to her theory about the attacker’s motive because the murder victim, Ms. Nordquist, was last seen alive in the company of a man wearing a Vulcan costume.”

  This revelation drew a murmur of amazement from the crowd. It also blew away the exclusive item that Brownie had promised me in return for my withholding the Vulcan connection until the end of the carnival. I whispered an expletive and fixed my eyes on the homicide chief. A minute later, possibly because he felt the heat of my stare, Brownie looked my way. When he saw the expression on my face, he shrugged and looked elsewhere.

  Chief O’Malley rattled on about Toni having been treated and released at Regions Hospital Sunday night, and having allowed them to match the leather thong found in the ladies room to the mark on her neck this morning. He finished with the news that Sean Fitzpatrick also had been treated at Regions and released for the wound in his foot, and that he had been charged with carrying a concealed a weapon and discharging said weapon in an unsafe manner. After leaving the hospital, Fitzpatrick had been booked and released on his own recognizance.

  “Sounds like poor old Tex should have waited until they passed that law he’s pushing,” Al said as we left the police station. “You might say he jumped the gun.”

  I was too angry about having my Vulcan exclusive shot down to fire back a reply.

  I’d just gotten settled at my desk when phone rang. “It’s Brown,” he said when I answered.

  “Calling with an exclusive?” I replied.

  “Calling to apologize. I didn’t know the chief was going to say that about the Vulcan costumes. He doesn’t run his statements past me before he speaks.”

  “And you, of course, hadn’t told him about our deal.”

  “What the chief doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Or me.”

  “Well, this time it pissed me off,” I said.

  “I have something else to offer as a replacement,” Brownie said. “Something I’ve been sitting on and the chief didn’t mention.”

  I picked up my pen and grabbed a piece of scratch paper. “And what is your exclusive offering?”

  “It comes from a source that can’t be named, but I’m sure you’ll figure out who it is. Anyhow, this source believes that Edward St. Claire is the father of Ms. Nordquist’s unborn baby.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Feeling Better

  My first response to Brownie was to ask if his source’s initials might be Connie St. Claire.“Like I said, my source can’t be named,” Brownie said. “And neither can yours. Just say yours is reliable. My anonymous source and a couple others told us Mr. St. Claire had been having sexual relations with Ms. Nordquist ever since they met last year.”

  “So the pregnancy could be his motive for murder,” I said.

  “Smart boy.”

  “Okay, the Lee-Ann Nordquist killing seems about to be solved. But if St. Claire did it, we’re left with the question of who wearing a Vulcan costume tried to kill Toni Erickson and why.”

  “If you figure that one out, let me know,” Brownie said. “Have a good day.”

  Mine had just gotten a whole lot better.

  After finishing my story, with St. Claire’s possible fatherhood in the lead, I decided to make a call that could further improve my day. Kitty Catalano had offered to give me additional details on the Klondike Kate scholarship or discuss anything I wanted to talk about whenever I had time. Since I had no other assignments, this looked like the perfect time to visit a lovely, long-legged lady, providing she had time.

  She did. In fact, she was free for lunch and said she’d meet me anywhere but O’Halloran’s or the Crowne Plaza. We agreed on a small sandwich shop a block from her office.

  As if cued by the end of the Winter Carnival, the downtown temperature had soared to twenty-six above zero, making the air feel almost balmy as I walked to the restaurant. My internal temperature also soared when Kitty rose to greet me. She was dressed in the same snug white sweater and form-fitting gray slacks she’d worn the first time we met. Her dark hair swirled around her shoulders as she pushed back the chair and stepped toward me. The only thing missing from our original meeting were the red boots, which had been replaced by a pair of black heels only slightly shorter than those she’d worn at the funeral.

  She surprised me with a full frontal hug—Minnesotans just don’t do that—and set my right ear on fire with a breathy greeting. We took seats facing each other at a small, square table, so close that our toes collided when we stretched our legs simultaneously.

  Questioning Kitty on the phone and in the office had been easy, but the hug, the ear-warming whisper and a close-up whiff of her haunting perfume had me so discombobulated that I found myself stuck for an opening line. Consequently, I sat gazing into her green eyes in silence until I became uncomfortable.

  “Weather’s much better, now that the carnival’s over,” I said at last, trying to break the ice. When at a loss for words, you can always talk about the weather in Minnesota.

  “Seems like it’s always that way,” Kitty said. “You freeze your buns off for almost two weeks and then, when you don’t have to go outside anymore, it warms up.”

  I wanted to say that her buns appeared to have thawed very nicely, but it seemed too early for flirtatious small talk. Instead, I said, “If we had any brains, we’d all go south in the winter and leave St. Paul to the glaciers.”

  Her smile would have melted those glaciers. “But then we wouldn’t have a Winter Carnival, would we? And you and I wouldn’t be enjoying each other’s company.”

  “Maybe we’d meet on a beach in Key West instead.” I felt like I was babbling inanities in front of this elegant woman. I was rescued by our server, who introduced herself as Maggie and asked what we wanted to drink. Kitty ordered a glass of Chablis and I asked for my usual ginger ale.

  “You don’t drink on the job?” she asked.

  “I don’t drink at all,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “That sucks. You mean you can’t even have one teeny-weeny glass of wine?”

  “I’ve learned the hard way that when I have one teeny-weeny glass of wine it expands into a great big gallon of booze pouring into a slobbering, snot-flying drunk.”

  Kitty wrinkled her nose and said, “Whatever. So, do you want to talk about the scholarship now or later?”

  “Let’s do it now and get it out of the way,” I said.

  “I like that idea. Then we can talk about more interesting things while we eat.” From her handbag, she produced another press release in a Klondike Kate folder and spent all of two minutes explaining how the scholarship would be managed and who would be eligible. She passed me the folder and said, “Any questions?”

  I had none. I was searching for my next line when Maggie returned with our drinks. We ordered our sandwiches, and Maggie hustled away. We hoisted our glasses, clinked them together and said, “To Klondike Kate.”

  This time I was ready with a question. “So, what do you do when you’re not coordinating the Klondike Kates?”

  “Very little,” Kitty said. “Once the Winter Carnival is over, all I have to do is schedule Kates for various events during the year and make sure they get where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there. They do get involved in a huge number of events, and now, of course, I’ll have the scholarship to deal with, but it’s still a very easy job.”

  “I was thinking more about non-working hours when I asked that question.”

  “I can give you the same answer. Very little. My social life sort of revolves around the Kates and the c
arnival.”

  “No family here?” I asked.

  “My family’s all in Wisconsin and Illinois,” Kitty said. “I grew up in Madison and graduated from UW with majors in English and theater. I taught high school English and directed the plays for a year, and moved here a couple of years ago to be with a guy, but that broke up almost as soon as I got here.”

  “What kind of a guy would break up with a beautiful woman like you?”

  “The kind of a guy who likes to play around with more than one beautiful woman at a time. It was tough to find out that I was second fiddle, but I’m still glad I followed him to St. Paul. I like it here.”

  “It’s a good place to live. How’d you get into the Klondike Kate competition?”

  “I was working in a bank with a woman who’d auditioned the year before. She said it was a lot of fun and that I’d have a good chance of winning. It was fun, but, as you know, the judges picked Lee-Ann as number one.”

  “Apparently you were a gracious loser,” I said. “I mean applying for the administrative job when it opened.”

  Kitty nodded and smiled. “I kind of fell in love with the organization during the auditions. Like I said the first time I met you, the Kates are like family. Now let’s talk about something besides me. You, for instance.”

  I gave her a quick rundown of my life, from boyhood on the farm, to University of Minnesota graduate, to Navy flight crew, to the soul-crushing loss of wife and baby in a car crash, to the subsequent descent into the darkest depths of alcoholism, to treatment and to a job at the Daily Dispatch.

  “Ever thought about a second marriage?” Kitty asked when I finished.

  “Once,” I said. “The day I was going to propose, the object of my affection told me she was going away to live with her high school sweetheart.”

  “Nice timing. You seem to have had a rough time with women. Anybody in the picture now?” I’d been wondering when that question would come up, and I’d been wondering how I’d answer it. I decided to be both truthful and vague.

  “Right now I’m working on a relationship with a divorced woman, but we both have commitment problems,” I said. “In fact, you met her Saturday night.”

  “Oh, sure, the gorgeous brunette,” Kitty said. “I can understand your problem. I’m a little gun-shy myself after finding out that the only guy I’d ever slept with was also screwing some other woman. Not that he or anyone else has ever asked me for a commitment.”

  “That’s surprising. Beautiful woman like you.”

  She actually blushed. “Thank you. Maybe someday I’ll get to play first fiddle instead of second.”

  We steered the conversation into less personal waters, finished our sandwiches and paid the tab (with Kitty insisting on covering her own). I walked her back to her building and when we exchanged goodbyes she surprised me with another hug. “If you and your friend decide you can’t commit, you know my phone number,” she said.

  After that invitation, I went home with an interior glow and an exterior trace of Kitty’s perfume remaining from the hugs. However, the inner glow began to fade when I thought back on the conversation. Why hadn’t I been firm about my loyalty to Martha when Kitty asked about our relationship? Why had I left the door open to a test run with Kitty when I should have closed and locked it? Was commitment to each other our problem or was it just mine? By the time Martha came home a little more than three hours later the glow had been snuffed out by a sodden blanket of guilt.

  The level of this guilt rose like a thermometer in August when Martha’s keen female nostrils picked up the scent of Kitty’s perfume as I welcomed her with a hug. “Have you had company this afternoon?” she asked, crinkling her nose and sniffing.

  I plunged with too much fervor into a story about my business lunch with Kitty and the surprising, un-businesslike hugs. “I think she’s feeling the strain of the murder of one friend and the attempted murder of another,” I said.

  “You sure that’s all she’s feeling?” Martha said.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me,” Martha said. “You are not an unattractive man.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” I said.

  Later that night, when I returned from my AA meeting and a quick ginger ale with Jayne Halvorson, Martha suggested temporarily ditching the Swami’s book and making love the old-fashioned way.

  Her suggestion reminded me of a song about that old-time religion that my mother used to sing when I was little kid. “It was good enough for Grandpa and it’s good enough for me,” I said. And it was good for both of us, long into the night.

  On Tuesday morning, the temperature was again in the positive twenties, so naturally it snowed. My car was covered with a three-inch-thick white blanket, and my face took a beating from a flurry of icy flakes driven by a stiff northwest wind while I brushed off the windows and the hood.

  The drive downtown was agonizingly slow because the streets had not been plowed and the traffic had churned the snow into a greasy gray mass. When I finally reached my desk, ten minutes late according to Don, my first call of the day went to Brownie. “Anything new?” I asked.

  “It’s snowing like a son of a bitch,” Brownie said.

  “If I wanted a weather report, I’d have called the Weather Bureau. What about the Klondike Kate killing?”

  “Not much at this time. We questioned that Carlson character again. He said he left the dance shortly after talking to you and went home. His wife verifies that he was home with her at the time of the attack on Ms. Erickson.”

  “Do you think they’re telling the truth?”

  “I do. The wife has a nasty cold and couldn’t go to the dance. He’d promised to come home early and she seemed pleased that he’d kept his promise. I also got the impression that this was a surprise.”

  “So, that eliminates him as the possible attacker?” I asked.

  “It does,” Brownie said. “Unless somebody else can put him at the dance at the time of the attack.”

  “Which makes that whole interrogation a non-news item. What about St. Claire?”

  “Can’t do much for you there either until the DNA sample comes back. We sent it to a private lab with a request to expedite. We’ll have the results in a couple of days, and I’m betting there’s a match.”

  This cock-sure attitude made sense. If Lee-Ann Nordquist was the woman with whom Connie St. Claire thought her husband was cheating, he was the most likely candidate for fatherhood. The timing of Edward St. Claire’s decision to disappear, immediately upon the announcement of Lee-Ann’s pregnancy, made it seem even more of a sure thing.

  “Here’s the way we see it,” Brownie said. “Ms. Nordquist tells her married lover that she’s pregnant. Married lover says go see a doctor about an abortion. Ms. Nordquist refuses to have an abortion and says she’ll be needing child support. Married lover says fuck off. Ms. Nordquist says if I don’t get it I’ll tell your wife what we’ve been doing. Married lover hauls out his old Vulcan running suit, takes advantage of the mob scene at O’Halloran’s, gets Ms. Nordquist off in a corner by the restrooms, twists a cord around her neck and walks out with the body like he’s helping a drunk stay on two feet. But the DA won’t drag this suspected married lover into court on a murder charge until we have DNA results confirming that he is the daddy. Have a good day, Mitch.”

  This scenario coincided with mine. I put down the phone and went to the photo department to run Brownie’s recitation past Al. He agreed that everything pointed to St. Claire.

  “I should have borrowed a picture of him when I was talking to his wife,” I said. “She had a picture on her desk of herself looking lovey-dovey with a guy that must have been him.”

  “I wonder if she would’ve given it to you if you’d asked,” Al said.

  “Who said anything about asking?”

  “You’re thinking of the Navy way of borrowing things, known as cumshaw.”

  “Come see, cumshaw,” I said. “Assum
ing we’re right about St. Claire, we still don’t have a handle on who tried to kill Toni Erickson. The cops think she was attacked because she was blabbing to everybody about knowing who killed Lee-Ann, but why would somebody go to that extreme in order to protect lover boy St. Claire?”

  “God only knows.”

  “And She ain’t telling.”

  “In other words, we haven’t got a prayer,” Al said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Square Pegs

  The St. Claire scenario took a hit the following day when I was visited by a lanky, athletic-looking young man wearing a snow-flecked London Fog raincoat and black-knit hat similarly dotted with white. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t say why.

  “Remember me?” he asked as he offered his hand for shaking. “I’m Tony.”

  “And your last name would be?” I asked as I took his hand and discovered it was wet with melted snow.

  “Costello,” he said. “Tony Costello. The Count of Ashes. When you rode with our Krewe, you asked me about being in O’Halloran’s Bar the night Klondike Kate, Lee-Ann, got killed.”

  “Okay,” I said. “As I recall, you blew me off and stayed far, far away for the rest of the ride.”

  “Orders from headquarters. The cops ordered us all not to talk to anybody, especially nosy reporters. The chief himself told us he’d toss our asses in the clink if we blabbed. Those exact words.”

  “That’s very interesting. While the chief was telling you to stonewall the media, the head of homicide was telling me to find out everything I could while I was with you guys that day. So what brings you to my desk this morning?”

  “I read your story about Eddie St. Claire being hauled in for questioning,” Costello said. “And I think the cops have got the wrong guy.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  “Have you seen Eddie? He’s short. Not much taller than Lee-Ann, who was only about five-four. The guy in the Vulcan suit who walked out with her that night was a lot taller. Probably close to six feet.”