The Weatherman

by Steve Thayer

  “Let me guess,” said Andrea. “The writer was great-Grandpa Beanblossom?”

  “No,” Rick told her, laughing, “but you’re close. The writer then penned his theories and conclusion about the murder into a thinly disguised detective story and had the story published in a New York magazine. At the time of publication he said if he had misinterpreted just one of the many details about the crime, then his conclusion would be equally suspect. And guess what happened?”

  “Tell me,” said Andrea, fascinated by the story.

  “Police went out and made two arrests, and their confessions confirmed in full not only the conclusion of Edgar Allan Poe, but of each detail that led him to that conclusion. The first great detective’s mind did not belong to a cop. It belonged to a writer.”

  “And that’s what we’re going to do?”

  “The same thing I’ve been doing with the Wakefield kidnapping. We go back over every story of every killing, each piece of evidence. The answer may be in there somewhere. Did we misinterpret something? Did we overlook something? Did somebody lie to us, including Dixon Bell?”

  “And what do we tell Jack Napoleon?”

  “We cut him out. We’re on our own. Stay out of his office,” Rick told her. “Don’t discuss anything of importance in there.”

  “Why, he’s our news director, for God’s sake.”

  “He wired his own office. Audio and video.”

  You have to be joking! How long have you known about this?”

  He evaded the question. “Don’t worry about it. I’m working with Dave Cadieux. When the time comes, we’ll fix his ass.”

  Andrea Labore flopped back on the pillow and shook her head in disbelief. She looked out the window and saw the moon sailing slowly out of sight like a ship off the horizon. “Do you think it was fate that threw us all together in that newsroom?”

  “I never liked him,” Rick confessed. “Not from the start.”

  “Napoleon?” she asked.

  “Yeah, him too, but I meant the Weatherman. I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, but the first time I saw him do the weather I was here at home watching television. I sensed something wrong with him. When we met, he knew I saw it. He’s still scared of me. He’s like those little kids who taunt me to hide their fear.”

  “Then why go out on a limb for him?”

  “Because he’s not a murderer. He’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet, but he’s not a murderer.”

  Andrea laid a bare leg over his legs and leaned into his shoulder. She yawned, then nibbled at his muscular arm. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Tired?” Rick laughed. “You should be half dead.” But he was tired too. He threw an arm around her. “You know, Puppy Dog, as exhausted as I am, I still want more.”

  “Me too,” she whispered. Andrea Labore positioned herself on top and they made love for the third time that night.

  She fell asleep in his arms as he lay staring out the window at the predawn sky. There was that star again. He thought of Dixon Bell on the jail monitor with that crazed laugh, as if he were starring in some late-night horror flick. Then his thoughts returned to Andrea, to their night together. Was this just a one-night thing to her? Did she love the man, or did she just like the mask? He wanted her for the rest of his life, but what did she feel? She was hard to read. Rick Beanblossom was still awake and holding Andrea tight when the summer sun began to rise and the sky turned as gold as the gilded room.

  The Source

  The green months of summer surrendered to the orange months of autumn. Leaves exploded in fiery colors, then zigzagged to the ground. The skies outside the windows at Channel 7 were more often gray than blue.

  Jack Napoleon was standing over Rick Beanblossom’s desk with a tip sheet. “Do you know they now make X-rated videos right here in Minneapolis?”

  Rick choked on the soda he was using to wash down two aspirins. He swallowed hard and wiped his mouth. “I’d heard there was a production studio up in the warehouse district.”

  “Are we efforting to get this?” The news director dropped the tip sheet on the producer’s desk and stomped off.

  Rick picked up the sheet. It listed the studio’s address and phone number. Maybe he’d drop in one afternoon and watch them efforting. He slammed the information atop his Wakefield file and sent a sheet of paper from the file to the floor. Rick bent down and retrieved it. It was the stolen-gun report from the farmer along the paper route. He read over it quickly, then shoved it back into the file.

  The white-hot lights came up on the news set, spilling over Rick Beanblos - som, causing him to squint. Andy Mack was at the weather podium, preparing his forecast. Ron Shea and Charleen Barington were strapping on their microphones. And there was Andrea, under the lights.

  Across from the anchor desk sat a smaller desk in front of a blank blue screen, onto which the control room could project just about anything they pleased. When a local story broke, they would sit a reporter over there and project on the screen a row of computers and desks and call it the News Center. When an international story broke, they would project a display of clocks and monitors in the background and call it the Satellite Center. It was also the Sports Center, Election Center, and whatever other center they wanted to trick viewers into believing, because management was convinced their viewers were too damn stupid to figure out it was all one desk in front of a blank screen and the reporters were just sliding their asses in and out of the same chair.

  Tonight Andrea was doing a story from the News Center—or maybe it was the Satellite Center, Rick wasn’t paying that much attention. They were carrying on as secret lovers, never dating. She confessed she wasn’t totally comfortable with him yet, and, besides, the secrecy made the relationship more exciting. He couldn’t complain. It had been a long time since he’d been happy. Her face was recognized on the street. He was a man in a mask. Could she be blamed? Perhaps he was being foolish, but he was shopping around for a ring. He’d do anything to get her that anchor job.

  Dateline was ringing. Rick picked up the phone. “Beanblossom.”

  “What have you done for me lately?”

  “That’s my line.” Rick grabbed a pen. “What have you got?”

  “Against the advice of his attorney Dixon Bell took a polygraph test. He beat the damn thing.”

  “You mean he passed?”

  “No. You’re going to say he passed. I’m saying he beat it.”

  “You believe in the lie-detector test,” Rick reminded him. “I did a story on it for you.”

  “A man without a conscience could very easily beat a polygraph test. I’m not fooling around anymore, I need those letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “Don’t give me that shit. The letters from his high-school sweetheart you pulled out of his diary. The letter from the little Afton girl.”

  The newsman swore, “I don’t know anything about those letters.”

  “You listen to me, Jarhead. I want those letters, and I’ll bring you and that entire newsroom down along with the Weatherman if need be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means I know where you get your heroin.”

  Rick Beanblossom froze. His stomach cramped. His head was thundering. He shielded his eyes from lights bright as the sun over the news set. Few men could intimidate him, but this man could. His knowledge of people’s weaknesses and his wealth of secrets was frightening. “All right, listen. I’ve never lied to you. After I heard of the arrest I went over and searched his office. I found the diary. I photocopied it. But the letters were already gone. It was the first thing I noticed.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “If he’s innocent, he never got a letter from the Afton girl. As for the diary letters, guilty or innocent, if he thought you were closing in on him he’d hide them, or destroy them.”

  “No, he wouldn’t destroy them. He’d take them to his grave with him. This is a man who never lets go.”The conver
sation was interrupted by a wheezing cough attack. Rick waited, surprised the old bastard was still alive. “Tell you what I’ll do, Masked Man. I’ll make you a trade. You find those letters and hand them over to me and I’ll hand you the governor’s head on a silver platter. How many reporters have brought down two governors?”

  Rick laid down his pen and rubbed his temple. Per Ellefson, the epitome of Mr. Clean. Andrea’s ex-lover. “What about him?”

  “I want those letters.”

  Dateline went dead. Rick hung up the phone. His aching head was doing cartwheels. It was bullshit. He was no more addicted to heroin than he was to television. Weeks would go by without even a thought of the junk, even months; then the needs would overtake him. His wounds had made him the strongest person he knew, but not even semper ficould stave off the darkness when it fell. Then he’d send in the Marines. At times he couldn’t help wondering if these were the same ugly needs, perhaps gone mad, that drove another man to murder with every change of the seasons.

  He watched Andrea at the desk in front of the phony blue screen rehearsing her lines. What did his source have on this governor? Would it hurt Andrea? He picked up the aspirin bottle again. It was empty. He threw it into the wastebasket and dug out his prescription pills.

  The Trial

  Delayed another week because of a snowstorm, the fourth such storm of the winter season, the trial of Dixon Graham Bell got under way in Minneapolis during the first week of February, Hennepin County Government Center, Courtroom 659, District Court Judge Stephen Z. Lutoslawski presiding.

  The meteorologist on trial would have warned them of the coming snow, but nobody in meteorology would touch his forecasts. The storms wereTexas hookers. They wound up in the Panhandle gathering Gulf moisture, then hooked north, following the Mississippi River until they met up with the arctic cold around Minnesota and Wisconsin. The Weatherman could see the storms coming from his jail cell over the river. They were not blizzards; there wasn’t a whole lot of wind with them—they just dumped tons of snow. Minnesota typically averages fifty inches of snow a season. By Dixon Bell’s reading, that amount would double during the winter of his trial.

  Courtroom 659 was sterile, suburban in design. It had no character. No windows. Low ceiling. Dark paneling with fake marble trim. Tan carpeting. The prosecutor’s table was to the left facing the bench. The defense table was off to the right, but it didn’t face the bench; it had been turned to face the jury box and the lone television camera. The witness stand was to the right of the judge. An American flag stood behind the bench. Above the judge’s head was the state seal.

  Even before jury selection got under way courtroom seating became an issue. The ghouls start lining up in the hallway hours before court. The entire right side of the spectators’ area was reserved for the media, one person from each news organization. Rick Beanblossom was back there on most days.

  The first two rows on the left side were reserved for family members of the victims. The only regular was an old black man, usually dressed in janitor garb. Rick learned that he was Officer Sumter’s grandfather. Behind the family members sat the ghouls, people who liked to watch. The courtroom next door had also been reserved for the trial, but people there had to sit and watch the proceedings on television like everybody else.

  The trial was being broadcast on national cable television, a station called Court TV. Dixon Bell had never heard of the show, but he correctly guessed they broadcast sensational trials from around the country.

  The local stations tried live coverage, but they soon learned what any criminal lawyer could have told them from the start: real trials are long and tedious and often boring. In this trial the prosecutor was going through seven murders, one at a time. Jurors were told they could expect to be sequestered three to four months. The local stations, including Channel 7, killed their live coverage fast and only summarized the juicy stuff on the evening news. They promised to cover the Weatherman’s testimony live should he decide to take the stand.

  Stacy Dvorchak was unhappy about the draw that turned the trial over to Judge Lutoslawski, a silver-haired hangman’s judge whom defense attorneys out of court often referred to as Judge Polack.

  The prosecutor was Jim Fury, a man cunning and scholarly in appearance but cheap in dress. The trial was a career opportunity for him. He had two assistants, both women, but they never questioned witnesses.

  The jury was young. Dixon Bell liked that. With the three alternates there were eight women and seven men. Each of them was made to swear he or she had never watched the news show on Channel 7. Half of them swore they didn’t watch television at all. The TV camera next to the jury box was small and unobtrusive. Although Stacy tried her best to kill the television coverage, everybody but Dixon Bell forgot about the camera after the first day.

  Police Captain Les Angelbeck was one of the early witnesses. For somebody who was supposed to be retired and dying of emphysema, he was moving around pretty damn good. He kept telling reporters he’d live to see the Weatherman fry. Dixon Bell thought the captain had a remarkable gift for manipulating the media— just the right sound bite at just the right time. In the good-cop-bad-cop bit, he always played the good cop, and he was very good at it, but Dixon Bell knew from experience Angelbeck could be one mean and devious son of a bitch. Answering the state’s questions, the captain was fluent, almost mellifluous. But during questioning by the defense he had a hundred coughing spells and even more apologies.

  Angelbeck was followed by Lieutenant Donnell Redmond, who was even more polished and articulate than the captain. Although the diary letters remained missing, nobody could argue the fact that the task force had put together a compelling case.

  The fight over the fingerprint broke out during testimony about the first murder. Prosecutor Jim Fury made a major point of it during his opening statement. “Beyond the overwhelming weight of circumstantial evidence,” he told the jury, “we have physical evidence that puts Dixon Bell at the scene of murder number one. We have his fingerprint.”

  An FBI expert flew in from Washington and explained to the jury the history of fingerprinting and how Dixon Bell’s name came out of the AFIS computer. He testified that of all the names on the list of probables the computer put the Weatherman’s name at the top, and that the AFIS computer was ninety-eight to onehundred percent accurate in its ability to search and match a print. The partial fingerprint found on the transformer atop the Sky High parking ramp was blown up to poster size along with the print taken at the detention center after Dixon Bell’s arrest. The FBI agent stood with a pointer, talking about the similarities. Anybody watching the jury’s reactions could see they were impressed.

  The first break for the defense came when the state made the mistake of putting Minnesota’s own fingerprint expert on the witness stand to bolster their argument. Stacy Dvorchak cross-examined Glenn Arkwright from her electric wheelchair at the defense table. “This AFIS computer reads digits assigned to so-called points of minutiae, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “How many points of minutiae are in a good fingerprint, Mr. Arkwright?” “A good one has a hundred.”

  “One hundred.” Stacy held up the fingerprint card. “And how many points of minutiae—that is, digits—did this fingerprint found on the transformer atop the Sky High parking ramp have?”

  “Seven.”

  “What is the least number of points that a man has been arrested and convicted on based on a partial fingerprint found at a crime scene?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, one jurisdiction, I don’t remember where it was, reported a hit made on only eight points of minutiae.”

  “So to convict Dixon Bell on the basis of this fingerprint, the jury would be asked to set a new low record for this AFIS computer?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, that would be the case.”

  “Mr. Arkwright, how many names did this computer give the Calendar Task Force to work with?”

  “I b
elieve when the suspect was arrested there was a total of sixty-two names.”

  “And the computer eliminated sixty-one of those names and said Dixon Bell is the man you want?”

  “No, that’s not the case.” Arkwright explained. “An AFIS system makes no de - cisions on identity. It only lists suspects. Its function is to reduce the number of compari - sons a fingerprint expert has to make. The final conclusion still rests with the experts.”

  “So you had to examine sixty-two sets of fingerprints, just like our FBI friend?”

  “Yes, I did.”