November Rain

by Donald Harstad

  I came around the corner, Norma gave a warning grimace, and I saw that his office was packed with people. Not surprisingly, I knew every one of ’em.

  Norman Gunderson, high school superintendent; Allen Jones, president of Northland Savings Bank; and his competitor, Willy Morton of Farmers Union bank were in the chairs. Olivia Young of the law firm Wilkins, Hughes and Young, was seated on the couch; along with Mike Ludwig, owner of Ludwig’s Super Market. The Reverend Samuel Thiese and Father Virgil Lahre were standing just inside the door. Seated on Lamar’s brand-new two-drawer file cabinet was Kayla Eder, current editor of the Nation County Journal. They were all community leaders, and only Olivia and Kayla were ever here, for any reason. Something was definitely up, and I suspected I wasn’t going to like it. The last people a cop wants to see in his office are a bunch of community leaders acting in accord. It almost always means that good police methods are about to be replaced with favors and concessions.

  I just said, “Hi, everybody.”

  “Carl, we got a question for you. . . . ,” said Lamar. He looked sort of pleased.

  “Sure. . . .” That was a good start. I like questions.

  “We’re having a meeting about Janine Schiller’s daughter Emma,” said Lamar.

  “Sure.” A little red flag started up the pole. Emma, along with our daughter, Jane Houseman, and another young woman named Vicky Burman were old friends, and the three were together in London, taking a semester of very special graduate level courses they’d all wanted to do for years. Their whole project had been made affordable by the fact that a girlfriend of theirs who worked for the US Embassy in London had taken a temporary transfer, and let them house-sit her flat. They were all very happy with the arrangements. Well, they had been, until some nine days ago. On October 28th, Emma Schiller had gone missing in London.

  Jane had been sending me email every day, and was becoming extremely worried. She’d been giving me some inside information on the matter, and had told me that Emma had a tendency to, frankly, go to a party, pick somebody up, and head off to the nearest bed with them. That had surprised me. As Jane had said, “Sometimes she’s been known to stretch out a good night into a good week.” I’d told Lamar about that aspect of the case as soon as I’d heard it. His response had been classic Lamar: “Really? Shit, she sounds like a guy.” At that time, he and I sort of assumed that she would turn up shortly. I think most people had thought the same. That was on the fourth day she’d been gone. Since then, as time passed, the feeling that she was the victim of foul play had gotten stronger. By now, I’d reached the stage where I honestly figured she was dead.

  Jane, being a cop’s daughter, had reported the matter to the Metropolitan Police in London after Emma had failed to come home after class on Wednesday. She’d told me that the police over there were taking the case seriously, and seemed to her to be working it diligently. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to find any trace of Emma.

  Emma’s disappearance had gotten lots of local publicity back in Iowa, and everybody here in Maitland, our county seat, seemed to have one of those yellow ribbons tied around something or other. The story had been on Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, and Waterloo television stations two or three times apiece so far, and on CNN at least once. The fact that Janine was a widow with two daughters, and that her husband had been killed in the same wreck that had cost her the use of her legs, just fueled the human interest aspects of the situation. There was a “Find Emma” fund drive that didn’t seem to me to have much direction other than possibly sending her mother Janine to London. Since Janine was confined to a wheelchair, that could get very expensive, and probably wouldn’t accomplish much. Anyway, Janine Schiller had been getting lots of sympathy and support, but there was only so much one could do.

  “Like I was saying, we’re all pretty damned worried,” said Lamar, in the self-conscious and deliberate tone of voice he used when speaking in public. “I’ve started our own inquiry through Scotland Yard,” he said to the assembly in his office, “but haven’t heard back yet.” He looked around, apparently trying to give the impression that we checked with ‘The Yard’ on a weekly basis.

  Actually, I’d been the one to check with the Metropolitan Police. I’d contacted them via police teletype, two days ago. I’m the investigator, and it was part of my job to cooperate with other departments. Cooperating with New Scotland Yard had never been anticipated in that job description, but that just made it more interesting. Lamar’s involvement had been to receive my verbal report, which had simply been that I’d tell him when we heard back. The fact that the agency in question had been called New Scotland Yard for more than a hundred years was consistently overlooked by Lamar. Ah, well. Bosses are like that.

  “Carl,” he continued, addressing me, “these folks have come to me because the fund drive is doing well, and they’d like to hire somebody to go over there and check things out.”

  “Really?” To me, that meant they were going to hire a private detective. That hadn’t occurred to me. I wondered who they had in mind.

  “Yes. They sort of wanted to hire Lloyd Boyd,” he said slowly and distinctly.

  Lloyd Boyd, aka Loidy Boidy, was a private detective in Dubuque. He did mostly injury cases for insurance companies, and made a pretty good living going into neighborhoods and bars where the attorneys who hired him wouldn’t venture, and obtaining what was basically speculative information from uninformed people who had the time to talk with him. That and the occasional photograph of somebody with a fake back injury lifting an engine block. He’d been a cop in Illinois years back, and been fired for misconduct of some sort.

  The Lloyd Boyd connection told me that Lamar wanted me to dissuade them, or at least, to help him do so. Piece of cake. And I could be totally honest, to boot.

  “He’s an idiot,” I said, looking around the room. “Honest to God, really, don’t hire Lloyd.”

  “That’s what I told ’em,” said Lamar, looking smug.

  “We’ve dealt with him before,” I said, looking at the office full of people. “He’s pretty worthless, in my opinion. And about as un-conscientious as anybody I’ve ever met. I know you could do better than him. A whole lot better. There are some really good private detectives out there. Cedar Rapids has a really good one, and I even have Mike’s number. I’ll vouch for him any day of the week.”

  “I told ’em that, too,” said Lamar. He now looked really, really pleased. Well, we were heading into an election year, and it sure wouldn’t hurt his chances if this group in his office was impressed with his performance. I don’t want to give the impression that Lamar is some political toady or anything like that. But he’s got political smarts, and backers like these would be a big help. He also enjoys getting re-elected because it means that the County continues paying his medical insurance.

  “I wonder, though,” I said, committing an error by volunteering information, “if this might not be a little unwise. I mean, if I were working for the Metropolitan Police, and some American private detective turned up . . . even a good one . . . I think I’d just tell him to butt out before he’d be able to screw up the case.”

  Lamar’s face split into a wide grin. “That’s exactly what I said you’d say.”

  It’s always nice to make Lamar happy, but I was getting a little suspicious. My little red flag started climbing further up the pole. The terms ‘cat,’ and ‘canary’ flickered in the back of my mind.

  “Well, regardless, I think that Emma’s been missing way too long,” interjected Reverend Thiese. “In my opinion somebody needs to do something, and pretty quickly, too. And now that the fund has got some money . . .”

  It was all I could do not to say “No shit, Sherlock?” It had been almost two weeks. If Emma was at risk, time was getting very short. Like I said, if she were really at risk, the chances of finding her alive were getting pretty slim after this length of time. I thought the excellent possibility that she could be dead was best left unsaid in this group, even though
most of them were probably thinking the same thing. On the other hand, I wasn’t going to share information about her crowded sex life, even though that seemed to hold out the only hope for her being safe.

  “I sure won’t argue with that,” I said. It was the easy way.

  “We’ve got the people here,” said Allen Jones, “who’re on just about every important standing committee in town. As of today,” he said, “we have more than twenty thousand dollars that we’ve raised. That’s ticket and board money. We can buy the tickets, and send somebody good. We all feel that we owe it to Janine Schiller to give this our best shot.”

  “I think we do, too,” I said. How could I disagree? I hoped Mike the Private Detective would appreciate this, and thought I’d hint to him to bring me something from London for my troubles on his behalf. But I really thought they were going to be hindering the London cops. I said so, again.

  “London’s a big place,” said Father Lahre. “We really don’t think we should wait too long to find out just what’s happening there. We surely don’t want the trail to get cold.”

  Cold? That was an understatement. I figured the trail was about as cold as Emma by now. I shrugged. “Well, the trail’s really about as cold as it gets, to tell you the truth. She was in a pub on a Tuesday night, and just disappeared. She was seen leaving, but so were a bunch of people about that same time. Nobody knows if she was connected with any of them or not. Apparently nobody they’ve been able to track down saw her after that, and nobody heard anything from her at all. Period.” I shrugged. “She just vanished.”

  “So you think it’s an impossible case?” asked Olivia Young.

  “Well, no . . . not impossible.” I shrugged. “I hate impossible. I think it’s a very difficult one at this point. As far as we know, there’s really no evidence except for the fact that she’s gone. But with the Metropolitan Police working the case, there’s nobody else in the world that could get to the bottom of this business any faster.”

  “Well, do they have an amber Alert system over there?” asked Mike Ludwig.

  In such august company, sarcasm wasn’t appropriate. I took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t know that they do.” I held up my hand. “What I mean to say is, if they do have some sort of system, it might not be called that.”

  “Well, maybe somebody from over here ought to go over there and show ’em how that sort of thing works,” he said.

  I looked at Lamar, and he just smiled. For some reason, he was letting me do all the work here.

  “Well, in the first place,” I said, “you all know our daughter Jane’s over there sharing an apartment with Emma. She’s the one who reported her missing. Anyway, she tells me that the Metropolitan Police are being very active in pursuing this. There’s not much they can do, really. I mean, with no witnesses at all, no suspects, no anything. . . .”

  Mike Ludwig just held up his hand, and said, abruptly, “I think that only makes our point. Opportunities may be slipping away.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “those guys over there are good. And they know their town better than anybody else. Knowing that area is the single most important factor in solving the case.”

  “I’m sure,” said Allen Jones, standing. “But what we were thinking of was somebody we could trust, to . . . ah . . . well, keep an eye on things over there for a week or two, until she turns up. Look at it through fresh eyes. Talk to them. You know. Let them know we’re really interested.”

  That’s when I made my second error. I bragged. “Well, if it’ll help,” I said, “we had a pretty good contact with a specific officer in the Metropolitan Police. . . . name of . . . Blyth, about two years ago,” I said. “We could contact him.” An FBI agent I knew actually had the contact, but I’d been in on the conversation with him back in December of 2001. That wasn’t all that long ago. Hopefully, in that time Blyth had neither died nor retired.

  “That’s what I told ’em,” said Lamar. “I just couldn’t remember his name.”

  Well, now I at least knew Lamar actually read some of my reports. “I don’t know what else can be done . . .” I said.

  “We thought we’d send you,” said Lamar, right out of the blue.

  “What?”

  “You. You’re an officer. You’re a good investigator. And you get along well with foreign people.”

  “Foreign people? The English? They ain’t exactly foreign.” I looked him square in the eye, and knew the answer before I asked. “Send me? You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. Not a bit. I’m dead serious, and we’re all in agreement that it should be you.”

  “I can’t go over there, Lamar. Honest. I’d have no jurisdiction for one thing.”

  “Observer. That’s what you’d be,” said Lamar. “You don’t need jurisdiction to observe.”

  He was sounding well prepared on this. That was a really dangerous sign. My little red flag was snapping in the breeze by now, and straining against the top of the pole. “Well,” I said, “we don’t have any guarantee they’d let me . . . and besides, I have too much to do here.”

  Lamar gave me a knowing look. He knew how busy I was right now. “I think we can spare you for a bit.”

  “And I don’t even have a passport,” I said. “That alone will take ten days. Either they’ll find her, or the trail will be stone cold by the time I get there.”

  Lamar looked over at Olivia Young. “That’s not what Olivia says.”

  Olivia smiled. “We can get a passport issued for you in Chicago inside twenty-four hours. We did it for a client once. It’s easy.”

  “I don’t even have time to have my shots,” I said, reaching. “And I could be allergic. . . .” Believe me, even the hives sounded better than what I was hearing.

  “You don’t need shots to go to the UK,” said Olivia.

  I was getting a little desperate. “The County Personnel Policy won’t allow a leave of absence without thirty days notice, and I can’t afford two weeks without pay anyway.” That was not only true, it was painfully true.

  “I talked with the Board of Supervisors about that ’bout ten minutes ago,” said Lamar. “Lucky for everybody concerned, you got two weeks vacation left.”

  Our vacations were sacred. Absolutely untouchable. It was the one thing the Department never screwed with. I was dumbfounded that he’d said such a thing. “Not my vacation . . . !”

  “Naw, don’t worry,” said my esteemed Sheriff. “I wouldn’t do that to ya. We’re gonna call it a special assignment.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” he said, “since nobody knows what the hell is goin’ on, who’s to say that her disappearance might not be connected to something back here?”

  “Like what?” I asked, startled.

  “Oh, in these times,” said Lamar, “could be about anything. We can’t rule out terrorists. You know that. Or meth labs and sales. . . . We both know we got so many labs here we can’t keep track. A real persistent stalker from her high school days. Something like that.”

  Something along the lines of ‘Get real’ wasn’t really appropriate. I thought for a second. “I think they call that a ‘low probability,’ Lamar,” I said.

  “Well, gee,” said Lamar with a tone of pleased finality, “we just won’t know that until you get over there and look things over, will we.”

  Okay, let me be honest. Although I was trying very hard to come up with logical and rational arguments against my going, at the same time I was thinking that I’d really like to go, I’d like to see how the Metropolitan Police worked this kind of case, and how cool it would be to visit Jane in London. I also mentally ran through what I had available to wear; and how I’d pack it in my old suitcase. Consequently, each time Lamar shot down an argument, my mind would add an item I’d need in my luggage.

  “Well,” I said, wondering if anybody had an umbrella I could borrow, “I guess it comes down to being your call.”

  “It’s the only way,” he said.

  “So, like what? D
o I contact a travel agent?” I had a few decent shirts, but only two pair of slacks to my name. Blue jeans? Sure.

  “We’ve already obtained your ticket and accommodations via the Internet,” said Norm Gunderson. “Expedia dot com. Confirmed just before I came up here.”

  Since he was the school superintendent, I thought I might as well try to get my wife, Sue, permission to come along as well. “Can you get a sub for Sue? I’d really like to have her along.” Sue was an English teacher, and I thought I might as well ask her boss while I had his attention.

  “The school has a rule about applying for leaves of absence, just like the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “Thirty days advance notice. I tried to find a way around that, I really did. But we can’t classify this as part of her job, like Lamar can with you.”

  “Sure.” Right. Explain that to Sue.

  “And I talked with Sue this morning, just before I came up here,” he said. “She agreed that it was impossible for her to go on this short notice. We even explored the family emergency clause in the contract, but we just can’t find a way to do it. Emma isn’t your family.”

  “Okay.” I thought a second. “So, just how short is this notice?” I asked.

  “You leave tomorrow evening at seven or so,” said Lamar. “They tell me you gotta be there at least two hours before the plane takes off.”

  “From where, Cedar Rapids?”

  Lamar shook his head. “O’Hare in Chicago.”

  “You can park at my mother’s house in Evanston,” said Reverend Thiese. “The airport shuttle will pick you up there, so you can save a bundle with parking.”

  “And it would cost almost twice as much airfare if you left from either Dubuque or Cedar Rapids,” said Lamar.

  “Here,” said Kayla Eder. She handed me several printouts on letter sized paper. “These are your vouchers, for the shuttle and the airline tickets. Don’t lose ’em. And a map to Ida Thiese’s house in Skokie, and your hotel accommodations. Don’t,” she repeated, “lose ’em.”