Out Of The Deep I Cry

Chapter 22

Friday, April 16, 1937

Harry McNeil was just picking up his lunch at the Rexall’s soda counter when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned, and was surprised to see Niels Madsen.

“I’ve been looking for you,” the attorney said.

Harry held out his hand. “And you found me.” They shook. He turned back to the counter, where the jerk was wrapping his ham-and-swiss. “You could have just called my office.”

“You’re never in your office,” Niels said, in a faintly accusing voice.

The jerk stuffed a small container of cole slaw and a paper napkin into the bag. “You want a pickle with that?” he asked. Harry shook his head. “Two bits,” the jerk said. Harry fished the coins out of his pocket and handed them over.

“I’m never there because very little crime happens in my office,” Harry said, picking up the conversation. “It’s good for the citizens of the town to see their police chief out and about.” He grinned. “And I get antsy if I’m cooped up too long.” He glanced at the lunch counter, its row of seats fully occupied. “Let’s go across the street and sit in the park.”

“It’s too cold to sit in the park,” Niels said, although he followed Harry out of the store. Harry didn’t see what the lawyer had to complain about-his long woolen coat looked far more substantial than Harry’s own police-issue jacket, which hadn’t been replaced in over eight years. He paused at the curb, looked both ways, and then jaywalked across Church Street toward the park.

Despite the early-April chill, Harry wasn’t the only person to have thought of an open-air lunch. The benches were filled with people eating, talking, sitting with their faces turned up, starved for the spring sun after the long winter. “How ’bout over there?” he said, pointing to a bench beneath an enormous old elm. It faced St. Alban’s, the age of the tree gently reproaching the church’s fake-medieval front. “Nobody’s sitting there.”

“That’s because it’s in the shade,” Niels said.

Harry ignored him and sat down. He took the paper napkin out of the sack and spread it over his knees. Niels grunted as he joined him. Harry removed the sandwich and unwrapped it, careful to not let any of the lettuce fall out. “So what’s up?” he asked.

Niels shifted on the bench. “How are your kids?” he said.

“Fine,” Harry said. “And yours?”

“Fine,” Niels said. “How’re things at the station?”

“Great,” Harry said. “And at the law firm?” He bit into his sandwich, closing his eyes for a second at the harsh tang of the mustard.

“Oh, great,” Niels said. He seemed fascinated by St. Alban’s red doors.

“Niels,” Harry said around a mouthful of cheese, “what were you looking for me for?”

Niels kept studying the church front. “Jane Ketchem came to see me last week.” Harry felt the twinge at the base of his skull he always got when he heard the Ketchem name. Like a bell ringing out over a defeated fighter, telling him he was out of the ring, his time was up. He waited for Niels to continue.

“She wants me to petition the court of probate to have her husband declared legally dead.”

Harry managed to swallow his bite. “Don’t you need to have some sort of reasonable belief that he’s actually dead?”

“I could get her a divorce based on abandonment easily enough.” Niels seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Harry. “But no, she wants to be a widow.” He turned to Harry. “You investigated his disappearance. What conclusion did you come to?”

Harry dropped his sandwich onto his napkin. “I never came to a conclusion. It’s still an open case. Every few years I send the description of Jonathon Ketchem out on the wires. Nothing ever comes back.”

“You’re joking,” Niels said.

“I wish I was.” Harry picked his sandwich back up. “I interviewed everyone who knew the man. I sent wires out all over the state, describing him and his car. I even had the police department of Santa Barbara, California, go out and talk to one Darlene Henderson, whose father worked at Ketchem’s dairy and who left town around the time Jonathon disappeared. Nothing.” He eyed the sandwich. His appetite was suddenly off. “I even checked out Jane Ketchem.”

Niels’s eyebrows shot up to where his hairline had been a decade before.

“Don’t look at me like that. Wives have been known to kill their husbands before. Of course, they don’t usually come running to the police the next day, asking for help in finding the body.”

“And?” A barely repressed quiver of interest ran through Niels’s voice.

“And her story checked out. The neighbor across the way was taking out his trash can and heard them arguing around the time she said. Not too much later that evening, the lady next door spoke to Mrs. Ketchem in person and then saw her return to her house.” He looked up to where the gnarled limbs of the elms wrote patterns in the sky. He could just make out the fuzzy gray buds studding the branches. Hard to imagine now, with the chill air pushing against his less-than-adequate coat, that they could swell and burst into voluptuous, intemperate green. Other people thought February or March were the worst, the time you got so sick of winter you wanted to take an ax to your wall and chop your way out. But for him, this was the longest stretch, these cool, ascetic days of early spring, when he most wanted the hot sun on his skin and the smell of new-mown hay making him dizzy with desire.

“So that was the end of it?” Niels’s question brought him back into himself.

“If there had been some reason for her to want him dead-if he had a girlfriend, or she had another man on the side. Or maybe a big insurance haul. But there wasn’t. That was the problem. No one had a reason to want Jonathon Ketchem dead.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“I finally boiled any evidence I got-not that there was much of it-down to two theories. The one thing everyone I spoke with agreed is that Jonathon Ketchem had had a hard few years. He had lost four kids and his farm, he was blue and distracted, he didn’t know what to do with himself next.” He took another bite and let Niels wait while he chewed and swallowed. “First theory. He walked. He left behind everything bad that’d ever happened to him and he took off for a new life somewhere out west.” He bit off another piece and ate it. “Second theory. He killed himself. Of course, there’s a problem with that one.” He took another bite to give Niels time to find it.

“If he committed suicide, where’s his car?”

“Right. Now maybe he left the car on the side of the road with the keys in it for someone to steal and he hiked into the mountains so deep no one has run across his body. But I wouldn’t put money on it.”

Niels nodded. “My son Norman says the kids at school have a theory. The Ketchem girl is in his class, you know. Anyway, he says Ketchem was set upon by desperate men.”

“Yeah, that’s the prevailing Ketchem theory. Except for his parents, they’re all convinced he was iced by bootleggers.” He balled up the paper the sandwich had come in.

“Isn’t that possible? From what I read in the paper, there were some pretty desperate characters back in those days. Judge DeWeese was handing out eight-year sentences and ten-thousand-dollar fines back in the twenties, for heaven’s sake. I’m sure there must have been some who were willing to kill to keep their money and their freedom.”

“Yes. There were.” Harry breathed in through gritted teeth, damming up the rage that washed through him whenever he thought of those days, good men’s lives poured out in defense of an idiot law that the government later turned around and repealed. Already, not five years on, people were starting to talk about the bootleggers as if they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men, as if they were some sort of gentlemen bandits instead of goddamn killers and thieves. He worked his jaw, trying to relax so he wouldn’t look as if he were glaring at Niels. “Yeah, there were.” He sighed, letting go of some of the heat in his head. “But even if he had stumbled across some gang unloading their cache, you have the same questions. Where’s the body? Where’s the car?” He shook his head. “He walked. Away from his wife and his kid. He’s a different person now, and maybe that helps him sleep nights, the selfish bastard.”

Niels sat silent for a moment. “So,” he said finally, “I guess I can’t count on your testimony as to his status as a decedent.”

Harry snorted a laugh.

“How about this,” Niels said. “You let me use those records detailing all the steps you’ve taken to find him. You don’t need to draw any conclusions. We’ll let the court do that. The fact that you haven’t closed the case after seven years and there’s still no sign of him may work in our favor.”

“And then what happens?”

“And then Mrs. Ketchem gets to become a widow. We can give her her life back.”

Harry thought about the woman he had first seen on the marble steps of the police station. Over the years they had met, at first frequently, then at longer and longer intervals, and each time, Harry felt the weight of letting her down, of failing to live up to his first ignorant promise to bring her husband back to her.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone can give Jane Ketchem her life back.”