Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

20

The town of Calumet, Wisconsin, hadn’t received this much media attention since Elton Gerber’s six-hundred-fifty-seven-pound pumpkin had fallen off the back of his truck on the way to the Great Pumpkin Contest in 1993. But even then, they’d missed the real story.

The TV news had covered it tongue-in-cheek, since the pumpkin had been the only casualty, and not one reporter ever connected that shattered pumpkin with the bullet Elton put in the roof of his mouth two weeks later. The grand prize that year had been $15,000, just enough to cover the balloon payment due on Elton’s farm, and there was no doubt he would have won it. His closest competitor weighed in at a paltry five-hundred-thirty pounds.

Not a tongue-in-cheek story, Sheriff Mike Halloran thought. More like an American tragedy, and the media missed the point. And they were missing it this time, too.

The thump of rotors from somewhere outside barely penetrated his consciousness. He was used to the news helicopters now; used to the vans with their satellite-dish hats cruising the streets of his town, stopping anyone who looked mournful enough or frightened enough to deliver a titillating sound bite; used to the clamor of reporters from the front steps of the building whenever a deputy tried to get outside to his car.

According to the autopsy report, John and Mary Kleinfeldt had died between midnight and one A.M. Monday morning. Less than eight hours later it was a lead story on every channel in Wisconsin, as interchangeable anchor people reported the small-town tragedy of ‘ . . . a God-fearing elderly couple savagely murdered while at their prayers in church.’

There was no mention of the bloody crosses carved into their chests – so far Halloran had managed to keep that little gruesome detail under wraps – but even without it, the story was irresistible to reporters, and mesmerizing to the public. The idea of someone shooting the elderly was bad enough; stage the crime in the supposed sanctuary of a church and you added outrage to the horror, and maybe a little fear. Bad news, great ratings.

Later that morning Deputy Danny Peltier’s death hit the airwaves as a bulletin, less than half an hour after it happened, while Halloran was still standing over the ruin of his body, looking for the poor kid’s freckles, weeping like a girl. By sunset Monday print reporters and TV news crews had increased the population of Calumet by at least a hundred, and now, a full day later, they were all still here.

But they were missing the story, every one of them; missing the tragedy beneath the tragedy, the crime beneath the crime. None of them knew that Danny Peltier, freckled and fresh and heartbreakingly innocent, had died because Sheriff Michael Halloran had forgotten the key to the Kleinfeldts’ front door.

‘Mike?’

Before he looked up, he cleared his face of whatever expression had been there, and raised dispassionate eyes to where Bonar stood in the doorway.

‘Hey, Bonar.’

His old friend walked closer and scowled at him, looking like an angry Jonathan Winters. ‘You look like shit, buddy.’

‘Thanks.’ Halloran set aside one of the tilting towers of paperwork on his desk, pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit up.

Bonar sat down and waved a beefy hand at the smoke wafting toward him across the desk. ‘I could arrest you for smoking in a public building, you know.’

Halloran nodded and took another pull off his cigarette. He hadn’t had one in his office in years, and couldn’t remember the last time smoking had tasted this good. Pleasure enhanced by the illicit nature of the act. No wonder people committed crimes. ‘I’m celebrating. I’ve cracked the case.’

Bonar gave him the once-over, taking in the uniform that looked slept in, the circles under his eyes that were almost as dark as his hair. ‘You don’t look like you’re celebrating. Besides, that is such bullshit. I solved the case. The kid did it. I told you that right from the start.’

‘You did not. You told me Father Newberry did it.’

‘That was just wishful thinking, and it was also before I knew the Kleinfeldts had actually reproduced. Minute you told me that I pegged the kid, and you know it. Hated to give up the padre, though. It was so perfect. Crosses carved in the chests, big inheritance for the church . . . I mean, you had to love the old guy as a suspect.’ He leaned forward and poked around the paper clutter on the desk. ‘You got any food in here?’

‘Nope.’

Bonar sighed unhappily and leaned back, lacing his fingers across his expansive belly. His brown uniform shirt gaped between buttons that were hanging on for dear life. ‘So angels came down and told you the kid did it, long after I told you the kid did it, may I point out, but such insight, my friend, is useless. We don’t know who or where the kid is, what he looks like, how old he is . . .’

Halloran smiled a little. This was good. Talking about the case with Bonar, focusing on that and nothing else – it was a straight line he could stand on for as long as it lasted. ‘The kid was born in Atlanta. Thirty-one years ago.’

‘Oh yeah? You had a vision? What?’

‘Tax returns. First ones we had were thirty-some years ago, back when the Kleinfeldts were the Bradfords. They weren’t rich then. Newly married, probably, just starting out, low enough on the income ladder to deduct medical expenses. Big ones for that day and age, their fourth year in Atlanta. I figured maternity expenses.’

Bonar straightened a little in his chair as his interest piqued.

‘So I called county records down there, asked for Baby Bradfords for that year, and there it was. Baby Bradford born to Martin and Emily Bradford, October 23, 1969.’

Bonar seemed to hold his breath for a moment. ‘Wait a minute. The Kleinfeldts were killed on October 23.’

Halloran nodded grimly. ‘Happy birthday, baby.’

‘Damn. DOB, DOD. The kid really did do it.’

Halloran took a last drag and then dropped his cigarette into an empty Coke can. ‘Too bad you’re not the district attorney. That guy’s a hardnose. Wants fingerprints, witnesses, you know, the kind of forensic evidence we don’t have? The kid didn’t even inherit.’

Bonar shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t carve up your parents’ bodies just because you want the money. He had something else going, and we aren’t going to like looking at it.’ He blew his cheeks out in a long sigh, pushed himself wearily out of the chair, and walked over to the window.

Helmut Krueger’s farm was across the road, and he watched a line of Holsteins filing from the pasture toward the barn for evening milking, thinking that maybe he should have been a farmer. Cows hardly ever killed their parents. ‘You run the kid’s name through the computer yet?’

‘Got a problem with that. No name on the birth certificate.’

‘Huh?’

‘The lady clerk I talked to said it wasn’t all that unusual. The certificate’s filed on the date of birth, and some parents just don’t have a name ready. Unless they call it in after they decide, it just stays blank. But the name of the hospital was there, and they gave me the name of the family doctor.’

‘You talk to him?’ Bonar asked.

Halloran shook his head.

‘Don’t tell me. He’s dead.’

‘Alive and golfing. His wife said she’d have him call back tonight.’

Bonar nodded, looked out the window again. ‘So we’re on our way.’

‘Maybe. You want to catch a bite before the doc calls? I gave his wife my cell number so we could get out of here.’

Bonar turned and looked at him, a tired, massive silhouette blocking the last of the day’s light from the window. ‘I’ll meet you at your place. I’ve got to stop at the grocery first.’

‘We can go to the café.’

‘It’s the twenty-fourth, Mike.’

‘I know that . . . ‘Halloran started to say, and then stopped abruptly. ‘Oh, shit. Bonar, I totally forgot. I’m sorry, man.’

‘No sweat.’ Bonar had a sad, silly grin that forgave everything. ‘We’re getting too many October dead people, you know that?’

‘That is the truth.’

But you shouldn’t have forgotten that dead person, Halloran thought a half hour later when he pulled into his driveway. He sat in the car for a moment and rode out the guilt, almost wishing he still believed just so he could go to confession and be forgiven.

Technically, Bonar was a bachelor, but in all the ways that mattered, he’d been widowed since the October blizzard of ’87, when his high-school sweetheart had gone off the road and buried the nose of her father’s pickup in Haggerty’s swamp. Thirty-seven inches of snow had fallen over the next forty-eight hours, but the road past Haggerty’s was seldom traveled, so it was four days before the county snowplow finally got to it and found the frozen, unpretty remains of Ellen Hendricks.

She hadn’t died right away, and that had been the worst of it, since she used the time to write Bonar a letter that wound all around the borders of a Standard Oil road map of Wisconsin. She’d been hurting, and she’d been cold, but there was no fear in that letter, just a dead certainty that Bonar would find her. She talked about their upcoming wedding, the three kids they were going to have, the two-seater Thunderbird that Bonar absolutely positively had to trade in because there was no room for children, and toward the end, when the pencil lines were starting to waver, she scolded him gently for taking so long.

She wrote her last words on October twenty-fourth, and every year since Halloran and Bonar had spent that evening together, eating, drinking, and not talking about things that might have been. The tradition had become more a part of their friendship than a conscious tribute to a girl who had died a long time ago, but in some way they never tried to understand, the date remained important. He shouldn’t have forgotten it.

‘Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have forgotten the Kleinfeldts’ goddamned keys, either,’ he said aloud, and then he banged on the steering wheel until the side of his hand hurt.

Hundred-year-old elms shaded the single acre that remained of his great-grandfather’s farm. He’d kept up the house and yard, but the old Dutch Colonial looked like an interloper in this new subdivision of tacky ramblers and split-levels. The house was much too large for a man living alone, but four generations of Hallorans had been raised in it, and he couldn’t make himself let it go.

He got out of the car and walked across the lawn to the front door, tugging the open flaps of his jacket closed. The wind had picked up since he’d left the sheriff’s office just a few moments before, and dried leaves skittered and swirled away from his boots, heading for Florida if they had any sense. You could almost smell the coming winter, and Halloran remembered Danny’s prediction of an early snow yesterday, while he had been driving the young deputy to his death.

He walked into the small entryway and heard his snowy childhood boots hitting the floor, and then his mother’s voice, silent for ten years now, reminding him to close the door, what did he think he was doing? Trying to heat the whole outdoors? In a gesture of defiance a decade too late, he left the door ajar for Bonar, wondering why most of his memories were of winter, as if he’d lived thirty-three years in a place with no other season.

He hung his heavy jacket in the front closet, then placed his belt clip and gun on the shelf above.

‘How dumb is this?’ Bonar had asked the first time he’d seen him do it. ‘I’m a drug-crazed burglar, okay? And here you go, leaving your piece right here in the front closet so I can pick it up on my way in and shoot you in the gut when you come stumbling down the stairs in your skivvies.’

But Emma Halloran would never permit firearms beyond the entryway of her house. Not her husband’s fifty-year-old Winchester, and certainly not her son’s department-issue 9mm. Ten years she’d been in the ground, and Halloran still couldn’t make himself walk past that front closet wearing his gun.

There was a bottle of Dewar’s in the refrigerator, a criminal offense according to Bonar, but Halloran liked it cold.

He poured healthy shots in two glasses that had once held grape jelly, then sipped out of one as he examined the contents of the freezer. He pushed aside a stack of frozen dinners and found treasure in a rectangle of butcher paper covered with frost.

‘Honey, I’m home!’ Bonar called from the front door, slamming it hard behind him. He stomped down the hall into the kitchen and dropped two grocery bags on the counter. Halloran looked skeptically at the greenery poking out of the top.

‘You brought flowers?’

‘That’s romaine lettuce, you numbnuts. You got anchovies?’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Bonar started unloading the bags. ‘Never fear. Got the anchovies, got the garlic, got a sad and limp bunch of green beans here that are going to need life support . . . ’

‘I got Ralph.’

Bonar sucked in a breath and looked at him. Ralph had been the last Angus Albert Swenson had raised before he sold his farm and moved to Arizona. They’d bought the young steer together, feeding him out on corn and beer for the last two months of its life. ‘I thought we polished him off last time.’

Halloran nodded toward the white package in the sink, then handed Bonar his Dewar’s in a jelly jar. ‘I saved the tenderloin.’

‘Praise Jesus.’ Bonar clinked his glass, downed his shot, and winced. ‘Man, how many times I gotta tell you? Cold mutes the flavor. You can’t keep this stuff in the fridge, and you sure as hell shouldn’t be drinking it out of old jars with cartoons all over them. Who is this? The Martian?’

Halloran peered at the dark figure on his friend’s glass. A lot of the paint had worn away over the years, but part of the helmet was still identifiable. ‘Damn. I wanted the Martian.’

Bonar snorted as he refilled his glass, then started to rub a clove of garlic around a wooden bowl Halloran had always thought was supposed to hold fruit. ‘Nuke Ralph on defrost for about three minutes, turn the oven as high as it will go, and get me out that big cast-iron skillet.’

‘I thought we’d just grill him outside.’

‘Well, you were wrong. We’re going to sear him on high heat and then finish him in the oven. Then I’ll add wine to the skillet drippings, reduce it to a glaze, throw in some morel mushrooms, and voilà.’

Halloran rummaged in the silverware drawer for steak knives. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Of course I’m kidding. You ever try to buy morels at Jerry’s Super Valu?’

‘In the old days you would have stuck this thing on a stick and held it over a blowtorch. I wish you’d quit watching that cooking channel.’

‘Can’t help it. Those guys are the twenty-first-century clowns. Like Gallagher without the watermelon, remember him?’

‘The guy with a sledgehammer.’

‘He’s the one. God, I loved that guy. Is he dead?’

Halloran drained his glass and refilled it. ‘Probably. Everyone else is.’

Bonar was silent for a moment, and then started to chuckle. The Dewar’s was working.

By the time Halloran’s cell phone chirped Ralph was a bloody memory on chipped white dishes and the kitchen was trashed. ‘Here we go,’ he said, flipping open the phone, wishing he’d had a little less to drink, trying to remember all the questions he’d wanted to ask the doctor. ‘Hello?’

A man’s cultured voice soared through space and into his ear, slow and rich with southern heat. ‘Good evening. Dr LeRoux, returning the call of Sheriff Michael Halloran.’

Good evening. Jesus, did people actually talk like that? He didn’t know what it was – the accent, maybe – but something about talking to southerners always made Halloran feel like a country rube, a farmer’s son, which he was; and an uneducated fool, which he was not.

‘This is Mike Halloran. Thank you for returning my call, Dr LeRoux. If you’ll hang up, sir, I’ll call you right back on my dime.’

‘As you wish.’ There was an abrupt click.

Halloran folded up the cellular and went for the phone on the wall.

‘What’s he sound like?’ Bonar asked.

‘Like Colonel Sanders with an attitude. Hello, Dr LeRoux. Mike Halloran again. I’m the sheriff of Kingsford County up here in Wisconsin, and I’m trying to locate the heir of some patients you tended to years ago –’

‘Martin and Emily Bradford,’ South interrupted North. ‘My wife told me.’

‘That was over thirty years ago, Doctor. You remember them?’

‘Vividly.’

Halloran waited a moment for him to volunteer more information, but there was only silence on the line. ‘You have an impressive memory, sir. You must have had hundreds of patients since then –’

‘I don’t talk about my patients, Sheriff, no matter how long it has been since I’ve treated them. As a law enforcement officer, you should know that.’

‘The Bradfords died earlier this week, Doctor. Confidentiality no longer applies. I’ll be happy to fax you copies of the death certificates, but I was hoping you’d be willing to take my word and save us some time.’

The doctor’s sigh traveled over the wires. ‘What precisely did you need to know, Sheriff?’

‘We understand there was a child.’

‘Yes.’ Something new in the voice. Sadness? Regret?

‘We’re trying to locate that child.’ Halloran glanced at Bonar, then punched on the speakerphone.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Sheriff.’ The doctor’s drawl filled the kitchen. ‘I delivered the child, I treated Mrs Bradford and the child after the birth, and then I never saw them again. Or heard from them.’

Halloran’s shoulders slumped in disappointment. ‘Doctor, we’re at a dead end here. Your county’s birth certificate was never completed. No name, no sex. We don’t even know if it was a girl or a boy.’

‘Neither do I.’

Halloran was stunned into silence. ‘Excuse me?’

‘The child was a hermaphrodite, Sheriff. And unless someone intervened on behalf of that poor creature, I doubt that he or she knows its own gender to this day. I tried to get Social Services involved down here immediately after the birth, and I have always suspected that those good intentions were responsible for the Bradfords’ sudden disappearance from the Atlanta area.’

‘Hermaphrodite,’ Halloran repeated numbly, exchanging a glance with Bonar, who looked positively stupefied.

Doctor LeRoux sighed impatiently. ‘Asexual, or more precisely, duality of gender. There are variations of physical manifestation within certain parameters. In the case of the Bradford baby, testes and penis were partially internalized but nonetheless complete. The vaginal configuration was present but deformed, and whether or not the ovaries were functional was indeterminate.’

‘My God.’

The doctor went on, warming to his subject. ‘It’s a rare occurrence – I can’t remember the statistics off hand – but even that long ago, it didn’t have to be a lifelong tragedy. When the genitalia and internal organs of both sexes are present, as they were in the Bradford baby, the parents simply choose the gender of their child based on the physical viability of the organs. The surgery to implement that choice is really quite simple.’

‘And which did the Bradfords choose?’ Halloran asked, and the doctor snapped back immediately.

‘They chose a living hell for their child, and for that, I hope they now find themselves in the same location.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Those . . . people,’ the doctor sputtered, ‘called their own child – and I’m quoting here, because I will never forget the phrase they used – “an offense to the eye of God. An abomination.” They believed its birth was divine punishment for some imagined sin, and that to interfere would somehow compound the sin and . . .’ He stopped and took an audible breath. ‘At any rate, in the short time they were under my care, the parents chose neither name nor gender for their child, and I tell you, Sheriff, even all these years later, my thoughts are haunted by what that child’s life must have been like. Can you imagine? They wouldn’t even give it a name . . .’

Someone in the background was talking urgently to the doctor, his wife, probably, but Halloran couldn’t make out the words. ‘Is there something wrong, Doctor?’ He heard a dark chuckle.

‘Atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, a slight valve defect. At my age any number of things are wrong, Sheriff, and my wife worries about all of them. Tell me one thing, if you will, before we close this conversation.’

‘Anything I can, Doctor.’

‘In my part of the country, it is not generally within the purview of law enforcement to track down missing heirs. There is a crime involved, is there not?’

Halloran looked at Bonar, saw him nod. ‘Homicide.’

‘Really.’

‘The Bradfords – actually they called themselves the Kleinfeldts while they lived here – were murdered early Monday morning.’ And then, because the doctor had been forthcoming, and much more human than Halloran had expected, he gave him what he knew he’d want to hear. ‘They were shot to death in church, while they were praying.’

‘Ah.’ It was more of a breath than a word, and there was the sound of satisfaction in it. ‘I see. Thank you, Sheriff Halloran. Thank you very kindly for that information.’

The disconnect was loud on the speaker.

Halloran went over to the table and sat down with Bonar. Neither one of them said anything for a minute, then Bonar leaned back in his chair, tugging his belt away from his belly. ‘I got an idea,’ he said. ‘What say we just close this thing down and say the Kleinfeldts died from natural causes.’