A Carnival of Killing (5 page)

“Damned women’s lib,” he said. “Next thing you know they’ll be demanding to join our Krewe.”

“They can compete for Klondike Kate,” I said. “Maybe that’s enough.”

At the mention of Klondike Kate, the Duke of Klinker spun away from me and ordered the Krewe back into the Royal Chariot.

Klinker was the last one to climb aboard and he stayed in a back corner, the full length of the truck box away from me.

“The Duke of Klinker seems overly reluctant to discuss anything having to do with the words ‘Klondike Kate,’ even though he spoke them first,” I said to Al.

“Could Klinker be the crumb who cold-cocked Kate?” he replied.

“Can’t comment. Couldn’t come up with a concrete connection.”

“Can you keep quizzing Klinker?”

“Klinker quit quickly when I mentioned Kate’s calamity.”

“Crap,” said Al.

“I concur,” I said.

I turned the other way and introduced myself to the nearest red-clad warrior. He shook my hand and said he was Grand Duke Fertilious.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “With a title like that, you must have some interesting duties.”

“Well, I’m the propagator of progeny, but that’s not as exciting as it sounds,” he said. “It only means that I’m the Krewe member with the most kids. The sad fact is that Fertilious doesn’t get to do any extra-curricular propagating.”

“Too bad,” I said. “I was thinking of applying for that title next year. How many kids do you have?”

“Seven. All girls.”

“How many bathrooms in your house?”

Fertilious laughed. “Not enough. Sounds like you have some daughters.”

“None that I know of,” I said. “But my mother has three sisters and they all have daughters. I’ve heard plenty of complaints about competition for bathroom time.”

“Maybe someday you’ll have the pleasure of competing with your own daughters.”

I shrugged, wondering if that would ever happen. Both Martha and I carried heavy baggage from previous marriages and were constantly struggling with the issues of trust and commitment. She’d been beaten ferociously and repeatedly by her former husband. I’d lost my first love to a speeding truck and my second love to another suitor.

Martha and I had only recently taken the step of living together. Would we be able to extend our journey to the point of having children together? That bridge was still far from being crossed.

Fertilious turned away to talk with another Vulcan and I bounced along in silence for several minutes. Then, to my surprise, I saw that we were turning onto Mississippi River Boulevard and heading in the direction of the previous day’s crime scene.

I tapped Fertilious on the shoulder. “Where are we going now?” I asked.

“To the water ski show,” Fertilious said.

“Water skiing? Are you serious? It’s twenty below. The river’s frozen solid.”

“The middle of the river is open, and the idiots, I mean the exhibitionists, are water skiing out there.”

“I like your original description, but I probably can’t use it in the paper.”

“You might get uncomplimentary phone calls.”

Wondering what Fertilious’s reaction would be, I said, “We’re getting close to the place where they found the body of last year’s Klondike Kate.”

“That was awful,” he said. “Did you cover that story?”

“I was the lucky reporter chosen to stand out in the cold while the cops looked at the body.”

“What do you know about who killed her?” The tone was of sincere interest.

“Not much,” I said. “The cops weren’t saying anything concrete yesterday and I haven’t been able to follow up today because of this assignment. Did you know the victim?”

“We all did,” Fertilious said. “We all went to this year’s contest and partied with all the Kates, past and present, afterward. Some of the guys—not including yours truly—were in a bar with Lee-Ann last night, as a matter of fact.”

This might be going somewhere. “Which guys were there?”

“I heard Ashes talking about it. I’m not sure who else. You could ask around.”

At that moment the truck turned off Mississippi River Boulevard and bounced down a steep, narrow road that took us to Hidden Falls Park, a flat stretch of flood plain. The driver parked near a cluster of warmly dressed people who were, indeed, watching as a boat towing a man wearing a black rubber thermal dry suit and water skis went speeding past.

“That idiot on skis must be nuts,” Al said.

“Can I quote you in my story?” I asked.

“I’m making that my suggested cutline,” he replied.

“Don will love that one.”

“Maybe it’ll slip through, like the one about the mayor saying ‘diddley squat.’”

“I sure hope not,” I said. Racing to finish a story minutes before deadline, a reporter (for another newspaper, thank God) wrote: “The mayor said, ‘diddley squat.’” The reporter intended to insert the correct quote later. However, the story went to the copy desk in that form seconds before deadline. The copy editor skimmed quickly over the story and sent it to the composing room.

The mayor was not pleased when he read the next morning’s paper. And the publisher was not pleased when he received the mayor’s subsequent phone call.

The reporter and the copy editor were duly chastised and a correction was duly printed. The irony was that what the mayor actually said wasn’t worth diddley squat.

We all piled out of the Luverne and the Krewe members began mingling with the crowd, which was surprisingly large given the weather. The temperature was still ten below and a numbing breeze was blowing down the river valley. Noses, mouths and cheeks were all that showed on most of the spectators. Every square inch of exposed skin was red from the cold, and clouds of steam from the watcher’s exhalations swirled around their heads.

I couldn’t believe what I saw on the river. A dozen people, eight men and four women, were taking turns on the skis. An announcer on a public address system was introducing the skiers and telling us where they were from and how many contests they had won. The skiers, all clad in the black dry suits, were performing on water that remained in liquid form only because it was moving too fast to freeze.

Al was standing beside me when one of the women skiers swished out of the water and onto the adjacent ice shelf, kicked off her skis and walked through the snow and ice toward a small warming hut.

“Look at her feet,” Al said.

I looked. And looked again. The woman’s feet were bare.

“Maybe they’re frozen solid,” I said. “That way she can’t feel them.”

Al shot a series of photos, zooming in on her feet at the end. “I’ve heard of keeping a woman pregnant in the summer and barefoot in the winter, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen the barefoot part.”

Watching the skiers skim the frigid water was sadistic fun, but I was really wanting to get next to the Count of Ashes and ask him about the party where Lee-Ann Nordquist was last seen alive. However, I had two problems. The first was that I didn’t know which one of the masked warriors was Ashes. The other was that all the Vulcans were busy schmoozing the female spectators and applying grease to any exposed patch of facial skin they could find. In some cases it was hard to determine who was male and who was female because of the abundance of clothing, but the Krewe moved boldly forward and more than one man got decorated with a V.

“Good thing they’re not doing it the old way,” Al said, nodding toward a burly man with a black smear on his cheek.

“You mean by kissing?” I asked.

“Exactly. Any Vulcan who kissed that one by mistake would probably get a fat lip in return.”

“Would that be called paying lip service to your job?” I said.

“You can button your lip any time,” Al said.

At that moment, the herder of the flock issued the call to board the chariot, and moving stiffly from our long exposure to the cold, we climbed aboard.

“It’s back to the hotel for lunch, me hearties,” Vulcanus Rex shouted as he slid into the passenger side of the cab. This sounded good to me because I could hear my feet thumping on the metal floor of the truck box but I could no longer feel them.

I clapped my hands together a dozen times to bring back feeling to my fingers as the Luverne labored up the hill to street level. When we had reached the top and were heading toward downtown St. Paul, I asked another of the red-clad Krewe which one of them was the Count of Ashes.

“At your service, sir,” he said. “I am the Count of Ashes, otherwise known as the swinger of the Krewe and the raiser of Sleeping Spirits.”

“The swinger of the Krewe?” I asked. “I thought all of you were swingers.”

“In a sense that’s true, but I’m the one you will actually see swinging upside down next Friday night at some joint on Payne Avenue. The event is called the Ashes Swing. You will be there, won’t you?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the ice in the river.”

He smiled, revealing an even row of sparkling teeth. “So, prince of the printed word, why seekest thou the Count of Ashes?”

With an appreciative bow, I said, “I seekest to talkest to everyone in the Krewe while we’re riding with you today. You know, give the readers a feel for the personalities involved.”

“Well, as I told you, my personality involves being dumb enough to swing upside down in front of a bunch of people who are more interested in getting sloshed.”

“I’m sure I couldn’t do it. Are you out somewhere every night during the Carnival?”

“Pretty much,” he said. “We’re a busy bunch.”

“Did you happen to be in the bar Wednesday night with Lee-Ann Nordquist and some of the other Klondike Kates.”

The smile disappeared. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m trying to cover two stories at once,” I said. “I was there when they found Lee-Ann’s body yesterday. I’ll be picking up that story again after riding with you today, so I’m trying to find out as much as I can about who might have seen her that night. It’s not a big deal.”

“Well, I said everything I’m going to say about that night to the cops, so please don’t ask me any questions about the bar scene and Lee-Ann.” With that, he turned and muscled his way past two of his compatriots to the back of the truck box, where he stood next to the Duke of Klinker for the rest of the ride. Their conversation included a number of head movements in my direction, which made me feel sort of like a turkey watching the farmer sharpening his ax.

Okay, I thought, that leaves me with four other red cloaks and Vulcanus Rex himself to question during the lunch break. I didn’t want to push any of them too hard, but at the very least I wanted to find out which ones had been questioned by the police. That would give me a starting point for my next chat with Detective Curtis Brown.

The Heat is On

Mere words cannot convey the wonderful feeling of being inside the Crowne Plaza Hotel and immersing myself in an enduring envelope of heat. Wonderful, that is, after a brief period of needles lancing through my fingers and several minutes of knife points stabbing into my toes as my tortured digits returned from their state of cryogenic suspension.

“Thank god we’re only doing this for one day,” Al said as he banged his toes against the carpeted floor in an effort to restore circulation. “I can’t imagine these guys freezing their asses off every day for … how long?”

“The carnival runs twelve days,” I said. “I don’t know if they’re out in that damn truck every day, but I’m guessing at least ten.”

“Give me a sweaty day at the Aquatennial any time,” Al said.

This would be the Minneapolis Aquatennial, which occurs in August when the daytime temperatures range from eighty-five to ninety-five degrees.

“That does seem like a more appropriate time to water ski,” I said.

“It’s a more appropriate time to do anything outdoors. I swear my toes are frost-bitten from standing around on that cake of ice by the river.”

“Think about that water skier’s bare feet.”

“I’m remembering how she looked in that skin-tight rubber dry suit and thinking about more than her feet being bare.”

“A shocking statement by a married man,” I said. Al’s wife is an extremely attractive blue-eyed blonde whose figure is still svelte after giving birth to a daughter and a son.

“I’m speaking strictly as a photographer,” Al said. “I constantly try to get to the bottom of things.”

Vulcanus Rex and his Krewe ate lunch at a long table in the room where we’d met them that morning. As we ate, I was able to get a better look at their faces because they’d removed their hats and goggles, but I didn’t recognize any of them as men who’d been featured in the news.

I was seated between Grand Duke Fertilious, blond, blue-eyed, round-faced and younger than I expected, and Baron Hot Sparkus, who was older (early forties), thinner and less willing to chat up a reporter. Fertilious wanted to question me about journalistic procedures and ethics. Hot Sparkus, who I wanted to question about Lee-Ann Nordquist’s last visit to a bar, was engaged in a long conversation with Klinker, who was seated on his other side.

Our desserts were before us when I finally managed to detach myself from Fertilious and get in a word with Hot Sparkus. He was a square-faced, broad-shouldered man in his mid-thirties with bushy black eyebrows and a heavy five o’clock shadow. According to the Vulcans’ Website, Hot Sparkus was “the spark plug of the Krewe,” whatever that meant.

I had decided to take a less direct approach to questions about who was in the bar with the murdered Klondike Kate, so we talked about the Carnival in general, the role of Vulcans and, finally, about the role of Klondike Kate. Our conversation was pleasant and relaxed until I asked if he had been acquainted with the unfortunate Lee-Ann Nordquist.

Even this roundabout tactic failed. The man’s back and shoulders went rigid. “What’s Lee-Ann Nordquist got to do with your story about riding with us?” he asked.

“Nothing really, but I’m working on the murder story as well, so I’m looking for comments from people who knew her.”

“You’re sure she was murdered?”

“I don’t think she took off her coat and laid down in that frozen driveway and died all by herself. Do you?”