A Hard Ticket Home (3 page)

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Authors: David Housewright

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled, #Private Investigators

BOOK: A Hard Ticket Home
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I nodded. It was a typical tactic of a small town police force. Whenever the rurals have a problem that isn’t worth their time and aggravation—or when the fix is in—they just tell the suspect to grab the next stage out of Dodge and don’t come back.
“That was toward the end of June,” Carlson said. “Week or so before Jamie left.”
“One thing has nothin’ to do with the other,” Molly insisted.
“I didn’t say it did,” Carlson said.
I jotted the facts down on the yellow pad along with a question:
Was 18-year-old Jamie’s sense of justice so offended by the treatment of her friend that she would abandon her family and home?
Molly shook her head at her husband, then gave me the photograph, a two-by-three high school graduation shot. It showed a young woman posed against a dark, marbled background. She was beautiful. Bright green eyes, hair like a palomino pony, skin—you knew not so much as a pimple ever dared blemish that skin. I looked from the photo to the Carlsons to the little girl playing quietly outside and then back to the photo. How did Richard and Molly Carlson ever produce a child who looked like this? Twice?
“I’ll be in touch.”
Molly squeezed my hand. Again she said, “Thank you.”
I shook hands with Carlson and went to my Jeep Grand Cherokee parked in their driveway. Stacy waved as I drove away. I waved back.
 
 
Ten minutes later I parked in front of the Judy Garland Museum, Judy singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” on a weather-battered speaker, the ticket taker singing along. Kirsten Sager Whitson was leaning against the building, waiting for me.
“Sorry I took so long.” I gestured toward the museum. “How was it?”
“Okay,” she answered without enthusiasm. I reached for her hand. She pulled it away and filled it with her purse, making it seem like a casual gesture instead of the deliberate snub I knew it to be. She moved quickly to the passenger door of my SUV, opening it before I had the chance to do it for her.
A visit to the museum—Judy Garland had been born Francis Gumm in Grand Rapids; her family later moved to Duluth—had been Kirsten’s idea, an alternative to meeting one of my “cases.” Kirsten didn’t approve of my occasional forays into detective work and said so.
She thought they were common, even used that word once. “Common.” I reminded her that I was eleven years a police officer. “How common is that?” Only that was before Teachwell and, in Kirsten’s world view, didn’t count.
Teachwell’s company and insurance carrier had agreed to pay a finder’s fee of fifty cents on the dollar with the stipulation that I keep my mouth shut about the size of the theft—thus avoiding a possible Enron-like meltdown of the company’s stock. After the government took its 36.45 percent, I was left with approximately two million in income-producing mutual funds. Kirsten expected me to act like it. Only I had been unable to cast off the shackles of my blue-collar upbringing. She had used those words, too. “The shackles of your blue-collar upbringing.”
“What do they want you to do?” she asked when we hit Highway 169 going south toward the Cities. I told her. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re going to find the girl.”
“Sure, if I can. Why not?”
“You don’t need to do this.”
“No. I could turn the car around and go back to the cabin. You and I can spend another week fishing and swimming and lolling in the sun. But I thought it was starting to get a little old toward the end, didn’t you?”
“No. What I mean is, you don’t need to do
this.
You could get a real job if you’re bored.”
“Doing what? Making more money?”
“There’s nothing wrong with making money.”
“Of course not. Except I already make $170,000 a year just for getting up in the morning. I realize that’s not much if you’re a shortstop for the Texas Rangers. On the other hand, I don’t have coaches yelling at me or fans booing because I hit a single instead of a home run. Anyway, my needs are few and relatively inexpensive. I have more than I’ll ever need.”
“I’m not talking about money.”
“I thought you were.”
“I’m talking about getting a job that you can care about, that has value, that gives you pleasure. Like, like …”
“Like helping people with their problems?”
She didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Kirsten, I was a cop for eleven years. It was the only real job I ever had. I liked it. I liked catching bad guys, I liked being a peacemaker, protecting the peace. But mostly I liked helping people. It got to be a habit with me.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that, either.
During the 200-mile drive up from the Twin Cities Kirsten had been all chit-chat, conversing in depth on a number of topics that meant nothing to her. Same thing at the cabin. Now she sat in stony silence, staring out the passenger window. I didn’t push, yet by the time we hit McGregor, midway between Grand Rapids and the Cities, I was feeling anxious. I figured she wanted to tell me something and was having a difficult time getting to it. I also decided I definitely didn’t want to hear it.
Kirsten agreed to stop for a sandwich, and I pulled off the main drag and parked in the gravel lot of a restaurant called Jack’s. Across the highway from Jack’s was a small office building. A few decades ago Jack’s was called Mark’s and the office building had been a mom-and-pop tavern called The Wheel-Inn. It was there that I had witnessed Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. My parents and I were returning from a camping trip not far from where my lake home is now and listening to the event on the radio. As the historic moment approached, my father stopped at the first public place he saw with a TV antenna. We sat in the tavern for over three hours eating hamburgers and drinking root beer while waiting for Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to leave their landing module. I don’t remember much about the historic moment—I was so young. But I remember the root beer and I remember my parents. Dad cried and Mom laughed.
“Are you coming?” Kirsten asked.
I closed my door and locked it with a button on my key chain.
“Are you pregnant?”
Kirsten’s mouth hung open for a moment and I thought I had guessed right. I was actually disappointed when she finally shook her head and said, “No.”
“What is it then?”
“Nothing.”
“Hey.” I rested my hands on top of her shoulders, leaning in, and giving her my most reassuring smile. “It’s me.”
She stepped back until her shoulders were no longer within reach. My hands fell away.
“Oh right. Like suddenly you’re the Great Communicator.”
I was surprised by the sharpness of her words. “Where did that come from?”
She crossed her arms.
“Kirsten?”
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
“What’s you and not me?”
“Do we have to talk about this now?”
I gestured toward 169 with my head. “We’re running out of highway.”
Kirsten stepped away from the restaurant door and walked to the center of the parking lot. Gravel crunched under her feet.
“Something’s changed,” she said.
“What’s changed?”
“Something.”
I shook my head dumbly, my mouth open. I felt numb, except for my stomach—my stomach was suddenly very active, performing all kinds of gymnastics.
“You spend too much time on the fringe, McKenzie,” she told me at last. “The people you associate with—they live in rooms they pay for by the week.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The coke-heads, the pushers, the prostitutes, the criminals and lowlifes and, and—two weeks ago we were supposed to go to the Guthrie Theater but we didn’t because instead you were parked outside a motel with a camera because a friend wanted to know if her husband was cheating on her.”
“The woman was from the neighborhood; I knew her growing up.”
“That’s what I mean. The people you deal with. In your world, in the world where you do these favors for people, everyone is so, so—wrong.”
“A middle-aged couple from Grand Rapids is wrong?”
“You know what I mean.”
I took the half dozen steps to my car door without realizing I had done it. The vehicle was now between us. I looked over its roof at Kirsten.
“I don’t want to deal with it anymore,” she announced with a voice as hard as the look in her eyes.
“Would you be happier if I was a stock broker?”
“Yes.”
“A lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“The artistic director for the Minnesota Opera Company?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t be those things.”
“I think maybe we should start seeing other people.”
“Are you already seeing other people?”
“Oh yeah, right. Typical male reaction.”
“Is that a yes or no?”
Kirsten moved to the Cherokee, leaned against it. Her arms stretched across the roof toward me. I took both of her hands in mine.
“I would never do that, Mac,” she said, softening her voice for effect. “I care for you too deeply. Besides, you carry a gun.”
Kirsten smiled. I guess she thought she had made a joke.
“If you tell me you just want to be friends, I might use it.”
See, I can be funny, too.
“You’ll always be more than that,” she said.
“Then why are you dumping me?”
Kirsten didn’t answer and I found myself gazing at the office building across the highway again. Suddenly, walking on the moon didn’t seem like such a big thing.
 
 
I dropped Kirsten at her handsome Cape Cod located on the parkway that ringed the Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis, the house with the Victorian-style gazebo in the backyard. She kissed me good-bye. Not one of those quick pecks people in a hurry usually give each other. This one lingered long enough to cause a stirring in the nether regions.
Sure,
I thought as she bounded away, her designer duffel bag over her shoulder.
Break up with a guy and then kiss him to the depths of his soul so he knows what he’s losing.
’Course, Kirsten insisted that she wasn’t dumping me, that we weren’t breaking up. We were merely seeing other people. So there was still hope. Yeah, right.
Twenty minutes later I reached my own home in Falcon Heights, a large English Colonial with a sprawling front porch. When I bought it, I thought it was located in St. Anthony Park, an exclusive, quiet, exceedingly old neighborhood of St. Paul tucked unobtrusively between the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis. It wasn’t until I made an offer that I discovered to my horror that the house was on the wrong side of Hoyt Avenue, that I had inadvertently moved to the suburbs. Still, I’m a St. Paul boy at heart and whenever anyone asks, that’s where I tell them I live.
I parked in my garage and entered the house through the back door.
 
The first thing I did—before flicking on a light, before opening a window, before checking my mail and newspapers stacked in a box on the porch—was to turn on my CD player. Immediately, the grandiose sounds of opera spilled out of nineteen speakers strategically placed in various nooks and crannies throughout the house—Maria Callas singing an excerpt from
Madame Butterfly.
There was a purity to the music that I rarely heard in any other form. Still, I wasn’t an opera fan. I listened to it because Kirsten listened to it. It was Callas, in fact, who had brought us together.
I had attended a Christmas party in the offices of my accountant, where I had discovered a remarkably handsome woman arguing with a man I didn’t know. From what they said, I gathered that Callas had once been quite fat—as opera divas often are—when she first established her reputation. Afterward, she carefully and deliberately shed a third of her weight, turning herself into the sleek, fashionable woman who attracted the attention of Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, among others. The topic of debate was whether Callas sounded better when she was fat or when she was thin.
“What do you think?” the woman asked abruptly.
“It might be sexist,” I told her, “but things tend to sound better when they come from an attractive package. You, for example, remind me of a Mozart aria.”
She laughed and told me that was the most original line she had ever heard. One thing led to another and there I was, listening to Maria Callas on a late Sunday afternoon.
“Why do you need to see other people?” I asked the empty house. Its answer was no more satisfying than Kirsten’s had been in McGregor.
I poured myself a Pig’s Eye beer and drank it way too fast. I poured myself another. I figured I had two choices. I could sit around and feel sorry for myself or I could work. I chose feeling sorry for myself. That lasted until the telephone rang.

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