A Winsome Murder (9 page)

I was sitting at a table at the far back of the bar. In the darkened corner, a tall, electronic dart board flickered red and played celebratory chimes every few minutes, even though no one was playing it; a Siren song of gaming, sung to a near-empty bar.

Sitting across from me was officer Michele Schaefer. She wore a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, blue jeans, and beat-up cowboy boots. Her hair, unfussily shoulder length and natural. Her eyes, a piercing hazel-green, that seemed to pronounce, “I will not suffer fools.” She wore no makeup that I could see. Her skin, burnished and smooth, had that natural look usually reserved for the very young or for those who can afford daily facial treatments and tanning booths. I thought Schaefer was in her late twenties. She is thirty-seven. She's also tall for a woman, nearly six foot. She hunts deer, turkey, and pheasant; works the Fireman's Smelt Feed each year; target shoots with a .44 Magnum; and will icefish on occasion. She's between relationships at the moment. Boyfriends, she said, tend to get in the way during haying season, when she helps out on the family farm. She's never married because, she said, husbands tend to get in the way
all
the time. Schaefer's dad, a cop for twenty years, retired early to run an organic dairy farm.

Her sister, Jeannie, who was with her during my interview, is thirty-one and has a similar look to her, a hardened beauty born of the fields
and more than a bit of grit. You wouldn't say either of these women was pretty, but they're striking nonetheless. She, like her sister, is not a small woman. This is solid stock around here. Her ancestors cut trees, pulled stumps, and wrestled boulders by hand, trying to grapple out tillable land in this Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin. Schaefer's brother, Cal, was in the bar too. Cast in half shadow by a too-bright plastic beer sign, he and his brother-in-law stalked a hazy pool table in the back room like mini-Agamemnons. This family could sack a city. They were all born and raised in Winsome Bay, and are determined to stay there.

They, too, are, in a way, driftless.

Schaefer drank a lot during the interview, her speech often slurred and sloppy. She seemed aware of this at times, but continued to talk through it, rough and rambling, and at times angry. She frequently went off on non sequiturs: small-town life, domestic beers, the press, deer season coming up, bow hunting turkeys, the flooding last spring, being a cop. The hardest thing about being a cop in a small town, she told me, was that you know just about everyone you have to deal with. They're your friends, your relatives, neighbors, people you like or don't like. Most of the calls are minor, she said, but there's always the farmer who rolls his tractor or gets caught on a power takeoff shaft, the neighbor kid on crack, the hunting mishap, the drunk driver, the domestic abuse, and now, the murder. Schaefer and officer Tom Ellison, the father of the victim, had worked together for the last four years.

“Tom,” she said, speaking about the victim's father. “He was just crazy about Deb.”

“How's he doing?”

She took a long, hot pull off her cigarette. “Not good. Not good.”

“Is he back to work?”

“No, no. He's, uh … no. He goes to church a lot. He's—Tom's a very religious guy. Always has been. His family too. Never missed a Sunday. Always wore a suit, did the collection at Mass, the prayers before eating, you know, the whole nine yards. He'd pray in the cruiser over a turkey sandwich. I'd tease him about it. And now …” Schaefer crushed out her cigarette. “Things just aren't adding up for him.” She reached across the table and grabbed another cigarette from my pack. “You mind?”

“No, go ahead.”

She looked to her sister. “I know, I smoke too much.”

Jeannie stood and said, “I have to pee,” and headed down a long dark hallway.

Schaefer's mood darkened suddenly. I wasn't sure what to ask next. I didn't want to scare her off. So I lit a cigarette too and said nothing. A long silence followed, one of those uncomfortably long pauses when you know somebody should say something but nobody does. It seemed to go on forever. I was just about to say something to break the awkwardness when Schaefer glanced toward the ceiling and said, “A policeman was just born.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Huh? Oh, nothing. Just something you say when nobody knows what to say. You know, like ‘an angel just passed over' or something. Deborah used to say it.”

“Oh.” I waited another few seconds. “So you said earlier that you knew her. Deborah.”

“Yes.” She held up the cigarette. “Thanks.”

“And you said you knew her pretty well.”

“Hold on.” Schaefer grabbed her empty beer bottle and went to the bar. Turning back to me, she asked, “Want one?”

“No, I'm good.”

She called the bartender out of a cloud of smoke. The woman twisted open a beer, poured a shot of something, and pushed it in front of Schaefer, who slammed it down. Schaefer took a guzzle of her beer and headed back to our table. “Sorry,” she said, “what were you saying?”

“You knew Deborah well, you said. Was this before she moved to Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“Was she living at home while she was here?”

“Home? No, she had an apartment by the lake. She was pretty messed up back then.”

“In what way?”

“I can't really go into that, but, uh, this wasn't a good place for her to be. She needed money, there were no jobs here, she was getting into some bad things.”

“Didn't her parents help her?”

Schaefer didn't answer. She shrugged and looked around the bar. I could tell she was uncomfortable with my last question, so I asked, “But you and Deborah were friends?”

“We didn't really hang out together, but I took her to Chicago with me sometimes.”

“Before she moved there?”

“Yeah, this was a while ago. My old boyfriend and me, we used to drive in a lot. And one time, we were on our way there, and we see her hitchhiking out on the beltline. I pulled over, I was like, what the hell are you doing? You're going to get yourself killed. She was trying to get to Chicago. So we took her with us. After that, I started telling her whenever we'd be going in, and sometimes she'd come with. We'd drop her off at a club or something and she'd meet up with us later, or crash with us.”

I took a sip of my drink. “Wesley Faber mentioned some kind of trouble Deborah had been in, when she was younger. Something Father Ryan helped with? Do you know anything about that?” Schaefer shook her head. Her eyes were glassy. I pressed her. “Is that why she moved to Chicago? Because of whatever this trouble was?”

Schaefer squinted and waved away smoke from her cigarette. She took another swallow of beer. “I don't know why she moved.”

I ventured a guess. “Was she pregnant?”

“No,” Schaefer said, giving me a look like I was stupid.

“But you knew her pretty well.”

“Yes.”

“And you identified the body.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry to ask this,” I said, “but I read about the condition of the body. How did you even know it was Deborah?”

Twenty-three-year-old female. 5´ 3˝, 110 lbs. Caucasian. Thirty-two stab wounds to the neck and upper torso. Extensive incise and puncture wounds across anterior and left lateral neck. Blunt force trauma to the face and skull. Bruising on upper forearms and biceps. Left hand missing.