Jelly's Gold (34 page)

“Ahh, hell, Sugar,” I said. “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine.”

22

I don’t know what I was feeling when I entered Rickie’s. Happy, sad, angry, frustrated, embarrassed—all of the above. I had called Ivy after I gave my statement to Bobby Dunston and Jeannie Shipman at the James S. Griffin Building—they let me in after all. I told her that Uncle Mike had confessed to shooting Josh Berglund and produced the murder weapon in case there was any doubt. I told her that I had hired G. K. Bonalay to defend him. I told her that she had nothing more to fear. I expected Ivy to be thrilled, and I suppose she was. Even so, her response to the good news was to point out how wrong I had been about her.

“I told you I didn’t do it,” she said. “I told you, but you didn’t listen. You were my friend. You should have believed me.” She hung up before I could defend myself.

A few minutes later, she called back. “I’m sorry,” Ivy said. “You are my friend. You tried to look out for me, and I’m grateful. I really am. I only wish you would have believed me in the first place.”

“So do I,” I said.

She hung up again.

“I don’t blame Ivy for being upset,” Nina told me. She had a folded section of the morning
St. Paul Pioneer Press
that must have been important, because she kept waving it.

“I don’t, either,” I said.

“What about the gold?”

“Yeah, about that.”

I explained about Kathryn’s missing letter and the Guardian Life Insurance Building and the fact that it was all a pile of rubble somewhere—maybe the gold had been crushed along with the concrete, maybe it hadn’t. “Heavenly and Whitlow are probably searching landfills even as we speak, if you want to join them,” I said.

“I wonder,” Nina said.

“What do you wonder?”

“Does it have to be an office in a building where he worked? I mean, couldn’t it be an office in his home? A home office. I have one. You have one—sorta.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Remember in Kathryn’s letters she complained about the mausoleum that Messer built for her?” Nina slid the folded newspaper toward me. “The Ramsey County Historical Society is conducting tours today of a house at 337 Summit Avenue, her old address. Someone had turned it into apartments in the mid-seventies, but the new owners paid a lot of money to have it restored to its original condition and are letting the society use it for fund-raising.”

I scanned the article but was too dim to see Nina’s point. “What does that have to do—”

“McKenzie, look.” Nina pressed her forefinger on the fourth paragraph of the piece. “Here,” she said.

The Presswood House was named after Robert Presswood, the lumberman and state senator who lived there for over thirty-five years. Presswood bought the house in 1936 immediately following the death of the original owner, famed architect Brent Messer, who designed and built the house for his wife, Kathryn, in 1928 …

Summit Avenue had always been St. Paul’s showcase, its most prestigious address. It curved for four and a half miles from the St. Paul Cathedral to the World War I monument located in the tiny park where Summit met the Mississippi River, and it had been the home of many of the city’s most illustrious citizens, from railroad tycoon James J. Hill to F. Scott Fitzgerald. What made it unique was that it had managed to retain its essential personality throughout decades of urban renewal. The great mansions still stood and were lived in; the houses, churches, and schools that had been slowly added since the first home was built in 1855 had all been constructed with an eye toward preserving the avenue’s Victorian charm and integrity. Bicyclists, Rollerbladers, joggers, and strollers all moved more slowly on the avenue than on any other promenade; rubbernecking tourists snarled traffic. When you were on Summit, you could feel the pull of the city’s glorious past.

Take the Presswood House. Brent Messer built it on the bluff side of Summit Avenue overlooking the valley descending to the Mississippi River. There had been a fifty-year-old Italian villa on the property when Messer bought it. He tore it down to make room for the house he designed personally for his young bride. Instead of embracing the building styles favored by his contemporaries, Messer reached back to the late nineteenth century for a Romanesque motif, the same style as James J. Hill’s monumental residence. While Hill’s house was singularly unattractive—it reminded me of a medieval castle; all it needed was a moat—Messer managed to build a house that projected not only strength and stability but also delicacy and warmth.

That’s what I was thinking while Nina and I waited for the tour to begin. Unfortunately, we weren’t alone.

Boston Whitlow was already at the house by the time we arrived. He was leaning against one of the posts holding up the striped canopy that protected the front entrance—apparently the county attorney had decided not to hold him for lying to the cops. He didn’t speak, but I could read the obscenity in his eyes. Meanwhile, two middle-aged women armed with clipboards greeted us cheerfully. We had not reserved a place ahead of time, so we were asked to “donate” twenty bucks each for a ticket; the women made it clear that the event was a fund-raiser for the Ramsey County Historical Society. We were each given a gold sticker, with
RCHS
stamped in black, that we dutifully positioned above our breasts and were promised that there would be refreshments and hors d’oeuvres on the patio following the tour, along with a presentation by the architects and remodelers who restored the mansion.

“Can’t wait,” I said. I was loud enough that Whitlow must have heard, but he pretended to ignore me. “Where’s Heavenly?” I said. “Don’t tell me you kids had another falling-out.” He ignored me some more.

I saw the question in her eyes, so I leaned down and told Nina in whispers who Whitlow was. She glanced at him once, then pretended to ignore him, too.

The parade was just beginning. A black limousine pulled up, a door opened, and Allen stepped out. He saw us instantly. His reaction was to bend down and speak earnestly to someone inside the car. A moment later, Timothy Dahlin emerged. He studied Nina, Whitlow, and me for a hard ten seconds, then decided to disregard our presence. While he approached the canopy, Heavenly arrived, smiling happily as if she knew her birthday wish was about to be granted, swinging her purse as she hustled up the avenue. She saw us, stopped, spun around, and showed us her back for half a minute before turning again and advancing toward
the house. This time she looked as if she had failed to blow out all the candles.

Eventually the six of us were huddled near the front door, behaving as if we were all strangers.

“I’m guessing everyone here reads the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
,” I said.

No one replied.

There were several displays trumpeting the services of both the architectural firm and the interior designers who were responsible for renovating the Presswood House; brochures and business cards were available to whomever wanted one. Dahlin skimmed a brochure while he spoke, his voice flat, quiet, and without emotion.

“The gold belongs to me,” he said. “It’s my inheritance.”

“I thought you didn’t want the gold,” Heavenly said.

“If you had to, could you walk into a courtroom tomorrow and prove your relationship to Jelly Nash?” I asked. Dahlin didn’t reply. “How ’bout Brent Messer? Robert Presswood?”

“I’m the one who found out about the gold,” Heavenly said.

“No, it was me,” said Whitlow.

Allen stepped in front of them. “You did it while you were both employed by Mr. Dahlin, don’t forget,” he said.

Both Heavenly and Whitlow ignored him.

“It’s mine,” she said.

“It’s mine,” he said.

“Technically, it belongs to the United States Treasury Department,” I said.

“Screw you,” Whitlow said. “You knew about Messer’s home office. You were holding out on us.”

“Us,” Heavenly said. “When did it become ‘us’?”

“What’s it going to take to make you people disappear?” Dahlin said.

“Let’s not start that again,” I told him.

“I’m not leaving,” Heavenly said.

“Neither am I,” Whitlow said.

“Oh, for goodness sake, what are you, children?” Nina said. “Didn’t you learn anything in kindergarten? Didn’t you learn to share?”

That silenced us for a few beats.

“I have a suggestion,” I said.

Dahlin knew what I was going to propose before I proposed it. He threw up his hands and said, “Fine. I’ll go along.”

“Go along with what?” Whitlow said.

“An equal split—four shares,” I said.

“An equal split,” Heavenly repeated, but she wasn’t giving in.

“What alternative do we have?” I said. “We all know where the gold is—at least we think we do. No one is willing to leave it to the others.”

Heavenly covered her face with her hands, inhaled between her fingers, and held her breath like a little girl desperate to get her way. When she exhaled she found Whitlow’s eyes. The two of them stared at each other, communicating without speaking, until Whitlow said, “What about it, Hep?”

“Agreed,” she said, although it sounded like she was agreeing to a flu shot.

Heavenly extended her hand, and Whitlow shook it. I shook Dahlin’s hand. Pretty soon everyone was shaking everybody’s hand.

“Wow, man,” I said. “We got the band back together.”

Finally a young woman dressed in all natural fibers led us forward. She was very pleasant and very knowledgeable and spoke with a nice, melodic voice, and she drove me nuts. Apparently she was under the impression that the group—we had swelled to over a dozen by the time she took us in hand—was actually interested in the building’s architecture and elegant furnishings. I blamed Nina and Heavenly because of the way they oohed and ahhed over every little thing. In the dining room there was a meticulously constructed cabinet built to store wineglasses that resembled a dollhouse.

“Isn’t it darling?” Nina said.

“Look, it has different rooms for different types of glasses,” said Heavenly. “Oh, how cute.”

“For God’s sake, keep your eyes on the prize, wouldja?” I said.

For the most part, they ignored me.

The tour actually started in the basement, where Messer had built an enormous German beer garden. It had a large, environmentally controlled wine cellar, an exquisite handmade pool table, and a mahogany bar that was bigger than the one at Rickie’s. Upstairs we toured an immense kitchen, a breakfast nook, a dining room, a library, a music room with a grand piano and a hired pianist, seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, three sitting rooms, a solarium, and a game room that had stained glass skylights facing north so the sun wouldn’t warm the place—after all, there was no AC when Messer built his dream house. It was stunning to think that after Kathryn left him he had lived in it all alone.

There were several decorators strategically placed throughout the house, and they and the tour guide emphasized that each room had been restored to it original condition for purposes of the tour. (It was suggested that the new owners would bring in their plasma TVs, PCs, CD players, and microwave ovens after we all left.) The Bellini landscapes on the wall had belonged to Messer, as well as most of the books on the shelves and the crystal and china in the dining room. There was a line drawing of a child building a house out of cards in the corridor with the legend
LE PETITE ARCHITECTE
that Messer was supposed to have received from his bride on their wedding day.

There were three framed photographs in the master bedroom as well. On the table next to the bed was a head-and-shoulders shot of Kathryn looking both lovely and earnest. I recognized her immediately from the photo she had taken with Frank Nash in Guardino’s Italian Restaurant. A second was placed on a dresser. It showed Kathryn and Messer dressed in what can only be described as a rich man’s idea of cowboy garb; she was sitting on the running board of a car with Messer posed next to her as if they were both intrepid adventurers. The third, a much larger photograph, was taken on their wedding day and was mounted on the wall. Kathryn was radiant, her veil flapping in the breeze, her arm hooked
around Messer’s. He was dressed in a tuxedo cut in the English style and clutched a top hat in his free hand. He looked indescribably happy.

I caught Dahlin staring at the photographs and wondered what he was thinking. I was surprised when he told me.

“My mother gave all this up to sleep with a gangster,” he said. “What the fuck?”

Finally we were standing in Messer’s office, the six of us plus most of the tour group; the rest were forced to peek into the small room through the doorway. There was a large partners’ desk, the kind with drawers on both sides, a Jacques Garcia Tuileries chair and ottoman, scroll book boxes, a floor lamp, an ivy pot, a smoking stand, an hourglass, a framed clock, and a stuffed owl. Yet what I was staring at—what all six of us were staring at—was the waist-high oak wainscot paneling behind the desk.

The guide said something about the strong, masculine feel of the room and quiet contemplation and escaping the pressures of the day, but we weren’t listening. Nor did we follow when she shooed the rest of the tour out of the office and down the corridor. Instead, we stood there, just stood there, mute, staring at the wall for what seemed like a long time.

“What if it’s not there?” Nina said.

“What if it is?” Heavenly replied.

“The residence has a pretty sound security system,” I said. “Just in case anybody is considering a little breaking and entering. We might have to add another partner.”

“The man who bought the house?” Dahlin said.

“It’s his property.”

Whitlow stepped forward. We were warned before the tour began to not touch anything, but his hands were all over the wall searching for a switch to open the magic door.

“Why don’t you yell open sesame,” I said. “Abracadabra.”

“Oh, hell,” Dahlin said. He stepped around the desk, took Whitlow by the arm, and pulled him away. Without a word, he kicked the paneling with the flat of his shoe—and kept kicking it.