The Weatherman (12 page)

Angelbeck flicked his cigarette butt into the woods. “Is the press here yet?”

“A guy from the town paper is up there asking questions. I imagine the TV people from the Cities are on their way.”

They made their way back to the parking area in somber silence, their senses torn between the smell of death over the river and the special aroma of crunching leaves under their feet. Les Angelbeck was more troubled than he could ever remember. Only this wasn’t trouble with his age or his health. This was that disturbing kind of trouble that hangs overhead like a storm cloud ready to burst.

“Mr. Shelander, this is Captain Angelbeck from the state police in Minnesota. Why don’t you tell him what you told me.”

The jogger was a young man who was losing his hair. His expensive track suit covered a nonathletic build fighting to stay slender. “Well, Captain, it’s like I said-they were walking along the path, past the mounds there, nonchalant-like. Just talking. Watching the sun come up on the water. Then I saw them disappear into the woods down there. You know, you see a lot of kids go in there, but these two weren’t kids, and it was awful early in the morning. It kept bothering me, so after breakfast I came back to check.”

“What did he look like?” Angelbeck asked.

“Well, I wasn’t all that close really, and I was jogging, but from the back he looked heavyset, with dark, curly hair.”

“Might it have been another woman?”

Shelander raised his eyebrows. “You mean a woman dressed like a man? Well, I only saw him from the back. I mean, it’s possible. but it would have to be a bie

woman. I mean, the general look, you know, was big and husky.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shelander.”

The two cops, almost seventy years of experience between them, huddled over a squad car. On the St. Croix River hundreds of boat slips, abandoned for the winter, were strung out like skeletons across the water. The afternoon sun off the golden river had the bright, playful look of a watercolor. A perfect autumn day, sacrilegiously spoiled.

“This is great,” the chief remarked. “I’ve got an unsolved homicide on my hands and the only suspect looks kind of like a husky man or a big, ugly woman.”

“It’s not a whole lot of help, but it’s something anyway.”

Les Angelbeck could see them coming across the valley. They drove down the hill to the bridge, exceeding the speed limit, then crossed the river into Wisconsin. It was a Channel 7 News van. Not a half-mile behind was a big, lumbering Channel 5 satellite truck. Barnum & Bailey.

“The first thing they’re going to want to know,” Angelbeck told Chief Haag, “is if this murder could possibly be related to those parking ramp murders in Minneapolis this past summer. Tell them no. You don’t see any connection. This victim probably knew her killer. It’s very important they don’t link these murders. You know how those people get. You don’t need that kind of hysteria over here.”

Talbert Haag was as agreeable as the weather. “Damn right we don’t. It’s been the best color in years. Tourism is way up. Now this.”

“Tell them she was strangled, but don’t mention her hair. And whatever you do, don’t talk off the record. Reporters can’t be trusted.”

“You know best.”

The old cop who really did know best wanted to be by himself. Les Angelbeck left the convention of investigators and the arriving media circus and walked the path up past the Indian mounds, the same path the killer had walked with his victim. The insects of summer were dead. The warm breeze in his face made breathing easy. The benign sun felt good on his skin. For the first time in a long time he did not feel like a sick old man. He felt alive again. One last case. That’s all he wanted out of life these days. Just one last mouth-watering case.

The captain stopped beneath the last ancient Indian grave. He cupped his hands to his face and lit another cigarette. Then the Marlboro Man gazed off toward the western sky, toward the hills of St. Paul and the blue skyscrapers of Minneapolis. He coughed into his fist. “All right, you son of a bitch, whoever you are … I’ve been expecting you.”

When Dixon Bell arrived in the Twin Cities, television weather was a pretty frivolous affair. He thought this odd in a state where weather is considered a moral issue. Minnesotans are obsessed with their changing seasons.

At one TV station in St. Paul a short, obnoxious, bald man did happy weather. Among his antics were sun stick-ons with big smiling faces, and grumpy-faced clouds. To show what was happening in Canada he’d mount a footstool labeled “Canadian Mountie.”

Another station specialized in Weatherettes. Over the years the pretty girls giving the highs and lows just kept coming and going. Some had high tits, some had low tits; it didn’t really matter so long as a big pair was giving the weather.

For a whole generation the weatherman at Channel 7 had been the avuncular Andy Mack. But Andy grew old and stale. He could sometimes be heard wheezing on the air as he stood in front of a painted map and gave the temperature readings in obscure corners of America. “And in Grangeville, Idaho, today the temperature reached eighty-eight degrees. And down in Malvern, Arkansas, it was ninety-one degrees. And up in Caribou, Maine, they made it all the way up to eighty-two degrees. Hard to believe.” On Friday nights Andy went international. “And in Bangkok, Thailand, this week it got up to a hundred and three degrees. Hard to believe.”

Hard for Clancy Communications to believe. They knew this dinosaur had to be replaced, even on the cheap. So they brought in the weekend weatherman from their station in Memphis.

From his stormy experience on Memphis TV, Dixon Bell had learned plenty. He knew that when the news ended, most viewers could remember nothing about the weather report they had just seen. To the average viewer phrases like “high-pressure system” and “barometric pressure” were meaningless. And viewers didn’t give a Tennessee Valley damn about what was happening in Canada or over the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. They wanted to know if it was going to rain on them tomorrow. Should they wear a raincoat? Viewers wanted an accurate, or at least a fairly accurate, prediction, that’s all.

After moving to Minnesota Dixon Bell decided to change things. He would teach Midwestemers about their weather. He wrote in his diary: “The trick is to do it without talking down to the viewer, without costing the station too much money, and without taking up more than my allotted time.”

For starters Dixon Bell insisted on being referred to on the air as a meteorologist, not a weatherman. He didn’t need to be reminded that three-fourths of the weather blabbers on local TV stations have had no training in meteorology.

Without wearing it on his sleeve, the new meteorologist let it be known that he had been trained in the military and tested in war. With new computers, new radar, and more detailed maps he transformed the weather office into Weather Center 7. Using exciting three-dimensional computer graphics, he began to explain what each element of the weather was and how they were all related. He taught viewers how to read a radar, what the different colors meant. He threw out words like “shower activity” and “zero precipitation” and used words like “rain” and “no rain.” Once in a while, when there was something significant in the sky, Dixon Bell would do his Sky High forecast from the roof of the
IDS
Tower. When the ratings began to climb, a consultant’s research showed that people weren’t tuning into the new Sky High News to watch the beautiful bimbos-they were tuning in to watch the Weatherman.

But there was a disturbing element in this consultant’s research that nobody could explain, though at the time of the report nobody really cared. The data showed that a small core of viewers, mostly young women, were literally turned off by Dixon Bell. They didn’t like him and they wouldn’t watch him.

It was children who especially loved the new weatherman. He took the weather drawings the little kids would send him and put them on the air during his five o’clock show. Working with Minnesota’s College of Natural Resources, he produced a children’s series called “7 Laws of the Forest.” Teachers ordered worksheets from Channel 7. Then every night for a week on the six o’clock news Dixon Bell would give a three-minute lesson on the laws of nature, using sharp graphics and some excellent videotape. One night he told how two-thirds of Minnesota’s trees had been chopped down by the turn of the century, and that most of the trees in the state were second growth. Students watched and filled in their worksheets. Teachers sent the completed worksheets back to Channel 7 to be used in a drawing. The grand prize for the winning classroom was a Capricorn II electronic weather station valued at more than a thousand dollars.

The forest series was so popular, he did another like it. In “7 Laws of Water” he pointed out that 60 percent of Minnesota’s wetlands had been drained or filled for farming or commercial development. Another series followed, “7 Laws of the Atmosphere,” in which he chronicled the state’s rise in air pollution and its harmful effects on wildlife. That report was followed by “7 Laws of the Night Sky.” Dixon Bell enjoyed these series for children, but there was nothing about the job he loved more than visiting their classrooms-and that’s what the Weatherman was doing on that perfect autumn day that was soiled by the murder of an American Indian girl on the brilliant banks of the St. Croix River.

Dixon Bell clapped his hands together and thundered away. “What is barometric pressure?”

A boy’s hand shot into the air. “It’s the pressure that the atmosphere, the air above, puts on the earth.”

“And how is this pressure measured?”

“With a column of mercury.”

“Why do we measure things with mercury? Quick … someone else?”

A girl raised her hand. “Because it’s the heaviest of liquids.”

“And what does the average barometric pressure keep that mercury at?”

“About thirty inches,” she answered.

“All together,” the Weatherman said. “What happens when the barometer goes up?”

“Good weather,” the class answered.

“And when the barometric pressure goes down?”

“Bad weather,” they told him. The children were getting into it.

“Wonderful.” He pointed out the window. “You pass with flying colors. Give yourselves a big round of applause.”

The classroom broke into happy clapping. It was Sister Theresa’s sixth-grade class at the Cathedral Elementary School in St. Paul. Bright sunshine was streaming through the open windows. The green domes of the Cathedral of St. Paul loomed directly overhead. The students’ uniforms were clean and pressed and as blue as the sky. Their little round faces were as sunny as the day. Two weeks of planning had gone into the visit by the Channel 7 weatherman. Sketches of the changing seasons lined the room. Posters from the “7 Laws” series hung on the wall. The kids had drawn their own charts, made their own forecasts. A gifted group. Dixon Bell envied them. While he examined their work, his thoughts drifted back to some of the deprived classrooms he’d visited in the Delta region of his native Mississippi.

“Okay, now, Sister Theresa tells me that y’all have written some papers for me to hear. Who wants to go first?” Every hand in the classroom was in the air. “All right, let’s start with this good-looking guy right up front. Stand up and tell me your name.”

The boy had blond hair with a neat cut to it. “My name is Kerry Anderson.” He was skinny and shy. His uniform hung on him.

“What would a Minnesota classroom be without an Anderson? What are you going to tell us about, Kerry?”

“My paper is called ‘Extremes.’ ” He took a deep breath. He was extremely nervous. His voice shivered as he read. ” ‘In Minnesota weird weather is the rule, not the exception. The Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis has more weather extremes on the average than any other city on earth, except maybe cities in Siberia and Mongolia. In the summers in Minnesota it can get up to a hundred and ten degrees, and in the winter it gets to forty below zero. The hottest day in Minnesota history was in

Moorhead on July 6, 1936, when it got all the way up to one hundred and fourteen degrees. The coldest day ever in Minnesota was on February 16, in 1903, when on Leech Lake up north it went down to fifty-nine degrees below zero.’ ”

“And that was without the windchill,” Dixon Bell reminded him. “What is windchill, Kerry?”

The boy looked puzzled. “Ah … that’s when the wind is chilly?”

“It’s a little more than that, son. Windchill is the power of the wind to cool your body. The windchill factor was developed by scientists in Antarctica doing research on the effects of cold weather on human skin. For example, if you have an actual temperature reading of twenty degrees below zero, and the wind is blowing at twenty miles per hour, then your body will be feeling a cold, a windchill, equal to sixty-seven degrees below zero. Those kind of temperatures are not uncommon during a Minnesota winter. Any time the windchill is more than fifty below zero, exposed flesh can freeze in one minute. So remember, on cold days always bundle up in layers.”

More hands shot up in the air. “Let’s hear from one of these pretty girls.”

“My name is Marilyn Stokowski, and my paper is called ‘The National Weather Service.’ ” She read with ease and clarity. ” ‘In 1844 Samuel Morse invented the telegraph. With this invention people in one town could tell people in the next town what kind of weather was coming their way. In 1849 the first official weather report was sent by telegraph in the United States. The United States started a weather service in 1870 as a part of the Army Signal Service. Then in 1890 congress organized a Weather Bureau and put it in the Department of Agriculture. President Franklin Roosevelt transferred the bureau to the Department of Commerce in 1940. It got renamed the National Weather Service in 1970. The central office is in Camp Springs, Maryland, and it has over two hundred weather stations across America, and twelve thousand volunteers throughout the country who help gather weather data.’ ”

Dixon Bell walked to the window as the girl continued her reading. That morning he’d watched steam rise off the river. A high pressure system had brought seventy-degree weather and lots of sunshine. The barometric pressure was near 30.70 and rising. From the slight rustle of the falling leaves he put the wind speed at five miles per hour. The vivid colors of the Midwest fascinated the Weatherman. The autumn splendor was as intoxicating as a thunderstorm. At the foot of the cathedral the garden roses were in bloom and bumblebees foraged on the fall flowers. Squirrels gathered acorns. Above the cross atop the great dome gaggles of geese were heading south. Cold weather was less than two weeks away.