Tradition of Deceit (14 page)

Seventeen

“The mill exploded?” Chloe
repeated blankly. “Because of
flour dust
?”

Owen nodded. “On the second of May, 1878. The dust inside this mill was so thick the workers couldn't see more than a few feet in front of them. We know now that flour packed densely into containers is generally safe, but when individual particles get suspended in the air in confined spaces, and they're exposed to oxygen, the risk is enormous.”

“I had no idea.”

“All it took was a spark. The explosion and fire destroyed much of the commercial area along the riverfront, and it cut the city's milling capacity in half. It also killed fourteen men working the night shift here, and four more nearby. A daytime explosion would have been
much
worse. After the explosion the mill was rebuilt with safer machinery, but the danger of fire and possible explosion never completely went away. There was always the chance that if a motor caught fire, flames could get sucked into the whole system. That could have led to another massive fire and explosion.”

My God, Chloe thought. That explains the fear lingering in this place. It wasn't just the machinery, or the danger of suffocating in a grain bin.

“We interviewed a former employee who worked until 1965, when the mill closed,” Owen added. “He always feared that a fire might start and not get noticed right away. He worked the night shift, when just a few guys were on duty.”

Chloe's eyebrows rose. “Just a few guys in this whole place? At night? Spooky.”

“Once there was a flour dust explosion in the next room. The man described the sound of it, and his eyes …” Owen shook his head. “Even years later, I could see terror reflected in his eyes.”

“Geez.” Chloe hoped that there wasn't a cloud of flour dust inexplicably lingering in the next room now.

“There was another bad fire in 1928. The building was remodeled after that, and some of the milling machinery goes back to that time as well.” He gestured at the dust collectors. “For years the flour dust was considered a waste product. The local mills dumped three thousand pounds of bran, germ, and dust into the river every single day.”

“Wow,” Chloe murmured absently, but her mind was stuck in 1878.
Everyone needs flour
. She hadn't realized that flour could also be deadly.

Roelke stood glaring at Kip, hands balled into fists, every muscle poised to spring. He had no idea how he and his old buddy had gotten to this place. He had no idea what to do about it. All he knew was that he needed to pound somebody into the pavement.

Kip reached beneath the bar, where he kept the damn baseball bat.

Don't be a dumbass, McKenna!

The words were so clear that Roelke jerked his head, half-expecting to see Rick Almirez hooting with laughter because he'd just pulled the mother of all practical jokes on his best friend. Instead Roelke saw four women at the closest table, watching with expressions ranging from indignation to apprehension. The next table went quiet, then the next. Soon the tavern was silent.

Roelke turned and walked out of the Bar.

He kept walking, faster and faster, trying to outpace the thoughts banging around in his brain. Rick and Erin. Rick and Erin. There had to be a connection. There
had
to be. And that meant that Erin's husband had just pole-vaulted to the top of his suspect list.

A passing taxi threw up a spray of slush. Roelke barely noticed it, or a car horn's distant blare, or anything else. He was trying to under
stand the incomprehensible. Why was Kip lying? He
had
to be lying—

“Hey!”
Someone grabbed the back of Roelke's coat. He whirled and saw Danielle, coatless and panting. “Didn't you—hear me?” she gasped. “I've—never seen Kip—go nuts like that. I said I was just—taking a ciggie break.”

Roelke felt his cop brain snap back to attention, angry that he'd let himself be oblivious to his surroundings. “Sorry. Why do you want to talk to me?”

“I heard part of what you said to Kip. And the thing is, I really liked Joanie.”

Roelke whipped out his photograph of Erin. “Is this her?”

Danielle covered most of the red curls with her thumbs. “She looks different now, but yeah. That's definitely her.”

“Do you know why she quit?”

Danielle glanced nervously over her shoulder. “I didn't even know she
had
quit until I got in today.”

“Do you know where I might find her?”

“I don't know where she lived. She didn't talk about herself at all.”

“How long did she work for Kip?”

Danielle shrugged. “I started three months ago, and she was already here.”

“Can you think of anything that might help me find her? I really am an old friend. I'm worried about her. I just want to be sure she's safe.”

“I'm worried, too. I could tell she was scared of somebody.”

Her SOB husband, Roelke thought.

“All I have is this.” Danielle scrabbled in her pocket. “I found a sort of business card thing this morning under the coat hooks we use.”

Roelke felt his nerves quiver as Danielle extracted a creased business card. An address, a phone number—he'd be grateful for even the tiniest scrap of information.

He didn't get an address. He got chickens. Two very pretty chickens, flanking a bouquet of flowers, printed in vibrant colors. It was all very artsy, and not the least bit helpful.

Danielle must have noted his disappointment. “There are two words on the back.”

Sure enough. Someone had penciled
Linka
-
Małgorzata
on the back. “Do you know what that means?”

“Nope.”

Roelke didn't either.
Linka
might be a name. The whole thing
sounded vaguely Polish. Dobry's family was Polish, so at least he had someone to ask. “Did Erin—Joanie—ever mention art school? Anything like that?”

“No. She didn't say much of anything personal, though. Look, I gotta get back.”

“Here.” Roelke fumbled for one of his own business cards. “If you hear from her, or hear anything else about her, please call me.”

Eighteen
May 1917

Frania stood knee-deep in
the Mississippi River, watching for floating driftwood and remembering the kerchief that her mother, Magdalena, had worn over her hair. It was Frania's clearest memory—her and Mama, gathering wood while the city women watched from the bridge above, as if the Flats residents were zoo animals.

She spotted a floating log with stocky trunk and smaller branches.
Perfect
. Papa Pawel came home from the mill exhausted, and she didn't want him taking on chores that she or her daughter could do instead. Pawel had been a champion loader—first with barrels, later with 140-pound sacks—at the Washburn Mill for over thirty years now. But the brute labor was becoming too much, and he'd developed a dry, hacking cough. Miller's lung, they called it.

After the horrible explosion in 1878, Pawel had managed the boardinghouse during the two years it took to build a new mill. Frania had been only four years old when her mother had disappeared in what the newspapers called “The Minneapolis Horror.” Pawel and the neighbor women had raised Frania, who gradually took over the boardinghouse. No one knew what Magdalena had been doing by
the mill, but Pawel was certain she'd been killed.

At seventeen, Frania had married a millworker of her own—a quiet, gentle Pole with a lopsided smile and kind eyes and dreams of returning to the old country. Two years later, a month before Lidia was born, his sleeve had caught in a piece of machinery. After the funeral, Papa Pawel had painted
Widow Frania's Boardinghouse
on the sign by the front door of their whitewashed cottage. Frania became famous for her poppyseed cakes, gingerbread, and especially
pączki,
the filled doughnuts Poles held dear. Sometimes as many as a dozen newly arrived Poles paid two dollars a month for sleeping space, meals, and clean laundry.

But the Great War brought changes. Fewer European men arrived in the Flats these days. More women, war widows of one sort or another, were taking in boarders. If only—

“Mama!” Frania's daughter, Lidia, stood on the shore, waving wildly. Tomasz, the black-haired boy with her, lifted a polite hand. Like Lidia, he'd been born in the Flats to immigrant parents.

Frania grasped a branch and towed the deadwood, trying to smile. Tomasz made her nervous—always talking about leaving the Flats. He'd tried to enlist when the United States entered the war, but his limp—legacy of a childhood injury—kept him out of uniform. Now he labored at the flour mill, courted Lidia on his free day, and spoke hungrily of “life above.”

Before Frania reached land, Tomasz said something to Lidia and limped away. Frania untucked her skirt's hem from the waistband and kissed her daughter's cheek. “Were you and Tomasz walking out?”

Lidia nodded happily. “I'm sorry I wasn't here earlier to help, but it's such a fine spring day …”

“What do you two speak of?”

Lidia took a deep breath. “Mama, I've been thinking about college.”

“College?” Frania repeated blankly.

“Some girls do go, you know. I could get a good job after graduating. Tomasz thinks it's a fine idea.”

Frania was tempted to ask if Tomasz going to pay for these classes, but she realized in time that she might not like the answer. Tomasz was smart, hardworking, and ambitious. It wasn't surprising that he would encourage Lidia to dream of something so unimaginable.

Frania sighed. All men wanted to do better for themselves and their families. Tomasz, though, seemed particularly eager to leave all things Polish behind.

Nineteen

Twenty minutes later Roelke
sat in his truck with engine on and heater blasting. Right now he couldn't face even a friendly waitress. He didn't want any more coffee. He didn't want anything to eat. He just wanted to figure out what the hell Rick had gotten himself into.

He pulled his stack of three-by-fives from his pocket, gathered the
People
cards, and set the rest aside. First, Captain Heikinen. Heikinen had access to call sheets, Evidence, probably even the downtown records. He'd also made a private and inappropriate call to Olivette to ask what the heck Roelke McKenna was doing. “More than you know,” Roelke muttered, before turning to the next card.

Next, Kip:
Hired Erin. Lied about Rick. Hiding something
. Roelke underscored that last word savagely.

He reached for a blank card, trying to dig the name of Erin Litkowski's husband from his memory. Steve, wasn't it? Steve Litkowski. Had Erin turned to Rick for help? Roelke didn't have any trouble with the picture of Steve Litkowski going after a cop who tried to assist Erin. But how could Litkowski have gotten his hands on a gun locked up in police Evidence? Roelke wrote,
Check up on Steven Litkowski.
Time to learn what the asshole was up to these days.

On another blank card he wrote
Lobo
/
Wolf
.
Sherman says Lobo was talking to Rick in the Rusty Nail shortly before the shooting. Recently released from Waupun. Seems to have disappeared from MKE.

Roelke lined these four cards up neatly on his dashboard—Captain Heikinen, Kip, Steve Litkowski, Lobo. He willed his brain to find a link, some connection. None of it made sense. He'd never heard even a
hint
of any shady stuff about Heikinen. Same with Kip—he was straight as a signpost and ran a clean place.

Litkowski was a bully and a wife-beater. Lobo was a felon. How might those two have connected? And how did Erin fit into this? Why had she come back to Milwaukee? How did she end up working for Kip? And why, Roelke demanded silently, did she run from
me
?

Maybe it was time to contact Erin's sister. Roelke considered,
then decided against it. If she was hiding Erin, she probably
wouldn't say anything. If she hadn't known Erin was back in Milwaukee, she'd be devastated to discover that her sister had come back but disappeared again.

Roelke wondered once more if drugs were in the middle of this mess. Cocaine didn't discriminate. Some people got involved for the money; some for the kicks. Maybe Lobo had been a dealer, and Litkowski had a secret habit. It wasn't unheard of for some big-time dealer to manage his business from prison. Roelke still couldn't fit Kip into the puzzle, but if Rick had discovered that Captain Heikinen was on the take, maybe he'd been trying to get Lobo to flip. Roelke could almost hear Rick: “Come on, man, you just got out! You want to go back to prison? Or do you want to help take down a dirty cop?”

Just one problem with that theory: he hadn't found any evidence of drugs. Somebody had stolen a gun from Evidence, and somebody had used that gun to shoot Officer Rick Almirez in the back of the head. Everything beyond that was conjecture.

Roelke felt a wave of loneliness as he watched pedestrians pick their way over snowbanks.
I'm a Lone Ranger,
he'd said to Klinefelter. Well, he was still discovering what that felt like. During his days as a Milwaukee patrolman, he'd always had Rick to kick ideas around with. More recently, he'd had some good conversations with Chloe about investigations. She hated being in the middle of crime stuff, but she was smart. She approached things differently, and she'd helped him a lot.

But he couldn't think about Chloe right now.

Instead he made a new to-do list:

1. Call Jody & ask about Lobo and Heikinen
2. Ask Dobry to check Steven Litkowski's address, and check for arrest record

3. Ask Dobry about Linka
-
Ma
ł
gorzata

Roelke stared at the next blank line for a long time before cursing, gritting his teeth, and finishing:

4. Go to Waupun

He stuffed the cards away, found a payphone, and called Jody. “It's me,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“I never know what to say when people ask me that.”

“Me either. Listen, I need to ask you a couple of things. Do you know if there was any bad blood between Rick and Captain Heik-
inen?”

“As far as I know, Rick didn't have any direct dealings with the captain. He would have been more likely to talk about that with you.”

“He never said anything to me. I was just wondering. Here's another one: did you ever hear Rick mention a bad guy named Lobo? It could be a nickname.”

“I don't think so. Is it important?”

“It could be. I just found out that Rick was talking to a guy called Lobo in the Rusty Nail that night.”

“Wolf,” Jody murmured. “Is that who shot Rick?”

“It's too early to know that,” Roelke cautioned. “But it's a start. Evidently this Lobo guy just got out of prison, so maybe Rick had arrested him.”

“You can check that, right?”

“I'm going to try. The thing is … it's possible that some of Rick's records are missing.”

“
Missing
?”

“Somebody got to Rick's field reports before they could be officially pulled. They ended up on the detective's desk, but I've got no way to know what, if anything, disappeared on the way.”

Silence.

“Listen, Jody. It looks like a cop is involved. Maybe more than one.”

“What? I don't understand!”

“Me neither. But I'll get it. I swear I will.”

“I didn't think I could possibly feel any worse.” Jody's voice was hollow. “But I do now.”

Roelke pressed one knuckle against his forehead. “Maybe I shouldn't have told you.”

“
No
.” The hollowness was replaced with a gritty strength. “I need to know, Roelke. Don't try to shelter me.”

“Just don't mention any of this to anyone, okay? I don't know who to trust anymore.”

Chloe kept Owen company for the rest of the afternoon
.
She had nowhere else to be, and she was interested. Besides, she was pretty sure she'd get lost if she tried to leave the mill on her own. If she even had the nerve to try.

On the way back down, they paused on the fifth floor. Owen opened an interior door. “Take a peek.”

Chloe walked into an office that might have been vacated moments earlier, not almost two decades. The desk still held a big blotter, typewriter, pens. A woman's sweater dangled from a coat tree. A placard—
Every day is safety day!
—hung on the wall. A sign on a time clock reminded workers that cards could be punched no earlier than ten minutes before shifts started.

“It looks like the employees just stepped out,” Chloe said.

“When the mill shut in 1965, the workers got no notice. Some of them learned about it on the evening news.” Owen studied the room. “When I'm here alone, I half-expect one of the old millers to tap me on the shoulder.”

“Yeah.” Chloe was glad that she wasn't the only one tuned to the workers who had come and gone.

They stopped next on the second floor to see rows of roller stands. “The grinding floor,” Owen said. “They called it ‘the money floor.' These rollers were so much more efficient than millstones that they revolutionized the entire process. Groups of roller mills were designed to grind grain into finer and finer flour.”

“Ah,” Chloe said sagely.

He tapped a roller mill. “I've isolated this one so we can simulate an operating machine. Fortunately I've had help from a couple of undergrads, and a millwright who got laid off in 1965. He loves tinkering with the machinery.”

“Is he bitter about the mill closing so abruptly?”

Owen considered. “It broke his heart, but I wouldn't say he's
bitter. Now, there were some ugly labor problems in the early
1900s. Union men versus owners, that sort of thing. Some guys lost their jobs, so I imagine that caused hard feelings.”

Some things never change, Chloe thought.

They left the complex as the afternoon sun sank in the west. “Say,” Owen said as they passed—legally—through a gate in the fence. “Did you ever see Bohemian Flats?

“That community down by the river?”

Owen clicked the gate's padlock. “Right. Even with all the automation, two million pounds of flour a day did not make itself. The city's population increased by something like thirteen hundred percent between 1870 and 1890. A lot of immigrants found work in the mills. And some of them lived down on the Flats.” Owen glanced her. “I'd feel better if we go down together, okay? I'll drive.”

“If it will make you feel better,” Chloe said magnanimously.

He drove no more than a mile or so before Chloe saw a low flatland between the river and the road. Owen pulled over. “This was Bohemian Flats, although there's not a lot to see now,” he said apolo-
getically.

Chloe didn't care. There was
something
here, something that compelled her to get out of the car. Behind them, steep bluffs rose to the city proper. A bridge ran almost overhead, connecting the
highlands here on the western bank of the Mississippi with the
equally impressive bluffs on the east side.

Owen got out, too. “At one time this was a community of maybe five hundred people. Lots of Slovaks, Czechs, Irish, Swedes, Germans, Poles …” He hunched his shoulders against a knife-like wind. “It's hard to imagine, now that everything—and everyone—is gone.”

“Oh, I can imagine it,” Chloe assured him. It was strange to be here in this silent, windswept pocket. The bustling modern city on high seemed more than a steep climb away. She squinted into the growing shadows and had no trouble at all imagining the people who had once called this place home.