Johnstone started to tap-dance. “You hear things, over the years…What I’m telling you, could be all wrong…”
“Just tell me, Gerald,” Virgil said. “I’ll sort it out.”
“The story was, something happened between this woman and Judd. The other people were out in the yard with a telescope, seeing if they could see the men on the moon. There wasn’t any chance, of course, but they had this telescope and they were way up on the ridge and they were drunk…”
“Gerald: the pregnant woman.”
Johnstone nodded. “So late at night, they’re out there, and they see a car that looks like it’s come off the driveway. It’s going down the hill, away from the party, sort of aimed down this crease in the hillside, and people are going crazy, yelling, they think the woman in it is drunk and lost, and they run down that way…
“And damned if she doesn’t drive the car right off Buffalo Jump,” he said.
“The bluff.”
“Right below Judd’s house. Supposedly, Indians used to stampede buffalo right off the cliff. So this car goes over the side and people are running around yelling and screaming. Judd comes running out of the house, and then he and a couple of guys jump in a car and they go tearing down the driveway and around to the bottom of the jump…
“And in the meantime, one of the other girls said, ‘She’s gotta be hurt bad,’ so they called the fire department and the fire boys got a rescue truck headed out that way.”
“She was killed,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but not right then. She was what we call brain-dead now—she had head injuries, and neck injuries, but her heart was still going when Judd and the other guys pulled her out of the car. Then the fire boys got there and they hauled her over to the hospital. She died in the emergency room, but the doctor…”
“Gleason,” Virgil said.
Johnstone stared at his daughter for a long time—ten seconds, fifteen—and then he sighed and said, “Yeah. Russell Gleason. Russ delivered the baby. Tough delivery, but the baby lived. There was a story in the paper, called it the ‘Miracle Baby.’”
“So why would somebody kill Gleason for delivering the baby?” Virgil asked. “If he was there at the emergency room, he couldn’t have been at the party, he had nothing to do with the woman.”
“That I can’t tell you,” Johnstone said. “I can tell you a rumor, and I can tell you a thought that passed through my mind.”
Virgil flicked his fingers at Johnstone, a “gimme” gesture.
Johnstone said, “There was a rumor that the woman hadn’t been there for the party. Hadn’t been invited. That she came down on her own from the Cities, in her own car, and that she’d been there before the party, and had had a fight with Bill. Bill could be rough as a cob.
“Nobody knows what happened, but there were rumors that he wasn’t right there with everybody else when they saw the car rolling down the hill. He came running out of the house a minute or so later. The question was…Where was he when the car came off the driveway? Once it came off the driveway, going down that seam in the hill, it was going to go over the bluff. Was the woman committing suicide? Why didn’t she turn, or put on the brakes?”
“Or was she dead unconscious when she went in the car?” Virgil asked. “Did somebody else steer it off the driveway?”
Johnstone’s head bobbed: “It could have been done. Could have rolled the car down to the seam, let it go, run back over the shoulder of the hill—this was at night, remember—then up and into the house, and then out the front…”
“Was there any suggestion of that at the time?” Virgil asked.
Johnstone shook his head. “No.”
“Was there an investigation?”
Quick nod.
“Roman Schmidt,” Virgil said.
“Yup.”
“Jerry, you really messed this up,” Virgil said, lying back in the rocker and letting it rock a few times. “God help you if anybody else gets killed in the next couple of days, before I can figure this out.” He rocked a few more times, and then remembered: “You said a thought passed through your mind.”
“Yeah.” Johnstone reached up with both hands and scratched his head above his ears, and then said, “I didn’t want to tell you all of this, because I really don’t know anything. But. I remember when I saw that girl’s body, on the dressing table, all bashed up in the accident, cut up in the hospital…How’d she get those bruises? Some of the bruises were fresh, but they weren’t fifteen minutes old. They didn’t develop between the time she died and the time she went off Buffalo Jump. They were hours old. But the doctor said she died in the accident, the sheriff…”
“What happened to the miracle baby?” Virgil asked.
“Adopted out,” Johnstone said. “I don’t know the details to that. But, the baby was adopted out. Baby boy.”
VIRGIL LEFT THEM SCARED: “You stay here. You’re at risk, but if it took Shrake and Jenkins a whole day to track you down, I don’t think the killer will get you. If you decide you don’t want to stay here, if it starts to feel hinky, get out to a motel. You don’t have to go far, to be completely lost. If you do that, you let me know. I’ll give you my cell phone…”
OUT IN HIS CAR, he went through the name file on his computer, called Dr. Joe Klein.
“It’s that fuckin’ Flowers,” Klein said, when he came up. “What do you want?”
“You going out?”
“No. I’m reading Proust, fifty pages a night, all summer,” Klein said. “I’m forty-two pages in, on tonight’s quota.”
“Sounds like a great read, you gotta have a quota,” Virgil said. “That’s how I read a chemistry book one time.”
“Great chatting with you, Virgil,” Klein said.
“Just being sociable,” Virgil said. “How’s the old lady?”
“What do you want?”
“I want to come over to your house and have you look at a photograph,” Virgil said.
“Will this be billable?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I doubt it.”
KLEIN WAS the Hennepin County medical examiner. He gave Virgil directions to his home in Edina, north and west across town, from Apple Valley. Virgil was at his front door in twenty minutes.
Klein’s wife, Kate, met him at the door. She was tall, thin, with a sharp nose and gold-rimmed glasses. “Gimme a hug, you big lug,” she said.
He did; and she felt kinda good…
Klein said, “That’s enough of that. What’s the picture?”
They took it into his home office. Kate, a pediatrician, looked over their shoulders as Klein inspected it with a magnifying glass. Klein hemmed and hawed a bit, and finally his wife said, “My, God, Joseph, you’re not in federal court. Spit it out.”
Klein tapped the photo, the woman’s rib cage. “Your undertaker is right. If she died in fifteen or twenty minutes, these bruises didn’t come from the accident. Besides, I’ve seen bruises like this before—this is what you get when somebody dies after a bar fight. When somebody gets beat bad with a pool cue, you see this striping effect, if it has time to develop. Say, there’s a bar fight, a guy gets beat bad, dies the next day. This is what you see. If he dies right at the scene, you don’t see it.”
VIRGIL CALLED JOHNSTONE: “Gerald, did you ever go up to Judd’s house?”
“Oh, yeah. Several times. I wasn’t real popular with him, because I was the mortician and he was sort of superstitious. But I did go a few times.”
“Did he have a pool table?”
“Oh, sure. He had everything. Swimming pool, pool room, hot tub…he had all that stuff. The joke was, his decorator was Playboy magazine.”
KATE KLEIN SAID, “Pool room?”
“Yup.”
“God, you lead such a neat life,” she said. “If only you were a rich doctor, I might have married you.”
“You woulda had to get in line,” Klein said. “This boy’s been married so often he’s got rice burns on his face.”
16
br /> VIRGIL LEFT THE KLEINS’.
Saturday night, nowhere to go.
He thought about calling Davenport, but he’d been leaning on Davenport too hard, and decided to let it go. Instead, he checked into the St. Paul Hotel, put on a fresh pair of jeans, a Flaming Lips T-shirt, buffed up his boots, and headed over to the Minnesota Music Café for a couple of beers.
Bumped into Shrake, who was there with a big-haired secretary from the Department of Agriculture; she said she dated him because he had a big gun. Then Shrake wanted to know what happened with the Johnstones, and a couple of St. Paul cops came over, and Virgil danced with a woman who had a butterfly tattoo around her navel. He’d gone back for a third beer when a woman’s hand slipped into his back jeans pocket and a familiar voice said, “I’d know that little butt anywhere.”
He turned and said, “Goddamn, Jeanie. How’ve you been?”
She said, “Okay,” and to a girlfriend, she said, “This is my first ex-husband, Virgil Flowers. I’m either his second or third ex-wife, I forget which.”
“Be nice,” Virgil said. He looked her over and she did look okay: prosperous, even. “Still in real estate?”
She rolled her eyes: “Yes. Shouldn’t admit it, the way it’s fallen out of bed, but…nothing like selling a house. Makes me feel good.”
So they chatted awhile, and he started remembering some of the better times they’d had, and then she patted him on the chest and said, “Guess what? I might get married again.”
“Hey…great, man,” Virgil said. “Anybody I know?”
“No, no. He’s at Wells Fargo, a vice president in the mortgage department. Known him for years.”
“And he’s available because…”
She shrugged. “His marriage broke up. Same old stuff. Everybody works, nobody talks.”
“He got kids?” Virgil asked.
“Two; but he’d like a couple more.”
“Does he dance?”
She laughed: “Not like you, Virgil. He does, but like a banker.”
“Ouch.”
Pretty good time, all in all, and he danced with the girlfriend a couple of times, and at one o’clock in the morning, a little drunk, rolled into bed at the hotel, all alone.
Thought about God for a while.
Sunday
NOT EXACTLY HUNGOVER, but a little lonely. He got cleaned up, got breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and drove over to the Historical Society. The library was closed. He called around, and the duty officer, which was not her title, but what she did, led him to the microfilm machines, and got him the missing roll of microfilm.
He spooled through it, found the paper that came out on July 24, the first one after the man-on-the-moon party, and there it was.
A “miracle baby” was delivered to a twenty-nine-year-old Minneapolis woman moments before she died at the Bluestem Memorial Hospital emergency room Sunday night after an automobile accident on Buffalo Ridge.
Margaret (Maggie) Lane of 604 Washington Avenue, Minneapolis, apparently lost control of her car as she was leaving a “man on the moon” party at the home of William Judd Sr. Witnesses say the car plunged over the Buffalo Jump bluff after leaving the driveway fifty yards below the Judd house.
An autopsy revealed .07 percent blood alcohol, below the legal limit, and Judd said that “Maggie had only a glass of wine or two during the party.”
“This is an awful tragedy,” Judd said. “She was a warm, interesting woman and nobody ever had a thing bad to say about her.”
Stark County sheriff Roman Schmidt said that deputies interviewed all the partygoers, and were satisfied that Lane’s death was accidental. “She’d only been to the Judd house a couple of times. She wasn’t legally drunk, but she may have had enough that she became confused as she was leaving, and turned the wrong way as she came over the shoulder of the hill,” Schmidt said.
A witness called the volunteer fire department, and a rescue squad reached the car within ten minutes. Lane was taken to the emergency room, where Dr. Russell Gleason delivered a healthy 7-pound, 4-ounce full-term baby even as the boy’s mother was dying of extensive and what Gleason called “surely fatal” brain injuries.
The baby will be remanded to the care of Minnesota child-protective services…
There was one bad photograph of the wrecked car sitting at the base of the bluff. The picture had been taken with a flash of some kind—were flashbulbs still used by news photographers in 1969? There were a few white faces in the background, unrecognizable, and three cops close to the car. One of them was a young Big Curly.
THE NEXT PAPER came out on July 31, and oddly, Virgil thought, there was no mention of the Miracle Baby. Not a single word. In his hometown, he thought, there would have been recurring stories for a month.
He went to the dailies at Worthington and Sioux Falls, and found stories similar to that from the Bluestem Record. But the dailies were farther away, and the death happened the same day of the first manned landing on the moon, and so was tucked away in the back of the papers.
He thought about it for a while, then called Stryker, and told him about the story. “You know, I’ve never heard that,” Stryker said. “You would have thought I’d have heard it. I mean, it’d be something that people talked about.”
“Got drowned out by the noise from the moon landing,” Virgil said. “So go over to the hospital, and find out what happened to the kid. I mean, kick somebody’s ass off the golf course, and find out where he went.”
“I’ll do that.”
VIRGIL HUNG OUT at the Historical Society for a while, looking at an exhibit on early photography, all those Civil War guys with white eyes and stolid faces. Stryker called back: “Nothing there. I mean, there’s something there, but it’s nothing. The child was turned over to protective services on August second. That’s it. You’ll have to work it from that end.”
“And it’s Sunday.”
Stryker: “Wonder what’s happening with the DEA?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. If I stay up here, and it goes down tomorrow, I could miss it.”
“Well…get the research chick to work it,” Stryker suggested. “Get back here. I’ve been thinking about it, and it’s all Feur. No mystery, no weirdness. Just Feur.”
“Give me the logic,” Virgil said.
“We’ve got a series of huge crimes, murders,” Stryker said. “Then we find out there’s a professional criminal, right in our backyard, selling dope all over the country, and he’s been doing it for years. Back at the beginning, he needed seed money to get started, and he needed a way to hide the operation. That’s about the time all these little farmer-sponsored ethanol plants were popping up. This crime we know about, with Feur, involves some of the same people involved in the others: the Judds. I don’t know how you tie the Gleasons in, but I could see a reason for Roman Schmidt: Schmidt was monitoring the cops through the Curlys. The Curlys might not even have known about the rest of it. You say Schmidt was willing to cover up a murder, take money for it. When you’ve done it once, you’ll do it again. In fact, the Judds might even have pulled him into it.”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “If somebody had to kill the Gleasons, they could have done it in a quiet way. Kill them, but don’t pose them. Try to make it look like a murder-suicide. Something…But the way it was done, was nuts.”
“Got your head up your ass, Virgil. It’s Feur.”
Virgil scratched his nose, made the call: “I’m coming back.”
HE WAS BACK by five o’clock, having stopped in Mankato to check his mail, pay bills, and run a load of laundry through the washer and dryer. Before he left home, he went into his closet and took out his third-most-favorite deer rifle, a Browning Lightweight Stalker semiauto in .30-06, an extra magazine, and a box of cartridges. The rifle wasn’t as accurate as his best bolt action, but it was as accurate as he was, and could put some heavy metal on a target in a big hurry.
Heading west, into the sun, he could feel some kind of
climax just over the horizon: too many things going on, not to have something shake loose.
THAT NIGHT, they went out to Barnet’s Supper Club in Sioux Falls, five of them—Stryker and Jesse Laymon, Virgil and Joan, and Laura Stryker. There was one tough moment on the way over, when Laura told Jesse that she should get Stryker to take her up swimming at the dell some hot night.
Jesse giggled and admitted that they’d already been. Then Joan and Virgil had to spontaneously join in teasing Stryker, and they pulled it off. And then the three women began working on Virgil and Stryker. Something was up with the case, they knew, but Virgil and Stryker weren’t talking.
Later that evening, Virgil was looking at the jukebox when Laura Stryker came by, on the way back to their table from the women’s room, and she stopped and asked, “Are you and Joanie going to get serious? You look like it.”
“Not that serious,” Virgil said. “She gave me a little talk. I’m not husband material. I’m her transition guy.”
“Damn it. I need a grandchild,” Laura said. “I want to be around long enough that my grandchild can remember his grandmother.”
“You’ve got a few years,” Virgil said.
“I’ve got enough years to be a great-grandmother,” Laura said. “But one side of the family stops when Joan’s clock runs out. I think Jim and Jesse…I think I’ve got something going there.”
They both turned and looked at Joan, who was leaning across their table, making a point to Stryker and Jesse. “She’ll be okay,” Virgil said. “I’m her transition guy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she has somebody picked out, on the other side of the transition zone.”
“I hope so,” Laura said, “or I’d suggest that you go ahead and knock her up.”
Before they left, Virgil went out in the parking lot and called Sandy, Davenport’s researcher, who’d just gotten back from a weekend trip. “Goddamnit, honey, you picked a bad time to go away. I need you to get some stuff for me tomorrow morning, and I need you to rain fire and brimstone on anybody who stands in your way. A woman named Margaret Lane, also known as Maggie, was killed in an auto accident on July 20, 1969…”