Trickster's Point

  “I read in the Sentinel that Lance played with All-State Orchestra in the Twin Cities last Saturday,” Cork said casually. “How’d it go?”

  “Fine,” she said. “They were wonderful.”

  “So, you were there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Was Lester with you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “He told me he wanted to spend the day with his father.” She’d answered immediately and without guile, but her face suddenly clouded. “Why do you ask?”

  Instead of answering, Cork glanced at the Mercedes. “I’m keeping you.”

  “I really do have to go,” she said. “Lance has a doctor’s appointment.”

  Cork smiled in parting. “I’ll pull out so I’m not blocking your way.”

  * * *

  He stopped at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler. Lester Bigby wasn’t there, and so far, Johnny Papp hadn’t seen him that day. But it was still early, so maybe Cork wanted to wait? Cork thanked Johnny and said he might be back.

  His next stop was The Greenbrier, an assisted-living facility in a newer section on the north side of town. It was a two-story redbrick building of recent construction, with nicely landscaped grounds full of squat evergreens and some young willows. There was also a little man-made pond, the kind that in summer might hold goldfish. In anticipation of winter, the pond had been drained, and the bottom was lined with the dark residue of rotting leaves. Because it was a secure building, Cork had to buzz for the door to be opened to him.

  The Greenbrier was warm and quiet inside. Just beyond the front door was a large open area, carpeted, where four ladies, grown thin and fragile with age but dressed almost formally, sat facing one another in the armchairs that had been placed about. Cork couldn’t tell if they’d been talking and had stopped to observe him when he came in or if they’d simply been sitting in silence for a while, waiting for something—anything—to happen. Above cheeks rosy with rouge and softened with powder, their eyes followed him keenly. The attendant at the front desk was young, maybe twenty, fresh-faced, and pretty. Her face lost some of its freshness as soon as Cork inquired after Clarence Bigby.

  “Buzz? You’ll find him in the community room. He’s always there after lunch.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “Whenever Mr. Bigby’s in the community room, he has it to himself.”

  Cork got her meaning. Some people mellowed with age. Not Buzz Bigby.

  Cork was about to walk away when the attendant said, “You’ll need to sign in.”

  She nodded toward a register book at one end of the desk. It was open, and a pen was attached by a thin chain. Cork signed and jotted down the time, noting that there hadn’t been many visitors before him that day. But it was Monday. Weekends were probably more likely times for families to come calling.

  The big flat-panel television was on, tuned to ESPN, the volume turned up loud. Bigby sat slouched in an easy chair, facing the screen but not really looking at it. His eyes seemed to be focused on something well above the television. Next to Bigby’s easy chair sat a small oxygen tank on rollers, feeding him through a tube that hung over his ears and plugged into his nose. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and wrinkled khakis, and wore slippers on his feet. His white hair was wild, as if windblown, though there wasn’t even a whisper of a breeze in the room. When Cork was a kid, Bigby had been a great pillar of muscle and bone. Now he seemed only a huddle of wrinkled flesh.

  “Buzz?”

  Bigby’s eyes moved but not his head, as if Cork wasn’t worth the effort of his full attention. “What do you want?” He spoke in a wheeze.

  “To talk.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  The remote control for the television was on a coffee table within reach of Bigby. Cork walked to the table, picked up the remote, and hit the Mute button. The room dropped into quiet. Cork grabbed an empty armchair and positioned it so that he sat between Bigby and the television. “You were always a son of a bitch, Buzz, and pretty proud of it.”

  “So?”

  “You carry a grudge better than any man I ever knew. And one thing I know about you absolutely is that you hated Jubal Little.”

  Bigby made a sound that might have been meant as a laugh but came out like air from a punctured tire. “I feel that way about a lot of people, you included.”

  “Never pull any punches, do you? Tell me, Buzz, does Lester visit you here very often?”

  “That boy don’t come to see me like he should. Ungrateful little bastard.”

  “Did he visit you last Saturday?”

  “Hell, no.” Bigby’s steel blue eyes suddenly went wary, and he said, “What’s it to you?”

  “Did you hear what happened to Jubal Little?”

  “Dead. Dumb-ass hunting accident.”

  “I was with him. Some folks think I might have had a hand in his death.”

  “You were the dumb-ass that shot him?” A vicious little smile crept across his lips. “There’s a God in heaven.”

  An old woman came into the room, using a walker. Her face held a look of happy anticipation, but when she saw Buzz Bigby in the easy chair, she stopped abruptly, and the happy look died. She carefully maneuvered her walker in a U-turn and left.

  “You were the one who taught Lester to bow-hunt, right?” Cork asked.

  “Tried. Christ, he couldn’t draw a bowstring to save his soul. Spindly little arms of his.”

  “He’s got himself a new compound bow now. A Bear Carnage, top of the line. You didn’t know that?”

  “Like I said, that boy don’t visit me like he should. Little snot.”

  “I thought he was here on Saturday.”

  “I told you not two minutes ago he wasn’t.” Bigby shifted and sat up. It wasn’t only his eyes that seemed on the alert now. His whole body, collapsed as it was, had tensed. “Or maybe he was. That was a couple of days ago. Sometimes I forget things.”

  Forget the slight of an ungrateful son? Cork thought not.

  He stood and said, “Thanks for your time, Buzz.”

  “And you, thanks for nothing. Give me that remote before you go.”

  On his way out, Cork stopped at the front desk to sign out. He used the opportunity to check the register pages where visitors had logged in and out over the weekend. He didn’t see Lester Bigby’s name there at all.

  The young attendant was on the phone. Cork hung around until she’d finished her call, then he asked, “Does everyone sign in and out?”

  “Not always. Sometimes family who visit a lot just go to their relative’s room without stopping here.”

  “Does Buzz Bigby’s family visit often?”

  “Oh yeah. Especially his son.”

  “Do you know if he visited on Saturday?”

  “I didn’t work this weekend, so I couldn’t say.”

  “Anybody here who might be able to say?”

  “I really don’t know.” She said it in such a way that Cork understood she probably did but was not going to tell him. A professional thing, he figured, resident privacy or something. He didn’t push it.

  As he left, the eyes of the ladies in the open area followed him, as if they were watching the passage of an exotic bird.

  * * *

  Cork pulled up to the curb in front of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler and parked behind the car that Lester Bigby often drove, a mint-condition 1965 Karmann Ghia. He found it interesting that Bigby preferred the same kind of vehicle his brother, Donner, had driven before he died.

  Inside, Cork found Bigby sitting in the same booth that, according to Heidi Steger, he’d occupied when Cork and Jubal breakfasted there on the day Jubal died. There was an empty plate in front of him, and he was reading a newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Compared to both his father and his brother, Lester Bigby was small and, in his face, more resembled the fine-boned features that, Cork recalled, had made Mrs. Bigby so lovely and yet so sad. In his mid-forties, he was mostly bald, with
only a narrow strip of dull brown hair circling his skull like a dead laurel wreath. He didn’t notice Cork approaching.

  “Mind if I join you?” Cork said.

  Bigby looked up from his paper. “I prefer to eat alone.”

  “Looks to me like you’ve finished eating.” Cork slid into the seat on the other side of the booth.

  Bigby carefully folded his paper and set it aside.

  Cork laid his arms on the table and leaned forward. “We’ve never liked each other, Lester.”

  “That’s not something I lose any sleep over.”

  “In a town like Aurora, it’s hard to avoid folks, but somehow we seem to do a pretty good job of it.”

  “Believe me, I don’t go out of my way, O’Connor.”

  “I think I can truthfully say the same. But there it is. I’ve been wondering why.”

  “You looked me up just to tell me that?”

  “That’s not the reason. It’s just something that came to me.”

  “What’s the reason then?”

  “I’ve been thinking about your resort on Crown Lake.”

  “What about it?”

  “You’re pretty heavily invested in it, I imagine. All that land, the cost of construction.”

  “So?”

  “Sulfide mining,” Cork said. And he saw from the look in Bigby’s eyes that he’d struck home.

  Cork had grown up in the Arrowhead of Minnesota, the northeasternmost section of the state, where some of the most beautiful wilderness in the entire nation lay next to the richest ore deposits imaginable. Historically, this unfortunate positioning had resulted in the decimation of a great deal of the pristine Northwoods by iron mining. The sacrifice of that land had made possible the industrial growth of the rest of the United States in the late 1800s and well into the twentieth century, but the deep open-pit mines of the Iron Range were wounds that would never heal.

  The mines had begun closing in the late 1960s, and the Arrowhead suffered one economic blow after another. Businesses folded. Range towns became ghost towns. But in recent years, there’d been a great deal of renewed interest in the mineral resources of the area. The demand for the raw materials to make steel in China and India had spurred a resurgence of mining in the open pits. Perhaps more important, there was intense interest in creating additional operations that would mine the deposits of base metals—copper-nickel and platinum. These precious ores had been discovered long ago in the Arrowhead but, until recently, were too difficult and costly to get at. New advances in mining technology, however, promised cheaper, better methods of extraction, and global mining concerns were clamoring for a shot at the riches that still lay beneath the wilderness of the Arrowhead. The proposals for these new mines had set factions in the North Country at war.

  Because the metals were contained in sulfide ore, the technique for extracting them was called sulfide mining. Environmentalists claimed the mining of this ore would create mountains of sulfide tailings that were exposed to the elements. When sulfide mixes with air and water, the result is sulfuric acid, which would inevitably leach into the groundwater, polluting the pristine lakes and streams of the region. This had already been the case in other areas where sulfide mining had been allowed, and a lot of folks in the Arrowhead believed that looming on the horizon was yet another instance of the earth suffering horribly for the benefit of industry.

  On the other side of the coin, the new mines represented the possibility of a rebound in the depressed economy of the region. This meant jobs in an area where, for too long, they’d been far too rare, and also much-needed tax revenues for the state as a whole. Because the mining companies were full of assurances that the new technologies would allow safe, nonpolluting extraction—they had all kinds of reports and charts to prove it—a great many people in the Arrowhead, and in Minnesota in general, welcomed the prospect.

  In his gubernatorial campaign, Jubal Little had talked about the need for sacrifice in order to make Minnesota self-sustaining. He’d strongly supported opening the North Country to additional mining. He never spoke of this as sacrifice but couched it in terms of responsibility and risk. It would be his responsibility as governor to ensure that mine companies kept their promises. And what small risk there might be to the Arrowhead was outweighed by the great benefit to the state as a whole. This was in direct contrast to the position of the incumbent, a man of liberal leanings who’d made environmental protection one of his top priorities but who’d been ineffectual in all his efforts to revitalize the state’s stagnating economy.

  Jubal’s argument about exploiting Minnesota’s mineral potential was the same kind of argument he’d made about the casinos. Responsibility and risk.

  Politically, Jubal characterized himself as socially progressive and fiscally conservative. But his politics had mattered a good deal less than his image. He was tall and good-looking. Confident, charming, self-assured. He could be winningly self-effacing. But more than anything else, he offered the image of a man who, like a great frontier scout, knew the way ahead was fraught with danger, but if you followed him, he’d absolutely get you to the promised land. In all the darkness of economic uncertainty, he offered voters the hope of light, and they flew to him like moths.

  Not Cork. And not the Ojibwe. And not, he knew, Lester Bigby.

  “As I understand it, Lester, construction of that resort of yours ground to a halt last summer. All because Jubal Little pledged to open the area to sulfide mining if he was elected. Crown Lake is just a few miles downstream from the site where that Canadian company intends to begin mining as soon as they get approval, which Jubal’s election would pretty much have assured. You stood to lose a lot of money.”

  “I’ve lost money before,” Bigby said.

  “This would have been on a huge scale. And probably a lot of other folks you talked into investing in your company stood to lose their shirts, too.”

  “And your point is?”

  “Somebody killed Jubal Little, killed him before he had a chance to make good on his campaign promises. I’m just thinking you had a lot of reason to want him dead.”

  Bigby seemed actually amused at this thought. He smiled and said, “Jesus, you think I killed Little?”

  “You bow-hunt. You’ve got yourself a good Bear Carnage as I understand it.”

  Bigby saw that Cork wasn’t joking, and the smile dropped from his lips. “You really think I killed Jubal Little.”

  “I think you had good reason to want him dead.”

  “Wanting somebody dead and killing him are at two different ends of the stick, O’Connor. Are you saying that everybody you want dead you’ve killed?”

  “Where were you on Saturday, Lester?”

  Bigby opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. “Hell, I don’t have to tell you.”

  “You’ll have to tell the sheriff.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a hunter with a fine new compound bow, and you have a pretty good reason to have wanted Little dead, and your wife believes you were visiting your father, and your father says you weren’t. At the very least, you have some explaining to do. And if the sheriff questions you about all this, word is going to spread, and whether you like it or not, people are going to start talking about you and wondering. I just thought I might be able to save you and your family some embarrassment.”

  “You talked to my wife and my father?” Bigby’s fine-featured face took on a stern look that was somehow still delicate.

  “I spent some time with both of them earlier today.”

  “You drag my family into this, O’Connor, and I’ll destroy you.”

  “Your family doesn’t have to be dragged in, Lester. All you have to do is tell me where you were on Saturday.”

  “Who the hell are you to be asking me questions?” He’d raised his voice above the general hubbub of the Broiler, and other voices grew quiet; eyes swung his way. Bigby noticed and spoke more softly. “You’re not the law around here anymore. Just who the hel
l do you think you are?”

  “I’m the guy somebody’s trying to frame for Jubal Little’s death, and I’m not just going to sit around and let that happen, Lester. Where were you Saturday?”

  “You don’t know me at all, O’Connor. I’d never kill anybody over money.”

  Cork leaned closer and said, “Maybe it wasn’t just about money.”

  Bigby’s eyes once again gave him away, and Cork knew he’d touched a nerve. Bigby sat up a little straighter and brought out a confused look, but he was a beat too late. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your father’s always blamed Jubal and me for your brother’s death.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “In some people, that kind of wound never heals. You know, when I was sheriff, I never encountered your father without him making some comment about how I couldn’t hide behind a badge forever. We both knew exactly what he was talking about.”

  “And yet here you are,” Bigby said. “Alive and well.”

  “Yeah, here I am the prime suspect in Jubal Little’s death. Exactly the kind of situation that would warm the cockles of your father’s heart.” Cork sat back. “You love your father, Lester?”

  “I’m not going to answer that, or any more of your questions.”

  “See, I think he would be a hard man to love. But I also think that one thing we seek most as men is the approval of our fathers. It seems to me that goes a long way to explaining everything from why Alexander the Great felt compelled to conquer the world to why George W. Bush led us into Iraq. And maybe it even explains why the son of Buzz Bigby would kill Jubal Little.”

  “That’s such bullshit.”

  “Is it? Easy enough to disprove. Just tell me where you were on Saturday.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Cork made ready to leave. “I’ll give you a while to think about it, Lester. But if I haven’t heard from you by the end of the day, next time you’re questioned, it’ll be by the badges investigating Jubal Little’s death.”

  Cork walked away. But he couldn’t help feeling a tingle in his back, as if the point of an arrow was about to bury itself there.