David A. Schwinghammer
Sitemap
My Blog
Contact Author
Message Board
Read
Reviews
Books
· Soldier's Gap
· Soldier's Gap
· Soldier's Gap
· Soldier's Gap
Short Stories
· Fisher of Men, Chapter 11
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 11
· Honest Thief, Tender Murderer, Chapter 11.
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 10
· Honest Thief, Tender Murderer, Chapter 10
· Fisher of Men, Chapter 10
· Mengele's Double, Chapter 9
· Seminary Boy, a memoir
· Fisher of Men, Chapter Nine
· Soldier's Gap, Chapter Three
Articles
· The Jerk
· Bone-headed Supreme Court Decisions
· Republicans Work Hard at Creating Divisive Issues
· Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School, book review
· Auschwitz (Always Remember Your Name), book review
· Fahrenheit 2021-22
· Biden's Approval Rate Plummeting
· Mr. Trump, have you no sense of decency?
· Critical Race Theory
· Clueless Judge Compares AR-15's to Swiss Army Knives
Poetry
· Should I Take Ballet?
· Caboose
· The Girl Next Door
· Llama, Llama (dedicated to William Blake)
· The Terminal Booger
· Fashion
· Widow's Peak
· Myth
· Alumni Game
· Stradivarius
More poetry...
|
|
David A. Schwinghammer, click here
to update your web pages on AuthorsDen.
|
|
|
|
Detective Jim Black and Charlie look for Marv, Dore's kidnapper.
Chapter 12
Leech Lake Odyssey
‟Offering dragons quarter is no good,
they regrow all their parts & come on again,
they have to be killed.”
–-John Berryman
Black’s Intrepid whisked along the main drag--past a movie theater showing a Schwarzenegger movie; past a nightclub, its blue neon sign trumpeting ladies night; past a 24-hour gas station, offering a free wash with purchase of a full tank--closing on the outskirts of Mason City.
Charlie sat scrunched up against the passenger-side door, wondering if tonight would be the night he’d see Dorie again. Rip fidgeted in the middle, perspiration gleaming on his forehead. He smelled like a wild animal.
When the highway cleared of traffic, Black switched his lights on bright, tapped the cruise control indicator, then turned to stare darts at Ripulski. ‟Where did you say I should make the first turn, Sport?” he snarled.
‟It’s about a mile out. I’ll let you know with plenty of time to spare. How do I go about gettin’ that there reward money?”
Black dipped in his shirt pocket, retrieving one of his long black cigars. ‟That’s something I want to kick around with you, Ripulski. I think you should split the reward with Mr. Zelnick. That is, if this woman really is Bendix.” Black pushed in the cigarette lighter. When it popped out, he affixed the red coil to the cigar, then blew smoke at Rip.
Rip shook out a Camel, moved his face toward the lighter. When Black ignored him, he dug in his jean pocket for his Zippo and lit his own cigarette. ‟It’s her all right. Got her in the basement. I could see her through this peephole Marv drilled in the door, watching television. Bored silly she was. Every once in a while, she’d jump up and start pacing. That’s the turn, the intersection there, County Rd. 55. I didn’t think cops were eligible for reward money.”
“I didn’t say anything about me getting any part of the reward, did I Sport?”
‟Well, I think that’s what you meant. Up there you want to turn left. Then you go down this dirt road until you see an Uncle Sam mailbox. It’s about a mile.”
Black’s headlights reflected off fir trees whipsawing in the wind. He had to pay more attention since the frozen ruts in the road jostled the car. The snowplow hadn’t been through since the last snowfall, and the farmers who lived along here had made their own trail.
The detective poked Ripulski in the chest. ‟Look, Shithead. I don’t like you. If it were up to me, you’d get zilch. You ought to consider yourself lucky to be getting an even cut out of this. You know damn well you’ve never seen any two thousand dollars all at once in your whole miserable life.”
The big Intrepid pulled up just before the Uncle Sam mailbox and stopped. ‟We’ll leave the car here. How long is the driveway?”
When Black cracked his door and the overhead light came on, the side of Ripulski’s face shown purple and overripe.
‟Not too long,” Ripulski said. ‟Marv is probably asleep. He gets drunk drinking beer and watching TV, then falls asleep watching Leno. Every night. The guy has no life.”
Black punched a button releasing all the door locks, turned off the engine, and reached in the back seat. He came up with a pair of overshoes.
Charlie, Black, and Rip tramped through the snowdrifts until they came to a turn in the road. ‟Say, Sport, does Marv have a dog?”
‟Not any more he doesn’t. Somebody ran him over.”
Black stopped, jabbed Ripulski in the chest again. ‟You know what, Sport? I think you did it. You came over here and you were going to rob your friend and the dog got in your way. Just like you robbed all those other people. How many of them were your friends?” Black was wearing thick leather gloves. He thrust a hand inside his coat and came out with a forty-five, which he cocked and uncocked.
Ripulski held his hands over his purpling ears. ‟Whatcha gonna do with that gun?” he said. ‟Marv ain’t gonna put up no fight. He’s your basic chickenshit.”
They came up to the farmhouse. No lights showing in any of the windows. They stamped their feet. Black shined his flashlight on the front door. ‟Mr. Zelnick, you’re a civilian. I want you to stay out here until we come back. Ripulski, I need you to help me get in there. That front door looks pretty sturdy. Let’s go around back. Maybe you know where there’s a key?”
‟If I’d’a known where there was a key . . .”
Black seemed to know what Rip had planned to say because he smiled, then crooked his finger at Ripulski. Marv hadn’t shoveled the walk leading to the rear of the house, but the two high-stepped their way through the drifts, Ripulski’s shoulders hunched up in his light coat with no overshoes. Black resembled his name in the heavy fur coat. His silhouette stood out as they moved farther away, but Ripulski’s seemed to fade into the white.
Time crawled by, and Charlie swore to himself under his breath. Literally. He could see it mushrooming above his head. He grew colder by the second. At least Ripulski was indoors by now. Charlie clapped his hands, stomped his feet, and rocked, but the exertion did little good. So this was what hypothermia was like.
The wind picked up again; his nose went numb and his eyes watered. He hunched his shoulders and turned away from the wind, but he wasn’t wearing winter underwear, so the hairs on his thighs began to freeze, and the head of his dick began to tingle.
When would Black be back for him? Just as he was about to go after them, he heard this popping sound. Bap, bap, bap, like in those mafia movies where the hood offs the mark with a silencer.
A shadow was moving out from behind the house. Black, motioning for Charlie to join him. Charlie wanted to run, but just like in one of those nightmares, his feet were frozen to the ground. Besides, where would he run? Black had the keys to the car, the nice overshoes. Charlie would have no chance. He tramped up to where Black was standing.
‟There’s nobody in there. There’s a room in the basement where Marv must have kept her, but apparently the little twerp was expecting us. I think Ripulski was running some kind of con; he tips Marv off and still claims the reward.”
‟Where’s is he?” Charlie said, massaging his hands again. ”What was that noise I heard?”
‟Ripulski ran off when I accused him of running a scam. We don’t really need the worthless bag of shit, do we? Come in here. I need you to help me search the place.”
They crunched through the snowdrifts bordering the side of the house. As they rounded the corner on the way to the rear door, Charlie scanned the yard, expecting to find Ripulski face down in the snow, but his eyes were still watering and he couldn’t see anything.
As they entered the back door, the warm air drenched Charlie’s face, and he forgot all about Ripulski.
“I turned on the furnace. We should be here for a good hour or so. I don’t want to call in the crime scene boys yet. They’d fuck up a wet dream. That’s Marv’s bedroom over there. You dig through his drawers and stuff. I’m going downstairs and see if I can find any confirmation that Bendix was ever really here. I found a bunch of keys hanging on a hook in the kitchen. One of them fits the door down there. I took a quick gawk around before. She’s not there.”
Charlie shoved the beaded curtain aside and stepped into the bedroom, which smelled of mothballs and potpourri. He crossed to a dresser, rummaged through Marv’s dingy underwear, pretty much just like his: T’s and briefs, yellowish, ratty, with holes in them. Beneath the shorts he found Marv’s stash of porn mags: Catwalk; Topless Brain Surgeons; Nightbreed. Charlie flipped through the skin books, came upon an especially titillating pose of a brunette wearing nothing but make-up, nylons, and a string of pearls. She looked too sophisticated to be posing for these kinds of pictures. He tossed the books aside.
The next drawer stuck, creaked, jerked open, spilling some of the contents on the floor. Personal papers, tax receipts, just like Charlie’s, no filing system at all. Nothing jumped out at him.
Marv’s closet beckoned on the other side of the room. A maroon sports coat, several lumberjack-type flannel shirts, some blue jeans neatly folded on the shelf above the hangers, two silk ties, pre-tied, hooked around a coat hanger. Everything seemed to be here. If the kid had split, he was traveling awfully light.
A lamp stand beside the bed drew Charlie’s attention. It had a drawer in it. He opened it, removing a flashlight, a bottle of aspirin and a little black book, which he paged through. Damned if it wasn’t some sort of diary dating back to October 31, the day that Dorie was kidnapped. There was a newspaper clipping in the diary of Marv holding a big fish, a walleye Charlie thought; the caption read ‟first place winner.”
A coughing sound shook Charlie so hard he dropped the little black book. “It doesn’t look good down there; I found some blood. There’s some dresses and stuff. Nothing that I can tie to Dorie Bendix, personally anyway. Maybe her friends would recognize something.”
“How much blood are we talking about here?”
“Found some shotgun pellets, too. Looks like he got rid of her. Forensics’ll dig up the yard, try to find her body.”
Charlie knelt to pick up the diary, sat down on the bed, held his head in his hands. He’d been so positive he’d see Dorie again.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” Black said, giving him the once-over.
‟Ah, Marv kept a diary,” he said, ‟starting with the day Dorie was taken. He mentions her name several times. Look at this entry. ‛This isn’t like I thought it was going to be. I’ve got to think of a way to get rid of her. She’s driving me crazy.’”
‟There wasn’t a lot of blood; nowhere near as much as you’d expect. She could be still alive. Better give me that; maybe I can find out where he took her.”
Charlie perked up. There was hope. “We’ll find out where he took her. I’m not missing out on any part of this story, and I found the diary.”
Black doffed his hat, knocked the snowmelt off. Water dripped on the linoleum floor. ‟Have it your way. I think we’re free and clear on that reward, if we find her I mean. Ripulski’s implicated somehow. When I accused him of scamming me, he ran off into the woods; I fired some shots over his head, but he got away. I’ve never heard of any law that says a reporter isn’t eligible for reward money. Even if there was such a law, you work for a half-baked shopper. That’s not even a real newspaper. Anyway, what I was thinking is you could cash the check and give me the money. I wouldn’t ask but I’ve got alimony payments, and her cunt of a literary agent is suing me.”
#
Once on the county road, Black floored the Intrepid, the huge machine careening from side to side on the snow-choked lane.
The man had to be suicidal. Charlie was sure the car would roll and he’d be catapulted through the shattered windshield, the glass shards slashing his throat red like a slaughter animal.
Despite the incalculable odds, they made it to Black’s office, Charlie suffering from a serious case of whiplash.
Black’s lair of an office was depressing: the floor wooden and deeply scuffed; creaking floorboards; fluorescent lights flickering. Charlie couldn’t help but obsess about the blood Black had found, just a few drops as it turned out, but still blood nonetheless.
Entwining his fingers behind his neck, Charlie tried to crick it back into place, then sank down on one of Black’s hardbacked chairs. Black assumed his usual pose, leaning back in his chair with his big cowboy boots on the desk. He licked his finger as he turned the pages of the diary. ‟Listen to this. ‛If I let her go, I could head up to the cabin on Leech Lake. Maybe stay there a couple of days until I figure what to do.’”
“I don’t understand why Marv would leave the diary behind,” Charlie said.
‟Maybe he wanted to get caught,” Black said.
‟Could the diary entry be a ruse to give Marv more time to get away?”
Black withdrew his cigar and pointed it at Charlie. “It says here he doesn’t know how to go about letting her go. He can’t run her into town and drop her off at her apartment--she’ll call the cops before he can get away.”
Charlie got up and went to the picture of Black charging through the line, cradling a football. The man had an assassin’s eyes and there were blotches of red on his uniform, forearms, and elbows. ‟One thing is apparent,” he said. ‟If Marv let Dorie go, we’d know about it. Maybe he tied her up and left her someplace. Tied her just well enough, so’s she’d be able to get loose eventually.”
Black blew a perfect smoke ring, and it drifted up toward the ceiling. “I don’t think he could turn her loose at all, unless somehow he got her to agree not to squeal on him. Look, Zelnick, I’m going to take a day and scope out this Leech Lake cabin. Want to come along?”
‟We don’t even know which cabin it is,” Charlie said, scratching the back of his head. ‟How are you going to find it? Those fishing resorts shut down after Labor Day.”
“I want to flash that picture around we found of Marv with the walleye. It was a pretty big fish. Somebody should recognize the fish, if not Marv. Got any better ideas?”
‟Why don’t we fax the picture to the cops up there? You do have a fax machine?”
Black nodded his head deliberately as if to say, God didn’t give you the sense of a barefoot elephant trainer. ‟If you want something done right, you better do it yourself. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
“I guess you’re right. Maybe he changed his mind and took Dorie along.”
‟There’s nothing else in here,” Black said, closing the diary. ‟Just some nonsense about how he misses his dog and how he thinks Ripulski had something to do with it.”
Charlie wasn’t sure he should do this, but he had to know if he was dealing with a killer. ‟Detective Black, what really happened to Ripulski?”
Black stood and moved toward him, holding the cigar like a harpoon. ‟Don’t worry about him. He was running in the direction of a farm not a quarter mile away. Somebody there probably gave him a ride back into town. He’ll keep until we get back; then we file conspiracy charges. The little germ helped Marv kidnap her, then when he heard about the reward, he decided to pull a double cross.”
Charlie hadn’t seen any farm lights, but that was nothing new. A train could pass within fifty yards, and he wouldn’t see or hear it sometimes.
‟Look, if you want to come along, I’ve got this friend who has a Piper Cub. He can get us there in a couple of hours. We can take off bright and early. It’s one o’clock now. You want to sleep in one of the cells?”
#
At seven in the morning, Charlie was staring down at feathery clouds, wondering when the plane was going to crash. That morning, when he’d seen the Piper Cub for the first time, he’d have sworn it had been put together with bubble gum and baling wire. Besides the acrophobia, there was also the worry that Black would go berserk and throw him out of the plane. Killers were compulsive types, they all were or they’d never be able to do something so horrible. Black’s mannequin of a pilot friend never said a word beyond a grunt or two in response to Black’s questions about how long it would be before they landed.
An hour or so into the flight, Black suddenly grew talkative. ‟You look pale,” he said. ‟You afraid of flying?”
Black lit up another stogie and repositioned his ever-present hat, pushing his ears out in an awkward manner. “I don’t know why you won’t admit it. Lots of people have phobias.”
‟Okay, I admit it. Are you happy now?”
‟That’s an interesting topic, phobias. Melanie’s afraid of spiders. Arachnaphobia. Has me step on them for her. Everybody has phobias, even me. How about guns, you afraid of them?”
‟They make me sweat.”
Black stretched his arms, almost setting fire to the roof of the plane. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but mine is a fear of being laughed at. Somebody trying to play me for a fool. I see red when that happens.”
‟Can’t blame you. Nobody likes to be laughed at.”
The engine made a sound like one of those zeros in a World War II movie when the kamikaze is going to dive on a destroyer. The mannequin was getting ready to land, so Charlie never got a chance to ask if Ripulski had laughed at him.
#
Charlie and Black rented an all-terrain vehicle and, Black at the wheel, they sped towards Fischer’s Resort, which the rental agent said was closest to the airport. ‟Pretty sure there’s somebody there year-round,” the guy had said. ‟They have to be or the kids’ll vandalize the cabins.”
They showed the picture of Marv and the fish around, but nobody there recognized him or the fish. After Fischer’s they tried Warren’s resort and from Warren’s they went to McDab’s, and all morning and all afternoon, they bounced from one resort to another with no luck.
At five, Black needed a drink, so they stopped at a little bar in town, and out of force of habit, showed the picture to Hugh the bartender, who just happened to be the second place finisher in the walleye contest Marv had won. ‟Don’t know where Marv’s cabin is,” Hugh said, ‟but I can give yah the phone number of the resort that promoted the contest. They should have Marv’s name and address on record.”
#
Black pulled up in front of the cabin Marv had been staying in when he’d won the contest. An elderly couple from Fergus Falls was staying there. Turns out the tourist season never really ended. Some people liked to ice fish and snowmobile on the lake.
Black and Charlie tried the office on the off chance that Marv was staying in another cabin, and sure enough, Marv was a creature of habit.
The detective drew his forty-five and motioned for Charlie to knock. When Marv opened the door, Charlie said, ‟Sorry to bother you Mister, but I’m wondering if you’ve seen a little girl around eight or nine years old, blond with freckles wearing a blue parka.” That did the trick as, before Marv had a chance to answer, Jim Black had the bore of his forty-five pressed up against his nose.
The man is in his element, a nineteenth century element, Charlie thought; if Black gets his way, Marv will make a break for it, whether he wants to or not, and wind up face down in the snow with a hole in his back big enough to put my arm through.
Black patted Marv down, and Charlie went through the place searching for a weapon. If Marv had one, it wasn’t in the cabin. Black twisted Marv’s hands behind his back, handcuffed him, and pushed him down on a chair next to a table in the middle of the one-room cabin. Black sat down next to him. ‟All right,” he said, ‟what did you do with her?”
“I d-don’t know what you’re t-talking about,” Marv said, turning a dirty shade of grey.
Black grabbed a handful of Marv’s flannel shirt. ‟Don’t be stupid. Your friend Ripulski told us all about her. Now what did you do with her?”
Marv sputtered, unable to enunciate even one word. Black exploded, backhanded Marv across the mouth with his empty hand, and the boy’s lip gushed a steady stream of red.
‟Hey, that’s not going to help,” Charlie said. ‟Leave him alone.”
‟Shut up, Zelnick. Next time, I use the gun. Now spill it.”
“I l-let her off. R-right in front of the s-station.”
‟That just can’t be, Sport, or we would have heard about it by now.”
‟Dorie said s-she’d tell everybody that s-she’d been
g-going through a rough patch with her b-boyfriend and had decided to g-get off by herself and that s-she didn’t w-want no publicity.”
‟How do explain the blood we found in her room, and the shotgun pellets?”
Marv just shrugged. Black got up, grabbed Marv by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him out to the all-terrain vehicle.
|
|
Web Site:
Mystery Writer
|
|
|
|
|
|
I don't believe that any guy who kidnapped someone would keep a diary? I have a sneaking suspicion that Dorie may have had that Stockholm syndrome and fallen in love with her captor. After all, she was probably young, and so far as I can tell from only one chapter, so was Marv.
You waxed into hyperbole a couple of times describing Charlie's reactions. You called Ripulski, Rip in the beginning, and then throughout used his full name. I would call him, Ripulski in the beginning and then, throughout, call him Rip since you are using nicknames for everybody else.
I like the way you write and Minnesota in the dead of winter is not a location for the usual crime story. I enjoy writing the way you write, down and dingy, gritty details--true to life.
Ron