Hunter’s Dance (20 page)

XXIX

What is so certain of victory as patience?

Pete Koski chewed and swallowed the last bite of his pasty. He pushed the plate aside to make room for the one containing half an apple pie. McIntire wondered if the sheriff ever ate anything that wasn't encased in a crust of some kind.

Koski downed a few more bites before he said, “What makes you think the bottle came from Morlen?”

“Somebody was setting up housekeeping in that old mine, and Bambi had the mine prominently marked on his map. It was most likely him and Ross Maki. Besides nobody else I know of could afford it.”

“Well, I'll ask Wendell,” Koski said, “if I can track him down.”

“Hasn't he been in touch? Isn't he at the mansion?”

“I don't know where the hell he is. He left the phone number of a hotel in Lansing, but so far he's never been there when I've called. And he doesn't call back.”

“Can't his wife tell you where to get hold of him?”

“I'd have to get hold of her first!” He pulled a cigarette from the open pack on the desk and contemplated its tip. “What do you suppose the two kids were up to in that mine? And why?”

“The provisions included blankets, so they must have spent some time there or at least been planning to. Carlson hasn't mentioned Bambi being out overnight, other than when he's gone home. We didn't get a chance to look around much before we received Esko Thomson's kind invitation to take tea. Maybe they were going to explore the mine more and wanted to be comfy. Maybe they were just playing Neanderthal. I'd say Ross Maki should be able to tell you.”

“But Ross was running a farm. He didn't have all that much time to play Neander-anything. Milk cows get up early. He couldn't have been away overnight, even if Bambi was. Bambi did quite a bit of his poking around on his own. How far in is this place? Any chance that Bambi was there the night he was killed?”

“None at all. It would have taken all night to walk in and make it back to the town hall in time to die there.”

The sheriff nodded. “Sure wish Billy Corbin was still around. Well, I'll send Cecil up to have a look. Unless you want to go back?”

McIntire might have liked to see what else Bambi had stowed in his hideout but had no wish to continue the role of surrogate Billy. “You could probably talk Fratelli into it,” he said. “He'll be wanting his Geiger counter.”

“Thomson's most likely cleaned the place out by now anyway.” Koski put down his fork, a definite sign that something significant was in the offing. “I got a package in the mail today,” he said, “from that stiff-necked butler at the Club.”

“The steward? Baxter?”

“Baxter, Jeeves, whatever the hell it is. He sent me a couple of magazines.”

“Thoughtful chap.”

“They were high falutin' cooking magazines.” Koski gave a snort. “The guy called it
cookery
. Can you beat that? Took me a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Anyway, his wife found them when she was cleaning the main lodge.”

McIntire was beginning to see where this was leading.

“When Mrs. Baxter went to whip up a batch of
cremm
something or other, she found part of the instructions missing.” Koski picked up the fork again, but only tapped it on the table. “The magazines had been left in the main lodge, but they were addressed to Mrs. Wendell Morlen.”

“So? Mrs. Wendell sure seems like the recipe clipping type to me.”

“No shit, but this wasn't only the recipe. It was whole pages. And the paper and print look suspiciously like the print in our ransom note.”

“You think Bonnie wrote that note herself?”

“That woman is crazy as a loon. I wouldn't put much past her. But Bonnie wasn't the only one that could get to those magazines.”

“The butler did it?”

“Looky here, Bambi's body showed no sign that he struggled with his kidnappers, and he was a tough little shit. He wouldn't go easy. He might have been poisoned, but he hadn't digested it, so he wasn't drugged into doing what they wanted. He went of his own accord. Guibard says he probably wasn't tied up until after he died. At least some of the raw material for the note comes from the Club. I'm guessing Bambi didn't put up a fight because he knew his kidnappers.”

“And,” McIntire reasoned, “those kidnappers were people who had access to the Club lodge. Which leaves out Ross Maki and Marvin Wall.”

“And Adam Wall,” the sheriff sounded definitely gloomy. “Unless he had an accomplice.”

“Adam Wall with a buddy at the Club? That's going pretty far out on a limb.”

“No stranger than Adam Wall with a buddy in the federal attorney's office. Besides, not everybody at the Club is upper-crust. There's plenty of peons working there.” Koski uncorked a red thermos and added coffee to his cup. “Even one or two trusty Indian guides.”

McIntire hadn't thought of that, and he didn't want any more complications now. He rose to his feet. “We'd be way ahead if we could be sure the person who wrote that note was the same one who stabbed Bambi in the back.”

“Ya.” Koski forked down the last morsel of pie and stacked the two empty plates. “You see quite a bit of Wall, I hear.”

“Now and then.” What was this leading to?

Koski went on, “Not especially law abiding, is he?”

“Nothing serious.”

Koski sighed. “Billy got on pretty well with the Indians. He was a handy guy to have around.”

Prior to his recent fishing expeditions, the sheriff had never been overly concerned about keeping on the good side of the local Indians. Well, it was quite a large segment of the population. Maybe he was expecting an uprising. More likely concerned about votes. Whatever the sheriff had on his mind, he didn't elaborate. He handed the dirty plates to McIntire. “Take these to Marian on your way out, will ya? And tell her to get me a couple aspirin.”

XXX

An implacable fate is on this lovely spot. It is as if misfortune were buried here, but found no rest in its grave, and perpetually rose from it to terrify the living.

“Aren't you coming to bed?” Leonie stood at the foot of the stairs, slapping her paperback western against her knee.

“No,” McIntire said. “Tempt me as you might, I'm not budging. The minute I doze off, or not, if you insisted, the phone is going to ring, and I'll have to go get an elephant out of somebody's attic.”

She clutched the book to her chest. “Well, Mr. Grey, I reckon it's just you and me.” She looked at McIntire with raised eyebrows. “You sure? We might bob for—”

“I'm not stirring from this chair until at least…one o'clock.”

“Fancy a cup of cocoa?”

“Sure. Thanks. Toss in a splash of brandy if you would.”

Leonie brought the cocoa, along with the brandy bottle and two pieces of cinnamon toast. McIntire thanked God that his wife had become Americanized enough to learn that toast should be buttered and eaten on the same day it pops out of the toaster.

“Siobhan is out, you know,” she said. “I expect she'll be quite late.” He'd married a persistent woman.

“Well, it is Halloween,” he said. “Fratelli is probably scaring the pants off her with tales of his daring exploits.”

“John! That is no way to talk about your dear Auntie. Anyway, it's not Melvin Fratelli this time. She's gone off with that captivating stranger, the handsome Rudy Jantzen.”

“Rudy who?”

“Jantzen. The good looking one. You remember. She left with him the evening you two went to the pub.”

McIntire nodded. “It's the first time I've heard he actually has a name. I thought he just went by oohs and ahs. Quite the coup for Siobhan. I hope she's prepared to beat off the competition.”

For a second McIntire thought he detected a smile that indicated his wife might be contemplating entering the fray. She replied, “He has created quite a stir. Even Lucy Delaney has taken to putting fancy barrettes in her hair when she goes to town.”

“Well, he seems okay,” McIntire said. “Kind of sissy looking, though. I'm not sure I trust a man with dimples.”

Leonie rolled her eyes. “Have you seen anything of Wendell Morlen yet?”

“Not hide nor hair,” McIntire replied. “But Koski's on his trail.”

“Good. Mrs Morlen shouldn't be left alone this way.” She kissed him on his retreating hairline and left him with only the radio for company. McIntire switched it on and listened with half an ear while he opened his own book, the year's hottest seller, Mika Waltari's
The Egyptian
. It was a gift from Leonie in its original Finnish. That was thoughtful of her, but for once McIntire might have preferred the translated version. Somehow he couldn't find the hot-blooded Mediterranean hero believable in the language of the earth's most sober people.

McIntire read to page eighteen, where those magic words,
Skull-borer to the pharaoh
, jumped out at him. He read on. So Waltari's dashing protagonist made his living drilling surgical holes in the skulls of the ruling class. Every Finn in the world, and that world definitely included Michigan, would no doubt be familiar with the trepanation concept, if not the term itself.

McIntire poured another squirt of brandy into his cup and sipped. So what? That didn't mean they'd relate it to Indians. Or that the hole was meant to point to Marvin Wall. Well, Egyptian was one of the few nationalities not represented in St. Adele, and if the driller had meant to frame a Finn, there were simply too damn many candidates.

McIntire closed his eyes and settled back to think things over.

The radio droned.
This is The Mysterious Traveler, inviting you to join me on another journey into the strange and terrifying.
I hope you will enjoy the trip, that it will thrill you a little and chill you a little. So settle back, get a good grip on your nerves, and…

Before the dregs of the cocoa were cold in the cup, a tentative tapping at the back door insinuated itself into his dreams. McIntire groaned himself awake, plodded to the kitchen, switched on the porch light, and flung open the door. In the bulb's sudden glow, Ross Maki stood blinking like a startled toad.

“I think maybe you should go….”

The boy radiated an aroma of wood smoke and cheap beer. McIntire waited.

“Some of the guys…they're….” He glanced down, then up quickly. “They got Marve.”

McIntire grabbed his coat from the peg by the door. “Where?”

“Down on the shore. By the old lighthouse. There's a path by the cemetery.”

McIntire knew that. He also knew that the path led through about a quarter mile of swamp. He tied on heavy leather boots and stepped out the door.

Ross set out across the yard toward Mia Thorsen's truck.

“Where do you think you're going?”

“Home.”

“Like hell! Get in the car. I'll see you safe home to Ma later.”

Ross Maki's face turned pale with the terror of a snitch anticipating being on the receiving end of retaliation, but he obediently slid into the passenger seat of the Studebaker.

“How fast should I be going?” McIntire asked.

“Fast” was the reply.

“What's going on?”

“Some of the guys got together—”

“Only guys?”

“A couple girls. Mostly guys.”

“And one of the guys was Marvin Wall?”

“Bugs Ferguson brought him along. Some guys thought if they got him drunk enough he'd confess.”

McIntire didn't need to ask confess to what. “And…?”

“And Marve got pretty loaded. He passed out.”

McIntire was reasonably sure Ross hadn't come to request that he escort a drunk home. He waited.

“Some of the guys thought it would be fun…well, not
fun
but…they kind of wanted to do to him what he did to Bambi.”

“They're going to kill him?”

“No! Only, you know…his head.”

“They scalped him?”

“I don't know! They were talking about it. That's when I came for you. There were girls there.”

McIntire overshot the turnoff to the road that ran past the cemetery, braked, reversed, and skidded around the corner. The road was deserted.

“Is this where the guys parked?”

“No. Course not. Everybody would see the cars here. We went back in by the boat docks.”

“Well,” McIntire brought the car to a halt, “you and I'll take the short cut.” He fetched a flashlight from the trunk and dug around for his official issue handcuffs. He'd never had occasion to use them, and hoped he wouldn't have to tonight. He wasn't absolutely sure he could locate the key.

He aimed the light at the ground and trotted down the trail with Ross dawdling a prudent twenty yards behind. The wide, sandy lane quickly gave way to grassy marsh with no discernable path. If there was a moon up there, the heavy overcast obscured it; outside the circle of the flashlight beam, the night was solid black. Wood smoke hung heavy on the air. Soon the glow of a campfire flickered through the darkness. McIntire loped toward it.

The spot had obviously been well used but was abandoned, and abandoned in a hurry. Empty Grain Belt cans littered the sand around the washed-up tree trunk that had served as a seat. The grumble of engines stirring to life sounded from the direction of the harbor.

“You can come out now, Ross, they're gone,” McIntire called.

The young traitor ventured out onto the beach.

The engines died away. There was no breeze, no plash of waves on the sand. Only the soft hiss of the driftwood fire. McIntire turned to Ross. “Where—?” A sound half way between a groan and a tremendous hiccup interrupted his question. McIntire swung his light toward the shore. A short stone causeway ran out into the lake, leading to the spot where St. Adele's lighthouse had stood before a 1947 storm had reduced it to a pile of rubble. The causeway was bisected by an iron gate which, even in McIntire's early days here, had always been secured with a massive padlock, necessitating that anyone bent on vandalism or a romantic assignation go to the bother of stepping over its three-and-a-half-foot-high bars. From the center of the gate a dark figure hung, long arms stretched out and up, head slumped forward—a black silhouette resembling a vulture in its macabre dance celebrating death. McIntire stood mesmerized and let his light travel over the scene. One side of Marvin Wall's head had been crudely sheared, exposing sallow skin, scraped and scratched, and decorated with patches of ragged black stubble. Above his ear a quarter-sized spot of crimson glistened. McIntire moved forward as if in a dream to touch a fingertip to it. His hand came away stained and greasy. Lipstick. Lipstick had also been used to draw three parallel lines on either side of the misshapen nose, and to scrawl the word
killer
across the burlap bag that was the youth's only garment. The boy gave a snort that ended in a moan.

An echoing whimper sounded at McIntire's shoulder. He turned to see Ross Maki, eyes deep holes in his sheet-white face, transfixed with horror. That's all he needed, another unconscious kid.

“Give me a hand here.”

Ross advanced a few steps. “He's not…is he dead?”

“No, but he's not especially lively.” McIntire shoved the flashlight into Ross' hand. “What'd they do with his clothes?”

Ross didn't answer. A scraping of his coat collar indicated that he'd shaken his head.

“Put the light on him.” McIntire opened his pocket knife and cut through the shoe laces that bound Marvin Wall to the gate. The boy slumped like a sack of oats onto the path. Ross leaped back. Marvin lay in a heap, his legs scrabbling in the gravel, making running movements like a dreaming dog.

McIntire untied his own laces and removed his boots and socks. He thrust his feet back into the damp boots and slipped the socks onto Marvin Wall's icy feet. Ross finally went into action, and together they pulled Marvin into a sitting position and grappled him into McIntire's jacket, which was just about long enough to cover the bony rear. Their ministrations did not revive the boy to the point that he was able to walk, or even stand unaided, but complicated matters by giving him enough strength to struggle ineffectually against them. McIntire and Ross locked arms behind his back and, struggling to prevent the skinny frame from slipping out of the oversized coat, managed to transport him to McIntire's car.

Once installed in the Studebaker's back seat, Marvin mumbled something that sounded like
pigshit
and collapsed into snores.

McIntire turned his attention to Ross. “He could have died. He still might.”

“There's nothing wrong with him. He's just drunk.” Ross was decidedly sanguine for one who'd been on the verge of collapse himself only a few minutes earlier.

“You don't know that. And people can die from drinking too much, you know, especially if it's cold. If he'd been left out there like that, naked, he'd have never lived through the night.”

“He wasn't left. I came to get you.” Ross lifted his chin. “A damn sight more than he did for Bambi.”

“Why are you so sure Marvin Wall killed Bambi Morlen?”

“Who else? Look at all the evidence.” Ross didn't sound nearly so confident as his words made out.

“Why'd you come for me then?”

Ross' reply was eclipsed by an explosive retching from the back seat. McIntire sighed and rolled down the window.

***

A light was burning in one of Guibard's upstairs rooms, and after an extensive wait, the doctor answered the door. He was covered only by a dapper silk bathrobe.

“I hope this is one Goddamned humdinger of an emergency,” he said.

“I hope you're disappointed,” McIntire told him. “I don't know how much of an emergency it is, but I didn't know what the hell else to do with him.”

“Him?”

“Customer for you, beaten, falling down drunk, and half froze to death.”

“Bring him into my office.” Guibard slammed the door. At that instant another upstairs window began to glow. Either the doctor had some touchy wiring, or he had a guest. McIntire wished he had the luxury of time to delve into that mystery.

Ross Maki had taken the opportunity of McIntire's temporary absence to disappear. He was probably a mile down the road by now. McIntire opened the car door. Like a bear trapped in its den, Marvin Wall shrank into the opposite corner. McIntire walked around to yank open the driver's side door. He flipped the seat back forward.

“Out! Now!” The venom in the black eyes left McIntire wondering if the boy might have stabbed Bambi Morlen after all.

“Go to hell.” Marvin's words came out thickly, with little conviction.

“You're in my car. Get out of it.” That tactic proved to be an inspiration. Marvin swung his legs out. His feet touched the gravel and the rest of him slid off the seat to join them.

McIntire leaned on the warm hood of the car and contemplated the ragged heap at his feet, knobby knees scraped and bleeding, filthy with sweat, dirt, and vomit, the warpaint-smeared face. Marvin Wall was a most pathetic sight.

“Come on, son, on your feet.”

Marvin opened his eyes. He seemed to notice his lack of trousers for the first time and tugged the borrowed jacket over his knees.

“It's all right, come on.”

Marvin waved off McIntire's help and struggled to his feet. He proceeded with docility to the doctor's front door, not even protesting when McIntire lifted him bodily up the two steps. He stayed admirably on his feet, only stopping to lean against the wall twice in the trip down the short hallway to Guibard's cramped office.

He'd dropped McIntire's coat and was still erect, garbed only in his gunny sack and Leonie's hand-knit socks, when the doctor came in.