Tradition of Deceit (3 page)

But … shot in the back of the head, Dobry had said. Rick never knew what hit him.

Then something else Dobry'd said penetrated, and Roelke opened his eyes again. Rick was required to use one of those call boxes to check in every hour. His mark time was ten minutes before the hour. Cops on patrol were only given a five-minute grace period to hit their mark, and sergeants got cranky if that window passed without communication. Unless Rick was wrestling a violent felon to the ground or something, he
never
missed his mark.

“So, what happened at 1:50?” Roelke asked.

“No call from Rick. The guy on the desk flashed the blue lights.”

The blue lights were on top of the call boxes. “That should have gotten Rick's attention.”

“But Rick still doesn't call in. The clerk, he's a good guy—Cox, remember him? So Cox wants to keep the sergeants out of it.” Dobry sucked one last bit of tar and nicotine from the cigarette before grinding it out on the cement pad. “He flashes the lights again, I get on the line, and he says ‘Hey, I can't roust Almirez. See if you can find him.' So … I find him.” Dobry paused.

Roelke ground his teeth again. For the love of God, if Dobry dragged this story out any longer, Roelke would throttle him. “Where?”

“In a bar.”

“Trouble on a bar check?”

“No. Roelke, Rick was having a Policeman's Coke.”

“What?”
Roelke stared at Dobry.
Policeman's Coke
was a euphemism for alcohol. “No way.”

Dobry held up his hands. “I saw Rick through the window, tossing back a cold one at the Rusty Nail.”

Roelke's eyes narrowed. Even if Rick had been off-duty, the Rusty Nail was not the kind bar he would have chosen to relax in. “Was he with somebody?”

“I don't know. I grabbed my flashlight and shined it inside to get Rick's attention.” Dobry pantomimed holding a phone to his ear, the signal for
You got to call in, NOW.
“I waited until he came out, and basically asked what the hell he was doing. He just thanked me, and said he'd go call in.” Dobry wiped a hand over his face. “That was the last time I saw him. He hit his next mark at 2:50, right on time. Nobody would have been the wiser except … you know. After Rick got shot, Cox figured he better come clean.”

“I don't see why,” Roelke snapped, although honestly, he probably would have done the same himself.

“Look,” Dobry said grimly. “You know, and
I
know, that Rick must have had a real good reason for what he did. But the sergeant—and probably now the captain and chief too—they don't necessarily see it that way.”

Roelke wouldn't have guessed that anything could be worse than what Jody had said:
He's dead, Roelke
. But this …

Dobry stared over the yard. “They kept it from the press for now, but …” He lit another cigarette and inhaled like a man in need. “If reporters discover that Rick had been tossing back a cold one earlier that night, they'll make the entire shooting look like officer error.”

Roelke's hands clenched. A growl came from somewhere deep inside. “God
damn
it!” His foot connected with the stack of flowerpots—some plastic, some clay—in a soccer kick. They flew into the yard with an obscene clatter.

“Geez.” Chloe planted her feet on the sidewalk and grabbed the chain-link security fence so she could study the enormous ruin inside—a hulk of limestone walls covered with cracked concrete, grimy and grafittied.

“Welcome to the Washburn A Mill,” Ariel said. “The whole complex was made up of ten buildings, constructed between 1866 and 1908. The museum is being planned for the A Mill, which is the largest.” She pointed to a series of cylindrical grain elevators, maybe 100 or more feet tall. “The head house on top of the elevators is five stories itself.”

Chloe shielded her eyes from the sun. Atop the head house an iconic sign spelled
GOLD MEDAL FLOUR
in huge yellow letters. “Is this where Gold Medal Flour got its start?”

“It is. And after a couple of mergers, Washburn became Washburn-Crosby Company in 1879, and then General Mills in 1928,” Ariel said mechanically. “Listen, Owen and Jay are supposed to meet us here. We should wait in the car. It's not safe to wander around alone.”

“It looks like any one of these walls might crumble at any moment,” Chloe agreed. Ariel had parked in a lane on the bank of the Mississippi River, in the industrial heart of Minneapolis. The landscape was bleak: weeds, heaps of gravel, railroad tracks, abandoned buildings, crumbles of rubble that only hinted at the industry once powered by the mighty river.

“It's not just that,” Ariel said. “This is a bad area. I know we're not far from my place, but those few miles matter. Lots of vagrants, and drug dealers and—oh
good
. There they are.”

Chloe watched two men emerge from a station wagon. The driver was a compact man with salt-and-pepper hair. His companion, a blue-jeaned beanpole in his late twenties, jumped from the passenger seat with an air of endless energy. He wore coat and gloves but no hat, displaying an untidy mess of sandy hair. Both men retrieved daypacks from the back seat before joining the women.

“Hey, guys,” Ariel said. “This is my friend Chloe Ellefson. We went through grad school together.”

The younger man offered Chloe a warm smile. “Owen Brinker-
hoff.”

His handshake was firm but not crushing. Chloe considered that a good sign. “Good to meet you, Owen. And your role on the team is … ?”

“I got involved because of a class in Historic Building Research and Documentation I took at the U of M last fall,” Owen said. “Now I'm doing an independent study, surveying the milling equipment still in the building. It's an amazing opportunity.”

“Sounds like it,” Chloe agreed, although she had no idea what kind of equipment was still in the building. Owen's enthusiasm made her want to encourage him.

The second man introduced himself as Jay Rutledge. “I'm documenting the physical condition of the structures.” Jay had thoughtful gray eyes and an air of calm competence.

“I thought Everett might join us,” Owen told Ariel. “I called his office a couple of times, but he never picked up.” He looked at Chloe. “Professor Everett Whyte specializes in industrial history. He's also my Ph.D. advisor. He knows this mill as well as anyone.”

“He's probably setting up for the exhibit opening tonight,” Jay said. He smiled at Chloe. “No problem. We can give you a tour.”

Owen waved one arm, embracing the landscape from blighted factory to harnessed river. “Everything happened because of St. Anthony Falls. Chloe, did you know it's the only waterfall along the Mississippi?”

“I did not,” Chloe confessed, humbled by the magnitude of her ignorance.

“In the US, the falls here are second in power only to Niagara,” Owen told her. “In 1874 the Washburn A Mill, the world's largest flour mill at the time, was completed. The production of a basic food item was industrialized for the first time in history. Isn't that awesome?”

“It is.”

“The mills needed cooperages, railroads, sawmills, foundries—all kinds of support industries. Immigrants poured into Minneapolis for the jobs.” Owen pointed downriver. “We should drive past Bohemian Flats later. There used to be a whole neighborhood crammed on a floodplain between the river and the bluffs. It was a place for immigrants to get started, and it became quite a vibrant and close-knit community.”

“A bridge went in right over the neighborhood,” Ariel added. “Wealthy Yankees would stop on the bridge and stare down like tourists. They thought Bohemian Flats was quaint.”

“So they could gawk without getting their shoes muddy,” Chloe said dryly. “I would like to see the place. I work at an outdoor ethnic museum, but we pretty much stick to the farmstead and crossroads village experience.” Something about the notion of a come-and-gone community at Bohemian Flats called to her. After spending so much time considering the lives of immigrants who settled in rural areas, it was intriguing to consider the people who'd made a different choice.

Three
May 1878

Magdalena stood knee-deep in
the Mississippi River, waiting for a log to drift within reach and dreaming of hats. One day, she thought, I shall own a hat. Perhaps a bonnet, covered with silk and adorned with ribbons. Or perhaps something woven from straw, with a perky brim and a cluster of artificial flowers. Either would be glorious.

Although she purposefully stood with her back to the bridge, she sensed the sightseers high above her. The city's well-to-do often promenaded to the bridge to literally look down on the immigrants making their home on the low tableland cradled by a bend in the river. Magdalena knew that if she did peek, she'd be able to make out the silhouettes of parasols against the setting sun—and hats.

She smoothed the kerchief knotted beneath her chin. She'd covered her hair this way back in central Poland, and on the ship across the Atlantic, not yet knowing that her black headscarf would represent her
otherness
. She lived in the community the Yankees called the Cabbage Patch, or Little Connemara, or Bohemian Flats. Magdalena suspected that the Yankee women up there knew very little about the Flats. She'd never seen anyone wearing a stylish bustle dress actually descend the seventy-nine steps that separated the Flats from the rest of Minneapolis. She only knew about the nicknames because the weary men who ate and slept at her boardinghouse told her.

“Mama?”

Magdalena turned and felt the sun rise in her heart. “Yes, Frania?” She'd named her daughter Franciszka, but the diminutive endearment was sweeter.

The four-year-old on the bank pointed proudly to a small pile of sticks nearby. “See?”

“Good girl,” Magdalena called. “Keep looking, all right? I need to wait a little longer. We're almost out of firewood.” And food. And money. But—one thing at a time.

Frania renewed her search, and Magdalena turned back to the river. The evening smelled of muck and wood smoke. The last feeble rays of spring sunshine slipped away from the worn wool shawl knotted over her shoulders. She should head to the boardinghouse soon; she wanted to make soup for the men trudging down from the flour mills. But she'd let her woodpile get dangerously low, and she needed to salvage one good log before heading home.

Life had been easier when her brother Dariusz was alive. They'd immigrated together, among the first Russian Poles to settle in Minneapolis. She'd considered his ill-suppressed disgust about her swelling belly the price for her escape—from the clacking tongues in their tiny village, from the disappointment in her mother's eyes, from the sharp words of rejection from the boy she'd expected to marry. Most of all she needed to escape her father's brother, with his sour-beer breath and grabbing hands and boots caked with pig manure. He'd left those boots on when, three weeks before her fifteenth birthday, he'd shoved her down in the straw stack and jerked his trousers to his knees, grunting like one of his boars. Three months later, she knew the life she'd planned was gone. When Dariusz suggested they emigrate, she'd agreed at once.

After the grueling trip, she and Dariusz had settled here in the Flats and moved into an abandoned shack right on the Mississippi. Dariusz found work in one of the lumber mills by St. Anthony Falls. Magdalena had scrubbed the shanty and declared it open for boarders, eager to contribute and determined to raise well the infant who'd been born halfway across the ocean. Seven weeks later, two strangers knocked on the door—the Irish foreman from the lumber mill and a Polish sawyer who understood a bit of English and tried to translate. Magdalena hadn't understood all of their babble—and she didn't want to—but she did grasp that her brother had been killed in a sawmill accident.

“Mama!”
Frania pointed upriver, quivering with excitement.

Jerked from her memories, Magdalena saw a stray log, escaped from one of the mills, floating near the shore. A couple of planks bobbed against it. Magdalena's eyes narrowed with determination. Firewood
and
lumber. With enough planks she could build an addition onto their home. She was tired of stepping over snoring men when she made her way to the stove at first light every day.

As the log floated closer, Magdalena slogged into deeper water, almost hobbled as her heavy wool skirt soaked through. I must do this, she thought, suppressing a shiver. She carried a long staff with a crotch on the end and waited until just the right moment before snagging the log and pulling it closer. She wrapped one arm around the log, pivoted, and thrust it straight toward shore with enough speed to lodge on the bank.

Frania clapped her hands. “Stay back!” Magdalena ordered her daughter sharply, before turning and floundering after the planks. She managed to wrestle them from the current as well and staggered to shore, soaked but satisfied.

Then she glanced at her daughter and felt fear. Frania's bony little wrists poked from an old dress. Her cheeks were hollow, which made her dark eyes look huge.

Magdalena sagged, hands on wet knees. She was tired. So very tired.

Then she straightened her spine and set her shoulders.
Tired
was a luxury she could not afford. I must go to the flour mill tonight, Magdalena thought. Even if the idea made her want to weep.

Four

“Ready for a tour?”
Jay asked. “Watch your step.” He unlocked a gate in the security fence and led the way over abandoned railroad tracks to a door made of rusty corrugated metal. “This way.”

Ariel zipped up her coat. Owen turned on a powerful flashlight, and they all stepped inside. “Take a moment to let your eyes adjust.”

Chloe heard water dripping, and a cold dampness leached through her parka. The building exhaled something stale and stagnant. Dim yellow light leaked through grimy windows as Owen and Jay played their flashlight beams over the vast floor. Concrete pillars with surprisingly graceful lines rose from broken bricks, limestone rubble, twisted bits of metal, and rusty machines. The mill's enormity felt overwhelming.

“This was the packing floor,” Owen explained. “In the 1880s, men packed barrels that held almost two hundred pounds of flour. This mill produced four thousand barrels of flour every day.”

“That's amazing,” Chloe murmured, distracted by the necessity of considering this space. She had perceived sensory echoes in old buildings since she was a child, and energy still lingered in the mill. In this place she sensed the busyness, the vibrating pulse of industry, the jumble of human beings who'd once walked this floor.

And within the faint hodgepodge of emotions resonating through time, she sensed a thread of fear. Chloe tried to hide a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold air clenched within thick stone walls. She understood better, now, why Ariel didn't like coming here alone.

“We're not cops!” Jay hollered. His words echoed.

“Who are you talking to?” Chloe asked.

“Anyone who might be listening. This place is a magnet for winos, runaways, drug dealers … Last week I chased out two ten-year-old girls playing hooky. The fence and door locks don't do much good, not with so many broken windows.”

“Not to mention the sewer tunnels,” Owen added. When Chloe gave him a dubious glance, he shrugged. “It's how some of the kids get in. They like to run around and drop smoke bombs down the empty grain bins.”

Chloe could imagine this place beckoning anyone wanting to find shelter, fade from sight, or get rowdy. She sincerely hoped that no one expected Ariel to patrol the sewers.

As they moved into the building, the men aimed their lights along the walls and into corners. Amid the ruin were surprising splashes of vivid color—graffiti painted on the cracking walls. Jay sighed when the light found a couple of ratty old sleeping bags, neatly folded and shoved into a corner beside grocery bags and a cardboard box. “Unfortunately Minneapolis does not have facilities for our population of homeless people,” he told Chloe. “Most of the people who come here have nowhere else to sleep.”

That explained the faint stink of urine mixed with mice droppings and decay. Sad to think this is their best option, Chloe thought.

“Let's climb up to the top of the wheat house,” Jay suggested. “The stairs are safe.”

“Just don't touch anything,” Owen cautioned. “A chunk of concrete might fall from the walls.”

Chloe obligingly thrust her hands into her pockets.

Owen provided commentary as they went. She wanted to ask questions, but the climb shortened her breath and she didn't want to sound like a worn-out weenie.

When they finished the ascent, an eruption of movement and sound shoved her pounding heart into her throat. Pigeons disturbed by the intruders noisily fled through broken windows. Pigeon poop and feathers covered the floor, and the air stank of ammonia. Geez Louise, Chloe thought, this is not the gig for Ariel.

Jay scribbled a note on his clipboard. “We've got to get this area cleaned up before Friday.”

Owen didn't seem to notice. “The story begins with wheat arriving from farms all over the Upper Midwest and Great Plains. Imagine: in the mill's heyday, seventy-six boxcars of wheat arrived every single day.” He paused expectantly.

“That's a lot of wheat,” Chloe agreed.

Jay led the way into a room on the south side of the narrow building. A huge metal monster that made Chloe think of a rusty octopus dominated the space. Sunlight filtering faintly through a high row of small windows showed ample evidence of more pigeon parties.

“We're on the eighth floor of the wheat house,” Owen said. “Grain arrived with stones, dirt, iron filings from the train cars, bugs, mouse poop—”

This is
so
not the gig for Ariel, Chloe thought.

“—and it came into the wheat house to be cleaned. The head miller chose the mix to grind every day. Different batches of wheat had different protein levels, but each barrel or sack of flour had to be blended to produce identical results.”

“It is
essential
to watch your step in here.” Jay's flashlight beam lingered on scattered metal trapdoors in the floor. “We haven't had a chance to weld the hatches shut. I suspect they've been used to dump trash, and last year some frat boys decided to haze their newbies by making them rappel down through one of them.”

“Where do they lead?” Chloe asked.

“Each of those trapdoors in the floor leads into a nine-story storage bin that held twenty thousand pounds of grain.”

“Sometimes wheat seeds would stick together in a bin,” Owen added soberly. “A worker would climb down a rope with a shovel or pitchfork to break up the clog. The guy was supposed to stay on the rope, but so many men were killed that the mill owner started insisting they wear harnesses.”

“Falling on grain is like falling into quicksand,” Jay added. “Every movement makes you sink.”

Chloe was starting to think that this was not a gig for her, either.

“There are stories of men dying in these bins well into the twentieth century,” Owen said. “Some suffocated. But even if a guy got buried just up to his waist, he'd have eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch against his legs. It would have been impossible to pull him out.”

Ariel, standing with shoulders hunched and arms crossed, gave Chloe a look:
Isn't this just loads of fun?

Chloe stepped closer to the wall. Even standing on top of a bin felt creepy. “Are the bins empty now?”

“Most are,” Jay said. “We haven't crawled through everything yet, though. I wouldn't be surprised if one or two still do hold grain.”

Chloe hoped that one day exhibits might help visitors reflect on the inherent danger of working at a mill. But right this minute, she really didn't need hear any more about it. “What's the octopus thingie?” She gestured to the apparatus that took up most of the room: a round structure that reached from ceiling to about six feet above the floor. Rectangular chutes angled down from that central bin.

“This is the turn head distributor,” Owen said, patting the metal beast with affection. “Millers used those metal chutes to distribute grain from a conveyor into the bins. Those sliding doors you see about knee level in each chute allowed workers to check for proper grain flow.”

Jay stepped closer to one of the chutes, eyes slightly narrowed. This man knows the mill, Chloe thought. She'd seen that look before—in their passion to document and preserve old buildings, architectural historians came to know every cracked brick, every sloping floorboard, every corroding scrap of metal.

Ariel stepped closer too and studied the square metal door in the nearest chute. “That was open last time I was here,” she said, interrupting Owen's enthusiastic description of bolters, middlings, and endosperm.

Owen shrugged. “Probably some homeless guy hiding his stuff. Once I found a knapsack tucked away in one of the chutes. Somebody had hammered out a corner of a metal plate so it made a hook.”

“With luck it's just a bundle of clothes and blanket.” Jay sighed. “But if someone's stashed their baggies of crack in here, we'll need to call the cops.”

“Maybe we should call the cops anyway,” Ariel suggested uneasily.

Chloe nodded, not keen on the idea of some crazed cocaine dealer wandering in while the history nerds were examining the goods.

But Jay clasped the handle. The door moved with a reluctant, rusty groan of protest. He leapt backwards.
“Christ!”

Chloe instinctively craned her head to look. Don't
do
that! came some voice in her brain, but too late. She'd already seen that the grain chute, which should have been empty, was stuffed. All that showed in the little open space was the head and shoulders of a man. A man who was quite obviously dead.

She pressed one hand over her stomach, fighting nausea, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “What … who … ”

But Ariel was screaming hysterically, and no one could hear.

Jody slid open the patio door about three seconds after Roelke punted flowerpots all over the Almirez family's back yard. She studied the debris. “Wish I'd thought of that,” she said. “Thanks for coming, Dobry.”

Dobry hugged her. “God, Jody, I'm so sorry.”

“I know.” Jody wiped her eyes. “Roelke, could you take me home? Rick's parents are dear, but I can't—I just … ”

“Let's go.”

Once in the truck, Jody leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Roelke was relieved. Dobry's words echoed in his brain:
Malloy says Rick screwed up
.

No way, Roelke thought. Rick didn't make dumb mistakes, and he sure as hell didn't drink on the job. So … what the devil
had
happened?

Jody didn't open her eyes until Roelke parked in front of her apartment building. “Thank you, Roelke. After I got the news, I didn't know what to do except call you.”

“You need anything, Jody, you just call.”

She squeezed his hand.

“Jody … did you talk to Rick at all after he went to work last night? Did he mention what he was working on? Anything un-
usual?”

“He did call me, a little after one a.m.” Jody began shredding a tissue. “There's a payphone in the lobby of an apartment building. He can see a call box across the street, but it's unlikely that a sergeant would spot him there. He said he wanted to hear my voice, tell me that he loved me.”

“Did he usually call?”

Jody drew in a shuddery breath. “He—we—Roelke, after we got home from the wedding last night, Rick asked me to marry him.”

Something brittle beneath Roelke's ribs splintered into a thousand pieces.
I'm hanging on to Jody,
Rick had said
. You better hang on to Chloe too, dumbass
. And what had he done? He'd gotten in his truck and picked a fight with her.

Pain made Roelke realize he was gripping the steering wheel way too hard. He
was
a dumbass, he really was, but he couldn't think about Chloe right now.

“I didn't know,” he said. “At least you know he really loved you.” Rick had never said
love
when talking about Jody. At least that wasn't surprising, Roelke thought. Guys like Rick and him didn't really use that word.

He turned to Jody. “Did Rick say anything about the shift? Calls? Anything?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. I asked how the night was going. ‘Okay,' he said.”

Not a whole lot there to go on.

“There was just one more thing,” Jody said. “I think somebody asked him something—I couldn't hear what they said or who it was—and Rick said he was about to do a bar check. Then he said ‘I gotta go' to me, and that was it.”

“Did Rick mention a tavern by name?”

“No.”

Roelke tapped his thumb on the steering wheel. Bar checks, walking the beat. Typical Friday night.

“Everybody from the department is being nice. Chief Bliss called Rick a hero. But I heard some whispers.” Jody stared straight ahead.

Malloy says Rick screwed up
. Roelke cursed whoever had done that whispering in the Almirez living room.

“Rick would
never
drink on duty,” she insisted.

“I know.”

After a long moment she said, “They said it was quick. Are they lying? Trying to protect me?” Her voice broke. “Oh God, Roel­ke, what if Rick didn't die right away? I can't bear to think of him hurt, lying there—”

“
Don't
. Dobry said Rick never knew what hit him. And Jody, the district is all over this.
Everybody
liked Rick, and cops go a little crazy when they lose one of their own.”

She nodded.

Roelke held her gaze. “And I swear to God, Jody, if the local guys don't find out who is responsible, I will.”

“You're a good friend.” Jody managed the ghost of a smile. “Thanks for being there for me today, but I need to be alone now. You go on home. Spend some time with Chloe.”

“Chloe's in Minneapolis.”

“Oh. Well, call her then.” Jody kissed his cheek and got out of the truck.

Roelke watched until Jody was safely inside. He
could
call Chloe. He wanted to hear her voice. Still …

Don't be a dumbass, McKenna.

Still, he had more to do before leaving Milwaukee. Chloe was off having fun with her friend. Calling Chloe could wait.