Dead Boyfriends (11 page)

The two of us forever.

 

“You wouldn't think something like this could happen here,” the woman said.

It seemed to be a recurring theme among the neighbors I had interviewed up and down the street where Merodie Davies lived.

I had started my canvass shortly after Officer Baumbach, having satisfied himself that I hadn't swiped Merodie's silverware, drove away. The stay-at-home moms were still out in force. They all seemed a little bit frightened for their children and for themselves. Out in the far suburbs, they figured they were safe—isolated from “big-city” violent crime. I couldn't imagine why they felt that way. After all, Anoka was a twenty-five-minute drive from downtown Minneapolis, and the bad guys have cars, too.

I didn't want to quote crime statistics, though. I wanted to talk about Merodie Davies. Unfortunately, most of the neighbors hadn't even known her name until she was arrested. They saw her coming and going, and for a while it seemed the cops were camped on her doorstep every other night, but during the last year or so, they weren't even sure Merodie still lived there. The mother of four across the street was convinced that Merodie had moved out. Only the neighbor living next door
to Merodie had a story to tell. She was home, nursing a broken ankle that kept her from her job.

“I broke it yesterday falling off a curb, do you believe it? I fell off a curb.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said.

“Not as sorry as I am.”

The woman ushered me into her overfurnished living room.

“Been living here long?” I asked.

“Two years. Moved in right before I divorced my husband, the prick. God, it's warm.”

“I think the word is hot.”

“I think the word is sweltering. Would you like something to drink? Pepsi? Beer?”

I declined.

“You sure? It's cold.”

In Minnesota, it's considered impolite to accept food or beverage until it's offered at least three times, but I was thirsty.

“Pepsi,” I said.

The woman said, “I'm going to have a beer.”

“Well, in that case . . . ”

Her name was Mollie Pratt, and she served Grain Belt Premium, brewed in New Ulm. It went down smooth, and I had to keep myself from gulping it.

“Yeah,” said Mollie, “I moved in two years ago next week. Paid for the house out of my settlement. I had married poorly, but I divorced real well. Anyway, at first I wondered what I was getting into, all the cops and such.”

“What do you mean?”

“That first year, seemed like the Anoka cops practically lived next door. People kept calling them because of the loud music, the loud arguments—it was always so loud. Merodie and Richard were fighting
all the time, fighting and drinking, drinking and fighting. I even called my real estate agent and said, ‘Hey, you told me this was a quiet neighborhood.' It was crazy.”

I took out my notebook.

“Tell me about Richard,” I said.

There's no special trick to conducting an interview. All it requires is a little patience, an ear for the important utterance, and the simple knowledge that to most people the sweetest possible music is the sound of their own voice.

“Richard was Merodie's boyfriend,” Mollie said. “That's all I really know about him. I don't think he had a job. He was always around, always entertaining friends. Must have been a million people in and out of his driveway. My ex, the prick, he figured Richard was dealing drugs. Sure, dealing drugs out of a split-level in Anoka. What a laugh.”

“Hysterical.”

Mollie's eyes grew wide. “You think?”

“It's certainly possible.”

Mollie didn't like the sound of that at all. She left her chair and limped to the window, fighting her cast all the way. She gazed out at Merodie's empty driveway. “You think he might have been a drug dealer?”

“You said a year?”

After a brief pause, Mollie answered, “Huh? A year? Yeah. Richard left after about a year. I didn't see him no more. Things got real quiet. You wouldn't have known anyone was even living next door.”

“Where did Richard go?”

Mollie shrugged her ignorance.

“Do you know his last name?”

Mollie shook her head.

“Richard is all I know,” she said. “I only heard it during the arguments.”

“Did you have any contact with Merodie after Richard left?”

“I never had any contact with Merodie before Richard left. Not really. It was like, ‘Hi, how you doing?' when we met on the street, which wasn't often. We didn't sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee or anything.”

“You saw her come and go.”

“Not lately. As near as I can tell, she was always in her house. She never left it.”

“Not to go shopping?”

“Well, she must go shopping, for food and stuff, you know? I just never see her.”

“The mail gets picked up.”

Mollie didn't know what to say to that.

“The lawn gets cut.”

“She must do that stuff when I'm at work. Truth is, I don't remember the last time I saw Merodie. Or Eli.”

“Eli Jefferson? The deceased?”

“Yeah. I was really bummed when I heard he died. He seemed like a nice enough guy.”

“You knew him?”

“I'll say. He hit on me. Couple of times.” Mollie smiled at the memory. “The first time was in winter. He helped me shovel the driveway, then invited himself in for hot chocolate, and then tried to invite himself into my bed. I'm saying, ‘What about Merodie,' and he's saying real dumb-ass things like, ‘What Merodie doesn't know won't hurt her.' Guy was a jerk. Charming, though. Real charming. The next time, I'm in the backyard working on my tan. I look up and there he is, grinning. He starts talking about Minnesota's scenic wonders, meaning me, right? He asks if I've seen the Split Rock Lighthouse. I say, ‘You mean up by Duluth?' He says, ‘Oh, it's much closer than that,' and then looks down at himself. I say it now and I think, God, what a jerk.
Only at the time it made me laugh. I'll tell you, though. Something I learned from my ex-husband, the prick. For some people, charm is a weapon.”

“How long did Jefferson live with Merodie?”

“I don't know. Six months?”

“Have you seen any activity at the house in the past two weeks?”

“Cops asked me the same thing. I really haven't. Last I saw of anyone over there was two weeks ago Saturday.”

“That would be . . .”

“August first, but even then all I saw was a car drive up and then leave a few minutes later.”

“What kind of car?”

“It's like I told the cops, I don't know from cars except it was black, a sports car. Now my ex, the prick, he knows cars. If he treated me as well as he treated his car . . . ”

“Did you see who drove the car?”

“Not really. It could have been anyone.”

“What time did you see the car?”

“Around noon?”

“Is that a guess?”

“I remember eating lunch and that's when I saw the car, so I figured it was around noon. It could've been later.”

We talked some more, but nothing new came of it. Mollie offered another Grain Belt, and I was tempted. Instead, I passed, telling myself that a semiprofessional private investigator wouldn't drink while on the job. I gave Mollie one of the cards I had made up. It read
R. MCKENZIE
and had my phone numbers printed on it. Mollie set the card on her table and promised if she thought of anything more, she'd call.

I returned to my Audi, still parked in front of Merodie's house. The car was broiling. The AC worked well but took time to cool the interior, so after I started the engine and turned the air-conditioning on full, I slid out of the car and shut the door behind me. While waiting for the
Audi to become habitable, I glared at Merodie's house. The stench of death was still in my nostrils, hair, and clothes and probably would be for some time to come.

I turned away from the house and looked across the lawn toward Mollie Pratt's place. For a moment I thought I saw her watching me from behind her living room drapes, but then she disappeared.

Woodbury, located southeast of St. Paul, was nearly an hour's drive from Anoka. Yet more than distance separated the two cities. Anoka was old, with a history and traditions that stretched back to 1680. Woodbury, on the other hand, was brand-spanking new—I had a Carl Yastrzemski autographed baseball that was older. It wasn't even a city when Yaz won the Triple Crown in 1967, yet it was now home to over sixty thousand residents.

The private street where Priscilla St. Ana lived served a quintet of estates that somehow all bordered on different holes of the Prestwick Golf Course. Like most of Woodbury, the five houses looked like they had all been built yesterday. I parked in front of the one with red brick, white trim, and a slate gray roof set way back from the street, only a little more pretentious than its four neighbors. It reminded me of an Italian villa, or at least what I supposed an Italian villa to look like, having never actually seen one.

I hurried along the tile walkway to the front door of the estate—I
couldn't think of it as a house—and used the bell. A doughlike woman of indeterminate age answered. She was dressed in a fawn-colored uniform and demonstrated no emotion or interest when I announced that I had an appointment to meet Priscilla St. Ana. With a curt “Wait here,” she closed the door, leaving me outside with no way of looking in. She returned a few moments later with instructions.

“Follow me, please.”

I trailed the maid into the immense house, moving through sumptuous, decorator-perfect rooms that would have caused my father to faint dead away at the excess. ‘Course, my father was a man who used the same toaster for thirty years and believed the automatic icemaker that came with the refrigerator I bought when we moved to Falcon Heights was an unnecessary luxury. I told him that since I was now filthy, stinking rich I intended to surround him with a lot of unnecessary luxuries. He fought it every day of the six months he had left to live.

The maid guided me through French doors and onto a sprawling patio of red tile and salmon-colored marble that was surrounded by lush garden flowers, a low hedge, and several trees that couldn't have been more than a few years old. In the center of the patio was a huge swimming pool, its walls and floor painted sky blue. Deck furniture of rich redwood with wide arms and lacquered patio furniture with thick cushions were mixed together and scattered around the pool in no discernible pattern.

I heard the thumping sound of a diving board and looked up just in time to see a young woman wearing a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit twisting, turning, somersaulting, straightening, and slicing into the water. An ice cube dropped into a tumbler of scotch made a bigger splash than she did.

Between the pool and the house was a round table with a glass top, an immense opened umbrella protruding from the center of it. On top of the table was a half-filled pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a single glass, also half filled. An enormous white towel was draped over
one of the chairs. The maid stopped in the shadow of the umbrella and announced, “Ms. St. Ana will be with you in a moment.”

I sat down and watched the young woman climb out of the pool. She went back to the board and made another dive and then another and another. Not once did she acknowledge my presence. After her fifth dive, she used the ladder to pull herself out of the pool and walked to the table. She reached for the towel, moving close enough for me to see that her sun-drenched skin was flawless and to smell the chlorine in her fine auburn hair. I watched her use the towel to buff her body; the swimsuit stretched tight over taunt muscles and gentle curves.

She glanced at me with chocolate-colored eyes that glittered with intelligence.

“I'm Silk,” she said.

“Yes, you are.”

“You're here to see Priscilla.”

It wasn't a question, but I answered yes just the same.

She squeezed her long tresses between the folds of the towel, breathing lightly with the effort. Beyond question, she was a lovely girl, and she looked almost exactly like her mother had in the photograph I discovered in Merodie's house—the one of Merodie holding an infant.

Silk casually tossed the towel over her shoulder and reached for the pitcher, performing each task with a fluid grace and sensuality that I usually associate with music, something by Gershwin perhaps. She filled the glass with orange juice and drank it down slowly, but I had stopped watching her long before then, turning my attention instead to a foursome of golfers lofting their second shots toward an elevated green beyond St. Ana's backyard. I knew when I was being played, and while I usually didn't mind, my inner voice kept repeating,
She's only a child.

A few minutes later a woman stepped through the French doors onto the patio. Priscilla St. Ana was handsomely approaching forty-five. Not quite as young and attractive as her air-brushed photo would suggest, I thought, but pretty enough that she could pass for younger. The
fact that she had changed her hairstyle helped. Piled high in the photo I had downloaded, it was now cut short. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt, tailored to accentuate her generous bosom and slender waist, and a long, thin black skirt with a silver buckle—two swans with necks intertwined. The skirt's front slit revealed a graceful leg.

Silk took her towel and her orange juice and moved past her as she approached the table. “Your guest,” she said as she passed.

“So I see,” Priscilla said. “Mr. McKenzie.” She extended her hand. Her eyes were neither warm nor cold, and they didn't give much away—a poker player's eyes. I shook her hand.

“Can I offer you something?” The maid seemed to materialize out of thin air behind Priscilla's shoulder. “Caroline makes an outstanding iced tea.”