Dead Boyfriends (18 page)

“Only, couple days later they find the guy dead. Drove his car off the road in a snowstorm, passed out in the car. Fucker dies of carbon monoxide. Who's to blame? Him? Fuck no. The woman, whatever the fuck happened to her? No way. The goddamn blizzard? Uh-uh. Me.” Piotrowski poked himself in the chest. “I'm the guy. I killed him. Shit.”

During the brief pause that followed, I asked, “This was sixteen years ago. How come you remember it so well?”

“Cuz I got my ass sued, that's why. You want another one?” He was pointing at my empty glass. I had another one.

“Bitch sued me for wrongful death,” Piotrowski continued after he poured my beer. “A kid. Fuck. A sixteen-year-old kid sued me, claimed that this St. Ana fucker was the father of her child. She's suing me on behalf of this child wasn't even born yet. I get pissed just thinking about it.”

“Do you remember the woman who picked up St. Ana?”

“No, it was a busy night and I wasn't payin' attention. Christ, it would've saved my ass if I knew who she was.”

“Do you remember what she looked like?”

“A looker—a looker with long dark reddish hair. That's all I ‘member.”

“Not Merodie Davies?”

“Know what? That was my first thought, cuz the kid, she had the hair. ‘Cept my lawyers said it couldn't be, insisted the kid didn't even have a fucking driver's license. I mean, shit.”

You were only fourteen when your father taught you how to drive a stick on the dirt roads Up North,
my inner voice reminded me, but I didn't say.

Piotrowski paused for a moment to catch his breath, then started up again. “I wanted to fight, that's what I told my insurance company. ‘Let's go to court,' I said. Not them pussies. They say, first, they only have my word that there really was a woman, like I made it up, right? Like I shoulda fucking asked her name, right? Shit. Then they say putting a sixteen-year-old unwed mother on the witness stand, crying all over the fucking place over this guy what was supposed to marry her and raise the baby, that's what they call a ‘no-win proposition.' So they settle out of court. Eighty-five thousand bucks, and me with a twenty percent deductible. Fuck. That's all I can say. Why you want to know all this shit for, anyway?”

“The woman, the kid who sued you . . .”

“Merodie fucking Davies,” Piotrowski said.

“She's in jail on a murder charge.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, good,” Piotrowski said.

 

 

Vonnie Lou Lowman, Eli Jefferson's sister, lived in a small, split-level house in New Brighton, a suburb just north of Minneapolis. The doors and windows of her house were closed and the drapes drawn, giving the place a murky look. Apparently, Vonnie Lou thought her efforts would keep the heat at bay. I admit, it was a few degrees cooler inside, yet the back of my shirt stuck to me just the same.

Vonnie Lou offered Dr. Pepper, which I accepted greedily. The beers I had at the Ski Shack were working on me, and I didn't want to be sloshed when I met Benny.

“No. No. No possible way.” Vonnie Lou answered my first question. “I'm not just saying that because he's my brother, either. Eli would never have abused Merodie, would never have hit her. I don't know who told you that, but it's just not true. He was the most good-natured man you would ever hope to meet. Sweet as honey, I'm not kidding. He liked women. Believe me.”

“Were you and your brother close?”

Vonnie Lou smiled at the thought. “We had our ups and downs,” she said. “Like I told you, he was a sweet man. He liked his liquor though, and when he drank he did stupid things. Not mean things, or dangerous things. Just stupid.”

“Like sleeping with other women?” I asked.

Vonnie Lou nodded her head then, sipped her pop. “This time I thought it would work out for Merodie,” she said. “I really did. Merodie hasn't had a whole lot of luck with men.”

“So I've been led to believe.”

“They've either turned out to be assholes or they died on her.”

“Let's talk about that. I know about St. Ana.”

“Robert St. Ana, the guy who got her pregnant. That was before my time, before I met Merodie.”

“Did Merodie ever talk about him?”

“Not really, although from what she did say, I guess he wasn't exactly the nicest guy in the world. Beat on her some, Merodie said. Did other things. Then he got her pregnant and wouldn't marry her. The way I figure it, the best thing that could have happened to Merodie was him dying like he did.”

“What about Becker?”

“Brian Becker?”

“Is that his name?”

“If we're talking about the same guy, yeah. Brian Becker. Him I did know. He used to live with Merodie. He was—God, what a creep. You heard he abused Merodie? That's no lie. Slapped her around, called her names—he did it in public, too. We all told Merodie to get rid of him, told her he was no good, but she stood by him. I don't know why. He treated her place like it was his. Drove her car. Took money from her. The day he died—I'll tell you how much of a jerk he was. The day we heard that Becker died, we all went out and partied.”

“How did he die?” I asked.

“He died from being stupid, that's how. You know what happened? He went out drinking without Merodie, but driving Merodie's car. He drove back to the house, pressed the button on the remote to open the garage door, drove into the garage, parked the car but didn't turn it off, closed the garage door, passed out, still in the car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Merodie found him the next morning and called the police. The cops wrote it down as an accident. Personally, I think it was divine intervention. God decided Becker was just too stupid to live.”

“What about Richard?” I asked.

“Richard Nye?” Vonnie Lou spat the name. “Another jerk. He used to live with Merodie, too. I swear, Merodie attracted them like ants to sugar, you know? This one, Nye, he sold crystal meth right out of Merodie's living room, I swear to God. Beat Merodie up when she told him to stop. Last I heard he was doing time.”

“For dealing drugs?”

“Yeppers.”

I made a note in my book and asked, “Did Merodie turn him in?”

“You're damn right, she did.” There was pride in Vonnie Lou's voice. “I'll tell you what happened. Richard attacked Merodie in her own home, and in self-defense, Merodie hit him over the head with a softball bat.”

The instant she said “softball bat” I recognized that this was the missing piece G. K. Bonalay had been looking for, the reason the Anoka County attorney was pushing a murder charge against Merodie.
It would seem to indicate
—my inner voice was choosing its words carefully—
a propensity toward violence and possibly even an MO since Merodie used the same weapon
—
the bat
—
on both victims.

“Merodie hit him with the bat,” Vonnie Lou continued, “and Richard broke her jaw. They both ended up in the hospital, only Richard was there for a night and Merodie was there for nearly a week. She complained to the cops, but it was one of those he said/she said deals. A domestic matter, one guy called it. As far as the cops were concerned, it was
both
of their faults.”

“What did they fight over, do you recall?”

“Silk.”

“Merodie's daughter?”

“Yeah. See, Merodie has this fantasy that Silk is coming back to live with her, that one day she's just going to just show up, suitcase in hand, or something like that, which is never, ever going to happen.”

“Why not?”

“Silk has been living with her aunt all these years and she doesn't come by, not ever. Maybe it's the aunt's doing, I can't say. I've known Merodie for, God, at least ten years, probably more, and I've never met Silk, never even seen her except for these photographs that Merodie has that are really old. I mean, it's just not going to happen—Silk moving back. At least I can't see it. Only Merodie believes, okay? So when she
learned that Richard had been dealin' out of her house, she freaked out, told him that she wouldn't allow drugs in the same house as Silk. Richard laughed at her, and one thing led to another.

“Anyway, there was no way Merodie was going to let Richard get away with what he did to her—laughing at her, beating her. Right before she left the hospital she called the cops and burned him. Burned him right down to the ground. He was already in custody by the time she got home.”

Vonnie Lou was smiling—perhaps she always smiled—but her melodic voice suddenly grew hard and cold.

“Merodie, she's one of the nicest people you're ever going to meet,” she said. “I love her to death. I mean it. She almost never gets angry at anyone or anything, but when she does get angry—you know what? You don't want to make Merodie angry.”

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery was housed just inside the Regis Center for Art in the West Bank Arts Quarter—at least that's what the colorful banners hanging from the light posts along Twenty-first Avenue called the area. It was near O. Meredith Wilson Library as Benny had promised, on that part of the University of Minnesota campus known as the West Bank because it was located on the western shore of the Mississippi River. I had gone to the U, mostly on the East Bank. Graduated cum laude, thank you very much. Yet all this was new to me. I remembered the library and, now that I saw it, the Rarig Theater. I also remembered the Viking Bar on Nineteenth and Riverside. The rest—Barker Center for Dance, Ted Mann Concert Hall, Ferguson Hall, the parking ramp that I would have used if I had known it was there—when did all that happen?

You really should start paying attention to the alumni magazine,
my inner voice told me.

A sign on an easel outside the entrance to the gallery read
WELCOME
MFA SHOW
. I presumed MFA meant master of fine art and this was an exhibit of the students' work. Probably Benny had a sibling or a friend in the show.

I didn't know what to expect when I entered the gallery—a handful of elegantly dressed patrons examining the exhibits while waiters passed among them with trays of champagne and hors d'oeuvres, I suppose. What I found was a pulsating throng of supporters, half kids around twenty-five and younger and the other half adults about fifty and older. Most were attired as if it were ninety-five degrees outside; I felt overdressed in black jeans and a black silk sports jacket. The crowd moved in a counterclockwise swirl, not unlike a hurricane, from one large room to another. I went with the flow.

There wasn't much that interested me. One artist—and I use the term loosely—had built a model of a very narrow building that had a facade like the State Capitol. There was a silhouette of a man painted on the wall at the end of a long corridor inside the building and another painted on the wall at the other end. A much shorter corridor intersected the building in the middle. I'm sure it all meant something, I just didn't know what.

Another artist exhibited a loop of photographs of ordinary women going about their everyday lives on a computer screen. I couldn't detect what linked them together except, well, they were all photographs of ordinary women going about their everyday lives.

The four walls of the next room each held a single huge photograph of—I'm not making this up—a wall. The walls in the photographs seemed to be from an empty motel room or possibly an efficiency apartment. Three of the walls were blank. The fourth framed a small window and an air conditioner. Taken together I suppose you could argue that the photographs were meant to depict the emptiness of our lives, yet all I saw was a room badly in need of furniture, not unlike my own house.

I was beginning to think that Benny had brought me there as a test of character. If I went screaming out of the gallery—and don't think I
hadn't considered it—then I just wasn't the man for her. I sucked it up and kept moving, all the while searching for her.

I didn't find Benny, but I did find an exhibit that I actually enjoyed—a series of woodcuts printed on silk. The prints were thirty inches wide and five feet high and hung from the ceiling in pairs, the images overlapping each other. One in particular I found fascinating. Looking at it from the front, I saw a hungry wolf stalking a woman who was on her hands and knees and drinking from a mountain pool. Stepping around and studying it from behind, the woman appeared to be stalking the unsuspecting wolf. After examining it for a few moments, I noticed that the face of the wolf and the woman morphed into one.

I discovered a title card that accompanied the wolf-woman. It read
PORNO WOLF GIVES ME A STOMACHACHE, B. ROSAS.
I decided right then that artists should not be allow to title their own work.

An arm looped around my arm. Benny's voice said, “What do you think?”

“Beautiful,” I said.

She stepped back and spun in a small circle. Her full red cotton skirt swirled around tanned legs; a black fitted linen jacket embroidered with red flowers was tight around her torso. The jacket had three buttons, but only the middle button was fastened.