Hunter’s Dance (14 page)

As she pulled out the scrap of carpet that covered the truck bed and carried it to the clothesline, she whistled a little tune.

XXI

No one, you know, worships unpunished the god of wisdom.

“She's back.”

McIntire stuck a pencil between the pages, closed his book, and regarded his wife's flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Her newswoman's face. “That doesn't surprise me a hell of a lot,” he said, “but I didn't realize that she'd gone.”

“No, not
her
. Bonnie Morlen has come back, and her husband, too, I reckon. She's moved into the Ford mansion and she's brought along one Mr. Melvin Fratelli.” Leonie paused on the verge of an old-fashioned swoon. “He's a private detective from
New York City!”

“A private eye? That should make quite a scoop for you. You'd better hotfoot it over to welcome her with a pie or something before Beckman beats you to it.”

“I have done, actually. You'll be having cheese for dessert tonight.” Her voice deflated, and she placed the bulky parcel she had been clutching to her chest gently on the table. “And to no good purpose. When Mrs. Morlen discovered I'm married to you, she wouldn't let me past the entrance hall. And frankly,” she added, “for a place that calls itself a mansion, it's not much of a hall.”

McIntire doubted that Henry Ford would be allowed to own a home not deemed a mansion whatever the condition of its front hall. “I wouldn't know about that,” he said, “but it's a pretty strange choice regardless. Why not just stay at the Club? It's been years since anybody's lived in that house. Matter of fact, I don't know that it's ever been lived in. Their modest little fishing club has everything anyone could possibly want and more.”

“Except telephones,” Leonie said. “And it is pretty isolated. Any day now they could get snowed under 'til June. But from what I've heard, once the Club members got a look at Papa Feldman, they decided the Morlens probably weren't their kind of people. Wendell received a rapid demotion from guest to hired help.”

The canceled stamps on Leonie's package were testimony to the source of her information. McIntire had to admit that things might move along faster with Nick Thorsen as the detective.

“You might have casually mentioned that you also put in a few years married to a man who wasn't the Club sort,” he told her. “Mrs. Morlen might have overlooked the fact that your current husband is the town snoop.”

“Believe me, I tried, but I couldn't come up with a way to work it into the conversation on such short notice.” Leonie removed her hat and stroked its improbably blue feathers. “I don't think it's your snoopiness that's bothering her. Before she chucked me out the door she said her detective would be coming to see you.”

“What is the problem then?”

Leonie shrugged. “I've not the foggiest. She was all graciousness when she came to the door, but the minute she heard my name, she said I simply had to excuse her, because she needed to frost a cake, like it was a dire emergency.”

“So you sacrificed a blackberry pie for nothing.” McIntire plunged into the depths of gloom.

“Don't remind me! That pie represented about fourteen hours of hard labor, not to mention the scratches and bug bites.” Leonie's aspect brightened when she turned her attention to snipping the string from the brown paper-wrapped box. A delivery from Montgomery Wards.

“You finally get some Wellie boots?” McIntire asked.

“Not quite.” Leonie grinned and spread aside the tissue to reveal a pair of heavily engraved high-heeled western boots, remarkably similar to those sported by Pete Koski when election time drew near.

“Going into politics?”

“Just going riding.” Leonie kicked off her pumps and, with the aid of a grimace or two, tugged the stiff boots onto her feet. She did a quick turn to the kitchen door and executed a tap dance on the linoleum. “How do I look?”

The boots were brown with spangled cutouts and squared-off pointy toes. In her blue flowered dress, Leonie looked like Annie Oakley on washday. McIntire responded with, “How do they feel?”

“Smashing.” Leonie sat again. “They may need a bit of breaking in.” She extended both feet and flexed her ankles. “You're probably wondering how much they cost.”

The question had crossed McIntire's mind.

“Fifteen dollars and some odd cents.”

McIntire hoped he managed to keep his expression bland. It was roughly half his weekly retirement pay. Not that it mattered. Leonie had money of her own. He'd often wondered how much. That not-the-Club-sort husband had done okay. He'd been well enough off to fly his own airplane, not something McIntire had ever envied him, since it was that piloting experience that led to his being the second of Leonie's husbands to lose his life in a war.

“I wanted to get some for Chuckie, too,” Leonie said, “but children's feet grow so fast, and shipping is so slow. By the time he got them they might already be too small.” Her eyes took on the wistful glaze that always accompanied a mention of one of her grandchildren. “I'll send a hat.” She poked the frayed spine of the three-inch-thick volume under McIntire's hand. “What's this?”

“I had it sent from the university library in Marquette.” He flipped the cover so she could read,
Neolithic Peoples of the Western Hemisphere
, by M. Gordon Hannah.

“To what purpose?”

“Trephination, or, more accurately,
trepanation
.”

“Which is?”

“Drilling a hole in the skull. As in brain surgery, or as practiced by various primitive peoples of the earth, including certain Indian tribes of,” he swept his hand over the chapter heading, “Central and South America.”

“This is neither Central nor South America.”

“No, but curiously, some of the scarce evidence of North American natives engaging in the ritual has been found right here in Michigan.”

“Does it mention any names?”

McIntire laughed. “It was a long time ago, a couple of thousand years, and it's not a tradition among any modern tribes.”

“So far as Mr. Hannah knows.”

“I'm not looking for any ancient skull drilling cult among the Walls. But whoever tried to make that hole in Bambi Morlen's head must have known about this procedure.”

Leonie went back to admiring her feet as she asked, “But is there some connection between the hole in Bambi Morlen's skull and the Walls or any other Indians? Would those ancient people have done it to young men? Was it a means of killing people? Some sort of sacrifice? What was the original purpose?”

“Well, my dear, that's the big question. M. Gordon here seems to think it was to let out evil spirits, or maybe let good ones in. Sometimes it appeared to be therapeutic, following injury, say. The patient did survive quite often. Other times it was done after death. Like it was with Bambi Morlen.”

“So Bambi's murderer did him the favor of letting out the evil spirits after he died?”

“Tried to. He didn't finish the job.” McIntire closed the volume with a thud. “Adam Wall's been putting an awful lot of energy into, as his father puts it, learning to be Indian. His last years in the army he had plenty of time for reading. He could have stumbled onto something about this.” He slapped the book. He couldn't bring himself to mention that Adam Wall was also the source of his introduction to the term trepanation. “Well,” he said, “somebody knows about it. That's for sure. And then there's that Indian tobacco.”

“Is that for certain?”

“It is. Guibard got some of the test results back yesterday. They confirmed an alkaloid substance that would be the same as that in
Lobelia inflata
.”

“Is that something Indians actually use?” Leonie asked.

“I don't know,” McIntire said. “Guibard says somebody named Sadie LaPrairie did. LaPrairie is a fairly common Indian name. Maybe it doesn't matter, if the common name connects it to Indians.”

“But that's exactly why it does matter. If it's something generally used by the Indians in the here and now, then it turning up here could point to an Indian culprit. But if it's not, if Indian tobacco is simply some old name that stuck, then whoever used it could be trying to frame an Indian.”

Frame.
Leonie had been listening to
Boston Blackie
again. “Or maybe it could be an Indian wanting to make a point,” McIntire said.

“I'll get you some fresh.” Leonie stood up and reached for the cold coffee pot. “John, you don't have to do this, you know. You can just forget about it and get back to Gösta.”

McIntire pushed his chair from the table and turned to his wife. “I hate to admit this, Leonie, but my first thought when I saw that poor boy's body was, ‘Thank God, it's not one of us this time.' And for some reason I figured if the victim was a stranger, we'd get lucky and the murderer would be, too. I'm not at all sure that'll turn out to be the case.”

“Well,” she put a hand on his shoulder and leaned to kiss the top of his head, “maybe you can leave it to that detective. He doesn't know
anybody
.”

As if waiting in the wings, a slowing engine and scraping gears sounded from the direction of the mailbox. McIntire turned to the window. Daniel Feldman's Morgan pulled into view, gave three hops and jolted to a stop. The mud it had collected in its travels with Bambi had been washed away, and areas not coated with rust were waxed to a gleam that would have done Inge Lindstrom proud. The driver, who could only be the imported private detective, stepped nimbly out, smoothed the lap of his brown serge suit, and looked around. He made a few notations on a small pad while staring down Leonie's brown leghorn rooster, then pocketed the pad and pen, and strode to the front door, glancing back toward the strutting fowl at prudent intervals.

McIntire stepped outside. “Ah, Mr. Fratelli, we've been expecting you.” Rather than being impressed with McIntire's powers of deduction, Fratelli only smiled stiffly and shook the extended hand, no doubt accepting as his due that his reputation, and name, would have preceded him.

McIntire led the detective to the dining room, shoved
Neolithic Indians
aside and invited him to a seat at the table. Recalling every P.I. movie he'd ever seen, he offered his guest a choice of coffee or scotch. A begging-dog look came into the gray eyes, but the response was, “Coffee'd be fine,” and the man got right down to business. “I've been engaged by Wendell Morlen to investigate his son's murder.”

McIntire nodded.

“I understand that Bambi Morlen was kidnapped, stabbed, and poisoned, and that the body was mutilated.”

McIntire nodded again. Put that way, it sounded positively tawdry.

“And no progress has been made in finding the killer?” He had a radio announcer's voice, smooth and unaccented. His name should have been
Smith
or
Jones
.

McIntire added a splash of the whisky to his own coffee and took a sip. It wasn't tasty, but he wanted to show this city boy the kind of people he was dealing with. “You'd probably be able to get more information from the sheriff or the state police,” he said. “They're handling the investigation.”

“But the sheriff is miles away. You live right here. You know these people.”

“I live here right enough, but the Morlens don't. Before this happened, I'd never met any of them.”

Fratelli was undeterred. “I mean you know the others involved, the ones who might be considered suspects. And,” he ran an unremarkable hand over his medium brown hair, “I thought you might be able to tell me where I could get a Geiger counter.”

“A Geiger counter? So far as I know they're no help at all at detecting murderers.”

Fratelli's indulgent smile reflected the feebleness of the joke. “Well, I was hoping to kind of blend in. If it looked like I was here hunting for uranium….”

“It's getting a little late in the year. People are beginning to give up and go home.”

“Then it should be fairly easy to get a Geiger counter.”

That was true enough. “Just go into Chandler and ask at any bar or café,” McIntire said. “You'll have more prospecting equipment than you'll know what to do with.”

“No question about that,” Fratelli laughed. “I wouldn't know what to do with any of it. I figure to lug it around and, like I said, blend in.”

McIntire had to admit that in a place like New York City it wouldn't take much to make this man disappear. He doubted that he'd ever seen such a forgettable face. Melvin Fratelli might have been a dictionary illustration for
Homo sapiens
. All the components were there—arms, legs, nose, eyes, chin—but the combined effect was completely indistinctive, like he'd been pieced together from a kit.

His nondescript looks no doubt served him well in his native cosmopolitan setting, but here in the Upper Peninsula, where individuals were so dissimilar as to be almost separate species, his bland handsomeness would single him out like a turd in a punchbowl, as Arnie Johnson might say.

And if the investigator thought he could gather more information by posing as a uranium prospector than he would by owning up to his considerably more intriguing profession, he had a lot to learn.

Fratelli pulled the notebook and pen from his breast pocket. “Mind if I ask a few questions?”

McIntire found that, for some reason, he did mind, but he nodded. Morlen had brought this guy all the way from New York. He was probably paying him a bundle.

“Was this an annual event?”

“Murder?” McIntire asked. “Or kidnapping? Murder's been semi-annual. We've gotten short-changed on our ration of abductions lately.”

The watered-down smile again. “The dance, the night Bambi was killed?”

“Oh. You betcha. The Hunters' Dance is
the
annual event.”

“So the kidnapper knew there'd be a crowd…maybe a lot of confusion…?”