Hunter’s Dance (9 page)

It was not a good choice of words. She sounded not so much angry, as uncomprehending. “My son gets in a fight and dies, and no one takes it seriously? Why wasn't I told about this?”

“It was only a minor scuffle. He wasn't hurt at all. I don't think the other boy got near him.”

“Was
he
hurt then, this other boy?”

“Slightly,” McIntire said. “He wasn't the kind to make a fuss over it.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I sent them both home.”

“Bambi never got home.”

McIntire nodded.

Mrs. Morlen placed the pillow squarely on her knees and looked into McIntire's eyes. “Let me understand this. My son got the better of another young man in a fist fight. You kicked him out and when he left,
somebody
ran him off the road, abducted him, and killed him. Why wasn't I told this before?” she demanded. “Do you see no connection here?”

McIntire had been seeing that connection since he'd first viewed Bambi Morlen's mutilated head, but the note on the table had changed things. “That letter took time to piece together. The kidnapping wasn't done on impulse.”

Somewhere inside the zombie shell, Bonnie Morlen appeared to be reasoning well enough. “So maybe the fight was planned in advance, too,” she said. “My son could have been baited into getting involved so he'd have to leave before everyone else…and he'd be alone.”

It was true. Someone planning to abduct Bambi would have a better chance being unobserved if they did it early. If he'd been left to leave on his own, when the dance broke up, the roads would have been crawling with possible witnesses. Not a bad theory, but not borne out in reality.

“But it didn't happen then, Mrs. Morlen. Bambi didn't leave by himself. He gave Ross Maki a ride home.”

“So Ross Maki was the last person that we know was with him before he died?”

“No, he wasn't. Bambi took Ross straight home. When he dropped Ross off, your son had a girl with him.”

Bonnie silently traced the stitching of the pillow for a moment before speaking again. “Have these people been interrogated? Does that sheriff know what he's doing?”

“Koski and the state police have been questioning everybody that might be even remotely connected to your son,” McIntire said. “I talked to Ross myself.”

The look on Bonnie Morlen's face clearly demonstrated her level of confidence in the constable's powers of detection. “So it would seem that Bambi was abducted by someone he knew, someone he trusted?”

“But that could be most anybody. Your son would have had no reason to think he was in danger. If he was approached by a stranger asking for a lift or some help with car trouble, he'd have probably done it without thinking twice.”

McIntire used the tip of his index finger to pull the note closer. “It seems kind of strange, asking for such a definite amount, seventeen thousand—.”

“What difference does it make what the amount is? Seventeen million won't bring my son back.”

“Still, it's a very specific amount and that might have some significance. Something that might lead to a particular suspect.” It also might be significant that the extortioners hadn't found it necessary to combine numbers from more than one source to request the $17,525. It had come as a unit. Of course they could have typed some of the words, and those numbers, themselves, before snipping and pasting. “Do you have any idea what the amount might signify?”

Bonnie shook her head. “I can't really think now.”

McIntire tried to sound in command. “The details of this note should probably be kept quiet for the time being. Has anybody else seen it? Greg Carlson?”

“What? Why? I don't know what you mean.”

“Greg Carlson. Did you show him the letter?”

“It only came a few hours ago. I haven't seen Mr. Carlson since…. I don't know, it's been some time.”

“I met him on my way in. I assumed he'd been here.”

Mrs. Morlen was clearly mystified. “Greg was here?”

The steward's wife looked up from her post by the window and cleared her throat. “I didn't think you were ready for visitors,” she shrugged. “I suggested he come back another time.”

Bonnie Morlen threw aside her pillow and wrappings and struggled to her feet. “Mrs. Baxter, I'll decide for myself what I'm ready for. Please don't do that again.”

The chastised woman turned and left the room. Bonnie plodded to the desk and rummaged for a few seconds through its drawers. She came back carrying a manila envelope, a ballpoint pen and a small book. “You can put the letter in this,” she said, “and I'll need a receipt.”

McIntire dutifully took the book and pen.
Received from Mrs. Wendell Morlen
…what? Ransom note? Threatening letter?
Letter dated October 14, 1950.
He signed it,
J. McIntire, Constable, St. Adele Township, Michigan
. Bonnie studied it carefully, tore off the carbon and handed it to him. She stood for some time staring at the letter, squinting a bit, seemingly reluctant to let it go, as if by looking at it long enough, she could somehow detect the source of the evil that had pieced it together. Finally she shoved it toward McIntire.

“Think if he hadn't been found,” she said. “If I'd waited to pay the money and thought I'd have him back, when all the time he'd been dead in that loft.” She turned away and selected a length of split maple from the basket next to the fireplace. “Mr. McIntire, are murderers executed in this state?”

“No,” McIntire told her. “Michigan was the first state in the union to abolish the death penalty. That was over a hundred years ago.”

She gripped the log like a cudgel and pitched it onto the dying fire, not flinching from the barrage of sparks that danced around her ankles. “Thank you for coming,” she said without turning. “If you see my husband, tell him to please hurry.”

Mrs. Baxter returned with McIntire's hat and guided him through the maze of furnishings. She surprised him by stepping out onto the porch and closing the door behind her.

“Mr. McIntire, I didn't want to say anything with Mrs. Morlen there. Maybe I shouldn't say anything at all.…”

In McIntire's experience, those who expressed reticence were often the most eager to speak. He waited while the steward's wife twisted the doorknob.

“On Saturday night—or Sunday morning, it would be, I think you should probably know…I heard Wendell Morlen's car drive in. It was after three.”

That was indeed something they should probably know. McIntire asked, “Does the guard work that gate twenty-four hours a day?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “The members have their own keys. Nobody else gets in after ten o'clock. That's why I took notice of a car coming in at that time of the night.”

“Did you see it? It must have been pitch dark. Are you sure the car was Wendell Morlen's?”

“There aren't too many people staying here right now with their own cars. Mostly only staff. I recognized the sound of Mr. Morlen's. Ask Sam. He'd have heard it, too.”

“Sam?”

“Sam Keller, the guard.”

So that was the old coot's name, not one McIntire recognized as an infamous murderer or bank robber, but then he'd been out of touch for awhile.

“Thank you, Mrs. Baxter,” he said. “You were right to let me know.” He would have liked to add a request that she keep an ear to the keyholes to see what else she could pick up.

McIntire got out of his car and interrupted Keller on his laborious hobble to unlatch the gate.

“Mr. Keller,” he said, “I wanted to ask you about Saturday. About anybody who might have gone in or out during the night.”

The furrows of wrath on the guard's face appeared to be a permanent fixture. “I don't open the gate at night. You ain't got a key, you don't get in, or out, neither.”

“But you sleep here in the gatehouse, I understand. Surely someone couldn't drive in without you hearing them.”

“After ten o'clock, worrying about who goes in and out ain't my job. I don't pay no attention.” He leaned against the gate and shook his cane for emphasis.

“Mr. Keller, we're not talking about somebody's granny sneaking in after a midnight pinochle game. A resident here has been murdered. Try to remember, did anybody go through the gate late Saturday night, about three or three-thirty?”

Sam Keller straightened his stooped shoulders. “I really couldn't say. And you can tell that horse's ass sheriff if he's plannin' to send somebody out here, they ain't gettin' nothin' out of me, so he might as well not waste his Goddamn time.”

McIntire assured Mr. Keller that he'd pass that information along.

XIV

You were all beauties, ever bright, ever young, ever lovely and gentle as a mother's eyes as she looks down upon her child.

A light mist had begun falling, droplets of liquid ice that were somewhere between fog and honest to god rain. John McIntire, driving a non-tree-climbing Studebaker, decided to exercise discretion by staying off the most primitive of Koski's shortcuts and made for home on a road that at least had been intended for cars. As he rolled through an intersection, he glanced at his gas gauge. Less than a quarter tank, not enough to get him all the way into Chandler. If he wasted a few hours by running out of gas maybe Koski would get off his royal backside and make the trip himself next time. Well, he'd make damn sure he got his fifteen cents a mile for these little excursions.

He braked and pulled over. He sat for a time, listening to the rhythmic thump of the windshield wipers. Then he switched off the engine and let the drizzle close him in with himself.

Why was he reacting this way? Why was the death of this young man more irritation than tragedy? A major irritation to be sure, but still, he wasn't experiencing the sorrow and outrage that such an event should inspire in any compassionate human being. Were these people and the kind of life they led so foreign to him that he could feel no empathy? Was it some underlying sense of envy? Did the detachment of the victim's mother communicate itself to him?

Maybe Leonie was right, and he was growing self-centered and grumpy. Perhaps it was the deep-seated Scandinavian sense that delving too deeply into the private griefs of others was simply unseemly. His wife was certainly correct about something else. He had no real professional interest in the situation, outside of being a damn sight closer to it than Pete Koski. It didn't directly concern him. A constable wasn't elected to solve murders, and it wasn't like the Morlens were his bosom buddies. There was no reason he should have a personal involvement.

Perhaps that was the crux of his unease. He couldn't stick his nose in if he didn't care, and if he did care, he couldn't keep his nose out of it. He sat in the cell a minute longer, then turned the key and put the car into reverse for the few yards necessary to swing it onto the main street of the hamlet of Thunder Bay—one tavern, a general store, a monster sawmill, a sawmill owner's mansion, and a sixteen-room hotel.

The store also boasted a gas pump. McIntire pulled up to it and got out of the car. A rosy-cheeked girl in a shabby letter sweater that proclaimed her to be
Judy
trotted out and began filling his tank with the requested two dollars' worth. McIntire left her applying a rag to his windshield and went into the cluttered shop.

The pump jockey looked as though she ought to be in school, and possibly she was; the girl seemed to have the ability to occupy two places at once. Here she was, perched on a stool behind the counter, bottle of orange Nehi at her elbow, leaning over a movie magazine. McIntire peered over the rack of paperback fiction to look outside. Judy was gamely swabbing the leavings of seagulls from his windshield.

***

A closer look at the young lady on the stool, and, in particular, her sweater, told him that this was
Joyce
. “Twins?” McIntire was no dummy.

Joyce tore herself away from the delights of Frank Sinatra and began an elaborate heavenward roll of the eyes, arrested when she reached McIntire's face at close to the elevation of that metaphorical paradise. McIntire smiled, and introduced himself as being from the Flambeau County sheriff's office.

He supposed he should exchange a few preliminary pleasantries before diving right into nosy questions, but what could one say to a child that didn't sound artificial and patronizing? Nothing McIntire could come up with. “You see many people from the Shawanok Club here?” he asked.

“Sure,” she answered. “Once in a while. This is the only place between here and Marquette to buy gas.”

“They have their own pump.”

“That's mostly for the Club trucks.”

McIntire hadn't come to talk about petrol. “You probably know that a young man from there died on Saturday,” he said. “Maybe you've seen him. Drove a fancy sports car.”

“Bambi, yeah.”

“You knew him? He stopped here, then?”

“I s'pose he might've been here. He would of had to put gas in that car now and then, but I knew him from the Club. We work there summers, me'n Judy, waiting tables. Bambi Morlen was around for a while, but then he took off and mostly only came back weekends. Is it true then? Was Bambi murdered?” Her eyes showed the delicious morbid curiosity of youth.

“It looks like that could be,” McIntire answered. He went on, “Did they allow you….” How could he put this? “Did you spend your free time with the residents?”

“Free time? They worked our hinders off sixteen hours a day. Did the Clubbers let their kids hang around with us lowlifes, you mean?”

McIntire supposed that's what he did mean. He nodded

“They didn't like it much, especially any boy-girl thing, you know. But,” she gave a meaningful cough, “they couldn't watch us all the time.”

“Did you get to know Bambi Morlen, enough to get an idea of what was he like?”

Joyce screwed up her nose. “Well, a little. I practically dropped dead when I heard he was staying somewhere back in the woods in a camp. Bambi was
not
the outdoorsy type. He tried to make out like he was a real whiz at sports, tennis and swimming…softball, that kind of stuff. He was a show-off, but mostly stood around griping about mosquitoes and flies, and he didn't like fishing or taking the boats out.”

Chalk one up for Bambi.

She sipped from her bottle and giggled. “Once he put a chipmunk in Mitzi Haggerty's underwear drawer. She about died.” She pursed her lips in a sugary smile and bobbed her head. “Course being one of their little darlings,
he
didn't get in any trouble.”

“He got caught then?”

“He got caught hiding under my sister's bed so he could take a picture when Mitzi opened the drawer. Judy almost got canned for letting him in the girl's dormitory.” The mincing smile came again. “But not our darling little Bambi.” She drained the pop. “Well, he swore Judy didn't know a thing about it. So he wasn't so bad, I guess. Too snooty to suit me, though. He always had that camera with him, drove everybody nuts worrying about
composition
and
lighting
.” This was something new. “He used a lot of big words, and he wasn't very…thoughtful, you know.”

“In what way?”

“He didn't care much about people's feelings. Mitzi wasn't so scared by the chipmunk, but she was only wearing….” She paused and a flush spread up her cheeks. “She wasn't quite dressed, and she has a big birthmark on her back. It's shaped kind of like a rabbit. Bambi teased her about it afterwards and made her cry. It was in the dining hall where everybody could hear. Typical stuck-up rich kid—thought his shit didn't stink.”

“Aren't all the Club kids rich?”

“They're not all stuck-up. Some of them are nice guys.” Another blush indicated that she might have had a specific nice guy in mind.

“Would you know any kids that Bambi especially hung around with?”

“Naah. He wasn't there that much, and when he came home he usually had that guy with him, the one he worked for. They always stuck together.”

“Not always.” The bell over the door jangled, and Judy scooted in, shaking off water and blowing on her hands.

“What?”

“They weren't
always
together.” She took the bills McIntire proffered for gas, and the dime for two Milky Way bars, and punched the keys on the cash register.

Joyce shoved her magazine aside. “Cripes, I never saw Bambi turn up without that guy. They were like…twins.”

“Maybe so, but the guy did turn up without Bambi.”

“He couldn't. He's not a member. What are you talking about?”

“I saw him.” Judy turned away to hang her dripping jacket on a coatrack by the door. “He was poking around down by Deer Horn Lake. All by himself. No Bambi.”

“And just what were
you
doing at Deer Horn Lake?”

“Fishing.”

“Well, now isn't that just ducky?” Joyce responded. “And with who, may I ask?”

“Never mind.”

“Bruce! You jerk! Did you pretend you were me? What did he say? What did you
do?
You better tell the truth or—”

“Wrong!”

Joyce's eyes narrowed. “There's nobody else at the Club that would give you…and what would your precious Dougie say if he knew you'd been fooling around with a…?”

Judy's only response was a smug smile, and Joyce let out a squeal that left McIntire's ears ringing. “Gads, you sneaked him in! You could of got us fired!”

The conversation was fascinating, but McIntire broke in before the two came to blows. He'd had more than enough of battling adolescents, and this wasn't his jurisdiction. “Was Professor Carlson looking for uranium on Club grounds?”

“I don't know if he was looking for anything,” Judy said. “When I saw him he was sitting on a rock, writing in a notebook.”

“Did he have a Geiger counter?”

“What's it look like?'

Where had this girl been for the past year? “It's kind of like a metal box, about yay big”—McIntire sketched out a foot square with his hands—“with a strap to carry it.”

“Nope,” Judy answered. “I didn't see anything like that. He had a knapsack, but it wasn't big enough to hold something that size.”

“How could he have gotten past the gate?” McIntire asked. “Would Mr. Keller have let him in?”

“Sam might have opened up for him
if
he'd come through the gate. He was used to the guy being with Bambi. But he didn't go through the gate.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and whistled a short tune before adding, “There are other ways.”

“Sure, you
would
know!” Her sister exploded. “He could of come in the same way you sneaked Doug in. You coulda got us fired!”

Judy blew on her fingernails and rubbed them on her shoulder. “You're just jealous.”

“Jealous? Of you and that pimply-faced creep?”

McIntire figured it was time to leave.