The Big Seven (21 page)

Sunderson allayed his melancholy by drinking faster. Lemuel’s spirits picked up talking about birds. They had seen two local rarities, a lazuli bunting and a black-headed grosbeak. Then he talked about getting out of prison that first time after doing seventeen years. He had been crazed for nature after being penned up that long and had bought a used Subaru and drove to a great birding region near the Mexico-Arizona border in late March and had added one hundred and nineteen species of birds to his life list in two weeks. He said this with such an air of triumph that Sunderson was almost moved and thought too bad you’ll likely finish your life back in prison. Sunderson was ultimately without sympathy. You can’t just go around killing people no matter how bad they are, but as a claustrophobe Sunderson dreaded the very idea of a prison cell. Death would be better, or so he thought for the time being. As a retiree he was surprised how little he thought about death, the end of the story. That wasn’t a flip idea but a truth favored by Native Americans. Your story had a beginning, middle, and end like all stories. He liked the epitaph that the anthropologist Loren Eiseley had written for himself, “We loved the earth but could not stay.” What could be more beautifully concise? Maybe he’d have it engraved on his headstone. He must instruct Diane. Who else could he ask?

They had finished a fine dinner when Smolens called to say that all of the prints were Kate’s and complimented him on his good work. Kate and Lemuel looked at Sunderson quizzically when he hung up the phone, thinking to himself that they were perfectly capable of killing him if they thought it was to their advantage.

It was early on the warmest morning of the year when Lemuel dropped Kate off for fishing continuing on to Escanaba to see his broker or so he said driving off. Kate evidently didn’t have waders and had on short shorts and hip boots. There was a five-inch gap of bare thigh between the tops of her boots and shorts and there was a bit of the electric in her rounded butt in her short shorts.

They fished for about two hours before he had to climb the bank and cool off under a maple tree. He was sweating hard under his waders so he took them and his pants off and sprawled under the tree in his boxer shorts. Kate joined him sitting against the tree in front of his face with her legs cocked up, her dainty crotch aimed at his nose. He felt his cock rising underneath him, Old Mister Fool. He reminded himself that to fool with her could be actionable and was forced to acknowledge that Lemuel was brilliant in his conning. He knew that Monica liked him a great deal but he also knew that to a specific degree even she was a setup. Lemuel was an obvious pimp with these girls and Kate could be held against him as leverage if he was stupid enough to touch her.

“It must be in the eighties. I’m going to take a dip.”

She stood and quickly shed her clothes, having an awkward time with the tight hip boots. She trotted to the river, screeched at the cold water and paddled out to a sand bar where she stood shivering and flailing her arms for warmth. She came back and sat nude against the tree on her T-shirt.

“Did I give you a hard-on?” she asked lightly. “Let me see it.” He could tell she was putting on bravado but there was a quaver in her voice.

He said no. It was the first piece of ass he’d ever refused, young or old. These oversexed Ames girls were making his stomach churn. Kate should be worried about school and when she’d develop, not being used as her uncle’s honey trap.

They fished for another hour in the hottest part of the afternoon, then walked back to his car in the shade of the woods across the river. He carried her shorts, T-shirt, and hip boots across the river in his waders and she swam.

When they got back, Lemuel offered him a vodka and orange juice which he drank thirstily, having surreptitiously watched to be sure it came out of a sealed bottle.

“I found four cases of half gallons in the root cellar, more than enough for my lifetime. You take this one.” He pushed the half gallon of vodka toward Sunderson who said thank you. He never drank vodka which was just tasteless alcohol and only valuable in a pinch. He preferred the flavor of Canadian blended whiskey like VO.

He took a three-hour nap, very long for him, and toward the end he was only half asleep and thought about the Seven Deadly Sins and also
The Poems of Jesus Christ
, the book Diane had given him. This was all in comic contrast to his day so far. There was a knock on the door and Kate entered carrying a casserole dish.

“I was making a
choucroute garnie
for Lemuel and made some extra for you. It’s just sauerkraut, sausages, onions, potatoes and one pig hock in the bottom. I didn’t have any dried mustard to make you hot mustard.”

Sunderson reflected that the dried mustard could have killed him. Her brash pronunciation of
choucroute garnie
was sweet, just like Diane’s when she made the dish which he loved. There were enough Germans in the Marquette area that good sausages were readily available though Diane had said that the dish had crept north and east from Wisconsin.

They were sitting at the table with her dishing up the meal when she said, “I think Sara did it. Levi let all the men beat her, even the male children. No one could have endured what she did and forgive it. She was stuck-up about her nice hands and was always wearing rubber gloves to protect them. Maybe she didn’t want to leave fingerprints? She was always trying to help Monica or me with the cooking but she was totally lame at it except for washing dishes.”

Sunderson stopped in mid-bite wishing he had hot mustard for the sausages but quite startled at the idea of Sara. He hadn’t thought of her because Monica had never told him she helped in the kitchen, and she was always lethargic, drunk, or both.

“Lemuel admitted to me that after prison he had had a long affair with Sara,” Kate continued. “She was depressed when he threw her over for Monica, all the more reason, I mean her anger, to try to frame Lemuel and Monica.”

Sunderson was thinking that it would be easy to open a spice bottle without leaving a print. Naturally Kate’s prints were on the bottle because she was doing the cooking. How easy it was to kill one another! And without the vulgarity of guns. Even the popes used poison. He called Smolens with the new possible developments being careful because he knew Smolens had been having marital problems and had a definite soft spot for Sara. Would it never end? Probably not. Sunderson disliked this sort of irony except in himself. You could get a crush on a burned woman and visit her every day in the guise of police work.

He stared at Kate and thought that she and Monica and Sara all reminded him of the hundreds of statues in the Xalapa museum whose faces were turning into those of the dread jaguars. He also thought that despite his retirement here he was in the middle of a murderous spree.

Chapter 22

The next morning there was a relentless cold rain. He heard it in the predawn sleepless hours. He went out with his coffee, standing under the eaves and seeing the rain was going to sock in for the day. He packed up and started to drive home, calling Diane halfway there in case she could have dinner. She was bereft and missing her husband. Sunderson actually felt morose for her. Her new marriage had gone so well for a year. They had a glorious trip to Italy, Spain, and France. They even went to China for God’s sake, a trip well beyond Sunderson’s interest. Her obsession with art could carry her anyplace.

The day Diane’s husband died Mona had called about 10:00 p.m. to tell him. He had the Miami–San Antonio NBA game on and was exhausted watching them run up and down the court. Mona told him not to bother but he drove over to the hospital. The night was black and cloudy but still a glint of light to the west. There was a little rain as he walked from the parking lot to the hospital and he was able to press down his unruly hair having forgotten to brush it. He was wearing old clothes and a shirt with food stains on it.

There were several of Diane’s friends in the waiting room with her. When he walked in she hugged him very hard and sobbed. They all drove over to Diane’s house and Mona opened a couple of bottles of Richebourg which was so delicious he thought it nearly made you forget the occasion. Mona also put a gentle Mendelssohn CD on. Three of the women who sat on the sofa were also widows. He sat there stiffly thinking about their husbands, hard-charging men who overate and all died at his age in their early sixties. Probably none had avoided the fat on their pig hocks.

The women all talked softly and Sunderson followed Diane into the kitchen where she and Mona made up a cheese platter. Sunderson shyly offered her a platonic camping trip wherever she liked. She shook her head and said maybe someday, smiling sadly.

Now Sunderson reminded Diane of their conversation and she admitted that she would like to see his cabin. It gave him hope. He sometimes thought perhaps he was a widower himself with the actual spouse alive seven blocks away. Human loneliness is a huge item and Monica couldn’t begin to compensate for his love for Diane. A hopeless love at that.

He thought of the number of times he had been rained out when fishing. When he was a junior in high school he had sat in a cheapish pup tent two full days in the rain until he and all his bedding were soaked. He persisted, catching trout for his family’s dinner. When wet you can only get a little wetter. Now he reflected that the odor of sex was as powerful as that of a butcher shop. At the cabin it was cut only by the blossoming of a chokecherry outside the window, an odor he had always loved. In the spring he liked to travel to an area to fish where there were hundreds of acres of blooming chokecherries and be overwhelmed by them.

Now, suddenly, in his car approaching Marquette he thought of copying passages from
Nightwood
and
Ada
under the idea he would thusly learn to write. Why not? He had the paper and pens. What was stopping him? He doubted this was a surefire answer but was worth trying. He didn’t think it constituted cheating. He certainly needed not to die before he wrote about the eighth deadly sin. For a very big change he felt necessary to the world. He knew if he could get it right the essay would change everything.

Back in college there was a year after the rage of existentialism that it was commonly held we are all guilty of everything. Sunderson, however, was drawn in very little on this one for common pragmatic reasons. He tended to see the entirety of the United States as an Indian graveyard but could not see how any of it was his own fault. Maybe his ancestors were at fault and he didn’t have any descendants.

He nearly ran a stop sign when he had the absurd idea that perhaps Sara, Monica, and Kate were all guilty. Lemuel was a junior Svengali. Sunderson couldn’t admit Monica might have known what she was doing and stopped at the IGA, buying a very large package of pig hocks. Back in the parking lot he called Diane’s cell phone to see how to cook them. He was disappointed to find out that the pig hocks took three hours at a slow simmer. Maybe he should nuke them first. “Absolutely not,” she said. Naturally he wanted more immediate results. He walked across the street and stocked up at the liquor store seeing a beautiful girl ride past with the seat of the bicycle stuck in her butt, or so it seemed. Boys used to tell girls they wanted to be their first bicycle seat and he wondered if they still did. What was there about a shapely fanny? The taste must be deeply embedded in the brain.

He put the pig hocks on the stove in the big Le Creuset, had a drink, got on the sofa for a snooze. He intended to spend the evening copying parts of Barnes and Nabokov. He awoke in three hours to smell pork fat. He leaped up and saw the water had boiled away and his beloved hocks were frying in their copious fat. He refilled the pot with water deciding that the hocks weren’t fatally injured. He got out his books by Barnes and Nabokov with the religious sense that he was in touch with greatness. Mona walked in without knocking because she saw him in the kitchen. She asked after the “dreadful” smell and he said, “Fucked-up pig hocks that I’m restoring.” He averted his eyes because she looked particularly lovely. Her boyfriend the cellist had parents with a house in Naples and they had gone there on August break. Mona’s long bare legs were tan as were her arms and face.

“Did you sunbathe nude?” he teased.

“Of course not.” She turned then raised her skirt and pulled down her panties revealing a lovely pale butt. She pranced around wagging it.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “It reminds me of our unforgivable sin in Paris.”

“Oh bullshit! You’ll live.” She flopped down on the sofa with her skirt on her chest. He bolted out the back door. After five minutes she came out with a beer and sat beside him. “I’m sorry I’m wicked. My current boyfriend can’t make love unless he’s wearing his bedroom slippers. I suddenly wanted to do something old-fashioned nasty.”

“I’m in a murder mess in my retirement. I can’t afford mentally to fuck up now.”

“Diane told me you were thinking of going to Spain. You should go tomorrow.”

“I’m sure it takes a lot of planning,” he said lamely.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll go in and call the travel agent.”

He followed her inside as she booked him to Paris for five days then Seville. If he didn’t like Seville he could take a train or plane to Barcelona, and his flight home was from there. She also booked him the same hotel near the Odéon he had stayed in when he came to retrieve her. May as well give him some memories. To irritate him she got him the most expensive hotel in Seville. She helped him pack and reminded him to pick up cash and the tickets in the morning. He kissed her goodbye and gave himself the treat of letting his hand brush across her tight ass. She had always amazed him with the immediacy with which she lived. Compared to her he existed totally on a diet of reverie and fishing. He was also proud of actually running out when she tempted him though there remained a nugget of regret. When she left she said that she wished she was going with him and his mind constructed an absurd headline, “Man Fucks Stepdaughter Across Europe.”

Monica stopped by to take a shower before work. She had been sailing on the bay with friends from the hotel. She was running late but he nagged her into some quick sex. Mona had built up a head of steam within him. After she went to work he had another drink and hastily made some hot mustard out of the dried. He sat down and ate with the prompt conclusion that they weren’t as tender as Diane’s but much better than no pig hocks.

Of course he was brooding about his possible trip. He could see that he was damned if he did—could he get the considerable sum back for the tickets?—but even more so damned if he didn’t. He couldn’t come up with a single other reason not to go. The TV had said that a week of coolish weather was due which meant there wouldn’t be bug hatches for fly fishing. Other than fishing and his little adventure tracking the Great Leader, his life in retirement had been quite aimless except, of course, for taking Monica to Mexico. Right now he wished he were in Veracruz or Mérida, then he wouldn’t have to fly to Paris, where the ghost of Mona waited. His last trip had been frantic on the way with worry about Mona’s musician and on the way back there was the regret and immense guilt. What they had done was clearly a strident violation of one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Mona made his mouth dry and his heart pound.

He had waited until Monica came home late to tell her about his trip. He gratuitously lied to her, saying an old friend from college was getting married and asked him to stand up for him. The friend was paying for the ticket. He began to believe the lie himself. He was already irritated because Smolens had called earlier to say that the prosecutor was still unwilling to proceed despite the new evidence. His point was obvious: Kate was in the kitchen all the time so of course her prints would be on the spice bottles and even more damning was that the two bottles that supposedly held poison contained small amounts of comparatively harmless cocaine, one cut with the popular Italian baby laxative Manitol, the other with a teaspoon of ordinary talc. The prosecutor was pleased with the coke and wanted to pin it on someone because it was the drug that put him on the warpath and strong action against it was popular with voters who were ignorant that the real threat was speed. Sunderson had always been amazed how drug dealers as businessmen cheated their customers and still stayed in business. A recent big bust in Detroit flopped because the three kilos of cocaine that had been seized had been devoid of any actual cocaine.

Meanwhile he tried to console Smolens who was heartsick and threatened to quit the case. “No one gives a shit about these people,” he said. Sunderson replied, “You can’t let a murderer go free,” and Smolens said, “Yes I can, just watch.” When Sunderson said “a murderer” the image of Lemuel flashed in his mind. There could be no other engineer of the whole matter. In the mail Lemuel had sent him another chapter, called “Doom,” of his wretched crime novel. Maybe he should actually be reading it for clues but the punishment was truly bad prose. Lemuel’s prose was absolutely devoid of any charm, one of the main reasons you read. If he found a clue would he recognize it while half asleep and bored? Lemuel would never be a good crime writer. He wanted to inform the world not describe it.

In the morning he cleared his credit cards in preparation for the trip. He stopped at the bar across the street from the travel agent. Suddenly worry hit like a sledgehammer. What if Diane wanted to go camping while he was wandering aimlessly in Paris, Seville, or Barcelona? What a disaster. He’d wait a day and call her tomorrow.

At the travel agent’s he delayed his trip for two weeks, not easy as it was a busy season and planes and hotels were getting booked. He was forced to book business-class tickets to Paris for a fortune but then he viewed the remaining blackmail cash as “funny money” like winning big at a poker game. The prospect of taking Diane camping was emotionally too large to miss. He had waited over sixty years to go so a couple more weeks wouldn’t hurt him.

Smolens stopped by for a chat and a drink. He was frazzled and generally bereft.

“What do you generally think happened not considering our lack of evidence?” Smolens grimaced with the size of the drink he had poured for himself.

“Well, it’s pointless to speculate but I see Lemuel spearheading the whole thing possibly using all three of the women not incidentally because he was a lover of all three. Lemuel was on the offense of course and besides he’s likely smarter than us. With the right preparation a perfect murder is easy and Lemuel possibly did a lot of research. He’s not going to break and I don’t see any of the women breaking. Too much is at stake. And I don’t see anyone suffering from conscience. The victims were too ghastly as humans.”

“I can’t believe that a hayseed outsmarted us college guys who wear guns.” Smolens smirked.

“Well, he’s very well self-educated. Don’t forget that he had fifteen years of reading time in prison. They have a pretty good library.”

“I simply don’t understand the power he had over the women. He’s an ugly little twerp.” Smolens was in a state of umbrage.

“He was the only one in the compound who listened to them. He’s not even having the two burned-out hulks of the houses removed. He told me he likes to look at them. The remnants of the family are living on the east side of Escanaba on welfare though I know he helps them out. He’s sort of rich.”

“I wish I was,” Smolens said begrudgingly. “I’d buy a small farm and dawdle on it. I’d quit this shit job like you did but I’m five years from possible retirement. My wife wants to live in Hawaii. I don’t.”

“Why Hawaii?” Sunderson was curious.

“A childhood dream, I think. She always wanted to grow coconuts near the ocean.” Smolens was obviously in despair.

“How do you grow coconuts?”

“I have no idea. I think you have to grow a tree first. It might take a hundred years. Luckily that leaves me out of the marketing.”

“Maybe we could look into Lemuel’s taxes.”

“Very hard to do. Even for a Mafia don or a political candidate.”

Their lack of ideas evaporated their withered spirits. They poured another drink and went out in the backyard and watched Delphine next door weeding a flower bed wearing knee pads. Smolens stared with curiosity. “On a certain level women can be quite basic. Of course so can we. Like lonely stray dogs who are still horny.”

That did it for Sunderson. He choked on his drink and had to spit up a precious mouthful.

When Smolens left Sunderson had a headache and poured yet another drink. He remembered a professor saying in a criminology course that some crimes are meant never to be solved. He thought, it’s always darkest before it gets even darker.

Monica had left him a small T-bone bought with her own money as he had forgotten to set out the grocery money. He errantly cooked it too long while fiddling with the TV to get the Bulls-Heat game. He was irked with himself and also the world. Only a fool didn’t know how to cook a steak. He had lectured junior officers countless times about their level of attention. The steak was pretty good anyway. He drank too much whiskey and after the ball game which LeBron won in the last minutes he treated himself to a quick peek at his neighbor’s evening yoga. From here, her ass looked a bit large but smooth and in good shape.