Highway 61
Authors: David Housewright
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Private Investigators, #Fiction, #Hard-Boiled, #General
FOR RENEÉ,
AGAIN AND FOREVER
I wish to acknowledge my debt to India Cooper, Keith Kahla, Alison J. Picard, and Renée Valois.
CONTENTS
ONE
I watched Erica through my kitchen window while she tossed bread crumbs to the ducks that lived beside the pond in my backyard, and I wondered—when did she become so damn pretty? She was cute when I first met her, but that was when she was nearly fifteen. Now she was twelve days past her eighteenth birthday and nearly as beautiful as her mother. Certainly she was taller—by at least two inches. Erica confided to me once that when she was sure her mother was going to scold her over some offense, she would put on high heels so she would tower over her.
“I keep hoping it’ll intimidate her,” she said, “only it never does.”
The man sitting at the table behind me sighed dramatically. I ignored him. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket, shook one out, and placed it between his lips. I waited until he lit it with a silver lighter.
“No smoking,” I said.
Jason Truhler sighed again, putting more effort into it this time. He moved to the sink, drowned the cigarette with the faucet, and dropped the remains into the garbage disposal.
I continued to watch his daughter while he slipped silently back into the chair. Erica knelt on the grass and scattered bread crumbs so close to her that the ducks came near enough to pet. I almost opened the window and shouted, “They bite, you know.” I didn’t because I knew she wouldn’t like it.
The ducks had moved in soon after my father and I had built the pond a few years back. Dad liked the ducks; one of the things he told me just before he died was to take care of them. So I did, feeding them corn and grain and whatever they put in those bags of wild birdseed I buy at Petco. Ever since, they would leave in the fall and return in the spring, often more than a dozen birds at a time. I used to name them until it became impossible for me to tell them apart.
I glanced at my watch. It told me the day, month, and date—Sunday, November 8. Duck hunting season had been open for nearly a month, and while the ducks were safe within the Twin Cities metropolitan area, I was always worried about how they would fare once they started south. I expected them to take wing at any moment; was surprised that they hadn’t left long ago. A pal at the DNR said they might have lingered past their traditional departure date because I fed them, because I domesticated them. I hoped not.
Truhler sighed again.
“What exactly do you want from me?” I asked. I continued to look out the window.
“Rickie says you help people.”
“Favors,” I said. Since quitting the St. Paul cops to take a three-million-dollar reward for capturing a particularly resourceful embezzler, I have, on occasion, assisted people with their more pressing issues. “I sometimes do favors for friends, people I like. I don’t like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know your ex-wife.”
“Not everything Nina says about me is true.”
“Of course it is.”
“You haven’t heard my side.”
I turned my head just enough to look him in the eye. “I don’t want to hear your side.”
“But—”
“But what? There’s nothing to debate here. I love your ex-wife. I love her enough to say so to complete strangers. Which means I’m more than happy to dislike her ex-husband with as much vehemence as she desires for whatever reasons she deigns to offer. Any questions?”
“I knew it was a mistake coming here,” Truhler said.
I returned to the window. Marvelous Margot, the woman with whom I shared the pond, emerged from her house and walked across her lawn. Erica saw her. They screamed each other’s name the way teenagers do that have been apart for a while and hugged, although Margot was hardly a teenager. She was pushing forty-five. She had been pushing forty-five for as long as I’d known her.
Margot was a life-loving babe—I could think of no better way to describe her. She was a babe not only in her wolf-whistle appearance but also in her take-no-prisoners attitude, one of those free spirits who lived exactly as she wished, as her three ex-husbands could attest. As far as I knew she and Erica had spoken less than a half dozen times, yet Erica seemed to like her enormously. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“I wouldn’t have come here at all,” Truhler said, “except Rickie said you could help me. She said you could be trusted. I’d hate to see her disappointed.”
Meaning
I
would be the one who disappointed her, not him.
“Does Erica know what trouble you’re in?” I asked.
“She knows—she only knows I’m having difficulty and that it has something to do with a trip I took in July. I admitted that much to her when she came to visit this weekend. I get her every third weekend. Now that she’s eighteen, she doesn’t have to obey the court order, but she does. She’s a good girl.”
“I know.”
“She told me if I was in trouble I should talk to you. ‘Tell McKenzie,’ she said. ‘He can fix anything.’”
“You believed her?”
“She told me about some of the things you’ve done for people. Helping the FBI corral some gunrunners, catching the guy who kidnapped that cop’s kid, solving that murder down in Victoria, Minnesota—Rickie thinks you’re quite a guy.”
I was glad to hear it. Still …
“You like her,” Truhler said. “I know you do.”
“That’ll only get you so far.”
“I’m not asking for much.”
“Yes, you are.”
It was my turn to sigh like a bad actor. I pivoted toward Jason Truhler. There was an expectant gleam in his eyes as if he were waiting for an MC to pull a name from a hat and announce the winner of a door prize.
“To put it bluntly, I’m your ex-wife’s lover,” I said. “I’m the last person you should be talking to. You’re the last person I should try to help. Nothing good will come of it.”
“Then why did you agree to see me?”
I looked out the window again. Erica and Margot were sitting next to each other on the grass on Margot’s side of the pond. God knew what Margot was telling her. Whatever it was, it made Erica laugh.
I was in love with Nina Truhler, so it was important that her daughter like me. To gain Erica’s favor I made a point of not calling her Rickie, although everyone else did, until she gave her permission. I never hung around her house, never raided her refrigerator, never watched her TV, never commented on her clothes; never stayed the night while she was there. I always spoke to her like an adult, declined to offer advice unless it was requested, vowed not to reveal her secrets even to her mother, scrupulously avoided phrases like “When I was your age,” and refused to take sides when she and Nina quarreled. Most important, I promised to be there whenever she needed me.
Saturday night she called. She said she needed me.
“I can give you the name of a good private investigator,” I said.
“I’m afraid to hire an ordinary PI,” Truhler told me. “If they come across a crime, they have to report it. If the cops ask them questions, they have to answer or risk losing their licenses, right? They don’t have privilege like an attorney or a doctor. They can’t guarantee confidentiality.”
“What makes you think I can?”
He gestured with his chin at the window.
“She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she,” he said. “Smart, too. We raised her right, divorce and all. No matter what Nina tells you about me or what I could tell you about her if you cared to listen, we managed to keep the gloves on when it came to Rickie. She turned out all right. She loves both of her parents.”
It’s my dad,
she told me.
Will you help him? For me?
“All right,” I said. “Tell me about your difficulty.”
Truhler covered his mouth with his hand, turned his head, and coughed. “Excuse me,” he said.
Yeah, you had better not let me see you smile,
my inner voice said.
You haven’t won anything yet.
“Well,” I said aloud.
“First, you have to promise not to tell Rickie, or Nina, for that matter.”
“I already promised not to lie to either of them.”
“I’m not saying lie. I’m saying—just don’t tell them about me.”
“As long as it doesn’t hurt them.”
Truhler thought about it for a few beats. “It won’t,” he said.
“Okay.”
“We have a deal?”
I shrugged in reply.
Truhler stared as if he were trying to see inside my head.
Good luck with that,
my inner voice said.
Half the time, I don’t even know what’s going on in there.
“How do I know I can trust you?” Truhler asked.
“Because Erica said so.”
Truhler thought about it for a moment. He said, “I suppose I have to tell someone.”
Don’t tell me. Please don’t tell me. If you tell me, then I’ll become involved, and I don’t want to be involved.
“I’m being blackmailed,” Truhler said.
Ahh, geez …
I moved away from the window and sat at the kitchen table across from Truhler.
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. It started four months ago. They’ve been demanding nine thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars in twenties each month. It’s an odd amount. I don’t know why they picked such an odd amount.”
“Banks are required to report cash transactions of ten thousand or more to the U.S. Treasury Department,” I said. “The law was passed in the early seventies to help catch criminals attempting to launder drug money. Now Homeland Security uses it to keep watch over the rest of us. The blackmailers set the amount so you wouldn’t attract attention.”
“You know about these things. That’s good.”
“What do they have on you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What secret is worth ninety-nine eighty a month?”
“They say, they claim … this is hard to say.”
I didn’t give him any help.
He stood abruptly and began to pace the kitchen floor. He was nearly as tall as I was and straight. He had fine brown eyes that you could see in his daughter and auburn hair that had been cut short and meticulously scrubbed of all gray, a gesture toward vanity that I found distasteful in a man. Plus, his face was far too pretty for someone his age. He looked like a guy whose problems had always been solved with a smile or by someone else. He stopped pacing, stared at the miniature guillotine I used to halve bagels as if it were the first time he had ever seen one, then turned toward me.
“They say I murdered a girl.”
Dammit!
“What girl?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t.”
“The blackmailers—I presume they have hard evidence that connects you to the girl.”
“They have photographs.”
“Yet you claim you don’t know the girl.”
“It’s true.”
“That requires explanation,” I said.
“I went to the Thunder Bay Blues Festival.”
“In Ontario?”
“It was held during the Fourth of July weekend, but that was just a coincidence. The Fourth doesn’t mean anything up in Canada.”
“Who did you go with?”
“No one,” Truhler said. “When I go to these things, I just want to be alone with the music. I don’t want to bother with other people. I don’t want to worry if they can see the stage, if it’s too cold or too hot for them, if they’re hungry or thirsty, if they want to leave early or stay late, if they can find me in the crowd or if I can find them. Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”