The Taking of Libbie, SD (14 page)

“Hi,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” I tried to keep my voice light and cheerful. I doubt I succeeded. My mouth was dry, my heart was drumming, and I suddenly felt out of breath.

Randisi looked down at the gun that he now held with both hands and then back at me. He was a short, compact man with thick shoulders and a worldly face and eyes that looked as if they had seen things. It was easy to imagine him helping to pull a neighbor’s car out of a ditch in the rain.

“How did you do that?” he said.

“Practice,” I told him. “Do you always draw down on people who come to your door?”

Randisi slipped the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “It’s legal,” he said. “State says I can carry.”

“It doesn’t say you can shoot people.”

“What do you know about shooting people?”

“Far too much.”

“You a cop?”

“In my misspent youth.”

“What about this one?”

He gestured at Tracie. I had forgotten about her. She was standing six feet behind me, blinking in the hard sunlight, her face flushed. Heat—I assume it was heat—had covered her body with a mist of perspiration; her skin glistened, and her eyes held an almost giddy light.

“She’s a model,” I said.

“Model?” he repeated.

There’s something about that word that makes men silly. It transformed Randisi from a menacing recluse into a gleeful teenager. He quickly removed the Colt from his waistband, set it on the kitchen counter, and nudged it away. Almost simultaneously, he brushed past me, stepped outside of the farmhouse, paused, gave Tracie a slow, bold stare of appraisal, and extended his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi,” he said.

Tracie smiled, only I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. She shook Randisi’s hand as if it were something she’d rather not touch.

“Sorry about the gun,” he said. “I’ve been getting some threats lately, and a fellow can’t be too careful.”

“Threats?” I said.

Randisi gently set two fingers and a thumb on Tracie’s elbow and urged her toward the door. “You don’t want to be standing out here in this heat. Come inside now, where it’s cool.”

Tracie gave me a look as if she expected me to wrestle Randisi to the ground and pummel him about the head and shoulders. Instead, I stepped back to give them plenty of room to enter the house. She gave me an NHL-quality elbow as they passed.

Once inside, Randisi led Tracie to a chair in a living room that looked as though its furnishings had been lifted intact from a department store showroom. After proceeding down the list, offering her everything from water to Scotch, which Tracie politely declined, he stepped back against the wall so he could get a good look at her sitting in his chair in his living room.

The man definitely needs to get out more
, my inner voice told me.

After a few silent moments, Randisi said, “I’m sorry. We weren’t properly introduced.” He crossed the distance to the chair and again offered Tracie his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi.”

Again, Tracie shook Randisi’s hand reluctantly. She didn’t remind him that he had introduced himself just moments before, and I didn’t, either.

“Tracie Blake,” she said.

For a recluse, Randisi seemed awfully sociable.

“I’m Rushmore McKenzie,” I said.

I was standing near the entrance to the living room. Randisi looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there.

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Tell me about the threats,” I said.

“Why? Are you going to do something about them?”

“I might.”

From his expression, I don’t think he believed me.

“It doesn’t matter,” Randisi said. “I haven’t gotten any for about a week now.”

Since the Imposter skipped town
, my inner voice said.

“What were they about?” I said aloud.

“Ahh, people saying they were going to teach me a lesson; that they were going to run me off, burn me out, beat me up, bury me in a shallow grave. It was all talk. I got phone calls, I got letters, yet no one ever came near me and, as far as I know, no one ever set foot on my land.”

“Did you never consider selling your property?” Tracie said.

There was a note of admiration in her voice. Randisi smiled broadly when he heard it.

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I might’ve considered it if someone had actually made me an offer.”

“Wait,” I said. “No one offered to buy your land?”

“No.” Randisi shook his head vigorously in case I misunderstood him. “I didn’t know anyone wanted my land. Hadn’t even heard about that shopping mall that folks wanted to build out here until I started getting the threats.”

“No one calling himself Rushmore McKenzie—”

“I thought you were Rushmore McKenzie.”

“Came to see you?”

“No. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

I quickly explained.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Randisi said.

I agreed with him.

“I wonder,” Randisi said.

“What?”

“There was this fella—I remember a fella who looked a little like you. He drove up to the place a while back, got out of his car, walked around the car once, got back in, and drove off. I have no idea what that was about. I figured he was lost. Or nuts. Think it was him? Think he was looking the place over so he could claim he was here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mr. Randisi,” Tracie said, “why didn’t you say something when you started getting the threats? Why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you come into town?”

“I don’t do too good in town,” he said. “I have a touch of the agoraphobia. I’m pretty good out here, in my own house, on my own land. In town, in stores and restaurants and church, places that aren’t, you know, wide open, that aren’t easy to escape from, sometimes I get panic attacks. I know it’s silly, and I’ve talked to people about it. I’ve tried exposure therapy and cognitive therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy, only nothing seems to work all that well. Now they have me on sertraline, but that doesn’t do much for me, either. I can’t even make myself go into town to get my prescription filled, so there you are.”

Randisi was visibly disappointed to see us go. He suggested that he might give Tracie a call sometime to learn how this business with the mall went, and Tracie said she thought that was a fine idea.

“In a couple of days,” Randisi said.

“A couple of days,” Tracie said.

“Or maybe later today.”

“Later today would be fine.”

In the car, she said, “I like him.”

“He’s not the person people thought he was,” I said.

“He’s not the person I thought he was,” Tracie said, which was more to the point. “If he doesn’t call me, maybe I’ll call him. If you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind?”

She didn’t answer, just looked out the window until we reached the end of Randisi’s long driveway and hung a right on the highway.

“Now what?” Tracie said. “Do you want to meet the other city council members?”

“Who was the first person the Imposter spoke to about the mall?”

Tracie gave it a moment’s thought before answering. “Ed Bizek, the city manager. He’s also the city’s director of economic development.”

“Rural flight,” Bizek said. “We’re fighting rural flight. Eighty-nine percent of the cities in the United States have fewer than three thousand people, and they’re getting smaller all the time. Six states, according to the numbers I last saw, six states—Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota—have lost over five hundred thousand residents, half of them with college degrees. Fighting rural flight. That’s what my job is all about. At least that’s what it was about.”

“Was?” I said.

“I expect to be fired at the next city council meeting.”

“Why?”

“Mistakes were made. Money was lost. Someone has to pay for that.”

“You?”

“The council sure isn’t going to blame itself.”

He was probably right, I decided. Especially since City Councilwoman Tracie Blake was sitting in the backseat of Bizek’s car and didn’t say a word to dispute his theory.

“You know, I did check him out,” Bizek said. “The Imposter, I mean. I called his office in the Cities. I went to the Web site. I interviewed his references. We had a conference call with Rush’s other investors. The city council was there. I even called a couple of the major retailers that Rush said were interested in becoming anchor tenants. They all said that they had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion, but no one set any alarm bells to ringing, either. There was no reason to believe, to not believe … Later, after Rush disappeared, I checked again. The investors were gone, and so were the references. The Web site had been taken down, the office phone just kept on ringing, and the retailers, they all had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion. Even then I couldn’t believe it.” He looked at Tracie’s reflection in his rearview mirror. “I guess I would fire me, too.”

She didn’t so much as smile in reply.

Bizek drove his car to a halt at a four-way stop. He surprised me by putting it into park and leaning back against his door.

“Of course, it was too good to be true,” he said.

I glanced through the back window of the car, looking for the traffic that he was blocking. There wasn’t any.

“I think I knew it was too good to be true, even when Rush was telling me about it,” Bizek said. “He was projecting sales of four hundred to five hundred dollars a square foot, though. I had to listen, and the more I listened—it really would have improved our way of life. Right now people drive, some of them drive hundreds of miles, to go shopping for furniture, for appliances, for clothes and whatnot. Think of the difference it would make if people could get what they need right here. No long drives, no waste of time and gas. The revenue we’ve been losing to other communities, to Rapid City and whatnot, we would have kept that revenue. Everyone in town would have benefited.”

“Not everyone,” Tracie said.

Bizek looked at her in his rearview mirror.

“Yeah, well,” he said, as if it were a topic not worth discussing. He sat straight in his seat, put the car in gear, and drove through the intersection.

“Still, the town should be all right,” Bizek said. “Look.”

He pointed to a blond-stone building to his left. The sign above the door read northern star nursing home.

“We’ve got health care,” he said. “We’ve got assisted living. We just finished up an expansion of the Libbie Medical Clinic down on the end of First Street, which has two full-time and two part-time nurse practitioners and roving doctors. People will move to a small town to retire if you have the medical facilities.”

Bizek continued his slow motor tour of Libbie, showing me a lot more than I had seen during my hike around the town’s perimeter that morning. There was a two-screen movie theater, a shoe store, a beauty parlor, a barbershop, an auto mechanic, a farm equipment dealer, a livestock sales barn, UPS—just about everything a small town needs except for a lumberyard.

“That was my biggest priority,” Bizek said. “To get a lumberyard. I worked on it for years. Talked to Home Depot, Menards, just about everyone you can think of. They all said, the big chains said, they weren’t interested in a town this size. Then I found a guy, a retired contractor—he was willing to build a lumberyard here. He was going to run it with his sons.” Bizek glanced at Tracie in his rearview again. “Only the city council wouldn’t dip into the development fund to help him out. They said it wasn’t a good investment considering our limited tax base. Still, I’d like to get a lumberyard here.”

Bizek made a couple of right turns and slowly drove past the industrial park I’d discovered that morning.

“I’m particularly proud of this,” he said. “The middle building, that houses Frank Communications. It’s a call center that handles inbound customer service calls and outbound sales calls, mostly for Fortune 500 companies. This guy, Ira Frank, millionaire, lives in Phoenix, has call centers scattered all across the country. I heard that he was from South Dakota, so I went to see him, went on my own dime, and talked him into moving a center here. It wasn’t hard. Frank likes South Dakota, likes the work ethic we have here.” Bizek looked into his rearview mirror again. “He said the fact that I drove down to Phoenix to talk to him without even an appointment was a good example of that.”

“We don’t need any more seven-dollar-an-hour jobs,” Tracie said.

“Microsoft and Apple are not going to waltz into Libbie with high-paying jobs for two hundred and fifty skilled, college-educated workers,” Bizek said.

Tracie had nothing to say to that.

“Would you like a tour?” Bizek said. “I’m sure we can arrange a quick tour.”

“Why not?” I said.

Tracie rolled her eyes.

Perry Neske liked his job. He managed the second shift at Frank Communications, the 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. shift, and his smile became broad and his eyes shiny when Tracie asked him to give us the fifty-cent tour. That threw me a little bit, Tracie asking and not Bizek. Instead, Bizek kept his distance, like a child afraid of drawing attention to himself for fear the adults would ask him to leave.

“Business is ramping up,” Neske said. “We expect it’ll get even better as we get deeper into the political season, doing campaign surveys, opinion polls, trolling for contributions.”

I was surprised by how open Neske was. Tracie had explained to Bizek who I was and what I was doing in Libbie. She hadn’t said a word to Neske, though. Still, he proved as forthcoming as if we were old friends picking up a conversation that had been on pause for about thirty seconds. While Neske spoke, Bizek carefully surveyed the people around him as if he were looking for someone and didn’t want to be caught at it.

“In telemarketing, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of your success is the sound of your voice,” Neske said. “Can you read a script, can you talk well, are you outgoing, do you sound upbeat and sincere?”

All around us was the steady hum of conversation, and for a while I thought we had caught the employees conversing with each other during a shift change.

“Oh, no,” Neske said. “They’re working.”