Dead Jitterbug (23 page)

Barb sat at one of the desks, head bowed over a laptop computer. She hadn’t heard them come in. When she did look up, it was obvious she was expecting someone else: someone she feared.

“Well, hey, hello,” she said, struggling to her feet as a smile broke through the anxiety on her face. “Ray, Doc, what brings you out here? Carla just left, if you’re looking—” Her expression turned serious at the sight of Lew in her uniform.

“Nope, it’s all about you, Barb,” said Ray, his voice relaxed and genial. “Got a minute?”

She sat back down and pushed the computer aside. “Ray,” she said, “for you—all day.” As they pulled chairs up to her desk, Osborne could see the strain in her face. She looked as if she hadn’t been sleeping. An open bag of corn chips sat next to her laptop.

“Do you know Chief Ferris?”

“I know who you are,” said Barb, extending a hand across the table. Lew gave her a friendly smile.

“This is quite a nice place,” said Ray, glancing around the room

“Yeah?” Barb’s voice was apologetic. “We got furniture on order. Takes forever to get stuff done in this town.”

“What’s a building like this cost anyway?” asked Ray.

“With the site, which is commercial, and we used a Wausau Home plan, you know—not too bad. Carla has had her dad doing the painting for us so that keeps the costs down. Maybe, oh, little over a million?”

“You girls are doing great.”

“I guess we are,” Barb said, her voice flat.

Ray smiled at her, his eyes kind. Lew and Osborne sat quietly beside him. A faint humming from a refrigerator somewhere could be heard. Barb shifted in her chair, then fidgeted with her pen. The three visitors watched her. No one said anything.

“Barb … we know,” said Ray.

Barb looked away from him, fluttered her hands, then pressed the fingers of her right hand to her temple as if she had a headache. After a long, silent moment, she met Ray’s gaze. She looked at Osborne and at Lew, then she said, “I’m glad. I can’t live this way anymore.”

She covered her face with both hands for moment, then heaved a breath. “Okay, where do we start?”

“Where’s the money?” asked Ray.

“Carla keeps it in a locker at the casino. She has the key.”

“Did you and Carla work together at the credit union?” asked Lew.

“Yes. That’s how we became friends. And this whole bank scheme was an accident, really. Carla decided we’d play a trick on a girlfriend of ours who was a teller at First National in Crandon. We knew she was the only one who worked the lunch hour, so we dressed up, walked in wearing masks, handed her a note that Carla wrote, and expected her to start laughing.

“But she didn’t. She handed us everything in her drawer. So … we walked out, got in our car, and drove away. No cops, no sirens. No one ever even reported the bank was robbed. We had seventy-five hundred dollars in cash.

“And your friend never knew it was you?”

“No. After that, Carla made the plans. I did what I was told. But—I know … I’m going to jail aren’t I?”

“Prison,” said Lew. “Robbing banks is a federal offense. But the more you tell us, the better it’ll be for you. Do you want to call a lawyer?”

“I don’t have a lawyer.” Barb’s face collapsed.

“I can suggest someone who’s very good,” said Osborne. “Lillie Wright.”

Barb looked at Ray for confirmation. He nodded. “I’ll call her later,” said Barb. “I’ll feel better if I get this off my chest before anything else happens.”

“You mean the IRS thing?” asked Ray.

“Kinda, yeah.” From the way her eyes moved, Osborne knew there was something else worrying her.

As if the confession could cleanse her soul, Barb was more than ready to talk. According to her, it was at Carla’s insistence that she had kept a ledger detailing each heist: Every bank robbed, the date and time, the take.

They planned carefully, choosing small banks with limited staff and hitting late in the morning—in time for the previous day’s deposits but before the noon rush. And always happy with modest takes ranging from a few thousand dollars to eighteen or twenty thousand at the most.

“We never did more than one a month,” said Barb. “It had to be at least a hundred miles away from our last bank. We made sure to choose a different day of the week, and we had one rule: we had to be able to park our car around a corner so we could drive off without being seen.

“The last bank surprised us,” said Barb. “We couldn’t believe how much money we got. That’s when Carla came up with the idea of opening this realty company—we needed an excuse for why we had so much money.”

“Where and how does Ed Kelly figure into this?” asked Osborne. “Didn’t I hear that you’re the brokers for some land he’s selling?”

“Carla met Ed and his girlfriend up at the casino. They were sitting at a blackjack table together, and Carla mentioned she was in real estate. Ed said he had been looking to work with a firm that didn’t buy for itself. We had no plans to do that—we just wanted to look like we did
something.
So one thing led to another, y’know. The strange thing is, he brought us more customers, and now we really
are
making a lot of money.”

Barb’s eyes brimmed with tears. “You know,” she said, starting to cry, “I have my real estate license, I enjoy doing this. Why … why couldn’t all this,” she swept her arm around the room, “have happened sooner?”

“Why couldn’t you have said no to Carla way back when?” asked Lew, her voice quiet. “That’s the tough question, Barb. You’re a nice person in a bad situation.”

“I know.” Barb wiped at her face. “I guess—I was afraid. That first robbery was supposed to be a fake, and then it was real, and then she told me I was as guilty as her. I was in too deep. You’re gonna put in me jail today, right?”

“Yes,” said Lew. “I’m afraid I will. And I’m not sure about bail.”

Barb leaned forward, her face frightened. “Please don’t put me in the same cell with Carla. She went after her dad this morning; I don’t need her coming after me next.”

“Her father—you mean Darryl?”

“Yeah. Poor guy. She treats him so bad. He was doing a lot of the work here—painting and stuff. Man, is she mean to him. Well, he got her back a hundred times over—he’s the one sicced the IRS on us.”

“How do you know that?” asked Ray. “He never said any such thing to me.”

“A friend of mine heard him bragging at a bar the other night. He was drunk and shooting off his mouth. I told Carla about it this morning—she was furious. Left for his place about an hour ago.”

thirty-three

Who hears the fishes when they cry?

—Henry David Thoreau

Ray
was right. The road in to Darryl’s place was unmarked and hard to spot. If you were headed west, you had less than two seconds to spot the ruts that cut back and east off the road—then a lurching, twisting mile down a grassy lane more logging trail than driveway.

The man lived in a sagging old shack whose logs were so black and its chinking so crumbling that it had to date from the early 1900s. Those were the glory days of the northwoods, when loggers by the thousands built one-room homesteads deep in the woods where they worked. But what might have once been a haven for a hardworking man was today’s squatter’s paradise: rundown and ramshackle.

“Does he even have running water?” asked Lew, eyeing the shack from a distance, as the police cruiser heaved its way over ruts and rocks.

“No water, wood heat, root cellar,” said Ray. “And electricity—he’s got electricity. Place is really not all that bad.”

“Does he own all this land?” asked Osborne, thinking

Darryl could log a few acres and make enough to pay for indoor plumbing.

“Belongs to a guy from Chicago,” said Ray. “He lets Darryl live here so long as he keeps hunters and snowmobiles off the property.”

The shack appeared deserted until they crested a rise fronting the building. Only then did they spot the red SUV parked alongside a huge, black satellite dish.

“Wouldn’t you know,” said Lew. “Can’t afford a faucet but he’s got sixty thousand channels on his goddam TV set.” She tipped her head at Osborne. “So ask your daughter. Is this what she has in mind when she tells me I need to get out and shake hands? Track down all these razzbonyas with no fire numbers and big honking satellite dishes?”

“Hey, easy on the insults,” said Ray. “So the man’s got HBO—lucky dog. Talked him into a cell phone a while back, too. Got tired of trying to reach him by carrier pigeon.”

“That’s no carrier pigeon driving that SUV,” said Osborne. “Most likely one angry woman.”

Lew reached for her Sig Sauer, pulling it from its holster. “Carla used a gun during the robberies,” she said. “I wouldn’t put it past her to be armed or have a weapon in her car.”

“Lewelleyn …” Osborne placed a hand on her arm. “Be careful.”

“Planning on it,” she said with a quick pat on his knee. “Same goes for you—both of you.”

“I can tell you right now something’s wrong,” said Ray, leaning in from the backseat and keeping his voice low. “Darryl always comes to that window on the right when he hears a vehicle—and where the hell is his van? I don’t see it. We didn’t pass it on our way out here. Something’s up.”

“Where does this road end? Do you know, Ray?” asked Lew. The lane on which they had been driving appeared to continue past the shack.

“At the swamp. There’s a heron rookery back in there. Enough water for Darryl to keep minnows and leeches. He loves it back in there.”

They approached the only door, which opened into a narrow porch of a room that held an ancient icebox, a wooden worktable piled with rags and tools and half-empty boxes of shotgun shells. Walking to the back, Ray knocked on the interior door. No answer. He turned the knob, pushed open the door, and stuck his head inside.

“Darryl,” he said. No answer. He motioned to Lew and Osborne to follow him inside.

The kitchen was separated from the living area by a wall covered with shelves and holding a miscellaneous collection of mixing bowls, pots and pans, and food supplies. A wood-burning stove and a wide table covered with a green oilcloth and hosting four rickety wooden chairs crowded the remaining space. It smelled of wood smoke and bacon.

“Hey, Darryl,” said Ray again, “you got company.” He walked to where the kitchen opened into the next room, which was long and dark.

The windows were so few and tiny and let in so little light that it was difficult to see. The heavy cloud cover outdoors didn’t help. Ray reached for a light switch. A single bulb went on over two bunk beds to their immediate right. Osborne could make out a rock fireplace and some furniture in the shadows to their left. A rumpled double bed at the far end made it obvious where Darryl spent most of his time. A large-screen TV rested on a dresser at the foot of the bed.

Lew caught her breath and pointed. Osborne peered past her into the shadows. An old rocking chair and a well-worn wing chair were positioned on a dark rag rug to face the fireplace. A console from the fifties, the kind that held a twelve-inch TV and a turntable, buttressed the seating area, almost hiding two feet, toes facing upward and one foot lacking its sandal.

As they walked across the room, an end table next to the rocking chair came into view. On it was a sawed-off shotgun. “Ever see that before?” asked Lew.

“Oh, yeah,” said Ray. “Darryl’s had it since he was a kid. Sixteen gauge.”

As they neared the console, Lew put her arms out as if to stop Ray and Osborne from going any farther. It was good she did. The rug was changing color.

Edging their way around for a better view, Osborne’s first thought was there’d be no measuring Carla’s jaw now—never good what a shotgun does to the human head. Lew made an automatic move to check for a pulse. As she did so, she pointed to the revolver gripped tightly in Carla’s right hand.

Ray turned on the floor lamp next to the rocking chair. The light illuminated more blood—a pattern leading across the wood floor and toward the door that led out of the back of the building. Bolting through the door, Ray ran down the rutted lane into the woods behind the shack, shouting, “Darryl! I’m here. Hold on, it’s Ray!” Osborne followed him, while Lew hurried to radio for assistance.

They found the van a quarter mile down the road at the edge of the swamp. Ray yanked open the driver’s-side door. He was leaning in as Osborne caught up.

“He’s alive, Doc. Bleeding bad, but he’s alive.”

To kill a human being—yourself or someone else—with one shot from a .22 pistol requires excellent aim. Darryl must have jerked as he pulled the trigger because he missed his heart and shattered a shoulder blade. Nevertheless, he was in pain and bleeding.

“Omigod, Ray,” he said with a gurgle, “I won’t make it, ‘Ol buddy. I shot the main artery to my heart.”

“No, you didn’t, Darryl,” said Ray, ripping off his shirt and pressing it hard against the wound in Darryl’s chest.

“I shot her—I wanna die. You gotta let me die.”

“Help me hold him, Doc,” said Ray, wrestling Darryl out of the van seat and onto the ground. “Now you just lay quiet, the ambulance is on its way.”

“I shot her—”

“We know you shot her, big guy. No doubt about it. But it sure as hell looks like self-defense. So just stop talking and everything will be okay.”

“No,” Darryl twisted his big head with an agony that didn’t come from his gunshot wound. His red eyes filled with anguish. “I didn’t understand, I didn’t know. I shot Hope. I killed Missus McDonald.” He passed out.

Ray dropped his head, then looked up, heartbreak written across his face. Osborne knew that look. It’s the look you have when the people you love are in trouble and there’s nothing you can do to help.

“Doc, he’s lost it. He’s in shock. We didn’t hear anything.” Ray pressed his shirt hard on Darryl’s chest, just above his heart. His face took on a grim resolve as he said, “Darryl did not shoot Hope McDonald. I’ll bet my life on that.”

“I’d like to believe you,” said Osborne, staring down at a brown-red face gone white.

thirty-four

Always let your hook be hanging; where you least expect it, there will swim a fish.