But the sizzle from the skillet was loud and she didn’t seem to hear.
37
Cork made his way through the snow, up the long slope of the judge’s estate. The broken pane on the side door had been covered with a bit of plywood that Cork easily pried loose. He reached in, unlocked the door, stepped inside. The cans he’d knocked over the night Russell Blackwater died still lay strewn across the kitchen floor. The smell of rotting garbage had grown worse. Cork made his way back to the judge’s study, where all the evidence of what the shotgun had done to the judge’s head still remained splattered on the map behind the desk, brownish now, more like mud than rivers of red. Cork started with the desk. He checked the telephone, a complicated thing with lots of buttons. Beside two of the buttons numbers were listed, one of which belonged to GameTech. He checked the drawers but found nothing that seemed relevant. He went through the judge’s mahogany secretary and came up blank there, too. He removed the books from the shelves, as Schanno had done, and, probably like Schanno, found nothing.
Including the bathroom, there were seven rooms on the first floor. Cork went through them all. If the judge kept any GameTech-related documents at his home, they weren’t downstairs. Cork headed up to the second floor. As he reached the top of the landing, he heard the front door open and quietly close. A shadow passed through a bar of sunlight across the floor, but he couldn’t see the figure who’d cast it. Carefully, he descended the stairway. From the kitchen came the squeak of a hinge like that of a little mouse. Cork crossed the bare wood floor, hoping the complaint of an old board wouldn’t give him away. He hadn’t thought to bring his Winchester, so he picked up a black metal sculpture of a perched hawk and cradled the heavy piece in his hand as he edged toward the kitchen doorway.
Hannah Mueller screamed as she stepped from the kitchen and saw Cork with the heavy black hawk drawn back ready to strike.
“Christ, Hannah, I’m sorry.” Cork let his hand drop immediately.
“Sheriff O’Connor!” the woman said breathlessly. Her eyes were huge with fright.
“It’s all right, Hannah. I didn’t know it was you.”
Hannah Mueller was a woman about forty, small, heavy, with dull gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and bound with a rubber band. She had a plain face, and in her blue eyes was an innocence much younger than her forty years, for Hannah was mildly retarded. She wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt and sneakers. She carried a mop and a bucket.
“I came to clean,” she said, as if she needed to defend her presence. “Mr. Parrant called me and said it was okay for me to clean. I didn’t clean my regular days.”
“That’s fine, Hannah,” Cork assured her. “That’s just fine.”
Hannah looked at him, her gaze full of question.
“I’m investigating, Hannah.”
“Oh,” Hannah said, as if that explained it just fine. She looked past Cork toward the hallway that led to the judge’s study. “I heard it’s bad.”
“It’s not pleasant,” Cork acknowledged. “Hannah, what are your regular days?”
“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes I clean on Sunday if the judge has a party or something. He leaves me a note.”
“He doesn’t speak with you?”
“I don’t ever see him. He’s always gone.”
Cork looked at his watch. “You always come at nine?”
“Nine.” Hannah nodded. “Always at nine.”
“And the judge is always gone.”
“Always gone.” Hannah nodded.
“What if you needed to talk to him? Could you call him?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the numbers.”
“What numbers?”
Hannah reached into her back pocket and drew out an old leather wallet with a nicely tooled design. She extracted a worn piece of paper and handed it to Cork. Two telephone numbers were written on the paper. Beside one Hannah had noted “Monday amp; Friday.” Beside the other she’d written, “Wensday.” The “Wensday” number was preceded by the digit 1. Long distance, same area code as Aurora.
“Wait just a minute, Hannah.” Cork put the hawk back on its stand, stepped to the phone near the stairs, and dialed the Monday/Friday number.
“Good morning. Great North. How may I direct your call?”
Cork smiled. “Joyce. Cork O’Connor.”
“Yes, Cork. Hi.”
“Could I ask you a question?”
“You can. Doesn’t mean I can answer it.”
“Did the judge work at Great North on Wednesdays?”
“No. For the last year or so Wednesday has been his day off.”
“Thanks, Joyce. You’re wonderful.”
“Tell Albert that.”
Cork hung up. He tried the Wednesday number. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. He called Ed Larson and asked for one last favor. Could he track down a long distance number?
“I have to wait for someone to call me back,” he explained to Hannah, who’d stood patiently, mop and bucket in hand, while he called.
“Sure, okay,” she shrugged. She looked again, not with great enthusiasm, toward the back hallway.
“You don’t have to do that, Hannah,” Cork said.
“It’s Christmas,” she explained. “The money.”
“Then let me do it,” Cork offered.
“No.” She shook her head vigorously, her dull ponytail swishing across her blue collar. “It wouldn’t be right. Mr. Parrant said he’d pay me.”
“Mr. Parrant doesn’t have to know.”
“It wouldn’t be right,” she insisted. She looked at Cork gratefully. “But it’s sure nice of you to offer, Sheriff.”
“At least let me help.”
“No. It’s my job.”
The phone rang. Cork picked it up. He listened. “Just a minute. Let me write this down.” There was a notepad by the phone but nothing to write with. Cork checked his pockets for a pen, then glanced at Hannah, who’d put down her bucket and was holding out to him a stubby pencil that looked as if the point had been sharpened with a knife. Cork smiled gratefully. He wrote down the address, thanked Ed, and hung up.
“Thanks, Hannah.”
“You’re welcome.” She picked up her bucket, took a deep breath, and started toward the back room.
It seemed to Cork the good people were always cleaning up the messes.
Not surprisingly, the address of the Wednesday number was in Duluth. It fit. As Cork made the two-hour drive to the port city on Lake Superior, he thought about the judge making the same trip once a week, retrieving GameTech mail from the post office box, and sitting in an anonymous office somewhere taking care of business. Cork wasn’t exactly sure what the business was, but the more he’d learned the more certain he was that it was a less than honorable enterprise.
He found the address near the harbor bridge. A small office building-square, red brick-that had probably once been busy when the ore ships ran regularly, but it looked as if it was mostly abandoned now. A big sign in one of the first-floor windows advertised office space for rent. Parked in front was a white van that had “Mosely
