body in all likelihood will never be recovered, according to authorities on the scene.
Kirchmeyer will perhaps be best remembered in St. Paul as the victim of a kidnapping in 1892 in which his father was forced to pay a ransom of $10,000. Kirchmeyer was later found unharmed and the ransom was also recovered. No one has ever been arrested for the crime, believed to have been the work of railroad transients.
Thomas, who read the newspapers religiously, reported the news to Rafferty that morning as they prepared to open the saloon.
“Well, Wash, I guess it is the end then of the Kirchmeyer saga,” Rafferty said. “Let us mark the occasion with due ceremony.”
Beneath the bar, Rafferty—for reasons he could not readily explain—had saved a quart bottle of “Kirchy’s” beer from the last batch made before the brewery shut down. He uncapped the bottle and poured out two glasses of the dark lager.
“A toast,” he said, raising his glass, “to the brewer of a noble beer and to his wife and his son, all gone now. May the Kirchmeyers rest in peace, though I’m thinking that where Michael is goin’ might be a tad hotter than the Yukon.”
“Amen to that,” Thomas said. “Amen to that.”
LOOPHOLE
by Quinton Skinner
I should have known there was going to be trouble from the moment I discovered serious irregularities in Sam Vincent’s books, but in my line of work “trouble” usually means nothing more than a procedural slap on the wrist or a threatening letter from the I.R.S. I’ve known of accountants who have gotten into difficulty for committing actual crimes, such as embezzlement. But for those of us who follow the letter of the law, the profession provides long, quiet, solitary hours. And that’s precisely how I like it.
My ex-wife accused me of being “immune to passion.” She may have had a point, but when she subsequently digressed about her fervid need for “a real man,” it came to mind that she might have been missing the point about me. Maybe she always had. I possessed my share of passions, but they were quiet in nature: precision, detail, and the satisfaction of rows of numbers lined up and silently ringing with the celestial harmony of perfectly executed mathematics. And, besides, what exactly were these passions Barbara extolled from such heights of hauteur? Losing one’s temper over nothing? Abandoning control in the name of “love” or “romance”? How about making constant, capricious, carping demands on one’s spouse—now that was truly Barbara’s passion.
It’s not exactly that I prefer solitude but I can adjust to it easily. I arise, pour coffee out of my pre- programmed maker, eat a single low-carb breakfast bar (chocolate or zesty mango), then don the suit and tie I selected the previous night. I drive to my office in the Foshay Tower—not the trendiest Minneapolis address, but something about its humbleness in the face of its upstart high-rise rivals, like a quiet reserved type in the rough and tumble of a high school boy’s locker room, has always appealed to me. I like to think that its old-fashioned charm gives clients a sense of permanence, decorum, and tact that keeps them returning to me (and referring their friends).
Sam Vincent was one such referral—he came to me by way of Lucas Huston, an executive who lived on Lake of the Isles and who had retained me as his primary accountant for the last seventeen years. Lucas isn’t exactly a friend. He’s never invited me to his house, for instance, for one of the glittering holiday fundraisers that I see written up in the
“His name’s Vincent,” Lucas told me, squinting through a cloud of purplish smoke that he exhaled across my desk in my direction. “He’s a building contractor. His company did some work on my house last summer, and he pestered me to find out who my accountant was until he got your name out of me.”
I nodded in my usual friendly manner, wondering why Lucas might have been reluctant to recommend me to someone.
“See, this is the thing,” Lucas went on. “The guy’s strange. Kind of a rough type. Makes a good living, I’m sure, but I didn’t know if you wanted to be associated with someone like that. Feel free to turn him down. It wouldn’t bother me at all.”
I fretted all that night about whether or not Lucas was telling the truth, and whether my turning down his contractor would indeed be something to which he wouldn’t take offense. In the process I rendered Sam Vincent, in my mind, into a slavering, drooling werewolf of a man, baying and clawing at my door with bone-sharpened claws.
Vincent showed up at my office the next day without calling ahead to make an appointment. He was no werewolf, but neither was he without certain fear-inspiring qualities. He was wearing a golf shirt, and its armbands strained against his considerable biceps. Under what I took to be a golf visor, his tanned face had frown lines where other people were wrinkled from smiling. His hair was so black that I figured he must have had it dyed. I wondered where vain rich men went to do such things—were there salons where intimidating building contractors were secretly buffed and pampered, their sun-damaged dermis lovingly tended to by smiling, silent young women?
“So can you do it?” he asked me.
“Beg pardon?” I said.
He shot me a look that implied people seldom dared drift off during his expositions. Somehow we had made it back to my office, where he was sitting in my chair, at my desk, and I was standing by my Twins 1987 World Series commemorative plaque.
“Nice plaque,” he said, in a fashion that made it impossible to discern whether he was joking or not.
“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”
Vincent had some tax problems, nothing major, but he didn’t care for his accountant and wanted someone to look over his tax returns from the last few years to see if he’d gotten a good break. He spoke of his accountant with the same disapproving regret one might reserve for a mouse that one had stepped on in one’s apartment, a rodent that had run from under the sofa to an unfortunate end.
I examined Vincent’s tax returns and saw that his accountant had indeed made a hash of them. There were all sorts of deductions missed and loopholes left unexploited. I got in touch with the I.R.S. on Sam’s behalf, and within days he went from being a debtor to the government, to a man with a clean slate. Vincent was ecstatic, and the next day a case of single-malt scotch arrived at my office.
Two days later Vincent was back, partaking of the scotch that he had so generously bought for me and outlining the details of our grand future together. He had made a lot of money and invested wisely, he informed me, and henceforth I would manage his wealth and, in the process of seeing to it that he paid as little tax as possible, I would be the beneficiary of his well-known generosity and largesse. And if I ever needed a new room put on the side of my house, it was mine for the cost of the materials.
It is true that, for some time, I had entertained notions of a hardwood den with antique leaded-glass windows. I had plenty of space since Barbara left me, though I hadn’t entirely given up on the idea that I might one day find another woman with whom I was compatible and who might one day share the home with me. There was, for instance, a secretary at my dentist’s office who always brightened when I came to endure the latest installment of my painful and protracted gum work. She was quite a bit younger than me, but seemed to view me as likeable in a paternal sort of way.
I told Vincent I would do it. I wasn’t wanting for work— my practice was doing very well—but I had to admit that dealing with Vincent brought a certain amount of excitement to my predictably stable professional life. He enjoyed telling me about his adventures, tales replete with withering impersonations of the “morons” and “assholes” he dealt with in the building trade. He told me about his girlfriends, and his wife, and his two sons who were evidently in a heated competition to see who could display the most appallingly antisocial qualities at the earliest age.
The honeymoon was short, but it was also enjoyable. Vincent sent me cigars, with which I impressed Lucas
