“There is no case.”
“When you said before, that not all your plans work out, did you mean that some of them do?”
“You took that picture, Irving, and that journalist is part of your coterie.”
“That’s not true. I hate the guy. But nice word. Coterie.”
“Fix this.”
“I’ll do it right now.” And true to his word, Irv fishes in his pocket for his phone, settles back in his seat, and—staring at the ceiling—waits for Roger to answer the phone.
“Sheriff!” says Roger. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“And now I know why,” Irv answers, switching on the phone’s speaker for Sigrid and Melinda.
“Saw the news, huh?”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“I wanted your comment, but deadlines must be met. The reason is right there in the term. Dead-line. A line that . . .”
“How much did you pay the industrialist?”
“I can’t reveal my sources, Sheriff, and you can’t compel me . . .”
“I paid her a hundred bucks to know if anyone came or went from that house.”
“A hundred! We paid her three hundred.”
“This woman should be running Wall Street. And when, exactly, did you get to her? The time line doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Not long after you issued that APB a few weeks ago. We went to Marcus’s listed address and there she was in pink curlers and one of those freaky green face masks you see in old movies. Told her we’d pay for tips on his whereabouts. We do that sort of thing all the time, so that was no big deal. I didn’t think it was going anywhere. Not until we found out about the love connection to Dr. Jones after a few interviews at the Ivory Tower. That’s when we learned that we had ourselves a SECRET interracial CAMPUS murder mystery coming shortly on the heels of that Roy Carman judgment. And now with the white supremacist motorcycle gang angle tossed in there with video to show? It’s like an afterschool special gone wrong! It’s paperback magic, Sheriff. There’s gonna be a miniseries about this. You mark my words.”
“Interracial? It’s 2008. We got a black guy running for president. Ten years ago we had a Jewish Secretary of Defense—from my home state of Maine no less—married to a black woman.”
“We did?”
“I think you just made my point.”
“Not a campus murder mystery, though. Everyone loves those.”
“Hmm. Yeah. Unfortunately, Roger, that’s not the story.”
“Ingredients make the dish, Sheriff.”
“No, Roger, it’s the recipe. It really is. For example, using careful observation and solid police work I could tell you that Sigrid Ødegård . . .”
Sigrid raises her eyebrows at Irv’s perfect pronunciation of her name and Irv winks. “. . . is not exactly a fugitive from the law. We know exactly where she is and what she’s doing.”
“Oh, really. And where’s that?”
“She’s at the Cheesecake Factory by the multiplex. She’s having herself a Factory Burger, medium rare, and she’s barely touched it.”
“Really.”
“Don’t believe me? Ask her yourself.”
Irv hands over the phone.
“I’m going to kill you in your sleep,” she says.
Irv takes back the phone.
“Her English is really coming along nicely. Thing is, she’s working with us, Roger. We’re even buying her lunch. Her brother is indeed missing and she came here to the Land of the Free all worried-like and looking for him. Doesn’t have anything to do with anything else. It’s all in your head.”
“And what about the video proving her ties with the Vandals?”
“She’s an expert on international drug smuggling and the influence of . . .”—he looks at the round hamburger bun—“globalization. Yeah. On organized crime.” He gives Sigrid a thumbs-up. “While here, as a tourist, we asked her to teach us a thing or two given that Scandinavia is so enlightened and everything and we have those villainous Canadians to deal with it. My crew was in the parking lot taking notes at the time.”
“And how did Juliet McKenna—lady of the night—come onto the scene with the grainy phone video?”
“Video. Right. Video that was taken from a dark corner by a dumpster. Personally, I think you shot the video. I think you were involved in some Expect-More-Pay-Less activity in the alley with Juliet—the one you admitted paying money to—when you saw something weird and decided to stop taking a home movie of your own shenanigans—which is just icky, by the way—and shoot that instead. Now, I admit I’m only wondering all this, but I find that a common sense of wonder is what brings people together, and I think it might be fun to share my sense of wonder with your wife.”
“Oh, come on, Sheriff . . .”
“Bye, Roger.”
Irv places the phone back in his pocket and smiles at Sigrid, waiting for her to acknowledge a job well done. He is slightly surprised to find that she doesn’t agree.
“You should have provided him with the solution,” Sigrid says, slumped in her chair. “If you tell him to fix something, you’re at the mercy of his imagination. If you tell him how, you only need to supervise.”
“You have an interesting problem, Sigrid,” Irv says. “It’s like . . . you’re right about everything, and yet it never seems to matter. You’re a Greek myth of some kind, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
“You’re really annoying me,” Sigrid says.
“You should eat. American beef, right there. Perk you right up.”
Le Suicide
From the comfort of a flat-topped rock facing due west, Marcus Ødegård watches the golden crest of the sun drop below the lake. He digs his bare feet more deeply into the sandy bottom of Lake Flower near Saranac.
America, for all its expansiveness and romantic poetry about wilderness, is a nation built by people with a keen sense of real estate and no fear of solitude. Every piece of land with a view of mountains or water is precious here, and someone has always laid a claim.
God is in the wilderness for the American soul. Out here is where you sit to
