HUNTER’S MOON / 257
“Talk to Bud lately?” he asked.
“It’s easier to ring up a federal prisoner than penetrate that damn hospital.”
“I talked to his lovely wife. She wants a million dollars.”
Linda Margoles whistled. “How are you doing?”
“Fine,” said Harry as he jammed shells into the Remington pump.
He set the shotgun across the dining room table and took a slug of whiskey. “Just signed up for a wilderness experience field trip.”
“What?”
“Check you later, Linda.”
Harry found a seat among the granite polyps overlooking the lake and sipped from the bottle. The shotgun made a comfortable brace for his elbows across his knees.
Whiskey was funny. Sometimes it slammed you hot and sweaty as Saturday night wrestling. Or, like now, it walked you slow and mercilessly through every mundane act of cowardice that living straight and drawing a paycheck from an American corporation required.
The sun flamed out against the black sticks of the forest and briefly he pictured Jesse and Emery padding through the trees, silent as wolves. He did not hear Miss Loretta’s voices. He thought, instead, about a book that had been his sophomore bible. Man’s Fate by André Malraux. The scene where the baron, on a mission to warn the hero that the bad guys are coming to snatch him, tarries at a casino, drinks, and watches the roulette ball tumble round and round in fascination as his friend’s life runs out.
That was close to what Jesse meant, he supposed, when she asked him to take a chance on her.
42
Working on One Day Sober Twice. The Sequel. Harry was thinking he had to figure out a way to shave the hot bristles growing on his eyeballs when the phone rang.
258 / CHUCK LOGAN
“Maybe you’re not so dumb after all,” said Dorothy Houston.
“What you got?” Harry took the call stretched on a chair, pointing his bare feet toward a roaring fire.
“My cop friend made a few calls.”
“What’d he turn up on Cox?”
“Cox schmox. Small potatoes. A couple of drunk and disorderlies in Seattle years ago—”
“But Emery is a different story,” said Harry.
“You nailed it. My friend found a detective on the Duluth force who used to work with him.”
“Lemme guess.”
“Detective Lawrence Emery shot Kidwell. Fact. But then it gets tangled depending on who you believe. The cops said Kidwell was resisting arrest. Kidwell’s family—brother and sister who co-owned his custom sailboat operation—insisted he was defending his business against intruders. There was a question about whether the cops properly identified themselves going in. The family sued. They settled it out of court for an undisclosed amount.”
“What about Emery?”
“The coppers all stuck together, said Emery did it by the book, was fired on, returned fire. They found traces of cocaine big-time in the sailboat, but no weight. Emery was cleared on the shooting, but the word was, if he’d stuck around, he’d have been walking a beat in the Boundary Waters.”
“The money? Did the wife get any of it?”
“Nope. She got the life insurance.”
“How? He was shot allegedly in the commission of a crime.”
“The insurance company investigated. They came up inconclusive on Kidwell’s involvement in a felony. No evidence. Where’s the crime? It was—”
Harry took a breath and let it out. “An accident.”
“Double indemnity for accidental death, Harry.”
“How much did she get?”
“A half a million bucks. He had tons of insurance. Even HUNTER’S MOON / 259
had one of those Lloyds of London specials for the trip. She couldn’t collect on the policies he took out when they got married. There’s this two-year contestability thing. She was on the policy he’d had for ten years.”
“And Emery and the grieving widow disappear into the sunset, to friendly Maston County,” said Harry. “Fuckin’ Bud. He hadda know this. He wanted Jesse to be this earth mother in a lumberjack shirt, so that’s what she was.”
“You think this Emery and the Deucette woman were running the same kind of game on Bud?”
“Damn straight. Except this time they were after a hunk of the Maston estate. Why didn’t someone in the Duluth media pick up on this?”
“She went by her mother’s name in Duluth. Her picture wasn’t in the paper and she was never interviewed on TV. No one put it together.”
“Hakala handled the media like a pro. That’s why he put it to bed so fast. Get Bud in treatment, politics, and Bill Tully. Sure, Right.
Who investigates a county prosecutor?”
“State Attorney General or the Justice Department. You have to make a case for probable cause that there was a conspiracy to violate Bud’s civil rights.”
Silence on the connection while his mind raced.
Dorothy said, “The thing is, you have to connect that kid you shot. Without that, you just have a vivid imagination and a compel-ling coincidence. You’re right on the cusp of a conspiracy theory.
Without proof you wind up sounding like a nut. Go slow. A lot of this is police department gossip.”
“You run any of this by Randall?”
Dorothy exhaled. “Mentioned it on the phone. I gave him Cox’s birthday and he said he’d get Hollywood to snoop around in the Justice Department computers. He called back and said he might have found something.”
“What?”
“Didn’t say.” A tired concern wove through her voice.
“Everything all right?”
“The last time he hooked up with Hollywood he tried to 260 / CHUCK LOGAN
party himself young. You know how they get going.” Dorothy paused. “And he told me to get you to come home. It’s not your scene up there.”
“C’mon, Dorothy. You, too?”
Dorothy’s voice changed, a bit of the childless matron in it. “We all love you, Harry…but you’re an amateur.”
“Right. Thanks, Dorothy. Talk to you later.”
Connect the dots. No wonder Emery looked so bummed that morning. He taught Chris how to shoot.
Harry called Linda Margoles at her office. She was on another line. He left a message. When the phone rang, he leaped at it.
“Harry?” Linda’s voice was cautious, concerned.
“What’s probable cause?”
“What?”
“The legal definition of probable cause. C’mon—”
“Harry, listen a minute. We got other stuff. I told
