Name:
Michael Bettich
SS#:
398-91-0038
DOB:
3/6/70
Sex:
Female
MS:
Single
Address:
4001 Capitol Street, #314 Deer Lake, WI
Employer:
Rosalind Colletti Investments 2035 Broadway Avenue Deer Lake, WI
“You couldn’t resist it, could you, Alison?” I said aloud, rereading the name of Michael Bettich’s current employer for the fifth time. “You just couldn’t let it go.”
I got up and removed Alison’s photograph from the wall, careful not to leave adhesive when I peeled the tape from the corners. I examined it carefully. The eyes had lost their pain long ago. For some time now they had held a different expression for me—she looked like Bill Clinton had when he claimed he did not have sex with that woman.
“Gotcha!” I said, more in relief than in triumph.
Cynthia seemed surprised by the rain. After parking her car she glanced skyward, shook her head, turned up her collar, and trudged to my front door. I held it open it for her, and she came into the house. There was no warm hug, no inviting smile.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, slipping off her coat and folding it over the back of a chair.
“I’m going to Deer Lake tomorrow morning to make sure it’s her.”
“Then what?”
“That’s it. Like I said on the telephone, it puts a period to the investigation.”
“Is that so important?”
“It is to me. I like things to be just so. What motivates me, besides my four hundred dollars a day and expenses, is a sense of order. Things ought to happen in a certain way. Like in baseball. Every batter gets three strikes. Every team gets three outs. The team with the most runs after nine innings gets the W. There are no ties, and you go from first to third at your own risk. When things don’t happen like that, when a player alters the rules to take advantage of another player, I feel compelled to do something about it.”
Cynthia didn’t believe me. She said my answer sounded like I had rehearsed it, and she was right.
“There is more,” I admitted.
Her expression asked, What?
“The other night, you said I wanted revenge because I had felt that somehow Alison had cheated on me. That’s not exactly true.”
“No?”
“I don’t want revenge. I don’t want to hurt her. Truly I don’t. I just want to ask her … why. And I want to see her face when she answers.”
“Just like any man who’s been cuckolded.”
I smiled. “Cuckold? That’s a little eighteenth century isn’t it?”
Cynthia smiled back. “I’ve been working to improve my vocabulary.”
We ate a couple of glazed turkey fillets I had simmered in ground ginger, Worcestershire sauce, and orange marmalade while we listened to the ball game on the radio. We didn’t have much to say to each other. Afterward, we watched the rain from opposite ends of a wicker couch in my three-season porch. Every time the thunder boomed and the lightning flashed, we moved a little nearer to each other until there was no distance between us at all.
sixteen
The Northland had grown considerably greener in the three weeks since I last drove through it, and the natives were dressed as if they actually believed the rumors that winter was over. I, for one, was skeptical. Some areas in the Northland reported snowfall on Memorial Day. I didn’t witness this event personally since I was visiting my parents in Fort Myers, Florida, a place where winter never comes, and spring is marked not with rain and slush but with the arrival of catchers and pitchers at the training camp of the Minnesota Twins. Still, I believed the reports. In the Northland, a snowball’s chance in July wasn’t all that remote.
“The Northland” is the title given by advertisers—“Visit the Northland’s number-one used-car dealership”—to a rather vaguely defined region in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin noted for its countless lakes and forests. And if you hail from Des Moines, I could see how the place might seem to embody the sense of wilderness that the sobriquet implies. However, if you hail from the true north, from Fairbanks or Prince Albert or even Edmonton, the Northland seems more like a suburb of Kansas City. Certainly the traffic jam I joined when I approached Deer Lake had an urban familiarity. It took twenty minutes to creep from the city limits sign to the intersection at the center of town.
“What’s going on?” I asked the county cop who was directing traffic. He growled at me and waved me through the intersection. I drove in the direction his hand pointed, obedient as any driver’s ed student, and followed the traffic without knowing where it was taking me until I came to the Deer Lake branch of the U.S. Post Office. I escaped the caravan and pulled into the parking lot.
I noted the post office’s address: 4001 Capitol Street. I reread the address I had written in my notebook for Alison: 4001 Capitol Street, #314. A mail drop. Give the lady credit; she understood the value of a mail drop. Her mail comes to 4001 Capitol Street, P.O. Box 314. She then picks it up or it’s forwarded on to her; her identity and location are known only to the postal employees, who are legally bound to keep it to themselves. However, like I said before, Alison had genius but not experience, otherwise she might have known that the U.S. Postal Service Manual contains a provision that clearly states that the post office must disclose the street address of a boxholder to someone needing the address to serve process. You can make good money as a process server. I’ve done a little of it myself.
I went inside and waited in the short line at the counter until it was my turn. The postal clerk spoke with a natural courtesy very few public employees possess. She was short and thin and black, probably the only African-American I’ve seen in the lily-white Northland outside of Duluth who wasn’t on vacation. She laughed at my surprise at finding her there and explained that she was the only black and one of the few women to work for the post office in all of Kreel County. “If I were gay I would fill the district’s entire minority quota all by myself,” she said and laughed again, without malice or bitterness. Listening to her infectious laugh and working to keep from breaking up myself, I found I liked her very much, this stranger—liked her more than some friends I’ve known for decades. But the laugh quickly died when I flashed my ID and lied to her, telling her that I was a process server looking for a deadbeat that my client wanted to sue, reminding her that my request was entirely legal.
“I know my job,” she coolly informed me as her long fingers danced over the keyboard of her computer terminal.
“Bettich, Michael J., 2035 Broadway Avenue, Deer Lake, Wisconsin,” she recited quickly.
I didn’t write down the address in my notebook. It was the same as Rosalind Colletti Investments, Alison’s alleged employer. I waited for the clerk to look up from her computer screen.
“Something more?” she said.
“Where is 2035 Broadway Avenue?” I asked, wondering if she was this protective of all her addressees.
“Do your own dirty work, gumshoe.”
Gumshoe? Now there’s a word I hadn’t heard for a long time.
“Sorry I ruined your day,” I told her, and I meant it.
I asked for directions from a pump jockey working the twenty-four hour service station on the corner, who looked at me like I was the dumbest human being alive. His directions consisted of shaking his head and pointing a greasy finger at the small building across the street and up the block. There was no address on the outside of the structure, only the sign: KING ENTERPRISES.