Ingrid was wearing a white shirtdress with gold buttons that matched the color of her hair. She was sitting at a table with a calculator, ledger book, and a few dozen invoices stacked neatly in front of her. “We’re closed until eleven,” she told me without taking the pencil out of her mouth.
“My name is Holland Taylor,” I announced, giving her a look at my ID. “Do you remember me?”
She looked at the stamp-sized photo and then at me. “Gretchen’s friend,” she said, taking the pencil from her mouth. “Good to see you again.” She offered her hand. I took it, probably held it too long—a soft, pleasant current of electricity passed through it into me, and I didn’t want to let it go.
“Do you have a moment?”
“Not really,” she said, gesturing at her paperwork. “I’m trying to finish up before the rallies end. I’m hoping for a good lunch crowd. Give me twenty minutes?”
“Sure.”
“Ginger!” she called.
A woman poked her head up from behind the stick like she had been squatting there, listening for her cue. “Ingrid,” she answered back.
“Take care of Mr. Taylor, here, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Twenty minutes,” Ingrid repeated, then went back to her calculations.
Ginger motioned me closer to the bar and asked, “What’s your pleasure?”
“Summit Ale?”
I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Sorry.”
“What do you have on tap?”
“Pig’s Eye pilsner—”
I raised my hand quickly to stop her recitation. “Sold,” I said. A moment later she slid a glass of beer in front of me. Pig’s Eye pilsner was named for one of St. Paul, Minnesota’s, more colorful founding citizens, Pig’s Eye Parrant, a rumrunner and all-around scoundrel who had settled in the area when it was still populated almost exclusively by Native-Americans and fur traders. In fact, the city was actually known as Pig’s Eye Landing for many years until a visiting priest decided the name was politically incorrect.
Ginger returned with my beer, and I asked her if she knew Michael Bettich. Waitresses can be a terrific resource for information, especially waitresses in small towns who can actually put a name and occupation to the face of the customers they serve, who are aware of the emotions at the tables they’re waiting. They know when a farmer is having a bad year, when a customer’s balloon mortgage is coming due, when the weather is making people weird; they can point out the customers who are dating for the first time, who are escaping from the kids for an evening, who want to kill each other. Ginger proved to be more knowledgeable than I had hoped and happy to share.
“Michael Bettich? Sure. Deputy Gretchen’s pal. We don’t see much of her these days.”
I took the photograph of Alison out of my pocket and showed it to her.
“Yep, that’s her,” Ginger confirmed. “I think she’s prettier in person.”
“You say you don’t see much of her anymore?” I asked.
“Nah. This gambling thing has emotions running pretty high. I think she’s trying to keep a low profile. Especially around Ingrid.”
“Why?”
“I guess because she might become Ingrid’s chief competitor.”
Have you ever felt like you’ve just walked in at the middle of a movie?
“I don’t understand,” I said, and my face probably showed it.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Ginger said and laughed. “Okay, here’s the story. There’s this resort called The Harbor. Mostly it’s a restaurant, but they have plenty of space for campers and such, and you can dock your boat, okay? Anyway, it went broke. The lake it’s on, Lake Peterson, had winter kill some years back and lost all its fish. The DNR restocked it, but rebuilding a fish population takes years. Besides, it’s way out on the highway, and hardly anyone went there. Somehow King Koehn got stuck with it—The Harbor, not the lake—and he’s been trying to unload it for years. Now, along comes Michael, and she buys it for—I don’t know—ten cents on the dollar. People tell her it’s a bad investment, but she buys it anyway.”
I took a long pull of my beer as Ginger continued.
“Now, the next day—I mean like the very next day after the deal is done—word leaks out that the local band of Ojibwa is, like, ultrasecretly trying to buy the old civic center from the Kreel County Board of Commissioners—I guess to revamp into an off-reservation gambling casino.”
“You guess?”
“Well, they haven’t actually come out and said it, the Ojibwa I mean, but that’s what everyone thinks. Why else would they want it?”
“What does the civic center have to do with Alison?”
“Huh?”
“I mean Michael.”
“The Harbor?” Ginger asked. “Because it’s … Okay, here’s the rest of the story. When the county decided to build the civic center as a way to generate convention business, there was a big fight over where it should be located, in Saginau or Deer Lake. The board settled on a compromise. They decided to build the civic center on a lake midway between the two towns.”
“Lake Peterson,” I volunteered.
“There you go,” said Ginger. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Only it didn’t do any better than The Harbor.”
“How close is the civic center to The Harbor?”
“Directly across the highway.”
“My, my, my, my, my.”
“Get it now?”
“Uh-uh.”
Ginger sighed, exasperated.
“You don’t think having a casino across the way isn’t going to be good for business?” she asked. “That’s why Michael is keeping a low profile. ’Cuz everyone is mad at her.”
“Who? Why?”
Again Ginger sighed. “Okay, let me count the ways,” she said. “You’ve got your King Koehn, who figures Michael stole The Harbor out from under him, like, unethically, using inside information—”
“Did she?”
“You got Charlie Otterness,” Ginger continued as if she didn’t want to be interrupted. “Charlie owns a bait-and-tackle store outside of town. Big place; you want minnows and stuff, you go to Charlie’s. Charlie is also a Kreel County commissioner. And he’s a widower who rumor has it—now, I’m not one to gossip, but rumor has it he was keeping time with Michael until the day she bought The Harbor and now has nothing nice to say about her.”
“Charlie told Michael about the impending sale,” I guessed.
“It’s amazing what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Oops,” Ginger added, making a dramatic gesture out of putting her hand over her mouth. “Did I say that?”
She laughed and I smiled, but I wasn’t feeling particularly happy. Alison sleeping with a county commissioner to get inside information? I didn’t want to hear that.
“Stupid! People are stupid!”
Ginger and I both turned toward the door. A tall, thin, bearded man dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and an ANIMALS ’R US button, glanced at us and then looked away.
“Hello, Mr. Thilgen,” Ginger said.
“Do you know how stupid people are?” Thilgen asked loudly. Ginger went along, playing straight man.
“How stupid are they?”
“They’re so stupid, they’re out there arguing about gambling, about gambling casinos, but they refuse to see the big picture.”
“The big picture?”
“The environment.”
“Ahh, yes. The environment.”
“Don’t you care about the environment? Are you stupid, too? Are you one of the stupid people?”
Ginger took a deep breath and did not reply. Thilgen seated himself in the restaurant section. Ingrid smiled at him, gathered her materials, and disappeared behind a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Thilgen was obviously well-known and not particularly popular. The waitresses flipped a coin to determine who would serve him; the loser demanded two out of three.
“Nobody cares about the animals,” Thilgen continued. “They’re going to widen the roads and cut down the trees to make room for parking lots and bring their foul-smelling cars in here and their human pollution. Well, what about the animals, is what I want to know. What about the deer and the woodchucks? Nobody asked them if they want a gambling casino. Oh, no! They’re expendable. So what if we destroy the wetlands, the habitats. So what if we turn Lake Peterson into a landfill. Just as long as everyone makes, a buck, screw the animals, forget the environment.”