Rafferty looked into Kirchmeyer’s tired, sad eyes and continued, “There is but one more thing for you to consider, sir, and it concerns the fate of your son. By all rights, he should be charged with his crime, not to mention the agony he put you and your wife through. Yet the fact is, you are the victim here and you must decide whether to prosecute the matter in the courts. What I’m sayin’ is that I will not hand Michael’s confession over to the police unless you ask me to.”
“And if I decide to tear up the confession, what will the police be told?”
“Leave that to me,” Rafferty said with a smile. “I have a fine Irish talent for embroidery. Besides, I believe I can convince Chief O’Connor to go along with whatever tale I have to offer, so long as he receives credit for findin’ your son and retrievin’ the ransom. He will be a regular hero by the time I’m through.”
“You would do that to spare our family the shame of Michael’s crime?”
“I would, but on one condition. The lad cannot be let off scot-free. You must see to it that he faces serious consequences for what he has done.”
Kirchmeyer nodded. “I understand, Mr. Rafferty, and I assure you there will be consequences. To be betrayed in such a cold and calculating manner by my own flesh and blood is a terrible thing. I don’t know that I will ever be able to forgive Michael.”
“It will be hard,” Rafferty acknowledged, “but perhaps one day, if Michael can prove himself worthy of forgiveness, you will be able to give it.”
“Yes, perhaps one day,” Kirchmeyer said as he stood up to shake Rafferty’s hand. Then he went downstairs to talk with his son.
Rafferty was as good as his word. When he talked to the reporters downstairs, he spun a lively yarn about how two unknown men—believed to be transients living in the shack—had snatched away Michael. The story was patently absurd, but Rafferty buttressed it with a glowing account of how Chief O’Connor and his men had allowed the ransom to be taken so that the kidnappers would think they had gotten away with their crime. Then, he said, he and the police had freed Michael and recovered the ransom yet the kidnappers had somehow escaped. The press was skeptical but Rafferty stuck to his story, and as there was no way to disprove it, the newspapers had no choice but to ratify it as the official version of events.
Johann Kirchmeyer was also true to his word. He banished his son from his home and business and wrote him out of his will. Soon thereafter, Michael left St. Paul for points unknown.
Five years later, in 1897, Johann Kirchmeyer died. His wife followed him to the grave a month later. With no heirs to take over the brewery, it soon foundered and was purchased at a rock-bottom price by an up-and-coming businessman named Jacob Schmidt, who eventually consolidated it into his large new brewery on West 7th Street. The old Kirchmeyer caves were then boarded up, and not long after that the brewery itself was demolished.
Michael Kirchmeyer never returned to St. Paul, not even for his parents’ funerals. He was not heard of again until May of 1898, when a brief story appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
It has been learned that Michael Kirchmeyer, aged 30, formerly of St. Paul and the son of the late Johann Kirchmeyer, a well-known brewer in this city for many years, has died in the Klondike. Kirchmeyer was among seventy-three stampeders in search of gold who were buried by the great avalanche at Chilkoot Pass on April 3. His 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
Downtown (Minneapolis)
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 Star- Tribune with clockwork regularity. But he often lingers in my office for a cup of coffee and sometimes a cigar, if I offer him one and its quality meets with his approval. It was during one such visit that Lucas informed me that I might be getting a call from an unusual prospective client.
“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.”