The Taking of Libbie, SD (24 page)

Forty minutes later, I was in the lobby of the Pioneer Hotel. I did not know the young woman behind the reservation desk, but she knew me.

“Mr. McKenzie,” she said, “Sharren Nuffer asked me to give this to you.”

I took a folded sheet of paper from the woman’s hand. It contained a list of the Libbie City Council members and where I might find them.

“Thank you,” I said.

I headed for the door. The woman called to me.

“If you’re hungry,” she said, “our brunch lasts until eleven.”

I stopped and looked through the arched doorway into the dining room. It was packed. I recognized some of the patrons from last night’s fire. I had no doubt that the fire—and the murders of Tracie Blake and Mike Randisi—were the main topics of conversation of the diners. Except for Perry and Dawn Neske, who apparently had other things on their minds.

I saw them sitting across from each other in a booth against the far wall, laughing over plates heaped with eggs, hash browns, flapjacks, ham, bacon, sausage, assorted fruits, and muffins. He reached across the white linen tablecloth and took her hand. She leaned toward him, said something, and smiled. He smiled back. A moment later, she pulled her hand free and cupped it beneath a cube of cantaloupe that she forked into Perry’s mouth. He responded with a strawberry that Dawn ate from his fingertips.

Huh
, my inner voice said.

Apparently my presence was a huge shock to her, because Linnea covered her mouth and stared when I entered Munoz Emporium. “I’m telling,” she said behind the hand. She reached for her red phone as I walked past. A few minutes later, Chuck Munoz found me in the housewares department.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a kitchen timer,” I said. “Something with a double-A battery. Oh, here we are.”

I took two small timers off the shelf.

“Anything else?” Munoz asked.

“Do you have any small glass bottles?” I held my thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “About this big, maybe an inch around.”

Munoz led me three aisles over to where there were plenty of empty jars of various sizes, including canning jars. It took me two minutes to find the size I needed.

“Anything else?” Munoz said.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Why would I?”

“Because I remind you that the woman you disliked so much was murdered yesterday.”

“I didn’t—I liked—” Munoz closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I liked Tracie very much. She was a friend of mine. We had our problems because of the mall, but we would have gotten past it.”

“Not if the mall had been a success. Not if you were put out of business.”

“What are you saying?”

“Did you know Mike Randisi?”

“No. I knew of him, but I didn’t actually know him. Why? What are you saying?”

“Rush disappearing, Tracie’s murder—they take care of a lot of problems for you.”

“What are you saying?”

“Stop repeating yourself, Chuck. You sound ridiculous.”

Munoz opened his mouth like he wanted to speak, and then quickly shut it.

“The Imposter disappeared after about 9:00 p.m. Tuesday before last,” I said. “Where were you?”

“You’re not a cop. You don’t get to ask me those questions.”

“Then we’ll have Big Joe Balk ask them.”

“I was here until 10:00 p.m.,” Munoz said.

Wow, that was the second time using the sheriff’s name scared someone
, my inner voice told me.
Balk must be some badass
.

“Are you open until ten?” I said.

“We’re open until nine in the summer. I was doing inventory.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“So we have just your word for it.”

“What are you say—”

Munoz cut off his sentence abruptly. I filled the void.

“After ten?” I said.

“I went home.”

“Witnesses?”

“No.”

“Where were you last Friday night?”

“I worked until nine, and then I went home.”

“Alone.”

“Goddammit.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“You have no business asking me these questions.”

“I’m making it my business to find the Imposter and to catch whoever killed Tracie Blake. It better not be you.”

“It’s not.”

“Then you should be willing to help.”

I had heard Munoz’s long, weary sigh before. He sounded like a man who was firmly lodged between a rock and a hard place. Putting him in that position gave me pleasure.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Tell me about your relationship with Tracie.”

“We were—intimate.”

“For how long?”

“A few months.”

“And then?”

“It ended.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She never told me. We were together and then we weren’t. A while later I learned that she had taken up with someone else.”

“Who?”

“Chief Gustafson.”

“That must have stung.”

“It did.”

“When she started supporting the mall, that must have stung even more.”

“I couldn’t believe she would betray me like that.”

“I could see why you would be angry.”

“Angry? I was a helluva lot more than angry. I could have killed both of them.”

“Did you?”

Munoz took a step backward.

“What am I saying?” he said. “No, I didn’t kill them. Of course not. It was just a figure of speech. I could never—no. I didn’t kill anyone.”

Sure sounded convincing to me.

Spiess Drug Store wasn’t actually a drug store because it no longer filled prescriptions.

“Our pharmacist left,” Terri Spiess said. “He decided he couldn’t make a living here, and he left. Can’t really blame him, but it leaves me in a tough spot. I’ve been trying to hire a pharmacist ever since—no luck. If something doesn’t happen soon…” She shook her head as if she were afraid to imagine the possibility.

Spiess was another of Libbie’s many beauties. Her hair was black, straight, and long, and her complexion was dark, hinting that she had some Native American blood. Her eyes, though, were red, and the wrinkles around them suggested worry.

“Is it as bad as all that?” I said.

“Last year, prescription revenue accounted for sixty-seven percent of our total sales,” she said. “Yeah, it’s that bad.”

“Where do people go for their prescriptions?”

“Most use the clinic. It costs a lot more, and they don’t deliver like we did, but what other choice do people have? No pharmacist, no pharmacy—it’s that simple.”

“Maybe if the mall had gone through—”

“I don’t have the money to pay rent in a mall,” Spiess said. “More likely they would have moved in a CVS or Walgreens, and that would have been the end of that. This store has been here almost as long as the town, and now…” She shook her head some more. “The way things are going, the town might not be here much longer, either.”

I remembered what Miller had told me. “It’s the county seat,” I said.

“What makes you think the county will survive? Twenty years ago we had nearly five thousand residents. Now it’s down to barely three. Besides, we’re the county seat in name only. The school is here, and so are the library, public works, the assessor’s office, and natural resources. On the other hand, human services, the sheriff’s department, the courts, county administration, all that’s up in Mercer. People like old man Miller keep talking about consolidation. They think that everything is going to move here, that we’ll be the town left standing when the smoke clears. C’mon. We’re nearly a quarter million dollars in debt. No one’s going to be consolidating with us. We’re the ones that’re going to be consolidating. We’ll be consolidating with Mercer.”

“The state could step in.”

“Why would it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would be damn nice if you could find all that money, Mr. McKenzie. It won’t do me any good, but the town…”

“Did you have any dealings with Rush?” I said.

“Very few. Once he learned about my situation, that I had no money for him, he stayed away.”

“What about as a member of the city council?”

“I just sat there and listened and nodded like everyone else.”

“You knew the password for—”

“I heard you were looking into that. McKenzie, everyone knew the password, and if they didn’t they could have figured it out easy enough. I mean, we used the same password for all of our accounts, for everything. You want to mess with our Web site the way those high school kids did last October? Just type in LIBBIESD1884. Seems to me that we could have avoided a lot of problems if only we had shown a little imagination. Listen, it’s Sunday. Sunday is my day for staring at my books and feeling sorry for myself. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“As a matter of fact, I could use some hydrogen peroxide, an eyedropper, and a thermometer.”

The owner of the only hardware store within fifty miles said he was selling out.

“Business has been falling off for years,” he said. “Now this. I never ran for city council, you know. I was appointed when Manny DeVine quit. He was the pharmacist over at Spiess Drugs, and one day he decided to hell with it and left town. Old man Miller thought I’d make a reliable rubber stamp, so he appointed me—our charter let him do it. Councilman George Humphrey, I kind of liked the sound of that. Now—now they’re going to blame me for everything that’s happened, for losing the money. Me and Bizek. I don’t need that shit.”

“Why blame you?”

“I was a true believer. I thought it was a great idea, the mall, and I talked it up, talked it up even when guys like Chuck Munoz and Ronny Radosevich said it would ruin business in downtown, when Jon Kampa said we should be more careful. Now all that money’s gone. You know what? I’m not even going to the next meeting. Screw it.”

Humphrey rang up my purchases—an acetone-based paint solvent, a roll of electrical tape, rubber gloves, and a pair of protective goggles—and put them into a brown bag printed with the name of his store.

“Anything else?” he said.

“Did you have any dealings with Rush outside of the city council?” I asked.

“A lot of dealings. I told you, I drank the Kool-Aid. I believed every word that bastard said, even put up fifty thousand of my own for a spot in the mall. That hurt, let me tell you. That’s it, though. I’m done. Kaput. Fini. I’m cutting my losses. I’m selling the store to the first chump who comes along with money in his jeans. Hell, I might not even wait for a chump. I might just shutter the doors and walk away.”

“That’ll leave your friends and neighbors in a tough spot, won’t it, since you have the only hardware store around?”

“McKenzie, you’re not listening. I don’t give a shit.”

There were two cars and a pickup parked in the lot of Schooley’s Auto Repair. The front ends of all three were smashed in.

“What happened?” I asked.

Schooley tapped the hood of the first car.

“This one ran into a tree,” he said. “Can you believe it? There are like three dozen trees in all of Perkins County and the kid finds one. Got his license like two weeks before the accident. Old man is fit to be tied. This one”—he pointed at the pickup—“I don’t know what happened here. Owner comes in and says fix it. He’s going to pay out of his own pocket; says he’s not going to bother his insurance company. I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be good, can it?”

“Probably not.”

“This one hit a deer.”

Schooley stopped next to a very nice 2009 Nissan Altima Rogue S—at least it used to be nice before the deer smashed its front right quarter panel all to hell. The passenger side fender had collapsed against the tire, shredding it as well. From the look of the damaged rim, I guessed that the owner had tried to drive it for a few miles anyway. The windshield was also broken. Lines like a spiderweb flowed from a single impact crater on the passenger side. Some of the glass at the point of impact was stained with what I strongly suspected was blood.

“It belongs to the banker,” Schooley said. “He’s really angry, and I don’t blame him. Had me tow it in Wednesday a week ago and told me to fix it, but I can’t fix it until I get the parts, can I? I used to work with a guy who was pretty reliable at getting me what I needed, only he went bankrupt. Now I need to go through these other parts guys, except they only ship up here once a week to keep costs down, and I missed the last shipment. Wasted a week. It’s harder and harder to do business, I’m here to tell ya. I should get the parts tomorrow, but that doesn’t make Kampa any happier. I don’t suppose you need any work done.”

“Sorry.”

“What do you need?”

“I need some battery acid.”

Schooley glanced at my car.

“Not for the Audi,” he said. There was alarm in his voice.

“No, no, no. Something else.”

“Are you going to do some tanning?”

Tanning?
my inner voice said.
What the hell is tanning?

“I thought I’d give it a try,” I said aloud.

“Yeah, a lot of people around here come in looking for the sulfuric acid they put in batteries for their projects. What kind of fur?”

“I thought I’d start small.”

“Goat?”

Why not?

“Yeah,” I said.

“I hear you,” Schooley said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, just starting out, it’s always best to go with something inexpensive. I knew a guy, ruined a perfectly good antelope. Now, if you tan the deer that Kampa killed…”

“Maybe I should. What happened to it?”

“Hell if I know. Probably still in the ditch up on White Buffalo Road. So, tell me, what recipe are you using? Pickle tan?”

“That’s what was recommended to me.”

“Gotta be careful with that. Sulfuric acid works fine if you keep it to about eight ounces per two gallons of water. The salt—that’s what you gotta watch out for. What kind of salt are you using? Rock salt?”

“That’s what was recommended.”

“I wouldn’t risk it.”

“Why not?”

“Rock salt doesn’t dissolve all that well. It’s gonna be rough, gonna tear up your fur. Want my advice?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Use about two pounds of nonionized salt. It dissolves much better in water; it’ll treat the fur a lot less harshly, I’m here to tell ya.”