“This woman, Molly,” Muriel Pink said, looking more than a little nervous. “You think she’s a suspect?”
Max pursed his lips. “Let’s just say she’s a person of interest.”
6
THE farmhouse was quarantined on twenty acres of ninety-year-old cottonwoods perched on the edge of a cliff. And like the trees that feebly sheltered it, the house was nearing the end of its life. Once upon a time, long before the First World War, the enormous two-story house with its carved finials and finely turned balustrade had been built as a showcase to boom times. Wisconsin settlers, newlyweds, flush from a pre-income tax inheritance, had lived there and raised a large family.
In the nineteen thirties, Alvin Karpis and his bank robber gang, anxious to escape harassment from both the Chicago and the Saint Paul Police Departments, had leased the place and found it perfect. It was centrally located, but still off the beaten track, perfect for a little gangster R and R.
Dull and homely now, thanks to wind, rain, snow, termites, and old age, most of the home’s exterior had been worn down to bare, gray wood. And not the silvered elegance of old barn wood, but the dowdy, gritty look of zinc.
The fields surrounding the house had been fallow for nearly twenty years, choked with an overgrowth of buckthorn and thistles. The skeletal remains of a large grain bin stood as the only testimony to this having once been a working farm.
Still, on this dark and frosty January night, people called it home.
Inside a large farm kitchen with outdated Kelvinator appliances, two women and a man sat at a battered wooden table under a heavy wrought iron light fixture. They sipped coffee, poked at pieces of meat that rested, gray and well done, on an oval platter, and ate Oreo cookies directly from the bag. Perched atop the refrigerator, overlooking this scene of tragic domesticity, was an enormous stuffed woodchuck, all flashing teeth and claws.
While Marjorie Sorenson crafted reborn dolls, Ronnie worked at his beloved taxidermy projects. And he was good at it, almost as skilled as Marjorie at breathing a startling reality into inanimate objects.
Ronnie’s girlfriend, Sharice Williams, known as Shake to all her friends and anyone who’d ever stuffed a dollar bill down her G-string, sat at the table with them. She was eyeing the two of them carefully, trying to read the temperature in the room.
Finally, after a few minutes of noisy chewing, Ronnie said, to no one in particular, “Shake and me was gonna go hang out at Judge’s.”
Flat, cobra eyes suddenly drilled into him. “This girl’s not going anywhere,” Marjorie told her son. “Especially not to some dimey bar like Judge’s. In case you hadn’t noticed, she’s due to have a baby any day now.”
“I’m bored,” Shake whined. “There’s nothin’ to do here.”
Shake was Ronnie’s latest girlfriend. He didn’t bed many women, but those he did seemed to share some common traits—they tended to be dirt poor, estranged from their families, and pretty enough, but in a worn-out, used-up way. Shake had been forced to give up pole dancing some five months ago when Buddy Yaruso, the manager at Club Paradise out on County Road A-2, had touched a hand to her distended belly, stuck a twenty-dollar bill in her panties, and fired her on the spot. He’d told her that a pregnant exotic dancer wasn’t good for business. It just reminded his club patrons of what they were trying to forget about at home.
Shake had cried a river of tears, thinking how unfair it all was. Still, she wasn’t about to score a job as Kim Kardashian’s personal stylist, and that chief financial officer job at Coca-Cola just wasn’t on the horizon. So hanging out with Ronnie and his old lady for a while seemed to be all right. Not good, just all right.
“Waaaaaah!” came a loud, demanding wail from down the hall.
“I wish that thing would shut up,” Shake said. She looked at Marjorie, who pointedly ignored her as she lit another Kool cigarette. She turned her gaze toward Ronnie. “Where’d that kid come from anyway?”
“I told ya,” Marjorie said. “She’s my cousin’s kid. Picked her up when we was in The Cities yesterday.” She flicked a piece of hardened food gunk off her sweatshirt. “Gonna watch her for a while.”
“Yeah?” Shake said. Suspicious eyes flitted across the table. “You got cousins in The Cities?” she asked Ronnie.