6
Janet Fischer’s great-great-great-grandfather had arrived in Wheatfield in the last half of the nineteenth century and, though Fischer didn’t know it, had given her the same oval face, yellow-blond hair, and bright blue eyes as he had.
She’d inherited her figure directly from her mother, a woman of French-Canadian descent who could still turn heads after sixty-two years and five children. Janet had been considered a Wheatfield natural resource since high school.
Not a totally untapped resource. She’d been engaged to marry Larry Van Den Berg for nine years and was known to be growing impatient. She’d heard the phrase “If he’s already gettin’ the milk, why would he buy the cow?” at least fifty times too many, but still had some faith that Van Den Berg would take her to the altar.
Van Den Berg was an over-the-road truck driver, working out of Albert Lea, making regular runs in a refrigerated rig to supermarkets on the West Coast. Fresh sausage, mostly. As a driver, he was gone for days at a time, and Janet—Jennie—found somewhat guilty solace in the arms of John Jacob Skinner.
Fischer worked afternoons at Skinner & Holland, except on weekends, when Skinner covered the store, and she was exceptionally well paid for a cashier. That afternoon, she’d washed her car and spent some time texting with girlfriends; but at 5 o’clock she’d taken a phone call from Van Den Berg and had immediately called Holland. She told him they all needed to meet at her house as soon as it got dark, that it was urgent, and that she didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.
At 9 o’clock, Skinner and Holland snuck between two Concord grape arbors in her backyard and into the house through the back door. The door led into a short hallway that went past her bedroom and into the living room. When they were in the living room behind drawn curtains, safe from the eyes of passersby, Holland asked, “What’s going on?”
Before Fischer could answer, Skinner asked, “Where’s Larry?”
“He’s parked off I-80 outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, conveniently close to Diamond Jim’s Gentleman’s Club, all-nude entertainment twenty-four/seven, free parking for trucks,” Fischer said.
Holland: “How do you know that?”
“I put a tracking app on his cell phone,” Fischer said. “There are times”—she glanced at Skinner—“when I wouldn’t want to be surprised about where he is.”
“Okay. So what’s the big crisis?” Holland asked. “He find out about you and J.J.?”
“Worse,” she said. “He might suspect that I’m the Virgin Mary. It’s my fault.”
“Oh, no,” Holland said. He ran both hands through his hair. “That’s bad.”
“You didn’t tell him?” Skinner asked.
“No. He doesn’t know for sure. When the first postcards came out, he said something about how it looked like me. He never said anything more about it. But then after I got the job down at the store, I opened up a new checking account at First Bank over in Blue Earth. My regular account is at Wells Fargo, and that’s where Larry’s is, too. Anyway, I got a new Visa card through First Bank, and Larry was sort of snooping around the house while I was in the shower and he found a statement. I’d bought some clothes . . .”
“How much?” Skinner asked.
“Four thousand . . . at Nordstrom’s, up at the Mall of America,” Fischer said. “I’m usually at Old Navy. I told him I needed new clothes for the job. He seemed to buy it, but he called an hour ago and said to tell you that he wanted a cut. I asked him, ‘A cut of what?’ He said, ‘You know what cut.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ And he said, ‘Yes, you do. You ain’t that good a virgin.’ I said, ‘Fuck you, Larry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘Tell Wardell,’ and hung up. I think he must’ve been sitting there in the driver’s seat, all the way out to the West Coast and halfway back, wondering where I got the money, and thinking about how you guys got the store going right away after the apparitions, and he figured it out.”
“Oh, boy,” Holland said.
“He’s got no proof,” Skinner said.
“He doesn’t need proof. All he needs to do is start running his mouth, and we’re in trouble,” Holland said.
They all looked at one another, and Fischer said, “Well, we can’t just shoot him.”
“Of course not,” Holland said.
They looked at one another some more, and Skinner said, “We really can’t.”
“I know we can’t,” Holland said. “But we gotta do something.”
“When’s he get back?” Skinner asked.
“He makes the Des Moines terminal tomorrow night. He could try to sneak home and fake his logbook later, but he’s been caught doing that before. I expect he’ll stay there overnight.”
“We’ve got some time,” Skinner said. “Let me think about it.”
Ten minutes later, Holland snuck out the back door. As he was leaving, he said to Skinner, “I got one word for you.”
“Yeah?”
“‘Blackmail.’ Larry’s always been a little sleazy. See if Jennie knows what he’s been sleazy about.”
An hour later, with Fischer’s head in the hollow between his chest and shoulder, Skinner said, “I don’t know Larry all that well. I kinda stayed away from him, because, you know . . . Is he a straight guy? Has he ever been in trouble on anything?”
She couldn’t meet his eyes—she was about to betray her fiancé. She said, “He was investigated last year. By Iowa.”
“Yeah?”
“Somebody stole a trailer full of Legos at the terminal down in Des Moines,” Fischer said. “The Iowa cops were up here to talk to him because they knew his tractor unit was down there at the time. He denied it all, but one night, later on, he hinted that he knew where the Legos were. I think he’s still got a lot of them.”
“At his house?”
“Oh, I don’t think at his house,” Fischer said. “We’re talking about thirty-eight hundred cubic feet of Legos. That’s the size of the inside of a fifty-three-foot trailer. I don’t believe his house is that big.”
“Huh. You know a lot about it,” Skinner said. “Trailer sizes.”
“Well, he tells me about it, even though it’s pretty boring. His idea of pillow talk,” she said. “Something else: he knows a lot about eBay. I’m pretty sure he has, like, a bunch of different accounts there. I think he sells the Legos under fake names.”
“Huh.”
“You think you could . . . use that?” she asked.
“Blackmail might be the only way to shut him up,” Skinner said. “But first, you gotta have something to blackmail him with.”
“Are we turning into criminals, Skinner?” She was twisting her hands. She’d been worried about events in the town since the appearance of the Virgin in December; and even more since the shootings.
“No. If he stole those Legos, he’s a criminal. If we could find them, all we’d be doing is . . . Well, we’re not cops,” Skinner said. “We don’t have to investigate somebody to see if he committed a serious crime. I mean, if he knew that we knew, if he knew that we had evidence . . . then he might not want to piss us off.”
“Okay. But we’re not criminals because of the Virgin Mary thing, are we?”
“Who have we hurt?” Skinner asked. “Nobody. All we’ve done is saved a town and made a lot of people happy.”
“Okay.” She shivered. “I think we should have some more sex to take our minds off all of this.”
“Fine, but before we do that . . . do you have a key to Larry’s place?”
“Of course.”
“I need to borrow it,” Skinner said. “I need to investigate him myself. I’m probably smarter than the Iowa cops.”
“I’ll get it for you. After this, I think I’m going to stop sleeping with him.”
“Good idea,” Skinner said. “There are other fish in the sea. Larry just isn’t that much of a catch, you know? Besides, he hangs out at gentleman’s clubs.”
“That’s true,” she said. She sighed, and said, “Speaking of more sex, you think we should get the toys out?”
At 3 o’clock in the morning, Fischer led Skinner through Van Den Berg’s backyard, unlocked the door, and took him through the kitchen and down to the basement, where Van Den Berg had built his man cave.
Fischer hadn’t wanted to go along, but Skinner patiently explained that if neighbors saw lights and knew that Van Den Berg was on the road, they might call a deputy. If the deputy found Fischer there alone, it’d be okay, because everybody in the county knew her and Van Den Berg were engaged.
“I’m still a little nervous,” she said, as she showed him around. “I don’t lie so good.”
“You’re not lying. You’re his fiancée. You have a key, you’re over here all the time. You check the house for him,” Skinner said.
“At three o’clock in the morning?”
“If somebody knocks, run upstairs and mess up a bed,” Skinner said. “You were sleeping over because you missed him.”
“Oh. Okay. If somebody knocks, I will.”
“If you hear his tractor pull in, for God’s sakes warn me.”
The man cave was decorated with mixed martial arts and Vikings posters, plus the centerpiece, a sixty-five-inch LG television that had fallen off a truck in North Platte, Nebraska, where Van Den Berg had been lucky enough to catch it.
To one side, next to a urine-scented half bath, were a beer refrigerator, plus two filing cabinets, as well as a homemade desk, constructed of two sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood cut in half lengthwise, glued back-to-back to make a thick, two-foot-wide plank, then painted black and screwed down to two carpenter’s sawhorses as legs. Sitting on top of the desk was an older Macintosh Pro computer with two screens and an ancient dot matrix black-and-white printer.
“Didn’t know Larry was into computers,” Skinner said.
“Well, he was going to be one of those day traders,” Fischer said. “He got some how-to CDs on day trading and he played them in his truck until he had them memorized. He borrowed five thousand dollars from me that I’d saved up for the wedding, and then he had another five thousand in savings and he put that in. He spent half of it on computer equipment and lost the other half five years ago. Lost it in two months.”
“Surprised it lasted that long,” Skinner said.
“Yeah, well—he was actually up, like, fifteen thousand dollars for a week,” Fischer said. “Then he got a letter from the brokerage he was using that said he owed a bunch of taxes. So, you know, he put it all on red and lost. He was getting letters from the IRS for three years.”
“That sounds like the Larry we know and love,” Skinner said. He was probing around the homemade desk. “He might have figured out how to day-trade, but he didn’t know anything about security.”
He reached out and tapped a piece of paper taped to the wall behind the desk.
“What’s that?” Fischer asked.
“All his passwords.” Skinner peered at them, and said, “Mostly porn sites. Plus, eBay.”
“Porn?”
“Let me get this thing up . . .” Skinner brought the computer up, dug through it, and brought up Van Den Berg’s emails. He spent fifteen minutes scanning through them. Fischer got him a beer, and one for herself, and finally she said, “I’m going upstairs to mess up the bed, but I want to see this so-called porn when I get back.”
When she came back, Van Den Berg’s cheap printer was grunting out a stack of paper. Skinner asked, “Who is Ralph Van Den Berg?”
“Larry’s brother. He lives down by Armstrong. Why?”
“Because Larry’s taking orders for something, which I think are Legos, and he talks to Ralph about shipping them out through UPS. Larry keeps telling Ralph to go to different UPS stores to make the shipments. Ralph’s running all over southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.”
“I bet that’s where the Legos are, down at Ralph’s,” Fischer said. “Those brothers are tight. Ralph lives on this acreage down there; he’s got a woodlot, which would be like the perfect place to hide a trailer. It’s already full of junked farm machinery and cars.”
“I’ll go over and take a look tomorrow,” Skinner said. “In the meantime . . . this printer is gonna take an hour to print out all these emails. I’d put them on a thumb drive, but I can’t find one. I mean, everybody’s got a thumb drive.”
“Show me one of these porn channels he’s signed up for,” Fischer said. “That jerk. He told me once that he never looks at porn because it’s tacky. I thought I was his main sexual connection. I tell you, Skinner, this explains a lot about his attitudes.”
“You actually don’t need to go out to the porn sites. He’s got his own collection on the machine, and it’s hooked up to the TV.” He pointed to a cable snaking along the wall and up behind the TV. “That’s an HDMI cable.”
“Then let me see one.”
Fischer settled on a video called Last Tango in Chatsworth, and Skinner fired it up for her, then began sorting through the paper chugging out of what must have been a fifteen-year-old dot matrix printer. “Got a fuckin’ parallel port,” he muttered, as he worked. “I didn’t even know you could find parallel ports anymore . . .”
Behind him, Fischer said, “Oh my God. OH MY GOD!”
Skinner turned to look, said, “Well, that’s not something you see every day. Wonder how they did that? You’d think they’d get stuck.”
The printer and the video ended simultaneously, and Skinner stacked up the paper, and said, “We gotta get out of here before it gets light.”
“You gotta get out of here. I’m going to look at every one of these filthy things. I want to know what kind of man I’ve been engaged to,” Fischer said. “Show me how that computer thingy works.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to walk all the way home. How about if I crash at your place?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving a hand at him, as The Gang Goes Bang! came up on the TV.
Skinner kissed her good-bye, left her on the couch, and crept out the back door. Dark as a coal sack outside, except for the stars, which were bright and plentiful. With the incriminating pack of paper under his arm, he went back to Fischer’s house, snuck in again, and lay in her bed until dawn, reading the emails.
By first light, he was convinced that the Van Den Bergs were up to something illegal, sending shipments of illegal somethings all over the country. Had to be the Legos. Could have been drugs, the way they talked in code, but they weren’t making enough money to be drug dealers.
It occurred to him that if a legitimate seller of Lego kits could find an off-the-books source that only cost, say, half of the normal wholesale price, he could make a killing. Wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on the profit. The Lego company would supply the advertising, and if you bought even a small number of kits from the company . . . you’d have the perfect cover.
“Sweet,” Skinner said. “Crooked but sweet.”
Shortly after dawn, he heard the back door rattle and was seized by the sudden fear that Larry had come home unexpectedly; but then Fischer called out, “Skinner? You still here?”
“Back in the bedroom,” he called.
She appeared in the bedroom doorway and posed there, one hand on the jamb. She had, he thought, a weird glow in her eyes.