The Case of the One-eyed Border (short story)
My ma she had to take in a boarder when my dad died a year ago. She doesn’t have what you’d call a good-paying job, only about eight dollars an hour. She works at the drugstore here in our little town on the Upper Peninsula where it gets so damn cold you can spit, and I swear it’s true: you can see the gob freeze before it hits the ground. Everybody knows my ma. She’s like an eccentric aunt to most everybody cause she’s got candy on her all the time, that Christmas candy; I guess they call it hard candy, which I hate cause it hurts my teeth.
The boarder, Pete Lebeau is his name, had lived with us for a year before the events in this story transpired, and he had to be the coolest looking guy that ever hit town 'cause he always had this three day’s growth of whiskers, although I guess he must have shaved sometime cause if he hadn’t he’d have had a beard, and he wore this eye patch which made him look like a pirate. As I said, he’d been living upstairs on the third floor of our big old Victorian for a year, and he was working at the packing plant. He had supper with us every night, smelling like soap all the time 'cause they made the men take showers before they left at the plant. Never said much other than "yup" and "nope" and "all right" when ma tried to get him to talk. I think she liked him 'cause she was always giving him extra gravy just like in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, a book by Mr. Charles Dickens Mrs. Willembring made us read. The guy chewed with his mouth open, which grossed me out a bit, but he had the biggest mitts I’ve ever seen. One time I tried to put my hand next to his at the supper table on a night we were having ribs and sauerkraut. We usually have those on Thursdays and I swear his mitts were three times bigger than mine; he gave me that serial killer look when he seen me do that
I suppose you’re wondering why I’m writing this since there are very few teenagers who bother writing anything these days what with television and the movies and rock music and everything. Well, it’s all Mrs. Willembring’s fault. The guys all call her the walleye because of her protruding eyes and puckered lips, and they sit in the back and throw beebees at each other which I don’t do cause I get A’s in that class. Anyway, she showed us this book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about this detective who was addicted to heroin with a friend named Watson who was telling the story. Sherlock kept saying “That’s elementary, my dear Watson,” when he’d solved an especially difficult case. Suddenly that old saying, “No shit, Sherlock,” made a lot more sense. So I thought I’d try it, especially since I had my very own mystery to impart.
Only my Watson is a girl. I have this one special girl named Dolly, last name Payne, which is really appropriate let me tell you, who lives with her mom and little sister Bootsie in this run down shack on the edge of town. I guess you’d call it a tar paper shack since it’s falling down and everything. Dolly says they’re on relief. She’s not too embarrassed about it cause lots of people are on relief in this town which has lost most of its industry, and her being on relief certainly doesn’t bother me, her best friend. I kind of think she’s better off in a way, if you know what I mean. She appreciates things more when she gets them. She’s the oldest of only two kids, so her mom, who’s divorced, gets her whatever she needs. Anyhow, we’re best friends 'cause we both like weird things like astrology and the "X-files" and UFOs and now Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She wears bicycle shorts and work boots which make her look like that Russian skater I saw once on TV who had these skinny little legs and these big old skates and then she won and cried like she was gonna flood out the arena. Dolly is named after Dolly Parton. I suppose you’ve already guessed she hates that name so I call her different things depending on the mood I’m in. Right now I’m calling her horny cause of her hair style. She has long blond hair but she has these ringlets that fall down on each side of her forehead which look like horns.
Back to Pete Lebeau. One day we were studying chemistry at my house, or I should say we were supposed to be studying chemistry because I couldn’t think of nothing else except what Dolly had said to me a few days before. She said she was a virgin so far and that when she was ready she was going to go to bed with me 'cause in case something went wrong, and she’d heard that it sometimes did, she wanted the baby to be nice. Sure, it would probably have a big nose. Did I tell you her nickname for me is the Snoz? My name is really Montgomery after Field Marshal Montgomery. No, I’m lying to you. You shouldn’t believe everything I tell you actually. My name is Zeb not much of an improvement, short for Zebulon, as in Zebulon Pike. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I’m not very good at chemistry and Dolly is a straight A student. I guess I’m not good at science 'cause they don’t have any stories in science, just formulas and stuff.
Maybe if they’d let us blow something up. I like it on days we can make stink bombs but otherwise not. I did like a movie our teacher showed with this scientist Carl Sagan cause he made it interesting with that billions and billions and billions of stars thing that he did. I saw Johnny Carson do an impression of him once that had Dolly and me on the floor laughing our guts out which brings me back to Pete.
Dolly and me are studying chemistry or I should say she is and she catches me looking down her dress, and son a bitch, you should excuse my language, does she ever get mad. “If I want you to see my tits, I’ll show ‘em to you,” she says and I say “I’m sorry” and she says “Don’t let it happen again.” That was when the sheriff came to take Pete in for questioning. A little girl, Francis Witucki from the trailer court, a third grader whose mom works at the American Family Insurance office, another divorcee, had been snatched and the neighbors said there had been a suspicious looking van in the neighborhood. Pete drives this rusted out white van and since he’s such a loner he was a likely suspect. I found out later that Pete was on the sexual predator list which I didn’t know there even was one of those things. Dolly gets it in her head to search Pete’s room, and I tell her that my ma had told me when Pete moved in that if I ever snooped in that man’s room, she was going to cut off my tookis, whatever the hell that means, but I can guess. Dolly pushed me down and was up on the third floor looking though Pete’s drawers before I could even get up. “Damn, how can this guy live this way?” she says.
“What’s wrong with it?” I say.
“No pictures, just a crappy bureau and a lumpy bed, not even a shower in the bathroom.” Personally, I felt she had a lot of room to talk considering where she lived. “I don’t know what else a guy needs,” I said. “I plan on living spare myself when I grow up. I’m gonna get me a little cabin in the woods away from everybody.”
“Kind of like the Unabomber, huh?” she says. That was when I jumped her and started tickling her. I jump her a lot, which is an easy way to get a feel, but she hasn’t caught on yet, although you’d think she would know since I can’t exactly control myself, if you know what I mean. She hit me over the head with this book Old Pete had laying under his bed, something called THE BLUEJACKETS MANUAL. Dolly said that was a Navy kind of thing. She went back to searching his drawers, holding up a pack of condoms which I desperately wanted since I was afraid to ask the druggist, Mr. Archambault, for some cause he’d tell my mother sure as Pluto is a pitiful excuse for a planet. Before we could straighten up the room, Pete came home and caught us in his room, which was kind of a good thing cause it forced him to say more than yup and nope and all right. What he said was, “What you kids want?” That’s four whole words, and Dolly, who is really quick on the uptake, said, “You’ve got bugs and Mrs. Brown sent us up here to exterminate the bastards.” Would you believe Old Pete started laughing and pretty soon all three of us were cracking up. Dolly made a break for it when Pete hung his coat and hat up on a hook behind the door, and I was right on her tail, you should excuse the expression. We ran all the way to the pond which is a good three football fields away from my house before we stopped to get our breaths.
“He was laughing. He can’t be such a bad guy if he has a sense of humor,” I said.
“I wasn’t about to take any chances,” she said. “If you want to go back so’s he can cut you up into tiny little pieces and feed you to your mother’s fishes, be my guest.”
“Okay, answer this then,” I said. “If he kidnapped Francis, what the hell did he do with her. You saw his room.”
“You’re so stupid, Snoz. His room would be the first place the cops would look. He probably raped her in the van, cut her throat, and buried her in the woods. Nobody’d ever find her up here in the Upper Peninsula. We got more woods than Russia and they’ve got a lot of woods let me tell you. I should know. I read all three parts of the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. They made those prisoners cut down trees without axes.”
The woman was a reading fool. She kept these little round cards with the title and the author of the books you’ve read the elementary teachers used to string around the room in their reading competitions. According to Dolly she read a hundred and nine books last year, and I think she was probably telling the truth because she was always telling me about them. “Let’s go look at the van. Maybe there’s some blood,” I said.
“The man is a butcher, numbnuts,” she said.
“Yeah, but a forensic scientist can tell the difference between hog’s blood and a little girl’s.”
“Sure did Marcia and Chris a lot of good, didn’t it?” she said, referring to the OJ trial. “Ma should be home by now. If Pete’s a kidnapper, we’ve got to save her.” When we got back, ma and Pete were standing in front of our house and Ma was saying, “I don’t think you took that girl, Pete, but you know how it is in this town. He said he understood. He’d be all right. He’d rent a room at the Lakawanna Motel--that’s the sound a train makes if you didn’t know--until he could find another place. “You come back and see me when this blows over, Pete,” Ma said. “You were never late with your rent and you always kept the place clean. I feel terrible about this.”
A week later little Tammy Widenbach, Father Mallory’s housekeeper’s daughter, went to the Piggly Wiggly to get a quart of milk and never came back. They found her body in a dumpster behind the Chicken Lickin. Some of the customers said they saw her talking to a man driving a white van, and Pete had showed up for work the next day with scratches on his face. This time they arrested him. Dolly felt bad about running away the time he’d laughed about her exterminator lie. She insisted there was no way he was guilty, so we went to see him in jail. We got in to see him cause Dolly’s second cousin Willard is a deputy sheriff and cause Pete didn’t have any relatives. I was the closet thing he had to one. “What happened to your eye?” Dolly asked. This was something I’d been trying to get him to tell me for a whole year now. I’d also hounded him to show me how to kill the cows at the packing plant, but he’d always looked at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my forehead.
“The war,” Pete said.
“Did yah get shot in the eye?” I asked. “Bayonet,” Pete saw.
“Eew,” Dolly went.
“Can I see it?” I said. When Pete lifted his patch, the thing looked just like an asshole, I swear. Not that I’ve seen that many assholes. Dolly thought she was going to throw up, so she went to the bathroom quick before she would do it right there in the little room with the partition down the middle, and the plexiglass separating the prisoner from the visitors.
When she came back, she asked, “How’d you get the scratch?”
“I fell on the ice,” Pete said, another new record for him. Five words that time.
“That doesn’t sound like much of an alibi,” I said. He shrugged.
“Which war was that?” Dolly asked, which I thought was a pretty stupid question, considering the only war of note we’d been in was Vietnam. “D’yah kill anybody?” I asked.
“Which time?” he said.
“In the war. Whatya think I meant?” I said. “Thought you meant that little girl,” he said, another new record.
“Nah, you didn’t do that,” Dolly said. “A killer would have drawn and quartered us when he caught us in his room, like they used to do to robbers during the middle ages. That’s what they did to that William Wallace guy that Braveheart was about. So, what’re you doing on that sexual predators list?” she asked. “You don’t look like a rapist to me.”
“What does a rapist look like?” he asked.
“Not like you,” she said.
I wondered what she could have been thinking. If anybody looked like a rapist it was Pete, what with that eye patch, the three-day growth of beard, and the King Kong hands.
“You sure are a nosey little thing, pretty though,” Pete said. She blushed. I’d never seen her blush before. “You’re too young to hear about it,” he said. “Weren’t any little girl though.”
“You just better tell me right now, Pete LeBeau,” she said, “or I won’t come see you anymore.”
“Oh, in that case,” he laughed and smiled the biggest smile ever. It lit up his face and made him look almost human. You could tell he already loved her almost as much as I did, if that’s possible. “I didn’t even know I was still on that list,” Pete said. “You’d think there’d be some kind of statute of limitations or something if a prostitute says you raped her. Sometimes the jury believes the woman and you go on the sexual predators list, but that’s a far cry from kidnapping little girls.” Old Pete had strung so many words together that time he’d probably used up his quota.
Sheriff Russell found some skin under little Tammy Wiedenbach’s fingernails and sent it to the BCA lab in Lansing just as some of the men began gathering under the window of the jail, talking about taking Pete out and stringing him up if he didn’t tell where Francis was, something that hadn’t happened on the Upper Peninsula since 1911. But before they could do anything, the lab results came back and Sheriff Russell made a public announcement saying that the blood under Tammy’s nails did not match Pete’s blood type, and the lynch mob should leave Pete the fuck alone, his words not mine, since I’d never use the “f” word in polite company. My mom would kill me. But Pete got kicked out of the Lakawanna anyway, and the sheriff had to let him sleep in a cell at the jail since he couldn’t find any other place to live and since the sheriff wouldn’t let him leave town. When the packing company fired Pete, the sheriff went to talk to Mr. Thornton, the manager of the plant. I hear he chewed him out about everyone being innocent until proven guilty, but the manager wouldn’t hire Pete back.
Both of the girls who’d been taken were third graders and Dolly’s little sister, Bootsie, was in that class. Guess who’s got to watch her every place she goes? Dolly said there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between Dolly and Bootsie who had to wear all of Dolly’s hand-me-downs some of which were way too big for her. Bootsie had her hair cut like a boy’s, to save money I guess. She had big old owl’s eyes that never blinked. “The milkman’s child,” Dolly always called her.
The first night after Pete had been cleared because his blood didn’t match, Dolly and me had to take Bootsie to a skating party. Bootsie wanted to know if we two ever played kissie face. Dolly told her to shut up or she’d wash her face in the snow. “I’ll tell ma on you,” Bootsie said. “She always gets two eggs for breakfast, and I only get one.”
“Who washes all the dishes?” Dolly said.
I decided right then and there I was never gonna have any kids. When Bootsie got her skates on, they were too big, and she had to wear several pair of wool socks to get them to fit. Dolly said, “We’re gonna have to find that killer ourselves. I got a couple ideas.”
“Dennis Kornblat,” I said.
“How’d you know?” she said.
Dennis Kornblat had been the third grade teacher for twenty years, still unmarried, living with his mother. He sang “Nearer My God to Thee” on his way to work every day. All the third grade boys could impersonate Old Cornhole. When I’d been in his class, one time he’d been reading us this story “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow” and the boys were all laughing so hard the snot was flying out of their noses cause Old Cornhole could’ve been that Ichabod Crane guy’s twin brother. Cornhole got pissed and called in Principal Woodlace who gave Gus Trimble, the principal instigator according to Cornhole, thirty whacks with the Board of Education. The Czechs, Poles, Bohemians, and Canucks who lived on the Upper Peninsula held no truck with misbehaving children. They laughed when other places did away with corporal punishment. They insisted on it. I remember the boys started counting when Woodpecker got to the tenth whack under their breaths, but you could still hear it. We all loved to see people suffer, providing it was somebody else of course. Gus blamed me for that, and I got beat up on the playground. Gus had a good twenty pounds on me.
“I seen Cornhole checking out the gay magazines at the drugstore,” I told Dolly.
“Didn’t neither,’ she said.
“Did so,” I said.
“You just wanna get even with him for that time you got spanked in front of the whole class,” she said.
“No, I never,” I said. “That was Gus Trimble.
“That’s right,” she said. “You got beat up for laughin’ while Woodpecker laid into Gus.”
“I’m not so sure Cornhole did it,” I said. “He likes boys.”
The other big story on the Upper Peninsula was the pending sale of the packing plant to a consortium of Koreans. There was a lot of racist talk going around about that since many of the men in town had been in the Korean War. Others said that Korean owners were better than no owners. Pete got a job digging graves, and my mother made me take him hot dish at the jail cause she was feeling guilty about kicking him out of the house. Bud Gault at the Gault Used Car Lot repossessed his van. I couldn’t see any reason why Bud would want the van if it belonged to a killer of little girls. Probably thought he could sell it out of town.
Dolly and I went to the Sadie Hawkins dance that Friday night. The school gym was all decorated with hay bales, and the kids had to come dressed as Hillbillies. Kind of tough in thirty below zero weather. We sat out all the dances talking until they played “Wipe Out.” Dolly always made a fool of herself on the dance floor, but I didn’t mind cause she was flopping all over the place in all the right places, if you know what I mean. When “Wipe Out” was over, we sat and talked about the kidnapping. No children had disappeared in the last week or so, probably cause the mothers were freaking out and had somebody watching their kids at all times. “I’m thinking we ought to find out who else owns a white van,” Dolly said.
“Don’t you think the police have already thought of that,” I said. What, do you think, they’re stupid?”
“Yeah,” she said, “They hired my second cousin Willard as a deputy, didn’t they?”
“The DMV can probably find out who else drives a white van in the area pretty easily,” I said. “Why don’t you ask Willard if they’ve done that?”
“I’ve got another idea,” she said. “I think the murderer knows those girls very well. He knows where they’ll be at all hours of the day, and he’s somebody like Dennis Kornblat, who we’d never suspect.”
“But everybody suspects Cornhole,” I said.
“Willard says the sheriff says Dennis has an alibi. He was playing bingo the night Francis Witucki disappeared, and practicing with the church choir when Tammy got taken.”
“Alibi smalibi,” I said. “I think we ought to follow him. I’ll bet even Ted Bundy had an alibi. I read someplace that your killers always have a good alibi cause they know they’re gonna need one.”
“I need to dance with Henry,” she said. Henry was her real boyfriend. Girls on the Upper Peninsula don’t go out with boys in their own grade, and Henry was a senior and the leading scorer on the Hadley Hawks hockey team. Dolly and Henry had had a fight, and I was here to make him jealous.
“I wouldn’t do this to you, Snoz, but I need Henry to help me get the team to follow those third grade girls everywhere they go. I checked and there are only thirteen girls in that class, minus two, of course, and we’re watching Bootsie, so that only leaves ten. When he tries to take another girl, we’re gonna be there right on top of him, and you and I are gonna get our pictures in the Detroit newspaper and maybe be on “The Today Show.”
She was given to these wild flights of the imagination. You had to love her though; she had such a cute little overbite, which became exaggerated when she was stressed. Sometimes I called her Buggs, but she hated that one even worse than Dolly, so I had to be awfully displeased with her before I’d use it.
Nothing happened for a good week, and you know how teenagers are. It was actually pretty impressive that Dolly got those hockey players to follow those little girls around from the time they got up in the morning, slogged through the snow to Tom Harmon Elementary School, their little backpacks slung over their shoulders, until they were safely tucked away in their featherbeds. But then, horny and gluttonous teenagers that they were, they began to be lured away to the fast food hangouts where their girlfriends were flipping burgers, or else they just plain lost interest. Since they didn’t have the largest attention spans in the first place, being hockey players, most of them had taken at least one puck in the head, the murderer must have seen the red and black letter jackets following little girls all over town, and he was biding his time.
Sometimes I underestimate people. Just because Pete never said much, I’d always thought he was kind of stupid. But, au contraire, Pete had been doing a little investigating of his own. One thing Dolly and I hadn’t thought of was that there were five girls in Bootsie’s third grade class who were Baptists, and both Tammy and Francis had belonged to that church. Pete picked up on this right away since he went to the Baptist church on Sundays. I had no idea Pete even believed in God, what with his swarthy Mephistophelean, that’s the devil for the uninitiated, kisser. Our town had four churches: Catholic, Lutheran, Assembly of God, and Baptist. Pretty damn many considering it’s such a small burg. Only Pete didn’t tell me and Dolly anything about the five Baptist girls, and when the hockey players stopped watching, Pete was still on the job. You’d think that someone would have reported Pete stalking those girls, but Pete must have been able to stay in the shadows cause nobody ever did until the night Bootsie got snatched.
This is how the whole thing went down. Nothing had happened for a good two months, except that the packing plant closed when the Koreans decided not to buy and real estate signs started popping up like dandelions in springtime, but most everyone else seemed to forget about the murder and the kidnapping. You know how people are; they want to get back to normal. And the sheriff was saying that the kidnapper had been a transient, probably because he didn’t have any clues and didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about finding the culprit. Dolly’s mom had kept Bootsie at home pretty much, and the poor little thing had cabin fever, complaining so much that finally Mrs. Payne agreed that it was okay for her to go sledding with the other third graders at Crazyhorse Hill, providing Dolly went along to watch her. Dolly bitched and moaned, and finally, cause misery loves company, she made me sharpen the runners on Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer and come along as assistant chaperone.
We were standing at the top of the hill drinking hot chocolate, watching Bootsie and her friends go up and down the hill twenty or thirty times. I remember telling Dolly about my horoscope that morning, which said I was going to go into a profession that embraced danger. Of course, she got smart about it and suggested that could mean I was going to be a Crash Test dummy. She also told me that she’s slept with her boyfriend and I felt almost suicidal. That was when Bootsie’s sled went over the road and into the trees. I remember being impressed by Pete, who was driving up and down, doing one bang up job plowing the road in front of the hill. He’d taken that job to supplement his grave digging income obviously. I remember he had a load of stove wood in the back of his truck which was awfully peculiar. The wood kept falling off the bed of the truck. Anyway, Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer went over the road and into the woods and shortly thereafter, a plumbing van came driving out of the little road that leads into the woods. The van turned right and drove on past the road which leads to the top of the sledding hill. That was when Pete in the truck with the snowplow attachment came rocketing out of nowhere. He was zigzagging left and right cause he was doing about fifty mph on the ice, and he runs that van right off the road, pulls this guy out of the truck and starts whaling on him like the hockey team does when they get into a brawl with the Ypsilanti Malamutes. Bootsie jumps out of the van, and she starts kicking the guy who’s down in the snow and bleeding. Dolly and me are doing our level best to slide down the hill, which isn’t too easy considering we ain’t got any boots on or anything. Boots are uncool you know. That’s when Willard shows up with the squad car and makes Pete stop hitting the guy. He lets Bootsie kick him a few more times. When we get down there, we realize it’s Manley Graham, the Baptist minister, and he’s swearing up and down he was just taking Bootsie to the top of the hill. Nobody believes him, and Willard takes him off to jail. We take Bootsie home, and Mrs. Payne lays into Bootsie with a willow switch cause she’s been told never to take a ride from strangers. “Weren’t no stranger, Ma,” she said. “It was only Manley Graham.” Bootsie is raising all kinds of hell, not so much cause she’s getting switched but cause she’s wanting to go with us to the jail to find out what’s happening. When we get to the jail, Pete tells us how he’d suspected Manley Graham all along. It seems Graham was the chaplain at the VFW, and every time he’d give one of his invocations at an armistice day event or whatever, Pete would get the creeps, just an eerie feeling he had about the man, like there was something wrong with the way he preached. “He said the angel Gabriel threw Adam out of Paradise for one thing,” Pete said. “A minister ought to know that was Michael that done that.” The man was becoming a regular blathermouth, and I wasn’t so sure it was an improvement. Seems like Pete was born a Baptist in Alabama and had always gone to church when he was a boy, although he’d lapsed some these days.
Willard says he’s gonna go out and check out Graham’s farm. Maybe he can find the body of the first girl. Dolly starts raising hell about going along. The sheriff is away in Lansing at some law enforcement convention, so Willard, who can never say no to Dolly, says it’s okay. He doesn’t think anything can happen since they’ve got the killer locked up in the jail in the basement. Dolly calls her ma and tells her she’s needed at the sheriff’s office, that she’ll be home in a couple of hours. The woman actually believes her.
Graham lives on a horse farm way out in the middle of the toolies. He’s got a mailbox with a silhouette of a horse on it. Two gray horses with black legs, I guess you’d call them roans, are nibbling grass through the snow. You’d think they’d be in the barn this late at night. In the next pen, there’s a goat. He’s just staring at us with his yellow eyes. He gives me the creeps. There’s a snowman with a red knit cap, coal eyes, and a carrot nose in Graham’s yard. Off to the left of the house, is a swingset and beyond that is an old building mostly burned down. Behind the house is a little brick structure. The house is made of logs. There are no power lines leading to the house. Damn! A brick shithouse, that’s what the brick thing was. As Willard is opening the front door with a set of keys he got off Graham, a dog attacks. A frickin’ Doberman pinscher. Willard blows him away with his Saturday Night Special. Dolly kicks Willard in the shins. She says the dog was only doing what he’d been trained to do. When we get inside we find a whole lot of photographic equipment, a cash of porno magazines and letters from all over the country. The basement door is locked, and none of the keys fit, so Willard and Pete break it down. Graham has a little jail down there, and we find Francis Witucki playing with her Barbie dolls.
It’s been a year since all this happened. Turns out Graham never was a real minister. Shows how gullible people are. My life is the pits. Would you believe my mother met Dennis Kornblat at a church supper, and they’re actually going out. I gave Dolly the silent treatment once all the commotion settled down. Then she told me that she’d been lying about going to bed with Henry just to see how I’d react. What’s a guy supposed to believe? I’m happy for Pete though. He’d done such a good job running down Graham when nobody else seemed to have a clue, including me and Dolly, that the sheriff had to give him a job as deputy or lose the next election.
I think I’m gonna be a detective when I grow up or else I’ll deal cards in the new casino that’s opening just outside of town.
A full-length novel by Dave Schwinghammer, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Amazon.com, new or used.
The boarder, Pete Lebeau is his name, had lived with us for a year before the events in this story transpired, and he had to be the coolest looking guy that ever hit town 'cause he always had this three day’s growth of whiskers, although I guess he must have shaved sometime cause if he hadn’t he’d have had a beard, and he wore this eye patch which made him look like a pirate. As I said, he’d been living upstairs on the third floor of our big old Victorian for a year, and he was working at the packing plant. He had supper with us every night, smelling like soap all the time 'cause they made the men take showers before they left at the plant. Never said much other than "yup" and "nope" and "all right" when ma tried to get him to talk. I think she liked him 'cause she was always giving him extra gravy just like in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, a book by Mr. Charles Dickens Mrs. Willembring made us read. The guy chewed with his mouth open, which grossed me out a bit, but he had the biggest mitts I’ve ever seen. One time I tried to put my hand next to his at the supper table on a night we were having ribs and sauerkraut. We usually have those on Thursdays and I swear his mitts were three times bigger than mine; he gave me that serial killer look when he seen me do that
I suppose you’re wondering why I’m writing this since there are very few teenagers who bother writing anything these days what with television and the movies and rock music and everything. Well, it’s all Mrs. Willembring’s fault. The guys all call her the walleye because of her protruding eyes and puckered lips, and they sit in the back and throw beebees at each other which I don’t do cause I get A’s in that class. Anyway, she showed us this book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about this detective who was addicted to heroin with a friend named Watson who was telling the story. Sherlock kept saying “That’s elementary, my dear Watson,” when he’d solved an especially difficult case. Suddenly that old saying, “No shit, Sherlock,” made a lot more sense. So I thought I’d try it, especially since I had my very own mystery to impart.
Only my Watson is a girl. I have this one special girl named Dolly, last name Payne, which is really appropriate let me tell you, who lives with her mom and little sister Bootsie in this run down shack on the edge of town. I guess you’d call it a tar paper shack since it’s falling down and everything. Dolly says they’re on relief. She’s not too embarrassed about it cause lots of people are on relief in this town which has lost most of its industry, and her being on relief certainly doesn’t bother me, her best friend. I kind of think she’s better off in a way, if you know what I mean. She appreciates things more when she gets them. She’s the oldest of only two kids, so her mom, who’s divorced, gets her whatever she needs. Anyhow, we’re best friends 'cause we both like weird things like astrology and the "X-files" and UFOs and now Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She wears bicycle shorts and work boots which make her look like that Russian skater I saw once on TV who had these skinny little legs and these big old skates and then she won and cried like she was gonna flood out the arena. Dolly is named after Dolly Parton. I suppose you’ve already guessed she hates that name so I call her different things depending on the mood I’m in. Right now I’m calling her horny cause of her hair style. She has long blond hair but she has these ringlets that fall down on each side of her forehead which look like horns.
Back to Pete Lebeau. One day we were studying chemistry at my house, or I should say we were supposed to be studying chemistry because I couldn’t think of nothing else except what Dolly had said to me a few days before. She said she was a virgin so far and that when she was ready she was going to go to bed with me 'cause in case something went wrong, and she’d heard that it sometimes did, she wanted the baby to be nice. Sure, it would probably have a big nose. Did I tell you her nickname for me is the Snoz? My name is really Montgomery after Field Marshal Montgomery. No, I’m lying to you. You shouldn’t believe everything I tell you actually. My name is Zeb not much of an improvement, short for Zebulon, as in Zebulon Pike. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I’m not very good at chemistry and Dolly is a straight A student. I guess I’m not good at science 'cause they don’t have any stories in science, just formulas and stuff.
Maybe if they’d let us blow something up. I like it on days we can make stink bombs but otherwise not. I did like a movie our teacher showed with this scientist Carl Sagan cause he made it interesting with that billions and billions and billions of stars thing that he did. I saw Johnny Carson do an impression of him once that had Dolly and me on the floor laughing our guts out which brings me back to Pete.
Dolly and me are studying chemistry or I should say she is and she catches me looking down her dress, and son a bitch, you should excuse my language, does she ever get mad. “If I want you to see my tits, I’ll show ‘em to you,” she says and I say “I’m sorry” and she says “Don’t let it happen again.” That was when the sheriff came to take Pete in for questioning. A little girl, Francis Witucki from the trailer court, a third grader whose mom works at the American Family Insurance office, another divorcee, had been snatched and the neighbors said there had been a suspicious looking van in the neighborhood. Pete drives this rusted out white van and since he’s such a loner he was a likely suspect. I found out later that Pete was on the sexual predator list which I didn’t know there even was one of those things. Dolly gets it in her head to search Pete’s room, and I tell her that my ma had told me when Pete moved in that if I ever snooped in that man’s room, she was going to cut off my tookis, whatever the hell that means, but I can guess. Dolly pushed me down and was up on the third floor looking though Pete’s drawers before I could even get up. “Damn, how can this guy live this way?” she says.
“What’s wrong with it?” I say.
“No pictures, just a crappy bureau and a lumpy bed, not even a shower in the bathroom.” Personally, I felt she had a lot of room to talk considering where she lived. “I don’t know what else a guy needs,” I said. “I plan on living spare myself when I grow up. I’m gonna get me a little cabin in the woods away from everybody.”
“Kind of like the Unabomber, huh?” she says. That was when I jumped her and started tickling her. I jump her a lot, which is an easy way to get a feel, but she hasn’t caught on yet, although you’d think she would know since I can’t exactly control myself, if you know what I mean. She hit me over the head with this book Old Pete had laying under his bed, something called THE BLUEJACKETS MANUAL. Dolly said that was a Navy kind of thing. She went back to searching his drawers, holding up a pack of condoms which I desperately wanted since I was afraid to ask the druggist, Mr. Archambault, for some cause he’d tell my mother sure as Pluto is a pitiful excuse for a planet. Before we could straighten up the room, Pete came home and caught us in his room, which was kind of a good thing cause it forced him to say more than yup and nope and all right. What he said was, “What you kids want?” That’s four whole words, and Dolly, who is really quick on the uptake, said, “You’ve got bugs and Mrs. Brown sent us up here to exterminate the bastards.” Would you believe Old Pete started laughing and pretty soon all three of us were cracking up. Dolly made a break for it when Pete hung his coat and hat up on a hook behind the door, and I was right on her tail, you should excuse the expression. We ran all the way to the pond which is a good three football fields away from my house before we stopped to get our breaths.
“He was laughing. He can’t be such a bad guy if he has a sense of humor,” I said.
“I wasn’t about to take any chances,” she said. “If you want to go back so’s he can cut you up into tiny little pieces and feed you to your mother’s fishes, be my guest.”
“Okay, answer this then,” I said. “If he kidnapped Francis, what the hell did he do with her. You saw his room.”
“You’re so stupid, Snoz. His room would be the first place the cops would look. He probably raped her in the van, cut her throat, and buried her in the woods. Nobody’d ever find her up here in the Upper Peninsula. We got more woods than Russia and they’ve got a lot of woods let me tell you. I should know. I read all three parts of the GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. They made those prisoners cut down trees without axes.”
The woman was a reading fool. She kept these little round cards with the title and the author of the books you’ve read the elementary teachers used to string around the room in their reading competitions. According to Dolly she read a hundred and nine books last year, and I think she was probably telling the truth because she was always telling me about them. “Let’s go look at the van. Maybe there’s some blood,” I said.
“The man is a butcher, numbnuts,” she said.
“Yeah, but a forensic scientist can tell the difference between hog’s blood and a little girl’s.”
“Sure did Marcia and Chris a lot of good, didn’t it?” she said, referring to the OJ trial. “Ma should be home by now. If Pete’s a kidnapper, we’ve got to save her.” When we got back, ma and Pete were standing in front of our house and Ma was saying, “I don’t think you took that girl, Pete, but you know how it is in this town. He said he understood. He’d be all right. He’d rent a room at the Lakawanna Motel--that’s the sound a train makes if you didn’t know--until he could find another place. “You come back and see me when this blows over, Pete,” Ma said. “You were never late with your rent and you always kept the place clean. I feel terrible about this.”
A week later little Tammy Widenbach, Father Mallory’s housekeeper’s daughter, went to the Piggly Wiggly to get a quart of milk and never came back. They found her body in a dumpster behind the Chicken Lickin. Some of the customers said they saw her talking to a man driving a white van, and Pete had showed up for work the next day with scratches on his face. This time they arrested him. Dolly felt bad about running away the time he’d laughed about her exterminator lie. She insisted there was no way he was guilty, so we went to see him in jail. We got in to see him cause Dolly’s second cousin Willard is a deputy sheriff and cause Pete didn’t have any relatives. I was the closet thing he had to one. “What happened to your eye?” Dolly asked. This was something I’d been trying to get him to tell me for a whole year now. I’d also hounded him to show me how to kill the cows at the packing plant, but he’d always looked at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my forehead.
“The war,” Pete said.
“Did yah get shot in the eye?” I asked. “Bayonet,” Pete saw.
“Eew,” Dolly went.
“Can I see it?” I said. When Pete lifted his patch, the thing looked just like an asshole, I swear. Not that I’ve seen that many assholes. Dolly thought she was going to throw up, so she went to the bathroom quick before she would do it right there in the little room with the partition down the middle, and the plexiglass separating the prisoner from the visitors.
When she came back, she asked, “How’d you get the scratch?”
“I fell on the ice,” Pete said, another new record for him. Five words that time.
“That doesn’t sound like much of an alibi,” I said. He shrugged.
“Which war was that?” Dolly asked, which I thought was a pretty stupid question, considering the only war of note we’d been in was Vietnam. “D’yah kill anybody?” I asked.
“Which time?” he said.
“In the war. Whatya think I meant?” I said. “Thought you meant that little girl,” he said, another new record.
“Nah, you didn’t do that,” Dolly said. “A killer would have drawn and quartered us when he caught us in his room, like they used to do to robbers during the middle ages. That’s what they did to that William Wallace guy that Braveheart was about. So, what’re you doing on that sexual predators list?” she asked. “You don’t look like a rapist to me.”
“What does a rapist look like?” he asked.
“Not like you,” she said.
I wondered what she could have been thinking. If anybody looked like a rapist it was Pete, what with that eye patch, the three-day growth of beard, and the King Kong hands.
“You sure are a nosey little thing, pretty though,” Pete said. She blushed. I’d never seen her blush before. “You’re too young to hear about it,” he said. “Weren’t any little girl though.”
“You just better tell me right now, Pete LeBeau,” she said, “or I won’t come see you anymore.”
“Oh, in that case,” he laughed and smiled the biggest smile ever. It lit up his face and made him look almost human. You could tell he already loved her almost as much as I did, if that’s possible. “I didn’t even know I was still on that list,” Pete said. “You’d think there’d be some kind of statute of limitations or something if a prostitute says you raped her. Sometimes the jury believes the woman and you go on the sexual predators list, but that’s a far cry from kidnapping little girls.” Old Pete had strung so many words together that time he’d probably used up his quota.
Sheriff Russell found some skin under little Tammy Wiedenbach’s fingernails and sent it to the BCA lab in Lansing just as some of the men began gathering under the window of the jail, talking about taking Pete out and stringing him up if he didn’t tell where Francis was, something that hadn’t happened on the Upper Peninsula since 1911. But before they could do anything, the lab results came back and Sheriff Russell made a public announcement saying that the blood under Tammy’s nails did not match Pete’s blood type, and the lynch mob should leave Pete the fuck alone, his words not mine, since I’d never use the “f” word in polite company. My mom would kill me. But Pete got kicked out of the Lakawanna anyway, and the sheriff had to let him sleep in a cell at the jail since he couldn’t find any other place to live and since the sheriff wouldn’t let him leave town. When the packing company fired Pete, the sheriff went to talk to Mr. Thornton, the manager of the plant. I hear he chewed him out about everyone being innocent until proven guilty, but the manager wouldn’t hire Pete back.
Both of the girls who’d been taken were third graders and Dolly’s little sister, Bootsie, was in that class. Guess who’s got to watch her every place she goes? Dolly said there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between Dolly and Bootsie who had to wear all of Dolly’s hand-me-downs some of which were way too big for her. Bootsie had her hair cut like a boy’s, to save money I guess. She had big old owl’s eyes that never blinked. “The milkman’s child,” Dolly always called her.
The first night after Pete had been cleared because his blood didn’t match, Dolly and me had to take Bootsie to a skating party. Bootsie wanted to know if we two ever played kissie face. Dolly told her to shut up or she’d wash her face in the snow. “I’ll tell ma on you,” Bootsie said. “She always gets two eggs for breakfast, and I only get one.”
“Who washes all the dishes?” Dolly said.
I decided right then and there I was never gonna have any kids. When Bootsie got her skates on, they were too big, and she had to wear several pair of wool socks to get them to fit. Dolly said, “We’re gonna have to find that killer ourselves. I got a couple ideas.”
“Dennis Kornblat,” I said.
“How’d you know?” she said.
Dennis Kornblat had been the third grade teacher for twenty years, still unmarried, living with his mother. He sang “Nearer My God to Thee” on his way to work every day. All the third grade boys could impersonate Old Cornhole. When I’d been in his class, one time he’d been reading us this story “The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow” and the boys were all laughing so hard the snot was flying out of their noses cause Old Cornhole could’ve been that Ichabod Crane guy’s twin brother. Cornhole got pissed and called in Principal Woodlace who gave Gus Trimble, the principal instigator according to Cornhole, thirty whacks with the Board of Education. The Czechs, Poles, Bohemians, and Canucks who lived on the Upper Peninsula held no truck with misbehaving children. They laughed when other places did away with corporal punishment. They insisted on it. I remember the boys started counting when Woodpecker got to the tenth whack under their breaths, but you could still hear it. We all loved to see people suffer, providing it was somebody else of course. Gus blamed me for that, and I got beat up on the playground. Gus had a good twenty pounds on me.
“I seen Cornhole checking out the gay magazines at the drugstore,” I told Dolly.
“Didn’t neither,’ she said.
“Did so,” I said.
“You just wanna get even with him for that time you got spanked in front of the whole class,” she said.
“No, I never,” I said. “That was Gus Trimble.
“That’s right,” she said. “You got beat up for laughin’ while Woodpecker laid into Gus.”
“I’m not so sure Cornhole did it,” I said. “He likes boys.”
The other big story on the Upper Peninsula was the pending sale of the packing plant to a consortium of Koreans. There was a lot of racist talk going around about that since many of the men in town had been in the Korean War. Others said that Korean owners were better than no owners. Pete got a job digging graves, and my mother made me take him hot dish at the jail cause she was feeling guilty about kicking him out of the house. Bud Gault at the Gault Used Car Lot repossessed his van. I couldn’t see any reason why Bud would want the van if it belonged to a killer of little girls. Probably thought he could sell it out of town.
Dolly and I went to the Sadie Hawkins dance that Friday night. The school gym was all decorated with hay bales, and the kids had to come dressed as Hillbillies. Kind of tough in thirty below zero weather. We sat out all the dances talking until they played “Wipe Out.” Dolly always made a fool of herself on the dance floor, but I didn’t mind cause she was flopping all over the place in all the right places, if you know what I mean. When “Wipe Out” was over, we sat and talked about the kidnapping. No children had disappeared in the last week or so, probably cause the mothers were freaking out and had somebody watching their kids at all times. “I’m thinking we ought to find out who else owns a white van,” Dolly said.
“Don’t you think the police have already thought of that,” I said. What, do you think, they’re stupid?”
“Yeah,” she said, “They hired my second cousin Willard as a deputy, didn’t they?”
“The DMV can probably find out who else drives a white van in the area pretty easily,” I said. “Why don’t you ask Willard if they’ve done that?”
“I’ve got another idea,” she said. “I think the murderer knows those girls very well. He knows where they’ll be at all hours of the day, and he’s somebody like Dennis Kornblat, who we’d never suspect.”
“But everybody suspects Cornhole,” I said.
“Willard says the sheriff says Dennis has an alibi. He was playing bingo the night Francis Witucki disappeared, and practicing with the church choir when Tammy got taken.”
“Alibi smalibi,” I said. “I think we ought to follow him. I’ll bet even Ted Bundy had an alibi. I read someplace that your killers always have a good alibi cause they know they’re gonna need one.”
“I need to dance with Henry,” she said. Henry was her real boyfriend. Girls on the Upper Peninsula don’t go out with boys in their own grade, and Henry was a senior and the leading scorer on the Hadley Hawks hockey team. Dolly and Henry had had a fight, and I was here to make him jealous.
“I wouldn’t do this to you, Snoz, but I need Henry to help me get the team to follow those third grade girls everywhere they go. I checked and there are only thirteen girls in that class, minus two, of course, and we’re watching Bootsie, so that only leaves ten. When he tries to take another girl, we’re gonna be there right on top of him, and you and I are gonna get our pictures in the Detroit newspaper and maybe be on “The Today Show.”
She was given to these wild flights of the imagination. You had to love her though; she had such a cute little overbite, which became exaggerated when she was stressed. Sometimes I called her Buggs, but she hated that one even worse than Dolly, so I had to be awfully displeased with her before I’d use it.
Nothing happened for a good week, and you know how teenagers are. It was actually pretty impressive that Dolly got those hockey players to follow those little girls around from the time they got up in the morning, slogged through the snow to Tom Harmon Elementary School, their little backpacks slung over their shoulders, until they were safely tucked away in their featherbeds. But then, horny and gluttonous teenagers that they were, they began to be lured away to the fast food hangouts where their girlfriends were flipping burgers, or else they just plain lost interest. Since they didn’t have the largest attention spans in the first place, being hockey players, most of them had taken at least one puck in the head, the murderer must have seen the red and black letter jackets following little girls all over town, and he was biding his time.
Sometimes I underestimate people. Just because Pete never said much, I’d always thought he was kind of stupid. But, au contraire, Pete had been doing a little investigating of his own. One thing Dolly and I hadn’t thought of was that there were five girls in Bootsie’s third grade class who were Baptists, and both Tammy and Francis had belonged to that church. Pete picked up on this right away since he went to the Baptist church on Sundays. I had no idea Pete even believed in God, what with his swarthy Mephistophelean, that’s the devil for the uninitiated, kisser. Our town had four churches: Catholic, Lutheran, Assembly of God, and Baptist. Pretty damn many considering it’s such a small burg. Only Pete didn’t tell me and Dolly anything about the five Baptist girls, and when the hockey players stopped watching, Pete was still on the job. You’d think that someone would have reported Pete stalking those girls, but Pete must have been able to stay in the shadows cause nobody ever did until the night Bootsie got snatched.
This is how the whole thing went down. Nothing had happened for a good two months, except that the packing plant closed when the Koreans decided not to buy and real estate signs started popping up like dandelions in springtime, but most everyone else seemed to forget about the murder and the kidnapping. You know how people are; they want to get back to normal. And the sheriff was saying that the kidnapper had been a transient, probably because he didn’t have any clues and didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about finding the culprit. Dolly’s mom had kept Bootsie at home pretty much, and the poor little thing had cabin fever, complaining so much that finally Mrs. Payne agreed that it was okay for her to go sledding with the other third graders at Crazyhorse Hill, providing Dolly went along to watch her. Dolly bitched and moaned, and finally, cause misery loves company, she made me sharpen the runners on Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer and come along as assistant chaperone.
We were standing at the top of the hill drinking hot chocolate, watching Bootsie and her friends go up and down the hill twenty or thirty times. I remember telling Dolly about my horoscope that morning, which said I was going to go into a profession that embraced danger. Of course, she got smart about it and suggested that could mean I was going to be a Crash Test dummy. She also told me that she’s slept with her boyfriend and I felt almost suicidal. That was when Bootsie’s sled went over the road and into the trees. I remember being impressed by Pete, who was driving up and down, doing one bang up job plowing the road in front of the hill. He’d taken that job to supplement his grave digging income obviously. I remember he had a load of stove wood in the back of his truck which was awfully peculiar. The wood kept falling off the bed of the truck. Anyway, Bootsie’s Red Ryder Flyer went over the road and into the woods and shortly thereafter, a plumbing van came driving out of the little road that leads into the woods. The van turned right and drove on past the road which leads to the top of the sledding hill. That was when Pete in the truck with the snowplow attachment came rocketing out of nowhere. He was zigzagging left and right cause he was doing about fifty mph on the ice, and he runs that van right off the road, pulls this guy out of the truck and starts whaling on him like the hockey team does when they get into a brawl with the Ypsilanti Malamutes. Bootsie jumps out of the van, and she starts kicking the guy who’s down in the snow and bleeding. Dolly and me are doing our level best to slide down the hill, which isn’t too easy considering we ain’t got any boots on or anything. Boots are uncool you know. That’s when Willard shows up with the squad car and makes Pete stop hitting the guy. He lets Bootsie kick him a few more times. When we get down there, we realize it’s Manley Graham, the Baptist minister, and he’s swearing up and down he was just taking Bootsie to the top of the hill. Nobody believes him, and Willard takes him off to jail. We take Bootsie home, and Mrs. Payne lays into Bootsie with a willow switch cause she’s been told never to take a ride from strangers. “Weren’t no stranger, Ma,” she said. “It was only Manley Graham.” Bootsie is raising all kinds of hell, not so much cause she’s getting switched but cause she’s wanting to go with us to the jail to find out what’s happening. When we get to the jail, Pete tells us how he’d suspected Manley Graham all along. It seems Graham was the chaplain at the VFW, and every time he’d give one of his invocations at an armistice day event or whatever, Pete would get the creeps, just an eerie feeling he had about the man, like there was something wrong with the way he preached. “He said the angel Gabriel threw Adam out of Paradise for one thing,” Pete said. “A minister ought to know that was Michael that done that.” The man was becoming a regular blathermouth, and I wasn’t so sure it was an improvement. Seems like Pete was born a Baptist in Alabama and had always gone to church when he was a boy, although he’d lapsed some these days.
Willard says he’s gonna go out and check out Graham’s farm. Maybe he can find the body of the first girl. Dolly starts raising hell about going along. The sheriff is away in Lansing at some law enforcement convention, so Willard, who can never say no to Dolly, says it’s okay. He doesn’t think anything can happen since they’ve got the killer locked up in the jail in the basement. Dolly calls her ma and tells her she’s needed at the sheriff’s office, that she’ll be home in a couple of hours. The woman actually believes her.
Graham lives on a horse farm way out in the middle of the toolies. He’s got a mailbox with a silhouette of a horse on it. Two gray horses with black legs, I guess you’d call them roans, are nibbling grass through the snow. You’d think they’d be in the barn this late at night. In the next pen, there’s a goat. He’s just staring at us with his yellow eyes. He gives me the creeps. There’s a snowman with a red knit cap, coal eyes, and a carrot nose in Graham’s yard. Off to the left of the house, is a swingset and beyond that is an old building mostly burned down. Behind the house is a little brick structure. The house is made of logs. There are no power lines leading to the house. Damn! A brick shithouse, that’s what the brick thing was. As Willard is opening the front door with a set of keys he got off Graham, a dog attacks. A frickin’ Doberman pinscher. Willard blows him away with his Saturday Night Special. Dolly kicks Willard in the shins. She says the dog was only doing what he’d been trained to do. When we get inside we find a whole lot of photographic equipment, a cash of porno magazines and letters from all over the country. The basement door is locked, and none of the keys fit, so Willard and Pete break it down. Graham has a little jail down there, and we find Francis Witucki playing with her Barbie dolls.
It’s been a year since all this happened. Turns out Graham never was a real minister. Shows how gullible people are. My life is the pits. Would you believe my mother met Dennis Kornblat at a church supper, and they’re actually going out. I gave Dolly the silent treatment once all the commotion settled down. Then she told me that she’d been lying about going to bed with Henry just to see how I’d react. What’s a guy supposed to believe? I’m happy for Pete though. He’d done such a good job running down Graham when nobody else seemed to have a clue, including me and Dolly, that the sheriff had to give him a job as deputy or lose the next election.
I think I’m gonna be a detective when I grow up or else I’ll deal cards in the new casino that’s opening just outside of town.
A full-length novel by Dave Schwinghammer, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Amazon.com, new or used.
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