A Winsome Murder Page 7

  “I got a full beer.”

  “Come on,” Jeannie said, “we’re helping Dad tomorrow early.”

  “I’ll be there. I’ll be there before you.”

  Jillian felt awkward in all kinds of ways, not knowing whether to stay or leave. “If this is a problem, I can—”

  “No, it’s all right,” Schaefer said. She looked to the two men, who were glaring at her. “Go shoot pool or something. Stop looking at me. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  Jillian heard Jeannie whisper to Cal, “I’ll stay with her.”

  The men headed to the poolroom, not happy.

  Schaefer waved for Jillian to sit. “Come on. Join me.”

  “Thanks.” Jillian extended her hand and sat. “I’m Jillian.”

  “I’m drunk. This is my sister, Jeannie.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “That’s was my brother,” Schaefer said, pointing to the poolroom, “the rude one, Calan. The other guy, the cute one, is Jeannie’s husband. Bobby. She always got the nice guys. Me? Not so much.”

  “I need another beer,” Jeannie said. She asked Jillian, “You want something?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Jeannie went to the bar.

  Jillian, unsure what to say, nodded toward Schaefer’s brother. “He’s a big guy.”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “Is he the oldest?”

  “No, just the bossiest. There are seven of us.”

  “Seven?”

  “Yup. My sister and me and five boys.”

  “That’s huge.”

  “Not for around here.”

  “I’m an only child. I can’t even imagine.”

  “You don’t want to.”

  Jeannie returned with her beer. A short awkwardness followed and then Schaefer said, “So what newspaper are you with?”

  “Well, uh …” Jillian said, “actually, I’m not a reporter. I’m a freelance writer, and I’m working on an article, a series of articles, for a magazine.”

  “About Deborah.”

  “Yes.”

  Jeannie leaned into the table. “My sister’s a cop, you know. She can’t talk about the case.”

  “No, I know that. I’m really just researching the town, the people. It’s a beautiful town.”

  The two sisters both let out something that sounded like a snort. Schaefer took a long guzzle of her beer, eyeing Jillian’s cigarettes. “Can I have one? I’m out.”

  Jillian slid the pack across. “Sure. Help yourself.”

  “You smoke too much,” Jeannie said.

  “I know.”

  Jillian didn’t ask any real questions at first. She wanted to gain Schaefer’s trust. She started out by saying that she was sorry for what had happened and went on a little bit more about how beautiful Winsome Bay was. She casually dropped that she had already talked to Wesley Faber and Dan Ehrlich, and that they’d been very helpful. Then she began asking easy questions about Schaefer’s own background, her family, her career. Her brothers eventually stopped staring over at them, and from the sound of it, were involved in a pretty heated pool game. Jeannie, wary, listened closely and drank steadily.

  Finally, Jillian got the nerve to ask, “So what can you tell me about Deborah?”

  Schaefer picked at the label of her beer bottle and glanced at her sister.

  “Nothing about the case,” Jillian added, “something personal about her.”

  “Why?” Schaefer asked. “Why do you want to know this?”

  “I’m … it just, it seems wrong to me,” Jillian said. “Nobody’s talking about Deborah, about who she was. Who she really was. Everybody’s talking about how she died. It’s good headlines, it sells. But nobody has written about her life. We hardly know anything about her. And I just think that’s wrong. We should know what she wanted to be, what she liked to do, the things she loved, her dreams. That’s how people should remember her.”

  Both Jeannie and Schaefer seemed moved.

  Schaefer spoke quietly, not making eye contact. “I’m, uh … I’m a good bit older than her, but we spent some time together.” She concentrated on peeling the label off her beer bottle. “I knew her pretty well.”

  Jillian took out her digital recorder. “Do you mind if I use this? I have a terrible memory.”

  Schaefer shrugged and took another of Jillian’s cigarettes. “I don’t care.”

  Jillian put the recorder on the table behind a small wicker basket of popcorn.

  Schaefer spoke hesitantly at first, eyeing Jillian often, but after another drink she started talking, and once she did, she wasn’t shy about it. By the time Jillian arrived home that night, she had more than enough material for her next article.

  She wrote late into the night.

  J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

  The Bar Nun Tavern

  I was sitting at a table at the far back of the bar. In the darkened corner, a tall, electronic dart board flickered red and played celebratory chimes every few minutes, even though no one was playing it; a Siren song of gaming, sung to a near-empty bar.

  Sitting across from me was officer Michele Schaefer. She wore a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, blue jeans, and beat-up cowboy boots. Her hair, unfussily shoulder length and natural. Her eyes, a piercing hazel-green, that seemed to pronounce, “I will not suffer fools.” She wore no makeup that I could see. Her skin, burnished and smooth, had that natural look usually reserved for the very young or for those who can afford daily facial treatments and tanning booths. I thought Schaefer was in her late twenties. She is thirty-seven. She’s also tall for a woman, nearly six foot. She hunts deer, turkey, and pheasant; works the Fireman’s Smelt Feed each year; target shoots with a .44 Magnum; and will icefish on occasion. She’s between relationships at the moment. Boyfriends, she said, tend to get in the way during haying season, when she helps out on the family farm. She’s never married because, she said, husbands tend to get in the way all the time. Schaefer’s dad, a cop for twenty years, retired early to run an organic dairy farm.

  Her sister, Jeannie, who was with her during my interview, is thirty-one and has a similar look to her, a hardened beauty born of the fields and more than a bit of grit. You wouldn’t say either of these women was pretty, but they’re striking nonetheless. She, like her sister, is not a small woman. This is solid stock around here. Her ancestors cut trees, pulled stumps, and wrestled boulders by hand, trying to grapple out tillable land in this Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin. Schaefer’s brother, Cal, was in the bar too. Cast in half shadow by a too-bright plastic beer sign, he and his brother-in-law stalked a hazy pool table in the back room like mini-Agamemnons. This family could sack a city. They were all born and raised in Winsome Bay, and are determined to stay there.

  They, too, are, in a way, driftless.

  Schaefer drank a lot during the interview, her speech often slurred and sloppy. She seemed aware of this at times, but continued to talk through it, rough and rambling, and at times angry. She frequently went off on non sequiturs: small-town life, domestic beers, the press, deer season coming up, bow hunting turkeys, the flooding last spring, being a cop. The hardest thing about being a cop in a small town, she told me, was that you know just about everyone you have to deal with. They’re your friends, your relatives, neighbors, people you like or don’t like. Most of the calls are minor, she said, but there’s always the farmer who rolls his tractor or gets caught on a power takeoff shaft, the neighbor kid on crack, the hunting mishap, the drunk driver, the domestic abuse, and now, the murder. Schaefer and officer Tom Ellison, the father of the victim, had worked together for the last four years.

  “Tom,” she said, speaking about the victim’s father. “He was just crazy about Deb.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  She took a long, hot pull off her cigarette. “Not good. Not good.”

  “Is he back to work?”

  “No, no. He’s, uh … no. He goes to church a lot. He’s—Tom’s a ver
y religious guy. Always has been. His family too. Never missed a Sunday. Always wore a suit, did the collection at Mass, the prayers before eating, you know, the whole nine yards. He’d pray in the cruiser over a turkey sandwich. I’d tease him about it. And now …” Schaefer crushed out her cigarette. “Things just aren’t adding up for him.” She reached across the table and grabbed another cigarette from my pack. “You mind?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  She looked to her sister. “I know, I smoke too much.”

  Jeannie stood and said, “I have to pee,” and headed down a long dark hallway.

  Schaefer’s mood darkened suddenly. I wasn’t sure what to ask next. I didn’t want to scare her off. So I lit a cigarette too and said nothing. A long silence followed, one of those uncomfortably long pauses when you know somebody should say something but nobody does. It seemed to go on forever. I was just about to say something to break the awkwardness when Schaefer glanced toward the ceiling and said, “A policeman was just born.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Huh? Oh, nothing. Just something you say when nobody knows what to say. You know, like ‘an angel just passed over’ or something. Deborah used to say it.”

  “Oh.” I waited another few seconds. “So you said earlier that you knew her. Deborah.”

  “Yes.” She held up the cigarette. “Thanks.”

  “And you said you knew her pretty well.”

  “Hold on.” Schaefer grabbed her empty beer bottle and went to the bar. Turning back to me, she asked, “Want one?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She called the bartender out of a cloud of smoke. The woman twisted open a beer, poured a shot of something, and pushed it in front of Schaefer, who slammed it down. Schaefer took a guzzle of her beer and headed back to our table. “Sorry,” she said, “what were you saying?”

  “You knew Deborah well, you said. Was this before she moved to Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was she living at home while she was here?”

  “Home? No, she had an apartment by the lake. She was pretty messed up back then.”

  “In what way?”

  “I can’t really go into that, but, uh, this wasn’t a good place for her to be. She needed money, there were no jobs here, she was getting into some bad things.”

  “Didn’t her parents help her?”

  Schaefer didn’t answer. She shrugged and looked around the bar. I could tell she was uncomfortable with my last question, so I asked, “But you and Deborah were friends?”

  “We didn’t really hang out together, but I took her to Chicago with me sometimes.”

  “Before she moved there?”

  “Yeah, this was a while ago. My old boyfriend and me, we used to drive in a lot. And one time, we were on our way there, and we see her hitchhiking out on the beltline. I pulled over, I was like, what the hell are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed. She was trying to get to Chicago. So we took her with us. After that, I started telling her whenever we’d be going in, and sometimes she’d come with. We’d drop her off at a club or something and she’d meet up with us later, or crash with us.”

  I took a sip of my drink. “Wesley Faber mentioned some kind of trouble Deborah had been in, when she was younger. Something Father Ryan helped with? Do you know anything about that?” Schaefer shook her head. Her eyes were glassy. I pressed her. “Is that why she moved to Chicago? Because of whatever this trouble was?”

  Schaefer squinted and waved away smoke from her cigarette. She took another swallow of beer. “I don’t know why she moved.”

  I ventured a guess. “Was she pregnant?”

  “No,” Schaefer said, giving me a look like I was stupid.

  “But you knew her pretty well.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you identified the body.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry to ask this,” I said, “but I read about the condition of the body. How did you even know it was Deborah?”

  Jillian stopped the article there, even though there was a lot more that Schaefer had revealed to Jillian that night. It was all great material, but everything else that had been said was off the record, so it couldn’t be used. What Jillian hadn’t included was everything that Schaefer had said after Jillian’s last question.

  When Jillian said, “I’m sorry to ask this, but I read about the condition of the body. How did you even know it was Deborah?” Schaefer answered, “The tattoos she had on her—”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when Schaefer lunged across the table, knocking empty bottles to the floor. “Fuck!” she said, “Fuck!” She grabbed the digital recorder, trying to turn it off, but she was too drunk and her hands weren’t working well. “You can’t write that. That’s not been released yet. It could screw up the case. You can’t, you can’t write that!”

  “Okay, okay, I won’t!” Jillian took the recorder and turned it off. “It’s off the record. You say off the record, it’s—”

  “Off the record!”

  “Okay.”

  “Swear to God.” Schaefer grabbed her arm. “Right now, swear to God.”

  “I swear to God.”

  She tightened her grip.

  “Please, you’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry,” Schaefer said, releasing her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.” She looked to see if her brother was watching. “Just be smart about what you write. We want to catch this guy.”

  Jillian sat back down. “I won’t print it.”

  Schaefer stared at the table for a moment. Her eyes glistened wet.

  Jeannie came back from the bathroom. “You okay?” she asked Schaefer.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “We should get going soon, okay? I’ll tell the boys.”

  “Sure.”

  Jeannie went over to the pool table. A little laughter and whistling welcomed her.

  Schaefer spoke very quietly.

  “I’d seen her tattoos before. When she crashed with us in Chicago once. We were getting changed together and she came out of the shower, and she showed me. She had lots of tattoos, in places where you usually can’t see them. Birds and flowers, wings. Her dad didn’t know about them, but I did, and uh … that’s how I recognized her.”

  “Did you—”

  Jeannie came over with the boys.

  “All right, sis,” Cal said, “you ready?”

  “In a second,” Schaefer said, chugging a last swallow of beer. “I gotta pee.” She pushed herself up off the table and stumbled slightly.

  Her brother caught her arm. “Whoa, a little drunk, are we?”

  “Yes. And I’m going to get drunker. I’ll arrest myself later.”

  Cal handed her off to Jeannie, who helped her to the bathroom. “Meet you out front,” he called after them. He and his brother-in-law left. They did not say good-bye.

  Jillian got up to leave. She checked her phone. Michael had texted her good night. Mara hadn’t returned her call. It was late and she really had to get headed home. She was going to go to the bathroom too, when she kicked an empty beer bottle that had been knocked off the table. She reached beneath to pick it up and saw Schaefer’s purse on the floor, its contents strewn about the filthy carpet. She gathered up her things quickly, shoving everything back in. As she did she noticed an official-looking document among the items. It was folded up, but she could clearly make out the heading.

  A coroner’s report.

  Jillian glanced to the bathroom, then quickly unfolded the document.

  Twenty-three-year-old female. 5´ 3˝, 110 lbs. Caucasian. Thirty-two stab wounds to the neck and upper torso. Extensive incise and puncture wounds across anterior and left lateral neck. Blunt force trauma to the face and skull. Bruising on upper forearms and biceps. Left hand missing.

  In the basement of the Chicago medical examiner’s office, Detective Mangan met with Brian Rhys to discuss the forensic evidence sent by the Wisconsin medical examiner.

  “Okay, Wo
nder Boy,” Mangan said, “wonder me. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “That’s a wide field of discussion.”

  “Blow me, Brad.”

  “Language, Jimmy, language.”

  “Don’t call me Jimmy.”

  “Don’t call me Brad.”

  Brian Rhys, early thirties, blond, handsome, and ridiculously intelligent, had aced forensic science at Michigan State, sailed through four years of internal medicine in Houston, and then enjoyed a sun-filled fellowship at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine before working his way up to the glory boy of Chicago crime analysis while simultaneously working his way through what seemed like every available woman in the downtown Chicago area. Mangan called him Brad because he looked a little like Brad Pitt. There was nothing particularly eccentric about Rhys, nothing like the morgue geeks or body doctors in crime novels and movies—always some weird quirk, or look, or habit—nothing like that. He liked his work, was good at it, liked his sports, was fascinated by things he couldn’t figure out, and obsessed with work only during business hours. When the day was over he was gone, jogging up the steps from his basement office. He always seemed to be on his way to a Cubbies game or happy hour somewhere.

  “It’s nice and cool down here,” Mangan said. “How come your AC’s working?”

  “It’s not. I leave the doors to the body fridge open. Where’s Coose?”

  “He’s following up at the Bank Street Diner, trying the find the girl Lachlan was with.”

  “Lachlan?”

  “The guy with the hand. He’s a magazine editor. American Forum. You know it?”

  “No.”

  “A fake lit mag. Cross between the Paris Review and People.”

  Rhys slid a photo of Deborah Ellison’s battered face in front of Mangan. “Show and tell,” he said. “This is the Wisconsin victim. Twenty-three-year-old female. Five foot three, a hundred and ten pounds, thirty-two stab wounds to the neck and upper torso, profound fracturing of the zygomatic and orbital—”

  “Do I look like someone who uses big words? Slow down.”

  “You have a larger vocabulary than I do, James. I don’t know why you pretend you don’t. What’s that get you, anyway? Power? Control?”