Riverwatcher Page 6

  “You said it was love.”

  “Half-love. But for a woman there’s no certain line between the two. Men never understand that.” Mercy smiled thinly. “Like me to continue?”

  “My experience,” Stroud said, “love’s a motive for murder.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  Stroud changed course. “What do you know about the husband?”

  “You told me to talk to Billie.”

  “I’ll get around to him. Background I’m asking for.”

  “I don’t know much. Burt’s a fisherman, so hosting at Rainbow Run is ideal for him. He’s always a little careful around me, wanting to look good, wanting Billie to. But that’s okay. It’s a damn nice trait, as a matter of fact.”

  “He do any hunting?”

  “I’ve no idea. He and Billie leave for Florida about when bird season begins, but he might. Why?”

  “I’m wondering if he has shotguns around.”

  “Let’s say he does. That would put him in the same company with nearly every other functioning male in Tamarack County. I wouldn’t say that’s much to go on.”

  “All right,” Stroud said. “Husband and wife, they get along?”

  “They must, working together, living bunched up in a trailer. I can’t imagine it. Fitzgerald and I’d be at each other’s throat.”

  Stroud let himself smile. “I wondered why he got himself that big place.”

  “Very funny. When I was leaving,” Mercy said, “Burt mentioned something—random violence, somebody shooting at Charlie’s tent for no reason at all. When we talked before, you didn’t suggest that.”

  “It’s a possibility, always is, but think what’s involved. Anybody drove in the campground late, they’d come right past the hosts’ trailer. But they didn’t hear anything except maybe firecrackers. He did. The only other way in is off the river or overland off Downriver Road, a hike through the woods either way. And lugging a shotgun. It could happen that way, but you’d have to figure, coming that way, Charlie had been singled out. It doesn’t figure to be random violence. It is, we’ve got no hope. But a jealous husband isn’t random.”

  “Jealous because she had coffee and talk with someone they called the Odd Fellow?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Well, I think it’s a stretch.”

  “Your opinion has been noted.”

  7

  “HEY, STRANGER,” SANDY Wink called out when Fitzgerald came from the lobby into the lounge of the Borchard Hotel. He waved to her, then waited a moment, eyes adjusting to dim lighting, before taking one of the high stools at the bar. Beyond the bar a pair of waitresses were setting tables in the dining room for the lunch crowd.

  Sandy positioned herself in front of him, absently ran multi-ringed fingers through frizzy yellow hair. “I’d figure you’ve been avoiding me, I didn’t know better.”

  “You do, though,” Fitzgerald said.

  “Weather, huh? Too good to spend in bars.”

  “That’s so, actually. I’ve been fishing, eating, sleeping, fishing again. Heck of a life.”

  “Weather too good for writing your book, too?”

  “Ah, Sandy,” Fitzgerald said, “you know how to wound a guy. Now round up a mug of coffee, assuming it’s strong.”

  When she came back with the coffee, Sandy braced both hands against the bar and leaned forward, her conspiratorial stance. “So how come you’re in now? It’s perfect out.”

  Fitzgerald encircled the mug with his hands. “You’ve heard?”

  “It’s all over town.”

  “That’s why. Dark bar and strong coffee. Bad mood.”

  “He never came in,” Sandy said, “but I knew about him. People talked about an old guy camping at Rainbow Run.”

  “Charlie liked a nip,” Fitzgerald said, “but he wasn’t a bar type. And he wasn’t so old. Late sixties, maybe. But it was hard to tell. He was one of those people who reach a certain age, don’t seem to get any older. He always looked the way he did when I first met him.”

  “Way back?”

  “I was working on the paper in Detroit, coming up here on weekends, fishing all the time, sleeping in my car. About the first people I met were Calvin McCann and Verlyn Kelso. Through them I got to know Charlie. We’d fish together all night, then go up to his campsite and make breakfast. Charlie wasn’t much of a cook, so Calvin or Verlyn would bring a big iron skillet and we’d mix potatoes, eggs, onions, ham, cook it all together. Charlie would eat like a trooper, but when he was alone all he’d make himself was beans and rice and peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “You never grilled a trout?”

  “Those days, we could have. It was before catch and release came on the mainstream and the South Branch. But Charlie was way ahead of his time. He never kept fish, and neither did Calvin or Verlyn. I didn’t have to worry. Hardly ever caught any.”

  “He was a good fisherman, huh?”

  “About the best, as far as I was concerned. Calvin and Verlyn were good, but they’d always been good. They assumed you knew more than you did. Charlie was patient with me. I learned a lot from him. It was important with Charlie to do things right on the river. But I always had the feeling, fishing with him, that it didn’t matter if we caught anything. Being out on the water mattered, getting late, canoeists gone and most other fishermen—wading out there in that spooky time before full dark when it cools down and you can’t see much but you feel the current against your legs and you sense in your bones the complete indifference of nature. You get a hint of where you fit in the order of things.”

  “Gee.”

  “I always felt Charlie knew where he fit. He was a wise and humble man.”

  “Gee.”

  Fitzgerald smiled. “Ask a simple question, get an inflated answer.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. You should hear the stuff gets said in here.” Then Sandy asked, “Stroud thinks it’s murder, huh?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “What a shame, nice man like that.”

  “What a shame,” Fitzgerald repeated.

  When the phone rang down the bar, Sandy excused herself and went to answer it. When she came back, she said the call was from Mercy.

  “I forgot to say,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re meeting here.”

  Sandy shook her head. “Change of plans. Says she’s tied up. She’ll see you at the sheriff’s office. It’s about the murder, huh?”

  “Expect so.”

  “Maybe Stroud caught the madman who did it.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “You don’t sound hopeful.”

  “Told you,” Fitzgerald said. “Bad mood.”

  *  *  *

  FITZGERALD DROVE THE three-block main drag of Ossning and pulled into the parking area of the city-county building. Backed into one of the handicapped-parking spaces near the entrance was the white van of a television station in Traverse City.

  When he came through the glass door into the sheriff’s office, Fitzgerald took a look at Elsie and stopped in his tracks. Winter and summer Elsie wore pastel-colored sweatshirts with glittering appliqué on the front. “Best ever,” he told her. “Thought the last I saw was. This beats it.”

  “Ha,” Elsie said. “You say that to every girl in the building.”

  “Only the good-lookers.”

  “Ha.”

  Fitzgerald dipped his head in the direction of the closed door behind Elsie. “Boss in?”

  “Thinking.”

  “If it’s okay, I’ll wait. Mercy’s coming over.”

  “He knows,” Elsie said. “Said to go in.”

  Inside, Fitzgerald closed the door behind him and took a chair in front of the sheriff’s desk. “Don’t encourage her,” Stroud said without looking up from some papers.

  “I didn’t think you could hear.”

  “Didn’t. I know how you operate.”

  Fitzgerald smiled and said, “Mercy’s tied up with something.”

  “She called, told
Elsie.” Stroud glanced up with tired eyes. “Seems the state park people downstate had a cow when she told them she was getting out a statement about Charlie. Told her any statements would come from Lansing. She argued that she knew about Rainbow Run, but they said they knew about the parks in general. They had statistics proving how safe they were and to mind her own business.”

  “Something tells me that didn’t sit well with Mercy.”

  “You’d know. You’ve got to live with her. Anyway, we’ve got no statement on our hands.”

  “I saw a TV van outside.”

  Stroud rubbed his eyes, said, “News conference. There’s still that. I want to say what I’ve got to say once, not dribble it out to every reporter who calls.”

  “Good idea.”

  “What I thought. Except I only got two people down in the conference room. Newspaper and TV from Traverse City. And Gus Thayer. Gus already put out a story, bare bones, for the AP.”

  “That’s the way it is these day, all the news organizations cutting back on staff. It’s all bottom line. They’ll use what Gus sends over the wire and copy what the Traverse City people put out.”

  “You’d figure Detroit would be interested, killing in a state campground.”

  “You’d figure,” Fitzgerald agreed. “So you don’t have any need for me?”

  Stroud raised a hand, held Fitzgerald in the chair. “Maybe I do. Come down to the news conference. Soon as Mercy shows up, we’ll get started.”

  *  *  *

  THE REPORTER FOR the Traverse City Record-Eagle turned out to be a bearded intern on summer vacation from Kalamazoo College. The TV reporter from WGTU was a rail-thin blonde who looked no older than the intern. Only Gus Thayer of the weekly Ossning Call, with a bristling crew cut, thick-rimmed glasses, and a craggy, middle-aged face, seemed an honest-to-god journalist. Fitzgerald, examining the three from the side, realized he had never before thought that way about Gus.

  The three were lined up on hard chairs before a folding table, Stroud and Mercy behind it. The TV reporter asked if they could get started since she had another assignment in Gaylord, and when Stroud said all right, she nodded to a jeans-and-tee-shirt cameraman and he switched on a hard blue-white light. Stroud and Mercy leaned forward, eyes narrowed, trying to ignore it.

  “Sheriff Stroud,” the TV reporter said, “would you begin?”

  You sit up there, Fitzgerald thought, pinned by the light, and you believe they are making a videotape of what you are saying. They are. But they aren’t going to use it, not the way you are saying it. You are saying it the way you have worked it out, talking from prepared copy or notes, one thing leading logically to another—what you believe is a careful, considered statement. But what you will see on the tube that evening, assuming they use anything at all, are snippets, bits and pieces lifted from the tape with the reporter’s narrative overlaid. Your face will be there, and some of your words, but you will hardly recognize either one. You will be on TV, but you won’t be happy.

  With newspaper accounts, it is only marginally better. There is more length and usually more coherence, and there isn’t the intrusive appearance of attractive young reporters trying to act like genuine reporters. There is the same picking and choosing that often as not selects what you thought were, when you talked about them, minor matters and passages put in quote marks that, even when accurate, don’t read like anything you think you said. You are in the paper but only less unhappy.

  Even experienced news sources, the types who gave news conferences all the time, rarely understood how the game worked. They wanted conduits, and what they got were filters. You want the former, Fitzgerald used to say when he was working the political beat for the Free Press, take out an ad. You want it for free, you get me. But understanding that, if you were on Stroud and Mercy’s side of the table, didn’t make it easier to take. Disappointment was built into the game. If he couldn’t help with a statement about the safety of Michigan campgrounds, maybe he could try, later, to help Stroud and Mercy through the raw edges of their disappointment.

  “The Tamarack County medical examiner,” Stroud was saying, “says Mr. Orr died as the result of wounds to the head and upper torso—two shotgun shells, .16 gauge, fired at close range from outside his tent. Preliminary time of death was between midnight and six o’clock. At the present moment we have no motive for the shooting, and no arrests have been made. We’re in the process of interviewing campers in Rainbow Run who may have heard or seen something. Individual sites are set back from the interior road and shielded by pines—so we might not get much visual information. And we’re trying to locate others who may have come in contact with Mr. Orr. We believe he was fishing on the South Branch of the Borchard River prior to returning, sometime during the night, to Rainbow Run. It was his practice to fish late into the night.

  “The body was found by Mrs. Billie Berry while she walked the campground road at approximately seven-thirty. Mrs. Berry and her husband are campground hosts at Rainbow Run. A 911 call was made from the Berrys’ mobile home, and an emergency vehicle was dispatched to the campground. Nothing could be done for Mr. Orr. We’re treating his death as murder. That’s all the information I have for now.”

  Stroud turned to Mercy, introduced her as the manager of the DNR field office in Ossning, said she would say a few words.

  “Only that a statement will be issued by the parks department in Lansing pointing out the exceptional nature of an incident like this in Michigan campgrounds. It will be sent to news organizations around the region.”

  Mercy looked back at Stroud, and Stroud said, “Questions?”

  Gus Thayer waved his hand like a kid in school. “You didn’t say,” he said to Mercy, “that Charlie had this sweetheart deal. He didn’t pay to camp.”

  “That’s incorrect,” Mercy said. “Mr. Orr did pay, though not in the usual manner. At the end of the season, he sent the DNR a listing of the nights he had spent in Rainbow Run and a check to cover the full amount. This special arrangement was an acknowledgement of his years of camping there that went back to a time when it wasn’t a fee-required campground.”

  “Any others get the same treatment?”

  Mercy’s lips tightened, but her voice remained even. “Not that I know. But if you mean at state campgrounds in general, you’d have to ask Lansing.”

  Gus turned his attention to Stroud. “Maybe that’s why he was shot. Some camper was teed off about Charlie getting favored handling by the DNR.”

  Stroud glared at Gus across the table but didn’t reply.

  “You looking into that?”

  “We’re looking into everything.”

  Following Gus’s lead, the intern with the Record-Eagle waved his hand. “Was theft involved?”

  “We don’t believe so,” Stroud said. “We believe nothing was taken from the campsite, nor was the tent entered. But it’s too early to say definitively that theft wasn’t the motive.”

  “If it wasn’t,” the intern said, “what was?”

  “As I said, at the moment we don’t know.”

  “Could be a thrill killing,” Gus Thayer said. “Kids from town used to horse around out there.”

  “Correct,” Mercy said. “Used to. There have been no recent incidents. The campground is regularly patrolled both by the sheriff’s office and DNR enforcement officers.”

  “Yeah,” Gus said, “and look what happened.”

  The intern raised his hand again and asked if the murder weapon had been found.

  “Not as yet.”

  “That mean,” Gus Thayer asked, “you found a shotgun but don’t know if it’s the right one?”

  Stroud stared at Gus before he said, “I’m not prepared to comment on that.”

  “I hear there was a break-in at a river place. Not too far from Rainbow Run. I hear a shotgun may be missing.”

  “I said,” Stroud said stiffly, “I wasn’t prepared to comment.”

  “The shotgun could be the murder weapon.”
/>
  “Let’s move on,” Stroud said. When no questions followed, he said hopefully, “If that’s all—”

  The TV reporter stood, light from the camera swinging to her, enveloping her. She went through the motions of consulting a notebook before she looked up at Stroud. “WGTU has learned that a reward will be offered. Could you comment on that, Sheriff Stroud?”

  Stroud glanced at Mercy, who shrugged, before turning back to the TV reporter. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “WGTU has learned that money is being raised by fishing companions of Mr. Orr. Apparently, Mr. Orr had a great many friends who are deeply concerned that the murderer be apprehended. All information from the public is to be directed to your office.”

  “Who told you so?” Stroud persisted.

  “That Mr. Orr had many friends?”

  “About a reward.”

  The TV reporter smiled serenely. “WGTU stands behind its sources.”

  “You’d know what she’s saying,” Gus Thayer piped up, “if you had a talk now and then with your deputies. Verlyn’s passing a hat out at the Kabin Kamp.”

  8

  “DON’T KNOW WHICH one gripes me more,” Stroud said after the news conference ended and he had guided Mercy and Fitzgerald to his office. “Gus or Verlyn.”

  “I nominate Gus,” Mercy said, “playing to the camera like that.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Fitzgerald said. “He’ll end up on the cutting-room floor. All you’ll see is Ms. WGTU.”

  “Lord,” Mercy said, “normal-sized women must look like blimps on TV. That one’s anorexic, I’ll bet you anything.”

  “Gus I deal with later,” Stroud said, “and whichever deputy’s been blabbing to him. Verlyn is first off. He’s got no business getting up a reward.”

  “I don’t know,” Mercy said. “It might be a good idea.”