Chapter 22 of 23Never Once Wrong

Rollie Schuette held the note by its corners, and by the time he set it down Dorothy Mercier knew what he was going to say. Block capitals, ballpoint, no signature. A threat nobody signs is a threat no prosecutor touches, and the cremation permit in the folder on his desk still wanted his signature on it before Monday, and there was nothing Dot could do about that. Without it, the body stayed where it was. With it, the body was gone, and any chance of proof with it.

"Could be a church lady meaning it kindly," Rollie said.

"Could be." Dot settled the readers' glasses on her nose, though she had the note by heart. "And then I got to thinking about how many people in this town know that I take County K home after dark with a case file and nobody riding along with me."

"Everybody knows that."

"Then everybody's on your list, and a list with everybody on it is no list at all."

He turned the note over and held it up to the window. Blank on the back. He laid it on the blotter beside the folder with DETLOFF, O. on the tab.

"Here's the official version." He tapped the folder as he went. "A Kwik Trip receipt off Highway 57. A photograph you took of a supply log. A pill that doesn't match its bottle. A deposit slip from a machine whose canopy light has been out since the first cold snap. And now a note."

"That's a case."

"That's paper." His chair creaked back. "The district attorney in Sturgeon Bay would laugh me out of his office and enjoy it, and I have fourteen months left before my pension, Dorothy."

He closed the folder and set it on the corner of the desk.

"I'll have a car run County K at shift change," he said. "Hook your back door."

"I hooked it Thursday night. I hooked it again this morning."

"I know. It's for me."

Dot pulled the folding fan out of her barn coat pocket and worked it. The annex ran its heat on its own opinion, and that morning the opinion was July.

"You're warm."

"I'm fifty-two." She snapped the fan shut. "It saves on the oil."

"Unofficially," he said, "you and I are the only people in this county who think it was Bonnie Tetzlaff."

"Peg thinks it."

"Peg thinks what you think." He walked to the whiteboard at the end of the room, where the month's fire inspections hung under a column of names, and wiped a corner of it with his sleeve. "That's not the same as a jury."

He printed it in capitals that leaned right. THE BOOKS.

"Here's the part she can't get around," he said. "Say the words segmental hair testing out loud in a hall, and half the hall hears a laboratory with a doctor in it. A hair test by itself is confusion. The books are motive, and every soul in this county understands a woman who needed money."

"And she can't take the binders."

"She couldn't take them all month." He capped the marker. "Any binder that walks out of that basement now walks out with her name on it and nobody else's fingerprints anywhere near the cover. That's why it's still down there."

"So we make her come get it."

"We make her come get it."

Dot looked at the words on the board. She thought about a woman who had cut her rice pie on the day Orv was buried and told her she came with the wallpaper.

Rollie picked up the desk phone and thumbed a number. Dale Detloff came into the room through the speaker, quick and thin, talking before the greeting was finished.

"Chief. What's up, is this the estate thing?"

"Partly." Rollie laid it out: an outside review of the club's books, a test on the body, and the county announcing both.

The toothpick stayed in while Dale talked, and Dot could hear it in the vowels.

"Review the books? Chief, if there's money missing out of that club, that money belongs to the estate."

"That's the idea."

"Then you've got my consent. All of it. Whatever you need, hon."

"In writing."

"Saturday." A chair scraped somewhere in Green Bay. "I'll be up Saturday. I'll bring it to the Legion."

Rollie hung up.

"Now I need somebody to say it out loud in a room full of people."

"You want me to say it."

"If it comes out of my mouth it's the county, and they'll have lawyers before the drawing." He squared the note against the blotter. "If it comes out of yours it's news, and news travels faster than any subpoena I ever served."

"That's the whole plan. I stand up at the meat raffle and tell the Legion hall there's going to be a test."

The whiteboard marker had rolled to a stop against the tray's raised lip.

"You stand up and say the county is reviewing the club's books and the circumstances of Orv Detloff's death, starting Monday, and every word of that is true, or I wouldn't ask you to carry it into a hall."

"Nobody says it that way."

"Then say it your way."

Dot put her glasses back on top of her head and stood. "Well."

Rollie wrote the date on a paper sleeve, put the note inside it, and filed it with the folder.

On the way south she stopped at the Kwik Trip on Highway 57 for coffee and a glazer, $1.09, and ate it in the truck with the west wind leaning on the door. Lu & Peg's had the chairs up and the lunch crowd gone. Lu's coffee sat in front of her, still full, going cold.

Peg cut a wedge of the rice pie and set it down without mentioning money, so Dot put two dollars by the register.

"Block capitals," Dot said, and told them the rest.

Lu heard it out. "Block capitals let Father Bert out. He'd have written it in Latin and left a casserole."

Peg laughed into the back of her hand, and Dot laughed with her, and then they stopped at the same time and looked at the pie.

"Say it at the raffle," Lu said, "and Arlene Vandermause will have it to Sturgeon Bay before the last ticket's out of the bucket."

"I want it said in a room I'm standing in."

Lu looked at her a while. "You'll be alone out on County K after."

"I've been alone out on County K since March."

Peg wiped the counter and did not look up. "Saturday you'll eat before you go."

Dot put her fork down with half the pie still on the plate.

"Saturday," she said. "I'll say the words."

Two blocks from the Legion, the porch light was on and the kitchen window over the sink was the only lit square on the block, with geraniums standing in coffee cans on the sill. The phone rang.

The screen said Danny, and under his name was the Minnesota number. She picked it up and six words came through.

"Ma, you sound tired. I'm okay."

"I'm fine." She turned her back to the window. "Did you eat?"

She listened to the rest of it with the phone against her ear and her free hand closed over the table's worn rim until the call ran down. Then she got the checkbook out of the drawer and worked the column, deposits and balance, and wrote the figure and ruled it off. The register had never once been wrong. She closed it, squared it against the tablecloth's hem, and took the ring of club keys off the hook by the door, and she laid them on the corner of the table where the lamp would find them.