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“You’re damn right, she did.” There was pride in Vonnie Lou’s voice. “I’ll tell you what happened. Richard attacked Merodie in her own home, and in self-defense, Merodie hit him over the head with a softball bat.”
The instant she said “softball bat” I recognized that this was the missing piece G. K. Bonalay had been looking for, the reason the Anoka County attorney was pushing a murder charge against Merodie. It would seem to indicate—my inner voice was choosing its words carefully—a propensity toward violence and possibly even an MO since Merodie used the same weapon—the bat—on both victims.
“Merodie hit him with the bat,” Vonnie Lou continued, “and Richard broke her jaw. They both ended up in the hospital, only Richard was there for a night and Merodie was there for nearly a week. She complained to the cops, but it was one of those he said/she said deals. A domestic matter, one guy called it. As far as the cops were concerned, it was both of their faults.”
“What did they fight over, do you recall?”
“Silk.”
“Merodie’s daughter?”
“Yeah. See, Merodie has this fantasy that Silk is coming back to live with her, that one day she’s just going to just show up, suitcase in hand, or something like that, which is never, ever going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Silk has been living with her aunt all these years and she doesn’t come by, not ever. Maybe it’s the aunt’s doing, I can’t say. I’ve known Merodie for, God, at least ten years, probably more, and I’ve never met Silk, never even seen her except for these photographs that Merodie has that are really old. I mean, it’s just not going to happen—Silk moving back. At least I can’t see it. Only Merodie believes, okay? So when she learned that Richard had been dealin’ out of her house, she freaked out, told him that she wouldn’t allow drugs in the same house as Silk. Richard laughed at her, and one thing led to another.
“Anyway, there was no way Merodie was going to let Richard get away with what he did to her—laughing at her, beating her. Right before she left the hospital she called the cops and burned him. Burned him right down to the ground. He was already in custody by the time she got home.”
Vonnie Lou was smiling—perhaps she always smiled—but her melodic voice suddenly grew hard and cold.
“Merodie, she’s one of the nicest people you’re ever going to meet,” she said. “I love her to death. I mean it. She almost never gets angry at anyone or anything, but when she does get angry—you know what? You don’t want to make Merodie angry.”
8
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery was housed just inside the Regis Center for Art in the West Bank Arts Quarter—at least that’s what the colorful banners hanging from the light posts along Twenty-first Avenue called the area. It was near O. Meredith Wilson Library as Benny had promised, on that part of the University of Minnesota campus known as the West Bank because it was located on the western shore of the Mississippi River. I had gone to the U, mostly on the East Bank. Graduated cum laude, thank you very much. Yet all this was new to me. I remembered the library and, now that I saw it, the Rarig Theater. I also remembered the Viking Bar on Nineteenth and Riverside. The rest—Barker Center for Dance, Ted Mann Concert Hall, Ferguson Hall, the parking ramp that I would have used if I had known it was there—when did all that happen?
You really should start paying attention to the alumni magazine, my inner voice told me.
A sign on an easel outside the entrance to the gallery read WELCOME MFA SHOW. I presumed MFA meant master of fine art and this was an exhibit of the students’ work. Probably Benny had a sibling or a friend in the show.
I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the gallery—a handful of elegantly dressed patrons examining the exhibits while waiters passed among them with trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres, I suppose. What I found was a pulsating throng of supporters, half kids around twenty-five and younger and the other half adults about fifty and older. Most were attired as if it were ninety-five degrees outside; I felt overdressed in black jeans and a black silk sports jacket. The crowd moved in a counterclockwise swirl, not unlike a hurricane, from one large room to another. I went with the flow.
There wasn’t much that interested me. One artist—and I use the term loosely—had built a model of a very narrow building that had a facade like the State Capitol. There was a silhouette of a man painted on the wall at the end of a long corridor inside the building and another painted on the wall at the other end. A much shorter corridor intersected the building in the middle. I’m sure it all meant something, I just didn’t know what.