Page 13 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

D etective Kenneth LaRose moved his Madison County Sheriff’s Department Ford police cruiser up and over the single pair of railroad tracks that intersected Morrison Road, past the greenish oil tanks, and along the lake road. A dim sun rose halfway up a gray sky to his right.

A half-hour earlier Sheriff Fraundorf himself had called him at home.

A body had been found in Tank Town. LaRose’s homicide expertise was needed “posthaste.” He had arranged a day off for the school holiday—Lincoln’s birthday—to take Ann and the kids to the Washington Theater in Granite City to see The Music Man .

“You all go ahead without me if I’m not back in time,” he told her as he buttoned on his blue tunic.

She understood his having to work. Not every day a “prominent businessman” (Sheriff Fraundorf’s description, not LaRose’s) bobs up through the Long Lake ice.

He parked his black-and-white next to a row of some twenty tin mailboxes at the edge of a vacant lot facing the lake—Township property, he recalled. A similar car sat ahead by the roadside ditch, along with a red and white ambulance.

LaRose trudged across the lot dotted with waist-high brown weeds toward the lake, boots crunching through melting ice.

Good to get out and move around. He was disciplined about staying in shape and could still fit into his Marine dress uniform a decade after demobilization.

And still wore his blond hair in a military cut.

But he was far happier and safer tromping through local ice fields than those of South Korea.

He paused at the top of the steep bank and looked down to the lakeshore.

There, a brown canvas tarp covered a body.

Two patrolmen—Bean, stocky, graying, and headed for retirement; and Shands, a dark-complexioned rookie—stood smoking cigarettes with the ambulance driver (he’d forgotten his name) at the water’s edge, where a rowboat sat surrounded by sheets of cracked ice.

The pungent, muddy scent of the lake rose to him.

It had turned bitter cold after New Year’s and remained so until Groundhog Day. In the past week temperatures had climbed toward fifty, though it likely wouldn’t get near that today.

LaRose made his way down the lake bank sideways, boots sliding in the loose dirt. He shook hands with the three men.

“Where’s the doc?”

“On his way.”

LaRose gestured toward the covered corpse. “Let’s take a look.” Shands bent to lift the tarp aside. LaRose nodded.

“Yep, right you are, Bean. Richard Dupuis.”

Shands asked who he was.

“A thug that used to run with the Sheltons and Buster Wortman. Not a great résumé enhancer, that,” said LaRose. “Former East St. Louis bootlegger and pimp. Still owns The Blue Note up the road. Or did.”

“Think it was a gang hit?”

“Seems possible given his past.”

“Who’d want him dead?”

“Present company excluded? Slick Dick was in the booze and broads business for decades. Bound to have made an enemy or two.” Or a friend or two. Which made LaRose reflect on Sheriff Fraundorf‘s seeming eagerness about expediting the investigation.

He squatted next to the corpse. Black wool topcoat and sport coat, charcoal slacks, white shirt and red silk tie, cordovan wingtips—all now sodden, muddied, and ruined.

Gold watch and diamond pinky ring in place.

A couple broken fingernails and abrasions on his fingers and palms. Sand and lakeshore debris in his hair and mustache.

“No wallet?”

Bean shook his head. “Could be snatched or on the lake bottom.”

Shands asked, “How long you figure he was in there, detective?”

“Maybe days, maybe weeks. Had only one other frozen corpse pulled from the lake and that was years ago. Doc Birkemeyer will know better… No signs of trauma other than the hands?”

“Check out his neck,” said Bean.

LaRose pulled a ballpoint from his tunic, leaned closer, and used the pen to peel back the corpse’s shirt collar. A thin red line cut deep into the throat.

The detective pursed his lips. His mind drifted back to 1950 and Parris Island Marine boot camp before he got shuffled off to Seoul.

It had been a blistering hot and humid South Carolina afternoon when he learned how to fashion an effective garrote out of a length of wire and two sticks, and got to practice applying it to fellow grunts.

He rose and stared down at Dupuis. “Who found him?”

“Couple neighborhood kids off school today,” said Bean. “You wanna talk to them? They live next door.” He tilted his head over his right shoulder, toward a graying shingle home set back from the lake bank. A roadhouse in the old days, LaRose recalled.

He let out a breath whose cloud hung in the still winter air. “Yeah, after the doc comes and goes.”

He would pursue this case with exacting due diligence, as homicide was rare in Madison County.

And as Fraundorf had already suggested. Canvassing the neighborhood.

Backtracking on Dupuis’s movements from when he was last seen.

Interviewing The Blue Note employees and customers and the deceased’s known associates.

Compiling a file with all the physical evidence.

Dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s to see that justice would be done. But he sensed it already had.