Page 36 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

M adison County Sheriff’s Department Detective Kenneth LaRose sat with his feet up on his desk, hands clasped behind his head, squinting at the tin ceiling, thinking.

Patrolman Bean sat across from him sipping coffee from a stained mug.

On the wall behind LaRose hung a framed photograph of Governor Otto Kerner, Jr. that he’d received in the mail from Springfield two years earlier when Kerner took office.

Doris had retrieved it from the trash and hung it there.

LaRose had been doing a lot of thinking over the past week—voluntarily and involuntarily—ever since they pulled Richard Dupuis from Long Lake.

“Doesn’t make sense dumping the body there. Been bothering me all weekend,” he said. “Only a few feet deep. He was gonna be found. Why not slip him into the Mississippi where he could have floated down to Natchez or New Orleans and never been identified or even found? No corpse, no crime.”

“Amateurs. Or someone wanting to send a message. But why now? Might have expected some wise guy to whack Dupuis back when he was running with the Sheltons.”

“Prohibition and Depression days. Before my time, thank God.”

Though the burgeoning East Side gangland mayhem back then might have been more interesting from a professional point of view.

Nowadays LaRose had few homicides to deal with.

The ones he did work were hardly mysteries: a drunken domestic dispute, a bar-fight knifing, a farmstead mercy killing and suicide.

He didn’t wish for more homicides thereabouts that might challenge his detective skills. Still…

“If the killer wanted the body to be found why not just roll it into a ditch?” said LaRose. “Why take the trouble transporting it to the lake?”

“Maybe that’s where he was killed.”

“Who knows? Dupuis had been on ice or under it for weeks. No one had seen him since New Year’s.”

The iron radiator behind Bean clanked and hissed. LaRose frowned at it. “Goddamn Monday mornings. Friday it was like a hothouse in here. Today it’s a meat locker.”

“At least we didn’t have to chop Dupuis out of the ice like we did that woman who drowned. When was that?”

“Nineteen-fifty-three. I’d just gotten back from Korea. What was her name?”

“One of the Robinson girls. War widow. Worse part it was her boy who found her.”

LaRose pursed his lips. “I remember. Been on my mind… We still have that file?”

“If the mice haven’t eaten it.” Bean rose. “I’ll check downstairs.”

§

LaRose rifled through the moldy-smelling file.

Interview notes, most written in his own hand.

Photographs of the corpse. Lovely woman, seemingly, even after drowning in the lake, freezing, and thawing.

The autopsy report indicated no trauma that couldn’t have been caused by falling through thin ice.

A whopping amount of alcohol in her. And a sixteen-week-old fetus. Husband long dead.

LaRose had been doubtful about the coroner’s ruling of accidental death.

Hazel Robinson Nowak had lived on the lake since 1941.

An avid ice skater, according to her sister, so she likely knew where the underground springs and thin ice lay.

Yes, it was dark, and she was drunk. Still, she would have known the danger if not her exact whereabouts on the ice.

He took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and lifted one of the morgue shots, focusing on her hands, as he had ten years earlier.

If someone had stumbled drunk out onto the ice and fallen through, that person likely would have been clawing to get out from under the ice.

But Hazel Nowak’s fingernails looked like she’d just come from the manicurist.

He set down the morgue photo and lifted one taken on Long Lake before they chopped away the ice to free her.

LaRose again scrutinized her last breath, caught in the frozen lake: small, regular bubbles rising from her lips.

As if from someone peacefully falling asleep, not from someone gasping and fighting for her life.

In 1953 the recent Marine MP and eager rookie detective Kenneth LaRose had told Doctor Birkemeyer that the evidence pointed toward suicide, not accidental death.

The coroner in turn informed the detective that a suicide ruling would mean her twelve-year-old son would not collect on the life insurance.

Worse, he would forever live with the knowledge that his mother had purposely abandoned and orphaned him, throwing him out into the world alone without a care whether he would sink or swim.

LaRose had responded that, yeah, maybe it was an accident after all.

Next he studied the notes he made when interviewing family members and neighbors back then, which detailed the former schoolteacher’s decline after her husband’s death in the D-Day invasion.

From the stack of scribbled pages three words jumped out at him—words that had been lurking in his subconscious all weekend, trying to break through and float to the surface: “The Blue Note.”

This from his interview with the deceased’s sister, Helen Robinson Lomax.

She said that Hazel often drank till closing hour at The Blue Note, the nightclub owned and managed by Richard Dupuis.

LaRose scoured other interview notes and found a neighbor claiming Dupuis had frequently visited Hazel Nowak.

And now he had been found in the frozen lake as well.

Also, not an accidental death. What if Dupuis had been the father of Hazel Nowak’s 16-week-old fetus? Where might that lead?

LaRose again leaned back in the roller chair, lifted his feet onto his desk, and clasped his hands behind his head.

He would let it all sink in and set loose his imagination, hoping things would begin to link up and make sense.

It was like being a playwright or novelist: piecing together a plausible story, arranging plot dominoes to fall in logical order, orchestrating a beginning, a middle, and an ending—though he doubted this script would have a happy one.