Page 38 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

D etective LaRose studied the Dupuis murder file opened before him on his desk.

Patrolman Danny Shands sat across from him, silhouetted by morning sun pouring through the tall window on the east wall.

LaRose had raised the window a few inches even though the temperature outside still hung below fifty.

It had been a hard winter now leaching into spring.

With Bean retired and relocated to the Florida Keys for the year-round fishing, LaRose was grooming Shands as his sounding board.

Though eager and diligent (reminding LaRose of himself a decade earlier), it would take him a few more years to develop a grounding cynicism and skepticism to rival Bean’s.

“How much do you weigh, Danny?”

“One-sixty, detective.”

“Yeah, dripping wet and fully loaded. Autopsy report says the deceased was six-foot-three and weighed two-thirty-five. For argument’s sake let’s say he went under his own power to the lakeshore where you strangled him. You’d have to know what you were doing to overpower a guy that big.”

“Or have the drop on him. Or dope him.”

“Autopsy showed a fair amount of alcohol, nothing else. Then how would you get his fat corpus out into the middle of the lake?”

Shands shrugged. “Slide it out over the ice.”

“And if the lake hadn’t yet froze?”

Another shrug. “Drag him up on a dock and push him off? Or use a rowboat.”

“How would you get a guy that big into a rowboat and then into the lake without capsizing?”

“Reckon you and me could do it.”

“A two-man job? Possibly. If so, maybe killed elsewhere and transported.”

“If not, how do you lure somebody there to be bushwhacked. What was Dupuis expecting?”

“Good question, Danny. What’s the inducement?”

“The usual: love or money?”

“I’d bet on the latter. Or maybe he was kidnapped.”

“Yeah, pulled a gun on him somewhere else and drove him there.”

“Then what happened to Dupuis’s car? It never showed up anywhere.”

“In the river?”

“Then why wasn’t Dupuis in it too?”

LaRose had been mulling the case off and on for a year now, asking himself the same questions time and again. He’d developed some possible scenarios. But without evidence or witnesses, no answers.

A knock came at the frosted-glass door, where LaRose saw Doris’s silhouette. The door opened a foot and she stuck her head through.

“A.J. Nowak here to see you.”

“Send him in.” He looked to Shands. “Thanks, Danny.”

As Nowak stepped through the doorway Shands passed behind him looking him up and down.

A.J. wasn’t that much taller than the patrolman.

However, he looked like a different species of primate: broad-shouldered, muscular, lithe, and gaunt.

Dark tan, short dark hair brushed forward, penetrating eyes almost black.

He wore new Levi’s and a white t-shirt under a brown suede jacket.

They shook hands and LaRose gestured toward the wooden armchair that Shands had vacated.

“Thanks for driving up. Hope you had a good Easter.”

“Holidays stateside are always good.”

“I spent Christmas ’52 in Seoul with the 7th Marine Regiment. A white Christmas though not very merry.”

“I suspect not. Good you made it back.”

“I was an M.P. Only fighting I did was with drunken G.I.s.” LaRose paused and cleared his throat. “When I interviewed your uncle, he said you were in the Caribbean.”

“That was last year. Just returned from Vietnam.”

“I read that’s heating up.”

“Afraid so.”

“Understand you’re Special Ops.”

Nowak nodded. He sat with his feet flat on the floor, elbows on the armrests, hands folded at his waist. LaRose thought of a compressed spring, straining for release.

As if to confirm the metaphor’s aptness A.J.

said: “Can we get down to business? My uncle told me about his interview with you last year and your concern about ‘coincidences’ between my mother’s death and Richard Dupuis’s.

One obvious one: Both found in Long Lake. Anything else?”

The detective shuffled some papers on his desk.

“Let’s say some tangents, like your mother’s relationship with the deceased.

I’m trying to solve this murder without much physical evidence to go on and no witnesses.

Hoping it was a gangland hit related to the nefarious activities and people Dupuis had been involved with over the years.

I’d like to discover something to focus my attention in that direction.

Nonetheless I have to do my job, my due diligence. ”

“Understood.”

“Last thing I want is for you or yours to somehow be involved in this directly or indirectly.”

With that LaRose lifted a typed sheet from his desktop and frowned at it. “The bartender at The Blue Note said that you had an extended conversation there with Dupuis just days before he was last seen alive.”

“I know nothing about when he was last seen alive. And I’d call it a brief chat.”

“Can you tell me what you talked about?”

“Old times. He was a friend of my mother and came by the house on occasion. I did not seek him out. I was home on leave and stopped in for a drink for the first time since I was finally legal age. Didn’t know he was still running the place.

The bartender carded me then tipped off Dupuis as to who I was, as he hadn’t seen me since I was ten or eleven.

He came over to say hello and pay belated condolences. ”

“No apology?”

“For what?”

“For contributing to your mother’s decline and ultimate suicide.”

A.J. nodded once. “Okay. Now after ten years you’re calling it a suicide, not an accidental death.”

“Maybe someone did you a favor ten years ago. In a couple ways.”

A.J. sat staring at LaRose. No comment. But he did tilt his head a millimeter to the left as if to acknowledge that favor. The detective went on.

“Back to Dupuis. You realize he was likely the father of the child your mother was carrying when she died.”

The marine sergeant leaned back in his chair frowning.

“Child?”

LaRose retrieved the autopsy report from the Nowak file and slid it across the desk. A.J. now bent forward and read, shaking his head.

“You didn’t know?” the detective asked.

“No one ever told me.”

“Really? Your aunt and uncle never said anything?”

“Not exactly something you’d comfort an orphaned twelve-year-old with, is it?”

LaRose reached for the second file folder on his desk, the Dupuis file, drew it to him, and again cleared his throat.

“Then a few days later, New Year’s Eve to be exact—the last time Dupuis was in fact seen alive—another new customer came into The Blue Note to talk to him. This man…”

From a manila envelope he withdrew a composite sketch of a dark-bearded man that he slid across to A.J., who leaned forward to study it, his expression blank.

“Looks like an interesting guy.”

“Do you know him?”

Nowak shook his head.

“What about a Dan Boggs? Name mean anything?”

Again the head shake. LaRose put the sketch back in the envelope.

“Did you have any business dealings with Dupuis?”

A.J. smiled briefly. “I don’t do business. I’m a grunt. I do soldiering.”

“Dupuis left the bartender Karl Maulhardt to close up New Year’s Eve.

He was not seen again until we pulled him from the lake six weeks later.

He didn’t drown. He was garroted. The staff figured he’d gone to Miami to play the ponies like he did every winter, but he never made it. And his car was never found.”

“Odd.”

LaRose leaned his forearms on the desk and locked his eyes on Nowak’s.

“Do you know what I think is odd, A.J.? That you wouldn’t want to kill Richard Dupuis with your own hands.

Here’s how I see it: A young widowed mother learns she’s pregnant by a man under whose control she has fallen.

A man who took advantage of a damaged and vulnerable woman.

Wanting to escape the humiliation her pregnancy would engender and to prevent her shame from attaching to and burdening her only child, this desperate woman decides to take her own life.

In despair and drunk she takes a walk on thin ice to bring it all to a halt.

Then her only child discovers her body in the frozen lake—an event that surely traumatized him.

“Then later that orphaned son, a dutiful son and trained killer with knowledge and skills that would enable him to clandestinely dispatch most anyone, does not feel obligated to exact vengeance on his dead mother’s behalf.

He doesn’t see or feel the divine justice in that? Now that seems odd to me.”

Nowak sat immobile, showing no emotion yet clearly thinking, eyes moving left and right. At last, he spoke.

“You’re correct, detective. Had I known the full circumstances it would have been my duty. Given that scenario, I failed. Failed us all—my mother, my father, and myself. I would certainly feel badly about it if that were the case, real bad.”

LaRose leaned back in his chair. He pursed his lips and nodded. Maybe now this guy was finally telling the truth.