Page 14 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

St. Paul, Minnesota

Steve Roper was smart but lazy. He had been a good student at Fertile-Beltrami High but he had skated through.

Had he applied himself, he could have been valedictorian, but dedicating himself to schoolwork wasn’t Steve’s thing.

He was number seven in his class, and that was fine with him.

He wasn’t interested in all the unrealistic expectations and stress that came with being numero uno .

The guy who came in first, Bill Felton, won a National Merit Scholarship to MIT and headed there determined to become one of the country’s top scientists.

Steve understood that kind of future would require multiple degrees and years of grueling study followed by more years of laboring forty hours a week to make it to the top of the next heap. Steve Roper had no such ambitions.

It had been Coach Nielson who, during Steve’s junior year, had sat him down and told Steve he had what it took to be the first member of his family to go on to college.

Surprisingly enough, Coach Nielson’s confidence in Steve helped him have confidence in himself.

And so, when it came time to head off to the University of Minnesota, he did so with the plan in mind of becoming a high school teacher.

He enrolled with a stated major in English—because English had always been his best subject—and a minor in chemistry—because of Coach Nielson.

He knew in advance that being a teacher wasn’t a path to fame or fortune, but he wasn’t interested in either one. What he was looking forward to was having three months off every summer to do whatever the hell he wanted. In that regard, golfing and fishing were very low on his list of priorities.

Once in college, in the fall of 1963, he still skated along, getting good grades without really trying.

In order to simplify things, for the first time in his life Steve told the voices that he needed them to shut up and go away.

Once they were gone, he missed them, but not having to listen to their constant yammering made it easier for him to concentrate.

He enjoyed being on campus. He made friends easily in a way that hadn’t been possible back home.

But part of the reason Steve shut the voices down was out of concern for his own safety.

If he targeted one of the coeds on campus, someone who had encountered him at school might recognize him.

After all, according to Sherlock, that was the real secret of getting away with it—don’t go hunting in your own backyard.

While in St. Paul, Steve dated some—enough to be regarded as available without ever allowing any of those fledgling relationships to become serious.

During his junior year, the university’s campus was plagued by a series of brutal rapes, and it was several months before the rapist was caught.

During that time, upperclassmen were recruited to accompany terrified coeds back and forth between dorms and both their daytime classes and evening activities.

More than once while escorting one sweet young thing or another, Steve was told how much his gallantry was appreciated.

He accepted the compliments and thanks with a show of humility, all the while reveling in the irony that these ignorant women were being protected by an actual killer.

As for the campus rapist? Steve held the guy in complete contempt.

He may have had balls enough to attack young women, but he wasn’t man enough to actually murder them.

Stephen Roper could have done that in a heartbeat.

Halfway through his senior year, Gramps got sick.

That came as a shock. Steve had always thought of Orson Hawkins as indestructible, but stage four stomach cancer was more than he could handle.

The last semester of Steve’s senior year, in 1967, he made the five-hour trip from the Twin Cities back home to Fertile almost every weekend.

At first he visited Gramps at the home in town that he still shared with Steve’s mother.

Later Steve visited Gramps in the hospital and finally in hospice.

Two weeks before graduation, and with the blessing of his professors, he took a pass on finals and went home to attend Gramps’s funeral.

This time, sitting in the small Lutheran church, he didn’t have to worry about pretending to be sad. In actual fact he was devastated. Once again people stepped forward to say what a wonderful guy Gramps had been, and this time Steve believed it.

At the reception afterward, two important things happened.

For one he had run into Coach Nielson. The two of them had stayed in touch during the intervening years, but that day, Malcolm Nielson mentioned that he was retiring at the end of the current school year and that he and his wife were moving to Florida.

Then he asked an intriguing question: Would Steve be interested in coming back home to Fertile and stepping into his shoes?

If he was, Coach Nielson promised that he would be more than happy to put in a good word for Steve with the local board of education.

Naturally, Steve thanked him profusely, but in that moment teaching at Fertile-Beltrami High School wasn’t anywhere near the top of his list as far as what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be.

But that’s when the other important thing happened—his mother introduced him to her new boyfriend Frederick Chalmers, or as Steve quickly came to call him, Freddy the Freeloader, red hair and all.

Gramps had loved Red Skelton and watched him perform every chance he got.

Since there had been only a single television set in the house, whenever Gramps watched Red Skelton, everyone else did, too.

“You shouldn’t call Frederick that,” Steve’s mother admonished Steve. “He used to teach art, but he had to stop on account of his high blood pressure. The stress was too much for him. That’s why he decided to try his hand at painting for a living.”

The whole while Steve was growing up, he had never known his mother to have a serious boyfriend, so this was something new. As soon as Steve met the guy and the two of them shook hands, a chill had passed through Steve’s body. In that moment, Sherlock suddenly emerged from hibernation.

Who the hell is this guy? he demanded.

Steve wanted to know the same thing. He was reasonably good at doing small talk, and that paid off in the case of Frederick Chalmers.

Steve made it his business to find out everything there was to know about Freddy, mostly as related by Freddy himself.

According to him, Frederick Chalmers came from Bismark, North Dakota.

After being forced to abandon teaching school due to his health issues, he was now an up-and-coming artist. That was how he and Cindy Roper had met in the first place, when she and some girlfriends had attended an art fair in Fargo where she had purchased one of his paintings and paid big bucks to have it professionally framed.

Steve’s mother claimed she loved the painting because of what she called “all its bright pops of color.” Steve looked at all those wild colors and saw nothing but a bunch of meaningless doodles, the same kind of crap he himself used to draw in the margins of all his textbooks as a kid back in grade school.

He also suspected that Freddy’s art might be the kind of thing someone would dash off while under the influence of LSD.

Like any other self-respecting chemistry student of the time, Steve Roper knew all about lysergic acid diethylamide.

He never used the stuff himself, but he could certainly have whipped up a batch of LSD had he been called upon to do so.

He also recognized the symptoms of drug usage, even if his mother didn’t.

Steve was pretty sure Freddy was tripped out most of the time, and he quickly made up his mind that he was going to send Freddy packing come hell or high water.

As a result, after Gramps’s funeral and before heading back to St. Paul to walk through graduation and pack up his apartment, Steve stopped by the school superintendent’s office in Fertile and filled out an application.

He also stopped by the high school itself to let Mr. Donner—the same guy who’d been the school’s principal throughout Steve’s high school career—know that he was interested in the job.

Within a matter of days, he knew the position was his for the taking.

About the same time, Steve was astonished to learn that, although the bulk of Gramps’s estate had been left to his daughter, a sizable bequest in the amount of $50,000 had been left to him.

The day before he was due to head back to St. Paul, he dropped by the house and found Freddy sacked out on the living room couch.

Had Grandma Lucille spotted someone sleeping on a sofa with his shoes on, there would’ve been hell to pay, but Steve didn’t say a word.

Instead, seeing Freddy’s wallet lying on the nearby coffee table, he gingerly picked it up and shuffled through it long enough to locate the driver’s license.

Then, having memorized the address, he replaced the wallet where he’d found it.

After returning to St. Paul, Steve picked up his diploma, cleaned out his apartment well enough to get his deposit back, and then headed home the long way around—via Bismark, North Dakota.

Once there he and Sherlock tracked down the address from Frederick Chalmers’s wallet, which led to a seedy boardinghouse in a not-so-nice part of town.

That afternoon, he visited a local pawnshop and bought a pearl-handled derringer pistol, small enough to carry in his pocket. The gun was evidently an antique, made in 1927, so the price was outrageous, but the size was right. And at that point in Steve’s life money was no problem.

“You know you only get one shot from this,” the clerk cautioned.

“If I ever need to use it,” Steve replied, “one shot will be plenty.”

“Do you have any ammunition?” the clerk asked as he rang up the sale.

“No,” Steve answered, “but I should be able to buy some.”

“No need,” the helpful clerk said cheerfully. “Have I got a deal for you. After the guy pawned it, I found out it was still loaded. I took the bullet out and put it right here in my cash register for safekeeping. Just for the hell of it, today I’ll throw in the bullet for free.”

That evening Steve went back to Frederick Chalmers’s neighborhood and made a complete canvass of all the local dives, flashing a roll of bills as he did so, and letting folks know that his buddy Fred had mentioned this might be a place to score some coke.

Just before closing time, as he sat in the last of the neighborhood bars sipping on a ginger ale, someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“I hear tell you might be looking to make a deal,” a disheveled stranger said. He looked like the kind of bum you’d find living on a sidewalk somewhere.

“That depends on what you have to offer,” Steve replied. “I’m looking for the C-word. Do you happen to have some?”

“How much do you want?”

“How about two hundred bucks’ worth?”

“Meet me out back in ten,” the guy replied before shambling away.

The dealer was good to his word. Minutes later Steve walked away with the goods he needed without having to show his weapon, much less use it.

Back home in Fertile for the summer, Steve was unsurprised to learn that his mother and Freddy were now living together. They had laid claim to Gramps’s old room, and the guest room was in the process of being transformed into Freddy’s studio.

Steve stayed at the house with the two lovebirds for the next few weeks while he went house hunting himself.

That’s when he learned Coach Nielson was putting his place on the market.

Not only that, it was listed for sale fully furnished.

That was too good of a deal to pass up, and Steve jumped on it.

With the help of Gramps’s generous bequest, he was able to purchase the property in an all-cash deal with some money left over.

Once the sale closed, it was time for Steve to move out of his mother’s place completely. During that process, and at a time when both Freddy and Steve’s mom were away from the house, Steve donned a pair of gloves and made a thorough search of the master bedroom.

Freddy’s chosen hiding place for his stash wasn’t exactly inspired.

A baggie half full of a white substance Steve assumed to be LSD was concealed on Freddy’s side of Gramps’s old bed, hidden between the mattress and the box spring.

Steve emptied the substance he’d just found into his own baggie, the one loaded with cocaine.

After shaking the resulting bag thoroughly to mix the contents, he refilled Freddy’s bag with a matching amount of the new concoction and slipped it back into its original hiding place.

After that Steve was able to complete his move with no one being the wiser.

But waiting around to see what would happen wasn’t easy. At one point, he dropped by the Country Inn ostensibly to have lunch with his mother, but in reality he wanted to know what, if anything, was going on. Not surprisingly, his mother appeared to be totally distracted.

“You look upset,” he said to her. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s Frederick,” she answered. “His blood pressure has shot through the roof.”

“Has he seen a doctor?”

She nodded. “They have him on medication, but he’s not getting better.”

Two weeks later Frederick suffered a massive stroke.

He was transported by ambulance to the local hospital but died in the ER before being admitted.

Since he was already under a doctor’s care, his death was ruled to be natural causes and no autopsy was performed.

When no other relatives could be located, a grief-stricken Cynthia Roper had Frederick Chalmers buried in the Hawkins’s family plot in Fertile Memorial Cemetery.

During the postfuneral reception, Steve slipped into the bedroom and removed the baggie.

He flushed the contents down the toilet.

As for the baggie itself and that unused derringer?

Knowing he needed something to remember Freddy the Freeloader by, Steve put the derringer in the baggie and added it to his cigar box.

Sherlock thought the whole thing was hilarious, and he laughed and laughed.

That was the first time ever that Steve heard any of his voices laughing, but it wouldn’t be the last.