Jess Lourey - October Fest

I fell heavily into the chair I’d pulled next to the bed. “How long have you known each other?”

“Almost a week, and shut up,” Mrs. Berns said. “I’m tired. I need you to do something, and I don’t have any extra juice to explain myself. You my friend?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then listen. My beloved Bernard Mink and I are going to get married.” He reached for her hand but she swatted him away. “But we can’t get married if he’s in jail. So you have to find out who murdered that bobber at the motel, and you have to keep quiet about who was driving the pickup.”

“No way,” I said. “First of all, since when do you want to get married? You’re the one who said we’d stay single forever as a passive resistance, that if enough good women refused to get married, men would have to improve. You said the next generation could reap the rewards of our sacrifices.”

“Changed my mind.”

“For this?” I indicated the pork-bellied Mr. Mink, who had gone back to nervously running his hands through his hair and had added timid mustache twirling to the repertoire.

“Love is a capricious thing. Now shut the hell up. Are you in?” Her voice was feisty but her eyes were fading.

“Wait, how did you know the blogger was murdered?”

Mrs. Berns pointed at Bernard. “Heard it through the grapevine.”

“And how does me finding the killer help Bernard?”

“It helps all three of us, pudding head, because we were all in Dead Body City, Minnesota, at the wrong time. It especially helps Bernard, however, as he has some past issues that might make the law treat him unkindly if they learned he was sleeping next to the room where his rival was hung.”

“Rival?” I asked Bernard.

“Just a friendly opposition among newsmen,” he said. “Nothing worth mentioning.”

“Would Bob the blogger have called it friendly?”

He shrugged and then looked away to twirl his mustache like he was hoping to jumpstart an escape helicopter.

“Crap,” I said, looking back at Mrs. Berns. “This is really what you want?”

She nodded, her eyes already closed.

“Fine.” How do you refuse a woman you love in her hospital bed? And the fact of the matter was I’d been lying to myself about not caring who murdered Webber. Like an accidental vampire, I’d had my first taste of blood-or in my case, the thrill of solving a mystery-last May, and I was hooked, despite all my internal protestations to the opposite. Mrs. Berns was just giving me an excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway. “But only if you tell me why Conrad and Elizabeth were in Battle Lake.”

“Tomorrow,” she croaked, and then she drifted back into her drug haze.

Dwindling state funding had forced me to cut the Monday through Thursday library hours from 9 to 8 to 12 to 6. The decision had made me livid. The library wasn’t a storehouse for books. It was the centerpiece of the community. Probably I should have let that anger drive my interest in government decisions. Instead, it was the discovery of a dead body and my pledge to Mrs. Berns that had me researching politics more deeply than I’d ever thought possible.

Taking advantage of the late opening of the library, I sat at one of the public computers, the guest list that I had pinched from the cleaning cart at my side. I’d dug it out of the garbage during a quick home pit stop on my way back from the hospital. I hadn’t slept or eaten in going on thirty hours. I felt as fuzzy as a dishrag, but I had a plan. I was going to research all the guests who were at the motel the night of the alleged murder. Most people can be found online, even if we’re not public figures, though I was willing to guess a fair number of the Saturday night guests had been in town for the debate, either on one of the politician’s teams or a reporter. Then, I’d generate a list of possible suspects, putting Bernard Mink at the top. I wasn’t going to break my promise to Mrs. Berns to exonerate Bernard of potential charges, but that didn’t mean I was going to be an idiot, either. Even if he wasn’t a murderer, he didn’t feel like one of the good guys, and I wasn’t letting my best friend go into anything blind.

After I’d narrowed the list, I’d suck in my pride and good sense and call Kennie to find out if she knew any more than she’d told me yesterday, or if she’d found out anything since then. Finally, I would be trying to track down the suspects, all of whom should still be in town if Deputy Wohnt had delivered to them the same message he’d given me about staying put, and see if any of them had a free moment to confess to murder.

If my scheme was a movie, it’d be more Fools Rush In than A Star Is Born, but it was all I had. So I set to work.

The room list showed that every room but two had been booked Saturday night: room 4, the room Webber had vacated on Friday, and room 19, the site of the dead body, which had “Glenn Vanderbrick” listed as occupant. Mr. Vanderbrick’s departure date column had 10/18 with an asterisk next to it and the words “pm checkout” penciled in. That explained why room 19 was empty the next morning, but why hadn’t room 4 been filled after Webber checked out? Between the debate and Octoberfest, the town had been packed for the weekend. With only two motels in town, I couldn’t imagine there’d be a Saturday night vacancy to spare.

Humoring a hunch, I held the list up to the cold October sunshine and was rewarded-the date next to Bob Webber’s name had a tiny blot on the bottom of the “8” that didn’t let in light. I placed the list on the desktop and used the edge of my fingernail to scrape the white-out off the lower left edge of the “8” on 10/18, revealing that he had originally intended to check out on the 19th. Someone had blotted the sleek bottom of the nine and replaced it with a tiny circle in pen the same color. Had his date change been so abrupt that the hotel hadn’t had time to reprint a list, or had someone tampered with the cleaning list, and if so, to what end? I didn’t suppose I could call the motel to find out what their computer system said about the dates he’d booked, but I’d sure like to know.

Tabling what I couldn’t address right now, I typed an alphabetical list of the twenty names so I didn’t have to mess up the original list with scribbled notes. Ignoring the alphabetical order, I started with Glenn Vanderbrick, the most likely suspect by virtue of location, and quickly found that he was a blogger as well as an on-call political columnist for various Midwest newspapers. Scanning his blog page, I didn’t see the thoroughness or sleek writing style of Webber’s, but he was good enough. As an off bet, I did a site search on his page for the name “Bob Webber” and came across several articles they’d cowritten. I didn’t know what that meant, that Webber had been killed in the room vacated by a coauthor, so I chose the direct route and sent Vanderbrick an e-mail explaining that I was a reporter from Battle Lake and would like to speak with him if he’d be so kind as to send me his phone number. I also included mine.

Returning to alphabetical order, I investigated Karl Bachin, whose room location between Glokkmann and Swydecker suggested he was a member of one of their campaigns. However, his two fame Googles consisted of his bowling team’s second place trophy in a Southeastern Minnesota bowling tourney and his post to a listserv regarding his preference for Brewer’s Best home beer brewing kits over True Blue Gold. A better online profile for an Octoberfest expert I could not have written. The next three names drew equal dead ends.