Donald Harstad: The Big Thaw

"No!"

I looked at Goober. "What?"

"No, no, don't take me in there. We can't go in to Maitland."

"We can't?" I looked at him over the top of my reading glasses. "And just why would that be?"

Suddenly, he looked as if he were about to cry. "They, they, they need me there…"

"'They,' Fred? Who are 'they'?"

I'd known Fred for about five years, since the time I'd busted him for DWI when he was sixteen. We'd always gotten along fairly well, really, and had met officially three or four times since his DWI. Minor stuff, a small theft, a couple of vandalism charges. Fred wasn't exactly what you'd call a career criminal. Just a bored kid in a very small Iowa town, who honked his horn at deer.

He opened his mouth, and made a tiny choking sound. He didn't look directly at me.

"You know, Mr. Houseman, those break-ins you beh, beh, been having around the county, in the farmhouses?"

"Yeah," I said, being noncommittal. I knew them, all right. Eleven burglaries at rural residences in the last sixteen days. That was just as far as we knew. One of the problems was that the burglaries were at a select number of farmhouses that were empty for the winter, the owners being elsewhere. Elsewhere as in warmer. Most of the burglaries were reported by whoever was looking after the place, when they showed up to check the furnace and the water pipes. Usually once a week or so. The main problem was, we had no idea if, or how many, more would be discovered. Neither did we have much of an idea of when they'd been done, except after the date the owners had left. We only knew the date when they'd been found.

"Well, uh, do you have a, a, a list, like, of the places that have been robbed?"

"Yeah." We had two lists, actually. The first was a simple listing of the known burglaries, in chronological order. The other was a list of residence check requests, filed with the department by the owners before they left, and giving information like the dates they'd be gone, who was going to check on their property for them, and asking us to have a car drive by every night. We were beginning to regard the second list as an indicator of the next burglaries. It was also very painful for Lamar, our sheriff. Many of the people who were on the list were his supporters. He'd gotten their support, at least in part, by having the residence check program in the first place. Simply being able to be the first to tell them they'd been burglarized, however, wasn't his idea of a positive result coming from the RC program. As a direct consequence of Lamar's pain, it was becoming a particularly painful experience for the officers on the night shift, who were supposed to do the actual checking.

"Uh, well, do you have anything about that Bohr, Bohr, Borglan place, out on W4G, down by the Church crossroads?" asked Fred.

"Cletus Borglan's, you mean?" A perfect target. Borglan and his family wintered in Florida, usually leaving right after Christmas. And about a half mile from where Mike had come upon Fred about an hour ago. I began to feel a glimmer of hope.

"Yeah, that's it." Goober began to rock back and forth, just a little twitchy movement, but noticeable.

"No." Not unless somebody had forgotten to tell me, I thought.

"Oh, boy. Oh, boy." He sat holding on to the front edge of the seat with both hands, looking down. "I wish you had, Mr. Houseman. Oh, boy." He sounded like he was going to cry. He began to rock a bit harder.

I figured that he was about to snitch somebody off, and that he was hoping that we had a report of the burglary already, so that he wouldn't be telling me something that only he and the burglar would know. A hazardous practice, without a doubt.

"If you're worried about us 'finding it,' Fred, we can always come up with something that'll keep you out of that part." I tried to be helpful.

"No, it's not that. Thanks, though."

"Sure." I waited a second. "Come on, Goober. Spit it out."

"It's just that, well, meh, meh, me and my cousins from Oelwein… we been the ones doing those break-ins, you know?"

"Just a second, Fred. Are you saying that you've been directly involved with some of them?" A confession? Could I be that lucky?

"Mostly all, I suspect," he answered, in a soft voice. The rocking increased, perceptibly.

Thank you, God. Thank you, thank you. Up to now, we hadn't had a single clue as to who had been doing the burglaries. I took a breath, to slow myself down, and to try to appear matter-of-fact. "I'm going to have to advise you of your rights, Fred."

"Sure, but that ain't what it's about. Not why I was out here… not directly, Mr. Houseman."

I told him to hang on a second, and very quickly recited his Miranda rights to him. To be safe. "There, Fred. Now, do you understand those rights?"

"Yeah. But, Mr. Houseman, you gotta understand. Dirk and Royce, my cousins, they had me driving the car, you know?"

"While they did the burglaries, you mean?"

"I just drive 'em out to the place, you know, and they get out and sneak in, and then I go away for a while, and I come back and pick 'em up."

"You pick 'em up? They go in on foot?"

"Yeah."

He looked up beseechingly. "Am I gonna get charged with manslaughter, or something, if they're dead?"

I must have given him my dumb look.

"If they're dead, are you gonna send me away? I just gotta know."

Fred leaned forward, terribly earnest. "You gotta understand, Mr. Houseman. That's what I been trying to tell you. I dropped ' em off Sunday night. Two nights ago. On the other side of the hill back of the place. I saw 'em go over the hill, to go into the place." He stared at me with wide eyes. "They never came back out."

Fred kept talking. "I came back two hours later, like I was supposed to, and they wasn't there. I came back again after an hour, and they wasn't there. I honked the horn, even if I wasn't supposed to do that. I waited right there. I wasn't supposed to do that, neither. I waited fifteen minutes or so. Nobody. I drove all the way to Vickerton, and came back. Nothin'. Nobody there. Then it got light, and I had to go." He was speaking in a rush. "This morning, I got scared they'd really be wantin' to get back at me for missin' 'em like that, and them havin' to walk and all, and I called Aunt Nora, and she said they wasn't home. I called again at suppertime. They still ain't home!" He looked at me, worried he wouldn't find them, and sort of afraid that he would. "I went back tonight, and they wasn't there then, either. That's why I was honkin' the horn. It wasn't no deer. And I was afraid to go in, 'cause I figured you'd be there by then, and waitin' for me." He drew a deep breath. "And they ain't come home." He looked up at me, his face all screwed up. "They still ain't come home, and I think maybe they froze to death!"

I hate to admit it, but my thinking was running quickly along these lines: I had a confession, albeit a tentative one regarding details, to a string of very irritating burglaries. I was virtually certain that the two cousins who had been dropped off were lying low somewhere else, having, for reasons of their own, ditched Fred. I was in a position of having good reason to check the Borglan place, based on Fred's statements. I certainly didn't need a warrant. But, to make the case as good as possible, I wanted to have Fred with me when I went to Borglan's, so he could show me where he'd let them off, and where he would pick them up. So far so good. But to take Fred with me, and to talk with him any more, I really should have him talk with his attorney first. Except… The lateness of the hour helped. But the biggest boon of all was Fred's genuine concern for the safety and welfare of his two dumb cousins. Exigent circumstances, as they say.