The Great Leader

On the way home he described to Mona a freakishly difficult case that he had finally solved the year before. In a small school system in the eastern U.P. twelve thousand dollars had been embezzled. The only possible guilty parties had been the school superintendent and his secretary, a minister’s wife in her midfifties, a graceful and intelligent woman, albeit rather dumpy. After a number of questionings about computer and accounting accesses he determined both of them to be clean. On what he decided was his final visit he talked to the school janitor who seemed somewhat retarded and had a speech impediment from a cleft palate. They smoked a cigarette in the parking lot and chatted. No one notices janitors in their green suits. To Sunderson the janitor had tried to present himself as stupider than he was and had let the word “ubiquitous” slip through while talking about students and the meth epidemic. It occurred to Sunderson that the janitor had ready access to the office computer after everyone left for the day. Back in the school he checked old yearbooks and noted that the janitor and the school secretary, the minister’s wife, were classmates. He took a big chance and suddenly asked her over coffee, “Why are you fucking Bob the janitor?” Bingo. She fell apart, confessing that she and Bob were going to run away with the money held in a bank account in the Soo. They were headed to Milwaukee where Bob had a job lined up at the famous Usinger’s sausage factory. Why did every other man in the U.P. seem to be named Bob?

Mona laughed hysterically. “The sweetest most religious girl in my class is a blow-job artist. She told me it was like conducting an orchestra.”

Sunderson was puzzled by this but let it pass. When they reached Marquette Mona made them mortadella and provolone sandwiches and then he headed out on his walk. The moonrise was stupendous forming a glissade of light on quiet Lake Superior and making the freshly fallen soft snow on the beach a nearly daytime white. He walked fast and raised a sweat, pausing only to talk to Professor Eathorne whom he had met in various taverns. Eathorne was throwing a ball for his yellow Lab who was able to find the ball hidden in the soft snow. Their language is in their nose, Sunderson thought. Where is mine? Maybe he should get a yellow Lab, he thought, to counter loneliness. Dogs need a lot of petting, which might have been a better way to conduct his marriage. Eathorne taught human geography, which among other things dealt with why people were where they were, a germane question in human history. Running into Eathorne gave Sunderson a dose of oxygen. There were all these areas of human inquiry that were intriguing. He thought he might begin auditing some courses at the university and stretch his mind beyond the confines of history.

Christmas dinner made him jealous of Diane’s dying husband. How can you be jealous of a dying man? It takes work. They lived high on the edge of a steep slope that overlooked the harbor. He was a gentle and obviously melancholy soul and when he and Sunderson went into his den it took a while to permit their chat to go fluidly. His son had sadly enough dropped out of medical school to enter the movie business in L.A. while his daughter happily enough was a marine biologist at Scripps south of San Francisco. Neither had married so there were no grandchildren. Sunderson sipped rather than gulped his whiskey, always a temptation, and stared at a half dozen bird and animal prints that were splendid including a javelina. The man said that they were first folio Audubons. Sunderson said he had seen a number of javelinas down on the border.

“Diane said that you were down their chasing an evil cult leader who preys on young girls,” he said with a hard edge in his voice.

“I haven’t been at it long, a couple of months, and I doubt I’ll be successful. The problem is getting one of his followers, a parent, to testify against him.”

“When my daughter was growing up a banker down the street had a discreet but unhealthy interest in her. I warned him and he broke into tears. He thought he was in love with a twelve-year-old. Then a friend of mine, an old classmate, who practiced in Omaha was caught and prosecuted for the same Lolita syndrome. It often comes from a man who lacked social contact with girls his own age between, say, age eleven and fourteen. The pathology is in the inability to control the urges.”

“The problem is of course the permanent scar tissue left behind.” Sunderson was unable to admit that he hadn’t read Lolita though Marion had advised him to do so. He grew nervous watching Diane’s husband wince a number of times.