The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

“Tracie, what are you doing here?” I said. “How the hell did you end up in Libbie, South Dakota?”

“You make it sound like a Russian gulag.”

“There are those who’d agree with me.”

“Honestly, McKenzie, this is the only place I’ve been where I’ve felt completely at home, completely relaxed.”

“Mayberry.”

“Hardly that. Still … I don’t know, McKenzie. Either you like small-town life or you don’t. I like it.”

“Were you born here?”

“No, no. My ex-husband was. Christopher Kramme. He was from Libbie. I met him in Chicago. He was taking graduate courses in aeronautical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He wanted to build airplanes. I didn’t discover until much later that he was more passionate about that than he was about me. Oh, well.”

“Were you a student?”

“I was a model. And an actress.”

I knew it, my inner voice said.

“Really?” I said.

“Not a supermodel by any means,” Tracie said. “I can’t complain, though. I worked steady. A lot of advertising work—catalogs, brochures, a lot of weekly supplements for department stores like Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, Value City. Some TV spots, too, some video work, plays. I acted in a couple of small theater productions doing Harvey, Agatha Christie’s Murder Is Announced—I once played Typhoid Mary in A Plague of Angels. They made me look thirty years older than I was. That was sobering. I read somewhere that the average career expectancy for a professional football player is something like four-point-four years. I bet it’s the same for models. Still, it was fun. Not as much money as you’d think, but a good time. People stopping me on Michigan Av and pointing at an outdoor board, my face twenty feet high, and saying, ‘Is that you?’ What a rush.”

Tracie took a long sip from her drink before continuing.

“Anyway, we lived in the same apartment building. At least once a week Christopher would come to my door carrying a pitcher of strawberry margaritas, and we’d sit on my balcony and get pleasantly stoned. Not once did he make a pass. Whenever the evening would start to take a romantic turn, he’d glance at his watch, jump up, and say, ‘Gotta go.’ For the longest time I thought he was gay. Then I discovered he was a member of an entirely different minority group.”

“What’s that?”

“He was a gentleman.”

“Ahh.”

“We finally went out on a real date—I had to ask him—and we just hit it off. He proposed, I accepted, and suddenly I was packing to go to Libbie to meet his parents. Unfortunately, his father died at the same time. Heart attack. He was only sixty-one. They say he was a great guy. They also say that it was the shock of his son settling down that killed him. They were wealthy people, the Krammes, and Christopher took advantage of that. Never held a job. Never wanted one. All he wanted to do was build and fly his airplanes, which he never actually did—build them, I mean.”

“What happened to him?”

“Christopher? He went to prison.”

“What?”

“The Feds got him. What happened, one day he jumped into his plane and flew off. The next day he called me. They had arrested him at the airport in a rinky-dink town called Mineral Point in Wisconsin. The Feds got an anonymous tip and asked the sheriff’s department to detain him. Turned out Christopher had a hundred and fifty pounds of high-grade marijuana squirreled away in compartments in his plane worth something like seven hundred thousand dollars. Christopher never explained where he got the dope, or where he was taking it, or why he landed in Mineral Point, or who ratted him out. At least not to me.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?”

“Money, of course. Mr. Kramme, Christopher’s father, was partner with Mr. Miller in a lot of things. The grain elevator, for one. They had an agreement built into their contracts that if either of them died, the business would buy out their heirs for half the value of the business. That way their businesses were protected and neither of them would get stuck with a partner that they didn’t want. Whether or not they added the clause to their partnership agreement because Mr. Miller didn’t like Christopher I couldn’t say, although Mr. Miller really didn’t like Christopher. He considered him a wastrel. That’s the term he always used, ‘wastrel.’