IT SLICES, IT DICES

By Mary Monica Pulver

If the Bobcat operator hadn’t been in such a hurry, it might have been a missing-person case, and never solved. But he was behind schedule so he revved up the little machine and ran it down the steep concrete slope, so its scoop struck deep into the great pile of wet straw and manure. He raised the bucket and locked the right hand wheels with the joy stick, making it do a swift pirouette, and hustled back up the slope, wheels thumping over the little cement traction ridges. As he topped the slope, he heard a woman scream and lurched to a stop, thinking a child was too near. The contents of the bucket slid forward – and swinging off the edge into his view was a human arm.

* * * *

It was the eighth day of the Great Minnesota Get-Together. Peace officers from all over the state came to earn extra money by working the fair, and by now were a good team. The Minnesota State Fairgrounds had its own police department, with its own chief and its own investigators, experienced at integrating outsiders.

JoAnne Jones was a State Fairgrounds Police Department investigator, a tall, lean woman of thirty-eight with short, thick blond hair and hazel-brown eyes.

Unhappy eyes at present.

She and the least-senior patrolman, both wearing borrowed rubber boots, were tramping around in the heaps of manure in a twenty-foot deep pit, looking for . . . what? Something out of place, something wrong, something that might be a clue to the way a young man had been fatally stabbed and then tossed with grotesque callousness into the most disgraceful grave imaginable.

Who could hate someone that much?

It was hard to think of a reason, or of anything much else, while conducting the search. The stench made her wish she could breathe through her ears.

JoAnne finally called a halt. All they were getting was filthy. It would take six showers and a sauna to make them fit for human company again. And they had found nothing but admiration for people who voluntarily engaged in animal husbandry.

Meanwhile, the body was taken to the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s office. It would undergo a preliminary examination – the autopsy would have to wait in line a few days. JoAnne went over to see the ME, who said, "Okay, on preliminary we have a white male in mid-adolescence, on whom we find two significant stab wounds. One to the throat was probably the fatal one. It sliced the right carotid vertically, and he seems to have bled out. The other serious wound was to the upper left abdomen. There are also some defense wounds on the hands. A razor blade might be the weapon, or a razor-sharp knife. I also found a couple of bruises, fresh ones, on both arms and his face, inflicted shortly before death."

"A fight, then," said JoAnne. But there hadn’t been a report of a fight ending in bloodshed on the fairgrounds. "Time of death?"

"I would say somewhere between eleven and one last night." So probably after the fair shut down for the night.

JoAnne nodded, making notes. "Anything else?"

"Well . . . this." The ME brought out a small, globular, red-and-white object with chips taken out of it, and handed it to JoAnne. "I found this in a pocket. I think it’s a radish."

JoAnne nodded. It was a carved radish, one a fanciful person might think resembled a rose. She had seen them on display at some of the knife-selling booths, along with cucumbers carved to look like dolphins.

"It was in a pocket?"

"Front trouser pocket – they were the usual outsize pair the kids wear nowadays, so it might’ve fallen in. Or been put in."

"Anything else?" she asked.

"Six dollars in ones, eighty cents in change, a State Fair ticket stub with the initials HO written on it in pencil, a set of car keys."

"No wallet, no ID?"

"No wallet, no ID. No cell phone, either."

That probably meant the victim came to the Fair looking for trouble. It was amazing (until you got used to it) how many young men, stopped on suspicion of criminal behavior, somehow had left their identification at home.

She had the ME print off a couple of pictures of the victim’s face and drove back to the fairgrounds.

Maybe the letters HO printed on his ticket were a clue. Tickets were printed fresh, so they were almost certainly the boy's handwriting.

HO – Santa Claus went ho, ho, ho.

There was a model electric train size called HO.

Maybe it was the nickname of someone he was to meet at the fair? Not likely, considering what it meant among today’s youth.

All right, maybe the initials of the person the victim was supposed to meet. Was he Henry Osborne? Hans Obermann? Heathcliff O’Neil? Howie Olson? Well, probably not Howie. Who under the age of sixty was named Howard?

Could it be the victim’s own initials? Some people, she knew, had a habit of marking anything they owned, however ephemerally, with their initials.

She pulled into her reserved parking spot on the fairgrounds and, still sitting in her car, took out the color prints and studied the face of the victim.

He was young, heartbreakingly so. Maybe a physically-mature fifteen, more likely sixteen or seventeen. Cases involving juveniles bothered JoAnne; that a youth, who knew little of the grown-up world, was making choices so bad they destroyed his chances of growing up well – or growing up at all. Here, even empty in death, was a fellow who was good-looking in a delicate-featured way, with arched brows, a sensual mouth and a nose that was actually improved by having been broken. It kept him from looking effeminate. What was the expression on that face before death wiped it clean? Stupid? Angry? Terrified? Was he easily amused, often curious or sometimes intelligent? Whatever threat or promise it had held was gone now.

Though it was well before noon, the car was starting to heat up. The sun through the windshield was blinding – there was no shade available in front of the modest little police station. JoAnne put the photos back in a pocket and climbed out into the amalgam scent of frying onions, cooked sugar, hot dogs, crushed grass, scorched pork and beef, hot machine oil, and farm animals. She inhaled deeply, comforted. Nothing like it on earth, the unique smell of a mature state fair.

She went in to report to Chief Louis Willem, a tall, slender black man whose face was set permanently into sad lines.

"So where do we go from here?" he said, leaning back in his old and squeaky office chair.

She reached out to touch the carved radish in its clear-plastic bag. "I’m going first to ask if garbage routinely – or even rarely – winds up in the manure pit. I didn’t see any while wading around in there, so it’s not common. If this is just a piece of garbage that somehow found its way into his front pocket, it’s not important. But if it’s an anomaly, then it’s a clue."

JoAnne walked over to the cow barn, where hundreds of cattle stood or lay in facing rows marked by board fences and surrounded by heaps of straw. More than half were the big black and white Holstein cows with grotesquely overgrown udders, but there were also the smaller brown and white Guernseys, some beautiful Siamese-cat-colored Jerseys and even a few of the little Scottish Highland cattle, with long hair and even longer horns. Some were patiently enduring being scrubbed, combed, polished, or wiped in delicate places.

JoAnne found two young women willing to talk about manure. Their answers surprised her. Trash and garbage was never – never – put into the manure pit. "They have a real strict rule against it," said the one wearing rubber Wellingtons and a t-shirt with a big, official-looking seal emblazoned on it featuring a wheelbarrow, crossed pitchforks, and the motto "Manure Movers of America." "There’s plenty of those big plastic bins to throw that other stuff in," she added.

The other young woman strongly agreed. "I think they’d kick us out of the fair if we put anything but manure in there," she said. "They compost the stuff, and gardeners want pure manure – " She paused to shake her head and smile at the odd fancies of gardeners.

JoAnne took notes, thanked them and left. She suspected the threat of expulsion was false, carefully nurtured by those in charge. Take the radish, for example. Did those young women think it could be fingerprinted to tell who was responsible for throwing it in the pit?

But that seemed not to have occurred to them. If all the manure movers thought like that, it was likely the radish was in the dead man’s pocket before he was dumped into the pit. And JoAnne could think of three places on the fairgrounds he could have acquired it.

She set out for the Grandstand, a big old brick building people had sat in to watch the great Dan Patch outpace every horse brought to race in harness against him. Its tiers of seats faced the racetrack and a stage already stacked with amplifying equipment in preparation for a rock band’s evening performance. Its broad, high back was to the rest of the fairgrounds.

JoAnne entered the hollow inside of the building, with its three stories of open-faced booths selling electronic organs, porcelain dishes, triple-paned windows, walnut fudge, glass art, fancy hammocks, vibrating pillows, kettle corn, quilts, vacuum cleaners, shop tools – and carving knives.

It was hot and humid inside; only the presence of dozens of roaring electric fans made it bearable. The aisles were packed with fair-goers of all ages, all moving slowly, caught in the grip of shoppers' hypnosis. Here and there little groups formed an eddy around a booth, this one to enjoy the ecstasy of vibrating pillows behind their aching backs or under their sore feet, that one to sample the tiny free bites of fudge or sweetened popcorn, yet another to appraise the authentic amber jewelry. Bright-eyed sales people and lively barkers did their best to encourage the transfer of money from pocket to cash box.

One barker was standing tall on a raised podium, brilliant lights making his silver hair incandescent. He was thin, with a cheerful face and a husky voice magnified through the little microphone that curved around one cheek.

"The only thing you got to be careful about," he was saying, "is the extreme sharpness of this blade. The sharpness never wears off, you can cut the damaged plug off that extension cord your wife is complaining about and go back to slicing tomatoes and never notice the difference."

He was cutting a cucumber into exquisitely thin slices with a short-bladed paring knife. His movements were swift and deft, but not at all showy – any of you can do this, was the implication.

He had a special offer: a carving knife, a filet knife, a paring knife, a peeler, and a plastic plug to insert into an orange to suck the juice out with - JoAnne remembered her grandmother having one in a kitchen drawer – all for the low, low price of twenty dollars. A few watchers drifted around to the side, where a woman waited to take their money and give them the collection in a plain brown paper bag.

JoAnne noted how the counter in front of his chopping block was ornamented with a carrot whose roughened surface was a trunk for the dagged green pepper that made the fronds of a palm tree. There were also four radishes cut into roses.

JoAnne waited until the last customer took her paper bag away before going to talk to the woman cashier. She, it turned out, was the wife of the silver-haired barker.

"You have to have two barkers," the woman said. "You burn out otherwise. They change off every hour. Ted’s walking around outside, probably drinking a Coke."

"How does a customer get one of those radish roses or a palm tree?"

"There’s an instruction book that comes with the set of knives. You make your own – we don’t sample at all." Meaning, they gave nothing edible away.

When JoAnne brought out a photo of the dead victim and asked, "Have you seen this man?" the woman began to laugh. She gestured out at the expanse of humanity milling through the aisles and laughed some more.

JoAnne left the building, found Ted – who told her nothing useful, except he didn’t have an alibi for last night – then went up Dan Patch Avenue to the Arts and Crafts Building. It was located right inside the main gate. On her way she passed stands selling steak sandwiches, balloon toys, and the stand selling the fair’s newest offense against arteries, the deep-fried Twinkie. Sprinkled with powdered sugar and ornamented with a line of melted chocolate, they smelled wonderful. But Joanne had had a small bag of mini donuts for breakfast and intended to buy a pork chop on a stick and a bucket of warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies for supper and so managed to pass on by.

The entrance to Arts and Crafts cut the corner of the building and inside JoAnne found herself surrounded by bright-colored quilts in eye-twisting patterns, sweaters and hats knit in Scandinavian and Irish styles, gorgeous bobbin and needle lace, and smocked little-girl dresses with Hardanger hems. As she worked her way to the back of the big room, she went past hand-carved toys too beautiful to ever allow a child to play with them, miniature houses and shops with miniature furniture, goods and even miniature shoppers.

At the rear of the room was a doorway into a different world, a broad hallway lined with booths. People were hawking moose-hide moccasins, jewelry cleaners, pecan fudge, sewing machines – and carving knives.

As at the Grandstand booth, the barker selling knives was standing under bright lights on a raised platform behind a counter. He was an older man with a gentlemanly air, wielding a potato peeler on a huge baking potato, flicking out the eyes with a pointed end.

The front of his counter was also ornamented with carved vegetables, including radish roses.

So it wasn’t going to be easy.

"Just for the next three minutes, I’m going to include this patented peeler in the package I’m offering, or to the first five people who come up here waving a twenty dollar bill under my nose. That is – " He brought out a medium-size paper bag and began putting items into it, calling out the names as he did so. "The carving knife, the peeler, the spiral cutter – " That was an odd-looking device that apparently produced the long, thin spiral-cut potato ornamenting the edge of his cutting block – "the bread knife, and the paring knife!" He held up the bag and rattled it, then pointed to the back of the crowd, which had almost doubled in size. "There’s someone who can smell a bargain!" he announced, though JoAnne didn’t see anyone waving money.

But the ploy worked, three people pushed forward, only to be directed around the side of the booth, where a man waited with a fat wad of bills, ready to make change.

JoAnn found out from the "resting" member of the pair – he was taking the money, making change, answering questions – that they were not representatives of the manufacturer but employees of a marketing company. "That’s how it works for us barkers," he explained. Most of them traveled all over the country to sell at fairs and open-air markets. The man who rented this booth for them also rented the booth down the way selling vitamins and food supplements.

The barker didn’t recognize the victim from his photograph, and neither did the other barker, when his break came. One had slept in a Winnebago with his wife last night, the other alone in a motel room.

"Does anyone ever steal one of your carved radishes?" she asked.

"Not from me, I’m armed and dangerous," said the barker with a grin. The other nodded with the same grin.

Good point.

She set out for the Agriculture Building. It was a big building, the oldest on the fairgrounds, a fat Art Deco cylinder standing on a little rise.

JoAnne climbed the slope, stopping at the top to admire its elegant architecture. Almost everyone she knew called it the Ag Building, but the tall black letters over the entrance she was approaching said Horticulture.

That reminded her of a joke her grandfather used to tell. "I can use the word ‘horticulture’ in a sentence: You can lead a whore to culture but you cannot make her think." JoAnne’s grandmother had been shocked at the witticism, but JoAnne hadn’t understood it until she was in high school.

Young people today might never get it; they didn’t know the word whore. They used the corruption ‘ho.’

JoAnne looked at the big letters again. Hmmmm. What was the difference between Agriculture and Horticulture, anyway? The two words meant the same thing, right? She gave a mental shrug and went inside.

The interior was curiously designed, with eight entrances, each letting into a long hall leading to a rotunda in the center. There were exhibits lining the halls, each with a theme, and rooms off the halls that continued that theme. Fresh flower arrangements; corn and other commercial farm crops (lots of ears of corn wrapped in wire cages, and in the room off it folk-art "paintings" made with dried seeds); honey and its products; Minnesota wine makers – tough grapes they’re growing nowadays, she thought. This year the tall, beautiful atrium in the center featured a large-scale model of the White House put up by a women’s group, with cardboard presidents on the front "lawn" among potted flowers.

Perhaps because of all the entrances and the very high ceiling, there was a steady breeze and the atrium was almost cool.

Pillars marked the joins of the hallways and vendors were set up at each. A thumping noise brought her attention to a barker across the atrium.

He was standing tall on a podium behind a brilliantly-lit counter, a good-looking man, maybe early thirties, with a cocky but charming air and great teeth. He was wearing an apron, but it was the tan denim kind men wear, not something frilly-feminine. His brown hair was curly and his eyes were as blue as the chambray shirt under the apron. A curved microphone came around one cheek, so he could speak conversationally and still be heard. He had a large carving knife in one hand and was slamming it hard into the butcher’s block top of the counter. The numberless chips and slashes already cut into it indicated this was not the momentary aberration of a man driven to madness by having make the same lame jokes over and over.

"Now I know you would never, ever, mistreat your Handy Dandy True Steel Eversharp knives like this," he was saying. He stopped the bashing and reached for a tomato, "but even if you do take that rather dramatic way to silence your neighbor’s barking dog – " The little audience snickered in surprise, and he began cutting the tomato into thick, then thin, then very thin slices. Finished, he looked up and smiled – "it never loses its edge.

"Now," he said in a suddenly lowered tone, looking around then leaning slightly forward, "I’m going to do something here I wasn’t told to do. We have about sold out of filet knives, there’s not enough left to make a regular offer of them, so tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll give the next eight people – " He turned and rummaged in a plain cardboard box beside his cutting block. It was deep; JoAnne couldn’t see its contents. He was saying, "Five, six, no, only seven people. Seven people will also get a filet knife as part of the package." He took one out of the box, a smaller knife whose narrow, curved blade was covered with an envelope of white paper. "Now, you aren’t to tell your friends and especially don’t tell my boss if he comes around."

He pulled off the paper, picked up a thick tomato slice and cut out its middle. "Next time you go fishing and all you’re getting are those little, bitty sunnies, don’t throw ‘em back, filet ‘em." He cut around the inside of the slice, then cut the rim open and laid it skin side up on his cutting board. "With this Handy Dandy True Steel Eversharp blade, you can made a boneless meal that’ll satisfy your whole family." He deftly fileted the rest of the flesh from the underside of it. His movements were easy, effortless, implying this was no great feat. "But you’ve got to get it all, every bit, to make it worth your while." To JoAnne’s surprise, he sliced yet again, removing the very last of the tomato’s flesh, leaving only a paper-thin slip of skin on the board. He lifted the skin on the blade of the knife, holding it high so the bright lights could shine through it. "All you throw away are the scales." He dropped the skin into a plastic bag hanging from one side of the board.

"Now, for your twenty dollars you get this filet knife, the butcher knife, the paring knife, and the juicer – but only the first seven will get the filet knife included." While he spoke he laid the knives across the front of the board, then grabbed a sponge from a small bucket and swiped the tomato pieces into the plastic bag.

The charming grin appeared and that started a few audience members coming forward, waving twenty-dollar bills.

JoAnne backed away to give them room, then noticed they were being directed around to the side, where another man waited to package knives into a brown paper bag and take their money. Meanwhile the barker was using a paring knife to make tiny cuts into a radish. "You can sneak next door and slash your neighbor’s tires and still come home to save hundreds on catering fees," he said, cutting into the radish’s equator at four equidistant places, making four tiny red tongues.

JoAnne couldn’t tell if the soft exclamations that blew through a new and growing crowd was for the slashed tires or the pretty work he was making of the radish. "This isn’t hard to learn to do." He cut more tongues higher up, then rotated the tip of the blade into the top of the radish, cutting out a tiny plug. "But you need the Handy Dandy True Steel Eversharp Blade to make it easy. It slices, it dices, it crawls on its belly like a reptile – whoops, wrong spiel." Laughing at himself, he held up the radish rose for the audience to appreciate.

"Make six or eight of these, put ‘em in a bowl of salt water to chill in the refrigerator, and impress people with these ornaments to your beautiful salad plate." He smiled. "But don’t get in a rush, or one of the roses will be your left thumb." He put the radish-rose down beside a pair he'd already made, and began to peel stripes off a cucumber. "Why make just an ordinary-looking salad when you can make a work of art?" he asked, swiftly cutting the cuke into wafer-thin slices edged with dabs of green. He brushed the strips of cucumber skin into the plastic bag, spread the slices with a single swipe of his hand to show how even they were, then swept them, too, into the bag.

JoAnne thought how wasteful that was. The contents of that bag could make a fabulous salad, far more healthful than any other edible being offered at the fair.

"Now, for the bigger jobs – " He picked up a large carving knife and in seconds was banging on the cutting board with it and asking his audience not to tell that the first eight – no, seven – people would get a filet knife if they bought the package deal he was about to offer.

Frustrated at not finding a gap in which to approach him with her questions, JoAnne went to one side, seeking to talk to his assistant. But no one was there, the customers having gotten their knives and the assistant gone away. This far around the side of the booth, she was out of the barker’s line of sight, and so was not seen when she lifted the top off another cardboard box and looked inside for more filet knives. But while it was half full, they weren’t filet knives, they were steak knives. Written in small penciled capitals on the lid’s inside was a notice that a set of six steak knives could be purchased for ten dollars. JoAnne picked one up. The blade inside its paper cover was very thin and the knife very light. Still, ten dollars for half a dozen was a heck of a bargain, even if they only lasted a year, a tendency of State Fair knives, which couldn’t be sharpened. She was sure she could replace them next year; vendors came back again and again, often renting the same location.

She looked around for someone to give her money to and finally saw a man hustling toward her, an ice cream cone in one hand. "I’m setting the land-speed record for the ice cream run," he said, smiling and going behind the counter. He was a tough-looking man with a craggy face and a military-style haircut. "I can get a cone between the start and finish of the sales pitch most times." He cocked an ear toward the barker while taking a big slurpy lick of ice cream. "Hey, he isn’t finished yet," he said thickly.

"I know," she replied. "I’m just here for the steak knives. And to ask a few questions." She produced her identification, which he frowned at, then at her.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"I’m trying to find that out," she replied, and got out her notebook. "What’s your name?" The man’s name was Chet Morganfeld, forty-seven, and he was a newly-retired army sergeant. He was about average height, with a small, solid paunch offset by broad shoulders. He was selling knives because the army had given him a taste for travel. "This is my sixth state fair so far this summer. But I suspect I’ll get an honest job in a year or two," he added with a smile.

He almost dropped the photo of the victim when it was handed to him. "This man’s dead!" he exclaimed.

"How do you know that?" she inquired, feeling her cop antenna extend.

"Saw a little combat," he said, his eyes for just an instant speaking volumes about not-long-enough-ago battlefields.

"Hey, Treat, I’m trying to run a show out here," said a voice, and they turned to see the barker smiling at them to take the sting out of the rebuke.

"Sorry, Dawg," said Treat. He said to JoAnne, "We call him Dawg, ’cause he’s a bird dog after the ladies." He gave a little bow. "They call me Sweet Treat ’cause I’m so good to look at." Treat wasn’t all that good-looking, unless you liked them battered from hard use. But then they called short men Stretch and bald men Curly, so why shouldn’t this rough customer be called Sweet Treat?

Treat didn’t recognize the man in the photo after a second, wary, look. "I don’t want to get mixed up in anything illegal," he said. He was plainly worried about not having an alibi for night before last. "I sleep in my car, shave and shower in the dorm over the cow barn about eight every morning," he said. He was relieved when she went back to the subject of steak knives, glad to sell her a set. "Radish rose?" he echoed when she asked. "No, we don’t let anyone have anything we’ve cut on," he said. "Sanitation regulations."

Dawg, when his break came, didn’t recognize the victim, either. "We don’t pay close attention to any one person or other," said Dawg, in a decided Texas drawl, "or we might get to feeling sorry for ’em, and start giving our product away." Which JoAnne thought might be a half truth.

Dawg’s real name was Chester Allan Belcher. He was thirty years old, "And I’m grateful they didn’t come up with a worse nickname for me."

His alibi, given reluctantly to a police investigator, was that he was up till nearly four in the morning shooting craps with six other men, four of whom he could name.

JoAnne thanked them and went up the hall occupied by an exhibit of vegetables grown in Minnesota – heavy on the squash and potato varieties. She paused outside to get her bearings. Down the slope and across the street was a band shell offering free entertainment for senior fair-goers. Yesterday it was a zydeco band with fiddles, washboards and button accordions; today it was polka music, with brass, reeds, drums, and a leader who punctuated the choruses with a falsetto, "Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!"

She sat on a bench and listened to the music while she worked on her notes. All around her swirled the thousands of fair-goers, parents pushing baby strollers, young lovers holding hands, the middle-aged keeping slow pace with an elderly parent. Who says we’re all a bunch of white-bread folk in Minnesota? she thought indignantly, looking at a woman in a sari and an impossibly thick, long, black braid down her back. She was talking animatedly to a man in a turban. Behind them was a typical Midwest farm family in jeans and t-shirts, man and wife pulling three chattering kids in a coaster wagon. They were black. Behind them were three white teens coating their lip piercings with cotton candy. Nobody was glaring at anybody.

She closed her notebook and went back to the police station.

Chief Willem was waiting to see her in his office. A middle-aged woman in blue shorts and white halter top was sitting on the only chair with a cushion on it in the room, weeping harsh, ugly sobs into a soggy Kleenex.

"This is Mrs. Lisa Swanson. She has identified our victim as her son David Pauley, seventeen."

JoAnne sat down on a hard wooden chair. "Oh, Mrs. Swanson, I am so sorry!" she said.

"I just don’t understand!" declared Mrs. Swanson. "Who could have done this to my Davie?" She began to cry again, and Chief Willem pulled another Kleenex from the box on his desk and handed it to her. "Thanks," she mumbled. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and struggled to contain her sobs.

Suddenly, through the closed door, came the sound of someone – a female – shouting and then of several other people shouting, and then something breaking.

"’Scuse me just a minute," said Chief Willem, rising. He was out the door before JoAnne could reply.

"That sounded like – " Mrs. Swanson began, then bit her lips. "But it couldn’t be. I’m just so upset."

"Who did you think it was?" JoAnne got just the right tone of sympathetic interest and Mrs. Swanson looked at her, slightly embarrassed.

"I – I thought it might be Glenda MacLynn. She’s Davie’s girlfriend. Was. I mean they broke up before . . . before this." She gestured around the little office.

"Was there a serious quarrel?"

"Oh, my, yes. They both have terrible tempers."

"How long ago was this?"

"Just . . ." She had to stop and think. "Three days ago. No, four. He told me about it the next morning and that was three days ago. Glenda played him for a fool – again – and he was very angry. She said he was playing her – "

"Was he?" interrupted JoAnne.

"Well . . . in a way. I don’t like Glenda, she’s unstable, and if there’s anything Davie doesn’t – didn’t – need in his life, it was a frivolous girlfriend. So I set him up with my best friend Judy’s daughter May-Beth, who is a nice, serious girl, got a partial scholarship to Hennepin County Technical College to be a veterinary aide. And they actually went out. He said she was okay but too serious. He’s all stuck on Glenda, who drinks and parties and does drugs and is unfaithful to him. I talk and talk but honestly, you might as well talk to the wall!" She threw up her hands in exasperation, then remembered she was here because her son was dead and burst into loud tears.

"What th – !" Chief Willem was back. "Sergeant Jones, what’s going on in here?"

"It’s not her, it’s not her!" cried Mrs. Swanson. "It’s me. I keep forgetting my son is dead, and then when I remember it’s like someone kicks me in the heart."

"Was the disturbance out front caused by a young woman named Glenda MacLynn?" asked JoAnne.

Chief Willem was surprised into a smile. "How did you know that?"

"She’s David Pauley’s girlfriend. They had a serious fight just a few days ago. Both of them were seeing someone else."

Willem said, "How about you go talk to Miss MacLynn and I’ll talk some more to Mrs. Swanson?"

"Yes, Chief."

Glenda was about what JoAnne expected: thin in an unhealthy way, wearing skimpy clothing that made a display of a narrow bra strap, professional and amateur tattoos, with a sullen expression on her face. Her tears had melted her mascara, but JoAnne wasn’t sure if she’d destroyed her hairdo in grief or if she’d spent some time arranging it that way. Yet JoAnne could see what the attraction was. Under all that mess was sensuality – in fact, the mess was part of it. She was like an unmade bed, its tangled sheets and the pillows in the wrong places speaking plainly of an adventurous evening of sex. Her kind would powerfully attract a young man, one who, at sixteen, would have been far too young to realize the danger.

And by the mess in the outer office, still being cleaned up as JoAnne came in, there was a wild temper to go with the sex.

It would have been neat and beautiful if she were the murderer. Provoking her to anger was easy, and angry people made damaging confessions. JoAnne provoked and Glenda made several. She loved Davie but he got mad at her all the time, called her a whore. "Ho," in her argot. She wasn’t a ho, she didn’t do it for money, she sobbed angrily. Of course, if someone wanted to give her a present ’cause she was nice to him, why was that wrong? Davie was mean to her, and sometimes made her mad, and she would slap him and throw things at him. Her purse, for one. A bottle of beer, for another. Once, a chair.

But she would not admit the big, bad one. About that, she was adamant. She hadn’t murdered Davie, she loved Davie.

Better, for her – she had a terrific alibi. She’d been at the Fifth Precinct Police Station in Minneapolis, talking to an investigator about the marijuana found in a car she was riding in after it was stopped for running a red light.

A phone call confirmed her alibi.

Glenda wept some more, this time in relief, when JoAnne told her that her alibi was confirmed.

But JoAnne wasn’t done yet. "Who did you hook up with who works here at the fair?"

Taken off guard, Glenda’s look of fright gave her away.

"Davie came out here looking for him, didn’t he?"

Again the retreat into tears. "He hit me! He made me tell!"

"Who?"

"Davie! Davie hit me until I told him who it was!"

"So now tell me. Who was it?"

She said to her lap, "He told me to always call him Dog." The description she gave fit Dawg Belcher.

She was permitted to go home, but with a warning not to leave town and to be prepared for further questioning over the next couple of days.

The problem was, Dawg Belcher’s alibi checked out. One man in particular remembered Mr. Belcher because he suspected he had switched dice towards the end of the game. "That man was rolling sevens like there weren’t any other spots on the dice but fives and twos."

So long as she was out, JoAnne went to the various places a person could take a shower around the fairgrounds – there were a surprising number of them. Someone hauling a stabbing victim to a manure pit must surely have taken traces of that ugly adventure away with him. But no one noticed a man smeared with animal waste walking around the fairgrounds around midnight night before last. Or in wet clothing. Or naked.

Of course, that time of night there weren’t many around to notice. The fair shut down at eleven.

JoAnne sat down at her desk to study her notes and write a preliminary report. She put the radish on her desk, and the admission ticket.

The word mnemonic occurred to her. And a certain similarity of names.

Dawg had an interesting tendency to suggest illegal uses for the knives he was selling – but his alibi was solid, covering the period from a couple of hours before through a couple after the ME’s estimate of time of death. On the other hand, Treat didn’t – and there was a box of extremely sharp knives right where he was standing when she talked with him. Easy to take one when no one was looking.

She sat back in her chair, turning a pencil over and over in her fingers, thinking. She finally shook her head and went off to make an arrest.

* * * *

"I’m sorry about the manure pit, but I needed a place to hide the body, someplace people aren’t likely to go digging around in, and if it stays there awhile no one will notice the smell. I didn’t know they emptied it every damn day."

"How’d you get him over there?

"In the cart I use to carry out the garbage. I’m the junior barker, so I get to stay behind and carry out the bags of chopped vegetables. I was bringing the last one out when I heard this voice say, ‘Chet?’ and I turned around and said, ‘Yes?’

"And suddenly this kid is coming at me yelling something – I don’t know what. It’s dark as the inside of a pocket back there, it wasn’t till I felt the sting on my arm that I realized he had a knife. And just like that, I flipped back to my hand-to-hand combat training, and in about a minute he’s on the ground, not moving. Jesus! It happened so fast – "

Chester "Sweet Treat" Morganfeld wiped his mouth with the edge of his hand. "You know, that was only the second time in my whole life I used what I’d been teaching in boot camp? I was ‘on the trail’ – I mean, a drill sergeant, at Fort Sill for three years." He shook his head. "Great times, but tough times. Specialized in hand-to-hand, use of a blade. I got to be damn quick at it, some of those recruits already knew a whole damn lot about wet work. Thought I put it all behind me, but I guess not."

JoAnne said, "This was the second time you used it?"

"Yeah, the other time was in San Francisco. I was in uniform and some crazy person thought I was there to impose martial law and came at me with a church key. High on something, I suppose. I broke his thumb for him inside of three seconds, and that was pretty much the end of the fight."

"But you killed Davie Pauley."

"I know, I know. I guess it was because I was thinking like I was up against someone who knew what he was doing. But he didn’t, not a clue. I got the knife away from him and he tried to take it back and I swung at him twice. First time, he threw his arm up, second time, he didn’t. I think he was going for my nuts, I’ve got a heck of a bruise on my left leg. But to do it, he dropped his guard, and I came in with a down-slash and suddenly he’s on the ground and I can tell there’s blood everywhere."

"That’s self-defense, Treat. For God’s sake – "

"Oh, yeah? Look at it from my point of view. I’m a goddam barker, a transient selling cheap, sharp knives. That puts me about this far – " He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart – " from a carney, and what you lawmen think of carneys can’t be published in a family newspaper.

"But it’s worse than that. I did think about calling an ambulance – maybe he wasn’t dead, you know? So I go back to the booth where there’s a flashlight, and I bring it out. Oh, he was dead, very, very dead. And he was just a kid. But worst of all, the knife is laying there on the ground, and it’s one of ours, one of those goddam steak knives.

"Now who is gonna believe me when say the kid brought one of our knives to the fight? Or that I never saw him before in my life? The kid called me by name, for Christ’s sake! How can I explain that?" Treat was sweating at this point, his eyes showing the whites all the way around, eyebrows very high on his forehead.

"He wasn’t calling you by name," said JoAnne. "He was calling Dawg."

Treat opened his mouth to continue, then stopped and a frown twisted his forehead amazingly – JoAnne had a sudden vision of him as drill sergeant, a scary sight. But Treat wasn’t angry, he was flummoxed. "What?" he finally asked.

"You two have the same first name, you know. Chester Belcher, Chester Morganfeld. Davie came here to kill Chester Belcher, called Dawg. But Dawg is a silly, stupid nickname, not appropriate for a man about to die. So Davie said, ‘Chet?’ and you, of course, turned and said, ‘What?’"

"I said, ‘Yes?’" corrected Treat. "Dammit, I said, ‘Yes.’" And he began to cry.