Death Before Dinner (The Otter Tail County Mysteries) - Softcover

Anderson, Gerald

3.49

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9780738708744: Death Before Dinner (The Otter Tail County Mysteries)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738708747 ISBN 13: 9780738708744

Publisher: Midnight Ink, 2007

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Could something like murder happen in Fergus Falls–a quiet Minnesota town known for its Scandinavian heritage and great lake fishing? Yah, you betcha!

Every August Dr. George Gherkin, the Fergus Falls State University president, hosts a faculty party. It's tradition for George to lock himself inside the kitchen to prepare his signature dish. But instead of Chicken Kiev, the guests find their chef with a meat cleaver buried in his head.

All the guests are suspects. There's Sally Ann Pennwright, Gherkin's scorned secretary and former mistress; Sherwin Williams, the assistant professor of Art who's been denied tenure for years; and Francis Olson, the athletic director whose attempt to leave Fergus Falls was thwarted by Gherkin. Everyone has an ax to grind with the selfserving, manipulative university president. Can the small-town sheriff–who hasn't handled a homicide case in his entire career–solve this unsavory crime?

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About the Author:

Minnesota native Gerald Anderson (Moorhead, MN) is a professor of British and European history at North Dakota State University.

p r o l o g u e

Dr. George Gherkin furtively glanced at the kitchen door to make sure he was alone. He grabbed two ice cubes from the bucket, silently slid them into the glass and reached into the top shelf of the cupboard to find his treasured bottle of Laphroaig, a ten-year-old Scotch. Now that was a fit drink for a university president! As he poured himself a generous three fingers, he smirked at the memory of the last time he'd had a faculty dinner party. He had placed Scotch in an elegant decanter on the sideboard, specifically to tempt his underpaid assistant professors. As counted upon, it was well received, to the point that one of his earnest English teachers had undertaken to deliver a discourse on the merits of fine Scotch. When he had asked Gherkin as to the label, Gherkin mysteriously let on that it was a private label of an unusual blend. "What a sap," he chuckled to himself at the memory. "It was a bottle of the cheapest booze I could find, mixed with a third of a bottle of awful vodka that I was planning to pour down the sink, and a cup of water to fill the decanter. Ah, but this single-malt Laphroaig!"

"The higher education business can provide well," he mused as he looked around his kitchen. He loved his Cuisinart appliances of enamel and chrome, his Calphalon cookware, his soapstone countertops, his birch cabinets of Scandinavian sleekness and efficiency, and the stainless steel double sinks. He moved to his Jenn-Air range and prepared two large frying pans with butter and olive oil. "Synchronizing this dinner could be tricky," he thought. "Perhaps I should have simply baked a rib roast. But what would have been the challenge to that?" He returned to the counter to put the finishing touches on his latest culinary masterpiece. The dainty, skillfully made portions of chicken Kiev nestled on a glass platter. They had been chilling most of the afternoon, giving the bread-crumb coating time to properly adhere to the tender breasts that enclosed the butter and chives. Gherkin sat on a stool and tenderly fingered the tiny paper frills that would adorn each protruding wing end, then bent over to neatly arrange, in order of frying time, the individual servings.

He noted the door opening and a person entering, but found the prospect of a conversation too boring to contemplate and responded with only a curt nod and returned to his final preparations. He could not know that these would indeed be his final preparations.

The person who entered the room was a murderer. The "perpetrator," as the person would soon be known in the terminology of law enforcement, had not considered being a murderer until that moment. But the mind of the perpetrator was an angry one. "How dare he?" the murderer thought. "Look at that fat, bald head, gleaming so much it is reflected off the refrigerator door! We must discuss this right now!" The mind of the murderer became clouded. Gherkin didn't even turn around, and seemed impervious to the presence of another human being. He tediously turned over each chicken breast, probing for the slightest flaw in the coating technique. The hand of the murderer, certainly not the mind, found a heavy and very expensive W�sthof meat cleaver laying on the counter. The hand tightly held the handle while the mind waited for Gherkin to display one ounce of acknowledgment that another soul was present in his mini-universe. The hand was impatient.

A few seconds later, the mind was aware that Dr. George Gherkin had a large meat cleaver stuck in the top of his head and his face had acquired an even coating of bread crumbs. The entree had become "chicken breasts in red sauce." The mind seemed to clear, and thoughts of anger were replaced with wonder. There had been no real sound, other than a rather satisfying thud. What blood there was had collected neatly in the pan, but there was not that much blood, when one considered it, almost as if the thick blade of the cleaver was acting as a cork. The mind observed the murderous hand. "Huh, no blood there at all. That's funny, you'd think there would be. How still he looks. Peaceful for the first time in his life, perhaps. All in all, his head looks like one of those stones that curlers slide along the ice, and the cleaver makes a perfect handle. I wonder if it would slide on the ice better if it had a layer of blood under it, or if that would slow it down. I suppose I should wipe that handle of the cleaver, I mean, that's what murderers do, isn't it? How did it come to this? My God, what should I do now? I suppose I should tell somebody. I didn't really mean to do this. But if anybody really deserved it . . . I mean, who could really blame me?"

The mind began to focus, and to appreciate the magnitude of what the hand had done. And from some distant memory came the words of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness. "The horror! The horror!" was the benediction whispered over the warm corpse of George Gherkin.
o n e

Murder is as common as jay-walking in much of urban America, but in Otter Tail County, in west central Minnesota, neither occur. Unpleasant things, by custom and inclination, are just not done. In fact, being in possession of an overdue library book is openly frowned upon. And when it comes right down to it, there are few things more unpleasant than murder with a meat cleaver. To be sure, in the last hundred years there had been the occasional act of manslaughter, and maybe a shotgun blast now and then, but that sort of thing was usually done by people who really didn't belong in the community anyhow. But this murder, well, it was beyond unpleasant; it was, in fact, quite nasty.

Nastiness is out of place in Otter Tail County. There are 1,048 lakes there, all of them lovely, fresh, clear, and filled with fish and fishermen. It's a place where the prairie meets the lake district, where a wheat field is on one shore and a deciduous forest is on the other. Small towns are found in unexpected places and serve the needs of intimate family lake resorts that are almost too numerous to mention.

The jewel in the crown of Otter Tail County is Fergus Falls, home of a giant cooperative called, appropriately enough, Otter Tail Power Company, and of a giant state hospital, which held as many as twenty-five hundred mental patients in the mid-1950s, before society found alternative methods to institutionalization. Say "Fergus Falls" to the rest of Minnesota and you get an "Oh, yeah, all that electricity," or "Oh, yeah, they had to send one of the Carlson boys there once. Never saw him again." What many people don't know is that this is one of the loveliest small cities to be found in rural America. About thirteen thousand people live there, settled in comfortable homes nestled around Lake Alice, with its ubiquitous Canada geese, or around Grotto Lake or by Lake Charles or Opperman Lake, or even Hoot Lake. On summer days you can see these people on the carefully manicured fairways of the Pebble Lake Golf Course. Under normal circumstances, the last thing on their mind is murder. This would change.

Not all of the people in Fergus Falls are Norwegians, even if it does seem that way. To be sure, there is the annual Scandinavian Heritage Festival, now called the Summerfest, which is held every June, and there are Norwegian arts and crafts and foods and street dances. Other nationalities are represented too, but the musical accent that one hears in the street or in Perkins restaurant carries the sound of the fjords. Nevertheless, it's an All-American town, with fireworks in DeLagoon Park every Fourth of July and a Harvest Festival to crown the summer. Murders aren't supposed to happen in such an Eden, one of the reasons the Otter Tail County sheriff liked his job.

It was a quarter to twelve on a warm and humid Friday morning at the end of August. Sheriff Palmer Knutson had spent the morning working out traffic arrangements and personnel assignments for the Harvest Festival. Knutson anticipated an easy day as he sat down in the dappled shade of an elm tree on the top step of the stairs leading down to the west end of the river walk. It was a secluded place, hardly visible from street level, and amazingly quiet. He had to admit that putting in the river walk was the most useful thing that the Downtown Revitalization Task Force had ever done. "Oh, those poor saps who have to be cops in New York City, or Minneapolis, for that matter," he mused. "I can walk down from my office and amble along the river without getting shot in the head. . . . I wonder what's keeping Ellie?"

It had been a busy week for the Knutson family. On Sunday, the sheriff and his wife Elaine had taken their younger daughter off to Concordia College in Moorhead for freshman orientation. "Little Amy," Palmer sighed, not for the first time. "A college student!"

He had expected to handle that particular life milestone a little better than he had. After all, his other daughter, Maj, had graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, and that was farther away. But the house seemed so empty that even the last chick in the nest, seventeen-year-old Trygve, missed being picked on by his sisters. Palmer reached down, plucked a piece of quack grass, stuck the end of it in his mouth, and contemplated getting old.

Sheriff Knutson didn't look old; in fact, he looked to be about fifty-eight. This observation would have cheered him little, however, since he was exactly that age. The color of his hair had always been rather difficult for anyone to describe–it had always been either a light brown or a dark blonde–but before long, he ruefully noted every morning as he looked in the mirror, people could be relieved of any uncertainty by calling it gray. He used to wear contact lenses over his light-blue eyes, back in the days when his handsome face was an asset on his campaign posters. Now, he worried less about his looks and less about getting elected, and he had reluctantly accepted the necessity of bifocals. Ellie had trusted him to select a pair of frames that would sit easily on his thin nose and make him look handsome. He disappointed her again. He thought she would like his brownish-gray, almost circular frames. Ellie said he looked like an owl.

Palmer had taken unusual pains to look presentable on this morning, and had shocked the office staff by showing up in a tie and a jacket. It was not simply that it was the weekend of the Harvest Festival and that more voters could be greeted on the street. No, today he had a special date with his wife. As a celebration of the end of summer and getting the girls off to college they were going to take a nice walk along the Otter Tail River, commune with nature, and go to the Viking Caf� for their noon smorgasbord. To some people, Swedish meatballs and lefse might seem a little "heavy" for lunch on a hot summer day, but Palmer had been looking forward to it for a week. Nevertheless, as he mentally pictured the varieties of comestibles soon to grace his plate, he unconsciously calculated the calories. He looked down sadly at the unattractive way gravity pulled his tie off of the mound that was his stomach to reveal the last two buttons of his shirt, which unsuccessfully strained to keep the seam straight. "Oh, well," he rationalized to himself, "it's not something we do every day."

"Sorry to keep you. Been here long?" Palmer looked up to see the green eyes of his short, somewhat plump wife beaming down at him.

"No, not really," he replied, hurriedly getting up and dusting off the seat of his pants. "Just loafing. Getting kind of hot, isn't it?"

"Yah. Wanna call off the walk?"

"No, not at all. Besides, it should be cooler down by the river. What kept you?"

"Oh, that old Henry Hartvig. He makes me so mad! I can never meet him without getting one of his right-wing sermons. I'm just walking down the sidewalk minding my own business and he comes up and says, ?Comrade Knutson'–he always calls me that–he thinks he is so clever–and he always yells it so everyone else can hear how clever he is. And then he goes into this long spiel about how, as the wife of a sheriff, I must be non-political and the Democrats in Minnesota are all Communists and how my husband should have better control over me. That's the one that really gets me! In one sentence he insults my political beliefs, my sex, and my family." Ellie fumed, her frizzled brown curls bobbing up and down as she descended the steps to the river.

"So, what did you tell him this time?" Palmer asked, with a measure of dread mixed with anticipation.

"Well, I thought about just reaching up and giving him a kiss on the cheek and saying ?God loves you,' but then I thought that would open the door for him to lecture me on my morality and about being on the board of Planned Parenthood and killing babies. So I just whispered low. He bent down to hear what I was saying and I looked around conspiratorially and said, ?Come the revolution, Henry, you'll be the first one we shoot.'"

"You didn't!"

"Sure I did. Why not? Were you counting on his vote in the next election?"

The sheriff sighed and said, "No, I guess not, at least I haven't really needed him in the past. What did he say to that?"

"Ha! For once he was too stunned to say anything. You know, he's never forgiven me for that protest march to the post office."

Palmer took Ellie's hand as they walked along the river. "He still remembers that? That was thirty years ago!"

"He's like an elephant. I hear he still has a picture of Nixon hanging in his home."

"Well, I know I'll never forget that day, but I have a better reason to remember it," the sheriff tenderly whispered, and kissed Ellie in the general neighborhood of her ear.

"You know," Ellie said, disengaging herself from her suddenly amorous husband, "I was helping Amy pack to go off to college, and she asked me again to tell her how we met. I thought that was sweet."

"So what did you tell her?"

"I guess I spent most of the time describing you. How handsome you looked in that cop's uniform. Tall, athletic, the army veteran, the big man on campus."

"Did you tell her how you looked?"

"I might have; but how would you have described me?" Ellie asked coyly.

"I would have said that you had this beautiful straight, long brown hair that flew in your mouth every time you shouted a slogan. That you had on a pair of jeans with a flag covering your cute rear end and they were so tight that I could read the date of the dime that was in your pocket. I have to admit that I could not have filed a decent report on the incident because," the sheriff lapsed into a soft croon, "?I only had eyes for you.'"

"How sweet, even if I don't entirely believe it. Do you remember how that old postmaster, Matthew Johnson, looked when I presented him with that anti-war petition?"

"Yah," Palmer laughed, "I don't think I have ever, in my whole life, seen anyone look so completely bewildered."

"But the post office was the most important United States government unit in town! Where else could we have gone? And he accepted it, didn't he? That was the most important thing. Do you think he really did forward it to Washington?"

"You know, I ran into him once about ten years ago, long after he retired and shortly before he died. And I asked him if he remembered that. He said it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him–apparently he didn't have any disgruntled postal workers shooting up the place–and that yah, he had actually forwarded the petition to the Postmaster General of the United States. He also said he never got a reply or even an acknowledgment that it had been sent."

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