Murder on the Red River Read online

  Murder on the Red River. Copyright © 2017 by Marcie R. Rendon. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in case of brief quotations for reviews. For information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas, El Paso, TX 79901 or call at (915) 838-1625.

  First Edition

  10987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rendon, Marcie R., author.

  Title: Murder on the red river / Marcie R. Rendon.

  Description: El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016021872 | ISBN 978-1-941026-53-3 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women detectives—Fiction. | Indian women—Fiction. | Sheriffs—Fiction. | Indian men—Death—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Ojibwa indians—Fiction. | Red Lake Indian Reservation (Minn.)—Fiction. | Red River Valley (Minn. and N.D.-Man.)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.E5748 M87 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021872

  Book and cover design by the indomitable ANNE M. GIANGIULIO.

  Cover image by JOSEPH J. ALLEN.

  gigawabamin, Jim—

  see you the next time,

  the next time

  and the next time around.

  Contents

  Fargo, the North Dakota side of the Red River

  Moorhead, the Minnesota side of the Red River

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Fargo, the North Dakota side of the Red River

  Sun-drenched wheat fields. The refrain ran through Cash’s mind as she pulled open the Casbah’s screen door. She stood still. Momentarily blinded, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkened barroom. Outside, the sun rested on the western horizon. Inside the Casbah it was always night. The wooden screen door thunked shut behind her. The bar smells—stale beer, cigarette smoke, sawdust and billiard chalk—welcomed her to her evening home.

  Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of god’s love wash gently over me. Cash didn’t like the word god. Even in her own mind it was written in small letters. What had he ever done for her? Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of sun’s love…nah, didn’t work. Healing rays of god’s love—now that worked.

  Her mind was always composing songs or stories. The long days in the field gave her plenty of time to think of things to write. If she ever found the time to put words to paper, that would be a different story. Words in her head didn’t pay the rent. Or buy a beer. Maybe with her next paycheck, she would get a guitar. She could sing in the cab of the truck and wouldn’t need to write things down. Maybe.

  Ole Johnson sat on a stool at the twelve-foot-long mahogany bar. The Hamm’s Beer Bear danced on cool sparkling waters over his head. Ole slid fifty cents to his brother Carl, seated at his right. They had a nightly bet on whether Cash’s hair, which just grazed the bottom of her butt, would get caught in the screen door. On the nights when that happened, she would kick back at the door with her right foot and jerk her hair into the bar after her.

  Tonight, her hair escaped the trap.

  Like every evening since she first walked into the Casbah a year ago, Cash put a couple quarters on the pool table before going up to the bar and ordering two Budweisers.

  Without a word exchanged, Shorty Nelson, the Casbah’s bartender, popped the top on a Bud and slid it across the wooden bar towards her. She rolled the cool sweaty bottle across her forehead. A cold jolt shot through her skin to the bone of her skull. It reminded Cash of the ice cream headaches she used to get as a kid.

  She took a drink and felt the coolness soothe her parched throat until the fizz hit her empty belly. Ahhhh. She picked up the other bottle and held it against her left collarbone as she walked to an empty booth by the pool tables, her cue stick case slung over her shoulder. It was a leather cue holder, one she had made herself sitting in the cab of a beet truck waiting to unload at Crystal Sugar a couple summers ago. It had leather fringe that swung with her walk.

  She could smell wheat coming off her cotton blouse. She had changed clothes before coming to the Casbah, but she supposed even her Ranchero, which sat at the end of the field all day, smelled like wheat too. Her whole world was wheat and chaff and stubble and the drone of combines and Ford trucks with clutches that stretched her short frame to the max. Sometimes, if she was lucky, the truck would have a radio she could tune in to some country music.

  Gol’ dang, if ol’ man Willie wasn’t already passed out in one of the booths. He was wearing field clothes. His stubby German mustache, cut in the same style as the salt and pepper bangs that hung over his forehead, drooped over slack lips. Cash fought off an involuntary shudder. The Hamm’s Beer clock behind the bar said 9:35.

  Willie must have left the fields early. That is, if he ever went to the fields anymore. Cash figured his son did all the farming for him these days. Old drunk. She couldn’t help but glance to see if the front of his pants were still dry. They were. She shook off the shudder again. Pitiful ol’ man. Every time she came into the Casbah, which was dang near every night, ol’ Willie already had a jump on her.

  She leaned against a booth to watch a couple farm boys shoot pool, playing at being hustlers. There were four quarters ahead of her. She had never left the Red River Valley, but she knew these two didn’t know jack about hustling. Once, a couple of guys had come in on leave from working the Montana ranches. They wore big silver belt buckles and Stetson hats to match, putting the farmers’ duckbills to shame. All the blond farm girls in the bar had been atwitter for the week those boys were in Fargo.

  Those two knew how to hustle. And another guy, home on leave from ’Nam, he had known how to shoot pool. But most nights, the only competition Cash faced was drunk luck.

  “You up, Cash?” one of farm boys asked her. She nodded, took a quick drag of her cigarette and gulped more beer.

  For the next two hours, against a background of quiet farm talk at the bar and and the occasional canned laughter from the TV set on the back counter, all that was heard was the click-clack of billiard balls and the clunk as one sank into a pocket and rolled down to the front gate with another clack-clunk against balls already in place.

  Cash held the table, drinking free the whole time. When she did lose, it was because Jim Jenson, a lanky farmer from Hendrum, came up behind her as she stood plotting the next run of five balls. He wrapped his arms around her waist and breathed into her ear. “Take me home, Cash.”

  Cash first met Jim at a pool tournament over at the Flame, a few blocks from the Casbah. She was shooting in their monthly singles’ tournament, women’s division, when the barmaid pointed out the tall, skinny farm guy who had sent a Budweiser her way. After she sank the 8-ball in the game she was playing, he ambled over and asked if she would be his partner in the couples’ tournament. Said his name was Jim and figured as partners they ought to have a chance at the tournament money. He wasn’t that much older than Cash and he didn’t seem to mind the fact that she wasn’t blond and blue-eyed. He did say he liked the way she cut that last 8-ball into the corner pocket.

  That night they placed third and took home fifty bucks each with the kitty and sidebets. Standing outside in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette, he asked where she usually played and when she said the Casbah, he laughed and made some comment about the high-class part of town. She slowly looked up at the neon-lit stripper winding her leg around a pole that graced the doorway above the Flame. He chuckled again. Said he might drop by the Casbah and shoot a few. Keep in practic
e for next month’s tourney. But now he had to get home to the wife and kids.

  Cash didn’t think any more about him until he showed up at the Casbah a couple weeks later, cue case in hand. He became a regular there and they became partners at the Flame tournaments. The pool, the beer, the winning—one thing led to another. Right back to Cash’s apartment, in fact, where Cash had asked, “What about your wife and kids?” and Jim had answered, “Don’t worry about it.” So she didn’t.

  She had a lifetime of not worrying about it.

  Tonight his breath moved her neckline hairs, goose bumps popped up along her arms. She shook him off, bent over the table and made a five-ball run. She missed her last pocket call. The guy she was playing hooted, “I knew I’d beat you, girl. Your lucky streak is at an end.”

  He ran his last four balls but couldn’t sink the 8-ball in the side pocket. Cash missed her shot.

  He missed his.

  Only Carl and Ole saw the slight shrug of Cash’s shoulder to Jim, a shrug asking, “What you want me to do?”

  Jim wrapped his arm around her waist and nuzzled her neck again. She brushed him off and bent over the table, shot the 8-ball straight into her pocket, followed immediately by the cue ball.

  “Buy me a Hamm’s, girl, “her opponent crowed. “Rack ’em up.”

  Cash broke down her cue instead, went to the bar and bought her opponent a Hamm’s. She finished her Bud.

  Jim wrapped his arm around her. She tapped Carl and Ole on the shoulder as they walked out. “Drinking free again, huh?” said Carl.

  “Look,” said Ole, pointing at the TV with his bottle. “More of our boys are dead.”

  Jim and Cash stopped to look at the grainy black and white images of Hueys landing in rice paddies. The newscaster finished up with the Viet Nam body count for the day and then images switched to the local news. Cash couldn’t hear the announcer as a loud whoop surrounded the pool table. By the time the noise died down, the newscaster was heading into the nightly weather.

  Cash leaned into Jim to get him moving back out the door. The night had cooled down. Crickets chirped. Frogs down by the Red River, which ran through town just a few blocks over, were calling to other frogs.

  Cash and Jim walked the two blocks to her apartment over the Maytag Appliance store. A makeshift set of wooden stairs crisscrossed the alley side of the building up to the second story. The wooden door opened into a grimy kitchen. A stove plate rested on a cracked linoleum counter. Dirty dishes filled the sink. Moths and mosquitoes batted against the screens of the open windows.

  Cash pulled open the round-top refrigerator and grabbed two longneck Budweisers from the top shelf. She pushed the door shut with her hip and walked into the living room that served double purpose as her bedroom. Dust-covered jeans were thrown over the back of a wooden chair.

  She sat on the end of the bed and took a drink before kicking off her shoes into the corner of the room. Another drink before she stood up, unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, leaving them in a heap at the end of the bed. She walked around to the other end of the bed and sat cross-legged, pillow across her lap, back against the metal headboard, before taking another drink.

  Jim undressed down to his white underwear and crawled into bed between the rumpled sheets. He put an arm around her waist and tried to pull her down to him. She said, “Lemmee finish this.”

  After the last drink, she set the bottle on the floor and lay full length into him.

  Fifteen minutes later, she pulled her tangled hair out from under his back, pushed against his chest and brought herself to a seated position. “Time for you to leave, Farmer Jim.” She lit a cigarette. “Your wife and kids are waiting.”

  Jim groaned and covered his head with a pillow. Cash pulled the pillow off and said, “Come on, get up. I gotta work early.” She went into the kitchen and pulled out another Bud. She took a long drink as she walked back to the bedroom. Half the beer was gone when she set it on the worn end table. She crawled into bed, pulling the covers off Jim and wrapping them around herself. She faced away from him, “Go on now. Lock the door on your way out.” She finished her cigarette, swallowed the last of her beer and was out cold.

  Jim rolled to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress, pulling his socks and jeans on. He fumbled in the dark for his shoes. As he buttoned his shirt, he leaned over Cash and kissed her forehead. She swatted, without waking, as if a mosquito had landed and she was brushing it off.

  He clicked the lock before pulling the door shut behind him.

  Moorhead, the Minnesota side of the Red River

  Cash got up the next morning, a Friday, and walked to the Casbah and retrieved her Ranchero. She drove across the bridge to Moorhead before turning north into farm country on the Minnesota side of the river. Both small cities—Fargo and Moorhead—are married to the Red River which meanders beyond the Canadian border. As Cash drove, the sun came up, warming the morning air, causing mist to rise from the trees lining the river.

  Folks, Cash included, didn’t think anything of putting on a hundred miles in a day’s worth of driving. Everything here was just around the corner. But just around the corner could be thirty miles or more. If a stranger stopped and asked where the Wang farm was, chances are the answer would be similar: just a bit up the road—meaning five or ten miles.

  Farmers got up at 4:30 to eat breakfast before driving in to the Fargo Implement shop to buy tractor parts when the shop opened at 7:30 am. They drove back to the farm, replaced the parts and spent until sundown in the field. Without cleaning up, many would drive the three or four or ten miles into the nearest town for a beer before heading home to shower up, eat the wife’s home-cooked meal, go to bed and start the day over again the next morning at 4:30.

  This time of the morning was Cash’s favorite time to drive. The only other folks out were farmers and farm laborers like herself. She lifted four fingers off the steering wheel in a courtesy wave as she passed them.

  She loved the vast expanse of farmland in either direction. Fields of wheat or oats stood waiting to be combined. Potatoes still in the ground. Hay fields plowed under, straight black furrows from one end of a field to another, the Red River tree line a green snake heading north. The leaves giving just a hint of fall colors.

  She remembered someone telling her that the river was used to send furs north to Hudson Bay in Canada in the early 1800s. Once the area was open for homesteading, the plains on either side of the river filled with Scandanavian immigrants, felling trees and marveling at the rich topsoil. Some became the richest farmers in America, usually the ones who hired on folks like Cash. Others struggled, barely making ends meet with the harsh winters, springtime floods and short growing season.

  The Red River Valley—or just the Valley as folks born and raised there called it—wasn’t even a valley. Cash had learned in seventh-grade social studies class that the Valley really was an old glacial lakebed. All of this land was flat because some giant glacier had shaved it flat while moving north. And every year it flooded.

  This year hadn’t been too bad. Every spring the winter runoff of melted snow and ice from tributaries that fed the river would fill to overflowing. In the worst flood years, for as far as the eye could see in either direction, there would be a lake of muddy floodwater. Cash had spent many a spring helping sandbag the riverbank in Fargo or nearby farms in a fight with the rising waters. In those years, the Valley reverted to its original lake size. Floodwaters covered the area seventeen to twenty miles east. The river disappeared. The only way you could tell it was there was by the treetops meandering in the same direction Cash was now driving.

  The social studies teacher, a farm kid who grew up and went to North Dakota State College and got a teaching degree because his dad wanted something better than farm life for his kids, proudly claimed the floods replenished the valley’s two-foot thick, nutrient-rich topsoil.

  Black gold, as the farmers called it. So while the growing season this far north was short—u
sually from May to August with potato and beet harvest going into September and October—this part of the country, this country that Cash called her own, was known to the locals as the breadbasket of the world.

  Cash had been working as a farm laborer since she was eleven when one of her foster mothers—one in a long line of foster mothers—decided she couldn’t stand the sight of Cash. Something about Cash’s dark hair and perpetually tanned skin next to her blond daughter’s peeling sunburn drove the woman crazy. She banished Cash to the fields to work with the men.

  At eleven, Cash was barely four foot, nine inches and certainly less than a hundred pounds. A shave over five feet is where she stood now and more than a sack of potatoes, she thought. Back then she was smaller than the hay bales she was required to throw or the potato sacks she was told to fill. But she was quick and smart and what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in sheer determination.

  The men laughed at her size, admired her willpower and soon had her driving tractor and truck that had foot gears rigged with wooden two-by-fours so she could reach.

  When the farm boys teased her about being a girl working with the men and asked why she was driving tractor instead of canning pickled beets, she would always reply, “I need the cash.” Except the only cash she got was from her foster father when he hired her out to the neighboring farmers—he would only give her ten dollars of whatever they were paying. By the end of beet hauling season that first year, Renee Blackbear was forgotten and Cash was the girl-kid farm laborer all the men knew.

  After a season in the fields, Cash decided there was no way she was going back to washing dishes, canning food and dusting ceramic trinkets from the old world. She started getting up a half hour early each morning and doing a routine of sit-ups, push-ups and isometric exercises she’d learned in sixth-grade gym class. All to build muscle strength. She sabotaged her housework by burning holes in sheets while ironing and over-seasoning whole kettles of stew meant to feed a household. While each insured a beating, it wasn’t long before she was once again banished outdoors to work with the men.