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The Ides of September

Introduction

In Ellery Queen's or Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazine, I forget which, I once read a short story about a Cajun sheriff in the Louisiana bayou country, and very much liked the ethnic flavor. I'd already decided to try my hand at mysteries, and an ethnic rural sheriff seemed a good way to go.

A few decades earlier I'd worked in the Lake Superior region, and loved it. Especially Upper Michigan, partly for its natural beauty, and partly for the flavor of its ethnic colonies, most of them Finnish. (The old colonization projects had settled immigrants in ethnic groups, which have since intermarried a lot, greatly reducing the ethnicity.)

So I wrote "The Ides of September," setting it in a fictional, backwoods Upper Michigan county at the beginning of the 1980s. Matti Seppanen, its Finnish-American sheriff, is the central figure. I hoped it would turn into a series. The Saint mystery magazine promptly bought it and asked for more.

I'd realized from the git-go there was a problem with setting a detective series in a sparsely populated backwoods county. There might be two murders in a decade, neither of them requiring much investigation. But by creating a concentration of lakes in the western part of the county, lakes with considerable resort development, and outsiders with money to fuel their vices . . .

At the end of the story I'll add a few comments about the principal characters—after you've gotten to know them.

* * *

Mary Eberley sat at the kitchen window nursing her breakfast coffee, which now was merely warm. The white-and blue porcelain clock said 7:40, the Ojibwa County courthouse was less than a ten-minute walk away, and the sheriff wasn't due there unlil eight. Outside the window, the lawn was white with frost. Mrs. Perttula was in the living room talking loud Finnish to her aged mother, who was hard of hearing.

I might as well start, Mary decided, and got up. The new jeans were stiff on her legs, the hunting boots unfamiliar weights. A gray twill shirt lent a touch of manliness to her slim, unmanly torso. After shrugging into her green twill jacket, she picked up her new lunch pail, the first she'd ever owned, and walked to the front door.

"Good-bye, Mrs. Perttula," she said.

"Good-bye, Mary."

"How do you say good-bye in Finnish?"

"Näkemiin."

Mary turned to the grandmother. "Näkemiin, Mrs. Herronen."

The old lady beamed up from her rocker. "Näkemiin, tyttö," she said, and there was more, which Mary didn't understand.

"She says it's nice to have a young person living here again," Mrs. Perttula translated.

The autumn morning was crisp and pleasant as Mary walked down the maple-lined street. So close to the great lake, the leaves were just starting to turn. Boarding with the Perttulas promised to be a new experience in itself. And living in a small town through an Upper Michigan winter.

The sheriff wasn't evident when she entered the office. She'd met him the day before, after arriving across the square at the White Pine Hotel, where the reception desk doubled as the bus station.

A middle-aged deputy sat pecking deliberately at an elderly typewriter, filling out his watch report. He looked up, his index fingers poised.

"Can I help you?" He had an accent, like everyone else she'd spoken with here.

"I'm Mary Eberley. I'm here to see Sheriff Seppanen."

"He ain't in yet," the man said, returning to the report. She sat down. I wonder what they think of having a sociology student spending a year up here on her graduate research, she thought. Her appointment as a deputy was a legal formality, not a salaried job. It made her research possible.

Two minutes later Matti Seppanen walked in. Physically, he was almost a stereotypical back-country sheriff. Seemingly in his fifties, he was about five-feet-ten and beefy, with remarkably big shoulders. His face was clean-shaven, his brown hair crew-cut. But the stereotype ended at his eyes, which declared a direct simplicity and calm self-certainty.

"Good morning, Mary. Good morning, Eddy." The deputy looked up again. "Mary," the sheriff said, "I'd like you to meet Deputy Nisonen. Eddy has the midnight-to-eight shift. Eddy, this is Mary Eberley, the young lady we've been expecting."

Nisonen nodded. "Nice to know you," he said, then turned and pulled his report from the platen.

"Anything I need to know about?" the sheriff asked him.

"Yeah. Hjalmar Tallmo phoned about ten minutes ago. He found Bill Skoog dead alongside the Stormy Lake Road, by Icehouse Lake. Looked like somebody shot him."

The sheriff picked up the call-in report from the dispatcher's desk—the dispatcher was in the cell block, feeding the few prisoners—then radioed the day deputy. "The sheriff calling sheriff three. Pete, where are you now?"

"I'm on 67 heading south out of town for Icehouse Lake, to check out the murder report on Bill Skoog."

"Good. I'll get there about ten minutes after you." He turned to Mary. "Let's go."

She almost had to trot to keep up with him as he strode to his pickup truck. How many murders would Ojibwa County have in a typical year? she wondered. She'd overlooked that item in her background study. Surely less than one. The county had barely 9,000 people, more than 3,000 of them here in Hemlock Harbor, the rest scattered over 1,500 square miles of back country. The population was predominantly Finnish-American, especially the rural population, with Swedes second and the rest assorted American. Hemlock Harbor was the only actual town. The other eight dots on the map included two resort villages on Lake Superior, three on concentrations of inland lakes, and three tiny crossroads places where farmers might stop to buy a six-pack. Her atlas identified the farmer villages as "Tamarack," "Makinen," and "Oskar."

She'd ridden through Makinen and Tamarack on the bus—each had five or six frame buildings, a pair of gas pumps, and a beer sign. Oskar was probably the same. She wondered how a town ever got named Oskar.

When the pickup topped the forested hill south of town, she could look out over the cold blue of Lake Superior, stretching sea-like to a distant horizon. A few miles offshore, a long barge was being towed toward the harbor by a tug. Probably from Canada or Minnesota with a cargo of spruce logs for the paper mill.

She turned her attention to the sheriff. "You people talked as if you knew the dead man."

"Bill Skoog is a deputy game warden."

"Um. Is there a lot of bad feeling between local people and the game wardens?"

"Not much. A little bit here and there, now and then."

The radio squawked. "Sheriff one, sheriff one, this is the dispatcher. Over."

They didn't even bother to use the ten-code, Mary thought.

"This is sheriff one. What have you got, Marlin?"

"A Roy Olson just phoned in that he had a calf stolen last night. On the Wolf Creek Road. You know the place? Over."

"About three miles east of the Oskar Road. Where's the calf missing from? Barn? Pasture?"

"Pasture. Olson said he heard a shot about three this morning. Thinks maybe a headlighter shot it for a deer and then hauled it anyway."

The sheriff grunted dubiously. "Okay. One of us will be over later today, when we finish at Icehouse Lake. Is that it?"

"That's it."

"Okay. Sheriff one out." The sheriff hung up the microphone on the dashboard.

"Do you think it really was a poacher?" Mary asked.

"That killed the calf? Could be. Or could be a bear. Cows' eyes aren't the same color in a spotlight as a deer's, and poachers are usually in bed by midnight."

He pushed the heavy pickup hard through gently rolling forestland—broken at intervals by clusters of small farms, their buildings mostly small and neatly painted, their yards largely bare of trees, as if to let in as much sun as possible in winter. After half an hour, the deputy in sheriff three called for an ambulance. He'd found the dead man.

Five minutes later the sheriff left the blacktop for a graveled road, turning west into the national forest, the woods now unbroken save for an occasional small lake or bog. Shortly afterwards, they turned north, and saw two vehicles parked beside the road—one a white sheriff's department sedan, the other a green pickup. Matti Seppanen slowed and pulled off behind the sedan.

The deputy walked over, clipboard in hand. He was still young, and wore his blond hair in a white-sidewalls style.

"Pete Axelson, Mary Eberley," the sheriff said curtly, then walked directly to kneel by the body. His thick fingers opened the dead man's forest-green uniform jacket; the blood that had soaked it was congealed and crusted. Mary heard a muttered Finnish expletive. Seppanen rolled the body over, pulled up the shirt in back, and examined the bullet's exit hole.

"Look at it, Pete. What do you see?"

"A small hole. Couldn't have been a soft point slug."

"Right. I doubt it was even a rifle. Now look where he was laying. What does it look like to you?"

Mary watched the deputy's eyes narrow, his lips pursing.

"Judas," he said, "there ain't much blood there, for somebody whose jacket is all soaked with it."

"Right. Maybe about as much as might drain out if he got put there after he laid dead awhile."

The sheriff walked to the game department pickup that stood with its door still open. "Take a look here," he said.

Axelson peered in thoughtfully. "Uh—the headlight switch is on. Does that mean anything?"

"It could. He might have left them on to light something." Matti strode off past the body in the direction the lights would have shone, Mary and Pete following, about twenty-five yards, to squat beside a pile of entrails.

"What do you see here?" he asked, looking up.

The younger man frowned. "Deer guts. And whoever killed it didn't know what's good. Left the heart and liver."

"All right. How many deer guts did you ever see?"

The deputy grinned. "Quite a few."

The sheriff took a jackknife from a pocket and slit the bulging sack-like rumen, which drew open, displaying its contents. There was a smell like fermented grass, like a cow's breath.

"Anything more to say?"

Axelson whistled silently. "Did you know what was in there?"

"I had a pretty good idea. So what have we got here?"

"It's full of grass and either clover or alfalfa. I don't . . ."

Seppanen silenced him with a gesture and looked at Mary. "What does this tell you?"

She looked around. There was only forest—dark maples with more autumn color than in town, a few darker hemlocks, scattered golden-barked birches, and along the ditch bank some young firs. Only along the road was there grass, and no clover she could see.

"Would you expect it to be full of grass and clover here?" she asked.

"You got it." The sheriff smiled up at her, wiped his knife blade on some roadside grass and stood. "Grass maybe, but not a lot of clover. And for damn sure there'd be a lot of browse—leaves, needles, twigs." He turned to his deputy. "The first thing that hit me, they didn't look right for deer guts. I think we'll find they came out of a calf. And there's a Roy Olson over east of Oskar that had a calf stolen last night. So what do you make of this?"

Axelson concentrated. "It looks like—like someone killed a calf and brought the guts here to make it look like Bill caught some headlighters with an illegal deer, and got shot by them. After they really killed him somewhere else and brought him."

Seppanen nodded abruptly, strode back and dug in the dead man's pocket, coming out with keys on a ring. "It looks like he parked here himself. Otherwise they'd either be missing or in the ignition." He stood again. "Pete, bag the rumen for the game department to examine. Then stay here and wait for the ambulance. Follow them to town. Tell Doc Norrlund I want his best estimate of what kind of bullet killed Billy, and about what time. And check his jacket for any sign of powder burns."

He turned to Mary. "Let's take a walk." She nodded. After he'd clipped a walkie-talkie on his belt, they crossed the dry roadside ditch. An inconspicuous trail, made years past by a tractor dragging logs, entered the forest, carpeted now with last year's moldering leaves. They followed it, the sheriff's eyes watching the ground.

"What do you see?" Mary asked. He shook his head. Two hundred feet from the road lay a lovely lake, and they stopped beside it. It was round, perhaps three-eighths of a mile across; she would not have hesitated to drink from it.

"Icehouse Lake," Matti said. Heavy forest came down to the shore all the way around, except for a segment to their left, where a large, lodge-like summer home stood in a circle of lawn, with a boathouse and other outbuildings nearby. A dock extended some fifty feet into the lake behind it. For a moment the sheriff contemplated the buildings, then raised the belt radio.

"Pete!"

Several seconds lapsed. "Yes, sheriff?"

"Radio Marlin and have him phone the Forest Service. Find out the nearest logging camp around here, the closest to Icehouse Lake." He clipped the radio back on his belt. "Time was," he said to Mary, "there was little gippo camps scattered all over the woods. When I was young. Now the loggers mostly live at home and drive to work."

She nodded. "Why did we come down to the lake?"

"Bill would have parked where he did for some reason. Maybe to come in on this trail." He looked across the lake. "That's a long dock."

"What did you think we might find here?"

He shrugged massive shoulders. "I thought we might see sign of a body being dragged. On a tarp maybe. But I didn't." He looked toward the summer home again, then they walked back to the road. Pete Axelson was sitting in his patrol car with the microphone in his hand and an open mapbook on his knee. After a minute or so, the receiver sounded.

"Sheriff three, this is sheriff's dispatcher. There are two loggers, the Waananen Brothers, batching on a pulp job only about three-quarter miles northeast of Icehouse Lake, on the east side of the Stormy Lake Road. That's in the northwest quarter of Section 17, Township 47 North, Range 39 West. Their shack is back in where you can't see it from the road, but you can see where they drive in. They've put a culvert in the ditch, with gravel over it. You want me to repeat that?"

Pete had penciled an X on the map page. The sheriff took the microphone from him.

"This is Matti. I'm with Pete. We'll find it; I can hear their saws." He gave the mike back. As they went to his pickup, Mary could hear the distant sound of a chain saw, joined a moment later by a second. A truck approached from the north, loaded with logs—the rough black of sugar maple, smooth gold of yellow birch, gray of basswood and others. It slowed as if to stop at the cluster of official vehicles, then drove on. Pete had covered the body with a square of white plastic so it wasn't exposed. The sheriff started the motor.

"If the truck driver had known there was a dead man here, do you think he'd have stopped?" Mary asked.

"Might have. People around here are more interested than in places like Milwaukee or Chicago. Or Ann Arbor. The residents, I mean, not the summer people." He looked at the young woman beside him. "I'll try to mention the kinds of things I think you might want to know, but don't hesitate to ask questions. I'm surprised you ain't used the tape recorder more," he added, referring to the small instrument hanging from her shoulder.

She smiled into the big square face. "I'm lucky. I can sit down later and play back the day from memory. That's one reason I had a 3.87 grade point average as an undergraduate."

"Um. If you ever want a real job as a deputy, let me know."

They climbed back into Matti's pickup and headed in the direction of the logging camp. The road dropped into a broad flat, the hardwood forest giving way largely to spruces, firs, and other conifers. The sheriff slowed. There was the culvert, and he crossed it to follow wheel tracks back in among the trees. Soon, they came to a small, battered travel trailer with a propane tank and a small, prefabricated metal shed. The chain saws were much nearer now. The sheriff shifted into four-wheel drive and pushed on. They heard a tree fall. The nearer saw slowed, to begin a series of alternate idlings and snarlings as the operator began sawing off limbs.

Matti parked beside the logger's jeep and they walked toward the noise, the woods becoming swamp. Moisture from the spongy moss-covered ground darkened their boots. The woods became open, the larger trees lying now as piles of small logs along a tractor trail, backed by delicate green saplings that would grow to take their place. The smells were new to Mary; she decided she liked them.

Yes, the cutter told them, he'd heard a gunshot the evening before, some distance off, probably about 9:15. He'd looked at the clock at 8:50 when he'd heard a low-flying plane, and the gunshot was some while after that. He'd gone to sleep about ten.

He wasn't sure what direction the shot came from. It was hard to tell when there was only one, but he thought it was from the south.

Back in the pickup, Mary mentioned that she'd gotten the interview on tape. "I noticed," Matti said, and began the slow bouncy drive back to the county road.

"So how does it stack up now?" she asked.

"Hmm. I might as well tell Pete and headquarters while I'm telling you. Hold the mike for me; I need both hands to drive here."

He summarized his conversation with Waananen, the logger. "It was interesting what he said about the low-flying plane. That dock at the lodge is awful long for two or three private boats; more like a seaplane dock. And we know there's quite a bit of drugs dealt in the Stormy Lake and Kekebic resort areas.

"So just to speculate—suppose Bill Skoog is patrolling along, watching for headlighters—poachers that hunt deer at night with spotlights. And suppose he sees a plane start down to land on Icehouse Lake and gets curious. It ain't really any of his business, but he parks and goes down to the lake to watch. And then, instead of doing the smart thing—heading back and mentioning it to us the next day—suppose he walks around the shore to snoop a little. Maybe peeks in a window. You might have noticed his boots were wet, as if he'd got in some wet ground."

"Umm. Everything fits, doesn't it?"

"What we've got fits. What there is of it."

They passed the patrol car and green pickup, turning west a short way farther on. Another quarter mile brought them to a wide driveway, blacktopped against dust, that curved in through timber to the large house on Icehouse Lake. Matti drove in and parked behind a black, four-wheel-drive pickup standing high on large tires. He radioed in his location. Then they went up the wide front steps to the wrap-around front porch, where he pressed the doorbell. Chimes sounded inside. When there was no response, the sheriff sauntered out to the black pickup, Mary half a step behind and feeling watched, exposed. He peered over the tailgate, then circled the vehicle.

They heard a window open, a slight sound pregnant with threat. Under other circumstances it would not have been noticed. Seppanen raised the radio to his mouth and spoke casually but not quietly. "Sheriff three, this is the sheriff. There's a black pickup parked here, Illinois plates 1PK378. The box looks freshly scrubbed, the rest just hosed off."

He put the radio back on his hip. "To discourage anyone from shooting us out the window," he murmured. "And maybe get them looking backwards, thinking what they should have done, instead of frontwards, planning."

Briskly then, he walked to the incinerator behind the house. Opening the front, he carefully explored the ashes with a poker leaning there. "Sheriff three, this is the sheriff. There are fragments of heavy polyethylene in the incinerator, like it could have been a plastic tarp. Also some charred blue denim fragments, a zipper like off a pair of pants—and someone just came out the back door. Sheriff out." He turned and waited for the man.

"Can I help you, officer? I'm afraid I was sleeping late this morning."

He was in his late twenties, possibly thirty, his brown hair frowzy, supporting his statement.

"Is that your pickup?" asked Seppanen.

"Yep."

"You're not from Illinois. You're from somewhere around Lake Superior; I can tell from how you talk. You live around Finns."

The man grinned at him. "Takes one to know one. I lived in Hibbing, Minnesota till I was nineteen. I guess it never totally rubs off." He thrust out a hand. "My name is Jim Connelly." They shook. "What can I do for you?"

"Did you hear any shots last night?"

"Yes, matter of fact, I heard two. One around nine o'clock. The other was at 9:20, because I remember looking at the clock and thinking that the poachers must be busy. I have to admit, it reminded me of fall in Minnesota."

"Kind of looks like poachers. We had a game warden killed last night, just over there by the road. There was a pile of guts nearby, as if he caught someone dressing out a deer, and they shot him."

Connelly shook his head. "The hazards of being a north-country game warden."

"There's something that bothers me though." Matti's eyes were steady. "Murder is a serious felony; shooting deer is a misdemeanor. Why would someone commit murder to get out of a $200 fine?"

The man became studiedly casual. "Well, sheriff, you know how clannish these Finn farmers can be. No offense, but they don't much care for non-Finns butting into their affairs." He shrugged. "That's the way it was back home, anyway. What you need is to have Finn game wardens."

Seppanen's quiet eyes threatened to see through the man. "You got a point there. Mind if I look around?"

Connelly's gaze hardened. "Just stay out of the house, unless you've got a warrant. I tried to be helpful, but I don't appreciate being accused of some crime." He turned and walked stiffly to the house. Matti watched him through the door, then raised his radio again.

"Sheriff three, we've got a suspect. White male, six feet, a hundred seventy pounds, brown hair, close-clipped dark beard, range accent. Got that? Calls himself Jim Connelly. Says he's from Hibbing, Minnesota. And he's got a scar below the left eye."

"Okay, I got that. Sheriff, the ambulance is just pulling in."

"Right. I ain't done yet. Connelly lied to me. Said there were two shots, about nine o'clock and 9:20. Which fits the way things were set up to look but not the way they were.

"So I want you to get any fingerprints off Billy's wallet and badge case, also the right front door and headlight switch of his truck. Steering wheel too; the killer might have touched it."

There was a brief silence, during which Mary could visualize the deputy scribbling rapidly on his clipboard, a sort of long-distance stenographer. "Right, sheriff. I got it."

"Okay that's all for now." Seppanen clipped the radio back on his belt.

A backwoods Sherlock Holmes, thought Mary. He doesn't miss a thing. "What's next?" she asked.

"Let's just look around." He walked directly toward the house, stopping outside a back window to examine the flower bed beneath it, its frost-killed plants shriveled and brown. A dozen yards away, the bed had been spaded and freshly raked. He went to it, and from a pocket took a plastic specimen bag and filled it with soil. Then he examined the wall, and with his pocket knife dug something from it. Silently he showed it to Mary—a somewhat flattened slug.

The back door opened, and they looked up into the muzzle of an automatic pistol.

"What did you find, sheriff?"

Seppanen simply looked without answering.

"Back away with your hands up." Connelly came down the steps and gestured toward the door. "In the house. Move!"

"No thanks."

"I'll count to five."

"Pull the trigger and it'll be heard. I've called in a description of your truck and you. Right down to the scar beneath your eye."

The man stood, undecided, his mind racing.

"Tell you what," the sheriff said. "Let me handcuff Mary for you. Then let her run off in the woods over there"—he gestured westward—"in the direction away from my deputy. When she's got a three or four minute start, I'll take the battery out of my truck so she can't come back and drive it or use the radio. Then you can handcuff me and take me with you."

"Matti! He'll kill you!"

"I don't think so. He'll drop me off in the boonies somewhere. And if he kills me, that's better than both of us getting it. I'm sixty years old, while you're—what? Twenty-five?"

Connelly stared at him suspiciously, then decided.

"Handcuff her," he said.

Matti manacled her wrists in front of her, then leaned forward and kissed her cheek. "Just in case I don't see you again, have a good life."

"Okay," said Connelly, "get out of here. That way." He pointed, and reluctantly she started, then, at fifty feet, began to run. She'd just reached the forest's edge when the pistol boomed. She turned, saw Matti on the ground, and screamed. Connelly half pivoted, his feet not moving, and tipped over, falling without trying to catch himself. Her second scream cut short as she saw Matti start to get up, and she headed back to him.

When she arrived, he was on one knee by the gunman, who lay on his side with a knife hilt jutting out at the breastbone.

"How?" she asked.

Matti got heavily up. "In the old days, some Finns were what they called puukkojunkkari, knife fighter. When I was a kid, I learned to throw a knife. Like this." He raised his hands above his shoulders, then abruptly doubled forward, his right hand flashing to his collar in back, then flashing forward. "I used to practice that when I was a teenager. Then, when I joined the sheriff's department, I started carrying a knife between my shoulder blades. For thirty-three years I never needed it. Then, he turned his head to see where you'd gotten to, and that gave me my chance."

The sheriff took a deep breath. "You know, that's the closest I come to getting killed since Italy in 1944."

* * *

At the end of the shift, Matti, Mary, and Pete stopped at the bar in the White Pine Hotel, settling down from the day.

"Why did you want me to fingerprint Bill Skoog's wallet?" Pete asked.

"Connelly said Skoog wasn't a Finn. Why would he think that? Actually he was a Finn; it's just that, like quite a few Finns, he had a Swede name. I figured he must have looked in Bill's wallet and seen the name and knew it wasn't Finn." Matti raised his glass then, swirling the amber whiskey and clear ice cubes, watching them pensively.

"A penny for your thoughts, Matti," Mary said softly.

"I was just wondering. If maybe I shouldn't have killed him. He might have let me go, you know?"

"No. you done right," Axelson said. "He killed Bill; he probably would have killed you."

"Yeah, I'm not regretting. But Pete . . ."

"Yeah?"

"He let Mary go. Too bad I had to pay him back like that."

Afterword

By the time I'd finished "Ides," it seemed to me that Matti and Mary had to have a June and November romance, and marry. And when Keith Bancroft, The Saint's editor, suggested the same thing, that settled it. The second Matti Seppanen story made their mutual attraction clearer. But sad to say, after a few issues, distribution problems sank the resurrected Saint, so I didn't follow through on the project.

However! In 1990 I wrote a novella, set in about 2010, featuring a young detective in L.A., where there are all kinds of crimes. His name is Martti Seppanen, son of Matti and Mary. The novella dealt with a very science-fiction crime, so it appeared in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact for April 1991. In October 2001, Martti resurfaced in a Baen Book, The Puppet Master. A futuristic detective trilogy in one volume.

Matti and Mary would have been proud of Martti. And as his literary grandfather, so am I.

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