Then I got out, knowing that this was the constituency of the dead that Wacky Walker had written about so many years before.
V
Wisconsin Dutch
19
I watched from my window as the propellers churned their way through a billowy cloud bank over the Pacific. The plane then arced left and headed inland for the long trip to a middle America I had never seen: first Chicago, then a connecting flight to southern Wisconsin, birthplace of Margaret Cadwallader and Marcella DeVries Harris.
As California, Arizona, and Nevada passed below me, I shifted my gaze from that arid landscape to the whirring propellers and became hypnotized by their circuitous motion. After a while a process of synchronization took over: my mind started to run in perfect circles, logically, chronologically, and in thematic unison: Marcella DeVries was born in Tunnel City, Wisconsin, in 1912. Tunnel City was eighty-five miles from Waukesha, where Maggie Cadwallader was born in 1914. Two years and eighty-five miles apart.
“_I’m just a Wisconsin farm girl_,” Maggie had told me. She had also gotten hysterical when she’d seen my off-duty revolver. “_No, no, no, no!_” she had screamed. “_I won’t let you hurt me! I know who sent you!_”
Six months later she was dead, strangled in the very bedroom where we had made love. The time of her death coincided with Marcella Harris’s abrupt journey to parts unknown.
“_You can’t go home again_,” Marcella had told her neighbor, Mrs. Groberg.
“_Gooey cheese and smelly sauerkraut_” her son had remembered–ethnic foods from the German/Dutch/Polish-dominated state of Wisconsin.
A comely stewardess brought me coffee but got only a distracted grunt of thanks. I stared at the propeller closest to me, watching it cut the air, feeling a deepening symbiosis of past and present, and a further unfolding of logic. Eddie Engels and Janet Valupeyk had been lovers. Eddie had been intimate with Maggie Cadwallader. Eddie had told Janet in the early summer of ’51 to rent Marcella Harris the apartment on Hibiscus Canyon. It _had_ to be related, all of it. It was too perfect not to be.
When the plane landed in Chicago and I hit terra firma again, I decided to change my plans and rent a car to drive the hundred miles or so into Wisconsin. I picked up an efficient-looking Ford at a rental agency and set off. It was near dusk and still very hot. There was a breeze coming from Lake Michigan that did its best to cool things off, but failed.
I drove into the heart of the city, watching the early evening tourists and window-shoppers, not knowing what I was looking for. When I passed a printer’s shop on the near north side I knew that it was my destination. I went in and purchased five dollars’ worth of protective coloration; two hundred phony insurance investigator business cards, these bearing my real name and a ritzy-sounding Beverly Hills address and phone number.
At a nearby novelty store I purchased three reasonably realisticlooking badges designating me “Deputy Sheriff,” “Official Police Stenographer,” and “International Investigator.” When I scrutinized that last one more closely, I threw it out the window of my car– it had the distinct look of a kiddies’ cereal box giveaway. But the others looked real, my business cards looked real, and the .38 automatic in my suitcase was real. I found a hotel room on the north side and went to bed early; I had a hot date with history, and I wanted to be rested for it.
Southern Wisconsin was colored every conceivable shade of green. I crossed the Illinois-Wisconsin border at eight o’clock in the morning and left the wide eight-lane interstate, pushing my ’52 Ford sedan north on a narrow strip of blacktop through a succession of dairy farms interrupted every few miles or so by small lakes.
I almost missed Tunnel City, spotting the turn-off sign at the last moment. I swung a sharp right-hand turn and entered a twolane road that ran straight through the middle of a giant cabbage field. After half a mile a sign announced “Tunnel City, Wis. Pop. 9,818.” I looked in vain for a tunnel, then realized as I dropped down into a shallow valley that the town was probably named for some kind of underground irrigation system that fed water to the endless fields of cabbage that surrounded it.