Hard Cheese

HARD CHEESE

by Carl Brookins

Published by Carl Brookins at Smashwords

ISBN:978-0-9853906-1-7

Cover design by Karen Syed

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Dedication

This story is dedicated to all of the thousands of Minnesota State Fair employees who, over the years, have worked so hard to make the fair the spectacular entertainment that it is and has been for many many years.

HARD CHEESE

Carl Brookins

“It’s the last week of August.”

“I noticed. Nights are getting longer and cooler.”

“State Fair time.”

“Heavier traffic along I-94. It’ll get back to normal soon.”

“Big crowds this year, I guess. In spite of the economy.”

I lowered the morning newspaper and looked out the window on the east side of my house. We’d spent the night in my Roseville place, rather than drive back across the city to Catherine’s apartment. The sun was shining and I saw a sparrow flit by. I think it was a sparrow. There was silence. Catherine hadn’t turned on the radio this morning.

I reached for my coffee, said, “What’s up?”

“Why do you ask?”

I smiled. “I have detected, over the past months, that you rarely give me idle conversation.” I looked at the lovely lady sitting across the table. She elegantly raised ome well-defined eyebrow.

Not looking at me, she said, “Can’t get nothin’ by you, slick, can I?”

I smiled. “Keen of eye, sharp of wit, fleet of foot, that’s me.”

“Well, my short friend, I wish to visit that great gathering in St. Paul called the Minnesota State Fair.”

“Really. I am surprised, and as you know, the detective business has left me with very few surprises in this life. In the next, who knows?”

“Philosophically, a non-sequiter, Sean. One cannot know what one does not know.”

“Let’s get back to your desire. I assume this means you wish me to escort you to the Fair?”

“I like ‘accompany me’ better, but yes, that’s the basic idea.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay? Just like that? No arguments?”

“None. It isn’t that I’m eager to join great sweaty boisterous crowds of folks wandering the grounds just over there in St. Paul, or technically Falcon Heights, but I am pleased to accompany you, most anywhere, you know that.” I reached for her hand and kissed the palm.

****

What a deal; we drove to the Health Partners parking lot at Como and Eustis and climbed aboard a bus for the ride to a gate on the very west side of the fair grounds. It was right there on Dan Patch Avenue. The last time I went to the state fair, the street was named Commonwealth Avenue. The noise from the grounds slammed us when we exited the bus and we were immediately enveloped in a crowd of happy fair-goers. Mostly at this end of the grounds they were young, from barely out of their rug-rat stage to shifting groups of teens laughing and scuffling as they roamed madly.

“Let’s walk through the Midway,” she said and clasped my hand. Her face was shiny and she had a sort of glow, like this was all new to her. The Midway, only a hundred yards or so away from our gate, featured a couple of acres of rides, concessions, games of questionable skill, and lots and lots of people. Lights, action, wall to wall. So we headed into the Midway.

“C’mon, baby,” Catherine cried, grinning like a maniac. “Win me a fuzzy animal.”

The barker for the ring toss, sensing a hot prospect, gestured us closer.

“Here we go, man! Win your lady a prize. But you have to have tickets. Get your tickets at the booth!”

So I stood in the fast-moving line and bought ten bucks worth of tickets. The ring toss game looks easy and there was a crowd three deep all the way around the tent. They cheered wildly every time one of the suckers tossed a ring at the bottles. I traded a bunch of tickets for rings. I don’t remember how much it cost me but finally after observing several disappointed losers, I saw that the rings were just big enough to fit over the necks of the bottles tightly lined up, but they had to be tossed in a flat arc. So I watched and pitched and eventually won a small soft stuffed bear for my lady.

Catherine whooped and applauded when I presented her with the prize.

Most of the rides in the Midway were of the thrill variety. The show tents seemed to be absent. Where had Club Lido gone? When I was a lad, and squired a girl from my high school to one of the nearby county fairs, we concentrated on the make-out rides. You know, the ones that took you slowly into dark places where you could grab a smooch and hold hands, or other parts of your partner’s anatomy, depending on how well you knew each other.

The rides this year seemed designed to help you lose your lunch and whatever loose change you had in your pockets. The music and the roar of the loudspeakers and generators seemed quieter than I remembered. I glanced up at Catherine. Enjoyment reigned on her face. She clutched that small bear like it was made of spun gold.

No freak shows, but one barker, a bosomy brunette in a top hat and tight-fitting tail coat over a very short skirt, was haranguing the crowd from the platform in front of an enormous bilious-colored tent. The tent had large paintings of odd-looking humanoid creatures, mostly female. We stopped to watch, leaning against the jostling crowd. The woman reached down, giving front row standees a good look at her cleavage. She picked up a bright shiny steel-colored sword that looked to be about two feet long.

“Ah,” I said. “A sword swallower.”

“How, d’you know?”

“Mere deduction, m’dear, I shouted. The woman threw back her head, waved the sword about and slid it down her throat, all the way to its hilt. The crowd applauded and a man sitting next to the woman on stage belched a plume of blue fire into the air. Behind us motors rumbled and other barkers exhorted the shifting rumbling crowds. The woman with the hilt protruding from her mouth slowly bent forward at the hips and the sword, glistening wet now, slid out of her mouth. There was another scattered round of applause.

“Fake, you think,” smiled Catherine. “Plastic? Rubber?”

“I can’t say from this distance, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a piece of rigid steel or aluminum.”

We strolled to the end of the Midway, taking in the sights the sounds and especially the smells.

“How about something to eat?” I asked. “Mini-donuts? Pork chop on a stick?” Catherine declined.

Across the street a block away was Heritage Square. Catherine pointed and we went there. First thing inside the gate was a small bookstore called J. O’Donohugh. We stopped there. I wanted to see if they had any used copies of the Shell Scott books I didn’t yet have in my paperback collection. They didn’t and we moved on down the row of old railroad and racing cars, a blacksmith and a leather shop. It was quieter here so we paused at the performing stage. The sign said Fiddle Festival Starting Soon. A small Polka band was just exiting the stage. Polka music not being one of my favorite forms of entertainment, I felt no disappointment.

A single performer took the stage. He was a big man wearing a long beard, a faded orange shirt and blue jeans. I guess he had shoes on, but I couldn’t tell. His raggedy pant legs dragged on the ground. He played a mean acoustic blues guitar with a big sound. He rolled into a John Lee Hooker piece and after a minute or two, the sparse crowd stopped talking and began paying closer attention. Except for a very few.

Three rows in front of us two men in rough casual clothes seated side by side were having what appeared to be an intense conversation. During a quiet space in the music I heard one of the two quite clearly. “That’s just hard cheese, innit.” At that the other man stood up and walked quickly past us. He was holding a small round plastic-wrapped package about two inches thick and five or six inches across. It looked like a bagel or a smooth doughnut without a hole. If it had been black it could have been a hockey puck.

I got back into the music, enjoying the sight of my friend softly swaying to the strong beat. The stuffed bear bounced contentedly on her lap.

After the guitar came fiddlers, singly and in groups of two, three and four. When they all finished, Catherine excused herself to visit a nearby facility while I amused myself with my other favorite pastime, watching people.

Catherine wanted to visit the animal barns so we walked across the fairgrounds amid the floating aromas of beer, brats, sweat and the occasional wash of some kind of perfume or cologne. The crowds grew larger and louder. Somebody stepped on my foot and left a smear of mud on my red Ked. But it didn’t matter. I stopped at a booth and snagged a paper tray of fresh deep-fried onion rings. I shared them with my companion and we walked into the cool and dim Sheep Barn. A different set of smells and sounds met our senses. The aisles between the pens were littered with straw and people. We observed sheep of wildly varying size and coloration. The biggest crowds were focused on the pens with the lambs.

“Newborns, you think?” asked Catherine.

“No idea. You know I’m a committed urban warrior. My backyard critters and the cats are pretty much it for me.” A movement in a side aisle attracted me. A scruffy looking man in a black and white striped shirt with a wide boat neck was walking swiftly away from us. In one hand he clutched a small white sack. He disappeared down another aisle and I wondered why I had even noticed him. Catherine was talking to a young woman about her height who smiled at her and then glanced down at me. Her smile widened.

What? I was wearing a pair of short checked cargo pants that just touched my knees and a deep blue short-sleeved shirt with bold yellow sunflowers on it. Not, I admit, exactly sartorially splendid, but Hell, it was the State Fair, right?

“C’mon, sport,” Catherine tugged at my arm. “They are going to judge the miniature horses in a few minutes.”

So we went to the judging barn and found places to sit in the bleachers among the scattered sparse crowd. It felt good to get off my feet for a little while. Catherine had it right, miniature horses, in several classes, none of them over about three feet high. I fleetingly wondered if this was some kind of backhanded comment about my stature. Catherine, standing just over six feet in her stocking feet, was not above making occasional gentle jokes about my height, five-two on a good day. But I knew she liked small animals. Me included.

It was quiet in the barn, the sounds of the nearby Midway muted to a background roar except for the occasional high-pitched squeal of someone on one of the more bizarre high-altitude rides. So it wasn’t surprising that I easily tuned in on nearby conversations. I pulled Catherine’s head close and murmured, “Check this out. Behind us and a couple rows to our right. There should be a scruffy looking fellow in a bold black and white striped shirt with a boat neck.”

A minute later Catherine glanced over her shoulder and confirmed what I had heard. The man in the boat-necked shirt was there. I’d twigged to his British accent.

“He’s with an attractive woman,” Catherine said. “Odd, she looks familiar somehow but I can’t place her.”

Another group of humans finished prancing through the dirt-floored arena, posing and presenting their small equine charges in various pre-set stances. Ribbons of various colors, purple, blue, red and yellow went to smiling and proud handlers, while the public address announcer presented names and locations of the winners. There appeared to be an almost endless number of classes of these horses with only subtle differences.

We decided to find something to eat and as we rose, I let my gaze idle around the bleachers near us. Boatshirt and the woman with him were in intense conversation and didn’t seem to have much interest in what was happening in the ring. I had an odd sensation that I too had seen the woman before, but where?

We left and Catherine dragged me to a bench outside the big brick Horse Barn where we rested for a while, watching the passing crowds.

I found us some iced milk from a booth that didn’t cost me an hour in a long line after Catherine declined cotton candy. Then we went into the Horse Barn. And our pleasant day-trip disappeared.

We were somewhere in the center of the big barn, having encountered several enormous equine creatures being maneuvered here and there down the aisles. The horses’ hooves made sharp clopping sounds on the concrete. Some of the animals seemed a little skittish so we avoided getting close. I was a few steps ahead of Catherine, who had stopped to peer through a barred grate at a small brown ass. Maybe it was a donkey. I’m no expert on these things. I went on around the corner and came face to face with an open stall. I remember there was a lot of what looked like fresh hay on the floor. Also a body.

He was slumped on the floor against a corner of the stall, one arm raised as if he were about to wave at somebody. The effect was ruined because his wrist was pinned to the wooden wall by one steel tine of a pitchfork. His striped black and white boat shirt glistened red down the front and there was blood from his pierced wrist on the shirt-sleeve. His head drooped forward but it looked to me like his throat had been slashed.

I recoiled and grabbed at Catherine. Too late. Her breath hissed out and she blanched at the sight of the dead man. “Call the cops,” I said. “Then turn around and just stand there. We have to keep people out of here.”

She fumbled in her purse and fished out her cell. There was a rustle of straw and a dark figure darted out of the next stall and bolted down the aisle.

“Hey! Stop,” I yelled and tore after her. Her? The figure made a fast turn at the junction into a side aisle. I was running full tilt, gaining on the fleeing figure and when I got to the junction, I stepped on it. A pile of manure. Horse droppings. My leading foot shot out from under me and I flew across the aisle to crash splat against the stall wall. Stunned, I collapsed in a heap. By the time I recovered, my quarry was gone with the wind.

****

“You got a name?” The cop, a Ramsey County deputy, was sweating. It was hot in the barn and he was unhappy. Killings just didn’t go with the projected friendly atmosphere of the Great Minnesota Get-Together. Fun, frolic, a congenial meeting of rural and urban inhabitants. Murder was definitely not in the plan.

We’d explained how we’d happened onto the dead guy and he’d checked out my creds so we hadn’t been dismissed to the sidelines, although I could tell Catherine was more and more interested in quitting the scene forthwith.

“No. I saw him maybe two or three times in the judging barn and the Sheep Barn, as I told you,” I said.

“Yeah, but you didn’t know him.”

I shook my head.

“But you know he’s English.”

“No, what I said was I heard him talking to a man in Heritage Square at the Fiddle Festival. He sounded English, and he said ‘hard cheese innit’ to the guy we saw with him. Then a while later we saw him again. He was sitting with a woman in the horse judging barn.”

The cop nodded, still scribbling, and one of the crime scene techs stood up and showed us what he had in his gloved hand. It was a dirty scrap of card, the remains of an entrance ticket to the Fair. In tiny faint scribble I could just make out two letters: HC.

“Hard Cheese?” I muttered. “Code, maybe?” The scrap disappeared into a small paper bag the tech was holding.

An hour later we were released, the body had been removed, and I’d been able to clean most of the crap off my tennies. They still smelled though. Fortunately when I fell after piling into the stall wall I hadn’t landed in the manure. My knee was bruised and so was my hand, the one I’d snapped up to protect my face at the last instant.

We left the horse barn and strolled back toward the Grandstand which would take us in the general direction of the gate we came in at. When we got to Dan Patch Avenue I stopped. “Look,” I said, “I think I’d like to go over to the Dairy Building for a look around.” Catherine peered at me, one eyebrow raised. I think she caught that expression from me. “Cheese, they make cheese from milk. Dairy.”

I was going to say more but she nodded. “I get it, I get it. You think there’s a clue there?”

“I don’t know but maybe.”

“Okay, but the words might mean nothing, you know.”

At the Dairy Barn we found lots of people in line for milk or ice cream and displays of all sorts of things milky and cheesy. We hung around for a little while and nothing happened. We didn’t recognize anybody either.

“Let’s try Ag-Hort,” I said then.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Agriculture-Horticulture. That building over there.” I pointed.

We went there. The Ag-Hort is a big white building with a central atrium under a tall lighted tower. Eight big exhibit halls radiate out from the center. Each hall is given over to a particular theme. We came in through the outer entrance to the Southwest hall and past a lot of crop displays. I never saw so much variety. The corn exhibit alone seemed to have a million ears of dried field corn. It was very impressive but I was more interested in the people milling about. We came across a long snaky line of people shuffling along. There were soft exclamations of wonder. Everybody seemed focused on the platform in the center of the wing. I carefully scanned the room, looking for anyone recognizable. Then I peered between two people at the focus of everybody’s attention.

“Wow,” I said.” Several large pumpkins squatted there. And when I say large I do not exaggerate. Each one of them, round saggy and deep orange or whitish in color, must have weighed over 400 pounds. Catherine pointed at the sign. It explained we were looking at the entrants into the giant pumpkin challenge, sponsored by a local family of pumpkin growers. Top prizes were some serious money, I saw.

“C’mon, we have to keep moving,” I said.

We went back and into the rotunda in the center of the building. It was quieter here, the noises and smells of the fair more of a background than a nearby presence. I looked at a map on the wall and noted the sky train terminus at the northeast side of the building. Another new wrinkle since the last time I did the Fair. I confessed to Catherine that I wasn’t really sure what I hoped to find, but the image of the fleeing killer still floated in my head. I knew that if the stars were aligned, I might stumble onto something or someone. Coincidental things happen to me all the time.

At the sides of the rotunda, between the spokes that are the different halls are platforms where gadget hawkers set up shop. They sell all sorts of things from super sharp knives to odd scissors to food choppers to special-appearing vacuums. There was even a guy demonstrating a high-pressure water pump, to the giggling hilarity of nearby urchins. I scanned the area and noticed a man standing idly, hands in pockets, gazing at one such booth where a restless man wearing a harness for his microphone was pacing about his space jabbering and demonstrating a set of kitchen knives. They were the ultimate in sharpness, he said. He held up a piece of what looked like tissue paper and letting go, neatly executed a figure eight with the short knife in his hand, slicing twice through the fluttering sheet of paper. Impressive.

The man nearest me with his hands in his pockets half-turned toward me and I realized that I’d seen him before. But where?

‘Where’ was in the audience of the small tent in Heritage Square. He was the man listening to the now dead guy with the boat neck striped shirt, the one who’d muttered “hard cheese innit.”

I started toward him. “Now my friends,” cried the knife hawker, “this blade is so constructed that it will easily slice paper as you just saw, but can be used to cut almost anything you find in the kitchen. From soft butter, of course, to dense and even hard cheese.” He held up a small yellow round of cheese from which the label had been removed. Then he thumped it on his cutting board.

When I looked again at the man in the audience I saw he had been joined by a slender short woman. She had short brown hair chopped at ear-level. She was dressed all in unadorned black except for a wide leather belt heavily studded with silver nail heads of some sort. I looked down to see black running shoes on her feet. They stood close together, jawing intently at each other. When she turned away from the restraining hand of the man, I flashed on the fleeting image I’d seen disappearing around the corner in the Horse Barn. It was the same person.

I flinched and started toward the pair. My sudden movement alerted the couple and the woman turned her head and stared at me for an instant. I saw recognition rise in her eyes.

Just as I reached out to take her arm, she reacted, pulling away. She shouted, looked me in the eye and twisted to run. I lunged for her. We were pretty evenly matched for size but I had the advantage of momentum. After two running strides, I slammed into her side. She swung her right elbow and I ducked. Her forearm grazed my head and when she kicked out, I wrapped my right hand around her ankle and yanked it toward me. We both went down to the hard tiled floor in a tangle of bodies and skidded into the scattering crowd. One guy didn’t move quick enough so the woman and I slid into him. As he fell, the woman swung her right hand around, trying to break her fall. She was holding a small white paper sack. It hit the floor with a thud. I reached out and smacked her shoulders to the floor. Hard.

Stunned, the fight went out of her. I heard a couple of men muttering about attacking women and a cop showed up along with Catherine while I sat there on the woman’s legs to keep her in hand. I explained between gulps of air why I’d jumped her. I took the paper sack from her unresisting fingers and opened it. The chunk of cheese had broken when it hit the floor. It was mostly hollow and there was a plastic baggie inside. The powder in the baggie looked to me like heroin or cocaine.

More cops arrived. Crowd control was established. Harsh conversations on radios crackled over the murmuring crowd while Catherine and I explained the circumstances again to newly arriving uniformed officers. A plainclothes detective I knew from Roseville showed up and shook his head at me.

“I mighta known you’d be involved somehow,” Ray Connolly snorted.

I gazed over his shoulder. Where was the knife hawker? He had skedaddled. No big surprise. I explained to Detective Connolly what my day had been like, emphasizing the places I had seen the murdered man and his presumed companions. At Heritage Square, and in the Horse Barn.

“Kind of coincidental, don’t you think?”

“Not particularly,” I responded. “Only twice, and I came here based on instinct and experience. The guy had said “hard cheese” in my hearing. When he left Heritage Square, he was carrying a small round of cheese, although I confess I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.

“But after he was murdered, for no obvious reason, I thought about it and said to Ms Mckerney here that the scribble on the ticket might have a connection. So we went to the Dairy Building first.”

“Why the Dairy Building?” Connolly interposed.

“Dairy? Cheese?” responded Catherine, squinting at him. “You know, that guy who was selling knives has disappeared. Did you see?” she said, pointing.

“Yes,” both Connolly and I said almost in unison. Then we looked at each other.

“You know something else about all this, am I correct?” I queried.

Connolly nodded. “We’ve been watching several people during the Fair. Bits of intelligence. The girl in black, and the guy with her. Also the knife seller. They’re part of a drug distribution ring out of Plano, Texas. We never had enough proof to bust them until now.” He showed us the sack with the demolished round of yellow cheese and the small plastic bag it had concealed.

“So why’d she stick the guy in the horse barn,” I queried.

“Stealing from his buds? Skimming the whey? Too soon to know. We aren’t even sure of the identities of these people.” His radio squawked and Connolly turned away. He nodded a couple of times at his radio and muttered at it. Then he turned back to us with a look of satisfaction.

“The knife hawker has been picked up. Seems instead of boogying straight out the nearest gate, he went for his car in one of the parking lots. He had a load of cheese in the trunk.”

“Are we done here?” I asked.

“Sure are, for now. But as you know, we’ll be in touch,” Detective Connolly and I shook and we headed for an exit.

“Had enough for today?”

Catherine glanced down at me. “Wel-l-l, if your bruises from slipping in horse droppings and collaring a killer aren’t too painful, I’d like to walk over to Machinery Hill.”

“There isn’t one any more , you know, just a few scattered exhibitors of big machines.”

“I know,” she smiled, “but those enormous machines make me hot.”

-end-

CARL BROOKINS

Before he became a mystery writer and reviewer, Brookins was a freelance photographer, a Public Television program director, a Cable TV administrator, and a counselor and faculty member at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has reviewed mystery fiction for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and for Mystery Scene Magazine. His reviews appear at Barnes & Noble and Amazon Internet sites and on his own blog; also at “Books n' Bytes” and on “DorothyL.” Brookins is an avid recreational sailor. With his wife and friends he has sailed in many locations across the world. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America. He can often be found touring bookstores and libraries with his companions-in-crime, The Minnesota Crime Wave.

He is represented by P.J. Nunn at Breakthrough Promotions.

Brookins writes the sailing adventure series featuring Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney, the Sean NMI Sean, private investigator detective series, and the Jack Marston academic series. He has ten novels in print along with a number of short stories and several E-books. He received a liberal arts degree from the University of Minnesota and studied for a Masters degree in Communications at Michigan State University. He is married with two grown daughters and lives with his wife Jean, a retired publisher and editor, in Roseville, Minnesota.

CRIME STORIES BY CARL BROOKINS

Novels

Tanner/Whitney Sailing Series

Inner Passages

Old Silver

A Superior Mystery

Devils Island

Red Sky

Sean Sean Private Investigator Series

The Case of the Greedy Lawyers

The Case of the Deceiving Don

The Case of the Great Train Robbery

The Case of the Stolen Case

Jack Marston academic mystery series

Bloody Halls

Reunion

Short Stories

“A Winter’s Tale” Silence of the Loons anthology

“A Fish Story” Resort to Murder anthology

“Fire Storm” Writes of Spring anthology

“Hard Cheese”

“The Day I lost My Innocence”

“Daddy’s Little Girl”