I met Tracie outside the entrance to Grandma Miller’s. The bison was waxing poetic about the vistas of South Dakota.
Tracie said, “Where to now?”
The bison started singing “Home on the Range.”
I pointed across the highway.
“Introduce me to Farmer Randisi,” I said.
“I’ve never actually met the man.”
“I thought you knew everyone around here.”
“Randisi is a recluse. Or antisocial. I don’t know what. He has no family, as far as I know. No friends. You never see him in town except for Sunday morning services, and even then he’s in and out in a hurry, never stops to talk. He does his shopping—I don’t know where he does his shopping, but it’s not in Libbie.”
My admiration for the Imposter was starting to grow.
“He picked his targets well, didn’t he?” I said.
Randisi kept his property like he was expecting company. He lived in a pristine white clapboard house on a low hill at the end of a groomed gravel driveway. A rich, manicured lawn surrounded the house, and green and purple fields of alfalfa bordered that. The outbuildings were recently painted, and what machinery I could see, although well used, looked like it had just come off the dealership lot. There was a turnaround at the top of the driveway. Large stones painted white bordered a small garden planted in the center of the turnaround. In the center of the garden was a flagpole. Old Glory flapped listlessly in the breeze.
I parked the Audi between the flagpole and the farmhouse. We hadn’t been in the car long enough for it to cool properly, yet it was still far more comfortable than the heat that greeted us when we left it. The sun was now high in the cloudless sky, and it glared down on us as if it were bad-tempered. The faint breeze that caused the flag to sway brought no relief. I saw large birds circling off to my left, and I wondered if they were buzzards—they felt like buzzards. Sweat trickled down my spine to my waist as I headed toward Randisi’s back door. Tracie trailed behind.
I knocked once, and the door flew open.
Randisi was standing on the other side of it.
He was pointing a rust-spotted, long-barreled .38 Colt at my head and smiling as if he had played an April Fool’s prank on me.
“What do you want?” he said.
I had been taking martial arts training on and off ever since the police academy. Some instructors were better than others, yet even the worst of them preached the same sermon—act without hesitation. Hesitation will get you killed.
Randisi was holding the gun in his right hand. I slid to my left even as I seized the wrist holding the gun and angled it away so I was out of the discharge line. I stepped in closer, took hold of the barrel of the gun with my other hand, and pushed it toward Randisi, rolling it against his thumb—the thumb is the weakest point of the hand. The gun was now pointing at his chest, but I kept twisting it until he let go of the butt. I released his wrist and shoved him hard backward into the kitchen. He lost his balance but didn’t fall. He grabbed his thumb with his left hand and said something that sounded like “Huh?” I released the spring-loaded latch on the left side of the gun, swung out the cylinder, tilted the gun upward, shook out all six cartridges onto the kitchen floor, slapped the cylinder back in place, and handed the Colt butt first to Randisi—all in the time it took to say it.
“Hi,” I said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.” I tried to keep my voice light and cheerful. I doubt I succeeded. My mouth was dry, my heart was drumming, and I suddenly felt out of breath.
Randisi looked down at the gun that he now held with both hands and then back at me. He was a short, compact man with thick shoulders and a worldly face and eyes that looked as if they had seen things. It was easy to imagine him helping to pull a neighbor’s car out of a ditch in the rain.
“How did you do that?” he said.
“Practice,” I told him. “Do you always draw down on people who come to your door?”
Randisi slipped the gun into the waistband of his jeans. “It’s legal,” he said. “State says I can carry.”
“It doesn’t say you can shoot people.”
“What do you know about shooting people?”
“Far too much.”
“You a cop?”
“In my misspent youth.”
“What about this one?”
He gestured at Tracie. I had forgotten about her. She was standing six feet behind me, blinking in the hard sunlight, her face flushed. Heat—I assume it was heat—had covered her body with a mist of perspiration; her skin glistened, and her eyes held an almost giddy light.
“She’s a model,” I said.
“Model?” he repeated.
There’s something about that word that makes men silly. It transformed Randisi from a menacing recluse into a gleeful teenager. He quickly removed the Colt from his waistband, set it on the kitchen counter, and nudged it away. Almost simultaneously, he brushed past me, stepped outside of the farmhouse, paused, gave Tracie a slow, bold stare of appraisal, and extended his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi,” he said.
Tracie smiled, only I could see that her heart wasn’t in it. She shook Randisi’s hand as if it were something she’d rather not touch.
“Sorry about the gun,” he said. “I’ve been getting some threats lately, and a fellow can’t be too careful.”
“Threats?” I said.
Randisi gently set two fingers and a thumb on Tracie’s elbow and urged her toward the door. “You don’t want to be standing out here in this heat. Come inside now, where it’s cool.”
Tracie gave me a look as if she expected me to wrestle Randisi to the ground and pummel him about the head and shoulders. Instead, I stepped back to give them plenty of room to enter the house. She gave me an NHL-quality elbow as they passed.
Once inside, Randisi led Tracie to a chair in a living room that looked as though its furnishings had been lifted intact from a department store showroom. After proceeding down the list, offering her everything from water to Scotch, which Tracie politely declined, he stepped back against the wall so he could get a good look at her sitting in his chair in his living room.
The man definitely needs to get out more, my inner voice told me.
After a few silent moments, Randisi said, “I’m sorry. We weren’t properly introduced.” He crossed the distance to the chair and again offered Tracie his hand. “I’m Mike Randisi.”
Again, Tracie shook Randisi’s hand reluctantly. She didn’t remind him that he had introduced himself just moments before, and I didn’t, either.
“Tracie Blake,” she said.
For a recluse, Randisi seemed awfully sociable.
“I’m Rushmore McKenzie,” I said.
I was standing near the entrance to the living room. Randisi looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
“Tell me about the threats,” I said.
“Why? Are you going to do something about them?”
“I might.”
From his expression, I don’t think he believed me.
“It doesn’t matter,” Randisi said. “I haven’t gotten any for about a week now.”
Since the Imposter skipped town, my inner voice said.
“What were they about?” I said aloud.
“Ahh, people saying they were going to teach me a lesson; that they were going to run me off, burn me out, beat me up, bury me in a shallow grave. It was all talk. I got phone calls, I got letters, yet no one ever came near me and, as far as I know, no one ever set foot on my land.”
“Did you never consider selling your property?” Tracie said.
There was a note of admiration in her voice. Randisi smiled broadly when he heard it.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “I might’ve considered it if someone had actually made me an offer.”
“Wait,” I said. “No one offered to buy your land?”
“No.” Randisi shook his head vigorously in case I misunderstood him. “I didn’t know anyone wanted my land. Hadn’t even heard about that shopping mall that folks wanted to build out here until I started getting the threats.”
“No one calling himself Rushmore McKenzie—”
“I thought you were Rushmore McKenzie.”
“Came to see you?”
“No. You want to tell me what’s going on?”
I quickly explained.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Randisi said.
I agreed with him.
“I wonder,” Randisi said.
“What?”
“There was this fella—I remember a fella who looked a little like you. He drove up to the place a while back, got out of his car, walked around the car once, got back in, and drove off. I have no idea what that was about. I figured he was lost. Or nuts. Think it was him? Think he was looking the place over so he could claim he was here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mr. Randisi,” Tracie said, “why didn’t you say something when you started getting the threats? Why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you come into town?”
“I don’t do too good in town,” he said. “I have a touch of the agoraphobia. I’m pretty good out here, in my own house, on my own land. In town, in stores and restaurants and church, places that aren’t, you know, wide open, that aren’t easy to escape from, sometimes I get panic attacks. I know it’s silly, and I’ve talked to people about it. I’ve tried exposure therapy and cognitive therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy, only nothing seems to work all that well. Now they have me on sertraline, but that doesn’t do much for me, either. I can’t even make myself go into town to get my prescription filled, so there you are.”
Randisi was visibly disappointed to see us go. He suggested that he might give Tracie a call sometime to learn how this business with the mall went, and Tracie said she thought that was a fine idea.
“In a couple of days,” Randisi said.
“A couple of days,” Tracie said.
“Or maybe later today.”
“Later today would be fine.”
In the car, she said, “I like him.”
“He’s not the person people thought he was,” I said.
“He’s not the person I thought he was,” Tracie said, which was more to the point. “If he doesn’t call me, maybe I’ll call him. If you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind?”
She didn’t answer, just looked out the window until we reached the end of Randisi’s long driveway and hung a right on the highway.
“Now what?” Tracie said. “Do you want to meet the other city council members?”
“Who was the first person the Imposter spoke to about the mall?”
Tracie gave it a moment’s thought before answering. “Ed Bizek, the city manager. He’s also the city’s director of economic development.”
“Rural flight,” Bizek said. “We’re fighting rural flight. Eighty-nine percent of the cities in the United States have fewer than three thousand people, and they’re getting smaller all the time. Six states, according to the numbers I last saw, six states—Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota—have lost over five hundred thousand residents, half of them with college degrees. Fighting rural flight. That’s what my job is all about. At least that’s what it was about.”
“Was?” I said.
“I expect to be fired at the next city council meeting.”
“Why?”
“Mistakes were made. Money was lost. Someone has to pay for that.”
“You?”
“The council sure isn’t going to blame itself.”
He was probably right, I decided. Especially since City Councilwoman Tracie Blake was sitting in the backseat of Bizek’s car and didn’t say a word to dispute his theory.
“You know, I did check him out,” Bizek said. “The Imposter, I mean. I called his office in the Cities. I went to the Web site. I interviewed his references. We had a conference call with Rush’s other investors. The city council was there. I even called a couple of the major retailers that Rush said were interested in becoming anchor tenants. They all said that they had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion, but no one set any alarm bells to ringing, either. There was no reason to believe, to not believe … Later, after Rush disappeared, I checked again. The investors were gone, and so were the references. The Web site had been taken down, the office phone just kept on ringing, and the retailers, they all had a strict policy against commenting on future expansion. Even then I couldn’t believe it.” He looked at Tracie’s reflection in his rearview mirror. “I guess I would fire me, too.”
She didn’t so much as smile in reply.
Bizek drove his car to a halt at a four-way stop. He surprised me by putting it into park and leaning back against his door.
“Of course, it was too good to be true,” he said.
I glanced through the back window of the car, looking for the traffic that he was blocking. There wasn’t any.
“I think I knew it was too good to be true, even when Rush was telling me about it,” Bizek said. “He was projecting sales of four hundred to five hundred dollars a square foot, though. I had to listen, and the more I listened—it really would have improved our way of life. Right now people drive, some of them drive hundreds of miles, to go shopping for furniture, for appliances, for clothes and whatnot. Think of the difference it would make if people could get what they need right here. No long drives, no waste of time and gas. The revenue we’ve been losing to other communities, to Rapid City and whatnot, we would have kept that revenue. Everyone in town would have benefited.”
“Not everyone,” Tracie said.
Bizek looked at her in his rearview mirror.
“Yeah, well,” he said, as if it were a topic not worth discussing. He sat straight in his seat, put the car in gear, and drove through the intersection.
“Still, the town should be all right,” Bizek said. “Look.”
He pointed to a blond-stone building to his left. The sign above the door read northern star nursing home.
“We’ve got health care,” he said. “We’ve got assisted living. We just finished up an expansion of the Libbie Medical Clinic down on the end of First Street, which has two full-time and two part-time nurse practitioners and roving doctors. People will move to a small town to retire if you have the medical facilities.”
Bizek continued his slow motor tour of Libbie, showing me a lot more than I had seen during my hike around the town’s perimeter that morning. There was a two-screen movie theater, a shoe store, a beauty parlor, a barbershop, an auto mechanic, a farm equipment dealer, a livestock sales barn, UPS—just about everything a small town needs except for a lumberyard.
“That was my biggest priority,” Bizek said. “To get a lumberyard. I worked on it for years. Talked to Home Depot, Menards, just about everyone you can think of. They all said, the big chains said, they weren’t interested in a town this size. Then I found a guy, a retired contractor—he was willing to build a lumberyard here. He was going to run it with his sons.” Bizek glanced at Tracie in his rearview again. “Only the city council wouldn’t dip into the development fund to help him out. They said it wasn’t a good investment considering our limited tax base. Still, I’d like to get a lumberyard here.”
Bizek made a couple of right turns and slowly drove past the industrial park I’d discovered that morning.
“I’m particularly proud of this,” he said. “The middle building, that houses Frank Communications. It’s a call center that handles inbound customer service calls and outbound sales calls, mostly for Fortune 500 companies. This guy, Ira Frank, millionaire, lives in Phoenix, has call centers scattered all across the country. I heard that he was from South Dakota, so I went to see him, went on my own dime, and talked him into moving a center here. It wasn’t hard. Frank likes South Dakota, likes the work ethic we have here.” Bizek looked into his rearview mirror again. “He said the fact that I drove down to Phoenix to talk to him without even an appointment was a good example of that.”
“We don’t need any more seven-dollar-an-hour jobs,” Tracie said.
“Microsoft and Apple are not going to waltz into Libbie with high-paying jobs for two hundred and fifty skilled, college-educated workers,” Bizek said.
Tracie had nothing to say to that.
“Would you like a tour?” Bizek said. “I’m sure we can arrange a quick tour.”
“Why not?” I said.
Tracie rolled her eyes.
Perry Neske liked his job. He managed the second shift at Frank Communications, the 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. shift, and his smile became broad and his eyes shiny when Tracie asked him to give us the fifty-cent tour. That threw me a little bit, Tracie asking and not Bizek. Instead, Bizek kept his distance, like a child afraid of drawing attention to himself for fear the adults would ask him to leave.
“Business is ramping up,” Neske said. “We expect it’ll get even better as we get deeper into the political season, doing campaign surveys, opinion polls, trolling for contributions.”
I was surprised by how open Neske was. Tracie had explained to Bizek who I was and what I was doing in Libbie. She hadn’t said a word to Neske, though. Still, he proved as forthcoming as if we were old friends picking up a conversation that had been on pause for about thirty seconds. While Neske spoke, Bizek carefully surveyed the people around him as if he were looking for someone and didn’t want to be caught at it.
“In telemarketing, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of your success is the sound of your voice,” Neske said. “Can you read a script, can you talk well, are you outgoing, do you sound upbeat and sincere?”
All around us was the steady hum of conversation, and for a while I thought we had caught the employees conversing with each other during a shift change.
“Oh, no,” Neske said. “They’re working.”
Neske led us down a corridor between soft-wall cubicles and gestured at the men and women that we found there. They were all wearing headsets and talking to customers. Some of them were sitting at desks, others were standing, and still others paced while they worked. Bizek drifted away, looking over the top of some of the cubicle walls.
“We ask our employees to dress in what I call business casual,” Neske said. “You might think that’s odd. After all, they work on the phone. No one sees them. But I think you need to ask people to dress professionally if you expect them to act professionally. On Fridays, though—if you bring in a can of food or packaged goods for charity you can dress down on Fridays.”
“I notice that most of your employees are pretty young,” I said.
“They’re either young or old,” Neske said. “We have a high turnover. Partly it’s the entry-level pay that comes with the job. It’s not enough to support a family, so you get kids starting out or retirees looking to supplement pensions or Social Security. The other thing is, some people have a tough time handling rejection. You go a few days without a sale and it can get you down. Some people take it personally.”
Bizek glanced over the top of yet another cubicle. Neske spun to face him.
“Are you looking for someone?” he said.
Bizek took a tentative step backward.
“She’s not here,” Neske said.
The hum of conversation suddenly ceased, and heads peered over the walls of the cubicles.
Bizek’s eyes lowered until he was staring at the floor.
I glanced at Tracie, hoping for enlightenment. She pressed an index finger to her lips and watched the scene unfold.
“I should kill you,” Neske said.
“Maybe you should,” Bizek said. He raised his head. “But I don’t think the lady would like that.”
“I should kill you both.”
Bizek took a step forward. If he had seemed repentant before, he now looked defiant. “Try it,” he said.
Tracie grabbed my arm just above the elbow and squeezed. “McKenzie, do something,” she said.
“Want me to go out for popcorn? Milk Duds?”
Bizek took another step forward. Neske moved to meet him. They stood like that for a long moment, reminding me of professional wrestlers giving each other the mad-dog stare. Only nothing happened, and after about six seconds I knew nothing would. The more people think about a fight, the less likely they are to start one.
“You should leave now,” Neske said.
Bizek sneered as if it had been his idea all along. He spun around slowly and walked from the building, moving as if he had all the time in the world. Tracie, Neske, and I watched him go, along with all the heads peering over the cubicle walls. A moment later, the hum of conversation returned to its original volume. Neske excused himself and disappeared into his office. I turned to Tracie.
“I think we just lost our ride,” I said.
The air was hot and hard to breathe. If that wasn’t bad enough, Tracie’s shortcut back to my Audi was along a dirt road. Wind and passing cars roiled up the dust, and the dust forced me to cough to clear my throat.
“So what was that all about?” I asked.
“Perry and Ed?”
“No, Penn and Teller.”
Tracie tilted her head and frowned; her hair was shiny in the slant of the afternoon sun.
“Perry Neske was born and raised in Libbie,” she said. “He left several times, but he always came back. The last time he came back, he brought a wife. Her name is Dawn. She hates everything about Libbie.”
“Except for Ed.”
“Except for Ed.”
“And everyone knows it.”
“What can I say?”
“Where the hell is my car?”
Tracie pointed down the street. I followed her finger, only it didn’t lead me to the government building where I had parked the Audi when we first went to visit Bizek. Instead, she was pointing at an ice cream parlor.
“My treat,” she said.
Back in the good ol’ days—whenever that was—I’m told that people would gather around the cracker barrel in the general store and talk it over. That’s something else I’ve never seen, a cracker barrel. In Libbie, they gathered at U Scream Ice Cream Parlor. There were about half a dozen people inside when we arrived, and another half dozen joined while we were there. I sat nursing a hot fudge sundae while the group discussed a number of subjects ranging from the economy to what’s the matter with kids today. After a while, I said, “What about that damn mall?”
I waited for someone to ask who I was, yet no one did.
“Yeah, the mall,” the man called Craig said. “Ol’ Ed really screwed that one up.”
“I hear that’s not all he’s screwing,” said another man whose name I didn’t know.
“Now, now, now,” said Craig, who chuckled just the same.
The owner of the ice cream joint was wearing a white smock with the name ron stitched in red over the breast pocket. “Good riddance,” he said. “A mall would have killed downtown Libbie.”
“Nah,” said a farmer sitting in the corner. “It woulda just moved it to the intersection.”
“A mall would have turned the city into a ghost town,” Ron said. “Instead of owning our own stores, we would have become greeters at one of theirs.”
A woman named Joyce agreed. “Build that mall and we wouldn’t even be a town no more,” she said. “We’d be an area. The area around the mall.”
“Woulda brought a lot of folks to town, don’t you think, from all over,” said Craig.
“It would have brought people to the mall,” said Ron. “They’d never set foot inside Libbie.”
“I gotta tell ya,” said the man without a name. “It would have been nice to have shopping close.”
Ron gave him a look that could have melted his ice cream.
“Losing the mall leaves Libbie in an awfully tough spot, doesn’t it?” I said.
Heads turned. The expression on several faces suggested that they thought they knew who I was but couldn’t remember my name. The fact I was sitting with Tracie probably helped, although she was staring at me as if I had broken one of the more important commandments.
“What tough spot?” Ron said.
“Some of the downtown businesses invested in the mall,” said the farmer. “They were all set to move, leaving us flat.”
“No,” said Ron.
“It’s true,” Craig said. “I heard some people lost a lot of money when the deal collapsed, and maybe now they’re in trouble, too.”
“Not me,” Ron said.
“Gotta sting, though,” Joyce said. “So many businesses ready to abandon downtown for a mall.”
“What businesses?” said Ron. “I don’t know of any businesses. You, Tracie, you know of any businesses?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Tracie replied.
“But there were some,” the farmer said.
“Some,” Tracie said.
“See?” the farmer said.
Another man—I called him Bob because of the way he continually nodded his head—said, “A mall never would have lasted here. After six months the novelty woulda worn off and people woulda gone back to their old ways.”
“I don’t think so,” Joyce said.
“Old people, they have their habits,” Bob said. “They like what’s familiar.”
“Old folks are like everyone else,” said the man with no name. “They don’t want to pay any more for stuff than they have to, and malls, they have lower prices, don’t they?”
“Some do,” Craig said.
“I’m telling you,” Bob said. “Old folks can get kinda overwhelmed by the big stores. Kinda frightens them. They’d stay away.”
From there the conversation veered to how many older people lived in Libbie, and from there to exactly how old is old. It was about then that Tracie suggested we leave. I think the ages that her neighbors were tossing about made her uncomfortable.
The air was still hot and heavy. If the sun had moved a centimeter in the past hour, I hadn’t noticed. We were finally closing in on the Audi, and I was contemplating a dip in the Pioneer Hotel’s pool.
“What do you think?” Tracie asked.
“I’m surprised you’ve been able to keep your losses secret for so long,” I said. “It can’t last, you know. Libbie’s finances are public record, aren’t they? Plus, you have so many people who seem to know exactly what’s going on.”
“We’re hoping you can help us get the money back before we have to report our losses. Oh, for the record, Ronny Radosevich, the owner of U Scream? He invested thirty-five thousand dollars in the mall. He just doesn’t want anyone to know. But that’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean?”
“Do you think fifty is the new thirty, like they said?”
The question made me laugh.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Me, neither,” Tracie said. “I might change my mind when I get there, though. You know, McKenzie, I don’t have a problem with growing old. I really don’t. Not if you have someone to grow old with. This town, it’s not easy when you’re alone.”
“No town is.”
“If you have someone, though, someone to grow old with, it’s a fine place to live.”
That sounded like the beginning of a conversation about relationships, probably my least favorite topic. Fortunately, Tracie didn’t pursue it. Instead, she fell into a kind of wistful silence that lasted until we reached my car and I drove her to her own car parked outside the Pioneer.
“What are your plans for tonight?” she said.
“I haven’t thought much about it beyond a dip in the pool.”
“If you should get—restless, give me a call.”
“I will,” I said. Yet we both knew I wouldn’t.