Wolfie's Game

By W.A. Winter

Rennie Beausoleil and Werther Wolfe are middle-aged brothers-in-law whose edgy relationship dates back to their high school days when they struggled to outdo each other concocting imaginary “perfect” murders. Twenty years later, in the late 1980s, Beausoleil, a short-tempered, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing ex-homicide detective, has been sacked by the Minneapolis Police Department; “Wolfie,” a brilliant psychopath, has grown tired of operating the preposterous scam that’s made him and his wife––Rennie’s provocative half-sister––wealthy. Though no longer a cop, Beausoleil has not forgotten the unsolved execution-style murder, two decades earlier, of Kenny Hiltz, a hapless former classmate. In fact, he’s convinced that Wolfie was Hiltz’s killer, and now, restive and obsessed, he’s determined at last to prove it. Wolfie knows his brother-in-law is hot on his case and is equally determined to one-up him yet again with a second all-too-real murder. And this time Wolfie’s victim will be Rennie himself. The two men play their deadly, sometimes slapstick cat-and-mouse game in the deteriorating inner-city neighborhood where they grew up, surrounded by ex-wives and lovers, old pals and aging rivals, and a pair of bumbling homicidal thugs––none of whom seems capable of either escaping the troubled past or staving off a lethal future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W.A. Winter
• Release date: Jun 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463794524

W.A. Winter

W.A. Winter is the pen name of a Minneapolis journalist and author.

Book preview

WOLFIE’S GAME

Win, lose, die.

A Novel

W. A. Winter

Copyright © 2018 W.A. Winter

All rights reserved.

Distributed by Smashwords

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CONTENTS

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

All plots tend to move deathward.

—Don DeLillo

ONE

Mickey Brix was talking about Denise. What he was saying was not particularly original or, by East Superior Street standards, either very crude or especially graphic, and the supper crowd at the Tip-Top was not paying him any more attention than usual.

Brix, as far as that goes, had not started out talking about Denise at all. He’d been talking about the hell he was going through trying to write his novel. He was working an eight-hour shift plus a lot of overtime on a county road crew, and that hardly allowed him enough waking hours to eat, do the laundry, and get his wick trimmed, much less write a goddamn book.

Someone, Oscar Petersen maybe, suggested that busy as he was, Mickey seemed to be spending a hell of a lot of time hanging around the Tip-Top, but Brix said that that was on account of the rain, which put a temporary kibosh on the road work. Then someone else—it might have been Dave Hagen—asked who it was who was trimming his wick, and Brix, grinning, said Denise. Dolph Dicklich said, Don’t you wish, and Brix, who didn’t appreciate the challenge to either his manhood or his creative powers, said, It’s a fact, man, and began describing the last time the two of them were together.

In my Bronco, dig? Brix said. "On the River Road down from the Franklin Bridge. We had a drink or two, and she started coming on to me. Once we got going, there was no turning back. She wanted it, man."

Careful Rennie don’t hear you, someone said, maybe with a wink, maybe not, but Brix said, Fuck Rennie, and went on with his story.

Brix was in his late twenties. He was tall and rangy, with that deep, permanent-looking tan that a guy got working in the sun all summer and long, blond, sun-streaked hair he wore in a seventies-style ponytail, now ten-plus years out of date. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy and it wasn’t hard to imagine him having some success with a certain kind of woman, but by that point his narrative was starting to sound familiar—one more version of the same old East Superior Street fantasy involving Denise Wolfe.

Then everything happened fast. Beausoleil, who’d come in the back door and sat down at the counter within easy earshot, turned around, bounded off his stool, and caught Brix in mid-sentence. Kneeling on the seat of the booth behind Brix, Beausoleil jerked his head back by the ponytail and held him, face up and caught in a terrible grimace, against the wooden divider that separated the booths. Beausoleil had ahold of Brix’s ponytail in his right hand while with his left he gripped a bottle of Heinz 57 like a dagger above Brix’s gaping mouth.

Like some ketchup with your meal, asshole? Beausoleil said.

In retrospect, the boys might have wondered how Beausoleil could have gotten the cap off the ketchup bottle without letting go of Brix’s hair—the cap had to have been off already when he picked up the bottle. But for a second or two they could imagine Rennie shoving the bottle’s neck down Brix’s throat and Brix either chugging the red stuff or choking on it.

At any rate, it was over in a minute. Leo Keating, who owned the joint, was on the two of them in a flash, coming out from behind the counter with his hands stretched in front of him like a referee on the Friday night fights, and Dolph, who had been a first-string tackle on South High’s juggernaut twenty-five years earlier, was there, too, grabbing Beausoleil in a bear hug from behind. Leo said, For chrissakes, Rennie, and Dolph made a lame joke about Heinz being the slow brand, and fastidious Dave Hagen, his little fist full of paper napkins, mopped up the coffee that had slopped out of his cup during the ruckus.

Beausoleil let go of Brix’s ponytail. He put the bottle down next to the napkin dispenser in the booth behind Mickey and stood up. Your mouth’s gonna get you hurt, Brix, he said.

Brix had the good sense not to talk back. He rubbed his neck where Beausoleil had snapped it back against the divider and then picked up the can of Coke Classic in front of him. The color in his face was higher than usual and the hand that lifted the Coke was shaking, but otherwise you wouldn’t have thought anything had happened.

Beausoleil sat down at the counter, ran his hand through his slicked-back, still mostly black hair, and asked Leo for a cup of unleaded. He specified the decaf because he’d been having a tough enough time falling asleep at night as it was. His hands, resting on the counter, were shaking, too.

Beausoleil ate a ham-and-swiss sandwich with his coffee and read Sid Hartman’s column in that morning’s paper, to all intents and purposes already a day old. He and Leo talked about the Vikings getting Herschel Walker from the Cowboys and how there were no more excuses for not winning a Super Bowl, then Dolph came over and turned the conversation to his son’s wedding, which was the day after next. When Dolph paid his tab and left a few minutes later, Leo asked Beausoleil if he was going to sing at Rudy’s reception, but Beausoleil was thinking about what Brix had been saying about Denise and it was obvious that the idea of singing at the Dicklich wedding wasn’t going to make him forget it. Beausoleil did not let go of things easily. Leo could tell he was smoldering under the small talk, embarrassed and angry at the same time.

Some guys are described as having a short fuse. Beausoleil had no fuse at all. Dave Hagen’s wife, DeeDee, who used to be married to Rennie, told stories—war stories, she called them—to whomever would still listen. Her stories had different settings and various characters, but they all contained at least one incident in which Rennie bashed a head against a table or slammed a body into a wall or chased down some poor son-of-a-bitch in his car. DeeDee always made the point that he never laid an angry hand on her or any of the other Yateses, which included, besides DeeDee, his childhood friend Sylvan and their older sister Maureen, who happened to be another one of Rennie’s ex-wives. But how much did that matter, DeeDee would ask, when he was slapping around everybody else?

Beausoleil was not a goon. He’d made the Honor Society his senior year at South, spent a couple of semesters at the University of Minnesota, read a book now and then, and kept up with the news. He had a wonderful tenor voice and a decent sense of humor, and women still found him attractive. But his rages and bad judgment had cost him his chosen career, at least two of his three marriages, and all but a handful of his friends. As DeeDee said, That temper pretty much cancels out the good things.

You could never tell with Beausoleil, the East Superior crowd would agree. One minute everything was hunky-dory, the next minute there was blood on the wall. And the guy, they would say, is so quick. Forty-five years old and showing signs of a middle-age paunch, he still moves quick as a cat.

Brix, for instance, hadn’t known Rennie was there until he was staring up into the business end of that ketchup bottle. That’s how quick Rennie was.

• • •

That evening Beausoleil left the Tip-Top at six-forty-five and walked east on Superior. He’d walked out without so much as a glance in Mickey Brix’s direction, Brix remaining uncharacteristically quiet until Rennie was out the door.

It was a chilly night that smelled of rain and wet leaves. The air was damp, on and off misty, and the tires of passing cars made a hissing noise on the gleaming asphalt. Beausoleil wore a dark blue Riverside Lounge windbreaker and khaki slacks that might have passed for Dockers in the dark and a pair of thick-soled Timberland boots that he believed would last forever. Though not quite five-foot-ten, he was broad across the shoulders and thick through the chest, and he carried himself with either authority or arrogance, depending on your point of view. He could have been mistaken for a middle-aged factory foreman on his way home from work.

The truth is he was neither coming home nor going to work. His last full-time employer, the Minneapolis Police Department, had let him go following disciplinary hearings almost exactly a year earlier. The hearings had followed a string of unrelated incidents in which Detective Sergeant Reynard Beausoleil had been accused of using excessive and inappropriate force in the apprehension and interrogation of a suspect. He had since worked as a security consultant for a few small businesses—bars and liquor stores in the extended neighborhood mostly. But the work had bored him or someone had gotten on his nerves and he said or did something that wasn’t believed to be in the best interests of the business, and he’d gone off and tried something else. He pictured himself at this point in his life as the human equivalent of a junkyard dog, which was not entirely displeasing, and thanked his lucky stars he had the house and the tenants upstairs. Between the monthly payments from his renters and the partial pension he’d been able to wangle from the M.P.D., he could stay alive doing little or nothing, at least for the time being.

For two hours that evening he sat at the all-but-deserted bar in the Riverside Lounge watching the Chiefs and the Dolphins on Monday Night Football’s Thursday night edition. He was hoping to get a line on the little blonde waitress the Lounge had brought on that week, but Paul, the nightside barman, said Corky Davis (the new girl’s name) had called in and asked for the night off. Her kid’s sick, I guess, Paul said. It was a slow night so Paul didn’t seem to mind. Beausoleil sighed, bummed a cigarette off the barman, and bought himself another Special Export. A single mom, he thought idly, watching the head thicken in the Pilsner glass. Either that or her old man’s got himself a night shift, too.

He tried not to think about Brix or Denise or what had happened at the Tip-Top, which would both anger and embarrass him all over again. A new girl to look at and kid around with and maybe, if luck ran his way, take home for a little action between the sheets would have taken his mind off the other shit. Now the Special Export and the Johnnie Walker Red waiting for him back at the house would have to do the job. He put away three glasses of beer before he got bored enough to leave.

Outside the air seemed drier than it had two hours earlier and the smell of wet leaves was for some reason invigorating, so instead of walking straight home he continued east on Superior, in the direction of the river. The anger and embarrassment were gone, at least for the time being, but the familiar restless energy remained. The booze could generally get rid of the other stuff, but not the energy. Only sex could take care of that, or, if not sex, something similarly physical. Action was the word that rattled around in his brain.

He needed to piss, all that coffee and beer, and ducked into an alley behind Thirty-fourth Avenue to relieve himself. He had not quite disappeared behind the boarded-up stucco shell of what had once been a popular Texaco station when he spotted a black Pontiac Trans Am sitting in the shadow of a billboard in the otherwise deserted RadioShack parking lot next door.

Beausoleil had been a cop for twenty-four years—twenty-six if you counted the military police. He could not walk past a late-model muscle car sitting by itself in an empty parking lot without wondering what the hell it was doing there. He wasn’t a cop anymore, but his curiosity was an itch that never went away.

Despite the volume of liquid he’d consumed, he approached the car with a practiced stealth. He crouched down and moved quickly on his rubber-soled Timberlands across the short stretch of asphalt. He didn’t make a sound.

A man was sitting in the front passenger seat, jerking his head and shoulders to the rhythm of some unheard music, the headphones of a Sony Walkman or some such device clamped on his head. Beausoleil stepped up to the passenger-side door, yanked it open, and rammed the passenger’s seat forward, heaving the man with the Walkman head-first into the dashboard. Just like that Beausoleil was in the Trans Am’s tight back seat, behind the stunned passenger. He grabbed the man under his stubbly chin with one hand and ripped the headphones off with the other.

"The fuck!" shouted Ricky Treece.

Treece was twenty-four or twenty-five, acne-scarred, and stinking of some fruity men’s cologne he’d no doubt lifted off a shelf at Tar-zhay. Treece had been in and out of the state slammer in St. Cloud since he dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. Beausoleil had once busted him for petty larceny at a discount store on West Superior. He was a born fuck-up, luckless, and incredibly stupid even by bad-guy standards.

Nice car, Beausoleil said, flipping the headset into Treece’s lap. Whose is it?

Treece tried to get a look at Beausoleil in the rearview mirror. The mirror was angled toward the driver’s side, however, and he didn’t dare reach up and adjust it. Not that he had to see Beausoleil’s face. He no doubt recognized the voice and might have recognized the grip, too, the grip moving from his skinny neck, thank God, to his skinny shoulder.

It’s Sutton’s, Ricky said uneasily.

Sutton’s? Beausoleil said. He might have guessed. Donald Sutton was a year or two older than Treece. Smarter and meaner, too, with a record of theft, robbery, and assault a foot and some inches long. Like Treece, Sutton had grown up in the vicinity. An older brother had been at South when Beausoleil was there, though they didn’t know each other well enough to say more than hello. Beausoleil heard that Larry Sutton had joined the Marines and gotten killed in Vietnam. South High, at any rate, had been only a memory to Beausoleil by the time Donald came along, and Beausoleil knew him only as a cop knows a robber.

Where’d Donald get it, Ricky? Beausoleil said, noticing the black-and-white Playboy bunny air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

"It’s his, Treece said. He got a job over at Bostrom’s, makes nine-fifty an hour."

Beausoleil grinned. Dumb shit, he thought. As though a job bending metal for a respectable outfit like Bostrom’s lifted a thug like Sutton above suspicion. How about you, Ricky? he said, easing his grip on the man’s bony shoulder. Got yourself a job yet?

Treece was obviously uncomfortable talking over his shoulder, but he didn’t have the nerve to turn around. He clearly didn’t want to go face to face with Beausoleil, who was still a maniac even if he was no longer a cop. I’m looking, he said, trying his best to sound casual.

Beausoleil said, Yeah, I’ll bet. What you’re looking at right now, if I might hazard a guess, is the opportunity to hit that 7-Eleven across the street. Sutton’s in there right now, isn’t he, checking out the security.

Uh-uh, said Treece, glancing over at the brightly lit convenience store on the other side of Superior. He’s getting us some cigarettes and Gatorade.

Leaning forward, Beausoleil looked past Treece toward the convenience store. So how come he parked over here? he said. All that traffic on Superior, a guy has to wait ten minutes till he can cross and even then runs the risk of getting flattened by a fucking bus. The 7-Eleven’s got a lot.

Treece cleared his throat, desperate for time to think.

Donald’s just protecting his car, he said. All the cars coming and going over there, you got assholes opening their doors and dinging your paint job.

Beausoleil sighed loudly. He let go of Treece’s shoulder and sat back, tired of the tough-guy routine. Yeah, well, he said, that’s a possibility I hadn’t thought of, Rick. This is a very handsome automobile all right. A significant investment for a guy bending metal for nine-fucking-fifty an hour. I mean all this leather and a top-drawer tape deck and all.

Sliding over a couple of inches into the middle of the back seat, Beausoleil unzipped the fly of his bogus Dockers, pulled out his cock, leaned forward, and let go of all that coffee and beer in a hard, hot jet that shot between the backs of the two front seats and spattered off the Trans Am’s dashboard and windshield. Spattering, the piss looked like a shower of diamonds glistening in the light from outside.

Treece jumped up and back against the door, banging his head on the car’s roof.

Jesus Christ! he screeched. What the fuck you doing?

Feeling considerable relief, Beausoleil watched his pee dripping from the dashboard controls and the tape deck and the simulated leather grip of the gear shift. He’d even nailed the air freshener hanging from the mirror, setting the cardboard bunny’s head dancing and dripping above the dash. He’d done a lot of sordid things in a car before, but never had he whizzed in one. Taking a long-deferred leak was still one of mankind’s underrated pleasures, he reflected. And he was pleased to note that neither his holding capacity nor the strength of his stream was much diminished by middle age.

Treece, meanwhile, was out of the car, cursing and stumbling around like a drunken sailor, looking down at his white Nikes, stonewashed Levis, and ersatz-leather jacket, an expression of total disbelief on his stupid pocked face. Feeling a couple of gallons lighter, Beausoleil shook himself off, tucked his cock back in his pants, and climbed out of the reeking car.

Treece was looking anxiously in the direction of the 7-Eleven across the street, no doubt checking to see if Sutton was on his way back. Beausoleil could well imagine what Sutton was going to be like, having taken the trouble to park his flashy wheels out of harm’s way only to have someone hose down its interior with an evening’s worth of Maxwell House and Special Export. He could appreciate Treece’s discomfort at the prospect of Sutton’s fury.

If Beausoleil had been armed, he might have waited around to find out for himself. But his Police Special was stashed away in the drawer of his bedside table and he wasn’t even carrying a sap, so he decided he’d probably best be moseying along. He was feeling better than he’d felt all night, and he was looking forward to a tumbler full of ice cubes and Johnnie Red.

Tell Donald to drive real fast with the windows down, he told Treece before strolling off into the night. And tell him to keep going till he hits the Iowa line. Tell him the old neighborhood ain’t very safe anymore.

TWO

The band that played at Rudy and Angela Dicklich’s wedding reception the following Saturday night was called Fine Wine. It comprised three smarmy white guys in powder-blue dinner jackets—two guitars and percussion—singing hits of the ’fifties and ’sixties.

It could be worse, Werther Wolfe—known on East Superior Street as Wolfie—muttered, but not much.

Dave Hagen, standing beside Wolfie at the Porta-Bar, took a sip of his bourbon-and-water and said, Hell, yes. It could be three Rangers with accordions. Dolph Dicklich, Rudy’s dad, had spent the first fourteen years of his life in Biwabik, on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Fine Wine was singing a medley of slow Lennon and McCartney. Jiggs Huntzicker waltzed past the Porta-Bar with Wolfie’s wife, Denise. Huntzicker was tall and silver-haired, light on his feet and distinguished-looking in a pearl-gray double-breasted suit, and he was smiling over the top of Denise’s head, not quite daring to close his eyes and give in to the delicious sensation of Denise’s full-figured body pressing against his, not in front of half the damn neighborhood. Denise, after all, was one of his patients. If he was fooling around with her—which he was, which he had been now and again for the past couple of years—he didn’t think it wise to make a show of it at this place and time, with so many of his other patients, prospective patients, and his horse-faced wife looking on.

So Huntzicker kept his head up and his steely eyes open and a superior smile on his face, knowing he was the envy of every guy in the hall, with the likely exception of Denise’s husband. Wolfie, the dentist would have noted, looked as bored and indifferent as ever, leaning against the bar drinking Dolph’s cut-rate bourbon with Dave Hagen. According to Denise, Wolfie hadn’t made love to her in more than four years. Huntzicker would have thought that amazing—he certainly appreciated his resulting good fortune—if he and his own wife hadn’t been sleeping in separate bedrooms for nearly twice that long.

The ballroom, which belonged to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was crowded and hot. The tall, old-fashioned sash windows were so steamed up that the wedding party and their guests couldn’t tell what it was doing outside. It was cold, Sylvan Yates could tell that, sitting near one of the windows they’d managed to shove open a few inches, but he didn’t know if it was still raining or not. The air coming in smelled wet and raw, like soggy newspapers.

How many of these fandangos do you suppose we’ve been to? said Madeline Yates, sitting beside her son at a round table filled with paper plates, plastic glasses and dinnerware, and little nut cups topped with tiny pastel-colored umbrellas. Madeline, who had just turned eighty, was holding a fresh Parliament up to her garish red lips.

"How many what, Ma—wedding receptions? Sylvan said. He was looking around for Beausoleil. I don’t know, he replied before his mother had a chance to snap at him. A couple- dozen maybe."

Oh, poop! Madeline said. "Three-, four-, five-dozen at least, dummy."

Madeline Yates was four-foot-ten when she was standing. The osteoporosis was shrinking her, curling her into a ball, so when she was seated her tiny, henna-topped head seemed to be perched on the tabletop like a burnt-out jack-o’-lantern the day after Halloween. Sylvan didn’t argue with her. Following his old man’s example, rest his soul, Sylvan left the bickering to his sisters.

Sylvan was eight years old when a Thanksgiving Day fire gutted the northeast corner of the East Superior and Twenty-seventh Avenue intersection. He was between nine and ten when the corner was rebuilt, with