“We ate there last night,” I said to encourage her. “A nice atmosphere.”
“Well — there was a night that man, Mr. Kostner, ate there, and he didn’t eat alone. He came in and I remembered him as staying here, because I’d seen him that morning in the breakfast lounge. I was helping there, too, before cleaning rooms.” She came to a halt and stared into space.
“Take your time,” R. J. prompted.
“He... came into Babcock’s and there was a backup, maybe twenty minutes. All the wait-benches were full. I took a party to their table and, you know, brought drinks, checked my other tables, didn’t give him another thought. But later on I saw him at a table, not one of mine, having his dinner with a young couple, man and woman. They stayed a long time, talking, and one of my tables was across from theirs, so I know I’m right, okay? The young woman in the couple was his daughter — the one who came later to get his things. I helped carry them to her car.”
She looked from me to R. J. and then back. R. J. said, “And I’d guess that if she and her partner had stayed here, you’d have known.”
“Helen checked, okay? But she would have recognized her. Nothing gets by Helen.”
Before we left, R. J. went back to the registration counter and convinced the manager, Helen, that she could save us time and effort by passing along the address and phone number of Tom Kostner’s daughter.
“Sure, she has them,” he claimed as he headed off. “Minneapolis,” he announced on his return.
Teresa Kostner
One day when I was sixteen Dad picked my brother and me up after school, something he never did, and drove us to an apartment building over near Harlem-Irving. Mom could have the house, he said, but we three would be living in two bedrooms plus bath from then on, or until we could find something better.
I was glad.
It wasn’t that Mom and Dad had drifted apart. It was that she had zoned the rest of us out. For years. The fact that she was unfaithful to him — which I pretended not to know — was just a minor part of the picture I personally saw. She started working full-time as a paralegal when I was nine and Mark was six, and over the next few years her job and colleagues and yuppie friends gradually displaced us. Her role in the family became perfunctory, and then it stopped being even that. If Dad was partially to blame for what happened, his share couldn’t have been more than ten percent.
He never talked about it. Instead he would say something once in a while like, “Since no one’s perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and mistakes are a lot like sins. When you sin you have to admit it first, then confess it, then atone for it, then try not to do it again. When you make a mistake, you have to recognize it and own up to it. Then you have to correct it if you can, and avoid making the same mistake twice.” This sounds heavy, I know, but most of the time he didn’t play the heavy father at all. He was enthusiastic and encouraging and understanding.
Everybody loved him but Mom.
There was money in a fund for our college, and even though times were hard he wouldn’t touch it for living expenses, and we never went hungry. I left for college after a year and a half and that meant one less mouth to feed and a bedroom, not the sleeper sofa, for Dad. Then three years later Mark left — that was 2007 — but there was a hitch. Costs had gone up so much that the year we both were in college depleted the trust money to the point that, even though I graduated that spring, what was left wouldn’t see Mark through another whole year, not at Marquette. Dad’s budding business was rocky, too, right then, because the economy was down, and the two things together made him make a mistake, although it didn’t look that way at the time. He wanted Mark to stay at Marquette and graduate debt free the way I had, that was his goal number one, and he also wanted a steadier income source than the freelancing gave him.
When the detective came all the way from Chicago to ask about Dad, I ended up telling him as much. He got it out of me, anyway. I suppose I wanted to talk, and he had a presence you felt you could trust — large, old, passive, and not anyone’s dream in terms of looks. He commiserated with me, losing my dad, said he lost his own when he was even younger than me, said his father still was a kind of secret ideal to him, the person he wanted most to measure up to.
Well, he read me like a book.
He didn’t even try to trap me. He just said a woman had seen me by chance with Dad in a restaurant the night before the suicide, something I’d not mentioned to the RCMP when they finally got hold of me. They hadn’t asked, and I was upset.
The explanation was simple enough. I have a degree in theater, and at the time I was working for a Minneapolis acting troupe as production supervisor — temping on the side to help pay the bills. That August we did a trade-off with a Winnipeg company for a month — they used our space and we used theirs — so I was in Winnipeg when Dad came up, and that Monday I drove out to see him in that little town.
“Tell me about it,” said Mr. Carr. “Take your time.”
I had to think, of course. “I only saw Dad three or four times a year after I moved to the Twin Cities — except on FaceTime every couple of weeks — so it wasn’t a coincidence, him coming to Manitoba when I was there. He planned it so we could see each other.
“He arrived on Sunday morning, we had lunch, and he watched our matinee before heading on. Monday and Tuesday we weren’t performing, so I drove out there around noon. It only took about an hour. We had a late lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon at a park along Lake Winnipeg—”
“What about the young man with you at dinner?”
“Oh.” I had to think about this too. “Yeah, Jess. Well... he’s in the troupe, and he and I were hanging together a lot just then, so he came along, but he wasn’t... he was just there. Anyway, we went to that restaurant and had some beers and some dinner, and I... never saw Dad again. Got back to Winnipeg around dark, and the next day I was running a theater workshop for kids while he... did what he did.”
“And your father was how?” asked the detective. “While you were there?”
I understood.
“He wasn’t sad. He wasn’t relaxed, though. He didn’t want to talk about himself, not in a personal way. He never did that. I’m sure he kept a lot from me about being alone and unhappy, but I know the past couple of years were rough on him. He said this, maybe not in these exact words: ‘I’m thinking of making a big change.’ And I thought he probably was going to quit his job, maybe go back to freelancing.”
“And you’re aware that he’d stopped going to church and quit coaching.”
“Not... really. We didn’t talk about the Catholic church. I left years ago because of — mainly because of the child abuse scandals, but lots of things, really. And the coaching? He might have said he was too busy at work one spring, I sort of remember.”
“So his unhappiness was work related, do you think?”
“That... I’m afraid we mostly talked about me, my life, but I... yeah, his job, that must have had a lot to do with it. But he never said.”
After the man left I had a crying jag. But I hadn’t told too many lies.
R. J. Carr
The Kostner affair was one of those investigations that didn’t go in the direction it should have. What the clients wanted was some kind of explanation as to why a man they had esteemed for his character could first of all abandon his pious and do-gooding proclivities at one jump and secondly, commit suicide in a state of despair.
What Ginny and I found, though, was a different mystery raising a set of new questions that didn’t resolve the original issues or even have much to do with them.