Frank laughed. “Well, I’m glad you remembered the right one for ‘hide.’ The meadowlark was the rescue signal, Liz. The mourning dove call meant, ‘The white man’s horses have been driven off.’”
Phlager asked Frank if he felt up to giving a statement when we got back to Winston Lakes or whether he would prefer to wait until he got back to the university.
“Now’s as good a time as any, I guess,” Frank said.
The sheriff had alerted Mary Louise by radio, and when we got to Winston Lakes she had rounded up the only steno-typist in the county and cleared the sheriff’s desk. She said a number of calls had come in from newspapers and television stations in the area and from wire services in the city.
“They all have police radio scanners, you know,” she said. “What should I be telling them, Mr. Phlager?”
“That Sheriff Reed will get back to them,” Phlager said.
Frank used the sheriff’s department locker room to shower and shave, and Liz went out to see if she could buy him some clean clothes. I phoned the CR&P—not knowing if I would even get an answer from a paper whose editor had gone ’round the bend last night and whose publisher had gone down in flames this afternoon.
But Grace picked up the phone, sounding cheery. When I told him where I was, he was excited.
“Listen, what the hell is going on up there? Mooniman got a tip that the state police radio was full of transmissions that sounded like some kind of war up in Coulee County. Dick says one of the old-timers who hangs around the cop house said it sounded like the time some small town cops got into a shoot-out with the Dillinger gang at little Bohemia, Wisconsin. But the wire services haven’t had a damn thing except advisories saying they are trying to get the story.”
“Well, I’ve got it and it was a sure-enough shoot-out,” I said. “Listen, I’m short of time, so let me dictate a story on what happened, and then I’ll call back with more details if I have some.”
I gave Grace about two columns on the game farm showdown and thought while I was dictating Swift would have loved it. “Terror in the North Woods,” or maybe “Blazing Guns; Watery Grave.”
Before hanging up, I asked Grace who was running the paper.
“Fargo’s back in charge. He showed up in the newsroom this afternoon and told us he was under instructions to take over temporarily. He said there would be an announcement from the owners ‘clarifying the situation’ some time today or tomorrow at the latest.”
A considerably fresher-looking Frank, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt Liz had brought back, was seated in the sheriff’s office sipping coffee when I finished the call. I filled most of a legal pad with notes while he talked and the stenotypist plinked away.
He told the story in detaiclass="underline" being grabbed in front of his apartment building, trussed up while Kehler methodically searched the apartment, being allowed to answer Liz’s phone call with a gun at his head, being led to a car, and the long trip to the game farm.
The first night, Kehler let him stay in the lodge. Frank waited until Kenny fell asleep and attempted to sneak out, but Kehler woke up and caught him.
“He tied me up again and the next morning ordered me to take a cot and mattress into one of the animal cages. Said he didn’t want to keep me tied, but the cage was the only place he could put me if I wasn’t. He couldn’t find a padlock, so he rigged up a doorbell that rang in the lodge when the cage door was opened. Kenny was a pretty good handyman as it turned out,” Frank said.
He stayed in the cage except for trips to the toilet. Twice when Kehler took him into the lodge and tied him to the bed, he went somewhere in the car.
“Once he came back with provisions but had none the second time, and I think he must have gone somewhere to telephone for instructions. He told me to get used to the place because we might be there a couple of weeks.”
But Frank said that night Shiu brought the helicopter to the island, and made several attempts that looked like he was going into the lake until Kehler marked off the landing area with some gas lanterns. “God, was that a hairy landing. But the little bastard really could fly.”
The next day the rescue party arrived.
At that point, Phlager asked Frank if he could describe in any detail the material Kehler had taken from his apartment.
Sanders looked at me and answered, “Well, I guess Bob must have told you I was investigating the ownership of the newspaper for the Center for Inquiry in New York. The stuff Kehler got was everything I had collected. Some good evidence, I think. Now, I reckon anything I tell you is just hearsay and speculation.”
“Well, don’t worry about that, professor,” Phlager said. “That’s most of the information gathered in any criminal investigation. We’ve got some documentary evidence ourselves that may duplicate what you lost.”
He paused and looked at me in the corner of the room. “Are you worried about being quoted? I suppose we could ask Bob and Miss Sanders to step outside…”
“Throw out reporters?” Frank replied. “My God, no. I’d never be able to live with myself. But, Bob, remember, there’s no way right now to back up everything I say.
“The information and the documents I had showed that the newspaper had been purchased by Gene Bright through a dummy holding company. And he never intended to run a legitimate business… this was a multimillion-dollar extortion scheme.”
“Extortion?” Phlager asked. “Now that’s a new wrinkle on this business.”
“Let me give you some background,” Frank said. “This whole thing was a double-cover operation… and a double cross of Granville Swift.”
“Swift wasn’t in on it?” Phlager asked. “How the hell could he not be?”
“Oh, sure, Swift came up with the original idea of getting control of a small town paper close to big cities and turning it into a sensational tabloid,” Frank said.
“He was sure he could produce a daily paper loaded with crime, sex, and ‘people’ news that could preempt the suburban supermarket base of the weekly tabloids and cut into the home delivery circulation of the stodgier metropolitan dailies. He figured once he established the paper’s sales appeal, the big retailers would be easy marks to sell advertising. And since that would be a hell of a threat to the big dailies, the plan had to be kept secret when they first moved in on the small town paper—so that was the first cover.
“Swift couldn’t find any regular publisher willing to take a flyer on his scheme and he ended going to Gene Bright. Bright agreed to invest enough in the idea to test it in several markets and brought Shiu, who was known to the mob from his drug traffic days in the Far East, into the project.
“Shiu was installed as publisher, but his real role was to set up a system to airlift the paper to suburban shopping center parking lots. They bought the big helicopter and the containers Bob spotted in the CR&P motor pool compound to get the papers down to the lots in the middle of the night. From there they would be distributed to stores and coin vending boxes by Bright’s own trucking company.”
I wasn’t supposed to be a part of the process, but without thinking, I interrupted.
“Wait a minute. How did Kehler figure in?”
Phlager gave me an annoyed look, but Frank answered anyway.
“Kenny had been Bright’s flunky for years. Gene sent him to keep an eye on the project… and later watch out for Kirk Bright, Gene’s son.
“I was told by several sources, including Kenny, that Kirk knew his old man had an interest in the newspaper, but not much else. It was his mother who insisted the kid be given a job and Kenny confirmed that he was told to keep him in the dark. From what he said, Gene was not delighted to have the kid there, but gave in to momma. Kenny said, ‘You know what it’s like being married to one of these broads.’”