Starvation Lake

fifteen

Back at the Pilot, black-and-white photographs of a couple in wedding attire covered Delbert Riddle’s desk. The faint reek of a stogie and the tang of film-developing chemicals hung on the air.

“Stop the presses,” I said. “Delbert was actually here?”

“I can confirm a sighting,” Joanie said. “But the minute I started asking about pictures for my story, he was out the door.”

In his twenty-nine years as the Pilot ’s sole staff photographer, Delbert had taken a picture of just about everyone in Starvation Lake. The way he saw it, one good picture was plenty, no matter that over the years people got older, fatter, grayer, balder. “Readers understand,” he’d say whenever he balked at taking a fresh picture of someone he hadn’t photographed in a decade. “It’s nostalgic for people to see how their neighbors looked a long time ago.”

As for Delbert’s own face, he rarely showed it at the Pilot, except to develop pictures, most of which, as far as I could tell, were for his sideline. I doubted those wedding pictures were for the Pilot, although I assumed-or hoped-he’d let us publish one. Henry kept him on, maybe because it was difficult to lure competent shooters to little towns with nasty winters. Delbert came through when we needed him. He also kept meticulous, alphabetized files of all the photos he’d taken in six steel file cabinets up front.

“What photos do we have for your stories?” I said.

“We could use a shot of Blackburn’s funeral,” Joanie said. “And one of Dingus.”

“I should’ve thought to have a map made of where Blackburn went down. Too late now.”

“He knew Blackburn, you know.”

“Delbert? Yeah, he took pictures of him. Or at least one picture.”

“He used to develop game films or something too. Said he made a few dollars off him.”

Coach had had an 8-millimeter movie camera for recording games and the occasional practice. Leo operated it from the bleachers. I hadn’t known that Delbert did the developing.

“Busy guy, Delbert,” I said. “Though you’d never know it around here.”

I sat down at my desk, and there, right where I thought I’d left it, lay the dossier on Soupy’s legal troubles. I resisted the urge to ask Joanie if she’d borrowed it, figuring it was smarter to have her focus on her stories for now. I grabbed a pen and on my blotter jotted, “Council minutes mon a.m.” Joanie sat across the room, still wearing her wool scarf. “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you from your writing, but how exactly do the cops know it’s a bullet hole?”

She stopped typing and let her hands hover motionless over the keyboard, as though she were deciding whether even to acknowledge my question. Be patient, I told myself. She dropped her hands to her knees and turned to face me. Her eyes locked on mine, then went to the clock, then back. “I sent you the Blackburn sidebar,” she said. “Now I really need to just write this. OK, boss?”

“Yes, you can write it, and we’re going to run it, but first I need to know a few things, and I really don’t need a lot of your ‘OK, boss’ crap right now, OK?”

What I’d heard at Mom’s had unsettled me enough. Then came the news of the bullet hole, and Francis’s accusations of Teddy. My head was filled with unanswered questions about $25,000 receipts and ferryboats and vague details in police reports. I was beginning to think everybody in Starvation Lake knew more than I did, and it was starting to piss me off.

“Take a chill pill,” Joanie said. “I don’t know much, but what I know, I know. There’s a bullet hole, and that’s news.”

“Agreed. Got two sources?”

“Yes.”

I assumed D’Alessio was one. “What does Dingus say?”

“Not talking.”

The story would certainly raise a ruckus. Although the word “murder” wasn’t about to appear in our stories, everyone would read it between the lines. Most people didn’t want to hear that Jack Blackburn had been murdered. I wanted to be sure we were right. Or at least close.

“Let’s just talk here, between us,” I said. “Think about it. How the hell do you know there’s a bullet hole in something that’s been submerged in eighty feet of water for ten years? How can you be sure?”

She drew herself up in the chair and gave me a knowing smile. How sweet it was to have a dumb-shit editor ask you a question to which you had the perfect reply. “Well,” she said, “they have a bullet.”

“They do? What caliber?”

“Twenty-two.”

Who in Starvation Lake owned a. 22-caliber handgun or rifle? Just about everybody. It wasn’t much good for killing deer, but it was handy for muskrats and chipmunks. “Where was it?” I said. “Did it lodge somewhere inside the snowmobile or-”

The phone on my desk rang. I slid back and grabbed it. “Pilot.”

I heard static, then, “Trap.” Soupy was on his truck phone. I could hear the pickup’s rumble.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got to talk to you, man.”

“I’m on deadline. Drop down later.”

“Not your office.”

For some reason, Soupy would never come to the Pilot. Since returning to town, I’d asked him to meet me there a few times and each time he’d made an excuse.

“Enright’s then?” I said. “Seven?”

Another burst of static made me pull the phone away from my ear. “No,” I heard him say. “Fuck.” He’d been drinking. He sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of fishhooks. “Trap,” he said. “I’ll-” Static obliterated him. The phone went dead.

“What?” Joanie said.

I shook my head. “Where were we?”

“You asked where the bullet was. In the snowmobile, obviously. But I don’t know exactly. My source was being a little cagey.”

No, I thought, D’Alessio was too dumb to be cagey. “Hold on-were there any reports of gunshots being fired that night?”

“Not on Starvation Lake.”

“Of course, and this happened-well, shit, we don’t know where the hell it happened. Or even what happened. Are the cops saying-wait, are the cops actually saying it was murder?”

“The cops aren’t saying anything, officially. But there’s a press conference tomorrow. I overheard a dispatcher calling the TV guys.”

“So that’s your second source? Of course. TV brings the Dingus bear out of hibernation.”

“Yes. So can I please write this now?”

For the next hour, the only sounds in the room were the clacking of our keyboards and the rattle of the printer. Joanie’s profile of Blackburn contained all the salient facts: Make-Believe Gardens. The near-misses in the state tournament. The town’s growing repute in amateur hockey circles. The letdown since his passing. The story noted that Blackburn, via his partnership with Dufresne, had become a fixture at local ribbon cuttings and dedications. The story also briefly recounted what the Pilot had reported about his accident, including what Leo told the police in 1988. Leo had politely rebuffed Joanie’s effort to speak with him about it. The story said, “Redpath referred a reporter to his attorney, Peter Shipman, who declined to comment.” I had to wonder why Leo would hire a lawyer, unless-I put the thought out of mind and turned to Joanie. “The sidebar looks good,” I said. “But did you ever figure out what happened to that one-year gap in Blackburn’s Canada period?”

“One second,” she said, typing. “Um, no, sorry, didn’t nail it yet.”

The phone rang. I picked it up without thinking. “Pilot.”

“Keeeeee-rist,” the voice on the line said. It was my boss, Henry Bridgman, calling from Traverse City. “What are you doing answering on deadline?”

I smiled. “I knew it was you and you must have something important to tell me, like what kind of polish you use on Kerasopoulos’s Caddy.”

“Haw! I meant to call yesterday but all I had was goddamn budget meetings. On Saturday, for Christ’s sake. Even missed the Wings game. I swear I spend half my days here picking goddamn doughnut sprinkles out of my teeth. Anyway, I won’t keep you, just wanted to slip you a little intelligence. Got good news and bad news.”

“Bad first, please.”

“You won’t believe this. They’re canning our motto.”

“No way. ‘Michigan’s Finest Bluegill Wrapper’?”

“Yeah. Apparently they did some focus groups, who told them it’s an anachronism, and not all that professional. Tell the truth, I can’t believe it lasted this long.”

“We’ll catch hell.”

“Not as much as we caught when I moved the crossword off A-2. Most folks probably won’t even notice.”

“What’s the good news?”

“You didn’t hear it from me, but your old pal’s getting kicked upstairs.”

Henry was finally going to make the move to corporate. That meant I had a shot at taking over as executive editor of the Pilot.

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. The missus won’t be happy about moving over here, but these people sign the checks. As for you, I think I’ve got ’em sold. You know the town and the job and you know you made some mistakes before and it won’t happen again. It won’t be a done deal for a few days. But the job is yours to lose.”

I’d figured my career was over when I left Detroit. I sent my resume and clips to other dailies around the country. Most didn’t call; maybe they’d heard I was damaged goods. For those who did inquire, I had a hard time explaining why I was leaving the Times. I found myself hiding out in my apartment, afraid to go outside where I might run into one of the other Times people. Eventually I ran out of money. With nowhere to work and nowhere to live, I figured I’d go back to Starvation Lake, spend a little time with Mom, maybe work with Soupy, regroup. After all, my problems really had begun there; I’d just carried them with me to Detroit. Besides, going home seemed fitting punishment for my mistakes in Detroit. Henry goaded me into coming back to the Pilot. “Just till you get your bearings again,” he said. At least I could make a living, or half a living, doing something I didn’t mind doing.

“Thanks, Henry.”

“Not a problem. You’ll get a little raise, and you’ll go into the bonus pool. Now, one other thing: What’s up with this story on the Bigfoot guy?”

I lowered my voice. “We’ve got a little more work to do.”

“Well, you might want to go slow, eh? Let them put your name on the masthead before you start stirring the pot.”

“Right.”

“And by the way, I like my steak medium rare.”

“You got it.”

“What do you got going for tomorrow?”

“Hang on,” I told him, hitting the hold button. Did I really want to tell him about the bullet hole? Would he tell me to hold off on that, too? Of course Henry had known Blackburn, had written some of the stories about his accident. But he didn’t know yet what was really going on. It was too late to hold Joanie’s stories. Better for Henry if he could tell his bosses he didn’t know about them.

I got back on the phone. “Henry, I gotta run,” I said.

“Be good.”

After editing Joanie’s bullet hole story, I ran down to Fortune Drug and picked up six Pabsts, a bag of nacho chips, and a container of cheese dip. I thought I’d treat Joanie. Over the years I’d learned that getting close to people I envied made me feel better, as if they could forgive my selfishness by sharing their success.

When I walked back into the Pilot, Joanie pointed at my phone, where the hold light was blinking. “Fleming?” I guessed.

“No,” Joanie said. “Somebody Trenton? From Detroit?”

“Get rid of him, please.”

“Does this have something to do with your, uh, situation down there?”

“Get rid of him and maybe I’ll tell you.”

Scott Trenton was the attorney I’d had to hire in my final days in Detroit. Joanie told him I was on deadline. There was a pause. Trenton was too scrupulous to say why he had called, but frustrated enough to use silence to express his displeasure. While she took down his number, I went up front and called Boynton’s lawyer, Fleming. I hadn’t done a thing with that dossier on Soupy. I didn’t expect him to be there on a Sunday night, and he didn’t answer. I left a message.

“So,” Joanie said when I returned. She had popped a beer. “Who’s Trenton and why does he keep calling you?”

I lifted her backpack off a chair next to her desk and set it on the floor.

“This thing weighs a ton,” I said. “What do you keep in here?”

“Everything,” she said. “You know, this Trenton dude left a bunch of messages on the machine yesterday.”

“Not when I checked.”

“Maybe they bounced to the Sound Off line.”

Every Tuesday in the Pilot, readers were invited to respond to the weekly Sound Off question: Should deer hunting season be extended? What are your favorite spring flowers? Do you prefer powdered sugar or syrup on your pancakes? The answering machine recorded their phoned-in responses. Answers ran on Saturdays with photographs of the readers quoted.

“What’s Till got for Sound Off this week?” I said.

“Something stupid about people shoveling off their roofs.”

“It’s always something stupid.”

“No kidding. My favorite was the one that asked if people thought it was wrong-like a sin or something-to leave their Christmas lights up past Easter.”

We both laughed.

“So what about Trenton?” Joanie said.

“No, no, wait,” I said, trying to keep the subject changed. “Let’s come up with something for Sound Off, something even funnier.”

“Tillie’ll be ticked.”

“Tillie will get over it. Come on. Here, stoke those creative fires.”

I opened two beers and handed Joanie one. She looked at her first beer, still nearly full. She shrugged. She set the fresh beer down, picked up the first, pulled her hair back from her face with one hand, and chugged the rest of the beer. Her hair tumbled back onto her shoulders as she loosed a guttural belch.

“Whoa,” I said.

“I’m such a pig,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.

“I’m not sure you’ll be able to do that at the New York Times. ”

She grabbed the next beer. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” she said. “Listen. ‘Sound Off: How do you keep your kids from belching at the dinner table?’”

“Not bad,” I said. “But how about…” I looked around the room. “‘Sound Off: Should the county outlaw buzzing fluorescent lamps?’”

“Yes! And ‘Sound Off: Why does every darn door around here have those little bells?’ And ‘Is there one eligible man around here who doesn’t live in a trailer and start every morning with a tomato-juice-and-beer?’”

We laughed again and drank. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe Tillie can out-stupid us any day.”

Joanie propped her boot heels against the edge of her desk. “Do you really think I could make it at the New York Times?” she said.

She has the chops, I thought, and she’s smart and usually solemn enough to fit in with those East Coast pinheads. But the evening’s flash of silliness made me wonder if she might be better off in Cleveland or Chicago. I’d never send her to Detroit.

“Honestly,” I said, “you really can’t expect to be a reporter of that caliber unless you can and will use profanity with remorseless abandon. Try this: ‘motherfucker.’ Go ahead. Say it.”

She stared at me blankly.

“OK. You might be able to handle New York,” I said. “Though you might need a little more experience than the Pilot. ”

“No, duh. Did you ever have a chance to work there?”

“The New York Times? Yeah, right, and the Pilot outbid them for my services. No, Joanie, in case you hadn’t noticed, my career has taken a slightly different direction. I’m thinking my next job will be covering volleyball for the Needle. ” The Needle was the paper at Pine County High School.

“Don’t sell yourself short. I know about those truck stories you wrote.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m up here in shitsville rewriting Kiwanis Club announcements.”

“All right, all right. I got rid of Trenton. Now give it up.”

She’d probably read about my departure from the Detroit Times in the Columbia Journalism Review, which had run a short item saying I’d resigned amid an unspecified controversy over my truck stories. “Carpenter declined to comment,” the story said, “as did executives at the Detroit Times and Superior Motors, citing the possibility of litigation.” Rumors had bounced around the Times newsroom, but no one knew the truth. According to my severance agreement, I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But who would know if I told Joanie?

“They want my source,” I said.

“Your what?”

“They want the name of someone who helped me on those stories. They want me to give up an anonymous source.”

“Who wants?”

“Superior Motors.”

She let her feet fall to the floor and leaned forward. She looked at me hard, as if she’d never seen me before. “Gus, what in hell are you talking about?”

Hell? I thought. Joanie had said hell. I told her everything.

I had gone to Detroit when I was twenty-two years old, carrying with me the vain and preposterous goal of winning a Pulitzer Prize. And not because I thought it might help my career or fatten my wallet. What I wanted was to take whatever fancy certificate they gave you for winning a Pulitzer back to Starvation Lake and hang it on the jangling damn door at Audrey’s, where Coach and Elvis Bontrager and everyone else could see it. Then they’d know who I was.

I almost pulled it off.

I spent most of 1996 writing about Superior Motors’ XP-model pickup trucks. The trucks were big sellers that made big profits. But they had a problem. Their fuel tanks sat between the chassis and the outer shell of the truck like eggs in a vise. In crashes, the tanks ruptured and gasoline ignited, causing explosions and fires. Hundreds of people had been severely burned. Some had died. Superior had kept it quiet by buying the silence of victims and survivors with out-of-court cash settlements. Almost no one noticed until I started writing about it. Eventually, the TV newsmagazines started airing pieces, the national papers followed, the government started investigating. It was the kind of story you waited your whole career for. And it kept getting better.

One family, the Hanovers of Valparaiso, Indiana, refused to take Superior’s hush money. Justin Hanover had been a seventeen-year-old basketball player with a decent jump shot who wore baggy jeans that hung to his butt crack and a fake diamond stud in his left ear. He played chess and liked Nick Lowe records and had a girlfriend named Jennifer, one of four Jennifers he’d dated in high school. One night on his way home after dropping Jennifer off, he was broadsided by a drunk driver in a Honda Accord. Justin’s 1991 XP pickup truck exploded beneath him. Eyewitnesses heard him screaming inside the flaming cab but couldn’t get near enough to help him.

In the courtroom, the Hanover family’s attorneys cited some of my stories as evidence that Superior executives and lawyers knew the trucks were dangerous but did nothing to fix them. My reporting showed that Superior had buried an internal study that portrayed the trucks as unsafe, that the company had attempted to hire a government investigator working on the case, that one highly placed executive was demoted after arguing that Superior should admit the trucks were unsafe. The jury found this behavior repugnant and awarded the Hanovers $3 million in compensatory damages-equal to Superior’s latest settlement offer-and an additional $351 million in punitive damages, or $1 million for every known truck fatality due to fire. The jury’s forewoman said jurors wanted to punish Superior for “a willful neglect bordering on the amoral.”

A good deal of my reporting depended on a longtime source I had inside the company. As a mid-to-high-level marketing executive, he had access to a great deal of valuable information, such as the next models Superior would be building, where it was closing or expanding plants, which bosses were hot or not. He’d call me with tips, feed me internal memos, confirm stuff I’d uncovered elsewhere. On occasion he leaked information that wasn’t flattering to Superior. I asked him once why he did this, and he said, “If I don’t dish some dirt, then the fluff has no credibility, does it?” Which was true. I didn’t worry about his motives because I believed, foolishly, that motivations had little or no bearing on whether something was factual. It was either a fact or it wasn’t, regardless of who happened to whisper it to you. And he had never fudged his facts or otherwise steered me wrong.

It would’ve been hard to pick him out of a roomful of Superior executives. Like most, he was white, trim, lightly tanned, with a charcoal suit, starched white shirt, dull red tie, every salt-and-pepper hair in place. He wore a smile as routinely as most guys wear a T-shirt. After we got to know each other a little, he told me to forget his real name and refer to him as “V.” That way, he said, I was unlikely to unmask him even if I did slip and mention him around anyone from Superior.

One day in May of 1996, V left a message to meet him that evening at Fran amp; Jerry’s, a pub on Detroit’s northwest side. When I arrived, the front door was propped open to let the sun in. Stevie Wonder was singing through a tinny radio behind the bar. V waited in a varnished wood booth in the back. He had removed his tie. A thin stack of papers rested facedown in front of him. We ordered a Pabst and a Michelob.

“So what’s up?” I said.

“You’re busting our balls, my friend,” V said. He meant the pickup truck stories. By then I had written just two or three.

“Pretty interesting stuff,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “A kid in flames, a big, bad company, all the ingredients.”

I didn’t respond, but I was thinking, yes, all the ingredients. The waitress brought our beers. V asked for a glass. Then he removed reading glasses from his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose. He turned his papers faceup and scanned the first page, then the second.

“You might find this interesting, too.” His eyes flicked up at me over the spectacles. “Off the record, for now?”

“Sure.”

“And the fact that I’m giving it to you is totally off the record.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

At first, I couldn’t tell what the pages were. The Superior letterhead marked them as clearly from inside the company, but they didn’t look to be a memorandum. More like a script. Each page was filled with entries, some lengthy, some as short as a few words. One said: “Mark, it’s Laurie, give me a shout back.” Each was labeled with numerals that appeared to denote a date and time. The entries made frequent references to the XP trucks.

“This isn’t Friedman, is it?” I asked V.

“That would be Mark Friedman, yes,” V said. Friedman was Superior’s general counsel.

“So Laurie would be, uh, Lauren Watson?”

“Wilson.”

“Right.” An assistant general counsel. “So this other guy’s got to be, what’s his name? Reichs.” Howie Reichs was Superior’s top safety executive.

I kept flipping through the pages. “I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s like they’re not in the same room. I can tell from these things”-I turned a page toward V and indicated the time-and-date notations-“that they’re not even talking at the same time. Some of these are like an hour or so apart.”

“Very good.”

“It’s not e-mail?”

“Close.” The waitress set a tulip glass down. V picked it up and tilted it as he poured so that the beer barely had a head on it. “Not quite so modern.”

“Voice mail?”

He nodded.

“Transcripts of voice mails?”

“Did you notice what they’re talking about?”

“Yeah, your pickup trucks.”

“You’re selling yourself short, my friend.”

I took a minute to reread the first few pages more slowly. “Oh,” I said. “Holy shit.”

The people on the pages were talking about me and my stories and some questions I had asked. “Look at this,” I said. “They’re plotting how to bullshit me. Friedman says, ‘I think we can provide Mr. Carpenter an answer that will make him think we’ve actually given him one.’”

“Stop the presses,” V said sarcastically.

“Goddamn voice mail. Where did you get this?”

“Not going there.”

OK, I thought, you’ll tell me eventually. “Can I keep these?”

V hesitated. I thought maybe I’d sounded a little too eager. The music faded. I heard traffic hissing past outside.

“You cannot quote from them,” he said.

“What? Come on.”

“No.”

“Then what good are they?”

“You don’t need to quote. You can read the lawyers’ minds.”

“But what good is it to read their minds about stuff that’s”-I looked at one of the date notations-“two weeks old? That doesn’t-”

“There’s more.”

“Like from when?”

“Like, for instance,” he said, taking a dainty sip of his Michelob, “you called about that government study.”

I had called that very morning about federal regulators preparing a new study of deaths in the trucks. “Jesus,” I said.

A briefcase sat next to V. He snapped it open and drew out a manila envelope stuffed with paper. “Here,” he said, handing me the envelope. “No quoting. Read, understand, use them to figure out what’s going on. Better to fish where you know the fish are, am I right?”

I couldn’t disagree. “Is this it?”

“Until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I tried not to show my excitement. “How are you getting these?”

“You don’t need to know. Use them productively. Or don’t.”

“Then why? Why are you doing this?”

V shrugged. “It’s the right thing to do? You’d never buy that. Let’s just say the truck people have it coming.”

At Superior, there were car people, like V, and there were truck people. The car people had grown considerably less glamorous-and got less and less of the company’s money-as pickups and sport-utilities had caught the public’s fancy. But was it enough to turn V against his own company? Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t care.

It worked like this: I’d open a line of questioning with Superior about some aspect of the trucks. Every Thursday after six, I’d walk to the bus station on Michigan Avenue, where I had rented a locker. I’d put a key in locker number 927, and remove three or four unmarked manila envelopes bulging with transcripts. I’d hustle them home and read what Superior lawyers and safety engineers and the occasional executive had said to one another about my questions. Then I knew exactly what to ask in my next round. I took care to word my queries generally enough so that the flacks wouldn’t make connections I didn’t want them to make. It wasn’t quite like I was sitting on the nineteenth floor at Superior headquarters, but it was close.

The voice-mail transcripts helped me write some of my biggest stories, several of which found their way into the Hanover trial. When the verdict came down, Detroit Times editors started preparing to nominate my stories for a Pulitzer. None of the editors knew about the voice mails. Because I’d never quoted from them, I didn’t feel the need to tell anyone about them. I told myself that this further assured that my source’s anonymity would be protected. And why should it matter anyway, I thought, so long as the stories were right?

One Thursday in late November, I opened locker 927 and saw no envelopes. Damn, I thought. I’d assumed that V eventually would decide that the truck guys had had enough bad press and my gravy train would end. But way in the back of the locker I saw a single sheet of paper. I had to get up on my toes to pull it out. The paper looked to be a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. The Superior letterhead was smeared black. A column of barely readable surnames, each matched with a six-digit number, ran down the page. I recognized the names of Superior lawyers and flacks. “No way,” I said. The numbers had to be their voice-mail pass codes.

An old man sitting against the lockers turned to me as if I’d spoken to him. He was eating a Hostess Sno Ball wrapped in a wrinkled napkin. Pink flakes of coconut stuck to the front of his sweatshirt.

“What am I going to do with this?” I said.

“Up to you,” he said.

Of course I had no idea why V had just given me the codes. I tried to reach him, without success. I thought maybe he’d gone on vacation. At the time I was working on a story that was supposed to wrap the entire year of truck news into one long, dramatic narrative. The bosses had ordered it up as the capper of our Pulitzer entry. I already had plenty of strong material for the story, but I wanted something really fresh and juicy.

I thought the voice-mail transcripts were probably stolen goods, although I didn’t know for sure because V never broached the subject and I never asked. Reporters aren’t supposed to accept materials they know to be stolen. Of course we take stuff all the time that we suspect has been procured through illegal or at least questionable means. It isn’t quite like buying a car stereo from a fence, but when we suspect the stuff we’re getting is hot, we justify taking it by telling ourselves that we aren’t the thieves and the public is being served.

The rationalizations weren’t so easy, though, when it came to the voice-mail pass codes. I hadn’t stolen the codes, of course. And I didn’t even know for certain that V had stolen them. But if I used them to listen to voice mails, and if listening to voice mails was theft, then, perhaps, I would be a thief. But would that be worse than knowingly allowing people to burn to death?

I didn’t think about it too hard. I used the codes twice. After midnight. From a phone booth outside the bus station. A few didn’t work; their owners had probably changed them. Others did work. The editors cleared space for my last great story to run on the front page on the last Sunday of the year.

Three days before, I attended an annual holiday get-together hosted by Superior. About twenty reporters, half a dozen flacks, and a few execs gathered at a restaurant in downtown Detroit for too many drinks, a dried-out dinner, and some phony laughs. Over the years I’d come to loathe the dinner, but I always worried that if I didn’t go, my competitors might beat me to a story. I was waiting at the bar when I overheard two midlevel execs talking about a “purge.” I hoped I’d misunderstood. At dinner I dropped a casual question. There had indeed been a round of early retirement buyouts the company hadn’t publicized. Certain execs-V’s name came up-had declined the buyout, but their bosses had leaned on them to resign.

I excused myself from the table and went to the men’s room and locked myself in a stall. I hoped no one had seen my face go pale or the cold sweat bead up on my forehead. V had been gone from Superior for nearly eight months. He’d left weeks before he started giving me the transcripts. Now I knew, without having to ask anyone, that every single thing V had supplied me with was stolen, that he’d had an ax to grind and a reason-a bad one-to use me. So the motivations trumped the facts, after all. There was nothing I could do about the stories that had already been published. But as I sat there staring at the muddy shoeprints on the floor, I contemplated the bitter knowledge that there was time to spike my last great story-and along with it, my chance at a Pulitzer.

I was shivering at a pay phone when I finally reached V at home just after 1:00 a.m.

“You got fired and you don’t tell me?” I said.

“You woke me up.” V yawned. “I didn’t get fired. I took a buyout.”

“I needed to know.”

“Why? You wouldn’t have taken the transcripts then? You would’ve just told me to keep them?”

My temper was rising. “If I’d known you stole them and was trying to screw the company, goddamn right I would’ve told you to keep them.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“So just forget it then,” V said. “You didn’t know they were stolen-and I’m not saying they were-but you didn’t know, so you’re fine. You can plead ignorance. Just take my last little gift and throw it away.”

He was taunting me. “OK, Ernest,” I said. Then I pronounced his full name.

V chuckled. “What are you going to do, get me fired? Remember, my friend, we were off the record. Blowing my cover would get you in more trouble than me.”

He was right, of course. Many of the rules of journalism are dressed in shades of gray, but this one is black and white: If you promise a source anonymity, you never reveal his or her identity. You keep your mouth shut. You go to jail before you unmask an anonymous source. A reporter who ratted out a source might as well leave the profession for good.

I hung up the phone without saying another word.

Pellets of sleet pricked my cheeks as I walked home. I’m screwed, I thought. It wasn’t V’s fault, either. Sure, he hadn’t told me the whole truth, but I had never sought it; hell, I’d avoided it. I’d worried less about his angle than I did about cops at the bus station suspecting me of drug dealing. And now, yes, technically I could plead ignorance about everything V had given me except that last little gift, the pass codes. On that count, I was dead. I’d used the codes to write my final masterpiece. The only way to absolve myself of that sin would be to go in that morning and confess to my editors.

Instead, I called in sick. I phoned in the final changes to my story. It ran that Sunday at the top of the front page and jumped inside to an entire page of copy dressed up with photographs and charts. The next week, I helped my bosses draft a letter nominating me for a Pulitzer Prize. All along, I kept telling myself that that last story-and every single story I had written about Superior’s pickup trucks-was true, that none of what I had reported would ever have come out if I had not used the voice mails, that no one ever would have known how Superior had tried to cover up its deadly mistakes. The stories were right, I told myself, and that’s all that matters.

Six months later, I was summoned to the office of Wendy Grimm, executive editor of the Times.

She sat behind a massive oak desk in a charcoal suit embellished by a bloodred silk scarf, her gray eyes fixed on a stapler she was fiddling with. A Times attorney named Ferris, whom I’d met once when he had reviewed and praised one of my Superior truck stories, sat glumly beside the desk. Grimm took her eyes off the stapler long enough to motion me into a chair. Her secretary closed the door behind me, shutting out the clatter of the newsroom.

“Gus,” Grimm said. She set the stapler down. “We have an issue.”

Wendy Grimm was a rising star in All-Media Corporation, the agglomeration of newspapers, TV and radio stations, and quick-copy companies that owned the Times. She’d come to the Times, her fifth newspaper in eleven years, only two years before and was expected to advance to the corporate offices in Dallas once she’d made her mark in Detroit. She’d had me in her office just a few months earlier to congratulate me on having my Superior truck stories selected as one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. That day she’d stood beaming at the framed certificates on the wall bearing witness to Pulitzers won by the Times in 1931 and 1954. “You’re next, Gus,” she’d said, knowing full well that my Pulitzer would be regarded by the corporate bosses as her Pulitzer.

After the Washington Post won the prize for a six-part series on the Congressional Budget Office, I’d actually felt relieved, because I had grown secretly terrified that winning the biggest prize might draw closer scrutiny of my reporting methods. Although I had continued to write an occasional story about Superior’s trucks, I’d cut off contact with V, rid myself of the bus station locker, and successfully resisted calling the voice mails again. I thought I’d put the previous year’s stories far enough behind me.

All of that changed when Wendy Grimm opened a desk drawer, took something out, and laid it on the desk in front of me. I immediately recognized the key to my old bus station locker, with “927” engraved on its bright orange fob. I felt Grimm and Ferris gauging my eyes and tried to stay calm through the sudden feeling that the bottom of my stomach was about to drop out.

“Tell us, Gus,” Wendy Grimm said. “Just how did you go about accessing Superior’s voice-mail system?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Only a couple of times.”

“Enough to get caught. Superior set up a trace.”

Yes, I thought. But the stories were true.

We sat there for a moment in silence. Wendy Grimm broke it.

“So who was your source?”

“The stories were true,” I said.

She picked up the stapler and slammed it down on her blotter. “Is that your rationalization for stealing property that wasn’t yours?” she said. “Who was your source?”

I looked at Ferris, then back at Wendy Grimm. “My source was anonymous,” I said.

“That isn’t what I asked,” she said. “Did you tell any of your editors about this person?”

“No one asked and, anyway, I didn’t need to tell anyone because I didn’t quote the voice mails.”

Wendy Grimm pressed her lips together and leaned forward over her hands, which were now folded together so tightly that her knuckles were white. “Gus, Superior is threatening lawsuits and some rather unflattering publicity. If we knew who your source was, we might be more comfortable in trying to deter them. If it was someone at Superior, I want his or her name. You will give it to me. Now.”

Normally a reporter would reveal an anonymous source’s name to an editor, who would then be bound by the same oath of confidentiality. At most papers, including the Times, refusing to do so was an offense that could get you fired. But it was clear by then that I was a goner anyway, and that this wasn’t about me or Superior or the trucks or even the Times. A fire was raging in Wendy Grimm’s building and she had to extinguish it before it spread to All-Media Corporation.

“I’m no longer in touch with the source,” I said. “He stays anonymous. That was my deal.”

“ Your deal, Gus? Your deal? Who do you think you work for? Do you realize how much shit you’ve brought down on me-on us, the Times, all of your colleagues?”

“Those trucks are burning people to death and Superior knows it. Every word I wrote was true.”

She smiled the brittle smile of a climber who could feel the rungs of the ladder snapping off beneath her feet. “We’re in a place now where that has become irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.” She turned to Ferris. “Phil?”

Ferris unfolded his praying mantis arms and outlined the lawsuits Superior was threatening: libel, slander, invasion of privacy, theft. One way or the other, he said, my methods would become known. The paper, my colleagues, Wendy Grimm, All-Media, all would be disgraced. Further, a libel jury might well have to disregard any evidence I’d collected with the help of the voice mails, because they were stolen property.

“Libel my butt,” I said. “Truth is a defense, as you told us over and over in your little newsroom seminars.”

Ferris looked annoyed. “Truth is not a defense,” he said, “until you’ve established what the truth is, until you’ve proven the truth.”

Wendy Grimm’s phone burbled electronically; she started to pick it up, then decided against it.

“Unfortunately,” Ferris continued, “without the aid of your purloined voice mails, we can’t prove very much, which means we’d be liable to lose a libel action.”

“These people are killers.”

“And we’d lose big,” Wendy Grimm said. Her phone rang again; again she ignored it. “We’re in discussions with Superior. The long and short of it is, we need you to resign, effective immediately.” She placed in front of me a single sheet of paper. At the bottom I saw my full name, “Augustus J. Carpenter,” typed where I was supposed to sign away my job. Until that morning, I had told myself that even if I did get caught with the voice mails, I’d only have to endure a beat change or maybe a suspension. They’d never fire me for writing stories that were true. Certainly not at Superior’s behest, and not without a fight. But sitting there, with my name in capital letters staring up at me, I knew I was dead.

Ferris withdrew an expensive-looking pen from inside his jacket. “Sign, please,” he said, “or we will be forced to terminate you.”

“They’re killing people.”

Wendy Grimm’s secretary ducked her head into the office. “It’s Al on four,” she said. “Better pick up.” I could hear computer keys clacking in the newsroom outside. Grimm held up one finger to hold the call.

“I don’t have time for this, Gus,” she said. “Just sign the damn letter. Or don’t sign, and you can get yourself into even more trouble.” She pressed a button on her phone. “Security, please.”

My brain stopped working then. I felt like I felt when we’d lost a hockey game in sudden-death overtime. When you lose like that, it happens so fast that at first you can’t believe it. But then you see the refs leaving and the other team celebrating and you look up at the zeroed-out clock and the certainty of your failure tears through you like a tumbling bullet. Losing in regulation time doesn’t hurt as much. The clock runs down. You prepare. In overtime, you just die.

I took the pen.

Soon, I was back in Starvation Lake. With my first Pilot paycheck I made part of a down payment on a used Ford pickup truck.

Two days before Christmas, my lawyer called. I had never met Scott Trenton, having hired him over the phone on the recommendation of another Times reporter who had used him for her divorce.

“The news isn’t too frigging favorable,” he said. I was in my kitchen, wrapping gifts for Mom. A robe, a fancy cribbage board, a gift certificate for dinner at a restaurant in Ellsworth. Freezing rain had coated my window with ice. For months I had heard nothing about my situation as the Times and Superior tried to negotiate a settlement that would avert a libel suit. Superior’s lawyers would have loved to stick the paper for a front-page apology, but the company’s executives weren’t eager for anything that would draw more attention to their death-trap trucks.

Trenton explained that Superior was seeking the Times ’s cooperation in the Hanover litigation. The Hanovers were the Indiana family who had lost their son Justin in a flaming truck and later won the $354 million verdict against Superior, based in part on my stories. Superior had appealed. Now it wanted the Times to file an affidavit with the court stating that my stories were less than accurate, which might in turn nudge the court to throw the case out. The Hanovers would then have to decide whether to endure a second trial and another six to twelve months of reliving their son’s death.

“It’s not pretty,” Trenton said. “So far, Superior and the paper haven’t been able to agree on the language of the affidavit. But they’ll get there. They’ll probably file one minute before five o’clock on New Year’s Eve.”

There was more. In separate settlement negotiations between Superior and the Hanovers, the family had agreed to drop their lawsuit in return for Superior contributing $200 million to a fund that would subsidize alterations of the trucks for owners who wanted them. The Hanovers would also receive a $5 million cash payment, most of which would go to their lawyers.

“They won’t get the windfall,” Trenton said, “but some of the trucks might actually get safer.”

“That’s what they said they wanted all along.”

“Between you and me and the barn door, Gus, plaintiffs always say that. Really most of them want a mountain of cash and maybe a CEO with his testicles in a bear trap.”

“The Hanovers are good people.”

He paused. “Yes, they are. Which is what makes this last little detail a bit of a problem. Superior has stipulated that a condition of their going through with the Hanover deal is you have to give them the name of your voice-mail source.”

“They can’t do that.”

“They’re doing it, friend.”

“They must know who it is. They had the key to my damn locker.”

“Whether they know or not, Gus, they want you to tell them, OK? If you don’t, the Hanovers don’t get their settlement.”

“The hell with them.”

“Then it’s the hell with the Hanovers, too, because Superior says this is not negotiable. No name, the deal with the family’s off, and they take their chances on the appeal, which won’t be too good after the Times tells the court your stories are bullshit.”

“But they weren’t bullshit.”

“Frigging tough to argue in the shoes you’re wearing now.”

My anger felt like it would suffocate me there in my kitchen, surrounded by wrapping paper and Scotch tape. I wanted to shove the phone through the icy windowpane into the pelting needles of rain.

“I can’t fucking believe this.”

“Believe,” Trenton said. “And one more thing: If you don’t give up the name, Superior will also go after you for felony theft.”

“Why the hell do they care so much about the source?”

“I wish I knew. All their lawyers will say is they have their reasons.”

“Right. They want to fuck with me. So, basically, I can screw the Hanovers or I can screw myself. Either way, Superior comes out OK, and tough shit for all the poor bastards who fry in their trucks.”

“My advice?” Trenton said. “Give the guy up.”

“How do you know it’s-”

“Shut the hell up a second and listen to your attorney. You’re pissed off and I don’t blame you. But you don’t owe this voice-mail guy or gal or whatever a thing. You two made a deal: He tells the truth, you protect his identity. But he didn’t tell you he’d been canned. He lied. You couldn’t know his motives were questionable. That’s a breach of contract. You’re no longer under any legal obligation to cover for him.”

Technically, he may have been right, but I didn’t think that V had lied to me. As a journalist, it was nice to imagine that, in extending the cloak of anonymity, you were protecting brave and noble people who were risking their livelihoods or maybe even their lives to tell you things you weren’t supposed to know and were unlikely to learn otherwise. But a lot of the time-hell, most of the time-you weren’t protecting the brave or the noble. Most of the time you were shielding lawyers and flacks and lobbyists and other dissemblers who knew exactly how to exploit your convenient little rule of anonymity so they could shape your story without leaving fingerprints. Yes, V hadn’t told me the whole truth. But I never sought the whole truth. V told me what I wanted to hear, and I eagerly, willingly, hungrily swallowed it. He got what he wanted, I got what I wanted. And the truth was now, as Wendy Grimm had said, irrelevant.

“When do they need to know?” I asked Trenton.

“ASAP.”

“Merry Christmas, Scott,” I said, as I dropped the receiver in the cradle. Then I picked it up again and dialed V. I heard one ring followed by three high-pitched beeps, then a recording saying the number had been disconnected.