Starvation Lake

nineteen

Deputy Esper, please.”

I’d let Joanie get ahead of me and pulled up to a pay phone outside the IGA.

“Esper,” came that voice.

“It’s me.”

An awkward silence followed. If she’d been home, she would’ve just hung up the phone, as she had every time I’d called her when I first came back to town. At work a hang-up might have attracted attention.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say thanks for giving me the heads-up the other night.”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“Well, thanks anyway. I wondered-”

“Gus, this is not fair.”

“Listen, this is work and we’re off the record, OK? I’ve just got to ask, Darl, you have to trust me, when you were talking with Boynton at Enright’s”-I felt a stab of jealousy-“he wasn’t-”

“I’m going to hang up, Gus.”

“It’s not what you’re thinking. He wasn’t asking you about Coach, was he?”

“I can’t talk.”

“Darlene, please, you’ve got to help me.”

After our sweet tryst in the county courthouse all those years ago, we’d begun dating. Around town we became, officially, an item, and there was talk that we would marry and settle on the lake. Not surprisingly, followers of the River Rats laced this talk with sarcasm about my gaffe in the state final. There were jokes about me falling down at the altar and dropping wedding rings. As for me, I can’t honestly say that I fell in love with Darlene then because I think I’d always been in love with her, as far back as the day I rescued her bike from Jitters Creek. Whatever I felt, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Starvation. We always knew I was going to leave, but even after I accepted the job at the Times and started preparing to move, we never talked about it. The pain we’d avoided for so long finally settled upon us. My last week in town, we didn’t speak.

Only after she married did she deign to talk with me again, but even then only in short, strained snatches, like the conversation we were now having. Most of the time, it was as if we were talking on a bad connection. Emotional static obscured our voices and blocked our ears. Darlene wavered between anger about her lousy marriage and fear that somehow the sound of my voice might lure her back to me and whatever sorrow I might inflict on her a second time. I waited apologetically for her walls of resolve to crack so that I might hear the slightest echo of her old kindness. In a way, the worst of returning to Starvation Lake was facing Darlene, whose icy distance accused me of having been a fool for ever leaving.

She was right, of course, that it was unfair of me to call her like this. I felt I had no choice.

“I told him no,” she said.

“No what?”

“No, I wasn’t going to tell him anything about your coach.”

“You didn’t tell him anything?”

She hesitated. “No, not-”

“Come on, Darlene.”

“I don’t have to talk to you at all.”

“I saw you taking the stuff out of Leo’s house today.”

The phone went silent. I waited for a dial tone. I heard Darlene sigh. “Boynton called me yesterday,” she said. “I told him to go to hell again, but he said he had information.”

By then Boynton had spoken with Joanie. He knew a little about Canada.

“What information?”

“It’s pretty creepy. He was asking-hold on.” I heard her close a door. She picked up the phone again. “He wanted to know about Blackburn’s criminal history.”

“Criminal history? Like felonies?”

“Blackburn didn’t have a record, though.”

“No record of what?”

“You can’t print this, Gus.”

“Darlene, I’m not going to print what Boynton was asking you.”

“He-darn it, hang on.” I heard knocking on her door. She covered the phone. I waited. She came back on. “I have to go.”

“What did he ask about?”

Now I got the dial tone.

My story about Boynton’s ultimatum to the zoning board went on the front page along with Joanie’s story about Dingus’s aborted press conference. Kerasopoulos read Joanie’s story before it went to print. He made us redo a few lines so it didn’t look like Dingus had walked out in a huff, even though he had. Joanie wasn’t pleased, but at least she didn’t blame me. Before I left, I made sure Tillie had put the underwater tunnel question in Sound Off. I also made arrangements for some editing help in Traverse City so I could make the trip to Detroit the next morning. I didn’t say why I had to take the day off, just that I had some personal business.

The phone on my desk rang as I was climbing the stairs to my apartment. I let it. I wanted a nap before the game. Upstairs I packed my gear and lay back in the recliner. My eyes fell on the boxes supporting the table. The one marked “Rats” held one big part of my life, the others marked “Trucks” held another. Neither seemed to have worked out very well. I flicked off the lamp and closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep.

By now, I thought, the police might have caught up with Leo. Or maybe they weren’t even pursuing him. Maybe he’d left for some other reason, something that had nothing to do with Coach. Maybe he’d gone because he could no longer bear staying in Starvation Lake now that his old friend had returned, albeit in shadow.

I got out of the chair and called Mom, whose mile-a-minute message informed me that she was out. I couldn’t tell where. I left a message that I’d try to stop by Tuesday evening. I didn’t want her to know I was going downstate. She’d worry. I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m.

I had to tape Eggo’s thumb. I unzipped my hockey bag, set the glove on the table, and rooted in my bag for the shiny black tape I always used. Barely any was left on the roll. I’d been meaning to buy more. I peeled off Saturday’s tape and started winding the fresh stuff on. I ran out before I’d gotten around the thumb twice. Even though the tape didn’t really hold anything, I liked to have it go around at least three times. Tonight, two would have to do.

When I walked into dressing room 3, the Chowder Heads were having the sort of discussion that passed for philosophical in a place that reeked of old sweat and mildew. Wilf was telling of a friend who’d skated on a minor-league team where it was customary for a rookie, as part of his ritual initiation, to come to a game and find his skates filled with a veteran’s dump.

“Jesus, Wilf,” Stevie Reneau said. He was smearing toothpaste on the inside of his plastic face shield so it wouldn’t fog. Stevie had no stomach for these sorts of stories, which was one reason why Wilf took such glee in telling them. We never knew whether Wilf was making stuff up just to make Stevie sick, but this particular story was, unfortunately, plausible.

“So this rookie’s cleaning out his skates, you know, while my buddy and all the other dudes are laughing their balls off,” Wilf said. “Then the guy goes out and-what do you know? — scores a hat trick. No shit. First of his career, eh?” He grinned widely, knowing Stevie would reach the conclusion any superstitious hockey player would.

“Don’t tell me,” Stevie said.

“Oh, yeah,” Wilf said.

Stevie’s face contorted with pain. “The guy had to keep putting shit in his skates? Get the fuck out of here.”

Wilf laughed while Stevie impulsively grabbed his own skates and stuffed them back in his hockey bag. “You’ve been in a bit of a scoring slump, Steve-O,” Wilf said. “You never know what might help.”

Although Zilchy thought it bad luck to speak a word just before games, this opportunity was apparently irresistible. “What do you think, Stevie? Would the guy have to have the same guy’s shit in his skates before every game?”

“And what if the shitter got traded?” Danny Lefebvre chimed in.

Wilf’s eyes lit up. “I guess the rookie’s career would go right down the shitter!”

“Goddamn it, Wilf,” Stevie groaned.

Soupy walked in, dragging his hockey bag and a cooler.

“Soup,” Danny said.

“Spoons,” Wilf said.

Soupy dropped his bag and slid the cooler to the middle of the room. He sat down, as always, to my left. He looked tired. It wasn’t like him to be late for a championship game, even if it was just the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

“Soup, you got to hear this,” Wilf said. He started to retell his story, but Soupy stopped him in midsentence.

“Not now.”

Wilf looked offended. “Fuck’s your problem?” he said.

“The Zam’s on.”

“Leo finally show up?” Danny said.

Soupy kept his head down as he pulled gear from his bag. “Ronny’s doing the ice,” he said. Ronny was a high school kid who worked for Leo.

“So the ice’ll suck,” Wilf said. “Where the hell is Leo? It’s a championship game, for fuck’s sakes.”

Soupy gave me a sharp sideways glance, as if I knew the answer. I flipped my mask down. “So, Soup,” I said, changing the subject. “Mom’s thinking of getting a boat, now that I’m back. Maybe a nice speedboat.”

He grunted as he struggled to jam his left foot into his four-sizes-too-small skate. “Mrs. C’s got the cash for a speedboat? I doubt that. You seen Leo?”

“No,” I said. “What do they run these days?”

“A good speedboat? A lot. But, between the two of you, we could probably put you in an inflatable raft.”

“So, like, what? Ten grand?”

He was forcing his second skate on. “Twice that,” he said.

“Huh,” I said. “So do you sell boats for, like, twenty-five thousand dollars?” That was the number on the receipt Dingus had given me.

“Sure,” Soupy said. “Nicer, bigger ones. You used to work there.”

“You don’t sell ferryboats, do you?”

“Ferryboats? What the fuck are you talking about?” He directed himself to the entire room. “Was Gus already drinking? Goalies aren’t supposed to drink pregame.”

“Never mind,” I said.

“Look, Trap, if Mrs. C really wants a boat, you know I’ll work something out. Have her call me. But, Jesus, you’re getting weird. Everything’s getting weird around here. Where the hell is Leo anyway?”

Most of the room had emptied. I could hear sticks cracking pucks and pucks booming off sideboards. Soupy pulled on his Chowder Heads jersey, red and white, with a logo of a soup spoon made to look like a hockey stick.

“You were a little weird yourself last night, man,” I said.

“You mean Saturday?”

“No, last night. On my stairway. You were shitfaced.”

He popped his taped-up helmet on his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And what about today? The zoning board missed you.”

“Ain’t lucky to talk business, Trap.”

“Ain’t lucky to talk luck.”

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder as he always did just before we went out to play. But this time he squeezed hard and pulled me in close to him and peered in through the eyeholes in my mask.

“Where’s Leo?” he said. “The Zam shed’s cleaned out.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Bullshit. You notice every goddamn thing.”

“We’ve got to get out there. I’m a brick wall, right?”

“Yeah,” Soupy said, standing. “And I’m a rubber band, liable to snap any minute.”

We came out fast. Zilchy scored on a rebound to make it 1–0 and then Stevie deflected a low shot by Soupy over Tatch, the Land Sharks’ goalie, for a 2–0 lead late in the first period. I had to make only one tough save when D’Alessio got free and swung in untouched from my left. He shot low and hard to my stick side and I barely got my right toe on it. The rebound went right to Boynton, who tried to jam it just inside the goalpost, but I dove and smothered it for a whistle.

“Fuck you, Carpie,” I heard him tell me yet again.

As we took the lead into the second period, Teddy started playing more and more like the Teddy he’d grown into. He kicked Stevie’s legs out from behind. Elbowed Danny Lefebvre in the face. Clipped me with a butt end as he skated past. All when the refs weren’t looking, of course. Mostly, though, he gunned for Soupy. He cross-checked him in the neck, whacked him in the back of the knees, yapped at him at face-offs. “You think this is a fucking game?” he shouted once. Soupy did not reply, which wasn’t like him. He was no fighter, but he rarely shied from yapping at a yapper. Boynton kept it up. Soupy kept turning away.

Midway through the third period, Loob took a pass from Boynton and fired a slapper just to my right. Loob had a cannon, but I saw this shot cleanly and flicked out Eggo to block it. I thought I had it easily, but it deflected off Eggo’s bottom edge, ricocheted downward, and bounced off the side of my right leg pad and into the net. While the Sharks celebrated, I stared at Eggo in disbelief, wondering if the lack of one wind of tape had cost me.

When I looked up, I saw blue and red police lights flashing through the glass at the other end of the rink. Everyone stopped to watch the sheriff’s deputies, five or six of them, trot into the Zamboni shed. They got Leo, I thought. One of the refs skated down there, and D’Alessio jumped off the Land Shark bench and joined him. I could see the cops stringing up yellow crime-scene tape. D’Alessio turned and directed everyone, even the referees, over to the benches. He left the ice and clomped into the Zam shed in his skates. I went over and leaned against the boards by our bench where the rest of the Chowder Heads were quietly watching. Soupy gave me a look. “What?” I said, and he turned away. The police lights kept flashing. Finally D’Alessio emerged from the Zam shed, shaking his head. He called the refs over. They had a brief conversation. D’Alessio skated off the ice and into the dressing room. I watched Soupy watching him. One of the refs came over and said, “They’re going to close the place, but we can finish.”

A little more than six minutes remained. The police lights kept flashing. The skaters lined up for a face-off to my right. As the ref held the puck out over the face-off dot, Darlene, in uniform, stepped into view outside the glass in the corner. Stevie won the face-off back to Soupy, who slid the puck immediately to me. I froze it for another face-off, which is what Soupy wanted. “Hang on,” he told the ref, and then skated over to Darlene. They had a brief exchange that I could not hear. Soupy punched the glass with his right fist and yelled, “No!” The ref’s whistle shrilled. “Today, gentlemen,” he said. Darlene hurried away, and when Soupy turned back to the game, his face was a pale mask of anger.

I felt certain then that something bad was going to happen.

From the next face-off, Stevie shoveled the puck ahead to Wilf, who banged it into the Land Sharks’ end. Zilchy chased it down in a corner and slid a quick pass back to Soupy waiting just above the face-off dot to the left of the Land Shark net. From there he could’ve had a clear shot on goal or he could’ve passed it to Danny Lefebvre at the far goalpost. Instead he lifted his stick an inch and let the puck slide beneath it. He tried to make it look like a mistake. Inexplicably, he waited a beat while Boynton rushed past and scooped up the puck. Soupy turned in pursuit.

Boynton had a breakaway. Soupy was faster, though, and could have overtaken him easily. Instead he maintained his pace two strides behind, waiting for something. What are you doing? I thought. I slid out to cut down the angle, my eyes darting between Boynton and Soupy, still trailing. Boynton veered to the middle of the ice. I stopped and squatted, prepared to push backward, catching glove high, Eggo in position, eyes now on the puck. I was guessing that Boynton was preparing to shoot rather than deke when his legs buckled and the puck squirted away.

The heel of Soupy’s stick caught Boynton just under the right eye. Soupy swung it like a baseball bat, following through as Boynton cried out once and crumpled. Soupy raised his stick again and brought it down like an ax on the side of Boynton’s head. Boynton was wearing a helmet, but again I heard the crack of wood on bone.

“Soupy!” I screamed. I dropped my stick and gloves and rushed to grab him before he swung his stick again. I had a fistful of his jersey when someone tackled us from behind. In an instant, other Land Sharks and Chowder Heads were piling on, screaming and cursing. A whistle was blowing. I heard someone saying, “Oh my God, call an ambulance, call an ambulance.” Somebody was punching me in the back, but I hung tight to Soupy, my mask pressed against the back of his neck. He was muttering to himself, “Leo, they fucking killed Leo. I’ll kill you, motherfucker, I’ll kill you.”

The refs peeled us apart. Somebody pulled me away, and Loob and Wilf grabbed Soupy by his arms and he let them. “That’s all, Soup, settle down,” Loob said. Boynton lay motionless on his side. A scarlet smear streaked the ice where he’d slid after falling. One of his teammates crouched next to him and removed his helmet. The side of his face was covered in blood.

“Fuck him,” Soupy said. “I hope he fucking dies.”

A ref stepped in front of him. “Game’s over,” he said. “Sharks win by forfeit.” Soupy didn’t care. He looked at me. “Happy now?”

I had no idea what he meant. D’Alessio reappeared. He showed Soupy a pair of handcuffs. “Easy way or hard, Soup?”

Soupy held his hands out impassively. As D’Alessio cuffed him, Soupy looked down at the unconscious Boynton. “Guess it ain’t a fucking game, is it?”

Two paramedics rushed through the front door of the rink, followed by two sheriff’s deputies and Sheriff Aho. But why would Dingus come for a lousy assault and battery? It wasn’t the first time a skater had gone a little crazy. Then a light like a car’s headlamp went on just over his shoulder, and I saw a bearded guy in a hooded green parka shouldering a TV camera pointed at Dingus. Walking beside him and speaking into a microphone was Tawny Jane Reese. A TV crew for a stick fight? I looked at Boynton. He still wasn’t moving.

Dingus walked out onto the ice and knelt next to Boynton, shaking his head. He looked up at Soupy. “You guys never grow up, do you?” he said.

Tawny Jane minced onto the ice, trying to keep her balance while she spoke into her microphone. Her cameraman aimed at Teddy as the paramedics secured him to a stretcher and hauled him out.

Dingus stood and walked over to Soupy and me. Tawny Jane and the cameraman followed. Dingus motioned to D’Alessio. “One minute, Deputy.” They stepped aside and talked. Dingus turned to Tawny Jane and said, “Give us a minute.” The camera light went out. Tawny Jane whispered something into the ear of the cameraman. She seemed excited.

D’Alessio moved back behind Soupy. He put one hand on the cuffs and one on Soupy’s shoulder. Dingus pointed at Tawny Jane and the cameraman. He stepped in front of Soupy. The camera light went on again. Tawny Jane stepped closer and stuck her microphone out for what Dingus was about to say.

Soupy spoke first, though. “Leo, Dingus?”

Dingus held Soupy’s gaze for a second, then he said, “Alden Campbell, you are under arrest for first-degree murder in the March 1988 death of John David Blackburn.”

“Fucking-ay,” Soupy said.

I had to lean on my stick to keep from falling over. I looked at Soupy. I wanted him to tell me this was all bullshit. His expression didn’t change. It was as if he expected this.

“Get him out of here,” Dingus said.

Tawny Jane narrated while the cameraman backpedaled in front of Dingus and D’Alessio walking Soupy off the ice.

I skated up behind them. “Dingus,” I said. “What about Leo?”

“They fucking killed him,” Soupy shouted.

Dingus stopped and turned to me. His face did not contradict what Soupy had said. “Later,” he said.

I followed Tawny Jane to the edge of the rink. She was telling her microphone: “…bleak chapter in the history of this down-on-its-luck resort town, here in the place named for the man who, we’re now being told, did not die in a snowmobile accident ten years ago but was, shockingly, murdered. Among the spicier ingredients in this torrid potboiler of a tale: A beloved coach, a disgruntled former player, and a twenty-two-caliber bullet. Channel Eight’s exclusive coverage…”

The damp hair around my ears froze as I stepped out of my truck in the parking lot of the Pine County sheriff’s Department. I remembered the time Soupy and I had a playful hockey fight on the rink in his backyard. My hair had frozen to my helmet and, when Soupy tore the helmet off, some of my hair came with it. Soupy thought it was hilarious.

Now he was inside somewhere, in an interrogation room or a jail cell. And something terrible had happened to Leo.

The glassed-in sheriff’s department lobby glowed with fluorescent light. Inside, Joanie spotted me approaching and hurried out.

“Are you OK?” she said.

“What’s going on?”

“Dingus is supposed to be out in a few minutes.”

“We better get in there.”

“Wait.” She put a hand against my chest. “Are you all right to cover this?”

Of course I wasn’t. But what was I going to do? “I’m fine.”

“Do you really think Campbell killed Blackburn?”

I hesitated just long enough that one of her eyebrows crept higher. I couldn’t imagine what Soupy’s motive would be, but I’d been surprised by so many things in the last few days that I wasn’t sure what to think. I’d always thought of Soupy as gentle. He’d never been one for the rough stuff in hockey. Then came the sneak attack on Boynton.

“No,” I said.

“Well,” Joanie said, “I’m sorry about your friends. And I’m sorry about getting scooped. I’ve got to wait a whole damn day to catch up.”

No doubt Tawny Jane’s report was already on the air. At that hour, maybe twenty people were watching. “Forget it,” I said.

“I come in tonight and she’s like, ‘Oh, this must be terrible for you, your stories today were so great,’ and I’m like, you little slut.”

“Just lock down your sources in the department now so we don’t have Tawny Jane attached to Dingus when the rest of this plays out,” I said. “Also, in case he has another press conference-”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

“Hey, guys,” came a voice. We turned to see Skip Catledge leaning out the door. “Sheriff’ll be out in a minute.”

When Dingus emerged, his brown tie was still tied and clasped and he moved with purpose I had never seen in him before. He raised his hands as the four of us-Tawny Jane, the cameraman, Joanie, and me-stepped toward him.

“Before you start asking questions, this is not a press conference,” he said. “Kill that, please.” He pointed at the cameraman, who lowered his camera. “Rather than have you sit in my lobby all night, I’m going to tell you a couple of things and then you’re all going home. Understood? No notes, Miss McCarthy. And no interruptions. This is totally off the record, just for your planning and information. There’ll be plenty on the record tomorrow.”

“As you know, we have in custody Alden Campbell. Most people around here know him as Soupy. He will be arraigned tomorrow at two p.m. before Judge Gallagher on a charge of murder, first degree, as well as assault and battery related to the incident during the hockey game this evening.”

“Sheriff?” It was Joanie.

Dingus looked at her in disbelief. “Miss, I’m giving you a second chance here. It will also be your last.”

“Sorry.”

“This is my investigation, OK? My investigation.” He waited for that to sink in. “We believe the murder did in fact occur on the same night as the snowmobile accident in which Mr. Blackburn previously was believed to have died. Again, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. Suffice it to say that we believe the accident itself was fraudulent, and we’re attempting now to determine the location of Mr. Blackburn’s remains. As you know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.”

The word “fraudulent” shivered through me like a fever chill. I thought of my mother and the floor that wasn’t wet, and of Leo running. “In a related matter,” Dingus said, “we attempted this evening to apprehend an individual who we believe had material knowledge of the events in question. That individual had fled the local area and was located by the Michigan state police on U.S. One Thirty-one about thirty-five miles south of the Mackinac Bridge. He resisted attempts to apprehend him peacefully. An unfortunate incident occurred, which we continue to investigate. We hope to have more for you on that tomorrow.”

Of course it was Leo.

Dingus held up a finger. “That’s all for now, but I will allow one question.” He looked directly at Joanie and said, “Ms. Reese?”

Joanie frowned at the floor. Tawny Jane stepped forward. Her hair was tangled in a maroon scrunchy at the back of her head.

“Sheriff,” she said, “do you have any idea of motive?”

Dingus pursed his lips. “We might.”

“Can you say what?”

“I’m sorry. That’s two questions.”

“Sheriff-”

“Don’t make the same mistake Miss McCarthy made, Ms. Reese,” Dingus said. “OK, I’d like you all to clear out now-except you.”

He meant me.

I waited in Dingus’s office in the same angle-iron chair I’d sat in a few days before. In my mind I scoured the Zam shed for any clue that I’d been there that morning. Had the cops dusted for fingerprints? I remembered the pieces of paper with the strange lettering I’d taken from Leo’s file cabinet. They were still in my coat pocket. What if this were some sort of interrogation? What if they searched me?

Dingus came in. He sat on the edge of his desk facing me and folded his thick arms across his chest. “We’ve got to talk,” he said, “but first you need to know what happened to Leo Redpath. Off the record. You were supposed to be his friend. But you didn’t do him any favors.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a tragedy, really. An unnecessary tragedy. We had questioned Redpath in this matter. Apparently he got scared for some reason, which is unfortunate because we didn’t regard him as a suspect, at least not for long.”

“Why did you-”

“Quiet,” Dingus said. It was sometimes hard to take Dingus seriously because of that singsong Scandinavian accent of his. Not now, though. “Late last night, we got an anonymous tip that Redpath knew more about this incident than he’d let on in the original investigation. This person suggested maybe the original incident didn’t happen the way everybody thought it did.”

“Who was this tipster?” I said. I thought I knew: Teddy Boynton, after all of his snooping around between Darlene and Joanie.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dingus said. “As I said, Redpath was a suspect, but only briefly. After we heard from this caller, we definitely wanted to speak with Redpath again. But when we went to see him this morning, we found his room at the rink empty. We put out an APB. Two state police cruisers caught up with him. They had the squawk box going, trying to get him out of his car, and he reaches into his glove box.”

My stomach dropped. “Jesus, Dingus. They shot him?”

Dingus leaned forward until his face was just a few inches from mine. “No, Gus,” he said. “The wound was self-inflicted. Redpath had a pistol in his glove box. He discharged it into the side of his head above the right ear.”

“Oh my God,” I said. A prickle of heat ran across my shoulders and up my neck. An image flashed in my mind of the first time I’d seen Leo, standing at the wheel of Ethel, circling the ice, and then of one of the last times I’d seen him, leaned in close to my face as he sewed the stitches into my jaw. “What the hell is going on around here?”

“I wanted to ask you that, Gus, because you know what?” Now he reached up and grabbed my coat collar in his beefy hand and yanked me up off the chair. “I think you had something to do with this.”

“What? Take your hands off me.”

He tightened his grip. “I ought to strangle that little redhead. Somehow she spooked Redpath.”

“Bullshit. He wouldn’t even talk to her.”

“He didn’t have to talk to her. He just had to hear her questions. She asked him something that spooked him. We’d already talked to him. He didn’t run. She goes to see him, he runs. I want to know what she asked him, Gus.”

“I wish I knew, Sheriff.”

Dingus swung me away from the chair and slammed me against the wall. “This man is dead,” he growled. “I have to contact his family, whoever and wherever they are, and we’re out a material witness in a murder case. All because your little reporter is sticking her nose in places it shouldn’t ought to go. What did she ask him, Gus?”

“I don’t know, Dingus, and I wouldn’t have to tell you anyway. She was doing her job. Or are you just worried about getting reelected?”

I knew that was a mistake the second it left my lips. He hammered me against the wall again and pushed in close enough that I could smell his Tiparillo breath, see the tiny yellowed teeth hidden by his handlebar. I thought he might punch me. “This is not about a goddamn election,” he said. “It’s about a murder investigation. It’s not your job to conduct murder investigations. It’s not your job to embarrass me in front of the public when I’m trying to do my job.”

“And you didn’t embarrass us with those bullshit leaks about our stories being ‘premature’? And then the TV chick gets a front-row seat for the arrest? Have hot lips D’Alessio take a cold shower, will you?”

He dropped me and stepped back and pointed a finger at me. “You know the meaning of ‘is’?” he said. “Until I say something is — like a murder-then it isn’t, understand? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about the case from Channel Eight. You guys are always talking about the public’s right to know. Don’t you think the public has a right to know what you know?”

“We know squat, Dingus. From what I can tell, Leo’s obviously the one who killed Blackburn. He was there that night. He lied about it. He ran, and then he killed himself. But you have Soupy in jail.”

“Where he belongs,” Dingus said. He sat back down on his desk. The framed photograph of his ex appeared over his left shoulder. I wondered if Barbara Lampley had still been talking with Dingus, or even married to him, when he was investigating the first time around. It was her dalliance with Blackburn, after all, that had effectively ended their marriage. I decided that I wanted to talk with her.

“Sit,” Dingus said. I sat. “Gus,” he said, “I have tried to help you out where I could because I think you can help me. What the redhead did was no help.”

“Her name is Joanie.”

“Uh-huh. Get her out of my way.”

I wasn’t about to accept responsibility for Leo’s suicide. But I thought I was beginning to understand Dingus. His original inquiry into Blackburn’s death obviously had missed the mark. Cops who messed up like that usually made excuses or tried to cover their tracks. Instead Dingus was doing everything he could to blow up his old case. It was as if he’d never believed the original conclusion, as if his hands had somehow been tied, and now that pieces of Blackburn were resurfacing in our little town, he was determined to set things right. I couldn’t promise Dingus anything, and I didn’t appreciate being roughed up, but I couldn’t help but admire him a little.

“We’ll try not to mess you up,” I said, “and you try not to mess us up.”

“Fair enough.”

“Can I ask one thing?”

“One thing.”

“Don’t get upset. I watched you guys today hauling stuff out of Leo’s house, including a bunch of computer stuff. What’s the deal?”

Dingus considered it. “Redpath had issues,” he said.

“What issues?”

He stood. “It’s late. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I drove directly to the pay phone outside the IGA. Joanie picked up on the first ring. “What happened?”

I told her what happened to Leo.

“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Let me ask you. What did you tell him when you talked to him?”

She hesitated. “He wouldn’t talk.”

“You must have said something to try to get him to talk.”

“I told him I was trying to find out more about what happened that night. He said he didn’t want to dredge it up, he wasn’t-how did he put it? — he wasn’t ‘a dweller in the distant past.’”

It sounded like one of those sayings he had pasted over his workbench. “And what’d you say?”

“I may have said something about Canada, the missing year and all that.”

“Same as with Boynton.”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t see necessarily why that would have spooked him. Leo wasn’t with Blackburn in Canada, so far as I knew. “I know a little more,” I said. “The cops searched Leo’s house. They confiscated his computer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“Why’d they take his computer?”

“No idea. Dingus said Leo had issues.”

“No, duh. Isn’t it pretty obvious he’s the killer?”

“Seems to make sense, but Dingus says no. Supposedly we’ll learn more at the arraignment. You’ll go?”

“Yeah.”

“While you’re at it, why don’t you do a little more checking into Blackburn’s background? I think he had a brother-in-law in Kalamazoo.”

“Wife’s brother or sister’s husband?”

“No idea. I don’t know if he was ever married.”

“Gus?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to get scooped again.”

In the darkness of my mother’s bedroom, I gently jiggled her bed. She lurched awake. I laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s Gus,” I whispered.

“Son. You scared me.”

“Sorry.” I sat down on the bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Leo.”

Mom sat up in her flannel pajamas. “What?”

I didn’t tell her about the computer, just the suicide. As she listened, her eyes grew slowly wider. She drew her hand up over her mouth. “No,” she said. In her eyes in that instant I could see she knew things she’d never told me, and I wanted to ask her then, I wanted to demand she tell me whatever it was she had held back, but all I could do was let her fall into my arms and hold her as she cried. She hadn’t sobbed so hard since Dad died. It surprised me only a little that I could not manage a single tear.