Starvation Lake

twenty-three

I was editing Joanie’s story on Brendan Blake when she tapped me on the shoulder. She whispered, “Is there a way to listen to the messages without using the phone up front?”

“Why?”

“You’ve got to hear one of the Sound Offs.”

I found an instruction book for the message machine in a pile next to the copier. Joanie sat next to me as I dialed. She had a folded map in her hand.

“OK, I’m in,” I said. “What am I listening to?”

“Can you skip through the messages? You want number thirty-four.” I kept hitting buttons and hearing beeps until the automated voice said, “Message number thirty-four, received today at three twenty-seven p.m.”

The recording began. At first, all I heard were indistinguishable voices in the background, then what sounded like a car passing. The call must have come from a pay phone. “Yo,” came the voice, a male rasp carrying the hint of a southern accent. “Tunnels? Y’all must be joking.” He cackled. “Ain’t no tunnels, ain’t no Blackburn. Time to maybe make a deal.” He hung up.

“Know that voice?” Joanie said.

“I don’t think so.”

I pushed replay and listened again while Joanie spread the Pine County map on my desk. Two X ’s were marked in green Magic Marker a quarter inch from the western edge of Starvation Lake. One X was just above and to the left of the other. She pointed to the lower one. “That’s where Blackburn and Redpath and Campbell were the night Blackburn died.”

“OK.” Though I had snowmobiled plenty in the woods between Starvation and Walleye, I had no idea where Coach and Leo might’ve built their midnight fire.

Her finger moved to the other X. “This is where Clayton Perlmutter lives.”

The Sasquatch hunter. “No way,” I said.

We made a plan to visit Perlmutter after deadline. No need to call ahead, I told Joanie, he obviously was expecting us. She went to Audrey’s for sandwiches while I wrapped up her stories on the arraignment and Brendan Blake. We quoted Blake saying Blackburn had sexually abused him, but left out the details. I scheduled the story for the front page, just below the fold. Prominent play, but not too.

I dialed Kerasopoulos on my main phone line. His secretary would be gone. I put that call on hold, pushed the button for my second line, and dialed his number again. While the first line blinked, I waited on the second. One ring. Two rings. Three. A pause. Voice mail. “Evening, Jim,” I recorded. “Gus Carpenter. Sorry to miss you, but wanted you to know we have a somewhat controversial story for tomorrow’s paper, slugged BLAKE. Just sent it. You might want to take a look. Thanks.”

If Kerasopoulos checked his voice mail, he’d have his heads-up, and he might well kill the story. If he didn’t, the story would run. He couldn’t say I hadn’t warned him. As I hung up the phone, I felt someone standing behind me. It was Tillie, holding another pink message slip.

“Jesus, you scared me,” I said.

“I’ll bet,” she said. I didn’t like how she was smiling. “This woman called again.”

“What woman?”

“From the Chicago Tribune. I told you before.”

“What does Chicago care about Starvation Lake?”

“How would I know? Can I please go?”

“Wrestling story in?”

“Sent it.”

I stared at the slip. The number was long distance, so the woman wasn’t in town. Might she be calling about my problems with Superior Motors? The Trib probably had subscribers in northern Indiana. Maybe the Hanovers had called the paper to say I was the coward who’d used their tragedy to get some big stories and then walked away when they needed me.

I put the slip on the stack of papers next to my computer. Joanie burst in through the back door, panting. “Let’s go,” she said.

“So, guess what the cops found in Redpath’s computer,” Joanie said.

I was steering my pickup onto Main Street toward Route 816. She was handing me a pasty. Warm grease bled through the wax paper as I propped the meat pie on my knee. “What?” I said.

“OK,” she said. “So I go over to Audrey’s and I see the TV slut’s in there with her camera guy. I order my usual Swiss cheese on pumpernickel. Audrey’s all weird, she leans across the counter and says she’s totally out of Swiss. So I say cool, make it with American, but Audrey says you can get Swiss over at Enright’s. I say American’ll be fine, and then she says, well, she might be out of that, too, and I’m like, what’s up?”

“So who was at Enright’s?” I said, biting into the pie. It needed ketchup.

“A source.”

“Deputy Esper, maybe?”

“You want to know what was in the computer?”

“Please.”

“Porn.”

“What?”

“Porn. All sorts of it.”

It pained me to hear that, but for some reason it didn’t surprise me. “What kind of porn?” I asked.

“What do you think?”

“Boys?”

Joanie nodded. “More bad stuff, Gus.”

We drove for a while in silence. Then I said, “Do you think Blackburn really killed himself?”

“Well,” Joanie said, “before I was thinking, no way, this suicide pact thing is, like Gallagher said, a cover. I mean, if Blackburn really killed himself, why wouldn’t Redpath have just told the cops back then? Why would he have gone to all the trouble of getting rid of the body and making up a snowmobile accident? Plus, Redpath had the gun, not Campbell. But now, I’m not so sure. You’ve got these two guys, buddies, and they’re apparently into some pretty deviant stuff. Odds are pretty good that if Blackburn was fooling around with boys, Redpath might’ve been too, right? So maybe-I don’t know, I shouldn’t say.”

“What?”

“Maybe-look, sorry, I know this guy was your friend, but maybe these guys-maybe they both had, like, some sort of, you know, thing for Campbell. Maybe they were rivals. Maybe this was some sort of weird triangle.”

I was gripping the steering wheel so hard I thought I might break it. “Aren’t you jumping to some conclusions here?” I said.

“Maybe.” She shifted around in the seat to face me. “What do you think?”

I fixed my eyes on the headlamp beams cutting through the dark. What did I think? That wasn’t really what Joanie was asking. She was asking, what did I know? What did I know of what went on between my best friend and my coach and his assistant? The answer, unbelievably, was that I knew nothing. The day’s events were beginning to sink in. All those years, Soupy had known. And he’d never given me the slightest hint. We’d sat there in the second-floor window at Enright’s, watching Blackburn’s funeral procession, Soupy with his hand on my neck, a comfort. And he knew. And maybe my mother knew, too.

“Gus,” Joanie said. “Are you all right?”

“No. I’m pissed and embarrassed. All this shit was happening right under my nose.”

“Come on. It’s not your fault. I mean, you weren’t-”

“No, Joanie, I was not part of it, whatever it was.”

I eased around a snowplow that was pitching sheets of snow onto the six-foot walls along the shoulder.

“Take a left up here,” Joanie said.

At the corner where I turned, a neon vacancy sign burned red in front of Jungle of the North, a tourist trap motel. A menagerie of concrete statues crouched in dim light thrown by flood lamps tacked on birches: An orange hippopotamus. A white tiger striped in purple. A pink-and-black giraffe, missing the lower section of one leg, steel reinforcement rods showing where the hock once was. A giant, leering alligator, his back and snout covered with snow.

“Whatever happened to the priest at your high school?” I said.

“Oh, he’s still there,” Joanie said.

I turned onto a two-track past hand-painted wooden signs warning of dogs and guns. I hadn’t gone far before I stopped and parked. “I don’t want to get stuck coming out of here,” I said.

As we trudged up the road to Perlmutter’s, the night was so quiet you could hear the snow falling. “Oh, yeah,” Joanie said. “Campbell’s out. Guess who posted bail?”

“Boynton?”

“How’d you know?”

“The zoning board meets again tomorrow. Teddy wouldn’t let something as minor as a hockey stick to the head interfere with business.”

“You know,” Joanie said, “Boynton might know a lot more about all this, too.”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

A few steps farther, a light flashed in our faces. We stopped and raised our gloved hands to shield our eyes. Over the menacing growl of a dog came a man’s rasp: “You can stop right there or I can let go of this here leash.”

The shadows in Perlmutter’s living room danced along the knotty-pine walls with the flickering in his fireplace. He was squeezed into a rocking chair, shotgun across his lap. His chest strained at the snaps of the down vest he wore over a red flannel undershirt. The German shepherd he called Shep crouched at his feet, glowering. Perlmutter reached behind his chair and fished a can of Bud Light from a cooler.

“Frosty, anybody?”

“No, thanks,” Joanie said. She sat in a chair Perlmutter had taken from the kitchen, its dull yellow vinyl seat back torn and peeling. I’d sunk into an armchair that sagged so badly that my butt rested below my knees.

“I’ll take one,” I said. I hoped the smell might cut the stench of cat stinging my eyes. He tossed the beer at me, hard and a little high. I snatched it out of the air as if I were wearing my catching glove.

“Whoa,” Perlmutter said. “Still got a little of that, huh? I saw you play a bunch of times, kiddo, including that last time. You played one hell of a game until the end there. What happened?”

“I screwed up.”

Perlmutter rocked back chuckling. “Well, I’ll be. That’s good. I didn’t figure anybody screwed up anymore. Every time I turn on TV, there’s somebody saying it wasn’t their fault, it must’ve been somebody else. Good for you.”

I saw little evidence of Perlmutter’s Bigfoot passion in his living room. An enormous rifle hung over the fireplace. On the mantel below sat a police radio next to a copy of the infamous fuzzy black-and-white photograph showing what purported to be a Sasquatch walking through a forest. An inscription etched across the top of the frame read, “The Truth Will Set You Free.”

Perlmutter rocked forward into the light, and the shadows fell away from the acne scars beneath his scraggle of a beard. He crushed his empty beer can with one hand and tossed it at the fireplace. Shep immediately rose, picked the can up in her jaw, and carried it into the kitchen.

“You folks in a trading mood?” Perlmutter said, dipping back into the cooler. “I got something to trade, but I ain’t talking unless it’s even-steven.”

“We don’t do trades,” Joanie said.

“Well, little Miss Mike Wallace, I’m talking to the boss here,” Perlmutter said. Shep came back and lay down by the fire. “And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t be writing in your little book anymore.”

Joanie gave me a sidelong glance as she shut her notebook. Perlmutter looked at me. “Didn’t you used to write for one of them Detroit papers?”

“Yep.”

“What was your byline?”

“A. J. Carpenter.”

“What’s Gus come from?”

“Augustus.”

“Augustus. Sounds like a Roman emperor. And the J?”

“James.”

“So you weren’t named for your daddy?”

The question startled me. “Actually I was,” I said. “My dad was Augustus Rudolph, after my grandpa, but they called him Rudy. My grandma’s dad was a Rudolph. My mom’s was a James.”

“And your momma’s daddy, that would’ve been Jimmy Damico?”

Again he surprised me. “That’s right,” I said. “You knew him?”

“My daddy and him used to hunt rabbits up around Sunset Trail where it zigzags there past Twin Lakes. Jimmy and his brother Bill. One of them had a kid who bought it over in Nam. I tagged along once or twice before I moved out here by myself. Ain’t sure they cared so much about the hunting, but they sure liked sitting around on the tailgate of Jimmy’s old Chevy wagon till dark, telling stories and drinking.”

“You knew my dad?”

He looked down at Shep. “A little. Bumped into him once or twice at the titty bar in Alden.”

“What titty bar?”

“Tit-for-Tat,” Perlmutter said. He’d noticed the surprise and disbelief in my voice. “Wasn’t there long. The cops got the owner for running coke and that was that.”

“It couldn’t have been my dad.” Mom had said he worked at a restaurant on those weekends. She had never mentioned naked dancers. But she wouldn’t have, would she?

Perlmutter took a long, slow sip of his beer. “Maybe I got it wrong,” he said.

“So, Clayton,” Joanie interrupted. “Why don’t you tell Augustus here how you got into the Sasquatch business?”

“Hah,” Perlmutter said. “This the interview part? Well, you know, as I told little Miss Wallace here, everybody’s got to do something. I used to work for the county extension service, and I’d see all these professor types coming up from downstate in their duck shoes and camo hats, getting all these grants and such to go chasing after mosquitoes and lily ponds and algae. I figured that money’d be better put to use looking for something ain’t nobody found yet.”

“Like Bigfoot,” I said.

“Yes, sir. You see that there on the mantel?” He pointed to the picture. “That’s a joke. A friend gave me that to remind me of my mission, because that picture, y’all seen it before, if that ain’t a guy in a gorilla suit, I’ll eat my gun.”

“Think so?”

“Aw, heck, the Sasquatch ain’t been definitively discovered. He’s no doubt out there, and me and Shep have set ourselves to the task of finding him, and we won’t give it up no matter what y’all put in your paper, will we, Shep?” He reached to pet the dog, but the dog turned its head away. “I got a whole museum in my garage and my tool shed and I showed it all to the little missy, but she don’t want to believe what she can see with her own eyes.”

With a glance I warned Joanie to keep quiet.

“You know, Augustus,” Perlmutter continued, “we all got stories to tell. Some are true and some ain’t and some are only half true, and those last ones are most liable to get us in trouble. Ain’t that right?”

“Yes,” I said, because it was. “But you’ve got to admit, Clayton, it’s pretty impressive how you’ve kept this museum going all these years.”

He grinned. “Well, it don’t hurt to have friends in high places. And that’s all I’ll be saying about that.”

“How did you know Blackburn?”

Perlmutter picked a birch log off a stack next to his chair and flung it onto the fire. The papery bark spat flames. “Not well. Saw him when I went to games, of course, and I’d say hello. I don’t think he was much for socializing. Now, I ought to talk, but Blackburn and his pal there, the guy who went and killed himself, I figured they were a little like me, they liked to go out and rough it up in the woods and have a few beers. I could see them out there at their bonfire once in a while, ain’t far from here. I tried to join them once or twice, but I could tell pretty quick they didn’t want me around.”

“They didn’t like you?” Joanie said.

“Who wouldn’t like a guy who rides up with a cooler full of cold ones?” He swigged his beer. “They had their own little club. Then one night I guess it kind of broke up.” He chuckled.

“What do you know about that?” I said.

He straightened in his chair, a movement I’d seen in many a source who knew something I wanted to know. I disliked them for it even as I tried to flatter them into telling me. “Well,” he said, “I might have seen a bit of it.”

“Come on,” Joanie said.

“Maybe this is where we talk about what you’re bringing to the table,” he said. “I believe you have an article you’re fixing to write about my livelihood.”

I pointed at the door. “Can we have two minutes?”

Out on the porch, the cold air sucked the cat smell from my nose.

“Does he have a cat too?” I said.

Joanie looked annoyed. With me. “About a dozen of them,” she said. “He says they have a special sense for Sasquatch. You’d probably buy that, huh?”

“Voice down, please.”

“What the hell are we doing here, Gus?”

“We’re getting the Blackburn story.”

“And we’re going to trade in my other story, which is dead solid, for something that could be total crap?”

“Quiet. Yes, we are. For now.”

“It was never going to run anyway, was it?”

I chose not to answer.

“Gus, this is a scumbag who insists he has a pile of Bigfoot crap. Now because he happened to know your dad, we’re going to trust him?”

I grabbed her elbow and steered her away from Perlmutter’s window to the edge of the porch. An automatic security lamp flashed on over our heads. The beam illuminated the ground through the trees all the way down to a corner of Walleye Lake.

“Yes, he’s a liar,” I said, speaking as quietly as I could. “But he’s capable of telling the truth. If he lies about Blackburn, our deal with him is immediately off, and I’ll fight like hell to run your Bigfoot story, I promise.”

“He’s capable of telling the truth? You know, it’s one thing to steal voice mails from a bunch of liars. It’s another thing entirely to make deals with one.”

“Cheap shot,” I said. It didn’t matter at the moment that she happened to be right. “Look, I’m going back in. You can wait in the truck if you want.”

“Whatever.”

“OK,” I told Perlmutter. I was sitting on the arm of the sagging chair. Joanie stood next to her peeling one. “I can tell you-and I shouldn’t be-that we’ve written our story on your so-called museum, and the lawyers don’t like it.”

“What good’s that do me?” Perlmutter said.

“Look, Clayton,” I said, “if Joanie and I go back and do some screaming, we’ll turn the lawyers around.” Joanie nodded on cue. “Or we could just stay on the Blackburn story, if we have something fresh to write. Anyway, Joanie’s going to be leaving the Pilot soon, and that’ll pretty much assure your story will die.”

“Where’s she going?”

Joanie blinked twice but kept her gaze on Perlmutter. “Who knows?” I said. “Someplace bigger. She’s the one breaking all these Blackburn stories. If it wasn’t for her, we might not even have had an arraignment today.”

“Huh,” Perlmutter grunted. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”

“Anyway,” I continued, “it was nice chatting about my family, but if you aren’t going to help us, we’re going to go do some screaming.”

It wasn’t the most ethical way to go about things, but I’d done worse. Anyway, if the people of Starvation Lake and the fools in the state capital who had showered money on Perlmutter wanted to think he was running a museum, maybe they deserved to get ripped off.

Perlmutter gazed at Shep for a long minute. He undid the top two snaps of his vest and produced a black-and-white photograph that he handed to me. Joanie got up and looked at it over my shoulder. Through a thicket of trees, the blurry shape of a man appeared on the shore of a lake. He was bent over another, indistinguishable shape, hidden in shadow. The perspective was similar to the one from Perlmutter’s porch. The trees were lush with leaves. A dull streak of moonlight glimmered on the water’s edge. “You took this?” I said.

“Yessir.”

“But this wasn’t that night?”

“No, sir. That was spring, couple of months later.”

“But what did you see that night?” Joanie said. “You said you saw something.”

Perlmutter ignored her, pointing at the photo. “You recognize the guy?”

“No,” I said, squinting.

“Here’s a hint. He was one of the four I saw at their little bonfire that night.”

“Four?” Joanie and I said in unison. “No,” Joanie said. “It was just Blackburn, Redpath, and Campbell.”

“That’s all I’m saying about that,” Perlmutter said. “Look at the picture.”

I knew it couldn’t be Blackburn. It was too bulky to be Soupy. “Leo?” I said.

“Give the man a cigar,” Perlmutter said. “Yessir, old Leo snuck down to the lake to dispose of a little something.”

“Blackburn’s snowmobile,” Joanie said.

“Another winner,” Perlmutter said, holding his beer up in salute. “Old Shep was just a puppy that spring, and Redpath wasn’t making that much of a racket, but Shep about tore her chain off the house, didn’t you, girl?”

“So,” I said, “you’re saying Leo killed Blackburn-or Blackburn killed himself-and then Leo waited a few months to dump the snowmobile and, presumably, Blackburn.”

“No,” Joanie said to me. “Remember what he said on the answering machine.”

“Hey, maybe I’m all wet,” Perlmutter said. “Try this.” He held out his hand. Lying in the palm was a. 22-caliber bullet. “Found it out by their fire,” he said.

“When? That night?” I said.

“The morning after.”

“The morning after the fire, after Blackburn died?”

“In the winter, yeah.”

He handed me the bullet. I examined it and gave it to Joanie.

“When I heard about the snowmobile dunking on the squawk box”-Perlmutter jerked a thumb at the police radio-“I got myself out to their campsite for a look-see. The cops were still messing around at Starvation. It was a sunny morning, and I caught a glint of the bullet, stuck in a tree.”

“In a tree?” Joanie said.

“Fourteen of my steps from the fire pit.”

“Must’ve been buried pretty good,” I said.

“Yep. Took a little work to dig it out.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Joanie said.

“Maybe I did. As I think you know, missy, I am nothing if not opportunistic.”

“Amen,” she said. “I’ll bet you’re the one who called the cops last week when the snowmobile finally washed up.”

“You never know.”

She held up the bullet. “We have to take this.”

“Not a chance.”

“This could be anybody’s,” Joanie said. “The cops have to look at it before we could write about it.”

“Ain’t going to happen,” Perlmutter said. He leaned forward, his hand open. “I’ll take that picture too, if you please.”

“Joanie, give him the bullet,” I said. The cops eventually would come for it anyway. “But let me keep the picture, Clayton, just for a little. I want to look at it some more in some better light.” If Delbert blew it up, we might be able to tell if it was a fake. Or it might actually give us a little leverage with Dingus. And maybe it could help Soupy, too, though it was pretty flimsy as court evidence went. “It will not appear in our paper unless you yourself give me permission, I swear on my father’s grave.”

“Your daddy’s grave, huh?” he said, chuckling. “Let me think about it.”

“Joanie,” I said.

She handed him the bullet. “So,” she said, “we’ve got a Bigfoot-like photograph and a bullet that could’ve come from Kmart.”

“Hah,” Perlmutter scoffed.

“Clayton,” Joanie said. “The cops say there were only two bullets-one in the snowmobile, one in Blackburn’s head.”

“But they ain’t got no bullet from Blackburn’s head, now do they, missy?”

The police radio sputtered to life. I heard Darlene’s static-riddled voice, calling for assistance at a fire.

“This bullet doesn’t mean diddly, Clayton,” Joanie said. “Who was the fourth guy?”

“I don’t remember saying it was a guy. Anyway, I think I’m done talking for now, missy. Obviously you ain’t smart enough to figure it out. I think I’ll just hold on to what I got until I know I’m not going to get crucified in the paper.”

Joanie turned to me. “We’re wasting our time.”

Perlmutter looked at Shep and shook his head. He looked as disgusted as he did amused. “The little missy’s just plain young, girl, but what do you figure is his excuse?”

He was trying to tell me something, but I was straining to hear the police radio. “Listen up,” I said. Darlene, louder now, was calling all available deputies to the old Blackburn property. Fire trucks and ambulances were on their way. A man had ignited some buildings and appeared to be trapped in one, but he was to be considered armed and dangerous nevertheless. I hoped it wasn’t who I thought it was. “Let’s go,” I said, jumping up. I must have spooked Shep, who leaped up snarling from where she lay and lunged at me, jaws agape, just as a fat black cat sprang from my right, flying straight at my head. My arm instinctively shot out and whacked the cat out of the air. It screeched as I drove my right boot into Shep’s ribs and yelled, “Get the hell away!” Shep yelped and skittered toward Perlmutter, who grabbed her collar while shouting, “No, down, girl, down!” I raced out the door behind Joanie and kept running off the porch and into the darkness, grabbing her by the arm as we struggled through the knee-deep snow, saying, “Go, go, go, before he realizes I have the picture.”