The Skeleton Box

SEVENTEEN

I turned my cell phone on after crossing the bridge at Zilwaukee, a bit more than a hundred miles north of Detroit. There were two new messages.

Attorney Peter Shipman said he’d been retained by my mother. Darlene, he said, had called him, God bless her. “Bea’s fine,” he said. “The cops aren’t saying much, and I told her to stay mum for now. No charges yet, but they’re holding her for questioning. Between us, I think they think it’s for her own safety. She has her own cell and they’re treating her with kid gloves. She sends her love.”

The young woman on the other message said simply, “Call me when you hit twenty-three.”

I dialed Joanie McCarthy when I exited onto U.S. 23 south toward Detroit.

“Thirsty?” she answered.

“Where are you?”

“The newsroom. The desk called me in to chase some stupid Freep story we wrote a week ago. Then they decided there was no space for it.”

My old newsroom: the wooden desks like steamer trunks, the wires snaking up the ancient pillars, the rattle of keyboards ringing off the tile floors, the smells of bad coffee and old leather and newsprint.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just pop it on the Internet.”

“Might as well put it in a bottle and throw it off the banks of the Detroit River. You still shoot pool?”

“Not for a while, but it’s kind of late, isn’t it?”

“Not upstairs at Aggie’s. You know it?”

I looked at my watch. After midnight. I had thought I would get a motel and meet Joanie in the morning. But she had stayed up, so I guess I had to stay up.

“Greektown, right? Monroe?”

“Off Beaubien. An hour?”

“Sure. You got some stuff on Breck?”

I heard what I thought was her taking her feet off of a desk, plopping them on the floor. “Altar boy,” she said.

“How so?”

“See you at Aggie’s. Bring your A game.”

I had to hop between three puddles of vomit glistening in the streetlights on the sidewalk outside Aggeliki’s Greek.

A man wearing a grease-spattered apron and folded white paper hat came out of Aggie’s with a bucket and mop, shaking his head. He looked at me and I said, “Not me, man.” He said something in Greek that I didn’t understand. His look said fuck off.

I opened the glass door to the vestibule at Aggie’s. The restaurant lay beyond another glass door to my right, aglow in white fluorescence, clattering with plates and forks and the babble of the boozed and drowsy. The aroma of garlic filled my nose, and my belly told me pastitsio, please, and dolmades, with a cup of creamy lemon soup. But I turned to my left and pushed through a wooden door that hid a gloomy stairway reeking of cigarettes. At the top of the stairs, I heard the faint din of the Clash on a speaker that must have had a torn woofer, then the dull crack of a rack of pool balls being broken, then the voice of a man saying, “Get in there, sweetness.”

I squinted through the haze, thicker even than at Enright’s. Behind the balls rolling to a stop on the table, Joanie McCarthy leaned against a paneled wall, a pool stick propped in one hand. Her face was obscured in the smoky radiance of the two bare lightbulbs hanging over the table, but I could tell it was her by the way her wide hips swung to one side over her crossed legs.

I caught her eye. She smiled. I was transported back to the Pilot newsroom, two years before, when she had sat where Whistler now sat, daring me to run the stories she wrote that she knew would upset the old fogies who would rather sit around Audrey’s bitching about how the politicians were pissing away their tax dollars than have to stomach reading about it in the Pilot. On the rare occasion back then when Joanie smiled without sarcasm, I don’t know exactly why, but I would feel better about myself, and about her.

Her smile across the pool table now did the same, for a heartbeat. Joanie turned to the guy who had broken the rack. “That’s all you got?”

“Loose rack,” said the guy.

“Loose? You love loose,” Joanie said, allowing herself a quick look at me, almost as if for approval. Now she came off the wall and leaned over the table, scanning the scattered balls. “One off the four,” she said. “Four might go, too.”

“The queen of slop,” the guy said.

His voice was oddly familiar.

Joanie grinned and bent and stroked the cue ball into the one ball. The one glanced off of the four and dropped cleanly into a corner pocket. The four edged toward a side pocket and hung on the lip. Joanie bounced sideways to her left, pointed her stick at the table again. “Two down there, and I’ll back up the cue and knock the four in this time,” she said.

“Sure you will,” the guy said.

The three of us seemed to be the only ones in the place. The floor was covered in shag carpet the color of zucchini and flecked with cigarette burns and stains I didn’t want to know the origin of. The walls were bare but for coats hung on nails and a single black-and-white photograph of a woman in an apron, Aggie herself, hugging the Stanley Cup.

The guy playing against Joanie plucked a cell phone off of his belt and punched the keys with a thumb while glaring at me. I looked away, wondering who the hell made phone calls at this time of night?

Joanie kept sinking balls. After each shot, she gave me a fleeting glance, gauging my expression. She knew she was not the Joanie McCarthy I had known, the baby-fat grad-school kid with the bush of flaming auburn hair and gigantic backpack who had spent an eventful year as my junior reporter at the Pilot. This Joanie shooting nine ball in an after-hours joint wasn’t quite slinky, but she had lost enough pounds to wear her Dearborn Music T-shirt knotted over her bare belly.

Her hair was cropped short and straightened, which made her green eyes seem bigger and brighter. She had never lacked for confidence, at least not around me, but watching her move around the pool table, weighing her options, calling her shots, leveling her stick, I thought she seemed more like a woman, even at just twenty-five, than the impatient girl who had left Starvation for bigger and better, first in Chicago, now in Detroit.

She missed a seven-nine combo that would have ended the game.

“Oh, crap,” she said.

I stepped into the light. The piss-yellow felt on the table was threadbare along the rails. “You mean, ‘Oh, fuck’?”

She turned to me, brushing reddish bangs from her eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a pool stick,” I said, mimicking the complaint I had heard from her about obscene words. “It’s a fucking pool stick.”

She laughed as she came over and surprised me first with a two-armed hug, the tip of her pool stick poking me between the shoulder blades, then a light kiss on the neck that made me shiver a little.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said.

“You, too.” Up close I saw a scar I had never noticed before, an upside-down smile etched between her chin and lower lip. I pointed at it. “Bar fight?”

“Not quite. How was your trip?”

“OK,” I said, thinking of the lockbox. “No traffic.”

“Excuse me.”

It was the guy with Joanie. He was moving around the table. I wasn’t in his way, but he wanted me to think I was. I took a step back. He gave me a look, gave a different one to Joanie, who didn’t seem to notice. The guy was big. Not athletic big, just lumbering cumbersome big, like a washing machine. He was wearing his olive drab winter coat open. A striped wool scarf dangled from his neck. He snapped the tip of his stick on the table’s edge, grabbed the chalk.

“Game over,” he said.

Again the voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Good luck,” Joanie said. “Hey-meet my friend Gus from up north. Gus, this is Albert Gaudreault.”

I started to offer a hand across the table but the guy was already lining up his shot. He jabbed at the cue ball. It struck the seven, which bumped the nine into a corner. He spread his arms and looked at Joanie. “Like I said.” He pointed the stick at me then and waggled it.

“Frenchy,” he said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Call me Frenchy.”

In my head I repeated the name I had heard: GAW-droh. It, too, sounded familiar, though again not familiar enough that I knew what it meant to me. Frenchy didn’t speak with even a hint of a French accent, as did some of the French-Canadians I’d encountered in hockey rinks. If anything, he sounded like he might have come from downriver. Maybe River Rouge, or Woodhaven.

“Gus,” I said.

“Yeah.” As if he knew me.

Somehow the Clash became Three Dog Night.

“Buy you a beer?” I said.

He looked at Joanie. He had the sad face of a basset hound, but the attitude was more Doberman. He mouthed the words, “This is the guy?”

Joanie stepped over, flattened a hand on the slight curve of his belly, leaned up and kissed him, quickly, on the lips. The hair on the back of her neck parted, revealing the whiteness of the nape.

Frenchy looked past Joanie to me. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m going.” Then to Joanie, “Careful now, sweetness.”

She laughed as she pushed him toward the stairway. He glanced at me over his shoulder before he disappeared. Then Joanie grabbed me by my belt and pulled me toward the bar.

“Nightcap,” she said.

“That your boyfriend?”

Joanie and I half sat, half stood on the rickety stools at the bar, a rectangular box of plywood and two-by-fours hung with a torn Kid Rock poster. The guy I’d seen cleaning up the puke appeared from a back room. His mood had not improved. Blue Ribbon wasn’t on the menu, so I ordered a longneck Bud, Joanie a Jack Daniel’s, neat.

She shook her head no to my question.

“You know him?” she said. “You know everybody.”

I peered at the doorway to the stairs, as if that might tell me. Frenchy was at least ten years older than Joanie, probably older than me. “He looks… I don’t know.”

Joanie shook her head. She obviously liked the guy, but I couldn’t tell if there was more than that. In my experience, the only thing that got Joanie going was scoops.

“Poor Frenchy,” she said.

“He’s not your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have boyfriends.”

“Really? Does he work for the Times?”

“Sort of. Not really.”

“Meaning?”

“He used to work there. The Free Press, too. Now he does a little of this and a little of that. Kind of a freelancer.”

“Ah. One of those guys.”

I knew a few. They hopped back and forth between the Times and the Free Press, playing the papers and their editors off of one another, getting raises and more raises until one day an editor who’d hired them at one paper had a drink with one who’d hired them at the other and halted that little gravy train. Guys like Frenchy wound up hanging out at the Anchor and the Post and the Money Tree, picking up dollar-a-word assignments and pretending they were loving the freelance life while leaving $10 bills on $120 tabs.

“He says the past is the past,” Joanie said, and I thought, Were it only so. She inched her stool closer. I caught a whiff of her body wash. Almond. “He’s good at computer stuff. You’ll see. How are you?”

I told her without telling her anything she didn’t need to know. She listened, her chin in one hand, her eyes intent on my face. She asked about Dingus, about the Pilot, about my mother. She had gotten to know Mom, and Mom her, while she was in Starvation. When she asked about Darlene, I changed the subject and asked her how she had wound up on the cop beat in Detroit, at the Times, after leaving the Pilot for the Chicago Tribune.

Joanie stirred her whiskey with a forefinger, licked the finger. I remembered how she once had surprised me by chugging a can of Blue Ribbon in the Pilot newsroom. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was more money.”

“The way I heard it, the Times came after you big-time after you broke some highway construction scam.”

“L trains, actually,” she said. “But, yeah, I guess. Whatever. The new editor at the Times used to be at the Trib. ”

She had been in a hurry since the day I had hired her at the Pilot. In a hurry for bigger stories, bigger audiences, bigger prizes. Lots of young reporters were in a hurry, but most were prone to tripping over their own feet. I had once been in a hurry and wound up stumbling all the way back to the small time.

“Don’t apologize for success, Joanie.”

“Don’t be a wimp, Gus.”

“What does that mean?”

“You could be back here now. All the people who sold you out are long gone. All you have to do is pick up the phone and you’d be kicking the auto companies’ butts again.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Look what you did in Starvation. You got the bad guy.”

“We both did. But I should’ve gotten him twenty years ago.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter where you are, it’s what you do that matters.”

I took a drink of my Bud. Warm again. “No complaints here. My mom needs me. I like my life OK. Got a new reporter.”

“You mean old reporter, don’t you?”

“You know him?”

“Lucas B. Whistler? Are you kidding? The youngest Detroit reporter ever to be a Pulitzer finalist? Prizewinning basher of computer screens?”

“He already smashed one at the Pilot, ” I said. “Sounds like you got Pulitzer envy.”

“I have another year to beat him,” she said, holding her glass up in a toast, then sipping from it. “And after I actually win, I plan to keep my job longer, too.”

“You have a ways to go.”

“How did you get stuck with him?”

“Stuck with him? I’m glad to have him. The guy’s a pro.”

“OK.”

“What does that mean?”

She pulled her hair back on her head. “Rumors. I don’t know.”

“Come on. Anything in particular? Or just beer blather at the Anchor?”

“Evidently he’s quite the wheeler-dealer.”

That was no surprise. I decided not to tell Joanie about Whistler and Tawny Jane Reese. During her Pilot days, Joanie had called T.J. “Twitchy-Butt.”

“Well, his clips looked great.”

“Yeah?” Joanie said. “How many had solo bylines?”

“There were some JVs in there. The guy was getting ready to retire.”

“He’s not that old.”

“Hell, I’m all for retiring at fifty-six. Anyway, he said he was mentoring the youngsters, letting them have bylines.”

“Huh. He might’ve had it backward. I think he smashed more computers in the last few years than he wrote stories.”

“This isn’t just a Times thing, is it?” I said. “You know-he’s a Freep reporter, therefore he sucks?”

She grinned. “Of course. You want me to ask around about him?”

“Knock yourself out. Did you get me that appointment?”

“I got us the appointment.”

“Ah.” I’d expected that. She wasn’t letting me have anything to myself.

“Nine a.m. At a golf course in Redford.”

“Redford. Why a golf course?”

“That’s what the flack wanted.”

“What flack? What do they need a PR guy for?”

“Got me. That’s who called me back.”

She stood and walked across the room to the nail where her jacket hung. She came back wrapping herself in black leather to her knees. She kept coming until she was standing so close that I could smell the almond wash again. She pointed a fingernail shellacked in scarlet at the half-moon scar on her chin.

“You know how I got this?” she said.

“Nope.”

The music, Creedence now, ended abruptly in the middle of “Lodi,” the 3:15 silence as sudden as a shriek.

“A puck.”

“At a Wings game?”

“My center throws me a cross-ice pass.” She took a step back and positioned her hands as if they were holding a hockey stick. My center throws me a cross-ice pass? When Joanie was in Starvation, she’d had no use whatsoever for the game I loved.

“I’m about to catch it on my backhand when this idiot from the other team shoves his stick in the way and the puck flies up and catches me.”

“Get out of here. You’re playing hockey?”

“Novice. Lots of leaners out there.”

“Benders,” I corrected her.

“Right.”

“And tripods.”

She pushed her face in close to mine, and for half a second I thought she might kiss me. Joanie McCarthy, who had called me a coward to my face when she had worked for me. Now she was sending me weekly e-mails about my coming to Detroit for a visit. And she was one of only a handful of Pilot subscribers who had the paper mailed to her in Detroit. “I’m not a tripod,” she said.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“See. You really did teach me things.” She looked at my beer. “You going to take that with you?”

“I’d rather drink Freon.”

“Freon’s a gas. You can’t drink it. If you want to know more about this Breck dude, you’re coming with me.”

“I’ve got to get some sleep. At least an hour or so. I don’t suppose the cops would appreciate me snoozing in my truck.”

“You’re coming to my place. We need a computer. Leave your truck. We’re not going to get much sleep.”

I had heard that line from a woman or two before, and it hadn’t had anything to do with computers. I must have sounded stupid when I blurted, “Why?”

She was already halfway down the stairs. “Now,” she said.