The Skeleton Box

NINETEEN

My cell phone woke me.

“Damn,” I croaked. I’d thought I had turned the thing off. I jumped up from where I had dozed off on a wool rug with my coat balled up beneath my head for a pillow. The phone was in my coat. I pulled it out and answered.

“Where the hell are you?” Luke Whistler said. I checked the stove clock. Not quite seven. On the floor at the foot of the loft ladder lay the Rats jersey Joanie had been wearing earlier, covering the boots I’d taken off to sleep.

“I had to run an errand.”

“At seven in the morning? You know your mom’s in jail?”

“I do.”

I heard a chair squeak through the phone. Whistler was at the Pilot. “Got the coroner’s report.”

“They released it?”

“Not publicly.”

I glanced up at the loft, turned my body away, lowered my voice.

“How come you bullshitted me about Breck?” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I asked you if you knew Breck. You said no. But you’ve been checking up on the guy.”

“You going through my mail?”

“It’s Pilot mail, pal.”

“OK, boss,” Whistler said. He sounded annoyed, but I didn’t care. “You got me. Although I didn’t really lie. I didn’t, and don’t, know this character. But I was trying to get to know him, for a story.”

“What story?”

“He’s supposedly in hot water with the state. They might disbar him. Which wouldn’t be good for the born-agains’ tax appeal.”

“First I heard of it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure it’s true.”

“Do me a favor and keep me posted.”

“I will. Sorry. Really. If you can’t trust a fellow scribe, who can you trust? It’s me and you and the rest of the world, right?”

“What about the coroner’s report?”

“Confirmed homicide,” he said. “Blunt trauma to the head, from a blow and from falling to the floor. She had a pretty bad gash above one eye, but that wasn’t the cause.”

“It wasn’t just a heart attack or something?”

“Everybody dies of heart attacks,” Whistler said. “A guy gets shot in the head, he dies of heart failure. Could be the break-in artist freaked out, so it wasn’t premeditated. But it’s a dead body. Your pal in the pokey may have a problem.”

“Have they charged him yet?”

“Nothing yet. And the cops ain’t talking a lick. I got in the sheriff’s face a little and your girlfriend threatened to usher me off the premises.”

“My ex-girlfriend.”

“Really? I don’t get that impression.”

I wasn’t about to engage Whistler on Darlene and whatever Tawny Jane had told him across the pillow.

“You don’t think they really believe Tatch did it, do you?” I said.

“Nah. I think they want him to give up the other guy. Meantime, some of the local yokels have been making noise about that Tex kid not playing in the big game. D’Alessio’s got them all riled up, saying this is all Dingus’s fault, he arrested the wrong guy. They’re getting up a posse to go demonstrate at the Jesus camp.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. People got signs in their windows: ‘Free Tex.’ Why’s he called Tex anyway?”

“Long story. Does Tatch have a lawyer?”

“Had that Flapp guy for a few hours. Then Breck took over. He supposedly told the cops Mr. Edwards isn’t going to say a word.”

I heard Joanie stir, glanced up, saw her naked shoulders, white as winter.

“Can you do me a favor?” I said. “Check on my mom.”

“Sure thing. By the way, your boss called.”

“Philo?”

“He sounds barely old enough to drive.”

Philo must have been calling about that board of directors meeting. I couldn’t believe that that collection of wide-assed retirees collecting per diems for telling the CEO he’s a genius would have the guts to switch the Pilot to online publication only. They would sit around their mahogany table the size of a rowboat and make their speeches about the future of newspapers until one of them motioned to table the subject until the next month’s meeting so they could all retire to the Knife and Fork Club for filets and cigars.

“Hey,” Joanie said. She was leaning over the edge of her loft, blanket bunched beneath her chin. “Who you talking to?”

I ignored her. “OK, thanks, I’ll check in later.” I ended the call.

“You want to shower?”

I looked at the phone, saw it was almost out of power, clicked it off. “No thanks,” I said. “Could we get some eggs before our appointment?”

I was swallowing the last of my second fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich as Joanie swung her Malibu off Beech Daly onto Six Mile Road. I followed in Soupy’s pickup.

I tossed the greasy sandwich wrapper on the garbage hiding the lockbox and grabbed the foam cup of black coffee from the console. I had checked to make sure the box was still there and kicked myself for having left it in the truck the night before in a neighborhood filled with curious late-night pedestrians. At least I’d thought to lock the truck, something I never did in Starvation.

We had sped down the Jeffries Freeway west through Detroit, an eight-lane gully winding between road shoulders pocked with snow and empty wine bottles, past pawnshops and liquor stores and boarded-up supermarkets and tar-papered houses, some of them charred black and literally falling down, where autoworkers had once laid claim to a good life that eventually slipped from their grasp. As a rookie Times reporter covering the cops, I had exited the freeway a few times to interview the bereaved families of shooting victims. But usually the Jeffries had ferried me to hockey rinks in the western suburbs.

Tunneling beneath the underpass at Telegraph Road, we’d crossed from the city into Redford Township, where those same autoworkers-the white ones, that is-had escaped in the 1950s seeking brick ranches and wider backyards. We’d left the Jeffries and turned north on Beech Daly. We passed a Lebanese bakery, a Little Caesars pizza joint, a vinyl-siding shop, a tool-and-die business hung with a For Lease sign, and what seemed like a dozen insurance agencies. I wondered why people in flat, quiet Redford would live in fear of fires and floods.

Six Mile is five gray lanes scarred with oily potholes and rock salt. I steered around a mattress discarded in the middle of the street. We passed a Catholic church and a used car lot and a Presbyterian church and another liquor store and a bar that advertised karaoke every Friday. The only human I saw was a teenage boy swaggering down the sidewalk in a hooded sweatshirt and headphones beneath a Yankees cap perched backward on his head. Only a Yankees fan, I thought, would be dumb enough to wear just a sweatshirt in that cold.

Joanie put on her right turn blinker and veered into a parking lot ringed by a low wooden fence. A curbside sign identified it as Lost Valley Golf Course. The only other car in the lot was a black Cadillac coupe parked in a handicap spot facing the first tee. I slid Soupy’s pickup in next to Joanie’s Malibu and peeked at the Caddy. I didn’t see any handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror.

Joanie came up to my door, notebook in hand. I stepped out.

“Ever do an interview at a golf course?” she said.

“Chased quotes once when the U.S. Open was at Oakland Hills.”

Out on the course, old oaks as big as the ones up north stood guard along a flat brown fairway mottled with snow. A sign planted in front of the first tee announced in big black letters COURSE CLOSED. But there were gouges in the matted grass on the tee, and at the end of the fairway, a red flag fluttered in the breeze. I didn’t like golf. If you played a lousy round, you could feel lousy for hours. If you had a bad day on the rink, it went away the second you cracked your first beer.

“Weird,” Joanie said. “But the flack insisted. Said the priest would be more comfortable.”

I started walking toward the pro shop. “Who’s the priest again?”

“Reilly. He’s apparently the visiting priest at that church back up Six Mile.”

“And the flack?”

“A guy named Regis something.”

I stopped. “No way.”

Regis Repelmaus greeted me at the door to the Lost Valley pro shop with his usual too-firm, held-too-long, so-sincere-it’s-bullshit handshake. He wore a dark suit, a starched white shirt, a red tie with pinpoint silver polka dots, a Caribbean vacation tan, and a head of brown shoe-polish hair that could have been transplanted from a Ken doll.

“It’s been too long, old friend,” he said. He smelled of breath mints. “How are the north woods?”

“Like you, Regis,” I said. “Cold and dark.”

He chuckled. “Ah, well, maybe it hasn’t been too long.”

Repelmaus wasn’t just any flack. He was Detroit’s premier public-relations fixer, a lawyer who did not practice law but had glad-handed himself into a position where, whenever a big company or wealthy executive got in trouble, he was called upon to prescribe a plan of action or inaction designed to “correct the record,” as he was fond of saying, as if he were an historian rather than a $500-an-hour dissembler.

His clients were never companies or individuals themselves, but rather the law firms that represented them. By renting his services out in this way, Repelmaus could pretend he was not defending a company whose poorly built pickup trucks burned people to death or a natural gas executive who used the corporate jet to fly call girls to his Harbor Springs redoubt. No, Repelmaus was representing the law firms, who were, of course, merely defending the law.

I first encountered him one evening in Detroit. I’d just begun covering the auto industry for the Times, and I’d gotten a tip that police had picked up the CFO of Superior Motors for smacking his wife around. I started calling cop shops to confirm it. I hadn’t made half a dozen calls before Repelmaus called me. He identified himself as a representative for a law firm representing Superior Motors.

“Call me Rep,” he said, as cheerful as if I were writing about the company boosting its dividend.

“Rep?” I said.

“Yes, thank you. May I be of help?”

I had to ask the company anyway, so I told him what I’d heard.

“Off the record,” he said, “this would certainly be a serious matter, if true, and I will get to the bottom of it and get back to you as soon as possible. When is your deadline?”

I told him I had until midnight and asked if he had heard from any Free Press reporters. “I have not,” he said. “It looks like you have an exclusive.”

My scoop evaporated two hours later. By then I had confirmed with anonymous police sources that the CFO had been arrested and that it wasn’t the first time he’d had a boxing match with his wife. There was no Internet then, so my story wouldn’t be out there until the papers hit the newsstands in the morning. But around ten thirty, Superior Motors issued a press release saying the CFO had resigned “to pursue other opportunities.” It was all over the eleven o’clock news. My editor asked me what the hell happened. When I told her, she said she wished she had known I was dealing with Regis Repelmaus.

The next day, Repelmaus called me and congratulated me on getting the story first. Of course I hadn’t gotten the story first. “You screwed me, Rep,” I said.

“I totally understand how you could see it that way,” he said. He explained that he had dutifully asked his “client” about the matter and the “client” had decided that “getting ahead of the matter” was in Superior Motors’ best interest. And you agreed? I asked. Repelmaus told me that, because he also happened to be an attorney, he couldn’t comment on that question, as it would violate attorney-client privilege.

From then on, I called him Regis.

I had to wonder why he would show up for a meeting with a priest at a public golf course in a scruffy suburb like Redford. “What are you doing here, Regis?” I said. “Something bad must be going on, eh?”

“The economy’s tough,” he said, smiling. “I’m taking whatever I can get.” He turned to Joanie, extending a daintier hand than he’d given me. “Miss McCarthy.”

“Joanie,” she said. “Or Ms. McCarthy.”

“Whoa, that’s quite a handshake. Feel free to call me Rep.”

Joanie ducked around him past the glass cases holding golf balls and hats and thirty-five-dollar shirts bearing the Lost Valley crest. “We doing this in there?” She pointed into the grillroom. “Oh,” she said to someone I couldn’t see. “Good morning, Father.”

“Excuse me,” Repelmaus said. He took Joanie by the arm to tug her back into the pro shop. “Could we talk about some ground rules first?”

Joanie yanked her arm away. “You didn’t say anything yesterday about ground rules.”

His smile did not falter.

“I totally understand how you could see it that way.”

“We see it that way,” Joanie said, “because that’s the way it is.”

That’s why I loved Joanie McCarthy.

“Please, hear me out,” Repelmaus said. “We think that once you hear what Father Tim has to say, you’ll be considerate of his privacy, and that of the people he represents, so that we may correct the record without undue harm coming to anyone.”

I brushed past him and went into the grill.

“Wait, Gus, please…”

I smelled frying onions. The room was dark with green carpeting, dark paneling on the walls, a low ceiling framed by dark wooden beams, and stilled ceiling fans, the only light leaking in through the windows and off some Christmas decorations strung along the wainscoting. Four stools upholstered in fake brown leather stood at a short bar stacked with red plastic burger baskets.

The priest hunched in a heavy wooden chair at one of the little round tables, gazing through a picture window at the first tee. White curls lapped the rim of his plaid flat cap. A coffee cup and a bottle of Jameson whiskey stood beside each other on a green vinyl tablecloth. His pale hands, riven with blue veins, gripped the blade of a pitching wedge propped between his knees. Bits of grass and mud were strewn on the carpet around his two-toned shoes.

“How’d you hit them?” I said.

He turned. I saw the Roman collar beneath his Lost Valley fleece. He smiled, his cheeks pink. He looked tired.

“Not as bad as yesterday,” he said. “See, they let an old man come play the first hole a couple of times a day, and I say an extra prayer for them at morning Mass.”

“Nice arrangement.”

“Had a birdie on the first try and then, of course”-he looked heavenward-“a double bogey, to set the world back on an even keel.”

I extended my hand. He took it. “Gus Carpenter, Father.”

“Apologies, Father, he just barged right in.” It was Regis, but the priest’s eyes stayed on mine. “Yes, Mr. Carpenter,” he said. “I’m Father Timothy. Please.” He gestured for me to sit. I did, to his left. He looked up at Regis and Joanie, standing at my shoulder.

“You must be Ms. McCarthy,” the priest said, offering his hand. “My mother was a McCarthy, and she was just as redheaded and lovely as you, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“Not at all,” Joanie said. She sat down across from me and set her notebook and pen down in front of her.

Father Tim looked up at Repelmaus. “Well, Mr. Repelmaus,” he said. “Are you going to join us?”

“Of course,” he said, sitting. “I was hoping we could establish a few ground rules first.”

“Give it up, Regis,” Joanie said.

Regis started to say something, but Father Tim interrupted, speaking to me, “Are you a Catholic, son?”

I answered as politely as I could. “Can I ask why that matters?”

The priest leaned forward on his iron and smiled. “So you’re a smart aleck, but you are not a Catholic, are you?”

“Not really, Father.”

He chuckled, his wattle jiggling. “You’ll have to do a good bit more than that, son. I understand your given name is actually Augustus. You remind me of another saint, Augustine. Are you familiar with him?”

“No.”

“He was, I’m guessing now, a little older than you when he wrote a series of books-I suppose today they would be called memoirs-in which he renounced his sinful youth and embraced Christ.”

“They’d probably be best sellers today.”

“That they would. Ah, Lolly.”

A woman in a gray sweatshirt stitched with the words LOUNGE STAFF appeared with a coffeepot. “Top you off, Father?” She poured without waiting for his reply.

“Anyone else like a cup?” the priest said.

All three of us demurred. Father Tim told the woman, “A three and a six today, Lolly. You’ll mark them down?”

“Indeedy,” she said. She lifted the Jameson and poured a splash into his cup before going back behind the bar.

The priest flipped the iron over and leaned the grip against the table. “I like to keep track of my scores,” he said. He took a sip of his coffee, set the cup back down, and folded his hands on the table. “So, your mother,” he said. “Beatrice Damico, yes?”

I was so startled that Joanie spoke before I could. “What’s that got to do with anything?” she said.

“I met your mother, Augustus. Just briefly. A long time ago, before she was Carpenter. I was on a little vacation, a cabin at Burt Lake, and came down to visit St. Val’s, met with a number of the classes. I recall that your mother had a devotion to the Blessed Mother.”

“Did she?”

“When Mr. Regis told me your name was Carpenter and you had come from up north, I wondered if it could be Beatrice’s son.”

And I wondered how he would have known that Mom eventually became a Carpenter.

“So that’s why you agreed to see me? To reminisce?”

“I wish,” he said.

“You must have known Nilus then-Father Nilus, that is. And Sister Cordelia?”

“I’m sorry,” Repelmaus said, “but Father Timothy, we really should go off the record.”

I ignored him. “Are you representing the archdiocese, Father?” I said. “We asked to speak with somebody from the archdiocese. Excuse me if I think it’s a little weird to be sitting at a golf course with a priest who’s drinking before ten a.m., questions my religion, and then claims to know my mother.”

I thought Joanie might flinch. She didn’t. Neither did Father Timothy. Repelmaus said, “That’s quite unnecessary, Gus.”

I turned to him. “Who are you representing, Regis? Not the archdiocese, of course.”

“My client is a Detroit law firm that represents the archdiocese.”

“You mean Eagan, MacDonald and Browne?” I said.

“I have not been authorized to-”

“That will suffice, Regis,” Father Timothy said. “Yes, Augustus, I speak for the archdiocese, and yes, Mr. Repelmaus is here on behalf of that firm.”

“Then maybe you can tell me why the archdiocese is buying up land around Starvation Lake?”

I was taking a chance, jumping my question to a conclusion in the hope that they’d think I knew the answer anyway, so they might as well tell me. The priest shrugged. Repelmaus said, “The Detroit archdiocese hasn’t had jurisdiction up north in decades.”

“That doesn’t mean they can’t buy land,” I said.

“Have you documented this?”

“I can document that your buddies at the law firm are buying land. But no way they’d be interested on their own. They must have a client who wants it, or wants control of it.”

“Please tell me why you think that client would be the archdiocese,” he said.

“Who’s interviewing whom here?” Joanie said.

“Maybe the archdiocese is interested for the same reason Wayland Breck is.”

I turned to the priest, who wore a purposeful smile.

“Ah, Mr. Breck,” he said. “Our lost sheep. We had high hopes for him.”

“He works for you,” Joanie said.

“No,” Repelmaus said, a little too quickly.

“Bullcrap,” she said, pointing the notebook at him. “He digs up dirt on-”

“Please, please,” Father Timothy said. “Can we all remain calm?”

Joanie sat back in her chair.

The priest said, “It is true that Mr. Breck assisted us with necessary research on litigation in which the archdiocese was involved. But that was some time ago. He is no longer in the employ of our counsel. Which is unfortunate, because Mr. Breck is afflicted with certain, shall we say, paranoid obsessions that we thought we were helping him with. Apparently we were mistaken.”

“Obsessions with his grandfather?” I said. “And the murder of a nun?”

“Excuse me, Father,” Repelmaus said. “Gus, you didn’t hear this from me, but you might want to make a discreet inquiry about Mr. Breck with the state attorney discipline board.”

“Noted,” I said. “Father?”

The priest took up his club again, stood it on its handle. “I knew of Mr. Breck’s grandfather. Joseph was a fine groundskeeper, a hardworking man who also played hard, as it was told to me. A man with good intentions. We know where those lead.”

Repelmaus placed a hand flat on the table. “I’m sorry, Father,” he said, “but we really must go off the record. If you say the wrong thing, Breck could sue for slander and-”

Father Timothy reached down and grasped the shaft of the golf club and raised the blade up and brought it down hard enough on the table that his cup spat up coffee and whiskey. Repelmaus pulled his hand away. Joanie sat back in her chair, wide-eyed. I kept my eyes on Father Timothy. His face had flushed red.

“I am quite capable, Mr. Regis, of determining what I can and cannot say,” he said.

“Of course, Father, it’s just-”

“Pipe down, man.”

“I apologize, Father.”

Father Timothy took the golf club from the table and dropped it on the floor with a thump. “I’m sorry for my lack of restraint,” he said. He slipped a handkerchief from a pocket, wiped it across his mouth, dabbed at the spilled coffee and booze. “Forgive me, Lord.”

He tucked the handkerchief away and turned to me. “You have done your homework, Augustus. But-some unsolicited advice? — you should worry less about Mr. Breck and more about your mother.”

“Meaning what?”

The priest raised his shaggy eyebrows. “She hasn’t told you about the poor Sister?”

“I know about Sister Cordelia, how she disappeared.”

“But your mother, son.”

“She told me she knew her, that she liked her,” I said. “That’s all.”

He leaned forward, scrutinizing my face, searching for a hint of guilt in a tic, an exaggerated blink, an averted gaze. I imagined that I gave him nothing, but inside I felt as I did at the rare interview for which I hadn’t had sufficient time to prepare, a reporter who not only didn’t know the answers, but wasn’t sure which questions to ask.

“That’s all?” he said. “I see. All the better, I suppose.”

“It would be better if you answered our questions,” Joanie said.

He picked up his cup. It wobbled as he brought it to his lips, took a sip, set it back down. “I have answered what I can without violating confidences or the good Lord’s trust in me. I will say, though, that for all of your enterprise, you may have stumbled onto a story that is not fit to print.”

“Why? Because Nilus was a serial womanizer and you wouldn’t want that exposed?”

The priest shook his head. “That’s news that’s almost older than me. I can’t imagine anyone would care, but if it sells some more papers, have at it. The story I was talking about has more to do with you and your family, Augustus. I would assume your mother asked for God’s forgiveness.”

“For what?” I said.

Father Timothy picked up his wedge and stood, leaning on the club like a cane. “I’m afraid we have to wrap this up,” Repelmaus said.

“Allow me to clear up one small item,” the priest said. “Unlike most Irishmen, I am done drinking by eleven.”

“Father,” I said. “What did you say your last name was?”

“Reilly, son. Not like the life of, but Reilly: R-E-I–L-L-Y.”

I wrote it down.

The priest nodded at Joanie, then offered his hand to me. “Thank you for your trouble,” he said. “If you write your story, Augustus, please be kind enough to send us a copy.”