The Skeleton Box

TWENTY-THREE

Silhouettes of reporters and cameramen and townspeople slid back and forth against the fluorescent glow of the glass-walled lobby of the Pine County Sheriff’s Department. “Mob scene,” I said to myself.

Catledge steered past the main entrance and headed toward the rear lot where the cops parked. As I followed, I saw Tawny Jane standing next to the Channel Eight van, smoothing her hair back in a side-view mirror.

Catledge stopped his cruiser and stepped out and opened the chain-link fence to the rear lot. After I pulled in, he got out again and closed the fence. We parked near the back door to the jail. I stepped out of my truck.

“Isn’t that fence automatic?” I said.

“Froze up,” Catledge said. “Dingus doesn’t have the budget to fix it.”

He ushered me through two buzzing doors. Everything was as brightly lit as a school cafeteria. I saw Dingus emerge from his office fingering a set of keys. “This way, son,” he said.

Catledge peeled off. The sheriff led me into the women’s wing of the jail, through a locked door, then through another, and finally into a dim gray corridor lined on both sides with cells. He stopped at the third one on the right. Through the bars I saw Mom, curled up beneath a wool blanket on a narrow bed, asleep. I felt the urge to reach in and stroke her shoulder, comfort her somehow. Dingus held a finger to his lips and shook his head. “Just wanted you to see,” he said.

He didn’t speak again until he’d closed his office door and indicated the angle-iron chair facing his desk. “Sit,” he said. The room smelled of mustard and salt. A hot dog for dinner, I thought. Probably cooked in the microwave in the shift room.

I sat. I’d been in the same chair many times while trying to wheedle information out of the sheriff, who usually leaned back and smiled through his handlebar mustache, his way of saying he wasn’t about to help me.

Dingus wasn’t smiling now. He sat and picked up his phone and hit a button and said into the handset, “Stand by,” then hung up the phone. He brushed some crumbs off the blotter, set his bowling-pin forearms down, and leaned toward me. Besides the phone and the blotter, the only things on his desk were a stapler, a set of black handcuffs, a file folder half an inch thick with papers, and a framed picture of his girlfriend, Barbara. He opened a drawer, took out a box of staples, closed the drawer, and set the box on the desk.

“Did you give my mother a sleeping pill?” I said.

He ignored that. “Where’ve you been?” he said. His Scandinavian singsong made it hard sometimes to tell whether he was just fooling around. Tonight, I was pretty sure he was not.

“You brought me here, Dingus.”

He plucked a row of fresh staples out of the box, then picked up the stapler and pulled the top half back to expose the carriage. “Figured you’d be out in the lobby with the other buzzards,” he said.

“Has my mother been charged?”

He slipped two sheets of paper out of the file folder, fitted them into the stapler, and punched it down with a fist. “Should she be?” he said.

“I can’t imagine with what.”

Dingus set the stapled sheets aside, took two more from the file folder, and slammed the stapler so hard that it flipped on its side. “How about obstruction of justice?”

“That would only apply if she actually knew anything.”

He righted the stapler. “What is it you hockey guys say? ‘You can’t hit what you can’t catch’?” He slammed the stapler again, this time without any paper in it. “Well, you can’t see what you can’t see, can you? Excuse me.” He picked up his phone and hit a button. “Now, please,” he said into the phone. Then he addressed me again. “Be warned, sir, although she’s your mother, you would be ill-advised to cover for her, legally speaking.”

“You think I’m covering for her?”

“Have you retained legal representation?”

“Why should I?”

“Your prerogative,” he said. “But let me tell you something: We do not believe that Bea slept as soundly Sunday night as she claims.”

“She said she woke up to go to the bathroom.”

“There’s more to it than that. Or maybe she’s told you.”

“Told me what?”

His office door opened. Darlene walked in. She had doffed her deputy’s hat and tied her hair back with a rubber band. She was carrying something behind her back that I couldn’t see from where I sat.

“Stay right there, Deputy,” Dingus said. Then, addressing me, “Can you think of a reason your mother would have left the house that night?”

My heart jumped into my throat. Because I could think of a reason.

“No,” I said.

“Do not lie to me, son. I can and will hold it against you.”

I wanted to ask Darlene what was going on. But of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t even look at her, which was why Dingus had brought her in, for maximum dramatic effect, to impress upon me the need to plumb Mom’s fickle mind for whatever secrets she was keeping. Or had forgotten.

“I don’t have to talk to you,” I said.

“But you will unless you want to join your mother in a cell. I can charge you with obstruction of justice, too.”

I grabbed my notebook and pen out of my back pocket. “That for the record?”

Dingus came out of his chair and leaned across his desk and pointed a finger so close to my face that I thought he might thrust it into my eye. “Do not trifle with me,” he said.

“Don’t trifle with me, Sheriff.”

He held his finger there a moment longer, then sat back down. “Bea Carpenter,” he said, “did not kill her best friend. And she might have slept through the assault on Phyllis Bontrager. But she woke up. And she got out of bed.”

“Which she has willingly admitted.”

“Here’s what she has not admitted: She left that house.” He turned to Darlene. “Put it here,” he said, indicating his desk.

From behind her back, Darlene produced a clear plastic bag. She slid one end open and removed a green boot with a black rubber toe and fake white fur lining the opening. I recognized it as one of the pair I’d bought Mom for Christmas. Then I remembered the old galoshes she’d worn when we’d gone up to Dad’s tree house.

“Tell me,” Dingus said. “Did you buy Bea a pair of boots recently?”

“For Christmas.”

“At Reid’s.”

“How’d you know?”

“Receipt. Credit card number.”

“So what?”

He looked at Darlene. She said, “We found it stuck in the snow on the path up to your Dad’s tree-garage. It was unlaced and pointing down the hill. The toe had gotten caught beneath a tree root under all that snow.”

I wanted to help Darlene, because I loved her mother and I loved her. But I wasn’t about to speak what I was now thinking: that Mom had left the house with the lockbox and gone up to Dad’s garage and hidden the box in the trunk of the Bonneville, then hurried back inside.

Nilus, Mrs. B had said. Like Soupy’s mom, she knew things that only they and my mother knew. I thought back to Sunday morning. Perhaps that’s what Mom and Mrs. B had been talking about when I’d come in with Saturday’s Pilot. Mom had asked why “they” hadn’t taken anything. I now concluded that she must have meant the Bingo Night Burglar.

“Forgive me,” I said, “but what does that prove? Maybe the burglar took the boot.”

Dingus shook his head. “I’m not an idiot,” he said. “Your mother lost this boot when she left the house that night. She was probably rushing, knowing we were coming.”

“Why did you arrest Breck?” I said.

“You’ll find out when he’s arraigned in the morning.”

“For murder?”

“Tell me why your mother left the house that night. Did she take something out of the house? Did she hide it somewhere? That garage?”

“I don’t know. The burglar or burglars haven’t taken anything. Have you figured out why? Or what they were really looking for? Feels like you’re just fishing, Dingus. You’ve got a whole jail full of people and you don’t know who did it, do you? What about your anonymous tip? Isn’t that why you arrested Tatch in the first place? Now it’s Breck? You don’t really have any idea what happened, do you? The best you can do is cancel bingo.”

Dingus ran a hand over his mustache. “Maybe the break-ins were for documents. You know, identity theft. These old folks have money stashed away.”

Or a map, I thought. “I’m not an idiot, either.”

“Perhaps you would like your own jail cell.”

I risked a glance at Darlene. She rolled her eyes.

“You still have vacancies?” I said.

Darlene stepped closer “We think,” she said, “the anonymous tip may have come from Breck himself. Tatch has been whining to other prisoners about what Breck did at his camp. Maybe Tatch had become an impediment to Breck.”

“Tatch-Mr. Edwards, that is-is now telling us Breck wasn’t at the camp that night,” Dingus said.

That wasn’t what Tatch had told me when he called me from the jail. He clearly was turning on Breck.

“How would he know whether Breck was there?” I said. “Tatch wasn’t there either.”

“We’re checking that out with the others.”

“Are you going to release my mother?”

“We did give her a sleeping pill,” Dingus said. “I’m hoping maybe, with a good night’s sleep and we let you take her home, her memory might improve a little.”

Darlene moved around behind me. Dingus said, “The truth is, I wish we could slam a big door on all the pain-in-the-butt, nutcase downstaters who come here and mess up our quiet little town. Then maybe Bea could just go home and fret over whatever it is she doesn’t want anybody to know. But it’s too late to slam the door.”

“You know, Dingus,” I said, “back in the fifties there was a sheriff here who was in the middle of a tough election and he suddenly solved a big crime.”

He pursed his lips. The tips of his handlebar jumped up an inch. “Get him out of my sight,” he said. “I’ve got to go see the other vultures.”

Darlene stuck a hand under my armpit and tugged me out of my chair. As we were going out the door, Dingus said, “By the way, way back in the fifties? Sheriff Spardell was re-elected in a landslide.”

“What the hell was that all about?”

I whispered it to Darlene as soon as Dingus’s door closed behind us. Darlene squeezed my arm hard, looked behind her, and yanked me down the hall, around a corner, and into a closet. She shut the closet door, plunging us into darkness. I backed up against a set of metal shelves, smelling soap and cardboard and then Darlene, as she stepped close to me.

She took one of my hands in both of hers and pressed something small into the palm.

“What’s this?” I said.

“The button you left on the stairs at the tree house the other night.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laid a hand on my chest. “When we came for Bea and you ran out the back.”

“Dingus is off his rocker,” I said.

“Shut up.”

She grabbed my coat collar and pulled me into her and kissed me, her badge pressing into my ribs. The kiss was not long but it was wet and warm and I felt a shiver ripple across my belly like the one I had felt when she had kissed me in the dark courthouse closet almost twenty years before. She pulled away and pushed me back against the shelves.

“What was that?” I said.

“Breck insists on talking to you.”

“What?”

“He has no lawyer and says he needs to speak with you. Dingus OK’d it.”

“Dingus really is crazy.”

She opened the door a crack, peeked out, closed it again, turned back to me. “Meet me later. My apartment.”

My gut fluttered again. “Are you sure?”

“You’re going to tell me all about the tree house and Bea.” She opened the door. “Out.”

Wayland Breck waited in orange coveralls at a long white Formica-topped table in the shift room. I was surprised to see a cigarette smoldering in a foil ashtray. He tapped a can of Vernors on the tabletop. Darlene sat me down across from him. His hands were unfettered, but I noticed shackles on his ankles.

“You have fifteen minutes,” Darlene said. I assumed she had brought us to the shift room because the rest of Breck’s group was being fingerprinted and mug-shotted and Dingus didn’t want them to see us talking. She closed the shift room door behind her. I saw the back of her head through the crosshatched observation window in the door.

“She’s important to you, isn’t she?” Breck said.

“Good evening, Breck. You wanted to talk to me?”

“Is she as important as your mother?” He smiled and took a drag on his cigarette before crushing it out. “You know, Mr. Carpenter, we are not so different. My mother kept secrets from me, too.” He let that hang there. I chose not to respond. “For years,” he continued, “I believed what my mother told me about my grandfather, that he died of emphysema in a hospital when I was a small boy. Only in her will did she leave a note telling me that was a lie.”

“Why would she wait? Weren’t you a grown man by then?”

“Yes. But as you, of all people, can appreciate, I can’t be sure why she held back. Maybe she was embarrassed. In retrospect, I believe my grandfather’s death tortured her for most of her life. She was”-he stopped and looked at the table-“an increasingly sad woman.”

“But she kept the truth-or her version of it-from you.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want it to torture me.”

“But now it does.”

He chose not to reply.

“She didn’t commit suicide, did she?” I said.

“Melanoma.”

“And what is the truth?”

Breck looked at the shift room door. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

“On the record?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

I took out my pen and notebook and opened the notebook and wrote BRECK, JAIL, WED at the top of the first blank page. I looked up at him. Only then did I notice.

“Did the cops confiscate your glasses?” I said.

“I don’t wear glasses,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“My grandfather,” he said, “did not kill Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero.” He clasped his hands together on the table and leaned over them. “He may or may not have had romantic feelings for her. But he did not kill her. The truth is, he knew something about what happened to the nun, and so Father Nilus Moreau made sure he was eliminated. My grandfather wasn’t even arraigned. He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed in this very building in a matter of two days on a weekend.”

“That’s all public record.”

Breck continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “He tried to call the only person in the world he trusted-his daughter, my mother-but she was away at a wedding, and there was no voice mail or mobile phones to track her down. She heard about his death a good twenty-four hours after it happened.”

“He got in a fight with the wrong guy.”

Again he ignored me. “As a fellow investigator, Mr. Carpenter, you’ll be interested to know that I found the priest who supposedly heard my grandfather’s confession.”

“Impressive.”

“Emile Waterstradt. Saint Robert Bellarmine. Otsego Lake. Glenfiddich.”

“Glenfiddich?”

“Scotch. A bottle a day. Waterstradt finally left the priesthood in his shame. I found him living in an apartment above a bar in Hillman.”

“How do you spell Waterstradt?” I said.

“He’s dead. But if he were still alive, perhaps he would tell you, as he told me, that my grandfather didn’t kill the nun, but that he did see what he believed to be the remains of the unfortunate nun.”

“Where?”

“In a crawl space beneath the old church. They were about to start building the lovely new church, and Grandpa was cleaning things up. He found her remains beneath a pile of dismantled pews. At first he thought it was an animal. But there were shreds of cloth.”

“Her habit.”

“Correct.”

“And he told the priest.”

“The charming Father Nilus, yes. As for the ‘wrong guy,’ after Rupert Calloway was released on the pretense that he had acted in self-defense, he subsequently moved north and enjoyed splendid employment at a home for retired priests on Lake Superior. He mowed the lawn and plowed the walks and in return received room and board and the convenience of a whorehouse in Ishpeming.”

“Rupert Calloway is-”

“The man who cut my grandfather’s throat. He died in ninety-seven. Unfortunately I didn’t find him in time to ask him a question or two.”

“You’re saying someone arranged for this Calloway guy to kill your grandfather?”

“I’m not saying it. Father Waterstradt said it, while crying like a child into his coffee cup of single malt. He and Nilus were close.”

“Entertaining story. But you didn’t go to the authorities.”

“What did the authorities say happened to the nun, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Your grandfather dumped her in Torch Lake.”

“But her body never washed up.”

“Sometimes bodies don’t wash up in that lake,” I said. “Sometimes boats don’t.”

Breck smiled. “I’ve heard all about the underground tunnels that suck things out to Lake Michigan.”

“Why should I believe a man who helped the church defend pedophiles?”

“Do not judge lest you be judged.”

“Enough with the biblical claptrap.”

“Believe what you like,” he said. “I saved most of those men from much harsher treatment at the hands of my clients.”

“Eagan, MacDonald and Browne, representing the archdiocese.”

“Indeed. To say they were ruthless would be an understatement of the first rank. My research, which the lawyers put on the record quite selectively, didn’t always help the archdiocese’s case. So they were forced to settle on less-than-palatable terms, at least financially. The men were compensated handsomely, and they went on with their lives.”

“You’re a hero. Congratulations.”

The door opened. Skip Catledge ducked in. “Five minutes,” he said.

The door closed. Breck said, “You’ve no doubt noticed that my name didn’t show up on any of these sex abuse cases until the early nineties, after my mother died.”

“So that’s why you got close to the church, to find out what happened to your grandfather.”

“The law firm would be careful, of course, with an outside contractor like me. But I made a few friends, learned a few things.”

“Like, they’re buying up land on the lake.”

“So you have done some homework. After I learned about the first purchases, last summer, I focused my research. And when I heard what they were offering for the Edwards parcels”-Tatch’s property-“I decided it was time to act.”

If only Tatch had taken the money and sold his land, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Mrs. B would be at Mom’s house now, drinking rose over a game of Yahtzee.

“Have you enjoyed your little messianic charade?” I said.

“It is nothing compared to your colleague’s.”

“My collegue?”

“I’m sure Whistler hasn’t mentioned that he came to me a few years ago to ask about my grandfather. He said he was researching a story.”

“Bullshit.”

“He came with a woman. It was a hot summer day and I had a window open. I could hear them out in the parking lot, bickering. Then I heard tires screeching and he came in alone.”

A woman? “How did he find you?” I said.

“My mother’s name was in the papers when my grandfather died.”

Of course. That’s how I had made the connection. I felt a little sick. When Breck had told me outside the drain commission meeting that I was being “led astray,” I hadn’t thought he was referring to Whistler.

“But how would Whistler have known there was a story?” I said.

“He’s fifty-six. Born in June 1943. And yet his father, supposedly one Edgar Whistler, was killed in April 1942 at Bataan. Which doesn’t add up. But if little Lucas was born in one town-let’s say Clare, an hour away, but another world back then-and his mother moved him back to Starvation as a baby, people there wouldn’t doubt he was the son of the fallen soldier.”

“But”-I hesitated, uncertain of the answer-“then he moved away?”

“To Allen Park. His mother was a night janitor at Superior Motors. But Whistler had to help support her. By the way, this is all publicly available information. I’m surprised you don’t know it. Are you surprised you don’t know it, Mr. Carpenter?”

Surprised wasn’t the word. “I don’t need to know the entire history of my colleagues.”

“I see,” Breck said. “It’s funny. My contacts at the law firm called him Luke Chiseler. He knows more about any of this than anybody-or almost anybody. And he put a price on it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Mr. Whistler called it a book deal.”

“And?”

The shift room door opened again. Catledge stepped in.

“And… if you want to hear more, you should be at my arraignment tomorrow. It should be interesting. I dearly hope the entire town shows up.”

“Why Tex? What’s he have to do with this?”

“What better way to punish this town?” Breck said, then briefly lowered his eyes. “I am sorry about his injury. That was not intended.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I said.

“In case I don’t get a fair trial.”

“Why? You think you’re going to follow in your grandfather’s footsteps?”

“Time’s up,” Catledge said.

Breck rose. “Ask Father Reilly.”