The Skeleton Box

TWENTY-SIX

Here, darling,” Millie Bontrager said when we dropped my mother at her house. She wrapped Mom in a blanket. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“I’ll come for you in the morning, Mom,” I said. “I love you.”

“Yes, Gussy,” she said. She looked sad. “I want to go to bed.”

Darlene left me at the back door of the Pilot.

“I better go face the music at work,” she said.

“I have to find Whistler,” I said. I’d called him twice while we drove back to town. He didn’t answer. I didn’t leave messages.

Darlene reached across the front seat of her cruiser and squeezed my hand. “Call me if you find out anything.”

In the newsroom, I hoped to see Whistler at his computer, pinkie ring snicking the keys. But all I saw was his desk, cleared of everything but his computer, a stapler, the blotter, and an empty Peerless Pilot Personals coffee cup full of paper clips.

I flipped on the black-and-white TV resting atop a pile of old Pilots on our fired photographer’s old desk and tuned it to Channel Eight. The sports guy was yammering about the River Rats’ chances against the Pipefitters. “Without Tex Dobrick,” I heard him say, “this one seems piped for the’Fitters…”

Go to hell, I thought.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Whistler’s cell. It rang, and rang again. Then I heard another ring, clearer, from nearby. I went to my desk. Whistler’s phone was lit up on my chair seat. I ended the call. He had left his phone sitting on a white business envelope. Typed on the front was simply GUS. I tore the envelope open. Something fell out onto the floor. Whistler’s Media North credit card. I tossed it on my desk. The envelope also held a single typewritten page, folded in three.

I slid it out and read it:

Gus,

We had a good run together. You are a fine journalist (even if you’re a Times guy-ha ha). I must regretfully resign from the Pilot, effective now. It’s not like you need me around for one more paper. Besides, it’s bad luck to hang around for the last issue of a newspaper. You know what they say about journalism careers ending badly. I had hoped we could get to the bottom of the Bingo Night Burglaries. Why bother now?

Will send forwarding info.

I’m sure the future holds good things for you.

Always First!

Luke

P.S. Sorry again about that monitor I killed! It deserved it!

“Bullshit,” I said. “Fucking bullshit.” I balled the letter up and threw it at the wall.

A feeling came over me, a feeling I knew well from playing goalie. You’re in the net and a guy is bearing down on you and you know you have the angle cut off but he’s a sniper who can detect the tiniest gap you’ve unwittingly left between your legs or under one of your arms, so you tighten up from head to toe and slide out another six inches to cut off even more of his angle.

Then his stick unwinds and follows through and you feel the puck hit you at almost the same instant that you realize you saw it, or at least a black blur that must have been it, and you know you have it but you’re not sure where, maybe your glove, maybe your gut, maybe your crotch, maybe beneath a leg pad, and you wrap yourself into a tuck while the shooter crashes in and your defensemen scramble around looking for the puck.

You’re terrified that it will flop out from wherever you’re holding it and lie there for the shooter or one of his teammates to slap into the net. You feel the fear in knowing that you have hold of something, but you don’t really know where it is, and you might lose it before you ever get control. And if you let that happen, then it will be your fault, and your fault alone. Because your job is to keep the puck out of your net. You and only you.

I had to do something.

I went to my desk, picked up my phone, looked at my blotter. Scratched across one corner of the February page was a 313 number. Joanie. I’d forgotten to call her back. She had said she would ask around about Whistler.

I dialed.

“Yeah,” she said.

Music blared in the background, and I thought I heard an announcer’s voice narrating a hockey game, heard the names Maltby and Draper.

She’s at the Anchor Bar, I thought. “It’s Gus.”

“What?” She was yelling. “I can’t hear you.”

“It’s Gus,” I shouted.

“Hang on.”

I heard a clamor of voices talking over Hendrix and clinking bottles. I pictured Joanie stepping outside onto the sidewalk on Fort Street, coatless and shivering.

“What’s up?” she said.

“I’m calling about Whistler.”

“Why didn’t you call before?”

“I was busy. What do you know?”

“Oh, jeez, this is weird.”

“What?”

“So, long story short: Whistler had turned into this classic investigative reporter, always working on some big secret project that’s going to win a Pulitzer and hardly ever getting anything in the paper. His career was in the crapper four or five years ago, the desk was trying to move him to one of the suburban bureaus, but he told them to stuff it. Then, a couple of years ago, he almost got fired.”

“For what?”

“He was working on a story about a professional burglar.”

“No.”

“Yeah. A real pro. Rips off the rich folks in the Pointes and Oakland County. Apparently Whistler got a little deeper into this story than he should have. Followed the guy around, actually saw him pull some jobs.”

I did not want to believe this.

“Are you sure?” I said.

I thought of my mother’s house, and the sliding glass door I hadn’t fixed.

“I’m sure,” Joanie said.

Mom, I thought, had had Whistler and me to dinner one Sunday. She had complained about the door, how it wouldn’t lock right. He was sitting there, hearing it as he finished his cherry cobbler.

“No way,” I said.

I felt sick to my stomach.

“It’s what I was told, Gus.”

“By whom?”

“A couple of people, but mainly his ex.”

Whistler’s ex. The woman who always wanted to get to the crime scene before the cops. Creepy good, he’d said. I sat back on my desk, woozy.

“What’s her name? Barbara something?”

“Beverly. Beverly Taggart. Byline had a middle ‘C.’”

“Tags,” I said.

“Whatever. She wasn’t happy. Said Whistler owes her money.”

“Hang on a second.” Tawny Jane had popped up on the TV. She was standing in front of the sheriff’s department. She had a news bulletin. The police had released Tatch and the other born-agains. Breck remained in custody.

“Sorry,” I said. “How did Whistler not get fired?”

“How else? One of the top Freep guys is a drinking buddy. They just killed the B-and-E stories and told him he better come up with something else good. So he holed himself up in some fourth-floor cranny for months, locked the door, shooed people away. The bosses started looking for excuses to can him. He finally got in trouble spending money on long-distance phone calls and outside experts and other stuff regular reporters can’t touch.”

I picked up the credit card I’d tossed on my desk. Whistler had used it to pay a consulting firm $450. But what was the firm’s name? I kicked myself for not asking Philo when he’d told me about it.

“Then,” Joanie said, “on Christmas Eve, he just e-mailed them, ‘I quit,’ and disappeared.”

“Christmas Eve?”

“Dramatic, huh? Why?”

“Because he started at the Pilot in November.”

“Are you sure?”

“Might even have been late October. He wrote the annual turkey story.”

“Oh. Well. Maybe my source got it wrong.”

I dropped the credit card and grabbed the Media North cell phone Whistler had left behind. He had insisted, as if he were doing me a favor, on using his own Detroit phone until the end of the year, when his service contract was up. But now I thought, no, Gus, you dipshit-that’s when the Free Press shut his Free Press phone off, when he tendered his resignation.

“No,” I said. “I am a fucking idiot.”

When Whistler joined the Pilot, he hadn’t yet quit the Free Press. His bosses there must have assumed he was doing his investigative reporter thing, digging a dry hole, looking for news outside the newsroom, whatever vapid saying he used. He wasn’t looking for a place to land in retirement. He didn’t give a shit about fishing. He was in Starvation Lake looking for the very same thing Breck was.

“Fire his butt,” Joanie said.

I almost laughed. “He fired himself,” I said. “He’s gone.”

“Good.”

“No, not good.” Tawny Jane was on the tube again, recapping the day’s Bingo Night Burglary news. The cops hadn’t let the Channel Eight crew come up to Tatch’s camp, so they shot from up on the ridge. I watched the camera pan the hill, passing Soupy’s parents’ house.

I had an idea.

“Could you get me that woman’s number?”

“Who?”

“Beverly Taggart.”

“Hold on. I might have it in my purse.” She did. I wrote it on my blotter. “Is there anything-oh, wait, one last little thing. Not that it matters, but it’s funny.”

“What?”

“You know how Whistler’s legendary for smashing computers?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems it’s not an anger thing. The guy would get freaked out on deadline and have like a panic attack. He wasn’t mad. He just lost it under pressure.”

“Really?”

“Typical investigative reporter, huh? Can’t handle the real stuff.”

“I guess. Listen, I owe you.”

“That’s right,” Joanie said. “When are you going to come visit again? Maybe less business and more pleasure next time?”

“Soon,” I lied.

I slid into my desk chair and let my head fall into my hands.

How had I missed so much? How had I let Whistler put so much over on me? I looked up to him. I trusted him. He was me. A reporter. If you can’t trust a fellow scribe, who can you trust? he had said. It’s me and you and the rest of the world, right?

I’d had the puck in my hands, and I had dropped it.

I sat up and looked at the phone. I heard one of the Channel Eight anchors babbling about a budget vote in Elk Rapids. I had calls to make. I was afraid of what else I might find. But I had to look anyway.

Philo was first. He was still up, watching the news. I told him I needed the name of that consulting firm Whistler had hired.

“Why?” he said. “It’s late.”

“I want to find out what the hell they billed us for. Maybe I can get it back.”

“I’m afraid it’s not going to save the Pilot, ” Philo said.

“Give me a fucking break,” I said. “Just do it. In two days I’ll be out of your hair and you can go back to playing newspaper exec.”

There was a lengthy silence before he said, “Wait.” I heard a keyboard clacking and Philo mumbling something about the idiots in accounting. I liked Philo, but I didn’t have time to be nice to him now.

“All right,” he said. “Something information services. Gawd-ralt? Gawd-ree-oh?”

“Spell it.”

I wrote it down as he recited, “G-A-U-D-R-E-A-U-L-T.”

“GAW-droh,” I said.

“I guess. Gaudreault Information Services. Grosse Pointe.”

I stared at the penciled word, recalling the voice I had heard, first around the pool table at Aggeliki’s, later on the answering machine in Joanie’s loft.

Frenchy. Albert Gaudreault. The computer geek.

Frenchy, whom Whistler had hired. Frenchy, who had lost one lover to me and thought Joanie would be next. Frenchy, who probably had known Joanie and I were going to meet with Reilly and Repelmaus at the golf course-and might have been working for them, too, for all I knew-and who had to have been the one who had stolen my mother’s lockbox and given it, no doubt for a price, to Luke Whistler.

“I’ll be goddammed,” I said.

“Huh?” Philo said.

“Good luck shutting the paper down,” I said, and hung up.

I dialed again, this time the number Joanie had given me. Eight or nine rings later, Beverly Taggart croaked, “What?”

I pictured her lying in bed. On the nightstand next to her would be a fake leather pouch for her cigarettes, probably pink, and an ashtray spilling over with butts.

“Tags,” I said.

“Who’s this?”

“I know where Luke is.”

I heard sheets rustling. “That bastard,” she said.

“I have to agree.”

“Who is this?”

I told her. She asked me where Whistler was. Of course I had no idea, but I said headed for Canada, with the cops on his tail. That didn’t seem to surprise her. I told her he had stolen something that had been buried on a hill overlooking Starvation Lake.

“He found it then?” she said.

“Found what?”

I heard the click of a cigarette lighter. “I wish I knew,” she said. She exhaled. “He would never say, exactly. All I know’s it had something to do with a nun his mother knew, and it was going to be our ticket out of the newspaper game.”

“Big book deal, huh?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Everybody up here knows about it.”

“That son of a bitch,” she said. She stewed for a minute. I pictured her in a redbrick bungalow in Garden City or Inkster, a rusting gas lamp sticking out of the front yard slush. “I did a lot of work on that project.”

“You talk to a guy named Breck?”

“The name sounds familiar. I don’t think he helped much.”

“It was you who found out about the map, though, wasn’t it?”

“Lucas told you an awful lot. What did you say your name was?”

“Philo.”

“That’s a strange name.”

“After my great-grandfather.”

“Did he get the map? He wouldn’t even have known about it if it wasn’t for me.”

“Somebody up here told you?”

She paused. I heard her lighter click again. “Some lady, I forget her name.”

“Louise Campbell?”

“Could be. She was all hopped up to help us-for cash of course-and then she just clammed up, wouldn’t talk again.”

“She died a couple of years ago.”

“Too bad. How?”

Cop reporters always wanted to know how.

“Broken heart,” I said. “Your book was supposed to be about a nun?”

“Partly. A nun who died back when Lucas was just a baby. He never told me everything, but what I heard sounded like a humdinger. Priests, murder, buried treasure. Bitsy knew it was buried, she just didn’t know where. Then again, Bitsy was just this side of crazy, and she was all drugged up on her deathbed when she told him, so maybe it’s all BS.”

“Who is Bitsy?”

“His ma. Elizabeth Josephine Pound Whistler. Bitsy.”

I wrote it down.

“Is she alive?”

“No. Died, oh, mid-nineties.”

Something was familiar about that name.

“Luke never said what the treasure was?”

“Nope. He just told me we’d be all set. So now the son of a bitch has it all to himself? I hope the cops-”

I hung up in the middle of her sentence. I’d gotten what I needed from Beverly Taggart. I got Darlene on the phone.

I told her I was now sure that Whistler had made off with Nilus’s box. His mother had told him things. He had learned that there was a map. He’d acquired my mother’s piece of it.

“He’s getting away,” I said. “You have to call the state police.”

“Dingus doesn’t like us sending the state cops on wild-goose chases,” she said. “I’m lucky he hasn’t asked for my badge already for kidnapping Bea.”

“Come on, Darl.”

“We don’t even know that he took anything, let alone what he took. Even if it was what you say, what does this have to do with my mother?”

“It must have been him. He was looking for the map. That’s why he never took anything. He left nothing behind. I’ll bet he broke into Soupy’s mom’s house, too.”

“All of those could just as well have been Breck. I mean, he was actually digging. And wasn’t Whistler covering the story the night of the murder?”

I thought back, recalled seeing Whistler at the hospital.

“Shit,” I said. “He was with T.J.”

“Tawny Jane?”

“Yeah, they’ve been fooling around. He was with her that night. He heard about it on her scanner. Damn.”

“Look,” Darlene said. “I’ll alert the borders at Sault Ste. Marie, Port Huron, Detroit. If he’s got something strange in his trunk, they’ll hold him.”

I sighed. “OK.”

“Get some sleep, Gussy. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

I grabbed my coat. I was exhausted and hungry. I considered driving to the Hide-A-Way for a burger, decided I was too tired. I’d have to settle for peanut butter toast. I glanced at the police scanner perched over Whistler’s desk. It was dark. “Now he turns it off,” I said to myself.

I moved to the TV. Merv, the weather guy, was talking about a snowstorm expected that weekend. He was fat and bald and way too cheerful about the prospect of ten to twelve inches of snow. Tawny Jane Reese, I thought, would not make a good weather bitch.

Then I froze. I looked at the scanner, then back at the TV, then at the scanner again.

“I have a huge scoop for you,” I told Tawny Jane when she answered.

“It’s late.”

“Two huge scoops.”

“Why the hell would you give me a scoop?”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to sleep with me. But I need to ask you something personal.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“True. You want the scoops or not?”

I waited. “Give me the first one,” she said.

I told her about the Pilot ’s imminent demise.

“Like the bosses at Media North are going to let me report that,” she said.

“That’s up to you,” I said. As I talked, I stared at the name I had scribbled earlier: Elizabeth Josephine Pound Whistler. I drew circles around the four initials.

“What’s the other one?”

“First I get to ask you.”

“I might not want to answer.”

“Understood. But at the hospital the other night, when they took Phyllis, you were late.”

“Yeah. So?”

“You’re never late. You’re always on the ball.”

She was. And if she’d heard the bulletin about the break-in at Mom’s house at the same time Whistler had, there was no way she would have been late to the hospital. No way would Tawny Jane let a guy she was fucking beat her to the story- especially a guy she was fucking.

“Thanks,” she said. “Except when my scanner goes bonkers.”

“What scanner?”

“I have a police scanner next to my bed. It died on me Sunday morning.”

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

“So,” I said, “Whistler was not with you that night.”

“Sunday night? No. Why?”

I told her everything I knew about Nilus, Sister Cordelia, Whistler, the box he had stolen away. She must have said, “Oh my God,” ten times.

I called Darlene again and told her what I now knew.

“Calm down,” she said.

“He’s getting away.”

“No.”

“They got him?”

“No, I’m going to get him.”

“You mean we’re going to get him.”

“Are you still at the Pilot?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait there.”

“Out back?” I said, but Darlene had already hung up.

I turned off the lights and the TV and locked the door and stood in the back parking lot watching for headlights. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. I called Darlene’s cell. She didn’t answer. I walked out to South Street and looked up and down, as if that would make her arrive faster. At half an hour, I called again. It went straight to voice mail. I called the department.

“Pine County.” It was Catledge.

“Deputy Esper, please?”

“Sorry, Gus. She’s gone.”

“Don’t bust my balls, Skip.”

“Not busting your balls. She hightailed it out of here forty-five minutes ago. Said she was going to make last call at Dingman’s.”

“She doesn’t drink at Dingman’s.”

“Good night, Gus.”

I stood listening to the wind hum through Starvation Lake, wondering where Darlene was and whether I’d see her again.