The Skeleton Box

FOUR

Sorry. Hospital’s closed. Nobody’s going in.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood with his arms crossed in front of the double glass doors at Munson’s emergency entrance.

“Hospitals don’t close, Frankie,” I said.

“They do today. Especially to vultures.”

As he swayed to and fro on his heels, his forehead moved in and out of the light thrown by an overhead lamp.

I held up my empty hands. “No pen, no notebook. I just want to see Darlene.”

She was standing with her back to me down the corridor behind D’Alessio, talking to a nurse. Doctors and cops milled in the hall beyond her.

“Your mom doing OK?” D’Alessio asked.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Good. Go home and take care of her.”

“I need to see Darlene.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “She’s with her mother. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

“Have they pronounced her dead?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“A little ticked you’re not working the scene, Frankie?”

“What scene? A bunch of people stumbling over each other. I’m fine right here.”

What an asshole, I thought. But that was Frankie. I’d played hockey against him for years, and he was no different on the ice. My pals in the Midnight Hour Men’s League referred to him as a short little prick with a short little prick.

“So when are you going to announce?” I said. “Noon tomorrow would be perfect, don’t you think? By then, every voter in the county will have heard what happened tonight.”

D’Alessio was the subject-and probably the source-of rumors about a possible election challenge to Dingus. The two had never gotten along. For many years, running against Dingus, who stayed on budget and made sure locals didn’t get too many speeding tickets, would have been futile. The burglaries had changed that. Murder would change it more.

“No comment,” D’Alessio said.

“Right. So I won’t quote you in the Pilot on your fellow deputies stumbling around and you let me duck in and see Darlene. OK?”

“How about, Sorry about what happened but go home.”

“Whoa,” came a voice behind me.

“Mr. Whistler,” D’Alessio said.

“Deputy,” Luke Whistler said.

Of course they knew each other. Whistler had gotten a few scoops on the Bingo Night stories and I figured his source was D’Alessio, who was leaking stuff to make Dingus look bad. Whistler hadn’t had anything juicy for a while, so I assumed Dingus was now keeping D’Alessio in the dark.

“What’s going on here?” Whistler said.

He wore a drab down vest patched in four or five places over a faded navy-and-orange sweatshirt announcing the Detroit Tigers as American League Champions, 1984. Sleet had mussed his white hair and streaked it dark along the sides of his boxy head. His retiree’s gut pushed the sweatshirt’s belly pocket out so that I could see the outline of a tape recorder inside.

“Sorry, no reporters allowed,” D’Alessio said.

“Of course not,” Whistler said. “Big story. No reporters. Who needs reporters?” He waggled a ballpoint pen in one hand and clutched a notebook in the other. He looked at me. “Sorry, boss. This can’t be easy for you.”

“I’m OK.”

“Your mom’s all right?”

“Yeah. Where were you?”

“Stopped at the cop shop.” He held up his notebook, open to a blank page. “Here’s what I got-squat. Nobody talking. How about you, Deputy?”

“Talk to the sheriff,” D’Alessio said. “Anyway, your boss isn’t here for the big story. He came to see his ex-girlfriend.”

Darlene Esper, nee Bontrager, had been my first love. We’d broken up the first time, years before, when I’d left Starvation to be a big-shot reporter in Detroit. After I’d come home, chastened, I found Darlene in an unhappy marriage, and we found our way back to each other. But by the time her divorce was final, we were apart again. I’d come to the hospital more out of a sense of duty to her mother than to her. At least that’s what I told myself.

“Sure he did,” Whistler said. “Her mother’s dead. I’d just like to talk to the next of kin, whoever it is. That’s what reporters do.”

“Parasites.”

“Been called worse by my exes, believe me. But you’ll be the first to pick up the paper and look for your name, won’t you, Deputy?” Whistler turned to me. “Shall we go?”

I took a last look into the hospital. There was Darlene, halfway down the corridor, facing my way. She raised a hand in a halfhearted wave, bit her lip. Then a doctor approached her and she disappeared around a corner.

“How’d the game go tonight?” D’Alessio said. “I was working.”

D’Alessio skated for the Ice Picks.

“You had no goalie, so we won easy,” I said.

“Where was Tatch?”

“Hell if I know. Probably with his fellow born-agains.”

“Frigging goalies.”

As I pulled out of the lot behind Whistler’s gigantic sedan-an Olds Toronado, black with red pinstripes, 1970 or 1971-the Channel Eight TV van was trying to pull in.

Tawny Jane Reese was hanging out of the front passenger window, yelling and gesturing angrily at two Traverse City cops waving the van away from the lot. She stopped for a few seconds to give Whistler a look as he slid past. It usually felt good to see my competitors hitting a stone wall. Tonight, nothing felt good.

I parked on Main in front of the Pilot. The sleet had stopped. A snowplow’s brake lights made red needle points in the dark two blocks down. I stood on the sidewalk watching the plow veer along the lakeshore, toward Mom’s house.

The street lamps had gone black at ten p.m., one of the austerity measures adopted by the town council. The late night darkness lured high school kids out for impromptu beer bashes on the beach, which required police visits, which probably cost more than the council had saved on shutting the lamps off. It made for decent copy in the Pilot.

I let my eyes adjust to the darkness until I could make out the snow-mottled beach, the frozen gray scar of the lake’s edge beyond. The two-lane street stretched back from the beach, flanked on both sides by two-story clapboard-and-brick buildings. The marina, a bait shop, Repicky Realty, a vacated lawyer’s office. An abandoned movie theater, Fortune Drug, Kepsel’s Hardware, a vacated dentist office, Sally’s Dry Cleaning and Floral, and Kate’s Cakes, closed for the winter. Between them all, empty storefronts like missing teeth in a hockey player’s mouth. Behind the shops on my right, the Hungry River flowed unseen beneath a crust of ice.

I smelled dampness in the air.

Fuzzy amber light glowed in the front window of Enright’s Pub. I wondered if Soupy had forgotten to turn it off or had just passed out in his office. Two doors down, Audrey’s Diner was dark, but in an hour or two, the lights would flick on and the proprietor would bustle about preparing for the breakfast rush of old men and their old wives.

On this particular morning at Audrey’s, there would be less of the usual jabber about the River Rats’ chances in the state playoffs, or how the weather was helping or hurting the tourist business of snowmobilers up from downstate. The men and women would lean on the counter together and listen as the little radio Audrey kept over the griddle told them that one of their own, a woman who had sat with them eating French toast with powdered sugar, never syrup, had been found dead in the home of Bea Carpenter.

It was my job to tell them what had happened and why. Whether they wanted to hear it or not. Whether I wanted to or not. Through the Pilot window I saw light bleeding from the newsroom into the reception area. My watch said 2:27 a.m.

“Shit,” I said, and fitted my key into the door.

Luke Whistler kept tapping on his keyboard as I threw my jacket over my chair and sat. I looked at my blank computer screen, considered having to write the obituary of Phyllis Marie Snyder Bontrager. Behind me, the tapping stopped. I heard the deadening hum of the fluorescent lamps overhead.

“Hey, guy,” Whistler said.

I heard him from behind the notes and files and newspapers and fast-food wrappers heaped on his gray metal desk. All I could see of him over the pile was the sheet-white top of his head.

“Yeah?”

He leaned back so that I could see his face. “Really sorry for what happened,” he said. “I couldn’t really say much back there with the copper.”

“Thanks.”

“You want to figure this out, boss?” He pushed his swivel chair out from behind his desk, the metal chair wheels crinkling the sugar packets scattered on the tile floor. “Huh? Me and you?”

I let out a breath. I didn’t want to break down in front of Whistler.

“Yeah. Hell yeah.”

“Good. Listen to these.”

Whistler stood, still in his down vest, and hit some buttons on the phone on his desk. A dial tone blared on the speaker. He was calling our voice mail system. Usually it was filled with people complaining about soaked papers and missed deliveries.

Now the automated voice said we had thirty-two new messages.

“That a record?” I said.

“Hang on.”

He played message twenty-one. “When are you guys in the media going to pick up the damn ball and run with it on this bingo guy? Our alleged police department can’t police a damn thing, and I don’t know what the hell we’re paying them for. We need you to find this bingo guy.”

“Yes, sir,” Whistler said.

He played message twenty-two. This voice was muffled, like one you’d hear coming from the other side of a motel wall. “Anyone checking on those whackaroonies at the Christian camp? They’re all agitated with the county. Maybe they’re just messing with us, and now they made a big damn mistake.”

Message twenty-three. A woman this time. “I can’t leave my house and go to bingo? Have you asked the church… Saint, Saint, oh, I can’t remember the name, I’m not Catholic… but have you asked the church-” A burst of static obliterated the rest of what she said. Whistler turned it off and sat. “Crazy, huh?”

“The natives are restless.”

“The natives are shitting their pants. But we’re going to figure it out.”

“Let’s do it.”

Luke Whistler had come to me, at the age of fifty-six, from the Detroit Free Press. Thirty years before, he had been the youngest Free Press staffer ever to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, for a series of stories he wrote about a Washtenaw County detective’s obsession with finding someone who was raping and killing young women in Ann Arbor. Whistler had never quite matched that performance, at least in the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, but his byline inspired awe and trepidation in the newsroom of my paper, the Detroit Times, because invariably it sat atop investigative stories that we wished we’d had the vision and courage and persistence to have pursued ourselves.

Whistler was nothing if not relentless. He had a reputation for immersing himself in stories so deeply that editors worried he’d have trouble resuming a normal life once he’d finished them, not unlike undercover cops who find themselves thinking more like the crooks than the good guys. Whistler hung around an emergency room for six months and came out knowing how to suture switchblade gashes and clean gunshot wounds. He became desperately ill from an ammonia leak while working undercover in a chicken processing plant for a story. Long after his stories about the Washtenaw detective had run, Whistler still met him once a week for double Crown and Cokes at the Tap Room in Ypsilanti. The serial killer was never caught.

I’d also heard he had a penchant for smashing computer screens. All reporters fantasized now and then about driving a fist into a balky monitor on deadline. I’d never known one who actually did it. Then came Whistler. He hadn’t been at the Pilot a month before I came into the newsroom one day and found a handwritten note on my keyboard. “Sorry about the computer,” he had written. “Thing kept freezing and I got carried away. Will pay for it.” I walked over to his desk and saw the shattered monitor, jagged cracks spidering out from a black circle at the center of the screen. Now that’s passion, I thought. I told our parent company, Media North, that the thing shorted out and blew up, and accounting reluctantly paid for a replacement.

I could have been just as good as Luke Whistler, or at least I liked to think so. But I had gone places I shouldn’t have, broken the law, and wound up back in Starvation Lake.

Finding Whistler’s resume in the mail the previous fall had surprised me. I was usually forced to choose between journalism school grads who couldn’t latch on at a decent paper and old ladies who wanted to use the columns of the Pilot to opine on the way teenagers dressed. I didn’t really vet him, didn’t bother calling his boss at the Freep, a know-nothing named McFetridge who couldn’t cover a house fire but had been promoted high enough that he could no longer do much damage. I knew Whistler’s clips and his reputation and, I had to admit, there was something perversely delicious about hiring him away from the Free Press, the competition I had so loathed and occasionally feared during my Detroit days. Besides, with the budget year nearing an end, I had to hire somebody or risk having the bean counters take the slot back. When I offered Whistler the job in a phone call one day, he told me, “They say all journalism careers end badly, it’s just a question of when.”

“Never heard that,” I said. “Funny.”

“Well, I’m going to prove them wrong.”

He insisted he’d come to Starvation not to retire, no, not a chance of that, but rather just so he wouldn’t have to worry every day about the Detroit Times or one of the network affiliates beating him to a story he’d been working on for weeks or months. His doctor had warned him about his blood pressure; strokes ran in his family, he said. Better to walk away now, settle into something less stressful, still be able to do what he loved, maybe have time for a little fishing, maybe read a book now and then.

Yet no one who had seen him around town, literally trotting from new source to new source, would think this hoary-headed guy in the ratty down vest and low-top sneakers had lost his passion. Whistler could get just as excited about a story on the new four-way stop at Horvath and Hodara roads as he could about the school millage vote that had split the town so savagely that Dingus assigned an extra deputy to the polling station. Hell, Whistler had happily written our annual story about the turkeys that survived Thanksgiving at the Drummond farm north of Mancelona.

Despite what he’d said about fishing and books, he was usually in the newsroom late at night, banging out the stories he had collected during the day. I would come in at 8:30 in the morning to e-mails and voice mails he had sent me just a few hours earlier. He avoided the place during daylight hours. “No news in the newsroom,” he liked to say.

I looked around the newsroom now, smelling old coffee and potato chip grease. There were three desks, some squeaky swivel chairs, a copier-and-fax machine that actually worked once or twice a week, and an old mini-fridge that made beers into slushies if you kept them in there too long.

“Can you hear those fluorescent lamps?” I said. “I hate that damn buzzing.”

Whistler shrugged. “Newsroom,” he said. “You know, I obviously didn’t know her well, but Phyllis was a good lady.” Mrs. B had worked the front counter at the Pilot. “I enjoyed getting to know her a little better at your mom’s the other night.”

Mom had had us both to dinner, and invited Mrs. B.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me. What’s the nicest thing she ever did for you?”

Someone who didn’t know Whistler might have told him it was none of his business. But I knew him, at least a little, and I knew he could not keep his curiosity bottled up.

“The nicest thing.” I thought about it. The story about getting my tonsils out was too personal. “When I was a kid,” I said, “she fixed one of my goalie gloves. My lucky glove.”

“Which?”

I flapped my right hand. “The stick hand.”

“Still got the glove?”

“Nope.”

“You know,” he said, “you remind me a little of Tags.”

“Who?”

“My old partner. Byline, Beverly C. Taggart. We’d be on some story, and she’d be acting all indifferent, but really she was the kind of reporter who wanted to knock on the door of somebody who’d just lost a daughter or a husband, maybe they didn’t even know it yet. Get there before the cops. She was good at that. Creepy good.”

“Before the cops? That’s out there.”

“Yeah. That’s probably why I married her.”

“She was one of your exes?”

“Both, actually. Married her twice. Divorced her twice.”

“You mean she divorced you.”

“Takes two,” Whistler said. “But I wouldn’t want to be married and divorced twice to any other woman in the world.”

“And I remind you of her why?”

“Well, you don’t have her caboose,” Whistler said.

I waited.

He said, “You’re not letting on how much you care. I mean, sorry for saying it, but what happened tonight could’ve happened-perish the thought-to your mother.”

I had let that notion curl into a ball in a dark corner of my mind. Better to imagine that the whole thing was some case of mistaken address or identity. I glanced at the ceiling, a suspended grid of warped beige panels that looked like they’d been dipped in piss.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Mrs. B,” I said. “Or my mother.”

“Your mother have a safe?”

“A safe? Right. Only the bank has a safe.”

“Valuables?”

“Define valuables. Her cross-stitch collection? She cashed in her jewelry a few years ago for like four hundred bucks and gave it to the Salvation Army. She’s got a coin collection she hasn’t looked at since my dad died. And a bunch of pictures of me in hockey gear.”

“Guns?”

“No. I mean, a twenty-two, for shooting muskrats and chipmunks, but they give you a twenty-two here when you get out of fourth grade.”

Whistler clapped his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. “OK then. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He zipped up his vest. “I suppose the next step is to figure out what this has to do with the other burglaries.”

“It happened on bingo night.”

“Yeah, but people know we already made that connection, so it’s a convenient cover.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“Anything to that Scratch guy not showing up?” he said.

“Who?”

“The hockey guy D’Alessio was talking about.”

“Oh, Tatch. A born-again Christian who plays goalie? Harmless.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone rang. Mom, I thought. “Excuse me,” I said. Into the phone, I said, “It’s Gus.” It wasn’t Mom. I listened. I hung up.

“Who was that at this hour?” Whistler said.

“No one.”

“You’re the boss,” he said. “Just tell me what you want me to do. We’ll get out there and dig some dry holes. You know what I say.”

“Can’t find a gusher without digging a few dry holes.”

“Yes sir.”

He went out the back door. The clock on the wall over the copier-and-fax said three minutes after three. I wanted to go to bed, but Darlene was waiting.