The Morgue and Me (6 page)

It felt weirdly intimate to be in the car as she went about her daily business, which from my brief experience seemed to involve a fair amount of drama and shouting matches. Not that I minded. I was nervous being so close to her, though. A cold sweat was spreading from my palms to my chest to my forehead, when I noticed the laws of inertia thrusting my body forward at a distressingly powerful rate. The vamp had angled off the road and jammed on the brakes. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and I had to brace myself against the dashboard. The Trans Am skidded for fifteen yards across a dirt parking lot, into one of the four spaces provided for customers of Ray’s Beef Burgers.

Dead center. Very cool.

I was still clinging to the dash with white knuckles when she said, “Screw this,” and ended her call.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “That’s rude as hell, I know, talking on the phone with you right there. Anyway . . . Tina McIntyre. Let’s get some grub. I know it’s early, but I’m starved.” And then she grabbed a bag from the backseat and was out of the car.

Inside Ray’s, she plunked down in a booth with her back against the wall and her spiked-heel boots up on the plastic.

“So, when’s your birthday, Chris?” she said.

“Uh . . . September twenty-fourth.”

“Libra. Hmm. Very nice.” She pointed to herself. “Taurus, like you couldn’t tell.”

We weren’t the only ones in the place, but it was close. In a far booth, two old men drank coffee and shot bull with the cashier. When a waitress came, her eyes darted between us as if to confirm the age difference and speculate as to the nature of our liaison.

Tina ordered two house specials (beef burgers) and an outrageous amount of other stuff. Luckily I had left the house without breakfast that morning, so I joined in. The waitress gave us a final questioning look and scurried away on toothpick legs.

A crusted ketchup dispenser and two paper-thin napkins sat on the speckled table. Tina reached into her bag. It was black with a white skull and crossbones painted on its side. Her hand emerged holding a file folder with newspaper clippings sticking out from the edges. She blew some hair away from her face, took off her sunglasses, and gave me the once-over.

“So tell me why you’re interested in Mitch Blaylock,” she said.

“Oh, I was just curious.”

“You were just curious?”

I hadn’t decided on how much to tell her, and I may have been a little flustered by all the hotness. Taking it slow seemed like the right approach. Somewhere, raw hamburger sizzled against the grill.

“Well, I’m a sports fan and the article said he played professional football, so, well, I don’t know . . .”

She was twirling her sunglasses on the table, staring at me with bored eyes.

“How about this? I’ll pay for your lunch if you stop being an asshole.”

“An asshole?” So no, I wasn’t sweeping her off her feet.

“Don’t take it personal or anything. I’m just saying, the guy played
semi-
pro football. That’s like Little League, only you get minimum wage and a kegger after the games. It’s nothing special. You’re lying.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, trying to manage the butterflies in my stomach. The whole encounter had been such a whirlwind that it didn’t fully hit me until that second that Tina might have some useful information about Mitch’s murder.

“You know something about him,” I said.

She shrugged, noncommittal, as the waitress labored over with our food. I felt slightly emasculated as she plunked a cherry Coke, a vanilla milk shake, and most of everything else in front of Tina. The waitress left and Tina munched her chili fries, staring out the window.

“This was probably a mistake,” she said, and I was filled with an intense panic that I would never see her again.

It was time to dive in. I breathed deep. “Okay, you’re right. I know something about Mitch, too, and you’re gonna want to hear it. But you’ve got to be straight with me. We need to pool our information if we’re going to get anywhere.” She was chewing her burger at the moment, so I added, as definitively as possible, “You go first.”

I actually sounded pretty tough. It was the most assertive speech I’d ever given, and I’d delivered it to the most attractive woman on the planet. I thought I might puke.

Tina leaned back against the booth, produced a Marlboro Red from her pocket, and struck her lighter.

“You don’t mind, right?” Smoke came floating out with her words.

“Uh, no.”

“Forgot how crappy this food is.” She tapped at the foil ashtray and contemplated me for a long moment.

“Something tells me you’re all right,” she said.

I let the smile bubble up to my face and told her to fire away.

“Okay, all I know is, that Mitch Blaylock story should have been mine. I answered the call about it, from the sheriff himself. That’s kind of unusual.” My heart did a little up-tick at her mention of the sheriff. I was clinging to the hope that he was more involved than Tim Spencer, and this was good news: he definitely knew about the body before it ended up in the morgue. “The sheriff asked for Art specifically. Art’s been at the paper longer than dirt, and the two of them are pretty tight.”

“How tight?”

“I’m gettin’ to that. Anyway, when Art told me why the sheriff called, I figured he was going to send me out to write it up. It’s a nothing story. ‘Man Croaks at Local Dump.’ Sure, it’s tragic, blah. But big deal. You can’t do much with it.”

She was right—the food was terrible. I pushed my plate away. From across the dining room, the old guys were checking Tina out.

“That’s exactly the kind of crap assignment Art loves to give me,” she said. “We have a personality conflict, you could say. Or you could just say he’s an ass.”

The waitress appeared again. She seemed hurt that we hadn’t enjoyed Ray’s handiwork. “Anything else?”

Tina ashed on the remains of her burger. “Nope.”

The waitress slapped our bill down and left in a huff.

“But instead of sending you, Art went himself?” I said.

“Exactly.” Tina jumped up in her seat a little, all enthusiastic about my brilliant deduction. “See, you’re getting it.”

I wasn’t actually getting it. I was glad the sheriff was the one who’d called the paper, but it didn’t sound like any big deal to me. If Tina wasn’t insanely hot, the whole lunch might have been a waste of time.

“And then, when I told Art that Blaylock had just gotten out of jail, he didn’t blink.”

I looked up from my shake. “What?”

“He just said it’d be more respectful to keep it out of the story, him being dead and all. I knew something was up then. Art would
never
care about being respectful.”

“Mitch Blaylock had been in jail?”

“I know, right? You see what I’m saying.”

She reached into her file and splayed out two clippings from the
Courier
. One story was three years old, about a robbery at the Pit Stop on Route 7. It said that an unidentified man had assaulted the attendant and gotten away with $155.52 from the gas station’s cash register. The other story—a week later—reported on the arrest of Mitch Blaylock for the crime. Apparently, police had traced it back to him through his license-plate number, which they got off a tape from the Pit Stop’s surveillance camera.

Tina gave me approximately a second to digest the stories and said, “He spent sixteen months in Jackson on the robbery and assault charges—he had priors for drunk driving and possession. Got paroled, came up here a month ago. And now he’s dead. Now, if you were writing a story about that guy, don’t you think you would have mentioned that?”

I started to agree, but Tina waved the question aside like it was unfair to ask of someone without professional credentials.

“I know I would,” she said. “Screw the quote-unquote respect.”

“You think the sheriff told him to keep that out of the story?”

A smile broke across her face, and for a moment my heart was too enraptured to beat. “Yeah, smarty. I think the sheriff wanted something kept quiet. Which Art would do in a second. He’ll do anything to stay in their good graces. The prick.”

She fished a dill pickle from her plate. “So, that’s what I know,” she said as the waitress collected our plates. She was still giving Tina the hairy eyeball.

“No tip for her,” Tina said. “Anyway, your turn now—better be good.”

As I considered my options, two things happened. First, I realized that she had never asked me how old I was. I liked her for that. Second, Tina stripped off her long-sleeved t-shirt. There was another, regular T-shirt underneath it, which read, KISS ME, I’M CHESTY.

“What I tell you,” I said with a voice that may or may not have quivered, “you can’t print in the paper. At least until I tell you it’s okay.”

She raised her hand. “I would go to jail before revealing a confidential source.”

I had a feeling that I was her first, but I didn’t press it.

Instead, I told her everything I knew.

 

 

“Damn,” Tina said.

I had told her about everything: the bullet holes in Mitch’s body, Dr. Mobley’s bogus death certificate, the money in his briefcase, and his secret rendezvous with Tim Spencer. When I finished, Tina crushed out the last cigarette in her pack—the foil tray had taken about all it could.

She picked the check up off the table. “Guess I owe you lunch for not being an asshole.”

She paid and we carried our shakes to the parking lot, where Tina perched on the Trans Am’s back bumper and watched the trucks whiz by on Route 14, stirring the weeds. The air smelled of grease, but it didn’t matter. I could have stayed there all day.

“Did you write the story about that judge who took the bribes?”

“Don’t I wish. Guess you heard on the way over, I’m trying to get a job with the
Detroit News
or the
Free Press
. Cracking a story like this would help a lot.” She lowered her shades to get a clear look at me. “So tell me, are you some kind of a brain?”

“I’m not dumb.”

“Yeah, you’re a brain, I can tell. So how do you figure this thing?”

“The obvious. Somebody paid Dr. Mobley off to conclude that Mitch committed suicide.”

“Sure, but who? The sheriff?”

“Probably,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. If the sheriff was the only one involved, it wouldn’t explain Mobley’s meeting with Tim Spencer. “Maybe it was some kind of botched arrest or something.”

She nodded, and we just sat there, enjoying a strangely comfortable silence, until finally Tina stretched and grabbed her keys. It was a wrapping-up movement, and it gripped me with a kind of horror. I had known her for about an hour, but the prospect of a Tina-less summer filled me with mortal dread.

“So, what do we do now?” I said.

She opened the door to her car. “I’m going to write a story about this, if I can find out what happened.”

“Look,” I blurted, “I didn’t come to the paper just to tell somebody what I knew.”

“Oh?”

“I want to find out what happened, too. If you try to investigate this, you’re going to have to do it on the sly, without Art finding out. You could use me. You know it.”

“Easy, tiger.”

“Sorry.”

“No, I like the energy.” Tina jammed her straw around inside her shake. She was watching me closely.

“What we need to do,” I said to fill the silence, as my heart did gymnastics over the prospect of joining forces with her in a Clark Kent-Lois Lane kind of way, “is find out who killed Mitch Blaylock. That’ll answer the question of where the money came from, and how Mobley is connected to this whole thing.”

“C’mon,” Tina said, and hopped into the Trans Am. When I got in beside her, she shot me a grin.

“You aren’t going to puss out on me halfway through?”

“No way.”

She fired up the engine. “Better not. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

PART II

W
e hit eighty-five on the way back to the Lighthouse Motel.

Tina sighed heavily as we turned into the motel’s dreary lot. “Too bad you didn’t just swipe that fifteen grand, huh? I know I would have.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let it go. Tina burst out laughing.

“I’m
kidding
, gullible. We’ll work on that.”

“Uh . . . I guess I should go,” I said.

“Not so fast.” Tina turned in her seat. “We need to move on this. First stop, right here. Lighthouse Motel. Get everything—what they know, who found the body, any details you can. Make sure to get exact quotes and the spellings of any names.” Tina produced a reporter’s notebook from her bag. “Here. It’s on me.”

“You want me to do this?”

“Good, you’ve got ears. I’m late for something else. You’ll do a great job. And oh . . . do you have a camera?”

I couldn’t believe it; she was into photography. This was a common interest, something to build on. “Yeah, a Nikon D50,” I said a little excitedly, “with a 50-200 millimeter—”

“I don’t give a crap about the
specs
, Ansel Adams. Just get a picture of that stiff if you can. It’d be great to have.”

I relaxed for the first time in an hour. “Beat you to it,” I said. “Got forty of them, suitable for framing.”

“Hot damn!” Tina scratched my head.
Good dog
. “All right, can you meet me at the paper, noon tomorrow? With a report on what you found out?”

“Noon,” I said.

“See ya, sexy.”

I climbed out of the car in a bit of a daze.

 

 

An electronic bell chimed when I entered the office, a tiny space overloaded with a stand of vacation brochures and a water cooler dripping slowly onto the Astroturf carpet. I was actually doing this.