The Morgue and Me (9 page)

Tina ordered a Bloody Mary. I got a Coke and asked her what the deal was with Bob.

She waved it off. “Nothing really. He’s a nice guy. Too nice, but I should have been happy with him—usually I’m an asshole magnet.”

Our drinks came then. Tina thanked the bartender and crunched into her celery stalk. The guy to the side of us was getting up. He wore sunglasses and one of those hats worn by paperboys about a hundred years ago. And old men in Italy. And American guys who think they should be Polo models. His date/wife/fellow-Polo-model was putting her purse on her shoulder while they debated the matter of who had their car keys.

When the bartender circled back to check on us, Tina pointed her celery stalk at him. “You ever hear of a guy named Mitch Blaylock?”

He wiped his hands on a pristine white towel hanging at his waist. “No, don’t think so.”

Tina got her bag out. She reached into her Mitch Blaylock file and retrieved a photocopied picture of Mitch from his high-school yearbook. “This is him. Think he worked here, a long time ago. Before the redevelopment.”

The bartender held the picture for a long minute. He was old and brought it close to his glasses. The Polo-model dude held out his check, but the bartender paid him no mind. His date coughed.

The bartender slapped the picture down. “Nope. Sorry.” He took the check and punched the couple’s bill up on the old-school register, which whirred and dinged ferociously.

Polo model turned the picture around. “I’ve seen him,” he said.

“You have?” Tina asked.

“Sure. I remember that guy. He was around here last week, Friday, talking up a storm. Kinda drunk, too.”

The guy’s date stuffed their change in her purse. “Sweetie, let’s go,” she said.

“Just a sec, doll.”

They used their sweet talk like knives on each other. The woman gave up and tore for the lobby. The red puff-balls on her socks bobbed up and down on her way out.

“Yeah, he got kicked out,” the guy said. “That’s why I remember.”

“He got thrown out?” I said.

“Yeah. It’s usually a mellow crowd, but this guy was pretty sloppy. The lady with him looked embarrassed.”

“Lady?” I said. “Who?”

“Hell if I know. Kinda young. The guy put up a little fight when they threw him out, but he went quiet in the end. He was all, ‘Hey, can’t a guy have a drink?’ And then he left.”

Tina bit off another chunk of celery. “With the girl?”

The man chewed his gum aggressively and removed his sunglasses for a better view of Tina. “Don’t remember. I could give you a call if something comes to me.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tina said. “We don’t want to hold you up any longer.” She nodded toward the lobby, where his date was tapping her toe like they’d be late getting out to the yacht.

He laughed. “Forget it. Maybe I’ll see you up here. I come with my friends. Sometimes alone.” His smile lingered on Tina as he parted.

“See what I mean?” Tina said. “Asshole magnet.”

She polished off her Bloody Mary and
oomph
ed in appreciation. “But that guy”—she pointed to the bartender—“he’s the real deal. He better watch out.”

The bartender threw his head back. His cackle echoed through the open room.

 

 

Tina said the Bloody Mary had hit her pretty hard and that we’d better eat lunch before she hit the road. “Not that I’m normally this responsible,” she said. “I guess you’re a good influence or something.”

We stayed and made friends with the gray-haired bartender, whose name was Buddy. A few golfers stopped at the bar while we ate, and after a while they started sticking. They had half pencils stuck behind their ears, and they kept snatching their score cards from each other. They would point at them and bark things and burst out in baritone laughs.

My eyes kept returning to the fox hunters on the wall, elegant in their tight red jackets with gold buttons, blowing pretty horns on their way to the kill. Julia would’ve hated the place—she was big on animal rights and had gone vegetarian in seventh grade. It’s one of many reasons my parents liked her so much.

“My mom and dad tried to stop them from building this place,” I told Tina.

She turned to me sharply. “Really?”

I nodded. “It was back before the disaster happened.” My parents just wanted to preserve the beauty of the bluffs. They thought the hotel would be ugly, and they were against the chemicals and tree-cutting to build the country club’s three golf courses, and the spa, and all the rest of it. Memories started flooding through me: our street lined with cars every other Wednesday; packed meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee to Preserve Petoskey’s Beautiful Spaces on our back porch; the green yard-signs: DON’T BLIGHT THE BLUFFS.

“What’d they do?”

“Everything they could, pretty much. They had protests. They tried to launch a boycott.”

“It didn’t work?”

“No. Everybody in town hated them.”

The developers said Petoskey would be a new golf mecca: people would flock from Detroit to play their three English-style links golf courses, right in Northern Michigan. The people in town believed them—they wanted the tourism business badly. They thought my parents were freaks.

The only people who supported my parents were their friends from NWMU. And Julia, who spent a lot of weekends working on the cause. I didn’t do much to help.

After the bluffs slid away, the earth collected in the lake and blackened a mile-long section of Lake Michigan’s blue waters. Because it came from a golf course, the earth had been soaked in chemicals that poisoned every fish within twenty-five miles. It was a long time before they stopped washing up dead.

Afterward, a lot of people claimed that they had been with my parents all along.

Tina put some money down on the bar and told me lunch was on her. “It’s cool that your parents tried to stop this place,” she said. “I wish I’d gotten to see those bluffs, just once.”

I nodded, feeling ashamed that I hadn’t helped try to stop the resort, when Buddy the bartender saw us getting up. He left the crowd of golfers singing the University of Michigan fight song and came over. He wiped his hands on his towel, now dirty from a day of work, and leaned in.

“Look, there’s something you should know. About Blaylock.”

“
I
knew him from way back,” Buddy said. “He caddied here years ago, when it was just the one golf course.” Buddy waved his arms out toward the golf courses and the rest of the resort.

“Did something happen back then?” I said.

“No, not then. I mean, Mitch was a character. I think he was selling some pot to the other caddies, little stuff like that. He had a big mouth, thought he was going places, but he was pretty harmless.”

“So what is it?” Tina said.

“The night he was in here. The night he got kicked out?”

“Yeah?” Tina and I said together, scooting forward on our stools.

“That was the same night he died.” Buddy let it sink in, then tapped a copy of the
Courier
sitting on the bar. We’d been helping him with the crossword earlier. “I saw it in the paper.”

Tina got out a pen. “Was that guy right—was he here with a girl?”

“Yep. I don’t know her, though. Heard him talking to her about some big score he had coming.”

“What was it?” Tina was practically jumping over the bar.

Buddy shrugged. “Don’t know. Mitch always talked like that. Always had some fortune coming down the pike, usually something illegal. You stop listening after a while.”

“Can’t you remember anything? Was it drugs or what?”

“Nah, I don’t know. He wasn’t exactly getting into specifics, not when I heard him, anyway. Not even Mitch was that stupid. I figured he was just talking to impress her anyway—it looked like he’d just picked her up that night.”

“Did she leave with him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Buddy said. “Had his arm around her when they walked out. She was young, too, like the man said. But that’s all I know.”

Tina scribbled down some notes. She looked up and smirked. “Why’d you hold out on us, Buddy? You looked right at that picture and said you didn’t remember him, with a straight face.”

Buddy chuckled. “You hadn’t worked your charm on me yet. No, I’d never forget Mitch.”

 

 

Back at home, I lay on my bed with an absurd sense of accomplishment. I broke out my reporter’s notebook and copied down the facts that Buddy had told us, then studied my collection of business cards: one from Kate Warne and one of Tina’s that I had taken from her cubicle.

I liked having those cards. Perhaps a Rolodex was in my future. A Rolodex and a fedora and snappy banter for the dames, like in movies from the “Gumshoe” section of University Video. I’d be quick-witted and streetwise, a man of honor in a dirty world.
Femmes fatales
could tempt me with their gams, powerful men could offer bribes, but it wouldn’t matter: I’d be incorruptible.

Daniel’s familiar noises floated through the wall. He was conducting some kind of science experiment in his room, and I drifted off to the
tink-tink
of his Young Scientist beaker set.

It was dark when he woke me by jumping up and down on my bed. I half expected news of cold fusion.

Instead, he had Mike on the phone.

“I’m taking you to the Hideaway,” Mike said. “And I’m really bored, so don’t say no. Pick me up in ten minutes.”

 

 

The Hideaway was Mike’s bar of choice, a grimy joint ten miles outside Petoskey on the road to High Point, a town that nobody much cared about. Some of Mike’s NWMU clients drank there because they didn’t check IDs, which was the place’s biggest attraction. I tried to stay away from it, but I wanted to hear about the Dana situation, so I gave in.

On the way, I filled Mike in on the investigation. We hadn’t actually found out very much, but we knew that: (a) there was a girl involved, and (b) Mitch was planning a crime of some sort. How those things might connect the dots to the sheriff and/or Tim Spencer, I wasn’t quite sure. On the plus side, Mike was finally showing some interest.

“So who was the girl with Mitch?” Mike asked when I’d finished.

“They didn’t know,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot with brown smoke flying up around the Escort. I couldn’t imagine a girl Mitch picked up at the bar being the key to the crime, so I wasn’t too worried about that part. “I just hope that Lovell guy returns my call.”

“Even if it leads back to Tim Spencer?” Mike asked as we walked toward the Hideaway’s red-painted door. We’d been through this already. I shrugged the question away, but Mike grabbed my shoulder and stopped me. “Think about that, man. Would you
really
want to find that out?”

“Tim couldn’t murder anybody,” I said. But then, I had seen his motorcycle in front of the restaurant. When he showed up at the mayor’s house, I’d been convinced Tim was in on it. I had even wondered if Julia knew what her brother had done and was just being nice to me to find out what I knew. It was a crazy thought, but also the best explanation I’d come up with for her weird friendliness.

Mike waited for a better answer. Mosquitoes orbited around the lights in the awning like a million tiny tetherballs.

“I want to find out what happened, Mike.”

He stared me down for a long time, like he wanted to argue about the stupidity of my conspiracy theories again. But I wasn’t going to give it up now. He knew it, and his shoulders slumped in resignation. “Yeah, okay,” he said with a nod. The moment had passed; we were cool again. “So, Tina . . . is she hot?”

“Insanely.”

Mike clapped me on the back and we went inside.

 

 

In the dim corners of the Hideaway, people played pool and threw darts at an electronic board with flashing red lights. Plastic Red Wings pennants dipped from the ceiling, celebrating a Stanley Cup win from ten years ago. A somber mood hung in the air like smoke.

Mike nudged me toward some open stools and ordered two Buds from a woman behind the bar. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but Mike was always hopeful. He rested his elbows on the bar, hunting for girls.

“See anything?”

There wasn’t a lot to choose from, but I made out a girl in a far booth. “How about her?”

“Who? Chernobyl?” Mike scoffed.

I tried not to laugh, but it took some work. He was talking about her fake tan, which did, in fact, look much too orange. She must have been a regular—he couldn’t have come up with the name on the spot.

“So, what’s the deal with you and Dana?” I said.

“Ehh, who knows? She called me out of the blue and we just sort of picked up again. Judging from past experience, it may not last forever.”

“Out of the blue?”

Mike nodded and swigged his beer, but he couldn’t keep his straight face for long. “Okay fine, I called her. Happy, Dick Tracy?”

He didn’t wait for a reply. His eyes were following a girl in a scarlet sports jersey who breezed in and wafted to the stool next to him. She must have been another regular; within a minute, the bartender plunked a cocktail with a sorry-looking cherry in front of her.

Mike gave me a wink and turned to her. “Excuse me,” he said, “I seem to have misplaced my Congressional Medal of Honor. You don’t happen to see it over there, do you?”

“No,” the woman said, cracking a smile. “Should I get my bullshit detector out and look for it?”

“That’s okay, I still have my other two at home.” Mike offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you. Mike Maske, man of your dreams.”

She smiled broadly and told him her name was Bailey. How he got people to fall for this stuff, I’d never know. “Sorry, I have a policy against dating guys who wear sunglasses indoors. I just came to say hi to a friend, anyway.”

“Bring her over.” Pointing at me, Mike stage-whispered, “Maybe we can lose the third wheel.”