The Skeleton Box (10 page)

“Working on it,” he said. “Was over there yesterday, digging through Mom’s shit. What a pack rat. Stacks of magazines from the sixties, Liz goddamn Taylor on the cover, and she’s not as big as a house. And, oh, hey—I found the old Bobby Hull.”

“The table hockey game?”

“Yeah, man, with the little metal players. I thought it was long gone, but there it was, all covered with dust under the basement stairs. Way to go, Ma.”

As kids we’d played hundreds of games on that table. Soupy had nicknamed his goalie “Tommy Trapezoid.” When I started to play goalie myself, he started calling me Trapezoid, too, and soon shortened it to Trap, which he called me still.

“We’ll resume the series,” I said. “I’m up like two twenty to two hundred five.”

“Bullshit, man, I was way ahead. You couldn’t handle my right-wing-to-center move.”

“Whatever. When’s the garage sale?”

He’d been talking about having a garage sale for months. I couldn’t imagine Soupy actually going to the trouble of making price tags and haggling with old ladies over an ancient ottoman or toaster oven. More likely, he would load everything into his pickup and take it to the county landfill. Even more likely, load everything up and tote it around for a few months.

“Rethinking that,” he said.

“How come?”

“Not sure.”

He turned to the back bar and started rearranging schnapps bottles.

“Not sure about what?” I said.

He turned back around, glanced down the bar at Angie, lowered his voice.

“Really don’t want all these local assholes talking about my business,” Soupy said.

“You got a buyer?”

“Kind of out of nowhere. Yeah. Five above asking.”

That was a good price in Starvation, where houses for sale sat for months, even years, without an offer. The Campbells’ place, a two-bedroom with water-stained clapboard walls and a roof enveloped in vines, wasn’t even on the lake.

“They must love that knotty pine paneling, eh?” I said. “And the cigarette smell. Who’s the buyer? Do I know them?”

“I’m dealing with some law firm downstate.”

“You get me the name, I might be able to check it out for you.”

Soupy studied the rim of his bottle.

“Thanks. Don’t want to jinx it just yet,” he said.

You don’t know a guy for thirty years and not know when he’s bullshitting you. Especially Soupy, who, except when he had a hockey
stick in his hands, wasn’t nearly as clever as he imagined. I let it go for the moment.

“Rats going to do it tonight?” he said.

“I think so.”

“Best thing that could happen around here, Rats win the state title. Good for the soul, good for the economy. Mrs. B would’ve wanted it that way.”

Mrs. B wouldn’t have given a rip, I thought. “I was just out giving Tex his skates,” I said.

Soupy flipped his empty at the overflowing barrel of garbage next to his office door. The bottle clanged off of another and nestled against a pizza box.

“Out where?” he said.

“Tatch’s.”

“Camp J.C.?”

“Yeah. A little spooky. Have you seen it?”

“Nope.” He reached into the fridge for another Blue Ribbon. “But I was out at Mom’s the other day and heard them making all sorts of noise.”

“They’re turning the hill into an ant farm. Got a backhoe going.”

“Bunch of crazy Jesus freaks, don’t want to pay their fair share.” It was Angie, shouting from her bar stool.

“Need a refill, Ange?” Soupy said.

She looked at her glass as if she hadn’t noticed it before. “Might as well.”

Soupy poured another tulip glass from the Busch Light tap and took it down the bar. When he came back, he said, “Where the hell was Tatch last night anyway?”

“He said family stuff.”

“Since when did Tatch give a shit about—” Soupy stopped and turned toward the front door as chilly air washed into the bar. Luke Whistler stepped in and closed the door.

“Gus,” he said. “Mr. Campbell.”

Soupy grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and slapped a shot glass
down on the bar. “Chief,” he said, filling the glass and nudging it in Whistler’s direction.

Whistler looked at it for a second, smiling uncomfortably, then picked it up and drank it back in one smooth swallow. As he set the glass back down, Soupy held the bottle up for a refill. Whistler pulled the glass away. “No thanks.”

“I guess you guys know each other,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be much of a reporter if I didn’t know the town barkeep,” Whistler said. Then he said to Soupy, “You’re going to get me in trouble with the boss.”

“Who, him?” Soupy said. “He’s a goalie. He doesn’t worry about anybody but himself and his little net. Ain’t that right, Trap?” He grabbed the beer I had pushed away and shoved it in front of me. “Drink up. People are dying of thirst in Cambodia.”

I grimaced through another tepid sip.

“Saw your truck outside,” Whistler said. “Got a little info on that thing you asked about.”

Nye-less? I thought. “That was fast.”

“I wish I could take credit. This Google thing is pretty nifty.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Soupy said.

“Nothing,” I said, standing up and feeling justified in keeping something from Soupy. “Can I have a Coke to go? And a bag of Better Mades?”

“Out of Coke,” he said. He snatched the potato chips off a rack on the back bar and threw the bag at me. I caught it in my left hand. “Nice save,” he said.

“You going over to the shop?” Whistler said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll meet you there in five.”

Soupy grabbed my bottle, downed the dregs, and flipped it at the trash barrel. It bounced off the pizza box and shattered on the floor.

“Fuck it,” I heard him say as I went out the door.

The
Pilot
front counter was buried. There were newspapers—the
Free Press,
the
Times,
the
Traverse City Record-Eagle,
shoppers from Kalkaska
and Bellaire—the weekend mail, and our weekly bundle of memos from corporate headquarters in Traverse City.

Plus the remembrances for Mrs. B: Bouquets of flowers. Baskets of dried cherries and fudge. A frozen casserole that must have come from some well-meaning lady who didn’t understand that Mrs. B was Darlene’s mom, not mine, or who just didn’t know what else to do when someone died but bake something stuffed with cheese and potatoes and offer it to the bereaved.

I needed to hire a replacement but didn’t want to think about it yet.

Whistler was hunched over his keyboard, batting away with his two forefingers. The plastic clacks of the keystrokes were punctuated by the metallic clicking of a fat gold pinkie ring slapping the shift key. A foam cup of coffee steamed next to him; he wouldn’t touch it until the steam was gone and the coffee was about the temperature of that beer I’d choked down at Enright’s. He said he’d gotten used to lukewarm coffee on winter stakeouts in Detroit.

I went to my desk and dumped the mail across my blotter. There were three March of Dimes solicitations; the spring sports schedule from Pine County High School; and press releases from an advertising agency in Traverse, the Meijer supercenter in Charlevoix, the winter park in Petoskey. At the bottom of the pile lay a manila envelope tied with string. It contained the ad layouts for the next day’s paper. I already knew what it would tell me: We had barely any ads, which meant fewer pages and less space for stories.

“Hey,” Whistler said. “Just sent you a story.”

The shrinking news hole hadn’t been a problem until Whistler showed up and started writing more stories than we had space for. It forced me to trim his stories, or hold them for the next paper, or just keep them out altogether, hoping someone would find them on our website. Whistler had complained only once so far, when I held a story he’d written about a road commissioner’s secret financial interest in an asphalt company in favor of an advance story on the River Rats’ chances in a Christmas tournament.

“Public service ought to trump kids’ play,” he’d said.

Hockey, I had replied, is more than kids’ play in Starvation Lake.

Now I hit a key and Whistler’s story appeared on my computer screen.

Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank T. D’Alessio will challenge the incumbent sheriff—his boss—in November’s election, according to papers expected to be filed with the county clerk and disclosed exclusively to the
Pine County Pilot.

Whistler was big on self-promotion, constantly mentioning the
Pilot
in his stories, what the
Pilot
knew “exclusively,” what it had reported before. I figured he did it because he had come from Detroit, where chest-thumping was part of the newspaper game. I usually sliced it out. Besides the AP guy in Grand Rapids, who seemed to come north only after the temperature hit eighty, we had no real competition except for Channel Eight. Readers and advertisers weren’t going away because we weren’t getting stories first. They were just going away.

I spun in my swivel chair to face Whistler. “Nice,” I said. “But do we have to do the commercial so high in the story?”

He propped a sneaker on the edge of his desk. “Why not tell the readers we’re kicking ass on their behalf?”

“I think they can see the paper they’re holding in their hands is the
Pilot.
Besides, doesn’t everyone know Frankie’s going to run?”

Whistler smiled the smile of a reporter who knew his boss was clueless. “According to the clips I read, everyone knew he was going to run last election, too. And he didn’t run.”

“He backed out because he knew he didn’t have a chance.”

“Correct. But everything’s different now, isn’t it?”

He had me there. The second and third paragraphs of his story were all about the break-ins, the murder, and Sheriff Dingus Aho’s inability so far to figure out what was going on. D’Alessio will love that, I thought.

“The story doesn’t quote D’Alessio and the department spokesman declined to comment,” I said. “So I’m guessing your main source is Frankie.”

Whistler shrugged. He took the pinkie ring off, rubbed the finger, put the ring back on. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources. But you should know that our friend from Channel Eight is snooping around, too.”

“Your friend,” I said. I tore open the bag of chips and popped a handful into my mouth. “You better hope D’Alessio doesn’t find out about you and your close relationship with her police scanner.”

“Ha,” Whistler said. “We better get that thing online, eh?”

“You think D’Alessio would do any better than Dingus?”

“I have no idea. Just a good story.”

I looked at the clock on the wall over the copier. Eight minutes after three. “Tawny Jane doesn’t have a program till five, but she could do a bulletin. Let me give this a quick read.”

I read the story through, fixed a few typos, and hit Send. A goateed twenty-two-year-old at the main printing plant would have it on the Media North website in minutes.

“Done,” I said. “Another Whistler scoop.”

“That’s nice,” he said, “but really, BFD, you know, all we did was beat another reporter.”

“Isn’t that the idea?”

“Well, yeah. ‘Always first.’ But it’s one thing to beat a competitor. They’re just journalists, after all. It’s another thing to beat the cops.”

“Right. Like your ex-wife.”

“Tags.”

“Yeah.”

“Which brings me to this,” Whistler said. He kicked away from his desk, rolled over to me, and leaned forward in his chair. He had a printout folded in one hand. “Did a little Internet search.”

“You are cutting-edge for an old man.”

“Funny. Write this down.”

I picked up a pen.

“N-I-L-U-S,” he spelled.

I looked at it written on my blotter.

“Nilus,” I said. “As in nye-less?”

“Nilus Moreau,” Whistler said. “Father Nilus Moreau.”

“A priest?”

“He was the pastor of St. Valentine’s.”

“Here? In Starvation Lake?”

“A long time ago. I only did a quick search. Been spending most of my time calling around to cop shops that might be hearing echoes from Dingus and his guys.” He handed me the printout. “Found an obit in the
Marquette Mining Journal,
1971.”

I scanned it quickly, three short paragraphs on an inside page of the
Mining Journal
from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Father Nilus Moreau had come to Starvation Lake in the early 1930s before it was even called Starvation Lake. He led the effort to build a new church at St. Valentine’s in 1951. He died in a nursing home in Calumet at the age of sixty-nine.

“So what?” I said.

“Where did you get this Nilus tip?” Whistler said.

I thought of Darlene. “I shouldn’t talk about my sources either. But it wasn’t D’Alessio.”

“OK. But you ought to run it down from here, don’t you think?”

“Fair enough.”

A priest? I thought, and an image of the crosses in the trees at Tatch’s camp popped into my head.

“Speaking of churches,” I said, “I was out at that born-again camp today.”

Whistler’s white eyebrows went up. “Whatever for?”

“One of the kids on our hockey team lives there. Took him his skates.”

“I’ll bet that was interesting.”

“A little weird, actually. Reminds me: Were you trying to get the records on that land?”

I could tell Whistler hadn’t expected that question. “I might have seen them if the wench clerk had let me.”

“You didn’t say anything to me.”

“Sorry, boss. I always go looking for the documents. The docs can’t kiss your ass and buy you lunch and make you write like a wimp, like
those auto reporters back in—” He caught himself, perhaps remembering I had once covered that industry. “Oh, sorry.”

“I wish writing like a wimp had been my problem.”

“Anyway, I got nowhere with Verna the Vault. But it’s a story, right? The born-agains want to get out of paying taxes, or at least pay less. Kind of a sore subject in this economy.”

“Yep. They apparently have a lawyer now, an out-of-towner named Breck.”

Whistler sat back in his chair. “Breck?”

“Like the shampoo. Didn’t get the first name. Know him?”