“He knew Blackburn, you know.”
“Delbert? Yeah, he took pictures of him. Or at least one picture.”
“He used to develop game films or something too. Said he made a few dollars off him.”
Coach had had an 8-millimeter movie camera for recording games and the occasional practice. Leo operated it from the bleachers. I hadn’t known that Delbert did the developing.
“Busy guy, Delbert,” I said. “Though you’d never know it around here.”
I sat down at my desk, and there, right where I thought I’d left it, lay the dossier on Soupy’s legal troubles. I resisted the urge to ask Joanie if she’d borrowed it, figuring it was smarter to have her focus on her stories for now. I grabbed a pen and on my blotter jotted, “Council minutes mon a.m.” Joanie sat across the room, still wearing her wool scarf. “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you from your writing, but how exactly do the cops know it’s a bullet hole?”
She stopped typing and let her hands hover motionless over the keyboard, as though she were deciding whether even to acknowledge my question. Be patient, I told myself. She dropped her hands to her knees and turned to face me. Her eyes locked on mine, then went to the clock, then back. “I sent you the Blackburn sidebar,” she said. “Now I really need to just write this. OK, boss?”
“Yes, you can write it, and we’re going to run it, but first I need to know a few things, and I really don’t need a lot of your ‘OK, boss’ crap right now, OK?”
What I’d heard at Mom’s had unsettled me enough. Then came the news of the bullet hole, and Francis’s accusations of Teddy. My head was filled with unanswered questions about $25,000 receipts and ferryboats and vague details in police reports. I was beginning to think everybody in Starvation Lake knew more than I did, and it was starting to piss me off.
“Take a chill pill,” Joanie said. “I don’t know much, but what I know, I know. There’s a bullet hole, and that’s news.”
“Agreed. Got two sources?”
“Yes.”
I assumed D’Alessio was one. “What does Dingus say?”
“Not talking.”
The story would certainly raise a ruckus. Although the word “murder” wasn’t about to appear in our stories, everyone would read it between the lines. Most people didn’t want to hear that Jack Blackburn had been murdered. I wanted to be sure we were right. Or at least close.
“Let’s just talk here, between us,” I said. “Think about it. How the hell do you know there’s a bullet hole in something that’s been submerged in eighty feet of water for ten years? How can you be sure?”
She drew herself up in the chair and gave me a knowing smile. How sweet it was to have a dumb-shit editor ask you a question to which you had the perfect reply. “Well,” she said, “they have a bullet.”
“They do? What caliber?”
“Twenty-two.”
Who in Starvation Lake owned a. 22-caliber handgun or rifle? Just about everybody. It wasn’t much good for killing deer, but it was handy for muskrats and chipmunks. “Where was it?” I said. “Did it lodge somewhere inside the snowmobile or-”
The phone on my desk rang. I slid back and grabbed it. “Pilot.”
I heard static, then, “Trap.” Soupy was on his truck phone. I could hear the pickup’s rumble.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve got to talk to you, man.”
“I’m on deadline. Drop down later.”
“Not your office.”
For some reason, Soupy would never come to the Pilot. Since returning to town, I’d asked him to meet me there a few times and each time he’d made an excuse.
“Enright’s then?” I said. “Seven?”
Another burst of static made me pull the phone away from my ear. “No,” I heard him say. “Fuck.” He’d been drinking. He sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of fishhooks. “Trap,” he said. “I’ll-” Static obliterated him. The phone went dead.
“What?” Joanie said.
I shook my head. “Where were we?”
“You asked where the bullet was. In the snowmobile, obviously. But I don’t know exactly. My source was being a little cagey.”
No, I thought, D’Alessio was too dumb to be cagey. “Hold on-were there any reports of gunshots being fired that night?”
“Not on Starvation Lake.”
“Of course, and this happened-well, shit, we don’t know where the hell it happened. Or even what happened. Are the cops saying-wait, are the cops actually saying it was murder?”
“The cops aren’t saying anything, officially. But there’s a press conference tomorrow. I overheard a dispatcher calling the TV guys.”
“So that’s your second source? Of course. TV brings the Dingus bear out of hibernation.”
“Yes. So can I please write this now?”
For the next hour, the only sounds in the room were the clacking of our keyboards and the rattle of the printer. Joanie’s profile of Blackburn contained all the salient facts: Make-Believe Gardens. The near-misses in the state tournament. The town’s growing repute in amateur hockey circles. The letdown since his passing. The story noted that Blackburn, via his partnership with Dufresne, had become a fixture at local ribbon cuttings and dedications. The story also briefly recounted what the Pilot had reported about his accident, including what Leo told the police in 1988. Leo had politely rebuffed Joanie’s effort to speak with him about it. The story said, “Redpath referred a reporter to his attorney, Peter Shipman, who declined to comment.” I had to wonder why Leo would hire a lawyer, unless-I put the thought out of mind and turned to Joanie. “The sidebar looks good,” I said. “But did you ever figure out what happened to that one-year gap in Blackburn’s Canada period?”
“One second,” she said, typing. “Um, no, sorry, didn’t nail it yet.”
The phone rang. I picked it up without thinking. “Pilot.”
“Keeeeee-rist,” the voice on the line said. It was my boss, Henry Bridgman, calling from Traverse City. “What are you doing answering on deadline?”
I smiled. “I knew it was you and you must have something important to tell me, like what kind of polish you use on Kerasopoulos’s Caddy.”
“Haw! I meant to call yesterday but all I had was goddamn budget meetings. On Saturday, for Christ’s sake. Even missed the Wings game. I swear I spend half my days here picking goddamn doughnut sprinkles out of my teeth. Anyway, I won’t keep you, just wanted to slip you a little intelligence. Got good news and bad news.”
“Bad first, please.”
“You won’t believe this. They’re canning our motto.”
“No way. ‘Michigan’s Finest Bluegill Wrapper’?”
“Yeah. Apparently they did some focus groups, who told them it’s an anachronism, and not all that professional. Tell the truth, I can’t believe it lasted this long.”
“We’ll catch hell.”
“Not as much as we caught when I moved the crossword off A-2. Most folks probably won’t even notice.”
“What’s the good news?”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but your old pal’s getting kicked upstairs.”
Henry was finally going to make the move to corporate. That meant I had a shot at taking over as executive editor of the Pilot.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. The missus won’t be happy about moving over here, but these people sign the checks. As for you, I think I’ve got ’em sold. You know the town and the job and you know you made some mistakes before and it won’t happen again. It won’t be a done deal for a few days. But the job is yours to lose.”
I’d figured my career was over when I left Detroit. I sent my resume and clips to other dailies around the
