“I wanted to ask you that, Gus, because you know what?” Now he reached up and grabbed my coat collar in his beefy hand and yanked me up off the chair. “I think you had something to do with this.”
“What? Take your hands off me.”
He tightened his grip. “I ought to strangle that little redhead. Somehow she spooked Redpath.”
“Bullshit. He wouldn’t even talk to her.”
“He didn’t have to talk to her. He just had to hear her questions. She asked him something that spooked him. We’d already talked to him. He didn’t run. She goes to see him, he runs. I want to know what she asked him, Gus.”
“I wish I knew, Sheriff.”
Dingus swung me away from the chair and slammed me against the wall. “This man is dead,” he growled. “I have to contact his family, whoever and wherever they are, and we’re out a material witness in a murder case. All because your little reporter is sticking her nose in places it shouldn’t ought to go. What did she ask him, Gus?”
“I don’t know, Dingus, and I wouldn’t have to tell you anyway. She was doing her job. Or are you just worried about getting reelected?”
I knew that was a mistake the second it left my lips. He hammered me against the wall again and pushed in close enough that I could smell his Tiparillo breath, see the tiny yellowed teeth hidden by his handlebar. I thought he might punch me. “This is not about a goddamn election,” he said. “It’s about a murder investigation. It’s not your job to conduct murder investigations. It’s not your job to embarrass me in front of the public when I’m trying to do my job.”
“And you didn’t embarrass us with those bullshit leaks about our stories being ‘premature’? And then the TV chick gets a front-row seat for the arrest? Have hot lips D’Alessio take a cold shower, will you?”
He dropped me and stepped back and pointed a finger at me. “You know the meaning of ‘is’?” he said. “Until I say something is — like a murder-then it isn’t, understand? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about the case from Channel Eight. You guys are always talking about the public’s right to know. Don’t you think the public has a right to know what you know?”
“We know squat, Dingus. From what I can tell, Leo’s obviously the one who killed Blackburn. He was there that night. He lied about it. He ran, and then he killed himself. But you have Soupy in jail.”
“Where he belongs,” Dingus said. He sat back down on his desk. The framed photograph of his ex appeared over his left shoulder. I wondered if Barbara Lampley had still been talking with Dingus, or even married to him, when he was investigating the first time around. It was her dalliance with Blackburn, after all, that had effectively ended their marriage. I decided that I wanted to talk with her.
“Sit,” Dingus said. I sat. “Gus,” he said, “I have tried to help you out where I could because I think you can help me. What the redhead did was no help.”
“Her name is Joanie.”
“Uh-huh. Get her out of my way.”
I wasn’t about to accept responsibility for Leo’s suicide. But I thought I was beginning to understand Dingus. His original inquiry into Blackburn’s death obviously had missed the mark. Cops who messed up like that usually made excuses or tried to cover their tracks. Instead Dingus was doing everything he could to blow up his old case. It was as if he’d never believed the original conclusion, as if his hands had somehow been tied, and now that pieces of Blackburn were resurfacing in our little town, he was determined to set things right. I couldn’t promise Dingus anything, and I didn’t appreciate being roughed up, but I couldn’t help but admire him a little.
“We’ll try not to mess you up,” I said, “and you try not to mess us up.”
“Fair enough.”
“Can I ask one thing?”
“One thing.”
“Don’t get upset. I watched you guys today hauling stuff out of Leo’s house, including a bunch of computer stuff. What’s the deal?”
Dingus considered it. “Redpath had issues,” he said.
“What issues?”
He stood. “It’s late. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I drove directly to the pay phone outside the IGA. Joanie picked up on the first ring. “What happened?”
I told her what happened to Leo.
“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Let me ask you. What did you tell him when you talked to him?”
She hesitated. “He wouldn’t talk.”
“You must have said something to try to get him to talk.”
“I told him I was trying to find out more about what happened that night. He said he didn’t want to dredge it up, he wasn’t-how did he put it? — he wasn’t ‘a dweller in the distant past.’”
It sounded like one of those sayings he had pasted over his workbench. “And what’d you say?”
“I may have said something about Canada, the missing year and all that.”
“Same as with Boynton.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t see necessarily why that would have spooked him. Leo wasn’t with Blackburn in Canada, so far as I knew. “I know a little more,” I said. “The cops searched Leo’s house. They confiscated his computer.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did.”
“Why’d they take his computer?”
“No idea. Dingus said Leo had issues.”
“No, duh. Isn’t it pretty obvious he’s the killer?”
“Seems to make sense, but Dingus says no. Supposedly we’ll learn more at the arraignment. You’ll go?”
“Yeah.”
“While you’re at it, why don’t you do a little more checking into Blackburn’s background? I think he had a brother-in-law in Kalamazoo.”
“Wife’s brother or sister’s husband?”
“No idea. I don’t know if he was ever married.”
“Gus?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to get scooped again.”
In the darkness of my mother’s bedroom, I gently jiggled her bed. She lurched awake. I laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s Gus,” I whispered.
“Son. You scared me.”
“Sorry.” I sat down on the bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Leo.”
Mom sat up in her flannel pajamas. “What?”
I didn’t tell her about the computer, just the suicide. As she listened, her eyes grew slowly wider. She drew her hand up over her mouth. “No,” she said. In her eyes in that instant I could see she knew things she’d never told me, and I wanted to ask her then, I wanted to demand she tell me whatever it was she had held back, but all I could do was let her fall into my arms and hold her as she cried. She hadn’t sobbed so hard since Dad died. It surprised me only a little that I could not manage a single tear.
twenty
My alarm buzzed the next morning at five-thirty. I bolted up in my bed, startled and groggy. Then I remembered: I was supposed to go to Detroit for the meeting with Superior Motors and the Hanovers. “Oh, God,” I said, lying back on my pillow. The night flooded back: Soupy was in jail. Boynton was in the hospital. Leo was dead. My mother had cried herself out and then I let her go back to sleep. I heard a snowplow rumble past my window.
