like a car passing. The call must have come from a pay phone. “Yo,” came the voice, a male rasp carrying the hint of a southern accent. “Tunnels? Y’all must be joking.” He cackled. “Ain’t no tunnels, ain’t no Blackburn. Time to maybe make a deal.” He hung up.
“Know that voice?” Joanie said.
“I don’t think so.”
I pushed replay and listened again while Joanie spread the Pine County map on my desk. Two X ’s were marked in green Magic Marker a quarter inch from the western edge of Starvation Lake. One X was just above and to the left of the other. She pointed to the lower one. “That’s where Blackburn and Redpath and Campbell were the night Blackburn died.”
“OK.” Though I had snowmobiled plenty in the woods between Starvation and Walleye, I had no idea where Coach and Leo might’ve built their midnight fire.
Her finger moved to the other X. “This is where Clayton Perlmutter lives.”
The Sasquatch hunter. “No way,” I said.
We made a plan to visit Perlmutter after deadline. No need to call ahead, I told Joanie, he obviously was expecting us. She went to Audrey’s for sandwiches while I wrapped up her stories on the arraignment and Brendan Blake. We quoted Blake saying Blackburn had sexually abused him, but left out the details. I scheduled the story for the front page, just below the fold. Prominent play, but not too.
I dialed Kerasopoulos on my main phone line. His secretary would be gone. I put that call on hold, pushed the button for my second line, and dialed his number again. While the first line blinked, I waited on the second. One ring. Two rings. Three. A pause. Voice mail. “Evening, Jim,” I recorded. “Gus Carpenter. Sorry to miss you, but wanted you to know we have a somewhat controversial story for tomorrow’s paper, slugged BLAKE. Just sent it. You might want to take a look. Thanks.”
If Kerasopoulos checked his voice mail, he’d have his heads-up, and he might well kill the story. If he didn’t, the story would run. He couldn’t say I hadn’t warned him. As I hung up the phone, I felt someone standing behind me. It was Tillie, holding another pink message slip.
“Jesus, you scared me,” I said.
“I’ll bet,” she said. I didn’t like how she was smiling. “This woman called again.”
“What woman?”
“From the Chicago Tribune. I told you before.”
“What does Chicago care about Starvation Lake?”
“How would I know? Can I please go?”
“Wrestling story in?”
“Sent it.”
I stared at the slip. The number was long distance, so the woman wasn’t in town. Might she be calling about my problems with Superior Motors? The Trib probably had subscribers in northern Indiana. Maybe the Hanovers had called the paper to say I was the coward who’d used their tragedy to get some big stories and then walked away when they needed me.
I put the slip on the stack of papers next to my computer. Joanie burst in through the back door, panting. “Let’s go,” she said.
“So, guess what the cops found in Redpath’s computer,” Joanie said.
I was steering my pickup onto Main Street toward Route 816. She was handing me a pasty. Warm grease bled through the wax paper as I propped the meat pie on my knee. “What?” I said.
“OK,” she said. “So I go over to Audrey’s and I see the TV slut’s in there with her camera guy. I order my usual Swiss cheese on pumpernickel. Audrey’s all weird, she leans across the counter and says she’s totally out of Swiss. So I say cool, make it with American, but Audrey says you can get Swiss over at Enright’s. I say American’ll be fine, and then she says, well, she might be out of that, too, and I’m like, what’s up?”
“So who was at Enright’s?” I said, biting into the pie. It needed ketchup.
“A source.”
“Deputy Esper, maybe?”
“You want to know what was in the computer?”
“Please.”
“Porn.”
“What?”
“Porn. All sorts of it.”
It pained me to hear that, but for some reason it didn’t surprise me. “What kind of porn?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
“Boys?”
Joanie nodded. “More bad stuff, Gus.”
We drove for a while in silence. Then I said, “Do you think Blackburn really killed himself?”
“Well,” Joanie said, “before I was thinking, no way, this suicide pact thing is, like Gallagher said, a cover. I mean, if Blackburn really killed himself, why wouldn’t Redpath have just told the cops back then? Why would he have gone to all the trouble of getting rid of the body and making up a snowmobile accident? Plus, Redpath had the gun, not Campbell. But now, I’m not so sure. You’ve got these two guys, buddies, and they’re apparently into some pretty deviant stuff. Odds are pretty good that if Blackburn was fooling around with boys, Redpath might’ve been too, right? So maybe-I don’t know, I shouldn’t say.”
“What?”
“Maybe-look, sorry, I know this guy was your friend, but maybe these guys-maybe they both had, like, some sort of, you know, thing for Campbell. Maybe they were rivals. Maybe this was some sort of weird triangle.”
I was gripping the steering wheel so hard I thought I might break it. “Aren’t you jumping to some conclusions here?” I said.
“Maybe.” She shifted around in the seat to face me. “What do you think?”
I fixed my eyes on the headlamp beams cutting through the dark. What did I think? That wasn’t really what Joanie was asking. She was asking, what did I know? What did I know of what went on between my best friend and my coach and his assistant? The answer, unbelievably, was that I knew nothing. The day’s events were beginning to sink in. All those years, Soupy had known. And he’d never given me the slightest hint. We’d sat there in the second-floor window at Enright’s, watching Blackburn’s funeral procession, Soupy with his hand on my neck, a comfort. And he knew. And maybe my mother knew, too.
“Gus,” Joanie said. “Are you all right?”
“No. I’m pissed and embarrassed. All this shit was happening right under my nose.”
“Come on. It’s not your fault. I mean, you weren’t-”
“No, Joanie, I was not part of it, whatever it was.”
I eased around a snowplow that was pitching sheets of snow onto the six-foot walls along the shoulder.
“Take a left up here,” Joanie said.
At the corner where I turned, a neon vacancy sign burned red in front of Jungle of the North, a tourist trap motel. A menagerie of concrete statues crouched in dim light thrown by flood lamps tacked on birches: An orange hippopotamus. A white tiger striped in purple. A pink-and-black giraffe, missing the lower section of one leg, steel reinforcement rods showing where the hock once was. A giant, leering alligator, his back and snout covered with snow.
“Whatever happened to the priest at your high school?” I said.
“Oh, he’s still there,” Joanie said.
I turned onto a two-track past hand-painted wooden signs warning of dogs and guns. I hadn’t gone far before I stopped and parked. “I don’t want to get stuck coming out of here,” I said.
As we trudged up the road to Perlmutter’s, the night was so quiet you could hear the snow falling. “Oh, yeah,” Joanie said. “Campbell’s out. Guess who posted bail?”
“Boynton?”
“How’d you know?”
“The zoning board meets again tomorrow. Teddy wouldn’t let something as minor as a hockey stick to the head interfere with business.”
“You know,” Joanie said, “Boynton might know a lot more about all this, too.”
