“Does he have a cat too?” I said.
Joanie looked annoyed. With me. “About a dozen of them,” she said. “He says they have a special sense for Sasquatch. You’d probably buy that, huh?”
“Voice down, please.”
“What the hell are we doing here, Gus?”
“We’re getting the Blackburn story.”
“And we’re going to trade in my other story, which is dead solid, for something that could be total crap?”
“Quiet. Yes, we are. For now.”
“It was never going to run anyway, was it?”
I chose not to answer.
“Gus, this is a scumbag who insists he has a pile of Bigfoot crap. Now because he happened to know your dad, we’re going to trust him?”
I grabbed her elbow and steered her away from Perlmutter’s window to the edge of the porch. An automatic security lamp flashed on over our heads. The beam illuminated the ground through the trees all the way down to a corner of Walleye Lake.
“Yes, he’s a liar,” I said, speaking as quietly as I could. “But he’s capable of telling the truth. If he lies about Blackburn, our deal with him is immediately off, and I’ll fight like hell to run your Bigfoot story, I promise.”
“He’s capable of telling the truth? You know, it’s one thing to steal voice mails from a bunch of liars. It’s another thing entirely to make deals with one.”
“Cheap shot,” I said. It didn’t matter at the moment that she happened to be right. “Look, I’m going back in. You can wait in the truck if you want.”
“Whatever.”
“OK,” I told Perlmutter. I was sitting on the arm of the sagging chair. Joanie stood next to her peeling one. “I can tell you-and I shouldn’t be-that we’ve written our story on your so-called museum, and the lawyers don’t like it.”
“What good’s that do me?” Perlmutter said.
“Look, Clayton,” I said, “if Joanie and I go back and do some screaming, we’ll turn the lawyers around.” Joanie nodded on cue. “Or we could just stay on the Blackburn story, if we have something fresh to write. Anyway, Joanie’s going to be leaving the Pilot soon, and that’ll pretty much assure your story will die.”
“Where’s she going?”
Joanie blinked twice but kept her gaze on Perlmutter. “Who knows?” I said. “Someplace bigger. She’s the one breaking all these Blackburn stories. If it wasn’t for her, we might not even have had an arraignment today.”
“Huh,” Perlmutter grunted. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”
“Anyway,” I continued, “it was nice chatting about my family, but if you aren’t going to help us, we’re going to go do some screaming.”
It wasn’t the most ethical way to go about things, but I’d done worse. Anyway, if the people of Starvation Lake and the fools in the state capital who had showered money on Perlmutter wanted to think he was running a museum, maybe they deserved to get ripped off.
Perlmutter gazed at Shep for a long minute. He undid the top two snaps of his vest and produced a black- and-white photograph that he handed to me. Joanie got up and looked at it over my shoulder. Through a thicket of trees, the blurry shape of a man appeared on the shore of a lake. He was bent over another, indistinguishable shape, hidden in shadow. The perspective was similar to the one from Perlmutter’s porch. The trees were lush with leaves. A dull streak of moonlight glimmered on the water’s edge. “You took this?” I said.
“Yessir.”
“But this wasn’t that night?”
“No, sir. That was spring, couple of months later.”
“But what did you see that night?” Joanie said. “You said you saw something.”
Perlmutter ignored her, pointing at the photo. “You recognize the guy?”
“No,” I said, squinting.
“Here’s a hint. He was one of the four I saw at their little bonfire that night.”
“Four?” Joanie and I said in unison. “No,” Joanie said. “It was just Blackburn, Redpath, and Campbell.”
“That’s all I’m saying about that,” Perlmutter said. “Look at the picture.”
I knew it couldn’t be Blackburn. It was too bulky to be Soupy. “Leo?” I said.
“Give the man a cigar,” Perlmutter said. “Yessir, old Leo snuck down to the lake to dispose of a little something.”
“Blackburn’s snowmobile,” Joanie said.
“Another winner,” Perlmutter said, holding his beer up in salute. “Old Shep was just a puppy that spring, and Redpath wasn’t making that much of a racket, but Shep about tore her chain off the house, didn’t you, girl?”
“So,” I said, “you’re saying Leo killed Blackburn-or Blackburn killed himself-and then Leo waited a few months to dump the snowmobile and, presumably, Blackburn.”
“No,” Joanie said to me. “Remember what he said on the answering machine.”
“Hey, maybe I’m all wet,” Perlmutter said. “Try this.” He held out his hand. Lying in the palm was a. 22- caliber bullet. “Found it out by their fire,” he said.
“When? That night?” I said.
“The morning after.”
“The morning after the fire, after Blackburn died?”
“In the winter, yeah.”
He handed me the bullet. I examined it and gave it to Joanie.
“When I heard about the snowmobile dunking on the squawk box”-Perlmutter jerked a thumb at the police radio-“I got myself out to their campsite for a look-see. The cops were still messing around at Starvation. It was a sunny morning, and I caught a glint of the bullet, stuck in a tree.”
“In a tree?” Joanie said.
“Fourteen of my steps from the fire pit.”
“Must’ve been buried pretty good,” I said.
“Yep. Took a little work to dig it out.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Joanie said.
“Maybe I did. As I think you know, missy, I am nothing if not opportunistic.”
“Amen,” she said. “I’ll bet you’re the one who called the cops last week when the snowmobile finally washed up.”
“You never know.”
She held up the bullet. “We have to take this.”
“Not a chance.”
“This could be anybody’s,” Joanie said. “The cops have to look at it before we could write about it.”
“Ain’t going to happen,” Perlmutter said. He leaned forward, his hand open. “I’ll take that picture too, if you please.”
“Joanie, give him the bullet,” I said. The cops eventually would come for it anyway. “But let me keep the picture, Clayton, just for a little. I want to look at it some more in some better light.” If Delbert blew it up, we might be able to tell if it was a fake. Or it might actually give us a little leverage with Dingus. And maybe it could help Soupy, too, though it was pretty flimsy as court evidence went. “It will not appear in our paper unless you yourself give me permission, I swear on my father’s grave.”
“Your daddy’s grave, huh?” he said, chuckling. “Let me think about it.”
“Joanie,” I said.
She handed him the bullet. “So,” she said, “we’ve got a Bigfoot-like photograph and a bullet that could’ve come from Kmart.”
“Hah,” Perlmutter scoffed.
“Clayton,” Joanie said. “The cops say there were only two bullets-one in the snowmobile, one in Blackburn’s head.”
“But they ain’t got no bullet from Blackburn’s head, now do they, missy?”
