and prayed I’d stay out of a ditch.
The quickest way out of Michigan was I-75, but the state cops would be lying for me there. I decided I’d take Old U.S. 27 as far south as I could and then wing it. The way the snow was blowing, I’d be lucky to make Ohio by 7:00 p.m. First I had to get to Old 27. I couldn’t chance Route 816, because the cops would be waiting there, too, so I figured I’d zigzag along some back roads they probably wouldn’t know. The falling snow enveloped me in a white cocoon. I pushed the Seger tape in and turned the volume up:
Go ahead and call me yellow
Two plus two is on my mind…
The snow let up south of Clare. I drove all night, stopping only for gas and coffee. A little after five the next morning, I pulled the Bonnie into the snowless parking lot behind the Fairfax Ice House. The trees in Virginia were still mostly bare, but the grass was beginning to turn green. I stretched out across the enormous front seat of Dad’s dream car and fell instantly to sleep.
twenty-nine
The sun woke me a little after seven. The floor of the Bonnie was a mess of foam cups and cellophane wrappers. I sat up and rubbed my eyes and peered at myself in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t look much worse than anyone wandering into a rink at this hour.
The lobby of the Fairfax Ice House was like most I’d seen. Black rubber mats covered the floor. Long benches waited for youngsters to sit and tie on their skates. The smell of popcorn lingered. To my right was a skate-rental window and hockey shop, closed at the moment, to my left a cluster of vending machines, video games, and pay phones. Facing me were two sets of double doors leading to the rink. Between the doors stood two banks of lockers, and over the lockers on the cinder-block wall hung five black-and-white photographs of people identified by name tags. Don Peacock managed the rink and Margie Peacock taught figure skating along with Kitty Petreault and Jeff Bender. Power skating was taught, appropriately enough, by Al Power. All of them wore white turtlenecks beneath purple nylon jackets.
No photograph accompanied the sixth name tag on the wall. “Richard Blackstone. Hockey Skills Coach,” it read. I wrote it down in my notebook. On the wall next to the skate-rental window hung a bulletin board listing the week’s activities: public skating sessions, figure skating classes, hockey leagues. On this Thursday, I saw Richard Blackstone was scheduled to teach a hockey class for kids aged five to seven at eleven forty-five, and another for eight-to twelve-year-olds at three forty-five. I wrote those down, too.
On a traffic-choked road called Route 50, I found a banged-up old diner squatting beneath a sign that said simply, EAT. There was no egg pie on the menu, and when I asked for fried potatoes, the waitress, a tubby woman wearing a dirty yellow smock stitched with “Shirley,” said, “Don’t you want grits, sugar?” I ate them with a cheese omelet and drank coffee reading the Washington Post until 9:00 a.m.. By then I figured the Fairfax County Clerk’s Office would be open.
The roads wound and twisted and doubled back in a bewildering asphalt pretzel. Wherever I turned, it all looked the same, clusters of townhouses squeezed between strip malls and fast-food joints and car dealerships. A perfect place to disappear.
At the clerk’s office, I paid for copies of every document containing the name Richard Blackstone. I went through them line by line sitting in the parking lot. Now I knew where Blackstone lived and what he drove. One piece of paper linked him to Richard Ltd., the company that owned Jack Blackburn’s property near Starvation Lake. The clerk gave me directions to a nearby electronics store. There I bought a point-and-shoot camera, a video camera with a tripod and zoom lens, and a tape recorder that fit into my breast pocket. I stuffed it all in my duffel bag and headed back toward the ice rink, noticing a FedEx store along the way. At a Mobil station I filled the Bonnie’s gas tank. Inside, I bought a cap adorned with the logo for the Washington Capitals, the local pro hockey team. A bony codger in an oil-stained sweatshirt changed my five-dollar bill for quarters.
I backed away from the gas pump and slid in next to a pay phone.
“ Pilot. McCarthy.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Holy crap.” Joanie lowered her voice. “Where are you? When I got back from Audrey’s yesterday, there were four cops waiting. You didn’t give up your source, did you?”
“Nope. What did you tell the cops?”
“I told them to call Kerawhatshisname. What a jerk. He just called me and said he’d spike any story with the name ‘Blackburn’ in it.”
“Just keep writing.”
“First I’ve got to do something on this bank thing. The jerk gave me a bunch of crap for not running anything on it in today’s paper. And Tillie took off.”
“What bank thing?”
“I told you, the New York bank buying the banks up here? I guess one of whatshisname’s golf buddies is a banker.”
“Keep it short. What about Tillie?”
“She’s gone. Came back for about five minutes after you took off and cleared out. Didn’t say a word to me.”
The missing film files had finally spooked her. Or maybe my sudden departure. It worried me. Had she figured out where I was going?
“What else is going on?” I said.
“AP put out a short on the cops looking for you. Redpath’s funeral is tomorrow. The zoning board got postponed yesterday because of the snowstorm. And the chick from the clerk’s office dropped off a big envelope.”
The 1988 town council minutes. “Vicky?” I said.
“Yeah. She said she was sorry but she had to go get them from that bartender guy.”
“Loob. Can you open them up?”
“Already did. I don’t see much. But I’ll bet you wanted to know about the dredging vote.”
She was good and getting better. “Yeah.”
I heard her rustle some papers. “They voted on it at this April thirteenth meeting. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, like, duh, how else are you going to find a body? But the sheriff, this Spardell dude, was worried about how it might mess up his budget.”
“Yeah. He wanted a boat.”
“I’ll get to that. Anyway, first they voted three to two to dredge the lake. But the sheriff made a fuss and then the mayor-excuse me, the mayor pro tem, because the mayor wasn’t there-called the council into a closed session. They came out of that and voted three to two again, this time not to dredge.”
“Who called the session?”
“Mayor Pro Tem A. Campbell.”
“Soupy’s dad? Shit, that’s right, he was on the council. And who switched their vote?”
“You’ll love this,” Joanie said. “X. Perlmutter.”
“Huh? Clayton’s brother?”
“Oh, no, it’s Clayton. His first name is actually Xavier.”
I’d never known Clayton was on the council. But then I had been in Detroit. “What about the boat?”
“The last thing they did was authorize twenty-five thousand dollars for that, with Campbell abstaining since they were buying it from him.”
“What an upstanding guy. What kind of boat?”
“Doesn’t say. Just one ‘appropriate to the tasks of policing the lake and its shoreline.’ Why’s the town buying a boat for the county sheriff anyway?”
A recorded voice was telling me I had to insert more quarters. “Listen,” I said. “Go to my desk, second drawer on the right. Near the top you’ll find a photocopy of a receipt from the marina. Get it. Hurry.”
I waited. She came back on. “Got it. A receipt from the Starvation Lake Marina for twenty-five thousand
