“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine. Dingus says they’re going to take you to jail in Detroit tonight. He says he’s trying to help you but you’re not cooperating.”
“Does he?” I said.
Dingus had persisted in his interrogation all the way back to Starvation. Whenever I dozed off, he roused me with more questions. I told him a little, though obviously not as much as he wanted to know. Hearing that Blackburn was alive didn’t seem to surprise Dingus much; he kept asking who else was involved, who was the brains behind Blackburn. It was as if he’d listened in on Blackburn telling me he couldn’t have been the only one peddling porn. I thought of my father and shut my mouth. Dingus deposited me in that jail cell.
“Gus,” Mom said. “It’s time to grow up now.”
“I’m sorry you think that,” I said. “But I’m not the only one who’s been keeping secrets, am I?”
Tears welled in my mother’s eyes. “It’s all right, Bea,” Joanie said. She looked at me. “Your mother has some things to tell you.”
“Yes.”
“Tell him about Leo.”
Mom pulled a packet of tissues from her coat pocket and used one to dab at her eyes. “I think I told you,” she said, “that on the night of Jack’s accident, Leo tried to tell me he’d done a terrible thing.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m not proud of this, son. As I said, I wouldn’t let Leo tell me what the thing was. He was hysterical, one minute cursing Jack, the next near tears. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was trying to say. But I knew, I mean, I didn’t think I wanted to hear it. Then the police came. Leo must’ve gotten scared. But I’m not so dumb. I could see he wasn’t wet.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying”-she stopped to collect herself-“I’m saying I knew what Leo was trying to say. I didn’t understand until later, a lot later, when I didn’t think it mattered anymore.”
“What was it, Mother?”
“He meant he’d let Jack go.”
“And why,” Joanie said, “would Leo have thought this was so terrible, Bea?”
“I can’t be sure. But I thought something-something that wasn’t right-was going on at those little houses Jack had for the out-of-town boys. I was with him once at his own house after we’d gone to a show. I could just-” She paused. “He was a strange man. A very strange man.”
My brain had begun to throb against the inside of my skull.
“You have to believe me, son,” she said. “I didn’t know for sure what was going on there. And, yes, maybe I didn’t want to know. But at least I kept you away. I’m so glad I did that. Joanie told me about the young man in Canada.”
“Did you tell all of this to Dingus?” I said.
“I told him I wouldn’t talk until I spoke with you.”
“Anything else?”
From a sweater pocket Mom produced a folded sheet of paper. She set it on her lap. “Your father,” she said. “I know you’ve been looking for answers. By now”-she glanced at Joanie-“maybe you know some things.”
I looked at Joanie.
“The delivery isn’t in yet,” she said. “Snowstorms.”
Shit, I thought. I turned back to my mother. “I know Dad made some sort of investment in something that had something to do with Blackburn.”
“No,” Mom said. “Not with Jack.”
“Mother, he made an investment. I knew it even back then.”
“Whatever he did, he did for us. For you.”
“Can we please stop this bullshit? Dad’s gone. If you have something to tell me, just tell me. What was this second job he had on Saturday nights? What was the damn investment?”
“Settle down,” Joanie said.
Mom continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “On Friday nights, he went to those poker parties, and-”
“At Blackburn’s?”
“Some. Remember, Jack was only here a year or two before your father passed. They were playing poker long before that.”
“All right.”
“Those nights, after a while your father started sneaking that old movie projector out of the house. The same one you were sneaking out the other day. He thought I didn’t know. I wanted to think it was just some harmless boys’ fun. But Rudy wasn’t the sneaking kind.”
“So what?”
“It wasn’t like your father.”
“What about Saturday nights, Mother? The job?”
“He just wanted some extra money. We were starting to save for your college. And there was that Cadillac he had to have. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“You didn’t mind him working at a titty bar?”
“Watch your mouth,” she said. I glanced at Darlene standing outside the cell and she looked away. “I didn’t know that, at least not right away. He was in his funny period after Cousin Eddie died. Anyway, the money was very good. And he didn’t work there long.”
“Long enough to get mixed up with the wrong people?”
She ignored me and unfolded the piece of paper. “Your father wanted that Cadillac. After the doctors told him about his illness, I wanted him to have it. But he insisted on buying that other car and putting a thousand dollars into this business opportunity. I tried to talk him out of it, but you know your father.”
“What opportunity?”
“You’re not going to like this, son.”
“What?”
“Rudy never told me. He never told me anything about our money. That’s the way things were then. He just said it would pay off. He wouldn’t do anything that would harm anyone. Your father was a good man.”
“You said he didn’t give it to Blackburn, though.”
“No. He gave it to Francis.”
I felt suddenly dumb. “Francis? Dufresne? What’s he got to do with Blackburn?”
“Didn’t they work on a lot of real-estate things?”
“Yeah, years after Dad died. Was Dad investing in real estate?”
“I told you I don’t know. All I know is, after your father died, when I was having trouble making tax payments on the house, Francis came to the rescue.” She handed me the paper. “This is from last year.”
“You never said anything about problems paying taxes.”
“You weren’t around, Gus. You were in Detroit.”
The paper was a photocopy of a receipt from the Pine County Treasurer’s Office and a canceled check drawn on First Detroit Bank. The receipt confirmed a payment of $542.61 in taxes on property owned by Beatrice Carpenter on December 5, 1997. The check in the same amount was signed by Francis J. Dufresne. So my father had given Francis that thousand dollars for who knows what, and years later, Francis returned the favor by helping my mother with her taxes? Was that how the investment paid off?
“By the way,” Joanie said. “I was trying to tell you something when we got cut off the other day. I noticed something in my Bigfoot notes I missed before. Dufresne chaired some little state committee that gave Perlmutter a bunch of the money he used for his Sasquatch stuff.”
I was staring at Dufresne’s signature. There was something strangely familiar about it. I grabbed the envelope off the sink and looked again at Francis’s handwritten note.
“Joanie,” I said. “Did you write that bank story?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Mom said.
“Why?” Joanie said.
“Did you?”
