“Yeah, buddy. Calls for a shot.”
He snatched two glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the back bar and poured us two fat shots. I really didn’t need it, but it gave me an opportunity to change the subject again.
I raised my glass. “To Gracie,” I said.
Soupy hesitated before clinking my glass. He drank the Jack down in a gulp, winced, poured himself another, swallowed that. I drank half of mine, set the glass down. “You all right?” I said.
“Fine.”
I knew he’d enjoyed sleeping with her, because he talked about it almost constantly. I wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten his heart as involved as his pecker, because he didn’t talk about that.
“Sorry, man. I know you liked her.”
“Yeah. Cool chick.”
“Are we going to talk about it?”
He picked up the dishrag again, held his arms up in an exaggerated shrug. “What’s to talk about? Obviously she wasn’t happy. So”-he looked into the sink-“she did what she did.”
“No, Soup.”
“Chickenshit, if you ask me.”
“No.” I lowered my voice. “She didn’t kill herself.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Cops been to see you?”
He sneaked a look at the regulars. They weren’t looking, but the jukebox was off again, so they could hear. For months, Soupy had imagined, or pretended to imagine, that only a few locals knew that he and Gracie were sleeping together, even though she came into Enright’s every night around nine, sat at the same end-of-the-bar stool beneath a picture of young Soupy celebrating after a goal, drank her eight or nine gin and Squirts, stayed until the bar was empty, and left through the back door with Soupy.
“What the hell would the cops want with me?”
“You tell me. Soupy Campbell closed his bar early last night. That’s front-page news right there.”
“There was a big fucking storm last night, you know.”
“There’s a big fucking storm every two weeks and you never close early. And you weren’t at the rink. You think Dingus isn’t going to notice?”
“Dingus?” He was getting louder now. One of the regulars had turned his head to watch. Soupy looked at him. “What’s your problem, Lenny? You interested in settling up?”
Lenny returned to his cocoon. Soupy glared at me.
“What the fuck, Trap? You selling me out to your girlfriend?”
“Oh, Jesus, give me a break. You could get yourself in trouble here, buddy. Where were you?”
“Good question,” came a voice from the front of the bar.
We turned to see Sheriff Dingus Aho standing in the open front doorway, his cruiser’s lights flickering on the street behind him.
“Damn,” I said. “This is not good.”
“Christ, Dingus,” Soupy said. “Did you have to use the lights? I got a business to run here.”
Dingus spared Soupy the handcuffs. By the time they pulled away, Soupy in the backseat staring straight ahead, a small audience had gathered on the sidewalk, and Soupy’s bar had closed early for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.
“What’s all the hubbub out there?”
Phyllis Bontrager asked me the question as I came through the front door of the Pilot. Her eyes, replicas of her daughter Darlene’s, widened behind the huge lenses she’d worn for as long as I’d known her. As kids, we had called her Tweety Bird.
“You didn’t see?” I said. “The cops took Soupy in.”
Mrs. B pursed her lips and popped her glasses up onto her head. She was standing behind the front counter wearing a red cardigan with the shapes of reindeer heads knitted into it. A game show flickered silently on a black- and-white TV at the other end of the counter.
“Are you all right?” she said.
I must have looked worried, though I was telling myself the sheriff was probably just going to grill Soupy before letting him go. He could have done it more quietly, but Dingus had his own way of doing things.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” I said. “Worried about Soupy.”
“You’re a good friend, but Alden Campbell wouldn’t hurt a flea,” she said. Alden was Soupy’s real name, but Mrs. B and my mother were the only ones who called him by it. “How is your mother?”
“Not so good.”
“Yes. This is difficult for her. I went over this morning as soon as I saw her up.”
“Thanks. I must have just missed you. Have you seen Darlene?”
She shook her head no. “She woke me up in the middle of the night. I was glad she did, of course, but she wasn’t making any sense. All I could hear was that Gracie was”-she stopped, searched for a word-“gone. Then I just sat up all night.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you think?”
She picked a pile of advertising invoices out of her in-basket, started stacking certain ones on the counter to her left, others to her right. “Alden didn’t really think he could close the bar early and nobody would notice, did he?”
“Who knows what goes on in that head?”
“Do you think he knows anything?”
“No. I mean, he probably knows something about what happened to Gracie, hopefully not enough to get himself in trouble.” Damn Soupy, I thought. He was a month older than me, but seemed like a little brother half the time. “Mail?”
“On your desk.” She flipped her glasses down again. “School menus. The phone bill. A notice from the Boy Scouts on their March fund-raiser. The county extension newsletter; this month’s focus is winter mildew. Revised town council agenda. Two letters to the editor: one from Jill Smith about the restrooms at the senior center; one from Danny Braun about your stories on the new rink-I can read that one if you’d rather not.” She tipped her head so that she was looking at me over the rims of her glasses. “And something from Detroit.”
She loved me like a son. And mistrusted me like the punk next door who had once broken her daughter’s heart.
“Probably a parking ticket I never paid,” I said.
Philo appeared behind Mrs. B in the doorway to the newsroom. “Good afternoon, Gus,” he said. He usually used that line on me when I showed up at 10:00 a.m. Now the wall clock over his head said 1:20. I had plenty of time to finish what I had to do for Tuesday’s paper, but that wasn’t what counted with Philo. He had a punch-clock in his head that his uncle had installed.
“Sorry, Philo. I was out gathering information.”
The look on his face told me he was not impressed.
“One other thing,” Mrs. B said. “Shirley McBride stopped in.”
Gracie’s mother. “Here? How was she?”
Philo pointed one finger at the newsroom then disappeared back there.
“Oh, you know. It’s all about Shirley. She said she was on her way down to see Parmelee.” Parmelee Gilbert was the only lawyer left on Main Street. “Something about a life insurance policy.”
“Gracie’s life insurance? Don’t tell me.”
“Her uncle supposedly sold her a policy not too long ago.”
Gracie’s uncle was Floyd Kepsel, Shirley’s brother and the owner of Kepsel’s Ace Hardware. He sold life insurance on the side and was a town councilman.
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Shirley, as you know, isn’t always crystal clear.”
“But if it’s more than a hundred bucks…”
“Exactly. She was doing her entitlement thing. You know.”
“Yeah.” I’d seen it on display at assessment appeal meetings. Shirley was the exceedingly squeaky wheel
