who rarely got the grease, or at least never enough to satisfy her. “Is she stopping back here?”
“Gus!” I heard Philo call out.
Mrs. B jerked a thumb toward the back. “Go.”
Philo was on the phone so I tossed my coat on a table strewn with yellowing Pilots and started on what I had to get done before deadline: Rewrite the school menu, Boy Scouts, and extension service items into briefs. Write the Jason Esper story. Get the sheriff to talk to me about Gracie, then write that story, doing everything I could to avoid the word “suicide.” Now Gracie supposedly had a life insurance policy. Who would take the trouble to buy a life insurance policy if they were deciding when and how they would die?
I left the rest of the mail for later, although I glanced at the Detroit piece to see if Mrs. B had peeked inside. It didn’t appear that she had.
The message light on my phone was on. I dialed. There was one message: “The animals are restless,” came a raspy voice.
I deleted the message, fished my cell phone out of my coat pocket, and dialed a number I didn’t want on the Pilot phone bill, which Philo now spent half an hour going over each month. He was either looking for pennies to cut out of the budget or trying to figure out who my sources were. Probably both. Our cell phone bills went straight to corporate.
The raspy voice came on my cell phone: “You didn’t hear this from me.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa-don’t be saying my name.”
“I won’t. What do you know?”
It was Clayton Perlmutter, town councilman and self-appointed curmudgeon. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw my hockey bag. But he spent most of his days on the two phones in his house deep in the woods, trading this bit of gossip for that one until a lot of little bits added up to something that mattered. I had to keep him closer than folks I actually trusted, because he actually knew things they didn’t. In my eighteen years as a reporter, I had come to the reluctant realization that it was better dealing with liars and thieves than with people who didn’t know anything. Or people who were just plain stupid. Perlmutter was not stupid.
“Your old pal Laird,” Clayton Perlmutter said, “has visited with a few select members of your town council-not including yours truly, naturally, because he knows where I’d tell him to go-with a great big hat in his hand.”
“Really? I thought you were the one with the hat.”
I heard the low bark of a dog in the background. Perlmutter muffled the phone and yelled, “Shep. Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” He came back on. “No, son, no hat for me. That’s past history, you know that.”
“Of course.”
He fancied himself an entrepreneur. A year before, he’d gotten into some trouble with the state of Michigan for using research grants to support a sasquatch museum he’d never actually opened. Now he was proposing to build an Up North Hockey Hall of Fame on a couple of acres abutting the land where the new rink would be. He didn’t have a nickel to build the thing, but that wasn’t the point. Perlmutter merely wanted to scare Laird Haskell into buying his little plot at a handsome premium. Until Haskell did, Perlmutter would be juggling his phones and spreading rumors and trying to make trouble on the council.
“So, anyway, old Mr. Haskell, it turns out, ain’t as rich as he looks.”
“I think we’ve written that.”
“Ha,” Perlmutter said. “Nobody wants to believe it.”
Philo walked over and sat on my desk. He crossed his loafers and folded his hands on his knees. I smiled, pointed at the phone, held up a finger, and pressed the phone harder to my ear.
“Anyway,” Perlmutter continued, “the big rich lawyer now wants the town to give him a little loan. You know, just a short-term thing, no strings attached, thirty days same as cash, like we’re some kind of special bank for millionaires.”
“Really? How much?”
“Oh, not much at all. And of course it ain’t because he’s having any financial problems. It’s just a little cash- flow glitch is all.”
“How big of a glitch?”
“He just needs a little six-figure bridge loan.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Shep barked again in the background. “Oh, give or take, about one hundred thousand smackeroonies.”
No shit, I thought. So that was what Haskell meant by “a bit of help”-a pretty hefty bit for a town that had to have bake sales to raise the money to buy a new backstop for the softball field. I doubted the town council had a hundred grand cooling in a bank vault somewhere. I sat up a little straighter in my chair, happy for the interesting turn of events, even happier that I knew and Haskell didn’t know that I knew. Philo was watching, so I tried not to look too happy. Plus I’d still have to get it confirmed elsewhere.
“Impressive.”
“Maybe next he’s going to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge, huh? You know, it might be nice to have all of this in the paper before it suddenly shows up at Wednesday’s council meeting. Otherwise, it’s a done deal, and I got a feeling we ain’t never going to see that hundred K again.”
“Well, thank you, sir,” I said. “Not sure we’d be interested, though.”
Perlmutter paused a moment, then let loose with a guffaw. “Oh, someone listening in, huh?” he said. “You are a regular Geraldo Rivera, sir. A regular Geraldo Rivera. Over and out.”
I ended the call and looked up at Philo.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Who was that?”
I riffled through my mail for the town council agenda and tore open the envelope. “Some whack job,” I said. In the middle of the agenda, below old business, an item had been added: “Executive Session re: capital construction.” That would be where the council went into a private caucus and wrote Haskell a big check.
“Are you sure?” Philo said.
He had watched me carefully. But before I told him anything, I wanted to do a little more reporting on Perlmutter’s tip. Bosses couldn’t always be trusted with good stories. The more time they had to think about them, the more time they had to mess them up or kill them outright.
I tossed the council agenda on my desk. “Would you like a story about how the White House is scheming to poison our lake so it can be turned into a cooling pond for alien spaceships?”
“Hmm,” Philo said. “I think not.”
“OK. Going for another correction tomorrow, Philo?”
“Pardon me?”
I gestured at my computer screen. “I was looking at the obit you wrote for old Mrs. Guthaus. Where the hell is Toussaint, Arizona?”
He looked at me, dumfounded. “Two what?”
“Tou-SANT.” I said it with what I fancied to be a French flourish.
“Oh,” he said. “Tucson. I would have caught it.”
“Let’s hope. You know, you’ve kind of got to imagine your corrections ahead of time. That’s the best way to avoid them. If you can imagine a correction-“ Tucson is a city in southern Arizona. A story in Tuesday’s Pilot misspelled the city’s name” — then you have to double-check it.”
I prided myself on this. Once I got out of bed in the middle of the night and called the printing plant to make sure that a caption referring to a shotgun said shotgun and not rifle, a common mistake among pointy-headed journalists who’d never held a real gun in their hands.
“So you’ve said,” Philo said. He uncrossed his loafers. “How did your meeting with Mr. Haskell go?”
“Fine.”
“Did you get a story?”
I thought for a second. “At least one.”
“Right.” I figured he already knew about the new Rats coach, courtesy of his Uncle Jim. “And how was the body language?”
“Fine. Everyone’s fine.”
Philo cleared his throat. “My meeting in Traverse was unnerving, to say the least.”
