I turned to Philo. “Alden is Soupy, the guy who owns Enright’s. The thing about him could be bullshit. Channel Eight gets stuff wrong all the time. I’ll chase it.”
“OK,” Philo said. “The coach is a bigger story anyway, don’t you think?”
No, I thought, the murder of a Starvation Lake citizen is way bigger. But I said, “Maybe. Just think, Philo, if we had our own Internet page, we might have beaten Channel Eight to both these stories.” I grabbed my coat. “I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?” Philo looked up at the wall clock over the copier. “You don’t have a lot of time.”
“You want to help?”
“I wish I could,” he said. “I have to do this budget.”
“No problem,” I said, and gave Mrs. B a light squeeze on the shoulder as I headed out to Main Street.
ten
Afternoon already had begun to succumb to night. I turned toward the lake. Low hanging cloud banks pinched the tree line against the far end of Main. I walked down the block and sat on a bench beneath the marquee of the old Avalon Cinema, remembering the smell of popcorn on the air when my mother had brought me there as a boy to see Willy Wonka amp; the Chocolate Factory. Now all I could smell was winter.
I had to make a few calls I didn’t want Philo to overhear. I dialed the numbers for three town council members who, if I caught them at the right time, might not mind talking. Most had shut me out since I’d started writing about Haskell and the new rink. A potato chip bag skittered past my boots as each of the calls landed on voice mail. I left bare-bones messages saying I needed clarification on a council matter; no need for them to know that I was prowling for another Haskell story.
I needed to confirm what Perlmutter had told me. Haskell had told me just enough off the record to tie my hands. Clever, I thought. Or stupid on my part. Now I had to write my story as if I’d never heard him say what he’d said about seeking help from the town. But I had to get the story. Everyone in town deserved to hear what the council was about to do before it was done and Haskell cashed his check, even if they didn’t want to hear it, which was probably the case. And I had to get back out ahead of Channel Eight.
Most important, I wanted to know what was going on with Soupy. I tried Darlene’s phone. She didn’t answer. “Hey, stranger, just checking in,” I told her voice mail. I shoved the phone back in my pocket and felt the old hair brush I’d found in Gracie’s Wayne State duffel. I pulled it out and scrutinized the stray hairs stuck in the bristles, auburn and gray.
I remembered what Mrs. B had said about a life insurance policy. So far as I knew, suicides often nullified life insurance policies; the beneficiary-I assumed it was Gracie’s mother, Shirley, based on what Mrs. B had said-was unlikely to get a penny. Even if it was obvious that Gracie was murdered, even if the police investigated her death as a homicide, someone would have to prove it or the insurance company could take forever to pay, if it paid at all.
And Soupy? Did he drive Gracie out to the shoe tree and boost her up to the hanging bough, then just leave her there to die? No way, I thought. Although he and Gracie were far from in love, they were having a hell of a good time. Or at least Soupy was.
“Dude,” he had whispered to me late one night as we dressed for a game. “I got no legs.”
“Why?” I said, digging for a roll of tape in my hockey bag.
“Gracie. I got to the rink early to get my skates sharpened and she hauled my ass back to the Zam shed.”
“No.”
“Yeah. Ever fuck on a Zamboni?”
I tried to imagine precisely how they had done it, decided I didn’t want to know. “Good old Nadia,” I said.
“More like Evel Knievel.”
I had to shut this conversation down. Without looking up from the sock I was winding with tape, I said, “So, you going to marry her?”
“Marry her? Trap, she won’t even let me take her to a movie. The woman fucks like there’s no tomorrow.”
And now there was no tomorrow.
I didn’t believe the cops were going to charge Soupy with a thing. More likely, I thought, the sheriff was trying to squeeze him for information.
So my next stop had to be Dingus-if Dingus would even talk. He didn’t do phones. I would have to go see him, hope whoever was at the front desk-maybe Darlene-would tell him I was there. I looked at my watch. I had enough time if he didn’t make me wait too long, if he agreed to see me at all.
I was about to get up from the bench when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“You are truly deep in thought, young man.”
I turned to see Parmelee Gilbert, attorney-at-law, in a charcoal topcoat and a wool scarf the color of a carrot.
“Impressive,” he said. “Would that all of us in Starvation think so hard about what we’re doing.”
“Hey, Parm,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing. How are you?”
“Staying busy.” He peeled the leather glove off of his right hand and extended it. “I am very sorry for your loss.”
I knew he meant it. “Thanks. Mom’s taking it pretty hard.”
“These sorts of things are never easy,” he said, and he meant that too. He slipped his glove back on. “Please extend my sincerest condolences.”
“I will, thanks. Did you see Gracie’s mom?”
The question took him by surprise. He folded his arms behind his back and leaned slightly forward, a polite smile on his face. Parmelee Gilbert was nothing if not polite. As Laird Haskell’s lawyer, he never failed to return my calls and politely decline to comment or to make his client available for questions.
“Shirley McBride?” he said. “I did speak with her, yes.”
“Ah, sorry,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege?”
He stood straight again, and peered past me down the street. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”
Twin mugs of tea steeped on coasters on Parmelee Gilbert’s desk. He sat in a leather chair behind the desk and lifted each of his legs to strip the slickened rubbers off his wingtips. The shoes gleamed with what I assumed was that morning’s polish. “I apologize,” Gilbert said, while setting the rubbers on a rug, “that I haven’t had you in before.”
From the straight-backed chair facing his desk, I could have laughed without being rude. Gilbert himself might have laughed with me. He had so thoroughly stonewalled me on my Haskell stories that I had almost given up on calling him. Of course I couldn’t actually give up; I had to keep trying, at least so I could tell the faithful readers of the Pilot that I had. Each time I called, he would thank me for calling with my “pertinent questions,” ask me to give his best to my mother, and promise to get back to me “with the clearest possible response I can offer.”
And then, invariably, he would call me at 5:40 p.m., twenty minutes before my deadline, to say, “We’re sorry, but Mr. Haskell prefers not to discuss these matters in the press” or “With our apologies, Mr. Haskell is focused exclusively on the positive aspects of this extremely vital project for Pine County and Starvation Lake.” He was a lawyer representing a lawyer. Sometimes I would wonder: Did Gilbert think at all like Haskell? Did he envy Haskell’s success? Or envy Haskell himself?
Gilbert always thanked me yet again for giving his client-never him, always his client-the opportunity to comment. He always declined, no matter how or how many times I asked, to say anything further. To my occasional attempts to get him to guide me one way or the other on an off-the-record basis, he would merely say, “With all due respect to you and your colleagues, in my experience there is no such thing as off the record.”
I knew reporters at my old paper, the Times, and our rival, the Free Press, who would have been pleased, even relieved, to have Gilbert’s nonresponse; it’s so much easier and quicker five minutes before deadline to insert “ so-and-so declined to comment ” than to have to shoehorn in a last-minute point-by-point rebuttal of every fact and
