“Off the record?”
“Yes,” Gilbert said, as if he went off the record as routinely as he tied his tie every morning. He looked down at his folded hands. “As you can imagine, I feel terrible for Mrs. McBride and everyone who knew the girl. The loss is no less, whatever the cause.” He stopped. I waited. He looked up, his eyes flitting to the photo of his daughter before returning to me. “But who can divine the workings of a single human heart? Who really knows what a person thinks and believes when he or she decides to do whatever they do?”
I thought of Gracie sitting on the edge of her cot in the Zam shed, alone, weary, bedraggled, alcoholic. Why would anyone have wanted to kill her? Who could possibly have had a motive?
“Yes,” I said. “But you have a client with money on the line.”
“I am not speaking for any client.”
“Sorry. Will I see you at town council Wednesday?”
“Back on the record. Always possible. My clients frequently have business before the council.”
“I’m sure I’ll be there.”
“Well then.” He stood. “I have an appointment to get to.”
“How can I help you?”
Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho leaned back against the front edge of his gray metal desk, thick arms folded across his thick midsection, one hand twirling a curl of his mustache. The room smelled of Tiparillos and, strangely, perfume. Dingus had kept me waiting outside his office for half an hour. He didn’t usually make me wait. I had only an hour or so to file my stories and write up the other junk waiting back at the newsroom. I cut to the chase.
“No way it’s suicide.”
“You knew her,” Dingus said. “What do you think?”
Since I had returned to Starvation a year and a half before, Dingus and I had come to an unspoken trust that we would not deliberately waste each other’s time. Even in the typical cop-and-reporter cat and mouse, there was purpose. He had his, I had mine, and he had learned that I might actually know things that he did not. In the hallway outside his office hung a framed copy of a Pilot front page. The banner headline read, “Police Uncover Porn Ring.” We had helped each other on that story. Dingus could have had a byline.
Darlene merely tolerated my relationship with Dingus. I knew it rankled her that the sheriff could seem more forthcoming with me than with his own deputies. I told her that a big part of his job was managing information, and sometimes he had to pay more attention to someone digging for it than to people who were beholden to him for their jobs. “Bullshit,” she replied. “It’s because you’re a boy.”
“Hell, Dingus,” I said. “I didn’t know Gracie. She didn’t live here for years.”
“You guys were in Detroit together.”
“No. We were just there at the same time. We might as well have been living on different planets.”
He stopped twirling his mustache and squinted one eye. “And you had no idea whatsoever what she was doing down there?”
“Nope.”
“You know, of course, I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”
I’d heard that line before. He wouldn’t have had me into his office if he didn’t want me to know something. Or wanted something from me.
“What’s with the leaks to Channel Eight?” I said. “You want to get on TV? Or are you just trying to help D’Alessio get laid?”
Dingus ignored that and moved around behind his desk. His swivel chair groaned as he sat. He moved a half- filled doughnut box aside, reached into a drawer, and came out with a glossy black pamphlet. “I like this,” he said, waggling it in front of his face. “Some vagrant gave it to me in Florida when I was down there for a conference.”
I saw the title on the pamphlet cover: Hiding from God. Dingus read aloud: “‘When we open the newspaper, we see for the most part bad news. We see more of the dark side of humanity than the good and decent side.’ ” He looked over the top of the pamphlet at me. “Here’s the best line: ‘The newspaper is simply a snapshot of the darkness that is within each one of us.’ ”
“I was definitely thinking that the other day as I was typing up the St. Jude Society’s lost-and-found list.”
Dingus set the pamphlet on his blotter and pointed at my face. “Don’t give me that smart-ass bull. Your sister’s dead and all you care about is your stupid little scoops?”
His singsong voice sometimes made it hard to take him seriously. Not at the moment. His mood tasted like all the sharp metal in the room, the angle-iron chairs, the star points on his badge, the shelf brackets, his pistol.
“She wasn’t my sister,” I said.
“For all intents and purposes, she damned well was. Nobody took better care of her than your mother. I had the distinct privilege of being reminded of that about an hour ago when Gracie’s other mother was sitting in that chair you’re in now.”
“Shirley?” That explained the perfume.
Dingus snatched a yellow Post-it note off his blotter and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I leaned in. The perfume filled my nostrils. Shirley usually used enough to deodorize a
ballroom. I peered at her scribble, which listed to the right: MUST TALK. URGINT NEWS. PLEAS CALL 231 555 3671.
“This is for me?” I said. “She’s threatening you?”
“Hell’s bells, it would take me all night to tell you how many times she’s told me she’d be going to the Pilot with this little bitch or that. She’s the least of my worries.”
I ignored the vibrating cell phone in my pocket.
“What did she want?”
He jumped up from his chair and paced to the back of the room, where a pair of particle-board shelves held cans of pepper spray, an assortment of black-and-chrome-colored handcuffs, and a photograph of Dingus’s ex-wife and current girlfriend, Barbara. “She wants me to find a murderer,” he said. His voice turned sarcastic. “She wants her daughter avenged. She wants closure.”
I imagined Shirley pounding her fat pink fist on Dingus’s desk, the bracelets she bought out of the clearance bin at Glen’s rattling, her bleached blond perm bouncing. She’d be wearing Kmart designer jeans pushing the zipper flap open and one of those $17.50 THROW AWAY THAT CORK! sweatshirts from the Just One More Saloon. Around town it was said that Shirley had sold her dead husband’s Purple Heart medal for $33.50 on an Internet auction site. It wasn’t hard to believe.
“She wants the life insurance proceeds,” I said. “And she’s going to raise a stink about it. But there is a murderer, isn’t there, Dingus?”
“l’ll be goddamned,” he said, turning away from me.
A light on Dingus’s phone started to blink. He didn’t notice. He was pacing from the shelf to his desk and back. The light went off and Dingus stopped in the middle of the room and held his arms out wide. His face flushed red.
“Why?” he said. “Why the hell did she have to come back here?” He pointed at his phone. “That thing’s been ringing all day. Every damn member of the county commission and the town council’s calling to tell me, ‘Leave it alone, Dingus’ and ‘Just let it lie, Dingus.’ ”
“Nobody wants a murder around here,” I said. “They have more important things to worry about.”
“Shirley’s just trailer trash to them, not worth the overtime,” Dingus said. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit. But they’re calling Doc Joe, too.” The county coroner. “They’re not supposed to do that. Doc, he gets the faintest whiff they might cut his budget, he’ll sign whatever they want.”
“Are they threatening to whack you too?”
“Funny you should ask.”
Dingus stepped to his desk, grabbed a file folder, and plucked out a sheet of paper that had come over a fax machine. He handed it to me. “You can’t have this,” he said. “But you can read it.”
The fax had been sent at 11:18 that morning. It was signed by town council chairman Elvis Bontrager. The town, which had long ago eliminated its own police force for lack of funds, now relied on the sheriff’s department and contributed to its budget. Elvis’s letter said an allocation of money for the purchase of two new police cruisers might have to be “temporarily delayed” because of “reconciliation issues” that had recently cropped up.
