Damn, I thought. Laird Haskell, who probably didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t have cared, was picking Dingus’s pocket. Instead of paying for better public safety, the council was about to give $100,000 to a supposed millionaire so he could build a hockey rink. Great for the story I was about to write. Not so great for Starvation. Unless, of course, the River Rats won a state championship. Then everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter to a soul if the local cops had to resort to bicycles to do their jobs.
“That sucks,” I said, handing the letter back. “They can just do that?”
“They can just do that,” Dingus said. “And that’s not all. They’re talking with the county commission about more cuts. Just between us.”
I thought about Darlene. For all of her carping about Dingus and the other “boys” at the department, she loved being a police officer. She would hate to lose her job so the town could have a shiny new hockey arena.
“Why do they give a rip?”
Dingus might have been the only person in town-except, perhaps, my mother-who didn’t care about hockey. He’d never played it, didn’t watch it, and probably thought it just caused him a lot of grief, what with all the postgame bar fights and drunks steering their way out of the rink parking lot.
“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe they think a big murder investigation’ll spook their bankers and that rich fellow will walk and they won’t get their precious rink. I don’t know what the hell these people think.”
“What are you going to do?”
He sat down heavily in his chair. His phone started blinking again. “I plan to proceed with-”
There was a knock at Dingus’s door. It opened and Deputy Frank D’Alessio ducked his head in. He gave me a What the fuck are you doing here? look before telling Dingus, “Sheriff, you have a call.”
“I can see that,” Dingus said. “Who is it?”
D’Alessio glanced at me and said, “Uh, a council member.”
“Which council member, Deputy?”
“Chairman Bontrager.”
“Not now.”
“He said it’s important.”
“Tell him to go cut a hole in the lake and jump in.”
D’Alessio grinned. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when you can.”
Dingus watched the door close.
“So,” I said, “you’re not really going to charge Soupy, are you? You just leaked that to buy yourself some time with the politicians.”
Dingus shrugged his acknowledgment. At least he hadn’t used me like he had Channel Eight. “I could still charge him with obstruction, though.”
“He’s not talking?”
“No, he’s-excuse me.”
A different light on his phone was blinking. Dingus picked up the phone and turned in his chair until he faced away from me. But I could still hear him, as he undoubtedly knew. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.
A full minute passed. “OK. Let me know. Thanks.” He turned around and hung up the phone. “Goddammit- why did she have to come back here?” He said it less to me than to himself. “You know, whatever happened to that girl-and we are off the record here, son-whatever happened to that girl has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of this town. Nothing at all.”
“Why don’t you send someone down to Detroit?”
“No,” he said. “They’re not going to have that.”
“They?”
He waved at his phone. “The whole lot of them.” He shook his head. “I told her not to come back here. I told her never come back.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pushed back up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet in the back corner of the office. He stretched a key ring on a retractable tether from his gun belt to the top drawer and unlocked it. He took out a brown accordion file, put it under one arm, locked the drawer, walked to the door, and opened it.
“This way,” he said.
I followed him out of his office. We walked down the corridor past the entrance, me glancing into offices to see if I might catch a glimpse of Darlene. I did not. At the end of the hallway we reached the locked door that opened into the Pine County Jail. Dingus peered through the little window crosshatched with steel. The door buzzed and Dingus pulled it open. He turned to me then and casually handed me the accordion folder.
“Hang on to this,” he said. “Do not lose it. Wait here.”
I took the folder and stood waiting, hoping no one would walk up and ask me what I was doing with a folder stamped CONFIDENTIAL on both sides. I stuffed it under an arm and glanced up at the surveillance camera screwed into the wall above the door, peering down on me like a crow on a telephone wire.
The door buzzed again. It opened and Soupy stepped through, Dingus right behind him. Past his shoulder I saw Darlene walking away and had to stop myself from calling after her.
“I’m releasing Mr. Campbell to you,” Dingus said. He turned to Soupy. “I’m not through with you. If you even think about taking any out-of-town trips, we’ll have you back in here before you hit the interstate. Got it?”
“Got it,” Soupy said.
“You tell them anything?” I said.
Soupy and I had just pulled out of the department lot, my headlamps carving the blackness into cones of white.
“I’m going broke, man,” he said. “Just get me back to my bar.”
He wasn’t going to talk. Not now. There’d be time to push him later.
There were all sorts of questions I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Dingus: What about that rejection letter Gracie had supposedly gotten? Why was she wearing only one shoe when she died? How did she get up into the shoe tree? Where was the ladder? Where was the car? Dingus might not have answered any of them. He usually gave me only what he wanted me to know, so that I might, in doing my own job, help him.
So I was dying to see what was in that accordion folder I’d stuck beneath my seat.
I glanced at Soupy. The way he was staring out his passenger window, I had to wonder if he was actually distraught over Gracie’s death, if he realized, facing the cops, that Gracie actually had mattered for more than whatever she did for him in bed, or on a Zamboni.
We rode in silence for a mile. Then, without turning to me, Soupy said, “Got something to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not yanking your chain.”
“About what?”
He shifted in his seat until he was looking out the windshield. “They put me in that room where the prisoners see their lawyers,” he said. I’d been in the room once for an interview myself. There was a table bolted to the floor, a few hard-backed chairs, a single window covered with a metal cage. “I’m looking out at the back lot, and who rolls up but Meat.”
“Jason?”
“Yep.”
My heart was suddenly racing. “And?”
“He wasn’t there to pick up his safe-snowmobiling certificate, Trap.”
He told me he saw Darlene come out to meet Jason. She wasn’t wearing a coat. I imagined her holding her arms tight around her bosom, her breath billowing around her head. Of course Soupy couldn’t hear anything. Then someone came to take him to another room.
“Well,” I said, “they probably have divorce details to work out.”
“Maybe. Didn’t notice any lawyers out there.”
I kept my eyes on the unfurling white road, my lights flashing on the lower halves of tree trunks whisking by in the dusk.
“Thought you’d want to know,” Soupy said.
“Yeah. Thanks.” The lamps along Main Street were coming into view ahead. “They didn’t, at least when-?”
