“No. No touchy feely. But… I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“Looked to me like he wants her back or something.”
I cackled. It came out sounding like someone else. “That ain’t going to happen.”
I dropped Soupy at Enright’s and went around the block to the Pilot back lot, where I sat in the dark checking the messages on my cell phone.
The three council members I had called said they would have no comment on whatever story I was working on. A fourth whom I had not called also left a message saying she wasn’t interested in commenting. I had to figure they knew what I was going to ask.
The fifth message came from Darlene. She said she had to work late, don’t bother making spaghetti dinner, she’d catch up with me at the Rats game, or later. She loved me. She had to go.
Relax, I told myself. She still had issues to work through. She wasn’t going anywhere. Everything would be all right. I’d try her again later. We’d lock her door against the night and hide beneath her blankets.
I switched on an inside light and pulled the accordion folder out from under my seat. A label pasted to the top of the folder was inscribed in felt-tip pen: “McBRIDE, Grace Maureen, 08/26/95.”
I reached inside and pulled out a stapled bundle of pages, maybe fifteen in all. It was an official Pine County Sheriff’s Department report. I flipped immediately to the last page and, sure enough, there was the signature of then-deputy Dingus Aho. “Fucking-ay,” I said.
I looked at my watch: 5:21. I had thirty-nine minutes to write two stories and a few briefs. No sweat, I thought. But, as much as I wanted to see whatever Dingus wanted me to see, I did not have time then to sit and read that police report. There was no chance of it going in that night’s paper, and if I didn’t get my work done on deadline, I’d have a call from Jim Kerasopoulous waiting for me at eight o’clock the next morning. I had no desire to talk to Kerasopoulous, not about my dedication to my job, not about the future of the Pilot, not about the weather.
I slipped the folder back under the seat and started across the lot toward the newsroom. By now Philo was probably panicking. I started to write the Gracie story in my head. I wasn’t about to write the standard “apparent suicide” story, but, given what I had heard at the sheriff’s department, I had to be careful about using the word “murder.” Foul play, I typed on my imaginary keyboard, may have played a role in the macabre death of a Starvation Lake woman…
I stopped in my tracks.
Starvation Lake woman?
I turned and trotted back to my truck, unlocked the door. The inside light came on. I reached under the seat and slipped the police report out of the accordion folder. I wanted to see just one thing. It was typed on the very first page, just below Gracie’s name and house address: “Melvindale, Michigan.”
Melvindale sat just south of Detroit on the northwest border of River Rouge. River Rouge was the old steel town where the X’d-out calendar hanging over Gracie’s bed had come from.
I knew Melvindale. I’d played hockey there when I lived downstate and drank in a bar called Nasty Melvin’s. I hid the folder and locked my truck. Walking back to the newsroom, I had a feeling I might be visiting Nasty Melvin’s again.
eleven
I knew there was a problem when I heard Philo say, “Oh, God. They’ve stopped the presses.” He was staring into his computer screen, hands frozen over his keyboard, his face a crimped mask of worry.
“Why?” I said.
Only once had I heard anyone actually say the words “Stop the presses” without sarcasm. It wasn’t because the pope had died or a passenger jet had plunged into the Detroit River. It was because some layout guy pasting up pages got miffed at his boss for not letting him take the night off to go to a Tigers game.
At the Detroit Times, we were running a wire story inside the paper one night about a man who’d been convicted of sodomy. We ran a mug shot and, beneath it, short captions that identified him as so-and-so from Wichita, “convicted sodomist.” But instead of the sodomist’s photo, the ticked-off layout guy inserted a picture of a well-known Detroit industrialist named Cochran. There were a few nervous laughs until the executive editor caught wind of it. He didn’t actually say, “Stop the presses,” he said, “Jesus H. Christ, we’re all going to get fired.” His secretary then picked up her phone and called the printing plant and gave the command. The layout guy got suspended for a week, but the suspension was set aside after his union appealed.
Philo looked across the room at me. “They’re stopping it for your stories.”
Uh-oh, I thought. I’d had stories spiked before, but never two on the same day. “Which?”
“Both. Shit, shit, triple shit. I knew I should have looked at those.”
“I thought you did.”
“No. No time. You didn’t give me any time.” He picked up his keyboard as if he might slam it down. He reconsidered, let it drop lightly back onto its tray. “Goddammit, Gus.”
“Sorry, Philo.” Although I wasn’t, really. “I wrote the stories and I’ll stand by them. Not your fault.”
“You might not have much to stand by. They’re totally redoing the hockey coach story and”-he squinted at his screen-“the dead lady story too, cutting that to a brief.”
“A brief? Who’s ‘they’?”
“Who do you think?”
The call from Kerasopoulos came ten minutes later. Philo kept his voice down but I overheard him say “at least half an hour”-which I took to mean how late I’d been-and repeat “Yes, of course” and “Sorry” four or five times. Finally he hit his hold button and turned to me. His expression vacillated between angry and shattered.
“It’s the boss,” he said.
I hit the blinking button and picked up my phone.
“What’s up, Jim?”
“Please tell me who your source is.” Issuing from the speakerphone in his Traverse City office, Kerasopoulos’s voice sounded even more like a foghorn than usual.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“Your source. Who’s your source?”
“Would you mind getting off the speakerphone?”
“I would.” So he wasn’t alone. Fat ass, I thought. I thought it not solely because Kerasopoulos indeed had a fat ass, but because he was a fat ass through and through with his fat-assed way of thinking that whatever he did or thought or said was absolutely correct. I knew it was stupid to think this, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Apologies, Jim, but I’m reluctant to discuss sourcing when I don’t know who else is listening in.” I was bound to disclose my sources-or at least most of them-to a superior, but I didn’t have to be careless about it, especially in an echo chamber like Starvation.
“Excuse me?” he said.
I imagined him leaning his double-wide torso out over his conference table, cheap paintings of white-tailed deer and mallards on the paneled wall behind his salt-and-pepper head.
“Which story are you talking about, Jim?”
I heard a click-the hold button-followed by silence. I figured he was inquiring about the story on Jason Esper being named coach of the River Rats. About midway through the story, low enough where Kerasopoulos might not notice it, I’d slipped in a couple of paragraphs about the town council planning to convene in private to consider the Haskell loan. I felt pretty good about it. The taxpayers of Starvation needed to hear it, even if they didn’t want to.
There was another click and Kerasopoulos came back on.
“The room is clear, sir,” he said, though he remained on speakerphone. “I would advise you not to test my patience any further. Now, please tell me who told you the rink developer wants a loan from the Starvation Lake council.”
That was easy, and even if Haskell was eavesdropping, I didn’t mind outing him. “The developer himself,
