Laird Haskell,” I said.
“And on what basis were you speaking with him?”
Kerasopoulos, who had set up the meeting, knew damn well what basis. “At the time, we were off the record,” I said, “but-”
“So you just violated that agreement willy-nilly? This is not Detroit, Gus.”
Oh, man, I thought, this was like having the puck on my stick in front of an empty net. My ready reply had popped into my head while I was talking with Dingus. “Sorry, Jim, but Haskell promised me the scoop on the hockey coach. Then he went and leaked it to Channel Eight, so the off-the-record deal’s off.”
“That’s your answer?”
“He broke the agreement, I didn’t.”
“Well, Mr. Big City Reporter, you are an idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“You are an idiot. Mr. Haskell did not leak that story- I did.”
The “I did” echoed through the speakerphone and reverberated in my ears. If what he said was true, I had truly fucked up.
“I’m sorry, how did you-”
“As chief executive of a company that oversees what I consider to be a sacred public trust, I try to keep myself abreast of everything happening in our communities,” he said. “When I heard about the new coach, I thought it was important enough news that we shouldn’t make our viewers and readers wait to hear it. You seem more concerned about pursuing your various vendettas against citizens who are trying to accomplish something good for the community.”
Citizens trying to buy a pile of ads in your paper with the community’s money, I thought. “They’re not vendettas,” I said.
“As for the other story, I’m not about to have the Pine County Pilot indulge your lurid conspiracy theories and phantom sourcing. ‘Sources familiar with the case’? What the hell does that mean? Do you think this is the Washington Post? Until someone from the appropriate police department says for the record that they are investigating a murder, it’s a suicide, do you understand? We put out newspapers here, not mystery novels.”
“All the story said is that police think foul play may have been involved, and that’s absolutely true.”
“Apparent suicide, three grafs, inside. Philo will take care of it.” I looked over at Philo, who looked away from me, his phone on his ear. Fuck me, I thought. “Frankly, Gus,” Kerasopoulous continued, “I have zero time-zero, is that clear? — for your vendettas. Please plan on being in my office tomorrow morning.”
“Wait, there’s-”
“Nine o’clock. Sharp.”
He ended the call. I hung up my phone. Philo was still on his. I’d hoped to read my leftover mail before heading to Enright’s for a beer before the River Rats game, but I just grabbed my coat and went for the back door. As I swung it open, Philo called out, “Late for a drain commission meeting?”
“Fuck you, Philo,” I said as I slammed the door shut behind me.
The crust of snow covering the beach splintered beneath my boots as I trudged toward the shore of the lake. The serrated ice dug into my shins. I stopped at the frozen edge of the lake and finally buttoned my coat. I took a deep breath, felt the cold air singe my lungs.
I liked the lake in winter. Of course I loved the lake when the summer sun lit the water and the afternoon music was boat motors and ice cubes being dropped into glasses and Ernie Harwell telling us a young fellow from Rawsonville would take that foul ball home as a souvenir. But the winter beach took me into a cocoon of wind and wet and cold that kept out the tinny claptrap surrounding the town’s preoccupations of the moment.
I’d barged out of the Pilot, snatched the accordion folder from the truck and scrambled down South Street, furious with Kerasopoulos and Philo, but furious mostly with myself. I had assumed that Haskell burned me, when in fact it was Kerasopoulos. My assumption hadn’t been unreasonable. But of course Kerasopoulos knew about the coach announcement, and probably all about my meeting with Haskell, how Haskell and I hadn’t really become best buddies. So Kerasopoulos did what he did.
But I had assumed nevertheless, which was unforgivably lazy and stupid-a mistake, I told myself, that I never would have made back at the Times. Here I was unmarried, no kids, thirty-five, living at Mom’s house, dating a married woman. No wonder I was already getting soft.
I walked toward the old marina Soupy had sold out of his family. Two streetlamps hovered at either edge of the eight concrete docks invisible beneath the snow. Just inside the first lamp’s pool of light, a brass bell fringed with corrosion and ice sat silent on a stanchion. I sat down with the bell at my back and looked around to see that I was alone. I slipped the Pine County Sheriff’s Department police report, S-950863, out of the accordion folder.
An ambulance was called to the Hill-Top Motel at approximately 2:14 a.m. on that muggy Saturday, August 26, 1995. The date sounded familiar, though I didn’t immediately recognize why.
Dingus’ neat block lettering made it easy to read. I admired his meticulous reporting.
The Hill-Top offered seventeen small rooms, $23.95 a night, in a peeling one-story building atop a low rise along U.S. 131. It was a favorite of truckers making runs between Chicago and the Soo Locks in the Upper Peninsula, and of lovers from Mancelona and Kalkaska conducting illicit affairs.
The owner, a man named Clarence Kruger, was a bald sixty-two-year-old with shrubs of white hair sprouting around his ears. He was at the office desk when a silver Jaguar, top down, roared up the gravel drive shortly before midnight. The couple in the Jaguar weren’t the kind of people Kruger preferred to have stay in his motel, or at least that’s what he would later tell Dingus.
The woman got out of the car and wobbled up to Kruger on high heels. She wore a silken white summer dress splashed with polka dots the size and color of strawberries. The man in the Jaguar shouted at her across the lot.
“Cash,” he said. “No neighbor.” He seemed to have an accent.
Kruger noticed the neck of a bottle of gin protruding from the woman’s purse. “A room with nobody in the rooms next to it, please,” she told him.
Number 7 was such a room, but Kruger had just repainted it. He considered telling the woman he had no vacancy at all, but it had been a slow summer, what with the drizzly weekends, so he took her three five-dollar bills and nine ones and handed over the key to number 14. “There’s someone in thirteen but nobody in fifteen,” he said. “Best I can do.” The woman combed her hair with one hand while waiting for her nickel change.
The phone at his desk woke Kruger an hour later. His copy of Boxing Illustrated slipped off his chest and fell to the floor. He snatched up the phone. “Hill-Top,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“Room thirteen here,” came the man’s voice on the other end of the line. He was whispering. “There’s some scary noises coming out of the room next to me. Sounds like somebody’s choking or something.”
Kruger sat up in his chair and peered across the lot. Of course the rooms were all dark. He told the man in 13 he’d look into it.
He dialed number 14. Kruger counted the rings. Ten. He hung up and redialed. Eight more rings. The woman answered. She sounded upset. “It’s… oh my God… please,” she said.
“What’s the matter, ma’am?” Kruger said, but she just kept sputtering incoherently and then hung up.
Kruger plucked his master key off the hook beneath his desk. He walked out to number 14 and leaned an ear against the door. The woman inside seemed to be weeping. “Wake up,” she kept saying. “Wake up, please, wake up.”
Kruger decided against knocking. He walked back to his office and called an ambulance, knowing it would also bring the sheriff or a deputy. He locked the door to his office, turned off the lights, and waited in the darkness, watching through the slatted blinds over his window. He put one hand to his heart. It was pounding. As he would tell Dingus, he’d had plenty of trouble in the Super 8s he had owned in Flint. How far north did a man have to travel to get away from it?
The phone rang again. Kruger let it ring three times before picking up.
“Yeah?”
“Jesus, guy,” the man in 13 said. “It sounds like they’re tearing the room apart next door. I just heard a hell of a crash.”
“Help is on the way, sir,” Kruger said. “Please be sure your door is locked and the dead bolt is in place.”
He heard the first siren just as the door on number 14 burst open and a man, naked and barefoot, staggered
