She hung up.
I pulled my truck into a gas station at the corner of M-72 and U.S. 31 and parked. My foot hurt when I stepped on the brake, and I remembered Jason hovering over me, telling me to stay away from Darlene.
I stared at my cell phone lying in my lap.
I remembered how Mich suddenly had been in a hurry to leave Petros. The Mich who had a good story going, who’d probed me about Haskell to see what I knew, who must have gotten nervous that I would get to it before her. And just for the hell of it, shoved her knife in and twisted.
I thought of Darlene hunched over the paper, reading. She must have read it at the sheriff’s department. She didn’t get the Free Press at home. Somebody must have given it to her, pointed out the story, the quotes, made her blush with embarrassment.
“Damn, Darlene,” I said to no one. “I’m sorry.”
I tossed the phone aside and pulled my truck onto U.S. 31.
Downtown Traverse City was what Starvation Lake longed to be. Before noon fell, shoppers would be scuttling along the brick-trimmed sidewalks of Front Street beneath old-fashioned gaslights hung during summer with baskets of flowers. The cheerful shop windows would beckon with antiques and books and bathymetric maps of Lake Michigan and jewelry and fudge and pastel sweatshirts embroidered “Up North.” There were banks and bars and art galleries, a movie theater that actually showed movies, and restaurants boasting of sushi and wild boar tacos and fresh walleye with a nut crust du jour.
Still, I didn’t feel jealous in the least as I peered down on the street from a fourth-floor conference room at Media North headquarters. I would have taken Audrey’s egg pie over nut crust du jour any day. Envy was for people like the town council members who deluded themselves into thinking that an influx of rich downstaters like Haskell-Haskell, the man with the feds chasing him-would return Starvation to whatever glory it imagined it once enjoyed.
A door opened behind me. I turned. Kerasopoulos swept into the room. “Betty,” he said to his secretary. “No calls.”
He closed the door and motioned at the conference table. “Please.”
“Good morning, Jim.”
“I’m afraid it’s not. Sit.”
I took a seat facing him across the table. He had a thin sheaf of papers rolled up in one meaty hand. He set them facedown on the table between us and sat. The strands of his navy tie with the pinpoint pink dots splayed in opposite directions across his belly, like a bib. He pressed his palms together and set his hands on the table so that his fingers pointed at me.
“Gus,” he said. “It’s been a year of firsts for this admittedly young company. First time gross margins exceeded forty percent. First time selling an all-in-one mobile-phone, long-distance, cable-TV, and Internet package. First time recognized by the Michigan Association of Ad Agencies as a prime partner.”
He tapped the tips of his fingers on the table with each sentence, his eyebrows knitted into a single salt- and-pepper hedge across his forehead.
“OK,” I said.
“Now, thanks to your reckless and irresponsible reporting, we are confronted with our very first libel lawsuit.”
He slapped the papers with his right hand but left them facedown. “But let’s take things one at a time. First, your specious and highly speculative article about the unfortunate young woman who hung herself. Thank God we caught that before the first press run. Did you think you could sneak it past me, Gus?” He pointed at the wall at one end of the room where a trio of diplomas hung in wood frames. “Did you forget that, as an attorney who takes his profession very seriously, I’ve spent more than thirty-five years paying attention to every single little detail?”
Fat ass, I thought. “She didn’t kill herself. Wait. The cops are going to prove she was murdered.”
“Oh, they are, are they? Well, I guess they better let the Pine County medical examiner know, because he says she committed suicide.”
I dearly wanted to tell him that his pal Haskell might well be implicated. But I didn’t need him squealing about what I knew.
“All Doc Joe said was that strangu-”
“Shut up!” Kerasopoulos lifted his wide body halfway out of his seat and stabbed a finger in my direction. “Just shut your damn mouth. This is not an argument. This is not a negotiation. This is me, the president and chief executive officer of Media North Corporation, telling you what’s what. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“We would look like fools today if we had needlessly stirred the town up with your cockamamie triangulations of half truths and rumors with a few irrelevant facts thrown in. I will not have it.” He was bellowing now, his baritone booming into my face. “Do you hear me? I will not have it. And I will not have my neph-Philo learning that this is the way to publish a community newspaper.”
He sat back down, took a deep breath. His starched shirt collar dug into his mashed potato neck. “A word of advice, though I sincerely have no expectation of you taking it: you really should keep your family matters within your family.”
“Excuse me?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have something to gain from a finding that your cousin was actually murdered, would you?”
“No,” I said, without thinking. Then I remembered the life insurance policy. My mother would benefit, but of course I was living with my mother, so-but how the hell would Kerasopoulos have known about the policy?
“Enough on that subject. Were it our only problem.”
He grabbed the papers, flipped them over, and shoved them across the table at me. The word COMPLAINT blared from the top of the cover page. Haskell v. Media North Corp. et al. included as defendants the Pine County Pilot, a number of contractors I had quoted in my stories, and me. I looked first for a docket number, which would have indicated that the lawsuit had actually been filed. There wasn’t one. I quickly skimmed the next twelve pages.
The lawsuit asserted that my stories had maliciously defamed Laird Haskell and, in doing so, deprived him of the ability to complete a project-the new rink, of course-in which he had invested considerable amounts of his own time and money. He was seeking damages in excess of $10 million. Just seeing that number, I thought, must have puckered Kerasopoulos’s wide butt.
I actually smiled. “He hasn’t actually filed it yet, has he?”
“Does this amuse you somehow?” Kerasopoulos leaned into the table, his face reddening. “A libel verdict against this company could render-”
“This is bullshit.” I slid the papers back. “He’s just trying to scare us into paying him a pile of money he desperately needs.”
“Let me assure you-”
“He hasn’t filed yet, right?”
“No, he has not. But I assure you that Mr. Haskell is dead serious.”
“Uh-huh. Have you seen today’s Detroit Free Press? Or don’t you read papers that don’t cuddle up to advertisers?”
He gave me one of those long, hard, penetrating looks that men who imagine themselves to be powerful give to men who don’t burden themselves with such illusions. It told me that the answer to both of my questions was no.
Kerasopoulos didn’t reply, though. He sat up straight and smoothed his tie across his torso.
“Well, Gus,” he said, “I’m afraid we can no longer tolerate your particular brand of journalism. Perhaps you found it easier to practice in Detroit. Although, as we both know, things didn’t work out so well for you there either.”
OK, I thought. My time at the Pilot was up. What did I need it for anyway? How could you tell anybody anything when the next paper was always three or four days away? And it wasn’t like the weekly paycheck of $412.50 was going to make me rich, even in Starvation Lake.
“Let’s see,” I said. “The feds are coming down on Haskell but we should be afraid of him. Gross margins are through the roof but you’re whacking the Pilot budget. Shit, Jim, you should be grateful for a big bad libel suit. It
