beanbag chair.
“Hell,” I said, “maybe we ought to just go get some breakfast.”
“You don’t like Pop-Tarts?” She slid onto the bottom step of the ladder to her loft. “I’m going up. What about you?”
The silence that followed probably was shorter than it seemed to me. “I’ll be OK,” I said. Joanie regarded me for a second, then started up the ladder. She was cute and tough and passionate, which made her beautiful, in her way. I made myself think of Darlene in Dad’s tree house the night her mother died.
I watched Joanie climb away from me.
She stopped at the top. Something, maybe a pipe, made a lurching sound inside a wall. “Nothing has to happen, Gus.”
“I know.”
She waited. I stayed. “All right,” she said. “See you in three hours.”
NINETEEN
My cell phone woke me.
“Damn,” I croaked. I’d thought I had turned the thing off. I jumped up from where I had dozed off on a wool rug with my coat balled up beneath my head for a pillow. The phone was in my coat. I pulled it out and answered.
“Where the hell are you?” Luke Whistler said. I checked the stove clock. Not quite seven. On the floor at the foot of the loft ladder lay the Rats jersey Joanie had been wearing earlier, covering the boots I’d taken off to sleep.
“I had to run an errand.”
“At seven in the morning? You know your mom’s in jail?”
“I do.”
I heard a chair squeak through the phone. Whistler was at the Pilot. “Got the coroner’s report.”
“They released it?”
“Not publicly.”
I glanced up at the loft, turned my body away, lowered my voice.
“How come you bullshitted me about Breck?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I asked you if you knew Breck. You said no. But you’ve been checking up on the guy.”
“You going through my mail?”
“It’s Pilot mail, pal.”
“OK, boss,” Whistler said. He sounded annoyed, but I didn’t care. “You got me. Although I didn’t really lie. I didn’t, and don’t, know this character. But I was trying to get to know him, for a story.”
“What story?”
“He’s supposedly in hot water with the state. They might disbar him. Which wouldn’t be good for the born- agains’ tax appeal.”
“First I heard of it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure it’s true.”
“Do me a favor and keep me posted.”
“I will. Sorry. Really. If you can’t trust a fellow scribe, who can you trust? It’s me and you and the rest of the world, right?”
“What about the coroner’s report?”
“Confirmed homicide,” he said. “Blunt trauma to the head, from a blow and from falling to the floor. She had a pretty bad gash above one eye, but that wasn’t the cause.”
“It wasn’t just a heart attack or something?”
“Everybody dies of heart attacks,” Whistler said. “A guy gets shot in the head, he dies of heart failure. Could be the break-in artist freaked out, so it wasn’t premeditated. But it’s a dead body. Your pal in the pokey may have a problem.”
“Have they charged him yet?”
“Nothing yet. And the cops ain’t talking a lick. I got in the sheriff’s face a little and your girlfriend threatened to usher me off the premises.”
“My ex-girlfriend.”
“Really? I don’t get that impression.”
I wasn’t about to engage Whistler on Darlene and whatever Tawny Jane had told him across the pillow.
“You don’t think they really believe Tatch did it, do you?” I said.
“Nah. I think they want him to give up the other guy. Meantime, some of the local yokels have been making noise about that Tex kid not playing in the big game. D’Alessio’s got them all riled up, saying this is all Dingus’s fault, he arrested the wrong guy. They’re getting up a posse to go demonstrate at the Jesus camp.”
“When?”
“This afternoon. People got signs in their windows: ‘Free Tex.’ Why’s he called Tex anyway?”
“Long story. Does Tatch have a lawyer?”
“Had that Flapp guy for a few hours. Then Breck took over. He supposedly told the cops Mr. Edwards isn’t going to say a word.”
I heard Joanie stir, glanced up, saw her naked shoulders, white as winter.
“Can you do me a favor?” I said. “Check on my mom.”
“Sure thing. By the way, your boss called.”
“Philo?”
“He sounds barely old enough to drive.”
Philo must have been calling about that board of directors meeting. I couldn’t believe that that collection of wide-assed retirees collecting per diems for telling the CEO he’s a genius would have the guts to switch the Pilot to online publication only. They would sit around their mahogany table the size of a rowboat and make their speeches about the future of newspapers until one of them motioned to table the subject until the next month’s meeting so they could all retire to the Knife and Fork Club for filets and cigars.
“Hey,” Joanie said. She was leaning over the edge of her loft, blanket bunched beneath her chin. “Who you talking to?”
I ignored her. “OK, thanks, I’ll check in later.” I ended the call.
“You want to shower?”
I looked at the phone, saw it was almost out of power, clicked it off. “No thanks,” I said. “Could we get some eggs before our appointment?”
I was swallowing the last of my second fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich as Joanie swung her Malibu off Beech Daly onto Six Mile Road. I followed in Soupy’s pickup.
I tossed the greasy sandwich wrapper on the garbage hiding the lockbox and grabbed the foam cup of black coffee from the console. I had checked to make sure the box was still there and kicked myself for having left it in the truck the night before in a neighborhood filled with curious late-night pedestrians. At least I’d thought to lock the truck, something I never did in Starvation.
We had sped down the Jeffries Freeway west through Detroit, an eight-lane gully winding between road shoulders pocked with snow and empty wine bottles, past pawnshops and liquor stores and boarded-up supermarkets and tar-papered houses, some of them charred black and literally falling down, where autoworkers had once laid claim to a good life that eventually slipped from their grasp. As a rookie Times reporter covering the cops, I had exited the freeway a few times to interview the bereaved families of shooting victims. But usually the Jeffries had ferried me to hockey rinks in the western suburbs.
Tunneling beneath the underpass at Telegraph Road, we’d crossed from the city into Redford Township, where those same autoworkers-the white ones, that is-had escaped in the 1950s seeking brick ranches and wider backyards. We’d left the Jeffries and turned north on Beech Daly. We passed a Lebanese bakery, a Little Caesars
