“Thanks.”
“You want to figure this out, boss?” He pushed his swivel chair out from behind his desk, the metal chair wheels crinkling the sugar packets scattered on the tile floor. “Huh? Me and you?”
I let out a breath. I didn’t want to break down in front of Whistler.
“Yeah. Hell yeah.”
“Good. Listen to these.”
Whistler stood, still in his down vest, and hit some buttons on the phone on his desk. A dial tone blared on the speaker. He was calling our voice mail system. Usually it was filled with people complaining about soaked papers and missed deliveries.
Now the automated voice said we had thirty-two new messages.
“That a record?” I said.
“Hang on.”
He played message twenty-one. “When are you guys in the media going to pick up the damn ball and run with it on this bingo guy? Our alleged police department can’t police a damn thing, and I don’t know what the hell we’re paying them for. We need you to find this bingo guy.”
“Yes, sir,” Whistler said.
He played message twenty-two. This voice was muffled, like one you’d hear coming from the other side of a motel wall. “Anyone checking on those whackaroonies at the Christian camp? They’re all agitated with the county. Maybe they’re just messing with us, and now they made a big damn mistake.”
Message twenty-three. A woman this time. “I can’t leave my house and go to bingo? Have you asked the church… Saint, Saint, oh, I can’t remember the name, I’m not Catholic… but have you asked the church-” A burst of static obliterated the rest of what she said. Whistler turned it off and sat. “Crazy, huh?”
“The natives are restless.”
“The natives are shitting their pants. But we’re going to figure it out.”
“Let’s do it.”
Luke Whistler had come to me, at the age of fifty-six, from the Detroit Free Press. Thirty years before, he had been the youngest Free Press staffer ever to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, for a series of stories he wrote about a Washtenaw County detective’s obsession with finding someone who was raping and killing young women in Ann Arbor. Whistler had never quite matched that performance, at least in the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, but his byline inspired awe and trepidation in the newsroom of my paper, the Detroit Times, because invariably it sat atop investigative stories that we wished we’d had the vision and courage and persistence to have pursued ourselves.
Whistler was nothing if not relentless. He had a reputation for immersing himself in stories so deeply that editors worried he’d have trouble resuming a normal life once he’d finished them, not unlike undercover cops who find themselves thinking more like the crooks than the good guys. Whistler hung around an emergency room for six months and came out knowing how to suture switchblade gashes and clean gunshot wounds. He became desperately ill from an ammonia leak while working undercover in a chicken processing plant for a story. Long after his stories about the Washtenaw detective had run, Whistler still met him once a week for double Crown and Cokes at the Tap Room in Ypsilanti. The serial killer was never caught.
I’d also heard he had a penchant for smashing computer screens. All reporters fantasized now and then about driving a fist into a balky monitor on deadline. I’d never known one who actually did it. Then came Whistler. He hadn’t been at the Pilot a month before I came into the newsroom one day and found a handwritten note on my keyboard. “Sorry about the computer,” he had written. “Thing kept freezing and I got carried away. Will pay for it.” I walked over to his desk and saw the shattered monitor, jagged cracks spidering out from a black circle at the center of the screen. Now that’s passion, I thought. I told our parent company, Media North, that the thing shorted out and blew up, and accounting reluctantly paid for a replacement.
I could have been just as good as Luke Whistler, or at least I liked to think so. But I had gone places I shouldn’t have, broken the law, and wound up back in Starvation Lake.
Finding Whistler’s resume in the mail the previous fall had surprised me. I was usually forced to choose between journalism school grads who couldn’t latch on at a decent paper and old ladies who wanted to use the columns of the Pilot to opine on the way teenagers dressed. I didn’t really vet him, didn’t bother calling his boss at the Freep, a know-nothing named McFetridge who couldn’t cover a house fire but had been promoted high enough that he could no longer do much damage. I knew Whistler’s clips and his reputation and, I had to admit, there was something perversely delicious about hiring him away from the Free Press, the competition I had so loathed and occasionally feared during my Detroit days. Besides, with the budget year nearing an end, I had to hire somebody or risk having the bean counters take the slot back. When I offered Whistler the job in a phone call one day, he told me, “They say all journalism careers end badly, it’s just a question of when.”
“Never heard that,” I said. “Funny.”
“Well, I’m going to prove them wrong.”
He insisted he’d come to Starvation not to retire, no, not a chance of that, but rather just so he wouldn’t have to worry every day about the Detroit Times or one of the network affiliates beating him to a story he’d been working on for weeks or months. His doctor had warned him about his blood pressure; strokes ran in his family, he said. Better to walk away now, settle into something less stressful, still be able to do what he loved, maybe have time for a little fishing, maybe read a book now and then.
Yet no one who had seen him around town, literally trotting from new source to new source, would think this hoary-headed guy in the ratty down vest and low-top sneakers had lost his passion. Whistler could get just as excited about a story on the new four-way stop at Horvath and Hodara roads as he could about the school millage vote that had split the town so savagely that Dingus assigned an extra deputy to the polling station. Hell, Whistler had happily written our annual story about the turkeys that survived Thanksgiving at the Drummond farm north of Mancelona.
Despite what he’d said about fishing and books, he was usually in the newsroom late at night, banging out the stories he had collected during the day. I would come in at 8:30 in the morning to e-mails and voice mails he had sent me just a few hours earlier. He avoided the place during daylight hours. “No news in the newsroom,” he liked to say.
I looked around the newsroom now, smelling old coffee and potato chip grease. There were three desks, some squeaky swivel chairs, a copier-and-fax machine that actually worked once or twice a week, and an old mini- fridge that made beers into slushies if you kept them in there too long.
“Can you hear those fluorescent lamps?” I said. “I hate that damn buzzing.”
Whistler shrugged. “Newsroom,” he said. “You know, I obviously didn’t know her well, but Phyllis was a good lady.” Mrs. B had worked the front counter at the Pilot. “I enjoyed getting to know her a little better at your mom’s the other night.”
Mom had had us both to dinner, and invited Mrs. B.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me. What’s the nicest thing she ever did for you?”
Someone who didn’t know Whistler might have told him it was none of his business. But I knew him, at least a little, and I knew he could not keep his curiosity bottled up.
“The nicest thing.” I thought about it. The story about getting my tonsils out was too personal. “When I was a kid,” I said, “she fixed one of my goalie gloves. My lucky glove.”
“Which?”
I flapped my right hand. “The stick hand.”
“Still got the glove?”
“Nope.”
“You know,” he said, “you remind me a little of Tags.”
“Who?”
“My old partner. Byline, Beverly C. Taggart. We’d be on some story, and she’d be acting all indifferent, but really she was the kind of reporter who wanted to knock on the door of somebody who’d just lost a daughter or a husband, maybe they didn’t even know it yet. Get there before the cops. She was good at that. Creepy good.”
“Before the cops? That’s out there.”
“Yeah. That’s probably why I married her.”
