The Skeleton Box sl-3

by Bryan Gruley

  “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.”

  “She was one of your exes?”

  “Both, actually. Married her twice. Divorced her twice.”

  “You mean she divorced you.”

&nb
sp; “Takes two,” Whistler said. “But I wouldn’t want to be married and divorced twice to any other woman in the world.”

  “And I remind you of her why?”

  “Well, you don’t have her caboose,” Whistler said.

  I waited.

  He said, “You’re not letting on how much you care. I mean, sorry for saying it, but what happened tonight could’ve happened-perish the thought-to your mother.”

  I had let that notion curl into a ball in a dark corner of my mind. Better to imagine that the whole thing was some case of mistaken address or identity. I glanced at the ceiling, a suspended grid of warped beige panels that looked like they’d been dipped in piss.

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Mrs. B,” I said. “Or my mother.”

  “Your mother have a safe?”

  “A safe? Right. Only the bank has a safe.”

  “Valuables?”

  “Define valuables. Her cross-stitch collection? She cashed in her jewelry a few years ago for like four hundred bucks and gave it to the Salvation Army. She’s got a coin collection she hasn’t looked at since my dad died. And a bunch of pictures of me in hockey gear.”

  “Guns?”

  “No. I mean, a twenty-two, for shooting muskrats and chipmunks, but they give you a twenty-two here when you get out of fourth grade.”

  Whistler clapped his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. “OK then. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He zipped up his vest. “I suppose the next step is to figure out what this has to do with the other burglaries.”

  “It happened on bingo night.”

  “Yeah, but people know we already made that connection, so it’s a convenient cover.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Anything to that Scratch guy not showing up?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The hockey guy D’Alessio was talking about.”

  “Oh, Tatch. A born-again Christian who plays goalie? Harmless.”

  “If you say so.”

  My cell phone rang. Mom, I thought. “Excuse me,” I said. Into the phone, I said, “It’s Gus.” It wasn’t Mom. I listened. I hung up.

  “Who was that at this hour?” Whistler said.

  “No one.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said. “Just tell me what you want me to do. We’ll get out there and dig some dry holes. You know what I say.”

  “Can’t find a gusher without digging a few dry holes.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He went out the back door. The clock on the wall over the copier-and-fax said three minutes after three. I wanted to go to bed, but Darlene was waiting.

  FIVE

  The tree house,” she had said on my cell phone. “Ten minutes.”

  Beneath four months of snow, the one-car garage seemed barely more than a bump on a hill. If you didn’t know it was there, with a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville parked inside, you probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything more than a gigantic snowdrift.

  I felt a tinge of regret seeing the shrouds of snow drooping from the eaves. My dad would have wanted me to climb on top of the garage and push the snow off so the weight didn’t cave the roof in. He had built the garage when I was two or three years old. On the back he had attached a platform of planks ringed by a wooden railing. He called it his “tree house.”

  From up there you could peer across the tops of shoreline trees and see the southwestern corner of the lake, watch the falling sun play its last orange and purple sheen across the water’s mirror before going away. Dad spent many a summer evening up there, smoking cigars, drinking Stroh’s, listening to Ernie Harwell narrate the Tigers. Mom almost never went up, which I think was how Dad wanted it, though I never heard him say so. “Girls don’t really get it,” he would tell me with a wink on the nights he let me come up. He’d pop me an Orange Crush and we’d clink bottles in the dusk.

  I had brought a shovel from my pickup. I used it to dig my way through knee-deep drifts to reach the side door. The door was unlocked. I shoved it open. The smell of gasoline washed over me. I stepped inside.

  “Hey, old girl,” I said.

  The Bonneville was gold with a cream vinyl roof. I pulled the driver’s door open and sat down. The keys were in the ignition. I had been starting the Bonnie every few months since moving back to Starvation. I had taken it out only once, two years before, for a long drive that almost killed her. After that, I let a mechanic have at her, and she’d come back almost as good as new. But now I hadn’t been out to the tree house in so long that I worried her battery had succumbed to the winter damp.

  I turned the key. There were a few clicks. Then nothing.

  “Shit,” I said. “My fault. Sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for now?”

  Darlene was silhouetted in the gray light framed by the side doorway, in uniform, a badge glinting on the furry front of her earflap cap. Her face was obscured in the shadow, but I could feel her gaze, pensive and wary and sad.

  I got out of the Bonnie, pushed the door closed behind me.

  “Hey, Darl,” I said. “I’m-”

  “Don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  Darlene took off her cap and her dark hair fell around her shoulders. Her hands trembled as she held the cap, every muscle in her face straining to keep it from cracking. She started toward me and, as she did, she dropped the cap, as if it was too heavy to hold. I bent to pick it up but she fell to one knee and snatched it up in both hands, lifting it to her face, where she buried her eyes in its fur, her shoulders heaving.

  “Darlene,” I said. I started to lay a hand on her left shoulder but hesitated, unsure whether I should.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can’t what?”

  She stood. She wrapped her arms around me, pressed her face into my chest.

  I remembered the night after her father’s funeral. We were in my dad’s garage. It was two or three in the morning. Darlene hadn’t spoken a word since we’d left the community hall where my mother and Soupy’s mom had stayed close to Mrs. B while the other ladies clucked around Darlene, telling her what a wonderful man her father had been. We left our clothes down in the garage and climbed the short stairway to Dad’s tree house. We fell asleep in the humid dark, waking just before dawn. Then she curled her body into me, shivering against the dew.

  Now she lifted her head and stepped back, fitted her cap back on. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have a hankie or something,” I said.

  She wiped a coat sleeve across her face. “I don’t want it to freeze there,” she said.

  “Why did you want to come here?”

  “I didn’t want them to see me.”

  “Who? See you what?”

  “The first thing Dingus did, after telling me he was so sorry about Mom, was tell me to stay away from you.”

  Because Dingus didn’t like the Pilot reporting things until he was ready to have them reported. Especially now.

  “That’s Dingus,” I said. “Look, Darl, I really am-I don’t know how to say it. About your mom. You know I loved her.”

  Darlene turned away, fighting more tears, and took off her cap again, set it on the roof of the Bonneville. She laid her hands on the roof and stood there staring into the car through the driver’s window.

  I looked in, too. The eight-track tape player was still bolted to the underside of the dashboard. During our college summers, before I left Starvation to work at the Detroit Times, Darlene had liked me to blast Elton John doing “Bennie and the Jets.” I hated the song, and she knew it, and when the tape got tangled up so badly that it wouldn’t play anymore, she accused me of messing it up on purpose. I told her I hadn’t but wished I had. The fight ended in Dad’s tree house sometime after midnight.

  “Why didn’t they go to bingo, Gus?” Darlene said.

  “I don’t know. Mom was in one of her crabby moods.”

  “Don’t
you usually go over for supper?”

  “Usually. But I had a game.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done. You weren’t there.”

  “Wait. Weren’t you the one always telling me I had to cut the apron strings? Telling me, Come on, you want to live with your mommy all your life? You can’t pin this on me.”

  “No.” She looked around the garage, finally let her eyes settle on mine. “I miss you.”

  “You miss me. You’ve been missing me? Or you miss me now?”

  “There aren’t many people left in the world who know me. Who really know me.”

  I was not about to go into how she had ignored my calls for weeks, how she had stolen out the back of Enright’s the one Saturday night I had spied her there, how I had finally accepted that we were to be nothing more than failed lovers who through the happenstance of necessity would inhabit the same crowded space while barely acknowledging each other.

  Now here she was, seemingly opening the door again.

  “How did you hear?”

  She looked at the floor. “I found her.”

  “You mean you were there first?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, Darl.”

  “I was out on patrol when the call went out from dispatch. Your Mother had called nine-one-one. When I got there, there was just the one light on in the living room.”

  “Where was my mother?”

  “In the bathroom. With my mother.” Darlene’s lips were trembling now. “There was a lot of blood.” She put a forefinger to her left eyebrow. “She had a gash here.” She drew the finger away, held it half an inch from her thumb. “About like this. Like she was hit with something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  She covered her face with her hands. I moved closer, wanting to embrace her, unsure whether I should. Darlene shook her head, dropped her hands. “I tried to show her a hundred times what to do if she was ever… ever in trouble.”

  “How to defend herself.”

  “She told me, ‘I know where a man’s privates are.’”

  “So she-”

  “He must have hit her in the head. Or he hit her and she fell and hit her head. Or both. Detectives are working on it.”