Starvation lake sl-1

by Bryan Gruley

  “Sheriff?” It was Joanie.

  Dingus looked at her in disbelief. “Miss, I’m giving you a second chance here. It will also be your last.”

  “Sorry.”

  “This is my investigation, OK? My investigation.” He waited for that to sink in. “We believe the murder did in fact occur on the same night as the snowmobile accident in which Mr. Blackburn previously was believed to have died. Again, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. Suffice it to say that we believe the accident itself was fraudulent, and we’re attempting now to determine the location of Mr. Blackburn’s remains. As you know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.”

  The word “fraudulent” shivered through me like a fever chill. I thought of my mother and the floor that wasn’t wet, and of Leo running. “In a related matter,” Dingus said, “we attempted this evening to apprehend an individual who we believe had material knowledge of the events in question. That individual had fled the local area and was located by the Michigan state police on U.S. One Thirty-one about thirty-five miles south of the Mackinac Bridge. He resisted attempts to apprehend him peacefully. An unfortunate incident occurred, which we continue to investigate. We hope to have more for you on that tomorrow.”

  Of course it was Leo.

  Dingus held up a finger. “That’s all for now, but I will allow one question.” He looked directly at Joanie and said, “Ms. Reese?”

  Joanie frowned at the floor. Tawny Jane stepped forward. Her hair was tangled in a maroon scrunchy at the back of her head.

  “Sheriff,” she said, “do you have any idea of motive?”

  Dingus pursed his lips. “We might.”

  “Can you say what?”

  “I’m sorry. That’s two questions.”

  “Sheriff-”

  “Don’t make the same mistake Miss McCarthy made, Ms. Reese,” Dingus said. “OK, I’d like you all to clear out now-except you.”

  He meant me.

  I waited in Dingus’s office in the same angle-iron chair I’d sat in a few days before. In my mind I scoured the Zam shed for any clue that I’d been there that morning. Had the cops dusted for fingerprints? I remembered the pieces of paper with the strange lettering I’d taken from Leo’s file cabinet. They were still in my coat pocket. What if this were some sort of interrogation? What if they searched me?

  Dingus came in. He sat on the edge of his desk facing me and folded his thick arms across his chest. “We’ve got to talk,” he said, “but first you need to know what happened to Leo Redpath. Off the record. You were supposed to be his friend. But you didn’t do him any favors.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a tragedy, really. An unnecessary tragedy. We had questioned Redpath in this matter. Apparently he got scared for some reason, which is unfortunate because we didn’t regard him as a suspect, at least not for long.”

  “Why did you-”

  “Quiet,” Dingus said. It was sometimes hard to take Dingus seriously because of that singsong Scandinavian accent of his. Not now, though. “Late last night, we got an anonymous tip that Redpath knew more about this incident than he’d let on in the original investigation. This person suggested maybe the original incident didn’t happen the way everybody thought it did.”

  “Who was this tipster?” I said. I thought I knew: Teddy Boynton, after all of his snooping around between Darlene and Joanie.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dingus said. “As I said, Redpath was a suspect, but only briefly. After we heard from this caller, we definitely wanted to speak with Redpath again. But when we went to see him this morning, we found his room at the rink empty. We put out an APB. Two state police cruisers caught up with him. They had the squawk box going, trying to get him out of his car, and he reaches into his glove box.”

  My stomach dropped. “Jesus, Dingus. They shot him?”

  Dingus leaned forward until his face was just a few inches from mine. “No, Gus,” he said. “The wound was self-inflicted. Redpath had a pistol in his glove box. He discharged it into the side of his head above the right ear.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. A prickle of heat ran across my shoulders and up my neck. An image flashed in my mind of the first time I’d seen Leo, standing at the wheel of Ethel, circling the ice, and then of one of the last times I’d seen him, leaned in close to my face as he sewed the stitches into my jaw. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  “I wanted to ask you that, Gus, because you know what?” Now he reached up and grabbed my coat collar in his beefy hand and yanked me up off the chair. “I think you had something to do with this.”

  “What? Take your hands off me.”

  He tightened his grip. “I ought to strangle that little redhead. Somehow she spooked Redpath.”

  “Bullshit. He wouldn’t even talk to her.”

  “He didn’t have to talk to her. He just had to hear her questions. She asked him something that spooked him. We’d already talked to him. He didn’t run. She goes to see him, he runs. I want to know what she asked him, Gus.”

  “I wish I knew, Sheriff.”

  Dingus swung me away from the chair and slammed me against the wall. “This man is dead,” he growled. “I have to contact his family, whoever and wherever they are, and we’re out a material witness in a murder case. All because your little reporter is sticking her nose in places it shouldn’t ought to go. What did she ask him, Gus?”

  “I don’t know, Dingus, and I wouldn’t have to tell you anyway. She was doing her job. Or are you just worried about getting reelected?”

  I knew that was a mistake the second it left my lips. He hammered me against the wall again and pushed in close enough that I could smell his Tiparillo breath, see the tiny yellowed teeth hidden by his handlebar. I thought he might punch me. “This is not about a goddamn election,” he said. “It’s about a murder investigation. It’s not your job to conduct murder investigations. It’s not your job to embarrass me in front of the public when I’m trying to do my job.”

  “And you didn’t embarrass us with those bullshit leaks about our stories being ‘premature’? And then the TV chick gets a front-row seat for the arrest? Have hot lips D’Alessio take a cold shower, will you?”

  He dropped me and stepped back and pointed a finger at me. “You know the meaning of ‘is’?” he said. “Until I say something is — like a murder-then it isn’t, understand? Or maybe you’d like to learn more about the case from Channel Eight. You guys are always talking about the public’s right to know. Don’t you think the public has a right to know what you know?”

  “We know squat, Dingus. From what I can tell, Leo’s obviously the one who killed Blackburn. He was there that night. He lied about it. He ran, and then he killed himself. But you have Soupy in jail.”

  “Where he belongs,” Dingus said. He sat back down on his desk. The framed photograph of his ex appeared over his left shoulder. I wondered if Barbara Lampley had still been talking with Dingus, or even married to him, when he was investigating the first time around. It was her dalliance with Blackburn, after all, that had effectively ended their marriage. I decided that I wanted to talk with her.

  “Sit,” Dingus said. I sat. “Gus,” he said, “I have tried to help you out where I could because I think you can help me. What the redhead did was no help.”

  “Her name is Joanie.”

  “Uh-huh. Get her out of my way.”

  I wasn’t about to accept responsibility for Leo’s suicide. But I thought I was beginning to understand Dingus. His original inquiry into Blackburn’s death obviously had missed the mark. Cops who messed up like that usually made excuses or tried to cover their tracks. Instead Dingus was doing everything he could to blow up his old case. It was as if he’d never believed the original conclusion, as if his hands had somehow been tied, and now that pieces of Blackburn were resurfacing in our little town, he was determined to set things right. I couldn’t promise Dingus anything, and I didn’t appreciate being roughed up, but I couldn
’t help but admire him a little.

  “We’ll try not to mess you up,” I said, “and you try not to mess us up.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Can I ask one thing?”

  “One thing.”

  “Don’t get upset. I watched you guys today hauling stuff out of Leo’s house, including a bunch of computer stuff. What’s the deal?”

  Dingus considered it. “Redpath had issues,” he said.

  “What issues?”

  He stood. “It’s late. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I drove directly to the pay phone outside the IGA. Joanie picked up on the first ring. “What happened?”

  I told her what happened to Leo.

  “Oh my God, that’s terrible,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Let me ask you. What did you tell him when you talked to him?”

  She hesitated. “He wouldn’t talk.”

  “You must have said something to try to get him to talk.”

  “I told him I was trying to find out more about what happened that night. He said he didn’t want to dredge it up, he wasn’t-how did he put it? — he wasn’t ‘a dweller in the distant past.’”

  It sounded like one of those sayings he had pasted over his workbench. “And what’d you say?”

  “I may have said something about Canada, the missing year and all that.”

  “Same as with Boynton.”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t see necessarily why that would have spooked him. Leo wasn’t with Blackburn in Canada, so far as I knew. “I know a little more,” I said. “The cops searched Leo’s house. They confiscated his computer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I just did.”

  “Why’d they take his computer?”

  “No idea. Dingus said Leo had issues.”

  “No, duh. Isn’t it pretty obvious he’s the killer?”

  “Seems to make sense, but Dingus says no. Supposedly we’ll learn more at the arraignment. You’ll go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “While you’re at it, why don’t you do a little more checking into Blackburn’s background? I think he had a brother-in-law in Kalamazoo.”

  “Wife’s brother or sister’s husband?”

  “No idea. I don’t know if he was ever married.”

  “Gus?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want to get scooped again.”

  In the darkness of my mother’s bedroom, I gently jiggled her bed. She lurched awake. I laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’s Gus,” I whispered.

  “Son. You scared me.”

  “Sorry.” I sat down on the bed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Leo.”

  Mom sat up in her flannel pajamas. “What?”

  I didn’t tell her about the computer, just the suicide. As she listened, her eyes grew slowly wider. She drew her hand up over her mouth. “No,” she said. In her eyes in that instant I could see she knew things she’d never told me, and I wanted to ask her then, I wanted to demand she tell me whatever it was she had held back, but all I could do was let her fall into my arms and hold her as she cried. She hadn’t sobbed so hard since Dad died. It surprised me only a little that I could not manage a single tear.

  twenty

  My alarm buzzed the next morning at five-thirty. I bolted up in my bed, startled and groggy. Then I remembered: I was supposed to go to Detroit for the meeting with Superior Motors and the Hanovers. “Oh, God,” I said, lying back on my pillow. The night flooded back: Soupy was in jail. Boynton was in the hospital. Leo was dead. My mother had cried herself out and then I let her go back to sleep. I heard a snowplow rumble past my window. The clock said 5:46. If I was going to Detroit, I had to get on the road.

  But why, really? The Superior Motors lawyers didn’t care whether I showed up; they just wanted the name of my source, which I could supply easily enough over the phone, if I was so inclined. And I was beginning to think I was so inclined. What difference would it really make if I ratted out the sleazebag V? Joanie would be disappointed, but she’d be gone soon enough, chasing her career. Kerasopoulos wouldn’t be concerned in the least that I had burned a confidential source at another paper. He’d care a lot more if cops showed up at the Pilot to arrest me for stealing Superior voice mails. The pointy-headed gods of journalism would undoubtedly denounce me if the news from Starvation Lake ever reached them, but I couldn’t see how that would affect me in any tangible way. My career already had hit bottom. Giving up V’s real name would help the Hanovers nail down the settlement they wanted, which might actually succeed in getting some of those killer trucks fixed.

  I walked into the kitchen and dialed my attorney. Outside, a few snowflakes wafted through the streetlamp glow. “Snowing like a bitch up here,” I told Scott Trenton’s answering machine. “Tell the lawyers I’m stuck but, listen, you wanted a show of good faith, so you can tell them”-I paused-“I’ll have a decision on the name by tomorrow at noon. I know they wanted it today, but they’ve got a few days yet before the judge rules. Anyway, I’ve given your advice some thought and, you know, you’re probably right.”

  The Pilot was empty when I walked down just after seven. I was hungry for a bite at Audrey’s, but first I wanted to check on a couple of things.

  Down in the basement I scanned paper after paper from 1988 and finally found what I was looking for. The story by Mildred Pratt, one of our blue-haired stringers, ran on the inside. It said the town council had decided against dredging the lake “due to budgetary constraints.” That was pretty much it. Mildred didn’t record the vote or supply any detail of the council’s discussion, assuming there was one. Normally Henry would’ve covered the council meeting, but the story ran in April, around the time Henry was usually on a golf vacation in Florida. The story told me nothing I didn’t already know. I had to get those meeting minutes.

  I went back upstairs to see if we had a recent photo of Dingus. Morning light eked through the blinds and across the filing cabinets where Delbert Riddle kept the Pilot photos. I’d heard Tillie complain about Delbert’s filing system, but I had yet to experience it myself because she was always the one who retrieved photos. At first glance, it looked simple. Taped on the front of each of the four drawers in each cabinet was an index card marked with letters in alphabetical order. I opened the drawer marked “A-Am.” I found the file marked “Aho, Dingus” and laid it atop the cabinet.

  Most of the folders were marked in the same simple way as Dingus’s file. But others, scattered throughout, were identified with a series of letters and numbers, such as one stuffed just behind Dingus’s file, marked Ai/0685/SL/W. I pulled it out and opened it. The first photo in a thick stack showed a beaming young woman in a wedding gown feeding a piece of cake to a man in a tuxedo. It was Dale and Sheila Ainsley. They owned the Dairy Queen. The stamp on the back said June 6, 1985. “I get it,” I said aloud. Delbert’s Ai/0685/SL/W signified Ainsley/June 1985/Starvation Lake/Wedding. So he was using the Pilot files to keep track of his freelance work. No surprise there. I slapped the file closed and stuck it back inside.

  I spread Dingus’s file open. There were only three photos. One showed a much younger Dingus, without the handlebar, accepting a plaque for being Deputy of the Year in a grip-and-grin with then-sheriff Jerry Spardell. An ink stamp on the back showed it had been taken January 31, 1987. The others were simple mug shots, both more than five years old. I left the file open and walked over to Tillie’s desk to make out a photo assignment sheet. I figured Delbert could catch Dingus at the arraignment. As I jotted instructions down, I thought it also would be good to have some photos from the rink. I remembered the yellow tape strung around the Zamboni shed.

  Then it hit me.

  I hurried back to my desk and grabbed my coat off of my chair. In the pocket I found the three scraps of paper I’d removed from the inside of Leo’s cabinet in the Zam shed. I rushed back up

  front and laid them next to Dingus
’s photo file. Scratched in red ballpoint were the numbers and letters that had flummoxed me the day before: F/1280/SL/R4. F/1280/SL/R5. F/1280/SL/R6.

  Now I thought I understood.

  I opened the drawer marked Ep-Fe. In the middle of the drawer where the F files began sat two accordion folders. I pulled out the first one. It was stuffed with thin white cardboard boxes marked on one end with Delbert’s peculiar indexes. Opening a box marked F/0279/ SL/R1, I slipped out a reel of what looked to be 8-millimeter film. So the F stood for film, I thought. I opened another box, marked F/0279/SL/R4. It, too, contained a reel of film. The 0279 apparently referred to February 1979, when I was in high school and playing for the River Rats; the SL, again, signified Starvation Lake. As Joanie had told me, Delbert developed film for Blackburn. These had to be films of our practices.

  But why would Leo scribble down just those three indexes and then hide them? None of the numbers on the boxes in the first accordion folder matched the ones on the scraps of paper. I pulled the drawer all the way out, put the first folder back inside, and peered into the others. The second folder contained nine similar boxes from 1980 and 1981. Three were marked with the same numbers and letters written on the scraps. I removed the entire folder, carried it back to my desk, and stashed it in a drawer. I put Dingus’s file back in the cabinet, then finished the photo assignment and dropped it in Tillie’s in-box before heading across the street.

  The first person I saw when I walked into Audrey’s was me, a blurry image in my goalie gear on a small black-and-white TV someone had set up in the back. A dozen codgers clustered around, some still in overcoats and scarves, watching Dingus march Soupy out of the John D. Blackburn Memorial Ice Arena while Tawny Jane Reese narrated. Elvis spied me as I took a seat at the counter.

  “Look who’s here,” he said. “An eyewitness to history, though you’d never know from reading his paper.”

  All the gray heads turned my way. What was I thinking coming in here? “Morning, folks,” I said.

  “Quite a night there, Gus,” one of them said.

  “Soupy Campbell wouldn’t hurt a flea,” another said. “Ain’t no way he killed Jack Blackburn. Dingus is off his nut.”