by Bryan Gruley
I thought of him in our dressing room, jamming his too-small skates onto his feet, and I jumped up and lurched around and leaned into the sink, trying to keep from vomiting. My breathing echoed on the stainless-steel walls. Beneath my face the unspooled film was heaped like dead snakes in a sewer. I pushed away and stumbled into the bathroom, where I flicked on the light and splashed cold water on my face and the back of my neck. Staring into the mirror, I drew deep breaths and watched the water trickling down my cheeks and off the stitches still in my jaw. I wiped my face and brought the towel with me into the kitchen.
For the next two hours I filled most of the notebook with everything I saw on the three reels. I had to stop now and then to collect myself. On every reel, scenes of River Rat practices were spliced with scenes of Soupy in the playroom. The woman was in some of the scenes, some not. Blackburn performed in every one. The level of light and the camera angle varied slightly from one reel to the next, suggesting that there had been numerous sessions. In one scene a whiskey bottle and a glass appeared on a shelf in the background. In another, Blackburn’s little dog, Pocket, jumped onto the table and licked Soupy’s face; Soupy, showing the only emotion I saw in any of the films, angrily swatted the dog away. I scribbled it all down.
I concluded Blackburn had placed the camera behind a mirror on the wall-a one-way mirror, obviously. Was Leo behind the camera? Or had Blackburn set it up and let it run while he participated? The wall was common to a bunkroom. For his last two years on the Rats, Teddy had stayed in that bunkroom alone while other out-of-town players shared the other billets. Imagining Teddy there aroused my nausea again, and then a searing wave of sympathy I’d never before felt for him.
Each time a reel finished, I lifted the snarl of celluloid from the sink and packed it gently in a brown paper bag that I then stashed in a Cheerios box in the back of my pantry. After stowing the last film, I unplugged the projector, wrapped the cord around it, and stuffed it under my bed. Then I lay down without taking my clothes off. I couldn’t sleep, though. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Soupy and that tattooed woman writhing on the pool table. I tried to focus on the ceiling, but that didn’t work. It was too quiet and too dark. I reached under my bed and pulled out the projector. I set it up again on the kitchen counter and turned it on. The empty white square appeared on the wall. I sat down on the floor and leaned back against the cabinets beneath the sink. The projector click-click-clicked. I stared at the blank light until my eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.
twenty-five
I woke with my face pressed against the scratchy wool braid of a throw rug. The phone was ringing. I shut off the projector and grabbed the phone. “Yeah?”
It was Joanie. She was angry. “Brendan Blake is not in the paper.”
“It’s on the front below the fold.”
“No. On the front below the fold there’s a high school wrestling story. The Blake story isn’t in the paper anywhere. I even looked through the classifieds.”
“A wrestling story?”
“By Matilda P. Spaulding.”
“Goddammit,” I said. “Goddamn Tillie.”
Tillie must have eavesdropped on me leaving the message for Kerasopoulos. That’s why she’d been smiling that smile I didn’t like. Then she’d obviously called him, and he killed the Brendan Blake story. With nothing else handy at the last minute, the printers substituted wrestling. No doubt I had a message from Kerasopoulos waiting downstairs.
“Come on,” Joanie said, incredulous. “Tillie wanted a front-page byline?”
“Of course not,” I said. A bit of the previous night’s queasiness returned. “Tillie didn’t give a damn about the wrestling story. She’s just kissing up to the bosses.”
“You’re her boss.”
“Yeah, right.”
The line went silent. Then Joanie said, “You know what? Fuck Tillie. Fuck Kerafuckface. Fuck the fucking Pilot.”
“Joanie!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, everything’ll be fine, you’ll get all my stories in the paper. I don’t even care anymore. I’m so fucking out of here.”
She slammed the phone down before I could say anything else.
I opened a cabinet and took out my only liquor, a dusty plastic bottle of vodka. I poured a little in a coffee cup and took it into the bathroom. I dipped some tweezers in the vodka and plucked the stitches from my chin. I didn’t know the trick of removing them without pulling part of the suture back through the wound, so I applied a dab of vodka after each one came out.
I took a shower and dressed. In my bedroom closet I found the knapsack I’d used to carry the Superior transcripts out of the Detroit bus station. I filled it with underwear, white socks, three T-shirts, and two flannel button-downs. I zipped a toothbrush and toothpaste into a separate pocket.
I lifted the plywood sheet off the boxes marked Trucks and Rats. One by one I hauled them down the outside stairs. The wind whistled around me as I loaded them into my truck’s flatbed, where my hockey bag still sat, covered with snow.
I did it all without really thinking. It felt like I was getting ready to leave, but I had no idea where I was going, or even if I was going. I just felt like I might have to leave, and quickly. I had to supply the name of my Superior source by noon or face arrest. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could run, didn’t even think I wanted to. But something was telling me to be ready. A lot of things I’d never expected had happened in the past few days.
A few minutes before eight, the phone rang again. I picked it up expecting Joanie. “Are you in the office?” I said.
“Excuse me? Mr. Carpenter?”
“Oh, sorry. This is Gus.”
“It’s Terence Flapp, attorney for Alden Campbell.”
Flapp told me Soupy had spent a few hours in the hospital but now was back in lockup. Soupy wanted to see me. Flapp wasn’t sure why. He had advised Soupy against seeing anyone. But Soupy was Soupy.
“Judge Gallagher will have my head for this if he finds out,” Flapp said. “Although I should tell you I do not intend for this to become an interview for your paper.”
I actually had no great desire to see Soupy. But I did have some questions. “Dingus doesn’t mind?”
“You tell me. When I told him I wanted to bring someone in, his first response was, ‘Over my dead body.’ But when I told him who, suddenly it was fine.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, well, meet me at the jail at ten-thirty.”
I had another stop to make first.
Gloria Lowinski, R.N., answered the door of her pink frame house in a white housecoat decorated with faded pink flowers. Pins and curlers knitted her hair, dyed the color of rust, tightly to her scalp. I hadn’t even introduced myself when she opened the door wide and beckoned me in. “Oh, oh, oh, you’re the man from the newspaper, aren’t you?” she said. Her eyes were exceptionally bright for a widow in her eighties. “I’ve seen you at the diner. Come in, come in. Would you like coffee? I’m a tea drinker myself, but most people drink coffee. Are you like most people?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, meaning I didn’t want coffee. “Sorry to bother you so early.”
“No bother. I adore having visitors anytime. Sit.”
I sat in a wing-backed chair covered with more pink flowers. Issues of People magazine covered the end table next to me.
“I have to say, young man, you have quite a popular newspaper,” Gloria Lowinski said. “I’ve been on the phone all day every day since I was in that article. It’s been absolutely astonishing.”
“I’m glad. What you said about the president was very interesting.”
“Oh, oh, yes, the way of the tantric, I think that most definitely would help him with his, shall we say, waywardness, and it certainly would be appreciated by his wife, I can you tell from glorious experience.” She closed her eyes and pressed a hand dramatically to her breast. “As in Gloria ’s experience.”
“Yes, ma’a
m. I was wondering if you could help me with a story I’m working on now. It’s about tattoos.”
I had an idea about the tattoo I’d seen in the films. I’d come to hear Gloria Lowinski tell me if I was right. I wouldn’t have minded being wrong.
“Tattoos? Young man, your timing is perfect. My granddaughter just got a tattoo on-well, I shouldn’t tell you, but, oh, what the hang-it’s just above her privates on the left side. Here.” She pointed to a spot on her bathrobe. I focused on my notebook. “Would you like to speak with her? It’s Priscilla Lawlor, 1209 Fletcher Street.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Lowinski, but actually, I’d-”
“Oh, I know, I’m prattling on, you want to ask me something.” She sat down on a sofa facing me. “I should tell you, Mr., Mr…”
“Carpenter. Call me Gus.”
“Of course, Bea and Rudy’s boy. How is your mother? She used to come to our office but she stopped. She never said why.”
“She’s fine, thanks. You were saying…”
“And you, weren’t you going to marry the Bontrager girl, the buxom one, Deborah or Deirdre something?”
“Darlene.”
“Yes, Darlene. That wasn’t so long ago.”
“About fifteen years.”
“Oh, well, that’s not so long. My husband died twenty-three years ago and it still seems like yesterday.”
Everything in my past was beginning to feel like yesterday. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You were saying you should tell me…?”
“Yes, yes. What I meant was, I’m no expert in tattoos. I don’t have one myself, but of course, as an obstetrical-gynecological nurse, I have seen a few.”
“I figured,” I said, and we both smiled. She was indeed a blabbermouth, as Mom had said.
“Now,” she said, “are you interested in what sorts of tattoos I’ve seen? Or the most, shall we say, interesting places women have them? Oh, oh, I remember a woman-Doris, yes, Doris Kellogg-an exceptionally large woman who had a tattoo of a large beautiful butterfly right where her-”
“Actually, Mrs. Lowinski, I have a specific tattoo in mind. We, uh, we have a photograph of a tattoo we’re trying to identify. It’s quite pretty and we’d like to contact the owner.”
“Please call me Gloria. Are you going to put me in the paper again?”
“We might.”
“Good,” she said. “Because, if I may say so, it sounds a bit, shall we say, farfetched, that there would be some local collection of tattoos”-she raised an eyebrow-“but if you’re looking to quote an expert, or, maybe not an expert but certainly an observer, then perhaps I can help you. If it’s a woman and she’s local, chances are I’ve seen her and her tattoo.”
“Of course. I’m sure you can help.”
“Can I see the photograph?”
“Unfortunately, no. I don’t have it with me.”
“Well, whose collection is it? Why wouldn’t they know whose tattoo it is?”
“That’s a little complicated, Gloria.” I was dancing as fast as I could. “I’m really not at liberty to say.”
“Are you sure the tattoo is from someone around here?”
“Pretty sure.”
I described the tattoo I’d seen on Blackburn’s films. Though I’d thought at first that it was a four-leaf clover, I’d caught a few other glances of it during the films, including one fleeting close-up, and decided it actually looked more like a star with something inside it. Gloria listened. I tore a page out of my notebook and drew a crude version of it for her. She took one look and gave me a sly smile.
“You’re not really doing a story, are you?” she said.
“Pardon me?”
She leaned closer. “You are a devil. Are we-are you playing a practical joke? Is it a certain someone’s birthday?”
“Uh, no, I’m not sure what you’re-”
“Come on, Gus. There’s only one person in this town with a tattoo even remotely like that, and you darned well know who she is.”
I wasn’t going to say it.
“Why don’t you guess?”
“I’d rather not, Gloria. Guessing gets newspaper people in trouble.”
“Really?” she said, laughing. “You are a devil. You’re here enchanting me with a chance to get in your paper again, but really you have some other secret agenda. OK, I’m game. It wouldn’t be the first time a man has bamboozled me.”
“So,” I said, totally unsure of myself now, “can you tell me?”
She shook her head and laughed again. “Hand me one of those.” She meant the People magazines stacked on the end table. “Any of them.”
I gave her one. She flipped through it, came to a stop, and showed me a photograph. “Here’s a clue,” she said. In the photo a young actress I didn’t recognize was stooping to admire her freshly implanted star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I looked up at smiling Gloria Lowinski.
“That’s what your tattoo looks like, doesn’t it?” she said. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? How else could our beloved beauty queen have gotten one of those?”
“Right,” I said.
Gloria stood. “You’re not going to put me in your paper, but this was fun anyway. And what a coincidence! She was just here the other day, sitting on that very chair.”
I didn’t really need further confirmation. But inside my truck, I flipped back to the notes I’d taken in my semistupor the night before. I wanted to see if I had written down the brand of the whiskey in the bottle standing on the shelf in the background. I had. My barely legible note read, “gntlmn jac.” Or, as Soupy put it that night on my stairway, “Gentleman-fucking-Jack,” the brand of Starvation Lake’s very own beauty queen, Tillie Spaulding.
twenty-six
Some things were beginning to make painful sense. Now I understood why Tillie had been behaving strangely, why she’d been so protective of the photo files, why Soupy had always resisted meeting me at the Pilot. Blackburn had stashed his film at the paper so Tillie-a movie star at last, in thrall to her director-could keep watch.
I was glad to see she wasn’t in yet when I got back to the Pilot. I was a little angry and a lot uncomfortable and I might have fired her on the spot, which would have been foolish. Better that she didn’t know what I knew, at least for now, although she had to be suspicious if she had noticed the missing films.
Joanie sat reading Newsweek with her feet up on her desk. Her clutter didn’t usually allow space for feet, but today she appeared to have cleared her desk onto the floor. I walked up and stood silently regarding the mess.
“In case you’re wondering, those are my notes from the story we’re supposedly covering,” she said, without looking up from her magazine.
“Nice. Why not just toss it all in the garbage?”
“I’ll get around to it.” She snapped a page back. “By the way, there’s a press release in the pile about some New York bank buying a bunch of little banks up here. Sounds like something tame enough for us.”
On my desk lay that morning’s paper. Across Tillie’s wrestling story Joanie had scribbled in red ink, “Pulitzer?” Higher up the page, that old picture of Blackburn in his slicked-back hair stared up at me. The caption read, “JACK BLACKBURN, Jan. 19, 1934-March 13, 1988.” Something about it bothered me.
My message light was on. I dialed voice mail. Kerasopoulos had called at 7:14, saying, “Please call the minute you get in.” I wandered back over to Joanie. I didn’t blame her for feeling the way she did. But I needed her to get over it.
“Hey,” I said. “I got a jailhouse interview with Campbell.”
“Great. You can add to the pile.”
She kept reading. I stooped down to look at what was on the floor. Seven or eight notebooks, half a dozen file folders, a smattering of other papers. One was a photocopy of a tax document that had to have come from the county clerk’s office. I picked it up.
“This from the old Blackburn land?” I said.
“If it’s that Richards Company, yep.”
“Boy. The assessed value’s almost five hundred grand.” My eyes went to the line identifying the owner. “It’s actually Richard Limited, singular, not Richards,” I said. There was an address in Springfield, Virginia.
“Who cares?”
I stood, letting the paper drop. “So what are you doing today?”
“Hmmmm. First I thought I’d finish reading this story about how everyone’s going to get rich selling poodle sweaters on the Internet. Then I was thinking maybe Audrey’s for a leisurely brunch or maybe just straight to Enright’s for a double Bloody Mary. Maybe Dingus’ll join me and I can at least tell him what I know.”
“That reminds me,” I said. I grabbed Joanie’s phone and dialed the county clerk’s office, hoping Vicky would answer. I was in luck.
“It’s Gus Carpenter,” I said. “How are you?”
“Sick of snow,” Vicky said.
“Me, too. Listen-remember that file from eighty-eight I wanted the other day? Did you ever find out who took it?” Dingus, I’d figured.
“Oh, God, I’ve got to get that back before my mother kills me,” she said. “Dave from Town Hall has it and he’s not returning my calls.”
“Dave?”
“Dave, you know, the bartender?” She meant Loob. He worked part-time for the tax assessor. But why in the world would Loob need those minutes? “If you see him, will you tell him to bring me my folder?”
“Sure.” I hung up the phone.
“Tell me,” Joanie said. “Why do you keep doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Doing this. Being a reporter. Chasing this story. Why bother? Nobody here wants to know the truth anyway. They don’t care what we have to say unless it’s to tell them where’s the Rotary lunch or what’s showing at the movies or who caught the biggest fish. I mean, sorry, but this is it for you, isn’t it? You had your shot at the big time and you blew it. Now you’re in piddling little Starvation Lake, the denial capital of the world. Why do you keep going?”
