The Morgue and Me

by John C. Ford

  We all stood around him while Tim made jokes about how he screwed things up out at the golf course. When it was time for me to take Daniel home, Tina stayed to give Tim the details on what I’d found out from Bob. We agreed to huddle up at Tina’s the next morning to strategize.

  “Dude isn’t as much of a pain in the ass as I thought,” Tina whispered when she hugged me good-bye for the night. As Daniel and I walked out, I took a final look back through the window and saw her resting her hand on Tim’s head. He was looking up at her, and there was something in his eyes that—even if I tried—I couldn’t mistake.

  My cell phone rang when we got back in the car. My dad, weak from stress and lack of sleep, told me he’d gotten my message—they were thrilled that Daniel was safe, but getting home would take a while. He and my mom had missed their connection in Denver. The next plane to Detroit wasn’t leaving until morning. It meant they wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night.

  I had one more day, and it was just enough time.

  31

  Something was off about Tina’s house. She had scrubbed the kitchen counter to a bright white and cleared most of the debris from her living room. She’d even put out a plate of glazed doughnuts from the bakery. She was scarfing down one of them when I got there at noon, Daniel in tow. I wasn’t about to leave him unsupervised for a second.

  Tim sat next to Tina on the couch, with a smaller bandage bulging out from his hip. The night before had put a different stamp on each of us. Tim sat there with a firm jaw, dressed in his police uniform, determined to get something done. Tina was angry, still steaming from Lovell’s betrayal. I was jumpy. Daniel, he was happy as a clam. Tim and Tina gave him a war hero’s greeting before Tina sent him to her spare room so we could talk.

  Tim got right down to it.

  “So you’re sure it’s Lovell that was blackmailing the mayor and the others?” he said.

  “As sure as I can be,” I said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  He nodded and checked with Tina, who was finishing the last of her doughnut. “He’s right. I wouldn’t bet against the kid,” she said.

  “Okay,” Tim said. “What about the thing tonight, in Duncan Woods?”

  I’d thought about that. “He’s going through with the blackmail. Tonight’s the exchange—he gives them the pictures, they give him the money.”

  I knew I was right. Lovell wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to get the pictures back if he wasn’t planning on getting something in exchange for them.

  “I think Mitch was supposed to do it originally,” I said, explaining my theory. “Lovell probably wanted to use Mitch because the mayor, Kate Warne, and Corbett didn’t know him. It would have kept Lovell out of things.”

  Tina nodded. “Right. And he was going to give Mitch part of the action. That’s why Mitch was bragging to the girl at the country club the night he died. That was the score he was about to get rich from.”

  I’d almost forgotten Buddy the bartender telling us about that, it seemed so long ago now: She was young, too, like the man said. But that’s all I know. I wondered if Abby Shales had really gone to Texas. I hoped she had—I hoped she’d gotten lost in the big state like she said she would.

  “Yeah, it makes sense,” Tim said, “but it’s still mostly hunches—we don’t have much evidence. I called my contact at the State Police this morning, and they’re giving me a meeting, even though it’s Saturday and they’re not too happy about coming in. If I can get them here for the exchange tonight, we can get them involved in the case. But I might need something more.”

  “I’ve got something,” I said, and turned on my camera. Bob had stolen my computer, and he’d gotten the blackmail pictures back, but he hadn’t taken my camera. I’d been carrying it around with me as usual that day, so I still had my pictures of Mitch’s body. Tim and Tina winced when I showed them. I’d almost forgotten how gory they were.

  “That’s no suicide,” I said, and handed the memory card over to Tim.

  “That’s good. Okay, I should get going if I’m going to get back here with them.”

  “How far are you going?” Tina said.

  “Traverse City.”

  Her eyes blazed. “That’s an hour’s drive.”

  “I know—I told you, I had to go to the state with this. They don’t have offices in every city. I had to go through a Michigan Bureau of Investigation task force—”

  “Well, get the hell out of here instead of explaining it all day,” Tina said. “We need them here tonight.”

  Tim laughed. “Is she for real?”

  “Welcome to my world,” I said, and Tina kicked him to the door before we could gang up on her any more. On his way out to the driveway, he stopped.

  “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get them up here. But whatever happens, promise me you won’t go to Duncan Woods tonight.”

  “Of course,” Tina said.

  Right. Of course.

  Tina and I watched from the front window as Tim’s police cruiser rolled down the street. Maybe it was like watching your kid go off to college or something, I can’t really say, but it felt like the whole thing was out of our hands now, and it was making me queasy. We were about to gather Daniel up when my pocket buzzed with an incoming call.

  Mike again.

  Tina looked over my shoulder at the display before I sent it to voice mail.

  “He’s got to fit into this somehow,” Tina said. She was going gentle—she knew how close we were. Or how close we’d been.

  She was right, though. Now that we knew that Lovell had been Mitch’s partner, it made even less sense that Mike would have the pictures. And it made even less sense why he wouldn’t tell me where he’d gotten them. Those pictures were the reason why Mitch had been killed—so how had they ended up in his hands, if he hadn’t killed Mitch himself?

  “I’m going over there,” I said.

  The trees in Mike’s neighborhood grew tall, their leaves meeting high above the twisting road, throwing cooling shade onto the asphalt. The night before was catching up to Daniel; he was crashed out in the passenger’s seat, head bobbing against the window at each tiny bump in the road. I wanted to go home, tuck him in, watch over him.

  He stirred when I stopped in the driveway. “I’m just gonna see if he’s home. You okay here?”

  He slapped my hand away when I brushed his head on the way out. Good old Daniel.

  I heard it from the front door—the blender, churning out another dubious smoothie creation. His quirks used to seem funny, but Mike didn’t make me laugh anymore.

  I banged on the door. It took a while for him to hear me, but he came, slowing up when he saw me. He opened the door reluctantly.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey. Can we talk out here, so I can watch Daniel?”

  “You got him back?” A thin smile creased Mike’s cheeks when he spied Daniel in the car. He raised an arm but Daniel was oblivious, asleep again.

  I nodded. “Is that what you were calling about?”

  “Yeah, of course. I wanted to make sure he was okay.”

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “Anything else what?”

  “That you want to talk about. Like how you fit into this whole thing.” It was strange talking to him now. My voice was different, even—I was using tones that I used with strangers, teachers, guys from the Petoskey High soccer team who I didn’t particularly like.

  Mike shook his head and said it softly: “I can never tell you, Christopher. I just can’t.”

  “We’ve got most of it figured out already.” Mike didn’t bite, so I asked him, “Do you know Lawrence Lovell?”

  And then Mike said, “I had nothing to do with that guy getting killed, but my advice is to just stay away from the whole thing. Not that you’re going to take it.”

  “No, probably not.”

  He nodded. “I’m glad you got Daniel back.”

  It sounded like a good-bye, so I left
.

  We pulled into the driveway at one thirty. An afternoon of waiting stretched out in front of me. Time was funny that day, the way it didn’t budge. I played chess with Daniel, I tried to read, I cleaned up the mess in my bedroom from Bob’s search for the pictures. It felt like I had fit three afternoons into one, but the clocks held back, drawing each minute out torturously.

  Every forty-five minutes or so, Tina called with an update. A non-update, I should say—she hadn’t heard from Tim all day.

  The calls got more hysterical until six o’clock, when she broached the topic: “If he’s not back, we’re going to Duncan Woods. You know that, right?”

  “Tina—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know what he said. But you remember what I asked you at the start of this thing?”

  “I wouldn’t call it pussing out at this point.”

  “Oh, I would,” she said. “Big time.”

  At seven thirty she called again, this time with news. “They wouldn’t meet with him till five o’clock, but he says he’s bringing two agents up with him.”

  “Agents?”

  “Whatever the hell they’re called, I don’t know. Tim said they’re from the Michigan FBI, but he’s waiting there for one of them still. He’s going to be cutting it way too close, so get your ass ready.”

  “Umm, for what?”

  “We’re doing this, Christopher. We’re going to get pictures of the exchange. Bring your camera, and don’t even think about backing out.”

  I wanted to. I wanted to back out in the worst way, but Tina clicked off before I could tell her.

  I put down the phone and listened to a tinkering sound coming from the porch. Daniel was playing with an abacus out there; I looked in on him for a second before retreating to my room, sweeping up the last of my books that Bob had knocked to the ground. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I placed them on the desk and sat down heavily on my bed.

  You feel like a fraud when your dreams come true and it turns out you don’t want them. I guess I never really wanted to be a spy, not if going to Duncan Woods that night had me scared out of my mind. All that stuff I told myself—wanting to work in the NSA and everything—it was just an excuse to read stories and watch movies. Mike was right all along: I should have gotten out of my head a long time ago.

  I texted Tina: BE THERE SOON.

  I brought Daniel to Julia’s at eight thirty. She was the only one I trusted to watch him, and when I told her it was an emergency, she didn’t ask questions. I paused on the front lawn, charging myself up. This was the start of it—the new me.

  The front curtains were pulled back. They gave me an angle to the sofa, where Julia had nestled in the corner with her face glowing in the flickering blue light. Julia: high-school nerd, wallflower, best friend, missed chance. Maybe I could make it happen.

  Daniel had bounded ahead of me up to the door. Julia heard him knocking and collected herself.

  I shot up to the front door and gave Daniel a hug good-bye before he rushed inside like her place was Disneyland.

  Julia looked at me for the first time. “Has he eaten dinner?” she said.

  “Yeah. Thanks a lot for doing this, really. I wouldn’t ask but—”

  “Don’t worry about it. When will you pick him up?”

  “Before midnight. It shouldn’t be too long.”

  She nodded. It couldn’t have been clearer that she didn’t care where I was going or whom I was doing it with.

  “So, you know, I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. A lot, really.”

  Julia saw it coming a mile away. She was already shaking her head. “I think we’ve just had bad luck. It’s probably best to leave it at that.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “Yeah, for now.”

  “No. Forever, I think.”

  She had thought about it, too—she was done with me. I would have left it at that, but tonight I was going to be different.

  When she grabbed the doorknob, I held it fast from the other side. “I sort of woke up to some stuff in the last couple of days. Maybe the last hour, actually.” It was like she’d heard me for the first time all night. Her eyes narrowed a shade; she released the door, intrigued enough to listen. “Anyway, umm, I really wanna try. I want to make it real this time—me and you. Not just something to obsess over.”

  Her face softened, opening a crack. “Obsess over? I don’t remember that part.”

  “My mistake. I’m certified obsessed. In a healthy way.”

  She grabbed the doorknob again, her pink fingernails curling against it. “You’ve always known where I am, Christopher,” she said with a hint of invitation in her voice. “You’ve always been able to call.”

  Then the door closed, and I called it a victory.

  32

  We walked up the hill from Tina’s house, stopping short of the long wooden stairway down to Duncan Woods. “That thing all charged up?” Tina said, pointing to my camera.

  “Yeah.” I threw the strap over my shoulder and led the way to the top of the hill. Crouching at the wooden landing, we had a bird’s-eye view of the clearing at the edge of Duncan Woods. The overhead sodium lights shone off the paint-lacquered picnic benches, where I had watched Tina twirl in the night before she pulled me down to waltz with her. The same picnic benches that the sheriff had scoured that day. He’d known the exchange would take place here—that’s why he’d been casing it.

  We were early, a half hour till showtime. The park was empty, and the visible notch of Lakeside Drive in the left distance was bare of traffic. “What’s the latest from Tim?” I said.

  “He called me when he finally left, maybe forty minutes ago. He’ll have to hurry to make it.”

  “You wanna stay up here?” We were far from where the action would be and a little exposed, but if we lay flat on the landing, no one would see us.

  “Not much time before they get here,” Tina said, “ but let’s go down.” We hurried down the stairs, surveying the grounds for a spot to set up.

  It was obvious. At the edge of the park sat a clump of leafy bushes, tall enough to settle under. “Stay here a sec,” I said, and crawled low into the bushes, lying between their thin trunks. I could see Tina plainly enough through the leaves. A pair of headlights flashed across Lakeside Drive behind her, then disappeared again.

  I wouldn’t be able to use my flash and had to pray they stood close enough to the light over the picnic table to get a decent exposure. I took a test picture of Tina, checked the lighting on the screen. Good enough. “Did you hear that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you see me?” I asked.

  “Just the glow from your camera.”

  I shut off the display and snapped another one. “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “C’mon then, we’re good.”

  Tina scurried under the bush with me, hunkering on the opposite side of a trunk. “You’re a genius, brainy,” she said. “Goddamn. It’s like a friggin’ apartment in here.”

  She pulled her cell phone out and punched at the settings. Silencing it, I figured, so nobody would hear if a call came in. “Okay, we’re officially flying blind here.”

  It almost didn’t matter if Tim showed up anymore—Tina and I were in this for good. We wriggled against the earth, finding comfortable positions.

  “Christ, I could really use a smoke right now,” Tina said after a minute. And then, getting serious, “Hey, thanks for sticking with me.”

  “Sure.”

  Her hand reached out and clasped mine in solidarity. She released it with a nod, and we understood without saying it that it was time to stay quiet. It was getting close to ten, and they could show up any minute. It felt like we had taken large breaths and dipped under water.

  I adjusted my leg a final time, triple checked the camera settings, and scoped the grounds through the telephoto lens. The sodium light over the park hummed white noise that I hoped would cove
r the clicks from the Nikon. My elbows were aching from digging into the ground, when we heard the crackle of brush on our right.

  They hadn’t come from Lakeside Drive, the way you would if you came for a Sunday picnic. They advanced from the woods, two shadows making for the cleared park area with light steps and swiveling heads. I poised the camera.

  Kate Warne came first, a thin briefcase in her right hand. The money. She had dressed in a dark jogging suit with white piping that picked up the light. Tina grabbed my arm as the second figure emerged: Sheriff Harmon. Her older brother, there to protect her. I wondered if he planned on arresting the blackmailer when he showed up, and if so, how they would explain the pictures of the golf-course bribery. Surely they’d come out if he tried to press charges.

  They stayed at the edge, close to the trees. I turned a dial, slowing the shutter speed—with some luck the pictures would be bright enough. I nodded at Tina and reeled off some shots of them standing together.

  The sheriff gripped Kate by the elbow, said some last words, and retreated into the darkness of the trees. I clicked a last picture of him and then he was gone, sucked in by the black forest. He was going to take Lovell by surprise.

  Kate Warne stood alone for a good five minutes, rolling her neck every once in a while, switching the briefcase from hand to hand. Then a soft crunch of gravel sounded through the park. A car door shut. A sturdy, satisfying shhhuck—an expensive car.

  Thirty seconds later, Lawrence Lovell walked up to her. They stood, stiffly facing each other and there was no question—this was it. Lovell was the one blackmailing her, and they’d come to make the exchange.

  Tina stared out at Lovell with a brittle, hard-eyed look of accusation.