Starvation Lake (23 page)

Now she knitted her penciled-in eyebrows as the camera dollied in. “Local news reports have pointed to the discovery of a bullet hole in Blackburn’s snowmobile as evidence that the coach has been murdered. However, sheriff’s department sources are telling Channel Eight this may be premature. In fact…”

“Bullshit,” I said. “We didn’t say he was murdered. Read the story.”

Tillie stubbed out one cigarette and lit another. “You and your little friend may have gotten a little ahead of yourselves this time, huh?” she said.

Where’s that coming from? I thought. “No,” I said. “Joanie nailed the story and Dingus knows it, but it drives him crazy so he gets Tawny Jane No-brain to piss on us.”

“You have no idea what Dingus knows.”

“Do tell. Is there something else we should be reporting?”

“Maybe. Maybe this isn’t quite as horrid a place as you’d like to imagine.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Look around, young man. When Jack Blackburn died, this whole town went into mourning. While you were downstate chasing your little dreams, this place was falling apart. So now we’re finally getting ourselves together, and you come back here with your little friend and dig up this cockamamie story about Jack getting murdered.”

“The cops found the snowmobile, Tillie, I didn’t.”

She expelled a cloud of smoke. “Oh, please, save the ‘don’t-shoot-the-messenger’ claptrap. The police find plenty of things we just plain ignore. The cops go out to Tazwell’s damn near every weekend when Lloyd’s whacking Ellie around, but do we write about that? And how about the Barbie heads?”

I was still working in Detroit when town council member J. Rupert “Woody” Woodhams had to have his stomach pumped one night and doctors found eleven shaved Barbie-doll heads he’d apparently bitten off. Neither the cops nor the hospital would confirm the story. The
Pilot
never wrote it. Everybody knew anyway.

“So,” I said, “we should’ve ignored the snowmobile?”

“Hey, you’re the big-city reporter here, I’m just a stenographer. But let’s face facts. You hate this place. Stop taking it out on the rest of us who don’t mind it so much.”

She turned away. She was obviously upset, and it was obviously about more than just
Pilot
coverage. Maybe, I thought, it was just the whole spooky reemergence of Blackburn. She had dated him way back when. I’d seen her around the rink, her black leather jacket cinched tight beneath her bosom, watching from the uppermost row of the bleachers with an enormous Coke that all the Rats knew was laced with whiskey.

“Till,” I said. “I don’t mean—”

She pointed at the TV. “Listen.”

Now Tawny Jane was standing inside the sheriff’s department cafeteria. The lunch tables had been folded up and stacked against a pop machine in a corner behind her. Folding chairs were set up in three semicircular rows in front of a lectern surrounded by TV microphones. I counted eight reporters sitting in the chairs, a pretty strong turnout. I couldn’t see Joanie.

“We’re live at the Pine County sheriff’s Department,” Tawny Jane said. “Let’s join Sheriff Aho.”

The screen framed Dingus in his brown-and-mustard uniform. An accordion folder bulged under his left arm. He’d waxed his handlebar mustache. Deputies Frank D’Alessio and Skip Catledge stood behind him with their hands behind their backs. Dingus set his folder down, removed a sheet of paper, and nodded at the reporters and TV cameras. “Good morning,” he said. “I have a brief statement to read and then I’ll be glad to take your questions.”

He cleared his throat. “On Friday, February twenty-seventh, at approximately twelve fifty-eight a.m., the Pine County sheriff’s Department was notified that a number of unidentified objects had appeared on the shore of Walleye Lake. sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the scene, arriving at approximately one-eleven a.m. Upon further inspection, it was determined that these objects were components of a snowmobile. This snowmobile had possibly been submerged in the lake for a lengthy period of time. The objects were classified as evidence and removed to—”

“Excuse me, Sheriff?”

I cringed. The camera stayed on Dingus, but the voice was unmistakably Joanie’s. “Didn’t you go out to Walleye yourself that night?” she said. “Can you tell us what prompted that unusual step?”

“Joanie, no,” I said. Tillie was shaking her head.

Dingus’s eyebrows and mustache rose as one in surprise. “Pardon me, young lady,” he said. “I’ll be taking questions after I’ve finished my statement.” He glared at Joanie briefly before continuing.

“After further investigation and testing, it was determined that the snowmobile had once been registered to John David Blackburn, a former resident of Pine County who drowned in an accident on Starvation Lake early the morning of March 13, 1988. Our investigation—”

“Excuse me, Sheriff, but everybody already knows it was Blackburn’s snowmobile.” It was Joanie again. I couldn’t believe it. “What we don’t know is why you personally went out there, and why you would send the snowmobile for forensics.”

“Forensics are—hold on—excuse me, Miss McCarthy, I will get to your questions at the proper time. But I—”

“Your deputies this morning have been telling TV”—here she turned and looked directly into the camera—“that my paper prematurely reported that Blackburn was murdered. We said nothing about murder, Sheriff. But since it’s apparently on the table now”—Clever, I thought—“would you confirm that Blackburn was
not
murdered? Some people are saying this whole thing has been ginned up to help you get reelected. Could you respond, please?”

“Joanie!”

The camera zoomed in on Dingus’s face, which was florid with disbelief and anger, as animated as I’d ever seen it on TV. The camera turned to the right, and there was Joanie. I wanted her to just shut up, but seeing her there with her legs primly crossed, her notebook propped on her right knee, I couldn’t help but feel a little rush of admiration for her sheer disregard of Dingus’s authority.

“Miss McCarthy,” he said. “I’m going to ask you one last time to allow me to finish. Or you can leave.”

Joanie, unfazed, scribbled in her notebook and continued as if she were conducting an interview. “Sheriff, haven’t you questioned an acquaintance of Blackburn about the very possibility that he was murdered?”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Kick her little ass out, Dingus,” Tillie said.

The camera swung wildly back to Dingus. He blinked once, hard, and said, “This briefing is over. Deputies, clear the premises.”

I grabbed my jacket and ran out the back door. I thought I knew who Joanie’s last question was about. I had to get to the rink, fast.

   I was too late.

By the time I crept in, the Zamboni shed had been cleared of nearly everything that belonged to Leo. The police scanner. The little fridge. The old River Rats cap hanging from a nail. The addiction aphorisms. Only his cot remained.

“Leo,” I sighed.

I glanced out at the rink through the little hexagonal window over the workbench. Young girls in short pastel skirts and white skates were cutting backward figure eights while their skating coach, a woman named Roberta, shouted instructions. My watch said 12:37. I figured Leo had resurfaced the ice for the noon session, then bolted. No one would notice he was gone until he was next scheduled to run the Zamboni at 1:00 or 1:30.

I had a few minutes to look around. I didn’t want to be seen if Leo really had left town. I wondered, was I obliged to alert the police to his parting? No, I quickly concluded. If they thought Leo had murdered Blackburn, they could’ve arrested him. I knew this was a rationalization, but I still wasn’t ready to believe that Leo had killed his best friend, regardless of what the cops thought.

I rifled the drawers and cubbyholes around Leo’s work area. Greasy parts, tools, and containers of lubricant and paint littered the bench. Leo had taken the jar of disinfectant that held his stitching utensils. I touched the sutures still in my jaw. I’d planned to have Leo remove them before the game that night.

Next to Leo’s cot stood a wooden filing cabinet. I tried a drawer and it gave. I pulled the drawers out one by one and peered inside, finding nothing. The last one, on the bottom, stuck when I tried to push it back in. I kept trying and it kept sticking. I pulled it back out, set it on the floor, and knelt to look inside the cabinet. The smell of mildew filled my nose. I couldn’t see for the dark inside. I found a flashlight on the bench and shined it inside the cabinet on the side where the drawer seemed to be catching. Taped on the inner wall was a torn piece of paper. I reached in and peeled it away. Another piece of paper was taped beneath it and, beneath that, two more. I peeled them all away and replaced the drawer.

I laid the yellowed, palm-sized pieces of paper out on the bench. They looked like they’d been scissored out of looseleaf pages. Each was inscribed in red ballpoint ink with short lists of similarly arranged letters and numbers: F/1280/SL/R4.F/1280/SL/R5. F/1280/SL/R6. They made absolutely no sense to me. I stuffed them inside my jacket and hustled out to my truck.

   Leo’s mobile home sat in a clearing encircled by pines off Route 816 three miles west of town. When two sheriff’s cruisers blasted past me headed in that direction, I veered off the main road and looped behind Leo’s place on DiRosa Drive. I parked on the shoulder and trudged up a snow-covered hill. At the crest I crouched behind an oak tree with a view down to Leo’s. Dingus stood in front of the trailer directing D’Alessio, Catledge, and Darlene. They were carrying out boxes of things and stacking them in the back of a sheriff’s van. I was too far away to hear much of what they were saying, but I did catch two words—“fucking disgusting”—uttered by D’Alessio as he moved past Dingus lugging a computer monitor. They had filled up most of the back of the van before they locked Leo’s door and pulled away.

Driving back to town, I tried to imagine Leo on the lam. It was ludicrous. Leo hadn’t left Starvation Lake for more than a weekend in thirty years. He hated driving cars because he had to sit. Leo drove a Zamboni; he liked to stand. He used to joke about cutting a hole in the roof of his car so he could stand while he drove. As I eased to a stop in front of the high school, I remembered how, when Leo was resurfacing the ice, we’d be perched at the rink’s edge, Soupy and Teddy and me and the other Rats, dying to jump on, and Leo would be making slow circles like an old lady in a church parking lot. Just before he pulled off, he’d yell at us, “Not one skate out here until I say, or I’ll do it all over again.” And we’d wait while the fresh water hardened. Leo said that’s what it took to put down a great sheet, and Leo put down a great sheet. It stayed hard and smooth and slick even after we’d chewed it up for an hour.

“Fucking disgusting,” D’Alessio had said. And a computer? I had no idea that Leo, who wouldn’t even get himself a new police radio, was interested in computers. If he really had fled, I hoped it was just irrational panic and not guilt that drove him. But even if he was just afraid, even if he really wasn’t Blackburn’s murderer, he evidently knew something no one else knew, or why would he have run? Again I thought of the Rats waiting to jump onto the ice, Leo on the Zamboni, Coach behind the bench. I remembered peering out at that little world through the eyeholes of my goalie mask. What had I failed to see?

   When I walked into the auditorium at Pine County High School, Teddy Boynton was on his feet, in a business suit, calmly addressing the five members of the zoning board. I slipped into a folding chair in the back and scanned the room. About seventy people were in attendance. Soupy Campbell was not one of them. Nor was Francis Dufresne.

Soupy needed to be there. After months of dithering, the board finally was disposed to grant the variance Teddy Boynton needed to build his marina. Most people thought it would provide an economic boost, and plenty were fed up with the erratic service at Soupy’s marina. The board members liked Soupy, though—most had known his dad—and they wanted to be sure Soupy was taken care of before they effectively handed his future to Boynton.

“…found a way to invest a few more dollars to address the environmental concerns that the board has raised,” Teddy was saying. His lawyer, Fleming, sat at his right elbow. The board listened from behind a long table draped with a green felt banner bearing the legend “Your Zoning Board of Appeals: Smart Growth Good Growth.” Teddy brandished a large manila envelope. “The board has talked about an amount in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars. If the board can compromise a bit, we can pledge ten thousand dollars now and the rest over the next three years. We are committed to making the Pines the most environmentally friendly marina in Michigan.” Boynton laid the envelope in front of the chairman, Floyd Kepsel. I was recalling what Francis Dufresne had told me about Teddy’s precarious financial position.

“In addition, Mr. Chairman,” Teddy continued, “we have come to an amicable agreement with Mr. Campbell and the Starvation Lake Marina. We recognize that the old marina, though sorely in need of renovation, is a treasured local resource, and our fervent wish is to work closely with Mr. Campbell, not against him, toward the betterment of our community. Mr. Campbell now agrees, and has indicated his desire to withdraw his concerns with our project.”

A murmur rose in the room and heads craned around, all looking for Soupy. Teddy himself surveyed the room and our eyes met briefly, but he looked through me and turned back to the board.

“Well, Ted,” Chairman Kepsel said, “not that I doubt your word, but I’d sure like to have Mr. Campbell here to vouch for himself.”

Teddy reached into his suit jacket and produced a thin white envelope. “I agree that would be best, Mr. Chairman, but we have it here in writing.” He handed the envelope to Kepsel.

I sat up in my chair. Kepsel slipped a single sheet of paper from the envelope, read it quickly, and passed it to the board member to his left, Vice Chairman Ralph Dexter. Dexter read it and handed it back.