Starvation Lake (27 page)

“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.

   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.”

“Poor old Leo.”

“Hoo-hah, I’ll bet Leo’s the one what killed Blackburn.”

“Blackburn wasn’t killed. He’s in the lake. This is all a conspiracy cooked up by the sheriff to make sure he gets reelected.”

“If Teddy dies, God forbid, we got a double murder in Starvation Lake.”

“Ain’t no double murder if one of them happened ten years ago, Elvis.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” Elvis said. “But like I said, you wouldn’t know a thing from reading our local paper. Looks like another one got behind you, Gus.”

It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

“The presses run at seven p.m., Elvis,” I said.

The blue-and-white cap perched on his head read Pekoe Hardened Tools. “I hear other papers actually stop the presses and start them up again when they have big news, like maybe a double murder,” he said. “But maybe you just don’t want your drinking buddies looking bad, huh?”

“Elvis!” Audrey shouted it from behind the counter. “Keep harassing my customers and you can have McMuffins for breakfast.” She pointed at the TV. The weather turtle was predicting a snowstorm. “And I don’t want to see that thing in my place tomorrow, I don’t care how big the so-called news is.”

Somebody turned it off.

I turned to face Audrey. She was wearing a sky-blue apron and her hair was pulled back in a tidy bun. As she picked up two platters of eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes, she said to me, “You know what you want, honey?”

“Cinnamon bun, warm, and a coffee to go.”

A
Pilot
rested on the stool two down from me. My eyes wandered past it to the autographed photo of Gordie Howe. He was winding up to shoot on a goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens. The goalie was still on his feet, probably backing into the cage. I wondered for the hundredth time if he’d made the save.

Audrey returned with my bun and coffee. “Audrey?” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, honey.”

I leaned closer so no one else would hear me. “You know Barbara Lampley? Dingus’s ex-wife?”

“Mm-hm.”

“She was still with Dingus when Coach died, right?”

Audrey scrunched up her face. “I can’t recall, exactly. Why?”

“I thought maybe she’d remember something from back then. Maybe not.”

Audrey glanced over at Elvis, then back at me. She didn’t tell many tales, certainly not with Elvis within earshot. But her look told me enough.

“Does she work over at Sandy Cove?” I said.

Audrey nodded yes.

“At the IGA? Think it’d be worth my trip?”

“She’s at Glen’s now, dear. And yes, my guess is, it would be worth it. Be careful in the snow.”

   I stopped for a minute at the
Pilot
on the way to my truck. Tillie had called and said she’d be late. Joanie was going to the clerk’s office to check on Blackburn’s old property records, then to Soupy’s arraignment. I reminded her to keep working the Canada angle and see what else she could find out about Leo’s computer. When my phone started ringing, I figured it had to be Trenton and headed out.