Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

Dingus peered over the half-moon glasses perched on his tulip bulb of a nose. “I have no comment on that report, sir,” he said in his Finnish lilt. “I can tell you, however, that the department has conducted administrative discipline on certain personnel.”

“Deputy Frank D’Alessio?” Whistler said.

“Next question.”

“So,” Whistler persisted, “you cannot confirm the Channel Eight report, and we should regard it as inaccurate? Is that what you’re saying?”

I glanced at Tawny Jane. She kept her eyes on Dingus, pointedly ignoring Whistler’s insult so as to assure the rest of us that her scoop was good.

Dingus ignored Whistler and pointed at Chester Pavich, a young reporter from Petoskey. With shirttails flying out from beneath his corduroy jacket, Pavich always looked like he was in a hurry, which could’ve meant that he had ambition and was going places, or that he was struggling to keep up and doomed forever to chase chicken-dinner news at dinky papers up north. Both were familiar to me.

He asked, “Is the man you’ve arrested considered a suspect in the murder of Paula Bontrager?”

Phyllis, I thought, and then, Doomed.

“As I said,” Dingus said, “we have in custody a person of interest.”

“Hold on.” It was Tawny Jane, her microphone thrust forward like a sword. “Sheriff Aho, would you tell Channel Eight’s viewers whether charges will be filed?”

“Ma’am,” Dingus said without looking at her, “as a deliberative police force, we need to investigate first, charge second, if we charge at all. Operating on rumors and speculation would be a poor use of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.”

Tawny Jane hated to be called ma’am, and Dingus knew it. “Well then,” she said, “what other than rumors and speculation are the basis of this arrest?”

“We had an anonymous tip and, upon further investigation, it turned out to be more than a rumor. That’s all I can say for now.”

I heard a car passing and looked behind me. A Jeep slowed almost to a stop before moving along. Breck. I pictured him gathering the adults and children at the camp, fixing them with his cross-eyed stare, telling them the townspeople were determined to stop them from living their lives, from practicing their faith, and now had captured one of their own to demonstrate their power and instill fear.

Tawny Jane furrowed her penciled-in brows and cocked her head just so. “Sheriff Aho, isn’t this just a reaction to your opponent’s charges that you haven’t responded aggressively to the recent break-ins? To the point that now a murder has occurred?”

“Excuse me, Sheriff,” Whistler interrupted. Tawny Jane looked at him as if she might shove her mike up his ass. “Your opponent has told the Pilot you may not have the right person in custody. Would you like to comment on that?”

Dingus’s face turned redder than a goal light. “I would not.”

“So do you or don’t you believe you’ve arrested the Bingo Night Burglar?”

Tawny Jane jumped in. “Will you tell our viewers that your investigation has nothing to do with a certain Father Nilus Moreau?”

I looked at Darlene. She must have had enough of the back-and-forth-I certainly had-but her face remained expressionless. I thought of her waking that morning and remembering, in an instant, that her mother was gone. Or maybe she hadn’t slept, maybe not since the night of the break-in, as the creases beneath her eyes suggested. She was tougher than me, tougher than anyone I knew, to stand there next to Dingus without losing it, without coming close, in front of all the professional voyeurs. Her mother would have been proud. I sure was.

“I cannot and will not comment on speculation,” Dingus said.

“Will you be giving us regular updates?” Pavich asked.

Dingus pursed his lips, pressed his hands together, and forced a smile. “The Pine County Sheriff’s Department is nothing if not transparent,” he said. “But we hope that all of the God-fearing people of Pine County will remain calm and rational as we sift through the evidence.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Thank you.”

Darlene and Catledge followed Dingus back inside.

“Where’d you find him?” Tawny Jane asked me as Whistler shuffled off to his Toronado. He’d whispered that he was going to put a story online and I should delay Channel Eight.

“He’s quite a character,” I said.

“You were awfully quiet today.”

Generally, I didn’t say much at press conferences. It gave lousy reporters an edge if decent ones were asking questions. But I said, “It was more fun to watch you and Luke go at it.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No,” I said, then realized she was referring to “go at it,” and said, “Sorry.”

She pulled her hair back with the hand holding her microphone, revealing silver wisps along her neck. Seeing Tawny Jane Reese up close always made me think, man, she must have knocked them dead when she was twenty-five, how did she get stuck up here? I had heard that she still stayed late at the station to make tapes she sent to stations in every major market in the country, hoping someone would notice.

Whistler’s car pulled away.

“Forget it,” she said. “How’s your mom?”

“OK.”

“It’s one heck of a story.”

“Yeah. Nice scoop last night, by the way.”

I was thinking I’d try to scoop her back with what I’d learned about Nilus’s serial womanizing, as soon as I figured out what it meant.

She shifted her Channel Eight equipment bag from one shoulder to the other. “I don’t know what it’s got to do with anything, but I’ll take it. It’s been getting a lot of Web traffic.”

“Really? I never keep track of that stuff.”

“Maybe because your job is safe.”

“No safer than yours.”

“Really? Do they want to make you the weather bitch?”

“Huh?”

“They want me to do the weather, Gus.”

“You mean like-”

“Yes. They want me to give up news and become the weather bitch. You know, smiling and waving my arms around like a goddamn cheerleader.”

“Jesus. Why?”

“I don’t know. My numbers are down, they have new bimbos to try out, they want to yank my salary back to poverty level. Depends what time of day you ask. Either I beat everybody on this story or I’m going to have to get new boobs.”

She wasn’t kidding. No wonder she was sleeping with the competition.

“Sorry about that, T.J.”

“You know,” she said, “when you came back here a few years ago, I figured you were going to make a quick stop, get your shit together, and get out of Dodge.”

“I probably thought that, too. But here I am.”

“Yeah, well, I am not going to be the weather bitch.” She stuffed the microphone in her bag. “See you in the trenches.”

My mother picked up as I was parking on Main in front of the Pilot.

“Is that you, Gussy?” she said.

“Are you at my place?” I said.

“I am. Why are all these boxes here? There’s nowhere to sit.”

On the floor and the sofa in my living room were four or five boxes I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there in a little while.”

“You’re not going to throw away your old report cards, are you?”

The old hockey tape box on the sofa was filled with junk from my boyhood that Mom had salvaged. “I’ll look through it soon,” I said. “I’ve been kind of busy.”

Mom told me about her day as I went inside. She and Millie had had a nice late breakfast in an empty Audrey’s Diner and done some shopping and then gone back to Millie’s and played cribbage and talked.