Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

I was swallowing the last of my second fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich as Joanie swung her Malibu off Beech Daly onto Six Mile Road. I followed in Soupy’s pickup.

I tossed the greasy sandwich wrapper on the garbage hiding the lockbox and grabbed the foam cup of black coffee from the console. I had checked to make sure the box was still there and kicked myself for having left it in the truck the night before in a neighborhood filled with curious late-night pedestrians. At least I’d thought to lock the truck, something I never did in Starvation.

We had sped down the Jeffries Freeway west through Detroit, an eight-lane gully winding between road shoulders pocked with snow and empty wine bottles, past pawnshops and liquor stores and boarded-up supermarkets and tar-papered houses, some of them charred black and literally falling down, where autoworkers had once laid claim to a good life that eventually slipped from their grasp. As a rookie Times reporter covering the cops, I had exited the freeway a few times to interview the bereaved families of shooting victims. But usually the Jeffries had ferried me to hockey rinks in the western suburbs.

Tunneling beneath the underpass at Telegraph Road, we’d crossed from the city into Redford Township, where those same autoworkers-the white ones, that is-had escaped in the 1950s seeking brick ranches and wider backyards. We’d left the Jeffries and turned north on Beech Daly. We passed a Lebanese bakery, a Little Caesars pizza joint, a vinyl-siding shop, a tool-and-die business hung with a For Lease sign, and what seemed like a dozen insurance agencies. I wondered why people in flat, quiet Redford would live in fear of fires and floods.

Six Mile is five gray lanes scarred with oily potholes and rock salt. I steered around a mattress discarded in the middle of the street. We passed a Catholic church and a used car lot and a Presbyterian church and another liquor store and a bar that advertised karaoke every Friday. The only human I saw was a teenage boy swaggering down the sidewalk in a hooded sweatshirt and headphones beneath a Yankees cap perched backward on his head. Only a Yankees fan, I thought, would be dumb enough to wear just a sweatshirt in that cold.

Joanie put on her right turn blinker and veered into a parking lot ringed by a low wooden fence. A curbside sign identified it as Lost Valley Golf Course. The only other car in the lot was a black Cadillac coupe parked in a handicap spot facing the first tee. I slid Soupy’s pickup in next to Joanie’s Malibu and peeked at the Caddy. I didn’t see any handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror.

Joanie came up to my door, notebook in hand. I stepped out.

“Ever do an interview at a golf course?” she said.

“Chased quotes once when the U.S. Open was at Oakland Hills.”

Out on the course, old oaks as big as the ones up north stood guard along a flat brown fairway mottled with snow. A sign planted in front of the first tee announced in big black letters COURSE CLOSED. But there were gouges in the matted grass on the tee, and at the end of the fairway, a red flag fluttered in the breeze. I didn’t like golf. If you played a lousy round, you could feel lousy for hours. If you had a bad day on the rink, it went away the second you cracked your first beer.

“Weird,” Joanie said. “But the flack insisted. Said the priest would be more comfortable.”

I started walking toward the pro shop. “Who’s the priest again?”

“Reilly. He’s apparently the visiting priest at that church back up Six Mile.”

“And the flack?”

“A guy named Regis something.”

I stopped. “No way.”

Regis Repelmaus greeted me at the door to the Lost Valley pro shop with his usual too-firm, held-too-long, so-sincere-it’s-bullshit handshake. He wore a dark suit, a starched white shirt, a red tie with pinpoint silver polka dots, a Caribbean vacation tan, and a head of brown shoe-polish hair that could have been transplanted from a Ken doll.

“It’s been too long, old friend,” he said. He smelled of breath mints. “How are the north woods?”

“Like you, Regis,” I said. “Cold and dark.”

He chuckled. “Ah, well, maybe it hasn’t been too long.”

Repelmaus wasn’t just any flack. He was Detroit’s premier public-relations fixer, a lawyer who did not practice law but had glad-handed himself into a position where, whenever a big company or wealthy executive got in trouble, he was called upon to prescribe a plan of action or inaction designed to “correct the record,” as he was fond of saying, as if he were an historian rather than a $500-an-hour dissembler.

His clients were never companies or individuals themselves, but rather the law firms that represented them. By renting his services out in this way, Repelmaus could pretend he was not defending a company whose poorly built pickup trucks burned people to death or a natural gas executive who used the corporate jet to fly call girls to his Harbor Springs redoubt. No, Repelmaus was representing the law firms, who were, of course, merely defending the law.

I first encountered him one evening in Detroit. I’d just begun covering the auto industry for the Times, and I’d gotten a tip that police had picked up the CFO of Superior Motors for smacking his wife around. I started calling cop shops to confirm it. I hadn’t made half a dozen calls before Repelmaus called me. He identified himself as a representative for a law firm representing Superior Motors.

“Call me Rep,” he said, as cheerful as if I were writing about the company boosting its dividend.

“Rep?” I said.

“Yes, thank you. May I be of help?”

I had to ask the company anyway, so I told him what I’d heard.

“Off the record,” he said, “this would certainly be a serious matter, if true, and I will get to the bottom of it and get back to you as soon as possible. When is your deadline?”

I told him I had until midnight and asked if he had heard from any Free Press reporters. “I have not,” he said. “It looks like you have an exclusive.”

My scoop evaporated two hours later. By then I had confirmed with anonymous police sources that the CFO had been arrested and that it wasn’t the first time he’d had a boxing match with his wife. There was no Internet then, so my story wouldn’t be out there until the papers hit the newsstands in the morning. But around ten thirty, Superior Motors issued a press release saying the CFO had resigned “to pursue other opportunities.” It was all over the eleven o’clock news. My editor asked me what the hell happened. When I told her, she said she wished she had known I was dealing with Regis Repelmaus.

The next day, Repelmaus called me and congratulated me on getting the story first. Of course I hadn’t gotten the story first. “You screwed me, Rep,” I said.

“I totally understand how you could see it that way,” he said. He explained that he had dutifully asked his “client” about the matter and the “client” had decided that “getting ahead of the matter” was in Superior Motors’ best interest. And you agreed? I asked. Repelmaus told me that, because he also happened to be an attorney, he couldn’t comment on that question, as it would violate attorney-client privilege.

From then on, I called him Regis.

I had to wonder why he would show up for a meeting with a priest at a public golf course in a scruffy suburb like Redford. “What are you doing here, Regis?” I said. “Something bad must be going on, eh?”

“The economy’s tough,” he said, smiling. “I’m taking whatever I can get.” He turned to Joanie, extending a daintier hand than he’d given me. “Miss McCarthy.”

“Joanie,” she said. “Or Ms. McCarthy.”

“Whoa, that’s quite a handshake. Feel free to call me Rep.”