Bryan Gruley: The Skeleton Box

“Sorry, no reporters allowed,” D’Alessio said.

“Of course not,” Whistler said. “Big story. No reporters. Who needs reporters?” He waggled a ballpoint pen in one hand and clutched a notebook in the other. He looked at me. “Sorry, boss. This can’t be easy for you.”

“I’m OK.”

“Your mom’s all right?”

“Yeah. Where were you?”

“Stopped at the cop shop.” He held up his notebook, open to a blank page. “Here’s what I got-squat. Nobody talking. How about you, Deputy?”

“Talk to the sheriff,” D’Alessio said. “Anyway, your boss isn’t here for the big story. He came to see his ex-girlfriend.”

Darlene Esper, nee Bontrager, had been my first love. We’d broken up the first time, years before, when I’d left Starvation to be a big-shot reporter in Detroit. After I’d come home, chastened, I found Darlene in an unhappy marriage, and we found our way back to each other. But by the time her divorce was final, we were apart again. I’d come to the hospital more out of a sense of duty to her mother than to her. At least that’s what I told myself.

“Sure he did,” Whistler said. “Her mother’s dead. I’d just like to talk to the next of kin, whoever it is. That’s what reporters do.”

“Parasites.”

“Been called worse by my exes, believe me. But you’ll be the first to pick up the paper and look for your name, won’t you, Deputy?” Whistler turned to me. “Shall we go?”

I took a last look into the hospital. There was Darlene, halfway down the corridor, facing my way. She raised a hand in a halfhearted wave, bit her lip. Then a doctor approached her and she disappeared around a corner.

“How’d the game go tonight?” D’Alessio said. “I was working.”

D’Alessio skated for the Ice Picks.

“You had no goalie, so we won easy,” I said.

“Where was Tatch?”

“Hell if I know. Probably with his fellow born-agains.”

“Frigging goalies.”

As I pulled out of the lot behind Whistler’s gigantic sedan-an Olds Toronado, black with red pinstripes, 1970 or 1971-the Channel Eight TV van was trying to pull in.

Tawny Jane Reese was hanging out of the front passenger window, yelling and gesturing angrily at two Traverse City cops waving the van away from the lot. She stopped for a few seconds to give Whistler a look as he slid past. It usually felt good to see my competitors hitting a stone wall. Tonight, nothing felt good.

I parked on Main in front of the Pilot. The sleet had stopped. A snowplow’s brake lights made red needle points in the dark two blocks down. I stood on the sidewalk watching the plow veer along the lakeshore, toward Mom’s house.

The street lamps had gone black at ten p.m., one of the austerity measures adopted by the town council. The late night darkness lured high school kids out for impromptu beer bashes on the beach, which required police visits, which probably cost more than the council had saved on shutting the lamps off. It made for decent copy in the Pilot.

I let my eyes adjust to the darkness until I could make out the snow-mottled beach, the frozen gray scar of the lake’s edge beyond. The two-lane street stretched back from the beach, flanked on both sides by two-story clapboard-and-brick buildings. The marina, a bait shop, Repicky Realty, a vacated lawyer’s office. An abandoned movie theater, Fortune Drug, Kepsel’s Hardware, a vacated dentist office, Sally’s Dry Cleaning and Floral, and Kate’s Cakes, closed for the winter. Between them all, empty storefronts like missing teeth in a hockey player’s mouth. Behind the shops on my right, the Hungry River flowed unseen beneath a crust of ice.

I smelled dampness in the air.

Fuzzy amber light glowed in the front window of Enright’s Pub. I wondered if Soupy had forgotten to turn it off or had just passed out in his office. Two doors down, Audrey’s Diner was dark, but in an hour or two, the lights would flick on and the proprietor would bustle about preparing for the breakfast rush of old men and their old wives.

On this particular morning at Audrey’s, there would be less of the usual jabber about the River Rats’ chances in the state playoffs, or how the weather was helping or hurting the tourist business of snowmobilers up from downstate. The men and women would lean on the counter together and listen as the little radio Audrey kept over the griddle told them that one of their own, a woman who had sat with them eating French toast with powdered sugar, never syrup, had been found dead in the home of Bea Carpenter.

It was my job to tell them what had happened and why. Whether they wanted to hear it or not. Whether I wanted to or not. Through the Pilot window I saw light bleeding from the newsroom into the reception area. My watch said 2:27 a.m.

“Shit,” I said, and fitted my key into the door.

Luke Whistler kept tapping on his keyboard as I threw my jacket over my chair and sat. I looked at my blank computer screen, considered having to write the obituary of Phyllis Marie Snyder Bontrager. Behind me, the tapping stopped. I heard the deadening hum of the fluorescent lamps overhead.

“Hey, guy,” Whistler said.

I heard him from behind the notes and files and newspapers and fast-food wrappers heaped on his gray metal desk. All I could see of him over the pile was the sheet-white top of his head.

“Yeah?”

He leaned back so that I could see his face. “Really sorry for what happened,” he said. “I couldn’t really say much back there with the copper.”

“Thanks.”

“You want to figure this out, boss?” He pushed his swivel chair out from behind his desk, the metal chair wheels crinkling the sugar packets scattered on the tile floor. “Huh? Me and you?”

I let out a breath. I didn’t want to break down in front of Whistler.

“Yeah. Hell yeah.”

“Good. Listen to these.”

Whistler stood, still in his down vest, and hit some buttons on the phone on his desk. A dial tone blared on the speaker. He was calling our voice mail system. Usually it was filled with people complaining about soaked papers and missed deliveries.

Now the automated voice said we had thirty-two new messages.

“That a record?” I said.

“Hang on.”

He played message twenty-one. “When are you guys in the media going to pick up the damn ball and run with it on this bingo guy? Our alleged police department can’t police a damn thing, and I don’t know what the hell we’re paying them for. We need you to find this bingo guy.”

“Yes, sir,” Whistler said.

He played message twenty-two. This voice was muffled, like one you’d hear coming from the other side of a motel wall. “Anyone checking on those whackaroonies at the Christian camp? They’re all agitated with the county. Maybe they’re just messing with us, and now they made a big damn mistake.”

Message twenty-three. A woman this time. “I can’t leave my house and go to bingo? Have you asked the church… Saint, Saint, oh, I can’t remember the name, I’m not Catholic… but have you asked the church-” A burst of static obliterated the rest of what she said. Whistler turned it off and sat. “Crazy, huh?”

“The natives are restless.”

“The natives are shitting their pants. But we’re going to figure it out.”

“Let’s do it.”

Luke Whistler had come to me, at the age of fifty-six, from the Detroit Free Press. Thirty years before, he had been the youngest Free Press staffer ever to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, for a series of stories he wrote about a Washtenaw County detective’s obsession with finding someone who was raping and killing young women in Ann Arbor. Whistler had never quite matched that performance, at least in the eyes of the Pulitzer judges, but his byline inspired awe and trepidation in the newsroom of my paper, the Detroit Times, because invariably it sat atop investigative stories that we wished we’d had the vision and courage and persistence to have pursued ourselves.