Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“Forgive me,” I said, “but what does that prove? Maybe the burglar took the boot.”

Dingus shook his head. “I’m not an idiot,” he said. “Your mother lost this boot when she left the house that night. She was probably rushing, knowing we were coming.”

“Why did you arrest Breck?” I said.

“You’ll find out when he’s arraigned in the morning.”

“For murder?”

“Tell me why your mother left the house that night. Did she take something out of the house? Did she hide it somewhere? That garage?”

“I don’t know. The burglar or burglars haven’t taken anything. Have you figured out why? Or what they were really looking for? Feels like you’re just fishing, Dingus. You’ve got a whole jail full of people and you don’t know who did it, do you? What about your anonymous tip? Isn’t that why you arrested Tatch in the first place? Now it’s Breck? You don’t really have any idea what happened, do you? The best you can do is cancel bingo.”

Dingus ran a hand over his mustache. “Maybe the break-ins were for documents. You know, identity theft. These old folks have money stashed away.”

Or a map, I thought. “I’m not an idiot, either.”

“Perhaps you would like your own jail cell.”

I risked a glance at Darlene. She rolled her eyes.

“You still have vacancies?” I said.

Darlene stepped closer “We think,” she said, “the anonymous tip may have come from Breck himself. Tatch has been whining to other prisoners about what Breck did at his camp. Maybe Tatch had become an impediment to Breck.”

“Tatch-Mr. Edwards, that is-is now telling us Breck wasn’t at the camp that night,” Dingus said.

That wasn’t what Tatch had told me when he called me from the jail. He clearly was turning on Breck.

“How would he know whether Breck was there?” I said. “Tatch wasn’t there either.”

“We’re checking that out with the others.”

“Are you going to release my mother?”

“We did give her a sleeping pill,” Dingus said. “I’m hoping maybe, with a good night’s sleep and we let you take her home, her memory might improve a little.”

Darlene moved around behind me. Dingus said, “The truth is, I wish we could slam a big door on all the pain-in-the-butt, nutcase downstaters who come here and mess up our quiet little town. Then maybe Bea could just go home and fret over whatever it is she doesn’t want anybody to know. But it’s too late to slam the door.”

“You know, Dingus,” I said, “back in the fifties there was a sheriff here who was in the middle of a tough election and he suddenly solved a big crime.”

He pursed his lips. The tips of his handlebar jumped up an inch. “Get him out of my sight,” he said. “I’ve got to go see the other vultures.”

Darlene stuck a hand under my armpit and tugged me out of my chair. As we were going out the door, Dingus said, “By the way, way back in the fifties? Sheriff Spardell was re-elected in a landslide.”

“What the hell was that all about?”

I whispered it to Darlene as soon as Dingus’s door closed behind us. Darlene squeezed my arm hard, looked behind her, and yanked me down the hall, around a corner, and into a closet. She shut the closet door, plunging us into darkness. I backed up against a set of metal shelves, smelling soap and cardboard and then Darlene, as she stepped close to me.

She took one of my hands in both of hers and pressed something small into the palm.

“What’s this?” I said.

“The button you left on the stairs at the tree house the other night.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laid a hand on my chest. “When we came for Bea and you ran out the back.”

“Dingus is off his rocker,” I said.

“Shut up.”

She grabbed my coat collar and pulled me into her and kissed me, her badge pressing into my ribs. The kiss was not long but it was wet and warm and I felt a shiver ripple across my belly like the one I had felt when she had kissed me in the dark courthouse closet almost twenty years before. She pulled away and pushed me back against the shelves.

“What was that?” I said.

“Breck insists on talking to you.”

“What?”

“He has no lawyer and says he needs to speak with you. Dingus OK’d it.”

“Dingus really is crazy.”

She opened the door a crack, peeked out, closed it again, turned back to me. “Meet me later. My apartment.”

My gut fluttered again. “Are you sure?”

“You’re going to tell me all about the tree house and Bea.” She opened the door. “Out.”

Wayland Breck waited in orange coveralls at a long white Formica-topped table in the shift room. I was surprised to see a cigarette smoldering in a foil ashtray. He tapped a can of Vernors on the tabletop. Darlene sat me down across from him. His hands were unfettered, but I noticed shackles on his ankles.

“You have fifteen minutes,” Darlene said. I assumed she had brought us to the shift room because the rest of Breck’s group was being fingerprinted and mug-shotted and Dingus didn’t want them to see us talking. She closed the shift room door behind her. I saw the back of her head through the crosshatched observation window in the door.

“She’s important to you, isn’t she?” Breck said.

“Good evening, Breck. You wanted to talk to me?”

“Is she as important as your mother?” He smiled and took a drag on his cigarette before crushing it out. “You know, Mr. Carpenter, we are not so different. My mother kept secrets from me, too.” He let that hang there. I chose not to respond. “For years,” he continued, “I believed what my mother told me about my grandfather, that he died of emphysema in a hospital when I was a small boy. Only in her will did she leave a note telling me that was a lie.”

“Why would she wait? Weren’t you a grown man by then?”

“Yes. But as you, of all people, can appreciate, I can’t be sure why she held back. Maybe she was embarrassed. In retrospect, I believe my grandfather’s death tortured her for most of her life. She was”-he stopped and looked at the table-“an increasingly sad woman.”

“But she kept the truth-or her version of it-from you.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want it to torture me.”

“But now it does.”

He chose not to reply.

“She didn’t commit suicide, did she?” I said.

“Melanoma.”

“And what is the truth?”

Breck looked at the shift room door. “Aren’t you going to take notes?”

“On the record?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

I took out my pen and notebook and opened the notebook and wrote BRECK, JAIL, WED at the top of the first blank page. I looked up at him. Only then did I notice.

“Did the cops confiscate your glasses?” I said.

“I don’t wear glasses,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“My grandfather,” he said, “did not kill Sister Mary Cordelia Gallesero.” He clasped his hands together on the table and leaned over them. “He may or may not have had romantic feelings for her. But he did not kill her. The truth is, he knew something about what happened to the nun, and so Father Nilus Moreau made sure he was eliminated. My grandfather wasn’t even arraigned. He was tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed in this very building in a matter of two days on a weekend.”

“That’s all public record.”

Breck continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “He tried to call the only person in the world he trusted-his daughter, my mother-but she was away at a wedding, and there was no voice mail or mobile phones to track her down. She heard about his death a good twenty-four hours after it happened.”

“He got in a fight with the wrong guy.”

Again he ignored me. “As a fellow investigator, Mr. Carpenter, you’ll be interested to know that I found the priest who supposedly heard my grandfather’s confession.”