Bryan Gruley: The Skeleton Box

I could have been just as good as Luke Whistler, or at least I liked to think so. But I had gone places I shouldn’t have, broken the law, and wound up back in Starvation Lake.

Finding Whistler’s resume in the mail the previous fall had surprised me. I was usually forced to choose between journalism school grads who couldn’t latch on at a decent paper and old ladies who wanted to use the columns of the Pilot to opine on the way teenagers dressed. I didn’t really vet him, didn’t bother calling his boss at the Freep, a know-nothing named McFetridge who couldn’t cover a house fire but had been promoted high enough that he could no longer do much damage. I knew Whistler’s clips and his reputation and, I had to admit, there was something perversely delicious about hiring him away from the Free Press, the competition I had so loathed and occasionally feared during my Detroit days. Besides, with the budget year nearing an end, I had to hire somebody or risk having the bean counters take the slot back. When I offered Whistler the job in a phone call one day, he told me, “They say all journalism careers end badly, it’s just a question of when.”

“Never heard that,” I said. “Funny.”

“Well, I’m going to prove them wrong.”

He insisted he’d come to Starvation not to retire, no, not a chance of that, but rather just so he wouldn’t have to worry every day about the Detroit Times or one of the network affiliates beating him to a story he’d been working on for weeks or months. His doctor had warned him about his blood pressure; strokes ran in his family, he said. Better to walk away now, settle into something less stressful, still be able to do what he loved, maybe have time for a little fishing, maybe read a book now and then.

Yet no one who had seen him around town, literally trotting from new source to new source, would think this hoary-headed guy in the ratty down vest and low-top sneakers had lost his passion. Whistler could get just as excited about a story on the new four-way stop at Horvath and Hodara roads as he could about the school millage vote that had split the town so savagely that Dingus assigned an extra deputy to the polling station. Hell, Whistler had happily written our annual story about the turkeys that survived Thanksgiving at the Drummond farm north of Mancelona.

Despite what he’d said about fishing and books, he was usually in the newsroom late at night, banging out the stories he had collected during the day. I would come in at 8:30 in the morning to e-mails and voice mails he had sent me just a few hours earlier. He avoided the place during daylight hours. “No news in the newsroom,” he liked to say.

I looked around the newsroom now, smelling old coffee and potato chip grease. There were three desks, some squeaky swivel chairs, a copier-and-fax machine that actually worked once or twice a week, and an old mini-fridge that made beers into slushies if you kept them in there too long.

“Can you hear those fluorescent lamps?” I said. “I hate that damn buzzing.”

Whistler shrugged. “Newsroom,” he said. “You know, I obviously didn’t know her well, but Phyllis was a good lady.” Mrs. B had worked the front counter at the Pilot. “I enjoyed getting to know her a little better at your mom’s the other night.”

Mom had had us both to dinner, and invited Mrs. B.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me. What’s the nicest thing she ever did for you?”

Someone who didn’t know Whistler might have told him it was none of his business. But I knew him, at least a little, and I knew he could not keep his curiosity bottled up.

“The nicest thing.” I thought about it. The story about getting my tonsils out was too personal. “When I was a kid,” I said, “she fixed one of my goalie gloves. My lucky glove.”

“Which?”

I flapped my right hand. “The stick hand.”

“Still got the glove?”

“Nope.”

“You know,” he said, “you remind me a little of Tags.”

“Who?”

“My old partner. Byline, Beverly C. Taggart. We’d be on some story, and she’d be acting all indifferent, but really she was the kind of reporter who wanted to knock on the door of somebody who’d just lost a daughter or a husband, maybe they didn’t even know it yet. Get there before the cops. She was good at that. Creepy good.”

“Before the cops? That’s out there.”

“Yeah. That’s probably why I married her.”

“She was one of your exes?”

“Both, actually. Married her twice. Divorced her twice.”

“You mean she divorced you.”

“Takes two,” Whistler said. “But I wouldn’t want to be married and divorced twice to any other woman in the world.”

“And I remind you of her why?”

“Well, you don’t have her caboose,” Whistler said.

I waited.

He said, “You’re not letting on how much you care. I mean, sorry for saying it, but what happened tonight could’ve happened-perish the thought-to your mother.”

I had let that notion curl into a ball in a dark corner of my mind. Better to imagine that the whole thing was some case of mistaken address or identity. I glanced at the ceiling, a suspended grid of warped beige panels that looked like they’d been dipped in piss.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Mrs. B,” I said. “Or my mother.”

“Your mother have a safe?”

“A safe? Right. Only the bank has a safe.”

“Valuables?”

“Define valuables. Her cross-stitch collection? She cashed in her jewelry a few years ago for like four hundred bucks and gave it to the Salvation Army. She’s got a coin collection she hasn’t looked at since my dad died. And a bunch of pictures of me in hockey gear.”

“Guns?”

“No. I mean, a twenty-two, for shooting muskrats and chipmunks, but they give you a twenty-two here when you get out of fourth grade.”

Whistler clapped his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. “OK then. We’ll talk tomorrow.” He zipped up his vest. “I suppose the next step is to figure out what this has to do with the other burglaries.”

“It happened on bingo night.”

“Yeah, but people know we already made that connection, so it’s a convenient cover.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“Anything to that Scratch guy not showing up?” he said.

“Who?”

“The hockey guy D’Alessio was talking about.”

“Oh, Tatch. A born-again Christian who plays goalie? Harmless.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone rang. Mom, I thought. “Excuse me,” I said. Into the phone, I said, “It’s Gus.” It wasn’t Mom. I listened. I hung up.

“Who was that at this hour?” Whistler said.

“No one.”

“You’re the boss,” he said. “Just tell me what you want me to do. We’ll get out there and dig some dry holes. You know what I say.”

“Can’t find a gusher without digging a few dry holes.”

“Yes sir.”

He went out the back door. The clock on the wall over the copier-and-fax said three minutes after three. I wanted to go to bed, but Darlene was waiting.

The tree house,” she had said on my cell phone. “Ten minutes.”

Beneath four months of snow, the one-car garage seemed barely more than a bump on a hill. If you didn’t know it was there, with a 1969 Pontiac Bonneville parked inside, you probably wouldn’t have thought it was anything more than a gigantic snowdrift.

I felt a tinge of regret seeing the shrouds of snow drooping from the eaves. My dad would have wanted me to climb on top of the garage and push the snow off so the weight didn’t cave the roof in. He had built the garage when I was two or three years old. On the back he had attached a platform of planks ringed by a wooden railing. He called it his “tree house.”