Bryan Gruley - The Skeleton Box

“I’ll be goddammed,” I said.

“Huh?” Philo said.

“Good luck shutting the paper down,” I said, and hung up.

I dialed again, this time the number Joanie had given me. Eight or nine rings later, Beverly Taggart croaked, “What?”

I pictured her lying in bed. On the nightstand next to her would be a fake leather pouch for her cigarettes, probably pink, and an ashtray spilling over with butts.

“Tags,” I said.

“Who’s this?”

“I know where Luke is.”

I heard sheets rustling. “That bastard,” she said.

“I have to agree.”

“Who is this?”

I told her. She asked me where Whistler was. Of course I had no idea, but I said headed for Canada, with the cops on his tail. That didn’t seem to surprise her. I told her he had stolen something that had been buried on a hill overlooking Starvation Lake.

“He found it then?” she said.

“Found what?”

I heard the click of a cigarette lighter. “I wish I knew,” she said. She exhaled. “He would never say, exactly. All I know’s it had something to do with a nun his mother knew, and it was going to be our ticket out of the newspaper game.”

“Big book deal, huh?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Everybody up here knows about it.”

“That son of a bitch,” she said. She stewed for a minute. I pictured her in a redbrick bungalow in Garden City or Inkster, a rusting gas lamp sticking out of the front yard slush. “I did a lot of work on that project.”

“You talk to a guy named Breck?”

“The name sounds familiar. I don’t think he helped much.”

“It was you who found out about the map, though, wasn’t it?”

“Lucas told you an awful lot. What did you say your name was?”

“Philo.”

“That’s a strange name.”

“After my great-grandfather.”

“Did he get the map? He wouldn’t even have known about it if it wasn’t for me.”

“Somebody up here told you?”

She paused. I heard her lighter click again. “Some lady, I forget her name.”

“Louise Campbell?”

“Could be. She was all hopped up to help us-for cash of course-and then she just clammed up, wouldn’t talk again.”

“She died a couple of years ago.”

“Too bad. How?”

Cop reporters always wanted to know how.

“Broken heart,” I said. “Your book was supposed to be about a nun?”

“Partly. A nun who died back when Lucas was just a baby. He never told me everything, but what I heard sounded like a humdinger. Priests, murder, buried treasure. Bitsy knew it was buried, she just didn’t know where. Then again, Bitsy was just this side of crazy, and she was all drugged up on her deathbed when she told him, so maybe it’s all BS.”

“Who is Bitsy?”

“His ma. Elizabeth Josephine Pound Whistler. Bitsy.”

I wrote it down.

“Is she alive?”

“No. Died, oh, mid-nineties.”

Something was familiar about that name.

“Luke never said what the treasure was?”

“Nope. He just told me we’d be all set. So now the son of a bitch has it all to himself? I hope the cops-”

I hung up in the middle of her sentence. I’d gotten what I needed from Beverly Taggart. I got Darlene on the phone.

I told her I was now sure that Whistler had made off with Nilus’s box. His mother had told him things. He had learned that there was a map. He’d acquired my mother’s piece of it.

“He’s getting away,” I said. “You have to call the state police.”

“Dingus doesn’t like us sending the state cops on wild-goose chases,” she said. “I’m lucky he hasn’t asked for my badge already for kidnapping Bea.”

“Come on, Darl.”

“We don’t even know that he took anything, let alone what he took. Even if it was what you say, what does this have to do with my mother?”

“It must have been him. He was looking for the map. That’s why he never took anything. He left nothing behind. I’ll bet he broke into Soupy’s mom’s house, too.”

“All of those could just as well have been Breck. I mean, he was actually digging. And wasn’t Whistler covering the story the night of the murder?”

I thought back, recalled seeing Whistler at the hospital.

“Shit,” I said. “He was with T.J.”

“Tawny Jane?”

“Yeah, they’ve been fooling around. He was with her that night. He heard about it on her scanner. Damn.”

“Look,” Darlene said. “I’ll alert the borders at Sault Ste. Marie, Port Huron, Detroit. If he’s got something strange in his trunk, they’ll hold him.”

I sighed. “OK.”

“Get some sleep, Gussy. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

I grabbed my coat. I was exhausted and hungry. I considered driving to the Hide-A-Way for a burger, decided I was too tired. I’d have to settle for peanut butter toast. I glanced at the police scanner perched over Whistler’s desk. It was dark. “Now he turns it off,” I said to myself.

I moved to the TV. Merv, the weather guy, was talking about a snowstorm expected that weekend. He was fat and bald and way too cheerful about the prospect of ten to twelve inches of snow. Tawny Jane Reese, I thought, would not make a good weather bitch.

Then I froze. I looked at the scanner, then back at the TV, then at the scanner again.

“I have a huge scoop for you,” I told Tawny Jane when she answered.

“It’s late.”

“Two huge scoops.”

“Why the hell would you give me a scoop?”

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to sleep with me. But I need to ask you something personal.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“True. You want the scoops or not?”

I waited. “Give me the first one,” she said.

I told her about the Pilot ’s imminent demise.

“Like the bosses at Media North are going to let me report that,” she said.

“That’s up to you,” I said. As I talked, I stared at the name I had scribbled earlier: Elizabeth Josephine Pound Whistler. I drew circles around the four initials.

“What’s the other one?”

“First I get to ask you.”

“I might not want to answer.”

“Understood. But at the hospital the other night, when they took Phyllis, you were late.”

“Yeah. So?”

“You’re never late. You’re always on the ball.”

She was. And if she’d heard the bulletin about the break-in at Mom’s house at the same time Whistler had, there was no way she would have been late to the hospital. No way would Tawny Jane let a guy she was fucking beat her to the story- especially a guy she was fucking.

“Thanks,” she said. “Except when my scanner goes bonkers.”

“What scanner?”

“I have a police scanner next to my bed. It died on me Sunday morning.”

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

“So,” I said, “Whistler was not with you that night.”

“Sunday night? No. Why?”

I told her everything I knew about Nilus, Sister Cordelia, Whistler, the box he had stolen away. She must have said, “Oh my God,” ten times.

I called Darlene again and told her what I now knew.

“Calm down,” she said.

“He’s getting away.”

“No.”

“They got him?”

“No, I’m going to get him.”

“You mean we’re going to get him.”

“Are you still at the Pilot?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait there.”

“Out back?” I said, but Darlene had already hung up.

I turned off the lights and the TV and locked the door and stood in the back parking lot watching for headlights. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. I called Darlene’s cell. She didn’t answer. I walked out to South Street and looked up and down, as if that would make her arrive faster. At half an hour, I called again. It went straight to voice mail. I called the department.