Bryan Gruley: Starvation lake

“No,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Elvis said. “Deputy, can you control your prisoner?”

“Sometimes,” Darlene said.

“No, by all means, let the boy speak,” Dufresne said. “Augustus knew these men well. Please. Son?”

He held his hand out to me, throwing a shadow across Leo’s urn. I did not take it. He knew where Blackburn was. He had known for ten years.

I looked directly at Dufresne. “What happened to Leo was not our fault,” I said. “It was not the town’s fault. You know that.”

“Well, son, I suppose we can agree to disagree.”

“No. It’s not a matter of opinion. You know.”

“What is it that I know?”

“You know Jack Blackburn was not a good man.”

“What the hell is this?” Elvis interrupted.

“Quiet, Uncle El,” Darlene said.

“Gus Carpenter has had it in for Jack ever since-”

“Shut your fat mouth, Elvis Bontrager,” Mom said. “Do you hear me?”

“Augustus,” Dufresne said. “I thought we were friends. I tried to help you as best I could, didn’t I?”

“Sure. Like you told me to look at the minutes of the meeting where the town council decided not to dredge for Coach’s body. Then you had your bartender-Loob, for Christ’s sake-go take the minutes so I couldn’t see them. I guess you think I’m pretty stupid, huh?”

“Not at all, Augustus.”

“How about that old calendar in your office?”

“A calendar? My God, what of it?”

“You got it from your bank, First Fisherman’s of Charlevoix. Then they got bought by First Detroit. And you stayed with them, right?”

“What in the world? We’re at a memorial service. This is no place for business.”

Judge Gallagher spoke up. “Why don’t you answer the question, Francis?”

Dufresne turned to him, unable to hide his surprise. “Ah,” he said. “Well, all right. Sure, I stayed with the bank, why wouldn’t I?”

“You wrote a check on that account in April of 1988, just a few weeks after Coach’s”-I hesitated-“incident. April twelfth, to be exact. For twenty-five thousand dollars. To Angus Campbell.”

“I’ve written a lot of checks to a lot of people.”

“Not for twenty-five thousand dollars in hush money.”

Dufresne folded his arms. “Excuse me?”

In the distance a siren wailed.

“I’ll show you,” I said. “Joanie, somewhere in that backpack I’ll bet you have a copy of that marina receipt we talked about.”

“Sure,” she said. It took her a minute, but she dug it out and handed it to me.

I held the receipt up for Dufresne. “See?” I said. “It says, paid in full, check 5261, written on First Detroit Bank. It’s your handwriting, Francis, not Angus’s. I guess you didn’t trust him.”

He chuckled again. “If that’s my signature, I’ll eat the receipt.”

“The signature’s smudged,” I said. “But look here.” I moved closer to Dufresne and pointed. “I’ll bet you didn’t think a word like ‘Jerryboat’ could give you away.”

It had come to me in the jail when my mother showed me the copy of the check signed by Francis J. Dufresne. The J on Dufresne’s signature looked like an F. It had a little tail on it like a fishhook.

“I’m sorry,” Dufresne said. “I don’t follow.”

“Yes, you do.” The siren was upon us now, just beyond the trees ringing the clearing. “How about your buddy Clayton Perlmutter? You helped get him a bunch of state money to stay quiet, too, didn’t you, Francis? You paid a lot of people to keep quiet.”

“Clayton Perlmutter? I haven’t spent more than five minutes with that old hermit in my life.” He looked at Darlene. “I think this foolishness has gone-”

“You were there, I mean here ”-I pointed at the ground-“you were here that night at the bonfire.” Some of the onlookers gasped. “There was Blackburn and Leo and Soupy and you. You were here the night Jack Blackburn supposedly died.”

“Supposedly?” Elvis said.

“You waited in the woods until Soupy ran away. Then you made Jack Blackburn leave Starvation Lake forever. You told him he’d gone too far, Francis. He’s not in any lake. He didn’t commit suicide. You kept him alive. And he kept you in the porn business.”

“Oh, my God,” my mother said.

“This is insanity,” Dufresne said.

“Sure as hell is,” Elvis said. “But it’s over now. Looks like you’re going back to jail, Gus.”

Everyone turned to see Dingus emerge from the snow-laden trees, trailed by Catledge and D’Alessio. The circle parted and the sheriff stepped into the middle. He gave Darlene a look, then addressed me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Thank God, Dingus,” Dufresne interrupted. “Augustus must have gone stir crazy in jail and now he’s dishonoring a good man-two good men-with a lot of crazy talk.”

“I see,” Dingus said. He plucked a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Like what?”

“Francis,” I said, “who owns the controlling interest in Richard Limited? Why has that company been paying the taxes on the old Blackburn estate?”

“Dingus,” Dufresne said. Now I heard fear in his voice. It felt good.

“Where’s Blackburn, Francis?”

“Get him out of here, Sheriff, so we can finish paying our respects.”

“Where is Jack Blackburn?”

Dufresne took a step toward me. His eyes went cold.

“I don’t know where he is. And neither do you. You don’t know a damned thing, do you, Augustus?” He turned to Dingus. “Sheriff?”

Dingus moved between us and slapped on the cuffs.

With Dufresne in custody, Judge Gallagher issued more pieces of paper that prevented the state cops from collecting me. After a couple of loopy hearings in his courtroom, they, and Superior Motors, gave up.

Joanie and I wrote front-page stories about Blackburn and Dufresne every day for the next three weeks. Soon the networks had camera trucks crowding Main Street. Reporters from across the country were lining up for interviews with Dingus and egg pies at Audrey’s. But the Pilot owned the story.

Darlene hadn’t really snuck me out of the jail; Dingus was in on it all along. She’d listened carefully to my talk with Mom and, on a hunch, pleaded with Dingus to search Dufresne’s home. Judge Gallagher came through with a quick warrant. Then Darlene left her walkie-talkie on as we stood at Leo’s gravesite. Dingus heard everything. In the trunk of his cruiser were boxes of confiscated photographs and videotapes, labeled with the same cryptic markings I’d seen on Blackburn’s bookshelves.

For years the legend had gone that Dufresne took five thousand dollars he inherited in the late 1960s and, by investing wisely time and again in real estate, turned it into millions. The truth was that he’d taken a thousand dollars from my father and a few other unwitting investors and, with the help of Jack Blackburn, turned that stake into a child pornography business. With Dingus’s help, Joanie and I uncovered a far-flung network of pedophiles buying and selling films and photographs, largely via the Internet. Dufresne was at the center of a loose but sophisticated web of suppliers, distributors, and consumers. The FBI hauled him away on charges of mail fraud, income tax evasion, and possession of child pornography.

Agents found Blackburn, Dufresne’s most reliable supplier, at a highway rest stop near Jacksonville, Florida, sitting on a picnic table eating a bag of fried pork rinds. He’d colored his hair and his beard a garish shade of red. He told the agents he was a recreational-vehicle salesman named James Graham, even producing genuine-looking identification. A cardboard box hidden in the spare-tire well of his Camry contained half a dozen videotapes and three manila envelopes stuffed with photographs.