The Next Cool Place

by Dave Balcom

  I sat back a minute. It wasn’t so shocking that she would ask this question, but the direct way she asked was so genuine and naïve that it took me back. Then I thought it might have been given to her as part of the assignment, and I decided to play with her a bit.

  “I haven’t read this week’s edition yet, and as you know that’s the only edition your readers ever judge. Readers don’t average. I read some back issues at the library, and I thought the newspaper came across as professional and thoughtful. Of course, I have no idea if the stories are accurate, balanced or fair.

  “I did think the editorial page was a bit liberal for this part of the world. I thought the sports coverage reflected its place in the lives of people, especially the outdoors coverage.

  “And, of course, the outstanding quality of the photography is obvious on first glance…” I delivered this in an off handed “everybody knows” tone while inspecting my boots. I sneaked a peek under the brim of my hat and could see her start to color just before she realized she’d been set up.

  “Great, thanks for that. You’re living up to your reputation as a smart ass.”

  “My reputation? I’ve been in town for three days and I have a rep?”

  “Guy has to be careful who he runs around with, I guess.”

  “I knew Big Mike was going to be my undoing.”

  At that she broke up laughing. She thanked me for the interview and started setting up to take the obligatory “informal portrait” that goes with such an interview.

  “Can I ask you a question while you finish up?”

  She smiled, “Sure.”

  “I noticed your by-line on the story of Mickey Buchanan’s fatal. Did you know him?”

  She hesitated and then dead panned, “I knew of him, why?”

  “Did you ever think while you were writing that story that you weren’t getting the entire story or that there was something funny weird about the story?”

  She pointed at the front of the house, and as I turned my head, she started taking pictures. “Now, beyond my left shoulder… perfect” and the auto drive on her digital Nikon rattled like small arms fire.

  She studied the results in the panel on the back of her camera, flicking forward and backward through the digital images. I heard a slight satisfied “hmmm” and she shut down the camera and started packing away her notes.

  “You know, I didn’t think there was much to question about the accident. Buchanan was a known boozer. He’d been drinking and arguing with his wife and some business associates. He left the restaurant about eight-thirty. Nobody knows where he went after that, but about one a.m. he piled his sports car into a culvert. Most likely he was home drinking and then went to look for his wife, couldn’t find her, and found eternity instead.”

  “Why do you think he was off looking for his wife?”

  “Sergeant Fish told me that he received the call about one-thirty and came from his house at Fife. About two-thirty the sheriff went to notify Mrs. Buchanan, but she wasn’t at the house. They went back out there about four-thirty and she was in the house. If she wasn’t there at two-thirty, she probably wasn’t there at one.”

  “Did you ask her where she was?”

  “I never spoke to her. You read the story? When I tried to follow up, their lawyer from downstate, a mister Willis Crocker, made it very clear to me and to Jan that any further harassment of Mrs. Buchanan would lead to legal action.”

  “Harassment?”

  “His word, not mine.”

  “You guys backed off?”

  “There really wasn’t much else to report. The M.E. called it an accident and we briefed that.”

  “I missed that brief. Did you guys ever print the obit?”

  “It never arrived. McGee called and called and called. Finally the funeral director called Jan and told her the family had specifically requested we not receive the obit for publication. By then it was old news anyway.”

  “Is that strange?”

  “Way strange. We receive obits all the time for summer people, even some who haven’t been here for years, but they were known by some locals, and they loved this place and wanted to be remembered.”

  “The Mickey I knew wasn’t the shy retiring type. A lot of people knew him?”

  “And liked him. Some would have driven down to Lansing to attend the service. You were a friend of his, right? Is that why you’re here, to look into the circumstances? To see if it was on the up and up? Are you working some story I should know about?”

  “No, nothing like that. I knew him thirty years ago, we were very close, but things happened and we drifted apart. His death rocked me a bit, you know? His friends from a place called Lake Lucy, where I knew him, held a celebration of his life last weekend, and I came back to attend. As long as I was here, I thought I’d take a nostalgia trip. I used to fish around here all the time.”

  “Ohmigod! I gotta move. I’m meetin’ some people to fish the midges up by the camp, and I gotta go. Thanks a bunch Mr. S.”

  “My pleasure. See ya in the funny papers.”

  That cracked her up. I thought maybe my reputation as a smart ass made every old saw I knew a knee-slapper with the staff at the Record.

  14

  An itch was starting. Call it an apprehension, even. But that feeling had led me to many a story. The only way to scratch it was to interview people.

  My first call Friday was to the State Police barracks in Cadillac and I was rewarded with the direct number for Sgt. Fish’s “office” recording. I left my name and cell number with little explanation other than it was about Mickey and it wasn’t an emergency.

  My call to the Medical Examiner’s office in Kalkaska found me another voice mail recorded by one Dr. Mildred Schwarz. It was about then I decided I had to pack up and move for the night as there would be no room at the Inn.

  I called Jan to see about lunch, but was told she was in Traverse City. I asked for her cell and was politely informed that if I left my number, she could call me. I did, and again admired the professional way her staff had handled me.

  Big Mike and I had lunch, and then I was gone. Driving up the river road toward M-66, I stopped at the culvert where Mickey Buchanan had died. The road was almost perfectly straight for more than a half mile coming from Schaeffer’s to here, high above the Big Manistee. In fact, the only jog in about two miles of the road was right there, where Cross Creek went under the highway. There was no little memorial like you see so often any more along the roads where people have died.

  There wasn’t even a mark on the culvert or the dirt embankment where the sports car had crashed. It was quiet. The trees towering up the hill dripped from a light mist, and swallowed any sounds beyond their own sighing.

  The itch was real.

  I rented a room in Kalkaska in an old motel that held a vivid memory for me. I was 14 and my dad and I were building a cabin out along the Boardman River.

  It was early May, and we had driven the well for the place, and didn’t find water in the required 20 feet. My dad dreamed of a pitcher pump in the sink of his place, and they’ll only pull water some 20 feet.

  He then dazzled me. Using a skinny tree cut for a lever and a log for a fulcrum and by wrapping a chain just so around the well pipe that was in five-foot sections, we pulled that well back out of the ground without bending a pipe or damaging the point. Once we were started, the whole operation was as quick and smooth as pulling a nail. It didn’t take 15 minutes.

  “How did you know how to do that?” I had asked my dad. I knew he was smart, he was a tool and die maker. I also knew that he lacked much in formal education, having quit school after the 8th grade during the depression.

  “Just picked it up,” he said.

  While that memory is part of that trip, the motel’s vivid memory was waking up on Sunday morning to find the world draped in half a foot of snow. I can never forget looking out that window at the trees with snow covered limbs and one forlorn robin puffed up and pouting, its breas
t a vivid red accent in that black and white world…

  For dinner, I chanced the Hotel, which had been a central gathering place in my youth when hordes of folks descended on Kalkaska for the annual Trout Festival.

  The joint was jumpin’ when I arrived just past 6. Happy Hour, a Friday night custom, was in full swing and the county seat’s professional staff was out in force. On a hunch, I asked the waitress if she knew Dr. Schwarz, and she said she did, and pointed her out to me.

  Schwarz was a middle aged woman sitting with a group of co-workers in a corner booth. They were all laughing and talking and moving to the music coming from the juke box.

  I watched her walk to the bathroom, and decided I would introduce myself, let her see that I was “normal,” and ask for an appointment to talk with her on Monday.

  It seemed safe enough to me.

  When she reappeared, I was waiting; put on my best innocent smile, and greeted her. “Dr. Schwarz?”

  She stopped in stark terror, looking around immediately for help. I put my hands up in front of my chest in what I thought was a reassuring gesture. “Whoa, I don’t mean to startle you. My name’s…”

  She gathered herself and the look of fear was replaced with one of anger. “I don’t care who you are. What’s the idea of jumping out at me here in the dark?”

  “I’m sorry. I called you today, left a message on your machine. Then the waitress pointed you out to me, and I thought you might give me an appointment to talk with you on Monday if I asked and you knew I was harmless.”

  “You don’t look all that harmless.”

  There are some people, not all of them women, who react like this whenever some stranger my size approaches them. One of the first things I had to do when I started my newspaper career was learn how to overcome that fear. One key, especially with women, was to go very formal.

  “Madam, I assure you, I have no intentions other than to ask you some questions about a friend of mine who died this winter in a one-car crash near Mineral Valley. I’m curious to know if the findings of an accident had been what you call open and shut or if there were any unanswered issues surrounding the case. That’s all. Really.”

  All of this was delivered with my hands in the surrender position and while I appeared ready to flee.

  “You mean the Buchanan fatality?” And all at once her entire body language changed. “I heard your message today, and failed to answer it. Sorry.”

  “Not a problem. Can we make an appointment for Monday?”

  “That was a cell number you gave me?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And you’re staying in town tonight?”

  “Yes, I’m leaving for Grand Rapids tomorrow morning. I’ll be home in Oregon on Monday, and I could call you then.”

  “How about I call you tomorrow morning, while you’re driving, if you’re going down one-thirty-one, there’s coverage all the way.”

  “That is very kind of you,” I said, taking a step back. “I’ll look forward to hearing you tomorrow.”

  She smiled a grim little twitch of her lips, and headed for her table. I could see her group had been watching us, and they were all questions. I went back to my table, found the salad already there and the fish was pretty good, too.

  15

  When I boarded the plane Sunday morning, my itch was a live thing, crawling across my shoulders and reaching into my hands.

  The flight to Minneapolis from Grand Rapids took about an hour and a half, and while the stews passed out coffee and juice, I replayed what had been a productive drive down U.S. 131 from Kalkaska to Grand Rapids on Saturday.

  Dr. Schwarz called me just after 8. She was all business, and I could tell she had a file open in front of her as she reviewed her findings.

  “This is all public record, you understand,” she said in way of prelude, and then she launched into her report. “Death resulted from massive trauma to the entire body resulting from the impact of the vehicle at high speed. Subject Buchanan was wearing a seatbelt. All six of the vehicle’s airbags, the two front and even all four of the side bags, deployed, but at that speed, they were no match for the subject’s momentum. He still impacted the steering column and dash.

  “There were extensive injuries to his chest, neck and head,” she paused.

  “Were there, perhaps, any injuries you found that weren’t consistent with the crash?”

  “You have to understand what a mess he was. That impact was as if he’d jumped off the Sears Tower. I’m guessing he had to be going a hundred miles an hour.”

  “Do your notes refer to anything that you found that seemed strange?”

  “No, well, there was a decidedly lower blood alcohol content than I would have been led to expect.”

  “Really, you mean he wasn’t drunk?”

  “Legally impaired, for sure. He registered a point-zero-eight. That’s the threshold for impaired driving. However, from what we gathered from testimony by his wife and business acquaintances, I would have expected much higher readings.”

  I would have, too. I could remember when Mickey woke up every day with a blood alcohol level of at least point zero eight.

  “And was there anything else in his system? Drugs, say?”

  “No, alcohol was the only thing that registered in the toxicology report.”

  “And what did you have for his actual time of death?”

  “Ah, yes, that was a bit strange, too. But in rural one-car crashes, especially at that time of year and on a week night, it can be explained.”

  “What explained?”

  “Oh, from stomach contents and testimony from the Schaeffer’s staff, I put his time of the accident or death at before midnight, perhaps as early as ten.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The digestive system can really shut down when the body’s dealing with extensive trauma. We see stomach and intestinal evidence that looks just like death in victims who lie in a coma for hours or days before they die. The system shut down at the time of the accident and did not restart.

  “Doc, did he die in that car?”

  “Undoubtedly. But why nobody noticed the crash until one-thirty, I can’t explain.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a pretty obvious place and it stuck out pretty well for anyone passing by, and he must have sat there if not dead at least fatally injured from ten or eleven until somebody came by and noticed the wreck. That’s a long time even on a typical winter week night, but certainly strange on a St. Patrick’s Day night.”

  “Was there anything else?”

  “No, but if you’re thinking that somebody killed him and put him in the car and then faked the crash, you’re wrong. He died in that car at that site.”

  “Really? Could he have died in his car somewhere else and then been towed there and run into the culvert?”

  She paused thoughtfully and as I was driving through Manton, Michigan, I just waited. “That could have been, but how? That car was going way too fast for someone to jump out.”

  “Would cruise control with the rear wheels off the road work?”

  “That’s not my area, but I can tell you he was in that seat when he died.”

  I thanked her and dialed the “office” number for Sgt. Fish. He answered on the first ring, and I started thinking maybe the only time these folks are ever not swamped is a Saturday morning.

  I introduced myself and explained my relationship with Mickey. “Do you mind if I ask you some stupid questions?”

  “Well, I’m right now writing up a report on stupidity. Three meth heads tried to steal gas out of a delivery fleet in Cadillac, but they kept cutting the fill line, not the outflow. Finally one member of the brain trust lighted a match to see why no gas was filling their can… Your questions can’t be all that stupid.”

  I chuckled along with him, “I’m just wondering if you recall anything about the night Mickey died that you wrote off as weird or strange.”

  “Like what, like if I wasn’t
lazy, I’d have tracked it down and found some reason to suspect foul play?”

  “Sergeant, I’m not trying to say anything about your investigation. I’ve come into this movie real late, and I didn’t start out looking for anything other than a nostalgia trip, but I’ve heard and seen some stuff that has started raising the hair on my neck.”

  “What kind of stuff.”

  “It would take hours to bring it all together for you, but I knew Mickey a long time ago. He met his wife, Charlotte, during that time, but they weren’t an item until after Mickey started working on the Penny Point development.

  “I went to a celebration of Mickey’s life a week ago, and some old stories that I heard there kind of jibed with some new stories I heard in Mineral Valley…”

  “Why did you go to Mineral Valley?”

  “Oh, the nostalgia thing. I used to fish around there when I was a kid growing up. The Copper, Bush, No-Name, the Big M, Au Sable – I fished them all and loved that area. When I heard Mickey had a development working up there, I just went up to look around, think about youth wasted, that rot.”

  “And you heard things?”

  “Just things. And I saw people I didn’t expect to see, and it appeared they were providing security to people I wouldn’t naturally expect to employ security guards… Again, it only connects with everything else I think I know.”

  “Are you some kind of investigator?”

  “No, not official or anything like that. I’m a retired newspaper guy. I spent a good part of my life doing investigative reporting and editing…”

  He interrupted again. “Spell your last name again, will you Howie?”

  “No, it’s J-I-M as in James; S as in Sam, t as in Tom, a, n as in never, t as in Tom, o, n as in never. Stanton.”

  He spelled it back, and then I could hear him exhale in recognition. “Oh, you’re him. My wife reads your books. When she heard you were dating Jan Coldwell, she about had a kitten.”

  “Dating?” I couldn’t help it, the word just jumped out.