by Bryan Gruley
“Just keep writing.”
“First I’ve got to do something on this bank thing. The jerk gave me a bunch of crap for not running anything on it in today’s paper. And Tillie took off.”
“What bank thing?”
“I told you, the New York bank buying the banks up here? I guess one of whatshisname’s golf buddies is a banker.”
“Keep it short. What about Tillie?”
“She’s gone. Came back for about five minutes after you took off and cleared out. Didn’t say a word to me.”
The missing film files had finally spooked her. Or maybe my sudden departure. It worried me. Had she figured out where I was going?
“What else is going on?” I said.
“AP put out a short on the cops looking for you. Redpath’s funeral is tomorrow. The zoning board got postponed yesterday because of the snowstorm. And the chick from the clerk’s office dropped off a big envelope.”
The 1988 town council minutes. “Vicky?” I said.
“Yeah. She said she was sorry but she had to go get them from that bartender guy.”
“Loob. Can you open them up?”
“Already did. I don’t see much. But I’ll bet you wanted to know about the dredging vote.”
She was good and getting better. “Yeah.”
I heard her rustle some papers. “They voted on it at this April thirteenth meeting. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, like, duh, how else are you going to find a body? But the sheriff, this Spardell dude, was worried about how it might mess up his budget.”
“Yeah. He wanted a boat.”
“I’ll get to that. Anyway, first they voted three to two to dredge the lake. But the sheriff made a fuss and then the mayor-excuse me, the mayor pro tem, because the mayor wasn’t there-called the council into a closed session. They came out of that and voted three to two again, this time not to dredge.”
“Who called the session?”
“Mayor Pro Tem A. Campbell.”
“Soupy’s dad? Shit, that’s right, he was on the council. And who switched their vote?”
“You’ll love this,” Joanie said. “X. Perlmutter.”
“Huh? Clayton’s brother?”
“Oh, no, it’s Clayton. His first name is actually Xavier.”
I’d never known Clayton was on the council. But then I had been in Detroit. “What about the boat?”
“The last thing they did was authorize twenty-five thousand dollars for that, with Campbell abstaining since they were buying it from him.”
“What an upstanding guy. What kind of boat?”
“Doesn’t say. Just one ‘appropriate to the tasks of policing the lake and its shoreline.’ Why’s the town buying a boat for the county sheriff anyway?”
A recorded voice was telling me I had to insert more quarters. “Listen,” I said. “Go to my desk, second drawer on the right. Near the top you’ll find a photocopy of a receipt from the marina. Get it. Hurry.”
I waited. She came back on. “Got it. A receipt from the Starvation Lake Marina for twenty-five thousand dollars. Got to be for the boat, huh?”
“What’s the date on it?”
“Let’s see. April twelfth.”
“But the meeting was the thirteenth, right? How could the town give Angus Campbell the money before the council voted?”
“Good question. What does it have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t.
The recorded voice said the call was about to end.
“Hey, that reminds me,” she said. “On Perlmutter, I was going over some of the state grant stuff again and-”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m going to be sending you something overnight. Look for it. And do me a favor and call my mom and tell her I’m OK.”
“Gus, listen, one of the names on-”
The dial tone cut her off.
The Zamboni made its final circuit before the 11:45 a.m. hockey skills session. At the top of the bleachers, I placed the video camera on its tripod, slung the still camera around my neck, got out my pen and notebook. A dozen little skaters burst onto the ice in baggy socks and too-big pants, their faces obscured by cages. They swerved right and skated counterclockwise. I made sure the video camera was recording.
Behind the skaters, the door to their dressing room swung open and their teacher emerged. I tugged my Caps cap lower. Richard Blackstone wore his silver hair in a comb-over swept left to right and then back. My heart skipped a beat. Jack Blackburn never wore his hair that way. Blackstone seemed smaller and paunchier than Blackburn, and his face was obscured in a full silver beard. No, I thought. Is that really him? I zoomed the camera in on his eyes. They were downcast, watching his feet. Of course. Blackburn had just one superstition. Had he left it in Starvation Lake? Just before he reached the threshold, Richard Blackstone took a little hop and a skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, so that his left blade would hit the ice before his right. A shudder went through me. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, he was circling behind the goalie net to my left and heading up the boards toward me. I took a deep breath and looked into the video camera. I caught a closer glimpse of his face, but he quickly passed. I watched him with my naked eye as he circled again. His black sweatsuit did nothing to hide the bulge at his waist. His stride was still smooth, but his legs had to work harder to move him along. As he turned toward me, I leaned into the video camera and focused on his face. His teeth seemed whiter and more prominent, probably false. They set off the dull yellow that tinged his sagging cheeks and the creases at his deep-set eyes. I pictured him in his house at night, drinking by the arid glow of his television. It made me feel good to think of him as alone and pathetic, a dried-up old man unloved and anonymous. He circled again and as he veered my way a third time he turned toward me and looked straight into the camera. It startled me. Maybe I merely imagined it, but I thought I saw a faint, knowing smile play across his lips before he was gone again. Had he recognized me? Had Tillie gotten to him? I hadn’t expected how hard it would be to see those eyes again as I’d seen them so many times across the Sunday dinner table.
Below me, three mothers in parkas stood along the boards, chatting, paying little attention to what was happening on the ice. As the coach gathered the boys around him, I felt the urge to walk down to those mothers and tell them everything I knew. I imagined myself talking and pointing, and the mothers’ eyes darting between me and the ice, and the disbelief on their faces, followed by horror, either at the truth of the matter or at me for telling it. Twice I yanked my cap lower and coat collar higher and ventured down to the edge of the ice where I could get clearer shots of his face. I snapped shots with the still camera and, when his back was turned, took notes.
He ran some of the same drills the River Rats had run. He took the boys by the shoulders and steered them to specific spots on the ice and showed them where to look for the puck and which way to hold their stick blades. He arranged short stacks of pucks around the ice and made the kids weave between and around them without ever touching them with their sticks. If he told them they had to be hungry for those biscuits, though, I couldn’t hear. Near the end of the session, he gathered the boys around him at center ice. Through the camera I watched their helmeted heads nod in unison as he turned this way and that, telling them they’d done well, patting each of them lightly on the head. I heard them laugh. I heard them shout, “Yeah!” I remembered standing there watching him reach out to the other Rats, waiting for his hand to touch me.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. One of the three mothers was standing next to me, wearing a nervous smile.
“Excuse me,” she said. “May I ask who you are?”
“Oh,” I said, startled again. “Just a second.” I repositioned the video camera so it was pointed at the dressing room door.
“There,” I said. “I’m, uh, I’m with a newspaper.”
“I see,” she said. I saw her friends watching. “You
’re doing an article?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you with the Post?”
“I wish. I’m just with a little paper.”
“Really? Which?”
Of course I had no idea what papers were in the area. “The Pilot,” I said.
“The Pirate?”
“ Pilot, ma’am.”
“The Pilot,” she repeated. “I haven’t seen that one. But there are so many little papers around here, some days we get four or five on the drive. How could I get a copy of your article?”
“Well, why don’t I send you one? Here.” I handed her my pen and notebook. “Write down your address.”
“I didn’t know newspapers took video.”
“They don’t, usually, but it’s a good visual aid. I don’t take very good notes.” The kids were heading off the ice.
“Mm-hm,” the woman said. She handed the notebook and pen back and stuck out a mittened hand. “Well, I’m Miriam Belzer. If you’d like an interview”-she motioned toward her friends-“we’d be glad to help. What was your name?”
“A.J.,” I said.
“A.J. what?”
I peeked into the camera. The coach was looking up toward us. “Oops,” I said. “This thing is screwing up. Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ll watch for your story.”
She walked down. I hurried a fresh videotape into the camera. The first one wasn’t nearly used up, but I was going to need two. I refocused the camera as the coach followed the boys off the ice toward the dressing room. At the door, he stopped and turned and looked at me again. I felt an involuntary shiver of fear while I zoomed in on his face, the hard, certain face that nobody in Starvation Lake could fail to recognize, no matter how much they might want to. He held the camera’s gaze for a full two seconds before turning away. Again I wondered if he had recognized me. But this time I relished the thought that he might have stood there wondering, for even a split second, whether his past was about to crash down on him. thirty
I pulled into another gas station pay phone and inserted the rest of my quarters. A man answered at Channel Eight in Traverse
City. I told him Gus Carpenter was calling for Tawny Jane Reese. Five seconds later, a woman picked up.
“T.J. here,” she said.
“I’m holding for Ms. Reese.”
“That’s me.”
“T.J.,” I repeated, liking it.
“You know, you’re pretty famous around here.” Her voice was just as soothing on the phone as it was on TV. “Where are you now?”
“Am I on the air, T.J.?”
“You are not.”
“Good. I don’t have much time, so listen carefully: I’m going to FedEx you something. You’ll have it in the morning. But you have to promise you won’t air it until eight a.m. Saturday.”
As she thought about it, I imagined her furrowing her brow the way she did when she was telling her viewers about a bombing in Kosovo or a flood in Des Moines. The image appealed to me, at once so mundane and so glamorous.
“I don’t usually make deals,” she said.
“Really? So you just happened to be covering a men’s hockey game in the middle of the night when the cops showed up to arrest an alleged murderer?”
“Ah, well, we all make exceptions, Gus, as you ought to know.”
Touche, I thought. “Trust me, you’ll want to make an exception for this. It has to do with Jack Blackburn.”
“OK. What about you?”
“There’s something else you need to do. After you get this FedEx and you’re getting your story ready, you’ve got to call a guy for comment. His name is Kerasopoulos. He’s the lawyer at the company that owns the Pilot. ”
“I know that blowhard. Why do I have to call him?”
I was liking her more every second. “For one thing,” I said, “to find out what happened to Gus Carpenter.” That was partly true. Really I wanted her to let Kerasopoulos know that Channel Eight was working on a story so he would have to run Joanie’s story, unless he wanted to be scooped on the most explosive news ever to hit Starvation Lake. “The rest will be obvious once you see what I’m sending.”
“You’re just a voice on the phone.”
“No, I’m a FedEx package on your doorstep tomorrow morning.”
“OK, OK, it’s a deal. But let me ask could we just run a teaser the night-?”
“No. No teasers. Eight a.m. Saturday.”
“All right, but listen, we have a one-minute news break at seven-thirty that morning. Let me just mention it then. What difference will half an hour make? The Pilot’s out by then. That’s what you’re worried about, right?”
Tawny Jane Reese was all right. And, yes, I just wanted to make sure Elvis read the story in the Pilot before he saw it on TV. “OK,” I said.
I bought a Coke and a package of cheese crackers and ate as I drove to the FedEx store. I parked, pulled out my notebook, and transcribed my scribbling into readable print. Then I went inside and made a copy of the same notes on other pages. I slipped the copied notes, the videotapes, and the undeveloped stills into separate FedEx boxes and shipped one to Joanie at her apartment, the other to T.J. at Channel Eight.
I had originally planned to return to the rink and record Richard Blackstone’s three forty-five session with the eight-to twelve-year-olds, but decided it might spook him. Instead I backed the Bonnie into a spot at the rear of the rink parking lot with a clear view of his silver Toyota Camry. The sun was sliding down the sky when he emerged from the rink a little after five. He was carrying the puck bag, two hockey sticks, and his tackle box first-aid kit. A man and a boy walked along with him. The man carried a hockey bag. The boy, his dark hair matted with sweat, had a pair of goalie pads slung over a shoulder and a stick in his hand. He squinted up at the coach and the man as they talked. The coach lowered himself to a knee and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and spoke to him. The man regarded his son and the coach with a proud smile. The boy nodded.
I let anger rise up to suffocate my sadness.
I followed the Toyota at a distance of a few hundred yards. We ended up in a neighborhood of red-brick bungalows with greening end-of-winter yards, towering oaks, and one-car garages. The streets twisted and turned. At a four-way stop, a UPS truck got between me and the Toyota. Three houses down, the truck came to a lurching halt at an awkward angle and the driver hopped out with a package under an arm. With cars parked along both sides of the street, I couldn’t pass. “Son of a bitch,” I said, slapping the steering wheel as the Toyota disappeared around a curve.
I dug through my notes for the address I’d written down at the clerk’s office and, after doubling back once, located Blackstone’s house. I drove about half a block past it and pulled to the curb. As I waited for darkness to fall, I considered whether he’d seen me. Maybe as I sat there he was calling the police and I’d be hauled away before I could make anyone believe me. It didn’t really matter. This neighborhood where I’d never been before and probably never would be again was exactly where I was supposed to be. When the streetlights blinked on, I stuffed my cap in a coat pocket and pushed the record button on the miniature tape recorder.
“Home of Jack Blackburn,” I dictated, “214 East Luray, suburbs of Washington, D.C., Thursday, March fifth, five forty-nine p.m.” I slipped the recorder into my breast pocket and stepped outside.
Four shaggy pines obscured the front of his house, making it impossible to see inside. A lamp over the concrete porch was unlit. I climbed the porch steps and rapped on the door, standing away from the peephole. The last time I’d seen Jack Blackburn up close was on the sidewalk outside Kepsel’s Ace Hardware the summer before he left us. We’d said hello and nothing more.
I pressed my ear to the door but heard no stirring inside. I knocked again. Still no answer. I walked around to the backyard. The side drive was empty. Maybe he hadn’t driven home. Maybe he’d noticed me following and decided to lose me in the maze of
his neighborhood. I tried to peek into the garage but couldn’t see a thing through the tinted windows.
Cyclone fence hemmed in the backyard. I unlatched a gate and stepped across a semicircle of turquoise patio stones to the back door. Laying an ear against the door, I heard only the flat ticking of a kitchen clock. I looked around at the shadows surrounding me, thinking maybe I had been foolish to come at night. I looked at the knob on the storm door. Did I really want to add breaking and entering to my list of crimes? I tried the door and it gave. The door inside gave, too. I eased it open two inches and called out softly, “Anyone here? Mr. Blackstone?” I stepped into the dark vestibule. A corn broom leaned on the wall beneath a flyswatter hanging on a hook. To my right was a sliding door, to my left two steps up into the kitchen.
I turned toward the kitchen, catching a whiff of Lysol. In my breast pocket, the record light on the tape recorder glowed red. I leaned my head down and whispered into it, “Inside now.” The immaculate kitchen was dressed in snow-white Formica countertops, a white tile floor, white appliances, blond cupboards. On the counter sat a dish drainer holding a clean plate, a coffee cup, a fork, a steak knife. Next to it stood two bottles of Jim Beam, one nearly empty, one unopened. Impulsively, I opened a cupboard door. There was no River Rats sticker on the inside.
I stepped through the kitchen into a small living room. The front window curtains were drawn. The beige walls were bare. An unlit floor lamp stood behind a recliner, which faced a television that stood in a corner. A TV remote rested on a copy of Business Week magazine atop a small folding table next to the recliner. Along the wall to my right stood a table hockey game, the kind with a plastic bubble top I’d seen in bars. Beyond it in the corner stood a garbage can filled nearly to the top with empty Coke and Mountain Dew cans.
“Mr. Blackstone?”
Across the living room a doorway beckoned to a darkened corridor. I felt an involuntary urge to leave. I could go back to the Bonnie and stake out his house until he returned. But what if he didn’t? What if he’d recognized me and was now fleeing? I might never find him again. I couldn’t go back to Dingus and the rest of the town and tell them Jack Blackburn was still alive without being able to say I had confronted him in the flesh. They might not believe me. They might not want to believe me.