The Morgue and Me Page 5

  “How tight?”

  “I’m gettin’ to that. Anyway, when Art told me why the sheriff called, I figured he was going to send me out to write it up. It’s a nothing story. ‘Man Croaks at Local Dump.’ Sure, it’s tragic, blah. But big deal. You can’t do much with it.”

  She was right—the food was terrible. I pushed my plate away. From across the dining room, the old guys were checking Tina out.

  “That’s exactly the kind of crap assignment Art loves to give me,” she said. “We have a personality conflict, you could say. Or you could just say he’s an ass.”

  The waitress appeared again. She seemed hurt that we hadn’t enjoyed Ray’s handiwork. “Anything else?”

  Tina ashed on the remains of her burger. “Nope.”

  The waitress slapped our bill down and left in a huff.

  “But instead of sending you, Art went himself?” I said.

  “Exactly.” Tina jumped up in her seat a little, all enthusiastic about my brilliant deduction. “See, you’re getting it.”

  I wasn’t actually getting it. I was glad the sheriff was the one who’d called the paper, but it didn’t sound like any big deal to me. If Tina wasn’t insanely hot, the whole lunch might have been a waste of time.

  “And then, when I told Art that Blaylock had just gotten out of jail, he didn’t blink.”

  I looked up from my shake. “What?”

  “He just said it’d be more respectful to keep it out of the story, him being dead and all. I knew something was up then. Art would never care about being respectful.”

  “Mitch Blaylock had been in jail?”

  “I know, right? You see what I’m saying.”

  She reached into her file and splayed out two clippings from the Courier. One story was three years old, about a robbery at the Pit Stop on Route 7. It said that an unidentified man had assaulted the attendant and gotten away with $155.52 from the gas station’s cash register. The other story—a week later—reported on the arrest of Mitch Blaylock for the crime. Apparently, police had traced it back to him through his license-plate number, which they got off a tape from the Pit Stop’s surveillance camera.

  Tina gave me approximately a second to digest the stories and said, “He spent sixteen months in Jackson on the robbery and assault charges—he had priors for drunk driving and possession. Got paroled, came up here a month ago. And now he’s dead. Now, if you were writing a story about that guy, don’t you think you would have mentioned that?”

  I started to agree, but Tina waved the question aside like it was unfair to ask of someone without professional credentials.

  “I know I would,” she said. “Screw the quote-unquote respect.”

  “You think the sheriff told him to keep that out of the story?”

  A smile broke across her face, and for a moment my heart was too enraptured to beat. “Yeah, smarty. I think the sheriff wanted something kept quiet. Which Art would do in a second. He’ll do anything to stay in their good graces. The prick.”

  She fished a dill pickle from her plate. “So, that’s what I know,” she said as the waitress collected our plates. She was still giving Tina the hairy eyeball.

  “No tip for her,” Tina said. “Anyway, your turn now—better be good.”

  As I considered my options, two things happened. First, I realized that she had never asked me how old I was. I liked her for that. Second, Tina stripped off her long-sleeved t-shirt. There was another, regular T-shirt underneath it, which read, KISS ME, I’M CHESTY.

  “What I tell you,” I said with a voice that may or may not have quivered, “you can’t print in the paper. At least until I tell you it’s okay.”

  She raised her hand. “I would go to jail before revealing a confidential source.”

  I had a feeling that I was her first, but I didn’t press it.

  Instead, I told her everything I knew.

  “Damn,” Tina said.

  I had told her about everything: the bullet holes in Mitch’s body, Dr. Mobley’s bogus death certificate, the money in his briefcase, and his secret rendezvous with Tim Spencer. When I finished, Tina crushed out the last cigarette in her pack—the foil tray had taken about all it could.

  She picked the check up off the table. “Guess I owe you lunch for not being an asshole.”

  She paid and we carried our shakes to the parking lot, where Tina perched on the Trans Am’s back bumper and watched the trucks whiz by on Route 14, stirring the weeds. The air smelled of grease, but it didn’t matter. I could have stayed there all day.

  “Did you write the story about that judge who took the bribes?”

  “Don’t I wish. Guess you heard on the way over, I’m trying to get a job with the Detroit News or the Free Press. Cracking a story like this would help a lot.” She lowered her shades to get a clear look at me. “So tell me, are you some kind of a brain?”

  “I’m not dumb.”

  “Yeah, you’re a brain, I can tell. So how do you figure this thing?”

  “The obvious. Somebody paid Dr. Mobley off to conclude that Mitch committed suicide.”

  “Sure, but who? The sheriff?”

  “Probably,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. If the sheriff was the only one involved, it wouldn’t explain Mobley’s meeting with Tim Spencer. “Maybe it was some kind of botched arrest or something.”

  She nodded, and we just sat there, enjoying a strangely comfortable silence, until finally Tina stretched and grabbed her keys. It was a wrapping-up movement, and it gripped me with a kind of horror. I had known her for about an hour, but the prospect of a Tina-less summer filled me with mortal dread.

  “So, what do we do now?” I said.

  She opened the door to her car. “I’m going to write a story about this, if I can find out what happened.”

  “Look,” I blurted, “I didn’t come to the paper just to tell somebody what I knew.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want to find out what happened, too. If you try to investigate this, you’re going to have to do it on the sly, without Art finding out. You could use me. You know it.”

  “Easy, tiger.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I like the energy.” Tina jammed her straw around inside her shake. She was watching me closely.

  “What we need to do,” I said to fill the silence, as my heart did gymnastics over the prospect of joining forces with her in a Clark Kent-Lois Lane kind of way, “is find out who killed Mitch Blaylock. That’ll answer the question of where the money came from, and how Mobley is connected to this whole thing.”

  “C’mon,” Tina said, and hopped into the Trans Am. When I got in beside her, she shot me a grin.

  “You aren’t going to puss out on me halfway through?”

  “No way.”

  She fired up the engine. “Better not. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  PART II

  NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY or SUNKEN BLUFFS

  7

  We hit eighty-five on the way back to the Lighthouse Motel.

  Tina sighed heavily as we turned into the motel’s dreary lot. “Too bad you didn’t just swipe that fifteen grand, huh? I know I would have.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let it go. Tina burst out laughing.

  “I’m kidding, gullible. We’ll work on that.”

  “Uh . . . I guess I should go,” I said.

  “Not so fast.” Tina turned in her seat. “We need to move on this. First stop, right here. Lighthouse Motel. Get everything—what they know, who found the body, any details you can. Make sure to get exact quotes and the spellings of any names.” Tina produced a reporter’s notebook from her bag. “Here. It’s on me.”

  “You want me to do this?”

  “Good, you’ve got ears. I’m late for something else. You’ll do a great job. And oh . . . do you have a camera?”

  I couldn’t believe it; she was into photography. This was a common interest, something to build on. “Yeah, a Nikon D50,” I
said a little excitedly, “with a 50-200 millimeter—”

  “I don’t give a crap about the specs, Ansel Adams. Just get a picture of that stiff if you can. It’d be great to have.”

  I relaxed for the first time in an hour. “Beat you to it,” I said. “Got forty of them, suitable for framing.”

  “Hot damn!” Tina scratched my head. Good dog. “All right, can you meet me at the paper, noon tomorrow? With a report on what you found out?”

  “Noon,” I said.

  “See ya, sexy.”

  I climbed out of the car in a bit of a daze.

  An electronic bell chimed when I entered the office, a tiny space overloaded with a stand of vacation brochures and a water cooler dripping slowly onto the Astroturf carpet. I was actually doing this.

  The man who had been watering the flowers gave me a sleepy look from the counter. He had dark hair that went past his shoulders and needed combing. Behind him, a full set of keys hung from the pegboard. The lazy eyes, apparently, were all the greeting I was going to receive.

  “Hi there. Christopher Newell, special assignment reporter from the Courier.” It just came out, but I liked the ring of it.

  He groaned. “You aren’t here about those ads? I paid for them two weeks ago. Really brought in the business, too.” This, I detected, was sarcasm.

  “Oh, it’s not about that. I’m here about the guest who died, Mitch Blaylock.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, I’m just running down a follow-up piece. Nothing special. You might see it in the Sunday rag, B section, if you keep your eyes peeled.”

  “I’ll have my scissors ready.”

  I may have been getting carried away with my role. “Getting to it then,” I said, and produced the reporter’s notebook for effect, “did you happen to be on duty the night it happened?”

  “No, matter of fact. It was all over by the time I got back. Out with the boys.”

  “Excellent. So, who was on duty?”

  He nodded to an Employee of the Month sign that had last been updated two years and three months ago. The frame had cheerful, sparkly decorations, but the picture inside was yellowing and sad—a dreary woman with stringy hair who couldn’t be bothered to smile. It looked like a Christmas card from prison.

  “And who’s that?”

  “Abby.”

  “Last name?”

  “Shales.”

  “Shales—perfect, great.” I wrote it down. The guy wasn’t too chatty, but I was determined to win him over. “So, Mitch Blaylock. Did he stay here for a long time?”

  “’Bout a month. I usually don’t let people stay that long without paying. I did with him, though. He talked so damn fast, always promising to pay up the next couple days or so. I was getting pretty fed up. Fact, I was about to kick his ass out when he died.” The man shook his head a little. “Never did get paid.”

  “That’s quite a shame,” I said, although I don’t think he noted my irony. “Could I get a look at his bill possibly, to see if he made any calls while he was here?”

  He looked at me with new skepticism and swept hair out of his face in a wide-arcing maneuver. It fell on the back of his Kid Rock concert T-shirt. “I don’t know about that.”

  I decided to leave it for the moment. “What about visitors—did Mitch have many?”

  “Nah,” the manager said, settling his elbows on the counter, comfortable again. “I felt sorry for the guy, kinda. Maybe that’s why I kept giving him a break on the bill. Who wants to talk to an ex-con, you know? Said he came here straight from prison. I believed him, too, the way he went on about how great it was to shower, and eat some real food, and how it was weird to see new faces all the time, every day, and all that. Guy was a real talker.”

  “Okay, great, I think that might do it.” Behind the counter, a door opened to a room that appeared to be his living quarters. A TV tray with a pizza box on it sat in front of a couch. An episode of Jeopardy! played into the emptiness. It felt lonely.

  I closed my notebook and took a half step away from the desk. Tina wouldn’t mind being used like this. “The reason I ask about the phone numbers—well, you might have noticed the woman I came here with?”

  His eyes sparked to life. “The one out there? With the body?”

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Renee works in the mailroom. As it happens, she’s half sister to Mitch, but she didn’t even know he was back in town. Really broken up about it. Sad, really, she’s so . . . vulnerable. Anyway, she wanted me to find out if Mitch had tried to call her from the motel. Ease the pain, I guess.” I let it sit for a second.

  “Renee?” the guy said.

  “Yeah, Renee Hottington. She wanted to ask herself, but she couldn’t manage it today. Too emotional. I’m sure she’d be extremely thankful if, you know, you could do it.”

  He spent a moment finding a printout on his desk, which I guessed was Mitch’s bill. “Well, what’s her number?”

  He clicked a pen, ready to take it down. I had to give him credit. I walked over and gave him a fake number. He wrote it down, which gave me enough time to look at the entries for three local calls that Mitch had made, all to the same number. I closed my eyes and repeated it in my head for safekeeping.

  The guy shook his head. “Looks like he didn’t call her.”

  “Well, like I say, I’m sure her thanks will be plentiful.”

  “Tell her to come over any time,” the guy said as I walked out the door.

  Daniel and my dad were listening to the second bill of a Tigers doubleheader. The radio on the table was an ugly, scuffed thing that Daniel had built himself from scraps he found at the city dump; it had won him the second-grade science fair in a walk. The announcer’s voice came through clear enough to tell that a Minnesota Twin had just brought in two runs with a double up the gap.

  “That’s right,” my dad said, “for a double you draw half a diamond.”

  Daniel marked a score sheet with his Detroit Tigers pencil. I had to hand it to him; nobody bothered learning how to score a baseball game anymore. Soon, Daniel would be the sole master of civilization’s lost arts.

  “And do you plan on spending a lot of time with this woman?”

  We were all in the kitchen, and my mom was into her twentieth question about Tina McIntyre, whom, I’ll admit, I’d been a little evasive about. I’d let it slip that I’d eaten lunch with a reporter from the Courier, but telling my mom that I was spending my summer investigating a murder with her wouldn’t have flown.

  “I don’t know yet. I guess I’m kind of doing an internship.”

  “And are they paying you?”

  “No.”

  My mom fussed at the tempeh burgers on the stove. She had impeccable radar and seemed convinced there was something she didn’t like about my new friend. “Well . . . I’m sure that your father and I would like to meet this Tina before we leave for vacation. If you’re going to be working with her, or whatever it is.”

  My dad threw me a helpless glance.

  “Fine, Mom,” I said.

  “And I don’t suppose you’ve called Julia back?”

  I gave in after dinner. Crickets called to each other as I sat out on the back porch, portable phone in my hand, dreading the call to Julia. The wicker lounge chair was making my butt ache. What this was all about, I had no clue.

  The kitchen curtains separated and my dad peered out at me. “There you are,” he said when he reappeared on the porch. “Keep this in a safe place.” He handed over a printed page with flight numbers for my parents’ trip, times of departure and arrival, phone numbers for the airlines, the hotels they were staying at, the hotels’ phone numbers, street and e-mail addresses, fax numbers, and their rent-a-car reservation number.

  “You forgot the state tree of Idaho,” I said.

  He smiled. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Calling Julia Spencer. Don’t tell Mom. She’ll want a transcript.”

  “Nonsense. She’ll just pick up the other line
.”

  “How about you go man it for me?”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.” He saluted, then gave me an awkward man-punch on the shoulder. I shifted myself upright and dialed, hoping to get voice mail. Julia answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, Julia. I heard you called.”

  “Yeah. Wow, you called back.”

  Not this again. Julia obviously had developed a deranged obsession with my calling patterns, but I didn’t feel like talking about it any more than I had at the mayor’s.

  “So, I forgot to ask you something the other night,” she said. “Well, I didn’t really forget, you just seemed a little weirded out.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  “I mean, I don’t blame you. It was a little bizarre for me, too. Anyway, so I saw Mike and Dana downtown a few days ago.”

  Julia knew Mike pretty well, but I had no clue why she’d want to call me about a run-in with him and Dana. A pit was forming in my stomach.

  “Mike and Dana?”

  “Yeah. So, Mike told me about the party at Dana’s house. I mean, I don’t even think she likes me, but Mike said I should definitely come. I haven’t been hanging out with a lot of people from school, so I was kind of tempted.”

  Julia was getting revved up. Words were tumbling out of her mouth like they did when she got nervous. It used to happen when she’d read lines from a play. I helped her prepare for an audition once—one of those stupid things that I’d thought was just an excuse for us to hang out, like playing tennis or night-swimming in the lake.

  The play was The Crucible, and Julia was a pretty terrible actress. The nerves colored her cheeks and mangled her words and flattened her voice to a monotone. If you thought about it, it took a lot of bravery to act so badly in front of someone else. I sat in her room back then, listening to her practice, and I thought: I couldn’t do this. We went over and over the soliloquy, and she butchered it every time, and I might have fallen in love with her a little bit then, too.