Starvation Lake (46 page)

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.

The town council declared the day of Blackburn’s arraignment an official day of atonement. More than five hundred people piled onto school buses to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids. An hour before the arraignment, they assembled along both sides of the sidewalk leading to the courthouse door. They stood in icy silence as federal marshals ushered Blackburn past, his head down, his eyes on the ground.

After Soupy was released from jail, he holed up in his marina office, shooing reporters away, too ashamed to talk. I left him alone. But that summer I returned to Grand Rapids and took notes as he gave testimony that would help send our old coach to prison. On the third morning of the trial, I spotted Dingus and Barbara Lampley at a coffee shop nearby, holding hands.

Joanie ignored the job offers pouring in while she worked on the Blackburn story. One night after deadline I sat her down with some Blue Ribbons and nacho chips, and we decided she should go to the
Chicago Tribune
to cover the police beat.

“All right,” she said. “But not until we’re done here.”

“OK, boss,” I said.

A few days after she left for good, I was named executive editor of the
Pilot.

   One afternoon, I walked up to my father’s old tree house. Under my arm was his Bell & Howell movie projector. In my pocket was the key to the closet I had never been inside.

The reels of film, fourteen in all, lay in cardboard boxes on the closet floor. I hung a bedsheet in the garage and aimed the Bell & Howell. I ran every reel through it, or tried. A couple of them, rotting, disintegrated in my hands. Others shredded as they fluttered through the projector. Most were movies of Soupy and me and my other buddies playing at Make-Believe Gardens. I’d forgotten how Dad used to run up and down the rink trying to get all of us into the frame; one time he slipped and fell on his face, and we all laughed. Other films showed some grainy images of women and men having sex. But no boys.

I dumped all of it, including the projector, into an oil barrel behind the garage. I doused it with kerosene, lit it, and stepped back in the wet snow to watch it burn.

“Hey, Gus.”

I looked up to see Darlene standing at the corner of the garage, wearing jeans and a denim jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. She walked up and stood facing me on the other side of the fire, a brown paper sack under her arm.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Not much. A little spring cleaning.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. I could feel her looking at me. The celluloid sizzled and spat.

“Brought you something,” she said. She walked around the fire and held the bag out, smiling. She hadn’t smiled like that at me in a long time. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Even Mom couldn’t fix her this time.”

I looked inside the bag and saw the tattered remains of Eggo. Darlene must have retrieved it from Horvath Road. I reached inside and touched the scrap of black electrical tape clinging to the thumb. I looked up at Darlene.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t know, Darl. Sometimes, I swear, I wish we’d just brought him back and drowned him in the lake.”

“No, you don’t.”

“What the hell.” I took the bag from her and tossed it on the fire. “I won’t be needing that anymore.”

“Gus. You can’t quit hockey.”

“I know. But I’m done playing goalie. Time to fire pucks at other people’s heads for a change.”

We stood there a little longer. The fire quieted until I could hear the melting snow dripping off the garage roof.

“Want to get out of here?” I said.

“Yeah. Want a ride?”

   Thanks to my agents, Erin Malone and Shana Kelly of the William Morris Agency; my editor, Trish Grader of Touchstone; her assistant, Meghan Stevenson; my copy editor, Amy Ryan; and my Web designers, Sunya Hintz and Justin Muggleton. They all made this book better. For her courageous book
Crossing the Line
, thanks to Laura Robinson. For their advice and encouragement, thanks to John Anderson, Shelly Banjo, Joe Barrett, Valerie Bauerlein, Michael Brown, Helene Cooper, Kimi Crova, Carrie Dolan, Sam Enriquez, the Gruleys (Danielle, Kaitlin, Joel, Pamela, David, and Terry), Matt Hulsizer, Greg Jaffe, Allan Lengel, Dan Morse, Bruce Orwall, Jonathan Pecarsky, Frank Provenzano, Mike Schroeder, Sean Sherman, Andrew Stoutenburgh, John Wilke, Jeff Zilka, and especially Jonathan Eig. Last but far from least, thanks to the Shamrocks, the Flames, the YANKS, and all the boys of Thursday hockey.

For the Complete Reading Group Guide, please visit www.simonsays.com.

How has your background in journalism helped prepare you to write mystery fiction? Is Gus inspired by anyone you know?

My years working for newspapers small and large helped me invent the
Pine County Pilot
and informed much of Gus’s behavior and choices relating to his journalistic present, past, and future. As for writing a
mystery
novel, per se, I didn’t set out to write a genre mystery; I just wanted to tell a story. Storytelling has been a big part of my journalistic career, both as a reporter who loves to write nonfiction narratives and an editor who encourages others to write them. Turns out the story I chose to make up in
Starvation Lake
is a mystery. OK. I think most novels are essentially mysteries, wherein authors pose questions and answer them as they see fit.

The question about Gus reminds me of the time I told my
Wall Street Journal
colleague Greg Jaffe, a great narrative writer, that I was writing a novel. “Don’t tell me it’s about a hockey-playing journalist,” he said. Very funny. Actually, though, Gus is an amalgam of many people I have known, journalists and not, and just as all of them have influenced who I am in one way or another, they have influenced the way Gus apprehends and interacts with his world. So, I suppose there’s a bit of me in Gus, although I am not a goaltender, at six feet two I’m a head taller than Gus, and almost none of what happens in the book ever happened to me.

What is your personal connection to the setting of the novel? Are you a Michigander? Could you see this story taking place anywhere aside from Starvation Lake?

I grew up in Redford, a blue-collar suburb abutting Detroit on the west side. In 1971, my parents bought a cottage on Big Twin Lake, about forty miles northeast of Traverse City in the northern Lower Peninsula. It’s probably my favorite place on earth. I’m writing the answers to these questions at that cottage, sitting on an oak swing that faces the lake between a pair of ancient birch trees. For dinner, I’m planning on a patty melt at the Hide-A-Way Bar on the
real
Starvation Lake a few miles from here.