The Morgue and Me (18 page)

A run came home. Daniel raised his arms. “Yes!”

“Just fifty bucks, for fun. Just to make the night a little more exciting,” Mike said.

I saw several bets by the initials DN. “I’m up two hundy already,” Daniel said. I examined the page again in disbelief, and considered ripping it out for evidence to be used against him later. It could be the only thing standing between him and the presidency someday—it would be up to me to stop him.

“You’re gonna lose it all, buddy,” Mike said. A graphic came up on the screen, showing the score: Tigers 2, White Sox 10.

I made mac and cheese for dinner—Daniel, rubbing his temples and rocking back and forth in front of the television, told me he didn’t want any—and by the time I finished, Mike had nodded off. I hadn’t told him about my visit to Dana’s yet; it made me feel guilty toward Mike, my best friend, snoozing away on the couch beside me. I wanted to ask him if he knew how the mayor treated her, but it seemed too personal. The least I could do for Dana was to keep my mouth shut and let her decide who knew about her home life.

The Tigers were down to their last out. Mike stirred upright, clapped his ledger closed, and gave Daniel a kick in the ribs. “Sorry bud, you lost it all. . . .”

Just then, a Tiger connected with a fastball. The bat hung loose from his arm and the ball traced an arc high above the outfield grass. The announcer said: “One of the greatest comebacks in Detroit Tigers
history
. Amazing. Unbelievable.” The Tiger swept around third base, engulfed in a river of teammates.

Mike knelt down in amazement and broke up laughing. “I owe, let’s see . . . let me find the lines here. Yeah, that makes it . . .”

“Thirteen hundred and fifty-two dollars,” Daniel said.

“Whoa,” I said, “I thought you said he only had two hundred dollars.”

Daniel bounded onto the couch. “Yeah, but I had the Tigers on a parlay.”

“Parlay?”

Mike finished a calculation and stared at Daniel in wonder. “Thirteen hundred and fifty-two dollars, that’s right. Did you do that in your head?”

Daniel nodded.

“I could use somebody like you,” he said.

Mike was laughing. Daniel had come out on top, as usual. For a brief moment, the world seemed right.

But it was a fantasy. It would all change the next day.

T
hings started out innocently enough.

Mike had crashed on the couch, and in the morning I found him pulling frozen boysenberries and other bounties from the fridge. He’d already found the blender, which could mean only one thing—another smoothie experiment. It turned out grainy. Plum colored. Bitter.

Daniel drained his whole glass in about two swallows and came up smiling.

“Thanks, Mike.”

“No problem. I gotta remember this one—Purple Haze.”

I swallowed something that might have been an acorn and gave up. I kept my opinions to myself and ruminated on Abby’s note; I had read it about a hunded times before going to sleep, in hopes that it would reveal something new. At the kitchen table, I played the last part back to myself over from memory:

I still wasn’t coming up with any fresh angles.

It was getting pretty frustrating, and I wasn’t being very social, but Daniel and Mike hardly needed me for conversation. In the background of my musings, I heard Daniel asking Mike if they could go to the movies later.

“Yeah, pick one out of the paper,” Mike said. “Just make sure there’s lots of sex and violence.”

But Dana had never seen Mitch there, and I doubt she would have missed him if he’d been there regularly. Mitch didn’t seem like a guy who would hang out at the pool, anyway. He liked to think of himself as a big shot, and the crowd at the pool wasn’t exactly high society, not like at the—

Mike was washing the glasses at the sink.

“Can you stay with Daniel this morning?” I asked him.

 

 

A banner fluttered across the second story of the Old Clubhouse: WELCOME TO THE FIRST-ANNUAL PETOSKEY CELEBRITY PRO-AM. We rolled up in Tina’s Trans Am, the stereo blasting a profane Eminem song from her “Workout” playlist across the tranquil grounds of the resort.

“I really can’t believe we didn’t think of this before,” Tina said.

“Yeah, I know.”

It was pretty obvious: if Mitch had been hanging out at a pool, there was a good chance it would have been one at the New Petoskey Resort and Spa. He wasn’t a member, of course, but he might have known an employee from his days working there and gotten in that way.

“Maybe the employee was even his partner,” I had said to Tina when I’d raced over to the
Courier
from home. Two minutes later, we had piled in her car and started formulating our plan. Our best bet, we figured, was getting a list of current employees who were working at the club back when Mitch left.

Another tournament banner hung in the Old Clubhouse. Below it, men in pastel shirts and bright visors trafficked through, sipping coffee, checking watches, filling the room with a distinct energy. Some of them lined up at registration tables staffed by gray-haired volunteers. The tournament schedule tacked behind them showed that practice rounds started today.

I wanted to head straight up to Corbett’s office, but Tina wasn’t having any of it. She insisted on starting with one of Buddy the bartender’s Bloody Marys instead. He beamed at her as he put down her drink.

“There you go, darlin’. I’d love to chat, but we’re scrambling today.”

“Well, don’t be a stranger.” Tina winked at him as he disappeared into the kitchen.

A leader board inside the bar listed all the tournament participants. The mayor and the sheriff, I noticed, made the “Celebrity” column, which seemed to render the term meaningless.

“Not to be a drag,” I said, “but I don’t see how this is getting us anywhere. Let’s just go to the office and ask his secretary for the list.”

Tina drained her glass and raised her hand for another. “Chris, you may not remember, but that’s an ex-boyfriend of mine up in that office. It’s awkward. Plus, his secretary’s not going to just hand over that kind of info without asking the boss. Sometimes you’ve got to lurk around a little, wait for your chance to strike.” She stopped and cocked her head. “Did I make that up? Lurk before you strike. Write that down for when you’re older. It applies well for picking up chicks at the bar. You’ll thank me.”

It sounded like it applied well to stalking, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, when Buddy came back with Tina’s second drink, I flagged him. “Hey, do you know where somebody might run into Alexander Corbett, say, if they wanted a word but didn’t have an appointment?”

Tina slapped my arm, and Buddy cut us with a sidelong glance. “You two are up to something.”

“We might be,” Tina said. “We might be.”

Buddy sighed. “Well, not that my name would ever get mentioned, but somebody could probably just look out that big window over there and see the man out at the tenth tee. They could probably bump into him over there.” He wiped his hands on his towel. “Now, I got work.”

“See?” Tina said. “You lurk a little, you get your answers.”

“I’m not sure it was the lurking. I think it was more the asking.”

“Whatever. We’re lurking till I finish this drink.”

The golf carts were lined up behind the clubhouse, all keyed up and ready for any of the tournament participants to take. Tina and I hijacked one and cruised past the practice tees toward the back nine. A hundred yards down the cart trail, just past the bunker-rimmed ninth green, Alexander Corbett was flashing his pearly whites around a large tent. Something about his eagerly projected confidence made him easy to pick up, even from just the painting and the photograph from the
Courier
.

I’ve heard that lots of movie stars have huge heads. I don’t know about his acting skills, but Corbett was qualified in the head department. His giant helmet of black hair was gelled so thick I could almost see a reflection of the clouds in it. On his feet he wore tiny black loafers, equally shiny. In between, there was lots of tailored clothing.

“Let’s lurk for a minute,” I said.

Tina punched my shoulder. “Now you’re getting it.”

We pulled off the path and relaxed in the shade of the cart. The tent was a “Courtesy Station,” established for the golfers to pick up a drink or a sandwich before making the turn to the tenth tee. We nestled behind a catering truck, unnoticed by the blue-coated officials, last-minute landscapers, and caterers servicing the area. Corbett was yukking it up with a group of pros collecting bananas and Gato rades. Standing a full foot shorter than them, he talked excitedly in their skyward direction, looking as though he’d be happy to feed them grapes if only they’d ask. When they left, he whirled and gave an earful to a man carrying food trays to the tent.

“Dude looks like an
ass
hole,” Tina said. She leaned back in her seat, surveying the elegant tenth fairway that rolled out ahead of us like Heaven’s front lawn. “So, what happened after they ruined the bluffs? Did this place even get into any trouble?”

“Not really.” I remembered pretty well how it all ended. It had consumed my parents for three months—three long months in which they went off on passionate tirades about the power of corporations, inadequate laws, and how Mother Earth went unrepresented in our judicial system. Family dinners had never been so boring. Even Daniel got a little tired of it after a while.

“Some environmental agency brought a lawsuit against the developers,” I said, remembering how my parents, after all their work to stop the construction that led to the disaster, had traded off days attending the trial. “If they’d lost, it would have bankrupted this place.”

“But they won?”

“Yeah. Mayor Ruby was actually the judge on the case. He ruled that it happened because of all the rain, not because of all the tree-cutting or the cheap drain system, which, according to my parents, is the real reason it happened.”

I could still see my dad’s face when he came home from court. My mom and I were home when he stomped into the kitchen, pale and stricken.
Lies, dear. It’s just a bunch of lies,
he had said, and I knew right away that the golf course had won.

“Mayor Ruby?” Tina said.

I nodded. “It was his last case before he ran for mayor.”

“Didn’t that make him kind of unpopular?”

“No. Businesses were depending on the tourism. They were all really happy the golf course survived. My parents think he ruled for the developers just so he’d win the election.”

“Politicians,” Tina said. “It figures.”

Corbett was alone under the tent, lining up water bottles with obsessive care.

“I’ve had bosses like this guy,” Tina muttered. “The insecure type. Probably wants to bone anything within a hundred feet.”

“You might wanna stay back then,” I said, and made for the president of the New Petoskey Resort and Spa.

Tina chanced it.

C
orbett checked his watch as we approached. Wind rippled the tent but his hair didn’t budge.

“Can I help you?” He looked Tina’s body up and down but otherwise didn’t bother to feign interest as we introduced ourselves.

“I know you’re busy,” Tina said. “We just need a quick word—”

“I’m sorry, but if you’re not credentialed you can’t be out on the course,” Corbett said. “It’s off-limits to anyone not participating in the tournament. Even under normal circumstances, it’s members only. Now, if you could return the cart.”

He fiddled with his gold bracelet, waiting for us to move along. Sweat glowed across his forehead, or maybe it was the hair gel melting down. A group of golfers came down the rise from the ninth green. I pegged a middle-aged man with a Hawaiian shirt as a local radio DJ, one of the “celebrity” players.

“It’s just a quick administrative request,” I said. “A list of your employees, from about two years ago.”

“We’re busy now,” he huffed, and was off to play host again.

Tina was still steaming when we got back in the cart. She punched the accelerator, then stomped on the brake. I jerked forward.

“No, this is bullshit,” she said.

“Tina, don’t.” Too late.

I couldn’t bring myself to follow her. Tina’s hair flowed behind her on her way over to ruin our chances of ever getting the list of employees. She stepped in front of the radio dude and said something to Corbett in a pointed way. Corbett gave the golfers a “one moment” gesture and barked something back. In no time they were into a full-on yelling match that I could hear bits and pieces of over the wind. Corbett’s side of it was threatening, and Tina’s side was vulgar. The golfers watched in stunned fascination, backpedaling away.