The Morgue and Me (22 page)

We had topped the stairs when I heard him call, “Are you guys going to make out some more?”

Tina took a seat before my monitor and clicked through the JPEG files with rising bafflement.

I had reordered the pictures so she’d see how it had happened: the mayor and Kate Warne entering; the short, dark figure right behind them; the three of them talking in the room; and then all of them leaving.

Tina tilted back in my chair.
“Corbett
?
”

“Yeah,” I said.

“What the hell is this? A threesome?”

That was for laughs, I think. When you saw the whole set together, it didn’t look like anything sexual. Corbett wore a crisp and tailored suit on his stocky frame, and his face was all business. He looked preoccupied, harried. At first I’d thought one of them showed Kate Warne putting her heels on, but after my in-depth inspection, I decided the grainy image actually showed her grasping a small briefcase.

“Notice the time stamp?” I said.

Tina checked the little yellow numbers running along the bottom of each picture.

“Two years ago,” she said, realizing it just then. “So . . . Mitch didn’t even take these?”

“I don’t think so. Not when he got back from prison anyway. They’re from before he even went inside.” I couldn’t imagine Mitch sitting on blackmail evidence for more than five minutes, let alone two years.

“I’m not getting this,” Tina said.

“I didn’t either, not at first.”

“You better spell it out for me. I’m a little slow today.”

“Okay, but I need to check something first. Does the
Courier
have copies of all its old papers? The Web site doesn’t have an archive.”

“Yeah, they’ve got them all,” Tina said. “In the morgue.”

“The morgue?”

“Not
that
morgue. That’s what newspapers call the place where they keep old copies.”

“Oh, all right. We need to go there.”

She gave me a sideways look. “Look dude, I don’t have the energy today. I need to know what I’m getting into before we head over there.”

I exhaled. “Okay, you know about the judge taking the bribes in those criminal cases?” Tina nodded. “Yeah, well, those stories keep saying that there could have been more than one judge doing it. There could be others taking bribes, too.”

“So?”

“So, what’s the biggest case in Petoskey in the last five years?”

“I dunno. Is there a point here, mysterioso?” But then I saw it dawn on her. Tina took off her sunglasses. “The golf course case.”

“Yeah, the one clearing the New Petoskey Resort for letting the bluffs slide into Lake Michigan. And who was the judge on that case?”

She turned to the computer screen and back. “No, you don’t think—”

“Yeah, I do. That’s exactly what I think.” I pointed to the picture of the mayor leaving the hotel room. “It was two years ago—he wasn’t the mayor then. He would have still been a judge.”

“We’re looking at a man taking a bribe,” I said, ejecting the memory card and sticking it back in my pocket—I wasn’t going to be separated from that thing until the mayor was in handcuffs. “We can confirm it at the paper.”

“Let’s do it,” Tina said.

 

 

When I told him we were leaving, Daniel was puttering around the living room, making his plans for world domination. Well, okay, he was just repeating French phrases from a Rosetta Stone video.

“Partez-vous?”
he said. “I mean, you’re leaving?”

“Yeah, you can go to the library if you want, but stay out of trouble.”

“Where are you
going
?”

“We have to do some work at the paper.”

“Can I go with you?”

I blinked. It was kind of touching, actually. “Look, I’m sorry. I guess I haven’t been the best babysitter—”

“You aren’t
babysitting
. Forget it, I’m gonna call Mike.”

“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t bother him today.”

“I won’t keep him long, little man,” Tina said. “We’ll be right back.”

“Will you come back with him?”

“If I can,” Tina said. “You can teach me some French, okay?”

“Okay,” Daniel said, and plopped happily on the couch. We gave him high fives on our way out, and I thought to myself,
He’s not such a bad kid after all
.

 

 

Tina floored it to the
Courier.
We were flying past MacGruder’s Market when she shot me a look. “So . . . do we need to talk about this?”

“Uh, talk about what?” Actually, I was pretty sure I knew what she was talking about, and it wasn’t Mitch Blaylock. I didn’t know if I wanted to broach the topic just yet, if ever.

“Last night was a good time, right?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, and well, I may have acted in the moment for . . . a moment, and . . . Look, I don’t know what the hell I’m even saying. This is a stupid conversation.”

“Ummm, we don’t necessarily have to—”

“All right, here it is. I don’t remember it too clearly, but I might have sort of led you on there, and I just don’t want you going soft on me. Are you going to go soft on me?”

“Uh, no.”

“I don’t know why I’m even needing to say this. You know your prick of a hero, Tim Spencer? He came to the house last night, after you passed out. Basically called me a pedophile.”

“I heard it.”

“So you heard him give me the big ‘hands off Christopher Newell’ speech.”

“Yeah, sorry ’bout that.”

“Not your fault.” Tina blew smoke out the window. “Jerk. What is he doing, keeping a watch on my house or something?”

“Let’s just forget the whole thing,” I said.

Tina pulled down her visor, slumping back in her seat at a red light. “Screw him. Are we cool about this?”

I had no idea what just got negotiated, except that we weren’t going to be stopping for edible undergarments on the way back to my place. “Sure, we’re cool,” I said, feeling stupid for the sunken feeling in my chest.

 

 

The “morgue,” as it turned out, was an orphaned room down the hall from a guy sitting at the biggest computer monitor I had ever seen, arranging the placement of stories in tomorrow’s edition. Tina whisked me past a set of restrooms, a fire exit, and a water fountain to an industrial gray room with a metal door.

She flipped the light switch, and the bulbs struggled to life at one-quarter strength. They provided enough light to make out a microfiche machine, a cabinet of film drawers, and leather-bound books of the
Courier
’s past volumes, stacked in a bookshelf made for a giant.

“Okay, what are we looking for?” Tina said.

“All we really need is the date that the mayor dismissed the case against the golf-course developers.” He wasn’t the mayor yet when it happened, but Tina knew who I meant—Dana’s dad. “Also, I want to know who the golf course’s attorneys were.”

“Hmmm. Stay here a sec, okay?”

“Where are you going?”

“It could take forever to go through all these.” Tina waved a hand at the tomes lining the walls. “We’ve got a search function on our internal network. Just give me a minute.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know if I could wait even five minutes anymore—I wanted to dive into those things and start looking.

But Tina came back in record time, a huge smile on her face. She shut the door, leaving us alone in the little room with the microfiche files and the wavering buzz of the fluorescent lights. “I could kiss you right now,” she said.

“Well, uh . . .”

“Sorry, shouldn’t have said that. Here, gaze upon your genius.”

She walked around the metal table in the middle of the room, pulled one of the giant volumes off the bookshelf, and flipped it open on the table. It was one of the later volumes, a little more than two years old. She turned gray pages crisping with age until she came to a front page with a blazing headline: RESORT CLEARED IN DECISION. The article had a large picture of Corbett standing on the courthouse steps with his arms raised, fists clenched. A subheading over the first column of the article (written by Art Bradford, natch) read, RULING SETTLES LEGAL QUESTIONS AROUND BLUFF DISASTER.

Tina pointed to the date. “How about that?”

“How about that.” It was seven days after Kate Warne, the mayor, and Alexander Corbett had met in the hotel room.

“Now, check this out,” Tina said. “Third graf, right here.”

She pointed to a quote from none other than Kate Warne, identified in the article as “counsel to the New Petoskey Resort and Spa.” Her statement was a BS-sounding line about how nobody had wanted the damage to happen less than the golf-course owners had. “The state wanted a scapegoat for this natural disaster, but in his well-reasoned opinion, Judge Ruby wisely declined their invitation.”

I turned to Tina, who actually kissed my cheek. “They did it, Tina. Corbett and Kate Warne—they bribed him for that opinion. It was one of the last things he did before he became mayor.”

“I know.”

If people knew, the scandal would set Petoskey on its ear. “It’s not enough to print a story, though, is it?”

“Not yet, but now we
know
it. I’m out of my gourd right now.”

The pictures didn’t really prove anything, expect that Kate Warne, Corbett, and the mayor had met at a hotel one night. Even if that was prohibited by the court rules, which I suspected it was, it didn’t necessarily mean that any bribery had occurred. But Tina was right: we knew it.

I gobbled up the rest of the article while Tina flipped to others that her search pulled up. They detailed how Mayor Ruby’s ruling had prevented a trial that “would have torn the community apart, for no good reason,” according to Kate Warne, who was quoted liberally in the reports. My parents appeared a few times, too. They were featured in one sidebar story about citizens who had protested the development. Somebody had shot a photo of a meeting of the Ad Hoc Committee to Preserve Petoskey’s Beautiful Spaces, which had moved out of our house by that time to accommodate their “increasing popularity among environmentally minded citizens from Petoskey and beyond.”

Julia Spencer showed up in the background, wearing a button that said DON’T BLIGHT THE BLUFFS. I wanted to reach in there and apologize to her.

Tina wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Do you realize how huge this is?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “But does this really get us any closer to who killed Mitch?”

It was unlikely that the mayor, Kate Warne, or Corbett had killed Mitch for the pictures. If they had, they would have destroyed them. But we knew that hadn’t happened—they’d ended up with Mike.

“Maybe not,” Tina said. “But we know a big part of the picture, Chris. We just have to give a little push, and it’s going to tumble right over into our laps.”

“Yeah,” I heard myself say.

“I’m going to ask Larry about this,” she said.

“No, Tina.”

It wasn’t that I worried about them getting back together. It wasn’t that I saw her going back to him, retreating to his bed of silk sheets with a bucket of ice and a champagne bottle at the ready. Well maybe, but there was more, too. “He could be loyal to Warne. He might . . . ummm . . . warn her.”

“Kate Warne? You said she pushed him out of the firm.”

“Yeah, but Tina, don’t bring it up without me there, at least. Please.”

“Dude, I’d do anything for you right now,” she said. “Almost anything.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No prob. But I’ve got to do some work now. Call you later?”

“Sure.” I stood up, ten feet tall and ready to conquer nations.

I
didn’t have my car, but I didn’t care—I had brought my camera along with me, and I had this idea that I would take some pictures on the walk home. It wasn’t like I didn’t have some things to sort through.

Daniel didn’t pick up when I called from the sidewalk on the way back to Main Street. I kept walking down to the Rialto Cinema, called home again, and left a message for him that he should be ready to go to a 7:05 show or he’d miss out on his chance to see Angelina Jolie naked. Then I called my parents’ hotel room and left a message that everything back home was going swell.

At the house, I yelled inside for Daniel. He didn’t answer, like I knew he wouldn’t, and I headed out to the Escort. I tried the library first, but his favorite chair was empty. It was in the reference section, where a small collection of wispy, fragile-boned men whiled away the summer entombed in silent, air-conditioned comfort. They gave me mistrustful looks of the kind I imagined their wives had to be familiar with.

“Is Daniel here?” I figured they were regulars and would know him.

“The whippersnapper?” one of them said.

“Yeah.”

“Nope, ain’t been round.”