The Morgue and Me (7 page)

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.

She got cast as Bewitched Girl Number 3, but I never saw her perform. Opening night was just after Homecoming.

Her voice paused, and I could hear the crickets again as she hesitated on some kind of verbal cliff. “I thought maybe you’d want to come along to the party?”

“Like, go with you?”

A rushed laugh came over the phone. “I mean, not like a date or anything.”

“No,” I said. “Obviously.”

“Christopher, c’mon.” Her voice was whiny, like I’d offended her. “I just want some company, you know? Dana’s going to have a million friends there. So what do you say?”

I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t back out on Mike, either. “Well, actually, Mike already told me about it.”

“Oh, great,” Julia chimed. “So we’re on?”

“Ummm, yeah I gu—”

“Awesome. I’ll pick you up.”

I hung up the phone, more confused about Julia than ever.

T
he suffocating popcorn smell was gone, but other than that, the
Courier
’s office felt the same as it had before. I stood at the entrance, proudly clutching the phone number I’d gotten from the guy at the Lighthouse Motel. I followed the rough-edged sound of Tina’s voice to a cubicle with pictures of NASCAR drivers tacked to the walls and Dr Pepper cans strewn about the desk. She hung up the phone midsentence when she saw me.

“Look who’s here,” she said, and snatched the scrap of paper out of my hand. “Whaddaya got?”

“A phone number Mitch called three times from his room.”

Tina nodded slowly. “Nice work, genius. What’s it for, the country club?”

“The country club?”

“Yeah.” She rummaged through a teetering pile of books on her shelf and pulled out an old Petoskey High yearbook she’d gotten from somewhere. She turned to a flagged page with a picture of Mitch sporting a ridiculous-looking mustache. “Says here he caddied at the country club back in high school. That’s the only thing I’ve been able to find out about him, except that we missed his funeral. They had it yesterday.”

“Oh.”

Tina had learned more about Mitch Blaylock in half a day than I had in three. “I just called around to the cemeteries, took about five minutes. But this is a real start,” she said, flicking at the phone number. “So c’mon . . . who was he calling?”

“I figured we’d look in a reverse directory.”

If you’ve seen enough movies with crusading journalists, you learn that newspapers have these phone books ordered by phone numbers instead of names. Tina didn’t seem impressed by my knowledge.

“Hmmm. Yeah, we could do that. Or how about this?” She picked up the phone and dialed the number. “Sometimes you just gotta get your hands dirty, Chris.”

“Oh, okay.” I stared at a picture of Tony Stewart spraying beer at his crew, feeling pretty useless, while Tina waited for someone to pick up. The hypnotic tones of Petoskey’s light rock wafted through the newsroom.

“Five bucks says it’s a chick,” Tina said, then gave me a shushing motion. She listened for a second and hung up the phone.

“Warne and Lovell,” she said to me. “Ever heard of it?”

I had. “They’re lawyers.”

“Shysters,” Tina said grimly. “Wouldn’t you know it.”

Warne & Lovell had a prime location. The offices were on the second floor of Petoskey’s most “historic” building, above a restaurant called Tellers that had been converted from a bank. My mom and dad went there for anniversary dinners.

Tina blared a playlist of “Angry Songs” on the way over while I told her what I knew about Warne & Lovell. It wasn’t much. It was the town’s first law firm, and Mayor Ruby had been a big shot there before he left to become a judge, and then on to politics. I figured Tina would know more about the place than I did, being a reporter and all, but she told me she’d just moved to Petoskey six months ago and was still catching up on everything.