We parked on Main Street—it took my ears a minute to adjust to the calm after the radio died out. Tina threw her gum into a gutter on the way to the entrance, which had a sign noting that the firm had been established in 1937. We took the elevator to the second-floor office.
“What exactly are we going to say to them?” I asked. “‘We know Mitch Blaylock was murdered and were just wondering if you might have done it?’”
Tina snapped her sunglasses together as the elevator door opened. “We’ll think of something. C’mon.”
The office had blood-red carpeting and smelled of flowers. A woman sat at the reception desk, wearing a headset. She addressed us in a whisper: “Can I help you?”
“Hopefully,” Tina said. “Somebody in your office was in touch with a man named Mitch Blaylock in the past week or so. Do you know who that might be?”
“I’m sorry, there’s no Mitchell . . . whoever here.”
“Yes, we know—”
The phone was ringing. The receptionist gave us a saccharine smile and raised a finger, begging patience. She eventually patched the call through, then made a showy effort to re-engage with us, as if getting back to a nettlesome problem of advanced trigonometry.
Tina had lost patience with her already. She slapped her reporter’s notebook on the counter and said, “How about this—is Warne around? Or maybe Lovell?”
“Mr. Lovell is no longer with the firm,” the woman said, basking in superior knowledge. She dialed a number, swiveled, and mumbled something about “Mitch Blayless” into her headset. “Ms. Warne will see you in a minute,” she said finally, with a sour look on her face.
We headed to the guest chairs. “Bitch,” Tina muttered.
I recognized Kate Warne immediately. She appeared at the edge of the reception area in a short-short skirt, the light shining off her blonde hair the same way it had at the mayor’s party.
She nodded a greeting, looking us over carefully. Tina had lost her leather bracelet, which probably helped us pass muster. Also helpful, she didn’t have a lewd T-shirt on. Kate Warne didn’t seem to remember me from the mayor’s party, which made sense—she’d been far too occupied with the bartender.
“Why don’t we talk in my office?” she said, and strutted back down the hall she had emerged from. We passed a half-furnished office with cardboard boxes and flat spots in the carpeting from the legs of bygone chairs. We ended up in a corner office with a view of Main Street. The walls were bare except for some crisp black-and-white photographs. No curtains on the windows.
Kate Warne introduced herself as she poured a glass of water from a pitcher with lemon slices floating inside like lily pads. Her legs were long strings of muscle, and you could see almost all of them in that skirt. She sat straight at her desk, her head high.
“So. You were asking about a Mitchell Blaylock, is that right?”
Her husky voice was the one touch of grit that hadn’t been buffed clean like the rest of her. Suddenly I could see her eating macaroni and cheese in front of a wrestling broadcast, and I liked her more.
“Yes—” Tina started.
“I can’t help you very much on that—don’t know him. He may have been calling for Lawrence.”
“Is he a lawyer here?” Tina said.
“Formerly,” Kate Warne said. “May I ask what this is about?”
For a split second, I could almost see the wheels spinning in Tina’s brain before her face settled into a theatric grimace. “It’s a bit of a sad story,” she said, and crossed her hands on her lap. “He died a couple of days ago. Very young.”
Kate Warne’s face softened, the frosty veneer gone in an instant. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. Actually, I didn’t know him very well. I’m just a reporter. Mitch grew up in Petoskey and played professional football, you see. The
Courier
may do a little piece on his career. And Christopher”—Tina threw sympathetic eyes on me and tilted her head, isn’t-he-cute style—“he’s an intern with us. And he was Mitch’s greatest fan.” Tina was making out the article like some kind of Make-a-Wish project for my benefit, which was making me feel slimy. But Warne was gobbling it up.
“We think that Mitch may have been in contact with someone at your firm before his death,” Tina said.
“Yes, I see,” she said, now giving me the too-cute look as well. “Unfortunately, I think Lawrence is probably the only one who can help you with that. Lawrence Lovell.”
“Nobody else here who might have talked to him?” Tina asked.
“I doubt it. We have a small staff. Lawrence and I are the only lawyers.” She stopped and took a sorrowful breath. “
Were
the only lawyers. He just resigned.”
“Does he have a contact number?” I said.
Kate Warne picked up a fountain pen and marked the back of a business card. She handed it over to me. “His cell. Mine’s on the front, just in case.”
“Thank you,” Tina said, shaking her hand. Kate Warne gave me a buck-up nod as we departed. My eyes swept across the modern office one last time before leaving, and stopped halfway.
In one of her black-and-white pictures, Kate Warne stood next to the sheriff, smiling brightly.
9
T
ina had seen the picture, too.
She whipped out her cell as soon as we left the office. “Friend of mine at the paper,” she explained to me, cupping the receiver. “She wrote those stories about the dirty judge. She knows everything.” Her friend must have come on the line then, because Tina started asking about a connection between the sheriff and Kate Warne.
We hopped into the Trans Am and I shut off Tina’s stereo before it could blow out her friend’s eardrums. Tina listened eagerly.
“You rock,” she said into the phone, then clapped it shut.
“What’s the deal?”
“They’re brother and sister,” Tina said. “How about that?”
The sheriff’s fingerprints were turning up everywhere. He’d called the story in to Art Bradford at the paper, which Tina said was unusual. He’d been there for the bogus autopsy. And now, it turned out Mitch Blaylock had been calling his sister’s law firm.
“He’s got to be the key to all this,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean anything yet.”
If Kate Warne had told us the truth, Mitch wasn’t even calling for her. We needed to talk to her partner. From him we could find out Mitch’s real link to Warne & Lovell, and whether it would lead back to the sheriff like everything else.
“Get what’s-his-face on the horn,” Tina said.
She was talking about Lawrence Lovell, and I wondered if the fact that I knew it meant we were soul mates.
I fished Warne’s card out of my pocket and called the number on the back. It rang four times before a honey-glazed voice told me I had reached Lawrence Lovell and that he regretted the fact that he couldn’t speak to me. I found him hard to believe. Tina spit her number out for me and I left it in a message.
“Buzzkill,” Tina said, and I knew what she meant. We’d just started getting somewhere, and now we’d have to wait for the guy to call back. Tina sulked, revving the engine at a traffic light. I tried to think of other leads and only came up with one.
“Got time for a trip to the country club?” I said.
Tina nodded, smiling. “Good call. Why the hell not?”
The light turned green. She blasted the “Angry Songs” mix and floored it.
A huge sign saying NEW PETOSKEY RESORT AND SPA marked the entrance to the country-club complex. Tina pulled in and we followed a snaking road to an intersection with little wooden signs pointing the way to the spa complex, tennis courts, and the cardio theater. The signs were affixed to a pole at odd angles, like those ones in the middle of nowhere pointing to TIMBUKTU, 607 MILES in one direction and CAIRO, 1,290 MILES in another. I think they were supposed to be cute. Tina kept on until we reached another blizzard of signs: INDOOR/OUTDOOR POOL, WHITEFISH RESORT, LAKE VIEW CONDOMINIUMS, GOLF ACADEMY, and the OLD CLUBHOUSE.
She stopped in the middle of the intersection, reading intently. “Christ, you need MapQuest to find your way around here. You know your way around this place?”
“Nope.”
I’d been here a long time ago, when it was just a regular little golf course. But I’d never actually set foot in the New Petoskey Resort and Spa, which was kind of weird. Weird because there’d been a huge scandal when it opened a few years ago, and it was all anybody in Petoskey talked about. I’d heard so much about it I felt like I knew the place, but now I was seeing it for the first time. The fairways on either side of us were carpeted with electric-green grass, bare of trees, and silent as a church. A worker in a white jumpsuit mowed a stretch of grass that already looked perfect. He glanced over at us and frowned, pegging us as riffraff. He probably wanted to come over and straighten our collars.
“If Mitch was a caddy, maybe we should try the clubhouse first,” I said.
Tina nodded and followed the sign until we arrived at a black asphalt parking lot the size of a football field. The clubhouse in front of us looked like a winter lodge. Golfers gathered to the side of it, taking lazy practice swings and scrubbing golf balls in a red machine. Tina shaded her eyes and looked off to our left, where we could see the resort’s signature building—a fourteen-story glass tower of luxury hotel rooms with built-in Jacuzzis.
I knew about the Jacuzzis because of my parents. I knew a lot of details like that; the golf course was all they’d talked about for a long time. I knew the hotel had 160 rooms, I knew they’d built three new golf courses, I knew the names of the chemicals they used to make the grass green, I knew that the place we were standing used to be a cherry orchard. The country-club property stretched for about a mile ahead of us, where there used to be a forest.
Tina sighed as she took in the glaring tower.
“You know why I moved here?” Tina said. “I saw a picture of the bluffs. I applied to the
Courier
the next day.”
We both laughed.
Petoskey Bluffs had been the town’s claim to fame. They were pictured on the town seal, the
Courier
’s masthead, and all the old travel posters ever made. They were pretty cool, those bluffs. At their highest point, they formed a 340-foot coastal wall that dropped down to the edge of the lake. People used to set up lawn chairs at sunset, just to watch them turn a bloodstained orange. It was the kind of thing that Julia and I would have done together in high school, if the bluffs hadn’t disappeared by then.
The developers wanted to make their new golf courses look like the ones in England, which don’t have trees on them, so they clear-cut the forest. But as it turned out, the forest had been playing a vital role for Mother Nature, absorbing rain and sheltering the bluffs from storms on the lake. When the spring rains came, the bluffs crumbled right down. It was the worst environmental disaster in the history of Michigan. The entire twelfth fairway—the part on the town seal—slid into Lake Michigan. Just like that, Petoskey’s natural wonder had become a mudslide.
That was four years ago, so the bluffs were wiped out before Tina even applied to the paper. I guess research wasn’t her strong suit.
In the clubhouse, lacquered wooden benches circled a huge fireplace in the center of the lofted room. To the side, newspapers hung from wooden racks near a cluster of stuffed chairs. The place would have felt pretty cozy except for the dead animal heads peering down from the walls.
We wandered down a hallway to the management office, which had a glass door with the names of club officials stenciled onto it. Inside, a beefy man with a tattoo on his neck manned an antique reception desk that cramped his giant body. Behind him was an oil portrait of a slick man in a power tie, gazing importantly into the distance.
The guy at the desk was reading something with a pencil at ninety degrees to his temple, about like you’d do with a gun if you were highly depressed. Maybe the job was getting to him.
Tina groaned.
“What?”
“Guy I dated,” she said. “Perfect.”
She inhaled deeply and charged ahead. Up close, I could see the receptionist’s tattoo (a dagger) and the thing he was reading (
Pro Paintball Monthly
). I wondered how things had ended between him and Tina and braced myself for fireworks.
“Hey, Tina,” he said with surprising tenderness.
“Hi, Bob. Guess I’m the last person you expected to see walk through that door.”
He shrugged boyishly. “You could say that.”
“Well, good to see you.” Tina grabbed my shoulder, breaking the mood. “Anyway, I decided to start robbing cradles, so say hi to Chris.”
Bob chuckled and shook my hand with something that felt like a Thanksgiving ham.
“Any bigwigs available?” Tina asked, thumbing back to the names on the door.
“You need an appointment,” Bob said apologetically. “They aren’t around anyway, though.”
“Can we schedule something?” I said.
“Sorry, you’d need to call their secretaries.” Bob motioned to the slick guy in the painting. “That’s the president, Alexander Corbett. If it’s something important, you probably want to talk to him. Whaddaya need, anyway?” He looked down at his magazine as soon as the question escaped his mouth. “Not to be nosy.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Tina said. “We’ll call ahead sometime.”
She gave him a smile, which he seemed to like, and then we left Bob, the tender tattooed muscleman, to his paintball. As we left, the oil image of Alexander Corbett watched over him like a father giving him an inferiority complex.
“Get me a drink,” Tina said outside the office. “Quick.”
10
S
he pulled me back through the lodge area with the huge fireplace, where we spotted a bar and grill on the far side of the room. The place was called Putters, with tables covered in green linen and paintings of fox hunts. Tina made a beeline for the bar, tended by a chubby black guy who was clearing the empty glasses of a sporty young couple.