Page 156 of Hello, Summer
Skelly put the car in gear and drove back to Felicity Street. The police cars were gone, but the front yard was ruined. The lawn was crisscrossed with deep tire ruts, shrubs had been knocked over, and a wrecker was in the process of winching the ruined Corvette off Lorraine’s front porch.
Conley’s stomach churned. “I think I’m gonna hurl.” She threw the car door open, bent double at the waist, and vomited in the street.
“I’ll go inside and get your stuff,” Skelly said. “I’ll put it in your car and back it out of the drive. Will you be okay out here?”
“Yeah,” she said, panting. “My keys and stuff are in the backpack, upstairs in my room. Can you please find what’s left of my phone? I need the SIM card.”
“It’s taken care of,” he said.
59
Michael was on the phone and typing a mile a minute when she walked into the newsroom. His eyes widened at the sight of her. “Are you okay?” he mouthed.
“Fine,” she mouthed back.
She sat at her desk and unloaded her backpack, setting up her laptop, taking out her notebooks and pen, and retrieving the newspaper clipping from her pocket.
LOCAL ROCK JOCK ARRESTED IN DUI DEATHwas the headline in theDetroit News.
It had been a big story. Robert “Robbie” Breitweis was the morning-drive-time deejay, back in the day when big-market deejays were a big deal in a town like Detroit. According to the newspaper, he’d had the highest ratings in town. Never married but always a fixture at the hippest new bars and clubs in town.
His fall had been fast and hard. She opened the browser on her laptop and began searching for more of the original news coverage. After forty minutes, she had the hard facts. The victim, a pretty teenager, the name of the car dealership where he’d been doing the remote broadcast, quotes from witnesses who said he’d been covertly drinking all afternoon.
They gave Conley a snapshot of the crime and the sentence, but shestill didn’t know much about the Buddy Bright who’d ended up in Silver Bay, Florida.
She found the name of another deejay, a woman named Kady O’Keefe, who’d worked with him at his next-to-last job at a station in Madison, Wisconsin. After another ten minutes of searching, she found a reference to a Kady O’Keefe who worked at an NPR affiliate in Columbus, Ohio.
“No chance in hell she’s working Sunday,” Conley muttered, but she made the call anyway, grateful for once for theBeacon’s landlines.
She got the expected recorded message, with the instructions that she could leave a message for a station employee by typing in the employee’s name on a touch-tone dial.
“Hi,” she said. “My name is Conley Hawkins. I’m a reporter for a newspaper in Florida, and I’m calling Kady O’Keefe to ask her about a former coworker named Robert Breitweis. It’s kind of urgent, so I’d really appreciate a callback.” She left the paper’s number and went back to work hunting for clues.
Her phone rang less than five minutes later. She snatched it up. “Silver Bay Beacon.This is Conley Hawkins.”
“I’m calling for um, Connie, something.” The woman’s voice was deep and throaty and reminded her of Stevie Nicks.
“This is Conley. Are you Kady?”
“Yes. What’s this about Robbie? Has he finally turned up somewhere? I always figured he was long dead by now.”
“Were you a close friend?” Conley asked.
“We were an item for a few months, but Robbie was an item with every woman he met back then,” she said, laughing. “He screwed anything that moved. Come to think of it, I guess you could say the same thing about me. Not anymore, of course,” she said hastily. “I’ve got grandkids, if you can believe it, so don’t quote me on the sex stuff.”
“I won’t,” Conley promised. “But you hadn’t been in touch with him in recent years?”
“Nobody that I know of has been in touch with him since he went to prison,” Kady said. “Why don’t you just come out and tell me what this is all about?”
“I’m afraid he is dead, but it only happened this morning,” Conley said.
“You’re shitting me! Where was this? Someplace in Florida? How the hell did he end up all the way down there?”
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Conley said. “He was working at a small local radio station here, using the name Buddy Bright. The station owner said he just showed up a few years ago, and he hired him on the spot.”
“And he didn’t think to check to see if he had a record? I mean, I think it was a big deal when he walked away from that prison detail. There were billboards with his picture on the interstate.”
“As I said, it’s a small station in a small town, and we’re a long way from Detroit. We’re, I guess you’d say, quirky.”
