The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  “Any footprints out there?”

  “Covered or blown over.”

  That reminded me. “One of her feet was bare, wasn’t it?”

  She waited, begrudging me this detail. “Yes.”

  “Have you-”

  “No. We haven’t found the other boot, unless it’s up in the tree. Dingus is trying to get a cherry picker out there, but the snow’s an issue.”

  “Well, how the hell did she get up there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she had help.”

  I thought of the stool Gracie had sat on driving the Zamboni. Soupy was always joking that she really needed a booster seat on top of that so she didn’t drive the thing through the boards.

  Then I thought, Oh, holy Christ, Soupy. He and Gracie had been seeing each other, less discreetly than they no doubt had imagined. Soupy had closed Enright’s early the night before. I hadn’t thought too much of it then, given the snowstorm, though it wasn’t like Soupy to close his bar even one minute before he could sell-or drink-one last beer. Now I had to wonder whether Soupy had driven Gracie out to the shoe tree. Nobody could be that stupid.

  Except maybe Soupy. My stomach tightened. He wasn’t capable of hurting anyone intentionally. But he was damned good at hurting himself.

  I decided against asking Darlene about Soupy. Instead I said, “So what about your voice mail?”

  “Did you go to Audrey’s?”

  “Yeah. Elvis was holding court.”

  “I figured. What did he say?”

  “He said the cops-you guys have a suicide note. Said it was on TV this morning, why the hell hadn’t I seen it, blah blah.”

  “Which is why I left that message.”

  “So there is no suicide note?”

  “No… well, there’s a… it’s complicated. She had a piece of paper on her. Some people might call it a suicide note, people who knew about Gracie’s”-I thought I heard a catch in Darlene’s voice-“you know, her flair for drama.”

  “A piece of paper? Like what?”

  “It wasn’t a suicide note.”

  “So, what then?”

  “She was trying to tell us something.”

  That she was suicidal? No. No car. No ladder. A shoe missing. “What exactly did she write?”

  “She didn’t. The people at that new hockey rink did.” There was a pause. I thought Darlene might have been collecting herself. “A rejection letter. One page.”

  “She applied for a job at the new rink?”

  “Yes. The same job she has-had at the old rink.”

  “Was the letter dated?”

  “Not sure. They haven’t let me actually look at it. But I assume it’s recent.”

  It seemed a little strange that the owner of the new rink, or his minions, would be making decisions about jobs when the rink was barely a skeleton of structural steel. Might Gracie have gotten the job if construction hadn’t stopped? Now I understood what Elvis had meant by the “connection” between my rink stories and Gracie’s death: my stories, by halting construction, had killed Gracie. Elvis had quite an imagination.

  “And they told her no?”

  “Yes. They told her to go to hell.”

  “Forgive me, Darl, but why would anybody think that’s a suicide note?”

  “Most people wouldn’t. But we’re talking about you-know-who.”

  She meant Pine County sheriff’s deputy Frank D’Alessio, who probably had leaked the detail to Channel Eight. “Where did you find it?” I said.

  “In a snowdrift a few feet from where she was hanging.”

  “So she could have just dropped it.”

  “Or it could have fallen out of her pocket as she was being dragged up into the tree.”

  I tried to imagine it. A man? Two men? It wouldn’t be a woman. Not with Gracie. No, it would be a man, or men. But why? I had no idea. All I could think at that moment was that the answer was likely to be found somewhere other than Starvation Lake. Somewhere downstate.

  “When do you expect to hear from Doc Joe?” I said.

  “You mean Doc Slow?” Doc Joe was Joe Schriver, Pine County medical examiner. He was not known for expediting cases. “We’ll probably figure this out before he rubber-stamps it.”

  “You’ve positively identified-Jesus!”

  A rapping on the window to my left startled me. I turned and saw D’Alessio standing in the road outside, a long flashlight in one hand.

  “What?” Darlene said.

  I lowered my voice and put a finger up to let D’Alessio know I’d be just a moment. “I have a visitor,” I told Darlene. “You-know-who.”

  “Gus,” Darlene said, “somebody wants us to think this was a suicide. Somebody who really didn’t like Gracie.”

  D’Alessio rapped the butt end of his flashlight on my window again, harder. “Open up, fuckhead.”

  I took another look at the shoe tree. “You’re right,” I told Darlene.

  “Gracie was no angel but-”

  “I know. She didn’t deserve this. Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

  six

  Cold whipped across my face as I rolled my window down. D’Alessio had hidden his eyes behind unnecessary sunglasses.

  “Frankie,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Can’t be parking here.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of town. “Got to move it along.”

  D’Alessio had come to Starvation from Detroit as a boy. His father had been a Detroit cop who got sick of the shot-up streets and falling-down houses, so he came up north and bought a grocery store in town. Frankie had a wife and a couple of kids. He skated in the Midnight Hour Men’s League. Not a lot of skill, but a knack for whacking the top of your skate with the heel of his stick when you weren’t looking, something I hadn’t had to endure when I was playing goalie.

  He also carried a barely disguised hard-on for Channel Eight’s on-air reporter, Tawny Jane Reese.

  “What do you think?” I said. “I hear you’ve got a suicide note.”

  “Crazy little bitch,” he said, meaning, I assumed, Gracie. “No comment.”

  “It’s not a suicide.”

  “All communications with the press should be directed to the sheriff or the on-duty press liaison.”

  I chuckled. “Tell me, Frankie. How do I get you to leak me stuff like this so-called suicide note? I hope Tawny at least gave you a hand job.”

  I didn’t really think she’d ever given in to D’Alessio’s come-ons, but I was sure she regularly used them to her advantage.

  “You want a tip?” D’Alessio said. He grinned and leaned his head down so he could look at me over the tops of his glasses.

  “I’m not giving you a hand job.”

  “Meat’s back.”

  I tried to look nonchalant. “Who?”

  “Fuck you,” D’Alessio said. He leaned his head back but kept the grin in place. “You know-the guy whose wife you been banging.”

  He meant Jason Esper, Darlene’s estranged husband. I had heard rumors that he might come back to Starvation after leaving Darlene and town many months before.

  Those of us who played hockey called him Meat for how the knuckles on his right hand looked after dozens of fights in the lowest of the low minor leagues. Like pounded meat. Darlene had told me that Jason went through periods when it was too painful for him to put his hand in his pocket. He also happened to be about as big and muscled as a steer.

  “Aha,” I said. “Well, welcome back, Meat. Why’s he back? Did someone beat his video golf record at Dingman’s?”

  “I hear he’s fixed himself up pretty good,” D’Alessio said. “But you can see for yourself tomorrow.”

  Tuesday night, Soupy and I and our team, the Chowder Heads, had a first-round playoff game in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

  “No shit, huh?” I said. “Meat’s playing?”

  “Yes, sir. Last time you saw him on the ice, he was skating for the Pipefitters, wasn’t he?”

  The Pipefitters was the team fr
om south of Detroit that beat us in overtime in the 1981 state final.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But he was young, didn’t get a lot of ice time.”

  “He’ll get plenty tomorrow, unfortunately for you.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “Deputy!”

  The shout came from the shoe tree. We both looked to see Dingus waving his arms over his head. He didn’t seem happy. D’Alessio, flustered, gave him a thumbs-up, then looked back at me.

  “Move it along,” he said. “I’ll see you at the rink or”-he smirked again-“maybe in the hospital.”

  I swung my truck around and headed back in the direction of town. As I turned north on Ladensack Road, I tried Soupy’s cell phone. As usual, he didn’t answer. Probably still in bed, I thought. I didn’t bother to leave a message he wouldn’t bother to retrieve.

  The Starvation Lake Arena, in all of its cinder-block glory, squatted in a parking lot ringed by snow-laden pines and birches.

  I slowed to let a snowplow pull onto the road in front of me. I was glad to see the lot empty but for a single Dodge pickup. Snow was piled high against the marquee on wheels near the roadside, but I could still make out the advertisement for that night’s game. “River Rats v Mar ue te, 7 o’clock, SRO”, it said, the “q” and a “t” missing from “Marquette”. I smiled and shook my head. It had been a long time since the Rats had commanded standing-room-only crowds. Back then, I was the goalie, Soupy was the all-state defenseman, and the Rats were one of the best squads in Michigan.

  I drove around to the back of the building and parked. A rusted oilcan overflowed with beer cartons covered in snow. The door to the back of the rink was locked so I walked around to the front, hoping I was alone.

  The sweet smell of refrigerant filled my nose as I pushed open one of the double doors between the arena lobby and the rink itself. The only sound was the hum of a generator beyond the walls somewhere. I walked to my left and stopped on the rubber-mat floor behind the net I had tended as a kid for the River Rats and, many years later, in the Midnight Hour Men’s League.

  I’d liked the vantage all those years I was a goalie: the rink spreading out in front of me, the bleachers rising to the shadows beneath the ceiling on my left, the benches and penalty boxes stretching down the dasher boards to my right, the opposing net facing me two hundred feet away, the banners dangling from the rafters overhead. When a crowd had gathered, I could feel the glass behind me groaning against their weight, hear them cursing me or praising me, no matter what I did. Some were on my side, some weren’t. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference.

  Finally, I had had enough of throwing myself in front of flying pucks, enough of people firing pucks at my head. A year before, I had ditched the mask and leg pillows and chest protector, grabbed a stick with a hook on the blade, and started playing on a wing. It felt good to be on the bench bitching about the goalie instead of being the one on the other end of the bitching, good not to be alone between those iron pipes.

  I scanned the rink, looking for whoever had parked the Dodge outside. Sometimes old folks came and walked circles around the perimeter for exercise. None were there on this morning. The preschool figure skating class wasn’t due for another hour. I knew these useless facts because I read them each week on the press releases someone sent to the Pilot. I peered up at the banners. The last, in faded Rats blue and gold, had been hung in 1987, when the team won the regional final before losing in the state quarters. The best-or the worst-was the banner from 1981, when my own Rats team lost in the state final, in that very rink, because of the goal I allowed into the net I was now standing behind.

  A noise came from the concession stand. I turned and saw a cardboard box marked Koffee-Kleen Filters appear on the counter. Whoever drove that Dodge was working back there-probably a kid a year out of high school who’d work in rinks and on construction sites between unemployment checks his whole life without ever leaving Starvation Lake. I ducked my head and skittered around the corner of the rink boards to my right, hoping no one had seen me.

  Staying low, I scrambled along behind the benches and penalty boxes toward the back of the arena. The floor peeled up in places. Chilly drafts blew over me through thin cracks in the walls. An electrical outlet box hung haphazardly off the back of the announcer’s box, spewing bare wires. Puddles had formed where water had dripped through the sieve of a roof. Even though the Rats were finally winning again, skating stride for stride with the downstate teams for the first time in years, the town was letting the rink go to pot.

  The town council, chaired by none other than Elvis Bontrager, had planned the year before to pay for refurbishments. Then Laird Haskell showed up at a council meeting one night with a box of glossy blue-and-gold folders embossed with the slogan “River Rats: Return to Glory.” He had a goaltender son who would keep other teams off the scoreboard and a bank account that would build the finest hockey facility in Michigan, complete with a weight room, two Zambonis, a bar called the Stanley Club-and a new scoreboard with a video screen that would show replays of his son’s brilliant saves. “We’ll build this,” he told the council, “and the championships will come.”

  The council, without asking a single hard question about when or where he was going to get the money, gladly set aside the plans to fix the old rink and started shoveling our tax dollars toward helping Haskell. What reason was there to doubt him? He was a wealthy man-just look at his enormous house on the lake. Why would he propose a new rink if he couldn’t pay for it? Why throw money at the old rink when a free one was there for the taking?

  At the back of the arena, I looked back over the top of the boards toward the concession stand and saw Johnny Ford doing something at the frozen yogurt machine. So that was his Dodge in the lot. He wasn’t out of high school yet. Either he didn’t have morning class or he was skipping.

  He hadn’t seen me, I decided.

  I crept past the two extra goalie nets leaned against the back wall and into the high-ceilinged bay where the Zamboni stood dripping water on a concrete floor. Johnny must have run it just before I’d arrived. I walked around the Zam once slowly, smelling gasoline, looking for anything that might give me an inkling as to how Gracie had wound up in the shoe tree.

  Three tall plastic buckets embossed with Miller Lite logos sat along the back wall, one filled with rags, another with clotted snow. Next to the buckets stood a broom-sized squeegee and a pair of shovels. Along a side wall stood half a dozen carbon-dioxide tanks beneath a fuse box.

  I glanced once more out the Zamboni bay to make sure Johnny wasn’t coming, then ducked under the yellow police tape strung across the doorway into the shed that Gracie had called home for the past few months.

  I smelled something like incense mixed with the unmistakable odor of marijuana. The town had so lost interest in the rink that nobody even cared if the Zamboni driver smoked dope. Maybe that’s why Gracie had been turned down for a job at the new rink.

  The floor in Gracie’s home was concrete. A scuffed wooden workbench ran alongside the wall to my left. A pegboard above the bench was empty, maybe because Gracie was too short to reach it. The bench was strewn with tools, cans of oil and paint and WD-40, greasy rags, some purple-and-orange marking pens, and an old Detroit Red Wings cap frayed around the bill. Gracie had worn the cap whenever she ran the Zam, her fading reddish hair streaked with silver straggling out the back.

  I stopped for a second and thought, She must’ve taught herself to use the tools to keep the Zam in working order. I had never given it a thought before she died, when my pals and I were playing and she was driving the Zam. Before she returned to town, I had never known she was handy around machinery, that she didn’t mind getting dirt under her sparkly pink-and-purple fingernails. Nor did I have the slightest idea what she had done for a living during her years downstate. Never cared either.

  When Gracie last lived in Starvation, she’d slung ice cream cones at the Dairy Queen. Business was especially good on her Friday
nights because she always wore the tiniest, tightest top she could find, and boys would come all the way from Torch Lake to flirt. The luckiest one would get a cone that came with a wink and a question: “Extra sprinkles tonight?” More than a few times, the lucky one was Soupy. And Soupy being Soupy, I was never short on the details of what happened in the backseat of his Chevy Nova or the woods around Gracie’s mom’s trailer. “The Gymnast,” he took to calling her, or sometimes “Nadia.”

  Beyond the bench stood an old wooden filing cabinet, a small refrigerator, and Gracie’s cot. As quietly as I could, I pulled out each drawer of the cabinet to see what I could find. Three of the drawers were empty and one contained a smattering of file folders filled with papers, some of the folders marked with dates from the early 1990s. Dampness had stuck the edges of the paper together. Maybe the cops had already taken all the revealing stuff, if there was any. Could there be a diary? A journal? I couldn’t imagine Gracie having the patience to sit and write in one.

  Atop the fridge stood four empty bottles of Gordon’s gin, their caps removed; two unopened bottles; and one bottle still about half full. I opened the fridge. The inside of the door was lined with sixteen-ounce plastic bottles of Squirt, the grapefruit soda pop Gracie splashed into her gin. I counted the bottles: ten unopened, one not quite empty. Five bottles of Blue Ribbon waited in the back of the fridge. For Soupy. The fridge’s top shelf held a loaf of wheat bread that hadn’t yet been opened, a package of cheddar cheese, and a bunch of low-fat strawberry yogurts. I picked up one of the yogurts and looked for the expiration date. March 11. More than four weeks away.

  Gracie had just bought all of this stuff, I thought. Why would she go grocery shopping if she knew she was going to kill herself? She wouldn’t.