The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry for all the phone calls.”

  “No trouble at all.” She looked at Jason. “It’s nice to see you, too, Jason.”

  “Felicia.”

  “I have to be going,” she said to Haskell. “But I can show Mr. Carpenter out.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Haskell said. He reached for my hand. I shook without thinking. “Call if you need anything.”

  “Not at the dinner hour, please,” Felicia Haskell said. “Come.”

  I slid past Jason. Neither of us made a move to shake hands.

  “See you,” I said.

  “You going to be at the game tomorrow night?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Keep your head up.”

  eight

  You had to be hungry to eat at Riccardo’s Pizza, and not because the portions were especially large. The pizza tasted as if grease had been ladled on instead of sauce. The stromboli should have been served with a chisel and hammer. The mozzarella sticks lay in your belly like lead sinkers. But it was cheap. And I was curious.

  I stood at the counter, breathing garlic as Aerosmith blared from a boom box in the back, the sole lunch customer at seventeen minutes after noon. Riccardo’s did most of its business late at night when the drunks came pouring out of Enright’s.

  “Anybody home?” I called out.

  There were three tight booths and a wall cooler filled with bottles of pop and chocolate milk. Next to the cooler was a small hole in the wall plaster that hadn’t been fixed since the last time I’d been in, with Darlene, weeks before. I remembered hearing it was made by a napkin dispenser flung across the room.

  The pizzeria sat on a steep rise above the river. I stepped to the window and peered down on downtown Starvation Lake. My gaze fell upon the door to Darlene’s apartment, set atop a set of outer stairs leading down to a railed sidewalk that ran along the river. I recalled the night before, how she’d grappled with me before we slipped into our lovemaking.

  “I thought you don’t eat here no more.”

  Stefan Bellissimo stood behind the counter in a white apron streaked with spaghetti sauce, hands on his hips, a butcher knife in one hand. Beneath the apron he wore a threadbare River Rats T-shirt. A hairnet mashed his black ringlets to his forehead. A ballpoint pen protruded from behind his ear. Flour powdered his thick eyebrows and mustache.

  “Belly,” I said. “How are you, buddy?”

  “Don’t give me that shit. You know what you did.”

  The men’s hockey team I played on, the Chowder Heads, had for years ordered postgame pizzas from Belly’s joint. But I had finally persuaded our captain, Soupy, to switch to Gordy’s in Fife Lake. The pizza was better and Gordy usually threw in fried mushrooms.

  “Hey,” I said, “I still bring Darlene in.”

  “Darlene brings Darlene in. I’m one of your paper’s biggest customers. You can’t even bring your boys by?”

  “What? One ad a week?”

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing at his booths, where he used old Pilots as tablecloths.

  “Ah. Well, I’m here. What’s good?”

  “Don’t be pulling on my dick. The pizza’s good.”

  I squinted over his head at the backlit menu on the wall. Belly had owned the place for something like ten years, in which time it had been called Zito’s, Sicoly’s, Fat Tony’s, Provenzana’s, Enzo’s, Mizzi’s and, for a time while he dated an Irish woman from Sandy Cove, Hickey’s. He kept changing the names, he said, for marketing reasons. The pizza stayed the same.

  Today’s “Rats Special” was a grilled cheese sandwich with pepperoni. Too risky, I thought. Maybe a cold sub. Just $2.95 with chips. Pretty hard to screw up.

  “What did Darlene have the other night?” I said.

  “What she always has. Small Greek salad, ham-and-pineapple pie.”

  “What about Gracie?”

  “What?” Belly said. “You want food or not?”

  I wanted to know what Gracie and Darlene had talked about there. The minute I had left Haskell, I’d forgotten about his little announcement and returned to the questions about Gracie swirling in the back of my mind: Why the fresh groceries if she’d planned to off herself? How did she manage to hang herself on a high branch without a ladder? What about the calendar with the dates crossed out in February but not January? Was she counting down the days till her death, and if so, why hadn’t she crossed off the final day? What about the single baby shoe left in her hiding place? And the key attached to the ribbon? Her ever-present Wings cap was hanging in the Zam shed; had she made a conscious decision to leave it behind? Or had she been forced to leave? And if so, why? Why would her worthless little life matter that much to anyone?

  “Yeah, yeah,” I told Belly. “Italian sub, extra peppers.”

  He waved the butcher knife around. “I’m not hearing a lot of enthusiasm.”

  “You want me to sing?”

  He put the heels of his hands against the countertop and leaned forward. Beads of sweat along the tops of his eyebrows glistened in the overhead light. “Let me ask you a question: You got a problem with us?”

  “No problem,” I said. “I just happen to like Gordy’s-”

  “Not that. That pissed me off but I mean like the whole thing. You got a problem with the whole town. It’s like we’re some bunch of fucking hooples who can’t do anything right, and you’re going to set us straight.”

  “Hooples? What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m fucking talking about. You know how much the game means to this place.”

  Belly, who did not play hockey but attended every Rats game and supplied half-price pizzas for team functions, always referred to hockey as “the game,” in the same sort of bizarre sacred intonation that baseball freaks used about their tedious sport. I loved hockey, loved watching it, loved playing it most of the time. But love to me didn’t require reverence. It was just a game.

  “What’s your point, Bel?”

  He plucked the pen from behind his ear, a greenish order pad from an apron pocket. “My point is, why do you got to jam this guy up in the paper?”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who’s building the rink. You seen his kid play yet? Patrick Roy rolled into Kenny Dryden.”

  “The old rink’s not good enough for him?”

  Belly slapped the order pad down on the counter. “Ain’t the point,” he said. “The point is, a new rink equals a new attitude-we can win. We ain’t had that around here. You of all people ought to know that. We’re like the goddamn Lions. No matter what we do, we lose because we think we’re going to lose. Something’s got to change to turn that around. This rink, the guy’s kid is our chance. Why do you have to fuck it up?”

  I really hadn’t tried to fuck it up.

  As a player, I was delighted to hear I’d be skating on a fresh sheet of ice and dressing in a room where my feet didn’t stick to the rubber-mat floors. As a reporter, I grew skeptical after two subcontractors left me late-night voice messages saying they had not been paid and Haskell wasn’t returning their calls.

  I started stopping by the Pine County Courthouse every few days to see if any lawsuits had been filed against Haskell. Soon there were three. I wrote a fifteen-inch story and scheduled it for the front page, above the fold, where we had run earlier stories about the rink’s progress. I made repeated calls to Haskell and his attorney. They ignored me.

  I was surprised to see the next morning that the story did not appear on the Pilot front page. Only later did I learn that Philo Beech, who’d been in meetings at headquarters in Traverse City, had read the story there and, without consulting me, decided to shorten it and move it to the bottom of page A6. When I asked him why, he explained that anybody could file a lawsuit and, without a response from Haskell, the story really wasn’t fair and balanced.

  Philo was sitting with his boots up on his desk behind a two-day-old Wall Street Journal. I listened from my swivel chair across th
e room, speechless. What proof did we have, Philo said, that the subcontractors had actually completed the work they claimed to have completed? These disputes could just be run-of-the-mill contractual spats best left to the involved parties. At least the story hadn’t been killed outright, he said; I should be happy it had run at all. So blithe were his criticisms that I got the impression that he was relaying something he’d heard from someone else. He finally put the paper down and, for the first time in his little soliloquy, actually looked at me: Had I finished that feature on the outhouses-on-skis race that Sandy Cove was planning for the weekend?

  I swallowed my pique, kept my mouth shut, and stayed on Haskell, sneaking calls and e-mails and half-day trips in between chamber of commerce press releases, school board meetings, and girls’ volleyball games. I combed through every local, county, and state file and database where I might find a reference to him, his Detroit firm, or any related business entity. There wasn’t much. I filed requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act with four different state agencies. I wrote and e-mailed Haskell and his lawyer; I called Haskell at home at night; his lawyer threatened to sue us; Philo ordered me to stop calling.

  I started driving past the construction site each morning before work. A cubical shell of rust-colored girders and columns had risen amid the mounds of mud and scrap and snow. Dump trucks and backhoes and bulldozers were parked around the site. I never saw them moving. I saw smatterings of workers on some mornings, none at all on others. I bought a disposable camera and, on four consecutive Fridays, drove to the site and from my truck window took four black-and-white photographs, one from each corner of the structure. I had them developed, shuffled them like playing cards, and left the stack one night on Philo’s desk chair.

  The next morning, I was working at my computer when I spied him in the reflection of my screen, flipping through the pictures and looking puzzled.

  “Gus,” he said, “are these yours?”

  I swiveled around. “Yep. I thought we could run a sort of sequence of photos showing the progress they’ve made on the new rink.”

  “Interesting idea,” Philo said. He riffled through them again. “Did you mark the order you took them in?”

  “I didn’t. But you can figure it out, can’t you?”

  Philo regarded my grin through his horn-rims. “A little game, huh?”

  He spread the sixteen photos out on his desk. He quickly discerned the four different angles and arranged the pictures accordingly. Then he stood back and folded his arms. After a few moments, he said, “I don’t see it.”

  “You don’t see what?”

  “The progression. Which one goes before-” He stopped himself. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all. That’s how it is.”

  “That’s how what is?”

  “That’s how the rink is. Four weeks. Zero progress. Lots of trucks and piles of stuff. But nothing actually being built.”

  “Well,” Philo said, “if you put these in the right order-”

  “Be my guest.”

  He pushed his glasses onto his forehead, snatched up a picture in each hand, and brought them close to his face. He looked at one, then the other, then back at the other. He picked up a third picture, then a fourth. I saw the back of his jaw flex as he ground his teeth. He flipped his glasses back down.

  “These could have been taken on the same day.”

  “You’re right, they could have,” I said. “But they weren’t.”

  “OK, I get it. May I keep these?”

  I never saw the pictures again. I watched the court docket for Haskell’s replies to the lawsuits and, when those inevitably appeared, I used them as excuses to write stories. Philo seemed relieved that Haskell was getting his public say. I doubt Haskell was pleased, though. Although the stories invariably ran short and at the bottoms of inside pages, I was able to shoehorn in tidbits from my far-flung fishing-liens placed on various Haskell properties around Michigan, litigation over the sale of his Bloomfield Hills house, a delinquent property tax bill on the same. Maybe it all added up to not much; after all, Haskell was a lawyer, and lawyers litigate. Or maybe it meant he’d eventually leave Starvation Lake holding a multimillion-dollar bag.

  The town council didn’t seem to think much of it. Nor did the zoning board, nor the road commission. They all did whatever Haskell’s lawyer asked, every step of the way. I wondered why I was even bothering to report things that nobody heard or wanted to hear anyway.

  Then late one Friday in January, just early enough for us to make deadline but too late to do much additional reporting, Haskell’s lawyer faxed over a three-paragraph press release stating that construction on the rink had been “temporarily suspended.” No shit, I thought. The second paragraph said, “The local media’s campaign to derail this well-intentioned project has emboldened certain of our creditors and made it difficult at this time to come to an understanding about the most expeditious path forward. However, we are confident…”

  That story ran on the front page, above the fold. Twenty-three messages awaited me on my office phone that morning.

  “Why can’t you just leave us alone?” said the first.

  “Stick to screwing up hockey games instead of rinks,” said the second.

  The rest were the same. Different words, same rebukes.

  “I don’t know,” I told Belly. “Ice is ice, attitude’s attitude. The Rats are playing pretty well in the old barn.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said. He set the knife down, tore his hairnet off and threw it aside, his curls tumbling down onto his forehead. “You cursed this place with your fuckup twenty years ago or whenever the hell it was. Now you don’t want to help a team that could put the curse to rest?”

  This wasn’t going well. I wanted to ask about what Darlene and Gracie had discussed. “Christ, Belly, I’m just making a living. Are you going to make my sub? Or-or should I have something else? What did you say Gracie had?”

  “The chick who offed herself? Jesus, what the hell do you care?”

  “Maybe I’m superstitious.”

  “Fucking hockey players.” He picked up the butcher knife and pointed it at me. “Well, I don’t know what the hell she had, pal. She was in here twice this week with two different babes and I can’t keep it all straight in my fat head.” He smiled. “Come to think of it, might’ve been an Italian sub. So maybe you’re taking a big chance, eh?”

  I turned away and looked through the window to town. A sheriff’s cruiser pulled into a space in front of Kepel’s Ace Hardware. The door opened and Darlene got out. I looked back at Belly. He was pulling his hairnet back on.

  “She was in twice?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, tucking his hair under the elastic with the same fingers that would be putting provolone on my sandwich. “OK, enough preaching. You ain’t hearing me anyway. I’m going to make your sub.”

  I glanced outside again. Darlene crossed Main and turned into the alley that led to the river walk and the stairs to her apartment.

  “Hey, Bel, never mind,” I said. But he’d already gone back into the kitchen and turned the music up loud, an old Rod Stewart tune. I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my jeans pocket and set it on the counter. “Bel,” I said, trying to make myself heard over Rod. “I gotta go.”

  “What?” he yelled.

  “I gotta go. Hey, tell me-who was the other babe?”

  “What?”

  “The other babe with Gracie?”

  “Onions raw or grilled?”

  I looked out the window again. Darlene was ascending her stairway two steps at a time. “Goddammit,” I said, and rushed out the door as Belly yelled again, “Raw or grilled?”

  She was already coming back down the steps when I arrived at the landing. She stopped when she saw me. She had a shoe box under one arm.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  “Hey.”

  She saw my look at the sho
e box.

  “They’re just letters,” she said.

  “Are you taking them in?”

  She looked down at her boots, trying not to cry.

  “Darl,” I said. She turned and went back up the stairs.

  She finally stopped sobbing.

  I stroked her hair as her tears dried on my chest. Her bedroom was silent but for the rumble of an occasional pickup passing on Main Street.

  When we’d entered her apartment, Darlene had dropped the shoe box on her kitchen table and shoved me up against the refrigerator. She brought her lips to mine and kissed me hard, unbuttoning my shirt, her deputy’s badge digging into my rib cage. Then she grabbed me by the waist of my jeans and dragged me into her bedroom, though I did not have to be dragged.

  We had made love twice before either of us said a word, Darlene crying in between and afterward in whimpers and shuddering sobs. “Ah, Jesus,” she finally said. She turned to face me, propped her elbows on my belly. The imprint of her sheriff’s hatband was still on her hair. She didn’t like the hat, thought it framed her face in a way that made it look fat, but she kept it on when she was on duty so nobody would take her any less seriously than any male cop.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She settled her face into the heels of her hands and rubbed her eyes, then let her chin fall to my chest. “If she had just killed herself, maybe I wouldn’t be crying. Maybe I’d just be angry.”

  “Gracie was Gracie,” I said. “Hard to account for anything she did, without getting into her head.”

  “She didn’t like people messing around in there.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the prom?”

  “What prom?”

  “Senior year. The prom. I wanted to take you.”

  “You were probably too chicken to ask.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I shifted in the bed so that Darlene straddled my left leg. I liked the feel of her skin warm around my thigh. “You were sort of on and off with that football player.”

  “Pete Klein. God, he was gorgeous. But really, I was just trying to make you jealous.”