The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  I called Kerasopoulos’s office number. I told his voice mail I had an emergency family matter that I had to attend to downstate. In a way, it was true. He’d either believe it or not. Either way, my days at the Pilot were probably numbered.

  I took the penknife and descended the stairs to the Pilot basement, ducking cobwebs dotted with the carcasses of flies. A naked overhead bulb cast a dim light across the floor, revealing a puddle of water covering a rusted drain cover.

  In the shadows along the walls stood racks built of two-by-sixes holding black binders of Pilots dating back nearly three decades. I found what I was looking for in the binder marked March 15–31, 1980. On page A3 of the March 18 issue, I found an eight-inch story beneath a two-column headline that read, “Anonymous Donor Bequeaths Scholarship on Local Girl.” A black-and-white school picture of Gracie was wedged into the story. With the penknife I cut the story out of the binder and put that in my wallet, too.

  Back upstairs, I sat at my computer and did a quick search for clips under the byline of a certain Detroit Free Press reporter. I selected half a dozen, printed them, scanned each one, and jotted a few notes about them on a piece of paper I also folded and stuffed into my wallet.

  Then I dozed for a few hours in an armchair that our fired photographer had used for afternoon naps. I woke at 4:47, put my coat on, and went out the back door, shivering against the cold.

  Audrey seemed surprisingly unsurprised to see me at her back door an hour before she would open the diner.

  She pushed the door open and told me good morning and asked me if I wanted something to go. Yes, I told her, a fried-egg sandwich with bacon and cheddar on toasted pumpernickel. And a large coffee, black.

  Audrey bustled about her griddle in a white apron over a peach-colored smock. A song played on a transistor radio propped on a shelf against a bag of brown sugar, Peggy Lee singing “Is That All There Is?” Audrey would turn it down to a murmur when her first customers arrived.

  I had always loved the diner. When I was a boy, Mom would bring me there on Saturdays, when Audrey made her special concoction, the egg pie, an envelope of Italian bread bubbling with eggs, cheese, sausage, onion, mushrooms, and whatever else you fancied. We’d sit at the counter so Mom and Audrey could gossip while I tore into my pie, shredding the top crust, letting the steam warm my cheeks, savoring the only thing in the world that mattered at that particular moment in my young life.

  Gracie didn’t like Audrey’s, though; she said it smelled like old people. When Gracie stayed with us, we didn’t go to Audrey’s on Saturdays; instead, Mom made Gracie’s favorite, chocolate-chip-banana pancakes. I ate them only after picking out the banana.

  “How is your mother doing?” Audrey said.

  “As well as can be expected.”

  “Are there funeral arrangements yet?”

  “Not that I know of. I think the cops have to finish first.”

  Audrey shook her head without looking back at me. “Looks like they have a lot more work to do after last night, huh?”

  I let her bring the two eggs to a sizzle before I asked whether my mother had been in with Gracie on Saturday. She told me yes, they had come in late, in between the breakfast and lunch rushes.

  “Did you happen to catch any of their conversation?”

  With Audrey, the answer to that question was almost always yes. The real question was how much she would tell me. She liked me, though. She’d known me all my life. That helped.

  “Not much, actually,” she said. She flipped the grilled slices of Canadian bacon and cheddar onto the eggs, covered it all with the toasted pumpernickel. “Molly wasn’t here and I was busy getting things ready for the lunch crowd.”

  “They had coffee?”

  “Gracie had coffee. Your mother had tea. Why do you ask?”

  “Come on, Mrs. DeYonghe. You know.”

  She wrapped my sandwich in wax paper, poured my coffee into a foam cup, handed them to me. “Where are you going?”

  You know the answer to that, too, I thought. “Downstate.”

  “And you’re coming back.”

  “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know, Gussy. Years ago, you ran when your hockey went bad. Then you ran back here when things went bad downstate. I don’t want you running again. Your mother needs you.”

  “I understand.”

  “You can’t just keep running. Eventually you have to make your choice and stand your ground.”

  “Uh, OK,” I said. I’d taken a stand at the Pilot the night before and wound up standing on my dick. “Any particular reason for the five a.m. lecture?”

  Audrey plucked a dishrag off the counter and wiped her hands. “I was a little surprised to see Gracie in here. I don’t think she’d been in since she came back to town. Your mother didn’t look very happy with her. And she didn’t stay long, left without Bea.”

  “Huh. OK. Thanks. For the food too. Here.” She waved off my offer of a five-dollar bill. I tossed it on the counter. “I better get going.”

  I was ten steps out the door when I heard her call after me: “Gussy.”

  I turned. Audrey stood with her rump propping the door open, arms folded against the chill. “They were arguing,” she said.

  “Arguing about what?”

  “I’m not sure. They kept their voices down. But it had something to do with an envelope.”

  Down from the walkway behind me the Hungry River lay frozen in the morning dark. Sometimes you could hear the burble of the water flowing beneath the ice. “Who brought the envelope?”

  “I don’t know. But it was pretty clear that Bea didn’t want it. Then she almost left without it. I had to chase her down the sidewalk.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A manila envelope.” She held her right thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “About yay thick.”

  Goddammit, Mother, I thought as I pulled my truck out of Starvation and aimed it toward Interstate 75 south.

  thirteen

  She was smoking a cigarette in a booth at the back of the Petros Coney Island on Michigan Avenue in east Dearborn. The tall Greek behind the counter nodded at me as I made my way to the table. His given name, I recalled, was Phaethon, though he went by Fred. Perhaps he remembered me, too. I savored the aromas of onions and chili and eggs fried in butter. I had fond memories of Petros.

  Michele Higgins and I used to have long breakfasts there when I was writing about the auto industry for the Detroit Times and she was covering cops and, later, federal courts for the Detroit Free Press. We both lived near downtown at the time, but when we first started seeing each other, we didn’t want to take the chance that someone from either of our papers would see us together, sitting on the same side of the booth, and think we might be sharing secrets between competitors. It was silly to think so; there were plenty of dalliances, affairs, and even marriages across the two dailies. Maybe, like those reporters who prefer to quote anonymous sources, we just thought it sexier to carry on a clandestine relationship.

  “Hey there,” I said. I slid into the booth opposite Mich. My butt scratched across a piece of duct tape that had been used to patch a tear in the red vinyl. I set the accordion folder Dingus had given me on the table next to the napkin dispenser. Mich glanced at it as she crushed out her cigarette. She pulled her blond locks off her forehead, only to have them fall right back. Her hair never stayed where she put it.

  “Hey,” she said.

  It must have been too much for her to smile, especially this early in the morning. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and the smell of cigarettes hung on her black leather jacket.

  “You look good.”

  “Ah,” she said, dismissing my compliment, probably knowing it was halfhearted. She did look good for a forty-year-old, though she’d looked better. “What brings you to the real world?”

  Fred appeared at our table. “The usual?” he said.

  He really did remember, and not just me. I wondered if Mich still came to Pe
tros. I looked at Fred. His thin salt-and-pepper mustache was neatly trimmed, as ever.

  “Not for me,” I said. “Just coffee, black, and some rye toast.”

  “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “You too, Fred. But it’s Gus, OK?”

  He smiled. We’d been over this a few years before. “OK, Mr. Carpenter,” he said. “And Miss Michele?”

  “Grapefruit juice.” She hated the stuff but insisted that it helped cure her hangovers. “And two eggs, soft-boiled.”

  “Three and a half minutes?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Fred went back behind the counter.

  “Nice piece on the judge with the three families.” The story had been among the ones I’d found in my search back at the Pilot. “What the hell was the guy thinking?”

  Mich lit another cigarette without taking her eyes off me. “I don’t need you blowing smoke up my ass. You don’t read the Times or the Freep. Let’s just get to it, all right?”

  “Sorry.”

  “And the next time you use the sorry word, I’m out of here.”

  I wished I could’ve just paid and left. But I needed Mich. She was the best crime reporter in Detroit-sourced up her pretty butt, like lightning on a keyboard, and when it came to competitors, ruthlessly efficient.

  In her own newsroom she’d dismiss her rivals’ stories as “wheezes” or “snoozers” or “history.” But when she ran into one of them at the cop shop or a crime scene, she was all smiles and flattery, softening them up, getting them off their games. “I worshipped your story on the twelve-year-old drug runner,” she’d say. Or, “Man, you blazed a trail I’ll have a hell of a time following.” Veterans weren’t so easily snowed, especially after she’d scooped them a few dozen times. Youngsters were another matter.

  Once, she was sequestered in a room at the federal courthouse with a young Times reporter. They were supposed to have equal access to a box of documents on a money-laudering case involving a car dealer.

  “Oh, I know your byline,” Michele Higgins told the Times rookie. “I hear you’re on the fast track.”

  He actually blushed. “I don’t know about that, but thanks,” he said.

  The Times reporter, who obviously didn’t know Mich, left to use the men’s room. Mich plucked out some of the juiciest documents and hid them in her purse. Only after the Times reporter finished going through the paper and left to write his story did Mich return the documents to the box. The next morning, Mich’s front-page story blew away the eight-inch piece inside the Times.

  And the blushing one-me-got his ass chewed by his bosses.

  Some time later, I encountered Mich again by the jukebox at the Anchor Bar. It was late and I was about to play Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” when she reached over me to punch in B86 for “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC.

  “Hey there, rookie,” she said. “You really like Patsy Cline?”

  I turned, recognized her, may have blushed again.

  “I do,” I said. “Why’d you do that to me?”

  “What?” she said. “You don’t like AC/DC?”

  “No. The auto dealer story.”

  “Oh.” She reached past me again and punched in A18 for “Crazy.” Her perfume washed over me as she turned her face close to mine.

  “You know, they had paper clips in there,” she said. She smiled. “Maybe you should’ve put one on your cock.”

  From that night on we were together, sort of, except when we weren’t. There was occasional talk of marriage-most of it on the newsroom grapevine that ran past the Anchor between our papers-but we both knew that getting married would require divorces from our jobs. I couldn’t recall ever telling her that I loved her, at least not when I was sober. She could have made the same claim, with the exception of the morning after her Chihuahua McGraw was killed on the street outside her apartment in Indian Village and she was a puddle.

  The fact was, I was no match for the police radio on her nightstand, and Mich couldn’t compete with the half-in-the-bag union guys and cranky auto chiefs who called me late at night to brag and whine and squeal and leak. Our thing, as Mich called it, was hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards. But it rarely lacked for excitement. Each of us had keys to the other’s apartment. We never knew when one of us might come home after midnight to find the other waiting naked and hungry.

  I liked it but most of the time I did not crave it, and neither did Mich. Or so I thought. After my job blew up and I moved back to Starvation, I put our thing behind me along with everything else from Detroit. I stopped returning Mich’s calls, partly because I was embarrassed, partly because I didn’t believe she’d ever care enough to venture as far from her precious cop shops and courtrooms as Starvation Lake.

  Then one night I opened the door to the apartment I’d had over the Pilot until Media North kicked me out. There she was in my recliner, a glass of Crown Royal on the rocks in one hand, a bedsheet bunched at her breasts in the other. “Oh, fuck,” said Darlene, who’d come home with me after dinner at a bistro in Bellaire. Oh, fuck, indeed. Darlene turned around and walked out. It took me two weeks to untangle that mess.

  Michele Higgins and I had not talked since, until that morning when I had woken her with a call from my truck as it descended the freeway bridge at Zilwaukee, a couple of hours from Detroit. She’d told me to leave her alone, but I had talked fast and told her it was about my second cousin, my mother’s favorite girl in the world, and there was no else who could help me. I figured I had her when she said, “Why don’t you call one of the dumb shits at the Times?”

  Now I told her in more detail about what had happened to Gracie. About the shoe tree, the absence of a car or a ladder, Gracie’s long hiatus downstate, the calendar hanging over her bed, the explosion in the Zam shed. I didn’t bother to tell her about the brush or the baby shoe or the key.

  While I was speaking, Fred brought our breakfasts and left the bill, which I took. Mich had one spoonful of her soft-boiled eggs and pushed the porcelain cup aside. Her gaze went to the accordion folder again. I grabbed it, pulled out the police report, and shoved the stapled pages across the table.

  “Take a look.”

  I waited while she read. Near the end she nodded her head and smiled. She pushed the pages back to me, picked up her cigarette, took a long drag.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  She blew the smoke over her right shoulder. “Is that all?”

  I pulled out my wallet and showed her the piece of paper with the name Vend on it. “Bingo,” she said, sliding the paper back. “Remind me: what was that country song you liked? ‘For the Old Times’?”

  “‘For the Good Times.’ My dad liked it.”

  “You liked it too. You used to play it at the Anchor.”

  “Only when I was drunk. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “‘And make believe you love me one more time,’ ” she sang, way off key. “Brother. Buck Owens?”

  “Ray Price.”

  “So.” She put out her cigarette. “Your friend was mixed up with some dangerous people.”

  “My cousin. Second cousin.”

  “Whatever. You ever heard of this Vend dude?”

  “Should I have?”

  “I knew you weren’t reading the Detroit papers.”

  I almost said I was sorry.

  “Owns a bunch of strip clubs, here and over in Windsor. Bottomless across the river. Brings in chicks from all over the place: Michigan, Ohio, Quebec, even Poland.”

  “Is he from there?”

  “Canada. The clubs all cater to different clienteles-Livonia autoworkers, Trenton steel guys, right up to the doctors and lawyers in the Pointes and Bloomfield. You can stick a buck in a garter to slobber all over a fat chick from Garden City or you can have a private room where you can jack off on a nineteen-year-old’s face while she pulls on a dog chain around your neck. A real marketing genius. Or at least that’s what I read in the blow job your old p
aper gave him on the business page last year.”

  Strip-club owners did make for good reading.

  “And he’s a bad guy?”

  “No, Gus, he’s a saint, like all guys who run strip clubs-all guys who run businesses, for that matter.” She shook out another cigarette. “Boy, once a business writer, always a business writer.”

  “Give me a break, will you?”

  She lit the cigarette and blew the first puff across the table. “I gave you a break. I’m here.”

  “Please tell me more.”

  “The guy’s constantly under investigation by the cops and the feds. Drugs, prostitution, guns, tax evasion. Even kid porn a ways back, though I think he got away from that. They’ll never catch the guy. He’s too smart, too generous with his money, too much the, you know, the whole bootstrap entrepreneur shtick. He’s good, I got to hand it to him. I mean, have you ever met a bad Canadian? Off the ice, I mean.”

  I could think of only one and he was in prison.

  She gestured toward the accordion file. “And he lives in Melvindale, for God’s sake. Brags about it. Blue-collar churchgoers, tree-lined streets, brick ranches. Just the place for a criminal mastermind, eh? He just built a new gym for some Catholic school there.”

  He’s making more progress than Haskell, I thought.

  “Al Capone lived in a neighborhood like that,” I said. I took a sip of my coffee. It was as bland as I remembered. “YA-rek, right? And Vend?”

  “Shortened. Used to be Vendrowska or Vendrowski. He has some goofy nickname, Knobs or Knobbo or something. He has a huge head. Saw him once.”

  Knobbo, I thought. It rang a bell.

  “But you haven’t nailed him yet in the paper?”

  “Got a file this thick”-she held her hands a foot apart-“but the guy’s slippery as an eel.”

  “Is he from Windsor?”

  “Sarnia.”

  “I went up there once on a hockey trip. For twenty-five bucks, the chicks would blow you under the table.”

  “I don’t need to hear that, thank you. He actually owns a piece of some team up there. He plays, or played. A goalie. Like you.”