The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  Another bell went off.

  “I’m not playing goal anymore,” I said.

  “Really? Quite the changed man, huh?”

  “Got bored with it.”

  “Uh-huh. But you’re still fucking that cop?”

  In reply, I sighed. She leaned back and looked at me like a skeptical judge might peer down at a defense attorney. “You really happy up there?”

  “Sure.”

  “I could still get you into the Freep, you know. They think you got screwed by those pussies at the Times who wouldn’t go to bat for you.”

  My bosses at the Times had indeed run scared when the auto company discovered I’d raided its voice mail system. I also shouldn’t have done what I had done, even if every story I had written was true.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Could we just talk about Vend? Is that his address?”

  “Why? You don’t plan to go there.”

  “Why not? I just want to ask him a few questions.”

  “At his house? Gus. This isn’t the business beat. Vend isn’t some pasty-faced guy in his sixties who thinks hitting a squash ball makes him a badass. People who piss this guy off pay for it.”

  “Got it.”

  “You said there was a bombing up north?”

  “Yeah. Nobody got hurt, though.”

  “Nobody was supposed to get hurt. It was a warning. What’s-her-name must have known something she wasn’t supposed to know.”

  Build it and they will die, the note said. Whoever had sent it clearly intended it for public distribution. But why would Vend or anyone else outside of Starvation care about a new hockey rink? And who would send something so crude and obvious?

  “Gracie,” I said. “But he already-she’s already dead.”

  Mich stopped to think. “Well,” she said, “maybe somebody else there knows something they shouldn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t me.”

  We sat in silence for a bit, Mich smoking, her eyes wandering around the diner, me spreading grape jelly on my toast.

  “Hey,” she said. “I hear your old ambulance chaser buddy is up there now.”

  “Who? Oh, Haskell.” I put the knife down and noticed Mich looking directly at me. She had been with me when I’d had my unfortunate encounter with Haskell in Detroit. “Yeah. His son’s a hockey hotshot. Haskell’s trying to build a rink. I don’t think he has the money.”

  She leaned slightly forward. “How could he not? The guy’s made a pile.”

  “I don’t know. But he’s not paying his contractors. Work’s come to a stop. And now he’s trying to shake the town down for a hundred grand.”

  “Huh. Have you written about it?”

  “A few stories. Ticked everybody off.”

  “Of course. How’s old Laird?”

  “Same. Like you said about Vend. Slippery as an eel.”

  “Yep.” She gathered up her purse and shimmied out of the booth. She seemed to be in a hurry. “Gotta meet a guy.”

  I started to stand but Mich raised a hand that said don’t bother.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Let’s stay in better touch.”

  “Tell Ray Price.”

  I finished my toast while checking my two phone messages. One was from Philo, who told me Kerasopoulos was not happy that I’d skipped out of our meeting, but I should call anyway for some other information. Darlene’s message was merely, “‘Apparent suicide’? What happened, Gus?”

  I left two dollars on the table and walked to the cash register. One side of the register was covered with school photos of smiling little girls in plaid jumpers, white bows in their hair, front teeth missing.

  “Those your grandkids?” I said

  “Yes, sir,” Fred said. He craned his head around to admire the pictures as if he’d never seen them before. He smiled. “Four of them, sir. I am very proud.”

  He popped the register drawer open, slipped my bills in, handed me my change. “It is very good to see you again.”

  “You too, Fred.”

  I was stepping through the door when he called after me.

  “Sir,” he said. “Excuse me for-I couldn’t help but hear.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please, sir. Be very careful.”

  I pointed my truck down Michigan Avenue toward Melvindale. I thought of the scar on the neck of the man at the motel. I thought of the blood coursing from the other man’s nose. I wondered what the hell I was doing.

  fourteen

  The one time Gracie and I had seen each other in Detroit, I was in my third year at the Detroit Times. We had set several dates previously for drinks or dinner, and each time Gracie had canceled or failed to show. My mother kept pushing me to invite her out, telling me my second cousin was struggling with life just like me.

  “Just like me?” I said. “Mother, I’m working sixty-five hours a week. I’m paying rent. I bought a car. They’re thinking of sending me to Japan for some stories. I’m doing just fine. I got some school loans to pay off but-oh, right, Gracie doesn’t have those because she got a freebie.”

  “All the more reason, honey. She needs a big brother.”

  “I’m not her brother. She ought to talk to whoever dragged her down here in the first place.”

  Still, I promised to try again.

  This time I was late. My computer had crashed-ten minutes before deadline, of course-and I had to redo an entire story about Chrysler threatening to shut an assembly plant in Wisconsin. The Red Devil, a beer-and-pizza joint on the west side, was almost empty on a Monday night. But there was Gracie filing her nails at one of the Formica-topped tables near the bar. Melting ice cubes and a cherry impaled on a plastic spear sat at the bottom of a glass. I could just barely hear “Sweet Child O’ Mine” playing on the jukebox.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Computers.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, without looking up. “Don’t have one.”

  “Did you order?”

  She dropped the nail file in her purse. Her perfume wafted across the table, cutting through the garlic and oregano on the air. She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. They were on me, then looking behind me, then on me again, then on the table, rolling around like marbles in a bowl. I wondered if the empty glass was only her first drink.

  “No,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

  I signaled for the waiter.

  “This place,” she said. “It’s so… so you, Gus.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Oh, you know. Low lights, but not romantic. Peeling vinyl seats. The whole fake unpretentious shtick.” She looked at me and giggled.

  “You must frequent much classier places.”

  “Maybe I do,” she said. “It’s charming. And it would be even more charming if…” She whipped her head around toward the bar. “Hey,” she shouted, “is my drink ready yet? I’m not used to being ignored.”

  “He’s coming,” I said.

  “He better fucking hurry.” She picked up her glass, shook the ice around. “Sorry. Don’t want to cause any trouble. How’s Bea?”

  “Fine. I haven’t talked to her in a week, the job’s been so busy.”

  “The job, the job, the job,” Gracie said. “You need to get your priorities straight, boy. Call Bea.”

  “When’s the last time you called her?”

  “I’m calling her tomorrow.”

  I grinned. “Do you even have a job, Gracie? Or priorities?”

  She gave me a dreamy smile. “I have my priorities. I just don’t happen to have them all in order.” Then she laughed, a little too loud.

  A spindly young man in a white button-down shirt, shiny black slacks, a skinny black tie, and an apron smeared with spaghetti sauce shambled over to our table. The plastic name tag pinned to his shirt said he was Randy. He set a full glass in front of Gracie. Her usual gin and Squirt.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” he said to me.

  I ordered a Blue Ribbon. Gracie
glanced up at Randy, then took the menu out from between the parmesan and pepper flake shakers. I watched her eyes as she pretended to look at it. One lid drooped. She dropped the menu on the table and looked up at the waiter. Her eyes seemed to brighten.

  “So,” she said. “You’re Randy.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Ha,” Gracie said. “I’m not ‘ma’am.’ I could be your little sister.”

  Randy smiled nervously. “What would you like?”

  “Gracie,” I said, wishing the computer had crashed a second time.

  “Don’t have a fucking-” She stopped and closed her eyes momentarily. “Don’t have a fucking cow, all right?”

  “Calm down.”

  “Hold your horses,” she said. “Randy’s not in any hurry, are you, Randy?” She gave him a smile I had seen her use on a hundred unsuspecting boys.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  Now Gracie swiveled around in her seat to face the young waiter. “I’ll say,” she said. “Tell me-tell the truth now-will you tell me the truth?”

  “Uh, sure,” he said.

  Gracie must have seen me start to interrupt, because she raised a hand to stop me. Then she used the same hand to pick up her drink, lift it unsteadily to her lips, and drink it down in one determined gulp. She dropped the glass on the table and it tipped over, spilling the ice cubes and cherry across the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

  “Gracie!” I said.

  “OK,” she said, ignoring me. “Tell me-are you a randy man? Huh?”

  “Gracie, come on. Just tell him what you want.”

  “I’m about to.”

  She stood and stepped into the boy, almost knocking him over. He tried to back away but she grabbed him by his tie and pulled him into her. “Ma’am,” Randy said, looking helplessly over his shoulder toward the bar. No one was there. I leapt out of my chair too late. She pulled harder on Randy’s tie and got up on her toes to plant a kiss on his mouth, getting mostly chin. Then her arms and legs went limp and she collapsed in a heap at Randy’s feet.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, jumping back. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”

  I crouched on the floor and turned Gracie over, cradling her head in one arm. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. She had bitten her tongue. “Gracie, Gracie,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

  As she’d fallen, she had bumped her purse off the table and some of its contents had spilled across the red carpet. I looked to see a change purse, a tube of K-Y Jelly, three tubes of lipstick. And my old blue hairbrush- the brush. I put it all back in her purse, brush first.

  It took me fifteen minutes and a twenty-dollar bill to keep Randy and the chef, a sweating stump of a woman named Rhonda, from calling the police. Gracie looked drunk to them, but I suspected she’d taken something that didn’t mix well with booze. I wouldn’t have minded her going to jail-it might have done her some good-but I would have had to answer to my mother for the rest of my life.

  From a story I had done on car crashes, I happened to know an emergency doctor at, of all places, Grace Hospital. I wrapped Gracie in a Maple Leafs jersey I had in my trunk, laid her on my backseat, and took her to the hospital. The doctors pumped her stomach. Out came Dilaudid, Quaaludes, cocaine, some alcohol. My doctor acquaintance explained that this was a dangerous mix, especially for someone who had been driving. He asked if Gracie might be willing to seek counseling. I told him I doubted it.

  I slept on and off on a chair in the ER waiting room. The doctor nudged me awake around six the next morning and told me Gracie would be OK. I left thirty bucks at the reception desk for a cab. I had to get to work.

  For the next two weeks, I called Gracie almost every day, trying to get her to see me, foolishly, vainly thinking that I could talk her into getting some help. She didn’t return my messages, unless you count the registered letter a lawyer sent on her behalf to the publisher of the Detroit Times.

  The one-page letter said I had made “persistent and inappropriate advances” on one Grace McBride. It said that if I did not cease and desist immediately, “further action” would be taken, including a court order barring me from any future contact with my second cousin.

  The publisher gave the letter to my boss at the time, a guy named Virgil Ropolletti. Rope sat me down in his glassed-in office in the newsroom, put his unlaced Hush Puppies up on his desk, and lit a Camel. He’d won a Pulitzer as a young man for stories on a state lawmaker who had created a secret stash of taxpayer cash he doled out to buddies. He was on his fourth wife-all from circulation or ad sales-and was now obsessed with finding the body of Jimmy Hoffa.

  “Well, sweetie,” he said, “what do I do with this?”

  I told him what had happened at the Red Devil. Rope knew the place, knew the owner, the barmaids, everybody. He could check it out if he wanted. But he wouldn’t bother. He knew me, too.

  “This chick hot?” he said.

  “Jesus, Rope. She’s my cousin.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know how the hell she can afford a lawyer.”

  “Hot-shit firm, too,” he said. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette in a Coke can. “Sounds like my second wife. Families are all fucking crazy, if you ask me.”

  I thought of Mom, decided there was no need to tell her any of this.

  “Yep.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What she wants me to do. Nothing.”

  “The old man,” he said, pointing up at the fifth floor where the publisher’s office was, “he’s a little worked up over this. He’s worried it’s going to show up in the Free Press.”

  “Nope,” I said, knowing I’d be calling Michele Higgins as soon as I left Rope. “Won’t happen.”

  “OK. But why don’t you make yourself scarce, take a couple days off?”

  I didn’t see Gracie again until she moved back to Starvation Lake-except, if it really was her, at that Red Wings playoff game, sauntering down to the rinkside seats with the dapper man in the turtleneck.

  fifteen

  Dirty white splotches of rock salt pocked the gray boulevards of Melvindale. I waited at a red light at the intersection of Greenfield and Schaefer. Not a single car passed in front of me. I supposed many locals would have been working the day shift at the Ford plant just across the Rouge River in Dearborn.

  The light changed. I steered my truck slowly along the wide streets, six and eight lanes across. Streets that were almost empty of cars and trucks. Melvindale apparently had expected more, believing the auto industry would keep it growing forever. I’d root for it anyway. I liked the towns downriver from Detroit-Romulus, Trenton, Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Ecorse, Wyandotte, Melvindale. I’d played a lot of late-night hockey at the rinks there while employed at the Times, drunk more than a few early morning beers at the redbrick bars, scarfed and invariably regretted scarfing sliders from the White Castle at Dix and Oakwood.

  I’d played there as a kid too, tending goal for the River Rats. I loved the Yack Arena in Wyandotte, with its polished oak beams arching gracefully over the ice surface; we’d beaten Mic-Mac there to win a Christmas tournament when I was sixteen. In Ecorse, we were down by a goal late in a game against a local team when a dad standing in the mezzanine over our bench dumped a Coke on us and earned his team a two-minute penalty; Soupy scored the tying goal on a low slap shot from the left face-off dot and, in overtime, slipped a backhander between the befuddled goalie’s legs for one of our sweetest wins ever.

  Then there was the rink in Trenton, home of the Pipefitters, a cramped, frozen box with a corrugated tin roof and bleachers along one side of the ice that swayed under the weight of more than a thousand people, almost every one in ’Fitters black and gold. One game, we had a 4–1 lead after two periods and came out in the third determined to grab our first win ever against what most people believed, year after year, was the best team in Michigan. When the Pipefitters tied it up with three goals in four
minutes and thirty-six seconds, I looked out through my goalie mask and swore that the roof was trembling with the crowd’s ferocious din. With fourteen seconds to go, Zilchy had a chance to break a 5–5 tie. His hurried wrist shot beat the ’Fitter goalie over his left shoulder but hit the crossbar and sailed harmlessly over the glass.

  After the game, Zilch sat on the floor against the dressing room wall, his head in his hands. Nobody noticed him sobbing at first, but then he began to weep, louder every second, and then to scream, shaking, hysterical, tears streaming down his cheeks, tearing his helmet off and slamming it against the floor until it split in two. “Fuck, Zilch,” Soupy said. He jumped up and crossed the room, one skate on and one off, and slapped Zilchy once, hard, across the face. Just like we’d seen on TV. And just like that, Zilchy stopped.

  We never did beat the Pipefitters.

  I turned onto Allen Road. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, not yet. I had no idea where Gracie had lived. But Mich had given me rough directions to Vend’s address. Now I was working up the courage to go there. As a reporter, I had never grown comfortable with confronting people face-to-face, no matter how many times I did it. I did not envy the cop reporters who routinely had to show up on people’s doorsteps to ask what they felt about their teenage daughter being found raped and knifed to death in a viaduct along the Lodge Freeway. I wasn’t sure I wanted to present myself on the porch of a man who took joy in breaking another man’s nose with his head, who I was beginning to believe had a hand in the death of Gracie McBride.

  I passed a radiator shop, a two-story condominium complex trimmed with shake shingles, a Moose lodge, three gas stations, an awning shop, a motel with Christmas lights strung around its windows. There was an Italian bakery, a bar, a bank branch, two liquor stores, a pharmacy, a McDonald’s, a Chinese restaurant called Ming Sun, a Slavic one called Putka’s. I slowed my truck as I passed Wally’s Wonder Print, trying to see in through the windows.

  Bare maples and oaks and ragged piles of mud-crusted snow lined both sides of Harman Street. The sidewalks were clean. Neat bungalows nestled behind the matted brown lawns, patchy with snow. Basketball hoops with their nets removed stood outside one- and two-car garages. I passed the house twice, once going south, once north. I circled around Hanna Street to Elizabeth and back up Harman again. I parked across the street and two doors down from Vend’s house, beneath an enormous oak that could have doubled as the tree in which Gracie was found.