The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

“Why are you up so early?” Mom said.

  “Got a meeting.”

  “Where were you yesterday? You didn’t return my calls.”

  “I was out of town. Did you call my cell phone?”

  Lately Mom had been calling my office when she meant to call my cell, and vice versa. Mrs. B reached across the table and took one of my mother’s hands in hers. “Bea,” she said.

  “Of course, yes,” Mom said. “How did it go?”

  “Fine.” I assumed Mom had told Mrs. B where I’d gone. I decided to change the subject. “Who sent these?”

  A glass vase holding a bouquet of white lilies and carnations stood on the snack bar in the kitchen. I picked up the card lying in front of it.

  Deeply sorry for your loss.

  With sincere regards,

  Felicia Haskell

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s nice. I didn’t know you knew her. Or that she knew Gracie was… you know.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Felicia Haskell.”

  Mom thought for a second. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t think I know her.”

  “It’s all just part of the campaign,” Mrs. B said.

  “Campaign?” For a second her suggestion eluded me. “Oh. You mean for the rink? Come on. They know me better than that.”

  An idea popped into my head. I fingered the letter in my pocket.

  “They came late yesterday,” Mom said. “I was just running out to ceramics and didn’t have time to move them.”

  “If it was me, I’d feed them to the deer,” Mrs. B said.

  “I might just do that.”

  “We don’t need that rink, and we don’t need a new coach either. Poppy does just fine with those boys.”

  I set the card back down. “I better get in the shower.”

  “We’re going to Audrey’s, dear. Would you like to join us?”

  That gave me another idea.

  “No thanks. I’m already running late. See you at the office later, Mrs. B.”

  The bathroom sat between the two bedrooms and had doors on either end. I went in one door, locked it, and turned on both the shower and the sink. I listened. Mom and Mrs. B were still talking. I opened the door at the other end and slipped into Mom’s room.

  I found the manila envelope Audrey had told me about in the middle drawer of my mother’s desk. It was torn open at one end. As quietly as I could, keeping one ear on the conversation in the dining room, I slipped two sheaves of pages out of the envelope.

  The first was bound within a cover of light blue cardboard. “Haverford Variable Life Insurance Company” read the logo on the front. I scanned the first page quickly. On January 7, Grace Maureen McBride had signed up for a term life policy for the sum of $250,000. I flipped through the pages, wondering who was the beneficiary. On page six I found a notation that the beneficiary “will be as shown in the application unless you change them.”

  I switched to the other sheaf of pages, Gracie’s application for the policy. I found what I was looking for at the bottom of the fourth page. Fifty percent of the death benefit, it said, would go to Patricia Armbruster of Melvindale, Michigan, the woman I knew as Trixie.

  The other 50 percent would go to Beatrice Carpenter of Starvation Lake, Michigan.

  “Oh, holy shit,” I whispered.

  “Gus?”

  My mother’s voice came from behind the opposite door of the bathroom. I stuffed the papers back into the envelope. She knocked on the door.

  “Gussy. Why is the sink running?”

  I slid her drawer closed, tiptoed back into the bathroom, and eased the door on my side shut. I turned off the running water.

  “Just shaving,” I said.

  “Are you all right in there?”

  “I’m getting in the shower.”

  “Gussy. Are you going to be all right? At your meeting?”

  Mrs. B must have known where I was going.

  “Everything’s going to be fine, Mom.”

  I stood there staring at the door, waiting for my mother to go back to the dining room. I could tell she was waiting herself, probably thinking, What does my son know? while I wondered the same about her.

  My cell phone rang as my truck descended the big hill overlooking Skegemog Lake along M-72 west. If I didn’t hit traffic along the Traverse bays, I’d be on time for my appointment with Jim Kerasopoulos.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  There was something unpleasant in the tone of Darlene’s voice.

  “Got a meeting with the fat ass in Traverse. Did you talk to the cops in Sarnia?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes you’re as slippery as an eel.”

  “Huh?”

  I heard a newspaper rustle in the background.

  “You haven’t heard the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Looks like you got scooped again.”

  I had watched a few minutes of Channel Eight’s 7:00 a.m. report at Mom’s house and seen nothing about Starvation Lake.

  “Scooped how?”

  “The Detroit Free Press. You know. Front page, too. Here, let me read you the headline: ‘Feds Investigating Car Makers’ Nemesis.’ ”

  Car makers’ nemesis, I thought. Ralph Nader? Why would I care about the feds and Ralph Nader? Then it came to me.

  “Haskell?” I said.

  “Correct,” she said. “Would you like to hear the first paragraph?”

  In my mind I saw Michele Higgins sitting across the table at Petros, cigarette jutting from her hand, her face lined with disdain.

  “Go ahead.”

  “‘A federal grand jury is considering evidence that renowned plaintiffs’ attorney Laird Haskell avoided paying taxes in excess of two million dollars, sources familiar with the matter say.’ ”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It gets better.” She continued reading. “‘Haskell, who left Metro Detroit last year and moved to the northern Michigan town of Starvation Lake, has had his assets frozen by the federal government and is said to be struggling to avoid personal bankruptcy, sources said.’ ”

  She stopped. In a way, the story was a complement to what I’d written about Haskell’s inability to finish the new rink. But I doubted that was why Darlene was reading it to me.

  “That’s quite a story,” I said, bracing myself.

  “Here’s the best part.” She read:

  A. J. Carpenter, executive editor of the local paper, the Pine County Pilot, said Haskell has stopped paying contractors he hired to build a new hockey rink in the town. “Work’s come to a stop,” Carpenter said in an interview Tuesday at a diner in Metro Detroit. “He’s trying to shake the town down for a hundred grand.”

  Carpenter, a former Detroit Times reporter who resigned in the wake of an ethics scandal two years ago, described Haskell as “slippery as an eel.”

  “I’ll bet you can guess the byline on the story.”

  “It was strictly-”

  “But not strict enough that you would mention it to me last night? Or the other day? I know you had all that other business to attend to and of course you had to get back in time for your precious hockey game but maybe you had a few minutes to squeeze in a quickie, huh?”

  “Darlene, we had coffee.”

  The line went silent. My tires whined on the plowed asphalt. Darlene spoke so softly then that I could barely hear what she said.

  “You lied.”

  “I-no. Darlene, I didn’t lie, I just didn’t-”

  “You lied. And I don’t know who to believe anymore. I don’t know who to believe.”

  She hung up.

  I pulled my truck into a gas station at the corner of M-72 and U.S. 31 and parked. My foot hurt when I stepped on the brake, and I remembered Jason hovering over me, telling me to stay away from Darlene.

  I stared at my cell phone lying in my lap.

  I remembered ho
w Mich suddenly had been in a hurry to leave Petros. The Mich who had a good story going, who’d probed me about Haskell to see what I knew, who must have gotten nervous that I would get to it before her. And just for the hell of it, shoved her knife in and twisted.

  I thought of Darlene hunched over the paper, reading. She must have read it at the sheriff’s department. She didn’t get the Free Press at home. Somebody must have given it to her, pointed out the story, the quotes, made her blush with embarrassment.

  “Damn, Darlene,” I said to no one. “I’m sorry.”

  I tossed the phone aside and pulled my truck onto U.S. 31.

  Downtown Traverse City was what Starvation Lake longed to be. Before noon fell, shoppers would be scuttling along the brick-trimmed sidewalks of Front Street beneath old-fashioned gaslights hung during summer with baskets of flowers. The cheerful shop windows would beckon with antiques and books and bathymetric maps of Lake Michigan and jewelry and fudge and pastel sweatshirts embroidered “Up North.” There were banks and bars and art galleries, a movie theater that actually showed movies, and restaurants boasting of sushi and wild boar tacos and fresh walleye with a nut crust du jour.

  Still, I didn’t feel jealous in the least as I peered down on the street from a fourth-floor conference room at Media North headquarters. I would have taken Audrey’s egg pie over nut crust du jour any day. Envy was for people like the town council members who deluded themselves into thinking that an influx of rich downstaters like Haskell-Haskell, the man with the feds chasing him-would return Starvation to whatever glory it imagined it once enjoyed.

  A door opened behind me. I turned. Kerasopoulos swept into the room. “Betty,” he said to his secretary. “No calls.”

  He closed the door and motioned at the conference table. “Please.”

  “Good morning, Jim.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not. Sit.”

  I took a seat facing him across the table. He had a thin sheaf of papers rolled up in one meaty hand. He set them facedown on the table between us and sat. The strands of his navy tie with the pinpoint pink dots splayed in opposite directions across his belly, like a bib. He pressed his palms together and set his hands on the table so that his fingers pointed at me.

  “Gus,” he said. “It’s been a year of firsts for this admittedly young company. First time gross margins exceeded forty percent. First time selling an all-in-one mobile-phone, long-distance, cable-TV, and Internet package. First time recognized by the Michigan Association of Ad Agencies as a prime partner.”

  He tapped the tips of his fingers on the table with each sentence, his eyebrows knitted into a single salt-and-pepper hedge across his forehead.

  “OK,” I said.

  “Now, thanks to your reckless and irresponsible reporting, we are confronted with our very first libel lawsuit.”

  He slapped the papers with his right hand but left them facedown. “But let’s take things one at a time. First, your specious and highly speculative article about the unfortunate young woman who hung herself. Thank God we caught that before the first press run. Did you think you could sneak it past me, Gus?” He pointed at the wall at one end of the room where a trio of diplomas hung in wood frames. “Did you forget that, as an attorney who takes his profession very seriously, I’ve spent more than thirty-five years paying attention to every single little detail?”

  Fat ass, I thought. “She didn’t kill herself. Wait. The cops are going to prove she was murdered.”

  “Oh, they are, are they? Well, I guess they better let the Pine County medical examiner know, because he says she committed suicide.”

  I dearly wanted to tell him that his pal Haskell might well be implicated. But I didn’t need him squealing about what I knew.

  “All Doc Joe said was that strangu-”

  “Shut up!” Kerasopoulos lifted his wide body halfway out of his seat and stabbed a finger in my direction. “Just shut your damn mouth. This is not an argument. This is not a negotiation. This is me, the president and chief executive officer of Media North Corporation, telling you what’s what. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “We would look like fools today if we had needlessly stirred the town up with your cockamamie triangulations of half truths and rumors with a few irrelevant facts thrown in. I will not have it.” He was bellowing now, his baritone booming into my face. “Do you hear me? I will not have it. And I will not have my neph-Philo learning that this is the way to publish a community newspaper.”

  He sat back down, took a deep breath. His starched shirt collar dug into his mashed potato neck. “A word of advice, though I sincerely have no expectation of you taking it: you really should keep your family matters within your family.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have something to gain from a finding that your cousin was actually murdered, would you?”

  “No,” I said, without thinking. Then I remembered the life insurance policy. My mother would benefit, but of course I was living with my mother, so-but how the hell would Kerasopoulos have known about the policy?

  “Enough on that subject. Were it our only problem.”

  He grabbed the papers, flipped them over, and shoved them across the table at me. The word COMPLAINT blared from the top of the cover page. Haskell v. Media North Corp. et al. included as defendants the Pine County Pilot, a number of contractors I had quoted in my stories, and me. I looked first for a docket number, which would have indicated that the lawsuit had actually been filed. There wasn’t one. I quickly skimmed the next twelve pages.

  The lawsuit asserted that my stories had maliciously defamed Laird Haskell and, in doing so, deprived him of the ability to complete a project-the new rink, of course-in which he had invested considerable amounts of his own time and money. He was seeking damages in excess of $10 million. Just seeing that number, I thought, must have puckered Kerasopoulos’s wide butt.

  I actually smiled. “He hasn’t actually filed it yet, has he?”

  “Does this amuse you somehow?” Kerasopoulos leaned into the table, his face reddening. “A libel verdict against this company could render-”

  “This is bullshit.” I slid the papers back. “He’s just trying to scare us into paying him a pile of money he desperately needs.”

  “Let me assure you-”

  “He hasn’t filed yet, right?”

  “No, he has not. But I assure you that Mr. Haskell is dead serious.”

  “Uh-huh. Have you seen today’s Detroit Free Press? Or don’t you read papers that don’t cuddle up to advertisers?”

  He gave me one of those long, hard, penetrating looks that men who imagine themselves to be powerful give to men who don’t burden themselves with such illusions. It told me that the answer to both of my questions was no.

  Kerasopoulos didn’t reply, though. He sat up straight and smoothed his tie across his torso.

  “Well, Gus,” he said, “I’m afraid we can no longer tolerate your particular brand of journalism. Perhaps you found it easier to practice in Detroit. Although, as we both know, things didn’t work out so well for you there either.”

  OK, I thought. My time at the Pilot was up. What did I need it for anyway? How could you tell anybody anything when the next paper was always three or four days away? And it wasn’t like the weekly paycheck of $412.50 was going to make me rich, even in Starvation Lake.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “The feds are coming down on Haskell but we should be afraid of him. Gross margins are through the roof but you’re whacking the Pilot budget. Shit, Jim, you should be grateful for a big bad libel suit. It gives you the perfect excuse to shut the Pilot down.”

  “We’re done here.” He picked up the papers and stood.

  “You can make a big show out of firing me, wait a few weeks, then tell the good people of Starvation Lake, Sorry, this libel suit is too much for your little rag and its subpar profit margins, we’ve got to shut it down. Then you throw a few hundred grand at Haskell to make
him go away-if he’s not in jail by then-and your year-end bonus will be secure. Great plan.”

  “I would fire you this minute if the lawyers would let me.”

  “Go ahead. Stand on principle, Jim. Or is now not really the time?”

  The door behind him opened. A slender young man in a security guard’s uniform stepped into the doorway and stood with his hands folded at his belt. He had a badge but no gun. He also seemed to be trying to grow a mustache, without much success.

  “This gentleman will show you out,” Kerasopoulos said. “You are hereby suspended from your job indefinitely, pending further consideration by the Media North board of directors. In the meantime, you are barred from the Pilot newsroom and any of its facilities. We will arrange for you to collect your personal items in due time. In the meantime, please do not attempt to contact any of the newspaper’s employees, including Mr. Beech. If you choose noncompliance, rest assured we will promptly take appropriate legal or other actions.”

  “Other actions?” I said. “I thought you were just a lawyer.”

  He glared at me one last time and left the room.

  The fuzzy-lipped rent-a-cop placed a hand on my elbow and led me silently to the elevator, down to the first floor, and across the lobby to the glass double-door entrance. Outside, a thin gray sleet had begun to fall. As I started out the door, I turned to the guard. “I hate fucking Traverse City,” I said.

  “Have a good day,” he said.

  My windshield wipers made slurping slaps as I steered my pickup past the fudge shops along the bay east of Traverse. I turned on the radio, thinking naively that I might catch a bulletin on Haskell’s IRS troubles. A country song came on. Despite myself, I laughed. I had nearly lost my job and my girlfriend. “Good thing I don’t have a dog,” I said aloud.

  What was I going to do now? A newspaper reporter wasn’t much without a newspaper. Even if I did get to the bottom of Gracie’s death, who was I going to tell? Not Michele Higgins, that was for sure. There was my mother, of course, and Mrs. B. They would listen and tell their bingo and bowling and ceramics partners only those things they wished to believe. And those women and men in turn would translate only those things they wished to believe, until it all became a fiction.