The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. Long story short: revenues are way behind budget, and the budget was conservative to begin with.” Philo looked nervously around the room. “I don’t know where else to cut.”

  I recalled him on his first day at the Pilot. A week before Christmas, he bustled around the newsroom like a kid about to open his presents: just twenty-eight years old and the managing editor of a real newspaper. A tiny newspaper, an obscure newspaper, a newspaper that didn’t report much news that anybody outside of Starvation Lake cared about, but a newspaper nonetheless.

  He had told me then how he had decided to eschew the route taken by his grad-school peers, which was to turn summer internships at the big dailies into full-time jobs that would someday have them covering the White House or Wall Street or wars in foreign hells. “I want nothing to do with the Washington media mob and the whole backstabbing New York scene,” he’d said. “I want to learn this from the ground up, get the ink in my veins, if you know what I mean.” Part of me found his purity and naïveté endearing. Another part wondered if Philo had failed to land any internships and had fallen back on his uncle.

  Either way, I couldn’t help but feel for him now as his eyes darted around our wretched little newsroom, looking for ways to clip a few pennies off our monthly outlay. There in the corner was the desk of our old photographer, who had worked on and off at the Pilot longer than Philo had been alive; Philo had had to call him up and fire him on New Year’s Day. There on Philo’s desk was the mug jammed with ballpoint pens Philo had sneaked one by one out of the Pine County State Bank. There on a shelf were the last three legal pads in a package that had to last until the end of the month.

  “Philo,” I said. “You went to journalism school.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  He laced his fingers together in front of his argyle sweater. “Because I like the way newspapers can knit communities together.”

  He must have read that somewhere, I thought.

  “And you understand how newspapers do that, right? They do it by telling people things they don’t want to hear.”

  “Please,” Philo said.

  “Well, why aren’t you doing journalism then, however you want it?”

  “I’m the managing editor of this newspaper.”

  “You’re the Bob Cratchit of this newspaper.”

  “You must mean Scrooge.”

  “Nope. Scrooge was the boss. You aren’t the boss by a long shot.”

  I saw him look at the thermostat on the wall near the back door.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  He couldn’t help himself. He slipped off the desk and walked to the thermostat and actually turned the heat down. I laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Philo said. He came back to where I was sitting and stood over me. “We could let you go. Would that be funny?”

  It didn’t hit me as hard as he might have hoped, because I didn’t think he was serious. After all, who would actually put stories in the paper if I was gone? Philo spent most of his time writing e-mails and going to meetings about all the other businesses Media North was now in, cell phones and television and the Internet and billboards and video rentals.

  “Hilarious,” I said. “Tell you what, why don’t you just fire yourself? Get the hell out of here and see the world, get drunk, get laid, do the things you really want to do. What’s that you always say? ‘Earth’s turning faster on its axis.’ What are you waiting around here for?”

  “What makes you so high and mighty? What are you, thirty-seven, and you’re still messing around in Starvation Lake?”

  “Thirty-five. And, hey, it pays the bills. I don’t have a trust fund, pal.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Come on.”

  “What do you know about me? You know nothing about me.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but you’re miserable and you know it.” I felt Mrs. B move into the newsroom doorway. “You came here thinking you were going to run this little empire and knit these nice little towns together and take over for Uncle Jimbo. But it’s not working out, is it? You fire me and you won’t have time to worry about the Internet anymore. You’ll have to go to things like drain commission meetings. Ever go to a drain commission meeting? It’s actually even worse than it sounds.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, pal,” he said. “I just might do that. But you know what that means? Huh? It means we’re all goners.”

  “Right, right, we’re all goners. But the Internet, that’s going to save us.”

  “That’s right. Print’s kaput, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend.”

  He pointed at me. “Our biggest cost? Those big damn presses that print the paper. And the trucks that have to haul it around. When we’re rid of those, we’ll have—”

  “Squat,” I said.

  “We’ll be in the money. You’ll see. I’m going to make them see.”

  Although Media North had an Internet business, it did not yet have the Pilot itself on the Internet. Philo had stood before Kerasopoulos and the other directors of Media North and patiently delivered his Internet-is-our-future speech. They had listened politely, as if they were indulging a boy asking the company to sponsor his Little League team, then moved to the next order of business. They wouldn’t even let us have our own experimental website. Kerasopoulos said we couldn’t be handing our stories over for nothing; that would be the death of us. He would also have a harder time controlling the news if the Pilot had an instant pipeline.

  “All they can see is their 401(k)s and their pensions and their long-term bonuses. They’re not about to piss all of that away on your—”

  “Excuse me.”

  It was Mrs. B. Philo turned. “Yes, Phyllis?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you two might like to know. Channel Eight just had a bulletin. The River Rats have a new coach.”

  I jumped out of my chair. “You’re kidding.”

  It hadn’t taken Haskell but two hours to burn me.

  “No,” she said. “It’s Jason Esper.”

  “And what do you think about that, Mrs. B?”

  “What do you think I think?”

  She wasn’t her daughter’s estranged husband’s biggest fan.

  “Who cares?” Philo said.

  ”There’s something else,” she said. She drew her reindeer sweater around herself. “They said the police are going to charge Alden in Gracie’s death.”

  “Impossible. Charge him with what?”

  “Alden who?” Philo said.

  “They didn’t say,” Mrs. B said. “They just said he’d be charged.”

  “There’s a difference between being charged and being taken in for questioning.”

  “I’m just telling you what was on TV.”

  I felt Philo staring at me. My heart was in my belly, partly for Soupy, partly because I’d just been scooped. Twice. In about thirty seconds. On the two biggest stories to hit Starvation in a year.

  I could blame Haskell for the first one; he’d obviously turned around after our meeting and leaked it to Channel Eight. Or maybe Jason himself had, I thought, maybe while I was in bed with his wife. On the other, I had no one but myself to blame. Then again, even if I knew the cops were going to charge Soupy, what the hell was I going to do with it? The Pilot wouldn’t be out till the next morning.

  Excuses, I thought. It felt lousy.

  I turned to Philo. “Alden is Soupy, the guy who owns Enright’s. The thing about him could be bullshit. Channel Eight gets stuff wrong all the time. I’ll chase it.”

  “OK,” Philo said. “The coach is a bigger story anyway, don’t you think?”

  No, I thought, the murder of a Starvation Lake citizen is way bigger. But I said, “Maybe. Just think, Philo, if we had our own Internet page, we might have beaten Channel Eight to both these stories.” I grabbed my coat. “I’ll be back.”

  “Where are you going?” Philo looked up a
t the wall clock over the copier. “You don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You want to help?”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “I have to do this budget.”

  “No problem,” I said, and gave Mrs. B a light squeeze on the shoulder as I headed out to Main Street.

  ten

  Afternoon already had begun to succumb to night. I turned toward the lake. Low hanging cloud banks pinched the tree line against the far end of Main. I walked down the block and sat on a bench beneath the marquee of the old Avalon Cinema, remembering the smell of popcorn on the air when my mother had brought me there as a boy to see Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Now all I could smell was winter.

  I had to make a few calls I didn’t want Philo to overhear. I dialed the numbers for three town council members who, if I caught them at the right time, might not mind talking. Most had shut me out since I’d started writing about Haskell and the new rink. A potato chip bag skittered past my boots as each of the calls landed on voice mail. I left bare-bones messages saying I needed clarification on a council matter; no need for them to know that I was prowling for another Haskell story.

  I needed to confirm what Perlmutter had told me. Haskell had told me just enough off the record to tie my hands. Clever, I thought. Or stupid on my part. Now I had to write my story as if I’d never heard him say what he’d said about seeking help from the town. But I had to get the story. Everyone in town deserved to hear what the council was about to do before it was done and Haskell cashed his check, even if they didn’t want to hear it, which was probably the case. And I had to get back out ahead of Channel Eight.

  Most important, I wanted to know what was going on with Soupy. I tried Darlene’s phone. She didn’t answer. “Hey, stranger, just checking in,” I told her voice mail. I shoved the phone back in my pocket and felt the old hair brush I’d found in Gracie’s Wayne State duffel. I pulled it out and scrutinized the stray hairs stuck in the bristles, auburn and gray.

  I remembered what Mrs. B had said about a life insurance policy. So far as I knew, suicides often nullified life insurance policies; the beneficiary—I assumed it was Gracie’s mother, Shirley, based on what Mrs. B had said—was unlikely to get a penny. Even if it was obvious that Gracie was murdered, even if the police investigated her death as a homicide, someone would have to prove it or the insurance company could take forever to pay, if it paid at all.

  And Soupy? Did he drive Gracie out to the shoe tree and boost her up to the hanging bough, then just leave her there to die? No way, I thought. Although he and Gracie were far from in love, they were having a hell of a good time. Or at least Soupy was.

  “Dude,” he had whispered to me late one night as we dressed for a game. “I got no legs.”

  “Why?” I said, digging for a roll of tape in my hockey bag.

  “Gracie. I got to the rink early to get my skates sharpened and she hauled my ass back to the Zam shed.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah. Ever fuck on a Zamboni?”

  I tried to imagine precisely how they had done it, decided I didn’t want to know. “Good old Nadia,” I said.

  “More like Evel Knievel.”

  I had to shut this conversation down. Without looking up from the sock I was winding with tape, I said, “So, you going to marry her?”

  “Marry her? Trap, she won’t even let me take her to a movie. The woman fucks like there’s no tomorrow.”

  And now there was no tomorrow.

  I didn’t believe the cops were going to charge Soupy with a thing. More likely, I thought, the sheriff was trying to squeeze him for information.

  So my next stop had to be Dingus—if Dingus would even talk. He didn’t do phones. I would have to go see him, hope whoever was at the front desk—maybe Darlene—would tell him I was there. I looked at my watch. I had enough time if he didn’t make me wait too long, if he agreed to see me at all.

  I was about to get up from the bench when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “You are truly deep in thought, young man.”

  I turned to see Parmelee Gilbert, attorney-at-law, in a charcoal topcoat and a wool scarf the color of a carrot.

  “Impressive,” he said. “Would that all of us in Starvation think so hard about what we’re doing.”

  “Hey, Parm,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing. How are you?”

  “Staying busy.” He peeled the leather glove off of his right hand and extended it. “I am very sorry for your loss.”

  I knew he meant it. “Thanks. Mom’s taking it pretty hard.”

  “These sorts of things are never easy,” he said, and he meant that too. He slipped his glove back on. “Please extend my sincerest condolences.”

  “I will, thanks. Did you see Gracie’s mom?”

  The question took him by surprise. He folded his arms behind his back and leaned slightly forward, a polite smile on his face. Parmelee Gilbert was nothing if not polite. As Laird Haskell’s lawyer, he never failed to return my calls and politely decline to comment or to make his client available for questions.

  “Shirley McBride?” he said. “I did speak with her, yes.”

  “Ah, sorry,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege?”

  He stood straight again, and peered past me down the street. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

  Twin mugs of tea steeped on coasters on Parmelee Gilbert’s desk. He sat in a leather chair behind the desk and lifted each of his legs to strip the slickened rubbers off his wingtips. The shoes gleamed with what I assumed was that morning’s polish. “I apologize,” Gilbert said, while setting the rubbers on a rug, “that I haven’t had you in before.”

  From the straight-backed chair facing his desk, I could have laughed without being rude. Gilbert himself might have laughed with me. He had so thoroughly stonewalled me on my Haskell stories that I had almost given up on calling him. Of course I couldn’t actually give up; I had to keep trying, at least so I could tell the faithful readers of the Pilot that I had. Each time I called, he would thank me for calling with my “pertinent questions,” ask me to give his best to my mother, and promise to get back to me “with the clearest possible response I can offer.”

  And then, invariably, he would call me at 5:40 p.m., twenty minutes before my deadline, to say, “We’re sorry, but Mr. Haskell prefers not to discuss these matters in the press” or “With our apologies, Mr. Haskell is focused exclusively on the positive aspects of this extremely vital project for Pine County and Starvation Lake.” He was a lawyer representing a lawyer. Sometimes I would wonder: Did Gilbert think at all like Haskell? Did he envy Haskell’s success? Or envy Haskell himself?

  Gilbert always thanked me yet again for giving his client—never him, always his client—the opportunity to comment. He always declined, no matter how or how many times I asked, to say anything further. To my occasional attempts to get him to guide me one way or the other on an off-the-record basis, he would merely say, “With all due respect to you and your colleagues, in my experience there is no such thing as off the record.”

  I knew reporters at my old paper, the Times, and our rival, the Free Press, who would have been pleased, even relieved, to have Gilbert’s nonresponse; it’s so much easier and quicker five minutes before deadline to insert “so-and-so declined to comment” than to have to shoehorn in a last-minute point-by-point rebuttal of every fact and nuance in your story without making it a he-said, she-said jumble that threatened readers with whiplash. “No comment” made a reporter’s job simpler. Unfortunately, simpler had never had much appeal for me. If I had preferred simpler, I never would have left Starvation, never would have gambled away my job in Detroit, never would have left the blessed sinecure of my crease and goalposts and mesh to play wing.

  I had to grudgingly respect Parmelee Gilbert for refusing to go off the record. He was correct, of course, that there was no such thing. There was fact and there was fiction and it didn’t matter whether you said it was “according to a person familiar
with the matter” if the person supposedly familiar was lying or ignorant or stupid. I had known plenty of lawyers and flacks who viewed off the record as an opportunity to dissemble and obfuscate. Gilbert hadn’t been terribly helpful, but at least he’d been honest in his unhelpfulness. So I didn’t laugh when he apologized for not having me in before.

  “You’re doing your job,” I said. “I just figure you could bill a lot more hours by actually answering my questions.”

  He smiled. “Milk? Sugar?”

  “A little of both, please.”

  While he finished preparing the tea, I looked around. For a lawyer who had hung his cedar shake shingle on Main Street for more than thirty years, Gilbert’s career mementoes were scant. Framed degrees from Michigan Tech, a bachelor’s in American history, and the University of Detroit law school decorated the otherwise empty wall to my left. A hot plate rested on the windowsill behind him. On his desk was a telephone, two pens and two sharpened pencils lined up alongside one another, and a blotter calendar neatly jotted with appointments and reminders. On my right, a waist-high bookshelf was lined with law tomes and a few slim editions of a book, Ghost Towns of Michigan.

  Atop the shelf stood a photograph of a smiling girl in braces and pigtails entwined with white ribbons. She was wearing a cheerleader’s blue sweater embroidered with an interlocking “P” and “C” for Pine County High. Her name, I knew, was Carol Jo Gilbert. Had she lived, she would have been in her mid-forties.

  When the girl was fourteen, her mother, Gilbert’s wife, had taken her downstate on an annual Christmas shopping trip. They went from store to store in the big Northland Center mall north of Detroit, stopping as always at Sanders for lunch. The mother left Carol Jo to finish a chocolate soda while going to a pay phone to let her husband know they were having fun.

  Carol Jo wasn’t seen again until the ice melted on a pond near Harbor Beach where her killer had dumped her. I remembered hearing about it as a boy, the hushed, anxious whispers, the shaking heads and furrowed brows, while eating breakfast at Audrey’s with my mother. Carol Jo’s killer was never found.