The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  I took the folder and stood waiting, hoping no one would walk up and ask me what I was doing with a folder stamped CONFIDENTIAL on both sides. I stuffed it under an arm and glanced up at the surveillance camera screwed into the wall above the door, peering down on me like a crow on a telephone wire.

  The door buzzed again. It opened and Soupy stepped through, Dingus right behind him. Past his shoulder I saw Darlene walking away and had to stop myself from calling after her.

  “I’m releasing Mr. Campbell to you,” Dingus said. He turned to Soupy. “I’m not through with you. If you even think about taking any out-of-town trips, we’ll have you back in here before you hit the interstate. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Soupy said.

  “You tell them anything?” I said.

  Soupy and I had just pulled out of the department lot, my headlamps carving the blackness into cones of white.

  “I’m going broke, man,” he said. “Just get me back to my bar.”

  He wasn’t going to talk. Not now. There’d be time to push him later.

  There were all sorts of questions I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Dingus: What about that rejection letter Gracie had supposedly gotten? Why was she wearing only one shoe when she died? How did she get up into the shoe tree? Where was the ladder? Where was the car? Dingus might not have answered any of them. He usually gave me only what he wanted me to know, so that I might, in doing my own job, help him.

  So I was dying to see what was in that accordion folder I’d stuck beneath my seat.

  I glanced at Soupy. The way he was staring out his passenger window, I had to wonder if he was actually distraught over Gracie’s death, if he realized, facing the cops, that Gracie actually had mattered for more than whatever she did for him in bed, or on a Zamboni.

  We rode in silence for a mile. Then, without turning to me, Soupy said, “Got something to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not yanking your chain.”

  “About what?”

  He shifted in his seat until he was looking out the windshield. “They put me in that room where the prisoners see their lawyers,” he said. I’d been in the room once for an interview myself. There was a table bolted to the floor, a few hard-backed chairs, a single window covered with a metal cage. “I’m looking out at the back lot, and who rolls up but Meat.”

  “Jason?”

  “Yep.”

  My heart was suddenly racing. “And?”

  “He wasn’t there to pick up his safe-snowmobiling certificate, Trap.”

  He told me he saw Darlene come out to meet Jason. She wasn’t wearing a coat. I imagined her holding her arms tight around her bosom, her breath billowing around her head. Of course Soupy couldn’t hear anything. Then someone came to take him to another room.

  “Well,” I said, “they probably have divorce details to work out.”

  “Maybe. Didn’t notice any lawyers out there.”

  I kept my eyes on the unfurling white road, my lights flashing on the lower halves of tree trunks whisking by in the dusk.

  “Thought you’d want to know,” Soupy said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.” The lamps along Main Street were coming into view ahead. “They didn’t, at least when—?”

  “No. No touchy feely. But … I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “Looked to me like he wants her back or something.”

  I cackled. It came out sounding like someone else. “That ain’t going to happen.”

  I dropped Soupy at Enright’s and went around the block to the Pilot back lot, where I sat in the dark checking the messages on my cell phone.

  The three council members I had called said they would have no comment on whatever story I was working on. A fourth whom I had not called also left a message saying she wasn’t interested in commenting. I had to figure they knew what I was going to ask.

  The fifth message came from Darlene. She said she had to work late, don’t bother making spaghetti dinner, she’d catch up with me at the Rats game, or later. She loved me. She had to go.

  Relax, I told myself. She still had issues to work through. She wasn’t going anywhere. Everything would be all right. I’d try her again later. We’d lock her door against the night and hide beneath her blankets.

  I switched on an inside light and pulled the accordion folder out from under my seat. A label pasted to the top of the folder was inscribed in felt-tip pen: “McBRIDE, Grace Maureen, 08/26/95.”

  I reached inside and pulled out a stapled bundle of pages, maybe fifteen in all. It was an official Pine County Sheriff’s Department report. I flipped immediately to the last page and, sure enough, there was the signature of then-deputy Dingus Aho. “Fucking-ay,” I said.

  I looked at my watch: 5:21. I had thirty-nine minutes to write two stories and a few briefs. No sweat, I thought. But, as much as I wanted to see whatever Dingus wanted me to see, I did not have time then to sit and read that police report. There was no chance of it going in that night’s paper, and if I didn’t get my work done on deadline, I’d have a call from Jim Kerasopoulous waiting for me at eight o’clock the next morning. I had no desire to talk to Kerasopoulous, not about my dedication to my job, not about the future of the Pilot, not about the weather.

  I slipped the folder back under the seat and started across the lot toward the newsroom. By now Philo was probably panicking. I started to write the Gracie story in my head. I wasn’t about to write the standard “apparent suicide” story, but, given what I had heard at the sheriff’s department, I had to be careful about using the word “murder.” Foul play, I typed on my imaginary keyboard, may have played a role in the macabre death of a Starvation Lake woman …

  I stopped in my tracks.

  Starvation Lake woman?

  I turned and trotted back to my truck, unlocked the door. The inside light came on. I reached under the seat and slipped the police report out of the accordion folder. I wanted to see just one thing. It was typed on the very first page, just below Gracie’s name and house address: “Melvindale, Michigan.”

  Melvindale sat just south of Detroit on the northwest border of River Rouge. River Rouge was the old steel town where the X’d-out calendar hanging over Gracie’s bed had come from.

  I knew Melvindale. I’d played hockey there when I lived downstate and drank in a bar called Nasty Melvin’s. I hid the folder and locked my truck. Walking back to the newsroom, I had a feeling I might be visiting Nasty Melvin’s again.

  eleven

  I knew there was a problem when I heard Philo say, “Oh, God. They’ve stopped the presses.” He was staring into his computer screen, hands frozen over his keyboard, his face a crimped mask of worry.

  “Why?” I said.

  Only once had I heard anyone actually say the words “Stop the presses” without sarcasm. It wasn’t because the pope had died or a passenger jet had plunged into the Detroit River. It was because some layout guy pasting up pages got miffed at his boss for not letting him take the night off to go to a Tigers game.

  At the Detroit Times, we were running a wire story inside the paper one night about a man who’d been convicted of sodomy. We ran a mug shot and, beneath it, short captions that identified him as so-and-so from Wichita, “convicted sodomist.” But instead of the sodomist’s photo, the ticked-off layout guy inserted a picture of a well-known Detroit industrialist named Cochran. There were a few nervous laughs until the executive editor caught wind of it. He didn’t actually say, “Stop the presses,” he said, “Jesus H. Christ, we’re all going to get fired.” His secretary then picked up her phone and called the printing plant and gave the command. The layout guy got suspended for a week, but the suspension was set aside after his union appealed.

  Philo looked across the room at me. “They’re stopping it for your stories.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. I’d had stories spiked before, but never two on the same day. “Which?”

  “Both. Shit, shit, triple shit.
I knew I should have looked at those.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “No. No time. You didn’t give me any time.” He picked up his keyboard as if he might slam it down. He reconsidered, let it drop lightly back onto its tray. “Goddammit, Gus.”

  “Sorry, Philo.” Although I wasn’t, really. “I wrote the stories and I’ll stand by them. Not your fault.”

  “You might not have much to stand by. They’re totally redoing the hockey coach story and”—he squinted at his screen—“the dead lady story too, cutting that to a brief.”

  “A brief? Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Who do you think?”

  The call from Kerasopoulos came ten minutes later. Philo kept his voice down but I overheard him say “at least half an hour”—which I took to mean how late I’d been—and repeat “Yes, of course” and “Sorry” four or five times. Finally he hit his hold button and turned to me. His expression vacillated between angry and shattered.

  “It’s the boss,” he said.

  I hit the blinking button and picked up my phone.

  “What’s up, Jim?”

  “Please tell me who your source is.” Issuing from the speakerphone in his Traverse City office, Kerasopoulos’s voice sounded even more like a foghorn than usual.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  “Your source. Who’s your source?”

  “Would you mind getting off the speakerphone?”

  “I would.” So he wasn’t alone. Fat ass, I thought. I thought it not solely because Kerasopoulos indeed had a fat ass, but because he was a fat ass through and through with his fat-assed way of thinking that whatever he did or thought or said was absolutely correct. I knew it was stupid to think this, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Apologies, Jim, but I’m reluctant to discuss sourcing when I don’t know who else is listening in.” I was bound to disclose my sources—or at least most of them—to a superior, but I didn’t have to be careless about it, especially in an echo chamber like Starvation.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  I imagined him leaning his double-wide torso out over his conference table, cheap paintings of white-tailed deer and mallards on the paneled wall behind his salt-and-pepper head.

  “Which story are you talking about, Jim?”

  I heard a click—the hold button—followed by silence. I figured he was inquiring about the story on Jason Esper being named coach of the River Rats. About midway through the story, low enough where Kerasopoulos might not notice it, I’d slipped in a couple of paragraphs about the town council planning to convene in private to consider the Haskell loan. I felt pretty good about it. The taxpayers of Starvation needed to hear it, even if they didn’t want to.

  There was another click and Kerasopoulos came back on.

  “The room is clear, sir,” he said, though he remained on speakerphone. “I would advise you not to test my patience any further. Now, please tell me who told you the rink developer wants a loan from the Starvation Lake council.”

  That was easy, and even if Haskell was eavesdropping, I didn’t mind outing him. “The developer himself, Laird Haskell,” I said.

  “And on what basis were you speaking with him?”

  Kerasopoulos, who had set up the meeting, knew damn well what basis. “At the time, we were off the record,” I said, “but—”

  “So you just violated that agreement willy-nilly? This is not Detroit, Gus.”

  Oh, man, I thought, this was like having the puck on my stick in front of an empty net. My ready reply had popped into my head while I was talking with Dingus. “Sorry, Jim, but Haskell promised me the scoop on the hockey coach. Then he went and leaked it to Channel Eight, so the off-the-record deal’s off.”

  “That’s your answer?”

  “He broke the agreement, I didn’t.”

  “Well, Mr. Big City Reporter, you are an idiot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You are an idiot. Mr. Haskell did not leak that story—I did.”

  The “I did” echoed through the speakerphone and reverberated in my ears. If what he said was true, I had truly fucked up.

  “I’m sorry, how did you—”

  “As chief executive of a company that oversees what I consider to be a sacred public trust, I try to keep myself abreast of everything happening in our communities,” he said. “When I heard about the new coach, I thought it was important enough news that we shouldn’t make our viewers and readers wait to hear it. You seem more concerned about pursuing your various vendettas against citizens who are trying to accomplish something good for the community.”

  Citizens trying to buy a pile of ads in your paper with the community’s money, I thought. “They’re not vendettas,” I said.

  “As for the other story, I’m not about to have the Pine County Pilot indulge your lurid conspiracy theories and phantom sourcing. ‘Sources familiar with the case’? What the hell does that mean? Do you think this is the Washington Post? Until someone from the appropriate police department says for the record that they are investigating a murder, it’s a suicide, do you understand? We put out newspapers here, not mystery novels.”

  “All the story said is that police think foul play may have been involved, and that’s absolutely true.”

  “Apparent suicide, three grafs, inside. Philo will take care of it.” I looked over at Philo, who looked away from me, his phone on his ear. Fuck me, I thought. “Frankly, Gus,” Kerasopoulous continued, “I have zero time—zero, is that clear?—for your vendettas. Please plan on being in my office tomorrow morning.”

  “Wait, there’s—”

  “Nine o’clock. Sharp.”

  He ended the call. I hung up my phone. Philo was still on his. I’d hoped to read my leftover mail before heading to Enright’s for a beer before the River Rats game, but I just grabbed my coat and went for the back door. As I swung it open, Philo called out, “Late for a drain commission meeting?”

  “Fuck you, Philo,” I said as I slammed the door shut behind me.

  The crust of snow covering the beach splintered beneath my boots as I trudged toward the shore of the lake. The serrated ice dug into my shins. I stopped at the frozen edge of the lake and finally buttoned my coat. I took a deep breath, felt the cold air singe my lungs.

  I liked the lake in winter. Of course I loved the lake when the summer sun lit the water and the afternoon music was boat motors and ice cubes being dropped into glasses and Ernie Harwell telling us a young fellow from Rawsonville would take that foul ball home as a souvenir. But the winter beach took me into a cocoon of wind and wet and cold that kept out the tinny claptrap surrounding the town’s preoccupations of the moment.

  I’d barged out of the Pilot, snatched the accordion folder from the truck and scrambled down South Street, furious with Kerasopoulos and Philo, but furious mostly with myself. I had assumed that Haskell burned me, when in fact it was Kerasopoulos. My assumption hadn’t been unreasonable. But of course Kerasopoulos knew about the coach announcement, and probably all about my meeting with Haskell, how Haskell and I hadn’t really become best buddies. So Kerasopoulos did what he did.

  But I had assumed nevertheless, which was unforgivably lazy and stupid—a mistake, I told myself, that I never would have made back at the Times. Here I was unmarried, no kids, thirty-five, living at Mom’s house, dating a married woman. No wonder I was already getting soft.

  I walked toward the old marina Soupy had sold out of his family. Two streetlamps hovered at either edge of the eight concrete docks invisible beneath the snow. Just inside the first lamp’s pool of light, a brass bell fringed with corrosion and ice sat silent on a stanchion. I sat down with the bell at my back and looked around to see that I was alone. I slipped the Pine County Sheriff’s Department police report, S-950863, out of the accordion folder.

  An ambulance was called to the Hill-Top Motel at approximately 2:14 a.m. on that muggy Saturday, August 26, 1995. The date sounded familiar, though I didn’t immediately
recognize why.

  Dingus’ neat block lettering made it easy to read. I admired his meticulous reporting.

  The Hill-Top offered seventeen small rooms, $23.95 a night, in a peeling one-story building atop a low rise along U.S. 131. It was a favorite of truckers making runs between Chicago and the Soo Locks in the Upper Peninsula, and of lovers from Mancelona and Kalkaska conducting illicit affairs.

  The owner, a man named Clarence Kruger, was a bald sixty-two-year-old with shrubs of white hair sprouting around his ears. He was at the office desk when a silver Jaguar, top down, roared up the gravel drive shortly before midnight. The couple in the Jaguar weren’t the kind of people Kruger preferred to have stay in his motel, or at least that’s what he would later tell Dingus.

  The woman got out of the car and wobbled up to Kruger on high heels. She wore a silken white summer dress splashed with polka dots the size and color of strawberries. The man in the Jaguar shouted at her across the lot.

  “Cash,” he said. “No neighbor.” He seemed to have an accent.

  Kruger noticed the neck of a bottle of gin protruding from the woman’s purse. “A room with nobody in the rooms next to it, please,” she told him.

  Number 7 was such a room, but Kruger had just repainted it. He considered telling the woman he had no vacancy at all, but it had been a slow summer, what with the drizzly weekends, so he took her three five-dollar bills and nine ones and handed over the key to number 14. “There’s someone in thirteen but nobody in fifteen,” he said. “Best I can do.” The woman combed her hair with one hand while waiting for her nickel change.

  The phone at his desk woke Kruger an hour later. His copy of Boxing Illustrated slipped off his chest and fell to the floor. He snatched up the phone. “Hill-Top,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “Room thirteen here,” came the man’s voice on the other end of the line. He was whispering. “There’s some scary noises coming out of the room next to me. Sounds like somebody’s choking or something.”

  Kruger sat up in his chair and peered across the lot. Of course the rooms were all dark. He told the man in 13 he’d look into it.