The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  I shut off the ignition and made sure my doors were locked.

  The one-story ranch was the last place I would have looked for a strip- club magnate. It was dressed in clean white aluminum siding. The white awnings over the front windows and porch were trimmed in royal blue. The lawn surrounded a rock garden set off by a neat curving border of beige bricks. In the middle of the garden stood a statue of the Blessed Mother.

  What was I going to do? Just walk up and say, “Is Knobbo here?” I wasn’t even sure that Vend lived there anymore. The address I’d found in Dingus’s file was almost four years old, after all.

  I picked up my cell phone. There were messages from Darlene and Philo. I dialed Darlene, ready to be yelled at.

  “‘Apparent suicide’?” she said. “Three paragraphs? You know we have a bomb squad here from Traverse? Does it sound like we’re treating this like a suicide?”

  “It’s not what I wrote,” I said. “The fucking fat ass in-”

  “Why do you let them push you around?”

  That wasn’t as simple a question as she might have imagined.

  “I don’t, Darlene. But it’s not my paper.”

  “Whatever. The Pilot’s so irrelevant anyway.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I just hope it doesn’t make people who might have information think it’s OK to keep quiet.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. At least Dingus seems to be letting you in on things.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Beautiful Melvindale, Michigan.”

  “Good. Gracie lived there. Or at least that’s where I mailed my letters… Hang on. I’m drying my hair. Finally got a shower.”

  Her hair had been wet the first time I had really noticed Darlene. I was thirteen. I crossed her yard next door to mine to catch the school bus that stopped in front of her house. I leaned against the mailbox facing Darlene’s house, my books under one arm. Next door my mutts, Fats and Blinky, started barking as the bus approached.

  Darlene’s screen door opened halfway and then banged shut and then opened again. She stepped out onto her porch in her white parka, a stack of books cradled against her chest, her damp, dark hair shining in the sun. I heard the bus rumble to a stop behind me but I kept watching Darlene. She didn’t even look at the bus. She bent forward at the waist and with her free arm shook out her hair as it fell over her face. Then she tossed it all back and shook her head some more and ran her hand through her hair again and again, smoothing it back and over her hood.

  The bus driver beeped her horn. A year before, a month before, a day before that morning, I would have yelled, “Come on, Darlene, move!” But today I just stood there watching her take care of herself. Of course she was being selfish and vain and disrespectful. And that thrilled me. She wasn’t afraid to believe that she knew what mattered at that moment, and that it wasn’t the bus or the school bell or anything else but that she looked her very best before she started her day. As I watched her cross her lawn and climb the bus steps without a word or a glance for the bus driver or for me, I knew that I wanted to matter to her.

  “It’s crazy here,” she said now.

  “The coroner say anything yet?”

  “No. Dingus is trying to hold him off. We think the bomb was set off remotely. You can do it with a phone call to a beeper or a cell phone.”

  “Can you trace it?”

  “Pretty hard without the beeper or the cell. We’re working on it. Actually, I’m working on it.”

  “Has anyone taken credit for it?”

  “Credit?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No one has stepped forward. No one has contacted us. We can only conclude it was someone who had it in for Gracie.”

  “Could it be somebody trying to send a message about the new rink?”

  “What would the message be?”

  Build it and they will die, I thought. But I said, “I don’t know. Why would somebody kill Gracie and then bother with a bomb that apparently wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”

  Because Michele Higgins had told me.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “We think the bomb was planted on the underside of that stool Gracie used on the Zamboni. So it could have hurt her, or somebody else driving it. I don’t know. Maybe there was a screwup. Maybe there’s more than one person involved. Maybe there’s more to this than just Gracie.”

  “Any prints?”

  “Just Gracie’s and a couple from that kid who works the concession stand, but that’s no surprise.”

  “I suppose Tawny Jane’s been all over this.”

  “She was waiting for me when I left the department an hour ago.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her I liked how she colored out the gray in her hair. How about you? What are you doing?”

  “Driving around mostly.” I didn’t mention Mich. Instead I told Darlene about Vend and that police report from 1995. She went quiet for a minute.

  “I see,” she said. “So that’s what happened the night before the wedding.”

  “I don’t suppose Gracie ever told you.”

  “No.”

  “Did she make the wedding?”

  “No.”

  “Of course you forgave her.”

  “Not at first. At first I said I’d had enough. I mean, I didn’t even see her, barely talked to her, for years. Then she wrote me this long letter about her life, about how she knew she’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people and now she was finally getting herself together. This was after she got back, last year sometime. I just reread it last night.”

  “I’ll bet she didn’t name any names.”

  “No. Except one, which is why I called, partly. Maybe you can find this woman. Looks like she might have been trying to help Gracie.”

  “Gracie never said anything about her before?”

  “Not that I can recall. Her name’s Trixie.”

  “Trixie what?”

  “I don’t have a last name.”

  “Great. I’ll just look in the phone book under Trixie.”

  “I thought you were a reporter.” She waited for a reply that I wasn’t about to give her. “She works at some kind of center for abused women. She apparently went by Trixie the Tramp, or at least that’s what Gracie called her.”

  Darlene’s landline phone began to ring in the background.

  “Trixie the Tramp,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I know you will.”

  “By the way, your hubby and I had a little talk last night.”

  The landline phone rang for the fourth time.

  “Jesus-hold on.”

  The ringing stopped as Darlene picked up. I pressed my cell phone to my ear to hear. “Roger,” Darlene said. “OK. I’ll be there in ten.”

  She hung up the landline and came back to me. “I have to go.”

  “We have to talk about Jason.”

  “Not now,” she said. My heart sank a little. “That was Dingus.”

  “OK. Go.”

  My cell phone battery was almost out, and I’d forgotten the charger. But I wanted to call Philo. He’d sounded oddly urgent on the brief message he’d left for me to call him. Maybe he’s cleaning out my desk, I thought.

  “Were you aware,” I said when he picked up, “that there really was a drain commission meeting today? Eleven a.m. at the county building.”

  “I know. I went.”

  I almost dropped my phone.

  “Really? How was it?”

  “Boring, mostly. A collection of old fat white guys dithering. How do these people order in restaurants?”

  “That’s the drain commission.”

  “And what the heck is a ‘wet-bottom pond’? Are there ponds with dry bottoms?”

  “Welcome to the big time, Philo.”

  A blue Suburban that looked newly washed pulled slowly past me and parked two driveways
ahead, directly across from Vend’s house. I watched for the driver’s door to open. It didn’t. The tinted rear window kept me from seeing inside.

  “Where are you?” Philo said.

  “Downstate, like I said.”

  “The boss is not happy. Is it really family you’re down there for?”

  “It is.”

  “That woman who hung herself-she was family, wasn’t she?”

  “She didn’t hang herself. But, yes, she’s family.”

  Philo went silent for a moment. I kept one eye on the house’s big front window, watching for the blue-on-white curtains to move.

  “I doubt the boss knows that,” Philo finally said. “But I’m supposed to tell you, if you’re not in his office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, you are no longer employed by Media North or the Pine County Pilot.”

  “Thank you. Is that all?”

  “No.” Philo lowered his voice. “Do you really think somebody killed her?”

  I hesitated. Was Philo spying for his Uncle Jim? Or was he genuinely curious? Had I somehow gotten through to him the day before?

  “I don’t have to think anything, Philo. Just following the bread crumbs. Tell me about the drain commission. You got a story?”

  “I don’t know. Of course, I don’t have a paper for four days. But they had a pretty lengthy discussion about sewer service at the new rink. Apparently the developer-”

  “Haskell.”

  “Yes, Laird Haskell. Apparently he has asked to modify his proposal for financing the system out there.”

  “That wasn’t on the agenda, was it?” I always checked the drain commission agenda. A lot of a little town’s money could literally go down the toilet in fifteen tedious minutes on a Tuesday morning.

  “No. They just showed up like they owned the place. Made me late for a meeting at headquarters.”

  I could tell that worried him. “That’s too bad. Haskell was there?”

  “Well, not at the meeting itself. I saw him later. Let me just tell you-”

  “Let me see,” I said. I wanted Philo to see this as clearly as possible. “Just two months ago, Haskell was going to pay for the whole thing. Read my lips and all. I’m betting he proposed an improvement. ”

  “His lawyer, Mr. Gilbert, did the talking. He called it an enhancement, actually.”

  “For which the town and the county would pay.”

  “That’s approximately right. I thought this one commissioner-I forget his name-might spit up his dentures. Then that Elvis guy was trying to say everything’s all right, nobody ever expected Haskell to pay for everything, the rink is the future of the town, yadda yadda.”

  I let that sit there a second, savoring the thought that Philo might be coming around to the possibility that Haskell, for whatever reason, didn’t have the money to build the new rink. Which meant, of course, that he wouldn’t need all those Pilot ads he was promising to buy.

  “So did the commission actually do anything?”

  “Tabled it till next month. But, listen, I wanted to ask you-you got a couple of pretty thick envelopes in the mail this morning.”

  The Suburban doors remained closed. I peered into the rearview mirror on the driver’s side. A pair of aviator shades on a wide face looked back. I averted my eyes, first to the house, then to the other side of the street. I turned the key to start my truck. It coughed twice, clicked, and died.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?” Philo said. “I didn’t open them.”

  “No, no, it’s my damn truck, needs a starter. What about the mail?”

  The driver’s side door on the Suburban swung open.

  “You got two big envelopes from Lansing.”

  I looked at the house. I wasn’t going in there now. Maybe later. Maybe never. I tried the ignition again. Philo was saying something but I wasn’t listening. The truck finally wheezed to life and I pulled it out onto the street. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead but as I passed the Suburban I glanced to my right and saw a man approximately half the tonnage of the vehicle itself turned sideways in the driver’s seat. He had a face like a moon, complete with craters that looked like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to him.

  In my rearview I saw him step out of the Suburban and stand in the street, watching me leave.

  “Gus,” Philo said, “what the hell’s going on?”

  “Nothing. City drivers. What were you saying?”

  The large man was still standing in the street, shades off and arms folded across his chest, when I turned right on Martel. I took that to Allen Road, swung another right, and hoped I’d lost him.

  “I’m guessing these envelopes have to do with those freedom-of-information requests you made a while back on Mr. Haskell,” Philo said.

  “Probably, yeah.”

  “Would you mind if I took a look?”

  My heart was pounding. What a wuss I was. Why didn’t I just get out and talk to the guy? Maybe he knew something. I couldn’t think about it now. Philo suddenly wanted to pry his way into the Haskell story.

  “Why do you want to look at that stuff?”

  “Fair question. I don’t blame you. I haven’t been, shall we say-well, let me put it this way. When I was leaving the drain commission meeting this morning, that Elvis fellow took me by the elbow and steered me into the men’s room, where he proceeded to, as he put it, ‘advise’ me of his confidence that the Pilot wouldn’t write a word that would jeopardize the future of the community. He also mentioned he’s having dinner with my uncle tonight.”

  “Elvis is a pillar of the community, you know.”

  “And while he’s talking to me, Haskell walks in and takes a leak.”

  “Just like hockey. It’s all about two-on-ones.”

  “Yes, well, frankly, it ticked me off a little. Plus I missed that meeting at headquarters.”

  So maybe it wasn’t me that had gotten to Philo, but Elvis. And Haskell. And that meeting he missed.

  I crossed Oakwood going south, watching my rearview for the Suburban while keeping an eye out for Wally’s Wonder Print. “Are you planning to cover the town council meeting tomorrow?”

  “I’m considering. Somebody told me it was routine and I probably didn’t need to bother.”

  “Somebody, huh?”

  “Yeah. Somebody.”

  I considered telling Philo about the note I’d received in the mail, decided his new interest in real stories had come up a little too abruptly for that. But I thought maybe he could help me.

  “Can you do me a quick favor?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Go online, do a clip search. Just the Detroit papers. Look for someone named Trixie the Tramp. See if you can figure out who she is, where she is.”

  “Trixie the Tramp. Is this family too?”

  “You could say that. And go ahead and look at what’s in the envelopes. You probably won’t find much. But you never know. If you see something interesting, give me a call.”

  “Will do. And Gus?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t forget. Eight a.m. tomorrow. Sorry.”

  “Uh-huh. Gotta go.”

  I swung my truck into Wally’s, over the paved lot, and into the back. I parked between a Dumpster and a utility pole where I thought the truck would be hidden from the road.

  I stepped outside. The wind snapped my coat collar against my cheek. I pulled the zipper all the way up and stuffed my hands in my coat pockets. Knobbo, I thought as I walked around to the front door. If anyone could refresh my memory, Wally could.

  sixteen

  The three glass walls that enclosed Ron Wallman’s office faced out on a room filled with laser printers, computer terminals, paper cutters, and tall steel racks stacked with boxes and rolls of paper. Signs hanging from the ceiling cheerfully exhorted the workers bustling between printing jobs to bustle a little harder: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference” and “Don’t judge those who try and fail, judge only those who fail
to try.”

  Dozens of photographs, plaques, pennants, and certificates crowded the plaster wall behind Wally’s wooden desk. Most of the pictures hung in cheap black frames at haphazard angles: Wally posing on a rink with his hockey pals; Wally on the tee with his hockey pals; Wally hoisting a frosted mug of beer in a bowling alley with his hockey pals. A row of plaques pronounced him Melvindale Chamber of Commerce Businessperson of the Year from 1992 to 1996. At the center of it all were professionally framed photos of his wife, Sheryl, and their kids, Joe and Roy.

  “What happened to the jersey?” I said.

  I was sitting in a cushioned folding chair across from his desk, nursing a Labatt Blue and still feeling the hurt Wally had put on my ribs when he had hugged me in the reception area. The last time I’d been in his office, drinking Scotch after a late-night hockey game a few years before I’d left Detroit, the centerpiece of the wall had been a framed display of his old gold-on-black jersey with the name PIPEFITTERS running diagonally down from the shoulder. Wally had been the star defenseman on the team that had beaten us in the 1981 state final, a six-foot-six, 225-pound bruiser with agile feet and pretty fair hands for a big man.

  “Ah, you know, time to grow up,” he said. He was sitting on the front edge of his desk, which I could barely see for his bulk. He grinned and winked. “Got it hanging behind my bar at home. The wife never goes down there.”

  I smiled. “Looks like you’re doing OK, Wall.”

  “Can’t complain. Wife’s good, boys good, life’s good.” He thrust his right hand forward again. It swallowed mine. “Always good to see you, buddy. What brings you to town? You bring your gear? I got a nine forty skate now every Tuesday at the Yack. I can tell one of the ’tenders to stay home tonight.”

  “Nah, gotta get back. Got a game. And I’m not playing goal anymore.”

  “I thought I heard that. What the hell?”