The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  “Grace’s hobby, not mine.” She nodded past me. “What’s the last one?”

  The front page of the Times was dated Thursday, July 24, 1997. I knew what was there. After forcing me to resign, the Times had agreed to publish a retraction of my stories about Superior Motors’ deadly pickup trucks. Four hundred and fifty-two words ran in a one-column slot at the bottom of the page, next to the index. Gracie had carefully clipped it and tacked it up as part of her “hobby.” I didn’t have to read it. But I stared at it anyway, cursing Gracie, picturing her in the Zam shed telling me I played hockey like a pussy, wishing she were alive so I could tell her to go to hell. Even things she hadn’t intended for me to see wound up stinging.

  “She’s a fan, all right,” I said. “What’s in these boxes?”

  The four boxes were closed but not taped. I bent over, flipped one open, reached in, and pulled out a tangle of black leather.

  “What the-,” I said, holding it up in front of me. A collar equipped with a drawstring was attached to thick straps that ran down to an adjustable belt that presumably wrapped around someone’s waist. More straps fitted with buckles and Velcro jutted from the belt. I dropped it on the floor and pulled more leather from the box. A hooded mask with a zipper running down the back. A girdle with thin silver chains dangling from the crotch.

  I put it all back and looked inside the next box. It looked like it had come from a hardware store. Or the Zamboni shed. There were chains and pulleys and clamps. Eyebolts, screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, a hammer, a can of WD-40, a jar of Vaseline, two packages of Saran wrap. I sifted through the jumble and found three pairs of handcuffs at the bottom of the box, two of blue plastic, one of nickel. The next box was stuffed with plastic tubes, leather belts, and rubber hoses of various lengths. I picked up one of the hoses and noticed small, curly hairs stuck to the open end.

  My stomach turned over once, then again.

  I thought of Vend, the naked man, bursting out of the motel room up north with something black and rubbery attached to himself. I turned to Trixie and took a deep breath.

  “I think I’ve seen enough,” I said.

  “What about the other box?” she said.

  “I’ve seen enough.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  I thought, What is this, hockey? Why doesn’t she just come right out and call me a pussy? “All right,” I said.

  I opened the fourth box. Inside was a small safe, gray with a black handle. “Do you mind?” I asked Trixie. She nodded. I lifted the safe out of the cardboard box, set it on the floor. I tried the handle. Locked.

  “Well,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have the key.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Oh, jeez, hang on.”

  I got down on the floor and dug out my key chain. I found the little rust-colored key that had been tied into the ribbon on the baby shoe in Gracie’s hiding place. I held the key up for Trixie. “Maybe this’ll work,” I said.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Gracie left it to me in her will.”

  The key slid into the lock and turned. I lifted the cover. Inside were half a dozen black plastic boxes. Along the spine of each box was a piece of white tape marked with what appeared to be initials and a date:

  DTJ 7/26/92

  LKH 3/19/90

  MXR 2/8/93

  JAV 12/31/91

  “Videos?” I said. I picked up one of the boxes and opened the plastic shell casing. A videotape fell out into my hands. The tape, too, was fixed with a label marked with initials and a date matching the ones on the box.

  I waggled the tape at Trixie. “Gracie got a video player?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then what are the videos for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You got a tape player back at the center?”

  “You’re not going in the center.”

  “Can I take these then? I’ll return them.”

  “Nothing leaves the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing leaves the house.”

  “Trixie, I can’t do my job-”

  “I thought you’d seen enough,” she said. “We’ve pawed through enough of Grace’s things. We’re not taking them away. This is her home.”

  I held the tape up next to my head. “Please?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Will you at least think about it?”

  “Put it back, please.”

  I set the tape back in the safe, closed the safe, lifted it into the cardboard box. I’d try her again later. I could always come back downstate if she relented. When she relented. I got up off the floor.

  “Tell me,” I said. “If you knew, why didn’t you just come out and tell me Gracie was mixed up with this Vend character?”

  “Because,” she said, as if the answer was obvious, “you’re a reporter. I’ve dealt with plenty of reporters. You’re skeptical. You have to find things out for yourself or you don’t want to believe them. That’s the way you are. Besides, Gus, face it-you’d never believe what Grace told you anyway. She could have given you chapter and verse about Vend or Laird Haskell and it would’ve gone in one ear and out the other.”

  “Ah, so it’s my fault,” I said, though I knew she was probably right. “What do you expect? She was drunk or high every time I saw her.”

  Trixie stepped forward and pointed a finger in my face. “Of all people,” she said, nearly shouting, “ you should know that appearances-oh, never mind.” She turned away, shaking her head. “Never mind.”

  “What happened to the others?” I said. “The women Gracie brought you. Are they OK now?”

  She let out a sigh, collecting herself. Trixie the Tramp obviously didn’t like losing her cool. “I have to be going now.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “One of them is managing. I try not to let her out of my sight. The other…” Trixie’s voice trailed off. I waited. She closed her eyes. “They found her a few weeks ago in Sarnia, near the beach, hanging from a swing set.”

  “Oh, man. No.”

  “Suicide.” She opened her eyes. “At least that’s what the cops said.”

  We rode back to the center in silence. I thought of what Trixie had just told me. A “suicide” in Sarnia followed by a “suicide” in Starvation Lake formed a gruesome pattern. I had to get to a phone.

  She parked the Civic in a dirt lot next to the center. I opened my door. The inside light came on. Trixie didn’t move. She still had her hands on the steering wheel.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I know it probably upset you, even though…” She swallowed. “You should know, Gus, that Grace was trying to turn her life around.”

  She shut off the car. We sat in the dark alongside the center, cars swishing past us on the road. “She would’ve been happy that you came,” Trixie said. “Even if it won’t do any good.”

  “You don’t believe she killed herself.”

  She let her hands drop into her lap. “Sometimes I do. It’s easier because, let’s be honest, what difference does it make? These are clever men. They didn’t get to where they are by leaving fingerprints all over their mistakes.”

  She turned in her seat to face me.

  “I know what I said before, but… I didn’t realize until I started to show you, but I wanted you to see. Grace would have wanted you to see. Now go home and bury her and forget all of this. You don’t have to ruin your life trying to prove something you can’t.”

  Either she was trying to be nice or she was daring me.

  “Would it ruin my life if I got a look at a couple of those videos?”

  Trixie opened her door. “I’ll let you know.”

  “One last thing?” I said.

  “One last thing.”

  “Did she regret it?”

  “Regret what?”

  I chose my words carefully. “Her baby.”
r />   “Very much.”

  I watched her walk back into the center with her determined limp, her dress swaying beneath the bomber jacket. Trixie the Tramp was a good woman. She was not a good liar. She’d said she hadn’t really looked at those newspaper pages; it was Gracie’s hobby, not hers. But she knew enough to call Haskell by his first name. I could only wonder if that was her only slip.

  The pay phone at Nasty Melvin’s was right where I remembered it, beneath the Bud Light sign-used to be a Miller Lite sign-hanging on the wall in the back of the bar alongside the chalkboard menu. The price of a cheeseburger had gone up since I’d drunk there with Wally and other hockey pals a few years before, from $3.25-with fries and a dill pickle-to $3.75.

  With my cell phone dead, I had no choice but to use a pay phone, but I didn’t mind visiting Nasty’s. I’d had a lot of fun there and managed to keep myself out of the occasional fights that broke out between the middle-aged bikers who tried to keep to their Bud longnecks and the overserved yuppies who insisted on playing pool for money, then tried to sneak out before paying their debts. Not once in my years of drinking at Nasty’s did I see a hockey player get into a fight. Fights were a part of the game on the ice, but skaters carry no illusions about hockey being some metaphor for life. Life was quite a bit harder than hockey, as was getting up for work with a busted face.

  I ordered a bottle of Blue Ribbon and five dollars’ worth of quarters.

  I figured I would make my calls, grab a cheeseburger or two to go, and head back up north. If all went well, I’d be back in time to make the playoff game against the Minnows before I went looking for Darlene.

  I set my Blue Ribbon on a table and stepped over to the phone, the soles of my boots peeling off the linoleum floor. I had to get someone at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office before it closed at five o’clock. Then I’d see if I could dig up a cop in Sarnia.

  The phone at the clerk’s office rang six times. Then came a recording. I hit a few buttons, hoping the options hadn’t changed. A man came on the line. I asked for Nova Patterson.

  “She’s left,” the man said.

  “No,” I said. “Look in the back. She always stays late.”

  “I am not allowed to leave the front desk, sir.”

  I didn’t bother asking the guy for what I wanted. He’d tell me I needed to come in, and I didn’t have time.

  “Listen, do me a huge favor. Just tell her-yell it out if you have to-that Gus Carpenter is on the line. She’ll want to talk to me.”

  “Sir, this is a place of business, I can’t be-”

  “Look, look, you’re right,” I said, changing strategy. “I’ll just come in. Let’s see… I got twenty minutes. I’ll be there in five. I have a pretty big request and I hope it doesn’t keep you there late.”

  “Sir, you might want to consider-”

  “Or you can just put Nova on the line and forget it.”

  He thought about it. “Hang on.” He put me on hold.

  A minute passed. The phone clicked. A big sweet voice came over the line, louder than it needed to be. “Where the hell you been, sugar?”

  “Nova,” I said. “How’s Michael? Is he playing for the Lions yet?”

  She had helped me a thousand times when I was working in Detroit. You needed a friend like Nova Marie Patterson in the Wayne County Clerk’s Office, where a reporter seeking public records was treated with all the respect of a rat scrounging in a trash can. I brought her chicken paprikash from Al’s Lounge. I told her she was way too nice to be working at the clerk’s office. We talked about her boy, Michael, who wanted to play in the NFL. He was tiny for his age, his head too small for the smallest helmet. Nova blamed the drinking she’d done as a teenager, when Michael was born. She drank sloe gin, “but not slow, if you know what I mean,” she’d told me. She was clean now.

  “Oh, my Lord, I hope not,” she said. “He plays for the Lions, he’s going to get killed.” She laughed. “So where’ve you been, stranger? Thank you for the tickets, but I want to see your handsome face.”

  I smiled and leaned over and grabbed my beer. I had a hockey buddy who knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for the Lions, and every season I sent Nova two tickets.

  “Long story,” I said. “Basically, I had to get back up north and take care of my mom.”

  “You’re such a good son. Are you going to come see me?”

  “I wish I could. That’s why I called. I need a favor.”

  “Well,” Nova said, “I am obliged to tell you that the stated policy of the Wayne County Clerk’s Office is to respond within forty-eight hours to written requests submitted in a timely fashion.”

  “That’s what you tell all the boys.”

  She laughed. “What do you need?”

  I read her the addresses for Gracie and Vend. She put me on hold.

  I sipped my beer and looked around the bar, tapping my foot to the jukebox, Bob Seger’s “Heavy Music.” Cigarette smoke twisted through the stilled blades of the ceiling fans. TVs flickered silently across the back of the bar between the potato chip racks, the glowing booze bottles, and the fifteen-dollar Nasty Melvin’s T-shirts. A pool table stood near the front door where my hockey pals and I once had sat, as many as twenty of us from both teams, after hockey games. Every night I promised myself I’d have two beers and get out of there, and every night I’d be begging our favorite barmaid, Double D, for one last pitcher ten minutes after she’d bellowed out last call.

  It wasn’t home, but it felt like it for now.

  Nova came back on the line.

  “Where you at?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Never mind, I don’t want to know. All right, I got your stuff.”

  I took out my notebook and pen. “Go ahead.”

  She told me the house on Harman with the Blessed Mother statue in front was owned by Jarogniew Andrzej Vend. It had been purchased in 1986 for $48,500. The taxes were current.

  “And the other one’s in foreclosure, isn’t it?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m a reporter, Nova.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  It didn’t make sense, though. The house I had visited didn’t look like one Gracie was planning to give up. It looked like she herself might have visited it recently. She’d come back to Starvation five or six months before. If she had planned to return for good, why wouldn’t she have sold the house? Why would she have let the payments slip?

  “And who’s the owner?” I said.

  “Hang on.”

  I heard papers rustling, then the muffled sound of Nova’s voice calling out to someone in her office, “Goodnight, Robert. Have a good one.” Then she said to me, “Man, this place… no matter how many times I get it all shipshape, somebody comes behind me and messes it all up.”

  Shit, I thought. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s all right, I got it here, just one second…”

  Before she could say another word, a fleshy hand wearing a gold ring and matching watch grabbed me by the wrist and pulled my arm away from my ear.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  I turned to see the man with the moon-cratered face who had stepped out of the blue Suburban on Harman Street. With his other hand, he snatched the phone out of my hand and set it back in its cradle. I tried in vain to remove myself from his grip. He smiled, revealing a lower jaw of teeth as yellow as a hamster’s. “You will come with me,” he said. He turned me toward the door.

  “Hey!” I yelled in the direction of the bar. “Help!”

  A second man, almost as big as Crater Face, had stepped between me and the bar and was saying something to the barmaid in a language I did not understand. I heard her laugh as Crater Face shoved me stumbling out into the parking lot, where the first thing I saw was a light flick on inside a large vehicle parked in the dark alley behind Nasty Melvin’s-the Suburban.

  I remembered I still had my beer and tried to swing it at Crater Face but he snapped my arm back
behind me so hard I thought it might tear loose from its socket. “Motherfucker!” I screamed, and I felt the beer being removed from my hand and looked up to see the second man hold it up in front of my face, taunting me, before he threw back his head and swallowed it in one gulp.

  “Ha ha ha,” he said.

  Crater Face reprimanded him in that foreign language and pointed at the Suburban.

  They forced a pillowcase over my head and pinned me between them in the backseat. A third man drove. Inside the pillowcase, the smell of sweat, someone else’s sweat, made me gag. We might have driven for two minutes or ten minutes or half an hour. The second man started to say something and I felt Crater Face reach across me and heard the thump of his fist against the second man’s chest. The rest of the ride was silent.

  The vehicle came to a stop. We had parked. I heard the doors opening. Someone yanked me out.

  A hand rough with calluses shoved me forward by the back of my neck, holding the rancid pillowcase tight to my head. There was a short flight of stairs then a walk down a dark corridor. Then we were on an elevator. I counted eight dings before the doors opened again.

  They shuffled me down another corridor. We stopped and I heard the men whispering and then an unfamiliar woman’s voice, blurting from an intercom. There was a clicking noise and the sound of a large glass door whooshing open. We entered. We turned left and then right and then they stopped me and sat me down in a chair. I felt leather soft on my palms, smelled cigar smoke.

  The pillowcase came off.

  A man sat against the front of a desk, his legs crossed, facing me. He leaned slightly forward, his shaved head pale as a winter moon. Smoke wafted from a cigar in an ashtray to his right.

  His black T-shirt clung tight to his flat belly and muscled chest. The shirt was emblazoned with the silhouette of a woman wearing a fireman’s helmet and swinging on a pole; a logo encircling

  her read, THE PUMP ROOM. SOUTHGATE. REDFORD. MOUNT CLEMENS.

  The man tilted his head to the left, sizing me up. I saw the crescent scar on the side of his neck. I recognized the man who had ushered Gracie-yes, it was Gracie, I was certain now-to her seat at that Wings playoff game. And perhaps the man who had killed her, as well as the young woman in Sarnia.