The Hanging Tree sl-2

by Bryan Gruley

  Prickles of heat skittered down the back of my neck.

  Michele Higgins had been right.

  The man smiled and scratched his chin.

  “You know,” he said, “you look like her.”

  eighteen

  How is Mr. Ron Wallman?” Jarek Vend said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Vend had introduced himself with a handshake, offered me a cigar that I declined, and, without asking, set a glass of Scotch with ice on a small table next to my armchair. Crater Face and his two partners had hovered behind me until Vend told them, “Leave us. I will call when you are needed.”

  I wished he had said “if” rather than “when.”

  The low lighting made it hard to see, but the office was as big as any I’d ever been in, and I had done interviews in the offices of the chief executives of every auto company in Detroit and two in Europe. Except for the twin sculptures of naked women-one marbled white, one polished bronze-standing on opposite ends of Vend’s desk, the office could have been that of anyone running a company that made designer jeans or tractor axles or cell phone accessories.

  “I am sure he is doing fine,” Vend said. He paced as he spoke, slowly circling his desk, using his cigar to gesture. I noticed that when he moved to his right, he unconsciously dropped his left shoulder slightly, like a goalie might, if he was left-handed. “Fine is not good enough for me.”

  As he passed the window that spanned most of one wall, I tried to peer through it to get an idea of where we were, but the vertical blinds were closed tight. He circled behind his desk and stopped at the bronze sculpture, gazing at me through eyes half hidden by his heavy lids.

  “Excuse me-wouldn’t you like to write down what I say? Isn’t that why you traveled all the way down here? To hear what I have to say?”

  “I don’t really know, to be honest.”

  “Ah, well, an honest journalist.” He picked his own glass up and took a sip. He smacked his lips. “So refreshing. Please. Take notes. As you can see”-he laid one hand atop the sculpture-“I have nothing to hide.”

  I pulled out my pen and notebook.

  “Now, concerning Mr. Wallman,” he said. He spoke with a trace of a Polish accent. But his “ows” came out sounding more like “oohs,” like the Canadian he was. “Let me tell you a story. I attended a chamber of commerce luncheon, oh, a year ago, maybe two. I assume Mr. Wallman has many customers, or prospective customers, in that gathering. I see him walking through, a beer in one hand, always with the beer, shaking hands and clapping this one and that one on the back. They are all his long-lost friends.”

  “That’s Wally.”

  “And I see him even shaking hands and clapping on the back men and women who are also in the business of printing things-excuse me, why do you stop writing in your notebook?”

  I was waiting for him to say something I cared about. “Just listening.”

  “I am not going to harm you, Mr. Carpenter.”

  Maybe you aren’t, I thought, but maybe Crater Face and those other guys are. “I appreciate that.”

  “Good. So, Wally. As you say, he is a very good guy. He will never be a great businessman, though, because a great businessman cannot be friends with competitors. He cannot be friends with those who are trying to take bread and jam from the mouths of his children. He cannot slap them on the back and offer them a bottle of beer.”

  I started to ask a question, but Vend held up a hand to stop me.

  “Please. Do not patronize me with, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ ” He stuck the cigar in his teeth and talked over it. “I am well versed in the verities of the American businessman. They are lies.” As he said “lies,” his lips pulled back, baring his teeth.

  He removed the cigar from his mouth, walked to my chair, and lifted one black loafer up on the arm. The mix of his cologne with the smoke smelled like black licorice.

  “The true goal of capitalism is monopoly,” he said. “That is all-total control of whatever market it is you choose to enter, so that you can do with it what you wish: raise prices, hire people, give to charity, fuck beautiful women. It is not about competition. Nobody wants competition. Only in textbooks do we want competition, not here”-he pointed the cigar at the floor-“in the fierce and arbitrary world of the real. Competition is angst and worry and hoping that your competitor is not so dumb that he takes you down with him.” He stepped back and spread his arms wide. Ropes of muscle spiraled along his forearms. “I know,” he said. “A paradox.”

  “Not really. Stupid can be dangerous.”

  “That is correct. And wealthy plus stupid, that is the worst of all.”

  He reached back and pushed something on the surface of his desk. Five television screens that were sunk into the wall above and behind him burst into brilliant life. They were all tuned to the same station. The sound was off. On each screen, the same pretty young woman talked as a glowing skein of numbers scuttled across the screen beneath her. Then her five faces disappeared and the screens filled with graphs showing how the stock price of a company identified as GX had performed that day. I had never heard of GX. Its bumpy price line stretched from the lower left corner of the screen to the upper right.

  The woman’s five faces then reappeared, all of them smiling.

  Vend stood facing the screens. “I digress, Mr. Carpenter. But wouldn’t you love to fuck her?” He looked over his shoulder at me, grinning like we were teammates scoping out the talent in the bleachers.

  “She’s all right,” I said. “But no, actually.”

  “Oh, please. You would not like to fuck her? Right there on her desk while the little numbers go past?” He laughed and laid a hand across his heart. “Is it because you have someone back home that you love with all of your heart? Is that it?”

  “What is your point, Mr. Vend?”

  “You are a man of unusual discipline, Mr. Carpenter. But, as I said, I digress.”

  He turned back to the TVs. “The committed capitalist, Mr. Carpenter, is bound to do everything in his power to eliminate or, at the very least, incapacitate every one of his competitors. Otherwise, like your friend Mr. Wallman, he is doomed. Otherwise, he will, in time, become no better than the rest of them. Look at the auto companies, how they squandered their advantage, how they frittered it away on businesses they knew nothing about. They ignored their competitors, but their competitors did not ignore them. And so we have Detroit.”

  “There is no middle ground?”

  Vend smiled wistfully. “Ah, yes, the middle ground,” he said. “How you Americans love to talk about the middle ground, that place where we all can agree. But really, Mr. Carpenter, if you think about it, there rarely is one that makes anybody happy. It’s really the place where we all disagree.”

  He reminded me of CEOs I had interviewed. While you were listening and taking notes, they sounded colorful and provocative. You imagined you were getting good stuff for your story. But later, when you looked through your notes, you realized that they really hadn’t said anything you could use, that it was all bromides and platitudes and generalizations. You had nothing that stuck.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said.

  “I have read your fine articles from the paper in Detroit. I like that paper. I’m not so fond of the other. So I thought you might understand. I am hoping that you would understand. Do you?”

  “Have you eliminated or incapacitated all of your competitors?”

  He studied me with a face at once curious and amused. “I am constantly at work,” he said. “How is your drink? It’s a Campbeltown malt, Springbank, fifteen years old. Not easy to get.”

  “You said I looked like her. You refer to Gracie McBride, yes?”

  I was sure by now that Jarek Vend had recruited Gracie all those years ago. Small-town girl, troubled family, long past virginity at the age of seventeen. She had worked for him, certainly slept with him, indulged with him in the kink that filled the cardboard boxes in her dark ro
om. She must have known things about him, things he would not have wanted others to know. But things bad enough to compel him to kill her?

  Vend ignored my question. “I have also enjoyed the stories you’ve been writing at your new paper.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He hit another button on his desk. All five TV screens filled with images of hockey players weaving to and fro. Vend reached into a fax machine on the credenza beneath the TVs, plucked out a page, and held it up for me to see. It was a copy of one of my stories about the new rink.

  “You seem to be the only one who sees the reality of your situation.” He tilted his head to one side. “Why do you look so surprised?”

  “Why would a strip-club owner in Detroit care about a hockey rink in Starvation Lake?”

  “You love hockey, don’t you?”

  “I play.”

  “So did I.” He turned his head and put a finger to the scar on his neck. “Played very hard.”

  “There are plenty of rinks around here. What does Jarek Vend care about ours?”

  “Excellent pronunciation, Mr. Carpenter, thanks no doubt to your new friend, Miss Patricia Armbruster.”

  An image of the woman hanging from the swing set in Sarnia appeared in my head. I focused on the tip of my pen moving across my notebook.

  “I come from a small town in Ontario, LaSalle, where I grew up playing in a barn. You know-with the dressing rooms that made you duck your head, and no Zamboni, just a Jeep with a large brush attached to the front. So I can well appreciate how much a splendid new arena would mean to your town.”

  “Understood.”

  “But please tell me: why should I pay for your splendid new arena?”

  “You? What are you talking about?”

  He drained his glass and set it down hard on the desk. His smile had vanished. Ice cubes crunched in his teeth.

  “You have written extensively about it,” he said. “There was the money, and then there was not. You used your skill to figure that much out, Mr. Carpenter. I commend you. But you have yet to determine where the money came from in the first place or where it went when it suddenly disappeared. Isn’t that right?”

  He squeezed a lighter out of his jeans pocket and slowly relit his cigar, the flicker of flame flashing in his eyes. Then he turned his back and with two fingers pushed a button on his desktop. Four of the TV screens went dark. The middle screen remained on. “Observe.”

  A man wearing nothing but a pair of white socks dangled from a rope attached at his back to a canvas harness wrapped around his torso like a girdle. The harness trussed him up at the elbows and ankles so that he looked like a chicken ready to go into an oven. His head was hidden in a black plastic garbage bag cinched at his neck. He spun slowly in the air, twisting his head back and forth in the bag.

  A woman in a black leather halter and matching thong pranced around. She tugged lightly at the ropes, a pair of pliers clutched in one hand, her skin pallid as a perch belly. She had her back to the camera, but she was too tall to be Gracie. Still I thought of Gracie again, working at the bench in the Zamboni shed, the tools natural in her hands, a finger smear of grease on her cheek. The woman on the screen squatted down and propped herself beneath the man in the harness. I turned away.

  “What the fuck?” I said.

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Carpenter, that is the appropriate response, the response a great journalist is always seeking from his readers, no?”

  “You can turn it off now.”

  “Now you have a headline. You can tell the fine, upstanding citizens of Starvation Lake that this”-he waved his hand toward the screen with a flourish-“is one very important source of funding for their excellent new rink, the rink that will catapult them once again to hockey greatness.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “There, Mr. Carpenter, is that better?”

  I looked back at the screen. Hockey players again were gliding where the hooded man had been writhing.

  “You see, we provide a full array of services for our clientele,” Vend said. “The clubs are merely a point of entry-a lucrative point of entry, to be sure, but just a starting place, not unlike the Chevrolet that a young man buys before he graduates to a Pontiac and then a Buick and an Oldsmobile and, finally, a Cadillac. You have now seen the Cadillac. Or perhaps these days Lexus is the more appropriate analogy.”

  He reached back and pushed the button on his desk again, keeping his hand there this time. The hockey players disappeared and all five screens lit up again. They were filled with close-up shots of five different men.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Of course,” Vend continued, “not everyone can afford every dish on the smorgasbord. Certain services begged for a rarefied sort of client, a man of certain tastes and bearing and means, who would pay a handsome premium for our services and, naturally, for absolute discretion.”

  “Jesus,” I said, pointing at the first screen. “Judge Rapp? And that’s Davis McInerney.” McInerney was an executive vice president at Superior Motors. From my days at the Detroit Times, I recognized the others, too: a real estate developer, a state senator, a retired outfielder.

  Now I had an idea what was on those videotapes in Gracie’s house. I tried to remember the initials I’d seen on the sides of the tapes. She must have figured out a way to smuggle out her own copies. She probably had more tapes hidden away somewhere else, somewhere safer. In my mind I scanned the rafters in the Zamboni shed, looking for hiding places. Vend must have known. Maybe Gracie had threatened to use the tapes against him, or his customers.

  “It’s quite an illustrious gallery,” Vend said. He hit the button again. Five more men appeared: two attorneys, a city councilman, two men I didn’t recognize, one of them wearing a police uniform. Vend hit the button again and there were five more. He kept hitting it until the faces were flashing too fast for me to tell who they were.

  “And these guys were all into the kinky stuff?”

  Vend took a puff on his cigar. “Not necessarily. As I said, we offered-offer-a multiplicity of services. That is one. The presence of the young woman enhances the aesthetic of the experience while at the same time offering some peace of mind in the knowledge that she is there to prevent any unfortunate accidents.”

  “But Gracie wasn’t just a minder, was she, Mr. Vend?”

  “Our associates perform a wide array of services for a wide array of customers.”

  The TVs went black.

  “Unfortunately,” Vend continued, “I personally did not have access to a certain, shall we say, strata of clientele, at least not back then. I had the product; I needed a partner who could provide the proper customer.”

  “And you found one. One who clearly was in that strata.”

  “Indeed.” I knew what he was going to say next. “Mr. Haskell was the best money could buy.”

  It was surprisingly easy to believe. While part of me didn’t want to think a man of Laird Haskell’s public stature would risk his career and family on such an enterprise, the part that knew Haskell, the part that had encountered many a rich and powerful man who had succumbed to the illusion that he could become invisible, accepted it as easily as if Vend had told me that Haskell favored suits and ties in the courtroom. I could see him first as a customer, then as a recruiter of talent, then as Vend’s pipeline to the wealthy and powerful.

  “And now,” I said, “your partner is stealing from you to build his rink.”

  “There appears to have been some diversions. But not just from me, Mr. Carpenter. I assume he is stealing-that is, diverting monies-from others as well. I just happened to be-what do ambulance chasers like Mr. Haskell call it? — a deep pocket.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “He’s going to the town council tomorrow for a little loan of a hundred grand.”

  “So I have heard,” Vend said. “Mr. Haskell is a most resourceful man, and we have benefited. He has been an enormously creative and productive member of our team. But he has let personal d
istractions cloud his focus. Obviously, for the sake of our employees and other various interests, I cannot indulge these distractions with my hard-earned assets.”

  “By distractions, do you mean… his son?”

  Vend blew out a thin ribbon of smoke that disappeared in the shadows above him. “We were all going to play in the NHL at one time in our lives, weren’t we?”

  I thought of Taylor Haskell on the ice, slapping the goalposts with his stick. Then of the smoke floating out from the Zam shed the night before. Then of Gracie, and of the Free Press story she had tacked up on the wall of her dark room.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “What is it, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “He brought Gracie into this?”

  Haskell had moved to Starvation full-time only in the past year. But he’d had a summer cottage on the north side of the lake for as long as I could remember. In Starvation Lake, it wouldn’t have taken much to have known about Gracie, the small-town girl from the troubled family, and about her father, blasted from the sky over the jungles of Vietnam.

  “I will leave you to your own conclusions,” Vend said. “As for Mr. Haskell, I now consider him my competitor.”

  “And so,” I said, “‘Build it and they will die.’ ”

  Vend cocked his head ever so slightly. I thought he might smile but he did not. The skin tightened around his cheekbones. He came off the desk, dropped his cigar on the carpet, and crushed it beneath the sole of his loafer.

  “For the record,” he said, “we support Mr. Haskell’s efforts to extort-excuse me, extract-additional monies from your elected leaders.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Indeed, we believe Mr. Haskell ought to seek even more support from your town’s benevolent elder statesmen. Will you be in attendance?”

  “The chances are better if I get out of here.”

  Now he smiled. “Of course.”

  I wondered if he knew that I knew about him and Gracie at the Hill-Top Motel. He certainly couldn’t have known that I’d seen him with her at that Wings playoff game. “Tell me, Mr. Vend,” I said. “Could this thing with Haskell be about more than just money?”