by Bryan Gruley
“Really?”
“Yeah. Some years back. Anyway, I checked and we have zero reports of suicides or homicides in the past six months, certainly none involving a swing set. Or monkey bars, for that matter.”
“Sorry for the bother.”
“No bother at all. You have a nice day.”
I hung up the phone.
Trixie had lied about the girl on the swing set. And about the abortion. I should have picked up on it when she’d fibbed about knowing who Haskell was. She had been having trouble with her landlord, whom I now knew to be one Jarek Vend. Gracie’s life insurance money would be good for her worthy mission. And, as Darlene had said, there was nothing anyone could do to bring Gracie back. The bad guys would get what they deserved.
I had a decision to make.
I could go home and get some sleep and let Philo post our stories online as we had planned. But now I knew that we had it all wrong, or a lot wrong. I didn’t have to think hard or long about why Gracie did what she did. There was vengeance and there was love and there was the belief, however misguided it may have been, that she was out of options.
I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang fourteen or fifteen times before I hung up and redialed. After a dozen more rings, Soupy picked up. He coughed and I heard him drop the phone-“Fuck,” he said-then he came on.
“What the hell, Trap?”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“Who else would it be? What do you want?”
“Listen,” I said. “Some shit’s going to come down tomorrow. I just want you to know, you were right. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Gracie. Like you said.”
“Oh, Jesus, man.” He fumbled around with the phone again. I heard something that sounded like a bottle banging off the floor. “What are you going to do?”
“I have to go. Just wanted you to know, buddy, you’re a good guy. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”
I took my Tigers mug when I left the Pilot.
It was still dark when Philo answered his front door. I had managed two and a half hours of fitful dozing on Mom’s sofa. Philo stood in the doorway in boxer shorts and a U.S. Navy T-shirt, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“Remember what I said about imagining your corrections?”
“What?”
“We’ve got to rewrite our stories.”
“You’re kidding.”
He made a pot of coffee and some peanut butter toast. We wrote and rewrote. We questioned every little thing we had written the night before. Around eight o’clock, Philo’s cell phone started ringing every ten minutes or so. He ignored it. “No desire to talk to my uncle,” he said.
The second the clock struck nine, I called Nova at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office. “Let’s make it two Lions games,” I said. I asked her to run down one more piece of information. She said she would call me back.
Philo ducked out at ten to cover the Haskell arraignment. Haskell stood mute and Judge Gallagher entered a plea of not guilty. For some reason, Kerasopoulos was in attendance. He motioned across the courtroom for Philo to come see him, but Philo pretended he didn’t see, then slipped out a side door.
We were ready a little before noon. The sidebar, on Kerasopoulos’s business relationships with Haskell, was essentially the same. Philo had e-mailed his uncle a list of questions. This is silliness, Kerasopoulos had replied. Won’t dignify with answer. Our sidebar quoted him.
The main story had been redone from top to bottom. The headlines read:
Murder Charge May Be Flawed
New Evidence Suggests Suicide
“Let’s not post it until I hear from my source in Detroit,” I told Philo. Instead of asking about my source, he went to his fridge for two more Amstels.
“Quite a morning,” he said as he handed me a beer.
“Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
“Fine. Just thinking of something Dingus told me a couple of days ago. Something about the newspaper being a snapshot of the dark human soul.”
“Hmm. They didn’t teach us that at Columbia.”
Nova called a little after twelve thirty. “This took some digging,” she said. “Had to call in a chit with folks at probate. I think you owe Michael a Lions sweatshirt, too.”
“Done,” I said. “What do you have?”
On December 6, 1984, Grace M. McBride had given birth to a son. The birth certificate did not name a father. The boy weighed seven pounds, six ounces. A note in the file indicated the boy was adopted shortly thereafter. Gracie named him Taylor Edward McBride.
twenty-five
How did you find me?”
She held the apartment door open only the width of her face. Through the crack I saw that her hair had gone from silver to ash, with strands of white that fluttered away from her head like feathers. In one hand she held something shaped like a bowl, wrapped in brown paper.
“A hockey buddy,” I said.
“They’re all the same, aren’t they?”
“Pretty much. Could I come in, please? I won’t stay long.”
“You’re not writing a story.”
I held my empty hands up. “Didn’t even bring a pen.”
Felicia Haskell opened the door.
It was late April. The ice on Starvation Lake had broken up. I had driven down to Detroit to find Laird Haskell’s wife.
She had borrowed the two-bedroom apartment from a girlfriend after leaving Starvation Lake. The living room was strewn with cardboard packing boxes. Some were open at the top, others taped shut and shoved against a wall beneath a panoramic photograph of Detroit’s skyline. Felicia set the wrapped dish inside a box.
“Taking off again?” I said.
“Not soon enough.”
She moved to a counter alongside the kitchen. It was stacked with unwrapped dishes and glassware.
“Taking Taylor with you?”
She kept wrapping and packing as if she hadn’t heard me.
Doc Joe had held on to the coroner’s report for weeks, even after Dingus and the Pine County prosecutor had sheepishly agreed to drop the murder charge against Laird Haskell. What Doc finally released told us little we didn’t already suspect. The cause of death was indeed strangulation, in combination with fractures along the upper cervical spine-a severely broken neck.
I scoured the report for any signs of a struggle, even of Gracie struggling with herself. Had she changed her mind at the last minute? Had she decided, in the final seconds of her life, that she ought to live for her son, however unavailable he was, rather than die for him?
I tried to interview Doc Joe. He ignored my calls and e-mails. One unseasonably warm evening, I found him at his house. He was sitting outside in the dying daylight, reading a history of World War I, in which, I had heard, his grandfather had fought.
Doc Joe wore a wool sweater vest zipped halfway up. I stood looking down on his bald spot. Inserting a scrap of paper as a bookmark, he closed his book, put his reading glasses in his vest pocket, and listened. When I had finished, he gazed out at the lake.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked the color of your mom’s place. But the missus, she’s never going to let me paint our place yellow. No, sir.” He turned back to me. “Why do you want to know, son? She killed herself. I understand that someone may have helped. But still.”
“She was family.”
“I am very sorry for your loss.” He pinched his glasses to his nose, opened his book. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”
The next morning, I dialed Wally’s Wonder Print in Melvindale. Wally was out, but five minutes later he called me from his cell phone. I invited his hockey team up for a weekend of games and drinking with the Chowder Heads. “Oh, fucking-ay, man, we are so there,” he said, and he must have nearly driven off the road because I heard car horns honking angrily in the background.
Then I t
old him why I’d really called. I needed to find someone. Someone in hockey circles. “Yeah, the goalie,” Wally said. “I heard the kid ain’t even skating anymore. Some kind of head case.” I didn’t bother telling him that it wasn’t so. He called me back that night with an address in Farmington Hills. “Just keep my name out of it, bud,” he said.
So there I was with Felicia Haskell.
She had initially been charged with aiding and abetting a suicide for whatever role she had played in Gracie’s death. But, without witnesses, the Pine County cops knew they’d have trouble making it stick. Along with the state police and the feds, they were also more interested in putting her husband behind bars than in punishing Felicia. She helped them. Probably still was helping. Though he was no longer charged with murder, Laird Haskell now faced multiple counts related to prostitution, solicitation, and fraud. And the IRS was still all over him and his enfeebled bank accounts.
“My lawyer would kill me if she knew you were here,” Felicia said. She looked around the room. “Where’s the goddamn tape? Oh fuck it.” She set the plate she was holding in one hand back on the counter. “Sit.”
She plopped on a stool. I took one facing her.
“What do you-wait.” She covered her face with her hands. I waited. “Why am I doing this?” she said, not to me, but to herself. She brought her hands down. She wiped her cheeks with a sleeve.
“We are totally, completely, unequivocally off the record,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
“I am doing this for you. And your family. Not for your newspaper. Not for the people in that godforsaken town.”
“Understood.”
“You’re still with the paper?”
“I’m back with the paper, yes.”
Our online story on Kerasopoulos’s ties to Laird Haskell had not gone over well with Media North’s board of directors. While they concluded that Kerasopoulos had done nothing illegal, they nevertheless asked for his resignation. He threatened to sue, but the board quieted him with a severance package rumored to be in the neighborhood of $3 million.
At Philo’s urging, I had returned to the Pilot as if I had never left.
“All right,” Felicia Haskell said. “It’s not that I’m worried about getting arrested again or anything. It’s just-my son. He knows enough.”
I could have said, He isn’t your son, but that probably would have ended the conversation.
“How’s Taylor?”
“Fine. He’s with my mother until I get things sorted out here.”
“Then you’re leaving.”
“Then we’re leaving.”
“Where?”
She spun halfway around on her stool, surveying the boxes. “Ask me something else,” she said.
“I hear he’s not playing anymore.”
“Not that either.”
“OK,” I said. “I just wish… it might have been nice to talk to him once before you leave.”
“I’m sorry,” Felicia said. “I thought about your request. But in the end, I just… couldn’t.”
“He’s family.”
“No, actually he’s not.” Felicia let that sink in. “He knows who his birth mother is, or was. Now she’s gone, and it’s best for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave all of this behind.”
“I understand.” What choice did I have? “So tell me why. Why did she-why did you-do it?”
Felicia placed her hands in her lap. They were naked of the rings and bracelets I’d seen before.
“You didn’t know your cousin very well, did you?” she said.
“I know her a little better now.”
“Well, I doubt I know her-knew her-any better than you. It’s really not that complicated, Grace and me. We had a lot in common. We both hated someone. And we both wanted the best for Taylor.”
“How could the best be for Gracie to die?”
“You’re not going to want to hear this. But she was never going to have Taylor. She was never going to see him. She was never going to get near him. Never. I made that clear. I made it clear to her and to my worthless husband. Taylor was mine. Legally mine. All mine.”
“That was your prerogative.”
She came halfway out of her chair, slapped a hand on the counter. “I brought him up knowing- knowing — that he was the bastard son of a whore and her… her bastard lover, my husband. But I was a good mother. A damned good mother. And I still am.”
I wanted to tell her not to call Gracie a whore. But I didn’t want her to throw me out yet.
She sat back down.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Part of me felt for her. I thought of the prenup that I figured left her with whatever was in the boxes in that room and not much else. Then I thought of the boxes in Gracie’s house. They were a lot different than the ones Felicia was packing.
“Tell me: Were you ever…” I decided to alter my question in midsentence. “Did you know Trixie?”
“This is not about me.”
There was no point in disagreeing.
“So whose plan was it, exactly?”
Felicia wrapped her arms around herself. “I could tell you it was Grace’s, because it was. But it took two, obviously.”
“How did you even-”
“I knew about Grace long before she knew I knew. Before even Laird knew. He thought he was so smart. God, he thought he was smart.”
She brushed an angry tear from a cheek.
“We knew we couldn’t have kids. So we adopted. It all happened so fast. Everybody I knew who adopted, it took forever. But of course Laird knew all the right people, you know, he called in some chits, this judge, that lawyer, a social service worker, and the next thing you know we have this beautiful boy.”
“Fourteen years ago.”
“And for six or seven years, it was fine. I didn’t know where Taylor came from and I didn’t care. He was such a good boy. And then, one day, Laird was out of town, and this package shows up.”
“In the mail?”
“In the mailbox. No postage. Just a little box. Addressed to me.”
“What was in it?”
“A shoe.” She had trouble getting it out. “A baby shoe.”
“For the right foot.”
“How do you know that?”
“Go on.”
Haskell pleaded ignorance, she said. He called the shoe a prank, blamed it on another lawyer he said was messing with him over a case. Felicia hired a private investigator. A young woman, the investigator discovered, had been trying to make contact with the son she had long ago given up for adoption. A young woman who knew Laird Haskell quite well.
As Felicia spoke, I imagined Gracie sitting high in the rafters at the rinks around Detroit, arriving late and leaving early, her face hidden by a hat or a scarf, surreptitiously watching her son play hockey. And I thought of her again at the Red Wings game with Vend. She stayed close to him, I decided, so she could keep tabs on Haskell, and on her son. It wasn’t the smartest way to go, but by then, what else did Gracie have?
“Did you finally confront him?” I said.
“At first I just decided it didn’t happen, it didn’t matter. Fired the investigator. Threw the shoe away. But finally it was just too much. So I went to him.”
“And he denied it.”
“Oh, no. It was too late for that. No, he just came clean, the son of a bitch. God, that man. You’d have thought I was sitting in a jury box.” She reached out and grabbed my sleeve. I could feel the anger in her grip. “It was just like that day in town hall, all that confessional bullshit.”
“I can imagine.”
She let go of me. “You know, that was the hardest part of this whole charade. Sitting in that room with all those idiots, playing the good wife, screaming and crying like he fucking mattered to me.”
“I’m thinking Gracie played the harder part.”
She lowered her head
to her chest, squeezing herself again.
“She followed us up here. She followed us. Our marriage had been shit for years. I’d hung on for Taylor. Then he moves us a million miles from civilization, away from our friends, and Taylor’s friends, and then he has the gall to start in with the stock trading, sitting on his ass yelling at the computer all day. He thought he was so goddamned smart.” Felicia shook her head, loosed a bitter laugh. “You know he was just bored. Like me and Taylor. Just plain bored up here.”
“So you went to Gracie.”
“Oh, no. Hell, no. She came to me. Woman to woman. I told her to go to hell, go back to Detroit, get out of our life. At first. Then the calls started coming. These men with strange accents. Coming to the house, where my son might answer the phone.”
“And the money problems…”
“Unlike my husband, I wasn’t counting on a pro hockey contract.”
She looked tired. Tired of the conversation, tired of packing boxes, tired of trying to escape from her husband’s grasp.
“You made Laird send that rejection letter to Gracie.”
“Actually, I had one of his staff do it.”
“And the explosion at the rink? What was that about?”
“That was Grace. She wanted Vend as badly as Laird. Bad idea, in retrospect.”
I thought of the clipping in Gracie’s dark room, of Vend acquitted of bombing a rival strip club, how the episode had amused him.
“The flowers were a bad move, too,” I said. “In retrospect.”
“Also Grace’s idea. But I felt for your mother.”
“Sure you did.”
“Part of the plan. They had the intended effect.”
“And you set the chimney fire so the cops would find the shoe? How do you a set a chimney fire?”
“You wait for your husband to go to bed and you build a really big out-of-control fire using lighter fluid and then you call the fire department and tell them you think you have a chimney fire.”
“And of course they come, whether you have one or not.”
“Silly women, huh? What do they know?”
“Right. What about the blackmail note? Why didn’t you just get it to the cops somehow?”
“Grace figured it’d look better if you found it for them and gave it to your girlfriend.”
