The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  Two months after Carol Jo was buried, her mother, who had not been seen outside the Gilbert home since the funeral, showed up at Sunday Mass in the middle of the priest’s homily. Mom and I, sitting in the front row, heard the murmur rising in the pews behind us and turned to see Mrs. Gilbert, in a wrinkled flannel shirt with the tails out, walking purposefully up the center aisle. She stopped in front of the communion rail. From the lectern astride the altar, Father Emmett gave her a sideways glance but continued with his sermon.

  Her first scream stopped him. You have nothing for me, she yelled. She raised an arm and pointed at the tabernacle. You have nothing but death. Father Emmett stepped away from the lectern toward Mrs. Gilbert—Mary Jo, he said—but she kept up her wail as if he weren’t there, as if none of us were there. You are nothing. You are nothing but death.

  Darlene’s father and two other men came out from their pews and tried to take Mary Jo Gilbert by the shoulders and settle her down but she pushed them away and continued her keening. Father Emmett hopped over the communion rail and approached her with his hand out, palm down, as if to bless her, but she slapped his hand away. I turned and watched the men drag her down the aisle until my mother twisted me around and told me to mind my own business.

  Late that night, Parmelee Gilbert called the police to say his wife had gone to the grocery store hours before and had not come home. Early the next morning, two officers appeared on Gilbert’s front doorstep on Ambling Street. They told him his wife had been found in the woods a mile north of the lake. She had used a garden hose to feed the tailpipe exhaust back into her car. After burying Mary Jo, Parmelee Gilbert sold the home where the three of them had lived and bought another house two blocks away.

  I had to believe that was why he had invited me in.

  Now he walked from his house to his office each morning, Monday through Saturday, and returned home each night around six, carrying a brown leather satchel under one arm. His caseload was mostly mundane and domestic—probate, real estate closings, property tax appeals. He politely declined to handle divorces or disputes between neighbors, surrendering that business to lawyers in other towns. He was a fixture at town council and county commission meetings but rarely if ever showed up for more social events like hockey games or euchre tournaments or even the annual Kiwanis Christmas brunch. Such aloofness was normally frowned upon in Starvation Lake, but Parmelee Gilbert was forgiven, more because of Carol Jo than his wife.

  He picked up his tea and gestured for me to do the same. “You inquired about Mrs. McBride,” he said.

  I sipped. He’d gotten the sugar just right. “Yeah.”

  “Please. I want to make it clear that she is not my client.”

  “Got it. But I heard—”

  “You heard that she is curious about the existence of a life insurance policy connected with the unfortunate demise of her daughter.”

  “That’s right.”

  He propped a wingtip against the edge of his desk and pulled his left sock taut on a pale calf. “I am not in position to confirm that there was or wasn’t a life insurance policy involved in this matter,” he said. He repeated the sock pull on his right leg. “But I can confirm that I have agreed, as of this morning, to represent the Haverford Life Insurance Company of Traverse City.”

  “This morning?”

  He sat up straight, picked up his mug, and looked at me over the top of it. “That is what I said.”

  “But you can’t confirm that Gracie had a life insurance policy?”

  “That would, as you say, violate the attorney-client privilege.”

  “We are on the record, yes?”

  “Unless I say otherwise.”

  So he was confirming that Gracie had a life insurance policy without leaving his fingerprints, all while staying comfortably on the record. Why else would Gilbert have been hired that very morning?

  I imagined Shirley McBride storming into his office, demanding her cut of the insurance proceeds, threatening to go to the paper, which of course she already had. Now Gilbert was trying to keep things calm and accurate and within his control.

  “Sorry,” I said. “This probably isn’t comfortable for you.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “So Shirley is the beneficiary?”

  Gilbert gave me a tiny smile, then took it back.

  “I didn’t say there was a life insurance policy. However, just for your information, if there was in fact a policy, I would not be at liberty to tell you who any beneficiaries might be, as that would indeed violate attorney-client privilege as well as the potential beneficiaries’ privacy.”

  “Understood.”

  I wished I had looked more carefully through the file folders and papers in the cabinet in Gracie’s Zam shed. The policy might have been in there. What a dope I am, I thought.

  “In addition,” Gilbert said, “strictly for your background information, life insurance policies are frequently voided in cases where the insured has inflicted death on him- or herself. In effect, there would be no beneficiaries in such a case.”

  “Right. And you think Gracie was a suicide.”

  “Gus, for the record, I have not said that the deceased is in any way related to my being retained by the Haverford Company. I trust that whatever you write, if you write anything, will reflect that.”

  “Understood. But why would someone who planned to kill themself bother with a life insurance policy?”

  He sat back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  “Off the record?”

  “Yes,” Gilbert said, as if he went off the record as routinely as he tied his tie every morning. He looked down at his folded hands. “As you can imagine, I feel terrible for Mrs. McBride and everyone who knew the girl. The loss is no less, whatever the cause.” He stopped. I waited. He looked up, his eyes flitting to the photo of his daughter before returning to me. “But who can divine the workings of a single human heart? Who really knows what a person thinks and believes when he or she decides to do whatever they do?”

  I thought of Gracie sitting on the edge of her cot in the Zam shed, alone, weary, bedraggled, alcoholic. Why would anyone have wanted to kill her? Who could possibly have had a motive?

  “Yes,” I said. “But you have a client with money on the line.”

  “I am not speaking for any client.”

  “Sorry. Will I see you at town council Wednesday?”

  “Back on the record. Always possible. My clients frequently have business before the council.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be there.”

  “Well then.” He stood. “I have an appointment to get to.”

  “How can I help you?”

  Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho leaned back against the front edge of his gray metal desk, thick arms folded across his thick midsection, one hand twirling a curl of his mustache. The room smelled of Tiparillos and, strangely, perfume. Dingus had kept me waiting outside his office for half an hour. He didn’t usually make me wait. I had only an hour or so to file my stories and write up the other junk waiting back at the newsroom. I cut to the chase.

  “No way it’s suicide.”

  “You knew her,” Dingus said. “What do you think?”

  Since I had returned to Starvation a year and a half before, Dingus and I had come to an unspoken trust that we would not deliberately waste each other’s time. Even in the typical cop-and-reporter cat and mouse, there was purpose. He had his, I had mine, and he had learned that I might actually know things that he did not. In the hallway outside his office hung a framed copy of a Pilot front page. The banner headline read, “Police Uncover Porn Ring.” We had helped each other on that story. Dingus could have had a byline.

  Darlene merely tolerated my relationship with Dingus. I knew it rankled her that the sheriff could seem more forthcoming with me than with his own deputies. I told her that a big part of his job was managing information, and sometimes he had to pay more attention
to someone digging for it than to people who were beholden to him for their jobs. “Bullshit,” she replied. “It’s because you’re a boy.”

  “Hell, Dingus,” I said. “I didn’t know Gracie. She didn’t live here for years.”

  “You guys were in Detroit together.”

  “No. We were just there at the same time. We might as well have been living on different planets.”

  He stopped twirling his mustache and squinted one eye. “And you had no idea whatsoever what she was doing down there?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know, of course, I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

  I’d heard that line before. He wouldn’t have had me into his office if he didn’t want me to know something. Or wanted something from me.

  “What’s with the leaks to Channel Eight?” I said. “You want to get on TV? Or are you just trying to help D’Alessio get laid?”

  Dingus ignored that and moved around behind his desk. His swivel chair groaned as he sat. He moved a half-filled doughnut box aside, reached into a drawer, and came out with a glossy black pamphlet. “I like this,” he said, waggling it in front of his face. “Some vagrant gave it to me in Florida when I was down there for a conference.”

  I saw the title on the pamphlet cover: Hiding from God. Dingus read aloud: “‘When we open the newspaper, we see for the most part bad news. We see more of the dark side of humanity than the good and decent side.’ ” He looked over the top of the pamphlet at me. “Here’s the best line: ‘The newspaper is simply a snapshot of the darkness that is within each one of us.’ ”

  “I was definitely thinking that the other day as I was typing up the St. Jude Society’s lost-and-found list.”

  Dingus set the pamphlet on his blotter and pointed at my face. “Don’t give me that smart-ass bull. Your sister’s dead and all you care about is your stupid little scoops?”

  His singsong voice sometimes made it hard to take him seriously. Not at the moment. His mood tasted like all the sharp metal in the room, the angle-iron chairs, the star points on his badge, the shelf brackets, his pistol.

  “She wasn’t my sister,” I said.

  “For all intents and purposes, she damned well was. Nobody took better care of her than your mother. I had the distinct privilege of being reminded of that about an hour ago when Gracie’s other mother was sitting in that chair you’re in now.”

  “Shirley?” That explained the perfume.

  Dingus snatched a yellow Post-it note off his blotter and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I leaned in. The perfume filled my nostrils. Shirley usually used enough to deodorize a ballroom. I peered at her scribble, which listed to the right:

  MUST TALK. URGINT NEWS. PLEAS CALL 231 555 3671.

  “This is for me?” I said. “She’s threatening you?”

  “Hell’s bells, it would take me all night to tell you how many times she’s told me she’d be going to the Pilot with this little bitch or that. She’s the least of my worries.”

  I ignored the vibrating cell phone in my pocket.

  “What did she want?”

  He jumped up from his chair and paced to the back of the room, where a pair of particle-board shelves held cans of pepper spray, an assortment of black-and-chrome-colored handcuffs, and a photograph of Dingus’s ex-wife and current girlfriend, Barbara. “She wants me to find a murderer,” he said. His voice turned sarcastic. “She wants her daughter avenged. She wants closure.”

  I imagined Shirley pounding her fat pink fist on Dingus’s desk, the bracelets she bought out of the clearance bin at Glen’s rattling, her bleached blond perm bouncing. She’d be wearing Kmart designer jeans pushing the zipper flap open and one of those $17.50 THROW AWAY THAT CORK! sweatshirts from the Just One More Saloon. Around town it was said that Shirley had sold her dead husband’s Purple Heart medal for $33.50 on an Internet auction site. It wasn’t hard to believe.

  “She wants the life insurance proceeds,” I said. “And she’s going to raise a stink about it. But there is a murderer, isn’t there, Dingus?”

  “l’ll be goddamned,” he said, turning away from me.

  A light on Dingus’s phone started to blink. He didn’t notice. He was pacing from the shelf to his desk and back. The light went off and Dingus stopped in the middle of the room and held his arms out wide. His face flushed red.

  “Why?” he said. “Why the hell did she have to come back here?” He pointed at his phone. “That thing’s been ringing all day. Every damn member of the county commission and the town council’s calling to tell me, ‘Leave it alone, Dingus’ and ‘Just let it lie, Dingus.’ ”

  “Nobody wants a murder around here,” I said. “They have more important things to worry about.”

  “Shirley’s just trailer trash to them, not worth the overtime,” Dingus said. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit. But they’re calling Doc Joe, too.” The county coroner. “They’re not supposed to do that. Doc, he gets the faintest whiff they might cut his budget, he’ll sign whatever they want.”

  “Are they threatening to whack you too?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  Dingus stepped to his desk, grabbed a file folder, and plucked out a sheet of paper that had come over a fax machine. He handed it to me. “You can’t have this,” he said. “But you can read it.”

  The fax had been sent at 11:18 that morning. It was signed by town council chairman Elvis Bontrager. The town, which had long ago eliminated its own police force for lack of funds, now relied on the sheriff’s department and contributed to its budget. Elvis’s letter said an allocation of money for the purchase of two new police cruisers might have to be “temporarily delayed” because of “reconciliation issues” that had recently cropped up.

  Damn, I thought. Laird Haskell, who probably didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t have cared, was picking Dingus’s pocket. Instead of paying for better public safety, the council was about to give $100,000 to a supposed millionaire so he could build a hockey rink. Great for the story I was about to write. Not so great for Starvation. Unless, of course, the River Rats won a state championship. Then everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter to a soul if the local cops had to resort to bicycles to do their jobs.

  “That sucks,” I said, handing the letter back. “They can just do that?”

  “They can just do that,” Dingus said. “And that’s not all. They’re talking with the county commission about more cuts. Just between us.”

  I thought about Darlene. For all of her carping about Dingus and the other “boys” at the department, she loved being a police officer. She would hate to lose her job so the town could have a shiny new hockey arena.

  “Why do they give a rip?”

  Dingus might have been the only person in town—except, perhaps, my mother—who didn’t care about hockey. He’d never played it, didn’t watch it, and probably thought it just caused him a lot of grief, what with all the postgame bar fights and drunks steering their way out of the rink parking lot.

  “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe they think a big murder investigation’ll spook their bankers and that rich fellow will walk and they won’t get their precious rink. I don’t know what the hell these people think.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He sat down heavily in his chair. His phone started blinking again. “I plan to proceed with—”

  There was a knock at Dingus’s door. It opened and Deputy Frank D’Alessio ducked his head in. He gave me a What the fuck are you doing here? look before telling Dingus, “Sheriff, you have a call.”

  “I can see that,” Dingus said. “Who is it?”

  D’Alessio glanced at me and said, “Uh, a council member.”

  “Which council member, Deputy?”

  “Chairman Bontrager.”

  “Not now.”

  “He said it’s important.”

  “Tell him to go cut a hole in the lake and jump in.”

  D’Alessio grinned. “I
’ll tell him you’ll call back when you can.”

  Dingus watched the door close.

  “So,” I said, “you’re not really going to charge Soupy, are you? You just leaked that to buy yourself some time with the politicians.”

  Dingus shrugged his acknowledgment. At least he hadn’t used me like he had Channel Eight. “I could still charge him with obstruction, though.”

  “He’s not talking?”

  “No, he’s—excuse me.”

  A different light on his phone was blinking. Dingus picked up the phone and turned in his chair until he faced away from me. But I could still hear him, as he undoubtedly knew. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.

  A full minute passed. “OK. Let me know. Thanks.” He turned around and hung up the phone. “Goddammit—why did she have to come back here?” He said it less to me than to himself. “You know, whatever happened to that girl—and we are off the record here, son—whatever happened to that girl has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of this town. Nothing at all.”

  “Why don’t you send someone down to Detroit?”

  “No,” he said. “They’re not going to have that.”

  “They?”

  He waved at his phone. “The whole lot of them.” He shook his head. “I told her not to come back here. I told her never come back.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He pushed back up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet in the back corner of the office. He stretched a key ring on a retractable tether from his gun belt to the top drawer and unlocked it. He took out a brown accordion file, put it under one arm, locked the drawer, walked to the door, and opened it.

  “This way,” he said.

  I followed him out of his office. We walked down the corridor past the entrance, me glancing into offices to see if I might catch a glimpse of Darlene. I did not. At the end of the hallway we reached the locked door that opened into the Pine County Jail. Dingus peered through the little window crosshatched with steel. The door buzzed and Dingus pulled it open. He turned to me then and casually handed me the accordion folder.

  “Hang on to this,” he said. “Do not lose it. Wait here.”