The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  “That’s OK. Got anything for me?”

  “Hang on.”

  From my pickup I could see down the hill and over the river to Main Street. A snowplow rumbled down the south side of the street, steering around Mrs. B’s Mercury in front of the Pilot. Had she been ordered to call the cops if I walked in the door? Soupy leaned out of Enright’s and flung a bag of trash at his Dumpster.

  A teenaged boy wearing a River Rats jacket came out of the dentist’s office, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and hunched his shoulders against the cold. It was Dougie Baker, the Rats’ backup goalie. Decent with his gloves, still figuring out how to use his feet. Taylor Haskell’s teammate would not be playing in the NHL or anything remotely close. He went to the dentist, not balance training.

  My gaze drifted toward the lake. A blue Suburban with tinted windows emerged from behind the marina and turned onto Main.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Something wrong?” Nova was back.

  “No,” I said, keeping my eyes on the Suburban as it moved slowly down Main then turned up Estelle Street into the neighborhoods behind. “What do you have?”

  “All right,” Nova said. “Where were we? I told you the one house, the one on Harman owned by that one guy.”

  “Mr. Vend,” I said. I reached into a jacket pocket for a pen and notebook and felt something else there: the brush. I kept forgetting I had it. “And the taxes were paid by?”

  “Something—I’ll spell it out: KNB LLC.”

  “KNB?” I said, writing it on the notebook cover. “‘K’ as in kitten?”

  “‘N’ Nancy, ‘B’ boy, yeah.”

  Short for Knob. Or Knobbo.

  “Brother.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. What about the other house—the one in foreclosure?”

  “Got that right here. The old owner was a company called … not sure how to say this … fee-liss … ?”

  “Felicity?”

  “Tuss.”

  “Felicitous,” I said.

  “Felicitous Holdings.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good, because I did a little extra checking for you.”

  Nova told me that over the past few months, Felicitous—it had to be Laird Haskell—had sold thirteen properties in Melvindale, Dearborn, and River Rouge. KNB had bought each of them for a dollar. Except the one where Gracie had lived.

  I added it up in my head: Whenever his money problems had started, Haskell must have tried to avail himself of some of the cash in that lush niche business he and Vend ran, the one Gracie had been so good at. Now he was trying to get square with Jarek Vend. I had my doubts that cheap bungalows in downriver Detroit were going to do it.

  No wonder that blue Suburban was trolling Starvation Lake.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “The house in foreclosure? I was in—I mean, the person living there still has the house. Doesn’t the bank padlock it or something?”

  “Not always,” Nova said. “This one’s going up for a sheriff’s sale. But the owner gets to try to pay back the money. You know, to redeem themselves.”

  Redemption and Haskell didn’t quite go together. But apparently he had held Gracie’s house back from Vend. I wondered why. For some reason, he must have hoped Gracie would go back downstate.

  “One more thing, Nova Marie?”

  “Please?”

  “Please.”

  Out of the mess of old newspapers and fast-food rubbish on the passenger seat floor, I dredged up a foam coffee cup.

  “Does your list have an address on Prospect?”

  “It does indeed.” She read it to me. It matched the one for Trixie’s women’s center I’d scribbled on the coffee cup.

  Trixie might never have known it, but her landlord had once been Laird Haskell. Now, whether she knew it or not, her landlord was Jerek Vend. Of course she was having trouble. Had Haskell discounted her rent because he felt such pity for unfortunate women? Had Vend raised it beyond her means?

  It made sense in the twisted, incestuous way that the last few days made sense.

  Philo came walking up the hill. He waved and went inside the pizzeria.

  “Thank you, Nova,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  “How about two—like two tickets to a Lions game?”

  I saw Soupy come back out of Enrights, let the door close, and just stand there in the cold, head bowed, arms wrapped around himself.

  “You there?”

  “Yes, yes,” I told Nova. “I’m on it.”

  Soupy went back inside. I thought of the calendar hanging in his kitchen. I looked down the street for Dougie Baker; he was gone. I remembered the piano music spilling over me in the Haskell kitchen. Something about it bothered me.

  “And don’t be hanging up on me no more.”

  “Shall I spread these out in grease or marinara?” Philo said.

  We were sitting in the corner booth at the pizzeria. The only other person in the place was the owner, Belly, who was in the kitchen. Philo held a file folder against his blue-and-black argyle sweater and surveyed the table with a look of utter disgust. Belly hadn’t yet changed the old Pilot covering the table.

  “Who cares? They’re just photocopies, right?”

  “I would prefer not to wallow around in some stranger’s lunch.” Philo came halfway out of his seat. “Waiter?” he shouted. “Can you bus this table?”

  “Hold your fucking horses,” Belly yelled from somewhere behind the counter. “I’m a one-man show here.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Philo said, sitting back down.

  “Here,” I said, peeling one edge of the newspaper away and folding it in half to expose the bare plastic tabletop. “Let’s see what you know that I couldn’t possibly figure out for myself.”

  Philo laid the folder flat on the table and flipped it open to reveal a two-inch-high stack of photocopied documents. Most of them had come from the Michigan Department of Treasury, although I’d sent my freedom-of-information requests to every agency I thought Haskell might have had to file with. Sticky tabs in red, orange, green, and yellow jutted from the edges of the pile.

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Show me all this stuff, given that I’m persona non grata at the Pilot?”

  Philo gave me a hard look through his horn-rims. Then he said, “Do you plan to go to the town council meeting today?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I might need your advice when I write my story.”

  Philo was serious. “I’m flattered,” I said, “even if you won’t be publishing for three days. Anyway, if Haskell’s going to apologize, I want to be there. Who knows? Maybe he’ll apologize to me.”

  “Good.” Philo placed one hand flat on the stack of pages. “They didn’t give us everything you asked for.”

  “They never do.”

  “And this stuff doesn’t tell you very much.”

  “Nope.”

  “A lot of it’s just routine. Some is blacked out. But there are a couple of things that might be helpful. You were obviously trying to figure out where Laird Haskell was getting his money, or where things might have gone awry for him.” He fingered the pages back to the green tab he had marked “dt.” He slipped out a few stapled pages and handed them to me. “This could be informative.”

  I scanned the cover page quickly. It was a state registration for a business called ExpertWitness Trading LLC. I found the description on line 6A: “Trading of securities and related assets.”

  “No way,” I said. “He was trading stocks? Himself?”

  “Looks like it. You can’t tell for sure.”

  “Good way to piss away a fortune in a hurry.”

  I flipped through the other pages. Haskell was not required to report how much he’d made or lost on the business. The last page listed the princip
al owners of ExpertWitness Trading as Laird Haskell and Felicia Quarles Haskell. I wondered if she knew she was co-owner of a one-man day-trading firm. I thought of Vend showing me the TV screens in his office, the comely young women furrowing their brows over the latest market news, the stock charts pointing infinitely up. Vend knew just how Haskell had been seduced.

  “Yes,” Philo said. “And from reading your stories about him, he strikes me as a man who would believe he could master anything.”

  “You read my stories? My Times stories?”

  “Just a few. Found them online.”

  “Yeah, well, if you can kick the auto industry’s ass, why not Wall Street?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Plus, it’s a fun way to fill up a lonely winter day up north.”

  “Though I don’t really understand why he’d bother filing the paperwork.”

  “Easier to write off the losses on your income tax,” I said. “Or to have a legal cover for laundering money.”

  “Why would Haskell need to launder money?”

  “Did you read this morning’s Free Press?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  I handed the pages back. Philo fitted them back in the original stack. I had never seen him so focused on something other than a budget.

  “What else you got?”

  “The rest of the stuff really just indicates how many different businesses Haskell was trying to run in addition to whatever legal work he might have had. Real estate, a little retail, the new rink, a bunch of residential downstate. But there was one thing, in particular—”

  “Nothing about kinky sex?”

  Philo stopped arranging the pages and looked at me. “Kinky—oh, the waiter.”

  Belly stood at the table glowering at Philo. “I am the proprietor, sir,” he said.

  I grinned. “Hey, Bell. Meet Philo Beech of the Pilot.”

  Neither of them offered a hand. Belly grunted. “What the hell kind of name is that? Philo? Sounds like something you use to wash a pot.”

  “I was named for my great-grandfather.”

  “BFD,” Belly said. He looked at me. “You guys going to order today?”

  We ordered Italian subs to go, mine with peppers, Philo’s without. “Here, let me grab this,” Belly said, tearing the newspaper away from the table and balling it up in his hands. “I’ll bring you another.”

  “Did you say kinky sex?” Philo whispered.

  “Just a joke. Let’s see some more.”

  “Well.” He took a deep breath. “There’s this one thing.”

  “The thing I couldn’t have figured out.”

  He ignored me and pulled out another stack of pages. “This particular collection of documents seems to show that Mr. Haskell, along with some other individuals, owns a great deal more property than we thought, right next to the property where the new hockey rink is being built.”

  “Really?” It immediately made me think that Vend might like to get his hands on that too. Which may have been why he seemed so interested in the town council meeting.

  “Yes. Much of it is owned by a company called—”

  “Felicitous Holdings,” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. Does it say what they plan to use the land for?”

  “No, just ‘future development.’ But you can imagine, if the rink is a success, that land could become valuable.”

  “Big if, but yes.”

  “If it doesn’t, they have problems.”

  He had no idea. “Correct,” I said.

  “What most interested me, though, was this.” He turned the first few pages back to one listing the company’s board of directors. There were nine directors, including Haskell and his wife; Haskell’s local attorney, Parmelee Gilbert; and other names I didn’t recognize. Philo placed a forefinger on one.

  “Here,” he said.

  The name he pointed to was Linda Biegeleisen. Her address was given as Suttons Bay, Michigan, a village on the Leelanau Peninsula jutting north from Traverse City. Jim Kerasopoulos, I knew, lived in Suttons Bay.

  “Who’s she?” I said.

  “She’s listed by her maiden name. I suppose that’s legal, if that’s the name you have on your driver’s license.”

  “So what?”

  Philo took another breath. He seemed, to my surprise, angry. “A few years after my great-grandfather came to this country, his wife made him shorten the family name. Some of his nine children adopted the altered form. But some chose to revert to the old one, out of respect for their ancestors. My father did not. His sister did.”

  “Get to the point, Philo.”

  He tapped the name twice. “This is my aunt.”

  “Your aunt as in—holy shit. No.”

  “Yes.”

  I almost jumped out of the booth. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Kerasopoulos has a piece of Haskell’s business?”

  “His wife certainly does.”

  “Same thing, man. Same thing. So your uncle has a direct interest in that rink. Direct. Man, I’m dumb. Here I thought he was just shilling for ads. Jesus. How the hell did he think he could get away with this?”

  Philo took off his horn-rims and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He put his glasses back on and stared at the table. “Believe me,” he said. “My uncle thinks he’s smarter than everyone. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  He looked up at me. “For being a little bitch.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought of saying I always knew his uncle was a fat ass, but that wouldn’t have helped.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Your uncle could be in a lot of trouble.” I was thinking now of Vend. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to cover the story.”

  “Right. Kerasopoulos will want to banner that baby across the front: ‘Publisher of This Newspaper Linked to Slime-Ball’—oops.”

  Belly showed up with our sandwiches in one hand and a wrinkled piece of newspaper in the other. “Two subs, one peppers, to go. That’ll be six dollars and thirty-five cents.”

  “Thanks, Bell.” I set a five and three ones on the table, took the sandwiches, and stood up.

  “Hey,” Belly said. “Remember that broad you were asking me about?”

  “Who? When?”

  “The broad was with your cousin in here.” I had totally forgotten about that. Belly shoved the piece of newspaper at me. “Didn’t know her name, but I never forget a face.”

  The date at the top of the clipping was November 8, 1998. The headline on the story said, couple renews wedding vows. There was a black-and-white picture of the couple: Laird and Felicia Haskell.

  “Her?” I said, pointing at Felicia. I didn’t remember the story; it was probably written by one of our blue-haired freelancers. Philo leaned in to see. “She was here with”—I hesitated—“with Gracie?”

  “Yep. Didn’t look like she wanted to be here. No wonder because your cousin, she got pretty worked up there for a while.”

  “About what?”

  “Fuck do I know. Girl stuff. This broad”—he pointed at the paper again—“she wore sunglasses the whole time, like she’s a movie star or something.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?”

  Belly dropped his arms to his sides. “Are you deaf?”

  Outside, Philo followed me to my truck.

  “Aren’t you walking?” I said.

  “Wait,” he said. “Kinky sex. That wasn’t a joke.”

  “Not really.”

  “Gus,” he said. “As I said, I’m sorry I wasn’t much help to you before. But frankly, I’m not in much better shape than you.”

  “No.”

  “And if I’m going to do what I have to do—what we have to do—I’m going to need to know what you know.”

  I looked down Estelle Street. The blue Suburban sat on the opposite end of the Estelle Street Bridge, peering up the slope and across the Hungry River at Philo an
d me. I could feel the stare of that cratered face.

  I turned to Philo. “So,” I said, “is now the time to stand on principle?”

  Philo didn’t flinch. “I think so.”

  I opened my truck door. “Hop in. We got a little time before the council meets. I think it’s going to be interesting.”

  Town hall sat on Elm Street just up from Main, in sight of the preserved remains of the dam the Civil Conservation Corps built in the 1930s to create the lake they christened Starvation.

  A fire in the 1970s destroyed the grand four-story edifice of brick and granite that had once towered over the spot. Before the fire, the council had been deadlocked over the budget, and Pilot headlines screamed of lawsuits and countersuits and citizens demanding recalls. Amid the uproar, the council neglected to appropriate enough money to pay the insurance premiums on the building. Today, town hall was a low-slung rectangle of beige brick that could have passed for a post office. Two willows flanking the walkway to the glass double-door entrance were all that remained from the old days.

  Now a long line of locals, most of them retirees, waited beneath the willows for seats at this afternoon’s town council meeting. The snow had stopped but the wind had not and many of the women had wrapped their faces in scarves. I watched from the open window of my truck on the street, keeping an eye out for the blue Suburban. I had dropped Philo at the Pilot after telling him some but not all of what I knew about Gracie’s doings downstate. I was taking a chance that he wouldn’t squeal to Dingus or his uncle. I didn’t think he would. Betrayal can change a person.

  I stood near the street watching the queue waiting to get into town hall. I’d been checking my voice mail all day for something from Darlene. Now I checked again, and again there was nothing. With so many people, I thought, maybe she’d be working the council meeting.

  The milling crowd at the head of the line parted and I saw Gracie’s mother, Shirley McBride, with her back to the double doors, her blond head wrapped in a white wool headband, a cigarette in one hand and a sign in the other. She had duct-taped a poster board to a metal clothes hanger bent into a crude handle. On the poster she had written in black felt-tip pen, UNFORGIVEN: MY DAUGTER OR HASKEL’S HOCKEY? Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood a few steps away, his eyes fixed on the ground, looking like he wanted to scream, or at least haul Shirley off to jail.