The Hanging Tree

by Bryan Gruley

  “Nah. I was dealing with Dingus and that briefcase.”

  “She was hysterical. She kept trying to get in the police car with her husband. It took two cops to restrain her. Her poor son just stood there like he was in shock.”

  “He probably was.”

  “Which reminds me,” Philo said. “Was she the woman that fat guy at the pizzeria pointed out in the paper?”

  “Supposedly.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Supposedly she was in the place with Gracie last week. I don’t know. Belly’s full of shit half the time.” I stood up, finished my beer, set the bottle down on Philo’s desk. What Belly had said didn’t make sense, at least not within the story line Philo and I had decided upon. I didn’t want to think about it. “We’ll have plenty more to write tomorrow. Maybe the cops will have grabbed Vend by then.”

  “You think maybe Dingus really does have the wrong guy?”

  “I don’t know.” I pulled on my coat. “There was a city editor at my old paper who liked to say, ‘They wouldn’t have arrested him if he wasn’t guilty.’ ”

  Philo had a good laugh at that.

  * * *

  Starvation Lake was quiet as I drove to Mom’s, almost as if nothing of note had happened that day, as if no one had been arrested and accused of murder. I planned to go home and make myself a big fat fried bologna sandwich with lots of ketchup and onions, drink a Blue Ribbon or two, and get a good night’s sleep, get ready for my Internet debut.

  I had to stop at the red light at the Estelle Street Bridge. I peered up the hill to the pizzeria. As usual, the place looked empty. I saw Belly’s head, wearing a white paper hat, moving around beyond the lighted windows. The stoplight turned green, but I sat there a bit longer, staring.

  Belly had to be yanking my chain, I told myself. Or he was just plain mistaken. I hit the gas.

  twenty-four

  The diced onions had just begun to sizzle. I was peeling the ring bologna when Mom emerged from her bedroom in pajamas and robe. One lamp was lit in the living room, the lake invisible in the dark beyond the windows. Mom sat down in her easy chair, wrapped herself in my River Rats afghan.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

  “I was reading. I thought I might watch the news.”

  The news wouldn’t be on for another hour.

  “Can I make you a sandwich?”

  Mom turned her head, gave me a look. “Do I look like your father?” My dad had loved fried bologna sandwiches, taught me how to make them. Mom never cared for them. “Phyllis made us a nice salad.”

  “Good.”

  She turned back to the living room. The TV remote sat untouched on the table next to her. I took out a cutting board and began to slice the bologna lengthwise into the pan. The long curls of meat crackled in the bubbling butter.

  “It was quite a day in Starvation Lake,” Mom said.

  I had decided I wasn’t going to tell Mom about my job situation until the website appeared the next day. I had some questions, but Mom wasn’t going anywhere, and I was hungry. I uncapped the ketchup and squirted it around the pan. The sugary tang filled my nostrils.

  “I’ll say,” I said. “What was going on with you and Shirley? I thought she was going to punch you.”

  Mom made a show of folding her arms. “Are you just going to talk to the back of my head?”

  I looked at the bologna and onions snapping in the pan, looked back at Mom. I turned the heat off and went over to sit on a footstool facing her.

  “OK,” I said.

  She shook her head, threw the afghan back off her shoulders. “What did you ask me?” she said.

  “About Shirley. The hockey fight you guys had at town hall.”

  “Hockey fight?”

  “Shirley McBride, Mom.”

  She wasn’t remembering. But she was trying. She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips together in her lap.

  “Shirley and I—oh, God. That was like a hundred years ago. The only person who gives a damn about it is Shirley.”

  “Gives a damn about what?”

  She opened her eyes. “Eddie.”

  “Gracie’s dad?”

  “Yes. Eddie. Your father’s cousin. The one who died in the war. “

  “OK.”

  “He used to come up here on weekends when he was in high school. I didn’t really know your father yet. I actually met Eddie first. Down at the public access. He pretended to help my father put our boat in.” She smiled. “He was standing on the stern and Daddy gunned the boat and Eddie went flying.”

  “Ah,” I said. “You and Eddie had a little summer fling?”

  “Well …”

  “I’m not sure how much of this I want to know.”

  “Not a fling,” Mom said. “I wasn’t that kind of girl.”

  “Good.”

  She sat there thinking. She looked at me. “Shirley,” she said. “That was her on the sidewalk today.”

  “That was her, yes.”

  “She was wearing braids. All sorts of braids.” We were back in the distant past again. “After Eddie, she wouldn’t braid my hair anymore.”

  “No?”

  “No. She never forgave me for Eddie. Even after, especially after Eddie died, and she started in with the boyfriends.”

  I thought of the trailer where I would knock on the only door and sing out, “Graaaayseee!” Most days Gracie would come right out and close the door quickly behind her. Once in a while she’d ask me in because she hadn’t finished her Frosted Flakes and tea. I thought her kitchen smelled like a doctor’s office. Shirley might come to the table and sit silently smoking in her slip. Once there was a hickey the shape of a snail on the skin over her collarbone.

  “All those men, every single one of them a piece of shit.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m sorry, son. Forgive my language. Shirley was drawn to that like a deer fly, but those men …” She brushed at her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Turn Gracie away? Send her back to that revolting little trailer in the woods?”

  “You did the right thing, Mom. Gracie loved you.”

  “She loved you, too, Gussy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why won’t you believe me?”

  “Mom,” I said. “When you saw Gracie at Audrey’s the other day, she gave you an envelope.”

  “I didn’t see Gracie at Audrey’s the other day.”

  “Yes, you did, you told me you did.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Now she was telling the lie she’d forgotten to tell two nights before.

  “All right. So what?”

  “She brought you an envelope.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes, you do. It was a life insurance policy.”

  “No—”

  I stood. “Should I get it out of your bedroom?”

  She gave me a look of reproach that she couldn’t sustain. “Sit down,” she said. I sat. “I brought the envelope to Audrey’s. Gracie had sent it to me, she said for safekeeping. Of course I had to take a peek. And when I saw that …” She shook her head no. “I’m glad I peeked. I don’t want that money.”

  The money Shirley had been talking about at town hall.

  “So you tried to give it back?”

  “I told her I didn’t want that money, I didn’t want her to die.”

  I leaned in closer. Gracie would have given Mom the policy around the time she gave Soupy her letter to Haskell, “in case something happened.” Around the time Gracie supposedly was with Felicia Haskell at the pizzeria. I looked over at the bouquets people had sent. Felicia’s weren’t there anymore.

  “Mother,” I said, “she was just giving you her life insurance policy. Did you have some reason to think she was going to die? Did she tell you she was in some kind of danger?”

  “No.”

  “Or you don’t remember?”

  “I remember. She was fine.�
��

  “Did she say anything about—wait.” I was thinking about the rejection letter, which made me think of the Zamboni shed, which made me remember what I had found there. “Hang on.”

  I stood and dug in my jacket hung on the back of a kitchen chair, then sat back down with my mother. “Look what I found.”

  I handed her the blue hairbrush.

  “Oh.” She took it in her left hand. “Where did you get this?”

  “In the Zamboni shed. Gracie had it in a secret place.”

  Mom turned it over in her hands. As she did, her lips began to tremble. Her eyes welled.

  “Mother?”

  She clutched the brush in both hands and brought it to her chest. She bowed her head. She began to sob.

  I reached across the chair and took her by an arm. “Mom. What’s wrong?”

  “She didn’t have to—” Mom had to stop for a moment. “I told her you could have helped.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She thrust the brush at me. “Why couldn’t you two get along? Why couldn’t you both just—” She was struggling to talk. “I told her. I told her … I told her you could help her.”

  “Help her what?”

  “She wouldn’t listen. ‘He’ll never help me. He hates my guts.’ That’s what she said. But you, you …” She pulled the brush back into her, crying harder. “Shirley can have the money. I never wanted any money.” She was sobbing so hard now that she could barely catch her breath. “I could have … I could have …”

  “What? You could have what?”

  She held up a hand to stop me. She set the brush in her lap and reached one hand out. I took it.

  “Mom, what is it?”

  “Those people. All those people from down there. I wish they’d just stay. Just leave us alone. We don’t need their big houses and fancy boats.”

  “Mom?”

  She tightened her grip on my hand.

  “You know, I would give my life for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  My mother hitched forward in her chair, gathered up my other hand. “Any mother,” she said, “a good mother, would lay down her life for her son.”

  I waited.

  “Gracie didn’t have an abortion,” Mom said. She saw the quizzical look in my eyes. “There was no abortion.”

  “So there was no baby?”

  “Yes. There was.”

  I looked down at our entwined hands. “I know who.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “You don’t know, Mom. There’s a really bad guy downst—”

  “No, Gus. Think.”

  In my mind I walked into Gracie’s good bedroom again, the one with the light coming in, the poster on the wall, the child’s drawing of the hockey player. Then I heard the piano music again. I looked up at my mother.

  “Are you—” I let her hands go. “No. My God.”

  “I wish she would have asked you for help.” She picked up the brush again. “It’s my fault that you two never got along.”

  “You knew? You knew all along? All this time? Fourteen years?”

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  I ate the bologna sandwich cold, without tasting it, as I drove to the rink. I parked in front and grabbed my skates out of my hockey bag. Until then, I had forgotten about the pain in my foot. I limped into the arena.

  A peewee team from Starvation Lake was playing one from Alpena. I didn’t bother to check the scoreboard. Johnny Ford watched from his perch behind the concession counter. He held his gaze even after I plopped my skates on the counter. He was wearing the same River Rats sweatshirt he had worn the night he had caught me snooping in the Zam shed, with the same mustard stain on the “N,” the yellow now turning brown.

  “Hey, Johnny,” I said. “Can you do these?”

  He still didn’t look my way. “Look at that,” he said. He pointed the stump below his left elbow in the direction of the ice. I turned to see. “Three guys coming into the zone, all on the same side of the ice. What’s the advantage in that? Might as well be two guys. Shit, one.”

  I had figured that Johnny Ford watched a lot of hockey, but until then I had no idea that he cared.

  “Yep,” I said. “All about two-on-ones, man.”

  “Really ain’t that complicated.” Now he looked at me; then, dolefully, at my skates. “It’s kind of late, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t need them tonight,” I said.

  “When’s your next game?”

  “Pickup skate, tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll leave them under the counter. Four bucks.”

  I gave him a twenty. He turned his back and moved to the cash register. He punched something with his stump and the drawer flew open. I heard the bill-holders snap inside the drawer as he plucked out a ten, a five, and a single with his other hand.

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever find that phone?”

  He shoved the drawer shut with his butt. He laid the change next to my skates. “Nah,” he said. “She probably lost it.”

  I took the ten and the five.

  “You get a new one yet?” I said.

  He dug in his sweatshirt pouch, produced a cell phone. “This.”

  “They let you keep your number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why the hell did you loan it to her anyway?”

  “She let me drive.”

  “The Zam?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How was it?”

  “All right. A little harder with the—” He waggled his stump.

  “I’ll bet. But you’re doing a fine job now, man. Ice was good last night.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I heard a funny story about a Zamboni driver tonight. He was—”

  “No, no, no, man.” Johnny waved his hand at me. “Bad luck.”

  “OK, OK.” I laughed. “But look, I was just thinking, you know, the cops are all over Gracie’s stuff since, you know. They might find the old phone. You can trade it in for, I don’t know, maybe some cash.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t want to mess with cops.”

  “I don’t blame you.” I looked at the skates. “Ready tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.”

  I started to leave, then stopped and turned back to Johnny Ford. “Shit, you know, John, I’m talking to the cops about ten times a day. Give me your number and if it turns up, I’ll give you a call.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No trouble.”

  He had to get low to the counter, his hair hanging down over his face, so he could hold a napkin down with his stump while he scratched out the number.

  The napkin was crumpled in my left hand as I knocked on the door of Darlene’s apartment with my right.

  She answered in an old white-and-green Michigan State football jersey that hung to her knees, number 23. She opened the door without a word, turned and walked into her little kitchen. I followed. She flicked on a light and took a glass out of the dish drainer and filled it with water from the tap.

  I unzipped my jacket. “We have to talk,” I said.

  Darlene pulled her dark hair back with one hand and drank the glass down. She set the glass in the sink. She turned to me.

  “Did you sleep with her?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Did you want to?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I had no good answer for that. “Like you said, things got complicated. I was doing my job.”

  We didn’t say anything for a minute. Darlene gazed vacantly at the wall behind me, thinking. “I was doing my job, too.”

  “When?”

  “When you saw me at the rink. We had Jason under surveillance. Dingus had talked to someone in Detroit about him. I was the tail because he wouldn’t suspect me.”

  “You?” I felt at
once stupid and relieved. “Jeez. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” She lowered her eyes now. “We followed you, too.”

  “When? When I went downstate? No.”

  “Yes. D’Alessio.”

  “Frankie? He let those shitheads basically kidnap me?”

  “You were doing your job, Gus. Isn’t that what you wanted? You got to Vend, right? You figured it all out?”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Why are you here? Haven’t you had enough pain yet? This isn’t hockey. You can’t just swing your stick at somebody’s head and make everything right.”

  I set the napkin on the counter, the number facedown.

  “Whatever happened to Sarnia?” I said.

  “You’re such a boy.”

  “What about the chick on the swing set, Darlene? The Sarnia cops wouldn’t talk because I’m a reporter. But they’d talk to you.”

  She wasn’t going to tell me. Or she didn’t know. Or she hadn’t called. “You know I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

  “Of course. Not now. So you can’t tell me whether you ever tracked down that phone call, can you?”

  “What phone call?”

  “The one that set off the Zamboni bomb.”

  That stopped her, as I had expected. “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? Did you track it down or not?” She started to shake her head. “Stop fucking with me, Darlene.”

  “Why are you fucking with me?” It was almost a shout. Tears were filling her eyes; I couldn’t tell whether from anger or sadness. “What difference does it make? Gracie’s gone. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

  Goddamn, I thought. She knows, too. She knows. Maybe not what my mother knew, but something nobody else did.

  I flipped the napkin over and pushed it along the counter. “That’s the number of the cell phone that ignited the bomb,” I said. “Gracie got the phone from Johnny Ford, the one-handed kid at the rink.”

  Darlene wouldn’t look at it.

  “Am I getting a little closer to what really was getting complicated?”

  She pulled the State jersey up to swab her cheeks. “Haskell’s in jail,” she said. “Jason’s in jail. The state police are going to have Vend soon. Isn’t that enough? Do you really want to bring in—” She stopped herself. She was going to say too much. “It’s time for you to go.”