The Hanging Tree (15 page)

When I had played goalie for the Rats and for Soupy’s men’s league team, the Chowder Heads, Soupy had always been my best defenseman, the smartest at staying between the puck and me, the most adept at stealing the puck and hurrying it to the other end of the ice. If an opposing player gave me the slightest bump, or whacked one too many times at my pads, I could count on Soupy giving him a stick shaft to the back of the neck, maybe a glove to the face.

After his hockey career evaporated in a steam of booze and drugs in the minors, Soupy had stopped expecting much from life. It didn’t take much to make him happy anymore. A case of beer, a bag of barbecue chips, a Red Wings game on the tube, a new cap for a playoff game. Gracie’s return had been a bonus. She was at once the new woman in town, since she’d been gone so long, and a familiar one, who knew Soupy well enough to have no expectations, except for a few drinks, a little reefer, a night in his bed.

For a while I had been glad for him. But eventually came the creeping suspicion that my apparent satisfaction with Soupy’s lot was a symptom of my own complacency, a sign that I too was now willing to settle for a day-to-day
existence in Starvation, with none of the visions I once carried around about changing the world with the things I could find out and write down.

“I like it,” I said, stuffing the cap in a coat pocket.

“Yeah, buddy. Calls for a shot.”

He snatched two glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s off the back bar and poured us two fat shots. I really didn’t need it, but it gave me an opportunity to change the subject again.

I raised my glass. “To Gracie,” I said.

Soupy hesitated before clinking my glass. He drank the Jack down in a gulp, winced, poured himself another, swallowed that. I drank half of mine, set the glass down. “You all right?” I said.

“Fine.”

I knew he’d enjoyed sleeping with her, because he talked about it almost constantly. I wasn’t sure whether he’d gotten his heart as involved as his pecker, because he didn’t talk about that.

“Sorry, man. I know you liked her.”

“Yeah. Cool chick.”

“Are we going to talk about it?”

He picked up the dishrag again, held his arms up in an exaggerated shrug. “What’s to talk about? Obviously she wasn’t happy. So”—he looked into the sink—“she did what she did.”

“No, Soup.”

“Chickenshit, if you ask me.”

“No.” I lowered my voice. “She didn’t kill herself.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“Cops been to see you?”

He sneaked a look at the regulars. They weren’t looking, but the jukebox was off again, so they could hear. For months, Soupy had imagined, or pretended to imagine, that only a few locals knew that he and Gracie were sleeping together, even though she came into Enright’s every night around nine, sat at the same end-of-the-bar stool beneath a picture of young Soupy celebrating after a goal, drank her eight or nine gin and Squirts, stayed until the bar was empty, and left through the back door with Soupy.

“What the hell would the cops want with me?”

“You tell me. Soupy Campbell closed his bar early last night. That’s front-page news right there.”

“There was a big fucking storm last night, you know.”

“There’s a big fucking storm every two weeks and you never close early. And you weren’t at the rink. You think Dingus isn’t going to notice?”

“Dingus?” He was getting louder now. One of the regulars had turned his head to watch. Soupy looked at him. “What’s your problem, Lenny? You interested in settling up?”

Lenny returned to his cocoon. Soupy glared at me.

“What the fuck, Trap? You selling me out to your girlfriend?”

“Oh, Jesus, give me a break. You could get yourself in trouble here, buddy. Where were you?”

“Good question,” came a voice from the front of the bar.

We turned to see Sheriff Dingus Aho standing in the open front doorway, his cruiser’s lights flickering on the street behind him.

“Damn,” I said. “This is not good.”

“Christ, Dingus,” Soupy said. “Did you have to use the lights? I got a business to run here.”

Dingus spared Soupy the handcuffs. By the time they pulled away, Soupy in the backseat staring straight ahead, a small audience had gathered on the sidewalk, and Soupy’s bar had closed early for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

“What’s all the hubbub out there?”

Phyllis Bontrager asked me the question as I came through the front door of the
Pilot
. Her eyes, replicas of her daughter Darlene’s, widened behind the huge lenses she’d worn for as long as I’d known her. As kids, we had called her Tweety Bird.

“You didn’t see?” I said. “The cops took Soupy in.”

Mrs. B pursed her lips and popped her glasses up onto her head. She was standing behind the front counter wearing a red cardigan with the shapes of reindeer heads knitted into it. A game show flickered silently on a black-and-white TV at the other end of the counter.

“Are you all right?” she said.

I must have looked worried, though I was telling myself the sheriff was probably just going to grill Soupy before letting him go. He could have done it more quietly, but Dingus had his own way of doing things.

“Yeah, I’m OK,” I said. “Worried about Soupy.”

“You’re a good friend, but Alden Campbell wouldn’t hurt a flea,” she said. Alden was Soupy’s real name, but Mrs. B and my mother were the only ones who called him by it. “How is your mother?”

“Not so good.”

“Yes. This is difficult for her. I went over this morning as soon as I saw her up.”

“Thanks. I must have just missed you. Have you seen Darlene?”

She shook her head no. “She woke me up in the middle of the night. I was glad she did, of course, but she wasn’t making any sense. All I could hear was that Gracie was”—she stopped, searched for a word—“gone. Then I just sat up all night.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you think?”

She picked a pile of advertising invoices out of her in-basket, started stacking certain ones on the counter to her left, others to her right. “Alden didn’t really think he could close the bar early and nobody would notice, did he?”

“Who knows what goes on in that head?”

“Do you think he knows anything?”

“No. I mean, he probably knows
something
about what happened to Gracie, hopefully not enough to get himself in trouble.” Damn Soupy, I thought. He was a month older than me, but seemed like a little brother half the time. “Mail?”

“On your desk.” She flipped her glasses down again. “School menus. The phone bill. A notice from the Boy Scouts on their March fund-raiser. The county extension newsletter; this month’s focus is winter mildew. Revised town council agenda. Two letters to the editor: one from Jill Smith about the restrooms at the senior center; one from Danny Braun about your stories on the new rink—I can read that one if you’d rather not.” She tipped her head so that she was looking at me over the rims of her glasses. “And something from Detroit.”

She loved me like a son. And mistrusted me like the punk next door who had once broken her daughter’s heart.

“Probably a parking ticket I never paid,” I said.

Philo appeared behind Mrs. B in the doorway to the newsroom. “Good afternoon, Gus,” he said. He usually used that line on me when I showed up at 10:00 a.m. Now the wall clock over his head said 1:20. I had plenty of time to finish what I had to do
for Tuesday’s paper, but that wasn’t what counted with Philo. He had a punch-clock in his head that his uncle had installed.

“Sorry, Philo. I was out gathering information.”

The look on his face told me he was not impressed.

“One other thing,” Mrs. B said. “Shirley McBride stopped in.”

Gracie’s mother. “Here? How was she?”

Philo pointed one finger at the newsroom then disappeared back there.

“Oh, you know. It’s all about Shirley. She said she was on her way down to see Parmelee.” Parmelee Gilbert was the only lawyer left on Main Street. “Something about a life insurance policy.”

“Gracie’s life insurance? Don’t tell me.”

“Her uncle supposedly sold her a policy not too long ago.”

Gracie’s uncle was Floyd Kepsel, Shirley’s brother and the owner of Kepsel’s Ace Hardware. He sold life insurance on the side and was a town councilman.

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Shirley, as you know, isn’t always crystal clear.”

“But if it’s more than a hundred bucks …”

“Exactly. She was doing her entitlement thing. You know.”

“Yeah.” I’d seen it on display at assessment appeal meetings. Shirley was the exceedingly squeaky wheel who rarely got the grease, or at least never enough to satisfy her. “Is she stopping back here?”

“Gus!” I heard Philo call out.

Mrs. B jerked a thumb toward the back. “Go.”

Philo was on the phone so I tossed my coat on a table strewn with yellowing
Pilots
and started on what I had to get done before deadline: Rewrite the school menu, Boy Scouts, and extension service items into briefs. Write the Jason Esper story. Get the sheriff to talk to me about Gracie, then write that story, doing everything I could to avoid the word “suicide.” Now Gracie supposedly had a life insurance policy. Who would take the trouble to buy a life insurance policy if they were deciding when and how they would die?

I left the rest of the mail for later, although I glanced at the Detroit piece to see if Mrs. B had peeked inside. It didn’t appear that she had.

The message light on my phone was on. I dialed. There was one message: “The animals are restless,” came a raspy voice.

I deleted the message, fished my cell phone out of my coat pocket, and dialed a number I didn’t want on the
Pilot
phone bill, which Philo now spent half an hour going over each month. He was either looking for pennies to cut out of the budget or trying to figure out who my sources were. Probably both. Our cell phone bills went straight to corporate.

The raspy voice came on my cell phone: “You didn’t hear this from me.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa—don’t be saying my name.”

“I won’t. What do you know?”

It was Clayton Perlmutter, town councilman and self-appointed curmudgeon. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw my hockey bag. But he spent most of his days on the two phones in his house deep in the woods, trading this bit of gossip for that one until a lot of little bits added up to something that mattered. I had to keep him closer than folks I actually trusted, because he actually knew things they didn’t. In my eighteen years as a reporter, I had come to the reluctant realization that it was better dealing with liars and thieves than with people who didn’t know anything. Or people who were just plain stupid. Perlmutter was not stupid.

“Your old pal Laird,” Clayton Perlmutter said, “has visited with a few select members of your town council—not including yours truly, naturally, because he knows where I’d tell him to go—with a great big hat in his hand.”

“Really? I thought you were the one with the hat.”

I heard the low bark of a dog in the background. Perlmutter muffled the phone and yelled, “Shep. Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” He came back on. “No, son, no hat for me. That’s past history, you know that.”

“Of course.”

He fancied himself an entrepreneur. A year before, he’d gotten into some trouble with the state of Michigan for using research grants to support a sasquatch museum he’d never actually opened. Now he was proposing to build an Up North Hockey Hall of Fame on a couple of acres abutting the land where the new rink would be. He didn’t have a nickel to build the thing, but that wasn’t the point. Perlmutter merely wanted to scare Laird Haskell into buying his little plot at a handsome premium.
Until Haskell did, Perlmutter would be juggling his phones and spreading rumors and trying to make trouble on the council.

“So, anyway, old Mr. Haskell, it turns out, ain’t as rich as he looks.”

“I think we’ve written that.”

“Ha,” Perlmutter said. “Nobody wants to believe it.”

Philo walked over and sat on my desk. He crossed his loafers and folded his hands on his knees. I smiled, pointed at the phone, held up a finger, and pressed the phone harder to my ear.

“Anyway,” Perlmutter continued, “the big rich lawyer now wants the town to give him a little loan. You know, just a short-term thing, no strings attached, thirty days same as cash, like we’re some kind of special bank for millionaires.”

“Really? How much?”

“Oh, not much at all. And of course it ain’t because he’s having any financial problems. It’s just a little cash-flow glitch is all.”

“How big of a glitch?”

“He just needs a little six-figure bridge loan.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Shep barked again in the background. “Oh, give or take, about one hundred thousand smackeroonies.”

No shit, I thought. So that was what Haskell meant by “a bit of help”—a pretty hefty bit for a town that had to have bake sales to raise the money to buy a new backstop for the softball field. I doubted the town council had a hundred grand cooling in a bank vault somewhere. I sat up a little straighter in my chair, happy for the interesting turn of events, even happier that I knew and Haskell didn’t know that I knew. Philo was watching, so I tried not to look too happy. Plus I’d still have to get it confirmed elsewhere.

“Impressive.”

“Maybe next he’s going to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge, huh? You know, it might be nice to have all of this in the paper before it suddenly shows up at Wednesday’s council meeting. Otherwise, it’s a done deal, and I got a feeling we ain’t never going to see that hundred K again.”

“Well, thank you, sir,” I said. “Not sure we’d be interested, though.”

Perlmutter paused a moment, then let loose with a guffaw. “Oh, someone listening in, huh?” he said. “You are a regular Geraldo Rivera, sir. A regular Geraldo Rivera. Over and out.”

I ended the call and looked up at Philo.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Who was that?”

I riffled through my mail for the town council agenda and tore open the envelope. “Some whack job,” I said. In the middle of the agenda, below old business, an item had been added: “Executive Session re: capital construction.” That would be where the council went into a private caucus and wrote Haskell a big check.