The Hanging Tree (16 page)

“Are you sure?” Philo said.

He had watched me carefully. But before I told him anything, I wanted to do a little more reporting on Perlmutter’s tip. Bosses couldn’t always be trusted with good stories. The more time they had to think about them, the more time they had to mess them up or kill them outright.

I tossed the council agenda on my desk. “Would you like a story about how the White House is scheming to poison our lake so it can be turned into a cooling pond for alien spaceships?”

“Hmm,” Philo said. “I think not.”

“OK. Going for another correction tomorrow, Philo?”

“Pardon me?”

I gestured at my computer screen. “I was looking at the obit you wrote for old Mrs. Guthaus. Where the hell is Toussaint, Arizona?”

He looked at me, dumfounded. “Two what?”

“Tou-SANT.” I said it with what I fancied to be a French flourish.

“Oh,” he said. “Tucson. I would have caught it.”

“Let’s hope. You know, you’ve kind of got to imagine your corrections ahead of time. That’s the best way to avoid them. If you can imagine a correction—“
Tucson is a city in southern Arizona. A story in Tuesday’s
Pilot
misspelled the city’s name”
—then you have to double-check it.”

I prided myself on this. Once I got out of bed in the middle of the night and called the printing plant to make sure that a caption referring to a shotgun said shotgun and not rifle, a common mistake among pointy-headed journalists who’d never held a real gun in their hands.

“So you’ve said,” Philo said. He uncrossed his loafers. “How did your meeting with Mr. Haskell go?”

“Fine.”

“Did you get a story?”

I thought for a second. “At least one.”

“Right.” I figured he already knew about the new Rats coach, courtesy of his Uncle Jim. “And how was the body language?”

“Fine. Everyone’s fine.”

Philo cleared his throat. “My meeting in Traverse was unnerving, to say the least.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Long story short: revenues are way behind budget, and the budget was conservative to begin with.” Philo looked nervously around the room. “I don’t know where else to cut.”

I recalled him on his first day at the
Pilot
. A week before Christmas, he bustled around the newsroom like a kid about to open his presents: just twenty-eight years old and the managing editor of a real newspaper. A tiny newspaper, an obscure newspaper, a newspaper that didn’t report much news that anybody outside of Starvation Lake cared about, but a newspaper nonetheless.

He had told me then how he had decided to eschew the route taken by his grad-school peers, which was to turn summer internships at the big dailies into full-time jobs that would someday have them covering the White House or Wall Street or wars in foreign hells. “I want nothing to do with the Washington media mob and the whole backstabbing New York scene,” he’d said. “I want to learn this from the ground up, get the ink in my veins, if you know what I mean.” Part of me found his purity and naïveté endearing. Another part wondered if Philo had failed to land any internships and had fallen back on his uncle.

Either way, I couldn’t help but feel for him now as his eyes darted around our wretched little newsroom, looking for ways to clip a few pennies off our monthly outlay. There in the corner was the desk of our old photographer, who had worked on and off at the
Pilot
longer than Philo had been alive; Philo had had to call him up and fire him on New Year’s Day. There on Philo’s desk was the mug jammed with ballpoint pens Philo had sneaked one by one out of the Pine County State Bank. There on a shelf were the last three legal pads in a package that had to last until the end of the month.

“Philo,” I said. “You went to journalism school.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

He laced his fingers together in front of his argyle sweater. “Because I like the way newspapers can knit communities together.”

He must have read that somewhere, I thought.

“And you understand how newspapers do that, right? They do it by telling people things they don’t want to hear.”

“Please,” Philo said.

“Well, why aren’t you doing journalism then, however you want it?”

“I’m the managing editor of this newspaper.”

“You’re the Bob Cratchit of this newspaper.”

“You must mean Scrooge.”

“Nope. Scrooge was the boss. You aren’t the boss by a long shot.”

I saw him look at the thermostat on the wall near the back door.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He couldn’t help himself. He slipped off the desk and walked to the thermostat and actually turned the heat down. I laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Philo said. He came back to where I was sitting and stood over me. “We could let you go. Would that be funny?”

It didn’t hit me as hard as he might have hoped, because I didn’t think he was serious. After all, who would actually put stories in the paper if I was gone? Philo spent most of his time writing e-mails and going to meetings about all the other businesses Media North was now in, cell phones and television and the Internet and billboards and video rentals.

“Hilarious,” I said. “Tell you what, why don’t you just fire yourself? Get the hell out of here and see the world, get drunk, get laid, do the things you really want to do. What’s that you always say? ‘Earth’s turning faster on its axis.’ What are you waiting around here for?”

“What makes you so high and mighty? What are you, thirty-seven, and you’re still messing around in Starvation Lake?”

“Thirty-five. And, hey, it pays the bills. I don’t have a trust fund, pal.”

“Pardon me?”

“Come on.”

“What do you know about me? You know nothing about me.”

“No offense,” I said, “but you’re miserable and you know it.” I felt Mrs. B move into the newsroom doorway. “You came here thinking you were going to run this little empire and knit these nice little towns together and
take over for Uncle Jimbo. But it’s not working out, is it? You fire me and you won’t have time to worry about the Internet anymore. You’ll have to go to things like drain commission meetings. Ever go to a drain commission meeting? It’s actually even worse than it sounds.”

“Well, let me tell you something,
pal
,” he said. “I just might do that. But you know what that means? Huh? It means we’re all goners.”

“Right, right, we’re all goners. But the Internet, that’s going to save us.”

“That’s right. Print’s kaput, my friend.”

“I’m not your friend.”

He pointed at me. “Our biggest cost? Those big damn presses that print the paper. And the trucks that have to haul it around. When we’re rid of those, we’ll have—”

“Squat,” I said.

“We’ll be in the money. You’ll see. I’m going to make them see.”

Although Media North had an Internet business, it did not yet have the
Pilot
itself on the Internet. Philo had stood before Kerasopoulos and the other directors of Media North and patiently delivered his Internet-is-our-future speech. They had listened politely, as if they were indulging a boy asking the company to sponsor his Little League team, then moved to the next order of business. They wouldn’t even let us have our own experimental website. Kerasopoulos said we couldn’t be handing our stories over for nothing; that would be the death of us. He would also have a harder time controlling the news if the
Pilot
had an instant pipeline.

“All they can see is their 401(k)s and their pensions and their long-term bonuses. They’re not about to piss all of that away on your—”

“Excuse me.”

It was Mrs. B. Philo turned. “Yes, Phyllis?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you two might like to know. Channel Eight just had a bulletin. The River Rats have a new coach.”

I jumped out of my chair. “You’re kidding.”

It hadn’t taken Haskell but two hours to burn me.

“No,” she said. “It’s Jason Esper.”

“And what do you think about that, Mrs. B?”

“What do you think I think?”

She wasn’t her daughter’s estranged husband’s biggest fan.

“Who cares?” Philo said.

”There’s something else,” she said. She drew her reindeer sweater around herself. “They said the police are going to charge Alden in Gracie’s death.”

“Impossible. Charge him with what?”

“Alden who?” Philo said.

“They didn’t say,” Mrs. B said. “They just said he’d be charged.”

“There’s a difference between being charged and being taken in for questioning.”

“I’m just telling you what was on TV.”

I felt Philo staring at me. My heart was in my belly, partly for Soupy, partly because I’d just been scooped. Twice. In about thirty seconds. On the two biggest stories to hit Starvation in a year.

I could blame Haskell for the first one; he’d obviously turned around after our meeting and leaked it to Channel Eight. Or maybe Jason himself had, I thought, maybe while I was in bed with his wife. On the other, I had no one but myself to blame. Then again, even if I knew the cops were going to charge Soupy, what the hell was I going to do with it? The
Pilot
wouldn’t be out till the next morning.

Excuses, I thought. It felt lousy.

I turned to Philo. “Alden is Soupy, the guy who owns Enright’s. The thing about him could be bullshit. Channel Eight gets stuff wrong all the time. I’ll chase it.”

“OK,” Philo said. “The coach is a bigger story anyway, don’t you think?”

No, I thought, the murder of a Starvation Lake citizen is way bigger. But I said, “Maybe. Just think, Philo, if we had our own Internet page, we might have beaten Channel Eight to both these stories.” I grabbed my coat. “I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?” Philo looked up at the wall clock over the copier. “You don’t have a lot of time.”

“You want to help?”

“I wish I could,” he said. “I have to do this budget.”

“No problem,” I said, and gave Mrs. B a light squeeze on the shoulder as I headed out to Main Street.

ten

Afternoon already had begun to succumb to night. I turned toward the lake. Low hanging cloud banks pinched the tree line against the far end of Main. I walked down the block and sat on a bench beneath the marquee of the old Avalon Cinema, remembering the smell of popcorn on the air when my mother had brought me there as a boy to see
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
Now all I could smell was winter.

I had to make a few calls I didn’t want Philo to overhear. I dialed the numbers for three town council members who, if I caught them at the right time, might not mind talking. Most had shut me out since I’d started writing about Haskell and the new rink. A potato chip bag skittered past my boots as each of the calls landed on voice mail. I left bare-bones messages saying I needed clarification on a council matter; no need for them to know that I was prowling for another Haskell story.

I needed to confirm what Perlmutter had told me. Haskell had told me just enough off the record to tie my hands. Clever, I thought. Or stupid on my part. Now I had to write my story as if I’d never heard him say what he’d said about seeking help from the town. But I had to get the story. Everyone in town deserved to hear what the council was about to do before it was done and Haskell cashed his check, even if they didn’t want to hear it, which was probably the case. And I had to get back out ahead of Channel Eight.

Most important, I wanted to know what was going on with Soupy. I tried Darlene’s phone. She didn’t answer. “Hey, stranger, just checking in,” I told her voice mail. I shoved the phone back in my pocket and felt the old hair brush I’d found in Gracie’s Wayne State duffel. I pulled it out and scrutinized the stray hairs stuck in the bristles, auburn and gray.

I remembered what Mrs. B had said about a life insurance policy. So far
as I knew, suicides often nullified life insurance policies; the beneficiary—I assumed it was Gracie’s mother, Shirley, based on what Mrs. B had said—was unlikely to get a penny. Even if it was obvious that Gracie was murdered, even if the police investigated her death as a homicide, someone would have to prove it or the insurance company could take forever to pay, if it paid at all.

And Soupy? Did he drive Gracie out to the shoe tree and boost her up to the hanging bough, then just leave her there to die? No way, I thought. Although he and Gracie were far from in love, they were having a hell of a good time. Or at least Soupy was.

“Dude,” he had whispered to me late one night as we dressed for a game. “I got no legs.”

“Why?” I said, digging for a roll of tape in my hockey bag.

“Gracie. I got to the rink early to get my skates sharpened and she hauled my ass back to the Zam shed.”

“No.”

“Yeah. Ever fuck on a Zamboni?”

I tried to imagine precisely how they had done it, decided I didn’t want to know. “Good old Nadia,” I said.

“More like Evel Knievel.”

I had to shut this conversation down. Without looking up from the sock I was winding with tape, I said, “So, you going to marry her?”

“Marry her? Trap, she won’t even let me take her to a movie. The woman fucks like there’s no tomorrow.”

And now there was no tomorrow.

I didn’t believe the cops were going to charge Soupy with a thing. More likely, I thought, the sheriff was trying to squeeze him for information.

So my next stop had to be Dingus—if Dingus would even talk. He didn’t do phones. I would have to go see him, hope whoever was at the front desk—maybe Darlene—would tell him I was there. I looked at my watch. I had enough time if he didn’t make me wait too long, if he agreed to see me at all.

I was about to get up from the bench when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“You are truly deep in thought, young man.”

I turned to see Parmelee Gilbert, attorney-at-law, in a charcoal topcoat and a wool scarf the color of a carrot.

“Impressive,” he said. “Would that all of us in Starvation think so hard about what we’re doing.”

“Hey, Parm,” I said. “I wish I knew what I was doing. How are you?”

“Staying busy.” He peeled the leather glove off of his right hand and extended it. “I am very sorry for your loss.”