The Hanging Tree (17 page)

I knew he meant it. “Thanks. Mom’s taking it pretty hard.”

“These sorts of things are never easy,” he said, and he meant that too. He slipped his glove back on. “Please extend my sincerest condolences.”

“I will, thanks. Did you see Gracie’s mom?”

The question took him by surprise. He folded his arms behind his back and leaned slightly forward, a polite smile on his face. Parmelee Gilbert was nothing if not polite. As Laird Haskell’s lawyer, he never failed to return my calls and politely decline to comment or to make his client available for questions.

“Shirley McBride?” he said. “I did speak with her, yes.”

“Ah, sorry,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege?”

He stood straight again, and peered past me down the street. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

Twin mugs of tea steeped on coasters on Parmelee Gilbert’s desk. He sat in a leather chair behind the desk and lifted each of his legs to strip the slickened rubbers off his wingtips. The shoes gleamed with what I assumed was that morning’s polish. “I apologize,” Gilbert said, while setting the rubbers on a rug, “that I haven’t had you in before.”

From the straight-backed chair facing his desk, I could have laughed without being rude. Gilbert himself might have laughed with me. He had so thoroughly stonewalled me on my Haskell stories that I had almost given up on calling him. Of course I couldn’t actually give up; I had to keep trying, at least so I could tell the faithful readers of the
Pilot
that I had. Each time I called, he would thank me for calling with my “pertinent questions,” ask me to give his best to my mother, and promise to get back to me “with the clearest possible response I can offer.”

And then, invariably, he would call me at 5:40 p.m., twenty minutes before my deadline, to say, “We’re sorry, but Mr. Haskell prefers not to discuss these matters in the press” or “With our apologies, Mr. Haskell is focused exclusively on the positive aspects of this extremely vital project
for Pine County and Starvation Lake.” He was a lawyer representing a lawyer. Sometimes I would wonder: Did Gilbert think at all like Haskell? Did he envy Haskell’s success? Or envy Haskell himself?

Gilbert always thanked me yet again for giving his client—never him, always his client—the opportunity to comment. He always declined, no matter how or how many times I asked, to say anything further. To my occasional attempts to get him to guide me one way or the other on an off-the-record basis, he would merely say, “With all due respect to you and your colleagues, in my experience there is no such thing as off the record.”

I knew reporters at my old paper, the
Times
, and our rival, the
Free Press
, who would have been pleased, even relieved, to have Gilbert’s nonresponse; it’s so much easier and quicker five minutes before deadline to insert “
so-and-so declined to comment
” than to have to shoehorn in a last-minute point-by-point rebuttal of every fact and nuance in your story without making it a he-said, she-said jumble that threatened readers with whiplash. “
No comment
” made a reporter’s job simpler. Unfortunately, simpler had never had much appeal for me. If I had preferred simpler, I never would have left Starvation, never would have gambled away my job in Detroit, never would have left the blessed sinecure of my crease and goalposts and mesh to play wing.

I had to grudgingly respect Parmelee Gilbert for refusing to go off the record. He was correct, of course, that there was no such thing. There was fact and there was fiction and it didn’t matter whether you said it was “according to a person familiar with the matter” if the person supposedly familiar was lying or ignorant or stupid. I had known plenty of lawyers and flacks who viewed off the record as an opportunity to dissemble and obfuscate. Gilbert hadn’t been terribly helpful, but at least he’d been honest in his unhelpfulness. So I didn’t laugh when he apologized for not having me in before.

“You’re doing your job,” I said. “I just figure you could bill a lot more hours by actually answering my questions.”

He smiled. “Milk? Sugar?”

“A little of both, please.”

While he finished preparing the tea, I looked around. For a lawyer who had hung his cedar shake shingle on Main Street for more than thirty years, Gilbert’s career mementoes were scant. Framed degrees from Michigan
Tech, a bachelor’s in American history, and the University of Detroit law school decorated the otherwise empty wall to my left. A hot plate rested on the windowsill behind him. On his desk was a telephone, two pens and two sharpened pencils lined up alongside one another, and a blotter calendar neatly jotted with appointments and reminders. On my right, a waist-high bookshelf was lined with law tomes and a few slim editions of a book,
Ghost Towns of Michigan.

Atop the shelf stood a photograph of a smiling girl in braces and pigtails entwined with white ribbons. She was wearing a cheerleader’s blue sweater embroidered with an interlocking “P” and “C” for Pine County High. Her name, I knew, was Carol Jo Gilbert. Had she lived, she would have been in her mid-forties.

When the girl was fourteen, her mother, Gilbert’s wife, had taken her downstate on an annual Christmas shopping trip. They went from store to store in the big Northland Center mall north of Detroit, stopping as always at Sanders for lunch. The mother left Carol Jo to finish a chocolate soda while going to a pay phone to let her husband know they were having fun.

Carol Jo wasn’t seen again until the ice melted on a pond near Harbor Beach where her killer had dumped her. I remembered hearing about it as a boy, the hushed, anxious whispers, the shaking heads and furrowed brows, while eating breakfast at Audrey’s with my mother. Carol Jo’s killer was never found.

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.”