The Hanging Tree (18 page)

He stopped twirling his mustache and squinted one eye. “And you had no idea whatsoever what she was doing down there?”

“Nope.”

“You know, of course, I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

I’d heard that line before. He wouldn’t have had me into his office if he didn’t want me to know something. Or wanted something from me.

“What’s with the leaks to Channel Eight?” I said. “You want to get on TV? Or are you just trying to help D’Alessio get laid?”

Dingus ignored that and moved around behind his desk. His swivel chair groaned as he sat. He moved a half-filled doughnut box aside, reached into a drawer, and came out with a glossy black pamphlet. “I like this,” he said, waggling it in front of his face. “Some vagrant gave it to me in Florida when I was down there for a conference.”

I saw the title on the pamphlet cover:
Hiding from God.
Dingus read aloud: “‘When we open the newspaper, we see for the most part bad news. We see more of the dark side of humanity than the good and decent side.’ ” He looked over the top of the pamphlet at me. “Here’s the best line: ‘The newspaper is simply a snapshot of the darkness that is within each one of us.’ ”

“I was definitely thinking that the other day as I was typing up the St. Jude Society’s lost-and-found list.”

Dingus set the pamphlet on his blotter and pointed at my face. “Don’t give me that smart-ass bull. Your sister’s dead and all you care about is your stupid little scoops?”

His singsong voice sometimes made it hard to take him seriously. Not at the moment. His mood tasted like all the sharp metal in the room, the angle-iron chairs, the star points on his badge, the shelf brackets, his pistol.

“She wasn’t my sister,” I said.

“For all intents and purposes, she damned well was. Nobody took better care of her than your mother. I had the distinct privilege of being reminded of that about an hour ago when Gracie’s other mother was sitting in that chair you’re in now.”

“Shirley?” That explained the perfume.

Dingus snatched a yellow Post-it note off his blotter and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I leaned in. The perfume filled my nostrils. Shirley usually used enough to deodorize a ballroom. I peered at her scribble, which listed to the right:

MUST TALK. URGINT NEWS. PLEAS CALL 231 555 3671
.

“This is for me?” I said. “She’s threatening you?”

“Hell’s bells, it would take me all night to tell you how many times she’s told me she’d be going to the
Pilot
with this little bitch or that. She’s the least of my worries.”

I ignored the vibrating cell phone in my pocket.

“What did she want?”

He jumped up from his chair and paced to the back of the room, where a pair of particle-board shelves held cans of pepper spray, an assortment of black-and-chrome-colored handcuffs, and a photograph of Dingus’s ex-wife and current girlfriend, Barbara. “She wants me to find a murderer,” he said. His voice turned sarcastic. “She wants her daughter
avenged
. She wants
closure
.”

I imagined Shirley pounding her fat pink fist on Dingus’s desk, the bracelets she bought out of the clearance bin at Glen’s rattling, her bleached blond perm bouncing. She’d be wearing Kmart designer jeans
pushing the zipper flap open and one of those $17.50
THROW AWAY THAT CORK!
sweatshirts from the Just One More Saloon. Around town it was said that Shirley had sold her dead husband’s Purple Heart medal for $33.50 on an Internet auction site. It wasn’t hard to believe.

“She wants the life insurance proceeds,” I said. “And she’s going to raise a stink about it. But there is a murderer, isn’t there, Dingus?”

“l’ll be goddamned,” he said, turning away from me.

A light on Dingus’s phone started to blink. He didn’t notice. He was pacing from the shelf to his desk and back. The light went off and Dingus stopped in the middle of the room and held his arms out wide. His face flushed red.

“Why?” he said. “Why the hell did she have to come back here?” He pointed at his phone. “That thing’s been ringing all day. Every damn member of the county commission and the town council’s calling to tell me, ‘Leave it alone, Dingus’ and ‘Just let it lie, Dingus.’ ”

“Nobody wants a murder around here,” I said. “They have more important things to worry about.”

“Shirley’s just trailer trash to them, not worth the overtime,” Dingus said. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit. But they’re calling Doc Joe, too.” The county coroner. “They’re not supposed to do that. Doc, he gets the faintest whiff they might cut his budget, he’ll sign whatever they want.”

“Are they threatening to whack you too?”

“Funny you should ask.”

Dingus stepped to his desk, grabbed a file folder, and plucked out a sheet of paper that had come over a fax machine. He handed it to me. “You can’t have this,” he said. “But you can read it.”

The fax had been sent at 11:18 that morning. It was signed by town council chairman Elvis Bontrager. The town, which had long ago eliminated its own police force for lack of funds, now relied on the sheriff’s department and contributed to its budget. Elvis’s letter said an allocation of money for the purchase of two new police cruisers might have to be “temporarily delayed” because of “reconciliation issues” that had recently cropped up.

Damn, I thought. Laird Haskell, who probably didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t have cared, was picking Dingus’s pocket. Instead of paying for better public safety, the council was about to give $100,000 to a supposed millionaire so he could
build a hockey rink. Great for the story I was about to write. Not so great for Starvation. Unless, of course, the River Rats won a state championship. Then everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter to a soul if the local cops had to resort to bicycles to do their jobs.

“That sucks,” I said, handing the letter back. “They can just do that?”

“They can just do that,” Dingus said. “And that’s not all. They’re talking with the county commission about more cuts. Just between us.”

I thought about Darlene. For all of her carping about Dingus and the other “boys” at the department, she loved being a police officer. She would hate to lose her job so the town could have a shiny new hockey arena.

“Why do they give a rip?”

Dingus might have been the only person in town—except, perhaps, my mother—who didn’t care about hockey. He’d never played it, didn’t watch it, and probably thought it just caused him a lot of grief, what with all the postgame bar fights and drunks steering their way out of the rink parking lot.

“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe they think a big murder investigation’ll spook their bankers and that rich fellow will walk and they won’t get their precious rink. I don’t know what the hell these people think.”

“What are you going to do?”

He sat down heavily in his chair. His phone started blinking again. “I plan to proceed with—”

There was a knock at Dingus’s door. It opened and Deputy Frank D’Alessio ducked his head in. He gave me a
What the fuck are you doing here?
look before telling Dingus, “Sheriff, you have a call.”

“I can see that,” Dingus said. “Who is it?”

D’Alessio glanced at me and said, “Uh, a council member.”

“Which council member, Deputy?”

“Chairman Bontrager.”

“Not now.”

“He said it’s important.”

“Tell him to go cut a hole in the lake and jump in.”

D’Alessio grinned. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when you can.”

Dingus watched the door close.

“So,” I said, “you’re not really going to charge Soupy, are you? You just leaked that to buy yourself some time with the politicians.”

Dingus shrugged his acknowledgment. At least he hadn’t used me like he had Channel Eight. “I could still charge him with obstruction, though.”

“He’s not talking?”

“No, he’s—excuse me.”

A different light on his phone was blinking. Dingus picked up the phone and turned in his chair until he faced away from me. But I could still hear him, as he undoubtedly knew. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.

A full minute passed. “OK. Let me know. Thanks.” He turned around and hung up the phone. “Goddammit—why did she have to come back here?” He said it less to me than to himself. “You know, whatever happened to that girl—and we are off the record here, son—whatever happened to that girl has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of this town. Nothing at all.”

“Why don’t you send someone down to Detroit?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not going to have that.”

“They?”

He waved at his phone. “The whole lot of them.” He shook his head. “I told her not to come back here. I told her never come back.”

“What are you talking about?”

He pushed back up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet in the back corner of the office. He stretched a key ring on a retractable tether from his gun belt to the top drawer and unlocked it. He took out a brown accordion file, put it under one arm, locked the drawer, walked to the door, and opened it.

“This way,” he said.

I followed him out of his office. We walked down the corridor past the entrance, me glancing into offices to see if I might catch a glimpse of Darlene. I did not. At the end of the hallway we reached the locked door that opened into the Pine County Jail. Dingus peered through the little window crosshatched with steel. The door buzzed and Dingus pulled it open. He turned to me then and casually handed me the accordion folder.

“Hang on to this,” he said. “Do not lose it. Wait here.”

I took the folder and stood waiting, hoping no one would walk up and ask me what I was doing with a folder stamped
CONFIDENTIAL
on both sides. I stuffed it under an arm and glanced up at the surveillance camera screwed into the wall above the door, peering down on me like a crow on a telephone wire.

The door buzzed again. It opened and Soupy stepped through, Dingus right behind him. Past his shoulder I saw Darlene walking away and had to stop myself from calling after her.

“I’m releasing Mr. Campbell to you,” Dingus said. He turned to Soupy. “I’m not through with you. If you even think about taking any out-of-town trips, we’ll have you back in here before you hit the interstate. Got it?”

“Got it,” Soupy said.

“You tell them anything?” I said.

Soupy and I had just pulled out of the department lot, my headlamps carving the blackness into cones of white.

“I’m going broke, man,” he said. “Just get me back to my bar.”

He wasn’t going to talk. Not now. There’d be time to push him later.

There were all sorts of questions I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Dingus: What about that rejection letter Gracie had supposedly gotten? Why was she wearing only one shoe when she died? How did she get up into the shoe tree? Where was the ladder? Where was the car? Dingus might not have answered any of them. He usually gave me only what he wanted me to know, so that I might, in doing my own job, help him.

So I was dying to see what was in that accordion folder I’d stuck beneath my seat.

I glanced at Soupy. The way he was staring out his passenger window, I had to wonder if he was actually distraught over Gracie’s death, if he realized, facing the cops, that Gracie actually had mattered for more than whatever she did for him in bed, or on a Zamboni.

We rode in silence for a mile. Then, without turning to me, Soupy said, “Got something to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not yanking your chain.”

“About what?”

He shifted in his seat until he was looking out the windshield. “They put me in that room where the prisoners see their lawyers,” he said. I’d been in the room once for an interview myself. There was a table bolted to the floor, a few hard-backed chairs, a single window covered with a metal cage. “I’m looking out at the back lot, and who rolls up but Meat.”

“Jason?”

“Yep.”

My heart was suddenly racing. “And?”

“He wasn’t there to pick up his safe-snowmobiling certificate, Trap.”

He told me he saw Darlene come out to meet Jason. She wasn’t wearing a coat. I imagined her holding her arms tight around her bosom, her breath billowing around her head. Of course Soupy couldn’t hear anything. Then someone came to take him to another room.

“Well,” I said, “they probably have divorce details to work out.”

“Maybe. Didn’t notice any lawyers out there.”

I kept my eyes on the unfurling white road, my lights flashing on the lower halves of tree trunks whisking by in the dusk.

“Thought you’d want to know,” Soupy said.

“Yeah. Thanks.” The lamps along Main Street were coming into view ahead. “They didn’t, at least when—?”

“No. No touchy feely. But … I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“Looked to me like he wants her back or something.”

I cackled. It came out sounding like someone else. “That ain’t going to happen.”

I dropped Soupy at Enright’s and went around the block to the
Pilot
back lot, where I sat in the dark checking the messages on my cell phone.

The three council members I had called said they would have no comment on whatever story I was working on. A fourth whom I had not called also left a message saying she wasn’t interested in commenting. I had to figure they knew what I was going to ask.

The fifth message came from Darlene. She said she had to work late, don’t bother making spaghetti dinner, she’d catch up with me at the Rats game, or later. She loved me. She had to go.

Relax, I told myself. She still had issues to work through. She wasn’t going anywhere. Everything would be all right. I’d try her again later. We’d lock her door against the night and hide beneath her blankets.

I switched on an inside light and pulled the accordion folder out from under my seat. A label pasted to the top of the folder was inscribed in felt-tip pen: “McBRIDE, Grace Maureen, 08/26/95.”

I reached inside and pulled out a stapled bundle of pages, maybe fifteen in all. It was an official Pine County Sheriff’s Department report. I
flipped immediately to the last page and, sure enough, there was the signature of then-deputy Dingus Aho. “Fucking-ay,” I said.