The Hanging Tree (27 page)

“Good old Meat.”

“Yep.” Wally sneaked a look at the clock on his desk. I stood up, set my second bottle on Wally’s desk.

“I better get going.”

Wally pointed at my half-full bottle. “Alcohol abuse, man.”

“What can I say? I’m a wimp.”

Wally deserved his good life. I wondered what he would have said or done if I had told him about my life, how I was just trying to hang on to my job and my girlfriend. He stretched out a hand. “Good to see you, bud.”

Jason Esper had cut Jarek Vend. Then he had saved his life. Then he was working for him. Then he came up north and married Darlene. But something was missing. His life went to shit and drink and video golf.

He left Starvation, went back downstate. Back to Vend. They were brothers bound by spilled blood. Now Jason was back in Starvation again,
supposedly cleaned up. I was betting he and Knobbo were bound by something other than just blood. Probably not something pretty.

Philo had left me a message. I scribbled the Prospect Street address for Trixie the Tramp—a.k.a. Patricia Armbruster—on the side of a foam coffee cup. Not bad, Philo, I thought. Not bad.

Then I dialed Darlene. I just wanted to hear her voice. My phone died in the middle of the first ring.

“There’s no need for you to see anything here,” she told me.

“But isn’t this—”

“What happens here is none of your business.” She gave me a prim smile. “My car’s out back.”

Trixie Armbruster did not look like a tramp, or at least the sort of tramp her nickname brought to mind. Taller than me, she carried her boxy frame in a baggy cotton dress. The dress was printed with tiny flowers that had all faded to the same shade of pale lavender. On our way out to the muddy lot behind her building, she wrapped herself in a worn brown bomber jacket. The zipper didn’t work so she clipped the jacket together beneath her bosom with a safety pin. Her gone-white hair stuck out over the jacket collar in a stiff, wavy perm. She walked with purpose, two steps ahead of me, limping with each step, favoring her left leg.

All I knew of Trixie’s past was what I had heard on Philo’s short phone message: She was once a prostitute and heroin addict. She had broken free somehow and started the center for abused women, mostly abused prostitutes. She called it Trixie’s Place for Tired Women and Girls. The name helped get her some publicity, a few grants, some pity donations from a rich liberal or two, a little extra police protection from the city. When I heard it on Philo’s message, all I could think was, Gracie, what did you get yourself into?

Trixie had sounded oddly expectant when I’d called her from a pay phone outside a party store to ask if I could drop by. I suppose that someone who did what she did was always ready for anything. I had explained how Gracie had been found dead in the shoe tree, how she was extended family, how I had come at the behest of my mother, Gracie’s favorite aunt, to see if I could gain a clearer understanding of how she had lived her life, why it had ended.

“I don’t know,” she had said. “I don’t see what good it would do.”

“Maybe Gracie told you—”

“Yes, I’m aware that you’re a newspaper reporter. If her aunt sent you, I suppose I can show you a couple of things.”

The center was in a dreary brick building that looked like it might once have been a corner store or a bar, tucked into a neighborhood not far from the Ford factory across the river. The only thing identifying the center was a semicircular plaque hanging on the front door and carved with the words “Trixie’s Place.” Beneath the plaque hung a plain wooden cross painted along its borders in gold.

I had pushed the doorbell and immediately a buzzer had sounded and a woman’s voice had come over an intercom: “Step inside, please. I’ll be out in five.” I’d waited in a space barely bigger than a closet, gazing down at a floor of muddy tile. There wasn’t a sound until I’d heard footsteps descending stairs inside and then the jingle of keys. The inner door had opened and I had presumptuously begun to step inside when Trixie blocked my way, closed that door behind her, and pointed me to her car.

“Thank you for meeting me,” I said.

Trixie was steering her Honda Civic through another neighborhood of snug bungalows. I tried to watch the street signs to see if we had wound up back at Vend’s house. Trixie was taking rights and lefts and rights again, seemingly doubling back. I thought we’d gone down the same block twice but couldn’t be sure because the houses looked alike. I thought maybe she was trying to make it so confusing that I couldn’t find my way back.

“Please understand,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “I am not happy that you are here. I am not happy that this day has arrived. I never am. But in all honesty, I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

“Tired Women and Girls?” I said.

“Tired of being abused?”

“So why not just abused?”

“Too many others with names like that.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

She continued to drive without speaking. A gentle smile made its way onto her face. Then it was gone. She turned to me.

“I don’t mean to be glum,” she said. “It’s hard.” She reached across and touched my forearm. “I’m sorry for your loss, too. Although, again, in all honesty, I can’t say that I think you appreciate it.”

“Thanks, I think.”

She withdrew her hand. “It’s all right. Grace was not easy to know. For anyone. It didn’t matter how much you loved her, or how hard you tried.”

“Then you obviously knew her well.”

Trixie tilted her head to one side, smoothing the crinkled skin along her jaw. A slender necklace of gold lay on her pale white neck. I decided she had been a beautiful woman once. “Sometimes, yes,” she said, “I thought I did. But that’s just vanity, isn’t it? Most of us don’t even know our own selves.”

She turned a corner and eased off the gas as the Civic approached a cul de sac. She parked at the curb in front of a house that looked like so many there, only a shade of paint or a set of shutters different than Vend’s. The aluminum siding was a dingier white and there was no rock garden or statute of the Blessed Mother. An orange-and-brown paper turkey dangled in the front window. It reminded me that Gracie had declined Mom’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner because she had been going for a visit downstate.

A piece of white paper was tacked to the front door.

“This is where Gracie lived?” I said.

Trixie looked past me at the house. “I know she could have used the money,” she said. “Now I’m glad she didn’t sell it, so you can see.”

“She owned the place? Gracie had a mortgage?” I pointed at the house. “What’s the paper on the door? That a foreclosure notice?”

“Details like that don’t really matter now.”

“Yes, they do. Unless you think Gracie really killed herself. I don’t.”

Trixie’s gray eyes moved to mine. “Why are you here again?”

“To find out what really happened to Gracie.”

“Do you think that’s possible? Without hearing it from Gracie’s own lips?”

“I guess I must, or I wouldn’t be here.”

The car was still idling.

“You know,” Trixie said. “We didn’t call her Gracie. We called her Grace.”

“We?”

“Her sisters back at the house. Me.”

“Gracie always called herself Gracie. She said Grace sounded old.”

Trixie looked out the windshield. “The will of God,” she recited, “will never take you where the grace of God won’t protect you.” She turned the car off. “Let’s go.”

Trixie had a key. As she swung the front door open, she blocked my view of the piece of paper. Then she closed the door.

“OK,” I said. I reached into my back pocket for my notebook.

“Be kind,” she said. “This is not a crime scene.”

“I don’t have such a good memory.”

“You reporters are so full of it.” She tapped two fingers on her chest. “Imprint what you see and hear on your heart. The story will be much clearer.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. For now, I left my notebook in my pocket. “Are we on the record?”

“You can write whatever you like. But for the sake of the women in my care, I don’t want to see my name in your paper. I’m already having enough trouble with my landlord.”

“What’s the problem?”

“None of your business. This way.”

The inside of the house was clean and sparsely furnished but obviously lived in. In the living room, another afghan like the one Mom had made me—identical to the one I’d seen in the Zamboni shed—lay in a bunch at one end of a sofa. An unlit lamp stood on an end table. An armchair faced the sofa across a coffee table. A television perched atop a mostly empty bookshelf. On the mantel over a fake fireplace stood a framed black-and-white photograph: Gracie and Darlene stood with their arms around each other at the end of a dock, smiling and squinting against the sun, ripples of lake water glinting behind them.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“What?”

“Why would Gracie leave all this stuff here if she was moving back to Starvation?”

“Good question.”

“I mean, did she have to leave suddenly or something? Was she in trouble?”

“Well,” Trixie said, “if she wasn’t in trouble before, she obviously found it. I don’t know. Maybe she just didn’t know if she wanted to move up there permanently. Grace didn’t tell me everything. Let’s go in here.”

The kitchen smelled faintly of Murphy’s Oil Soap. My mother used up a big bottle of Murphy’s every few months and said its lingering aroma was her favorite in the world next to that of a cinnamon cake baking.

There was a breakfast table with two chairs covered in flowery green vinyl, white cabinets, Formica counters the color of bananas. The table held an empty schnapps bottle sprouting a bouquet of dried hydrangeas. Lacy cotton curtains dressed a window over the sink that looked out on a tiny backyard, a concrete side drive, and a one-car garage. In the dish drainer rested a chipped black coffee cup embossed with a Detroit Red Wings logo.

It was the cup more than anything that made me silently marvel: Gracie had had her own house. I pictured her standing in that kitchen, sipping coffee from that cup, looking out the little window to see whether the morning promised sun or rain or snow. Was it really hers? That wouldn’t be too hard to find out. I made a mental note to check before I went back up north.

I opened a cabinet next to the sink. There were half a dozen each of plates, bowls, coffee cups, and milk glasses. I looked in the next cabinet, saw a platter, two serving bowls, an empty shelf. I crossed to the other side of the sink and opened another cabinet. Inside I glimpsed a collection of flower vases before Trixie’s hand appeared and pushed the cabinet shut.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you looking for something?”

“Booze.”

“You won’t find it here.”

I looked over at the schnapps vase on the table. Peach schnapps, I noticed.

“Ancient,” Trixie said. “Come on.”

A hallway off the kitchen led to a pair of facing bedrooms. The door on the left stood halfway open. The door on the right was closed. Trixie stopped just short of where I could see into the rooms and placed her big body in front of me.

“How did you know to find me?” she said.

“Someone told me.”

“Who?”

She seemed determined to know. The implication seemed to be that if I didn’t tell her, I wouldn’t see the rooms. I had no idea what I might find in there, but I definitely wanted to see.

“Darlene Esper,” I said. “A friend of Gracie’s. Do you know her?”

“I know of her. She’s the wo—the girl—in the picture in the living room.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been in love with her your whole life.”

Her certainty startled me.

“Isn’t that right?” she said.

“Pretty much.” I nodded toward the rooms. “Which was Gracie’s?”

“Wait,” she said, stepping forward and placing a hand against my chest. “Do you know what Grace did when she came to Detroit? Have you ever really given it any thought—a girl of, what, eighteen or nineteen, leaving her tiny little town up north to come to the big city?”

“Forgive me, but what’s the big deal? Lots of kids leave up north every year to go to college downstate. I did. And they do fine. And they don’t have rich benefactors paying their tuition for them like Gracie.”

“So your answer is no, you have not given it much thought.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Grace’s
benefactor
? You mean the man—it could only be a man, or more than one—who promised her an education? She got one, all right.”

She told me about it.

Gracie had enrolled in the freshman program at Wayne State University in the fall of 1980. She had hoped to declare her major as English. One semester of tuition and room and board had indeed been paid for in full. But no money had been provided for her required texts. At the campus bookstore Gracie learned that the bill for those would come to nearly $350. She had saved barely half that from her summer job at Dairy Queen. Her appeals to her mother for the rest met first with promises, then with lectures about saving money, then with unreturned phone calls. Grace started classes without books.

Finally she contacted her anonymous benefactor. The only requirement the donor had was that Gracie write a short letter at the midpoint and the end of each semester reporting on her academic progress. There was a post office box to which she was supposed to mail the letters. Now she wrote
explaining her book dilemma. In the letter she apologized for her ignorance and promised to repay any book money provided.

Soon Gracie heard from a man. He didn’t say whether he was her actual donor, but he had a job for her waiting tables. Late one afternoon she showed up for her first six-hour shift. Although it served food and drinks, B.J.’s Office wasn’t a restaurant. B.J.’s was a strip club on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, about a fifteen-minute drive from Gracie’s dormitory. When she drove up to the place, she thought maybe she’d gotten the address wrong.

“I’m aware that Grace was no angel in her youth,” Trixie said. “But even she was, shall we say, taken aback.”

“But she took the job,” I said.