The Hanging Tree (31 page)

“Jesus,” I said, pointing at the first screen. “Judge Rapp? And that’s Davis McInerney.” McInerney was an executive vice president at Superior Motors. From my days at the
Detroit Times
, I recognized the others, too: a real estate developer, a state senator, a retired outfielder.

Now I had an idea what was on those videotapes in Gracie’s house. I tried to remember the initials I’d seen on the sides of the tapes. She must
have figured out a way to smuggle out her own copies. She probably had more tapes hidden away somewhere else, somewhere safer. In my mind I scanned the rafters in the Zamboni shed, looking for hiding places. Vend must have known. Maybe Gracie had threatened to use the tapes against him, or his customers.

“It’s quite an illustrious gallery,” Vend said. He hit the button again. Five more men appeared: two attorneys, a city councilman, two men I didn’t recognize, one of them wearing a police uniform. Vend hit the button again and there were five more. He kept hitting it until the faces were flashing too fast for me to tell who they were.

“And these guys were all into the kinky stuff?”

Vend took a puff on his cigar. “Not necessarily. As I said, we offered—offer—a multiplicity of services. That is one. The presence of the young woman enhances the aesthetic of the experience while at the same time offering some peace of mind in the knowledge that she is there to prevent any unfortunate accidents.”

“But Gracie wasn’t just a minder, was she, Mr. Vend?”

“Our associates perform a wide array of services for a wide array of customers.”

The TVs went black.

“Unfortunately,” Vend continued, “I personally did not have access to a certain, shall we say,
strata
of clientele, at least not back then. I had the product; I needed a partner who could provide the proper customer.”

“And you found one. One who clearly was in that strata.”

“Indeed.” I knew what he was going to say next. “Mr. Haskell was the best money could buy.”

It was surprisingly easy to believe. While part of me didn’t want to think a man of Laird Haskell’s public stature would risk his career and family on such an enterprise, the part that knew Haskell, the part that had encountered many a rich and powerful man who had succumbed to the illusion that he could become invisible, accepted it as easily as if Vend had told me that Haskell favored suits and ties in the courtroom. I could see him first as a customer, then as a recruiter of talent, then as Vend’s pipeline to the wealthy and powerful.

“And now,” I said, “your partner is stealing from you to build his rink.”

“There appears to have been some diversions. But not just from me, Mr. Carpenter. I assume he is stealing—that is, diverting monies—from
others as well. I just happened to be—what do ambulance chasers like Mr. Haskell call it?—a deep pocket.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “He’s going to the town council tomorrow for a little loan of a hundred grand.”

“So I have heard,” Vend said. “Mr. Haskell is a most resourceful man, and we have benefited. He has been an enormously creative and productive member of our team. But he has let personal distractions cloud his focus. Obviously, for the sake of our employees and other various interests, I cannot indulge these distractions with my hard-earned assets.”

“By distractions, do you mean … his son?”

Vend blew out a thin ribbon of smoke that disappeared in the shadows above him. “We were all going to play in the NHL at one time in our lives, weren’t we?”

I thought of Taylor Haskell on the ice, slapping the goalposts with his stick. Then of the smoke floating out from the Zam shed the night before. Then of Gracie, and of the
Free Press
story she had tacked up on the wall of her dark room.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“What is it, Mr. Carpenter?”

“He brought Gracie into this?”

Haskell had moved to Starvation full-time only in the past year. But he’d had a summer cottage on the north side of the lake for as long as I could remember. In Starvation Lake, it wouldn’t have taken much to have known about Gracie, the small-town girl from the troubled family, and about her father, blasted from the sky over the jungles of Vietnam.

“I will leave you to your own conclusions,” Vend said. “As for Mr. Haskell, I now consider him my competitor.”

“And so,” I said, “‘Build it and they will die.’ ”

Vend cocked his head ever so slightly. I thought he might smile but he did not. The skin tightened around his cheekbones. He came off the desk, dropped his cigar on the carpet, and crushed it beneath the sole of his loafer.

“For the record,” he said, “we support Mr. Haskell’s efforts to extort—excuse me, extract—additional monies from your elected leaders.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Indeed, we believe Mr. Haskell ought to seek even more support from your town’s benevolent elder statesmen. Will you be in attendance?”

“The chances are better if I get out of here.”

Now he smiled. “Of course.”

I wondered if he knew that I knew about him and Gracie at the Hill-Top Motel. He certainly couldn’t have known that I’d seen him with her at that Wings playoff game. “Tell me, Mr. Vend,” I said. “Could this thing with Haskell be about more than just money?”

He looked past me, snapped his fingers, and called out something I didn’t understand. I heard footsteps approaching, the door behind me swinging open. Vend looked at me.

“What is it you journalists like to say when you’ve been backed into a corner by your own recklessness? ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” He stepped up and pushed his face to within an inch of mine. Other, lighter, shorter scars became apparent along his neck. “Here is a message,” he whispered. “Your Gracie gave up on life because the people who supposedly loved her gave up on her. When you are all weeping around her grave, you should remember that there is no tragedy in the inevitable.”

He stepped back. Hands grabbed my shoulders from behind and jerked me out of the chair. Vend reached out and snatched my notebook away.

“Hey,” I said. I tried to wrench free but the men held me fast. “Come on.”

“Worry not,” Vend said. “I will return it momentarily.”

He dropped the notebook on the floor next to the flattened cigar butt. He unzipped his pants and removed himself. I understood then how he had gotten his nickname. It had nothing to do with the knob of tape on his goalie stick.

He zipped up and gestured toward the soaked notebook.

“There you go, Mr. Carpenter. I very much look forward to your next article, if you can get it in your little paper. I would hate for you to have come all the way down here for nothing.”

I left the notebook lying on the floor.

The flickering lights looked like fireflies through the tinted windows of the Suburban. As the vehicle rolled to a stop, the window to my right edged down, and the smell of burning gasoline leached in. Crater Face, sitting to my right, grabbed my arm and yanked me forward.

“Look,” he said.

The lights, I could see now, flashed from police cars and fire trucks and an ambulance. Flames and smoke were spewing from the roof of a house.
Gracie’s house. We were parked one street over, close enough to see but not be seen. Every few seconds the lights illuminated neighbors standing around in parkas. I thought of the Red Wings cup waiting in the drainer.

And those videotapes I would never be seeing.

“Motherfuckers,” I said.

Crater Face turned and grasped me by the neck and squeezed, turning me sideways, his fingernails biting into my skin. The man behind me pinned my elbows back. I felt my neck muscles collapsing as I struggled to remain conscious. The window went back up. The vehicle started to move. The men let me go. They spoke in their language, laughing.

They were still laughing when they threw me onto the gravel of the parking lot at Nasty Melvin’s.

My hamstrings didn’t stop quivering until I veered onto Interstate 275 heading north. I pulled off at Eight Mile Road to fill up. The smell of gasoline made me nauseous. Ten minutes up 275, I was still smelling the gas. I pulled onto the shoulder and flicked on my emergency lights.

I found the four empty five-gallon cans under the cover of my flatbed. I glanced around, looking for police flashers. There were none yet. I waited until there was a break in traffic and took the cans and flung them into the high weeds poking through the snow across the road shoulder.

I stayed on back roads, keeping my eyes peeled for state police cruisers, all the way back to Starvation.

nineteen

The cop lights flashed on in my rearview mirror just as I parked behind the Starvation Lake Arena. “Fuck me,” I said.

I had stopped earlier and called Darlene from a pay phone outside a Grayling tavern called Spike’s Keg ’O Nails. She hadn’t answered, so I’d told her voice mail I’d see her after the game. She wasn’t much of a hockey fan.

I’d also tried the Sarnia police. The night dispatcher told me only the chief was authorized to speak to the media, and he was out of town until the next night. I left my name and number.

Now in my side-view mirror I saw Sheriff Dingus Aho approaching, alone. It wasn’t like Dingus to be out on patrol; he had to have been looking for me. I shut off the truck, opened the door, and stepped out. A fluorescent lamp on the back of the rink threw diffuse light across the snow-packed asphalt. Dingus walked into it, arms folded across his chest.

“Can this wait?” I said. “I’ve got to be on the ice in ten minutes.”

“Can’t go in this way,” Dingus said. “The Zamboni area is still off-limits.”

“Oh. OK, I’ll walk around front. Sorry.”

“What are you parking back here for anyway?”

“Got in the habit when I was playing goalie. Had to do with some superstition I’ve long forgotten.”

I grabbed my bag and sticks out of the back of my truck. “You hauling gasoline?” Dingus said.

“Soupy ran out the other day and I spilled some giving him a hand.”

“Uh-huh.” He stepped between me and the rink. “So how was your trip to Detroit? Find out anything?”

I had debated while driving back exactly what I could or would tell Dingus and Darlene. I didn’t have a paper for four days and I had serious doubts about what, if anything, the publisher would allow the
Pilot
to print. Journalists weren’t supposed to be snitches for cops. But Dingus had pointed me to Vend. And Darlene, well, hell, Darlene was my girlfriend. One of them could probably get to the Sarnia police. I decided I wanted Darlene to hear about that first.

“Not much that I can say anything about,” I told Dingus. “I’ve got to make some calls in the morning.”

His frown bunched his handlebar up beneath his nose.

“I wouldn’t be holding out on me, son. Your little story about Soupy is believable, but bullpuckey. My sheriff friends in Wayne County gave me a call. You were seen going into a house this morning that later went up in flames.”

Trixie, I thought. Would she have been implicated too?

“I am not an arsonist, Dingus.”

He sniffed at the air. “If you say so.”

“Gracie was murdered, all right,” I said. “But you knew that.”

“By whom?”

I had been sure that Vend was responsible for Gracie’s death. Until I had heard about Haskell. It could have been Vend, or Haskell, or both. Gracie’s videotapes—and whatever other evidence she had hidden away—could have put them out of business and in jail. I thought of the girl in Sarnia. What had she known and how had she threatened these men?

What did I really know? That Gracie had become ensnared, probably by Haskell, in a prostitution ring that included among its specialties asphyxiation for wealthy gentlemen. That Gracie had apparently tried to escape that life and make a saner one of her own while struggling against the knowledge that she had given up a child. That both Haskell and Vend could have had motives for killing her, depending on what she knew and what she was willing to reveal. That Vend and Haskell were embroiled in a conflict over large amounts of money and—I only guessed—Gracie’s affections.

But if Gracie was truly out of their business, as Trixie seemed to have been saying, why would Haskell and Vend have cared about her anymore? She must have wanted something. Money? Her house? A job at the new rink? Her dignity? Could they have somehow given that back to her?

“Not sure,” I said.

“Well, Doc Joe appears to disagree.”

“Doc Slow reported already?”

“Surprise, surprise, the county commission sent a letter yesterday to the good doctor asking for input on his budget.”

“And so he produced his report in record time. What’d he say about Gracie?”

“The proximate cause of death was strangulation, the result of a broken neck,” Dingus said. “Strongly suggesting suicide. Of course ol’ Doc didn’t come down too hard on any one side, trying to keep all parties happy. But he cited no specific evidence of homicide, no real signs of struggle, no marks other than the striations on her neck.”

“Come on. She walked out there in a snowstorm, shinnied up a tree, and hung herself?”

“I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that the good doctor did not address those issues directly.”

“Can I get a copy of his report?”

“I doubt it. I myself have yet to see it. The county attorney said it would be made available in due time.”

“After Haskell gets his way with the town council.”

“Maybe so.”

“So we can get that fabulous new rink.”

“That is paramount.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I was thinking the same.”

We stood without speaking for a minute. I heard slap shots echoing off the dasher boards inside the old rink.

“You know,” I said, “Gracie had an abortion.”

Dingus knit his hands behind his back. “Go on.”

“Not sure when. Probably in the last few years.”

“Aha. That’s why she killed herself.”

“It’s a story.”

“Yes. Well. I’ll be candid, Gus, I suspect you know quite a bit more than you’re letting on. And I can appreciate that you’ve probably had a tough day, traveling back and forth and all. So I’ll let it go for the moment.”