The Hanging Tree (42 page)

“I don’t blame you.” I looked at the skates. “Ready tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

I started to leave, then stopped and turned back to Johnny Ford. “Shit, you know, John, I’m talking to the cops about ten times a day. Give me your number and if it turns up, I’ll give you a call.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No trouble.”

He had to get low to the counter, his hair hanging down over his face, so he could hold a napkin down with his stump while he scratched out the number.

The napkin was crumpled in my left hand as I knocked on the door of Darlene’s apartment with my right.

She answered in an old white-and-green Michigan State football jersey that hung to her knees, number 23. She opened the door without a word, turned and walked into her little kitchen. I followed. She flicked on a light and took a glass out of the dish drainer and filled it with water from the tap.

I unzipped my jacket. “We have to talk,” I said.

Darlene pulled her dark hair back with one hand and drank the glass down. She set the glass in the sink. She turned to me.

“Did you sleep with her?” she said.

“No.”

“Did you want to?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

I had no good answer for that. “Like you said, things got complicated. I was doing my job.”

We didn’t say anything for a minute. Darlene gazed vacantly at the wall behind me, thinking. “I was doing my job, too.”

“When?”

“When you saw me at the rink. We had Jason under surveillance. Dingus had talked to someone in Detroit about him. I was the tail because he wouldn’t suspect me.”

“You?” I felt at once stupid and relieved. “Jeez. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She lowered her eyes now. “We followed you, too.”

“When? When I went downstate? No.”

“Yes. D’Alessio.”

“Frankie? He let those shitheads basically kidnap me?”

“You were doing your job, Gus. Isn’t that what you wanted? You got to Vend, right? You figured it all out?”

“Isn’t that what
you
wanted?”

“Why are you here? Haven’t you had enough pain yet? This isn’t hockey. You can’t just swing your stick at somebody’s head and make everything right.”

I set the napkin on the counter, the number facedown.

“Whatever happened to Sarnia?” I said.

“You’re such a boy.”

“What about the chick on the swing set, Darlene? The Sarnia cops wouldn’t talk because I’m a reporter. But they’d talk to you.”

She wasn’t going to tell me. Or she didn’t know. Or she hadn’t called. “You know I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“Of course. Not now. So you can’t tell me whether you ever tracked down that phone call, can you?”

“What phone call?”

“The one that set off the Zamboni bomb.”

That stopped her, as I had expected. “Why?”

“What do you mean why? Did you track it down or not?” She started to shake her head. “Stop fucking with me, Darlene.”

“Why are you fucking with me?” It was almost a shout. Tears were filling her eyes; I couldn’t tell whether from anger or sadness. “What difference does it make? Gracie’s gone. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

Goddamn, I thought. She knows, too. She knows. Maybe not what my mother knew, but something nobody else did.

I flipped the napkin over and pushed it along the counter. “That’s the number of the cell phone that ignited the bomb,” I said. “Gracie got the phone from Johnny Ford, the one-handed kid at the rink.”

Darlene wouldn’t look at it.

“Am I getting a little closer to what really was getting complicated?”

She pulled the State jersey up to swab her cheeks. “Haskell’s in jail,” she said. “Jason’s in jail. The state police are going to have Vend soon. Isn’t that enough? Do you really want to bring in—” She stopped herself. She was going to say too much. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Bring in who? My mother? Your mom? Trixie?”

“Go.”

She stepped forward and shoved the heel of one hand hard into my chest. I fell back a step. But I wasn’t leaving yet.

“The phone that called this phone to make it ring and set off that little bomb—the area code was two four eight,” I said. “Wasn’t it? Only one person could have set that off and been sure it wouldn’t hurt a certain someone. Only one person knew exactly where her boy was when she dialed that number.”

Darlene grabbed the napkin and balled it up in her hand and drove both of her fists into my chest, driving me backward into the door.

“Get out.”

“You knew.”

“Get the fuck out.”

I opened the door, felt cold wash over the back of my neck. “You knew,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t know what Gracie was going to do, but once she did it, you knew. And you kept it to yourself.”

“Everything is,” she said, “as it should be.”

I stood at the bottom of Darlene’s stairway for a while, shivering in the dark, wondering if she would reconsider. The outside light over her door went out. I walked away, feeling the ache in my bruised foot again.

“Sarnia Police,” said the woman’s voice. “Officer Poulin.”

Her voice on the phone, husky and matter-of-fact, reminded me of Darlene’s. I was at my desk in the
Pilot
newsroom. I told Officer Poulin
I was a sheriff’s deputy in Pine County, Michigan, and I needed to confirm the details of a recent suicide—or perhaps it had been reclassified as a homicide—in Sarnia. I described a young woman hanging from a swing set.

I was not terribly surprised to hear Officer Poulin chuckle. “A swing set, eh?” she said. “That’s a good one. I have a feeling I’d remember that. Are you sure it happened recently?”

“That’s what our source says. A few weeks ago.”

“Who’s your source?”

“You know, some goofball trying to trade info.”

“Well, that explains things, eh? But you’re calling awfully late—or early, depending.”

“Picked him up on a DUI. He has a warrant out in Detroit.”

“Right-o. He sure doesn’t want to go back there.”

“No, ma’am. So, you have no record of a suicide or a homicide occurring there in the last few weeks, or even months?”

“Wait just a minute. I’ll double-check.”

She set the phone down. Someone, probably Mrs. B, had cleared my desktop. All the pens and pencils in my Detroit Tigers beer mug were gone.

Officer Poulin came back on the phone.

“Deputy—I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

I hesitated, then said, “Esper.”

“Esper? Hmm. We had a young man played for the minor league team here named Esper. Pretty good with his fists.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some years back. Anyway, I checked and we have zero reports of suicides or homicides in the past six months, certainly none involving a swing set. Or monkey bars, for that matter.”

“Sorry for the bother.”

“No bother at all. You have a nice day.”

I hung up the phone.

Trixie had lied about the girl on the swing set. And about the abortion. I should have picked up on it when she’d fibbed about knowing who Haskell was. She had been having trouble with her landlord, whom I now knew to be one Jarek Vend. Gracie’s life insurance money would be good for her worthy mission. And, as Darlene had said, there was nothing anyone could do to bring Gracie back. The bad guys would get what they deserved.

I had a decision to make.

I could go home and get some sleep and let Philo post our stories online as we had planned. But now I knew that we had it all wrong, or a lot wrong. I didn’t have to think hard or long about why Gracie did what she did. There was vengeance and there was love and there was the belief, however misguided it may have been, that she was out of options.

I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang fourteen or fifteen times before I hung up and redialed. After a dozen more rings, Soupy picked up. He coughed and I heard him drop the phone—“Fuck,” he said—then he came on.

“What the hell, Trap?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Who else would it be? What do you want?”

“Listen,” I said. “Some shit’s going to come down tomorrow. I just want you to know, you were right. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Gracie. Like you said.”

“Oh, Jesus, man.” He fumbled around with the phone again. I heard something that sounded like a bottle banging off the floor. “What are you going to do?”

“I have to go. Just wanted you to know, buddy, you’re a good guy. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

I took my Tigers mug when I left the
Pilot
.

It was still dark when Philo answered his front door. I had managed two and a half hours of fitful dozing on Mom’s sofa. Philo stood in the doorway in boxer shorts and a U.S. Navy T-shirt, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Why are you here?” he said.

“Remember what I said about imagining your corrections?”

“What?”

“We’ve got to rewrite our stories.”

“You’re kidding.”

He made a pot of coffee and some peanut butter toast. We wrote and rewrote. We questioned every little thing we had written the night before. Around eight o’clock, Philo’s cell phone started ringing every ten minutes or so. He ignored it. “No desire to talk to my uncle,” he said.

The second the clock struck nine, I called Nova at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office. “Let’s make it two Lions games,” I said. I asked her to run down one more piece of information. She said she would call me back.

Philo ducked out at ten to cover the Haskell arraignment. Haskell stood mute and Judge Gallagher entered a plea of not guilty. For some reason, Kerasopoulos was in attendance. He motioned across the courtroom for Philo to come see him, but Philo pretended he didn’t see, then slipped out a side door.

We were ready a little before noon. The sidebar, on Kerasopoulos’s business relationships with Haskell, was essentially the same. Philo had e-mailed his uncle a list of questions.
This is silliness,
Kerasopoulos had replied.
Won’t dignify with answer.
Our sidebar quoted him.

The main story had been redone from top to bottom. The headlines read:

Murder Charge May Be Flawed
New Evidence Suggests Suicide

“Let’s not post it until I hear from my source in Detroit,” I told Philo. Instead of asking about my source, he went to his fridge for two more Amstels.

“Quite a morning,” he said as he handed me a beer.

“Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Just thinking of something Dingus told me a couple of days ago. Something about the newspaper being a snapshot of the dark human soul.”

“Hmm. They didn’t teach us that at Columbia.”

Nova called a little after twelve thirty. “This took some digging,” she said. “Had to call in a chit with folks at probate. I think you owe Michael a Lions sweatshirt, too.”

“Done,” I said. “What do you have?”

On December 6, 1984, Grace M. McBride had given birth to a son. The birth certificate did not name a father. The boy weighed seven pounds, six ounces. A note in the file indicated the boy was adopted shortly thereafter. Gracie named him Taylor Edward McBride.

twenty-five

How did you find me?”

She held the apartment door open only the width of her face. Through the crack I saw that her hair had gone from silver to ash, with strands of white that fluttered away from her head like feathers. In one hand she held something shaped like a bowl, wrapped in brown paper.

“A hockey buddy,” I said.

“They’re all the same, aren’t they?”

“Pretty much. Could I come in, please? I won’t stay long.”

“You’re not writing a story.”

I held my empty hands up. “Didn’t even bring a pen.”

Felicia Haskell opened the door.

It was late April. The ice on Starvation Lake had broken up. I had driven down to Detroit to find Laird Haskell’s wife.

She had borrowed the two-bedroom apartment from a girlfriend after leaving Starvation Lake. The living room was strewn with cardboard packing boxes. Some were open at the top, others taped shut and shoved against a wall beneath a panoramic photograph of Detroit’s skyline. Felicia set the wrapped dish inside a box.

“Taking off again?” I said.

“Not soon enough.”

She moved to a counter alongside the kitchen. It was stacked with unwrapped dishes and glassware.

“Taking Taylor with you?”

She kept wrapping and packing as if she hadn’t heard me.

Doc Joe had held on to the coroner’s report for weeks, even after Dingus and the Pine County prosecutor had sheepishly agreed to drop
the murder charge against Laird Haskell. What Doc finally released told us little we didn’t already suspect. The cause of death was indeed strangulation, in combination with fractures along the upper cervical spine—a severely broken neck.

I scoured the report for any signs of a struggle, even of Gracie struggling with herself. Had she changed her mind at the last minute? Had she decided, in the final seconds of her life, that she ought to live for her son, however unavailable he was, rather than die for him?

I tried to interview Doc Joe. He ignored my calls and e-mails. One unseasonably warm evening, I found him at his house. He was sitting outside in the dying daylight, reading a history of World War I, in which, I had heard, his grandfather had fought.

Doc Joe wore a wool sweater vest zipped halfway up. I stood looking down on his bald spot. Inserting a scrap of paper as a bookmark, he closed his book, put his reading glasses in his vest pocket, and listened. When I had finished, he gazed out at the lake.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always liked the color of your mom’s place. But the missus, she’s never going to let me paint our place yellow. No, sir.” He turned back to me. “Why do you want to know, son? She killed herself. I understand that someone may have helped. But still.”

“She was family.”

“I am very sorry for your loss.” He pinched his glasses to his nose, opened his book. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

The next morning, I dialed Wally’s Wonder Print in Melvindale. Wally was out, but five minutes later he called me from his cell phone. I invited his hockey team up for a weekend of games and drinking with the Chowder Heads. “Oh, fucking-ay, man, we are so there,” he said, and he must have nearly driven off the road because I heard car horns honking angrily in the background.