The Hanging Tree

eleven

I knew there was a problem when I heard Philo say, “Oh, God. They’ve stopped the presses.” He was staring into his computer screen, hands frozen over his keyboard, his face a crimped mask of worry.

“Why?” I said.

Only once had I heard anyone actually say the words “Stop the presses” without sarcasm. It wasn’t because the pope had died or a passenger jet had plunged into the Detroit River. It was because some layout guy pasting up pages got miffed at his boss for not letting him take the night off to go to a Tigers game.

At the Detroit Times, we were running a wire story inside the paper one night about a man who’d been convicted of sodomy. We ran a mug shot and, beneath it, short captions that identified him as so-and-so from Wichita, “convicted sodomist.” But instead of the sodomist’s photo, the ticked-off layout guy inserted a picture of a well-known Detroit industrialist named Cochran. There were a few nervous laughs until the executive editor caught wind of it. He didn’t actually say, “Stop the presses,” he said, “Jesus H. Christ, we’re all going to get fired.” His secretary then picked up her phone and called the printing plant and gave the command. The layout guy got suspended for a week, but the suspension was set aside after his union appealed.

Philo looked across the room at me. “They’re stopping it for your stories.”

Uh-oh, I thought. I’d had stories spiked before, but never two on the same day. “Which?”

“Both. Shit, shit, triple shit. I knew I should have looked at those.”

“I thought you did.”

“No. No time. You didn’t give me any time.” He picked up his keyboard as if he might slam it down. He reconsidered, let it drop lightly back onto its tray. “Goddammit, Gus.”

“Sorry, Philo.” Although I wasn’t, really. “I wrote the stories and I’ll stand by them. Not your fault.”

“You might not have much to stand by. They’re totally redoing the hockey coach story and”-he squinted at his screen-“the dead lady story too, cutting that to a brief.”

“A brief? Who’s ‘they’?”

“Who do you think?”

The call from Kerasopoulos came ten minutes later. Philo kept his voice down but I overheard him say “at least half an hour”-which I took to mean how late I’d been-and repeat “Yes, of course” and “Sorry” four or five times. Finally he hit his hold button and turned to me. His expression vacillated between angry and shattered.

“It’s the boss,” he said.

I hit the blinking button and picked up my phone.

“What’s up, Jim?”

“Please tell me who your source is.” Issuing from the speakerphone in his Traverse City office, Kerasopoulos’s voice sounded even more like a foghorn than usual.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“Your source. Who’s your source?”

“Would you mind getting off the speakerphone?”

“I would.” So he wasn’t alone. Fat ass, I thought. I thought it not solely because Kerasopoulos indeed had a fat ass, but because he was a fat ass through and through with his fat-assed way of thinking that whatever he did or thought or said was absolutely correct. I knew it was stupid to think this, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Apologies, Jim, but I’m reluctant to discuss sourcing when I don’t know who else is listening in.” I was bound to disclose my sources-or at least most of them-to a superior, but I didn’t have to be careless about it, especially in an echo chamber like Starvation.

“Excuse me?” he said.

I imagined him leaning his double-wide torso out over his conference table, cheap paintings of white-tailed deer and mallards on the paneled wall behind his salt-and-pepper head.

“Which story are you talking about, Jim?”

I heard a click-the hold button-followed by silence. I figured he was inquiring about the story on Jason Esper being named coach of the River Rats. About midway through the story, low enough where Kerasopoulos might not notice it, I’d slipped in a couple of paragraphs about the town council planning to convene in private to consider the Haskell loan. I felt pretty good about it. The taxpayers of Starvation needed to hear it, even if they didn’t want to.

There was another click and Kerasopoulos came back on.

“The room is clear, sir,” he said, though he remained on speakerphone. “I would advise you not to test my patience any further. Now, please tell me who told you the rink developer wants a loan from the Starvation Lake council.”

That was easy, and even if Haskell was eavesdropping, I didn’t mind outing him. “The developer himself, Laird Haskell,” I said.

“And on what basis were you speaking with him?”

Kerasopoulos, who had set up the meeting, knew damn well what basis. “At the time, we were off the record,” I said, “but-”

“So you just violated that agreement willy-nilly? This is not Detroit, Gus.”

Oh, man, I thought, this was like having the puck on my stick in front of an empty net. My ready reply had popped into my head while I was talking with Dingus. “Sorry, Jim, but Haskell promised me the scoop on the hockey coach. Then he went and leaked it to Channel Eight, so the off-the-record deal’s off.”

“That’s your answer?”

“He broke the agreement, I didn’t.”

“Well, Mr. Big City Reporter, you are an idiot.”

“Excuse me?”

“You are an idiot. Mr. Haskell did not leak that story- I did.”

The “I did” echoed through the speakerphone and reverberated in my ears. If what he said was true, I had truly fucked up.

“I’m sorry, how did you-”

“As chief executive of a company that oversees what I consider to be a sacred public trust, I try to keep myself abreast of everything happening in our communities,” he said. “When I heard about the new coach, I thought it was important enough news that we shouldn’t make our viewers and readers wait to hear it. You seem more concerned about pursuing your various vendettas against citizens who are trying to accomplish something good for the community.”

Citizens trying to buy a pile of ads in your paper with the community’s money, I thought. “They’re not vendettas,” I said.

“As for the other story, I’m not about to have the Pine County Pilot indulge your lurid conspiracy theories and phantom sourcing. ‘Sources familiar with the case’? What the hell does that mean? Do you think this is the Washington Post? Until someone from the appropriate police department says for the record that they are investigating a murder, it’s a suicide, do you understand? We put out newspapers here, not mystery novels.”

“All the story said is that police think foul play may have been involved, and that’s absolutely true.”

“Apparent suicide, three grafs, inside. Philo will take care of it.” I looked over at Philo, who looked away from me, his phone on his ear. Fuck me, I thought. “Frankly, Gus,” Kerasopoulous continued, “I have zero time-zero, is that clear? — for your vendettas. Please plan on being in my office tomorrow morning.”

“Wait, there’s-”

“Nine o’clock. Sharp.”

He ended the call. I hung up my phone. Philo was still on his. I’d hoped to read my leftover mail before heading to Enright’s for a beer before the River Rats game, but I just grabbed my coat and went for the back door. As I swung it open, Philo called out, “Late for a drain commission meeting?”

“Fuck you, Philo,” I said as I slammed the door shut behind me.

The crust of snow covering the beach splintered beneath my boots as I trudged toward the shore of the lake. The serrated ice dug into my shins. I stopped at the frozen edge of the lake and finally buttoned my coat. I took a deep breath, felt the cold air singe my lungs.

I liked the lake in winter. Of course I loved the lake when the summer sun lit the water and the afternoon music was boat motors and ice cubes being dropped into glasses and Ernie Harwell telling us a young fellow from Rawsonville would take that foul ball home as a souvenir. But the winter beach took me into a cocoon of wind and wet and cold that kept out the tinny claptrap surrounding the town’s preoccupations of the moment.

I’d barged out of the Pilot, snatched the accordion folder from the truck and scrambled down South Street, furious with Kerasopoulos and Philo, but furious mostly with myself. I had assumed that Haskell burned me, when in fact it was Kerasopoulos. My assumption hadn’t been unreasonable. But of course Kerasopoulos knew about the coach announcement, and probably all about my meeting with Haskell, how Haskell and I hadn’t really become best buddies. So Kerasopoulos did what he did.

But I had assumed nevertheless, which was unforgivably lazy and stupid-a mistake, I told myself, that I never would have made back at the Times. Here I was unmarried, no kids, thirty-five, living at Mom’s house, dating a married woman. No wonder I was already getting soft.

I walked toward the old marina Soupy had sold out of his family. Two streetlamps hovered at either edge of the eight concrete docks invisible beneath the snow. Just inside the first lamp’s pool of light, a brass bell fringed with corrosion and ice sat silent on a stanchion. I sat down with the bell at my back and looked around to see that I was alone. I slipped the Pine County Sheriff’s Department police report, S-950863, out of the accordion folder.

An ambulance was called to the Hill-Top Motel at approximately 2:14 a.m. on that muggy Saturday, August 26, 1995. The date sounded familiar, though I didn’t immediately recognize why.

Dingus’ neat block lettering made it easy to read. I admired his meticulous reporting.

The Hill-Top offered seventeen small rooms, $23.95 a night, in a peeling one-story building atop a low rise along U.S. 131. It was a favorite of truckers making runs between Chicago and the Soo Locks in the Upper Peninsula, and of lovers from Mancelona and Kalkaska conducting illicit affairs.

The owner, a man named Clarence Kruger, was a bald sixty-two-year-old with shrubs of white hair sprouting around his ears. He was at the office desk when a silver Jaguar, top down, roared up the gravel drive shortly before midnight. The couple in the Jaguar weren’t the kind of people Kruger preferred to have stay in his motel, or at least that’s what he would later tell Dingus.

The woman got out of the car and wobbled up to Kruger on high heels. She wore a silken white summer dress splashed with polka dots the size and color of strawberries. The man in the Jaguar shouted at her across the lot.

“Cash,” he said. “No neighbor.” He seemed to have an accent.

Kruger noticed the neck of a bottle of gin protruding from the woman’s purse. “A room with nobody in the rooms next to it, please,” she told him.

Number 7 was such a room, but Kruger had just repainted it. He considered telling the woman he had no vacancy at all, but it had been a slow summer, what with the drizzly weekends, so he took her three five-dollar bills and nine ones and handed over the key to number 14. “There’s someone in thirteen but nobody in fifteen,” he said. “Best I can do.” The woman combed her hair with one hand while waiting for her nickel change.

The phone at his desk woke Kruger an hour later. His copy of Boxing Illustrated slipped off his chest and fell to the floor. He snatched up the phone. “Hill-Top,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Room thirteen here,” came the man’s voice on the other end of the line. He was whispering. “There’s some scary noises coming out of the room next to me. Sounds like somebody’s choking or something.”

Kruger sat up in his chair and peered across the lot. Of course the rooms were all dark. He told the man in 13 he’d look into it.

He dialed number 14. Kruger counted the rings. Ten. He hung up and redialed. Eight more rings. The woman answered. She sounded upset. “It’s… oh my God… please,” she said.

“What’s the matter, ma’am?” Kruger said, but she just kept sputtering incoherently and then hung up.

Kruger plucked his master key off the hook beneath his desk. He walked out to number 14 and leaned an ear against the door. The woman inside seemed to be weeping. “Wake up,” she kept saying. “Wake up, please, wake up.”

Kruger decided against knocking. He walked back to his office and called an ambulance, knowing it would also bring the sheriff or a deputy. He locked the door to his office, turned off the lights, and waited in the darkness, watching through the slatted blinds over his window. He put one hand to his heart. It was pounding. As he would tell Dingus, he’d had plenty of trouble in the Super 8s he had owned in Flint. How far north did a man have to travel to get away from it?

The phone rang again. Kruger let it ring three times before picking up.

“Yeah?”

“Jesus, guy,” the man in 13 said. “It sounds like they’re tearing the room apart next door. I just heard a hell of a crash.”

“Help is on the way, sir,” Kruger said. “Please be sure your door is locked and the dead bolt is in place.”

He heard the first siren just as the door on number 14 burst open and a man, naked and barefoot, staggered out into the light and fell. Kruger stood up from his chair.

The man crawled haltingly around on the pavement outside 14, grabbing at his throat, his skin glowing yellow in the wash of the bare bulb next to the door. The woman emerged, still in her summer dress, a shoulder strap fallen onto her arm. She dropped to her knees and placed a hand on the back of the man’s neck. She leaned down to his ear and said something. He shook his head no, pushed her away. She leaned in again. He pushed her away harder. She stood and backed into the doorway and pulled the shoulder strap back over her arm.

The door on number 13 opened. A man came out. Kruger considered going out himself, almost put his hand to the doorknob, but the siren was growing louder.

He thought better of it.

The man from 13 was barefoot in jeans and a wrinkled white V-neck undershirt. His left forearm bore a faded, shapeless tattoo.

The naked man slowly stood. Kruger saw that he had a penis like a section of garden hose, much darker than the rest of his ashen body. Kruger grabbed the crank on his window and opened it enough to hear. The sirens, more than one now, swelled in his ears.

“Jesus H. Christ, man, you all right?” the tattooed man was saying. The naked man seized his penis in his right hand and yanked something rubbery and black away. He tossed it at the woman, who caught it and threw it into the room. “What in hell is going on here?” the tattooed man said.

The naked man stepped forward and said something Kruger couldn’t make out. The woman clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing. The tattooed man took a step backward toward his room. The naked man offered him a hand. As he did, the light illuminated a scar on the right side of his neck the shape of a jagged crescent moon.

“Get the hell away,” the tattooed man said.

It happened so fast that Kruger would have trouble explaining it to the police. The naked man stepped forward and took the tattooed man by his shoulders and hammered the butt of his head into the other man’s face. The tattooed man staggered backward, grasping at his nose and cursing as blood spurted between his fingers. The naked man watched for a few seconds. Kruger thought he looked amused. Then the naked man turned and ran to the Jaguar, snickering as he hopped gingerly across the gravel. The woman gave chase but he leapt over the door into the driver’s seat and stomped on the gas. She threw up her arms to shield her face against the flying pebbles.

The woman was uncooperative with Deputy Sheriff Dingus Aho, refusing, at first, even to acknowledge that she was Grace Maureen McBride. She denied knowing anything about the peculiar equipment the police found inside number 14, insisting it had been there when they checked in.

An eyebolt had been screwed into a stud inside the wall just above the bed, about three inches below the ceiling. Hanging from the bolt the police found shreds of sheet that appeared to have been torn from the bed in the room. The bed had been stripped to a bare mattress on which police found bits of drywall plaster and a tangle of frayed yellow twine. The materials were marked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab in Grayling for further analysis. Dingus’s report noted that the black rubbery item the naked man had removed from his penis appeared to be a vacuum cleaner attachment.

The ambulance took the tattooed man to a hospital in Traverse City. No charges were filed against Gracie, despite Kruger’s protests that he was entitled to recompense for the shredded sheet and the damage to the wall in number 14. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the naked man, but if he was apprehended, that was not reflected in Dingus’s written report.

Gracie at first told police that she did not know the naked man’s name, but she apparently slipped and referred to him as “YAR-ek”, or at least that’s how Dingus wrote it in his report. I had never heard such a name before. Gracie then insisted that she really did not know this man well, that his last name was too long to pronounce or to spell, that he came from somewhere downstate but she could not remember exactly where.

Dingus’s report said he released Gracie into the custody of Beatrice Carpenter. When I read this, I looked away from the pages and stared down the beach to my left, in the direction of my mother’s house. I imagined Dingus walking Gracie up to the back door, his hand lightly on her elbow, the kitchen lights coming on, my mother in her fuzzy blue robe hugging Gracie and thanking Dingus, who would have kept his lights off so as not to alert the neighbors.

My mother had never said a word to me about this.

Then I remembered why the date-August 26, 1995-had resonated. Darlene and Jason had married on that Saturday. I had heard about the wedding from Soupy but of course had not been invited and remained in Detroit that weekend, working.

My mother later asked me if I had heard that Darlene had wed. By then it was Labor Day weekend and we were sitting on the bench swing that overlooked the lake. I took a long sip on my can of beer and told her, yes, I had heard. Mom then told me the wedding had been nice, but nothing special, which was her way of letting me know that she was sorry-not for herself but for me-that I had not been at the altar with Darlene.

Darlene never said anything about the incident at the Hill-Top Motel. She may not have known about it. In August of 1995, she hadn’t yet moved to the sheriff’s department; she worked then for the Bellaire Police.

I scanned Dingus’s report again quickly, turning it over and back, letting the wind ruffle the corners of the pages. As I was slipping it back into the accordion folder, I noticed a piece of notebook paper crumpled inside.

I pulled it out. Someone had written on it in neat block letters:

J Vend

26669 Harman Street

Melvindale Michigan 48122