The Hanging Tree

seven

My password opened Philo’s computer.

The techies hadn’t gotten around to disabling the override the Pilot ’s previous owners had bestowed upon me as the boss of exactly three people. I supposed that they would get around to it, and then Philo probably would have the ability to pry into my e-mails. But for the moment, Media North’s organizational inertia was working in my favor. While my truck idled in the parking lot behind the newsroom, I scrolled through Philo’s e-mails. I wanted to confirm a hunch.

The subject line on a 9:14 a.m. e-mail read, “RE: hskl meetng.” I opened the e-mail. Now is not the time to stand on principle, I thought, remembering what Philo had said to me on the phone. I read the e-mail. phi- haskell amp; 1 other 11:15 his place great opp here. No time 4 soap box. jmk

“Figures,” I said to myself.

I closed up the computer and headed back out to my truck.

Only through the naked trees of winter could you see Laird Haskell’s home from the road. And, on this gray morning, Haskell himself, coatless on his porch.

After more than twenty-five years suing auto companies for building unsafe cars and trucks that killed and maimed and burned people, Haskell was a bona fide millionaire. He had lived in Bloomfield Hills near Detroit among many of the executives who appeared as defendants on his lawsuits. He had bought his house on Starvation as a weekend getaway in the mid-1970s after seeing the lake when he’d come to watch his nephew’s Port Huron team play against the Rats.

Many years later, it turned out that his own son was quite a player. Minding the net for HoneyBaked Ham’s peewee team in Detroit, Taylor Haskell had let in, on average, fewer than two goals per game and registered an astonishing twenty-three shutouts in the fifty-six games he had played. But Laird Haskell was not satisfied, not with the coaching of his son, or with the players around his son, or with the fact that, every few games, HoneyBaked’s other goaltender would get a chance to play. He moved his boy to Little Caesars, then to Emmert Chevrolet. But nothing was good enough for Laird Haskell, who, like so many deluded hockey dads and moms, believed his son was destined for the NHL.

Haskell sold his Bloomfield Hills home and moved his son and wife to the palatial house on Starvation. They hadn’t been in town a month before Haskell appeared before the town council to say he had bought a thirty-acre parcel of land on which he planned to build the River Rats a new home, the Felicia Haskell IcePlex, with his own $7.5 million, all cash. He just needed a property tax break and a little help getting utilities hooked up.

I hadn’t seen him up close in years. Once in a while I’d glimpse him on the lake, shirtless at the wheel of his cruiser, or directing his help at his boathouse, which was about the size of Mom’s cottage. In Starvation he kept a low profile for a man who had made his name as one of the most effective plaintiff’s lawyers in the country, the scourge of Detroit’s automakers. He dispatched his attorney to most of the public meetings about the rink. Of course he showed up for every River Rats game to watch his son tend goal. But even there, he kept to himself; he had paid to have a small private box built in a high corner of the bleachers, where he served cocktails to men and women who came from places other than Starvation and vanished afterward, presumably to hotels or bed-and-breakfasts in the real resort towns, Charlevoix or Petoskey or Traverse City. Normally this would have been the source of much carping and gossip around the breakfast tables at Audrey’s, but no one dared to speak ill of Laird Haskell once he’d offered to build that rink with his own money.

He waved to me as I eased my truck down a steep winding path plowed to the bare concrete. Fake gas lamps glowed along both sides of the path. Haskell ambled off the porch and stood waiting at the end of the drive. The house loomed up before me, three stories of cream siding, picture windows framed in maple, cantilevered decks someone had bothered to shovel. Plumes of smoke wafted up from a brick chimney. Even the firewood stacked neatly against the house had been swept clean of the night’s snow.

As I parked, Haskell approached, smiling. I wished he wouldn’t. The veneer of familiarity made me uncomfortable, even if we had in fact known each other for a good many years. He was grayer and thinner on top than I remembered, a small man, no bigger than me, who moved with the sureness of someone who had calmly accused chief executives to their faces of murdering the people who had died in their cars and trucks. His paunch nudged a little more firmly at his starched denim shirt, but Haskell was well kept for a man in his sixties. His smile, in particular, looked just as sculpted and willful as I’d seen it when he was beguiling juries and making himself wealthy.

I hopped out of my truck, automatically patting my back pocket for my notebook. Haskell stepped up and took my right hand into both of his.

“Long time, Gus,” he said. “I guess it really is true: you can run but you can’t hide.”

“You talking about me or you?”

He laughed and put an arm around my shoulders. “Let me show you my shack,” he said, as if I’d never written a single story calling the money behind his project into question, as if he’d never had his lawyer order me to stop calling the Haskell home at the dinner hour, as if we were old friends who’d bumped into each other at the country club.

The case was Willing v. Superior Motors. It was 1991 and I was covering the auto industry for the Detroit Times.

Laird Haskell represented the estate of James P. Willing, a forty-one-year-old father of five who was killed when he ran his four-door sedan into the back of a panel truck on an interstate in southern Ohio. The lawsuit alleged that Willing’s antilock brakes had failed due to negligence on the part of the car’s manufacturer, Superior Motors.

At Haskell’s invitation, I appeared one morning at the thirty-fifth-floor offices of his firm in one of the glass-and-steel towers of the Renaissance Center on the Detroit River. A secretary led me to a conference room. Four square white boxes marked WILLING were stacked against one wall. Six yellow legal pads and three blue felt-tipped pens waited at the seat where the secretary, a woman named Joyce, deposited me. Bottles of orange juice and Coke huddled on a silver tray. “Take all the time you need,” Joyce said. “Feel free to help yourself to a beverage. Sandwiches will be brought in later.”

“If I wanted to copy some pages, is there a-”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Haskell has directed that nothing be removed from the room, including copies. You may take notes, of course.”

“OK.”

“And,” she said, pausing at the door, “you were never here.”

I grinned. “Of course not.”

I spent the next five and a half hours going through the documents in the boxes. There were depositions, internal Superior Motors memos, various court pleadings. All told, the documents showed how the engineers at Superior had detected problems in the development of the company’s new antilock brake system. They had advocated design changes that, according to certain memos, would have cost Superior a few pennies per vehicle. A “safety economist” for the company had prepared a cost analysis estimating that the potential cost of litigation over the design of the brakes would be less than what it would cost to implement the changes. The analysis calculated the cost of a single human life at $432,124.68. The design changes were never made.

I ignored the stamps on the front of many of the documents saying they had been sealed by court order. That was Haskell’s problem, I figured. I had wanted to write about the Willing case for months, but the state judge overseeing the case had, at Superior’s request and over Haskell’s objections, blocked public access to all documents obtained in discovery between the company and the Willing family. So there wasn’t much to write about.

Until Haskell’s secretary phoned me one day and asked if I’d like to spend a few hours in a conference room with some boxes of paper. I readily agreed that anything I saw or read would be off the record until Haskell gave me the go-ahead to write my story. It was better than nothing, and I couldn’t imagine that Haskell wouldn’t want me to tell the world how Superior had behaved prior to the untimely death of a father of five.

I had eaten a turkey sandwich, gone through nearly three of the boxes, and filled three legal pads with notes when Joyce came into the conference room around two thirty that afternoon and said I would have to leave because the conference room was needed. I was so excited about the prize-winning story I was already writing in my head that I never wondered why a firm with offices taking most of an entire floor in the Ren Cen didn’t have other conference rooms available.

“OK if I come back in the morning?” I said.

Joyce smiled politely. “Mr. Haskell will be in touch.”

I went back to the Times and told my editor to prepare a big display space in Sunday’s paper. We could start the story on A1 and open a page, maybe two, inside. I didn’t bother telling him that I couldn’t publish a word of it until Haskell gave me permission. I wasn’t worried in the least that he wouldn’t give it to me.

I began to worry a little when neither Joyce nor Haskell returned my calls the next day, or the day after that. Late that night, I got Haskell’s answering machine. “We plan to run this Sunday,” I said. “You’re going to love it.” Technically we weren’t supposed to tell sources when stories were running, especially stories that affected companies owned by public shareholders. But how could I get Haskell to release me to write without him knowing when? I didn’t think it could hurt.

On the Friday before the Sunday that my story was supposed to run, I received a phone call from a flack for Superior, an unctuous gnome of a man named Snell. I’d been trying to reach Haskell all morning, to no avail.

“I don’t get to say this very often,” Snell said. “But it’s a great day for American jurisprudence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I understand you’re working on a story.”

I could almost hear his smirk.

“I’m always working on stories, Dave. What’s up?”

“I don’t think you’re going to get to write that story.”

“Which story?”

He tittered. Then an echo came over his voice as he switched to a speakerphone. “I’ve got Howie Reichs with me.”

Howie Reichs was Superior’s top safety executive.

“Hello, Howard,” I said, knowing he hated being called Howard. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Augustus,” he said, imagining no doubt that I didn’t like being called Augustus. I actually didn’t mind. “I hate to disappoint you, but you’ll have to find another company to crucify this Sunday. “

How did he know it was Sunday? Only Haskell knew that.

“We’re going to be making an announcement shortly, and I wanted you to be the first to hear.”

I let my head drop into a hand. I knew what he was going to say.

Thirty minutes later, the company issued a two-paragraph statement: Superior had settled the Willing matter. The terms were not disclosed. The statement quoted Laird Haskell as saying the settlement “served the best interests of the Willing family while addressing the complex safety dilemmas posed by this admittedly complicated matter.”

My story never ran. The world did not find out about the design defects in the antilock brakes. But over the course of the next year, Haskell represented seven additional clients who sued Superior over the brakes. Each time, the cases were settled quickly and the terms were not disclosed. A story in the American Lawyer, quoting anonymous sources-Haskell, I guessed-estimated that the firm of Haskell, Sherman amp; Toddy had collected more than $20 million in contingency fees on the brakes cases. People kept dying, Haskell kept collecting, and my scribblings on those legal pads went unseen.

I called Haskell every day for months. Each day, Joyce would kindly tell me she’d give him my message; she may well have, but I never heard from him. I kept track of his firm’s cases, though. One morning I cornered him in a men’s room at the federal courthouse on Lafayette. He had just started to pee when I walked in and stood next to him at the adjacent urinal.

He turned and smiled at me, not the least bit surprised. “Hello, Gus,” he said. “We’re a little old for a sword fight, don’t you think?”

“I know what you did.”

“Really?” He peered into the urinal. “Then what are you doing here?”

I had come prepared. “You hear of the Miller family in Austin?”

“Austin, Texas?” He turned and faced me, shook himself off, zipped up. “No. Should I?”

“They don’t exist anymore,” I said. “They rolled their minivan when the brakes failed. Husband, wife, three little kids. All dead.”

Haskell stepped to a sink. He squeezed pink soap onto his hands, washed them in cold water, splashed water on his face. He snapped a paper towel from the dispenser and dried his hands, then patted his cheeks and forehead dry, watching himself in the mirror as he did.

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“I heard you.” He reached into his suit jacket and produced a slim leather case from which he plucked a business card. He handed it to me. “If someone is in need of legal advice in this matter, they really should call me.”

He started to leave. I stepped in front of him.

“Are you serious? You almost got me fired.”

Our eyes met. I was younger and stronger and angry enough to beat his face in with the soap dispenser. But his eyes told me I was no more important to him than the guy who’d be swabbing the toilets that night.

“So that’s what’s important here? Your job security?” he said. “Maybe you should go back to your newspaper and write a story. Meantime, I have to be back in court. Excuse me.”

“I haven’t checked my voice mail yet today,” Haskell said. “Have you?”

We were sitting at a round mahogany table in his office on the third floor of his home. Haskell had his hand on a multi-line phone in the middle of the table.

“Uh, no,” I said. “Why, did you call me?”

“Ha,” he said. “I meant, ‘Have you checked my voice mail?’ ”

It was a joke. I had lost my job at the Detroit Times two years before because I had learned some things about accessing a certain auto company’s voice-mail system that I would have been better off not learning. Haskell had had nothing to do with my demise but undoubtedly had heard about the details on the attorney grapevine in Detroit.

“Ah,” I said. “Got it.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know if that was still raw. Apparently so.”

Behind him one half of a credenza was crowded with pictures of Haskell with his wife and son, in ski attire atop a mountain, on a sailboat, in front of the White House. There was a picture of Haskell in a tuxedo and his wife in a ball gown with President Clinton and the first lady. The other half held pictures of the son in goaltender gear, holding the wide blade of his goalie stick aloft, hugging a teammate, posing in a blurry shot with a man in a Detroit Red Wings uniform.

Above the credenza, framed reproductions of front pages of the Detroit Times, the Detroit Free Press, and the American Lawyer lined the paneled wall. Headlines on each shouted the size of verdicts Haskell had won against auto companies: $28.1 million, $94.4 million, $42.8 million. I couldn’t help but think of the one case that was not on his trophy wall, the one I’d covered for the Times that had set me at odds with Haskell and gotten me in trouble with my bosses. Nor could I help wondering again how he could be coming up short with the money to build that new rink. What exactly was the problem?

“It’s fine,” I said. “I like it here.”

“You landed on your feet, man. And of course who wouldn’t like it here, huh?” He swept an arm toward the big bay window facing the lake. I looked. Mom’s house was a fuzzy yellow speck in the tree line on the opposite shore.

“I hear you’ve been staying with your mother,” Haskell said. “That’s a good son, in my book.”

“The rent’s free. The food’s good.”

“Oh, my, you must have heard.” He leaned into the table and shaped his face into one reflecting concern. “That girl.”

Gracie, I assumed.

“Yes. Not a girl, really.”

“Did you know her?”

“A little.”

“It’s terrible. Her poor mother.”

“Yeah. She worked at the rink, you know.”

“Did she?” he said.

“Drove the Zamboni. Sharpened skates.”

“Ah.” Haskell gazed out the window again, crossed his legs, ran his fingers along a crease in his corduroy slacks. “Suicide is so… so selfish, don’t you think?”

“It’s not a suicide,” I said.

“Really? Is that what the police are saying?”

“They aren’t saying yet.”

Haskell shook his head. “I had a client once-did I ever tell you this story? — this client had a son, an only child, four years old, who’d been gravely injured when he was thrown from a minivan. He actually died while we were at trial due to complications related to being a quadriplegic, which should have worked to-well, that’s beside the point.”

“Right.”

“The defense put my client, the mother, on the stand. About as brazen a move as I’ve seen in all my years of lawyering. They asked her a lot of questions about how the boy was situated, where she’d bought the car seat, how well she secured him, et cetera. They even asked about her husband supposedly leaving her. All of it patently irrelevant, trying to blame her for their own client’s egregious negligence. They got her crying, of course. I assured her they were out of order and I’d get her testimony thrown out by the judge. But…”

He let his voice trail off for dramatic effect.

“And she killed herself?” I said.

“Unbelievable.”

“She’d lost her son and her husband. And she must have felt guilty.”

“No,” he said, leveling his eyes on me as if I were a member of the jury. “She was just afraid to get on with her life.”

“What happened with the case?”

“The family had been through enough. We settled.”

“I guess you missed out on a pretty big payday there, huh?”

“A payday had nothing to do with it.”

I felt more comfortable now. I pulled out my notebook, set it on the table, and opened it to the first page. I took out a pen and wrote HASKELL and the date across the top of the page. I made sure to write it big enough that he could see it.

“Ah, well,” he said. “Time for the business part of the meeting. We should probably discuss some ground rules.”

“What? You asked me here, Mr. Haskell.”

“Call me Laird, please. Look, my understanding-”

“I’m the only one here, Laird.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not being clear. My attorney had a discussion with a helpful intermediary for your organization, and my understanding was that we were going to visit for a while and we could work out what you might want to write, if anything, in your little paper.”

“You talked to Kerasopoulos,” I said.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

The e-mail I had read in Philo’s computer had come from Jim Kerasopoulos, my boss, Philo’s boss, Philo’s uncle, the president and chief executive of Media North Corporation, and Haskell’s intermediary. Kerasopoulos was a businessman who saw nothing wrong with sticking his nose into news coverage. I actually didn’t mind his gaining me access to Haskell. But he was not going to set the terms for how I made use of it.

“Well, Laird, I’m here, and I’m happy to listen to whatever you have to say, so long as it’s on the record. I also have a few questions I’d like to get answered for my little paper.”

Haskell grinned and slapped his palms on the table. “Because the public has a right to know. Is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“Is this your way of getting a little payback?”

“Payback for what? I’m just doing my job.”

“It’s my money, son. Don’t forget that. My money’s building that rink.”

“Not entirely. There’s sewer and water and roads and police and fire paid for by tax dollars. You’re also getting a nice little property tax break. And while your rink stands out there with the wind blowing through the steel, the town’s letting the old rink rot.”

“Fair enough,” Haskell said, raising his hands as if in surrender. “But I have something for you today and, frankly, I think it’s a pretty big story for this town. We can give it to you exclusively, if you can help us out a bit.”

“Help you out how?”

“Nothing special, nothing extraordinary. Just a little balance. The next time you’re going to quote a subcontractor bitch-excuse me, complain about allegedly not getting paid, I wish you’d check with me about what the sub’s actually accomplished to warrant being paid.”

“Are you kidding? I have called you repeatedly and-”

“Yes, yes, I understand. I have been remiss at responding to your inquiries because I’ve been, well, I’ve had other priorities. I apologize. I realize now that I have let the stories in your paper make it even more difficult for me to complete this project. But I will complete it.”

“When?”

“You’ll see. Soon. Very soon.”

I wrote that down in my notebook.

“Wait,” Haskell said. “We are not on the record.”

“Did I ever say we were off? When exactly is ‘very soon’? By next season?”

Haskell folded his hands on his chest and fixed his gaze on the table.

“Do you want to hear what I have to tell you?” He lifted his gaze to me. “Or should we just give it to Channel Eight?”

I thought of Elvis embarrassing me that morning at Audrey’s Diner. I was not about to get one-upped by Channel Eight twice in one day.

“What do you got?”

“Off the record?”

I set my pen on the table. “For now.”

“Two items,” Haskell said. “Something we’re going to announce shortly. And something else I can’t really tell you about yet. Just a heads-up.”

Christ, I thought. That’s how it went when you agreed to go off the record.

“What’s the second thing?”

“You have a paper tomorrow, is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“And then your next paper is Saturday?”

“Yep.”

He gave this a moment’s thought. “If I tell you, then you cannot use it in the paper in any way, shape, or form, is that correct?”

“If you-”

“Never mind. Look, let me be candid, all I can say at the moment is that we might be seeking a bit of help from the town.”

“Financial help?”

He considered for a moment, his way of letting me know, yes, it was financial help. Then he said, “I’m afraid that’s all I can say.”

“Come on.”

“I’m sorry. Things are in a delicate stage. I’m being as helpful as I can.”

On the contrary, he was giving me just enough information that it could, in theory, handcuff me if I happened to hear something more specific from someone else. That’s why he’d asked about my not being able to use it in any way, shape, or form. Although I hadn’t answered that question, Haskell might remember things differently, if it served his purpose. But what could I do? If I hadn’t gone off the record, I’d have nothing. I knew Haskell was as slippery as a bass on a bad hook, but I had no choice, or I thought I had no choice, but to deal with him any way that I could. At least he was speaking to me.

“That’s pretty disappointing, Laird,” I said. “So I better be able to put whatever your announcement is in tomorrow’s paper.”

Haskell brightened. “You will.” He picked up the phone, punched two numbers, and said into the phone, “Felicia. Yes. Could you send him up? No need for you to-no. No. Yes, I understand. Thank you, dear.” He returned the phone to its cradle, stood up, and walked over to the door, pushing the button on the doorknob that locked it. “I guarantee you will love this.”

He waited at the door, smiling. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside the door, then the sound of someone trying to open the door.

“Whoa, one minute,” Haskell said. He undid the lock and held the doorknob. “It is my distinct pleasure,” he said, “to introduce to you the new coach of the Hungry River Rats.”

He swung the door open and there, filling up most of the doorway in a blue-and-gold River Rats sweat suit, was Jason Esper.

“How are we doing today, Coach Esper?” Haskell said as he pumped the hand of Darlene’s husband. Jason was looking at me, just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I decided I’d better stand up.

“Meat,” I said, using his nickname. I extended my hand. “Congrats.”

He tilted his head slightly and allowed himself a small, amused smile. Haskell nudged him in my direction. Jason took my hand. I felt the calluses on his knuckles, the scars of a hundred minor-league hockey fights. He held tight when I tried to release. “You can call me Coach,” he said. He let my hand go.

“Midget squad?” I said.

“Yep.” He turned to Haskell and handed him a manila envelope.

“Thank you,” Haskell said. “Let’s sit down for a minute, shall we?”

I’d always thought of Jason as big, but he looked bigger than ever as he eased himself into a chair. He had indeed cleaned himself up since the last time I’d seen him. That afternoon eight or nine months before, he was hunched on a stool at the Kal-Ho Tavern in Kalkaska, a can of Busch Light and a empty shot glass in front of him, his lighter lying atop a pack of Marlboros. I’d stopped for a patty melt on my way back from a meeting at corporate in Traverse City. If Jason noticed me, he gave no indication. He sipped and smoked with his half-open eyes on a soap opera on the television hanging over the back bar. A jagged line of clotted blood crossed the bridge of his nose.

Now, sitting across the table next to Haskell, Jason looked as lean and strong as I’d seen him since he was the mullet-headed winger, number 28, skating for the Pipefitters all those years ago. Scars from sticks, pucks, and his nightly scraps cut thin slashes beneath his eyes and along his chin. But his blue eyes were bright, his blond curls clung tightly to his head, he wore a neatly trimmed blond goatee touched with gray. A different man, at least in appearance.

I looked at Haskell and said, “What about Poppy?” Dick Popovich had been the midget coach for five years. He’d never gotten the Rats out of the regionals. With Haskell’s boy, Taylor, in goal, people figured he had a chance.

“He’s retiring,” Haskell said.

“Of course. And we’re so desperate for a winner that we hire a guy from our archnemesis to get us there.”

“I hired him,” Haskell said.

“I might have Poppy give me a hand with the goalies,” Jason said.

“Goalies need all the help they can get,” I said.

Jason gave me a mirthless wink. “You ought to know, eh, Carpie?”

Jason had been sitting on the opposing team’s bench when I allowed the goal that cost the River Rats the state title eighteen years before. He’d moved to nearby Mancelona with his parents as a teenager. He was quick and agile for a tall kid. And mean as a snake. Our coach begged him to defect from the Pipefitters to the Rats, but his parents had other plans-college hockey and then the NHL. He lived with a teammate’s family near Detroit during the Pipefitters’ season and spent summers up north. Our paths didn’t cross much.

While I was taking journalism classes at the University of Michigan, Jason skipped college for Canadian juniors. He played one game in the NHL and later wound up skating for two hundred dollars a game in minor-league towns like Raleigh and Baltimore, where people went to hockey games to drink beer and howl for players to spill one another’s blood. I had heard he was briefly a celebrity in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Local youngsters wrapped their knuckles with white tape to emulate their brawling hero.

He was briefly a celebrity in Starvation, too, after he retired from the minors and moved to town to sell insurance in the early 1990s. By then I had been working in Detroit for years and planned to stay until, as I dreamed, the New York Times or Washington Post hired me away. I never quite understood how Jason managed to woo Darlene. In a matter of weeks, my mother had told me, their romance went from a few weekends in Jason’s cabin in the woods to a wedding in the Pine County Courthouse. After hearing that, I wasn’t able to bring myself to go back to Starvation for months.

Darlene didn’t like to talk about her years with Jason. Everyone in town knew that he was much better at video golf in bars than he was at selling insurance, which was why he and Darlene could manage only to rent the little apartment over Sally’s that she lived in now. I teased her once that she had married Jason because he had skated for the team that had made me the town goat, that she had wanted to make me jealous. She went silent for two long nights, which made me think that what I had said in jest might actually have been a fact.

Which meant I never had to bring it up again. It was all in the past anyway, I told myself. But here Jason was, sitting across from me, my girlfriend’s husband. I wondered what Haskell knew about it, whether Jason had told him or he had heard it around town. Hell, I wondered what Jason knew.

“So, first practice is what?” I said. “Boxing lessons? How to get the other guy’s jersey over his head?”

Jason folded his arms on the table and leaned forward.

“This is a whole new package, my friend,” he said. “I’m here to prepare young men to be winners in life, on the ice and off.”

“Precisely,” Haskell said, placing a hand on Jason’s arm. “Past is past, now is now, and the future for the Hungry River Rats is brighter than ever, with a new rink, a new coach, and some fine new players.”

“That’s right,” Jason said. He glanced at Haskell, who removed his hand from Jason’s arm. Then Jason turned back to me. “I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve been telling his son: Winners win. Players play.”

“And goons goon. Isn’t that what they say in the East Coast League?”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

He seemed pretty cocky for a guy who’d lost his wife to me. I turned to Haskell. “How much are you paying him?”

Coaches normally received their annual pittance from the local hockey organization funded by parents and fans and silent auctions and sponsors like Enright’s and Fortune Drug. But I assumed that, if Haskell was handling the announcement, he would be writing Jason’s checks.

Haskell slid the manila envelope to me.

“Everything’s in there,” he said, and I knew my question wouldn’t be answered. “Press release, bio, photo, and other materials you may find helpful. It’s all yours. Nobody else has seen it.”

“How much is he getting to be coach? I don’t think Poppy makes more than like fifteen hundred.”

Jason started to answer but Haskell quieted him with a gently raised hand. “Candidly,” he said, “I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

“Look, if you’re paying him out of your pocket, or your unbuilt new rink’s pocket, then I guess it’s none of my business. But you said you might be seeking a ‘bit of help’ from the town, so I think-”

“Whoa,” Haskell said. “Hold on there, mister. That was off the record.”

“I understand, but I still heard what I heard, and my question-”

“No.” He wagged a finger back and forth in front of his face. “You don’t even know that, sir. I never said it. That’s what off the record means.”

Jason sat back and knitted his hands atop his head, enjoying the show.

“I know what off the record means,” I said.

Haskell looked at his watch. “My gosh,” he said. He picked up the phone again, punched two numbers. “Fel,” he said, “are you taking Taylor?” He turned away and lowered his voice, but I could still hear him. “Not-no. No. He needs to do his balance class. He has not been-dear? Dear? He hasn’t been getting from post to post like he-I’m sorry, but-please, Felicia, that’s simply not fair. He is not going to be playing in the New York Philharmonic so let’s just put that whole fantasy to rest.” He listened for a few seconds. I glanced at Jason, who’d let a barely disguised smile creep onto his face. “I understand that’s how you feel,” Haskell said.

He hung up the phone and pushed his chair back. “I’m afraid that’s all the time we have. Thank you for your time, Gus.”

“I had a few more questions.”

“I’m sorry,” Haskell said. “I didn’t realize how much time we’d already spent. But feel free to call me if you have follow-ups.”

“This afternoon?”

Haskell gave me one of his jury frowns. “Today is really not going to be good. Try me tomorrow.”

“I have a paper to put out.”

“Great,” he said. He pointed at the envelope. “You have a great front page story right there. Which reminds me. I have a question for you.”

“I thought you were out of time.”

Jason was smiling more broadly now.

“Have you been made aware,” Haskell said, “of our plans for advertising in your paper when the rink opens?”

“I don’t have a thing to do with advertising, Mr. Haskell.”

“Really?”

“Really. Love seeing it, though.”

The door opened and a buxom rail of a woman in jeans and a cashmere sweater the color of oatmeal appeared. I recognized her initially from the pictures on Haskell’s credenza; then I remembered seeing her at the rink, once with her son, another time with her son and husband. Her silver hair, drawn back into a billowy ponytail, belied the youth in her emerald eyes. Her left wrist was wrapped in an Ace bandage. Bracelets in silver and gold speckled with highlights matching her eyes covered her other wrist.

“Did you hurt yourself, dear?” Haskell said.

Her eyes darted from Haskell to Jason to me, where they lingered for an uncomfortable second before returning to her husband.

“Slipped on the back porch. Our plow crew missed a spot.”

“Let me see that.”

Haskell reached for her injured hand but his wife pulled it away.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I really would rather Taylor not miss another piano lesson.”

“Dear, I thought-”

“I went ahead and called his trainer and he said he’d move the balance session back an hour. So Tay can do both. I’ll have him back here for his pregame meal in plenty of time.”

Haskell gave her a look long enough to make me wish I was somewhere else. Felicia folded her arms. As she did, she took a tiny step backward.

“I see,” Haskell said. “We can talk about this later.”

“If you like.”

“Have you met Gus?”

I stood and extended my hand. “Gus Carpenter, Mrs. Haskell.”

“Of course,” she said. A smile flickered on her face. Her handshake dug a fat diamond into my palm. “Nice to finally meet you.”

For a second I wondered if she was being sarcastic. I figured she was the one who’d insisted that I stop calling the house for her husband.

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry for all the phone calls.”

“No trouble at all.” She looked at Jason. “It’s nice to see you, too, Jason.”

“Felicia.”

“I have to be going,” she said to Haskell. “But I can show Mr. Carpenter out.”

“Thank you, dear,” Haskell said. He reached for my hand. I shook without thinking. “Call if you need anything.”

“Not at the dinner hour, please,” Felicia Haskell said. “Come.”

I slid past Jason. Neither of us made a move to shake hands.

“See you,” I said.

“You going to be at the game tomorrow night?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Keep your head up.”