Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Yeah, I’m OK,” I said. “Worried about Soupy.”

“You’re a good friend, but Alden Campbell wouldn’t hurt a flea,” she said. Alden was Soupy’s real name, but Mrs. B and my mother were the only ones who called him by it. “How is your mother?”

“Not so good.”

“Yes. This is difficult for her. I went over this morning as soon as I saw her up.”

“Thanks. I must have just missed you. Have you seen Darlene?”

She shook her head no. “She woke me up in the middle of the night. I was glad she did, of course, but she wasn’t making any sense. All I could hear was that Gracie was”-she stopped, searched for a word-“gone. Then I just sat up all night.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What do you think?”

She picked a pile of advertising invoices out of her in-basket, started stacking certain ones on the counter to her left, others to her right. “Alden didn’t really think he could close the bar early and nobody would notice, did he?”

“Who knows what goes on in that head?”

“Do you think he knows anything?”

“No. I mean, he probably knows something about what happened to Gracie, hopefully not enough to get himself in trouble.” Damn Soupy, I thought. He was a month older than me, but seemed like a little brother half the time. “Mail?”

“On your desk.” She flipped her glasses down again. “School menus. The phone bill. A notice from the Boy Scouts on their March fund-raiser. The county extension newsletter; this month’s focus is winter mildew. Revised town council agenda. Two letters to the editor: one from Jill Smith about the restrooms at the senior center; one from Danny Braun about your stories on the new rink-I can read that one if you’d rather not.” She tipped her head so that she was looking at me over the rims of her glasses. “And something from Detroit.”

She loved me like a son. And mistrusted me like the punk next door who had once broken her daughter’s heart.

“Probably a parking ticket I never paid,” I said.

Philo appeared behind Mrs. B in the doorway to the newsroom. “Good afternoon, Gus,” he said. He usually used that line on me when I showed up at 10:00 a.m. Now the wall clock over his head said 1:20. I had plenty of time to finish what I had to do for Tuesday’s paper, but that wasn’t what counted with Philo. He had a punch-clock in his head that his uncle had installed.

“Sorry, Philo. I was out gathering information.”

The look on his face told me he was not impressed.

“One other thing,” Mrs. B said. “Shirley McBride stopped in.”

Gracie’s mother. “Here? How was she?”

Philo pointed one finger at the newsroom then disappeared back there.

“Oh, you know. It’s all about Shirley. She said she was on her way down to see Parmelee.” Parmelee Gilbert was the only lawyer left on Main Street. “Something about a life insurance policy.”

“Gracie’s life insurance? Don’t tell me.”

“Her uncle supposedly sold her a policy not too long ago.”

Gracie’s uncle was Floyd Kepsel, Shirley’s brother and the owner of Kepsel’s Ace Hardware. He sold life insurance on the side and was a town councilman.

“How much?”

“I don’t know. Shirley, as you know, isn’t always crystal clear.”

“But if it’s more than a hundred bucks…”

“Exactly. She was doing her entitlement thing. You know.”

“Yeah.” I’d seen it on display at assessment appeal meetings. Shirley was the exceedingly squeaky wheel who rarely got the grease, or at least never enough to satisfy her. “Is she stopping back here?”

“Gus!” I heard Philo call out.

Mrs. B jerked a thumb toward the back. “Go.”

Philo was on the phone so I tossed my coat on a table strewn with yellowing Pilots and started on what I had to get done before deadline: Rewrite the school menu, Boy Scouts, and extension service items into briefs. Write the Jason Esper story. Get the sheriff to talk to me about Gracie, then write that story, doing everything I could to avoid the word “suicide.” Now Gracie supposedly had a life insurance policy. Who would take the trouble to buy a life insurance policy if they were deciding when and how they would die?

I left the rest of the mail for later, although I glanced at the Detroit piece to see if Mrs. B had peeked inside. It didn’t appear that she had.

The message light on my phone was on. I dialed. There was one message: “The animals are restless,” came a raspy voice.

I deleted the message, fished my cell phone out of my coat pocket, and dialed a number I didn’t want on the Pilot phone bill, which Philo now spent half an hour going over each month. He was either looking for pennies to cut out of the budget or trying to figure out who my sources were. Probably both. Our cell phone bills went straight to corporate.

The raspy voice came on my cell phone: “You didn’t hear this from me.”

“Good afternoon.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa-don’t be saying my name.”

“I won’t. What do you know?”

It was Clayton Perlmutter, town councilman and self-appointed curmudgeon. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw my hockey bag. But he spent most of his days on the two phones in his house deep in the woods, trading this bit of gossip for that one until a lot of little bits added up to something that mattered. I had to keep him closer than folks I actually trusted, because he actually knew things they didn’t. In my eighteen years as a reporter, I had come to the reluctant realization that it was better dealing with liars and thieves than with people who didn’t know anything. Or people who were just plain stupid. Perlmutter was not stupid.

“Your old pal Laird,” Clayton Perlmutter said, “has visited with a few select members of your town council-not including yours truly, naturally, because he knows where I’d tell him to go-with a great big hat in his hand.”

“Really? I thought you were the one with the hat.”

I heard the low bark of a dog in the background. Perlmutter muffled the phone and yelled, “Shep. Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” He came back on. “No, son, no hat for me. That’s past history, you know that.”

“Of course.”

He fancied himself an entrepreneur. A year before, he’d gotten into some trouble with the state of Michigan for using research grants to support a sasquatch museum he’d never actually opened. Now he was proposing to build an Up North Hockey Hall of Fame on a couple of acres abutting the land where the new rink would be. He didn’t have a nickel to build the thing, but that wasn’t the point. Perlmutter merely wanted to scare Laird Haskell into buying his little plot at a handsome premium. Until Haskell did, Perlmutter would be juggling his phones and spreading rumors and trying to make trouble on the council.

“So, anyway, old Mr. Haskell, it turns out, ain’t as rich as he looks.”

“I think we’ve written that.”

“Ha,” Perlmutter said. “Nobody wants to believe it.”

Philo walked over and sat on my desk. He crossed his loafers and folded his hands on his knees. I smiled, pointed at the phone, held up a finger, and pressed the phone harder to my ear.

“Anyway,” Perlmutter continued, “the big rich lawyer now wants the town to give him a little loan. You know, just a short-term thing, no strings attached, thirty days same as cash, like we’re some kind of special bank for millionaires.”

“Really? How much?”

“Oh, not much at all. And of course it ain’t because he’s having any financial problems. It’s just a little cash-flow glitch is all.”

“How big of a glitch?”

“He just needs a little six-figure bridge loan.”

“Can you be more specific?”