Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“I was definitely thinking that the other day as I was typing up the St. Jude Society’s lost-and-found list.”

Dingus set the pamphlet on his blotter and pointed at my face. “Don’t give me that smart-ass bull. Your sister’s dead and all you care about is your stupid little scoops?”

His singsong voice sometimes made it hard to take him seriously. Not at the moment. His mood tasted like all the sharp metal in the room, the angle-iron chairs, the star points on his badge, the shelf brackets, his pistol.

“She wasn’t my sister,” I said.

“For all intents and purposes, she damned well was. Nobody took better care of her than your mother. I had the distinct privilege of being reminded of that about an hour ago when Gracie’s other mother was sitting in that chair you’re in now.”

“Shirley?” That explained the perfume.

Dingus snatched a yellow Post-it note off his blotter and slapped it down on the desk in front of me. I leaned in. The perfume filled my nostrils. Shirley usually used enough to deodorize a

ballroom. I peered at her scribble, which listed to the right: MUST TALK. URGINT NEWS. PLEAS CALL 231 555 3671.

“This is for me?” I said. “She’s threatening you?”

“Hell’s bells, it would take me all night to tell you how many times she’s told me she’d be going to the Pilot with this little bitch or that. She’s the least of my worries.”

I ignored the vibrating cell phone in my pocket.

“What did she want?”

He jumped up from his chair and paced to the back of the room, where a pair of particle-board shelves held cans of pepper spray, an assortment of black-and-chrome-colored handcuffs, and a photograph of Dingus’s ex-wife and current girlfriend, Barbara. “She wants me to find a murderer,” he said. His voice turned sarcastic. “She wants her daughter avenged. She wants closure.”

I imagined Shirley pounding her fat pink fist on Dingus’s desk, the bracelets she bought out of the clearance bin at Glen’s rattling, her bleached blond perm bouncing. She’d be wearing Kmart designer jeans pushing the zipper flap open and one of those $17.50 THROW AWAY THAT CORK! sweatshirts from the Just One More Saloon. Around town it was said that Shirley had sold her dead husband’s Purple Heart medal for $33.50 on an Internet auction site. It wasn’t hard to believe.

“She wants the life insurance proceeds,” I said. “And she’s going to raise a stink about it. But there is a murderer, isn’t there, Dingus?”

“l’ll be goddamned,” he said, turning away from me.

A light on Dingus’s phone started to blink. He didn’t notice. He was pacing from the shelf to his desk and back. The light went off and Dingus stopped in the middle of the room and held his arms out wide. His face flushed red.

“Why?” he said. “Why the hell did she have to come back here?” He pointed at his phone. “That thing’s been ringing all day. Every damn member of the county commission and the town council’s calling to tell me, ‘Leave it alone, Dingus’ and ‘Just let it lie, Dingus.’ ”

“Nobody wants a murder around here,” I said. “They have more important things to worry about.”

“Shirley’s just trailer trash to them, not worth the overtime,” Dingus said. “That doesn’t surprise me one bit. But they’re calling Doc Joe, too.” The county coroner. “They’re not supposed to do that. Doc, he gets the faintest whiff they might cut his budget, he’ll sign whatever they want.”

“Are they threatening to whack you too?”

“Funny you should ask.”

Dingus stepped to his desk, grabbed a file folder, and plucked out a sheet of paper that had come over a fax machine. He handed it to me. “You can’t have this,” he said. “But you can read it.”

The fax had been sent at 11:18 that morning. It was signed by town council chairman Elvis Bontrager. The town, which had long ago eliminated its own police force for lack of funds, now relied on the sheriff’s department and contributed to its budget. Elvis’s letter said an allocation of money for the purchase of two new police cruisers might have to be “temporarily delayed” because of “reconciliation issues” that had recently cropped up.

Damn, I thought. Laird Haskell, who probably didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t have cared, was picking Dingus’s pocket. Instead of paying for better public safety, the council was about to give $100,000 to a supposed millionaire so he could build a hockey rink. Great for the story I was about to write. Not so great for Starvation. Unless, of course, the River Rats won a state championship. Then everything would be fine, and it wouldn’t matter to a soul if the local cops had to resort to bicycles to do their jobs.

“That sucks,” I said, handing the letter back. “They can just do that?”

“They can just do that,” Dingus said. “And that’s not all. They’re talking with the county commission about more cuts. Just between us.”

I thought about Darlene. For all of her carping about Dingus and the other “boys” at the department, she loved being a police officer. She would hate to lose her job so the town could have a shiny new hockey arena.

“Why do they give a rip?”

Dingus might have been the only person in town-except, perhaps, my mother-who didn’t care about hockey. He’d never played it, didn’t watch it, and probably thought it just caused him a lot of grief, what with all the postgame bar fights and drunks steering their way out of the rink parking lot.

“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe they think a big murder investigation’ll spook their bankers and that rich fellow will walk and they won’t get their precious rink. I don’t know what the hell these people think.”

“What are you going to do?”

He sat down heavily in his chair. His phone started blinking again. “I plan to proceed with-”

There was a knock at Dingus’s door. It opened and Deputy Frank D’Alessio ducked his head in. He gave me a What the fuck are you doing here? look before telling Dingus, “Sheriff, you have a call.”

“I can see that,” Dingus said. “Who is it?”

D’Alessio glanced at me and said, “Uh, a council member.”

“Which council member, Deputy?”

“Chairman Bontrager.”

“Not now.”

“He said it’s important.”

“Tell him to go cut a hole in the lake and jump in.”

D’Alessio grinned. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when you can.”

Dingus watched the door close.

“So,” I said, “you’re not really going to charge Soupy, are you? You just leaked that to buy yourself some time with the politicians.”

Dingus shrugged his acknowledgment. At least he hadn’t used me like he had Channel Eight. “I could still charge him with obstruction, though.”

“He’s not talking?”

“No, he’s-excuse me.”

A different light on his phone was blinking. Dingus picked up the phone and turned in his chair until he faced away from me. But I could still hear him, as he undoubtedly knew. “What’s up, Doc?” he said.

A full minute passed. “OK. Let me know. Thanks.” He turned around and hung up the phone. “Goddammit-why did she have to come back here?” He said it less to me than to himself. “You know, whatever happened to that girl-and we are off the record here, son-whatever happened to that girl has nothing whatsoever to do with the people of this town. Nothing at all.”

“Why don’t you send someone down to Detroit?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not going to have that.”

“They?”

He waved at his phone. “The whole lot of them.” He shook his head. “I told her not to come back here. I told her never come back.”

“What are you talking about?”