Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

He pushed back up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet in the back corner of the office. He stretched a key ring on a retractable tether from his gun belt to the top drawer and unlocked it. He took out a brown accordion file, put it under one arm, locked the drawer, walked to the door, and opened it.

“This way,” he said.

I followed him out of his office. We walked down the corridor past the entrance, me glancing into offices to see if I might catch a glimpse of Darlene. I did not. At the end of the hallway we reached the locked door that opened into the Pine County Jail. Dingus peered through the little window crosshatched with steel. The door buzzed and Dingus pulled it open. He turned to me then and casually handed me the accordion folder.

“Hang on to this,” he said. “Do not lose it. Wait here.”

I took the folder and stood waiting, hoping no one would walk up and ask me what I was doing with a folder stamped CONFIDENTIAL on both sides. I stuffed it under an arm and glanced up at the surveillance camera screwed into the wall above the door, peering down on me like a crow on a telephone wire.

The door buzzed again. It opened and Soupy stepped through, Dingus right behind him. Past his shoulder I saw Darlene walking away and had to stop myself from calling after her.

“I’m releasing Mr. Campbell to you,” Dingus said. He turned to Soupy. “I’m not through with you. If you even think about taking any out-of-town trips, we’ll have you back in here before you hit the interstate. Got it?”

“Got it,” Soupy said.

“You tell them anything?” I said.

Soupy and I had just pulled out of the department lot, my headlamps carving the blackness into cones of white.

“I’m going broke, man,” he said. “Just get me back to my bar.”

He wasn’t going to talk. Not now. There’d be time to push him later.

There were all sorts of questions I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Dingus: What about that rejection letter Gracie had supposedly gotten? Why was she wearing only one shoe when she died? How did she get up into the shoe tree? Where was the ladder? Where was the car? Dingus might not have answered any of them. He usually gave me only what he wanted me to know, so that I might, in doing my own job, help him.

So I was dying to see what was in that accordion folder I’d stuck beneath my seat.

I glanced at Soupy. The way he was staring out his passenger window, I had to wonder if he was actually distraught over Gracie’s death, if he realized, facing the cops, that Gracie actually had mattered for more than whatever she did for him in bed, or on a Zamboni.

We rode in silence for a mile. Then, without turning to me, Soupy said, “Got something to tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not yanking your chain.”

“About what?”

He shifted in his seat until he was looking out the windshield. “They put me in that room where the prisoners see their lawyers,” he said. I’d been in the room once for an interview myself. There was a table bolted to the floor, a few hard-backed chairs, a single window covered with a metal cage. “I’m looking out at the back lot, and who rolls up but Meat.”

“Jason?”

“Yep.”

My heart was suddenly racing. “And?”

“He wasn’t there to pick up his safe-snowmobiling certificate, Trap.”

He told me he saw Darlene come out to meet Jason. She wasn’t wearing a coat. I imagined her holding her arms tight around her bosom, her breath billowing around her head. Of course Soupy couldn’t hear anything. Then someone came to take him to another room.

“Well,” I said, “they probably have divorce details to work out.”

“Maybe. Didn’t notice any lawyers out there.”

I kept my eyes on the unfurling white road, my lights flashing on the lower halves of tree trunks whisking by in the dusk.

“Thought you’d want to know,” Soupy said.

“Yeah. Thanks.” The lamps along Main Street were coming into view ahead. “They didn’t, at least when-?”

“No. No touchy feely. But… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“Looked to me like he wants her back or something.”

I cackled. It came out sounding like someone else. “That ain’t going to happen.”

I dropped Soupy at Enright’s and went around the block to the Pilot back lot, where I sat in the dark checking the messages on my cell phone.

The three council members I had called said they would have no comment on whatever story I was working on. A fourth whom I had not called also left a message saying she wasn’t interested in commenting. I had to figure they knew what I was going to ask.

The fifth message came from Darlene. She said she had to work late, don’t bother making spaghetti dinner, she’d catch up with me at the Rats game, or later. She loved me. She had to go.

Relax, I told myself. She still had issues to work through. She wasn’t going anywhere. Everything would be all right. I’d try her again later. We’d lock her door against the night and hide beneath her blankets.

I switched on an inside light and pulled the accordion folder out from under my seat. A label pasted to the top of the folder was inscribed in felt-tip pen: “McBRIDE, Grace Maureen, 08/26/95.”

I reached inside and pulled out a stapled bundle of pages, maybe fifteen in all. It was an official Pine County Sheriff’s Department report. I flipped immediately to the last page and, sure enough, there was the signature of then-deputy Dingus Aho. “Fucking-ay,” I said.

I looked at my watch: 5:21. I had thirty-nine minutes to write two stories and a few briefs. No sweat, I thought. But, as much as I wanted to see whatever Dingus wanted me to see, I did not have time then to sit and read that police report. There was no chance of it going in that night’s paper, and if I didn’t get my work done on deadline, I’d have a call from Jim Kerasopoulous waiting for me at eight o’clock the next morning. I had no desire to talk to Kerasopoulous, not about my dedication to my job, not about the future of the Pilot, not about the weather.

I slipped the folder back under the seat and started across the lot toward the newsroom. By now Philo was probably panicking. I started to write the Gracie story in my head. I wasn’t about to write the standard “apparent suicide” story, but, given what I had heard at the sheriff’s department, I had to be careful about using the word “murder.” Foul play, I typed on my imaginary keyboard, may have played a role in the macabre death of a Starvation Lake woman…

I stopped in my tracks.

Starvation Lake woman?

I turned and trotted back to my truck, unlocked the door. The inside light came on. I reached under the seat and slipped the police report out of the accordion folder. I wanted to see just one thing. It was typed on the very first page, just below Gracie’s name and house address: “Melvindale, Michigan.”

Melvindale sat just south of Detroit on the northwest border of River Rouge. River Rouge was the old steel town where the X’d-out calendar hanging over Gracie’s bed had come from.

I knew Melvindale. I’d played hockey there when I lived downstate and drank in a bar called Nasty Melvin’s. I hid the folder and locked my truck. Walking back to the newsroom, I had a feeling I might be visiting Nasty Melvin’s again.

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.