Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

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.