Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

But I had assumed nevertheless, which was unforgivably lazy and stupid-a mistake, I told myself, that I never would have made back at the Times. Here I was unmarried, no kids, thirty-five, living at Mom’s house, dating a married woman. No wonder I was already getting soft.

I walked toward the old marina Soupy had sold out of his family. Two streetlamps hovered at either edge of the eight concrete docks invisible beneath the snow. Just inside the first lamp’s pool of light, a brass bell fringed with corrosion and ice sat silent on a stanchion. I sat down with the bell at my back and looked around to see that I was alone. I slipped the Pine County Sheriff’s Department police report, S-950863, out of the accordion folder.

An ambulance was called to the Hill-Top Motel at approximately 2:14 a.m. on that muggy Saturday, August 26, 1995. The date sounded familiar, though I didn’t immediately recognize why.

Dingus’ neat block lettering made it easy to read. I admired his meticulous reporting.

The Hill-Top offered seventeen small rooms, $23.95 a night, in a peeling one-story building atop a low rise along U.S. 131. It was a favorite of truckers making runs between Chicago and the Soo Locks in the Upper Peninsula, and of lovers from Mancelona and Kalkaska conducting illicit affairs.

The owner, a man named Clarence Kruger, was a bald sixty-two-year-old with shrubs of white hair sprouting around his ears. He was at the office desk when a silver Jaguar, top down, roared up the gravel drive shortly before midnight. The couple in the Jaguar weren’t the kind of people Kruger preferred to have stay in his motel, or at least that’s what he would later tell Dingus.

The woman got out of the car and wobbled up to Kruger on high heels. She wore a silken white summer dress splashed with polka dots the size and color of strawberries. The man in the Jaguar shouted at her across the lot.

“Cash,” he said. “No neighbor.” He seemed to have an accent.

Kruger noticed the neck of a bottle of gin protruding from the woman’s purse. “A room with nobody in the rooms next to it, please,” she told him.

Number 7 was such a room, but Kruger had just repainted it. He considered telling the woman he had no vacancy at all, but it had been a slow summer, what with the drizzly weekends, so he took her three five-dollar bills and nine ones and handed over the key to number 14. “There’s someone in thirteen but nobody in fifteen,” he said. “Best I can do.” The woman combed her hair with one hand while waiting for her nickel change.

The phone at his desk woke Kruger an hour later. His copy of Boxing Illustrated slipped off his chest and fell to the floor. He snatched up the phone. “Hill-Top,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Room thirteen here,” came the man’s voice on the other end of the line. He was whispering. “There’s some scary noises coming out of the room next to me. Sounds like somebody’s choking or something.”

Kruger sat up in his chair and peered across the lot. Of course the rooms were all dark. He told the man in 13 he’d look into it.

He dialed number 14. Kruger counted the rings. Ten. He hung up and redialed. Eight more rings. The woman answered. She sounded upset. “It’s… oh my God… please,” she said.

“What’s the matter, ma’am?” Kruger said, but she just kept sputtering incoherently and then hung up.

Kruger plucked his master key off the hook beneath his desk. He walked out to number 14 and leaned an ear against the door. The woman inside seemed to be weeping. “Wake up,” she kept saying. “Wake up, please, wake up.”

Kruger decided against knocking. He walked back to his office and called an ambulance, knowing it would also bring the sheriff or a deputy. He locked the door to his office, turned off the lights, and waited in the darkness, watching through the slatted blinds over his window. He put one hand to his heart. It was pounding. As he would tell Dingus, he’d had plenty of trouble in the Super 8s he had owned in Flint. How far north did a man have to travel to get away from it?

The phone rang again. Kruger let it ring three times before picking up.

“Yeah?”

“Jesus, guy,” the man in 13 said. “It sounds like they’re tearing the room apart next door. I just heard a hell of a crash.”

“Help is on the way, sir,” Kruger said. “Please be sure your door is locked and the dead bolt is in place.”

He heard the first siren just as the door on number 14 burst open and a man, naked and barefoot, staggered out into the light and fell. Kruger stood up from his chair.

The man crawled haltingly around on the pavement outside 14, grabbing at his throat, his skin glowing yellow in the wash of the bare bulb next to the door. The woman emerged, still in her summer dress, a shoulder strap fallen onto her arm. She dropped to her knees and placed a hand on the back of the man’s neck. She leaned down to his ear and said something. He shook his head no, pushed her away. She leaned in again. He pushed her away harder. She stood and backed into the doorway and pulled the shoulder strap back over her arm.

The door on number 13 opened. A man came out. Kruger considered going out himself, almost put his hand to the doorknob, but the siren was growing louder.

He thought better of it.

The man from 13 was barefoot in jeans and a wrinkled white V-neck undershirt. His left forearm bore a faded, shapeless tattoo.

The naked man slowly stood. Kruger saw that he had a penis like a section of garden hose, much darker than the rest of his ashen body. Kruger grabbed the crank on his window and opened it enough to hear. The sirens, more than one now, swelled in his ears.

“Jesus H. Christ, man, you all right?” the tattooed man was saying. The naked man seized his penis in his right hand and yanked something rubbery and black away. He tossed it at the woman, who caught it and threw it into the room. “What in hell is going on here?” the tattooed man said.

The naked man stepped forward and said something Kruger couldn’t make out. The woman clapped a hand over her mouth, laughing. The tattooed man took a step backward toward his room. The naked man offered him a hand. As he did, the light illuminated a scar on the right side of his neck the shape of a jagged crescent moon.

“Get the hell away,” the tattooed man said.

It happened so fast that Kruger would have trouble explaining it to the police. The naked man stepped forward and took the tattooed man by his shoulders and hammered the butt of his head into the other man’s face. The tattooed man staggered backward, grasping at his nose and cursing as blood spurted between his fingers. The naked man watched for a few seconds. Kruger thought he looked amused. Then the naked man turned and ran to the Jaguar, snickering as he hopped gingerly across the gravel. The woman gave chase but he leapt over the door into the driver’s seat and stomped on the gas. She threw up her arms to shield her face against the flying pebbles.

The woman was uncooperative with Deputy Sheriff Dingus Aho, refusing, at first, even to acknowledge that she was Grace Maureen McBride. She denied knowing anything about the peculiar equipment the police found inside number 14, insisting it had been there when they checked in.

An eyebolt had been screwed into a stud inside the wall just above the bed, about three inches below the ceiling. Hanging from the bolt the police found shreds of sheet that appeared to have been torn from the bed in the room. The bed had been stripped to a bare mattress on which police found bits of drywall plaster and a tangle of frayed yellow twine. The materials were marked as evidence and sent to the state crime lab in Grayling for further analysis. Dingus’s report noted that the black rubbery item the naked man had removed from his penis appeared to be a vacuum cleaner attachment.