Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Arguing about what?”

“I’m not sure. They kept their voices down. But it had something to do with an envelope.”

Down from the walkway behind me the Hungry River lay frozen in the morning dark. Sometimes you could hear the burble of the water flowing beneath the ice. “Who brought the envelope?”

“I don’t know. But it was pretty clear that Bea didn’t want it. Then she almost left without it. I had to chase her down the sidewalk.”

“Yeah?”

“A manila envelope.” She held her right thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “About yay thick.”

Goddammit, Mother, I thought as I pulled my truck out of Starvation and aimed it toward Interstate 75 south.

She was smoking a cigarette in a booth at the back of the Petros Coney Island on Michigan Avenue in east Dearborn. The tall Greek behind the counter nodded at me as I made my way to the table. His given name, I recalled, was Phaethon, though he went by Fred. Perhaps he remembered me, too. I savored the aromas of onions and chili and eggs fried in butter. I had fond memories of Petros.

Michele Higgins and I used to have long breakfasts there when I was writing about the auto industry for the Detroit Times and she was covering cops and, later, federal courts for the Detroit Free Press. We both lived near downtown at the time, but when we first started seeing each other, we didn’t want to take the chance that someone from either of our papers would see us together, sitting on the same side of the booth, and think we might be sharing secrets between competitors. It was silly to think so; there were plenty of dalliances, affairs, and even marriages across the two dailies. Maybe, like those reporters who prefer to quote anonymous sources, we just thought it sexier to carry on a clandestine relationship.

“Hey there,” I said. I slid into the booth opposite Mich. My butt scratched across a piece of duct tape that had been used to patch a tear in the red vinyl. I set the accordion folder Dingus had given me on the table next to the napkin dispenser. Mich glanced at it as she crushed out her cigarette. She pulled her blond locks off her forehead, only to have them fall right back. Her hair never stayed where she put it.

“Hey,” she said.

It must have been too much for her to smile, especially this early in the morning. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and the smell of cigarettes hung on her black leather jacket.

“You look good.”

“Ah,” she said, dismissing my compliment, probably knowing it was halfhearted. She did look good for a forty-year-old, though she’d looked better. “What brings you to the real world?”

Fred appeared at our table. “The usual?” he said.

He really did remember, and not just me. I wondered if Mich still came to Petros. I looked at Fred. His thin salt-and-pepper mustache was neatly trimmed, as ever.

“Not for me,” I said. “Just coffee, black, and some rye toast.”

“It’s good to see you again, Mr. Carpenter.”

“You too, Fred. But it’s Gus, OK?”

He smiled. We’d been over this a few years before. “OK, Mr. Carpenter,” he said. “And Miss Michele?”

“Grapefruit juice.” She hated the stuff but insisted that it helped cure her hangovers. “And two eggs, soft-boiled.”

“Three and a half minutes?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Fred went back behind the counter.

“Nice piece on the judge with the three families.” The story had been among the ones I’d found in my search back at the Pilot. “What the hell was the guy thinking?”

Mich lit another cigarette without taking her eyes off me. “I don’t need you blowing smoke up my ass. You don’t read the Times or the Freep. Let’s just get to it, all right?”

“Sorry.”

“And the next time you use the sorry word, I’m out of here.”

I wished I could’ve just paid and left. But I needed Mich. She was the best crime reporter in Detroit-sourced up her pretty butt, like lightning on a keyboard, and when it came to competitors, ruthlessly efficient.

In her own newsroom she’d dismiss her rivals’ stories as “wheezes” or “snoozers” or “history.” But when she ran into one of them at the cop shop or a crime scene, she was all smiles and flattery, softening them up, getting them off their games. “I worshipped your story on the twelve-year-old drug runner,” she’d say. Or, “Man, you blazed a trail I’ll have a hell of a time following.” Veterans weren’t so easily snowed, especially after she’d scooped them a few dozen times. Youngsters were another matter.

Once, she was sequestered in a room at the federal courthouse with a young Times reporter. They were supposed to have equal access to a box of documents on a money-laudering case involving a car dealer.

“Oh, I know your byline,” Michele Higgins told the Times rookie. “I hear you’re on the fast track.”

He actually blushed. “I don’t know about that, but thanks,” he said.

The Times reporter, who obviously didn’t know Mich, left to use the men’s room. Mich plucked out some of the juiciest documents and hid them in her purse. Only after the Times reporter finished going through the paper and left to write his story did Mich return the documents to the box. The next morning, Mich’s front-page story blew away the eight-inch piece inside the Times.

And the blushing one-me-got his ass chewed by his bosses.

Some time later, I encountered Mich again by the jukebox at the Anchor Bar. It was late and I was about to play Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” when she reached over me to punch in B86 for “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC.

“Hey there, rookie,” she said. “You really like Patsy Cline?”

I turned, recognized her, may have blushed again.

“I do,” I said. “Why’d you do that to me?”

“What?” she said. “You don’t like AC/DC?”

“No. The auto dealer story.”

“Oh.” She reached past me again and punched in A18 for “Crazy.” Her perfume washed over me as she turned her face close to mine.

“You know, they had paper clips in there,” she said. She smiled. “Maybe you should’ve put one on your cock.”

From that night on we were together, sort of, except when we weren’t. There was occasional talk of marriage-most of it on the newsroom grapevine that ran past the Anchor between our papers-but we both knew that getting married would require divorces from our jobs. I couldn’t recall ever telling her that I loved her, at least not when I was sober. She could have made the same claim, with the exception of the morning after her Chihuahua McGraw was killed on the street outside her apartment in Indian Village and she was a puddle.

The fact was, I was no match for the police radio on her nightstand, and Mich couldn’t compete with the half-in-the-bag union guys and cranky auto chiefs who called me late at night to brag and whine and squeal and leak. Our thing, as Mich called it, was hardly the stuff of Hallmark cards. But it rarely lacked for excitement. Each of us had keys to the other’s apartment. We never knew when one of us might come home after midnight to find the other waiting naked and hungry.

I liked it but most of the time I did not crave it, and neither did Mich. Or so I thought. After my job blew up and I moved back to Starvation, I put our thing behind me along with everything else from Detroit. I stopped returning Mich’s calls, partly because I was embarrassed, partly because I didn’t believe she’d ever care enough to venture as far from her precious cop shops and courtrooms as Starvation Lake.

Then one night I opened the door to the apartment I’d had over the Pilot until Media North kicked me out. There she was in my recliner, a glass of Crown Royal on the rocks in one hand, a bedsheet bunched at her breasts in the other. “Oh, fuck,” said Darlene, who’d come home with me after dinner at a bistro in Bellaire. Oh, fuck, indeed. Darlene turned around and walked out. It took me two weeks to untangle that mess.