Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

I shut off the ignition and made sure my doors were locked.

The one-story ranch was the last place I would have looked for a strip- club magnate. It was dressed in clean white aluminum siding. The white awnings over the front windows and porch were trimmed in royal blue. The lawn surrounded a rock garden set off by a neat curving border of beige bricks. In the middle of the garden stood a statue of the Blessed Mother.

What was I going to do? Just walk up and say, “Is Knobbo here?” I wasn’t even sure that Vend lived there anymore. The address I’d found in Dingus’s file was almost four years old, after all.

I picked up my cell phone. There were messages from Darlene and Philo. I dialed Darlene, ready to be yelled at.

“‘Apparent suicide’?” she said. “Three paragraphs? You know we have a bomb squad here from Traverse? Does it sound like we’re treating this like a suicide?”

“It’s not what I wrote,” I said. “The fucking fat ass in-”

“Why do you let them push you around?”

That wasn’t as simple a question as she might have imagined.

“I don’t, Darlene. But it’s not my paper.”

“Whatever. The Pilot’s so irrelevant anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“I just hope it doesn’t make people who might have information think it’s OK to keep quiet.”

“Look, I’m sorry. At least Dingus seems to be letting you in on things.”

“Where are you?”

“Beautiful Melvindale, Michigan.”

“Good. Gracie lived there. Or at least that’s where I mailed my letters… Hang on. I’m drying my hair. Finally got a shower.”

Her hair had been wet the first time I had really noticed Darlene. I was thirteen. I crossed her yard next door to mine to catch the school bus that stopped in front of her house. I leaned against the mailbox facing Darlene’s house, my books under one arm. Next door my mutts, Fats and Blinky, started barking as the bus approached.

Darlene’s screen door opened halfway and then banged shut and then opened again. She stepped out onto her porch in her white parka, a stack of books cradled against her chest, her damp, dark hair shining in the sun. I heard the bus rumble to a stop behind me but I kept watching Darlene. She didn’t even look at the bus. She bent forward at the waist and with her free arm shook out her hair as it fell over her face. Then she tossed it all back and shook her head some more and ran her hand through her hair again and again, smoothing it back and over her hood.

The bus driver beeped her horn. A year before, a month before, a day before that morning, I would have yelled, “Come on, Darlene, move!” But today I just stood there watching her take care of herself. Of course she was being selfish and vain and disrespectful. And that thrilled me. She wasn’t afraid to believe that she knew what mattered at that moment, and that it wasn’t the bus or the school bell or anything else but that she looked her very best before she started her day. As I watched her cross her lawn and climb the bus steps without a word or a glance for the bus driver or for me, I knew that I wanted to matter to her.

“It’s crazy here,” she said now.

“The coroner say anything yet?”

“No. Dingus is trying to hold him off. We think the bomb was set off remotely. You can do it with a phone call to a beeper or a cell phone.”

“Can you trace it?”

“Pretty hard without the beeper or the cell. We’re working on it. Actually, I’m working on it.”

“Has anyone taken credit for it?”

“Credit?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No one has stepped forward. No one has contacted us. We can only conclude it was someone who had it in for Gracie.”

“Could it be somebody trying to send a message about the new rink?”

“What would the message be?”

Build it and they will die, I thought. But I said, “I don’t know. Why would somebody kill Gracie and then bother with a bomb that apparently wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”

“How do you know it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone?”

Because Michele Higgins had told me.

“I don’t,” I said.

“We think the bomb was planted on the underside of that stool Gracie used on the Zamboni. So it could have hurt her, or somebody else driving it. I don’t know. Maybe there was a screwup. Maybe there’s more than one person involved. Maybe there’s more to this than just Gracie.”

“Any prints?”

“Just Gracie’s and a couple from that kid who works the concession stand, but that’s no surprise.”

“I suppose Tawny Jane’s been all over this.”

“She was waiting for me when I left the department an hour ago.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“I told her I liked how she colored out the gray in her hair. How about you? What are you doing?”

“Driving around mostly.” I didn’t mention Mich. Instead I told Darlene about Vend and that police report from 1995. She went quiet for a minute.

“I see,” she said. “So that’s what happened the night before the wedding.”

“I don’t suppose Gracie ever told you.”

“No.”

“Did she make the wedding?”

“No.”

“Of course you forgave her.”

“Not at first. At first I said I’d had enough. I mean, I didn’t even see her, barely talked to her, for years. Then she wrote me this long letter about her life, about how she knew she’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people and now she was finally getting herself together. This was after she got back, last year sometime. I just reread it last night.”

“I’ll bet she didn’t name any names.”

“No. Except one, which is why I called, partly. Maybe you can find this woman. Looks like she might have been trying to help Gracie.”

“Gracie never said anything about her before?”

“Not that I can recall. Her name’s Trixie.”

“Trixie what?”

“I don’t have a last name.”

“Great. I’ll just look in the phone book under Trixie.”

“I thought you were a reporter.” She waited for a reply that I wasn’t about to give her. “She works at some kind of center for abused women. She apparently went by Trixie the Tramp, or at least that’s what Gracie called her.”

Darlene’s landline phone began to ring in the background.

“Trixie the Tramp,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”

“I know you will.”

“By the way, your hubby and I had a little talk last night.”

The landline phone rang for the fourth time.

“Jesus-hold on.”

The ringing stopped as Darlene picked up. I pressed my cell phone to my ear to hear. “Roger,” Darlene said. “OK. I’ll be there in ten.”

She hung up the landline and came back to me. “I have to go.”

“We have to talk about Jason.”

“Not now,” she said. My heart sank a little. “That was Dingus.”

“OK. Go.”

My cell phone battery was almost out, and I’d forgotten the charger. But I wanted to call Philo. He’d sounded oddly urgent on the brief message he’d left for me to call him. Maybe he’s cleaning out my desk, I thought.

“Were you aware,” I said when he picked up, “that there really was a drain commission meeting today? Eleven a.m. at the county building.”

“I know. I went.”

I almost dropped my phone.

“Really? How was it?”

“Boring, mostly. A collection of old fat white guys dithering. How do these people order in restaurants?”

“That’s the drain commission.”

“And what the heck is a ‘wet-bottom pond’? Are there ponds with dry bottoms?”

“Welcome to the big time, Philo.”

A blue Suburban that looked newly washed pulled slowly past me and parked two driveways ahead, directly across from Vend’s house. I watched for the driver’s door to open. It didn’t. The tinted rear window kept me from seeing inside.