Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

Vend smiled wistfully. “Ah, yes, the middle ground,” he said. “How you Americans love to talk about the middle ground, that place where we all can agree. But really, Mr. Carpenter, if you think about it, there rarely is one that makes anybody happy. It’s really the place where we all disagree.”

He reminded me of CEOs I had interviewed. While you were listening and taking notes, they sounded colorful and provocative. You imagined you were getting good stuff for your story. But later, when you looked through your notes, you realized that they really hadn’t said anything you could use, that it was all bromides and platitudes and generalizations. You had nothing that stuck.

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“I have read your fine articles from the paper in Detroit. I like that paper. I’m not so fond of the other. So I thought you might understand. I am hoping that you would understand. Do you?”

“Have you eliminated or incapacitated all of your competitors?”

He studied me with a face at once curious and amused. “I am constantly at work,” he said. “How is your drink? It’s a Campbeltown malt, Springbank, fifteen years old. Not easy to get.”

“You said I looked like her. You refer to Gracie McBride, yes?”

I was sure by now that Jarek Vend had recruited Gracie all those years ago. Small-town girl, troubled family, long past virginity at the age of seventeen. She had worked for him, certainly slept with him, indulged with him in the kink that filled the cardboard boxes in her dark room. She must have known things about him, things he would not have wanted others to know. But things bad enough to compel him to kill her?

Vend ignored my question. “I have also enjoyed the stories you’ve been writing at your new paper.”

“Excuse me?”

He hit another button on his desk. All five TV screens filled with images of hockey players weaving to and fro. Vend reached into a fax machine on the credenza beneath the TVs, plucked out a page, and held it up for me to see. It was a copy of one of my stories about the new rink.

“You seem to be the only one who sees the reality of your situation.” He tilted his head to one side. “Why do you look so surprised?”

“Why would a strip-club owner in Detroit care about a hockey rink in Starvation Lake?”

“You love hockey, don’t you?”

“I play.”

“So did I.” He turned his head and put a finger to the scar on his neck. “Played very hard.”

“There are plenty of rinks around here. What does Jarek Vend care about ours?”

“Excellent pronunciation, Mr. Carpenter, thanks no doubt to your new friend, Miss Patricia Armbruster.”

An image of the woman hanging from the swing set in Sarnia appeared in my head. I focused on the tip of my pen moving across my notebook.

“I come from a small town in Ontario, LaSalle, where I grew up playing in a barn. You know-with the dressing rooms that made you duck your head, and no Zamboni, just a Jeep with a large brush attached to the front. So I can well appreciate how much a splendid new arena would mean to your town.”

“Understood.”

“But please tell me: why should I pay for your splendid new arena?”

“You? What are you talking about?”

He drained his glass and set it down hard on the desk. His smile had vanished. Ice cubes crunched in his teeth.

“You have written extensively about it,” he said. “There was the money, and then there was not. You used your skill to figure that much out, Mr. Carpenter. I commend you. But you have yet to determine where the money came from in the first place or where it went when it suddenly disappeared. Isn’t that right?”

He squeezed a lighter out of his jeans pocket and slowly relit his cigar, the flicker of flame flashing in his eyes. Then he turned his back and with two fingers pushed a button on his desktop. Four of the TV screens went dark. The middle screen remained on. “Observe.”

A man wearing nothing but a pair of white socks dangled from a rope attached at his back to a canvas harness wrapped around his torso like a girdle. The harness trussed him up at the elbows and ankles so that he looked like a chicken ready to go into an oven. His head was hidden in a black plastic garbage bag cinched at his neck. He spun slowly in the air, twisting his head back and forth in the bag.

A woman in a black leather halter and matching thong pranced around. She tugged lightly at the ropes, a pair of pliers clutched in one hand, her skin pallid as a perch belly. She had her back to the camera, but she was too tall to be Gracie. Still I thought of Gracie again, working at the bench in the Zamboni shed, the tools natural in her hands, a finger smear of grease on her cheek. The woman on the screen squatted down and propped herself beneath the man in the harness. I turned away.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Carpenter, that is the appropriate response, the response a great journalist is always seeking from his readers, no?”

“You can turn it off now.”

“Now you have a headline. You can tell the fine, upstanding citizens of Starvation Lake that this”-he waved his hand toward the screen with a flourish-“is one very important source of funding for their excellent new rink, the rink that will catapult them once again to hockey greatness.”

“Bullshit.”

“There, Mr. Carpenter, is that better?”

I looked back at the screen. Hockey players again were gliding where the hooded man had been writhing.

“You see, we provide a full array of services for our clientele,” Vend said. “The clubs are merely a point of entry-a lucrative point of entry, to be sure, but just a starting place, not unlike the Chevrolet that a young man buys before he graduates to a Pontiac and then a Buick and an Oldsmobile and, finally, a Cadillac. You have now seen the Cadillac. Or perhaps these days Lexus is the more appropriate analogy.”

He reached back and pushed the button on his desk again, keeping his hand there this time. The hockey players disappeared and all five screens lit up again. They were filled with close-up shots of five different men.

“No way,” I said.

“Of course,” Vend continued, “not everyone can afford every dish on the smorgasbord. Certain services begged for a rarefied sort of client, a man of certain tastes and bearing and means, who would pay a handsome premium for our services and, naturally, for absolute discretion.”

“Jesus,” I said, pointing at the first screen. “Judge Rapp? And that’s Davis McInerney.” McInerney was an executive vice president at Superior Motors. From my days at the Detroit Times, I recognized the others, too: a real estate developer, a state senator, a retired outfielder.

Now I had an idea what was on those videotapes in Gracie’s house. I tried to remember the initials I’d seen on the sides of the tapes. She must have figured out a way to smuggle out her own copies. She probably had more tapes hidden away somewhere else, somewhere safer. In my mind I scanned the rafters in the Zamboni shed, looking for hiding places. Vend must have known. Maybe Gracie had threatened to use the tapes against him, or his customers.

“It’s quite an illustrious gallery,” Vend said. He hit the button again. Five more men appeared: two attorneys, a city councilman, two men I didn’t recognize, one of them wearing a police uniform. Vend hit the button again and there were five more. He kept hitting it until the faces were flashing too fast for me to tell who they were.

“And these guys were all into the kinky stuff?”

Vend took a puff on his cigar. “Not necessarily. As I said, we offered-offer-a multiplicity of services. That is one. The presence of the young woman enhances the aesthetic of the experience while at the same time offering some peace of mind in the knowledge that she is there to prevent any unfortunate accidents.”