Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“But Gracie wasn’t just a minder, was she, Mr. Vend?”

“Our associates perform a wide array of services for a wide array of customers.”

The TVs went black.

“Unfortunately,” Vend continued, “I personally did not have access to a certain, shall we say, strata of clientele, at least not back then. I had the product; I needed a partner who could provide the proper customer.”

“And you found one. One who clearly was in that strata.”

“Indeed.” I knew what he was going to say next. “Mr. Haskell was the best money could buy.”

It was surprisingly easy to believe. While part of me didn’t want to think a man of Laird Haskell’s public stature would risk his career and family on such an enterprise, the part that knew Haskell, the part that had encountered many a rich and powerful man who had succumbed to the illusion that he could become invisible, accepted it as easily as if Vend had told me that Haskell favored suits and ties in the courtroom. I could see him first as a customer, then as a recruiter of talent, then as Vend’s pipeline to the wealthy and powerful.

“And now,” I said, “your partner is stealing from you to build his rink.”

“There appears to have been some diversions. But not just from me, Mr. Carpenter. I assume he is stealing-that is, diverting monies-from others as well. I just happened to be-what do ambulance chasers like Mr. Haskell call it? — a deep pocket.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “He’s going to the town council tomorrow for a little loan of a hundred grand.”

“So I have heard,” Vend said. “Mr. Haskell is a most resourceful man, and we have benefited. He has been an enormously creative and productive member of our team. But he has let personal distractions cloud his focus. Obviously, for the sake of our employees and other various interests, I cannot indulge these distractions with my hard-earned assets.”

“By distractions, do you mean… his son?”

Vend blew out a thin ribbon of smoke that disappeared in the shadows above him. “We were all going to play in the NHL at one time in our lives, weren’t we?”

I thought of Taylor Haskell on the ice, slapping the goalposts with his stick. Then of the smoke floating out from the Zam shed the night before. Then of Gracie, and of the Free Press story she had tacked up on the wall of her dark room.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“What is it, Mr. Carpenter?”

“He brought Gracie into this?”

Haskell had moved to Starvation full-time only in the past year. But he’d had a summer cottage on the north side of the lake for as long as I could remember. In Starvation Lake, it wouldn’t have taken much to have known about Gracie, the small-town girl from the troubled family, and about her father, blasted from the sky over the jungles of Vietnam.

“I will leave you to your own conclusions,” Vend said. “As for Mr. Haskell, I now consider him my competitor.”

“And so,” I said, “‘Build it and they will die.’ ”

Vend cocked his head ever so slightly. I thought he might smile but he did not. The skin tightened around his cheekbones. He came off the desk, dropped his cigar on the carpet, and crushed it beneath the sole of his loafer.

“For the record,” he said, “we support Mr. Haskell’s efforts to extort-excuse me, extract-additional monies from your elected leaders.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Indeed, we believe Mr. Haskell ought to seek even more support from your town’s benevolent elder statesmen. Will you be in attendance?”

“The chances are better if I get out of here.”

Now he smiled. “Of course.”

I wondered if he knew that I knew about him and Gracie at the Hill-Top Motel. He certainly couldn’t have known that I’d seen him with her at that Wings playoff game. “Tell me, Mr. Vend,” I said. “Could this thing with Haskell be about more than just money?”

He looked past me, snapped his fingers, and called out something I didn’t understand. I heard footsteps approaching, the door behind me swinging open. Vend looked at me.

“What is it you journalists like to say when you’ve been backed into a corner by your own recklessness? ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” He stepped up and pushed his face to within an inch of mine. Other, lighter, shorter scars became apparent along his neck. “Here is a message,” he whispered. “Your Gracie gave up on life because the people who supposedly loved her gave up on her. When you are all weeping around her grave, you should remember that there is no tragedy in the inevitable.”

He stepped back. Hands grabbed my shoulders from behind and jerked me out of the chair. Vend reached out and snatched my notebook away.

“Hey,” I said. I tried to wrench free but the men held me fast. “Come on.”

“Worry not,” Vend said. “I will return it momentarily.”

He dropped the notebook on the floor next to the flattened cigar butt. He unzipped his pants and removed himself. I understood then how he had gotten his nickname. It had nothing to do with the knob of tape on his goalie stick.

He zipped up and gestured toward the soaked notebook.

“There you go, Mr. Carpenter. I very much look forward to your next article, if you can get it in your little paper. I would hate for you to have come all the way down here for nothing.”

I left the notebook lying on the floor.

The flickering lights looked like fireflies through the tinted windows of the Suburban. As the vehicle rolled to a stop, the window to my right edged down, and the smell of burning gasoline leached in. Crater Face, sitting to my right, grabbed my arm and yanked me forward.

“Look,” he said.

The lights, I could see now, flashed from police cars and fire trucks and an ambulance. Flames and smoke were spewing from the roof of a house. Gracie’s house. We were parked one street over, close enough to see but not be seen. Every few seconds the lights illuminated neighbors standing around in parkas. I thought of the Red Wings cup waiting in the drainer.

And those videotapes I would never be seeing.

“Motherfuckers,” I said.

Crater Face turned and grasped me by the neck and squeezed, turning me sideways, his fingernails biting into my skin. The man behind me pinned my elbows back. I felt my neck muscles collapsing as I struggled to remain conscious. The window went back up. The vehicle started to move. The men let me go. They spoke in their language, laughing.

They were still laughing when they threw me onto the gravel of the parking lot at Nasty Melvin’s.

My hamstrings didn’t stop quivering until I veered onto Interstate 275 heading north. I pulled off at Eight Mile Road to fill up. The smell of gasoline made me nauseous. Ten minutes up 275, I was still smelling the gas. I pulled onto the shoulder and flicked on my emergency lights.

I found the four empty five-gallon cans under the cover of my flatbed. I glanced around, looking for police flashers. There were none yet. I waited until there was a break in traffic and took the cans and flung them into the high weeds poking through the snow across the road shoulder.

I stayed on back roads, keeping my eyes peeled for state police cruisers, all the way back to Starvation.

The cop lights flashed on in my rearview mirror just as I parked behind the Starvation Lake Arena. “Fuck me,” I said.

I had stopped earlier and called Darlene from a pay phone outside a Grayling tavern called Spike’s Keg ’O Nails. She hadn’t answered, so I’d told her voice mail I’d see her after the game. She wasn’t much of a hockey fan.

I’d also tried the Sarnia police. The night dispatcher told me only the chief was authorized to speak to the media, and he was out of town until the next night. I left my name and number.