Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Huh?”

I heard a newspaper rustle in the background.

“You haven’t heard the news?”

“What news?”

“Looks like you got scooped again.”

I had watched a few minutes of Channel Eight’s 7:00 a.m. report at Mom’s house and seen nothing about Starvation Lake.

“Scooped how?”

“The Detroit Free Press. You know. Front page, too. Here, let me read you the headline: ‘Feds Investigating Car Makers’ Nemesis.’ ”

Car makers’ nemesis, I thought. Ralph Nader? Why would I care about the feds and Ralph Nader? Then it came to me.

“Haskell?” I said.

“Correct,” she said. “Would you like to hear the first paragraph?”

In my mind I saw Michele Higgins sitting across the table at Petros, cigarette jutting from her hand, her face lined with disdain.

“Go ahead.”

“‘A federal grand jury is considering evidence that renowned plaintiffs’ attorney Laird Haskell avoided paying taxes in excess of two million dollars, sources familiar with the matter say.’ ”

“Jesus,” I said.

“It gets better.” She continued reading. “‘Haskell, who left Metro Detroit last year and moved to the northern Michigan town of Starvation Lake, has had his assets frozen by the federal government and is said to be struggling to avoid personal bankruptcy, sources said.’ ”

She stopped. In a way, the story was a complement to what I’d written about Haskell’s inability to finish the new rink. But I doubted that was why Darlene was reading it to me.

“That’s quite a story,” I said, bracing myself.

“Here’s the best part.” She read:

A. J. Carpenter, executive editor of the local paper, the Pine County Pilot, said Haskell has stopped paying contractors he hired to build a new hockey rink in the town. “Work’s come to a stop,” Carpenter said in an interview Tuesday at a diner in Metro Detroit. “He’s trying to shake the town down for a hundred grand.”

Carpenter, a former Detroit Times reporter who resigned in the wake of an ethics scandal two years ago, described Haskell as “slippery as an eel.”

“I’ll bet you can guess the byline on the story.”

“It was strictly-”

“But not strict enough that you would mention it to me last night? Or the other day? I know you had all that other business to attend to and of course you had to get back in time for your precious hockey game but maybe you had a few minutes to squeeze in a quickie, huh?”

“Darlene, we had coffee.”

The line went silent. My tires whined on the plowed asphalt. Darlene spoke so softly then that I could barely hear what she said.

“You lied.”

“I-no. Darlene, I didn’t lie, I just didn’t-”

“You lied. And I don’t know who to believe anymore. I don’t know who to believe.”

She hung up.

I pulled my truck into a gas station at the corner of M-72 and U.S. 31 and parked. My foot hurt when I stepped on the brake, and I remembered Jason hovering over me, telling me to stay away from Darlene.

I stared at my cell phone lying in my lap.

I remembered how Mich suddenly had been in a hurry to leave Petros. The Mich who had a good story going, who’d probed me about Haskell to see what I knew, who must have gotten nervous that I would get to it before her. And just for the hell of it, shoved her knife in and twisted.

I thought of Darlene hunched over the paper, reading. She must have read it at the sheriff’s department. She didn’t get the Free Press at home. Somebody must have given it to her, pointed out the story, the quotes, made her blush with embarrassment.

“Damn, Darlene,” I said to no one. “I’m sorry.”

I tossed the phone aside and pulled my truck onto U.S. 31.

Downtown Traverse City was what Starvation Lake longed to be. Before noon fell, shoppers would be scuttling along the brick-trimmed sidewalks of Front Street beneath old-fashioned gaslights hung during summer with baskets of flowers. The cheerful shop windows would beckon with antiques and books and bathymetric maps of Lake Michigan and jewelry and fudge and pastel sweatshirts embroidered “Up North.” There were banks and bars and art galleries, a movie theater that actually showed movies, and restaurants boasting of sushi and wild boar tacos and fresh walleye with a nut crust du jour.

Still, I didn’t feel jealous in the least as I peered down on the street from a fourth-floor conference room at Media North headquarters. I would have taken Audrey’s egg pie over nut crust du jour any day. Envy was for people like the town council members who deluded themselves into thinking that an influx of rich downstaters like Haskell-Haskell, the man with the feds chasing him-would return Starvation to whatever glory it imagined it once enjoyed.

A door opened behind me. I turned. Kerasopoulos swept into the room. “Betty,” he said to his secretary. “No calls.”

He closed the door and motioned at the conference table. “Please.”

“Good morning, Jim.”

“I’m afraid it’s not. Sit.”

I took a seat facing him across the table. He had a thin sheaf of papers rolled up in one meaty hand. He set them facedown on the table between us and sat. The strands of his navy tie with the pinpoint pink dots splayed in opposite directions across his belly, like a bib. He pressed his palms together and set his hands on the table so that his fingers pointed at me.

“Gus,” he said. “It’s been a year of firsts for this admittedly young company. First time gross margins exceeded forty percent. First time selling an all-in-one mobile-phone, long-distance, cable-TV, and Internet package. First time recognized by the Michigan Association of Ad Agencies as a prime partner.”

He tapped the tips of his fingers on the table with each sentence, his eyebrows knitted into a single salt-and-pepper hedge across his forehead.

“OK,” I said.

“Now, thanks to your reckless and irresponsible reporting, we are confronted with our very first libel lawsuit.”

He slapped the papers with his right hand but left them facedown. “But let’s take things one at a time. First, your specious and highly speculative article about the unfortunate young woman who hung herself. Thank God we caught that before the first press run. Did you think you could sneak it past me, Gus?” He pointed at the wall at one end of the room where a trio of diplomas hung in wood frames. “Did you forget that, as an attorney who takes his profession very seriously, I’ve spent more than thirty-five years paying attention to every single little detail?”

Fat ass, I thought. “She didn’t kill herself. Wait. The cops are going to prove she was murdered.”

“Oh, they are, are they? Well, I guess they better let the Pine County medical examiner know, because he says she committed suicide.”

I dearly wanted to tell him that his pal Haskell might well be implicated. But I didn’t need him squealing about what I knew.

“All Doc Joe said was that strangu-”

“Shut up!” Kerasopoulos lifted his wide body halfway out of his seat and stabbed a finger in my direction. “Just shut your damn mouth. This is not an argument. This is not a negotiation. This is me, the president and chief executive officer of Media North Corporation, telling you what’s what. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“We would look like fools today if we had needlessly stirred the town up with your cockamamie triangulations of half truths and rumors with a few irrelevant facts thrown in. I will not have it.” He was bellowing now, his baritone booming into my face. “Do you hear me? I will not have it. And I will not have my neph-Philo learning that this is the way to publish a community newspaper.”

He sat back down, took a deep breath. His starched shirt collar dug into his mashed potato neck. “A word of advice, though I sincerely have no expectation of you taking it: you really should keep your family matters within your family.”