Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“Wait a minute,” I said. “The house in foreclosure? I was in-I mean, the person living there still has the house. Doesn’t the bank padlock it or something?”

“Not always,” Nova said. “This one’s going up for a sheriff’s sale. But the owner gets to try to pay back the money. You know, to redeem themselves.”

Redemption and Haskell didn’t quite go together. But apparently he had held Gracie’s house back from Vend. I wondered why. For some reason, he must have hoped Gracie would go back downstate.

“One more thing, Nova Marie?”

“Please?”

“Please.”

Out of the mess of old newspapers and fast-food rubbish on the passenger seat floor, I dredged up a foam coffee cup.

“Does your list have an address on Prospect?”

“It does indeed.” She read it to me. It matched the one for Trixie’s women’s center I’d scribbled on the coffee cup.

Trixie might never have known it, but her landlord had once been Laird Haskell. Now, whether she knew it or not, her landlord was Jerek Vend. Of course she was having trouble. Had Haskell discounted her rent because he felt such pity for unfortunate women? Had Vend raised it beyond her means?

It made sense in the twisted, incestuous way that the last few days made sense.

Philo came walking up the hill. He waved and went inside the pizzeria.

“Thank you, Nova,” I said. “I owe you one.”

“How about two-like two tickets to a Lions game?”

I saw Soupy come back out of Enrights, let the door close, and just stand there in the cold, head bowed, arms wrapped around himself.

“You there?”

“Yes, yes,” I told Nova. “I’m on it.”

Soupy went back inside. I thought of the calendar hanging in his kitchen. I looked down the street for Dougie Baker; he was gone. I remembered the piano music spilling over me in the Haskell kitchen. Something about it bothered me.

“And don’t be hanging up on me no more.”

“Shall I spread these out in grease or marinara?” Philo said.

We were sitting in the corner booth at the pizzeria. The only other person in the place was the owner, Belly, who was in the kitchen. Philo held a file folder against his blue-and-black argyle sweater and surveyed the table with a look of utter disgust. Belly hadn’t yet changed the old Pilot covering the table.

“Who cares? They’re just photocopies, right?”

“I would prefer not to wallow around in some stranger’s lunch.” Philo came halfway out of his seat. “Waiter?” he shouted. “Can you bus this table?”

“Hold your fucking horses,” Belly yelled from somewhere behind the counter. “I’m a one-man show here.”

“Well, excuse me,” Philo said, sitting back down.

“Here,” I said, peeling one edge of the newspaper away and folding it in half to expose the bare plastic tabletop. “Let’s see what you know that I couldn’t possibly figure out for myself.”

Philo laid the folder flat on the table and flipped it open to reveal a two-inch-high stack of photocopied documents. Most of them had come from the Michigan Department of Treasury, although I’d sent my freedom-of-information requests to every agency I thought Haskell might have had to file with. Sticky tabs in red, orange, green, and yellow jutted from the edges of the pile.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Show me all this stuff, given that I’m persona non grata at the Pilot?”

Philo gave me a hard look through his horn-rims. Then he said, “Do you plan to go to the town council meeting today?”

“Why do you care?”

“I might need your advice when I write my story.”

Philo was serious. “I’m flattered,” I said, “even if you won’t be publishing for three days. Anyway, if Haskell’s going to apologize, I want to be there. Who knows? Maybe he’ll apologize to me.”

“Good.” Philo placed one hand flat on the stack of pages. “They didn’t give us everything you asked for.”

“They never do.”

“And this stuff doesn’t tell you very much.”

“Nope.”

“A lot of it’s just routine. Some is blacked out. But there are a couple of things that might be helpful. You were obviously trying to figure out where Laird Haskell was getting his money, or where things might have gone awry for him.” He fingered the pages back to the green tab he had marked “dt.” He slipped out a few stapled pages and handed them to me. “This could be informative.”

I scanned the cover page quickly. It was a state registration for a business called ExpertWitness Trading LLC. I found the description on line 6A: “Trading of securities and related assets.”

“No way,” I said. “He was trading stocks? Himself?”

“Looks like it. You can’t tell for sure.”

“Good way to piss away a fortune in a hurry.”

I flipped through the other pages. Haskell was not required to report how much he’d made or lost on the business. The last page listed the principal owners of ExpertWitness Trading as Laird Haskell and Felicia Quarles Haskell. I wondered if she knew she was co-owner of a one-man day-trading firm. I thought of Vend showing me the TV screens in his office, the comely young women furrowing their brows over the latest market news, the stock charts pointing infinitely up. Vend knew just how Haskell had been seduced.

“Yes,” Philo said. “And from reading your stories about him, he strikes me as a man who would believe he could master anything.”

“You read my stories? My Times stories?”

“Just a few. Found them online.”

“Yeah, well, if you can kick the auto industry’s ass, why not Wall Street?”

“Exactly.”

“Plus, it’s a fun way to fill up a lonely winter day up north.”

“Though I don’t really understand why he’d bother filing the paperwork.”

“Easier to write off the losses on your income tax,” I said. “Or to have a legal cover for laundering money.”

“Why would Haskell need to launder money?”

“Did you read this morning’s Free Press?”

“Yes. Of course.”

I handed the pages back. Philo fitted them back in the original stack. I had never seen him so focused on something other than a budget.

“What else you got?”

“The rest of the stuff really just indicates how many different businesses Haskell was trying to run in addition to whatever legal work he might have had. Real estate, a little retail, the new rink, a bunch of residential downstate. But there was one thing, in particular-”

“Nothing about kinky sex?”

Philo stopped arranging the pages and looked at me. “Kinky-oh, the waiter.”

Belly stood at the table glowering at Philo. “I am the proprietor, sir,” he said.

I grinned. “Hey, Bell. Meet Philo Beech of the Pilot.”

Neither of them offered a hand. Belly grunted. “What the hell kind of name is that? Philo? Sounds like something you use to wash a pot.”

“I was named for my great-grandfather.”

“BFD,” Belly said. He looked at me. “You guys going to order today?”

We ordered Italian subs to go, mine with peppers, Philo’s without. “Here, let me grab this,” Belly said, tearing the newspaper away from the table and balling it up in his hands. “I’ll bring you another.”

“Did you say kinky sex?” Philo whispered.

“Just a joke. Let’s see some more.”

“Well.” He took a deep breath. “There’s this one thing.”

“The thing I couldn’t have figured out.”

He ignored me and pulled out another stack of pages. “This particular collection of documents seems to show that Mr. Haskell, along with some other individuals, owns a great deal more property than we thought, right next to the property where the new hockey rink is being built.”