Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

“How do you know that?”

“Go on.”

Haskell pleaded ignorance, she said. He called the shoe a prank, blamed it on another lawyer he said was messing with him over a case. Felicia hired a private investigator. A young woman, the investigator discovered, had been trying to make contact with the son she had long ago given up for adoption. A young woman who knew Laird Haskell quite well.

As Felicia spoke, I imagined Gracie sitting high in the rafters at the rinks around Detroit, arriving late and leaving early, her face hidden by a hat or a scarf, surreptitiously watching her son play hockey. And I thought of her again at the Red Wings game with Vend. She stayed close to him, I decided, so she could keep tabs on Haskell, and on her son. It wasn’t the smartest way to go, but by then, what else did Gracie have?

“Did you finally confront him?” I said.

“At first I just decided it didn’t happen, it didn’t matter. Fired the investigator. Threw the shoe away. But finally it was just too much. So I went to him.”

“And he denied it.”

“Oh, no. It was too late for that. No, he just came clean, the son of a bitch. God, that man. You’d have thought I was sitting in a jury box.” She reached out and grabbed my sleeve. I could feel the anger in her grip. “It was just like that day in town hall, all that confessional bullshit.”

“I can imagine.”

She let go of me. “You know, that was the hardest part of this whole charade. Sitting in that room with all those idiots, playing the good wife, screaming and crying like he fucking mattered to me.”

“I’m thinking Gracie played the harder part.”

She lowered her head to her chest, squeezing herself again.

“She followed us up here. She followed us. Our marriage had been shit for years. I’d hung on for Taylor. Then he moves us a million miles from civilization, away from our friends, and Taylor’s friends, and then he has the gall to start in with the stock trading, sitting on his ass yelling at the computer all day. He thought he was so goddamned smart.” Felicia shook her head, loosed a bitter laugh. “You know he was just bored. Like me and Taylor. Just plain bored up here.”

“So you went to Gracie.”

“Oh, no. Hell, no. She came to me. Woman to woman. I told her to go to hell, go back to Detroit, get out of our life. At first. Then the calls started coming. These men with strange accents. Coming to the house, where my son might answer the phone.”

“And the money problems…”

“Unlike my husband, I wasn’t counting on a pro hockey contract.”

She looked tired. Tired of the conversation, tired of packing boxes, tired of trying to escape from her husband’s grasp.

“You made Laird send that rejection letter to Gracie.”

“Actually, I had one of his staff do it.”

“And the explosion at the rink? What was that about?”

“That was Grace. She wanted Vend as badly as Laird. Bad idea, in retrospect.”

I thought of the clipping in Gracie’s dark room, of Vend acquitted of bombing a rival strip club, how the episode had amused him.

“The flowers were a bad move, too,” I said. “In retrospect.”

“Also Grace’s idea. But I felt for your mother.”

“Sure you did.”

“Part of the plan. They had the intended effect.”

“And you set the chimney fire so the cops would find the shoe? How do you a set a chimney fire?”

“You wait for your husband to go to bed and you build a really big out-of-control fire using lighter fluid and then you call the fire department and tell them you think you have a chimney fire.”

“And of course they come, whether you have one or not.”

“Silly women, huh? What do they know?”

“Right. What about the blackmail note? Why didn’t you just get it to the cops somehow?”

“Grace figured it’d look better if you found it for them and gave it to your girlfriend.”

“Jesus.”

I thought of how Gracie had led us to this moment in this room filled with boxes. How she’d fooled me in the Zam shed and shown me the hiding place I later thought I was so clever to plumb. How she’d stocked her little fridge and left her Wings cap hanging and marked the calendar so that my piqued curiosity would lead me to where she wanted me to go. How she knew the pages hung on her walls would at once flatter and anger me to action. How her bogus blackmail note would neatly and easily satisfy my hunger for a motive.

And those videotapes at Gracie’s house? They were probably blank. Of course Trixie wouldn’t let me take one.

“That night at the pizzeria,” I said.

It stumped her for a second. “Oh, that disgusting place. She made me go.”

“Belly blew your cover.”

“Belly?”

“Was Gracie having doubts?”

“Doubts about what?”

I was beginning to get angry.

“Doubts that she wanted to kill herself, Felicia. Doubts you talked her out of.”

“No.” Felicia held my eyes, made sure I saw that she was not lying. “She had no doubts. Once she saw that I would not bend on her seeing my son, she had no doubts. None at all.”

I believed her. It sickened me, but I believed her.

“Gracie was fucked up,” I said.

“Your words. But yes.”

“So you made a deal. You could kill a lot of birds with that stone, eh?”

“I tried, Gus,” she said. She wasn’t answering my question. She wanted me to know something else. “Right at the end.”

“Tried what?”

The women struggled across the road with the extension ladder Felicia had taken from the toolshed at her home. The snowstorm howled, the shoe tree a hulking phantom in the blizzard dark.

The wind kept grabbing one end of the ladder and whipping it away. Gracie held it fast to her shoulder, spitting orders as she bit down on a penlight in her teeth. Felicia kept glancing over her shoulder for headlights. Even here, she thought, the storm would keep most people inside. She had made sure her husband took an extra sleeping pill before telling him she was going downstairs to read. Beneath her parka she wore the cashmere robe and flannel pajamas she’d been wearing before she left him snoring.

They propped the ladder against the shoe tree.

It would look like a suicide so obvious that it could only be murder. Haskell would take the rap after Felicia planted one of Gracie’s shoes in their fireplace. Haskell, in turn, would finger Vend. Both would go to prison for one crime or another. Felicia would disappear with Taylor. And Gracie’s life insurance policy would take care of the only people who had ever taken care of her, my mother and Trixie.

The cool, clear logic of desperation.

Gracie climbed the ladder, tucking her head into her shoulders against the wind and pelting snow. Felicia followed two rungs below. They faced the road so Felicia could watch for cars.

Gracie had visited the tree at dawn to select a bough that appeared strong enough to hold her, high enough that she would not touch the ground. She had fashioned a noose from black nylon rope and foam sheathing, the same as the many she had made for her clients. She’d been wearing it around her neck beneath her coat when Felicia had picked her up on the service road in the woods behind the rink. Felicia had felt her stomach flip but decided not to say anything. This was how it would be and soon it would be done.

Near the top of the ladder, Gracie hugged the bough with her left arm, wound the rope around the bough, and knotted it in a loose-fitting loop that she slid out onto the branch as far as she could reach. The ladder wobbled and Felicia leaned right and grabbed at the tree trunk. In the branches above Gracie’s head she saw the blurred white shapes of sneakers and boots and skates.