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Bryan Gruley: The Hanging Tree

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Bryan Gruley The Hanging Tree

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Darlene grabbed the napkin and balled it up in her hand and drove both of her fists into my chest, driving me backward into the door.

“Get out.”

“You knew.”

“Get the fuck out.”

I opened the door, felt cold wash over the back of my neck. “You knew,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t know what Gracie was going to do, but once she did it, you knew. And you kept it to yourself.”

“Everything is,” she said, “as it should be.”

I stood at the bottom of Darlene’s stairway for a while, shivering in the dark, wondering if she would reconsider. The outside light over her door went out. I walked away, feeling the ache in my bruised foot again.

“Sarnia Police,” said the woman’s voice. “Officer Poulin.”

Her voice on the phone, husky and matter-of-fact, reminded me of Darlene’s. I was at my desk in the Pilot newsroom. I told Officer Poulin I was a sheriff’s deputy in Pine County, Michigan, and I needed to confirm the details of a recent suicide-or perhaps it had been reclassified as a homicide-in Sarnia. I described a young woman hanging from a swing set.

I was not terribly surprised to hear Officer Poulin chuckle. “A swing set, eh?” she said. “That’s a good one. I have a feeling I’d remember that. Are you sure it happened recently?”

“That’s what our source says. A few weeks ago.”

“Who’s your source?”

“You know, some goofball trying to trade info.”

“Well, that explains things, eh? But you’re calling awfully late-or early, depending.”

“Picked him up on a DUI. He has a warrant out in Detroit.”

“Right-o. He sure doesn’t want to go back there.”

“No, ma’am. So, you have no record of a suicide or a homicide occurring there in the last few weeks, or even months?”

“Wait just a minute. I’ll double-check.”

She set the phone down. Someone, probably Mrs. B, had cleared my desktop. All the pens and pencils in my Detroit Tigers beer mug were gone.

Officer Poulin came back on the phone.

“Deputy-I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?”

I hesitated, then said, “Esper.”

“Esper? Hmm. We had a young man played for the minor league team here named Esper. Pretty good with his fists.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Some years back. Anyway, I checked and we have zero reports of suicides or homicides in the past six months, certainly none involving a swing set. Or monkey bars, for that matter.”

“Sorry for the bother.”

“No bother at all. You have a nice day.”

I hung up the phone.

Trixie had lied about the girl on the swing set. And about the abortion. I should have picked up on it when she’d fibbed about knowing who Haskell was. She had been having trouble with her landlord, whom I now knew to be one Jarek Vend. Gracie’s life insurance money would be good for her worthy mission. And, as Darlene had said, there was nothing anyone could do to bring Gracie back. The bad guys would get what they deserved.

I had a decision to make.

I could go home and get some sleep and let Philo post our stories online as we had planned. But now I knew that we had it all wrong, or a lot wrong. I didn’t have to think hard or long about why Gracie did what she did. There was vengeance and there was love and there was the belief, however misguided it may have been, that she was out of options.

I picked up the phone and dialed. It rang fourteen or fifteen times before I hung up and redialed. After a dozen more rings, Soupy picked up. He coughed and I heard him drop the phone-“Fuck,” he said-then he came on.

“What the hell, Trap?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Who else would it be? What do you want?”

“Listen,” I said. “Some shit’s going to come down tomorrow. I just want you to know, you were right. It wasn’t your fault.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Gracie. Like you said.”

“Oh, Jesus, man.” He fumbled around with the phone again. I heard something that sounded like a bottle banging off the floor. “What are you going to do?”

“I have to go. Just wanted you to know, buddy, you’re a good guy. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”

I took my Tigers mug when I left the Pilot.

It was still dark when Philo answered his front door. I had managed two and a half hours of fitful dozing on Mom’s sofa. Philo stood in the doorway in boxer shorts and a U.S. Navy T-shirt, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Why are you here?” he said.

“Remember what I said about imagining your corrections?”

“What?”

“We’ve got to rewrite our stories.”

“You’re kidding.”

He made a pot of coffee and some peanut butter toast. We wrote and rewrote. We questioned every little thing we had written the night before. Around eight o’clock, Philo’s cell phone started ringing every ten minutes or so. He ignored it. “No desire to talk to my uncle,” he said.

The second the clock struck nine, I called Nova at the Wayne County Clerk’s Office. “Let’s make it two Lions games,” I said. I asked her to run down one more piece of information. She said she would call me back.

Philo ducked out at ten to cover the Haskell arraignment. Haskell stood mute and Judge Gallagher entered a plea of not guilty. For some reason, Kerasopoulos was in attendance. He motioned across the courtroom for Philo to come see him, but Philo pretended he didn’t see, then slipped out a side door.

We were ready a little before noon. The sidebar, on Kerasopoulos’s business relationships with Haskell, was essentially the same. Philo had e-mailed his uncle a list of questions. This is silliness, Kerasopoulos had replied. Won’t dignify with answer. Our sidebar quoted him.

The main story had been redone from top to bottom. The headlines read:


Murder Charge May Be Flawed

New Evidence Suggests Suicide


“Let’s not post it until I hear from my source in Detroit,” I told Philo. Instead of asking about my source, he went to his fridge for two more Amstels.

“Quite a morning,” he said as he handed me a beer.

“Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Just thinking of something Dingus told me a couple of days ago. Something about the newspaper being a snapshot of the dark human soul.”

“Hmm. They didn’t teach us that at Columbia.”

Nova called a little after twelve thirty. “This took some digging,” she said. “Had to call in a chit with folks at probate. I think you owe Michael a Lions sweatshirt, too.”

“Done,” I said. “What do you have?”

On December 6, 1984, Grace M. McBride had given birth to a son. The birth certificate did not name a father. The boy weighed seven pounds, six ounces. A note in the file indicated the boy was adopted shortly thereafter. Gracie named him Taylor Edward McBride.

twenty-five

How did you find me?”

She held the apartment door open only the width of her face. Through the crack I saw that her hair had gone from silver to ash, with strands of white that fluttered away from her head like feathers. In one hand she held something shaped like a bowl, wrapped in brown paper.

“A hockey buddy,” I said.

“They’re all the same, aren’t they?”

“Pretty much. Could I come in, please? I won’t stay long.”

“You’re not writing a story.”

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