The Hanging Tree (28 page)

Trixie shrugged. “This wasn’t some smoky pit frequented by guys missing teeth and stuffing dollar bills in G-strings. This was a gentleman’s club. A jacket was required. You had to pay twenty-five dollars just to get in the door. The girls were from everywhere but here.”

“Canada? Poland maybe?”

“How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Hm. Well, on a good night, Grace could make two or three hundred dollars in tips. So she really only had to work one or two nights a week, which left her more time to study.”

“And I’m sure she used it for that,” I said.

“I didn’t know her then, of course, so I can’t say for sure. But she told me she tried, and I’ll take her word.”

“Did she dance at the club?”

“No. She waited tables.” Trixie folded her arms and gazed down at the floor. “But she might have been better off dancing.”

The middle-aged men who sat with their $7.50 Heinekens at the little round tables in the shadows of B.J.’s Office hadn’t made their fortunes by pursuing things that were easily available. The dancers, of course, were easily available; the waitresses were not, or at least not as obviously so. To bed a slinky young woman who peeled off her clothes before men as routinely as she poured herself a morning coffee was one thing. To seduce a waitress—especially that pretty college student named Gracie—now that was something else.

Midway through her second semester at Wayne State, Gracie stopped going to classes. She moved out of her dorm and into an apartment in the Bricktown neighborhood near downtown Detroit. She continued to work at B.J.’s one or two afternoons a week. Her nights were given to other employment that paid her much more. There was a man, a very rich man, many years her elder, who paid her rent and bought her things. After a while there were other men, other apartments, more money and things.

“So she was a hooker,” I said.

“Of a sort,” Trixie said. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t strictly about having sex for money. Grace became very good at satisfying a particularly difficult-to-satisfy customer. And, unfortunately for her, she came to enjoy it. At least for a time, she enjoyed it at least as much as the customers.”

“Jesus. What kind of customer?”

“Please be respectful of the Lord’s name.”

“Sorry.”

“Tell me, Gus. Are you familiar with sexual bondage? Autoerotic sex asphyxiation?”

From the Lord’s name to autoerotic sex. This woman was tough. I studied her face for any sign of weariness. There was none. She looked to be in her sixties. I wondered if she merely looked older than she was because of the past life she had led.

“I’ve heard of it. Can’t say I’m familiar.”

“You’ll see.”

“So,” I said, “this whole anonymous donor thing was bull.”

I pulled out my wallet and showed Trixie the clipping I’d cut from the
Pilot
of March 18, 1980. She scanned the article quickly, smiled wanly at the picture. “Look at her,” she said. “Just a child. Can I keep this?”

“It’s yours,” I said. “Whoever paid her tuition was really a”—I searched for the word—“a recruiter.”

“Essentially. Small-town girls from troubled homes, out of sorts in the big city. We had two others at the center. Grace brought them to me.”

”Goddamn b—excuse me.”

“That’s all right. All these guys were bastards.”

She pushed open the door to the room on the left and let me step in before her. The room was lit by the flat afternoon light coming in through the window facing the street. The first thing I noticed was the poster on
the wall at the head of the single bed. Red Wings star Sergei Fedorov was spraying ice and snow at the camera in a sideways hockey stop. He wore a bright red jersey, number 91, and a wide smile on his boyish face. Beneath the poster a red bedspread was emblazoned with the Red Wings’ white winged-wheel logo. Three foot-high stacks of Red Wings game programs sat on a trunk at the foot of the bed.

A small desk and a chair stood next to the bed. Atop the desk was a red plastic cup filled with pencils and pens, a photograph in a standing frame, and a single piece of construction paper.

I stepped over and picked up the photo frame. Eddie McBride—Gracie’s late father, cousin and drinking buddy of my own father—reclined across the backseat of a boat, shirtless, in a yellow bathing suit that set off his deep tan. On his lap sat a baby girl with reddish curls and a cloth diaper. She was smiling.

There was no picture of Gracie’s mother, Shirley McBride.

I set the photo down and took up the sheet of paper. It held a pencil drawing of a hockey player with his arms and stick raised over his head in celebration of a goal. It was crude enough to have been rendered by a child, but I supposed it could just as easily have been Gracie’s work.

“Whose room is—was this?” I said.

“Grace,” Trixie said. “Grace slept here.”

“When she wasn’t at the center?”

“Here mostly, at least the last couple of years. Until she went back up north.”

I went to the closet on the opposite wall and slid the doors open. The hangers were filled with simple cotton dresses and jumpers and frilly tops. The floor was covered with pairs of shoes piled on one another. There were pumps and flats and mules and slingbacks, sneakers and moccasins, clogs and knee-high boots and flip-flops and slippers. I shoved the door closed and turned back to Trixie.

“Except for that, looks like a boy’s room,” I said.

“Grace loved hockey. Loved the Detroit team, that player especially.”

Fedorov, one of the Wings’ Russians, was a gifted skater who could play as well as anyone in the world at either end of the ice—when he wanted to. Some nights he played as if he didn’t much care. I wondered if his occasional ambivalence appealed to Gracie, whether she saw whatever struggle she was going through mirrored in her hockey hero.

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Why would you?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving on the street outside. I turned and saw the back end of a blue sport-utility vehicle sliding slowly past the house.

“What?” Trixie said.

“Nothing.”

I moved to the foot of the bed and started riffling through the first stack of programs on the trunk. I was looking for one from that Detroit-versus-Chicago playoff series when I thought I had seen Gracie. But Trixie grasped my shoulder and pulled me toward the door.

“Come on, I don’t have all afternoon.”

She left the door to Gracie’s room open, stepped across the hall, and produced a pair of keys that unlocked the two locks on the door to the other room. She pushed the door half open and stood across the threshold. “Gracie called this her dark room,” she said.

“Not for photography, though.”

“No.”

I peered into the room, couldn’t see a thing. I looked at Trixie. “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did Gracie have a son?”

Trixie held my gaze for what seemed like a full minute. Then she looked away. “No,” she said. “Grace …” She looked back at me. “Her employer said she couldn’t be pregnant. But Grace let … let the baby go. It was her choice.”

“What employer?”

Trixie looked at me again. “You’ll see.”

“I will? What about that drawing in the other room?”

“Part of her rehabilitation was volunteering at a local grade school. The kids in Melvindale love the Red Wings, too.”

So Darlene was right about the abortion. I thought of the baby shoe Gracie had hidden in the Zam shed. Something approaching sadness swelled then receded in the pit of my stomach.

“When did she have it?”

“What?” Trixie said.

“The abortion.”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t think Grace would want me talking about it.”

“Grace is dead.”

“Not yet. Not to me, at least. And not to you, either, or you wouldn’t be here now, would you?”

“Do you talk in riddles with the women at the center?”

“Do you want to see what’s in this room or not? If you prefer, we can leave right now and you can go chase down whoever was outside the bedroom window.”

Trixie didn’t miss a trick. “All right,” I said.

She stepped aside and let me pass.

seventeen

The room was tiny, more like a sewing room than a bedroom, with the musty smell of a place no one had been in for a long while. And it was indeed dark, the shades drawn on the window opposite the door. Trixie flicked a wall switch. A bare bulb in the center of the ceiling threw a dim oval of yellow light that left the corners of the room in shadow.

Next to the window hung a glassed-in frame containing a medal pinned on white satin. The Purple Heart.

“Is that her father’s?” I said.

“Why else would she have it there?” Trixie said.

“Don’t tell me—she got it off the Internet.”

“How did you know?”

For $33.50, I thought. “Things get around in Starvation Lake.”

Cardboard boxes sat along the baseboards on two walls. Above them, to my left, hung four pages that had been clipped out of newspapers and thumbtacked to the wall. I stepped past Trixie to see them up close.

“Holy shit,” I said.

The first was the front page of the
Detroit Times
, Sunday, March 3, 1996. A thirty-six-point headline ran across the top: “
Teen’s Fiery Death Shines Harsh Spotlight on Superior Pickup Truck.”
The story beneath it ran under the byline of A. J. Carpenter. Augustus James Carpenter. Me.

“What does she have this up here for?”

“Maybe you had a fan,” Trixie said.

I shook my head as I read the first few paragraphs of the story, remembering. “Gracie never gave a damn about what I did. She used to call me a fag if I got an A in school.”

“I don’t know what she used to do. Keep going.”

The next page, yellower than the first, was also from the front of the
Times
, Friday, January 31, 1992. Under my byline again, barely above the fold: “
Local Attorney Nabs Another Big Verdict; GM Vows Appeal
.” The amount of the verdict, which someone had underlined in red ink, was $28.3 million. The copy wrapped around a small black-and-white photo, circled in red ink, of the local attorney, a handsome smiling man named Laird Haskell.

That’s quite a coincidence, I thought.

I turned and glanced at Trixie. She was leaning against the doorjamb, watching me. “What?” she said. “Something wrong?”

I ignored her and turned to the third page, which was not from the
Times
but the
Free Press
, page B4, Friday, September 1, 1995. “Strip-Club Owner Acquitted of Role in Explosion” read the headline over the story by Michele Higgins:

The prosecution of a prominent area strip-club owner blew up in Wayne County Circuit Court yesterday when a judge dismissed charges that Jarek A.Vend paid to have a bomb planted in the kitchen of a rival gentlemen’s club in Romulus.

Vend, 46 years old, owner of more than a dozen strip clubs in Metro Detroit, had insisted he had nothing to do with a minor explosion that occurred at the Landing Strip one afternoon in May. But he told reporters he was amused that someone appeared to have played a prank on a competitor. No one was injured in the blast, which police said appeared to be designed to frighten rather than inflict real harm.

There was no photo.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Please,” Trixie said.

I spun around to face her.

“This is the guy who gave Gracie a job when she needed book money?”

“Who?”

“Vend.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He was probably the guy’s boss. Vend doesn’t talk to the help, unless he’s sleeping with them.”

“I was at his house earlier.”

“Over there?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder.
“That’s his mother’s. His late mother’s. It’s in his name. The press eats that crap up about him being a local guy. He has a high-rise in Windsor overlooking the river. Just in case the cops here ever decide to really go after him, which they never will. Talk about a goddamn bastard.”

And I thought Starvation was a small town. She probably knew who was in that Suburban cruising past the house too.

“What about this lawyer?” I said, pointing at the page with the Haskell story. “Why was Gracie so interested in him?”

“What’s his name?”

“Haskell. You haven’t looked at these?”

“Grace’s hobby, not mine.” She nodded past me. “What’s the last one?”

The front page of the
Times
was dated Thursday, July 24, 1997. I knew what was there. After forcing me to resign, the
Times
had agreed to publish a retraction of my stories about Superior Motors’ deadly pickup trucks. Four hundred and fifty-two words ran in a one-column slot at the bottom of the page, next to the index. Gracie had carefully clipped it and tacked it up as part of her “hobby.” I didn’t have to read it. But I stared at it anyway, cursing Gracie, picturing her in the Zam shed telling me I played hockey like a pussy, wishing she were alive so I could tell her to go to hell. Even things she hadn’t intended for me to see wound up stinging.

“She’s a fan, all right,” I said. “What’s in these boxes?”

The four boxes were closed but not taped. I bent over, flipped one open, reached in, and pulled out a tangle of black leather.

“What the—,” I said, holding it up in front of me. A collar equipped with a drawstring was attached to thick straps that ran down to an adjustable belt that presumably wrapped around someone’s waist. More straps fitted with buckles and Velcro jutted from the belt. I dropped it on the floor and pulled more leather from the box. A hooded mask with a zipper running down the back. A girdle with thin silver chains dangling from the crotch.

I put it all back and looked inside the next box. It looked like it had come from a hardware store. Or the Zamboni shed. There were chains and pulleys and clamps. Eyebolts, screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers, a hammer, a can of WD-40, a jar of Vaseline, two packages of Saran wrap. I sifted through the jumble and found three pairs of handcuffs at the bottom of the box, two of blue plastic, one of nickel. The next box was stuffed with
plastic tubes, leather belts, and rubber hoses of various lengths. I picked up one of the hoses and noticed small, curly hairs stuck to the open end.