Easy Street

by Elizabeth Sims

  We spent more time on the couch, trading caresses under the guise of therapeutic healing. I had a hurty place on one thigh, and she remembered that she'd strained a shoulder not long ago. Eventually, I murmured, "I have to be going soon."

  Audrey Knox sat bolt upright. "What?"

  "I—I have a pet at home that I need to go and care for."

  "A pet?"

  "Yes, he's a rabbit named Todd. He has a heart condition and he needs me."

  Audrey Knox just looked at me.

  I went on, "He's old, you see, for a rabbit, and he gets a little anxious if I come home late. I don't like to stress him unnecessarily." That sounded silly, but as you know, I was as devoted to Todd as I'd have been to a human.

  "We don't," said Audrey, "have much time, then."

  "Well, I thought maybe we'd save—"

  But she lunged for my lips and I never did finish that sentence.

  We didn't fuss with anything; I kicked the Parsons table out of the way, the pizza box skittered for cover, and we more or less cascaded to the floor in a tangle of knits and worsteds and denims that quickly got sorted into a pile.

  Audrey's rug was new and clean, I smelled that furniture-store fragrance, and the room was warm with good old radiator steam heat, so we were quite comfortable. I discovered that Audrey was wearing a truly killer black bra and panties, skimpy yet serious. It was almost painful to my eyes to see her pale, buttery skin contrasted with the stark black stiffness of the lace trim, so I took care of that problem.

  My mind said a little parenthetical thank-you to itself for having chosen my most unshabby underthings this day. Oh, perhaps I'd just had a feeling that morning.

  Somewhere Audrey had gotten a tattoo of a bunch of yellow daffodils above her left breast, and I decided I ought to count all the petals sometime soon. But for now I focused on the two firm rosettes she'd grown on her own. My, what pretty things they were: Such rosettes could decorate a cake, and it would be the nicest cake you'd ever see.

  All the parts of Audrey were just as sweet and delicate, and I breathed in her aroma, which changed marvelously as I moved along. It was like shopping on a street in Italy or some fabulous country—here was the bread bakery wafting warmth from its door, here the pushcart full of savory vegetables and light cheeses, here the stand of candies and fruits. I helped myself to it all and went back for more.

  It was the most blissful evening I'd spent in a long time, and by the time I dragged myself into my clothes and picked up my keys, I realized that I'd never felt so well nourished.

  Chapter 10

  After breakfast the next morning I took Todd out for a romp in the McVitties' frosty backyard grass. He bumped around beneath the cloudy sky, checking out a pile of rosebush prunings and a new gopher mound, then turned to me and seemed to heave a little sigh.

  "What is it, Todd? You tired already?" Usually, outdoor playtime invigorated him. I squatted down. He was trembling, though I didn't think he could be very cold. When I picked him up his hind legs jerked convulsively against my stomach. "Oh, Toddy."

  I took him upstairs and looked him over. He didn't seem to have lost any weight. In a few minutes he felt a little better, hopping around the living room as if to show me. However, when I introduced the idea of playing a quiet round of Follow the Finger, he wasn't interested. I petted him for a while, checked his water, and went out.

  I stopped at the Gas-A-Rama on Nine Mile, put ten dollars' worth of regular in the Caprice's tank, bought four packs of Camel Filters, and headed for Greektown.

  Morning, not too early, is always the best time to deal with street people. The ones who use drugs or alcohol—that is to say almost all—have experienced the slight detoxifying effects, however marginal, of a night's sleep, and now they're up and out looking for a little food as well as that first hit or drink or at least a cigarette. They're the most alert you're going to find them all day.

  I parked the Caprice on St. Antoine, broke open the cigarettes, and stuffed all four packs into my pockets. Wearing my Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers, jeans, and wool pea coat, I hit the pavement.

  You might tell me it's wrong to give cigarettes to street people, that I should give only food. But let's be real: It's not as if lung cancer is a chief concern for you if you're living from food stamps to public toilet to garbage bin. Most street people die from complications from their other addictions long before cancer comes around. At least smoking doesn't make you slur your words. And smoking a butt can be a real comfort on the street—something to share, something to do, something to trade. I understood that much anyway.

  The street people who aren't addicted to destructive things are few and far between. Runaways tend to fall into that category merely because they haven't had enough months or years of substance abuse under their belts to qualify them as addicts.

  The air was cold, not freezing, but you knew it was coming: The sky had that high overcast, thinking-about-snow look. I walked up the streets and down the alleys and spoke to the people I met, giving out the Camels three or four at a time. Brand-name cigarettes are a luxury on the street. Everybody I talked to I invited to meet me on the steps of the church in about an hour. People asked me about Rick; naturally Young Brenda had told them all that I'd taken Rick away and nobody'd seen him since. I didn't tell them about Rick's death; I wanted to talk to Brenda first. I learned that she'd been seen behind Pegasus that morning, so I ambled over there.

  I found her in a rare vertical position, leaning against a brick wall talking to a couple of Detroit foot-patrol officers. I'd never seen foot patrollers in Greektown until the casino opened; now they were around all the time. They intervened if they saw some tourist open his wallet to give money to a street person. I couldn't blame them for this—it's their job to discourage enabling behavior, as I'd heard one of them put it.

  The two cops, a guy and a gal, were chatting with Brenda in that neutrally friendly way cops have, and she looked about the same as when I last saw her, except her clothes had been washed. Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band, making her face look so terribly tired and drawn, yet it was animated in the meth-habit tradition of little tics and quivers.

  The guy cop was saying, "If you go back to the shelter, they could help you sign up for job training."

  "The shelter's a hellhole," replied Brenda.

  "What do you call this alley, then?" said the other cop.

  Brenda looked down at the filthy concrete. "It's not so bad," she muttered, her cheek twitching.

  I said good morning to the cops, who eyed me.

  "I'm not giving out money," I told them. "I just need to talk to Brenda here for a minute." I invited them to meet us at the church steps later.

  "What for?" the guy cop asked.

  "Just a little … gathering."

  The cops walked on without saying anything else.

  "Brenda," I said, "I'd like to buy you a coffee and a bun or something, OK?"

  "Where's Rick?" she asked suspiciously.

  "Let's go, OK?" I turned toward the mouth of the alley.

  She followed me into a café where we found a little table and I ordered coffees. She said she didn't want anything to eat, but I got her an egg and toast anyway. As we talked, she did eat a little, pricking the egg yolk and dipping the corner of her bread into it. Her eyes were slits against the bright restaurant light.

  "I'm sorry to tell you that Rick's dead," I began.

  She turned her slitty eyes up. "I know."

  "How do you know?"

  "He—he." Brenda touched her forehead with her sleeve. "How to tell you. I was talking to a little kid at the shelter, and I was saying I like French fries a lot too, when Rick came around the corner by the bulletin board and showed me his stomach."

  "His stomach?"

  "Yeah, he opened his coat and there was a ball of sticks, like sharp sticks, where his stomach was supposed to be. And he said, I'm dead for good. Then he walked away."

  So he had come to her. Those thin
gs happen sometimes, I knew.

  "Well," I said, "I don't know what the bundle of sticks is about, but—"

  "A ball of sticks, like a ball of sticks." She interlaced her fingers, cracked with dirt and grease, to show me.

  "OK, well, whatever. The fact is, Brenda, he had too much to drink and fell into the river."

  Brenda's mouth kept moving all the time even when she wasn't talking, and when I talked, she uttered little syllables under her breath, like buh, vee, vee, buh, over and over. She flicked a fingernail at the tabletop, then at a sore on her face.

  I asked, "Did he say anything else, when he talked to you? Did you get an impression of anything, like whether he was alone when it happened?"

  "No."

  "OK. Do you know his last name?"

  "Yes." Brenda seized the sugar server and did about a five-count pour into the half-cup of coffee she had left.

  "Well, what is it?"

  "I can't remember."

  "Brenda, do you think you'd like to see your sister in Clarksville?"

  "I dunno. Yeah, I guess so. Tell her to send a limo! Hah!"

  "I can buy you a ticket and help get you on the bus. There's one leaving at one-thirty."

  She agreed but wouldn't tell me her sister's name so I could call ahead. I told her I wanted to do one more thing before I drove her to the station. We made a circuit of Greektown together, giving out more cigarettes and issuing the church-step invitation. "There'll be more cigarettes," I added.

  When we got to the steps, there was a knot of half a dozen street people, plus the two cops.

  I gave out cigarettes, which the cops didn't object to, and passed around a book of matches. Everybody lit up, including the cops. I mounted the stone steps and stood before the carved, pretty, locked doors.

  "This is as close to God as the likes of us can get at short notice," I began. I tapped out a Camel for myself, lit it, and took a good long hit. Exhaling, I said, "I have an announcement to make. Our friend Rick has passed away. Some of us knew him as Drooly Rick."

  The cops looked at each other, then nodded to me.

  "And some of us," I went on, "might have known him as Rick the sorry unfortunate bastard." Some other heads bobbed up and down.

  The street was fairly quiet—nobody much else out, just delivery guys unloading liquor and linens for the restaurants. Pigeons pecked around in the gutters.

  "I don't know yet if Rick has any family, or even his last name. Does anybody here know?"

  My congregation shrugged and puffed their cigarettes hungrily.

  "Well, I thought people might want to, uh, share their memories of Rick today."

  A guy with one good eye and one empty socket tugged on his beard and said, "Rick never hurt nobody."

  "Amen," said another guy whose face and hands were so dirty you could only tell he was white by the part in his hair, which oddly was nicely combed.

  A woman who looked fairly OK except for a squirrel tail hanging from her coat pocket cleared her throat. Everyone turned to her. She said, "I just want everyone to know I never stole that tape deck."

  "Amen," said the dirtiest man again.

  "Well," I said, "I think Rick was a decent guy who just had a few hard times in his life. Things were looking up for him a little bit."

  The guy cop spoke up. "Rick tried to be a good citizen."

  Young Brenda began to cry. "I loved him!" Her voice pitched upward, making a pigeon scoot away in a ruffle of molting wings. "Oh, how I loved that man! Now he'll never see our son!"

  "Your son?" I gasped. "Oh, my God—are you pregnant?" Brenda sobbed into her coat sleeve.

  "She could be," said the lady cop.

  "No," Brenda said, snuffling, "but I wish I was carrying his child."

  "Oh," I said. "Well, unless somebody has something else, let's wrap it up."

  Another guy said, "One time Rick. One time Rick." We all waited, but he couldn't get any further.

  I concluded, "Thank you all for coming. God bless Rick, and God help all of us."

  Chapter 11

  After putting Brenda on the bus, I swung over to the Detroit Public Library and spent a little time online, surfing around the Wayne County sites in the property records departments.

  To my mild surprise, Porrocks's purchase of 201 Adderly St. had been posted. And she'd gotten a hell of a good deal: $125,000 for a house I'd have guessed would've cost twice as much—I mean, the waterfront location, the size, the boathouse, the nice deep lot. The work it needed plus the extras Porrocks wanted wouldn't set her back more than another fifteen or twenty grand, I judged.

  The seller's name was Helen B. Donovan. To find out how long she owned it, I would've had to search the sales records year by year, so I looked up the tax records. Mrs. Donovan, evidently along with her husband Charles J. Donovan, had paid the taxes on the place for twenty-six years. Before that, there had been a string of four owners over about fifteen years, then another owner who'd paid taxes for almost fifty years, and it appeared he was the one who had built the place. Since Mrs. Donovan's name was on the record of sale solo, it was likely that she was a widow or divorcée.

  So, given the dates on the money I'd found in the wall, this Helen B. Donovan was where I needed to start. I went back to the record of her sale of the house to Porrocks and found that the proceeds went to her at an address in Ohio, evidently not a private residence. The address line said, "Erie Shores Care Center," then gave a number and street. I wrote it all down in my notebook.

  I headed to Wyandotte via I-75, the Caprice's engine laboring up the steep grade of the Rouge River overpass. Ford's Rouge complex lay below: a dark, powerful, incredibly massive organism stretching to the smoggy horizon, its towers and tanks and pipes and steam columns and waste-gas flames only hinting to the world at how much goes on in there. The new model year was coming up and I wondered whether Ford would keep on the path of retro styling, given the success of the revised Thunderbird. I longed for a car like that. The Caprice was burning even more oil these days, and although I kept adding oil as necessary and once in a while would splurge on a bottle of gas treatment, I figured the engine wasn't going to last another year without a ring job. Have you ever had to pay for one of those? On top of that, the transmission was beginning to slip under hard stress, and rust had made a travesty of the once proud body. When I started it up or revved it, the loose body panels hammered against the frame like thunder.

  I tried to do right by the car, but you know how it is. People with plenty of money and a utilitarian attitude about cars say, "Well, it finally reached the point of diminishing returns. Time to quit repairing it and get me something nice and new." Well, I needed something nicer and newer, but there was no immediate chance in hell for that. Yes, I could stop buying oil and save twenty dollars over a couple of months, and yes, I could stop paying my mechanic to coax and jerry-rig and improvise, thus saving a few hundred more over time. But where was I going to get a better car for $300?

  Moreover, I loved that car. It was police secondhand, originally an unmarked detective car, and I believed that its law-and-order karma had lent me a low-level, unnameable sort of protection at critical moments. I thought about the Caprice, and I thought about the distance from Detroit to Cleveland.

  ----

  The lieutenant who agreed to see me for five minutes at the Wyandotte PD was a walrusy guy, cheerful in spite of being so busy. I asked about the results of Rick's autopsy, and he told me readily enough what the report said, which jibed exactly with what Porrocks had told me. Yes, it had occurred to me to double-check that. The cop said they still didn't have any information on Rick from the social services people.

  "Are you gonna run his prints?" I asked.

  "We did that already, and nothing."

  "I guess he was a law-abiding guy, then."

  He looked at me kindly. "Prob'ly was."

  My afternoon at Porrocks's was quiet for the most part. She worked on her unpacking in the house, and I continued work in t
he boathouse, attacking that kitchen tile. By this time I'd generated a few knee-high piles of rubble in addition to all the old carpet and linoleum, plus there was the scuzzy old furniture. When I took a break, I went to the house and offered to haul the junk away.

  "What would you haul it in, your car?" Porrocks asked.

  "No, Erm, I'd rent a pickup for a day, make one or two trips to the dump, and you'd be all set. I'd do it as soon as I finish ripping everything out."

  "Good idea. OK."

  "Say, did Lou do a good job for you?"

  "Oh! I'll say. She's great. Everything's working perfectly, and there wasn't a question I asked that she didn't know the answer to." Porrocks started telling me about what kind of satellite dish she'd ordered that morning, and I tuned out.

  Late in the afternoon I was standing in the kitchenette, panting after having wrestled the heavy electric stove away from the wall and out of the way near the window. I heard a little tapping noise on the glass and turned, hoping to see Audrey Knox, but it was Lou pecking at the pane with one finger, in the most delicate gesture I'd ever seen her make. I let her in.

  "Where's Erma?" she said, her face so openly emotional that I almost ached for her. I'd seen that look before.

  "She's not at the house? I guess she went on an errand." I wiped my hands on my jeans. "Yeah, come to think of it, she said she needed some stuff from the store, shelf paper? Do you need to talk to her?"

  "Oh, I just came by to see how she was doing, how everything was. I'm off duty."

  I looked at my watch, and it was indeed after five already. "Well, she said you did a wonderful job."

  "She did?"

  "Yep. What's that behind your back, Lou?"

  "Oh, it's just—I was gonna drop this off, uh, for, uh, her." With a little chuff of embarrassment, she showed me a box of candy.

  Ordinarily, when you want to give a girl a box of candy, you buy a pound of dipped chocolates. You know, an assortment of chocolates in brown crinkle papers nicely arranged in a candy box. But Lou had bought for Porrocks a retail-pack carton of Baby Ruth bars, a dozen of them, which I knew to be Lou's favorite kind. Lou was like a third-grader in some ways: What she liked she thought everyone else would naturally like too. Lou had once been in love with me.