The Devil's Only Friend

by Mitchell Bartoy

  It seemed like things might work out with Eileen—my dead brother’s wife. I kept thinking it might still go along like it does in the movies, but with the cracked-up lives we’d both had, any pretty story we could spin would just go wheeling away. There was the nagging feeling that I had made a mess of things on purpose. I had intentionally fouled up every close feeling I stumbled into because I felt that my ugly face wasn’t fit to show anyone up close. What was worse, I hadn’t made anything out of all the extra chances I had been given. All along the road—I had mapped it out in my dreary moping a thousand times—everyone I had ever known had been nicer to me than I deserved, had thrown a break or a good word my way at every step. All of that had been wasted on me. I had always been a disappointment to my father, and it would kill him to see me now: a brooding, useless man.

  Things started to get even messier when Walker turned up at my door. After the race riot of the previous year, folks became more keenly interested in who showed up in their neighborhood. Black Bottom, Paradise Valley, the colored west side: There were places in Detroit where Negroes could live, where they might buy houses or property without running into a mob. My own place wasn’t far from the line, but when a colored man as dark as Walker came along in the neighborhood, tongues began to wag. Especially when he showed up so early in the morning that people were still in their nightshirts, still mopping up the egg yolk from their breakfast plates.

  I was wiping out my one frying pan, letting the bacon fat drip into a tin can, when I heard boots clumping up the hall. Somehow I knew the boots were coming for me; I expected every day that one ghost or another from my past would come calling. And so I was not surprised to open the door to see Walker’s passive mug. Half a year had gone by, but he seemed to have aged more than that. I guessed that he had worked through the night, and that he would go home to a wife and a bed after he could get away from the business that had pulled him to my door.

  “Detective,” said Walker.

  “No more,” I said. “You know that.”

  “That’s the name I have for you,” he said. “I can’t think of you any other way now.”

  A more ordinary man would not have answered the door in his shorts and a torn undershirt, but I didn’t give it a thought. Walker didn’t seem to mind, or at least he wasn’t giving that much away with his face. He wore several shirts buttoned over an old turtleneck in place of a jacket, and kept the whole mess tucked into his work trousers, which had been patched at the knees and along the hem. Walker held a dusty knit cap with one hand at his side.

  “I guess I ought to let you in,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I shifted out of the doorway, and Walker stepped in. With the tin can still in my hand, I waved him over to my chair at the little table. I had cleared away my plate and coffee mug, but greasy scraps from my breakfast still marked the surface.

  “What’s it all about, Walker?”

  “You don’t want to ask me about my health, or ask after my family?”

  “The both of us know my manners don’t work that way,” I told him. I hung up my frying pan on a wooden peg that came out of the wall near the sink and put the greasy can at the back of the counter.

  “Well, I didn’t come here to roist you, Detective. But you can see I’ve—”

  “You shouldn’t call me detective,” I said. “I’ve left all that behind me.”

  “I’ll need to call you something.”

  “Only if your business here takes overlong to wrap itself up.”

  Walker said nothing. He shifted in the chair and angled his fingertips together on the table. He would not have come, I knew, for some trifling thing. He was polite enough to keep from looking around my place. Still, it burned me to think of how filthy everything was, how hollowed-out and empty it seemed—no pictures on the walls, no food to offer a visitor, no books, my bed unmade, the floor unswept. I should have been glad to see him, as I knew him to be a good man, a sturdy man, even a friend. I should have gladly offered him my hand.

  “Why don’t you just call me Caudill?” I said. “I call you Walker, don’t I?”

  “I’d better call you Mr. Caudill,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell whether he was joshing me.

  “I don’t want to forget myself in this neighborhood.”

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t give a good goddamn how you call me. You don’t have to call me anything.”

  Walker pulled a curling photograph from his shirt pocket and smoothed it over a clean place on the tabletop. He turned it toward me. Because my only other chair was on the fire escape, I had to stand over him.

  “My baby sister,” he said softly. “Felicia.”

  I picked up the photo. Somebody long ago had put a thumb on the picture, and now the girl’s face seemed fuzzy at the cheek with the imprint. She was not remarkable in any way for a Negro woman except for the little nurse’s cap she wore and for the way she pulled her lips down over her protruding teeth.

  I shrugged. “So?”

  “She was killed about two weeks ago down toward Cleveland.”

  “Listen, Walker, I—” I looked again at the picture. The woman’s eyes seemed to look out more sharply now that I knew she was dead. “I can’t do anything for you.”

  “They found her at the marsh at the edge of the old Lloyd axle plant. I don’t know what they build over there now. That whole place now is locked up tight for the war, just like all the plants. They have army guards patrolling along the fences.”

  “Well, Walker, what did you think I could do about any of that?” My knees began to tremble at the sight of Walker’s poor face. I wished that I had never put my other chair out on the fire escape.

  “I don’t know. You’ve spoken to Mr. Lloyd—”

  “Old Man Lloyd would rather he’d never met me,” I said. “I haven’t seen him or had any word from him since the first night of the riot, you know that. And I understand he’s just about ready for the glue factory.” I had saved the Old Man’s life that night, which must have been quite an inconvenience for such a wealthy man.

  “Detective, I don’t have anything to offer you. I have run around with the Cleveland police and it seems like they are over and done with anything to do with this case. Unless something jumps up and bites them on the rump, so to say, they won’t ever find out who did this. Now, you know how I lost my job on the force—”

  “All right, Walker. You know I did what I could with Captain Mitchell. What else could I have done? What sway did I have?”

  “Detective, I—”

  “Jesus Christ, Walker! Can’t you stop calling me that?”

  He put his head down like I had slapped him. The nap at the top of his head was going thin and flecked with curls of gray. He pulled a shop rag from his back pocket and used it to swab the grease from my table. He tipped back his head and looked up at me patiently.

  “I don’t try to lay any blame about everything that happened last summer,” he said. “I don’t see how we could have dug ourselves out of that hole we were in. But Felicia left two little ones, and their daddy isn’t reliable—so it looks like we may have to take them in. We’re stretched a bit thin, but that doesn’t bother me. I just … You can see how a thing like that can be important to a man. I mean, your family can be important.”

  Walker did know how to cut into me. There wasn’t any way for him to know that I still hadn’t been able to locate my nephew Alex, that I had botched things up with my sister-in-law Eileen, that I had arrived at the end of my rope. Walker and I had not spoken since the previous summer, on that morning before I tossed my badge at Captain Mitchell. But Walker could see how I was living—that I had whittled myself down almost to nothing. The apartment was bare except for the few pieces of furniture I hadn’t sold … and I had been talking to him all the while in my bare feet, unshaven, in just my shorts and a ratty shirt. I counted myself lucky that I had at least taken the trouble to put the patch over my eyehole that morning.

 
; “I’m not looking for a miracle, Detective,” said Walker. “Maybe you could just ask around a bit.”

  I stood breathing heavily for a few moments, heat rising over my chest. I looked closely at Walker. His hands were swollen and scuffed up from work, and I could see from the dullness of his eyes and the general withering of his face that he had not been sleeping much or resting easy.

  “What are you doing these days, Walker?”

  “I pick up work tossing freight,” he said. “I do some driving. How about you?”

  The question surprised me. I blinked and shrugged. “Not a damn thing.”

  “That’s nice work if you can get it,” he said. “But it doesn’t do well by you, from the look of things.”

  I looked around the flat. It took only a glance or two to make an inventory of my things.

  “I’d just like to know,” Walker said. “I’d like to know what happened down there. I won’t even say that it’s to get revenge on anybody.” He turned his eyes to me. “It’s my sister. She come out of the same mother and father as me. I’d like to be able to think about the whole story of her life and be able to put an end to it.”

  Does he know about all the people I’ve lost? I thought. My memory had been so abused that I could not remember what I had told Walker about myself. I guess I knew that he was trying to help me in some way because he knew how important a family should be to a man. He knew that I had fallen away.

  “I’ll try to help you, Walker,” I said. “I doubt it’ll come to much.”

  “I can’t pay you.”

  “Pay me!”

  “For your time. I don’t ask for charity. If there is some service I can do for you … my Emily puts together a fine meal…”

  “Listen, Walker, don’t think about it. I’m only saying I’ll ask around. That don’t cost anything.”

  “I appreciate this, Detective. But let me say—not to be frontways with you—you might want to clean yourself up a little before you head out in the world.”

  “Yah,” I said, drawing my hand over three days of jawbone stubble.

  It grew quiet enough for a time to hear a telephone ringing somewhere in the building. My feet scraped over the dusty wood floor as I shifted from side to side.

  “Well,” Walker finally said, standing up. “I’ll leave the photograph. If you can, I’d like to have it back.”

  “Sure.”

  Walker turned away and walked carefully to the door like an older man with an ache throughout the body. I felt a sudden shame that I hadn’t even thought to offer him anything to drink, not even a glass of water.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said. “I know how that goes.” I was thinking about my brother Tommy, really—not two years gone. But then the memory of my own baby sister came back to me. Twenty years had gone by since the influenza had taken her, more than twenty years—and now I had fallen to such a state that even that sharp memory had begun to fade.

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” said Walker. “It wasn’t any fault of yours.” He let himself out and pulled the door shut. His footsteps seemed to drag away forever.

  I wanted to crawl back into my bed, but the bright light of morning washed away the idea. Walker’s sister seemed to stare out at me accusingly from the photo, and so I had to turn it over on the table. This, too, made me feel a pang of guilt, like the woman was alive and could take it as an insult; but I was used to it. I worked hard to squander the rest of the day, thinking and stewing in my little room. I reasoned that I could hold the photo for a day or two and just tell Walker that I had failed to turn up anything. Nobody had ever believed that I could be credible as a police detective anyway, and Walker had seen it for himself. Everything I had tried to work on had been botched in one way or another. My partner had been killed, Walker had lost his position on the force, and I had failed to do anything to prevent the riot and the flames that had scorched Detroit.

  I could forget about helping Walker. He would not blame me. His sister was gone, and there was nothing to do for her. During the remainder of the day—Good Friday—I didn’t go out. I kept myself occupied by listening to the radio, dialing away whenever news of the war broke into the music. It became another whole day I had wasted in my life. By dusk I had convinced myself to shirk it off, and by the time darkness really took over I thought I had forgotten about the bucktoothed woman. But I had to keep inside my apartment because I did not want to think about meeting Ray Federle again on my little landing, and by Saturday morning the thought of Walker and his sister had worked me over hard enough to push me up out of bed with some intention. It burned in my gut whether or not I wanted to think about it. It was his sister, after all, and there were children, too.

  This was how it had started the other time. I had let my feelings get strong after Bobby and I found young Jane Hardiman killed in the nigger’s apartment. Why should I have cared so much about that rich man’s girl? There was nothing to be done for her, and it had not ended happily for anyone. I wanted to shrink back from the feeling that Walker, such a good man through and through, had brought up in me. But it was no use.

  As I scraped a dull shaving blade across my cheeks, in the mirror I watched the delicate hole where my eye had been. The eyelids opened and closed like a baby’s mouth as I stretched and shifted my cheeks in shaving. What’s it trying to say to me? I thought. I was in such condition that I felt a twinge of guilt when I covered the eyehole with the patch, like I was strangling a living thing. What am I doing? I thought. What am I doing?

  CHAPTER 3

  Saturday, April 8

  There wasn’t any elevator. There was a stairwell to the east and one to the west. I always went west because it was the darker of the two and because no one else ever used it. But I hadn’t made three steps downward when I saw the woman and the two children in the stairwell, stopped on the landing below and looking out the window to the street. A slender woman, pale—she turned to stare at me with huge dark eyes.

  “You,” she said. “You’re that Caudill?” She kept a baby crooked in her arm. The infant, too, stared at me with overlarge eyes.

  “I’m Caudill,” I said.

  She lunged at me and slapped me a good one right across my face. Even the popping noise it made was shocking. I was stuck there on the tiny landing. I couldn’t even bring my hand up to ward off the blow.

  “Bringing that nigger up here! With my baby girls in the building!”

  The older girl turned away from the window at the commotion but showed little expression. Her eyes were as round and as dark as her mother’s, and her skin was pale. The baby just stared at me, stared not at my eye as babies do but at the black patch that covered the hole. The older girl stood picking at her fingers until the woman jerked her away down the stairs.

  I guess my cheek must have been red. I was only a few steps away from Mack Avenue when I finally placed the woman: Federle’s wife. It made me wish that I’d locked the door to my room before I left, though there was nothing worth taking or wrecking inside.

  I had stopped at a bank earlier in the week to pull enough cash from my safety box to last me the week, and the folded money chafed at the top of my thigh. When I stopped at a drugstore and took a stool at the counter, I could feel the metal clip rubbing. From the inside pocket of my old jacket I pulled the picture Walker had given me. I thought that I should never have allowed him any hope about what I could do. When I thought of the future in any regard, I saw a blank, a nothing. I could not seem to get my imagination working.

  Someone had written on the back of the photograph in a woman’s hand: “Felicia Downey 1936.” There was an address as well, written in the same hand but with blue ink rather than black. I took this to mean that the address was more recent than the photo. What of it? What could I do? I had sold my old Packard, and to get down to Ohio I’d have to ride a bus or take a train. I didn’t know Cleveland or have any people down that way.

  I stepped into the telephone booth and closed myself inside.
It was small enough to put me in mind of a coffin, a coffin too small for my shoulders to fit in comfortably. I went through all the coins in my pocket calling around until I got the number for Hank Chew, one of the crime-beat reporters from The Detroit News. A number of the bloodhounds from the News and the Free Press kept their offices right inside the police headquarters down on Beaubien. They worked through the weekend because it was usually the time when all the raciest crime, the most sordid episodes came to light. There was a general clamor for a bit of scandal in the Sunday papers. I talked the switchboard girl into buzzing Chew’s line for me, and it rang enough times for me to be sure he wasn’t at his desk. As I pulled the piece away from my ear, though, I heard the click of an answer.

  “Chew,” he said.

  “Hiya,” I said. “It’s Pete Caudill.”

  “Caudill! We been wonderin’.”

  “You been wondering what?

  “Wondering if you blew out of town. Wondering if you were dead.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t spring to call you long-distance,” I said, feeling already that I had made a mistake in calling him. “I’m still around, but I’m not around as much as I used to be.”

  “Pretty quiet though, eh?” said Chew, gathering steam. “Not like the old days. Quite a rabble-rouser you were, quite a gent with the fisticuffs. Made me a bundle in those days. Haven’t been to a smoker like that for years.” He broke off for just a moment, and I thought I could hear him taking a drag from the pipe he kept in his watch pocket. “Now that I think of it, there’s a thing or two I’d like to ask you, Caudill. You still in tight with Old Man Lloyd?”

  “Jesus Christ, who told you that?”

  “Well, well.”