Stress

by Loren D. Estleman

  Russell took the card. Without removing his gaze from the detective he tore it in half, then tore the halves into quarters, and let the pieces flutter to the floor. Battle’s eyes, soft and sad for a pig’s, followed the last piece until it came to rest. He shook his head.

  “Dumb.”

  He went out through the office.

  Alone in the cluttered room, Russell stretched out his arms and spread his hands. He’d learned the trick from one of those little hot-blooded lizards in a National Geographic special; something to do with getting oxygen into its system in the desert. He stood like that for a full minute. Then he carried the rest of the boxes out to the dumpster. The wind came off the lake, hurling icepicks into his face. Detroit sure was a long way from the Kalahari.

  Chapter Twelve

  CARYN CROWNOVER OGDEN’S TUESDAYS BELONGED to the Charlotte Gryphon Foundation.

  Named for a quasi-mythical young Frenchwoman who had warned the commander of Fort Detroit of Chief Pontiac’s plan to invade the garrison in 1763—a distant ancestor of the Crownovers—the foundation had been established by Caryn in the wake of the 1967 riots to identify and reward deserving minority students with college scholarships. Although Ted Ogden, an investment counselor by trade, served as the group’s treasurer, it was Caryn’s grasp of business organization that prevented it from dissipating its energies in directions other than those stated in the charter, and to keep the various community leaders who served on its board from bludgeoning one another with their chairs.

  This Tuesday had been one of those days. Henry Ford II, already well in his cups at 9:30 A.M., had pounded the conference table with a pudgy fist when Caryn reminded him that the foundation did not exist to help underwrite his plans to build a glittery office complex and shopping center in the warehouse district, but rather to educate the architects and engineers who would design and construct its successors. Studying him through her platinum-framed glasses, she saw a deteriorating giant much like her grandfather, his flabby cheeks a map of purple blood vessels burst by drink, the famed Ford eyes out of focus and a little afraid. Of what, she wondered? Of the younger, talented men on his own board of directors, with their cargo load of revolutionary ideas, ideas of the dangerous sort that when he possessed them had blasted aside his own grandfather and his ring of cronies like loose metal shavings on an unpainted chassis? Of Christina, his second wife, whose patience with his infidelities could only be expected to carry so far? Of Caryn? Or—and this was most likely—of Henry Ford II, and the myriad weaknesses of his own poor clay?

  Poor Hank the Deuce. She wished she’d known him better in the days before the Edsel. It was plain he had never quite recovered from that personal Little Big Horn.

  The meeting, convened to decide whether to expand the scholarship’s horizons beyond the sciences so beloved of industry to encompass the liberal arts, had adjourned with a motion to table the measure until tempers had cooled. In this manner the happy problem of what to do with a surplus that threatened Gryphon’s non-profit status had become a crisis that might require an army of tax attorneys to lay to rest. Their fees would eliminate the surplus, with no advantage gained for the promising minority members the foundation existed to encourage. It was no wonder so many of them turned to the street.

  As if to confirm the suspicion, the radio in her Corvette as she drove away from Gryphon’s headquarters in the Penobscot Building reported an astonishing assortment of fresh horrors that had taken place the previous night: County workers had rolled four members of a family out of their house on Sherman that morning under sheets, punched full of bullet holes by persons unknown in an incident believed to be connected to the family’s heroin business; a police officer was in critical condition at Receiving Hospital with a bullet in his chest, delivered at close range during a routine traffic stop on Outer Drive at 3:00 A.M.; the unidentified corpse of a young woman with her hands cut off and her teeth knocked out had been gaffed in the River Rouge around midnight by police on Zug Island; and a newborn infant, found blue and comatose in a dumpster by a restaurant worker on the east side shortly after dawn, had expired thirty minutes ago at St. John’s Hospital. A teenage girl thought to be the child’s mother was in custody.

  Caryn wondered if Henry Ford ever listened to the news, and if he was truly convinced his proposed glass-and-steel headstone for a culture that had gone West with his horsecollar-grilled Dream Car would make a difference. At the national level, Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley had dubbed Detroit the Murder City, a place where the violent crime rate had tripled in five years, three out of five citizens owned unlicensed firearms, and homicide was the fourth leading cause of death. Network pundits analyzed a recent joint directive issued by Mayor Gribbs and Police Chief Nichols advising Detroiters to avoid arguments with strangers. The concept of politeness as a weapon of self-defense kept things lively between commercials for ring-around-the-collar.

  From Eight Mile Road to the foot of Woodward Avenue, from the self-consuming chimneys of the coke ovens and glass plants downriver to the black iron jockeys of Grosse Pointe, established order in the City of Detroit had broken down. Street gangs named for dead movie stars took in wandering youths in lieu of a stable family environment. Even the police had fallen into vigilantism, stripping the uniforms from its officers and the insignia from its cars and Turning them loose in alleys and rail yards on hunting expeditions for suspicious persons. The place was any civic architect’s picture of hell.

  As the daughter of a man who had shipped Negro laborers north to break the strikes of the 1930s, Caryn was sensitive to issues of race, and did not share the opinion of some of her colleagues at Gryphon that the community’s black majority was somehow responsible for the decline. Rather, it was the almost criminally nearsighted refusal of its white governing class to recognize that majority. But she did agree with the assessment of department store magnate Joseph L. Hudson, Jr., when on the fifth anniversary of the riots he announced: “The black man has the feeling he is about to take power in the city, but he is going to be left with an empty bag.”

  Until the incident in her own living room at the close of the old year, Caryn had comforted herself that the anarchy was confined to the Inner City, that alien place where her father had continued to recruit the labor to build automobiles to carry his customers north and west from the squalor downtown; but the cancer had spread.

  Not for the first time since the killings at the party, she considered sending Opal to an eastern school when she came of age. But that would mean moving, as Caryn couldn’t bear to be separated from her daughter, and that was unfair to Ted, all of whose clients were in Michigan and Ohio. They had never discussed, would never discuss the fact that her income through Crownover Coaches would support all three of them for several lifetimes even if he never put together another portfolio for another prosperous client. There would always be people without imagination who clung to the obvious conclusion about their marriage. Although they were easily ignored, they exerted a kind of reverse influence on the way Ted and Caryn conducted their lives. Always the Ogdens would go to the opposite extreme to prevent those people from crowing that their impressions were right.

  The only alternative was to make the city safe for Opal.

  Cadillac Square and her best route to Jefferson and home was sealed off. Police barricades and a city blue-and-white with its roof light flashing compelled her to take Woodward north to Grand River. As she maneuvered around an obviously cold and miserable patrolman directing traffic in fur hat, collar, and black leather gauntlets, she rolled down her window and asked if there had been an accident.

  “No, ma’am. They’re shooting a movie.”

  “A movie? What kind?”

  “Crime picture. What else?”

  Maybe it was a good sign, she thought as she followed a grumbling caravan of slow-moving vehicles through the detour. If Hollywood was tiring at last of New York City and southern California, had in fact begun to discover the great interior part of t
he country that provided the bulk of its audience, it meant more money in the city treasury. Money enough, perhaps, to tear down the black and twisted remains of Twelfth Street, erect decent housing on the site, and maybe even help fund Hank’s glitter palace. She thought it a fine irony that the bad reputation that inspired a motion-picture company to shoot its bloody scenes on location in Detroit should help to eradicate the conditions that had attracted it,

  She was meeting Abner for lunch at Sinbad’s on the river. The sight of his bottle-green Mercedes in the parking lot, with its vanity plate reading DUGOUT, made her mouth pull lines in her face. She had discussed with him the questionable form of driving a foreign car when the family income was tied so firmly to Detroit, but his interest in the company their adoptive ancestor had carved out of the wilderness extended only so far as the walls of his office and their usefulness as a place to hang Tigers pennants and uniforms. No one disliked the Gashawks more than Caryn—Robin and Cedric epitomized the predatory nature of their late father while possessing nothing of Sir Roger’s roughhewn candor—and yet she shuddered to think what would happen to Crownover if her brother were truly running it instead of their capable and acquisitive British cousins.

  The lunch was a waste of time. Abner, brooding over a portfolio of sketches for a new Tigers logo, barely touched his salmon mousse and grunted in response when Caryn recounted the details of the Gryphon meeting. His tiny eyes, set close above a nose that had been broken the one time he had actually tried to play baseball, showed a flicker of interest only when she mentioned the movie being shot downtown.

  “Casting anybody local?”

  “I don’t know. Why? Are you considering a career in show business?”

  “Maybe there’s a cameo in it for Kaline. It might be good for attendance.”

  “I’m sure someone in Dallas is going to hop a plane east and buy a season ticket because Al Kaline ordered a cup of coffee in a movie.”

  “It worked with Alex Karras, and the damn Lions haven’t won anything since 1957. What do you think of this one?” He held up a sixteen-by-twenty sketch in pastels of a cartoon tiger in a baseball cap winding up to pitch.

  “It looks like Snagglepuss. Abner, give it a rest. Spring training doesn’t start for two months.”

  “Six weeks. Anyway the season’s just the tip of the iceberg. A big win in September starts in January. How’s my niece?”

  “Coming down with a cold. I almost canceled the meeting so I could stay home with her.”

  “That’s great. She’s a cute kid.” He was looking at Snagglepuss.

  Caryn sat back and ordered another highball.

  Driving home, floating a little, she decided that if it weren’t for Cornelia she would never see her brother except at family events. The old lady sitting in her big empty mansion placed a lot of store in blood relationships, possibly because she could never bear children of her own. Caryn hadn’t discussed with Abner what they would do with the house once their mother passed on. She didn’t care to live there herself, and she didn’t think even Abner could fill it with trophies and autographed baseballs. The paintings, tapestries, and statuary that decorated it would bring a fortune at auction even by Crownover standards, but she doubted the house itself would attract a private buyer. When it was built, the enormous staff required to maintain it had cost only pennies a day, but in recent years adequate help for a reasonable wage had become scarce—good help, as perceived by the vanishing members of Cornelia’s class and generation, was close to nonexistent—and brass went unpolished and cobwebs laced the crystals of Catherine the Great’s chandelier in the front hall. It was simply too much house even for a billionaire, and billionaires no longer even changed planes in Detroit on their way between coasts. Probably the family would donate the building and its six acres to the City of Grosse Pointe to beat the taxes, and probably the city would tear down the building and sell the lot to a developer. The materials and fixtures alone would fund another war memorial.

  Ted’s Eldorado was parked in the garage when she pulled in and cut the Corvette’s motor. When she got out he was leaning through the connecting doorway to the kitchen. He was in his shirtsleeves, but his necktie was done up, which meant he hadn’t been there long. His curly hair needed combing. It usually did. It was a weave, and he thought if he left it a little disheveled, no one would notice. It was one of several areas where his and Caryn’s opinions differed. He looked anxious.

  “I expected you home earlier,” he said.

  “I didn’t expect you at all. Is Opal all right?” A fist in a nice glove closed on her heart.

  “She’s running a fever. Netta called me at the office when she couldn’t reach you. I called Doctor Farhat. He doesn’t think it’s serious, but he’s sending an ambulance.”

  She was sure she’d given the governess the number at Sinbad’s, but she didn’t stand there arguing. At the mention of fever she pushed through the doorway, nearly colliding with her husband. He followed her into the living room and up the stairs to Opal’s bedroom, saying something reassuring. But she heard the concern in his tone. Whether it was over their daughter or because Caryn hadn’t been on hand when the situation changed, she couldn’t tell.

  Opal’s voice was small—“I’m hot, Mommy”—and her forehead was burning up. Caryn stretched out next to her on the bed, holding her, and got off only when the paramedics came and strapped her daughter to a board. They were kind, warmer and more genuine-sounding in their reassurances than Dr. Farhat, Opal’s pediatrician, whose bedside manner Caryn had always thought oily. She kept her hand on her daughter’s as they carried the stretcher down the stairs and out the front door to where the ambulance was parked with its doors open and its lights twinkling. They didn’t even wait for Caryn to ask if she could ride along. One of them stood aside and held the door for her to climb in. When the doors were secured and his partner in back, the driver strapped himself in and swung the boxlike vehicle out of the drive and into the private road, expertly avoiding the blue Duster parked on the other side, which pulled out behind and stayed there all the way to the hospital.

  Chapter Thirteen

  HOLLYWOOD PEOPLE WERE PUSSIES.

  Kubicek had suspected as much for some time—a couple of Christmases ago his wife had dragged him into a theater for the first time in fifteen years to see A Clockwork Orange, whose faggy British accents and phoney liberal worldview had almost made him puke up a twelve-dollar prime rib dinner—but his first exposure to the talent behind Detroit P.D., an independent production starring somebody Kubicek vaguely remembered as one of the mobsters wiped out in the climax of The Godfather, confirmed the suspicion.

  The director, whose name was Corky, came up to about Kubicek’s sternum in platform boots with a beaded Indian band around his forehead, black hair to his shoulders, and an untrimmed beard spilling down the front of his tie-dyed sweatshirt. It had taken the sergeant the better part of the morning to sort the honcho from the rest of the crew, none of whom looked to be a minute past thirty. Most of them were clearly freezing despite their heavy quilted coats, big fuzzy earmuffs, and mittens. Mittens, for chrissake; he kept looking to see if they were tied to their sleeves. He himself was comfortable on this moderate day in mid-January in a belted topcoat with a zip-out pile lining and black Cossack hat. An old-fashioned Alberta Clipper of the kind that closed schools and brought out the county plows would probably send these California feebs squealing back to their topless beaches and hot tubs. There wasn’t a Pappy Ford or a John Huston in the bunch.

  They all appeared to know what they were doing, he gave them that. While the actors and extras stood around pounding their shoulders and gulping steaming coffee and tea from Styrofoam cups provided by a catering truck, young men and women in baseball caps with film titles stenciled on the fronts unwound miles of cable from portable reels, pulled out the telescoping legs of tripods, erected big silver umbrella reflectors, swung booms, plugged cords into the backs of control panels, trundled cameras, switc
h-started a gas-powered generator the size of a city bus, laid out hand props on a folding table, and just generally screwed tight, spread out, clamped down, snapped shut, winched up, rolled, pounded, dug, tested, taped, chalked, wired, strapped, wheeled, pushed, tugged, slapped, cursed, replaced, and shouldered equipment both familiar and alien to the sergeant from 7:00A.M. until noon, at which point everything shut down for lunch.

  This was beef Wellington and baked potatoes served in the Motor Bar at the old Book-Cadillac Hotel, closed to the public that day. Shamefacedly, Kubicek asked the production’s leading lady, recruited from one of his wife’s favorite soap operas, for her autograph, which she gracefully granted on a paper napkin over her vegetarian plate. While he was waiting, an assistant director even smaller than Corky shoved him aside to deliver a message to the actress, then manhandled him again on his way out. Kubicek resisted the urge to break the little turd in half.

  With an hour to go before they lost the light, the company was ready to shoot its first scene, a shrieking, arm-flinging argument between the soap girl and the Godfather guy in front of the statue of the Spirit of Detroit outside the entrance to the City-County Building. Of the three, Kubicek thought the great sculpture, a muscular giant holding a man, woman, and child in one hand and a sunburst symbolizing Industrial

  Progress in the other, was the best actor; but he supposed they did something back at the studio to improve the scene. After two takes, Corky stopped the cameras and asked three of the uniformed city officers working Crowd Control if they would mind being in the background.

  “Doing what?” This from Horace Hyde, a Traffic Bureau cop Kubicek knew slightly. He had silver temples and a horseshoe moustache just this side of regulation.

  “Just walking through. The scene needs a note of realism.”

  “Well, we’re on duty.”