The Devil's Own Rag Doll

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “Pete,” said Anna, hovering near my elbow, “you’re getting soaked. Let’s go.”

  I was startled out of my daydream. It took a moment for me to feel the rain again, to bring my mind back to the sodden grass, the dull light, and the hiss of the cars passing over the wet pavement of Mt. Elliott.

  “Let’s go.” She held an umbrella out to me, and I took it, bending toward her as we walked to my car.

  “I’m sorry, Anna. I guess it was my fault.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Pete. It happened to him because—I know—he wasn’t a careful man.” Her English was clipped and careful, the German accent muted.

  I flinched to hear her speak so plainly. She was a tall woman, slender, with a handsome, square-jawed face, and this suited her personality: grim, plainspoken, and businesslike. Yet I could not accustom myself to her practicality.

  “He was careless, but he wasn’t stupid,” I said.

  “He could be stupid.” She stopped at the passenger door and let me open it for her. “Pete, you can teach me how to drive one of these things?”

  I said nothing as she slid onto the worn seat. I thought dully that from anyone but Anna the request would seem a come-on. “Sure,” I said. “But it’ll have to wait a couple weeks till I get things straightened out.” I took down the umbrella as I walked to the driver’s side and shook out the water as well as I could. Then I slipped out of my soaked coat and put it in the rear seat with the umbrella. Behind the wheel, I sat for a moment watching the water running down the windshield.

  “The ladies are putting out some sandwiches and coffee,” said Anna, “in the basement of the church.”

  “No disrespect, but I think I’ll pass on that.” I started the car and began to drive toward the church.

  “It’s okay,” she said. She crossed her ankles and folded her gloved hands on her lap and stared listlessly out the window. “I would skip it myself.”

  I hoped that the rain might suck the heat right out of the air and wash it away, but I knew that the heat would rise up like steam after the clouds blew away. It didn’t seem fair. I glanced at Anna’s angular profile and made out no trace of emotion. I had not seen her cry during any part of the proceedings.

  “It’ll be better in a while,” I said.

  “I’ve been through worse things,” she said. “It’s Lucy I worry about. Someone told her that Bobby had just gone to sleep, and now—and now she’s terrified of the bed.”

  I could think of nothing to say. I felt numb and weak and wanted to smash through something.

  “I can’t imagine what we will do now,” said Anna. She worked with long fingers to adjust the pins that held her little black hat to her hair.

  Something about the way she was sitting or a murmur at the back of her voice seemed too open to me, too intimate. We had not spoken much before. I ground my teeth together and wondered how shook up I must be to let my body feel what it was feeling, with my partner’s stiff, made-up fingers folded over his belly not half a mile away.

  I drove slowly, peering through the bleary windshield. I could not quite suck in enough air.

  “I am not fit for anything,” she said. “And who would hire me?”

  I knew that her accent and history would make it hard for her to find something. I knew that most of the Japs in the country had been rounded up, even the ones who had been born here. Though I had never asked Bobby anything about it, I had gathered that Anna had come over from Germany in the 1930s with her brother, an engineer. Even if she had become a naturalized citizen since that time, her accent would hang like a cloud over her, at least until the war was over.

  “But this is America,” said Anna. “Widows and orphans are not left out on the street.”

  I saw no trace of humor or bitterness in her words. I could not say what she was feeling, though I could see that she, too, was clenching her jaw.

  “Listen,” I said, “do you have any family over here?”

  “No,” she said. “Not here.”

  “Well, we’ll think of something, I guess.” I scrambled to think of a way to come up with a little money. I could run over to Bobby’s business and grab up all the sugar, unload it on the black market. Bobby had mentioned something about some money. It seemed clear that money could buy some flexibility, at least, or a little time.

  “I don’t really worry,” she said. “When I was a girl, it was much worse. You perhaps cannot imagine.”

  We arrived at St. John’s, and I pulled around to the side, where I knew the old ladies of the church would lay out their sandwiches and cookies. Though the sky still looked heavy and close, the rain had stopped.

  “It’s not my business,” I said, “but how did Bobby leave things?”

  She coughed or choked back a laugh. “He was always at the end of his string, you know. At the end of his rope.”

  “He worked pretty hard. He was always looking to get ahead. Had he saved anything up?”

  Now she laughed bitterly. “He had hoped he could be a good man. He was always running away!”

  “Running away?” I held both hands on the wheel and met her eyes.

  “Pete, you are a dear man,” she said. She gripped my forearm hard enough to shift my muscles under her fingers. “But you seem to know nothing sometimes.” She loosened her grip on my arm and stroked her hand over the damp fabric of my jacket. Then she turned and opened the passenger door.

  I could not imagine what to say.

  Anna stepped out of the car. She leaned her head back in and said quietly, “You should know it, Pete. You should know what it means. Don’t think less of me for the telling. Bobby was a queer.”

  “Ah,” I stammered, “queer?”

  Anna closed the car door, turned curtly, and walked into the church.

  I put the car into gear and let the idling motor drift the vehicle away toward the street.

  * * *

  Probably at a dozen other beer gardens or back rooms in the city, the better part of the police force swallowed liquor that day, not out of remorse for the way Bobby ended up but because the situation allowed a certain show of self-pity. I found a place where I knew there would be no company and guzzled half a dozen highballs. But the alcohol could not produce much feeling for me or offer relief from the ideas slamming inside my head. I sat for an hour in my car, watching the rain come and go and wishing that I could fall asleep in the backseat. I pulled my revolver from the glove box and looked it over. I dropped the shells from the wheel into my palm and then held them up, one by one, turning them and eyeing them between my fingers. After reloading the shells, I put the gun into its holster and worked it into the squeaking leather the way a ballplayer might work a glove. Since I knew that the burning ache in my gut would not go away no matter where I went, I decided I might as well try to get back into the swing of work.

  The police headquarters were empty for a Tuesday. In a room behind the main desk, I rummaged over the cluttered desk.

  “I told you to take a few days off, Caudill.” Captain Mitchell’s voice sounded close to my ear.

  “I enjoy my work so much,” I told him, “this is a holiday for me.”

  “You’re his partner, you should have stayed at the church. A lot of the men are there.” Mitchell stood close and spoke softly. “I could smell the liquor on you before I came into the room.”

  “They won’t miss me.” I thumbed the pages of the order book. “Roscoe!” I called. “Where’s the roster for the Fourth Precinct?”

  Faintly, through the open doorway leading to the front desk, came Roscoe’s thick voice. “It should be in there, I’m telling you.”

  I told Mitchell, “I’m trying to find out who was supposed to be on the beat where Bobby got it.” I fumbled through the heavy book. “Hell with this,” I said. “I’ll just run over there.”

  Mitchell took me hard by the elbow. “Come up to my office for a minute, Caudill. And keep your mouth shut.”

  I fought the urge to jerk my elbow free and followe
d Mitchell through the building to the back staircase that led up to the offices on the third floor. It always bothered me to pass by the second floor, tiled and furnished cheaply with desks for the detectives, and then to step up to the third floor, where the big brass kept house. Oak paneling as dark as mud, separate offices with walnut desks and windows overlooking Beaubien, a bank of secretaries set up in the middle of the floor. We passed into Mitchell’s office, and I stepped to the window and looked down at the street. Mitchell closed the door.

  “I won’t mince words,” said Mitchell. “Frankly, Caudill, I wish I could see a little more spark behind that eye of yours. It’s a disappointment for me to realize how limited your thinking is always going to be.”

  “Then why the hell did you make me a detective?”

  “I’ve told you before about that swearing. It’s good enough for the tough-guy act down on the street, but up here you’re supposed to be acting like a detective. It’s an honorable position. I expect you to take some pride in yourself.”

  “Why the hell did you make me a detective if I don’t even look right?”

  “I didn’t,” said Mitchell. He sat behind his desk. “You don’t seem to notice that there are people working behind the scenes here that you don’t see every day. You did all right on the test, but I always thought—I still do—that you haven’t got the temperament for the job. You don’t have the patience. You’d rather just slug right through everything. We’re not children here, so I can admit that your talents can be useful in a certain arena. But I’ll tell you right now, if there wasn’t a war on, you’d still be in the blues as far as I’d have a say in it.”

  “Bust me back down,” I said. I stared down at the street. “I won’t kick up a fuss about it.”

  “No,” said Mitchell. “I won’t do that. The only thing that’s saving you right now is that I know you’re not smart enough to lie to me effectively. Swope might have been smart enough, but he didn’t have the grit that you do. He couldn’t quite throw himself into his lies with enough vigor or lack of concern to be convincing. That’s what made the two of you together so valuable to what we’re into here.”

  I wished I could think faster. I reminded myself that Mitchell knew more than I did. Had he known about Bobby? Was he trying to tell me something by speaking this way? Maybe it was the booze still muddling things up, but I could not make my mind race through everything fast enough.

  I asked, “What are we into?”

  “Barton Rix was on the beat where Swope got killed.”

  Barton Rix. I rolled my back toward the window and stared hard at Mitchell.

  “So you can guess the situation,” said Mitchell, “without thinking too much about it. I know that you’ve known Rix since the old days. I need to figure out if I can trust you to handle things with some tact from here on out.”

  “It won’t take much tact for me to put a slug between his eyes,” I muttered.

  “One thing we know, it wasn’t Rix that killed Swope.”

  “You don’t think he knew what was happening there? Three guys socking up some poor nigger in an alley, that doesn’t sound like Rix to you?”

  “Sure it looks like something Rix might be involved in. But does that mean you should just run right over and commit felony murder? Can’t you stop and think what it might mean?” Mitchell was half out of his chair, leaning toward me. “Do you think Rix is smart enough or sneaky enough to put anything like this together? Think for a minute. Think. He’s got no more initiative than you do.”

  I lowered my eye and felt like sleeping. Maybe it was a dream coming on, a nightmare; I let my mind come up with the idea that Mitchell wanted. The Black Legion. My memory wandered back ten years or more to the leanest years: 1931, 1932. Even then we had been overrun in Detroit by poor southerners looking for work. They came up on the rails, hoping to land a nice job at one of the auto plants. For a lot of those crackers and hill people, the only thing they could hold on to to make themselves big was that they weren’t niggers. Even before that time, during the years following the Great War, the beginnings of the Legion had taken root. They splintered off the Klan up here in Michigan, and for a time it seemed that the Legion might overrun everything. At least fifty murders, I knew, could be laid at the foot of the Legion, and probably more, since the stiffs were usually the wrong color. The bulls didn’t spend much time investigating murders on the dark side of town, especially in those days. There were other things happening in Detroit, too many starving and living on the dole to worry about a few less nigger mouths to feed. I guess I knew about the Legion as much as any outsider. Certainly many men on the force were members, or would have been, if they could have stood for the hokey ceremonies and were willing to pay the dues. Though I never cared enough about it to find out, it was understood that a number of city councilmen, state lawmakers, and judges were members or sympathetic to the Legion.

  But the Legion has gone to dust, I thought. Or so the story was told, after the murder of a white man, Charles Poole, in May of 1936. Dayton Dean, the triggerman, had embarrassed the Legion by singing his canary head off for a grand jury. They had taken Poole on a one-way ride because he had supposedly beaten his wife on occasion. That was how it was with the Legion. They weren’t particular about who they smacked around. They hated Negroes first and foremost, but they also hated the Catholics, the Jews, and especially the Communists, all swarming around Detroit during the Depression. Poole’s wife was in Kiefer Hospital giving birth to their baby when the Legion took him, and she later denied being beaten altogether. The papers went wild, of course, and the publicity forced a scramble to stamp out the Legion. It only went as far as the level of the goons, though, because it was clear that further investigation would implicate many powerful men, judges, state senators, and police officials. They put up twelve of those lamebrained crackers on trial, and convicted eleven of them on Dayton Dean’s testimony.

  And Barton Rix, a patrolman like me at the time, on a beat, was rumored to have been in the third car, I now remembered. The car that didn’t make it to the Poole murder because it was caught at the Rouge River drawbridge. Without the rope they carried in the third car, the lynching party was unable to hang Poole. So Dean shot five holes into him with a pair of semiautomatic pistols.

  I chewed on it for a while. I couldn’t pull together what it might mean down the road because my mind was half taken thinking about Bobby. What Anna had told me made me feel that I needed to go back over all the times I had spent with Bobby to figure out if they meant what I had thought they meant. And now, with the suggestion that the Legion—it had been a dirty time. It was all beyond what I could do to sort it out.

  But a smile crept to my lips. I fished down into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled up the chain and the bullet that had rolled from Bobby’s hand while he was dying. I rolled it around my palm with the index finger on my bad hand. A bullet on a little chain, kept inside the lapel: the calling card of the Black Legion. I had forgotten. A whole world I had forgotten. But now the two, Rix and the bullet, came together to spark certainty in my mind, like two words matching up in a crossword puzzle. And another thing: The Legion boys, I remembered, were deeply involved in busting up the unions in the old days; though we never spent much time investigating such things, it was standard practice to blow up houses of organizers. Just around the time I lost my eye in an explosion. I tossed the bullet on the desk toward Mitchell.

  Mitchell picked it up. “Who does this belong to?”

  “I guess Bobby pulled it off the runt that killed him.”

  “So this is evidence, then.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess you’ll have to decide about that in this case.”

  Mitchell dangled the bullet by the chain. “We won’t find any prints on it now, that’s for certain.”

  I sat quietly, rubbing the pink nubs of my bad hand, waiting. I figured, the way things were, it was just me. There wasn’t a person on the earth to trust, at least until things shook
down enough so that I could see who stood to lose what. I kept my head low and peered up through my eyebrow at Mitchell.

  “You’re wondering,” said Mitchell, “if you can trust me.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Captain. I don’t trust any man that doesn’t get his hands dirty when he works.” I watched him with a slack expression.

  “Make up your mind, Caudill. Do it quick. I won’t sweet-talk you. If you don’t think you can act like a detective on this one, go along with me as far as it goes, then you’re out. I can put you anywhere you like, directing traffic, helping little old ladies across the street. If you’re in, you’ll do just what I tell you and be happy with what information I think you need to know.”

  “You figure the Legion is trying to come back up?”

  “I can’t imagine how it could be done these days. It looks like a few of the Legion punks trying to pull a few things over while we’re busy thinking about other things. That’s the best guess I have.”

  “You’re just guessing?”