Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “Dawn Spens, if anything happens to him I’m going to hold you responsible,” Dee yelled.

  Dawn just stared at her. She’d seen that blank look before. Dawn had a way of turning to a passive silence when she was in trouble. She’d seen her work people for sympathy that way, but Dee wasn’t feeling very charitable.

  “I’m not kidding, Dawn,” she raved. “I cannot believe you subjected me to this knowing how important that dinner was, then brought him home in this state in front of my mom.”

  Dawn later apologized.

  “We were just out and about doing our thing,” she said. “They talked me into staying out and partying.”

  All Dee wanted was a phone call. She didn’t expect one from Donnie Carlton. And she eventually dumped her boyfriend. But Dawn was her best friend. She felt betrayed, conned. What, she thought, were all those talks in Memorial Park about? Maybe she really didn’t know Dawn after all.

  They saw even less of each other after that. Two months before graduation she heard from Patty Spens that her sister was thinking of dropping out. She saw Dawn that night at Memorial Park.

  “I’m thinking about leaving,” Dawn said. “I think I’m going to move in with Donnie.”

  Dee did everything she could to dissuade her.

  “You only got a little while to go. With your average, you’ve got a chance at a scholarship. You always wanted to go to college. Why do you want to stop now?”

  “Things are too tough, all the way around. It’s something I’ve got to do. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Dawn, you’re going to get messed up with the wrong kind of people and the wrong kind of atmosphere and something is going to happen. You can’t run from your problems.”

  Dawn said she’d phone her the next day. The call never came. Dee heard Dawn moved in with Donnie, who had an apartment near downtown Detroit.

  It had been eight months. Dee Cusmano wondered where her old friend was living and what she was doing now. Those old high school traumas seemed pretty stupid now, she thought.

  Dee Cusmano wondered if Dawn Spens felt the same way.

  23

  John Fry concocted the scam as he looked at his father’s Torino, parked outside the Homewood, the day after Christmas. Cheryl Krizanovic watched Dawn Spens dial up Dr. Al Miller.

  “Hey, Al, guess what? I found a car,” Dawn said. “Yes. It’s here now. But he wants the money right away.”

  Then Dawn looked as though she was going to cry.

  “Aw, Al,” she said. “I need eight hundred dollars real bad. I need this car really bad and this guy is going to sell it to somebody else if I don’t get it.”

  Cheryl had used the same plaintive little girl’s voice with her regulars. She never understood why men bought it, but they did. Dawn was adept at playing the role. With her deep-set brown eyes and slightly pouting lips, the word “helpless” was written all over her face. Dawn, she thought, could make a trick feel sorry for her and never say a word.

  Dawn met Dr. Miller in front of the Homewood early that afternoon, showing him the car as she accepted the eight hundred dollars. When she returned to apartment 202 she handed the money over to John.

  But Dawn would never own the car. The Torino later would be dropped off with one of Pete Fry’s cousins in Detroit for return to the South. Later, Dr. Miller would accept Dawn’s excuse that the car deal fell through. He wouldn’t ask for his money back.

  Later that night Dawn asked John for one hundred dollars.

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “I just fuckin’ gave you eight hundred dollars this afternoon.”

  Fry smirked and squeezed the yellow tattoo of the cartoon character on his right arm.

  “Tweety Bird got drunk,” he cracked.

  Then John began adding up the totals. Lunch, one hundred dollars. Christmas Eve trip money and gift, one thousand dollars. Car scam, eight hundred dollars. Holiday total: nineteen hundred dollars.

  “I mean, we’re talking about this much in a three-day period,” Fry later told a friend. “He was actually giving her more money than I could understand.

  “I mean, the girl is getting a hundred dollars a day, and he’s only spending a half hour with her. He takes her to the shopping mall and buys her a three-hundred-dollar coat. All cash. No credit cards.

  “By this time I’m thinking, yeah. This guy is a fuckin’ gold mine.”

  24

  A Detroit cop named Mark Bando had waited months for the opportunity to roust Lucky Fry. Now he had one.

  “I knew he’d eventually fuck up,” he said. “It’s his destiny.”

  A routine record check had shown Fry was wanted on an assault and battery warrant. The thirty-three-yearold Bando and his partner, John Woodington, noted the A&B for their next call to the Homewood Manor. It would only be a couple of days.

  Bando first learned of Fry two years ago when Fry and Cheryl Krizanovic were staying at the Travler Motel on Cass Avenue. On three successive nights, the motel’s guests—most of them dubious characters themselves—had complained:

  “She turns tricks day and night. He comes home every evening, picks up his money, then beats her for about forty-five minutes straight. You can hear her screaming all over the motel and just why the fuck don’t somebody do something about it?”

  Fry and Miss Krizanovic had earned a place in what Bando called his “whore book”—a three-volume directory of twelve hundred Corridor girls and street types. Bando shot pictures of John and Cheryl from his squad car for their entries in one of the eight-by-fourteen-inch bookkeeping ledgers:

  Cheryl Krizanovic—“Twiggy” 7108 Clayton. Pimp: John “Lucky” Fry.

  John Carl Fry—“Lucky”—fiend/pimp/punk.

  The book tracked the turnover and helped flag false IDs. The ledger rode in the squad car with other items Bando kept in a doctor’s valise: A 35mm single-lens reflex for detailed photography. A 110 camera for quick photos. A flashlight and binoculars. A stack of three-by-five cards for notes. And a pair of “bum gloves” for handling derelicts.

  Mark Bando had been working the neighborhoods near downtown for five years, but he already was legendary in the neighborhood he and Woodington called “the sewer hole.” They navigated the Thirteenth Precinct’s “whore car,” a patrol devoted exclusively to busting prostitutes, pimps, and johns.

  When he first joined the force ten years ago, the former Wayne State history major barely passed the department physical with his five-foot-seven, 140-pound frame. His parents met in a U.S. detention camp in Utah during the Second World War. The street life often made note of his Japanese roots. He was the “rice-eating bitch,” the “slant-eyed mothafucker” whose “Nip ass should have been nuked in Hiroshima.”

  Off duty, the cop was writing a nonfiction book about an American company in the European theater of World War II. Bando was pounding out the historical narrative in a home office decorated with war memorabilia—including a mannequin of a fully outfitted GI. The story was about 122 GIs who were surrounded in the Battle of the Bulge. They were men in the 101st Airborne who died by the dozens and jumped out of airplanes until their feet bled.

  “If they’re on the other side, you’d call them fanatics,” he once told a friend. “If they’re on yours, they’re dedicated. The country today is full of artificial heroes. Sports stars are not heroes. Nor are actors. But people who actually risk their lives.” Bando loathed the TV show “Entertainment Tonight.”

  The way the cop looked at it, when the Thirteenth Precinct commander assigned him and Woodington to the whore car nearly two years ago, he wanted them to bust whores. Most cops in the Thirteenth made five to ten arrests a month and wrote as many tickets. Bando and Woodington were arresting fifty and writing a hundred. Many cops considered bringing a girl into the Thirteenth in handcuffs unbecoming to police work.

  Bando, however, remembered how bad it was in the Corridor before enforcement was increased. One night he took a girlfriend to the opera at the Mas
onic Temple, and he couldn’t get his car down Second Avenue. The girls were three lanes deep flagging dates. He couldn’t see letting them rule the streets unchecked.

  The sewer hole, Bando resolved, was ruled by predators. The weapon of choice for many punks and pimps was the baseball bat. The law had no control over the Louisville Slugger, but it was as deadly as Mace.

  “Just goin’ to play a little ball, Bando” was a common line from someone on the street on their way to even a score.

  Bando grimaced when people talked about prostitution as a victimless crime. Some of the johns may have thought they were spending time with sexually liberated party girls, but the cop never saw any such emancipation. He saw girls as young as eight turned out by local pimps. He arrested one pimp who had cut off his whore’s finger and kept it iced in the refrigerator. Another time he recorded a bloody prostitute who ran up to his squad car, screaming.

  “Look, Offitha, I’m bleeding from where he hit me!”

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch, you bleed more than that on your period,” the pimp said.

  “Quit lyin’, mothafucker, you hit me upside my haid!”

  “You two-dollar punk bitch, I didn’t do nothing but use your ass … got them abscesses all over you. Stankin’ bitch! Go on out and turn tricks! That what she want to do.”

  Some girls were second-generation whores. Bando once copied a note left by a prostitute dead from an overdose:

  “It’s so fucking sick in this neighborhood, it’s sickening. Everybody I know is a stone dope fiend to the max. I’m going to try to get some good friend tricks of mine to co-sign a car for me and get the fuck out of Detroit altogether. My baby is not going to go through what I went through. I’ll get a better life for my baby if I have to kill a motherfucker to get it.”

  But most of the whores in Bando’s book came from everywhere and most of them were going nowhere. There was no pattern to their backgrounds. One girl was the daughter of a Grosse Pointe doctor. Another’s father was a police chief in Kansas. Many started without drug habits. The closest he’d heard to a logical reason for the career choice came from a reformed prostitute he knew.

  “I just wanted to be loved,” she told him. “My father never loved me. So I said, ‘I’ll show you, Daddy, I’ll get love from the johns.’ ”

  Bando decided early on that if he ticketed the girls enough times and struck fear into their pimps, a few might just wake up and get out. At least they got clean in jail. He’d received Christmas gifts from some of the girls, those he’d taken to emergency rooms after they were brutalized by dates or their boyfriends. Those who didn’t lie usually got a break. The rapport had paid off. Bando had solved two murders with his connections.

  But most girls were bent on destroying themselves.

  “Some of these whores look like they’re studying for parts in The Night of the Living Dead,” he said one night.

  “It’s the teeth,” said Woodington. “Always the teeth are the first to go. They turn yellow, then begin to fall out.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s the semen. The semen creates a new kind of plaque that rots their teeth.”

  The black humor helped for a while. The pair had improvised a number of gags the previous summer. They played Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” on the squad car’s public address system as they swept the streets, or Bando’s favorite, “Man Eater,” by Hall & Oates. He piped the lyrics as the squad car flew out of an alley, spotlighting negotiating johns.

  But the predators fought back. Some of the pimps tried to track their patrol schedule. Bando and Woodington worked odd shifts. When Bando went on furlough, they spread rumors about the cop:

  “Bando got caught screwing a fifteen-year-old hooker in the backseat of a police car.”

  “Bando locked up a girl who wasn’t a whore and got fired.”

  “Bando got promoted to inspector.”

  On Bando’s last vacation, Woodington fought back with another gag. He told people his partner had tried to kill himself and “botched the job.” When he returned, Bando put bruises on his forehead with theater makeup. Woodington drove him around. Bando was seemingly dazed and speechless. When a group of prostitutes gathered around the squad car, Woodington explained Bando was nearly brain dead.

  “I feel bad,” said one. “Bando wasn’t that bad. He was just doing his job.”

  By the end of the year, however, Mark Bando was finding the job more difficult and the humor harder to come by. Three prostitutes he had some hope for had died of drug overdoses. He was fed up with local hoodlums he called the Cass Corridor Commandos. They were Southern white families who for years committed a wide variety of the crimes in the Corridor.

  Lucky Fry ranked right at the top with the rest of the predators, he thought. On New Year’s Day Bando and Woodington decided to do a little stalking themselves. The pair was called to the Homewood Manor on a routine gun complaint. Fry’s apartment was just down the hall.

  Lucky Fry was alone when he opened the door of apartment 202. The two cops surrounded the pimp. They were looking for an excuse to give him what they liked to call “a tune-up.”

  “Woman beater. You wouldn’t resist arrest, would you, faggot?” Bando spat.

  But Lucky Fry wouldn’t take the bait. He just glared.

  They cuffed him and took him to the Thirteenth Precinct. After more than two thousand arrests, Bando could tell a standout when he saw one.

  “That guy is destined for bigger and better things,” he told his partner. “Did you see that look in his eyes?

  “Lucky Fry’s a goddamn killer.”

  Part Two

  1984

  25

  Jan Canty always looked forward to their yearly trip to Sun Lakes the first week of January. But this year she felt Al needed the Arizona vacation more than she did.

  Not that Al was so eager to go. He never was. It wouldn’t be the first time she would have to pry him from his practice. Al’s concern for his patients often exceeded his own best interests, and she thought he was looking tired and drawn. The prosecutor’s office, he’d said, had increased his work load at the jail. She had little knowledge of forensic work, or even the court system itself. But she did know he couldn’t keep up the pace, whatever the work entailed.

  Lately, he seemed more interested in her work at the University Health Center, which was part of the Detroit Receiving Hospital and Medical Center complex. He wondered who ran the psychiatric unit and emergency-room admissions. He wanted to know how hospital records were kept. He was curious about what the hospital looked like inside.

  That’s all he needs, she thought. How could he possibly have any mental energy left to get involved in my career?

  Always a deep sleeper, Al now was tossing and turning some nights. His psoriasis was flaring up. It has to be work-related stress, she concluded.

  As he complained about the trip, Jan packed both their bags. Sun Lakes was the ideal rest spot. Her parents had relocated from Detroit to the small retirement community for the dry air and the perennial Arizona sun. In January, the weather was like April in Michigan, without the rain. There were few distractions. A post office, a small grocery store, a golf course, and a travel agency made up the heart of the town.

  Al complained all the way to the airport, but, predictably, his attitude changed once they got to her parents’ house. They stayed in the guest room, in the same bed that had cured Jan of her mono. Al spent the first day in bed, sleeping. He emerged unshaven and made sure everyone in the house knew he’d put his new watch away for the week.

  “For us, a vacation is any place without a schedule,” Jan said. Al agreed.

  They had a lazy week together. Jan’s mother pulled out her best recipes for dinners. Another night they ate out at one of the good Mexican restaurants nearby. Al spent a lot of time on the patio reading a stack of custom car magazines he’d brought. Several times she noticed him sitting out there alone. He seemed preoccupied with his thoughts as he cleaned
his nails with a pocketknife he always carried. At night, he watched TV and was less vocal than on past trips to her parents.

  One night a local station carried a special on the Grand Canyon. Al became quite interested in the program. It was a documentary about a rescue project for burros in the canyon. The animals were descendants of donkeys brought by nineteenth-century miners. The program detailed the rich history of the bearded explorers with big appetites for gold and straight whiskey. The men were gone, but the burros they left behind had multiplied in the wild and now were in danger of starving.

  That year, the four of them decided to visit the Grand Canyon National Park. Every year they liked to go on one sight-seeing trip. Jan, Al, and her parents drove the six hours north to the park but found many of the roads, lodges, and activities closed for the winter. They stopped at a lookout. Jan’s father took a picture as she and Al posed.

  Al and Jan Canty were standing on the edge of the great precipice.

  Jan later chuckled about the photo. She was wearing a ski jacket and knit cap, Al a light winter jacket. They looked as though they had been roughing it for days, when it had to be one of the shortest canyon visits on record. They lingered along the edge of the picturesque drop-off for about an hour, then drove home that night.

  When they returned to Sun Lakes, Al was anxious to get back to Detroit. He never stayed more than a week, while she usually remained for two.

  Al was talking about his practice and the prosecutor again as Jan and her father drove him to the Phoenix airport. But after a week on the bum, he looked refreshed. Jan had no doubt he’d put his recharged cells right to work once he got back to Detroit.

  26

  Dr. Al Miller’s antibiotics provided only temporary relief for Dawn Spens’s infected groin. Two days after her return from Tennessee, she hardly could walk. Now she was in the hospital.