Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  “Oh, you know I’m going to give it to you.”

  She knew there was no someplace else.

  Gladys Canty wrote him a check for $900. Then he left. He was in a hurry. Buster always was in a hurry when he needed money.

  35

  Mark Bando bailed out of the squad car and sprinted toward the Homewood Manor after Dawn Spens. The cop caught the front door just before it locked shut and raced toward the sound of high heels clicking down the basement steps. He caught her on the landing, pinning the prostitute against the wall as he cuffed her.

  Bando wasn’t sure why she fled when he and John Woodington drove up Charlotte from Third. But they had a standing policy about such situations: You approach someone in the car; they run; you catch them first; you worry about what they’re wanted for later.

  Back at the squad car they found she was wanted for $400 in outstanding warrants.

  “Time for a ride downtown, Dawn,” Bando said.

  The prostitute squinted her eyes, glaring at some spot in space. Capricorns could be like that, he thought, like robots or something. He wasn’t surprised when her birthday put her square under the sign. He pulled out his whore book.

  Dawn Marie Spens, 20082 Elkhart, 7112 Clayton; 5′4″—brn/brn. “Dumb Donnie Carlton’s protégé.”

  Bando felt like adding “lost cause” this Friday, March 23.

  Almost a year ago the cop welcomed her to the Cass Corridor with her first arrest. Bando and Woodington had heard a whorehouse was operating above a market on Park and Montcalm, its main attraction a young girl named Dawn. They eventually caught up with her on the streets. When they checked Dawn’s handbag they found a set of works.

  Bando was disappointed. She hadn’t been in the neighborhood two months. He booked her for possession of narcotics paraphernalia, then he called her father. He was hoping to get her back to Harper Woods before she destroyed herself. If she didn’t, he knew the neighborhood would.

  “We’re concerned that something should be done before it’s too late,” Bando told Roy Spens over the telephone. “What do you think? Can she come back and live with you?”

  Then Dawn got on the phone. Bando remembered it as a somewhat sentimental scene. Tears rolled down her cheeks. The sewer didn’t stink so bad that night.

  Roy Spens seemed eager to do what he could. The father agreed to meet Bando and Woodington the following night at Chris And Carl’s Cafe on Cass. Dawn promised she would meet them there, too. Her father would pick up her things and take her back to Harper Woods. Bando and Woodington would be there as a kind of stabilizing influence, just in case Dumb Donnie or anybody else tried to make trouble.

  They met Roy Spens at the restaurant. The three of them sipped coffee and waited. Roy seemed like an OK guy, Bando thought. They talked about what kind of work he did. He said he appreciated them trying to help. They waited for more than a half hour, but Dawn never showed up.

  Several days later Bando and Woodington heard that Dawn had hooked up with Lucky Fry.

  “What could she possibly see in that sick, sadistic, sociopathic gnome?” Bando asked his partner. Lucky Fry had always reminded him of a twisted version of the trademark character on the Vernors ginger ale bottle.

  Then he heard from the vice squad that Dawn was turning tricks on Michigan Avenue. Dates were lined up around the block for her, they said.

  Bando arrested her again in November. There were no tears that time.

  Now, as he processed Dawn Spens on the warrants, he didn’t much care what happened to her. By then he knew that talking to Dawn Spens was like having a conversation with a wall. She was quite unlike the verbal Cheryl Krizanovic, Fry’s old punching bag. Dawn Spens was spooky, he thought. Bando remembered Fry’s icy stare the day he arrested him in the Homewood.

  “Dawn Spens and Lucky Fry deserved each other,” he later said. “They both seemed cold-blooded, heartless. There was something missing. He was ruthless. She just didn’t give a shit. They complemented each other perfectly. Together they formed a third personality of their own.”

  When he heard the news during his visit to the Homewood, Dr. Al Miller told John Fry he didn’t have the money to post Dawn’s bond. She would have to spend the weekend in jail, waiting for the courts to open on Monday morning.

  What was she doing in jail, anyway? She wasn’t supposed to be working the streets, Al said. John tried to explain the ways of the Japanese cop.

  “Bando, man,” John said. “He’s death on whores.”

  Al toddled to his Buick and sped off, seemingly irritated.

  Early the next evening Dawn’s sugar daddy made a visit to Police Headquarters. The building at 1300 Beaubien had hardly changed since it was built in the Roaring Twenties. The ambience inside would make Kojak feel at home. Visits to the eighth-floor lockup were as intimate as those in most jails. Prisoner and visitor talked over a telephone, eyeing each other through a small window of shatterproof glass. Visits were restricted to lawyers, immediate family, and medical personnel. But on slow nights, the cops working the desk on the first floor relaxed the rules.

  Dr. Miller didn’t need an M.D.’s credentials to make the visit. At the precinct desk, an officer wrote down the name he gave for the March 24 pass. The cop filed a copy, then directed Dawn’s visitor to the elevator to the lockup above.

  On the pass he wrote: “Alan Canty, a friend.”

  36

  … The now potentially-disturbed individual literally convinces himself of the validity of his own thinking. He is actually making himself emotionally disturbed, since his difficulty is growing, not out of the specific behavior of others, but rather out of his reactions to their behavior and the way he has allowed himself to experience them.

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  John Fry and Dawn Spens were stirred from their sleep by the pleading car horn outside the Homewood Manor. It was the morning of April 8, a Sunday. Dawn shuffled to the window.

  “Damn. Al’s out there.”

  “Fuck it,” John mumbled. “I ain’t gettin’ up.”

  The next series of bleats from the Buick raised John upright. Then he realized what day it was.

  “Fuck, I don’t even have time to get right,” he grumbled. “What the fuck ever happened to never on Sunday?”

  John pulled on his clothes and ambled downstairs to let the trick in. Dawn scurried around the apartment, picking up. When the two men reached the door of apartment 202, John started down the hall to wake up a friend.

  “No, John,” Al said. “Come in. I want to talk.”

  Dawn went to the kitchen to fire up a pot of Al’s special blend. She explored a bag of juices and chocolates that Al had brought her for Sunday brunch. John sat on one end of the couch and Al on the other as they waited for the coffee.

  “John,” he began. “I know you and Dawn are boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “Who, me? What?”

  “Let’s stop the games, John. I’ve been around.”

  They talked for only a few minutes. Dawn seemed to be giving them time to talk. She lingered over the treats in the kitchen.

  Al said he had developed some “strong feelings” for Dawn.

  “OK,” John said. “You’re saying that to say what?”

  “What would it cost for you to bow out of the picture?”

  John explained he was not the kind of man who just walked out of somebody’s life for money. He’d have to think about it. It would not be easy—or cheap—to reestablish himself.

  “The girl means a lot to me, too,” he said. “Like I said, Al. I’ll have to think about it.”

  Al looked as though he was ready to deal right there, but John Fry had no intention of letting a trick personally hand him a large sum of cash. He considered the drug purchase for Dawn when she was in the hospital a risky enough venture. He knew too little about Dr. Al Miller. What he did know just didn’t make sense. Al was too aloof to be the basic middle-class trick loo
king for thrills in the Cass Corridor, but too much of a goof to be an undercover cop. Plus, there was something about the proposal that just plain pissed him off.

  John decided to let Al make his next move through Dawn. He left the apartment so she could be with her juice, her chocolates, and her sugar daddy. When he returned, John and Dawn discussed the trick’s offer.

  “What the fuck is goin’ on?” John said. “Where does he come off, coming to me like that?”

  “That’s just the way he is,” Dawn said. “He wants you to bow out of the picture.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Don’t even try it, John. You know me better than that.”

  But that did not mean, Fry added, that they had to pass up such an opportunity.

  “Can we squeeze him?” she asked.

  “If that’s what he wants to do, it can be done.”

  Now they were thinking as one.

  The negotiations were conducted as Al visited that week, with Dawn relaying the offers back and forth. Al first offered two thousand dollars and a plane ticket to a destination of John’s choice.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” she told John. “It was that easy.”

  “But I’m not,” John said.

  He knew Al was willing to pay more. He countered with ten thousand dollars and a plane ticket. By midweek, they appeared to have an agreement.

  “Tell him five thousand dollars,” John said, “and he’ll never see me with you again.”

  Al bought the package. The plane ticket was left as an option once John decided where he wanted to go. Al said he would deliver the payoff in cash on Friday. Lucky Fry, meanwhile, was already making plans for himself.

  None of them included a trip to the airport.

  37

  The patient whose mental disturbance has reached psychotic [insane] proportions is no longer in contact with the external world … These patients have suffered a complete breakdown … There are specific techniques for treating psychotics but these are usually carried on in a hospital setting …

  —W. ALAN CANTY,

  Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy

  Jan Canty was hardly through the doorway after a lunch date with a neighbor when her cleaning woman pressed the message into her hand: “Call your mother-in-law. Emergency!” When she reached her, Gladys Canty’s voice was breaking.

  “Jannie, something has happened to Alan. I don’t know what. He won’t talk. He’s calling for you. Jannie, I know something terrible has happened.”

  It was Thursday, April 12, the day Dr. Al Miller would have been looking for ways to raise five thousand dollars.

  Jan dialed Al at the Fisher Building. She called a half-dozen times. Each time someone picked up the phone.

  “Al? Al? Al? Is that you?”

  Each time there was only silence.

  She buckled herself into her new Thunderbird and made quick use of the five-speed. Her anxiety raced with the Ford turbo on the freeway. Finally the Golden Tower of the Fisher appeared ahead on the cityscape. She hoped her mother-in-law had overreacted. I hope I’m overreacting, she thought.

  Jan canceled the notion when she reached her husband’s suite. Something was very wrong. Two patients were in the waiting room. Al never let that happen. He had a separate exit door from his counseling office so patients never had to meet.

  The patients looked at her with anticipation. She walked right past them, heading directly to Al’s inner office. There she found her husband.

  She was shocked. There was no sign of the comfortable, rational man who had left for work that morning. Al was pressed deep into his big chair, his head nearly touching the wall. His face was a study in terror. His body was frozen with it. In all her life—in all the cases she’d seen in the university clinic—Jan Canty had never seen anyone look so horrified.

  “Al. Honey. What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. Alan Canty appeared enraptured by the vision of some dreaded act, as though someone was just about to blow off his head.

  “Al … Al,” she said. “Al …”

  He was mute. His mouth moved, but only because his tongue was swabbing the inside of his lower lip. Next to his chair he’d scrawled something on notepaper. Jan picked it up and read it. At the time it didn’t make sense.

  The patients, she thought. She raced back to the waiting room, composing herself along the way.

  “Excuse me, there’s been a family crisis and I need to help Al,” she said.

  They rose. They wanted to help.

  “No, please,” she said. “Please leave, everything is under control. I’ll contact you as soon as I can.”

  She hurried back to Al. He was cold to the touch. He was perspiring heavily. Her clinical mind raced through a dozen university lectures and a thousand pages of text. State of shock. No. Insulin rush. No. Wait, this is Al.

  Jan Canty started to cry. Her brain was locking up, like a computer trying to run two different programs at once. She was thinking like a clinical psychologist. She was feeling like a wife.

  Then one program crashed. Psychotic break. My God, she thought, my husband is having a psychotic break. His schedule. The coffee. The sleepless nights. The work at the jail. The load has finally caught up with him and pushed him over the edge.

  Jan had to get help. Al needed help. He needed a hospital, and judging from that look on his face, he needed one now. The University of Michigan, her alma mater. She would take him to University Hospital.

  Her newfound purpose steadied her. She began talking to Al in a calm, rational voice, as with a crisis call back at the Center Point Crisis Center. She gently took Al by the arm and led him from the office to the parking garage. She would take him first to Dr. Aaron Rutledge. He had connections at University Hospital, and she trusted him.

  Al seemed to stabilize once they arrived at Dr. Rutledge’s office ten minutes later, but he remained severely withdrawn. His responses were limited to little more than a nod of the head. Jan felt more stable, too, in the company of the therapist who had supervised her for three years. Together they tried to secure a bed at University Hospital, but the psychiatric unit was booked. He would have to be admitted the following day through the hospital’s emergency room. Jan decided she could contain the situation herself for twenty-four hours. After all, she told herself, I’m a psychologist.

  She might as well have hooked Al up to a remote control once she got him back to the big Tudor. He was compliant, meek. He did anything she said. Here and there he would try to act normal. He laughed at things she said, but she knew he hadn’t understood a word. When she served dinner, he ate mechanically, but she could tell he wasn’t hungry. From time to time he looked frightened.

  She knew a psychotic break was like that. Al’s symptoms were textbook: loss of touch with reality—times, places, dates, faces, names. Sometimes the patient comes in and out.

  Jan tucked him into bed. She lay down but didn’t sleep.

  The next morning Jan Canty decided to seek some help for herself. She called her closest friend, Celia Muir. They’d known each other twenty years. Ces, as Jan called her, and her husband John were the only couple that could lure Al out of the house for a dinner date. She knew Al liked John.

  John Muir offered to drive all of them to Ann Arbor to get Al admitted. They met at the couple’s house in the western suburbs. Al had been quiet all day. But when they arrived at the Muirs’ home, he got out of the car and stood with his back against their garage door. That frightened look was back.

  By the time they got on the road, it was late in the afternoon and raining.

  Al sat in the front with John. Jan heard him mumbling during the forty-mile drive. In between disjointed phrases she heard him say, “I’m in over my head.” And later, “The Cass Corridor.”

  Al’s shoulders hunched together. When the car hit a bump, he jerked. He’s so frightened, Jan thought.

  “Are you comfortable, Al?” John said softly. “Are you cold?”r />
  John patted him on the leg.

  “Am I going to be OK?” Al began.

  “You’ll be fine, honey,” Jan said.

  “Am I going to be OK? Am I going to be OK? Am I going to be a bad boy? I’m a bad boy. Am I going to be OK? I’ve been bad. I’ve been bad. I am a bad boy.”

  She thought, what is he talking about? She wished they were at the hospital.

  Then she thought she heard him crying. His shoulders got even closer together, as though they were trying to touch his breastbone.

  “Do you still love me, Jan?”

  “Of course I do, honey.”

  “Do you still love me, Jan? Do you love me, Jan? You’re so good. You’re so good to me, Jan. Jan, you’ve never done anything wrong. I’m so bad. I’m so bad. Am I going to be OK?”

  “Al, of course I love you. You know I love you.”

  It went on for thirty miles. Al seemed to find comfort by leaning next to John, who often patted him on the leg. Her best friend’s husband was such a steady, warm man, Jan thought. She was glad she had called her friends.

  When they got to the emergency room Al cowered under the fluorescent lights. He wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone. He sat down and shook. He was cold to the touch.

  The wait dragged on. Eventually, tears began to stream down Al’s cheeks. Doctors and nurses were scurrying about in response to a car accident case. A young child with a lacerated hand was crying. A man limped through the door with a broken foot.

  At first Jan thought the emergencies were upsetting her husband. Then she knew better. She thought, I’ve fooled myself into believing the hospital simply will give Al a big dose of psychotropic medication and release him in twenty-four hours. No, it isn’t going to be that easy.

  Neither was the admitting process. Eventually the four of them were escorted to a small interview room with a window. Al’s behavior was getting stranger. At one point he marched, standing tall as he swung his arms mechanically. But most of the time he walked with his shoulders hunched. He clasped his hands in front of him as a four-year-old would do while exploring a room full of objects he was told not to touch.