Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  There were a half-dozen people who said they knew the couple. Brantley suspected they all had information, especially when one woman pulled him aside in a hallway.

  “Lookit,” she said. “They said they did it. You oughta get ’em. They’re probably going to be here again.”

  As he returned to the squad room from Inspector Hill’s office late Wednesday morning, Brantley knew right where his outfit would begin. They were going back to get the talkative girl from the Morrell Apartments, but he planned to offer a half dozen the trip downtown. That would take the heat off the snitch.

  “Well, everybody,” he said, “let’s go take some hostages.”

  The squad concept of concentrating a half-dozen detectives on one case had served the homicide section well. Brantley liked to fit a cop’s personality to the task at hand. The spectrum was well covered.

  On one end was Gerald Tibaldi, a grinless sergeant with more pepper than salt in his hair. Eight years of facing reams of cases as a precinct detective had blessed the twenty-year veteran with no tolerance for hand-holding.

  On the other was a detective Brantley called The Social Worker—Marlyss Landeros, a soft-featured cop who had taken a lot of crap as the first black woman in the section. But even her critics had to admit she could “work the religion angle” better than most anybody. The thirty-seven-yearold cop called her aim for the heart “The Gift.” She’d learned from Gil Hill, who, one cop once said, “had the uncanny talent of making you think you were his best friend as he put you away for life.”

  The Canty case officially was assigned to Landeros, meaning she’d cover the formal paperwork and see that prosecution witnesses made it to court. The latter was another forte. Landeros already fielded fifty phone calls a week from her “friends” made on past murder cases. Some called collect from Jackson Prison.

  A new slew of friends arrived in the homicide section late that afternoon when Brantley and a cruiser returned from the Morrell Apartments. Tammy Becker, Consuelo Flores, and Gary Neil were in the first group. Later Keith Bjerke, Steve Kovach, and Cecelia Ramirez followed. Not all were talkative, but Landeros found a common thread among those who were.

  “I couldn’t help but get the feeling,” she later said, “that many of them really liked this guy called The Doc. He was a symbol of prestige to a lot of them, and some felt John and Dawn had abused his generosity.”

  The stakeout at 2518 Casper produced only one temporary captive—furniture merchant Robert Saleh, when he returned to collect another twenty dollars. By Wednesday evening Homicide had a search warrant.

  The squad dismissed John Fry’s boast of scattering the body as high street drama until detectives and evidence technicians entered the bungalow just after sunset.

  Right off, Brantley noticed the missing carpeting. Then he began spotting the blood: A smudge at the base of the toilet. Splatters on the white wall above the tub. Dried droplets on the doorframe of the back bedroom.

  He saw blotches of darkened blood on two towels left in the living room and front bedroom. Another small stain marred the kitchen floor. Squad members followed a trail down the stairs from the kitchen; they discovered a pool dried on a rubber step mat at the back landing. Underneath the basement stairs was a piece of bloodstained formica. Next to the stairs was a small storage area, and more blood.

  Brantley walked over to an old concrete laundry tub and looked in. It was dry except for a recessed groove in the basin. A channel of water had yet to evaporate. It was bright red with blood. An evidence tech pointed to a box under the last basement step. It was an empty trash-bag box, and it was smeared with blood.

  “Jesus,” Brantley said. “We need samples of all this.”

  Marlyss Landeros found herself studying the junk left behind in the back bedroom. Items on a dresser reinforced what people had been telling her all day. A spoon for cooking dope. Empty prescription bottles. A couple of dozen used paper seals for cocaine. There was a stethoscope, a Comerica Bank envelope, an eviction notice, and a book, Psychology of Industrial Conflict.

  Landeros looked at a copy of the Yellow Pages at the foot of the dresser. Scrawled across a page was “Dawn Marie Spens Fry.” On the floor she found a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook: “Canty, W. Alan, Ph.D. 906 Fisher Building.” The psychologist’s home and office phone numbers were also there. A clump of red hair stood tall atop the fibers of the bedroom carpet.

  As camera strobes sent bursts of light into the yard from the bungalow’s windows, Brantley talked to neighbor Mike Oliver outside. His girlfriend Juanita Deckoff was still vacationing in the north. Oliver told Brantley what the squad already knew, about Al Canty’s daily visits and the money for Dawn Spens. Then he said that last week he had eavesdropped on John Fry as the pimp sat at a picnic table beneath his kitchen window.

  “One day I’m going to kill that fuckin’ doctor,” Oliver said he heard Fry tell a companion.

  When Oliver mentioned garbage bags, Brantley began tapping his pencil on his thumb. The neighbor said he saw a pickup truck and two people carrying bags out of the bungalow in the back alley late Saturday night.

  “How many bags did you see?” Brantley asked.

  “At least five, but not more than six bags.”

  “Have you seen those kind of bags before?”

  “Yeah. They look like big leaf bags.”

  “Have you seen John or Dawn use garbage bags before?”

  “No. They never used plastic bags for garbage. They would throw garbage out the window, or put it in paper bags and throw it out the window.”

  Back at Homicide, the squad checked the garbage pickup schedules after they found the alley dumpster empty. The trucks had hauled away the entire south side early in the week. Brantley was convinced the body had left with the empty soup cans and milk cartons.

  “We’ve just run out of luck, everybody,” he said.

  As far as the squad leader knew, no one had ever been convicted of murder in Michigan without a body, and the detective figured an ex-con such as Lucky Fry knew that as well. Brantley called the Wayne County prosecutor’s office anyway. He wanted a murder warrant for John Fry and Dawn Spens.

  “Lookit,” he told an assistant prosecutor. “We’ve got blood. We’ve got great witnesses. We’ve got a witness seeing the plastic bags.”

  The assistant prosecutor wanted a body.

  “Damn it, how much more circumstantial evidence do you need?” Brantley said. “We’ll never find the body.”

  “Bernard, we’re reluctant to issue a warrant without a body.”

  The squad bitched about the wording of the teletype. John Fry and Dawn Spens were wanted for “questioning” in the disappearance of W. Alan Canty.

  Gil Hill wasn’t surprised that Jan Canty was a class act. He knew the name Canty well. Alan Canty, Sr., was one of his favorite lecturers at the police academy. But the inspector pondered how the old man would have handled the task he faced as she waited outside his office Thursday morning.

  Hill was convinced Jan Canty was a widow. Duty dictated he tell her about the picture that was emerging of her husband on the south side.

  She was wearing a smart blue suit as she took a seat across from his desk. He began with the torched car. He said they had executed a search warrant and were seeking two suspects.

  “I believe that your husband is dead because of these circumstances. There’s always room for hope, of course. But based on my experience, I like to tell people what I believe to be the truth.”

  Jan’s lip began to shake. She asked if her parents could join her. The family held hands as he continued. Hill couldn’t decide which was more difficult, revealing the possible homicide or the next installment.

  “We’ve been getting a lot of rumors as to what was going on with your husband,” he began again.

  He told her about the prostitute named Dawn, her husband’s clockwork visits, and the money he reportedly had been bringing every day.

  “That’s what people were sayi
ng,” he said. “And these people also have told us he’s been killed and his body cut up.”

  During the silence, Hill remembered the last time he broke the news to a family about a dead John. An entire squad was detoured two weeks because a wife wouldn’t be candid. He could hear her shouts echoing: “Why you want to do that to him! The man is dead now. There ain’t been no money missing. He ain’t been fuckin’ around with no whores.”

  Hill pressed on anyway with questions. He needed to find out if all he had was a bunch of junkies with big imaginations. He had a hard time believing their story himself.

  They talked for a good hour. They talked about money, sex, and work schedules. She cried. Her mother and her dad cried.

  “I knew something was wrong,” she stammered. “The finances are not what they should be. But we both work. It didn’t make sense. But this makes sense. In fact, this is the only thing that has made any sense for months.”

  “And now, Mrs. Canty,” Hill said, “it all makes sense to us.”

  The circuit of circumstances over the past nineteen months lit up all at once for Jan. Then came the overload. Only one light was left blinking as her parents drove her back to the big Tudor.

  This, she thought, explains why we never had lunch. Now Al might be dead. What am I supposed to do? Hope? Mourn? Or be furious?

  She was too shocked to feel any one of the three.

  Gladys Canty got the call from Jan’s mother just before noon Thursday.

  “Gladys, can you get someone over there to be with you?” she said. “We’re on our way.”

  She knew they were bringing terrible news. She summoned her eighty-sevenyear-old friend named Edna, a doctor’s widow she’d known for years. Her friend arrived shortly before Jan’s parents. Jan’s mother’s face was florid. Her father sat with his hands folded and his head down.

  Out with it, Mrs. Canty thought.

  “Alan has been murdered,” Jan’s mother said.

  Gladys closed her eyes.

  “And it’s worse than that. He was involved with a prostitute. Her pimp killed him. He’s been dismembered.”

  “I’m just glad his father isn’t here.”

  She didn’t think Al Sr. could have handled this kind of strain.

  “How was he killed?” she asked.

  “We don’t know how.”

  They didn’t stay long.

  This is all some kind of mistake, Gladys thought after they left. The truth will eventually come out. It has to come out.

  Then she felt a stillness in her home she’d never known before. She and Edna sat together on the couch, as her old friend gently patted her hand.

  Over the next several days, the tips kept the squad phones ringing. Many callers reported Fry’s handiwork with a baseball bat and his attempts to sell the Buick. One caller said he’d overheard a clerk in an auto-parts outlet saying Lucky Fry had been shopping in his store for a saw.

  One anonymous informant tried to connect Fry with another death. Fry, the frightened caller said, had killed his own brother on Christmas in Tennessee. Street talk was that Jim Fry had witnessed his brother kill a southside couple and was planning to talk before Lucky staged a suicide.

  When Marlyss Landeros pressed for details, the caller hung up. The squad already had all they could handle with Fry on one case.

  “Maybe Fry got cocky,” Landeros said near the end of one of the squad’s eighteen-hour days. “Maybe he thinks ’cause he got away with murder before he’s gotten an extra sense of self-confidence.”

  But nobody knew where John Fry and Dawn Spens had gone. By late in the week the Canty story was all over the papers and the television.

  Then, late Friday afternoon, somebody else balanced an old delinquent account with Lucky Fry.

  “It’s a place he goes to hide out and dry out,” said the informant. “It’s in Alanson, not far from Petoskey. They’re up there right now.”

  85

  By midweek Frank McMasters was sleeping very lightly with an old handgun tucked between his sheets.

  John Fry already had tried to move the body parts while Frank was at work. The only set of wheels available was Frank’s old motorcycle. The plan never got farther than the kick starter and John working up a heavy sweat.

  John spent most of his time hanging around the house, pontificating about his next move as Dawn sulked. When someone mentioned the murder, she burst into tears. Frank’s first concern was Cheryl. She was growing more jittery by the day. Frank was worried about the baby.

  When he got an unexpected day off, Frank decided he had to do something about everyone’s nerves. They bought a couple of six-packs and spent a day sight-seeing to the north. They drove across the Mackinac Bridge and strolled down the strip of little gift shops in the Upper Peninsula town of St. Ignace. On the way back, they stopped in Indian River at a pay phone. Dawn called a relative in Texas who she said was a former addict. He might help them out, she said. She asked him to send two bus tickets. He turned her down.

  On Thursday a money order arrived from Dawn’s mother for fifty dollars. It was made out to Frank. He cashed it and split it with his houseguests. They bought some more beer and went driving again. That night their outing took them down Douglas Lake Road, past the state land where Al’s remains were buried. John was smirking when he recognized the area.

  “There’s where Al’s buried,” he said. “He has his own personal cemetery.”

  He looked out the window, chuckled, and waved his hand.

  “Bye-bye, you motherfucker,” he said.

  Dawn started sobbing again.

  Frank figured the problem at hand had nothing to do with laughter or tears. Somebody had better make a move, he thought. The Detroit daily newspapers they bought earlier that day reported the burned Buick and a police search of 2518 Casper. One story reported a couple as being sought for questioning.

  Early Friday morning Frank went to work. Shortly after the rest of the household woke up, the Detroit News and Free Press were spread out on the kitchen table. John’s and Dawn’s names and descriptions were in front-page stories.

  “His goodness may have got him,” Gil Hill was quoted as saying about Al. “Some people are telling us he was trying to get her off drugs.”

  “Shit,” Fry said. “Maybe they’d like to know about all those prescription pills he was bringing her.”

  Cheryl Krizanovic thought John was missing the point.

  “John,” she said, “your pictures are going to be in the paper tomorrow. Count on it.”

  In fact, back in Detroit, Homicide was releasing the mug shots that morning. They showed John in a full beard and Dawn with long, straight hair pulled back from her forehead. When Frank returned from work, the couple was already packed, waiting for a ride to Detroit.

  “We gotta go,” John said, handing Frank the newspaper.

  “I guess you do,” he said.

  Frank McMasters didn’t need any convincing.

  As freeway signs charted their progress south, John and Dawn discussed where they might go after they connected with a friend in Detroit. Texas, Florida, California, anywhere.

  Then they began working on a story. The pair had been seen by too many people in Alanson, the four of them decided. It only would be a matter of time before they were traced to the village. They decided Frank and Cheryl, if questioned by police, were to say the two of them had visited, then left.

  Fry then began telling Dawn what to do in case they were arrested. There was no body, he said. There was no way he or she could be charged for murder if everyone kept silent. But he added an amendment to the plan in case something did go wrong.

  “If it comes down to it, put it on me,” John said. “Put all the weight on me.”

  “Babe, what do you mean?” Dawn said.

  “Make a deal to testify against me for immunity, damn it. You make a deal because it’s gonna come out anyway.”

  “But John, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to lose you.”


  “Goddamn it. It’s not gonna do any good if we’re both in the goddamn penitentiary. We’re still not going to be together. You may as well take your way out.”

  Then Frank and Cheryl listened as Fry instructed them about their role in a worst possible scenario.

  “You guys do everything you can to help her out and let me go to the dogs,” he said. “Because if it gets down to murder, that’s where I’m gonna go anyway.”

  It wasn’t Dawn who took batting practice with Al’s head, Frank thought, but he knew she could face a number of charges.

  Earlier that week, when Frank grilled John about the killing, John emphasized Dawn wasn’t in the house during the mutilation. Later they talked about that alone, during a trip to the beer store.

  “John, that’s all bullshit and I don’t want to hear it,” Frank said.

  “Well, what the fuck do you want me to tell you, that she was packaging it up when I was cutting it up?”

  “That sounds more like you. That sounds more feasible.”

  “OK. So it happened that way, man. But don’t tell Dawn I told you. She don’t want anybody to know that she was there.”

  Dorothy Wilson had already entertained a visit to her modest westside home from Marlyss Landeros, telling the detective about John Fry’s Sunday phone call. She fell asleep on the couch after the Canty reports on Friday’s eleven o’clock news, absolutely convinced now that Johnnie Carl was a killer.

  Dot’s feet skated on the carpet as she struggled to clear her head and reach the ringing kitchen telephone. It was half past midnight.

  The voice was deep and low.

  “This is John. I’m around the corner on Kentfield and I’m coming to your house.”

  He hung up before she could speak.

  Dot Wilson’s mouth went so dry so fast she couldn’t swallow. Oh Lord, she thought, he told me about the murder. John Fry is coming to kill anyone who knows about the murder!

  She dialed as fast as she could. She called her brother down the street. His phone had been cut off. She called her son across the street. There was no answer. She called her mother, who answered.

  “John’s comin’ for me. Get help. Get the police.”