Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  Jan’s parents acted as buffers. They met people at the door, answered the phone, and gave her verbal synopses of what was being reported. She’d caught a glimpse of just one TV account, the footage inside the house on Casper. Blood appeared to be everywhere. She feared Al had been chased down, beaten, and tortured throughout the house.

  Several times reporters greeted her in her waiting room at the Fisher Building. One waited with one of her patients. When he didn’t identify himself, she thought he was one of Al’s patients. Then he began asking questions. She asked Fisher security to keep reporters off her floor.

  Jan resolved that she wasn’t going to close up shop and hide. She’d yet to miss a day of work. She was worried about her patients and her practice. She thought, a psychologist and marriage counselor whose husband had been off whoring around for nearly two years. What will they think of the profession? What will they think of me?

  No one taught her how to handle something like this in graduate school. Jan knew she had to wing it. She decided not to let the subject of Al dominate therapy, but she wouldn’t make it taboo either. She tried to be sincere. Her patients came in with white knuckles and dry mouths. She tried a straightforward approach with all. She started each session along these lines:

  “I’m sure you weren’t sure whether you should have come in today or not, but I’m glad you did. I don’t want you out there wondering how I’m doing. Or, I’m sure you have questions that need answering. You’re entitled to know. It’s been forced on you by the media, and now my problems, in some respects, are your problems. If I was in your shoes, I’d have unanswered questions myself. Don’t worry about me. I’m not delicate. Feel free to ask. If I don’t feel the question is appropriate or I don’t feel ready to answer it, I’ll tell you so.”

  She lost only one patient. The most frequent question was “Are you leaving Detroit?”

  Reporters had a plethora of angles to pursue. They went to Harper Woods, where school officials and old schoolmates portrayed Dawn Spens as an honor student who mysteriously went bad. One reporter found Roy Spens in his Harper Woods bungalow. They chatted.

  “She didn’t do heroin; she did cocaine,” he said. “I visited her in jail … She’s not going through withdrawal. She’s doing great. She feels good. She’s a very strong girl. She was in love [with Fry]. At eighteen you fall in love pretty easy.

  “She’s an intelligent girl. She was going to school, then two and a half years ago she crushed me. I said she wasn’t a prostitute, then the police showed me her arrest reports. This is obviously the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  Dawn’s old soul mate Dee Cusmano was having a few pops in the East Warren Lanes bar when a story on the Canty case came on the TV. She scrambled to turn up the set. A number of Dawn’s old friends were there. The bar became still.

  “It was very hard to accept,” she said later. “It was very upsetting.”

  Then Dee Cusmano got a collect call at home from Dawn Spens from the Wayne County Jail. Dawn began calling every night. She wanted Dee to visit.

  One night she drove down to the jail. Dee couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing through the little glass window.

  Dee asked her old friend what happened. Dawn told her that John had demanded $5,000 from Canty, but he’d arrived with only $100. In recent weeks, she said, his payments had been cut down to $10 or $20. She relayed the story about the argument and the baseball bat. Then John had ordered her out of the house to turn tricks, she said. When she got back the body was already cut up and packaged, she said.

  Dawn was scrawny, full of needle tracks, and laughing. Dee was stunned. How, she thought, can Dawn be so flippant, especially after a story like that? Doesn’t she realize where she is?

  After Dawn was taken back to her cell, Dee couldn’t find her visitor’s pass. As deputies checked with the front desk, she remained jailed inside the small visiting cell for a half hour. One of the turnkeys began teasing her, saying they were going to keep her there for the night. The place must have been a hundred degrees. She slid into a dizzy panic.

  “Let me out, damn it!” she screamed. “I’m not a criminal.”

  When she finally hit the fresh air at the door, she vowed never to go back. But Dawn called her every night for a week. When Dee missed a couple of calls, her old friend stopped phoning.

  Dee didn’t know whether to feel sad or relieved.

  89

  It was so hot the day of the W. Alan Canty’s memorial service, the pavement shined by noon. Inside the big parlor of the Verheyden Funeral Home, air conditioners dropped the temperature to an uncomfortable chill.

  Jan Canty arrived at the Grosse Pointe Park mortuary clutching two of her husband’s precious paving bricks. As she set them down outside, a man approached her.

  “What are those for?” he said.

  “I’m going to have them buried with Al’s ashes,” she said. “Al was so attached to these crazy bricks I thought it would be a nice gesture.”

  “I wouldn’t go to that kind of trouble for him,” he said. “In fact, considering what he has done, I don’t even know why you’re bothering to give him a decent burial.”

  She was speechless. All week Jan had been trying to postpone her anger. She’d reasoned I was a good wife to him and I’m going to finish that role with this memorial service. I’m not going to stop before the last act of the play—then I’m going to get good and pissed off.

  Celia and John Muir were at her side. Celia sensed the tension building between two of the most important women in Al Canty’s life. She was relieved that the third was in the Wayne County Jail. Celia knew Jan and Gladys Canty were at odds over some of the funeral arrangements. She suspected Jan’s smoldering anger toward Al was finding a target in Gladys Canty.

  And anger was everywhere in the funeral home. At first it looked like hardly anyone was going to show up. Jan, her parents, her sister, and the Muirs sat on one couch to the right of the aisle. Gladys Canty was sitting alone on the left. Mrs. Canty’s nephew and sister-in-law were expected from Cleveland, but had not arrived yet.

  “I’m going to go sit with Mrs. Canty,” John Muir said. “I see a woman who has lost her son.”

  Then the parlor quickly filled. Al Junior’s turnout would equal Al Senior’s nine years earlier in the same room. Some of the nearly 300 in attendance found out about the arrangements at the end of a long story delivered by their local paper boy this Sunday morning.

  In its July 28 editions, the Detroit News laid out everything three reporters could find in the week following the discovery of the leg off I-75. The story “Police Look for the Hook” proposed a half dozen theories about the psychologist. They ranged from extramarital thrills to a research project that had “gotten out of hand.”

  Print journalists assigned to cover the service sensed the hostility from mourners. They sat in back chairs and kept their notebooks obscured at their hips.

  “You bastards,” one mourner muttered to a nervous writer. “You’d think you had your fill.”

  Another tapped the same reporter for some information.

  “Hey,” he said, pointing to a tall black man. “Tell me, is that Gilbert Hill, the movie cop?”

  One after another the people came from the hot parking lot into the rose-perfumed chill. Celia noticed one couple who looked like street people. A southsider had been quoted in the News story that she was coming. There were patients, colleagues, antique car collectors, the curious, and many old friends of Gladys Foster Canty. There weren’t enough seats.

  Gladys Canty was shocked by what the man in his mid-thirties was telling her.

  “Mrs. Canty, I’m the one who bought Al’s coin collection,” he said, shaking her hand. “I thought it would be a good investment for my kids.”

  Ever since Gilbert Hill told her about the kind of money involved, Mrs. Canty had been worried about the coins. Earlier that week, she asked Jan to check the attic of the big Tudor where Buster said he kept the coll
ection hidden. Grandpa Canty started amassing the coins for his grandson. Al Senior continued it, buying the pieces of gold and silver. He spent substantial amounts of his pension on the shiny inheritance for young Alan.

  Jan reported back after a visit to the attic. She’d found only empty envelopes scattered about.

  “He must have been really desperate to sell that,” she said later. “He’d always told me, ‘Oh, I’ll guard it with my life Ma.’ ”

  Mrs. Canty estimated its value exceeded well over $10,000. Ray Danford signed the guest registry and led his family into the room. He spent a lot of time looking at the carpet, but it had nothing to with his second job. He found facing Jan difficult. He felt bad that he hadn’t taken Al’s situation more seriously.

  Also among the mourners was the budding child psychologist Bob Willing and Al’s longtime patient, John Mosey, the recovering alcoholic.

  Willing felt cheated. He figured his 2,000 hours of supervision might turn into another wasted chapter in his long, rambling career. Just a month earlier Al Canty had signed his recommendation forms for his state licence. One section attested to Willing’s “good moral character.” The board is going to laugh me out of the state capital, he thought.

  John Mosey hadn’t seen his therapist in a year. Al cut him lose a year ago, agreeing his self-destructive thinking problems were over. Then two close friends of Mosey died. One was another recovering alcoholic who relapsed and drank himself to death at 29. Mosey recently called Al, wanting a refresher to cope with the anger over the deaths. The psychologist told him he was booked, but would have some openings in the fall. Just knowing Al would be available had subdued much of his anguish.

  All week Mosey had been reading the papers. Earlier in the week he took some ribbing. “Hey, isn’t that the sonovabitch you wanted me to see,” said one acquaintance. “You asshole, his body is strewn halfway up and down I-75.”

  He thought of compulsion and two dead friends. The last thing he wanted was a drink.

  Jan Canty felt as if she was caught between two echoes. She could hear her mother on the end of the parlor sofa.

  “That sonovabitch. That sonovabitch. How could he do this to you?”

  Then she heard her sister.

  “Oh Jan, I’m going to miss him. He was so good to me, so supportive.”

  She just wanted it all to end. Why, she thought, hasn’t the service started? She had asked Dr. Thomas Mooney, a Port Huron psychologist Al was supervising, to deliver a eulogy. She wanted no religious symbols. Al would have never gone for that.

  “It’s been all over the newspapers,” she told Mooney. “We need something appropriate.” He was one of the last people to see Al alive that Saturday.

  “Leave it to me,” he said.

  The service opened with the Twenty-third Psalm. Gladys Canty had asked John Muir to read it. Then Dr. Mooney tackled what might well have been the toughest speaking assignment in Detroit that day.

  “When Jan called me a week ago today to ask if I would give this eulogy … My response was instant: ‘Yes, I would be honored and privileged.’ Had it not been for Al and his incredible skills, I would not be the person I am today. The only reservation I had was that I may fall apart emotionally while giving the eulogy for my friend, my mentor, my therapist. Jan assured me that would be all right.”

  Mooney struggled through the thirty-minute delivery, but it did not diminish a message culled from the philosophies of leading psychologists of the century. He cited Al’s professional competency, then went right after the emotions in the room.

  “I want to remember, too, the many lessons that Al helped people with. One important lesson that is so timely now is that we not vilify and judge as this leads only to our own anger and blame. Let us seek comfort in the thought that wherever there is intense sun, there is a shadow. Let us not dwell on the shadows cast by Al Canty but rather focus on the sunlight he shed.”

  He evoked the writing of Elizabeth Kuebler, citing the stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

  “As the news of this tragedy and of Al’s death unfolded, I am sure that all of us experienced in some degree the first four stages … As the news stories progressed, my thoughts became: How could he? How could they? They only led to my own anger …”

  He spoke of Albert Ellis’s rational thinking, urging his listeners to let go by changing the way they thought. Then he quoted Leo Buscaglia from Loving Each Other:

  “Forgive. There is a wonderful aura surrounding the verb forgive, great warmth and strength. It is a word suggesting a letting go, a releasing, an action which has the power to soothe, to heal, to reunite, to recreate …”

  Later he added, “With Al’s death, we are all faced with a unique opportunity for growth. His death has left all who knew him and loved him feeling vast emptiness—perhaps anger, resentment, betrayal, fear, or perhaps questions that seem to haunt security and peace … The emptiness will lessen, the anger will subside, forgiveness will unfold, and we will all start to heal and accept.

  “… Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never, ever the same.”

  The bright light from the TV camera flooded the parlor after Mooney’s last words. Jan Canty collapsed weeping into Celia Muir’s lap. John Muir covered the lens and ordered the cameraman from the funeral home.

  John came up with a plan to switch cars. He wanted Jan’s as a decoy so they wouldn’t be followed by the TV crew back to the big Tudor.

  “I felt absolutely violated,” Jan later said.

  Gladys Canty returned to her retirement bungalow with her forty-year-old nephew and seventy-eight-yearold sister-in-law. She wondered what she would do with the chickens. She’d cooked up a bunch hoping that Jan and her parents would stop by after the service.

  Mrs. Canty had been informed that her son’s widow planned something home alone with friends. “I’m sure she won’t mind if you come,” one of her relatives said. She didn’t consider that an invitation.

  She and the few surviving members of her family loaded the roses from the funeral home in her nephew’s van. They drove to Elmwood Cemetery where her son’s ashes were to be buried. Because of the criminal case, his remains would not be released by the medical examiner for many weeks.

  Like his life, the date of W. Alan Canty’s death was split in two. The death certificate fixed it at July 21. That was the date Jan identified the remains of the man she married. The man John Fry killed died on July 13. Mrs. Canty was having the latter chiseled on Buster’s headstone.

  The grave was at the top of a hill in Detroit’s most historic cemetery, the burial place of Territorial Governor Lewis Cass. Elmwood’s many mausoleums and towering monuments carried the names of some of Detroit’s oldest and wealthiest families. Many of the city’s street names were represented in family stones.

  The Canty plot was marked by a family memorial of brightly polished red granite. It was a stark newcomer among the gray-weathered stones. Gladys Foster Canty was having a marker made for herself with Buster’s. She knew now that nobody else would be around to see to that task.

  Oh, Mrs. Canty thought, how Al Senior and Junior loved this old place. She remembered the many times their tightly knit trio visited Elmwood just to study the historic grounds. Then Al Senior picked out their spot, overlooking a stretch of water called Bloody Run.

  “I’ve always wanted to live on the water,” Al Senior said. “Ma, I’ll be able to come out at night and see the ducks.”

  The Canty name now was two full generations old in Detroit. It’s the end of it, Gladys thought. Maybe now father and son could walk together at night.

  In just a couple of weeks an erroneous rumor worked its way from the Grosse Pointes twenty miles west to Detroit’s struggling Brightmore district and the open ear of Dot Wilson, John Fry’s surrogate mom. Dot listened as a friend told the story. It supposedly came from somebody who worked a
t the Verheyden Funeral Home.

  “The widow was so mad at the doctor, she gave the undertaker a couple of bricks,” the friend said. “She wanted them put in a bag with the remains and wanted it thrown in the Detroit River. That’s right, bricks. That’s how bad his wife wanted to be rid of him.”

  90

  No one doubted that Thirty-sixth District Court Judge Isidore B. Torres would find enough evidence to bind Fry and Spens over for a full trial. But in the wake of the news blackout at Homicide, the state had to lay out its case for public consumption at their preliminary examination July 31.

  Reporters, patients, former students, colleagues, and the plain curious were looking for clues that would explain Al Canty’s involvement with the suspects. Everyone wanted a good look at the man who could cut up a body. Everyone wanted to see the superhooker who could milk a man for $140,000.

  All the seats in the two-hundred-person courtroom were taken a half hour before the start.

  Marlyss Landeros had been preparing Jan Canty for her testimony all morning. At first Jan was reluctant, but then she realized the detective was right. It was time she took back some of the control of her life. This was her chance to stand up and have her say.

  Under the mutilation statute, Jan only had to testify that she’d not given anyone permission to carry away or dissect her husband’s body. She wore her most professional blue suit and put her hair in a twist. Just as she finally was psyched up for the task, the prosecutor offered to cut her from the witness list. The defense would stipulate what she was going to say.

  “No, please,” she said. “I want to do it. I need to do it.”

  Jan was the first witness. Landeros let go of her hand at the courtroom door and she walked up the aisle between the jammed benches of spectators. At the end, just to her left, sat Fry and Spens. She looked only at their hands as she passed. She thought of what they had done with them.

  She was not frightened anymore. She was angrier than hell.