King of the Corner
Page 5
Kubitski seated him in an uncomfortable chair facing the desk and kept him waiting while he read Doc’s file spread out on the blotter. At length he sat back, communed for a full minute with his pipe, and said, “You’re changing your employment?”
“Yes.” Doc didn’t elaborate. If his time in prison had taught him anything it had taught him never to volunteer information.
“Are you unhappy at the farm dealership?”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Maynard Ance is well-known around here. He skates the edge of the law. Working for him wouldn’t be in your best interest.”
“Is it a violation?” Before coming in that morning, Doc had called the office to report last night’s adventure and his decision to accept Ance’s offer. He hadn’t mentioned he was driving a cab.
Kubitski sucked on his pipe. The gurgling made Doc think of a rain gutter. “How are things at home?”
“Okay.”
“But?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Oh, come on. A grown man, forced to live with his brother and his brother’s family? I’d have gone berserk with a chainsaw before this.”
Doc saw he was going to have to give Kubitski what he wanted. He sat back as far as the straight chair allowed. “I had friends in Jackson I knew better than Neal. I was just a kid the last time we lived under the same roof. He’s still got the first job he ever had. We don’t exactly speak the same language.”
“What about the others”—the parole officer glanced down at the file—“Wilhelmina and little Sean?”
“Billie’s great. I don’t remember my mother that well but she was a lot like my sister-in-law, warm but tough.”
“But?”
“She think’s baseball’s what got me in trouble. Maybe she’s right, but not in the way she thinks. I think that has something to do with why she’s turning her boy into a carrot. All the kid does is watch TV and play video games. He’s getting to look like eighty pounds of pork.”
“And you’ve argued with her about this.”
“No. He’s not my son.”
“But?”
Kubitski’s but was getting on his nerves. “I take a lot of walks.”
“Going to work for Maynard Ance at all hours must seem like a nice change.”
“I’m going to work for him because he offered me more than I’ve been getting.”
“Enough to move?”
Doc hadn’t expected him to catch on so quickly. “I’ll just be driving him around. Is it illegal?”
“No more than operating a taxi cab under someone else’s license.” Kubitski unhooked his glasses to catch the other’s reaction. “I work at this job, Doc. I don’t play at it. A certain kind of parole officer would send you back to serve out your sentence on a complaint like that. He would think you hadn’t learned your lesson.”
“The only lesson I learned is who to throw out of my parties.”
He wished immediately he hadn’t said it. Roger Craig had once told him the only thing that would keep him out of the Thirty Game Club was his tendency to rattle when a batter anticipated one of his pitches. The gooseberry eyes glittered dangerously, but after a moment the man behind the desk struck three matches in a clump and relit his tobacco. His pale cheeks billowed and caved in rapidly. He deposited the matches in an ironwood ashtray. “How much did Ance tell you about himself?”
“Just that he was a lawyer. And something about a job he did down in Tennessee.”
“Did he mention he was disbarred?”
“What for?”
Kubitski puffed. Doc was beginning to realize he didn’t give answers. “He’s a grandstander, a cowboy. Either he doesn’t know how to turn down work or he likes going on these midnight raids to bring back jumpers, because he averages five to the ordinary bail bondsman’s one. If I were you I’d keep on selling manure spreaders. You stand a lot better chance of finishing out your time on the outside.”
“Does that mean I can take the job?”
“Just stay behind the wheel.”
Doc thanked him and left. Heading toward the elevators he thought he might have been less belligerent with Kubitski and to hell with his habits. But he wouldn’t have known how to explain to the parole officer that during his time in the Independence Motel with Ance, from the moment he had leaned menacingly on the clerk’s counter until they got away from Sergeant Battle, when a wrong word could have revoked his parole, he had felt more alive than at any time since the two-hitter he had thrown his last day in Jackson.
A uniformed officer carrying a large manila envelope down the hall directed Doc to Major Crimes, where he almost collided with Battle coming out of the squad room. The sergeant, in striped shirtsleeves and a burgundy leather shoulder clip that actually matched his tie, caught himself with a hand on the doorjamb, thanked Doc for coming in, and asked him to wait in the lieutenant’s office.
The lieutenant’s office was the only enclosed cubicle in a room full of desks and detectives talking on telephones. It had glass walls that stopped short of the ceiling and was just big enough for a desk half the size of Kubitski’s, two chairs, and a row of gray steel file cabinets stacked with folders that had overflowed the drawers. In spite of that the room was neatly kept, the telephone, calendar pad, and portable scanner on the desk squared in line with the corners and a fistful of yellow pencils standing at attention in a rubber cup with their razor points directed at the ceiling. Doc felt certain that Sergeant Battle used the office more than anyone. He wondered idly if the sergeant owned a matching gun rig for every tie in his wardrobe.
Atop one of the cabinets a portable TV set was tuned to CNN with the sound off. When a still photograph of Wilson McCoy appeared on the screen, Doc went over and turned up the volume. The report of the discovery of McCoy’s body was sketchy and, like every other news event Doc had ever witnessed firsthand, bore little resemblance to what he remembered. Biographical footage followed: McCoy at twenty in jungle fatigues with the sleeves cut off, haranguing an all-black crowd with a banner behind him bearing the initials B.L.A.C.; McCoy in handcuffs and streaked coveralls being escorted to a squad car by white Detroit Police officers in uniform; McCoy standing on the steps of the City-County Building wearing the same coveralls but without manacles, raising a fist in the Black Power salute to a mob hooting and pumping placards reading FREE WILSON; McCoy, many years older and almost unrecognizable in a blue county jumpsuit with his hair cut short and no goatee, being arraigned before a judge on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of interstate flight; McCoy looking much as Doc had seen him last night, graying and emaciated, entering the auditorium of the Detroit Light Guard Armory with the crowd, turning to look at the camera with an expression that reminded Doc of the uncomprehending faces of the old people he had seen in the nursing home in Warren. The last shot dissolved to the still photograph he’d seen before, over the dates of Wilson McCoy’s birth and death. In the late footage he had looked much older than forty-four.
The program turned from there to a second Detroit story, wherein a group of journalists were asking Mayor Coleman Young for his reaction to a number of allegations made against him by yet another of his aides currently standing trial for misuse of public money. His reply was mostly bleeped out and after thirty seconds he shoved his way through the pack and out of the frame. Sergeant Charlie Battle entered the office then and turned off the set. “Nothing wrong with this city couldn’t be cured with an asshole transplant, you old fart,” he said, stepping behind his desk. He opened the top drawer, took out a typewritten sheet, looked at it, and laid it on Doc’s side of the desk. “I typed up what you told me last night from my notes. Anything else you remember, tell me now.”
Doc read the statement. It was almost word-for-word what he had given the detectives. “I didn’t see you taking any notes.”
“I did all that later.”
“Can’t see someone’s eyes when you’re writing down their words, huh?”
The
sergeant laughed shortly. “Eyes aren’t the part that talks.”
Doc borrowed a pen and signed his name on the bottom, adding the date. Battle took the sheet over to the file cabinets and put it in the folder on top of the pile. “Where’s Ance?”
“I haven’t seen him since last night.”
“He’s a pistol, your boss. When I’m his age I plan to be sitting in one of those condos they’re building in the warehouse district, flipping my wang-doodle across the river at Canada. That’s if I can still get it up.”
“I thought you were married.”
“Oh, I expect to outlive her.” He was still holding the file. He removed a stiff rectangle of yellowed paper sealed in clear laminate and handed it to Doc. “I brought it in this morning. I wasn’t sure you believed me last night.”
It was a Detroit Tigers scorecard. He’d forgotten how elaborate his signature was then, full of loops and flourishes. Jackson had cramped it up. He gave back the card. “I believed you. How old is your son?”
“Fourteen. I almost called him down here last month to help me dope out the new computer. I guess his boy’ll fly a rocket to Mars for his first science project.”
“He play any ball?”
“Shoots the hoops better than his old man ever did, for what that’s worth.” He switched off the scanner. “Your boss been in touch with Starkweather Hall lately?”
The change-up caught him looking. “Who’s he?”
“You really did watch nothing but sports,” Battle said. “Wilson McCoy was just window dressing on account of he knew Mahomet personally. Hall is the Marshals. Without him they’re just a bunch of throw-backs spitting up black revolutionary slogans from the sixties. Ance put up his bail last time we popped him. It didn’t take, but he’s wanted again on a case we can make stick.”
“What are the Marshals of Mahomet?”
“Jesus. Well, you remember Mahomet.”
“Some kind of double-A Malcolm X. Somebody shot him.”
“Kercheval Street, 1966. Looked like the riots were going to start that night, but it rained. The real riots the next year and then King’s assassination in ’68 shoved him into the backseat—he was just starting to make a name for himself locally with his white suits and Lou Rawls pipes when some nutso Mafia hitter took him out—but it looked for a while like the whole white establishment in this town was going to come apart that week. Then McCoy cut down Patsy Orr and a couple of his paisani in the Penobscot Building, and nobody knew if it was racial or just another gangland blowout and the whole thing just lost momentum.”
He sat on a corner of the desk. “McCoy jumped bail on the Orr killing and just disappeared. These revolutionary types aren’t your average lamster, they don’t keep in touch with their friends and families. The FBI staked out his mother’s house until she died. They even went to her funeral, like if he didn’t break cover to see the old lady when she was alive he’d come out for the planting. Finally they gave up on him. By the time he turned himself in down in Atlanta or someplace a new generation had taken over the Bureau and they didn’t know him from Dillinger. But his trial got a lot of publicity—Remember Jimi Hendrix, Gilligan’s Island, and Watts?, that kind of thing—and when the jury couldn’t decide and the prosecutors didn’t retry and cut him loose, he did the lecture tour for a while; men Starkweather Hall came to him with this crackpot Marshals of Mahomet idea and he just lapped it up.
“The organization’s all black, founded on the notion that Mahomet was God and McCoy was his prophet on earth. Mahomet used to speak at meetings of McCoy’s Black Afro-American Congress, so it made sense in a lunatic kind of way. They started meeting in the basement of a crummy house on Erskine, and in six months they were pulling in crowds of thirteen and fourteen hundred in the National Guard Armory downtown. That new African-American thing, you know, second generation. Like Lester Maddox never died, and George Wallace isn’t just filling a shitbag in his wheelchair in Alabama.”
“Sounds legitimate.” Doc leaned against the door.
“That was the idea. The M-and-M’s make a lot of noise about lobbying for new laws to protect minorities, but they’re the chief source of crack cocaine in this town. Those beat-up buses they take to Washington to march on the capital are so loaded down with dope their bumpers practically touch the ground. And they’re branching out. Starkweather Hall thinks he’s some kind of Lucky Luciano, trying to tie together all the black drug operations in the country under one governing body with him as chairman of the board. Had a shot at it, too, if he didn’t get careless three months ago and sign his name to the lease on an apartment on Vernor. We frisked the place on a warrant and recovered enough rock candy to light up Pittsburgh. Then Hall powdered. McCoy bellying up last night was our first break in—yeah?”
Someone had rapped at the door. Doc stepped away as a big white detective in an orange shirt and a wide necktie opened it and leaned in. “Autopsy report, Charlie.”
Battle sprang off the desk and snatched the sheaf of paper from the detective’s hand. He skimmed it. “Shit!”
“McCoy?”
He looked at Doc without focusing, as if he’d forgotten he was there. “For a while there I hoped Hall fell out with him and capped him, give us a handle.”
He sailed the report at the desk. It skidded across the top and off the other side. “Blood workup HIV positive. Son of a bitch killed himself because he had AIDS.”
“I thought he didn’t look well,” Doc said.
Chapter 7
“LOOK WHO’S HERE: GIVE ’Em Another Chance Ance. Hey, Maynard, is it true you offered to put up a million to spring Chuck Manson?”
“Now, Phil, you know I never bet on anybody crazier than myself.”
Doc had been almost out the door of police headquarters when he overheard Ance’s name behind him and the bail bondsman’s reply. He turned around and saw his new employer leaning on the watch sergeant’s desk in the same blue suit and overcoat he’d had on the night before. By daylight his hair definitely looked dyed, blue-black under the fluorescents and showing the marks of the comb. Doc went over there. The uniformed sergeant, a beefy fifty with big red hands and the face of a Greek fisherman, was showing his teeth at Ance in a smile of uncut malice. “I hear your boy Wilson took fifty G’s of your money with him.”
“Yeah. I’ll have to work through next weekend to make it back. Phil, I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s that chipped beef the government hands out taste like? I’m thinking of picking up a can for my cat, but I don’t want him to get sick.”
“Fuck off, lardass.” The sergeant transferred his attention to the duty roster clipped to the wall over the desk.
Ance turned and shook Doc’s hand. “Thought you’d be at work now. Just coming in?”
“Going out. I signed my statement. I don’t think Battle’s in any hurry to get you to sign yours. His murder theory blew up in his face.” He told the bail bondsman about the autopsy report.
“Wilson looked like shit for a long time. I thought he was just doping too much. Well, hell.” He looked at his watch. “Had lunch?”
“A little early, isn’t it?”
“Only if you ate breakfast. You know the Acropolis?”
Doc said he did. They left the building and walked down Beaubien. It was the first warm day of spring. Last night’s puddles were drying and the few people they encountered wore their overcoats open. As usual the downtown sidewalks were almost empty. Far from revitalizing the city, the People Mover electric train had merely plucked its remaining pedestrians off the pavement.
“You’re not popular with the police,” Doc said.
“Who, Phil? He’s a shithead or he’d be a lieutenant by now.”
“It looked like more than that.”
“Somebody else’d put up the money if I didn’t. Their gripe is with the judges that set the bail in the first place. But the judges don’t come down to thirteen hundred. You get canned?”
“I quit I decided to take the job.”
“Change your mind?”
“Taber’s been with me four years. He fucks up plenty, but he’s taken a lot of stitches for me. I can’t just fire him. You should’ve called me before you gave up your job. I said last night I was wasted.”
“Who says you have to fire him?”
“They’re making drivers’ seats smaller and smaller. You won’t both fit.” They were in Greektown. The block was lined with restaurants and markets with five-syllable names on their signs. Ance grasped the brass handle of a wooden door with beveled glass panels.
“I get it he’s always late picking you up,” Doc said. “Let me do that. He can go on taking stitches for you and I’ll do the driving.”
The restaurant was a dimly lit rectangle with a bar and tall booths lining the wall opposite. Murals of the Parthenon and various other ruins Doc couldn’t identify covered all four walls and a fishnet hung in hammocks from the ceiling. A tiny waitress with blonde hair and blue eyes, not a Greek, showed them to a booth and left menus. At the only other table that was occupied at that hour, a waiter set fire to a dish of cheese soaked in retsina with a halfhearted cry of Opah! and smothered the flame quickly.