“For five bills a week I’ll hire A. J. Foyt to drive me around. I need muscle. Taber’s not good for much else, but he’s good enough for that.” Ance studied his menu.
“Who is Taber, anyway?”
“Up till Old Numb-Nuts became mayor he was a Detroit police officer, a twenty-year man. Something about misuse of deadly force.” He summoned the waitress and ordered moussaka and a glass of cold milk.
Doc asked for water and a dish of inflammable cheese. When the waitress left with their menus: “I’m in good shape. A third man would’ve come in handy in that bar in Tennessee.”
“That’s old history. These days I don’t accept clients with out-of-state addresses. Except Toledo. Half my business comes from there.”
“Beside the point.”
Ance put away the glasses he had put on to read the menu. His eyes were that shade of gray that looked like coins in shallow water. “Your P.O. know you’re having this conversation?”
“He said I could take the job.” Doc had decided not to mention the part about staying behind the wheel.
“What’d he say about me?”
“He said you’re a cowboy and that you must like running down jumpers or you wouldn’t get so many.”
“Yeah, I can see why he gave you the green light.” He lit a cigarette.
“You can call him if you don’t believe me. His name’s Kubitski.”
“I know. I was there when you told Charlie. Just a second.” The waiter who had ignited the cheese at the other table arrived with Doc’s order. He looked more Arab than Greek. Before he could touch off the retsina, Ance tossed his burning match into the dish. The liquor went up in a sheet of orange and blue flame and the bail bondsman shouted Opah loud enough to make glasses ring behind the bar. “That’s how it’s done, Farouk,” he said as the flustered waiter fumbled the cover in place, extinguishing the blaze. “Tell your boss to hire the real thing if he wants to compete with Colonel Sanders.”
The waiter served Doc and withdrew without a word. The cheese was charred at the edges. “How many restaurants have you been thrown out of?”
“They can’t throw me out of this one. I own half of it.” Ance put out his cigarette. The little blond waitress had brought his eggplant and milk. “Kubitski doesn’t know me. He’s just repeating what he’s heard around headquarters. I’m sixty-two next month. Three doctors told me two years ago if I didn’t quit smoking and lose weight I’d never see sixty-five. I buried one, but three of a kind’s a hand I’d bet on any day of the week. Does that sound like I look forward to climbing mountains and getting the shit kicked out of me in saloons?”
Doc shrugged. The cheese tasted fine.
“Kubitski say anything else?”
“He said you were disbarred.”
“He say why?”
“No.”
“I was standing up for this little scroat on a charge of first-degree criminal sexual conduct.” The bail bondsman spoke between forkfuls of moussaka. “It was outside my specialty, but the scroat’s old man was a friend. First day of testimony the prosecutor asked the victim to identify her rapist, and she pointed right at the punk sitting next to me at the defense table. Only it wasn’t my client, it was a kid we had doing errands at the office who looked a little like him. Well, the judge got all bent out of shape over it. It was his evidence tipped the board of review against me. Some of my colleagues had been trying to do that for years.”
“I think Perry Mason pulled that trick once.”
“Perry’s judge wasn’t an asshole. He was lucky that way.”
“It doesn’t seem like enough to get you thrown out of the profession.”
“Well, a lot of old shit got dragged out at the hearing. Point is, you measure your success by how many enemies you’ve made. I play dirty, son. Life ain’t baseball.”
“I found that out.”
“Fuck that.” Ance chewed and swallowed. “You keep looking behind you, you bump into what’s in front of you. Think I’m bitter? Hell, disbarment was the best thing ever happened to me. All the money in this town that isn’t in the mayor’s personal investment company is in dope, and I represent more drug dealers than Parke-Davis. They pay their bills. In their business it’s a good habit to get into if you don’t want your creditors cutting off your dick and shoving it down your tonsils. The clients that come through outnumber the jumpers twenty to one. Everything else is a tax loss. When I was a lawyer I’d’ve killed for odds like that.” He drank his milk and whisked away the moustache with a knuckle. “So you don’t get your picture on a bubble-gum card. Life don’t serve all the courses.”
“Does that mean I’m hired?”
“On approval. You handle cops okay, but handling cops is the smallest part of the job. Show me how you do in heavy shit and maybe we’ll talk about making it permanent.”
“What do I do first?”
“Get the tip.” Ance stood and took his overcoat off the hook.
Chapter 8
DOC HAD RETURNED SPENCE’S cab and ridden a bus into town. He and Ance took a taxi to Inkster. On Michigan Avenue they got out in front of a block of two-story yellow brick buildings sheltering a Kid Koin Laundry, a used furniture store, and a health spa with a rear entrance under a blue awning and a sign reading WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES.
“Need a back rub?” Doc asked.
“That’s about the only thing they don’t rub here. We’re home.” Ance led the way around the side of the building.
That side bore a ten-foot cartoon of a coin wearing a cowboy hat and drawing a pair of six-guns. One of its booted feet decorated a steel fire door. Stopping there, Ance glanced around the unpaved parking lot and sorted through a dozen keys on a ring the size of a softball. “No sign of the crate. Taber’s sleeping one off again.”
He unlocked the door, and they entered a narrow hallway paved with broken linoleum that ran the length of the building. It smelled like a bus station.
Near the end was another steel door painted to look like wood with a gridded-glass window lettered in black:
M. W. Ance
KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING
“What’s your advertising budget?”
Ance used another key and opened the door. “Strictly Yellow Pages and the county grapevine. You don’t get much off-the-street trade in this business.”
The office was square, well-furnished, and surprisingly neat. It contained a large pearwood desk with a leather top, a telephone and fax machine, a copier, and a complicated-looking coffee maker with a checkerboard of flashing colored lights atop a nine-drawer file cabinet. The rug looked expensive and too ornate for the room, and the desk was bunted up against the wall under a window overlooking the parking lot. Outside, a pickup truck bearing the name of a well-known construction firm on the door of the cab pulled up and a driver in dusty coveralls got out and went into the massage parlor.
“Dumb putz.” Ance was watching, too. “He owns the company. The feds have had that skin shop under surveillance for a couple of months. They think it’s one of the places where city contracts go to get fixed. Rumor is the company that owns the place is a subsidiary of our right and honorable mayor’s holding corporation. You’d think a construction boss would know better than to drive up in one of his own trucks.” He hung up his coat “Terrible what’s happened to corruption in this town. Under Cavanagh it had style.”
“How come you know so much about it?”
“Secrets are only secret from the people who want to know them. When you don’t give a shit, you hear things. That’s your first lesson.” He sat down at the desk and lifted the receiver off the telephone.
His was the only chair in the office. “Where do the customers sit?”
“At home. I work here. I don’t entertain visitors.” He dialed, took out a cigarette while he was waiting, then crumpled it and tossed it into the metal wastebasket next to the desk. “Maynard Ance. Any messages? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” He hung up and wrote something on his calendar pad. �
�We got an appointment in Redford at two. You know the Kingswood Manor Apartments on Livernois? They’re down the street from Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.”
“I know Baker’s. Is that where the appointment is?”
“That’s where the transportation is. Apartment 612. If Taber doesn’t answer, tack a note to his door and bring back the bus. Here’s the extra set.” He opened a drawer and handed Doc a pair of keys attached to a miniature license plate.
“What do I do, compare numbers?”
“You’ll know it when you see it. Believe me.”
Doc opened the door. “A guy doesn’t get to do much sitting around this place.”
“One thing you won’t get working for me is hemorrhoids.” Ance put on his glasses.
Kingswood Manor was a quiet complex set back from the road with potted trees on the balconies and patios and a taxi stand in front. Doc paid the driver and went in through the main entrance. Finding the inner door locked, he studied the rows of mailboxes built into the wall and pushed the button next to R. TABER. When there was no answering buzz after his second attempt, he pressed another button at random. A buzzer sounded and he went through the door.
Sunlight slanted through a tall window at the end of the corridor on the sixth floor. When he knocked on 612, the door moved. He knocked again, then pushed it open.
The living room was large and took up most of the apartment, with a kitchenette to the left and a door at the back that he assumed led into a bedroom. Parts of a newspaper, or of several newspapers, lay in tents on a blonde pile carpet and a smell of stale tobacco hung in the air like shabby laundry. On a green vinyl Strato-lounger a man lay as if in state, with his stockinged feet on the swing-out footrest and his head on the cushioned back. He was a blocky, fortyish six feet and two hundred pounds in a white shirt and dark trousers with gray in his short rumpled brown hair and looked like a truck driver, or what a truck driver used to look like before power steering. Between the first two fingers of his right hand resting on the chair arm a cigarette had burned down to the flesh and gone out
For a second Doc thought he’d found his second dead body in twelve hours. Then something broke loose and a fierce racking snore made him jump. After that the noise became rhythmic. It remained loud.
A pony glass and a fifth of Ten High two-thirds empty stood on an end table next to the chair. Doc thought he knew something about Taber then, if this was Taber. It was a special kind of drunk that didn’t wake up when a cigarette scorched the tender flesh between his fingers.
Doc didn’t try to wake him. In a desk with a pullout leaf he found paper and pencils, wrote a note explaining that he was from Maynard Ance and that he was taking the car, signed it, and left it on the leaf, weighting it down with a dirty ashtray. Taber was still snoring when he went out.
A small paved parking lot for the tenants elled behind the building. Four cars were parked there early on a working afternoon and none of the plates matched the number on the key ring Ance had given him. Walking around the outside of the complex to see if there was more to the lot, he spotted a Coachmen motor home as long as a city block, parked next to the building with two wheels up on the berm that flanked the driveway. The numbers checked out. He hadn’t paid much attention when Ance had referred to it as a bus.
The inside was a higher climb than Neal’s pickup. Both front seats were mounted on swivels. Behind them was a dining nook, a stove and refrigerator, a couple of fold-down beds, plenty of drawers and cabinets, a closet of a bathroom with a stainless steel basin and a chemical toilet, and something next to it that had a drain in the floor and so might have been a tiny shower before someone had installed bars around it that opened on one side, turning it into a cell.
The tallest of the cabinets was locked. He unlocked it with a small brass key that didn’t match the others on the ring. Two shotguns, one with a cut-down barrel, a .30–30 Winchester carbine, assorted handguns, and a Thompson submachine gun glistened under a sheen of oil inside foam-lined compartments. Doc had never seen a Thompson outside of old-time gangster movies. The guards on the catwalks at Jackson had carried rifles. He removed the full-length shotgun, a twin of the Ithaca his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday to hunt rabbits, and inspected the breech. It was loaded. He wondered if that was legal in a motor vehicle in Michigan. He wondered if that mattered with the bail bondsman. Feeling suddenly that someone was watching him, Doc put back the weapon and closed and locked the cabinet. Just holding the gun was a violation of parole.
The motor home’s controls were the same as a car’s. He started the motor and, proceeding slowly—he had never tried to maneuver anything so large—pulled forward into the parking lot and backed and turned the wheel and went forward again and backed again, angling the vehicle’s nose out toward the road. He was straightening it for the last time, using both big side mirrors to avoid hitting parked cars, when a face came to the window on the driver’s side eight feet above the ground. Startled, he stamped on the brake.
The face’s mouth was moving, distorting it, but he recognized the man he had left snoring in apartment 612. He rolled down the window.
“—going, you son of a bitch?” The cab filled with the stench of half-digested whiskey.
Doc said, “Maynard Ance’s office. I left you a note. Want to come along?”
“Give me them keys.” An arm in a white sleeve flashed past Doc’s face. Instinctively he slapped it up with his left hand. Taber almost fell off the step but caught hold of the mirror post and hauled himself back up. “Fucking prick cocksucking car thief bastard.” Doc rolled up the window quickly.
An open palm struck the glass, flattening out like a ham and shooting hairline cracks in four directions. Doc’s foot slipped off the brake pedal, and the Coachmen lurched forward. Taber, still off-balance from his own blow, lost his grip on the mirror post and dropped below the window.
Doc braked again a few feet ahead and opened the door to look back. Taber was sitting on the pavement. He hadn’t put on shoes before leaving the apartment and the soles of his socks were filthy. After a few seconds he pushed himself to his knees, rested, and started to get up, cursing loudly the whole time. For a moment Doc was indecisive. Then he yanked the door shut and accelerated. His last view of Taber as he pulled out into Livernois was a flash in the right side mirror of a man running after him, mouth working silently.
Driving along, one hour into his new job, Doc wondered if five hundred a week was going to be enough.
Chapter 9
STANDING IN THE DIRT lot behind the office, Maynard Ance scowled at the cracked window, crushed another half-smoked cigarette under his toe, and spat after it as if to make sure it was out. “Lucky I got glass insurance. What’d he use?”
“His hand.” Doc played with the keys.
“Hope he didn’t bust it like last time.”
“He’s done this before?”
“No. Tried to punch a hole in a block wall. Taber’s one mean drunk. He isn’t anybody’s Mother Theresa sober, but when he gets a snootful he’s worse’n the bleeding shits. You’re lucky it was just the window.” He brightened; or at least became less dour. “So how do you like the bus? I had it customized.”
“I didn’t think it came with the cell.”
“Oh, that. That came later. I used handcuffs until this Robbery Armed we were bringing back from Chicago snapped the chain and brained Taber with a jack handle. Taber was driving and we ran up a bank and turned over. I busted my collarbone. The scroat was a pro wrestler, the Mad Sheik or the Hindu Warrior, some crap like that. About a thousand cops tied him down in Evanston ten days later and I was out eighty grand plus the hospital bill and five hundred bucks deductible on the bus. That’s when I ordered the bars. They’re made of the same kind of steel they use on the space shuttle. The torch hasn’t been made that can cut through them.”
“Ever use them?”
“Wilson McCoy was going to be the first one, but Taber and me missed connections. Well, that�
�s why you’re here. Let’s go to Redford.” He walked around to the passenger’s side.
Doc got in and started the engine. “Quite an arsenal back there.”
“Checked it out, did you?” The bail bondsman cut him a quick glance from the other seat. “The tommy gun’s just for looks. You’d be surprised how fast they come around when you slam one into the breech. One thing these scroats know is their Eddie Robinson flicks.”
They had been on the road several minutes when Ance spoke again, his eyes on the scenery. “Don’t worry, it’s legal. A motor home isn’t a vehicle behind the front seats. We could be hauling around a loaded howitzer.”
“Which we’re not.”
“Too hard to get shells.”
They arrived at the address in Redford a few minutes ahead of the appointed time. There was just room enough to park the Coachmen in the driveway of a red brick house with an attached garage and a picture window in front. A small white-haired woman in a gray wool dress and orange beads answered the door.
“Mrs. Wizotsky? I’m Maynard Ance. This is my associate Kevin Miller.” It was a manner Doc had not previously seen in the bail bondsman.
She grasped her beads. The creases from her nose to the corners of her mouth were as deep as gashes and there were pink swellings like welts under her eyes. Doc noted with a start that she was at least ten years younger than his first estimate; fifty at most. She said something welcoming and got out of their way. The living room was small, neat, the furniture fairly new but unremarkable. It looked like a display in a discount furniture store. Family pictures crowded the mantel of the gas fireplace, the only personal items in the room.
“Thanks for coming. I’m Howard Wizotsky.”
Ance and Doc shook hands in turn with the man who got up from the sofa when they came in. He looked younger than his wife but was probably about the same age, a solid man starting to go soft around the middle in a blue work shirt and slacks with shards of gray in his black crew cut. His hands were heavily calloused, with square, thick nails, and his face was burned reddish brown and grainy as if from long exposure to the sun or some other source of dry heat.
King of the Corner Page 6
