“No. Shit, no. You’re a contract worker. Figure your own taxes.”
After Doc let him out behind the office he picked up the bills and looked at the WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES sign. Then he pocketed the cash and drove out of the dirt lot. A man could spend his whole paycheck in the building where he earned it
A few blocks from the office he pulled into a metered space, bought a Free Press from a stand, and had a second cup of coffee at a counter manned by an Arab while he read through the classifieds. He borrowed a pencil from the Arab and circled five notices under APARTMENTS FOR RENT.
He drove past the first address without stopping. It belonged to one of a row of buildings on Antietam with plywood in most of the windows and three young black men in torn jeans, bomber jackets, and hundred-dollar Nikes leaning against a burnt-out car parked in front.
The second address, on West Grand River, looked more promising. It was a brick house with green shutters and a shady front porch built sometime in the twenties and well-maintained. But the owner, a tall handsome black woman of about the same vintage, told him she was looking for a married couple to occupy the two rooms on the second floor; she had had bad luck renting them to single men in the past. She took his name and number and said she’d be in touch if she changed her mind. The third place was in a warehouse that had been converted into lofts on Highland Park, light and roomy and the rent was reasonable, but it was right next to a mosque with a loudspeaker chanting Moslem prayers at all hours. Doc didn’t leave his name.
Two of the three others he checked out were more than satisfactory, but the owners wanted first and last months’ rent in advance with a security deposit, which came to more than he had on him. He decided he’d have to postpone serious hunting until next payday, and since the last place was only a dozen blocks from Greektown he went to the Acropolis for lunch. Maynard Ance was in a booth with a man Doc didn’t know. The bail bondsman spotted Doc and motioned him over.
“Doc Miller, Jeff Dolan,” Ance said. “We’re on a break.”
Dolan had the grip—and the build—of a center for the Lions. He had red hair and bright blue eyes in a big face full of freckles. “You don’t look like an accountant,” Doc said.
“I get that a lot,” Dolan’s voice was high and soft for a man his size.
“Dolan used to make the figures jump through hoops for Patsy Orr. You wouldn’t remember his grandfather, Big Jim Dolan, the Irish Pope; he died when I was a little kid. He told the fat cats who to elect for mayor.”
“I’ve heard of Patsy Orr.”
“I quit just in time,” Dolan said. “Six months later Wilson McCoy dusted him and his new accountant in an elevator in the Penobscot Building.”
“Congratulations.” Doc didn’t know what else to say.
“Sit down. Dolan was just leaving. We’ll hit the books next week, same time.”
“I guess that’s my exit line.” Dolan rose. He was as big standing as he looked sitting. “Good to meet you, Doc. Maynard tells me you played ball.”
“A little.”
“We should get up a game sometime. I used to belong to a softball league in my neighborhood, but everybody died.”
“What position?”
“Hot corner.”
“What are you doing Saturday?”
In the exchange that followed Dolan gave Doc his card and wrote down the Millers’ telephone number in an alligator notebook. They shook hands again and Dolan left. Doc sat down.
“If I wasn’t a hockey man I’d offer to umpire.” Ance popped a chunk of roast lamb into his mouth and pushed his plate to one side. “Lucky we ran into each other. Dolan rode me down here. I’ve been trying to get Taber all day but I guess he’s drunk again. Any plans this afternoon?”
“No.” He’d been hoping to stop by a sporting goods store and pick up some stuff for tomorrow’s game with Sean and Sergeant Battle and his son.
“Good. Did the state give you a dark suit when they kicked you?”
“I’ve got a dark suit.”
“How’d you like to wear it to Wilson McCoy’s funeral? I got an invitation this morning.”
“Who invited you?”
“Well, you might say I invited myself. I bought the casket.”
“Why?”
“McCoy wasn’t my only M-and-M client. It gets around I dump them just because they’re dead, I lose half my revenue. The Marshals have been paying my mortgage for years. Anyway the six grand was just a drop in the bucket after the fifty he cost me when he flushed himself down the toilet. Where’s the suit, at home?”
Doc said it was.
“We’ll swing by there after lunch. Funeral’s at two-thirty. We’ll be late, but these colored revolutionaries don’t go by the clock. White man’s invention, don’t you know, to keep the slaves in line. Try the shish-kebab; it’s my own recipe.”
*
The Brown & Kilmer Funeral Home on Sherman was a two-story house built sometime in the twenties with a fresh coat of white paint and a red brick front that looked as if it had been added on. As Doc slowed down in front, a mixed group, all black, in dark suits and gray and blue and lavender dresses was climbing the front steps, one of the men holding the arm of an old woman in a flowered hat. A black Cadillac hearse was parked in front and a number of limousines with smoked windows and other cars of various makes lined both curbs. One was a powder blue van bearing the News 4 logo on its side.
A young black in pinstripes approached the rented Cadillac carrying a handful of small red flags with suction cups attached and leaned down next to the open window on the driver’s side. If Doc’s white face surprised him he gave no indication. “Will you be joining the procession?” he asked.
Doc looked at Ance, who shook his head. Doc said no and the young man directed him to park in the alley that ran next to the building. As they came back around the corner on foot they passed the van, where a bald-headed black man built like a professional wrestler was fooling around with a video camera and a small spare white man Doc thought he recognized from TV was looking at his reflection in the window on the passenger’s side. He had on a trenchcoat, although the temperature was in the upper fifties and there was no sign of rain.
The entryway was done in soft grays with a mauve carpet that extended into the other rooms wall to wall. There was a lighted portrait in a heavy gilt frame, a photograph tinted with oils, of a middle-aged black man with a tabby-cat smile in sixties lapels with an engraved plate reading ELROD BROWN 1921–1970. The lighting was indirect and so was the manner of the bearlike man in a black suit and French cuffs who took their hands in a warm, enveloping grip while steering them firmly toward a room on the left. This room, separated by gray curtains from the rest of the ground floor, contained rows of folding chairs with an aisle down the center, a dais supporting the casket, and murmuring guests seated and standing about in groups. There were some white faces among them. Doc thought he could tell the undercover police officers, each of whom stood alone in a different part of the room. He looked for Sergeant Battle but didn’t see him.
The recorded organ music was turned so low in keeping with the rest of the proceedings that it was several moments before Doc realized the tune being played, albeit in half-tempo, was “My Guy.”
“You’d think they were burying a Methodist.” Ance was almost whispering; Doc had to stoop slightly to hear him. “In the Depression my old man took work as a gravedigger at Mt. Elliott Cemetery, and he was there when they planted this big black numbers boss the wops iced. He said he could’ve retired on the diamond rings and gold teeth that showed up for the graveside service.”
“Times change.”
“I’m glad as hell I don’t.”
Ance circulated, shaking hands and introducing Doc. None of the mourners seemed pleased to see them, but Doc didn’t sense real hostility. McCoy had left no family and it was clear he hadn’t many friends. Doc mentioned this to Ance when they moved out of the others’ hearing.
“Hell
, he didn’t have any friends,” the bail bondsman muttered. “McCoy was a stone asshole. Only reason the Marshals put up with him at all was his reputation. He should’ve been glad he was born black or nobody would’ve hung around him more than five minutes. Well, let’s go pay the son of a bitch our respects.”
The casket was polished mahogany, almost black, with brass handrails and an eggshell satin lining. McCoy, dressed in a brown leather Windbreaker and blue silk shirt with the collar spread to show off a gold chain around his neck, was lying slightly propped up on a pillow with his hands folded atop a paperback-size book resting on his sternum. Doc twisted his head to read the tide stamped on the black Permabound cover. Mahomet: The Life and Death of a Negro Prophet, by Clinton Baedecker.
“The little Black Book,” Ance said. “I don’t know if the cocksucker could even read.”
Brown & Kilmer had worked miracles with the shrunken corpse Doc had seen in the Independence Motel a few days earlier, filling in the caved cheeks and doing something with putty where the flesh had puckered to the bone. The temple wound was only a faint outline, filled in and covered with makeup. The rest was paint and lighting; a fixture in the top of the arch over the dais shed dusky pink light on the deceased, eliminating harsh shadows and softening the atrocities of years and drugs. Doc thought he looked better than he had in recent newsreels.
Ance echoed his thoughts. “Cashing in was one smart career move. I just wish he’d done it before he got so far into my wallet.”
Mourners were still filing in. Most of the latecomers were young, in their late teens and early twenties, and the nearest most of them had to a suit was a matching black leather jacket and pants with skinny Michael Jackson neckties. The haircuts ranged from conservative flattops to geometric designs razored into their heads. Their talk was noisier than the earlier arrivals’ but less raucous than it would have been on the street. There was something about the presence of a dressed and painted corpse that knocked the edge off people.
The largest group had formed around a chair in the front row by the aisle. This was occupied by the elderly woman Doc had seen entering the building when he was looking for a place to park. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, answering remarks politely but without looking up. The flowered hat, set on a pageboy that was too straight and too dark to have grown on her head, was the brightest thing about her. Her tailored suit was ash rose and she had on plain black pumps and glasses with heavy black rims that Doc suspected had been selected to cover the crepe under her eyes. She looked seventy. She could just as easily have been ninety.
“Beatrice Blackwood,” said Ance when Doc asked about her. “After Mother Waddles and Alcina Lilley she’s just about the most respected black woman in this town. Her whorehouses were cleaner than most of the restaurants.”
“She’s a madam?”
“Was. Well, halfway; word is she’s semi-retired, sold all her cribs and massage parlors and comes in a couple of times a month on a salary basis to make sure nobody’s skimming too much. Place you got your tie straightened in yesterday? One of hers.”
“I thought you said it belonged to the mayor.”
“I said the feds think that. Anyway she sold it along with all the rest. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
The group was gathered in a kind of ragged reception line, each person taking her hand and saying something to her in obsequious tones as if she were the widow. Doc and Ance took their place behind the well-upholstered trousers of a man Doc was sure he recognized as a city official or a leading businessman or a minister he had seen a few times on local television.
When the overstuffed man stepped out of the way, Ance moved forward and spoke to the woman. Doc wasn’t paying attention to the words. He was watching the way she didn’t offer her hand, sheathed in a gray kid glove, until she heard his voice, the way he reached over to take the hand, and the way her heavy-lidded eyes, magnified behind the thick glasses, remained fixed on the middle distance between them, not lifting to meet his gaze. Doc wondered how much she could see. Perhaps Ance was just a shadow between her and the light.
“Maynard, how long has it been?” Her speech was youthful and almost musical, the consonants crisp. Jamaican? “Contributing to the delinquency, wasn’t it?”
“Five counts. Four girls and the queen, straight flush. Fifteen thousand for each of them, sixty for you. I was down to bread-and-butter sandwiches that month.”
“Don’t complain, you got back every penny. Beatrice never stiffed anyone. How much did Wilson beat you out of?”
“Fifty.”
“That boy. I could have told you he was a bad risk.”
“This is Doc Miller. He works for me.”
Her grip was surprisingly strong. “I hope he’s paying you. Maynard wouldn’t do anything he asks his people to do.”
Doc said he was pleased to meet her. She smiled, showing a perfection of teeth not found in nature, groped, and laid a hand on Ance’s wrist. “Come see Beatrice after she gets the cataracts off. Bring this charming boy with you. I’m going in next week.”
“It’s a date.”
They stepped away. “You’ll be old a long time before you meet another woman like her,” Ance said. “She delivered thirty thousand votes to the mayor last year.”
“And they still arrested her?” Doc asked after a moment.
“That was three elections ago. It takes a couple of terms in office to find out where to oil the machine. Oh, they crack down from time to time, to keep the whores from going out and stopping traffic, but those misdemeanor pops are petty cash, and they’re a lot cheaper than breaking in a new administration. So she gets out the vote.”
Ance had been right about the casual timing. At 2:45 guests were still arriving, and the bruiser in the black suit who had greeted them at the door was setting up a tripod at one end of the casket bearing a blowup photograph of Wilson McCoy inside a black wreath, a shot Doc remembered from a period poster of the young commando in the black beret and fatigue uniform of the Panthers with gloved fist raised and a predatory light in his eye. Another black suit brought in a lecturn and stood it in front of the first row of chairs. The hum of conversation began to level off. Doc and Ance found seats in the back row near the curtain.
One of the young men in black leather sat down next to Doc. “Excuse me, did I hear somebody say you’re Doc Miller? The ballplayer?”
He was a lean youth sprouting a silky moustache. On either side of his head a barber had shaved quarter-inch squares set corner to corner in an elaborate checkerboard. There was no hostility in the young man’s expression, only curiosity. Doc admitted he had played ball. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the haircut.
“I knowed it! I cut school and snuck into the park to see you pitch to the Brewers. It was a doubleheader, and you come on in the ninth both times. My mama whomped the shit out of me when she found out, but it was worth it.”
“The only time I relieved back to back against Milwaukee we lost both games.”
“Wasn’t your fault. Petry went all to hell in the sixth inning of the first game and Kirk Gibson choked with the bases loaded in the top of the eighth in the second like the motherfucker always done till he went to California. You walked Robin Yount in the first game. Nobody else got past you.”
“You must’ve been what, twelve years old?”
“Ten. Epithelial Lewis. My friends call me Needles.” He stuck out a hand that looked too big for his wrist.
Doc took it “You play, Needles?”
“I catch some out on Belle Isle. First base too, when it’s open, but I’m better behind the plate. This here is Yarnell and Creed; they’s some of the ones I play with.”
Doc stretched his neck to nod at the two men who had sat down on the other side of Needles. Yarnell shaved his head. Creed wore his hair in dreadlocks and sported a diamond on the left side of his nose. Doc was pretty sure all three were M-and-M’s. He was about to ask them what positions they played when the li
ghts came up.
Actually it was just one light, a bright one on a stand erected by the News 4 cameraman, standing to the side of the curtained entrance supporting the camera on one shoulder. The reporter Doc thought he recognized stood next to him holding a microphone. The object of their attention was the Reverend Somebody-or-Other—Doc never caught the name—from the Second Baptist Church, who donned a pair of Ben Franklin glasses to read from a Bible spread open on the lectern; something from Luke. The oration that followed was brief and entirely forgettable. Maynard Ance’s head slid forward after a minute and Doc wondered if he’d gone to sleep.
He wondered too why the Marshals of Mahomet had invited the press. He’d expected pyrotechnics, but so far Needles’ checkerboard and Creed’s diamond seemed to be it.
The minister finished speaking and the guests began to stir. Just then a woman came through the curtain past the cameraman and the reporter and walked up the aisle without looking right or left, not slowing or stopping until she came to the casket, where she placed a small bouquet on top of the closed half of the lid, paused for a beat, then turned and went out the way she had come. Doc got a good look at her then, a trim tall handsome black woman in a knee-length blue dress caught at the waist with a wide black belt, no other accessories, and straight hair tied behind her head. But for some pale lipstick she wore no makeup. She appeared to be in her middle thirties. She’d been gone a full second when the TV reporter seemed to come to life and went out after her, hesitating only to say something to the man with the camera, who followed him, leaving his light behind. Only then did the first of the mourners rise from his chair to turn and stare at the curtain.
“Shit.”
Doc looked at Ance, wide awake, who tilted his head toward the exit. “Alcina Lilley. Mahomet’s widow. Just when you think the show’s a bust.”
GRANNY AT THE BAT
By Leon “Bud” Arsenault
(continued)
In 1968, when Loyola MacGryff was 65, she became determined to cheer her beloved Tigers to victory in person over the St Louis Cardinals in Detroit’s first World Series since 1945.
King of the Corner Page 10
