King of the Corner

by Loren D. Estleman

  Beatrice made no attempt to look surprised. She smiled and stood still and turned her cheeks this way and that for kisses and allowed herself to be embraced. There seemed to be a kind of protocol in the order in which the others came forward to bestow their affections, but it didn’t seem to be according to age, as some of the grayer heads came later, and he decided he didn’t know enough about the hierarchy to follow the pattern. He was largely—but not pointedly—ignored.

  The room was more of a surprise than the party. The furniture was dyed leather and polished wood and chrome, the hardwood floor buffed to a satiny sheen, and underneath the cigarette odor the place smelled of citrus wax and regular airing. Books lined built-in shelves in a wall papered in bright yellow. Beatrice Blackwood had managed through no small effort and expense to construct a moat between her home and the squalor of her neighborhood without abandoning it.

  Beatrice’s queenly reserve shattered in a squeal that prickled Doc’s skin under his clothes. She tottered forward, arms out, dividing the crowd, and bent to embrace an old man seated in an easy chair in the corner. Completely bald to the narrow brim of his Tyrolean, he had the dark gaunt look of an African wood carving. The lenses of his gold-rimmed half-glasses were opaque and the cane his long bony hands were folded on was bamboo with a broad white band halfway down its shaft in the universal symbol of the blind. His suit was electric blue, cut extravagantly, and he wore black silk socks and alligator shoes. He unfolded one hand to pat her on the back.

  “Gidgy, I heard you was dead and buried.” Her Jamaican-accented speech had slipped from cultured third-person to street argot.

  “Buried, anyways. Croakers won’t even let me smoke the weed no more.”

  “That ain’t no Chesterfield there in the ashtray.”

  “Sweet thing, I done turned eighty last month. I was running out of things to do that I ain’t supposed to.”

  “You still selling?”

  “No. Hell, no. That damn crack has gone and roont the drug culture. I only deals in Acapulco and Asian and I can’t get my price. You still selling?”

  “No. That AIDS thing got everybody staying home pulling they own chain. You hear about Quincy?”

  “I heard he died.”

  “Well, you knew him, how he was built. He didn’t weigh no more than ninety pounds at the end.”

  “I always told that boy he’d fuck hisself to death.” He pointed the cane in Doc’s general direction. “Who’s that white boy you got with you?”

  “Can you see him?”

  “Somebody looked out the window. He one of them Libber Als?”

  Beatrice remembered her manners then, disengaged herself from the old man, and came over to grasp Doc’s arm. “This is Doc Miller, he drove me over from the hospital. He works for Maynard Ance. You all know Maynard.” The sculpted tones were back.

  Doc felt a general lifting of the atmosphere then, as if a window had been opened. He wondered how many digits that assembly totaled in past bond. Beatrice went off to mingle. Doc was offered a drink by a woman with her hair cropped close to her skull and a forked scar on her left cheek that crinkled the skin around that eye when she smiled. He accepted a vodka and water. Somebody else offered him something to eat, and he became aware then of the sweet smell of hot grease. One minute later he was holding a paper plate weighted down with ribs in a maroon sauce. The volume on the old-fashioned cabinet stereo was turned up, and it was straight Lou Rawls, Stevie Wonder, and Martha and the Vandellas from then on. The woman with the scar was talking to Beatrice when the music got louder. She raised her voice. “ …another surprise. Truman?”

  The big man in the dark suit set his paper plate down on the stereo, rapped gently at a side door, listened with his ear to the panel, and pushed it open. Alcina Lilley came out.

  Chapter 17

  “I WAS BORN IN KINGSTON, that much I know,” Beatrice Blackwood said. “I think in 1914, but I don’t know what month. I was the eighth girl in the family. When I was about six months old my father sewed me up in a tobacco sack and threw me in a river. I don’t know which one; Jamaica has more rivers than it has girl children.”

  She paused to break a two-inch column of ash next to a row of them in the saucer on the kitchen table. She only used it twice per cigarette, a trick that fascinated Doc. With at least six Bacardis in her system, she had stopped referring to herself by name, but she showed no signs of loss of coordination or concentration. Her cataracted right eye looked milky behind her glasses. Doc had no idea how much she could see with it, or through the holes in the patch over her left. There were sixteen of them arranged in a star, like a Chinese checkerboard.

  Doc had had only the one vodka, after which he kept refilling his glass from the tap in the apartment’s clean little kitchen, but he was getting sleepy. It was dark out and the tobacco smoke burned his eyes. The music from the living room improvised all around the rhythm of his pulse.

  Beatrice went on. “A policeman fished me out. By the time the police tracked down my father he had himself barricaded in the house. He shot my mother and five of my sisters with an army gun; the other two were in school. He’d have shot himself too, probably, but he was out of bullets. The police did it for him.

  “I got artificial respiration, but no one knew how long my brain had gone without oxygen, so I was registered as an idiot at the orphanage. I must’ve thought they were right, because I didn’t start talking until I was four years old. After that they couldn’t shut me up. I was adopted by a couple named Thornton. He was a retired British Army officer. I was eleven or twelve when he took me to bed the first time. Mrs. Thornton found out and threw me out of the house.” She sipped Bacardi. “When I was sixteen a man named French Bill took me to Detroit with four other girls. He sold me to Hattie Long and I went to work for her.”

  “Sold you?”

  “Well, my work card, but it came to the same thing. They called me a domestic. The first time you tried to run away Bill bruised you up. If you tried again—well, nobody ever made a third try. Hattie was a woman ahead of her time. She ran the first integrated house in Detroit. Some of those big auto men liked their meat dark, you see, and that black trade got big after the Rouge plant opened, but none of the other white places would touch it. She took a special interest in me. She taught me how to dress and talk and which fork to use and where to hide a knife where I could get to it in a hurry. ‘Ruby,’ she said—Ruby Sandoval, that’s my birth name, my great-grandmother was a Spanish slave—‘Ruby, don’t ever lose the accent. There’s lots of girls prettier than you, but the second they open their mouth they might as well be out on Michigan Avenue giving out hand jobs at a buck a throw. When you’ve got something nobody else has, hang on to it.’ I cried like a baby at her funeral. By then I had my own place. I met them all: Joey Machine, Jack Dance, Frankie Orr. You’re too young to remember those names.”

  “I remember Frankie Orr.”

  “His boy Patsy lost his cherry at my place on Twelfth. Personally I don’t believe it, that boy was crippled in more than just his legs, but I didn’t ask my girls any questions as long as they came through with the house cut and the customers left looking satisfied.”

  She shook her head, smiling. She didn’t look as old when she wasn’t showing the perfection of her dentures. “The sixties, now, that was the time to be on Twelfth Street. Those were our Roaring Twenties: blind pigs, rib joints, our music coming out of every open car window. Quincy Springfield ran the numbers. You should’ve seen the shirts that boy wore, all the colors of Life Savers. They made parks out of some of the buildings that burned down in the riots and boarded up the rest, so you wouldn’t know it to look at the place now, but for a little while there we owned the town.”

  “You own it now. The mayor’s black and so’s the chief of police and most of the population.”

  “That’s not owning it.” She laid a fresh column next to the last. “That’s being owned by it.”

  He drank some of his water. “Who’s Gidg
y?”

  “Theron Toussaint L’Ouverture Gidrey.” The name rolled grandly off her experienced tongue. “Nobody ever got poisoned on his merchandise, although some OD’d because they weren’t used to the pure original. He had a half-interest in the Morocco Motor Hotel on Euclid. Maybe you heard that name.”

  “There was a Morocco Motel incident.”

  “STRESS cops broke down the door in ’73 looking for a liquor-store robber. They shot and killed three people. One of them was Gidgy’s sister’s son Richard. Gidgy had a stroke the next day. He never did get back his eyes.”

  “Was the robber there?”

  “No, the police in North Carolina arrested him about a week later. Richard wasn’t in the business, he was just staying there while he was going to Wayne State. Well, Gidgy had to expect something like it in his line of work. Anyway nobody around here cried when Young took office and disbanded STRESS. Some of those white cops went around with notches on their guns. Seriously.”

  The air changed in the kitchen, stirred by the two-way door. Doc knew—and was aware that he knew—that Alcina Lilley had entered behind his back. He stood. Her head came above his shoulders, which made her almost six feet tall in her moderate heels. She was wearing a beige skirt that should have hobbled her at the knees but didn’t, and a matching jacket with a double row of big cloth buttons. There was no blouse; the diamond-shaped expanse of medium brown flesh that was her bosom and the neck that grew up out of it were without lines or blemishes except for a small mole just above the shadow where her lapels met. She had full lips, small eyes set far apart, and a short nose and long upper lip that colluded in the overall impression of youth. As at McCoy’s funeral, her only makeup—almost an afterthought—was a touch of lipstick. He couldn’t believe she had been married to a man dead twenty-four years.

  “It was a lovely party, Beatrice,” she said.

  Beatrice drew a fresh cigarette out of her pack and smiled. “You should tell Truman. Would you believe it was his idea? He’s starting to develop an imagination. Thank you for coming. I was afraid we were only going to see each other at funerals from now on.”

  “Poor Wilson. I can’t think of anything good to say about him.”

  “Neither could he. I suppose that’s why he shot himself.” She leaned forward while Doc lit the cigarette from a throwaway lighter, thanked him, and sat back. “Are you ready to go home? Truman will drive you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Alcina Lilley said. “He passed out about a half-hour ago.”

  “That boy never will learn how to drink. He’s Sebastian Blight’s youngest, you know. When he gave him to me for protection he didn’t tell me I was supposed to finish raising him. Doc—I hate to ask.”

  “Where do you live?” he asked the younger woman.

  “Birmingham.” She couldn’t prevent a light drawl from seeping into certain words and names.

  “Mind riding in a motor home? The man I work for calls it a bus.”

  She smiled, briefly lighting the grave arrangement of her features. “As long as you don’t put me in the back.”

  Beatrice separated a finger from her glass to beckon. When Doc leaned down she kissed his cheek. “Tell Maynard thanks. He knows Beatrice can’t get along without her handsome young men.”

  He touched the back of her wrist. “Like hell.”

  Gidgy was sitting in the same place when Doc and Mrs. Lilley crossed through the living room, his chin on his chest and his face hidden by his hat. Doc paused to watch the old man’s chest rise and fall a couple of times, then moved on.

  Mrs. Lilley’s legs, veneered in sheer hose, were nearly as long as Doc’s, and the pressure of her hand on his was very slight as she mounted to the passenger’s seat. The warm nights of late spring and summer were more than two months off and she clutched her light wrap at the throat. Doc slid the heat levers all the way to the right. When he felt warm air coming out of the vents he turned on the fan. The wipers skinned a light mist off the windshield. Lighted windows hung on the night like ripe yellow pears, delineating the neighborhoods less by the lights themselves than by the dark spaces in between. To the southeast, the glow of downtown and Coleman A. Young’s riverfront reflected off the man-made overcast of factory smoke and auto exhaust

  “Nice party,” Doc said after a few minutes. He couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Yes, it was.” She was looking out her window.

  “Beatrice has a lot of friends.”

  “Beatrice is a lot of friend.”

  “Have you known her a long time?”

  “She was part of the Twelfth Street scene in the sixties. I knew most of them.”

  “Through Mahomet, I guess.”

  “No, I met them after he died. Most of them didn’t know he was married. I was sixteen, the youngest of the batch.” She made a throaty sound. “I still am. It’s funny how few of the young ones are left, and how many of the ones who weren’t young even then are still around.”

  “Those early models last”

  “This town eats its young,” she said.

  He took the ramp onto the Jeffries Freeway. The slipstream squealed around the edges of the new bullet-proof windows. “You wonder how someone like Wilson McCoy lasted as long as he did.”

  “A lot of people thought he was already dead. They were right.”

  “Did you go to the funeral because of his connection with the Marshals of Mahomet?”

  She turned her head to look at him. Bursts of light from the gooseneck streetlamps stuttering overhead found the bones of her face, making it look illuminated from within. She turned back. “I thought I recognized you. No, McCoy never understood Gerald, what he stood for. The Marshals represent a big part of what he was trying to overcome. He died trying to stop a riot that McCoy was doing his best to start. I didn’t go to the funeral of Wilson McCoy the M-and-M. I went to pay my respects to the man who gave Mahomet his first chance to speak to his brothers and sisters about what was eating him from inside. Gerald was just another unemployed Negro with a taken name until McCoy asked him to address a meeting of the Black Afro-American Congress. I went because Gerald would have gone himself without having to think about it.”

  “Oh.”

  She made the throaty sound. “I speechify when I’m tired. I’m sorry. Gerald used to use me as his test audience and I guess some of it took. It comes in handy when I’m asked to say a few words at rallies and fund-raisers.”

  “You speak beautifully.”

  “Not as beautifully as he did. He was a gospel singer, and he had the voice. But what you mean is I don’t speak like a city black. I can do that too. Most of us switch back and forth. Most of you do, too, depending on who’s listening. I dropped out of high school to get married. Beatrice made up for what I missed.”

  “She learned from a madam too, she says.”

  “She told me the same story. Maybe it’s true. I think she dramatizes herself a little. I’m pretty sure her father was still alive when I knew her on Twelfth Street. She used to get these letters in an old man’s shaky scrawl from Jamaica, addressed to Miss Ruby Sandoval. Probably asking for money.”

  “I thought that story about him trying to drown her and shooting the rest of the family was fishy,” he said. “It sounded more like something that would happen in Detroit.”

  “The older you get the fewer people there are who can call you a liar.”

  They exited the Jeffries and rolled through well-lit blocks of large homes with clipped lawns and beds of flowers. “Truman is Beatrice’s bodyguard, such as he is,” Doc said then. “Why don’t you have one?”

  “I have three. The N.A.A.C.P. pays for them. I sent them home this afternoon. Freedom is supposed to be what it’s all about.” More of the deep South was veining her speech, as if she were too tired to fight it back. “If they could stuff me and stick me in a glass box, they would. Being a symbol is a tough way to make a living.”

  “Why don’t you quit?”

  “How do you qu
it what you never started?” She shifted on the seat. “That’s my house there, the third one.”

  It was a brick split-level on a quarter-acre lot, with a fence of cedars along one edge of the yard and an arched window in front that reminded Doc of church. He parked in the asphalt driveway, filling it, and got out to help her down, but she was already standing on the ground when he reached her. He walked with her to the front door.

  “Thank you, Kevin. Or do you prefer Doc?” She used her key. A T-square-shaped section of light tipped out onto the porch.

  “I can go either way.”

  “Kevin, then. Doc sounds too much like a street name.” On the other side of the threshold she turned to smile back at him. “Good night, Kevin.”

  “Alcina, that you? I just—”

  Beyond her shoulder, a young black man in mottled jeans and a green tank top stained black with sweat had stepped into the lighted entryway through a side arch, saw Doc, and drew back out of sight

  Mrs. Lilley moved quickly and gracefully, filling the space between the door and the frame with her body. “My nephew,” she said. “He has a key. Good night.” The door closed.

  Doc hesitated, then stepped off the porch. On his way across the grass to the Coachmen, the tail of his eye caught a movement of the curtain in the arched window, but he didn’t turn to see which of them was watching.

  Neal, Billie, and young Sean were sitting at the dinner table when he got home. The house smelled of cooking. It sat heavily on the vodka in his stomach. Neal said to his wife, “Told you I saw that big box going past the window. Hope you didn’t block my truck,” he told Doc.

  “I parked on the street. Ance said I could take it home when I called him from—when I called him. I don’t feel like eating,” he said when Billie got up to set another place. “I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down.”