King of the Corner

by Loren D. Estleman

  The mayor’s concluding words slid under a fresh detonation of palms throughout the auditorium. Doc stood and—somewhat maliciously, for one of the N.A.A.C.P. bodyguards had left the wall to reach for Mrs. Lilley’s chair—presented his own services, blocking the aisle with his body. She rose with a slight pressure of her hand on his and left the table silently on a cushion of encomium. Young steered her to the lecturn. By this time everyone was on his feet. She waited, smiling, while the din washed away. Flashguns lit her face in a sputtering volley.

  “Thank you.” Her voice, keyed slightly above the middle register, went out into the room without the electronic booming that had accompanied Young’s. “Gerald—Mahomet—would have been proud to see this day. Not because of the attention to him, but because of the pride that is present and which he gave his life trying to instill in all of us.” She paused and seemed to turn away from the microphone; a single pair of hands smacked. Then: “I might add that he could have bought five suits for the price of the meal I just had. Thank you.”

  The simple speech and the quiet joke at the end brought the audience back out of its seat, and as she left the podium with a kiss on one cheek from the mayor, the noise reminded Doc of thirty thousand fans stamping their feet on the grandstand. He joined in the applause. He couldn’t hear his own hands clapping.

  “Mahomet is God! You’re eating the body and drinking the blood of Mahomet!”

  Doc had the impression that the same words had been shouted over and over again before anyone heard them over the general tumult. They came from the direction of the door, where a group of young black men dressed as he was, in old shirts and faded trousers, surged against the arms of the two bodyguards extended to keep them out. “You’re eating the body and drinking the blood of Mahomet! Mahomet is God!”

  On the dais, Mayor Young had inserted himself between Alcina Lilley and the intruders. At the other end of Doc’s table Charlie Battle, backing into the clear space in front of the lecturn, lifted his hands to signal to the plainclothes officers stationed around the room, unconsciously mirroring Mahomet’s pose in the huge photograph behind him. Some of the officers were already tunneling their way toward the door with their hands inside their coats. One almost knocked over the Channel 7 cameraman, who had turned to record the disturbance. All this time the apparent spokesman for the uninvited guests continued to assure the assembly at the top of his lungs that Mahomet was God and that they were eating his body and drinking his blood.

  He was almost out of sight, obscured by the broad backs of the converging detectives, before Doc recognized the young man as Needles Lewis, one of his acquaintances from Wilson McCoy’s funeral and the best catcher he had had in a long time.

  Chapter 20

  “WAKE UP, KEVIN! TELEPHONE!” Doc had been Doc so long he almost never thought to answer when his Christian name was called. This time he seized it as a hand up out of his old naked dream, in which he had been pondering how to conceal his tendency toward erection whenever he got set to throw his fastball. He awoke with a real-life erection, and pretended entanglement with the bedclothes until his sister-in-law pulled her head out of the doorway. For a minute he sat in his pajamas on the edge of the mattress, thinking thoughts of the deaths of loved ones, and when he was flaccid enough to present himself put on his glasses and padded downstairs. The light coming through the living room window was gray; it was just past dawn Sunday morning. “Hello?”

  “Is this Mr. Miller? Doc Miller?”

  He woke up a little. He had thought it might be Ance, but this was a woman’s voice. Billie, wearing a blue quilted housecoat and furry open-toed slippers, scuffed across the room without looking at Doc, opened and closed the front door, and went back toward the kitchen, unrolling the Sunday Free Press. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Miller, my name is Joyce Stefanik. I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning. I’m a reporter with the News. I’d like to do a story on you for the Sunday magazine. Would you be available for an interview?”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Well, I understand you were quite the local celebrity before you—before your bad luck.” Listening, Doc thought there was something calculated about the substitution; that the woman was not as unsure of herself as she tried to appear. “I apologize for not having heard of you, but I was away at school when you played for the Tigers, and I’m afraid I’ve never been much of a baseball fan. What I want to do …”

  “Kevin?” Billie came back in from the kitchen, staring at the front section of the Free Press.

  “ …along the lines of a former all-American hero trying to put his life back together,” Joyce Stefanik went on.

  Doc excused himself and put his hand over the mouthpiece. “What?”

  Billie turned the section over and held it out by the edges.

  Young greets former Tiger pitcher Kevin “Doc” Miller at Saturday’s event honoring Mahomet, began the caption under the two-column color picture centered near the top of page one. Alcina Lilley, widow of the slain civil rights leader, looks on. Indeed, she was standing as far off to the side as possible without being left out of the shot entirely. The angle at which the photo was taken diminished the Mutt-and-Jeff effect of Doc’s reaching down to grasp the mayor’s hand. He hadn’t known a camera was anywhere near.

  “Mr. Miller?”

  He asked the reporter to call back later and fumbled the handset into the cradle. Billie watched him as he took the paper, skimmed through the portion of the article that appeared on page one, and turned to the concluding columns near the back of the section. There was no mention of him anywhere in the article. The headline read MAHOMET RALLY SUCCESSFUL DESPITE PROTEST.

  The story reported that $21,000 had been raised for efforts to have Mahomet’s birthday made a state holiday. The attempt by seven men identifying themselves as Marshals of Mahomet to disrupt the proceedings had ended peacefully enough when the interlopers were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace and trespassing. They were expected to be arraigned on Monday.

  Doc shook his head distractedly. He would never understand either politics or religion. Why the M-and-M’s should want to prevent their god from having his own holiday eluded him.

  “You didn’t tell us you met the mayor,” Billie said. “What were you doing—I’ll get it.” She answered the telephone. “Hello? Oh, hello, Roberta. Yes, that’s Neal’s brother; your Nicole met him last time she sat with Sean. Well, it didn’t come up. No, we haven’t been hiding him. Listen, Roberta, can I call you back? We have to get ready for church.” She hung up. “Honestly, Kevin, why don’t you ever tell us anything? Are you afraid we’ll embarrass you in front of your friends? Neal said you were kind of stuck up when you played ball, but I always defended—darn it.” She picked up the telephone and spoke with another neighbor who had read the Free Press. Doc went back to bed.

  He was up again in a half-hour. The ringing of the telephone every five minutes made sleep impossible. He had just finished shaving and was buttoning his shirt when Billie tapped at the bathroom door. This time it was Ance on the line.

  “Hobnobbing with politicians and the high-class coloreds,” greeted the familiar broken-gravel voice. “I guess he don’t hardly talk to no bail men no more.”

  “I didn’t know that picture was being taken. I didn’t even know about the banquet until we walked in the door. Mrs. Lilley dragged me away from a ballgame.” Doc turned his back on his brother, sprawled on the sofa in his old plaid bathrobe with the newspaper spread around him like entrails. Neal was unshaven and surly-looking at that hour on a Sunday morning. The Miller family hadn’t been to regular church services since Kentucky.

  Ance said, “Yeah, I bet she goes a hundred and thirty stripped. You ought to carry a piece to protect you from these renegade widows. Hey, I’m not bitching. Didn’t I say I wanted you to worm your way into that crowd? I just wasn’t expecting to see my worm kissing the mayor’s butt over my morning stack and tomato juice.”

  “
If I kicked it instead of kissing it I wouldn’t be here to answer the phone.”

  “He wouldn’t’ve felt it as long as it wasn’t in the pocket where he keeps his wallet. Just stay low, okay? You’re no good to me you become a celebrity, drag a shitload of reporters behind you every time you go to the can.”

  He remembered the reporter he’d spoken to. “I got a call from a woman named Stefanik.”

  “Shit. Joyce Stefanik? Shit.”

  “You know her?”

  “Do I know I got a prostate the size of Ohio? She’s a pain-in-the-ass feature writer at the News, gets in my face every time a client takes a hike. I think she fucks somebody down at the City-County Building is how she finds out. She used to be food editor, but I guess you can only straddle so many zucchinis before it starts getting old. What’d she want?”

  “An interview for the Sunday magazine, she said. I guess I should refuse.”

  “Fuckin’-A you should refuse. Tell her to parade it straight up her—no,” He was silent for a moment.

  Sean came in yawning in his pajamas and turned on the television in the middle of a religious program. Doc stuck a finger in his ear to shut out the organ music. Ance said, “No, you better do the interview. You start playing hermit every snoop in town’ll be at your door trying to find out what you’re hiding.”

  “Any other instructions?”

  His tone was lost on the bail bondsman. “Try not to be too fucking fascinating.” The connection broke.

  “Look! Uncle Kevin’s on TV!”

  Doc turned toward Sean, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the set. Neal looked up from the sports section. The boy had switched stations to a local news program. Doc saw himself sliding out Alcina Lilley’s chair and helping her to her feet in the armory auditorium. As his profile came into view the news reader’s voice laid in over the scene. “Mrs. Lilley’s escort for the afternoon was Kevin ‘Doc’ Miller, a former pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. His major-league career ended in 1983 when he was convicted on felony charges in the death by cocaine overdose of a teenage girl at a party he hosted in the Westin Hotel and sentenced to prison. Mrs. Lilley took the opportunity to tease the guests for spending more on the luncheon than—”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  His sister-in-law’s blasphemy shook Doc more than the spectacle of seeing himself on television. She had charged in past him wiping her hands on a dish towel and clonked off the set Sean continued staring at the screen while the picture folded horizontally and vertically and retreated into the center of the tube. Doc couldn’t see his expression. Billie’s was furious.

  “You just stood there and let him watch!” She rolled the dish towel into a hard ball. “You want to talk to him?”

  Sean was looking at him now. “Uncle Kevin? What they said?”

  Billie said, “It’s not true, honey. Remember what we talked about when you saw that scary program? It isn’t real.”

  “Sean, how about a game of catch?”

  Even as he said it he became aware that it was raining outside. Big drops like blobs of glue smeared the living room window and thudded on the roof. Sean got up in one motion and ran out of the room. Feet drummed the stairs, an upstairs door banged shut.

  “Kid needs his butt paddled.” Neal scaled aside the sports section and braced his hands on the sofa cushions.

  Doc said, “Sit tight. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Billie. “He’ll come down later and I’ll talk to him then. You’ve done enough.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She flinched. “What?”

  He repeated it “It was your idea not to tell him anything about me. The kid didn’t even know I was a ballplayer until somebody mentioned it yesterday. How long did you think you could keep him ignorant?”

  “He’s eight years old! How much did you understand when you were eight years old?”

  “He was bound to find out. It should’ve come from one of us. I’ll go up and talk to him.”

  She looked down at Neal, still braced on the sofa. “It’s your son and your brother. Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “The hell with the whole damn bunch of you. It’s my only day off.” He got up and went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door thumped. Something plopped and hissed.

  “I’ll be upstairs.” The statement dropped into the silence between Doc and his brother’s wife. He left her.

  Sean had gone to his uncle’s room, probably from old habit because it had been Sean’s room first. Doc had been age eight and thought he could picture it the look of horror when his impulsive retreat placed the boy among the effects of the very person he had fled there to avoid; the turn back toward the door; then the stubborn angle of the young jaw with the decision to stay put. Doc rapped at the door and when there was no answer he let himself in. There was no lock, a common safety feature in houses of that vintage where the smaller bedrooms were likely to be occupied by children who were sometimes a liability. He caught Sean returning a soiled baseball to the top of the bureau. It was the last ball Doc had pitched in his last game at Jackson and had been presented to him by Blaize Depardieu, team manager and convicted rapist. It was plastered with signatures in felt-tipped marker. The inscribers weren’t allowed to have ballpoint pens.

  It seemed as good an opening as any.

  “Did you read the autographs?”

  Sean, looking out the window at a blighted maple blocking the view, was a long time responding. “I don’t know any of those names.”

  “No reason you would, unless you hung around the post office. They’re all convicts.”

  “What’s a convict?”

  “A guy in prison. You know what a convict is.”

  “You were one.” It was almost inaudible.

  “Yeah, I was one. You know what the difference is between the guys that signed that ball and your Uncle Kevin? They all did what they were in for.”

  He didn’t turn from the window. “You didn’t do what they said?”

  “I threw a party. A girl died. I didn’t know there was dope there.”

  Doc stopped. He was listening to himself with Sean’s ears. Under his breath he said, “Oh, shit.” He sat on the bed. Across from him on the wall hung a framed picture of him in his old uniform. The picture had cost him forty dollars in a downtown studio with a hundred wallet-size prints. “I don’t like talking to people’s backs. You don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to. I’ll let you know if that tree starts growing.”

  The boy turned. He focused on the bedding accordioned against the footboard. Doc wiped his palms on his pants.

  “I knew there was dope there, Sean. Every time the bathroom door opened someone was in there doing lines. No,” he said when the boy cut a glance toward him, “not me. I tried it once and it made me feel like I could pitch the world, but I felt that way when things were good on the mound and that didn’t make me feel like—didn’t make me feel rotten afterwards, so I left it alone. But I knew it was there and I knew the batboy who brought the girl worked for a dealer and that meant she was one of the ones who kept going into the bathroom. I could’ve stopped it, but nobody ever stopped it before, I wasn’t going to be the first. I just told you more than I ever told anyone, even your father.” There was more: Someone finding the girl unconscious on the tile floor, laughing and trying to wake her up by pouring beer on her; someone else finally getting the message and shoving the clown aside to give her CPR; the girl’s eyes all rolled over white and glittering when the Samaritan tipped her head back to clear her esophagus, the green-marble look of her skin that told Doc she was a corpse even though she wasn’t declared one until they got her to Receiving. He remembered thinking at the time—groping for answers through a fog of Cutty and panic for answers to the stale-sounding questions asked by the police in their preoccupied way—that the cunt couldn’t have picked someplace else to snort the rest of her life up her nose, no, it had to be there.

  Later, at his tr
ial, he had seen the girl’s mother sitting in the same seat every day and looking too young to have a daughter almost grown. It was the first time he had considered that you didn’t have to be very old to be the parent of a sixteen-year-old. And then he had felt something of her loss.

  To Sean he said, “I could throw a ball better than anybody I knew. I guess when you can do that you start to thinking you don’t have to do anything else. One thing I learned, just because you didn’t do anything doesn’t mean you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The boy was looking at him now. His eyes had a rubbed look. “Charlie Junior said you were a Tiger. That’s all he said but if he didn’t say it I wouldn’t know.”

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t my decision.”

  “But you just said—”

  He put up his hands. “You got me on that one. I took too long a lead and you picked me off. Your Uncle Kevin’s stupid, Sean.”

  Sean nodded as if he’d just been given the correct answer to a tough problem. “Dad said that. I heard him say it to Mom. Before you came.”

  “Your dad’s smart.” At that moment he realized he meant it. He’d always thought of Neal as a big dumb mechanic. Even after prison he thought he was smarter than Neal, the one who had stayed home because their father didn’t hold with chasing clouds. He was living under his brother’s roof, out on parole because his brother had stuck his neck out at work to get him a job, and Doc had thought he was a buffoon. He stood. “Make you a deal. From now on we tell each other the truth. No matter what we tell anybody else.”

  After a moment Sean grinned and put his hand in Doc’s big one. Doc thought the boy was developing a callus.

  The telephone rang then and Billie came up after a minute to announce it was that Stefanik woman from the News.

  Chapter 21

  THE WAITER WHO GREETED HIM at the Acropolis, a genuine Mediterranean type with olive skin and long thick eyelashes and the arms of a Greek fisherman, bulging like thighs below his rolled-up shirtsleeves, welcomed Doc like an old friend and steered him to a booth where a young woman sat contemplating the typewritten specials clipped to the menu. Doc was pretty sure he’d never seen the man before. He was aware that most of the diners in the restaurant were watching him. He heard his name whispered.