King of the Corner

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Miller.” Joyce Stefanik, shoulder-length chestnut hair and alert brown eyes under bangs and a square jaw that was the only mannish thing about her, lent him a cool hand with no rings and withdrew it. She had on a pink jersey top that hinted at a black brassiere beneath and a rose-colored silk scarf secured with a gold signet ring bearing her initials. Whatever else she was wearing was hidden by the table. She looked twenty-five, but might have been older; the bangs were misleading. “You seem to be pretty well-known here.”

  “I’ve only been here twice.” He sat down. He thought the waiter was still standing next to the booth but when he saw that the Stefanik woman was looking that way he glanced up. It was a young man in a Dick Tracy T-shirt and cutoffs.

  “Doc, could I have your autograph?”

  Doc looked down at the ballpoint pen and paper napkin in the young man’s hands and back up to his face, thinking it was a joke. The face looked earnest and a little unsure of itself behind a struggling moustache. Doc scribbled his name on the napkin and gave it back. The young man thanked him, hovered there a moment, then thanked him again and joined a group of men and women his own age seated in the corner booth. The napkin was passed around and looked at and chattered over.

  “I haven’t signed one of those since the Minnesota game,” Doc told the Stefanik woman. “Even then I wondered what they do with them.”

  “Sell them. Or trade them for something else. There aren’t any collectors any more. They’re all speculators.”

  “You sound like you know something about it.”

  “I did a story once about an eleven-year-old kid who bought a Lou Brock rookie card for eight dollars and sold it for a thousand. My editor thought it would be amusing to assign someone to the story who didn’t know anything about baseball. I thought it was going to be a cute piece about a lucky kid. That boy was the most cold-blooded businessman I ever met, and I interviewed Roger Smith and Lee Iacocca. I’ll just have the squid.” She handed her menu to the Greek fisherman, who had rematerialized by the table.

  Doc ordered moussaka and coffee. His companion had a full cup in front of her. The waiter took his menu and lumbered away. “I guess kids don’t flip cards any more,” Doc said. “Maybe mine, if I had one. Do you really eat squid?”

  “I like it best cold for breakfast the next day. Are you sorry you never had a card?”

  “It’s the single greatest tragedy of my life.”

  She smiled. The expression softened the cut of her jaw. “You seem to have adjusted fairly well.”

  “I haven’t.” He glanced down at her hands. The nails were short—he supposed because she did a lot of work on keyboards—and the hands were smoothly tanned, like her face and neck and what he could see of her bosom. Her arms too, whose smoothly defined muscles said she worked out. “Don’t you take notes?”

  “I haven’t started the interview yet.”

  The waiter came by with Doc’s coffee and the carafe, which he used to replace the quarter-inch she’d sipped from her cup on his way to the other tables. Doc said, “What kind of story are you planning to write? Has-been jock recalls his life?”

  “I let the interview suggest the angle. The other way is backwards. Do you consider your life over?”

  “I did when my appeal was denied and again the first time I was turned down for parole. Now I’m not sure. Can we come back to that question?”

  “Will you be able to make up your mind by then if you haven’t so far?”

  Inwardly and outwardly, he shrugged. Before that morning the answer to the question of whether he thought his life was over might have been yes. Something had happened during his conversation with Sean, though, and he wasn’t quite sure what. He was experiencing a queer tingling and spreading warmth starting at the floor of his stomach that might have been evidence either of dead cells replacing themselves or of live ones blinking out.

  She seemed ready to press the point, but just then the food arrived, interrupting the volley. Cutting up the rubbery-looking squid she said, “Have you known Alcina Lilley long?”

  “About four days. We met at a party at Beatrice Blackwood’s house. Beatrice is a friend of the man I work for.”

  “Maynard Ance.” When Doc looked at her: “I have contacts at police headquarters. What do you do for Ance?”

  “Fetch and carry. What did Sergeant Battle say about me?”

  She swirled a bit of tentacle on the end of her fork in a pool of black juice on her plate. “Even if I were to identify him as a source, that would be confidential.” She chewed and swallowed. “He said you play baseball Saturdays with his son. Are you getting up some sort of neighborhood team?”

  “Nothing so organized. There’s a pair of empty lots on the corner of the street I live on. Where I was brought up, if you could afford a bat and a ball, you didn’t let a thing like that go to waste.”

  “That could be an angle. Is Mrs. Lilley involved?”

  “No. What makes you think she would be?”

  “Three of the boys who play on your field are Marshals of Mahomet. If Mrs. Lilley’s appearance at Wilson McCoy’s funeral means anything she’s in the midst of a reconciliation with the M-and-M’s. I thought there might be a connection.”

  It had started raining again in big drops. His back was to the window but he could hear the drumroll against the glass. “This doesn’t sound like a piece for the Sunday magazine. If you’re fishing for the front page, I can’t help you. All I know about politics is which lever to pull to vote the straight Democratic ticket.”

  She smiled and set down her coffee cup. “I notice that Tennessee twang—”

  “Kentucky.”

  “—gets more emphatic whenever we close in on something you don’t want to talk about. You’ve got that Clem Comes to the Big City routine down cold.”

  “Okay, so I know a little more. I know you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think Alcina Lilley is throwing in with the Marshals. Those three you mentioned were with the group that came to protest the Mahomet dinner yesterday.”

  “I know. It’s a smokescreen of some kind. They worship Mahomet. Why interrupt a banquet in his honor?”

  She still wasn’t taking notes. He said, “Am I being interviewed now?”

  “Not if you say it’s off the record.”

  “It is, then. I wondered about the same thing. I think the M-and-M’s have staked out Mahomet for themselves and don’t want any other group claiming credit for whatever gains are made in his name. Especially not at five hundred bucks a plate with the mayor invited.”

  “It’s a point,” she conceded. “It still doesn’t explain what Mrs. Lilley was doing at the McCoy services.”

  Technically it wasn’t a question, so he didn’t attempt to answer it. What Mrs. Lilley had told him about Wilson McCoy and her husband struck him as confidential. “How’s the squid?”

  “Just like eating surgical gloves. I love it. Would you like wine? Retsina? It’s on the News.”

  “Make it ouzo.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that kind of heady for an ex-convict?”

  “It’s raining. If I lose the rest of the day it won’t be that much of a loss.”

  “A liter? Or doesn’t ouzo come in liters?”

  “Even if it does, let’s make it a bottle. If you’re planning on joining me.”

  “I don’t have to report to the office until tomorrow anyway.” She got the waiter’s attention.

  The clear liquid—Doc knew enough about spirits to recognize that transparency meant potency—poured slowly and smelled like molasses. When they introduced water from the pitcher the waiter had brought, the contents of their glasses clouded over and turned milky. She held up hers. “What should we toast? Freedom?”

  “Freedom is an abstract concept.” He liked the sound of it and wondered where it had come from. Talk radio, probably; he’d become hooked on it all over again since the McCoy controversy. “A pennant for the Tigers.”

  “No,
toasts should be about something that could conceivably happen.”

  “Meanwhile this stuff is setting up like concrete.”

  “Impossible. It’d hold its consistency at two hundred below.” She shrugged. It was a masculine gesture, but not when it involved her bare tanned shoulders. “Oh, hell, here’s to the rest of the day.”

  They touched glasses. Doc thought the heavy licorice taste would take some getting used to. Joyce—she had become Joyce the moment she ordered ouzo—licked her lips and set her glass down. “Seriously, if you’re interested in putting together some kind of youth league, I could help. You’d be surprised how many donations a mention in the paper could bring in.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with them. The whole thing started because I wanted to get my nephew away from his video games.” He took one last bite of his moussaka and pushed the plate away. It didn’t go so well with the ouzo. “I could use permission from the City of Dearborn to convert the corner into a ballfield. The person I’ve got looking into it hasn’t been having much luck.”

  “I don’t know anyone in the Dearborn city government.”

  “There is no Dearborn city government. You know as well as I do that Coleman Young calls the shots in all the suburbs stuck inside Detroit.”

  “Young shoves the press around. It doesn’t work the other way. But I can ask. What’s in it for me?” She rested her chin on her palm.

  “As good an interview as I can give. I used to be pretty good at it.” Which was true. Whenever Sparky Anderson said something that the reporters couldn’t make any sense out of, which was after practically every game, they had generally garnered in front of Doc’s locker. The southern aphorisms he’d grown up with and hadn’t thought very special were fresh meat for the yankee press.

  She took her chin out of her palm. “Gloves are off?”

  “You mean they’ve been on?”

  “You haven’t seen me at bat.” She groped in a white vinyl purse for a notebook and gold pencil. “Just how bad was it in prison? Were you raped?”

  He hesitated with his glass halfway to his lips, then drank and set it down. “No. Too big. That kind of thing doesn’t happen as often as you might think. A lot of the guys inside have their steadies.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do for sex?”

  He was about to say I made do, then remembered she was writing everything down. “I didn’t.”

  “Come on.”

  He met her gaze. He was used to batters trying to stare him down. A columnist in Cincinnati had written about Doc Miller’s “blank, owl-eyed stare.”

  She looked down at her notes, then back up. “Were you impotent?”

  He laughed and sat back. “You’re a woman. I guess a lot of guys hit on you when you were a teenager, all that stuff about urges and how it’s painful for a man to go too long without sex. Maybe that’s true for some, but the rest of us can hold out for as long as any of you. Let’s say I thought about it a lot. I had a lot of experience of showering with other guys when I went in. They just never appealed to me.”

  “That’s a good quote.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Are you still going without?”

  “What are you doing this for, the News or the Enquirer?” he asked after a beat.

  She clipped her pencil to the spiral of the notebook, put it down on the table, and folded her hands on top of it. He saw his reflection in her pupils. “Let’s say I’m curious.”

  In the little silence that followed, a dish of combustible cheese went up at another table with a poof and a hoarse cry of “Opah!” from the Greek fisherman. Doc picked up his glass and stroked a flaw in the rim with his forefinger. “Ms. Stefanik, are you trying to pick me up?”

  “I prefer Miss Stefanik. When I’m trying to pick someone up.”

  He became aware that someone was standing next to the booth. Expecting another autograph collector, he turned to take the pen and paper. The man’s hands were empty. They were large hands and blocky, with coarse dark hair on the backs and a netting of healed-over scars stretched across the knuckles of the right. Russell Taber grinned down at him. He was swaying a little and he smelled like the alley behind a bar.

  “I thought that was you I saw coming in,” Taber said. “You’re hard to miss.”

  Doc said hello and that it had been a while. He kept his hands on the table. There was a kind of dangerous glow on the ex-cop’s face that he’d seen in the parking lot of the Kingswood Manor Apartments when Taber had tried to push his hand through the window of the Coachmen.

  “Ance fired me yesterday,” Taber said. “On the phone.”

  “I didn’t hear. I’m sorry.”

  “He said he didn’t need two drivers. He said I’m unreliable.” He had trouble with the last word.

  Joyce said, “Excuse me. I think I’ll visit the ladies’ room.” She slid toward the edge of the booth. Taber put a hand on her shoulder. It dipped under the sudden weight.

  “You sure can pick ’em for looks.” He petted her with his eyes. “Funny, I thought you went for that dark meat.”

  None of the other diners seemed to be aware of the scene. The big waiter was preparing to ignite a dish of cheese for the table across the aisle. Doc said, “Let her out, Taber.”

  Taber squeezed. The skin of Joyce’s shoulder yellowed under the pressure of his fingers. She unclipped the gold pencil from her notebook and fisted it like an icepick.

  “Baseball Joe ought to be sharing the wealth. He’s got my job and two girls. He can keep the nigger. I’ll just—”

  Flame gushed up in the tail of Doc’s eye. He swept the dish off the cart and sidearmed it into Taber’s face. The ex-cop shrieked, more from fear than pain, and cupped his face in his hands. Doc came out of the booth, barking a hip on the edge of the table, hooked his foot behind Taber’s near ankle, and shoved him with both hands. The cart fell over and he went down in a tangle of limbs. Doc pulled Joyce to her feet by her wrist and headed for the door.

  The Greek fisherman called after them, “Your bill!”

  Doc pointed at the man trying to get up off the floor. “It’s on him.”

  “My hero,” said Joyce under the awning. The rain ran off the canvas in a sheet.

  “I was rescuing him, not you. Were you really going to stab him?”

  “The pen is mightier—”

  “Shut the hell up.” He waved at a passing cab. Two cabs later he got a driver to stop.

  Chapter 22

  WHEN DOC ENTERED THE OFFICE Monday morning, Maynard Ance was poking through an ashtray with the eraser end of a pencil looking for a smokable butt. Finally he found one an inch and a quarter long, sniffed at it, made a face, and threw it and the rest of the contents into his wastebasket. Spotting Doc then he grunted and fished inside a side pocket of his trousers. His arm went in almost up to the elbow. “Count that.” He tossed a roll of bills the size of a softball at Doc.

  Doc reported thirty-two thousand in hundreds and fifties.

  “’Kay, go down to Frank Murphy Hall and bail out those M-and-M’s the cops arrested at the armory. Bring back what’s left.” Ance poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “They’re clients?”

  “As of about twenty minutes ago, when their p.d. called. Drug dealers are a good risk, generally speaking. They can raise the cash in a hurry, and they don’t stiff you on account of they may need you again. ’Course, they stand about a seventy-two percent better chance of getting dead at an early age than your average citizen, but the payoff’s worth the gamble and it’s all in cash. No sense bothering Uncle Sam.”

  Doc pocketed the bills, then switched them to his other pants pocket. They made too big a bulge on the side where he carried his keys. “Have they been arraigned?”

  “No, otherwise I’d know the amount. Here are the names.” He tore a page off his telephone pad and gave it to Doc. “Wait till they’re all out of the courtroom before you pay the clerk. Tha
t way you won’t have to give any of them a ride. I need you back here in case something comes up.” He studied Doc’s face. “Doesn’t look like Taber laid a glove on you. I heard you mixed it up yesterday.”

  Doc was a little in awe until he remembered that Ance owned half of the Acropolis. “Just a scuffle. He’s a mean drunk. He said you fired him.”

  “I’ve fired him before. This time I mean it to take. I can’t go around picking up jumpers in cabs because my ride didn’t show. It makes me look like an amateur. How’d it go with Joycie?”

  “Fine.” He couldn’t help grinning.

  Ance read him immediately. “I hope you took precautions. We don’t need any little Stefaniks running around taking all the fun out of the bail business.” He sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone.

  A gray-haired bailiff taking a cigarette break on the steps of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice directed Doc to the courtroom where the arraignments were taking place. Doc dawdled over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, then went on up and found a seat in the last row of the gallery. The seven members of the Marshals of Mahomet who had been arrested for attempting to disrupt the fundraising banquet were brought out one by one. Doc knew only Austin Yarnell, George McClellan Creed, and Epithelial Lewis, none of whom looked particularly cowed by his circumstances; it would take more than the dowdy blue coveralls of the Wayne County Jail to take the strut out of Needles Lewis with his wispy moustache and checkerboard haircut. Standing by the public defender waiting for the large black judge to look up from his papers, he craned his head around, spotted Doc, and grinned fit to split his head in two. Doc couldn’t help smiling back.

  Doc couldn’t help smiling, period. On the way in to work he had remembered to stop at a florist’s and send roses to Joyce Stefanik’s apartment in Royal Oak, where they had spent all Sunday afternoon and part of the evening listening to the rain stroking the roof and trying to match it with some strokes of their own. The sex had been awkward and sloppy and embarrassing like sex everywhere, and even more so because Doc was out of practice; and immensely satisfying. Joyce had an athletic body, tanned all over—she said she spent more time at the tanning parlor in the next block than she did at home—and, so far as Doc could determine from an exhaustive inventory, no inhibitions. Afterward they had showered, gone to dinner in Royal Oak, and parted in the foyer of her building with a long kiss and an agreement to go out again next week. He didn’t know whether he had Taber to thank for tipping the balance. Retracing these things the next day you never knew where they would have led had one or two items been out of sequence.