King of the Corner

by Loren D. Estleman

  “His mind’s gone,” Neal said. “Half the time he doesn’t know what he’s saying or who he’s talking to. He thought I was Uncle Roy in the car. He’s been dead thirty years.”

  “I’m okay. I just had to get out.”

  “He won’t be with us long.”

  Doc said nothing.

  “Billie says some TV people called.” Neal was making conversation.

  “Channel Seven,” Doc said. “No, Seven was yesterday. Today I think it was Channel Two. I guess nobody got killed this week.”

  “How you handling it?”

  “One at a time. I’m doing a talk show next Friday.”

  “No, I mean how are you holding up?”

  “This is nothing. When I was pitching I did interviews all the time.”

  “Then you were a pitcher. Now you’re an exjailbird. Some kind of freak for them to have fun with until they get tired of you.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “So why let them?”

  Because I need it. Because if playing ball were all of it, or even half of it, the corner lot would be enough. But if you’ve never had thirty thousand pairs of eyes on you when you were reading signals or using the resin bag or toeing the rubber, you can’t understand. Aloud he said, “I don’t mind. It keeps me busy.”

  “Fuck them. You’re better than them.”

  Doc was stuck for an answer. Neal had never said anything like it before. To say it, he would have had to think it, and the idea that he might think that Doc was better than anybody would have been like expecting one of the heads on Rushmore to ask him to reach up and scratch its nose.

  The expression on his brother’s face was Rushmore-like. Doc began to wonder if he’d said what Doc had heard. “Still looking for an apartment?”

  “I may have found one.” It felt good to be talking again. “It’s in Taylor, back half of a duplex. It isn’t too far to visit. I could catch a bus here for the Saturday game.”

  “Need cash?” Neal reached for his hip pocket.

  “I’m covered. Would you believe I was walking around with thirty thousand bucks in my pocket yesterday?”

  Neal’s hand dropped to his side. Doc could hear the alarm horn. In his brother’s world, too much money was a carcinoma come to the surface. “You’re not getting into something you can’t climb out of?”

  Doc laughed. “I spent seven years in a place like that.”

  “Quit fucking around.”

  “I’m not in any trouble, Neal.”

  A breeze came up, freshening the street. A radio clonked on next to an open window, and Ernie Harwell’s voice drifted out like the first green scent of spring. Frank Tanana was warming up at the mound.

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” Neal said. “You leaving. Things are getting kind of crowded at home.”

  “I guess Sean will be happy to have his room back.”

  “He’s my son. The last time you saw him he was just learning to walk.”

  The harshness startled Doc. Neal’s heavy features were drawn tight, as if someone standing behind him had gathered up a fistful of his scalp and pulled. Doc knew then why they were talking about his moving out.

  “He’s a good kid, Neal. You did a good job. You and Billie.”

  The tautness went out. His brother nodded. Then his right hand came forward. They made contact. When Neal grinned the years slid off like a veil. “You know what you get when you shake hands with the devil.”

  Doc smiled. The contact broke.

  “I’m taking Saturday off,” Neal said. “The whole day. So I can umpire.”

  “They’re talking about rain Saturday.”

  “It wouldn’t goddamn dare.”

  They turned around and walked back to the house.

  Chapter 24

  THE OFFICE OF PAROLE OFFICER Peter Y. Kubitski wasn’t shafted for air conditioning. Street noises came through the window propped open behind his desk, but little air, it being mostly static at that level. It was helped along a little by an oscillating table fan of a model Doc hadn’t seen since childhood, and that left over from another epoch, with a green cast-iron base and a stainless steel housing shaped like the nacelle of a B-52. The blades were off pitch, causing the unit to shift its position a fraction of an inch to the left each time the head swung that way. Kubitski was aware of this and without looking up from his desk would reach out to push the fan back to the right just when another revolution or two would have tipped it off the edge of the file cabinet. Doc, who appreciated control, was impressed.

  Aside from that he did nothing for Doc’s pulse. Same salt-and-pepper hair teased out at the sides to divert attention from the thinning top, same long white face and crooked nose, same stingy little eyes parked under the mantel of his forehead. It might even have been the same knitted tie and blue Oxford shirt. Doc was sure Kubitski didn’t own two identical mohair jackets. Even hanging on the back of his chair it retained the general shape of his angle-iron frame.

  He finished reading the letter of employment signed by Maynard Ance, then drummed the pages together and went through them again quickly. Finally he unscrewed the reading glasses from his face and folded them on the blotter, lunch-stained and strewn with the apple-soaked pipe tobacco that made the tiny room smell like a neglected orchard. “Ance pays you this much just to drive him around?”

  “It isn’t that much compared to what I made when I played ball.”

  “Hm. What sort of man is he to work for?”

  “I don’t have to remind him to pay me.”

  Kubitski stroked the bend of his nose with the stem of his pipe. The bowl had deteriorated further since Doc’s last visit; soon it wouldn’t hold a ten-minute charge. “You have an irritating habit of giving answers that have nothing to do with the questions,” he said. “Is there a reason you’re evasive?”

  “I’m not sure what kind of answers you want.”

  “No one’s trying to trap you, Kevin.” He picked up his glasses and held them above the rest of the papers before him. Doc found the routine nature of the monthly interview, which required him to complete a form while waiting for his appointment as if the place were some kind of outpatient clinic, morally crushing. “So you’re moving?”

  “The address is there,” Doc said. “I put down a security deposit. I move in next week.”

  “Trouble at home?”

  “No. Now that I can support myself there’s no reason to depend on my brother.”

  “Was that your decision or his?”

  “Mine.”

  Kubitski turned over the sheet and read the other side. The other side was blank. He put it down and slid his glasses into the imitation alligator case clipped to his shirt pocket. His pipe had gone out in the ashtray. He picked it up and relit it, wasting half a book of matches. “I saw your interview with Bill Bonds last night.”

  Doc waited. The officer didn’t pursue it.

  “I’m a little concerned about these weekend baseball games,” he said after a little silence.

  “Did someone complain? We get a little noisy.” He hoped the city hadn’t been in contact. During the most recent game a couple of Dearborn police officers in a scout car had slowed down to watch on their way past.

  “Nothing like that. Do you know who you’re playing with?”

  Doc saw where he was going now. He tossed a warm-up. “Some pretty good athletes. If I’d had a couple of them in my last game in Jackson I might’ve had a no-hitter.”

  “You almost did.” Kubitski pulled a yellow sheet from under the pile on the desk. “Your catcher has an arrest record going back to junior high school. That’s if he ever attended junior high school. He and two more of your all-star team were brought in just ten days ago for creating a disturbance during a dinner at the National Guard armory. I understand you were there.”

  “Not with them. I was a guest.”

  “The terms of your parole are clear on the subject of fraternizing with known felons.”
/>   Doc feinted with a curve. “Are you sure they’re felons?”

  “I just told you about Epithelial Lewis’ record. Austin Yarnell has two juvenile convictions for possession and aggravated assault and George M. Creed spent two years at the Boys Training School in Whitmore Lake for selling two grams of crack to a police officer.”

  He threw his fastball. “Were there any adult convictions? I did a lot of legal reading my first two years in prison. A juvenile record isn’t in point of fact a record at all. So they’re not felons.”

  “Your first two years in prison. I see. You haven’t been brushing up on it just recently.” He took the stem out of his mouth, smacked his lips in distaste, and returned the pipe to the ashtray, where it smoldered out. “I’m not crazy about your attitude, Kevin. Frankly, I don’t think you’re adjusting all that well to life outside.”

  Doc felt some of the blood run out of his face. It was as if he had split the plate at the knees only to have the umpire call it a ball.

  Kubitski went on. “One of the purposes of the penitentiary system is to prepare the inmates to rejoin society. Whatever bitterness and distrust of authority they may feel must be left behind the gates. I sense that you’ve taken a good deal of it out with you. I don’t feel comfortable about filing a satisfactory conduct report with the parole board at this time. You know what that would mean.” The hard little eyes caught the light.

  “What rule did I break? Tell me.”

  “I didn’t just happen to catch that interview on television last night. I’ve watched all of them and read the ones that appeared in the papers.” Without taking his eyes off Doc he corrected the drifting fan, then dived into the pile of papers again and came up with a sheaf of cuttings held together with a clip. One of them was the Sunday piece by Joyce Stefanik. Doc thought he had come out of that one sounding arrogant, unregenerate. It wasn’t a hatchet job, as she could have mentioned the scuffle with Taber in the restaurant and made enough out of it to get him in serious trouble, but the tone puzzled him and he hadn’t called her or taken the two calls she’d placed to the house when he was home. “The picture I get is not that of a man who’s ready to get on with his life. I assume you’ve read the articles and seen some of the tapes. What picture do you get?”

  “If it’s the interviews I’ll stop giving them.” In fact the requests had begun to fall off. Doc suspected he’d had his fifteen minutes. Chief Hart, Kenneth Weiner, and the manhunt for Starkweather Hall had shoved him and every other story west of the margins.

  “It’s not the interviews. It’s the man who’s giving them. I can’t ask the penitentiary system to free you if you won’t free yourself.”

  “Call Sergeant Battle.”

  Kubitski hadn’t finished speaking. He went on for several more phrases, then stopped and rewound. “Who?”

  “Charlie Battle. He’s a detective sergeant. I guess whoever you’ve had watching the Saturday games didn’t notice he plays almost every week. He’ll tell you how I’m adjusting to life outside.”

  Watching the parole officer pick up his pen and write down the name, he had the feeling he’d betrayed a confidence. He hadn’t planned to mention Battle at all. Listening to Kubitski drone his moldy platitudes about rehabilitation and society, he’d smelled the disinfectant powder the trusties used when they swept the corridors between the cells, felt the mildew damp of the gray concrete blocks that bled through the modern painted drywall on rainy days. And confidence was only a word.

  I could talk to Kubitski, get him to cut you some slack.

  “I’ll speak with him,” Kubitski said. “I’m not an ogre, Kevin. There are parole men, bitter men, who enjoy threatening their cases with reincarceration. I’m not one of them. Each revocation is a failure.” He shifted the fan. “Just to be safe, I wouldn’t sign a lease on that new apartment.”

  Sweat pricked like burrs on Doc’s forehead. As the fan swooped back the other way the breeze frosted his face. The intercom buzzed. Kubitski switched it off.

  “That’s my next appointment. I’ll call you before I take any action.”

  Doc took the stairs down to Major Crimes. The elevator was too closed in.

  He felt a flush of hope when he found the door to Charlie Battle’s office standing open and the desk lamp on inside. In the doorway he paused to rap on the frame. And didn’t rap. A young white plain-clothesman was seated at the sergeant’s desk in a striped shirt and one of those floral ties that were beginning to crowd the more conservative prints out of the men’s stores. He looked up. “Yes?”

  “Sergeant Battle,” Doc said.

  “He’s on vacation. Anything I can do?”

  “I need to get in touch with him.”

  “I think he went out West with his wife and kid. I don’t know where.”

  “Will he be checking in?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m new here myself. They yanked me off General Service to hold down his desk. I don’t even know him except sometimes from the elevator. Are you reporting a crime?”

  Yes. Aloud he said, “If he checks in, ask him to call Doc Miller. It’s important.” He gave the young man Neal’s telephone number.

  “The baseball player?”

  “No.”

  But he doubted the young man heard him.

  Chapter 25

  “SAY HEY, MR. MAYS!” Having left 1300 Beaubien, Doc was walking along Macomb toward Randolph, where he hoped to catch a cab; downtown Detroit was no place to try to park a motor home, and so he had left the Coachmen at the office. At the cry he looked around and spotted Joyce Stefanik leaning against the fender of a silver Trans Am. She had on a white nylon thing with a scoop neck and no sleeves, one of those pleated skirts that turned out not to be a skirt at all when the person wearing it mounted a horse or a motorcycle or something, red with yellow Van Gogh flowers, and black platform sandals. Her hair, gathered into a loose ponytail, was red in the sunlight. He went over and stopped a couple of yards short of her, hands in his pockets. “Willie Mays was a fielder,” he said.

  “Whatever. I told you I didn’t know much about the game. I see they let you go.”

  “Who told you I was here?”

  “Your sister-in-law. I called the house for about the eighteenth time. I was beginning to think you thought I had AIDS.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Everything was okay until Sunday. Was it the story?”

  “You’re a good writer.”

  “That’s what my editor says just before he tells me he’s not going to use something I wrote. I thought it was a good piece. The file picture of you pitching to George Brett was a nice touch.”

  “It was José Canseco. And you made me look like a cocky son of a bitch.”

  “Interesting choice of words. Cocky.” She was smirking.

  He took his hands out of his pockets. “You fucked me over twice, lady. The second time wasn’t nearly as much fun.”

  “You’re serious. You didn’t like what I wrote.”

  The naïveté of it made him gasp. He started to shake his head, but that reminded him of the fan in Kubitski’s office. He turned and resumed walking.

  Her sandals clickety-clicked behind him. “I said you had ‘a quiet kind of self-possession bordering on impudence.’ That bothered you?” She was striding alongside him now, trying to keep up with his long legs.

  “Not impudence. Insolence. Bordering on insolence.”

  “That’s bad?”

  “It is to parole officers.”

  “Insolence is a turn-on. I was turned on.”

  “I could tell. You said I was aloof and sly. You must’ve had a real thing for Nixon.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  He glanced back at her then. She had started to fall behind.

  “Not about Nixon,” she said. “You. You look at people like you’re watching them from a tower or someplace where you can see what they’re heading for and they can’t.”

  “It’s called eye contact.”
r />   “Reportorial interpretation.”

  “Bullshit.” At the corner of Randolph he saw a Yellow Cab letting a passenger off by the opposite curb and started to cross against the light. A SEMTA bus flatted its horn and blew past an inch in front of his nose, lifting his hair.

  “Maybe it’s the glasses.” She was shouting over the drumroll of the diesel. “Have you ever considered changing frames? The ones you wear make you look like a bird of prey.”

  The cab had pulled away while the bus was passing. Doc said shit and leaned against the lightpole on that side.

  “Did I really get you in trouble with your parole officer?”

  He looked at her. The slipstream from the bus had tangled her bangs, and she had almost lost a sandal crossing the street. Hopping on one foot, she tried to adjust it and look at him at the same time. Her expression was worried.

  He laughed. The sound of it surprised both of them. He said, “You look like a dog I used to have that tried to scratch himself when he was walking.”

  “I was wondering when you’d get around to calling me a bitch. Well, to hell with this.” She took off the sandal and the other one, too. Barefoot, she scarcely came to his breastbone. “Are you in real trouble?”

  He breathed deeply. It was an old trick to settle himself when a batter had rattled him. “It wasn’t just you. Hell, it probably wasn’t you at all. Or anyone else. My P.O.’s had it in for me ever since I went to work for Maynard Ance.”

  “He is kind of scummy.”

  “Next to my brother he’s the most honest guy I know. He provides a service for money and goes out to collect it when it doesn’t come.”

  “So does a loan shark.”

  “Another honest profession.”

  She fluffed out her bangs, an unconscious, youthful gesture Doc liked. “So can I offer you a lift, or are you still determined to board a bus doing thirty?”

  “Forty-five, at least. I’m still checking my toes for tread marks.” He offered her his elbow. She took it, swinging her sandals by their straps in her other hand.

  The interior of the Trans Am was black and smelled of leather and some kind of sachet from a tiny brown-and-cream jug hanging from the gearshift lever. She tossed her shoes into the backseat, turned the key, and said, “Where to?”