King of the Corner (17 page)

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 quit 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.”

She said, “You smell like an ashtray. You’re not supposed to go to any bars.”

“It was a party in an apartment. I’ll tell you about it later.” His head was hurting, too. All the smoke and too much conversation were catching up with him.

The telephone rang as he was climbing the stairs. Billie answered.

“Kevin, it’s for you. I think it’s your boss.”

A TV set was mumbling in the background on Ance’s end. Doc recognized the percussive theme and looped soundtrack of that irritating cold-medication commercial inspired by rap. “Want me to pick you up in the morning?” he asked.

“Fuck that.” The bail bondsman’s voice had an edge. “You watching Channel Two?”

He glanced at the dark set and said no. Ance said, “Put it on. I’ll call you back.”

The picture blipped on just as the commercial ended. He waited through another almost as bad, then the TV-2 News anchorman’s moisturized and barbered face looked up from the sheaf of blank sheets in his hands and announced that an undercover officer with the Detroit Narcotics Squad had been shot to death while on assignment. Doc thought that couldn’t be what Ance had wanted him to see. Then, following a picture of the slain officer taken in uniform, a front-and-profile mug shot came on. The anchorman’s professional-mourner voice continued:

“Police suspect Starkweather Hall, a prominent member of the Marshals of Mahomet group of African-American activists, believed to be a front for one of the city’s biggest crack cocaine operations. Hall, sought since last December on drug charges …”

Doc didn’t pay much attention to the rest, which was mostly file information he had heard before. The photo of Starkweather Hall showed a combative face with wide-set eyes, short hair, and black fan-shaped side-whiskers underscoring the hollows under his cheekbones. Clean-shaven, the face would look fuller and younger and somewhat less sinister. That was how Doc had seen it less than thirty minutes before in the entryway of Alcina Lilley’s home in Birmingham.

S
ATURDAY’S GAME TOOK PLACE
under a gray steel sky like the doors of the old solitary cells in Jackson, now used for storage. And it was three-handed.

Charlie Battle was pulling extra duty in the investigation into the death of Sergeant Ernest Melvin of the Detroit Narcotics Squad, whose body dressed in civilian clothes had been found leaking into the grass behind an empty crack house on Dragoon. Needles Lewis and his two fellow Marshals didn’t show up, and Doc guessed they had been taken in for questioning. Neal was working, and just before Doc and Sean left the house Jeff Dolan called to say he had clients coming in all day to have their taxes done. At that point Doc had suggested canceling, but Sean surprised him by saying he needed batting practice. The boy looked bright-eyed on the way to the corner and almost rugged in a new pair of jeans and a sweatshirt he had cut the sleeves off himself. He carried the bat and fielder’s glove Doc had bought for him.

“That ain’t no way to throw. You got to snap your arm.”

Doc, stepping forward to retrieve the ball Sean had tried to throw back at him while he was warming up, looked up as Battle’s son Charlie Junior came trotting across the lot. He was wearing the same cutoff sweatshirt and Levi’s he’d had on the week before. Doc suspected from Sean’s similar outfit that some bonding had been going on outside his notice. “Hi, Charlie!” The boy sounded ecstatic.

“I thought your dad was working,” Doc said.

“He is. I walked.” Junior pulled on his glove and turned the palm Doc’s way. Doc threw him the ball. “Sean, you ever see a gladiator picture, they bust down a wall with one of them catapults? That’s how you got to use your arm. Here, I’ll show you.”

The ballfield was shaping up. Doc and Sean had cleared away a lot of debris during the week, stuffing it into trash bags and carrying it to the curb. Doc made a note to ask his brother if he could borrow his lawn mower next week.

Things had been quiet since the day of Beatrice Blackwood’s homecoming party. When Ance had called back after the news report on Starkweather Hall and the murder of Sergeant Melvin he had asked Doc to come to his house.

The woman who had answered the door was nearly as tall as Alcina Lilley, trim, blonde, and younger than Doc. She wore a gold open-necked blouse tucked into beige slacks that hugged her hips and high-heeled sandals on her bare feet with vermilion paint on the toenails.

“Hi. I’m Cynthia, Maynard’s wife. You’re Doc Miller. What are the Tigers’ chances for a .500 season?”

“About five hundred to one against.” He shook her strong hand. “Better if Sparky has a stroke or Monaghan fires him.”

“Not much chance of that. I think Sparky has evidence that Monaghan worships Satan, or maybe that he’s allergic to pepperoni. I’d have canned him after the ’85 season. Maynard’s downstairs.”

It was a full basement with a seven-foot soundproofed ceiling and pegboard panels on the walls loaded with tools. It contained a workbench with vise attached and shelves of how-to books arranged alphabetically according to subject and a drill press and bandsaw mounted on stout frames and cans of stain and varnish on steel utility shelves. Doc was no great observer, but during the short walk across the thick carpet from the stairs to the big recliner where Ance sat reading the evening
News,
he decided that the tools had never been off their hooks and that the lids had never been pried from the cans. The only things in the room that showed signs of use—besides Ance himself—were the recliner, split at the seams with foam rubber bulging out like pale flesh, and a scarred kitchen table leaning in a corner covered with empty brass cartridges and cans of smokeless powder. A bare metal revolver frame with neither cylinder nor side grips lay atop a stack of
Shooters’ Bibles.

‘‘My workshop, where the cares of the day fade away whilst I’m painting a shithouse for hummingbirds,” said the bail bondsman without greeting. “My third wife sprang it on me when I got back from eleven days in Wisconsin looking for an arsonist. Her psychotherapist told her I needed a hobby. I filed the next day.”

“Your new one seems nice.”

“I’ve been married to her longer than the first four put together.” He folded the newspaper and scaled it onto the bench. “How was the party?”

“Dull, except for the conversation. I was the youngest one there not counting the bodyguard, and he passed out early.”

“Beatrice the one you had the conversation with?”

“She’s had an interesting life.”

“Several of ’em. Which one she tell you about?”

Doc pulled a stool out from under the bench and sat down. “Just out of curiosity, do you tell Taber any more than you tell me when you send him on an errand? It’d help if I knew what I was supposed to find out. Truman or any one of a dozen people at that party could have driven her home from the hospital. She didn’t need me.”

“She asked for you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay, but she did. I wanted to send Taber. I should’ve guessed how it’d go when I couldn’t find him to take me to the funeral. You two hit it off pretty good there.”

“Has it got something to do with Starkweather Hall?”

Ance had gotten out a cigarette and was playing with it. He glanced beyond Doc’s shoulder. “Hit that switch, will you? It goes to the vent fan.”

Doc reached over and flipped it without getting up. The fan, mounted behind a screen in the wall near the bandsaw, whirred. Ance struck a kitchen match off the edge of the bench and lit the cigarette. “I promised Cynthia she wouldn’t catch me smoking. If you want to keep a wife you’ve got to keep your promises first.” He batted at the smoke until he was satisfied it was drifting toward the screen. “If it wasn’t for Beatrice Blackwood I’d have gone bust years ago. You know what it’s like for a white man in my racket to get information in a place like Detroit?”