King of the Corner (19 page)

At the end of the big room near the door stood another long table on a dais, and behind the table on the wall with drapery gathered around it like an enormous window hung a photograph fifteen feet by ten of Gerald W. Lilley, known best to the world as Mahomet. The handsome, straight-haired black man, who bore a slight resemblance to Nat King Cole, was shown from the waist up in one of his trademark white suits, posed characteristically with arms aloft, his face illuminated from some unseen source. For Doc the image contained all the best and worst qualities of one of those trick paintings of Jesus whose face moved with the angle of scrutiny or an Elvis portrait on black velvet. It would have seemed riotously out of place anywhere but among the Wagnerian proportions of that room. With a jolt, Doc recognized Detroit City Councilwoman Maryann Mahaffey and State Senator John Conyers seated among the dignitaries at the head table. They too were watching the two new arrivals.

For a moment Doc had a horror that they would be conducted to the head table, but when a bodyguard pulled a chair from the end of the one nearest the door for Mrs. Lilley, Doc responded gratefully to a gesture from her to take the seat next to hers. He was relieved to be out of the line of sight of most of the assembly.

Mrs. Lilley sensed it. “They wanted me to sit up there, but I can’t stand having everyone in the room watching me eat. I’d be sure to spill something.”

“I expected something more casual.” Doc’s place setting looked like a silver-plated hubcap.

“You look fine. They’re just staring because I had the nerve to choose my own escort.”

“A white escort.”

“Don’t be a bigot. I attend these things about four times a year and I was getting just a little tired of being steered around like someone’s crazy rich aunt.”

“A necktie at least.”

She wasn’t listening. “This time they’re raising money to lobby the legislature in Lansing to have Gerald’s birthday declared a state holiday. He’d have been fifty-six next Tuesday.”

Doc said nothing. He didn’t know whether to offer congratulations or condolences. He was sure Mahomet was staring down at him from the picture.

The bodyguards had retreated to the near wall, where standing with feet spread and their hands folded in front of them they made no attempt to look like anything but what they were. Looking around, Doc saw others he knew on a more personal basis than Mahaffey and Conyers: Dick “Night Train” Lane, the former Detroit Lion and now director of the Police Athletic Program, whom Doc had met a long time ago at a banquet honoring yet another sports legend with his eye on local politics; a number of conservatively dressed men spotted around the room whom Doc eventually identified as police officers he had seen at Wilson McCoy’s funeral; and, seated kitty-corner from him at the far end of his own table, talking with a fat man in a bad hairpiece sitting on the other side, Sergeant Charlie Battle. He made brief eye contact with Doc but there was no recognition in it, and he appeared engrossed in the discussion, which Doc decided from the other man’s gestures had to do with the Pistons’ performance in last night’s NBA play-off game. Either that, or the man was having some kind of fit.

“See anyone you know?”

Doc realized Mrs. Lilley had been watching him watching Battle. “A few,” he said. “Who’s minding the store?”

“The clerks and secretaries, just like always. That’s why you never see them at these things.”

The room was stirring again. A flying wedge of anonymous humanity in dark double-breasted suits had entered on the stride with Mayor Coleman Young in the center.

Frustrated would-be visitors and newsmen who had failed to track down the peripatetic politician complained that he moved around like a man with a price on his head, as if a lifetime of dodging grand juries, process-servers, and old girlfriends with new babies had forced him into a shell game in which even the shells—his office in the City-County Building, his Manoogian Mansion residence, the shifting headquarters of his Detroit Technologies investment firm, various hotel suites throughout the city and its suburbs—changed with the daily calendar. The way he moved suggested that same restless energy. The group, charged by the industry of its central component like a vehicle its engine, knifed in without pausing and made straight for the table where Doc was seated with Alcina Lilley. The effect of the Presence on the room’s occupants was physical, turning their heads and bodies in a kind of wave as if an inverse wind had blasted the door open from inside and tried to suck them out into the corridor. Doc felt it and was rising from his seat—whether resisting it or succumbing to it, he wasn’t certain—when the group stopped and Young glittered forward out of its center to take Mrs. Lilley’s hand in the two-handed grip universal to office-holders everywhere. “’Cina, if you was to bottle them good looks and put them on sale in Hudson’s you could buy the whole God damn city.”

She smiled. “I didn’t know you were selling.”

Young reacted with that silent, shoulder-shaking laugh often seen in press conferences (until the wrong question was asked), watching her closely through the large square lenses of his featherweight glasses. He wasn’t as tall as he looked on television. Built like a truck on a short wheelbase, round-faced and graying above nine hundred dollars of haberdashery, he had skin almost as light as Doc’s, against which his white Clark Gable moustache came close to disappearing under the overhead lights. But his blackness was unquestionable, particularly in his urban drawl and seemingly unconscious use of gutter language in unexpected surroundings. The precision of his “God damn”—not “goddamn” as it was frequently written, or “
got
damn” as it appeared in articles by journalists who fancied themselves authors—convinced Doc that it was anything but unconscious. “Motherfucker,” another favorite Colemanism, still escaped publication in the family-oriented press. The dirty-old-man twinkle in his eyes when he swore couldn’t quite mask an increased intensity in his gaze as he observed the effect on his listener.

Now the gaze shifted Doc’s way, and he broke off his own analysis to grasp the large smooth well-manicured hand that was offered him. “You’re Doc Miller,” Young told him. “Where were you in ’87 when the Twins took the play-offs away from us with their God damn domed stadium?”

Doc just smiled. They both knew where he’d been. The mayor’s grip was strong, too strong. It seemed to be yet another test, but it tightened spasmodically with the words “domed stadium”; Young had been wanting to pull down the venerable and historic Tiger Stadium—the oldest of its kind and the site of the first major league game in baseball history—and replace it with a sprawling cupolaed multipurpose coliseum along the lines of those in Houston and Minneapolis-St. Paul for as long as he had been in office, preferably with his own name etched in granite over every entrance. From his advantage of height and leverage, Doc gave back as good as he got in the handclasp. The contact was broken with an approving duck of the mayoral head. There was nothing subtle about the expressions and gestures of this diabolically subtle man.

“How long you know our ’Cina?” he asked then.

Doc had a flash of complete certainty that it was a question to which Young already knew the answer. Indeed, his recognition of a ballplayer whose face he could not have seen since his third term had been too fast to be the result of anything but a recent briefing.

“We met just this week.” He wondered how long he had been under investigation. It was an open secret in Detroit that an entire detail of the police department existed only to run errands for Coleman A. Young.

“Well, you be sure and look after her good, son. She’s a one-woman campaign chest.” And he moved off in the direction of the head table, shoulders shaking. His entourage closed around him like bow wash around a fast-moving destroyer.

The food, catered by the exclusive (and dear) Lark restaurant in West Bloomfield and brought by waiters and waitresses in spotless livery, was excellent, light-years removed from the common banquet fare of embalmed turkey, superannuated mashed potatoes, and despicable peas. Doc commented on this to Mrs. Lilley, who said, “It better be, at five hundred dollars a plate. Coleman doesn’t change his shirt for anything less.”

Doc paid special attention to his London broil after that.

Dessert was chilled peaches cloaked in heavy cream, followed by speeches. Doc’s old friend from Wilson McCoy’s funeral, the Reverend Whatsizname from the Second Baptist Church, hooked on his Ben Franklins and read a benediction from a prepared text with the leaden intonation of an eighth-grade English student reciting Shakespeare, while Doc bowed his head and studied a gravy spot on the tablecloth. The emcee was Dave Bing, former Detroit Piston and rumored protégé of Young’s to succeed him in office, who told a joke about the black folks being in charge of the armory, then as the laughter rippled away introduced the mayor. At that point a Channel 7 news crew moved down the aisle trailing its tentacled infinity of equipment and a bolt of hard white light lifted the new speaker out of the human condition onto the bright antiseptic plane of the public platform. The applause rocked the huge old building on its foundation. This self-described “Cadillac mayor” was one of theirs: labor activist, war hero, belligerent survivor of the congressional witch-hunts of the 1950s, former blue-collar incorrigible who had slugged his way—with a monkey wrench, according to an old police complaint—out of the pipe-sweating, acetylene-splattering, man-made labyrinth of this working-class town into a silk-lined office twice the size of his parents’ apartment, and never let the suburban white establishment forget either his color or his street-soiled past. His low forehead and chubby cheeks had supplanted the austere green cast-copper face of the Spirit of Detroit the way the cylindrical cigar-case towers of his Renaissance Center had changed the skyline along the river. Neither the Justice Department nor the federal grand jury system nor the Detroit Yacht Club—altogether a far more formidable society with its own concept of government and a memory going back to before Mr. Ford’s five-dollar workday darkened the city’s complexion—had been able to tip him out of the wingbacked tufted-leather swivel chair of power; no amount of garbage-contract scandals or plundered police funds or paternity suits or personal traffic in South African Krugerrands could even force him to shift his weight on the springs. He had planted himself so solidly that even an assassin’s bullet could do no more than remove his almost redundant physical presence from the upholstery. His aura had scorched its stocky outline onto the surface of Detroit like a garish pattern onto an early color television lens, to glow there like some mocking Banquo long after the person who wore it had passed out of the frame.

Young’s opening remarks were surprisingly tame, confining themselves to platitudes on race, equality, and Mahomet’s brief career as a public spokesman on their behalf that Doc had heard from more conservative sources. The subject of race seemed to make the mayor uncomfortable when he wasn’t employing it as a bludgeon to pummel his detractors and bring the largely white-owned Detroit media into line. His experiences as an unfriendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee had taught him the power of labels, and in the painfully socially sensitive atmosphere of the 1990s, to be branded a racist by the most volatile black politician in America was as potentially devastating as to be termed a communist by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the time of Eisenhower. But before a sympathetic audience, most of whom had suffered from the effects of true racism at one time or another, all his best ammunition went off with the hollow plop of blank cartridges in a mock battle staged for purposes of training. Nevertheless he was forced to pause at intervals while geysers of applause spouted and died.

Police Chief William Hart had entered the room behind the mayor and his people and taken a seat at the end of the head table by the door, where he sat in his customary heap of inert ugliness, stirring only to put his hands together along with the rest of the audience whenever his superior remade a point established as far back as
Brown vs. Board of Education.
A disconcertingly homely man whose wide-set eyes glimmered through fissures in a face like a collapsed balloon, Hart had made few public appearances recently and seldom spoke when he did. He left during yet another noisy interlude, slipping out the door without fanfare. Doc wondered if he was reluctant to stay away from his office for fear it would be rifled by federal investigators. The probe into his connections with much-indicted civilian Deputy Police Chief Kenneth Weiner showed no signs of letting up; currently, canceled checks indicating that Weiner had used public money to pay the rent on an apartment for Hart’s daughter were appearing on television and in facsimile in both local newspapers. The daily soap operas faded like pressed flowers beside revelations of these and other investments made by Weiner in the name of Mayor Young’s Detroit Technologies corporation, of which he was general manager. It was a Young blessing that a large part of his constituency was incapable of following so intricate a fraud and thus continued to re-elect him with spasmodic regularity.

“… person best qualified to speak of Mahomet’s life and work. His widow, Alcina Lilley.”

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.”