King of the Corner (24 page)

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.

“S
AY HEY,
M
R.
M
AYS!”
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.”

“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?”

“Can we just drive around?”

“St. Clair’s pretty today. We’ll take Jefferson up to Lake Shore Drive.”

She changed gears smoothly and never missed a traffic light. Doc suspected Joyce was a better driver barefoot than he was with shoes on.

Lake St. Clair, filling a cavity hollowed out by glaciers and transfused by the Detroit River bordering the United States and Canada at the only point where that foreign nation lay to the south of its neighbor, performed as a color-coded barometer of the city’s criminal temperament throughout the seasons: blood red in autumn (arson), shroud gray in winter (suicide) , heartless blue in spring (rape), blazing white in summer (riot, gang violence, domestic murder). Today was one of its ambivalent days, its surface soft violet under polished blue sky with corpulent white clouds waddling across. Bright sails doodled around on the water like dragonflies dipping and swooping at a pond, oblivious of the hungry fish watching from beneath. The Independence Motel, scene of Wilson McCoy’s death and undoubtedly of others less notable, was blocks and a world behind the purring Trans Am, along with the ribbon streamers of yellow Corvettes, red Camaros, orange Firebirds, and other fuel-injected, fully-bored, flames-on-the-fenders engines on wheels already assembling for the daily afterschool cruise up and down Jefferson. Next to the five-sided enclosure of a baseball stadium with its own concept of time and rules of conduct, a moving car was the only place of true isolation. Provided it wasn’t equipped with a cellular phone. He was relieved to see this one wasn’t.