King of the Corner (28 page)

“Gordon wouldn’t have gone quietly,” she said. “But I don’t believe the car story. Alcina could have gotten him a car if that’s what he wanted.”

“Could he have found out about our arrangement and panicked?”

“Not from Alcina or me. Truman didn’t know anything. I have to get back to her now.” She waited for him to leave.

He didn’t move. “Who else knew he was here?”

“Truman.”

At first he thought she was answering his question, but when Truman re-entered the room he knew the bodyguard had been hovering within earshot. Taking it as a dismissal, Doc turned and opened the front door. Looking back: “I wasn’t after the reward. I had an agreement with Sergeant Battle to split it between Maynard Ance for the use of his restaurant and Mrs. Lilley to be applied to Hall’s legal expenses. You can ask Battle. All I wanted was a break on my parole.”

Beatrice said nothing. She and Truman might have been wildly mismatched carvings chosen to go with the painting on the wall. Doc went out. The door chunked into its frame behind him like an axe biting into a stump.

*     *     *

He had the driver drop him at the corner of Neal’s street and tipped him a dollar. It was a few minutes after seven on a moist Saturday morning; perfect globes of dew on the grass in the ballfield refracted the early sunlight into primary colors like the jewels in Beatrice Blackwood’s abandoned eye patch. Two days earlier, Doc had clipped the grass within two ruthless inches, and with a proper pitcher’s mound and a home plate and bases acquired from Dunham’s downtown, the lot couldn’t be mistaken for anything but a baseball diamond. Neal had surprised him that day with a lime spreader borrowed from work. Now the base paths and foul lines stood out crisp and white like fresh chalk on slate.

Nobody was up yet at the house. Even Billie had been out late Friday night cooking for an event at the school and was sleeping in. Doc used his key, went upstairs, changed into his ballplaying clothes, and went back out with his glove and the ball and a six-foot plank he kept in the garage. He had asked for a green one with plenty of spring at Builders Square, but the clerk had explained they didn’t carry green lumber and sold him a wolmanized plank instead. It had proven more than satisfactory on its first tryout.

He prised up home plate and drove the narrow end of the plank into the soft earth beneath, pounding it with a rock that had belonged to the foundation of one of the houses that had stood there. Just as he made the last blow a window squeaked open on the second floor of a house across the street and a phlegmy male voice shouted at him to knock it off.

Doc didn’t spend much time admiring the result. It looked like a headstone erected over the grave of his freedom. He’d marked out a strike zone on the board with chalk, hit it square in the middle with his first three pitches, then missed the plank entirely with the next four and had to chase the ball before it rolled into the street. When he hit, the ball came back off the resilient wood with a crack like a bat connecting, returning to him with identical or superior velocity, providing him with practice in both pitching and fielding. After the first dozen or so pitches he ceased to miss the plank, although he hit outside the strike zone with some regularity, usually on purpose, especially when he threw his slider. The return was more predictable than if the board had been an actual batter with his varying swings, and so he fielded better than he would have in a real game; but that wasn’t the point, nor if he chose to admit it to himself was the pitching. The rhythm—kick, deal, catch, kick, deal, catch—was mindless, a kind of sensory-deprivation tank of the spirit in which he went through a series of movements as natural as breathing, acting and reacting in a vacuum of pure physical activity, aware of neither the raw stinging of his palm nor the cracking of the tendons in his arm, the whack of the board and the thud of the glove heard only dimly through layers of sentient callus. The sheer mechanistic repetition of the chain of motions wore down the bumps and whorls that retained thought like puddles in a rutted riverbed so that when he stopped—
if
he stopped, for there was a seductive rapturous self-fueling perpetuity to the thing—the intelligence would come rushing in all of a unit in a reverse climax of shattering clarity. Using, respectively, B & O boxcars, the wall of the barn behind the house in Louisville, a Lagooner named Archie Oliphant, and Tiger catcher Lance Parrish, Doc had resorted to this method four times in his life when he needed direction, and it hadn’t failed him yet. Most recently it had helped him decide to face the authorities on the manslaughter charge when he was out on bail and considering flight to Canada.

This time was no exception.

He didn’t know how long he’d been throwing when he stopped. He’d left his wristwatch at the house. The light had broadened and hardened and the last of the dew was rising from the grass in gray vapor like spools of thread uncoiling. He was mopping his forehead with his sleeve, sorting out the impressions now filling his skull, when he saw Charlie Battle coming his way across the lot.

“I don’t remember you throwing that hard when you were with Detroit,” he called. “Training for a comeback?”

The sergeant was wearing cutoff jeans and a summer-weight yellow sport shirt that showed his physique through perforations in the material. His legs were lean and hairless. Muscles jumped in the thighs and calves as he walked.

“Just breaking a sweat,” Doc said. “Is it that late? Where’s your glove?”

“I’m not playing today. They want me to come down and fork over my paperwork on the Starkweather Hall case. I’m on my way in. Had a hunch I’d find you here.”

“That the summer dress code at Thirteen Hundred?”

“Fuck ’em. I was going out for a run when I got the call.” He stopped in front of Doc. “I left a message at Kubitski’s office. I’ll follow it up Monday. Your parole’s off the hook. It never was on, really. Tough talk, that’s the job.”

“Bullshit, Sergeant. But thanks.”

“The Hall I’ve been chasing was too smart to throw down on two cops at once. What spooked him, the deal?”

“He never knew about it. He hiked before anyone could tell him.”

“Jesus. I guess when a lucky son of a bitch loses his luck it goes all at once.”

“Did those detectives belong to your squad?”

“No, they were narcs. Good ones, too. First he knew they were on the other side was when they identified themselves. Could be that’s why he didn’t think it through.”

“He knew them?”

“The drug world’s small. Everybody knows everybody.”

“Internal Affairs got separate jackets on them too?”

Battle stuck his hands in his pockets. “They aren’t all Sergeant Melvin. That’s an extreme case.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how dirty they are. Hell, maybe they’re clean. It happens, even on that detail. You’re barking down the wrong hole there. The shooting team cleared them an hour ago.”

“Lengthy investigation.”

“It’s only lengthy when something smells. This one was textbook. Any idea what Hall was doing in a place like Birmingham?” He was studying Doc’s face.

“Maybe he was house-hunting.”

“Or he’d been hiding there right along and just broke cover. This is Detroit. When you’re hot and you don’t have wheels, you boost them as quick as you can. You don’t walk clear past Eight Mile Road looking. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me who had him socked away?”

Doc gave him the blank owl-eyed stare. “You going to shake my parole in my face if I don’t?”

“No,” he said after a beat. “Doesn’t matter. There are too many more Starkweather Halls out there to waste time poking at this one’s corpse. Sorry I had to kick you around. I don’t enjoy doing that to a friend.”

“It’s the job.” Doc had been flipping the ball back and forth between his glove and his bare hand. Now he took off the glove and stuck the hand out.

Battle gripped it. When they broke contact he glanced down at his palm and rubbed it against its mate. “Hey, you know your hand is bloody?”

Doc said, “Yeah, I know.” He had rubbed it against his bleeding left.

After Battle left, Doc went back to the house for a shower and a change of clothes and a late breakfast of cereal and coffee. Neal was putting in his half-day at work and Sean was in the living room watching the Ninja Turtles. Billie, wearing the baggy shorts and old blouse she tied in front to work in her flower garden, refilled Doc’s cup. “That Joyce called again this morning. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

“I’ll call her.”

“Are you two dating?” His sister-in-law’s tones were incapable of innuendo.

“We must be. I told her my whole story the first time we went out.”

“I hope she’s not just using you.”

“Everybody uses everybody,” he said.

Sean came in with his glove. His sweatshirt and jeans had grown soft from wearing and washing. The pants were starting to bag in the seat. “Doc, let’s go.”

His uncle showed him his raw palm. “Can you pitch a couple of innings? Just until it stops bleeding.”

“Kevin!” Billie was pale.

“Wow!”

“Just building callus,” Doc said. “I got used to too many rest days in Jackson. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Looks like a big old piece of hamburger,” Sean said.

“If that’s what throwing a ball around does to you, I’m not sure I want Sean to pitch.”

“Aw, Mom!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll spell him the minute the ball starts to turn pink.”

“It’s not funny, Kevin.” She was holding the coffee pot like some kind of talisman of domesticity.

Doc got up and pushed in his chair. “You had him all to yourself eight years. All I’m asking is to borrow him Saturdays. I’ll bring him back in one piece.”

“All I know is no video game ever made him bleed.”

You have to be alive first.
Aloud he said, “We’ll be back by suppertime.”

Charlie Battle Junior was there when they got to the field. He’d brought his own ball and was playing catch with himself, looping the ball up over the neck of the corner streetlamp and trapping it in his glove when it came down. Doc had replaced home plate and taken the practice plank back with him to the house.

“Sorry your dad’s working,” he told the youth, who snapped the ball his way. Doc caught it over his head.

“I’m used to it. What’s happenin’, Sean?”

Sean slapped Junior’s open palm. “I’m pitching today.”

“No shit? Must be the chromosomes.”

Jeff Dolan pulled up to the curb at the wheel of a silver Mercedes and got out, tugging on his Tigers cap. The big Irishman looked bigger than ever in a faded maize-and-blue University of Michigan T-shirt and sweatpants that hung dangerously low on his hips, the elastic waistband shot. Doc asked him why rich accountants always dressed so badly come the weekend.

“How we get to be rich, Koufax,” he said, booming a little like his shanty ancestors. “We let you poor folk blow all your dough on snazzy jogging clothes. What the hell!”

The last comment was hurled over his shoulder. Needles Lewis, leaning out the open window of his old Dodge club cab, grimaced at the blow he’d delivered to the rear bumper of the Mercedes. “Hey, man, I’m sorry,” he shouted over the percussion from the pickup’s radio. “I been meaning to fix them brakes.”

Creed leaped out of the truck box and bent to examine the car’s bumper, holding his dreadlocks back from his face with both hands. Dolan was there already. He rubbed a scrape in the vinyl with his thumb.

“Fix that right up with a Magic Marker,” said Yarnell, who had been riding up front with Needles. He was carrying the equipment

Dolan straightened, shaking his head gravely. “Six hundred-dollar job if it’s a penny. It means yanking the bumper and recovering it.”

Needles, who had climbed out and slammed the door, reached back through the open window, took out a satin jacket, and groped in one of the slash pockets. He counted the bills he found there and stuck them at Dolan. “Fifty short. I’ll owe you the rest”

“Forget it. The lease is up in another month. Let’s play ball.” As he walked past Doc, the Irishman muttered: “Drug Enforcement marks all its bills.”

“Who’s watching the wardrobe?” Doc gave Needles the five-finger handshake.

Needles looked puzzled, men uncorked his barndoor grin. “Old Sylvanus. He never leaves the store.”

Doc said he guessed he’d heard about Starkweather Hall. Needles shrugged and started walking toward the diamond.

“Were you friends?” Doc asked.

“Friendly. Old Starkweather was too serious for friends. I would of thought he was too old for that Billy the Kid shit.”

“He was twenty-three.”

“I guess being old ain’t being smart.”

Walking with the kid in the wild checkerboard haircut Doc felt his spirits lifting like the dew from the grass. He hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed the young drug dealer’s company.

Sean pitched better than Doc had feared he might, although it was clear he’d never make a living from it When Needles and Yarnell and Charlie Junior all blasted home runs back to back, his uncle, who had been catching for him, knew the boy’s arm was tiring. Doc handed the mitt to Needles and took the mound. Sean drooped, then lit up all over when Doc told him to spell Creed at first base. Doc’s hand burned when he grasped the ball, but he imagined he could feel it repairing itself, rebuilding the damaged tissue thicker and more resilient. That evening he would soak it in salts to advance the process. In the old days he could shove a needle a third of its length into his palm before it drew blood. He told people that if his arm went he could always support himself making sails.

Baseball was like that, too; healing soul-deep abrasions through activity and repetition, stretching a fresh better skin over the old, deadening the pain and making him stronger for the next trial. It was a salt-bath for the heart.

Neal arrived while his brother was warming up, still wearing the pocket T-shirt and old patched Levi’s he had worn to work, and took his official stance behind the plate. His big face was burned a deep cherry color from working outdoors on the heavy equipment. With his huge arms and slight stoop from too much lifting—there was a breed of mechanic that scorned the chainfall for raising any engine smaller than 200 horsepower—he was starting to look like their father had at his age, thought Doc as he prepared to face his first batter.