King of the Corner (4 page)

Later, after they had wheeled him into the living room and while Neal was calling Dan Rather an arrogant commie asshole more or less to his face, Doc went out. Billie, clearing the table, made no comment. His after-dinner walk was an accepted routine.

Damp dusk was settling in. This time he didn’t stop to look at the real estate going to waste, although it still saddened him. He kept walking to the Perry drugstore on the next corner and used the public telephone inside the entrance to call Information. There was an embarrassed moment while he struggled to recall Spence’s full name before he was able to ask for his number at home.

F
ATE,
D
OC
M
ILLER KNEW
, never came dressed in a suit of lightning. He was a master of disguise. One time he might be a tall man in a striped double-breasted who intercepted you on your way to the showers after college baseball practice to give you his business card; another time he might camouflage himself as a spacey adolescent girl hanging around the neck of a pimple-faced batboy who came to your party without an invitation. Even if you did recognize him as Fate you never knew what he had for you.

On this night, one week after the telephone conversation in the Perry drugstore, he was a rumpled-looking fat man who stepped out between parked cars with an overcoat over one arm and a hand in the air in a desperate hailing motion. He had on a gray suit selected more for durability than style and black thick-soled Oxfords with exposed stitching. Fat men were often light on their feet, but this one, hurrying, landed flat on heel and toe with each step, the impact jarring him visibly to his scalp.

It had been raining heavily all night, the first night since Doc had been driving that came close to Spence’s rich predictions. On a normal evening in a city like Detroit where everyone owned a car and used it for any journey longer than a block, Doc was lucky to take in seventy-five dollars, half of which belonged to Spence. Tonight, with the rain and a new show opening at the Fisher Theater, he was attracting passengers like mud.

As he braked for the fat man, another man, half the fat man’s weight and thirty years younger, wearing a glistening leather sport coat and a cashmere scarf knotted sloppily around his throat—the uneven ends an unmistakable sign of wealth—made a dash for the cab all the way from the corner. He got his hand on the door handle ahead of the fat man. Doc waited for the altercation with professional detachment. He almost missed what happened next.

The fat man’s weight shifted so fast Doc thought he’d slipped on the greasy pavement, and then the younger man in the leather coat was backpedaling away from the cab, swinging his arms for balance. He almost caught it, then tripped on the curb and dropped out of Doc’s vision. The fat man swung open the door without looking back, threw his overcoat into the backseat, and followed it. The cab heaved on its springs.

“The Independence Motel on Jefferson,” he said. “Know it?”

Doc nodded and cranked over the meter. “Nice body check.”

“What? Oh, yeah. These Grosse Pointe scroats think they own the fucking town.”

Light from streetlamps and shop windows stuttered into the backseat as they picked up speed, illuminating the passenger’s face in freeze-frames in the rear-view mirror. In youth it would have had strength, but now the flesh hung away from the prominent bone and eddied over his collar, obliterating the knot of his necktie. His hair, black and gleaming like a new tire, lay flat against his scalp. Even in that light Doc could tell he dyed it.

“You a policeman?”

The fat man glanced up at the mirror. The bags under his eyes were like bunting. “Me? Shit, no.”

Doc thought that was the end of the conversation.

“I used to be a lawyer,” the fat man said then. “Guess I still am, but I don’t practice.”

“Writing a book?” The one Doc’s attorney had written was still in the stores.

“Boy, if I ever did.” He sat back. Then he leaned forward. “I advertised on TV. Maybe you caught one of my commercials. Maynard Ance, Your Friend in Court.”

“I guess I missed them.”

“They ran twenty times a day during
I Love Lucy
and
The Beverly Hillbillies.
The flu would be easier to miss.”

“I’ve been away.”

“I did one in front of these shelves of law books, like I ever used them. You want to know the secret to winning a personal injury suit? Stall. Sooner or later the other side gets tired of showing up for depositions that don’t come off and settles. My record was seven years on a five-mile-an-hour rear-ender.”

“How’d it come out?”

“Search me. I retired while it was still on and handed it over to my partners. We don’t keep in touch. For all I know it hasn’t got to court yet. That’d make it eleven years. Christ, I hope the poor son of a bitch isn’t still wearing the neck brace.”

They traveled ten blocks in silence. The radio was tuned low to an oldies station. Doc liked to keep it low and try to guess what song was playing. He’d heard them all a thousand times.

“This is twice this month that asshole Taber has left me standing around holding my dick,” Maynard Ance said. “He swore he’d pick me up in front of Carl’s Chop House at nine-thirty. What time you got?”

Doc checked the dashboard clock. “Nine twenty-three.”

“No shit? Jesus, I’m a half-hour fast Fucking Rolex.” Something rattled. “Well, let the cocksucker find out what it’s like to get stood up. You as tall as you sit, Joe?” He paused. “Reason I ask, some people sit six feet, when they stand up they’re more like five-four. Honest to Christ, they’re sitting on a half-foot of lard. Joe?” He paused again. “Shit, maybe that’s not your name. Where’d I leave my fucking glasses this time?”

It was the third time that week Doc had been slow to answer to the name on the chauffeur’s license clipped to the dash. He covered. “Most people call me Spence.”

“Right, like I’d know. So how tall are you?”

“I’m six-five.”

“Yeah? Hey, I lucked out. You in the market for a hundred bucks?”

“I’m on parole.” It slipped out

“Who cares? It’s legal. Probably just come to standing around looking tough as old cabbage. I’m picking up a client.”

“I thought you were retired.”

“Just from the bar. I’m a bail bondsman. Here’s the buzzer.” He tipped open a learner folder over the back of Doc’s seat. It contained a plastic-coated ID bearing Ance’s picture and a gold-plated Wayne County deputy sheriff’s star. “The client skipped. It’s a routine pickup, but if I show up alone he might get ideas. He’s not bright or I wouldn’t know where to find him.”

“What’s the charge?”

“Simple assault. I’m armed if it comes to that. Believe me, it won’t.” He withdrew the folder. “This is kosher. I’m an officer of the court requesting assistance from a citizen.”

“Hiring it, you mean.”

“Nothing in the statutes says you have to do it for free.”

Doc turned onto Jefferson. The lights of Windsor looked like a string of beads on the opposite bank of the river.

“I’d be like, what, some kind of bounty hunter?”

“Don’t pin any glitter on it. Lothar the Human Orangutan could do the job, only the circus isn’t in town.”

“Make it two hundred,” Doc said. “I’m not sure how it’ll look to my parole officer.”

“I’ll write him a note. I’ll even notarize it. I’m a notary public.”

Doc said nothing, the same thing he had said during his first and only contract negotiation. A Roadway van passed them going the other way. The concussion of air smacked the side of the cab twice.

Ance said, “Shit. Okay, two hundred. You sure you were never in the legal profession?”

“I’ve been around it.”

The Independence Motel came up on their left, a square horseshoe striped with four tiers of narrow balconies overlooking a small parking lot in need of resurfacing. Doc had delivered several male passengers there that week in the company of long-legged black girls with short skirts and big hair. He parked beside a dumpster and accompanied Ance into a shallow lobby smelling of cigarette butts and d-Con. A black shaven-headed clerk of indeterminate age in a raveled sweater and glasses with white plastic rims slouched beyond a square opening in the wall, watching the Tigers on a thirteen-inch TV screen. Ance slapped the bell on the counter.

“Keep your pants on,” the clerk said without turning. “Petry gonna strike out George Brett”

“What inning?” Doc asked.

“Bottom of the fourth.”

“Buck says he gets on base.”

“You
on,
man.”

Two pitches later Brett walked. The clerk said shit, pulled a tattered wallet from his hip pocket, and slapped a bill on the counter. He looked up at Doc, doing a take when he saw how far up it was. “How’d you know?”

“Petry fades after the third. That’s how he flushed the only game Detroit lost in the ’84 Series.” Doc pocketed the dollar.

“Sparky won’t take him out, neither. Old fart been chawing so long his brain done turned to spit”

“I got a bet, too.” Ance spread the leather folder on the counter. “I bet you your next visit from the fire marshal you’re going to give me the key to sixteen.”

The clerk peered at the card over the top of his glasses. “That ain’t no detective’s ID.”

“I don’t need one to call the City-County Building. If anybody’s inspected the wiring in this dump since the riots I’ll get you a box at Tiger Stadium.”

“Tell that to the A-rab owns the place. I just watch the desk.”

Ance put the folder in his pocket. “Spence, explain to the man his situation.”

Doc wasn’t sure what to do. He leaned into the counter, filling the opening. He made his face a blank sheet. On TV a gaggle of aging athletes debated the properties of a low-calorie beer. After a moment the clerk snorted, said, “Shiiit,” and handed Doc a brass key from the pegboard. Doc gave it to Ance.

“He in?” Ance asked.

“How the hell should I know? The A-rab don’t pay me to take them to the shitter.”

Ance led the way around the corner and down a hallway paved with printed linoleum and lit greasily by three twenty-five-watt bulbs in the ceiling. Brass mailbox numerals were screwed to the hollow wooden doors. Ance unlocked number sixteen, turning the key slowly to avoid a click. Winking at Doc, he reached under his left arm inside his suit coat and brought out a blue automatic. Then he opened the door. Immediately Doc smelled something harsh and squalid and, smelled once, identified itself instantly every time it occurred thereafter: Burnt hair. Ance went inside. A minute later he came back to the door and motioned Doc in. The pistol was gone now.

The room jinked around a small bathroom with its door ajar, the mildew ensnared with the other odor that grew stronger with each step. Drapes made of some stiff-looking material covered the far wall, where sliding glass doors would open on to a small enclosed patio corresponding to the balconies on the upper floors. There was an industrial carpet, a dresser with a glass top, a nightstand and lamp, a double bed. The upper half of the man who lay atop the covers was drenched in darkness. He had on mottled jeans and dark socks.

Ance switched on the lamp with a hand wrapped in a handkerchief. The man on the bed was black, in his middle forties, balding in front, with graying chin whiskers and one of those moustaches that start at the corners of the mouth and straggle down until they lose interest. The beard hadn’t been trimmed in days and the splintery new growth on his cheeks and neck were white. He was bare to the waist. His chest was sunken and hairless, his ribs showed. The whole front of his jeans were wet through, and Doc noticed a second stink, fully as organic, under the first. The hole in the man’s head, bluish and puckered, was a little forward of his right temple, the singed hairs curled back from the edge. His right arm hung off the side of the mattress. A black, short-barreled revolver with plastic side grips like the handle of a Boy Scout knife lay on the carpet almost under the bed.

“Had to fuck somebody even at the end, didn’t you, cocksucker?” Ance said. “Don’t look like he’d come to better than four hundred bucks a pound, does he? Fifty large, that’s what I’m out.”

“That’s stiff bail for simple assault.” Doc felt his own stomach crowding the back of his tongue.

“He’s got a history of not being in when the law comes to call. He was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for fifteen years.”

“Who was he?”

“Most recently, Ambrose X. Dryce. Before that he was Wilson McCoy.”

The name thudded in Doc’s memory like a wooden gong. “Black Panther?”

“Not for twenty-five years. You’re looking at what’s left of the grand exalted poobah of the loyal and malevolent Marshals of Mahomet.”

That meant nothing to Doc.

“I wouldn’t’ve taken him on at all except I thought he was too pooped to run any more. I sure as hell hit that one square on the head. No offense, Wilson.” Ance turned toward the dresser, where a wallet and a straight razor lay in what looked like a scattering of plaster dust from the ceiling.

“How long do you think he’s been dead?”

“Somebody saw him check in this morning. I’ll let the cops take his temperature.” He drew a silver pencil from his breast pocket and poked through the wallet. “Asshole spent his last nickel on the room. My luck.” He licked a knuckle, touched it to the white dust, licked it again. “Well, we know where he found the balls to jerk the trigger. None of that cheap Michigan Avenue crack for the leader of the M-and-M’s. Too bad he couldn’t afford enough to just glide on out.”

That
name—M-and-M’s—struck a chord. “Somebody should call the police, I guess.”

“I’ll do it. No sense you hanging around.” Ance handed him a business card. “Call me and I’ll get your money to you. Not two hundred, though. It’d be different if you had to earn it.”

“The clerk saw me.”

“Shit, I forgot. You better stick.” He misread Doc’s expression. “Sorry about this, Spence. I’ll put in a word with your parole cop.”

“My name’s Miller,” Doc said.

S
ECOND SUICIDE THIS YEAR
,” muttered the clerk while Ance used his telephone. “They going to stop their clock anyway, why don’t they check into the Westin, order room service?”