Stress (11 page)

This one carried his shield in his bare palm, no hot-shit leather folder. It wasn’t gold either, but the plain silver of the uniformed cop on the beat. Russell felt a little more sure of himself then. This was no full-time detective. “See they let you wear long pants today.”

The pig didn’t look offended. He even smiled a little. “My name’s Charlie Battle, Russell. You can call me Officer Battle.”

“You can call me busy. Pinky don’t like us talking on shop time.” He lifted an empty carton off the top of a stack and carried it out to the dumpster. He half expected the pig to follow him, but when he went back inside, Battle was standing on the same spot. When Russell reached past him to pickup another carton, Battle swept out a hand and closed it on Russell’s wrist tightly.

“I talked it over with your boss. He said it was okay.” There was no strain in the detective’s tone.

Russell, who had tensed his biceps when his wrist was seized, relaxed them. Battle turned the young man’s hand palm up and squeezed the tendon at the base of his thumb, spreading Russell’s fingers. Then he let go. Russell could still feel the pressure afterward. The detective’s fingers were like articulated iron.

“I’m looking for a speedboat,” Battle said.

“We got lots. Don’t look for no low rates just because the lake’s froze over, though. Pinky don’t give discounts.”

“Actually I’m looking for the pilot of a speedboat. Someone took this one out late New Year’s Eve.”

“It wasn’t nobody here. We was closed from Thanksgiving till the day after New Year’s.”

“So was every other marina on the lake, or the half of them I’ve been to, anyway. None of them reported a boat stolen, so I’m assuming somebody borrowed one. Pinicus says you have a key to the back door. Did you use it that night?”

“You don’t need to get in to take a boat. They was all tied up at the dock.”

“All the ignition keys are hanging inside, behind the counter.”

“Anybody can hot-wire a boat.”

“Russell, I’m getting a lot of answers from you and none of them fits the question. Did you take a boat out New Year’s Eve?”

“No. I stayed home that night and read
Motorcycle World
.”

“It took you all night to read one magazine?”

“Who’m I, Evelyn Wood? I got up a couple times to take a leak.”

“That’s not a very exciting evening for a young guy like you.”

“I guess you don’t know what kind of young guy I am.”

“Is there someone who can confirm you were home between nine and ten-thirty?”

“My parents, maybe, but I didn’t see them. I got an apartment with its own entrance. What if they can’t? You going to arrest me?”

Battle put his hands in the pockets of his topcoat. “I found your record at Juvenile Division. You were busted when you were seventeen for sticking up a movie theater. The crime I’m investigating is armed robbery.”

“You need a gun to stick up a place. They didn’t find no gun on me when they picked me up. I pleaded guilty to assault. Anyway I got no record as an adult. This that Crownover thing, right? I heard about it from the TV. Seems to me this pig that blowed away every brother at the party’s the one in trouble.”

“That’s what I’m investigating. Whoever drove that speed-boat away from the party when the shooting started is the only one who can tell us whether Junius Harrison was in on the heist or just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone else involved is dead. I’m not saying that boatman is going to walk, but if he comes forward and tells the truth, some judge will consider that when he hands down his sentence. The robbery itself isn’t important,”

“Bullshit. When you’re in on a stick-up and somebody gets iced, don’t matter if it’s one of the stick-up guys, whoever’s left gets nailed for felony murder. I know that much.”

“That’s the theory, only it almost never works out that way in court.” Battle took his hands out of his pockets. There was something in one of them. “I could arrest you right now, Russell. Those needle tracks between your fingers are fresh. That’s probable cause for a warrant to search your apartment. A gram of heroin is enough to send you to Jackson for a couple of years.”

“Go ahead and toss it. You won’t find nothing.” Russell wondered what was in the pig’s hand. It was too small for a piece.

“I don’t like that,” Battle said. “Everybody has something he doesn’t want found. Unless he’s got a good reason to get rid of it.”

Russell said nothing.

In the silence a heavy truck whined past on Jefferson, chuckling over a break in the pavement. Battle stuck out the hand. Russell jumped, but there was nothing but a card between the fingers.

“That’s Special Investigations. Ask for me, Charlie Battle. If I come back here uninvited, there won’t be a thing I can do for you.”

Russell took the card. Without removing his gaze from the detective he tore it in half, then tore the halves into quarters, and let the pieces flutter to the floor. Battle’s eyes, soft and sad for a pig’s, followed the last piece until it came to rest. He shook his head.

“Dumb.”

He went out through the office.

Alone in the cluttered room, Russell stretched out his arms and spread his hands. He’d learned the trick from one of those little hot-blooded lizards in a
National Geographic
special; something to do with getting oxygen into its system in the desert. He stood like that for a full minute. Then he carried the rest of the boxes out to the dumpster. The wind came off the lake, hurling icepicks into his face. Detroit sure was a long way from the Kalahari.

C
ARYN
C
ROWNOVER
O
GDEN’S
T
UESDAYS BELONGED
to the Charlotte Gryphon Foundation.

Named for a quasi-mythical young Frenchwoman who had warned the commander of Fort Detroit of Chief Pontiac’s plan to invade the garrison in 1763—a distant ancestor of the Crownovers—the foundation had been established by Caryn in the wake of the 1967 riots to identify and reward deserving minority students with college scholarships. Although Ted Ogden, an investment counselor by trade, served as the group’s treasurer, it was Caryn’s grasp of business organization that prevented it from dissipating its energies in directions other than those stated in the charter, and to keep the various community leaders who served on its board from bludgeoning one another with their chairs.

This Tuesday had been one of those days. Henry Ford II, already well in his cups at 9:30
A.M
., had pounded the conference table with a pudgy fist when Caryn reminded him that the foundation did not exist to help underwrite his plans to build a glittery office complex and shopping center in the warehouse district, but rather to educate the architects and engineers who would design and construct its successors. Studying him through her platinum-framed glasses, she saw a deteriorating giant much like her grandfather, his flabby cheeks a map of purple blood vessels burst by drink, the famed Ford eyes out of focus and a little afraid. Of what, she wondered? Of the younger, talented men on his own board of directors, with their cargo load of revolutionary ideas, ideas of the dangerous sort that when he possessed them had blasted aside his own grandfather and his ring of cronies like loose metal shavings on an unpainted chassis? Of Christina, his second wife, whose patience with his infidelities could only be expected to carry so far? Of Caryn? Or—and this was most likely—of Henry Ford II, and the myriad weaknesses of his own poor clay?

Poor Hank the Deuce. She wished she’d known him better in the days before the Edsel. It was plain he had never quite recovered from that personal Little Big Horn.

The meeting, convened to decide whether to expand the scholarship’s horizons beyond the sciences so beloved of industry to encompass the liberal arts, had adjourned with a motion to table the measure until tempers had cooled. In this manner the happy problem of what to do with a surplus that threatened Gryphon’s non-profit status had become a crisis that might require an army of tax attorneys to lay to rest. Their fees would eliminate the surplus, with no advantage gained for the promising minority members the foundation existed to encourage. It was no wonder so many of them turned to the street.

As if to confirm the suspicion, the radio in her Corvette as she drove away from Gryphon’s headquarters in the Penobscot Building reported an astonishing assortment of fresh horrors that had taken place the previous night: County workers had rolled four members of a family out of their house on Sherman that morning under sheets, punched full of bullet holes by persons unknown in an incident believed to be connected to the family’s heroin business; a police officer was in critical condition at Receiving Hospital with a bullet in his chest, delivered at close range during a routine traffic stop on Outer Drive at 3:00
A.M
.; the unidentified corpse of a young woman with her hands cut off and her teeth knocked out had been gaffed in the River Rouge around midnight by police on Zug Island; and a newborn infant, found blue and comatose in a dumpster by a restaurant worker on the east side shortly after dawn, had expired thirty minutes ago at St. John’s Hospital. A teenage girl thought to be the child’s mother was in custody.

Caryn wondered if Henry Ford ever listened to the news, and if he was truly convinced his proposed glass-and-steel headstone for a culture that had gone West with his horsecollar-grilled Dream Car would make a difference. At the national level, Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley had dubbed Detroit the Murder City, a place where the violent crime rate had tripled in five years, three out of five citizens owned unlicensed firearms, and homicide was the fourth leading cause of death. Network pundits analyzed a recent joint directive issued by Mayor Gribbs and Police Chief Nichols advising Detroiters to avoid arguments with strangers. The concept of politeness as a weapon of self-defense kept things lively between commercials for ring-around-the-collar.

From Eight Mile Road to the foot of Woodward Avenue, from the self-consuming chimneys of the coke ovens and glass plants downriver to the black iron jockeys of Grosse Pointe, established order in the City of Detroit had broken down. Street gangs named for dead movie stars took in wandering youths in lieu of a stable family environment. Even the police had fallen into vigilantism, stripping the uniforms from its officers and the insignia from its cars and Turning them loose in alleys and rail yards on hunting expeditions for suspicious persons. The place was any civic architect’s picture of hell.

As the daughter of a man who had shipped Negro laborers north to break the strikes of the 1930s, Caryn was sensitive to issues of race, and did not share the opinion of some of her colleagues at Gryphon that the community’s black majority was somehow responsible for the decline. Rather, it was the almost criminally nearsighted refusal of its white governing class to recognize that majority. But she did agree with the assessment of department store magnate Joseph L. Hudson, Jr., when on the fifth anniversary of the riots he announced: “The black man has the feeling he is about to take power in the city, but he is going to be left with an empty bag.”

Until the incident in her own living room at the close of the old year, Caryn had comforted herself that the anarchy was confined to the Inner City, that alien place where her father had continued to recruit the labor to build automobiles to carry his customers north and west from the squalor downtown; but the cancer had spread.

Not for the first time since the killings at the party, she considered sending Opal to an eastern school when she came of age. But that would mean moving, as Caryn couldn’t bear to be separated from her daughter, and that was unfair to Ted, all of whose clients were in Michigan and Ohio. They had never discussed,
would
never discuss the fact that her income through Crownover Coaches would support all three of them for several lifetimes even if he never put together another portfolio for another prosperous client. There would always be people without imagination who clung to the obvious conclusion about their marriage. Although they were easily ignored, they exerted a kind of reverse influence on the way Ted and Caryn conducted their lives. Always the Ogdens would go to the opposite extreme to prevent those people from crowing that their impressions were right.

The only alternative was to make the city safe for Opal.

Cadillac Square and her best route to Jefferson and home was sealed off. Police barricades and a city blue-and-white with its roof light flashing compelled her to take Woodward north to Grand River. As she maneuvered around an obviously cold and miserable patrolman directing traffic in fur hat, collar, and black leather gauntlets, she rolled down her window and asked if there had been an accident.

“No, ma’am. They’re shooting a movie.”

“A movie? What kind?”

“Crime picture. What else?”

Maybe it was a good sign, she thought as she followed a grumbling caravan of slow-moving vehicles through the detour. If Hollywood was tiring at last of New York City and southern California, had in fact begun to discover the great interior part of the country that provided the bulk of its audience, it meant more money in the city treasury. Money enough, perhaps, to tear down the black and twisted remains of Twelfth Street, erect decent housing on the site, and maybe even help fund Hank’s glitter palace. She thought it a fine irony that the bad reputation that inspired a motion-picture company to shoot its bloody scenes on location in Detroit should help to eradicate the conditions that had attracted it,

She was meeting Abner for lunch at Sinbad’s on the river. The sight of his bottle-green Mercedes in the parking lot, with its vanity plate reading DUGOUT, made her mouth pull lines in her face. She had discussed with him the questionable form of driving a foreign car when the family income was tied so firmly to Detroit, but his interest in the company their adoptive ancestor had carved out of the wilderness extended only so far as the walls of his office and their usefulness as a place to hang Tigers pennants and uniforms. No one disliked the Gashawks more than Caryn—Robin and Cedric epitomized the predatory nature of their late father while possessing nothing of Sir Roger’s rough-hewn candor—and yet she shuddered to think what would happen to Crownover if her brother were truly running it instead of their capable and acquisitive British cousins.