Stress (24 page)

“You didn’t get them beat out much. That’s why Charlie Balls offered you that wrestling contract.”

“Wrestling? Shit. Monkey-training’s more like it. Airplane spins. Atomic drops. We had us a script. Otherwise I’d of throwed the Peruvian Giant clear acrost Olympia.”

Battle knelt to tie his uncle’s shoes. “You make it how you can. That’s what you always told me.”

“Not you, Charlie.”

He raised his head. Anthony was looking at him.

“I bust my buttons when you took that oath,” the old man said. “You come a far piece, boy. Mother run off, your daddy dead at twenty-seven with a shiv in his ribs in the shower at Jackson. Everybody said you’d end up the same way.”

“Not you.”

“They was times. When you cut up them bus seats your aunt and I thought we lost you for sure.”

“Reggie Cleveland dared me. It was his scout knife.”

“Walking them eighteen blocks to school and back for the rest of the semester cured you of that. Ginny said I should drive you, but I said no, walking gives a boy time to think.”

Battle helped him button his shirt. “Anthony, we’ve got something to talk about.”

“I know.”

The old man’s tone was suddenly grave. When his nephew looked at him, his eyes were watering. He hoped this wasn’t going to be another uncontrollable jag. Sometimes the wires in his head crossed and he started blubbering.

“Hey, Battle!”

“We’re on our way, Sergeant.” Battle threaded his uncle’s arms into the sleeves of the old coat he’d brought.

“You know these women?”

He looked beyond the gate. Thea was standing there with a black woman he didn’t recognize. She wore a heavy woolen cape, a black slouch hat secured with a scarf tied under her chin, and that tragic, big-eyed expression that went with the professional caregiver.

Shit.

He told McDowell they were okay. Thea opened the gate without waiting and approached the cell, followed closely byte woman in the black hat, who was carrying a leather portfolio.

“Is he all right?” Thea asked. Unlike her husband, she looked put-together. No one would have known she’d been up half the night like Charlie. She had makeup on and a pressed pants suit under her belted trench coat.

“H’llo, Thea. My, don’t you look pretty. Tell her she look pretty, Charlie.”

“He’s fine,” Battle said. “Just got a little turned around.”

“A woman gots to hear these things,” Anthony insisted.

“Charlie, this is Bianca Ferguson. She’s with Social Services.”

“Hello, Charlie.” The woman pulled off a glove to grasp his hand. She had strong fingers. “How you doing, Anthony?”

“You the social worker?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Sorry you come all this way, ma’am. Truly I am. Ginny and me, we done decided to keep little Charlie. Blood gots to stay with blood.”

“Mrs. Ferguson specializes in geriatric cases.”

“You work late.” Battle felt his gorge rising.

“We have a twenty-four-hour line at the office. Thea called there and they called me. I was visiting a case not far from your neighborhood. One near you, as they say.” She smiled.

“Honey—”

Thea interrupted him. “Charlie, we talked about this. What if no one got to Anthony? He could have frozen to death.”

“He wouldn’t have got out if you kept an eye on him like you were supposed to.”

“Charlie?” Mrs. Ferguson said.

“We’ve been through this. I can’t watch your uncle every minute of every day.”

“Charlie, if I may say something.”

He gave the social worker an expression of exasperated patience.

“Everyone in your situation thinks their problem is unique. Believe me, I see it a dozen times a month. I understand your uncle raised you, and now that he can’t look after himself you feel obligated to take care of him.”

“It’s not an obligation.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. It happens all over. You’re adults, you have your own lives to lead, but you don’t want to abandon your older loved ones to an institution. Meanwhile the tension grows. Your wife resents the demands on your time and emotions, you resent her objections, and you both resent the person in need—you more than Thea, because you remember when your uncle was young and strong and able to look after himself and his family, and you’re constantly reminded of the disparity. And you feel guilty for feeling resentful, and take it out on your wife. Institutionalization—”

“Got it all figured out, huh?” Battle said. “Just another case history for your folder.”

“Charlie, that’s not what she’s saying at all.”

He ignored her. “Bianca, is it? I mean, since we’re all getting on so tight, first-name basis and all. Well, Bianca, you’re right. This all happened before. Only with us, the last time
I
was the person in need, and somebody from your department tried to talk Anthony into putting me in a home because he was making thirty bucks a week and already supporting himself and my aunt. And he said the same thing I’m saying to you. No. Not on your life.”

The blow, coming from beyond the corner of his eye, nearly knocked him off his feet. A blue light exploded and he staggered, grabbing one of the bars.

“Hey!”

All five of the uniformed officers in the room converged on the cell. Sergeant McDowell had snaked a baton from the socket behind the front desk. Battle stuck out a hand, stopping them. He looked at his uncle, who was kneading the stinging palm of his huge open hand.

Anthony said, “You don’t talk to no ladies that way, no sir. Didn’t I raise you no better than that? You tell her you’s sorry.”

Bianca Ferguson smiled. The whites still showed all around her irises. The old man could still move swiftly for his bulk. “It’s all right, Anthony. He wasn’t being disrespectful.”

“It ain’t all right. He ain’t so big and I ain’t so far gone I can’t take him over my knee like I done that time I caught him spitting on a girl when he was nine. Charlie, you tell this fine lady you’s sorry and it won’t never happen again.”

He told her, smiling a little despite the numbness. The side of his face had begun to swell.

Anthony grunted surly satisfaction. “Now, you listen to what the lady gots to say. She making sense if you just open up your earholes.”

“I was about to suggest our foster home program.” Mrs. Ferguson was addressing all three of them now. The other officers had begun to disperse. “Anthony will have to undergo a complete physical and psychological examination to determine he doesn’t need advanced nursing care. I’m inclined to think he doesn’t. In that event we’d place him in a group home, which Charlie and Thea may select after visiting a number of them in the area. He’d be free to come and go as he pleases, with some supervision purely for his own safety, and he’ll receive all the medical care he requires. You may visit him at any time, and sign him out whenever you want him to stay with you at your home, or accompany you on a family trip.”

“I’ve heard some bad things about foster homes,” Charlie said.

“There have been serious abuses. In every case, the elderly victim had been dumped at the facility by relatives who never stopped by to see how they were getting on. I don’t deny that Social Services slipped up badly in those cases, but it shared the blame with the families. Very likely the victims would have been subject to the same abuse and neglect at home. I think I can state with assurance that these circumstances are very different.”

Thea moved close to her husband inside the cell’s open door and took his hand. He squeezed it. “I can’t make this decision,” he said.

“This place black folks only?” Anthony asked.

The social worker shook her head. “We’re forbidden by law to discriminate. However, in this area, the guests are predominantly black.”

“ ‘Guests.’ ” The old wrestler beamed. He had all his own teeth. “I likes the sound of that. How soon I move in?”

Battle laid a hand between the great bunched muscles high on his uncle’s back. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

A ditch appeared in Mrs. Ferguson’s brow. “I’d like your consent to check Anthony into Detroit Receiving tonight. When someone his age has been exposed to extreme cold he should be held overnight for observation. Pneumonia is the greatest killer in his age group.”

“We’ll keep him warm.”

“Charlie,” Anthony said, “I’m awful tired.”

Thea said, “Of course we’ll check him in. Charlie?”

Anthony winked at his nephew. “I be back for my things, so don’t you sell ’em.”

Charlie embraced his uncle. After a moment the old man’s arms closed around him and squeezed. Charlie gasped for breath, choking on tears and the rough wool of his uncle’s shirt.

The telephone was ringing when they got back to the apartment, loud in the emptiness of the place with just Charlie and Thea Battle in it. He hurried to answer. It was twenty past three, way too late for good news.

“Sergeant, this is Lieutenant Zagreb. I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”

“Sorry, sir, I had an emergency.” He dropped into his worn easy chair, then rolled over on one hip to finger his keys out of his pocket. Thea, satisfied the call wasn’t from the hospital, went into the kitchen. He heard cups clinking.

“I just wanted to tell you to report to the City-County Building tomorrow instead of 1300. You’ve been reassigned. You’re back on City Hall detail.”

“How come?”

“We’re closing the Crownover-Ogden investigation and reinstating Kubicek. He’s back on STRESS starting tomorrow.”

“What about Junius Harrison?”

“We have a gun and a dead man with a criminal record. Thanks to you we have an unstable early home life for Harrison, an abusive father who beat his wife and probably his boy as well. That’s a breeding ground. Damn fine detective work, Officer.”

“It doesn’t make Harrison a criminal.”

“It’s enough to make Quincy Springfield and his American Ethiopian Congress go looking for a more suitable martyr. Anyway with Russell Littlejohn out of the picture we have nothing to prove Harrison wasn’t involved in the robbery and that Kubicek wasn’t justified in using deadly force to stop his flight.” He cleared his throat. “I’m putting you in for a commendation. For a novice investigator you did an impressive job.”

“Trouble was I impressed all the wrong people.”

“What? I’m sorry.”

“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I wish you’d forget the commendation. I was just an extra hand on this one. Bookfinger and Stilwell should have all the credit for the way it turned out.”

“Don’t be coy, Officer. The department doesn’t appreciate modesty.”

“I’d consider it a favor.”

“It’s your career. Good night.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s been shitty all around.” But he was talking to a dial tone.

T
WENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER
O
PAL
O
GDEN DISAPPEARED
from Hutzel Hospital, the Detroit office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released an Identi-Kit reconstruction of the face of the man believed to be her abductor to the Associated Press and every television station exceeding ten thousand megahertz in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.

Four hours after the drawing first aired, during the six o’clock EST TV news reports, all the circuits in the switchboard of the Federal Building on Cass Avenue were loaded. One citizen, an elderly woman from the sound of her voice, insisted that the dour Indian features belonged to her milkman—a report that was discounted when it developed that there had been no residential milk delivery to her neighborhood since 1963. Another forty or so were circular-filed immediately when the callers drifted off on tangents to extraterrestrial conspiracies, the Second Coming, and in one memorable instance the somber assurance that the suspect was in fact Art Linkletter rigged up in a diabolical disguise.

(The caller was well known to most of the operators, who had for years been directing his singular theories concerning the children’s talk-show host to Bureau offices upstairs. He was a retired tool-and-die foreman living in Inkster whose son, a guest on the show at age five, had run away from home when he was sixteen. Mr. Linkletter had changed his telephone number twice to discourage the man from calling him and demanding to know the whereabouts of his son.)

Approximately twenty of the callers were considered serious enough to warrant putting an agent on the line. Seven of the callers received personal visits. The information in each case was found to be faulty, although the superintendent of an apartment building in Harper Woods, a three-quarter-blood Cheyenne who had come east from Oklahoma in 1954 to take a job in the Ford Rawsonville plant, was brought in for questioning. He was released when the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that he had been in jail awaiting arraignment on charges of assault and battery and malicious destruction of property in connection with a disagreement in a downtown Detroit bar the night of the abduction.

Stephen Grunwald, Special Agent Francis Riordan’s number-two man, adjusted his black-framed glasses when he entered Riordan’s office. The senior field operative looked as close to disheveled as Grunwald had ever seen him. He was in his shirt sleeves, and a comma of uncombed hair dangled over his right eyebrow. Both conditions were a clear breach of Bureau regulations, such as they were amid the shambles caused by Hoover’s death and the assumption to the national directorship by L. Patrick Gray—aptly named, pale nonentity that he was. And the knot of Riordan’s silk necktie was slipping. But then he had been at his post since eight o’clock that morning, or rather yesterday morning, with no hope for relief in sight.

“Yes, ma’am,” he was saying into the telephone. “If we should run across your husband while we’re looking for the kidnapper, we’ll be sure and tell him to run along home. It’s lucky you haven’t moved in the twelve years since he left. Yes, that would be inconvenient. Thank you for calling.” He banged down the receiver. “Bitch. Is anyone screening these calls?”

“Everyone is. You’re getting the cream.”

“Anything from the reservations?”

Grunwald shook his head. “Custer has a lot to answer for.”

“I’m still waiting for feedback from Quantico. The computers are mucked up. Hoover had all the access codes in his head. I could get the Flying Nun to put out faster.”