The Devil's Only Friend (25 page)

“That's a tragic story,” said Lloyd. “A man done in by his appetites.”

“Listen,” I broke in, “what's the story here? You have any idea who might be doing this?”

Lloyd seemed to relish the attention, the chance to put on a show of how smart he could make his words. He began, “Mr. Caudill, I know you have an idea what comes inevitably with the sort of vast fortune the Lloyd family has accumulated. Any man excepting the Buddha himself wants to nibble or tear away a chunk of it. There might be, in Detroit alone, a million men who'd like to live in such fashion as we do here. You might include yourself and Mr. Walker in that tally.”

“I wouldn't live this way,” I said. “All this moldy old stuff.”

“Too many ghosts, Mr. Caudill? You're a sensitive man.”

Walker said, “I couldn't ever rest easy in a place like this.”

“How many of those million or so men you talk about are homicidal maniacs?” I asked.

Lloyd turned sour. He paced around us. “You've killed, haven't you, Mr. Caudill? What about Mr. Federle? I except you, Mr. Walker, as we've only just met. For all I know with any certainty, my own butler might slice my throat as I lie sleeping.”

“I couldn't ever rest,” Walker said very quietly.

“Your friend Chew will be delirious when he gets a whiff of this.” Lloyd eyed me pointedly, hoping to draw anger or some sharp response. His nerves made him thrust out all his words like jabs.

“He will,” I said.

“It's a disaster in the making. From my point of view, it's positively biblical in scale—a plague of locusts, a flood. Rivers flowing with blood! Fire raining down from the sky! But we are not yet lost. Did you ever learn anything about the principle of supply and demand in school, Mr. Walker?”

“I believe I've forgotten any of that, sir. I apologize.”

“Let me ask, when was the last time you purchased a new automobile?”

“Never, sir.”

“Well,” Lloyd said, “when was the last time
anyone
purchased a new car?”

“Before the war,” I said.

“Exactly right! I should lower my voice. Do you know what all the pent-up demand for automobiles will cause when this war is won?”

“More money for you,” I said. “If you're not sunk by then.”

Lloyd seemed glad that I was speaking sharply, as it gave him the excuse to make his own speech more extravagant. “This war is like a long winter. Everywhere”—he was swinging his long arms broadly—“open commerce lies dormant beneath the snow. When peace comes at last, you'll see a great flowering—mark me now. What a century it's been so far! But the past is nothing to compare with what will follow. If you've money to invest, you could make yourself a wealthy man. Anyone could.”

“The problem you ought to consider,” I said, “is that the dicks will be hot for you in this case. And the papers, once they get hold of it, will be crawling up your ass in a flash.”

“The police act in the public interest,” said Lloyd coolly. “I trust they'll behave appropriately.”

They'll want to talk to me, too,
I thought.
Dilley and Foulard don't seem to move too fast, but—

“Something troubles you, Mr. Caudill?”

“Can you tell me again about your little trip to California?”

“I arrived in the area by plane at perhaps half past ten in the evening, and then I drove myself here. This is all easily verified. May I ask, Mr. Caudill, why you're so worried that the police will suspect me? Does the guilt from all your past missteps plague you with worry? For myself, I trust that these dedicated men will see the truth plainly from the evidence. I've nothing to hide.”

“You don't consider all the maniacs who might be after your money,” I said. “You don't worry about a frame-up?”

“Mr. Federle suspects the Hardiman brothers,” Walker said. “If it's all right to say so.”

“Their mother, too, is a magnificent piece of work,” Lloyd said, showing an undertaker's smile. “Aunt Estelle, I used to call her. Do you believe that?”

“No,” I said.

“You're too keen, Mr. Caudill. You don't believe in anything.”

“That doesn't get me anywhere,” I said. “These boys— Can you tell me anything about Elliot?”

Walker started to say something, but he seemed just then to realize that he had been talking too much.

“You'll find the young Hardiman men haunting the big plant tirelessly,” said Lloyd. “Even on a Sunday, the formal day of rest, I'd say they'll both be nursing some plot, scheming together in that Machiavellian way they seem to have been born to. If you find them there, they won't be friendly.”

“Do you think this place is as safe as you might want it?” I asked him.

“The house itself is secure. The grounds … well, you can see how expansive the estate is. Would you like to come and stay here to coordinate all the security matters? Would it make you happy to follow in Frank Carter's footsteps? After all, it's my father's fondest wish.”

“You make me want to pop you in the nose,” I said.

Lloyd laughed with such gusto that a fleck of spittle flew in a long arc from his mouth and landed on the shoulder of a terra-cotta statue of Hercules. Walker started to chuckle.

“Mr. Carter never spoke to me that way!” he said.

“You ought to be more serious,” I said.

“Mr. Caudill, I'm fully aware of the gravity of our situation. In the past week I've spoken to representatives of perhaps a dozen foreign countries, scores of suppliers, competitors, accountants, lawyers, foremen, security men, engineers, architects—imagine it! In the past week! Try to conceive of it—a young woman is murdered—or two or three—with everything going on in the world, Mr. Caudill, how much attention shall I give to these women? How important can it be, really, compared to the welfare of our fighting forces all across the wide world? Make no mistake; the Lloyd Motor Company is critically important to the war effort. I trust that the police will do their duty as far as these murders are concerned.”

“If it's clear that the murders in these different states are connected, and especially if it seems they're making a target of Lloyd Motors in particular, then they're going to bring in the FBI. That doesn't bother you?”

All his nervous energy drained away as we watched him. He took on the same drooping posture I had witnessed at the big plant, and his eyelids and jowls began to sag as if the life had been let out of them.

“You'd perhaps ask my father about the FBI,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“I've had him taken to his place behind the plant. It's along the river.”

“Could any of this wreck the company?” I asked.

“If we could make a study of the relationship between reputation and economic activity—”

“I'm just asking a simple question.”

“Things do get wrecked, Mr. Caudill. Empires crumble.”

“I don't see how it could happen,” Walker said.

“If we could see the future,” said Lloyd, “it would be easy to stave off ruin.”

“You just said we'd all get richer after the war,” I said.

“If the war can be won, and I think it must be, then I believe it's inevitable that there will be a flourishing of enterprise. And so you see I'm always torn between optimism and pessimism. If I focus on the trouble at hand … it's necessary to press forward as if one believed in the future.”

“He still hasn't brought the coffee,” said Walker. “I feel like I've troubled him.”

“Perhaps the butler really is our culprit,” said Lloyd. He had turned to look out the bay window toward the grove of trees. “If that's the case, maybe all this will be wrapped up by suppertime.”

I stood up and looked down the gentle hill. Probably at least half the safety officers from the Pointes had swarmed to the property. All the way down to the water, the cops were strolling and pointing. A few portly suited inspectors were now making their way toward the house.

I tapped Walker on the shoulder and he rose as well. We stepped quickly out of the library and I led him down the long dark hall, past the servants' quarters and out the little door at the west end of the big house.

“All of this comes down to me,” Walker muttered. “I should not have intruded on you like I did.”

“You can step out if you want to,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Now we're just about coming to the end of it, I think.”

“I guess you're right about that.” I knew that the pieces would soon begin to fall. They'd string me up for all of it soon enough, no matter if it was the Grosse Pointe men, or Hoover, or Dilley and Foulard. I thought of the wrinkles that came up around Eileen's eyes when she smiled, and tried to consider the best way to keep Walker and Federle away when everything came crashing down.

CHAPTER 24

She always told me her name was Bessie Love, and I wondered if she was even old enough to have seen any of the pictures that actress had made before they began to add the noise to the movies. Had she made up the name on her own, thinking that it gave her a worldly flair? Had she been named Bessie by her mother and added the Love on her own? Anyway, I always thought of her that way, as Bessie, and if we had the need to speak I would use that for a name.

I had been seeing her—I had been putting the sex to her—for some months, ever since I had fouled things with Eileen. Maybe it wasn't more than a dozen times. At first it was because I was plain crazy, and then it became easy after I settled into it. There was never any other woman. I had been with her the night the thugs pulled me off the street, and I had been with her the night I found Hank Chew's arm outside Eileen's house. I guess I should have known that my sorry life was an open book because I was too stupid to keep an eye out for trouble. It would have been easy for the thugs or for Ray Federle or anyone else to know my business; and now young Bessie was dead as dead gets. No mistake, either: whoever took her to pieces did it because of me, and they laid her out on Lloyd's lawn because they knew I'd be one of the first to have a look at her.

I wasn't a drunk, ordinarily. The last time I saw her alive, though, I was lit up to the gills. Walker had made me look at the blind boy Joshua, and I wanted to blot out any thought of him for a while. I hopped the crosstown line to get over to Black Bottom and I staggered into the house where she kept herself. You went in the front and came out the back; that was how it worked. I expected the place to be busier than it was, and in my addled mind it was because of the holiday—because of Good Friday—but then I realized that I had missed it by a week. It seemed like a joke, and so I chuckled to myself.

I didn't have to wait long in the foyer. On some signal from upstairs I didn't catch, the two leathery brown pugs at the bottom of the staircase gave me the nod. I stood up and hoped I hadn't sucked up too much juice. My feet felt cold.

They must have known me from the first time they laid eyes on me. The whole neighborhood must have known me. Pete Caudill, the nigger-hater, the nigger-killing cop, son of a cop. Maybe they knew that Walker had taken me to visit the blind boy earlier in the day. Maybe they knew everything about me, and they were keeping notes about it, all my failings. The Negroes were organized, they had some intent and purpose that was far enough outside my reach as to be impossible to see—for a one-eyed whore-chasing thug. If they talked about me, it was never to my face. Walker was the only colored man that ever took the trouble to try and reach me.

There was a whole set of courtesies to be followed in such a circumstance. I had to knock at Bessie Love's door, but I didn't have to wait for any reply before I went in. She was seated at a little dressing table, turning over a wooden brush in her hands. Nothing in her face betrayed any surprise or concern over my ragged appearance.

“Mr. Caudill,” she said, “sit right down. Would you like something to drink?”

“No,” I said. “That would put me over.” I let myself down onto the battered couch and sat back to wait for her. The liquor had filled me up, and the tight room pressed me and made me feel stuffed after the walking I had done in the cool evening.

Bessie came and began to take down my trousers. She slipped off my shoes and put them neatly to the side of the couch. By that time she knew what to do, and it was a great relief to let her do it.

She took my coat and thumbed down the buttons of my shirt. I let her take it off me but I stopped her hands when she tried to peel off my Clark Gable. If she felt any disgust toward my mottled skin or the scabs or stitches, she kept it inside of her. She put everything off to the side neatly and let me watch her with her own things.

Bessie was an ordinary colored woman. She wasn't pretty, but she kept herself clean. On her hands and arms and legs she used a kind of butter to make the skin shine. When she moved around the room before me, she did it slowly and deliberately, so I could watch her hips and her fanny and bosom turning and pressing inside her dress. Her eyes did not meet mine, but I could see that she was thinking of me; she knew how I watched her. Carefully she began to take down her dress, pulling the cloth flat and smoothing it over a padded hanger. While she hung up the dress, she lingered and tightened up her back so my eye could take it in properly. Then she turned and stepped close to me. She stooped to drop her half-slip, bringing her shoulders forward so that her breasts could swell up over the top of her brassiere. She wore nothing under the slip but her garters and stockings.

Shame and guilt and alcohol burned through me. My face was hot and my hands and scars throbbed with blood. I watched her plump rear as she turned to hang up the slip, and my prick swelled up and flopped over my thigh.

I had never been able to decide if it was wrong. I had the money and she had the sex to sell, but I could have bought relief from any number of white whores throughout the city. There was the usual bad feeling that I carried in my gut regardless of circumstance. But then, too, there was the shadowy thought that I had decided to smear my shame over this poor Negro woman only because I knew how I was hated in the community. In the beginning maybe it was true; but by that night I might have sworn that I never meant to hurt her—I had begun to think of her tenderly. Maybe everything was true.