The Devil's Only Friend (5 page)

Walking back toward Gratiot Avenue, I considered again if I could pin down the day I had gone astray. It might have been a day in early fall of 1943 when I went really wrong. After the mess with the riot and Captain Mitchell and Jasper Lloyd, after Lloyd's executive Roger Hardiman had been killed and there had been some settling of the score for his daughter Jane's murder, I should have been resting easy. Eileen and I had been going out now and again, stepping gingerly because we had been made skittish by loss. The shadow of Alex, her only son—somewhere on his own in the world—was always there, but we were used to sharing our places with shadows. I think the knowledge or the hope that Alex was still alive gnawed at us, but again, we had been accustomed by then to a world where our expectations were kept tight.

I had made a visit to my mother's place in East Detroit on a day in late September of 1943 when the trees had not yet begun to drop their leaves. All the heat of summer had been stored in the earth, or it seemed that hell pushed heat up from inside the melted ground below. I always ran hot, anyway, and the prospect of visiting my mother did nothing to cool my mood. I had not given up the old Packard yet, and I drove easily north to her place, noting with melancholy how so many cheaply built shops were springing up along Gratiot, how many boxy houses were ripping up what had been green and open only a year before. If I stayed away from her for a month or more, there might have grown the husk of a service station or a hat shop on a strip of road I knew as empty. It was impossible to hold on to anything, to keep the things you knew from changing. Even though I should not have had any emotion about East Detroit—my mother had only lived there a short while—it was just the same as any other place I might have counted on. Whenever some razor-edged memory of my young days in Detroit surfaced from my brain, I was always caught by the understanding that the landmarks I had used to set those memories in place had all been changed or destroyed.

I stopped at a couple of places to pick things up for my mother, food for her and seed for the birds she loved to feed in the yard. As I carried it all in a big box up to her porch, I could see her looking out the front window, placidly gazing from behind the gauzy curtain at the new houses across the way. Everything in the area had a sense of rawness, of rudely built newness. The houses were plainer and made largely out of cheaper materials. For my mother it must have been much worse to think about what had withered away since her childhood. She had lived too long already: beyond the deaths of four of the five children she had carried into the world, beyond the murder of her husband. She had seen me change from a rambunctious boy to a shallow youth to a sour man in his middle age, maimed and distant. Maybe there had been a time when she felt pretty.

“Hello, Peter,” she said. “You brought something.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I don't need anything.”

“You have to eat, don't you?”

“I don't eat much.”

Some days she was calmer and seemed more at peace. She had her finger tucked into a book on her lap.

“I could cook for you, Peter, if you told me when you were coming.”

“That's all right. I eat out.”

“It's not the same.”

I carried the box into the house and put the items where they belonged. There was trash to be taken away, and spoiled food in the icebox, and so I put all of it into the box I had brought. Over the throw rugs that covered the wood floor, I could see the paths my mother had worn during her days alone, back and forth in her limited track: the kitchen, the bathroom, the front room. The chairs she used carried the print of her backside. Her shoes were formed to fit her badly shaped feet and bloated ankles. There was a long coat she wore most days she went outdoors, even when it was steaming with heat. This held the shape of her stooped back even as it hung on the coat stand by the door.

“Eileen is fine,” I called to her.

She made no answer, and I figured that she had lost herself in staring out the window again.

I walked out the side door and went into the garage. Since my mother did not drive, the garage served as a depository for all the items from the old house and from my rented house, which I had recently given up. Worthless truck was piled up against all four walls and tucked up into a loft made from old floorboards I had nailed into a platform. I meant to retrieve an old rake and some shears for Eileen from the garage. My father's old workbench sat along one wall, and I would have to hoist it aside to get at the rake.

The bench was not overlarge but it was heavy because it had been made from a number of boards glued together like a butcher's block. I supposed my father had made it himself as a younger man. The legs were as thick as my arm and looked as if they might have been turned in a rush on a lathe; they were hewn with uneven grooves all along their length. The top had been hacked and burnt and drilled so that its surface was splintered and uneven. Where the great vise had been attached, the grime was not as thick and the wood was not as splintered, and so I gripped the bench there when I tried to move it.

I found I could move the bench only an inch or two from the studs of the garage wall, and as I did it, pain tore through my back and shoulder, where I had been slightly injured by a bullet from Roger Hardiman's derringer just three months earlier. It ran through my mind that I was getting old and out of shape; I pictured my father shifting the bulky thing with ease. Between the swearing and the grunting and the heaving, I made little progress.
I'll go on a regimen,
I thought,
I'll take up boxing again, work the gym.
Each time I held my breath to shift the bench another inch across the concrete floor, I felt the veins in my head throb. I knew that even a young man could die in an instant if his blood spilled out into his brain.
That's the way to go, rotting out here for a month before my mother thinks of looking for me.
Finally one front leg snapped off the bench at the top and the whole thing fell slowly over. I fell, too, and just managed to avoid getting pinned under the big block. Worry had come to work so quickly in my mind that I couldn't help but imagine how my leg bones would snap under the massive weight of the bench. I gritted my teeth and tried to shut down the sinking nausea in my gut.

I picked up the snapped leg and felt a wave of emotion. It wasn't that I had any use for the bench. But I knew it was something that had been of much use to my father, and I could see what the work of his own hands had done to the worn wood. Some of my father's working tools were there in the garage, forgotten and useless for a man like me. My own extra things were there, too, my shoulder rig and my gun-cleaning kit, my record collection, some books I had read.

All of Fred Caudill's children were dead but one. What remained of his blood in the world amounted only to one misshapen son and one lost grandson. It seemed by my own lack of strength or faith that I was fading away, too, and I felt sad for my father. By all accounts he had been a good man. He had worked and worked his whole life and tried to hold things together. I was saved at that moment by my lack of ability to believe that my father could be looking down at me from some great hereafter. I was spared that shame.

I picked up the broken leg and examined it more closely. There was a big threaded plug in the end, probably an inch and a half in diameter, that had snapped jaggedly from its anchor in the underside of the benchtop. The wood was old and had dried, and so I was able to work the plug loose from the leg. From the surprisingly light heft of the cylinder of wood I guessed that the hole had been bored out and threaded all the way through to the other end.

I put my littlest finger into the leg, lifted it and peered inside, wondering if I could rig something with more modern hardware to reattach it. A thick roll of bright green bills slipped out of the end of the leg, then another and another. There were eight rolls of bills altogether in the leg. I unscrewed another leg to find it full of another eight rolls of bills, larger in denomination, and a third leg that held only two rolls.

This marked the time when my father had stopped stashing money away because he had been taken to Fighting Island and murdered. I had no doubt that the money had come through Frank Carter, Jasper Lloyd's flinty chief of security for so many years, and ultimately from Jasper Lloyd himself. My father had done work for the Lloyd Motor Company during the labor troubles of the 1930s, this much I knew to be true, and it only stood to reason that he should have been paid for it. I turned and pressed the tight rolls of money in my fingers. They had all been secured carefully with butcher paper and strapping tape, and they felt almost as solid as ash wood. If it was this work for Carter and Lloyd that had brought about my father's murder, then I could see for myself what the life of a good man was worth in the world.
What about me?
I thought.
What am I worth?

I was soaked through with sweat in the cluttered garage. I rounded up all the rolls of bills on the floor and sat down to consider them. From a guarded place came a heaving blast of hot sorrow; I cried for myself and my father, and for everything I had done to disappoint all the people I had known.

CHAPTER 5

There are places where you can't see across to the other side, and in itself that would make Lake St. Clair a big lake. But situated as she is along the chain of Great Lakes—like a heart-shaped hernia below Lake Huron—she suffers by comparison. The lake goes only to a depth of twenty feet in the channels. It keeps the waves low and makes for good sailing, good fishing. In winter, the shoreline freezes and the wind blows away the snow, and you could skate from the Detroit River north to the St. Clair River if you were crazy enough to try it.

There are pockets in Detroit where the money runs deep. Down in Indian Village and close to Belle Isle, east of downtown, you can see how it is. The houses sit squarely on their big plots of land with an ease that can't be faked on the cheap. Grand Boulevard spreads right down to the bridge to Belle Isle, and in that neighborhood you could get a cop to help you by stubbing your toe. The debutantes and private-school boys prance along in their tennis clothes without any worry about the war or about finding gasoline or butter or new stockings.

East of Indian Village, beyond the eastward edge of the city, you can ride along Jefferson Avenue, following the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair right up to a place where the houses stand even farther apart on even broader stretches of property. The Grosse Pointes had blossomed before I was born into a haven for the lumbermen, factory owners, and fur traders who had made their fortunes in Detroit or who had brought it to the big city from outposts in the wild north, the upper peninsula of Michigan. By a queer blessing of geography, my mother's house in the city of East Detroit was hard by the Grosse Pointe area, not far from the water, and it was easy to make my way over to Whitcomb Lloyd's place along the lakeshore. There were a number of dazzling mansions nearby, but the Lloyd house had been designed to trump them all, in location and in size. Jasper Lloyd had employed some of his architects and builders to raise the place as a wedding present for his only son, Whitcomb, during the great flowering of the automobile giant's fortune. I had come to a vague understanding that the elder Lloyd now spent his days puttering about the estate, though it was far from any large plant in his empire.

I had a cab drop me off alongside the road. I was just stupid enough to let the taxi putter off before I had any idea if I'd really be able to get in to see the Old Man. It was only a short walk from the road to the gatehouse, and so I strolled at my leisure. There was a guard there dressed in a nice suit, and I guess he was used to derelicts approaching the place. He should have put me away, pressed a button to summon the Grosse Pointe safety men, but he heard me out.

If it had been me inside the gatehouse, and I had seen a man like myself approaching, I would have been put off by the sight. I was clean-shaven, it was true, but the eye patch and the outdated suit were a kind of signal. And the fact that I had just walked up from nowhere with an expectation of seeing the richest man ever to live in Detroit should have put the guard on edge. We had all seen during the tough times how men could veer off the path of reason. I had been forced to knock down a few men who had been put out of their apartments or lost their homes; they had the wild look I imagined I had now. But I explained to the guard who I was and what I wanted, and he calmly picked up his telephone and called the big house.

He was more like a mechanic or a gardener than a guard. After he put down the telephone, he walked me through the garage. Six or eight vehicles were lined up on the inside, including the big V-12 Franklin limousine that carried Jasper Lloyd whenever he traveled about the city. The big car sat atop a turntable built into the floor that could point it toward any of the three exit doors. Some of the cars were almost as old as I was, but they were all in perfect repair, spotless and shiny under the open trusses and high windows of the garage. A 1923 Lloyd Cargo Van, with Lloyd Motor Co. painted in red letters in the old style along the sides and back, was a proud reminder of the Old Man's working days. It seemed that the building had become more of a museum than a working garage, and I wondered if there were half a dozen more buildings just like it on the estate.

They made me wait, but after a time they sent a car out to pull me in toward the house along a sharply designed drive lined with poplars. I had seen photographs of the place, but still it seemed unreal. Around the last bend, the main building seemed to loom up suddenly. It was all designed to be overwhelming, and so I turned my head away until I felt the car come to a stop.

*   *   *

Jasper Lloyd's ancient cadaverous head lolled on his pillow. He was propped up on his bed in a state exactly between lying down and sitting up, and it was clearly impossible for him to find any comfort, even with all his millions to coddle him. He rolled his pale mustard-yellow eyes and trained them on me.