The Devil's Own Rag Doll (7 page)

“How is it,” I said, “that a bright boy like you can't keep a teenaged girl in line?” I pulled my hands from my pockets, felt heat throb in them, felt the heat radiating from the barrel of Hardiman's shotgun.

“That mouth of yours will dig your grave one of these days, Mr. Caudill.” He paused and tried to drive that home with a level stare. “Now, you bring me that nigger's balls or don't show your face near me again. Our business here is finished.” Hardiman turned, red and sweating.

*   *   *

As he drove, Bobby tapped his nails on the roof of the car. “Jesus, Pete, what was that all about?”

“Just seeing what Hardiman's made of.”

“Couldn't you find a nicer way to do it? You need to learn how to grease people a little bit.”

“I'm giving him more credit than you are,” I said. “Why's he want Pease's balls?”

“Jesus, Pete, if you had a daughter killed like that—”

“Leave off with that. You know as well as I do it wasn't Pease,” I told him. “Probably Hardiman's guessed it, too.”

Bobby spent a few moments looking from me to the road and back. “You're probably right.”

“Sure I'm right. First off, Pease is an idiot. You read the book on him? How he got caught in St. Louis? Stole a car and drove it over a fire hydrant right in front of a scout car.” I worked my hands around the brim of my hat in my lap, thinking of Hardiman's long neck and of the lack of concern he seemed to feel for Jane.

Bobby said weakly, “I don't hear much on Pease except that he's been running numbers in the west side neighborhoods.”

“Listen, it takes some kind of stomach to do that to a girl, such a young girl. For these guys, slapping them around is one thing. But a small-time lifter like Pease couldn't come up with the marbles for this type of treatment, not especially with a rich white man's daughter, and not especially with the way things are right now in this town.”

“So you don't figure him at all,” said Bobby.

“Hell, no.”

“Who, then?” Bobby gestured with both hands on top of the steering wheel, showing blue veins below the pale skin of his palms.

“You're the senior man here,” I said. “I worked up a good sweat just thinking that much.” I could see that Bobby had hoped Pease's guilt would not be called into question. Pinning it all on Pease, finding him, and dragging him to Hardiman would settle things easily and maybe lead to a big payoff. It was just lazy, slippery thinking, and I was getting to feel that lazy thinking could be dangerous. But it fit Bobby like a second skin.

“You'd almost have to be crazy to pull something like this,” said Bobby. “The way things are down in Black Bottom—it's just too many people crowded too close together, see? Come the real summertime, when it all boils over, know where I'll be?”

“Standing on the corner of Chase Alley and Riopelle,” I said, “selling baseball bats for ten bucks a pop.” I adjusted the eye patch a bit and moved the strap higher on the back of my head.

Bobby pulled back his face into a smile. “And you'd head for the hills, if there was any hills around here.”

“I'll be cooling my heels on a boat in the middle of Lake St. Clair, pretending to have some bait on the line,” I said.

“Well, Pete, if things ran good all the time, there wouldn't be any need for us on the police force. We'd be sweating like pigs at Chrysler's.”

“I'm sweating like a pig now.”

“So you don't think it was Pease went back to beat up Thrumm, either?”

I closed my eye and leaned back. “Pease is too little to have done something like that all alone.”

“Some other niggers got something for Thrumm?”

“It's too much to believe all at once.”

“So you think,” said Bobby, “that whoever killed the girl came back for Thrumm after we left?”

“That sounds right.”

“But that would mean—”

“That they've been watching us.” I breathed deeply and worked a point into my hat's brim with the three digits of my left hand. “We've been putting on a monkey show for them.”

“Jesus.”

I stared out the window as the bustling city rolled by. The Arsenal of Democracy, they called it. Detroit was a great steaming engine, pouring out a steady supply of steel and power to the front lines of the war. An idea flickered through my head, and it felt right: Someone was deliberately trying to mess things up in the city. Looking at it Bobby's way, what profit could there be in that? In terms of business, I never figured out how everything could work like it did. I could not bring my mind to understand what all those men in the white shirts could possibly be doing at Chrysler's or Lloyd Motors to bring in a profit—adding up to millions for the men in charge. It seemed to me that they were just talking all the time or shuffling numbers on papers. And if I couldn't understand how a regular company might work, how could I understand how it might profit anybody to wreck things?

But then it was in all the papers; you heard it every day on the radio and every time a gaggle of old broads stood gossiping at the back fence: Loose lips sink ships; there were enemy agents among us. I could see that the Japs or the Germans might like nothing better than to foul up production in Detroit. Even if it would cost them millions, they wanted to wreck us, and I could understand that. But I couldn't quite make myself believe that there were spies about. The war seemed so far away. If I hadn't already lost a brother to it, I would have wondered if it was real at all.

If I could trust my gut, I knew that our problems slept closer to home. No spy would come halfway around the world just to meddle with a rich man's daughter when he could put dynamite to almost any plant in the area. Our trouble, I knew somehow, had sprouted up from our own soil, our own foul history. As I began to realize how deep the water had swelled up around us, I mashed my teeth together and clutched at my hat. Detroit, like any big city, was built atop the flimsiest house of cards imaginable, the basic civil cooperation between its citizens. I had been a police officer long enough to know that civil behavior, when it broke down, did so in a flash. A husband breaks a bottle over his wife's head; a rummy knifes another drunk over a half-empty bottle. If we could not find a way to handle things quickly, I sensed, the pending summer in Detroit would be one to remember. My throat clenched as I considered it. Detroit was the only place I had ever lived. Where could I go if it all broke down?

CHAPTER 5

I wondered what Bobby thought of the early brush-off. To me, the day had been a waste: talk and more talk. We had not made any progress toward finding Pease or whoever was responsible for the girl's early exit. In fact, everything seemed less sure, and the situation had become spongy, too soggy to get a firm grip on. Nobody knew anything, nobody had anything to say. Walker and Johnson had turned up nothing. They had run into either a stone wall or genuine ignorance in their door-knocking. Nothing on the boy, Joshua, and no indication that the people near the apartment had heard or seen anything amiss. It was all coming together to remind me that too much thinking always took something away from you. Even if you got somewhere by thinking, it always left a rawness in your throat that you couldn't wash down.

So when the regular end to our shift came, I told Bobby to drop me off at home. To Bobby's objections I only raised my bad hand like a traffic cop. I knew that Bobby was probably still out driving somewhere, scrounging for some hint of information, driven by the vague tickling at the back of the head that dicks get when they know there's a piece somewhere that'll fall into place and wipe away the fog. In Bobby's case, it was not so easy to say what kept him going day and night. Though he had a beautiful wife and a little girl at home, Bobby did his best to avoid the place. He seemed most at home swimming through the tangle of petty motivations he found in the dark corners of the city. There was also the dangling carrot of Hardiman's money, which seemed like something that got talked about but never showed up in anyone's hand.

After cutting out on Bobby, I stood in my shorts before the mirror in my bathroom. I pulled the patch off my eye and rubbed the red outline on my nose and cheekbone, tried to smooth away the groove pressed into my brow by the thin leather strap. When I bought the patch, it seemed hard and funny to me that I'd spent a small fortune on the finest one I could find, beautifully tooled and stitched and lined with thick red satin cloth, but none of that saved me from the discomfort I could have bought more cheaply. I hung the patch on a hook alongside the mirror, and then I drew up cool water from the tap and splashed it on my face.
Fair enough,
I thought.
Bobby can go hang himself. I've got things to do.

I placed a shallow bowl in the sink, poured a small portion of table salt into it, filled it with warm water, and mixed it with my hands until I could no longer feel the scraping of the salt over my knuckles and my nails. With a turkey baster I kept in the linen closet, I sucked up some of the salty water, leaned over the sink, and washed out the cavity of my eye. Then I carefully removed my glass eye from its box, rinsed it in the salty water, and placed it in the socket.

I winced a little as it went in. Holding a towel over my face, I squeezed my eyelids shut as my tears started spilling over from both sides. After a time, the stinging subsided, and I was able to open my lids again. It was good for a chuckle to see how the glass eye stared out, blank and bright. The doctor was right; I wore the eye so rarely that it was beginning to fit poorly in the changing flesh of the socket.

I ran a hand over the thick stubble on my chin and considered shaving again but decided against it. I found a clean shirt and put the rest of my clothes back on. As I stepped out the door and felt the evening's heat still hanging on, I stopped, thought for a moment, and grabbed my hat from its hook.

I hoped my old Packard would hold up for a few more years. I didn't look after it like I should have. Though I drove with the windows down, and though I couldn't hear any extra snorting from the exhaust, I was sure that fumes were coming up into the interior. My nose always recoiled and my eye and eye socket always watered whenever I drove for more than a few minutes. I wondered if I could get funny in the head from sucking up exhaust. I wondered if I already had. I had seen more than a few suicides in their garages after the stock market crash, soft-handed businessmen too cowardly to use a gun. But I let it roll off me like the hundred other things I might have found to worry about.

As I rolled up to my sister-in-law's house at the northern edge of Hamtramck, I tried to avoid running down any of the kids heading for the movie theater on Campau. I had seen the marquee: an Alan Ladd movie, something about the war. I generally avoided the movies because I felt that it would be best not to strain the eye. Now they were starting to make them with too many colors, too many bright colors. I had never seen such colors in the real world. Even though Detroit was a city of trees in many areas, their green could never match what I had seen on the movie screen. And there was something about Alan Ladd as a hero. You could see that he was just a little guy, but he always acted so tough. I guess that's where the acting comes in—but he wasn't such an actor after all. You could see that he wasn't tough in real life, just pissy.

My brother Tommy's widow, Eileen, lived in a house with a big basement on Carpenter Street, just half a block off Campau. It was a nice place with a big attic, too, probably too big for her and her son, Alex. I had arranged things so she could keep it after Tommy was killed, done some things I shouldn't have to come up with the money to pay the mortgage down. Eileen got by all right with the widow's pension and by taking a few odd typing and filing jobs. In fact, the house was better than the place I had been renting for the last four years.

I stomped up the wooden steps to the wide porch and pounded my fist on the doorframe before coming in.

Alex was sitting on the sofa, working the pocket of his ball glove. “What's with the skiff, Uncle Pete? It's a hundred-ten degrees out.”

“It might cool off later, you never know,” I said. I pulled off my hat and looked at the boy, tried to see his father in him. But Alex was softer at the edges than Tommy had ever been; he favored his mother, maybe.

“Your uncle is a formal guy with his hat and all,” Eileen called from the kitchen. “At least he dresses for dinner.”

“At least I'm not wearing my spikes!” Alex's voice wavered, a bit too loud, a bit too blustery.

“He's crazy about baseball,” said Eileen.

“Well, don't get fresh with your mother, kid, or I'll wallop ya.” I felt the lead weight of my joking with the boy. I wanted to make up for what he was missing since his father had been killed, but I could not think of a way. Though I had known him since he was shitting yellow in his diapers, I couldn't just grab up the know-how to deal with a kid of any age overnight. It was clear that he felt some resentment about the way things were, but he covered it well. Fourteen years old. A bad age to be without a father.

“Dinner's almost ready,” Eileen said, draining potatoes in the sink.

“Maybe we'll go see the Tigers sometime, ah?” I said. “Yanks coming to town next week.” I watched the boy closely.

“Maybe,” said Alex. He shrugged.

Alex had grown up in Pittsburgh, where Tommy had graduated from college. After I lost my eye and our father died, Tommy thought it best to pull up his family and come back to Detroit. When the boy finally saw me with the patch over my socket and the missing fingers—he was only seven or eight years old at the time—he was the only one who didn't offer any sympathy or try to get me to look on the bright side of things.

“Man oh man, Uncle Pete,” he said. “Man oh man.”