King of the Corner (15 page)

The house itself was as old as the century but very clean, smelling of lemon-scented furniture polish and one of those subtle air fresheners that managed not to remind Doc of a Christmas tree or lilacs gone berserk in the parlor, and was in excellent repair, unlike the rest of the decomposing neighborhood around Tiger Stadium. Dolan’s grandfather, the legendary Big Jim Dolan, had lived there the last thirty years of his life, electing mayors and governors and dispensing influence for favors even as the great political machine he had built on a platform as solid as the Vatican choked and shook itself to pieces on the rich mixture of brash new Prohibition money. (The tattered ends of the so-called Dublin Mafia, Jeff Dolan said, still gathered once a month at the Irish Saloon around the corner on Trumbull to swap stories of the glory days and plot the overthrow of Coleman A. Young, secure in the support of the fifteen percent of Detroit’s population that was still white.) A portrait of the Irish Pope, big and beer-bellied in white muttonchops and black cutaway, thumbs in vest pockets, hung from the mahogany paneling over the fireplace, its subject looking like a piece of heavy carved furniture in a room full of Plexiglas and plastic.

Ance was in a sanguine mood when they pulled out of the driveway, resting his arm across the back of the seat and humming something tuneless. Doc asked him if the news about his taxes was good.

“I got ripped. But that fifty large I dumped on McCoy kicks me into a lower bracket this year, so my estimated’s less. Looks like the cocksucker did me a favor after all. Not here,” he said when Doc started to turn onto Woodward Avenue. “I talked to the garage this morning. The bus is finished.”

“What do we do with the Cadillac?”

“Leave it at the garage. I’ll have Taber pick it up and drop it off at the agency. It’ll be good to get out of this nigger deisel and look down at traffic again.”

The body shop was on Cadieux in Grosse Pointe and looked like an antique shop in front, a square yellow brick building with beveled glass in the bay doors and a sign on the lawn suspended by chains from an iron stanchion. The Coachmen barely cleared the top of the bay when the mechanic drove it out. A Mercedes, two Cadillacs, and a green Porsche up on the hoist were in various stages of assembly inside. Doc tried the window on the driver’s side. It rolled down and up without a hitch. Stepping down, he told Ance he couldn’t figure out why it had taken so long just to replace a window. The mechanic, a tall gray-haired man in clean coveralls, banged the door with the side of his fist. It made a dull sound like lead.

“Kevlar panels,” the mechanic said. “Bullet-resistant up to forty-five calibers at twenty yards. That means almost a thousand extra pounds up front, so we had to put in heavy-duty shocks. That was last spring. The new window’s bullet-proof and three-quarters of an inch thick, which calls for a whole new gear assembly in the cranking system to handle the weight. I had to install it myself and there were two cars ahead of this one. Now, one bullet-proof window’s not much good unless all the others are too. I was just finishing up the one on the passenger’s side this morning when Maynard called to ask when it’d be ready. Windshield should be in next week,” he told Ance.

“Call me then.” The bail bondsman was playing with a pack of cigarettes.

“Every time Maynard has it in we have to add something else. Last time it was bars.”

Doc said, “I can’t figure out how you did it so fast.”

The mechanic laughed. “The day after the first time he came in here I bought subscriptions to
Police Times, Soldier of Fortune,
and
The Whole Survivalists’ Catalogue.
When he starts daydreaming out loud I put in an order.”

“What do I owe you, Dick?”

“Fifteen hundred ought to do it. It takes three people to handle one of those windows.”

Ance put away the cigarettes, got out his old wallet, and counted fifteen bills onto the mechanic’s palm. The bills were folded into a breast pocket of the coveralls and the flap was snapped shut. No receipt changed hands.

Doc felt a new respect for the smooth glide of the motor home as they drove away. He would never have known about the armor plating if he hadn’t been told, although he’d wondered why the vehicle averaged only eight miles to the gallon. “Does everything he does for you stay off the books?” he asked Ance.

“Only the big jobs. He discounts for cash. If I told you what a grease monkey in Grosse Pointe lays out in taxes you’d shit your pants. I used to deduct every cent until some son of a bitch at the IRS disallowed the two grand Dick soaked me to install those bars. Like I’d ride around in a fucking hoosegow on wheels if I wasn’t in the business I’m in.”

They drove most of the way to the office without speaking—a feat of which Doc would have thought his employer incapable. He decided the bail bondsman was preoccupied.

A dozen blocks short of their destination Ance spoke. “How’d you like Beatrice Blackwood?”

It was the second time Doc had been asked the question. He made the same noncommital answer he’d given Charlie Battle.

Ance didn’t seem to have been listening. “She’s a hummer. In her own way she’s made a deeper dent in this community than the last three administrations. When the local N.A.A.C.P. raised a hundred grand for the lobby to have Martin Luther King’s birthday declared a national holiday, she matched it. She knew King personally.
How
personally is her own business.”

“Wasn’t she a little old for him even then?”

“You didn’t see Beatrice twenty years ago. Even in her fifties she could make a sock stand up straight.”

“Still, I wonder why she settled for being a madam.”

“I don’t guess the GM board of directors had any openings for poor black island girls when she was young. Anyway it’s honest work. Nobody ever carried away a dose from one of her joints. When the AIDS thing broke, she shut down for three months, had her girls tested, and paid all the medical bills for those that got infected. It broke her. That’s why she sold out.”

“I hope her operation comes off okay.”

“She had it Monday. They’re kicking her out of Receiving today. I said you’d pick her up, that all right?”

“You’re the boss.”

“I never get tired of hearing you say it. How’d the game go Saturday?”

Doc adjusted to the change of subjects. “My arm got tired. My arm didn’t used to get tired.”

“Yeah, well, thirty-three ain’t twenty-two.”

“Tell that to Nolan Ryan.”

“Right after you tell it to Mark Fidrych. The money’s big because you’re washed up at forty. What kind of a player is Charlie Battle?”

“Good hitter. Fair fielder. His boy’s better. I guess Dolan told you he was there.”

The bail bondsman didn’t reply. “Charlie never took a minute off work in his life. He pump you?”

“He asked me about Starkweather Hall.” Entering their block, Doc decided to tell some of the truth. “He thought you might have him stashed somewhere.”

“The idea doesn’t stink. Hall and I could split the reward and he could pay his lawyers with his half.”

Doc pulled into the dirt lot and stopped. The extra thousand pounds didn’t sway more than a fraction of an inch. “Was I wearing a bug?”

“Doesn’t take a computer whiz to put it together. Don’t think I didn’t give it some thought. Only those rewards are never paid. Ask the lady who dropped the dime on Dillinger; they deported her for prostitution. Battle knows that and he knows I know it”

“So why’d he bring it up?” He kept his hands on the wheel and gazed through the windshield at the sign reading WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES.

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said I didn’t think you were dumb enough to risk a harboring charge.”

“Did you mean it?”

Everything Ance said sounded offhand, but Doc had been with him long enough now to recognize his grilling technique. He made eye contact. “I’m on parole. If I didn’t mean it I’d have to quit.”

Ance opened his door. “He’s fishing. When you don’t have bait or a hook or a line you throw in the rod.” He hopped down and turned to look back in with one hand on the door. The floorboards were level with his sternum. “Room 411. She’s expecting you any time.” He swung the door shut.

Doc wondered if he should stop and buy flowers.

A
FTER TAKING HIS FIRST
step through the open door of 411, which was nearly as wide as it was tall to leave room for wheelchairs and gurneys, Doc reversed himself and double-checked the number on the wall outside.

He had half-expected to find the impoverished madam in a ward, or at most a semi-private room. Number 411 was equipped with a small sitting room containing a sofa, love seat, and chairs upholstered in gray tweed and oil paintings on the walls, with a connecting door to a corner bedroom with windows on two adjacent walls looking out on the city. Beatrice Blackwood, in her pageboy wig and a pink bed jacket with a spray of rhinestones on the left shoulder, was sitting up in bed reading a large-print edition of Countee Cullen’s
Copper Sun.
Behind her glasses she had an egg-shaped perforated aluminum patch taped over her left eye. Her face was made up lightly and expertly. She looked younger than she had at Wilson McCoy’s funeral, but then here she controlled the light. The reading lamp was switched off and the sunlight coming between the vertical louvers over the windows was obsequious. Doc felt a flash of certainty that he had just stepped onto a stage set for his entrance.

“My stars, is it that time?” she asked when he greeted her. “I guess I
am
getting old. Give me ten minutes, please.”

“Do you need help?”

“Beatrice has been dressing herself for more than seventy years.” She swung two long ruby-nailed feet, slightly wrinkled, out from under the covers and into a pair of furry white slippers on the floor.

He retreated to the sitting room and closed the connecting door. The room was filled with flowers, small bouquets of peonies in throwaway vases and big displays of roses and orchids that reminded him of gangland send-offs in the movies. He recognized the names of some Detroit city councilmen and a judge or something on several of the cards. Most of the rest ran along the lines of Captain Jack, Mighty Dee, and the Rap City Ring. The splash of colors was enough to make him forget he was in a hospital.

In scarcely more than the promised ten minutes, the door opened and the woman stepped out wearing a mauve suit that caught her below the knees and flared out at the shoulders. Doc suspected the jeweled butterfly perched on the side of her head belonged to a pin securing the wig to her own hair. The piratical eye patch should have clashed with the Victorian gray kid gloves and gold jabot at her throat, but it didn’t. A word came to mind, shimmering to the surface from the dim depths of his forgotten education:
courtesan.

From the flowered hat she’d had on when he first met her to the muted gaiety of her appearance in this room full of blossoms, Doc was beginning to associate Beatrice Blackwood with a universe of color, and to consider the scale of the tragedy should modern medical science fail to restore her sight.

“Does Beatrice look that bad?” she asked, showing her sculpted teeth. “Never trust a woman who wears a uniform to hang up your clothes for you.”

“You look great”

“You’re a gentleman. I look old. Would you bring out my suitcase? I’m not allowed to lift anything heavier than five pounds.”

It was white pigskin with two straps, very old but beautifully kept, like its owner. When he carried it out into the sitting room, a black nurse with big hips and orange hair was folding down the footplates on a wheelchair.

“Beatrice almost invested in this hospital.” She allowed the nurse to help her into the chair. “Then she decided that the kind of mind that would get you up and walking as soon as possible after surgery, then forbid you to walk out the front door, couldn’t be trusted with her money.”

The nurse laughed, a not unpleasant bray. “Sending someone back for the flowers, sugar?”

“Distribute them to the other patients. I can’t stand to watch things die.”

“Very generous. You want a receipt for your taxes?”

“Of course.”

Down in the lobby Doc left them to get the Coachmen and bring it up under the canopy. He was a little worried about getting the old woman up into the passenger’s seat, but using the toolbox from the back for a stepping stool and taking one of her hands and supporting her back with his other palm, he lifted her in with little effort. She looked tall when standing on her own, but he towered over her by more than a foot and she weighed almost nothing. She told him she lived on McGraw.

The afternoon rush hour was under way, and for several streets he was too busy maneuvering the great towering rectangle among cars desperate to get out of the city before the sun went down. Leaving behind the commercial district and gliding through neighborhoods of old houses with missing shingles, burnt-out lawns, and a shiny orange basketball hoop attached to every garage, he relaxed. “How’d the operation go?”

“Well, I’m reading street signs. I couldn’t do that before. In a couple of months I’m going back to get the other eye done. I haven’t finished a book in one sitting in two years.”

“I guess you’re used to being independent.”

“I’ll never get used to that,” she said; and Doc had the impression that that conversation had ended. But he thought about it all the way to her place.

It was a brownstone in a block of them separated by common walls, five stories high with plywood in some of the windows and crushed cans and broken bottles tossed behind wrought-iron railings designed to enclose gardens in genteel days. A trio of black youths in parachute pants and sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders looked up from the stoop they were sitting on as the motor home drifted to a stop against the curb. The twin speakers of a boom box perched on top of one of the railings gargled and coughed in rhythm with rap’s kidney-crushing beat. Doc felt them watching as he climbed the steps of the place next door, his free hand on Beatrice Blackwood’s elbow. He carried the pigskin suitcase in the other.