King of the Corner (7 page)

“Sounds legitimate.” Doc leaned against the door.

“That was the idea. The M-and-M’s make a lot of noise about lobbying for new laws to protect minorities, but they’re the chief source of crack cocaine in this town. Those beat-up buses they take to Washington to march on the capital are so loaded down with dope their bumpers practically touch the ground. And they’re branching out. Starkweather Hall thinks he’s some kind of Lucky Luciano, trying to tie together all the black drug operations in the country under one governing body with him as chairman of the board. Had a shot at it, too, if he didn’t get careless three months ago and sign his name to the lease on an apartment on Vernor. We frisked the place on a warrant and recovered enough rock candy to light up Pittsburgh. Then Hall powdered. McCoy bellying up last night was our first break in—yeah?”

Someone had rapped at the door. Doc stepped away as a big white detective in an orange shirt and a wide necktie opened it and leaned in. “Autopsy report, Charlie.”

Battle sprang off the desk and snatched the sheaf of paper from the detective’s hand. He skimmed it. “Shit!”

“McCoy?”

He looked at Doc without focusing, as if he’d forgotten he was there. “For a while there I hoped Hall fell out with him and capped him, give us a handle.”

He sailed the report at the desk. It skidded across the top and off the other side. “Blood workup HIV positive. Son of a bitch killed himself because he had AIDS.”

“I thought he didn’t look well,” Doc said.

“L
OOK WHO’S HERE: GIVE
’Em Another Chance Ance. Hey, Maynard, is it true you offered to put up a million to spring Chuck Manson?”

“Now, Phil, you know I never bet on anybody crazier than myself.”

Doc had been almost out the door of police headquarters when he overheard Ance’s name behind him and the bail bondsman’s reply. He turned around and saw his new employer leaning on the watch sergeant’s desk in the same blue suit and overcoat he’d had on the night before. By daylight his hair definitely looked dyed, blue-black under the fluorescents and showing the marks of the comb. Doc went over there. The uniformed sergeant, a beefy fifty with big red hands and the face of a Greek fisherman, was showing his teeth at Ance in a smile of uncut malice. “I hear your boy Wilson took fifty G’s of your money with him.”

“Yeah. I’ll have to work through next weekend to make it back. Phil, I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s that chipped beef the government hands out taste like? I’m thinking of picking up a can for my cat, but I don’t want him to get sick.”

“Fuck off, lardass.” The sergeant transferred his attention to the duty roster clipped to the wall over the desk.

Ance turned and shook Doc’s hand. “Thought you’d be at work now. Just coming in?”

“Going out. I signed my statement. I don’t think Battle’s in any hurry to get you to sign yours. His murder theory blew up in his face.” He told the bail bondsman about the autopsy report.

“Wilson looked like shit for a long time. I thought he was just doping too much. Well, hell.” He looked at his watch. “Had lunch?”

“A little early, isn’t it?”

“Only if you ate breakfast. You know the Acropolis?”

Doc said he did. They left the building and walked down Beaubien. It was the first warm day of spring. Last night’s puddles were drying and the few people they encountered wore their overcoats open. As usual the downtown sidewalks were almost empty. Far from revitalizing the city, the People Mover electric train had merely plucked its remaining pedestrians off the pavement.

“You’re not popular with the police,” Doc said.

“Who, Phil? He’s a shithead or he’d be a lieutenant by now.”

“It looked like more than that.”

“Somebody else’d put up the money if I didn’t. Their gripe is with the judges that set the bail in the first place. But the judges don’t come down to thirteen hundred. You get canned?”

“I quit I decided to take the job.”

“Yeah, well, I slept on it.” Ance struck out across Monroe against the light, holding out a palm as he stepped in front of a Buick with mismatched fenders. Brakes squeaked, the driver cranked down his window and shouted something that was lost under the rap beat that thumped out with it. Doc hung back while the car squirted past, its slipstream lifting the tails of Ance’s coat, then loped across.

“Change your mind?”

“Taber’s been with me four years. He fucks up plenty, but he’s taken a lot of stitches for me. I can’t just fire him. You should’ve called me before you gave up your job. I said last night I was wasted.”

“Who says you have to fire him?”

“They’re making drivers’ seats smaller and smaller. You won’t both fit.” They were in Greektown. The block was lined with restaurants and markets with five-syllable names on their signs. Ance grasped the brass handle of a wooden door with beveled glass panels.

“I get it he’s always late picking you up,” Doc said. “Let me do that. He can go on taking stitches for you and I’ll do the driving.”

The restaurant was a dimly lit rectangle with a bar and tall booths lining the wall opposite. Murals of the Parthenon and various other ruins Doc couldn’t identify covered all four walls and a fishnet hung in hammocks from the ceiling. A tiny waitress with blonde hair and blue eyes, not a Greek, showed them to a booth and left menus. At the only other table that was occupied at that hour, a waiter set fire to a dish of cheese soaked in retsina with a halfhearted cry of
Opah!
and smothered the flame quickly.

“For five bills a week I’ll hire A. J. Foyt to drive me around. I need muscle. Taber’s not good for much else, but he’s good enough for that.” Ance studied his menu.

“Who is Taber, anyway?”

“Up till Old Numb-Nuts became mayor he was a Detroit police officer, a twenty-year man. Something about misuse of deadly force.” He summoned the waitress and ordered moussaka and a glass of cold milk.

Doc asked for water and a dish of inflammable cheese. When the waitress left with their menus: “I’m in good shape. A third man would’ve come in handy in that bar in Tennessee.”

“That’s old history. These days I don’t accept clients with out-of-state addresses. Except Toledo. Half my business comes from there.”

“Beside the point.”

Ance put away the glasses he had put on to read the menu. His eyes were that shade of gray that looked like coins in shallow water. “Your P.O. know you’re having this conversation?”

“He said I could take the job.” Doc had decided not to mention the part about staying behind the wheel.

“What’d he say about me?”

“He said you’re a cowboy and that you must like running down jumpers or you wouldn’t get so many.”

“Yeah, I can see why he gave you the green light.” He lit a cigarette.

“You can call him if you don’t believe me. His name’s Kubitski.”

“I know. I was there when you told Charlie. Just a second.” The waiter who had ignited the cheese at the other table arrived with Doc’s order. He looked more Arab than Greek. Before he could touch off the retsina, Ance tossed his burning match into the dish. The liquor went up in a sheet of orange and blue flame and the bail bondsman shouted
Opah
loud enough to make glasses ring behind the bar. “That’s how it’s done, Farouk,” he said as the flustered waiter fumbled the cover in place, extinguishing the blaze. “Tell your boss to hire the real thing if he wants to compete with Colonel Sanders.”

The waiter served Doc and withdrew without a word. The cheese was charred at the edges. “How many restaurants have you been thrown out of?”

“They can’t throw me out of this one. I own half of it.” Ance put out his cigarette. The little blond waitress had brought his eggplant and milk. “Kubitski doesn’t know me. He’s just repeating what he’s heard around headquarters. I’m sixty-two next month. Three doctors told me two years ago if I didn’t quit smoking and lose weight I’d never see sixty-five. I buried one, but three of a kind’s a hand I’d bet on any day of the week. Does that sound like I look forward to climbing mountains and getting the shit kicked out of me in saloons?”

Doc shrugged. The cheese tasted fine.

“Kubitski say anything else?”

“He said you were disbarred.”

“He say why?”

“No.”

“I was standing up for this little scroat on a charge of first-degree criminal sexual conduct.” The bail bondsman spoke between forkfuls of moussaka. “It was outside my specialty, but the scroat’s old man was a friend. First day of testimony the prosecutor asked the victim to identify her rapist, and she pointed right at the punk sitting next to me at the defense table. Only it wasn’t my client, it was a kid we had doing errands at the office who looked a little like him. Well, the judge got all bent out of shape over it. It was his evidence tipped the board of review against me. Some of my colleagues had been trying to do that for years.”

“I think Perry Mason pulled that trick once.”

“Perry’s judge wasn’t an asshole. He was lucky that way.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough to get you thrown out of the profession.”

“Well, a lot of old shit got dragged out at the hearing. Point is, you measure your success by how many enemies you’ve made. I play dirty, son. Life ain’t baseball.”

“I found that out.”

“Fuck that.” Ance chewed and swallowed. “You keep looking behind you, you bump into what’s in front of you. Think I’m bitter? Hell, disbarment was the best thing ever happened to me. All the money in this town that isn’t in the mayor’s personal investment company is in dope, and I represent more drug dealers than Parke-Davis. They pay their bills. In their business it’s a good habit to get into if you don’t want your creditors cutting off your dick and shoving it down your tonsils. The clients that come through outnumber the jumpers twenty to one. Everything else is a tax loss. When I was a lawyer I’d’ve killed for odds like that.” He drank his milk and whisked away the moustache with a knuckle. “So you don’t get your picture on a bubble-gum card. Life don’t serve all the courses.”

“Does that mean I’m hired?”

“On approval. You handle cops okay, but handling cops is the smallest part of the job. Show me how you do in heavy shit and maybe we’ll talk about making it permanent.”

“What do I do first?”

“Get the tip.” Ance stood and took his overcoat off the hook.

D
OC HAD RETURNED
S
PENCE’S
cab and ridden a bus into town. He and Ance took a taxi to Inkster. On Michigan Avenue they got out in front of a block of two-story yellow brick buildings sheltering a Kid Koin Laundry, a used furniture store, and a health spa with a rear entrance under a blue awning and a sign reading WE EMPLOY ONLY AMERICAN MASSEUSES.

“Need a back rub?” Doc asked.

“That’s about the only thing they don’t rub here. We’re home.” Ance led the way around the side of the building.

That side bore a ten-foot cartoon of a coin wearing a cowboy hat and drawing a pair of six-guns. One of its booted feet decorated a steel fire door. Stopping there, Ance glanced around the unpaved parking lot and sorted through a dozen keys on a ring the size of a softball. “No sign of the crate. Taber’s sleeping one off again.”

He unlocked the door, and they entered a narrow hallway paved with broken linoleum that ran the length of the building. It smelled like a bus station.

Near the end was another steel door painted to look like wood with a gridded-glass window lettered in black:

M. W. Ance

KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING

“What’s your advertising budget?”

Ance used another key and opened the door. “Strictly Yellow Pages and the county grapevine. You don’t get much off-the-street trade in this business.”

The office was square, well-furnished, and surprisingly neat. It contained a large pearwood desk with a leather top, a telephone and fax machine, a copier, and a complicated-looking coffee maker with a checkerboard of flashing colored lights atop a nine-drawer file cabinet. The rug looked expensive and too ornate for the room, and the desk was bunted up against the wall under a window overlooking the parking lot. Outside, a pickup truck bearing the name of a well-known construction firm on the door of the cab pulled up and a driver in dusty coveralls got out and went into the massage parlor.

“Dumb putz.” Ance was watching, too. “He owns the company. The feds have had that skin shop under surveillance for a couple of months. They think it’s one of the places where city contracts go to get fixed. Rumor is the company that owns the place is a subsidiary of our right and honorable mayor’s holding corporation. You’d think a construction boss would know better than to drive up in one of his own trucks.” He hung up his coat “Terrible what’s happened to corruption in this town. Under Cavanagh it had style.”

“How come you know so much about it?”

“Secrets are only secret from the people who want to know them. When you don’t give a shit, you hear things. That’s your first lesson.” He sat down at the desk and lifted the receiver off the telephone.

His was the only chair in the office. “Where do the customers sit?”

“At home. I work here. I don’t entertain visitors.” He dialed, took out a cigarette while he was waiting, then crumpled it and tossed it into the metal wastebasket next to the desk. “Maynard Ance. Any messages? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.” He hung up and wrote something on his calendar pad. “We got an appointment in Redford at two. You know the Kingswood Manor Apartments on Livernois? They’re down the street from Baker’s Keyboard Lounge.”

“I know Baker’s. Is that where the appointment is?”

“That’s where the transportation is. Apartment 612. If Taber doesn’t answer, tack a note to his door and bring back the bus. Here’s the extra set.” He opened a drawer and handed Doc a pair of keys attached to a miniature license plate.

“What do I do, compare numbers?”

“You’ll know it when you see it. Believe me.”

Doc opened the door. “A guy doesn’t get to do much sitting around this place.”

“One thing you won’t get working for me is hemorrhoids.” Ance put on his glasses.