The Devil's Only Friend (11 page)

I started drinking right after the secretary left, though it was only midafternoon. I was surprised to find a pint of whiskey in my cupboard with the seal still on it, and I put it to good use. The doctors will tell you how bad liquor is for the old carcass, but that's only true in the long run. The booze cleared out my sinuses right away and eased my breathing. Before long I felt right, and some of the pain in my muscles loosened and drained away. If my liver rotted out in a few years, it was a proper trade-off for an evening of comfort. I thought I knew enough not to drink myself into a wicked hangover.

Since I didn't have anything else like a weapon, I spent a good hour or two trying to put a proper edge on my meat cleaver with a tiny whetstone. It was not a blade to do a butcher proud, and I knew that my swollen grip was not firm, but it was better than nothing, and it was soothing enough to keep me from thinking too much. As the day faded I gave up trying to sharpen my only other blade, an ancient paring knife with a broken tip and a wooden handle that rattled against the tang and the rivets.

I became tired from the booze and from all the work it took to heal. What I needed was sleep, a solid block to let my body take care of itself. It was early still, but I capped the dribble of whiskey left in the bottle and got up to pull the shades. Something made me pause at the window. I was light-headed, and I looked for a good place to fall over. The spell passed, but I stood for a moment more, all abuzz from the booze. I heard someone in the hall coming to my door, and I knew it was Federle.

He rapped in a syncopation, like a secret code.

“Pete? Pete?”

It seemed to take me a long time to get to the door.

“Pete? Pete?” More knocking.

When I pulled the door open, it made a puff of cool air on my red face. I don't think I knew how tall Ray Federle really was until that moment. He was very slender, and he had a kind of restless energy that seemed to burn him up from the inside. It reminded me of the partner on the police force I had known so briefly—Bobby Swope, until he was gutted.

“Hey, Pete. Listen, I didn't know you were going to bug out of the hospital so fast.”

I stood aside so he could enter.

“It's better I come through the door, eh?”

I shrugged and walked over to the counter.

“I'm on tonight,” he said. “They're giving me some hours. Don't pay much, though.”

My legs trembled as I stood with my good hand propping me at the counter. I did not want to face Federle, because I was afraid he had done what I asked him to do.

“Got a light on, eh? It's all right. The liquor will dry you up—takes the swelling down. We used to drink grain alcohol when we could get it.”

He had moved closer to me, and I could feel heat from him. I felt dully that I needed to piss.

“What do you know about me, Federle?”

He stopped in his tracks and considered it. “Not so much, I guess,” he said.

“Did I ever tell you anything about myself?”

“Ah,” he said, “you don't need to if you don't want to.”

He stood calmly before me. I was screwing it over in my mind, what Eileen had told me. Now I wasn't sure if I had only imagined it or heard it in a dream. “Have you been talking to anybody about me?”

“Pete, why would I? I told my wife I had been to see you, sure.” He furrowed his forehead. “Who do I know around here?”

“A friend of mine told me you left a note for her at her job,” I said. “Does that make any sense to you? How could she have called you by your name?”
Am I thinking straight?

A dark and steady cast came over Federle's face. “Somebody's putting one over on you, maybe,” he muttered. “It looks like somebody has it in for you.”

“Well,” I said, “never mind about it. Maybe … I'm a goner anyway. Maybe I heard it wrong.”

He looked me over with some concern. “If your bandages are bled through, you need to get them off,” he said. “You got anything clean to put on?”

“Maybe some gauze.”

“You can tear up a shirt if you need to. It don't need to be fancy.” He walked off to rummage through the medicine box in my bathroom. He had an armload of truck when he returned.

“You're like Florence Nightingale,” he said. “You've had some medical training?”

“That's all stuff that sits in there. Never been opened.” It was finally coming down on me, all of it—the blunder I'd made in going to Chew right away, the beating, the liquor—how I couldn't get rid of Federle—and I was about to collapse. Fine enough. The chair would do if I couldn't make it to the bed.

“Get that shirt off and let's have a look,” Federle said. “Sit down here. The other way.”

He more or less pulled the shirt from my back and set to work. I straddled the kitchen chair and put my teeth together as he pulled tape and dry bloody gauze from my back. The way his hands moved, it reminded me of a squirrel burying a nut in the grass.

“Jesus Christ, Pete,” he said. “This shirt is ruined, so I'm gonna use it.”

Though my front side and my arms were torn up more thoroughly than my back, it was the pair of slashes from the edge of the board on my back that caused the most trouble. Over my shoulder blades, the cuts were deep and kept moving and opening. Federle splashed hydrogen peroxide over everything and swabbed it away with patches of gauze and the ruined shirt. Then he broke open the small bottle of mercurochrome and used swabs to dab it into the deeper holes.

“You fucker,” I said.

“Hey!”

“I don't mean it.” The red stuff burned like hell, but I figured it was doing some good.

“Don't worry, don't worry. You need to dry up. You need to stop moving around so you can scab up good.”

“You shouldn't be so nice.”

“You got anybody else to be nice to you?”

“Jasper Lloyd sent me a car today.”

“That's the box down in the alley? The Chrysler?”

“Sure.”

“It's got a towing tag on it. They'll come in the night to tow it away.”

“You move it for me?”

“I can do that.”

“Why don't you take it to work with you?”

“Oh yeah?”

“It don't cost me anything.”

“I really can't say how much—”

“You got that thing I asked you for?”

He pressed a patch of gauze down and taped it in place. “I got a line on it,” he said.

“You'll need some money.”

“They don't give stuff away,” he said. “Except cars, I guess. Old Man Lloyd can bear to part with a little.”

“Take what you need from the counter there.”

“But what's the case? What do you need the gun for? You're working for Lloyd?”

“You're sticking your nose in.”

“Well, you're asking me to stick my neck out. I got a family, such as it is. I'm not afraid, but—”

“Lloyd's in some trouble and he asked me to look into it.”

“You're going after the boys who roughed you over?”

“Maybe so, maybe no.”

“Let me help you,” Federle said.

“They strapped me to a board and put me under the water.”

By this time he had finished his work on my back, and I could see him stalking restlessly out of the corner of my eye.

“I've seen some of that,” he muttered. “Fucking Japs wouldn't take a hint.”

I was still straddling the chair with my arms crossed over the top of the ladder-back. Though I was dead tired, I couldn't let myself slump because it pulled at the stitches.

“What happened to you?” I asked him.

The question made him squirm even more. He was at the window, checking the latches and peeking through the shade.

“I got burned up,” he said, “by my own guys! Don't that seem funny?”

“Let me think on it a little while.”

“You ever seen a guy burned up, Pete? I guess you must have.”

“I've seen a little of everything. But mostly the burned ones were really burned down to charcoal.”

“You and me—ain't we a pair!”

I had to get up from the chair. Federle skipped over and took my elbow to keep me from falling.

“You'll be all right, Pete. The whiskey will dry you up. I've seen plenty worse than this. I could open up a story that would make your hair stand up like a porcupine! Maybe sometime I'll tell you.”

He steadied me where I was and went over to the counter. With one hand he slid the clip off my money and spread the bills out. He picked up the bill he wanted and held it up for me.

“This is what he's asking,” he said. “But I haven't had a look at it yet. And if the piece is on a no-payment loan from somebody, I can probably talk him down.”

“I don't care about the money,” I said. “Keep it for yourself.”

“Ain't we friends, Pete? You shouldn't give me money.”

“Suit yourself. I said I don't care about it.”

He picked up the key to the Chrysler. “Get some sleep,” he said. “That's what you need. You should drain off before you lie down. You understand? Latch up this door when I leave.”

Some part of my brain sparked with an idea.

“Thanks for the whiskey,” I said.

“It was lying up in the cupboard at my place. I figured sooner or later my wife would be at it.” He shook his head. “Not so good for me.”

I was cold from standing shirtless, and it made my belly clench. Federle let the key and the bill fall into the pocket of his baggy work trousers. Slipping out the door, he glanced around my little place. “Drag something in front of the door here. In case anybody wants to pay you a visit tonight, it'll make a racket for you.”

“Sure,” I said, “but I think they're done with me.”

“Good night then.”

“Thanks, Ray.”

He pulled on the door until it clicked shut behind him. The last thing I saw of him was his eye. The white showed all around. Though I figured that Ray Federle probably knew how to walk without making any noise, I could feel him waiting on the other side of the door. I secured the dead bolt and pulled the bare telephone stand over to the door.

Federle moved off down the hall. Though it was still early, it had gone dark outside, and I knew that soon the spiders would come to plague him. I was glad at least that he'd have the car so he could get away from things. Against advice and my own sense, I didn't visit the toilet. I turned off all the lights in the place, stepped out of my trousers, and rolled into bed. My head throbbed but not notably, and soon numbness settled over me. As I burrowed into dreamland, I thought I heard the Chrysler's engine jump to life and rumble away down the alley.

CHAPTER 12

Thursday, April 13

It might have been around four in the morning when the pain in my bladder woke me up. My eye, adjusted to the dark, easily made out the way to the toilet. It took so long for me to produce anything that I finally had to sit down to piss like a woman. The chill in the air made me shiver the whole time, and when I finished, I pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around me.

It didn't seem likely that I could make it through the window and up to my seat on the fire escape without a terrible ruckus—if I could manage it at all—so I pulled up the shade just a bit and dragged my living room chair near the window. Without the lights on, it was easy to see out. I didn't have the view I would have had from my seat on the fire escape, but it was comforting to see my old alley.

Federle had been right about the liquor. My hands felt less swollen, and my breathing was a little easier. I was all alone, really, and I realized that there wasn't much keeping me alive. If things kept running toward misery, I figured I'd skip over to the other side some day soon, step in front of a streetcar or a truck or heave my carcass off the top of the Guardian Building. Not to botch it up, that was key. Certainly with a gun I'd have a way to do it reliably. In a second it could be over. In a second I could kill Federle or anyone. That's what a gun's good for. I could run up and kill Federle's woman for the price of a slug or two.

Maybe I had contracted a case of the spiders, too. I was trying to remember what the Catholics said about killing yourself. It wasn't something you could work off with just a spell in Purgatory. Or was it Limbo? It seemed like a pretty good story, and I wondered how the old-timers had ever come to make up such a thing. What was there to live for, really, if you didn't believe in heaven, if you knew that nothing could last forever? My face wasn't whole anymore, and I couldn't tell right then why anyone would want to have anything to do with me. Outside my window I could see how the few feeble lights were swallowed by inky blackness.

Federle's woman was upstairs somewhere with the children. It seemed a lifetime had gone by since she slapped me. Was she happy that her man stayed away at night? What sort of black scheming moved her sleep, her daydreams? Federle had gone off to war—and now at night he had to keep his hands at work or lose himself to the darkness. Though it was not my greatest talent, I tried to move myself to feel for all the poor souls who might be in the same boat as me or Federle. Millions of men had been sent off to war, and they didn't have the luxury of sitting by a window and thinking. They were getting shot up or they were burning or killing someone else, all of them caught up and lost in a wave of darkness like the world had never seen.

I had been in Detroit my whole life. I knew how fast, even in the best of times, I knew how easy it was, for any ordinary man to get shuffled to the bottom rung of the ladder, or to panic on the downward slide. When I was working as a police officer, I knew how many guns could be found under mattresses and in closets when we had to come in and haul some sorry bastard off to the pokey. Some men had to hock their iron to scrape up a few dollars for another week's rent or a meal or to have their child's tooth pulled. We got called over, too, whenever a gun got turned around backward. You don't see it spelled out in the newspaper how many men put their brains out after they've come to the end of their rope, how many make the quick decision to take a hard rest after so many frustrating years. Even the newspaper men, with skin as thick as bark, however they might thrive on dirt and scandal, know they can't print everything. Just as a way of getting things to keep working at all, it's often necessary to put on a happy face and stay civil during the daytime hours.