The Devil's Only Friend (21 page)

The opossum had been messing with something on the ground behind the tulips, up against the brick of the porch. I thought it might have been a badly thrown newspaper. Then, too, I thought of Alex's worn baseball glove, and I wondered if it might still be lying there forgotten. The way the streetlights cast shadows along the porch, it was impossible to see anything. So I got down to one knee and felt along the ground with my left hand. I grabbed something solid and brought it up to the light, knocking the heads off a few tulips.

It was a severed human forearm.

Drained of blood, the skin was like hairy wax. The fingers were curled to the palm like a dead spider's legs. But I could see from the ink staining the thumb and forefinger that Hank Chew wouldn't be stuffing any more notes into the pockets of his little vest.

CHAPTER 21

You can flounder through a dream sometimes when you know it's a dream and you ought to wake up. You want to wake up, but your whole body is caught stiff, like a panther is on top of you, smothering the life out of you. You're sure your heart is going to thrash itself loose from all the pipes and cords that hold it in place. That's when you might let out a little groan—if you can catch enough breath for it. You want to swim up out of that underworld but you can't. It's a lot like drowning.

Only I wasn't inside any dream. I knew—as bad as things were—that it wasn't so common to find sawed-off body parts lying about. Chew's arm was heavier or lighter than I expected it to be, and I could not seem to manage it with the faulty grip of my bad hand. I turned it round until I saw the gristle and the round cap of the bone at the severed end. Years had gone by since I had misplaced my eye and my fingers.
Where are they now?
I thought. The liquor fog ran straight out of me.

I leapt up onto Eileen's porch, tossed Chew's arm to the side, and tried the door. It was bolted, so I put the shoulder to it. Nothing doing. I slammed my forearm close to the bolt a few times, and I thought that thirty or forty more whacks might begin to splinter the oaken door or the reinforced frame I had put in. The window was too high in the door to let me reach down to the inside latch.

I stepped back on the porch and had a run at it. I bounced back and into a heap on the planked porch, and in frustration rose up and stomped my foot near the door handle. By this time all the dogs in the neighborhood were yodeling, and a few lights began to pop on in the windows up and down the street.

I ran around to the back door and found it unlocked. Armed only with my stupid rage, I stumbled in and blundered through the house. Eileen's bed was made up primly, and, excepting what I had knocked over myself, nothing in the house seemed out of place. I went up the angling stairway to the attic and found nothing; the basement was quiet, too.

All my strength had deserted me. I walked back out to the formal dining room, little used since Alex had gone, and slumped down in the chair in the corner next to the telephone. I picked up the handset and dialed the operator.

“I'd like the police. The police. Yes, thank you.” I could hear blood squirting weakly inside my temples. “Yes—Kibbie, is that you? It's Pete Caudill. I'd like to report a murder.”

Through the lacy curtains over the front windows, I could see the scout car arriving before I hung up the phone. The neighbors had summoned them. I got up weakly to meet the officers at the front door.

*   *   *

They let me hang fire in cuffs in the back of the scout car while they staked out the scene. Despite the late hour, pretty soon a crowd of neighbors in their bedclothes gathered across the street, and all the houses had at least one light on. I kept myself slumped down out of sight on the long seat, and might have been able to sleep except for the acid vomit that threatened to come up if I relaxed my clenched throat.

Two dicks from the homicide squad finally arrived in a long, gray, unmarked car and parked in front of the scout car so that their lamps lit up my hiding place. It was Dilley and Foulard, two old-timers who lived right next door to each other in identical houses right up close to the Sojourner Truth Homes, where a passel of Negroes had been moved in by the National Guard a couple years before.

They knew me, and from the way they tipped their heads together toward the scout car after conferring with the patrolman, I could see they weren't too happy about having to deal with me. They took charge of the scene, grunting and pointing. Two other patrolmen had arrived, and Dilley and Foulard sent them with their notepads to brace the onlookers and knock on doors.

The detectives shuffled onto the porch with slack faces to have a look at Chew's wing, their hats tipped back over their shiny foreheads. It was another half an hour before they turned their attention toward me. They came out together along the narrow walk that led to the backyard and leaned down to give me the hard eye through the window of the scout car.

Right then a little coupe pulled in off Campau and slowed to a crawl when the driver saw the ruckus. Dilley and Foulard left me and strolled across the street. My hands had lost all feeling, and it pained me to push myself up in the seat. The driver was a small man with a thin mustache, a sparse head of hair, and round glasses. Dilley motioned for him to roll down the window.

I could only see the lower part of her face as she leaned toward the open window of the auto. Her white chin and the bright red of her lower lip, but I knew it was Eileen, and I knew she was safe. All the air went out of me, and I let myself go against the door next to the curb. The glass felt cool on my forehead.

Saturday, April 15

“Well, why didn't you say anything about these goons to us when they worked you over?” Dilley's tiny eyes seemed cruel, but he was all right.

“We might've picked 'em up,” Foulard said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I keep a tight lip.”

“We heard you were in a state,” said Dilley. “But if you don't talk, what can we do?”

For effect, they had carted me all the way down to the headquarters on Beaubien. It didn't look like they were planning to charge me with anything, but I wasn't clear in my thinking.

Dilley said, “Suppose you tell us where we can find the rest of Chew.”

“You guys must know him better than I do.”

“So you know him, then?” Foulard's face was like a patty of ground meat, fat, with lines and creases where his jowls and lips hung down. His eyes were lost behind baggy folds of skin and heavy lids. But like Dilley, he was all right.

“I wonder how you knew Chew,” said Foulard. “You were chummy?”

“No,” I said. I knew I had to tell them something. “I only rang him up to ask a favor, and I regretted that right away.”

“I wonder what kind of favor it was.”

“A colored fella I know had a sister in Cleveland—”

“You're talking about Walker,” Dilley said.

“Sure.”

“So you called up Chew to see if he could dig anything up, is that so?” Dilley's little eyes seemed very watery, and he had to press at them with the handkerchief he kept wrapped around his mitt. “Why you like Chew so much?”

“I never liked Chew.”

“Why not call us?” asked Dilley. “You don't want to see us no more?”

“You coulda come down to see us. We ain't strangers,” said Foulard.

“Well,” I said, “I get some bad ideas.”

Dilley sat down and leaned his bulk on the table over a meaty forearm. “Your father liked to drink, Pete. But he never let it get the best of him.”

“He was a good Joe,” Foulard said.

“I know it.”

“You don't need to be as good as him,” Dilley said. “But you could at least stay out of the gutter.”

I didn't have any way to respond. There was a glass of water near me on the table, and I wanted it, but I knew how it would taste on my swollen tongue. My belly felt hard and stuffed.

“What about this Lloyd business? What about this badge?” Foulard put his thumb in the corner of the box with my belongings and rattled it a bit.

I couldn't come up with any reason not to spill a little. Besides I was dead tired.

“Chew got me thinking about the Old Man. Walker's sister was found outside the Lloyd plant—”

“Inside, you mean,” said Dilley. “Right?”

“Indiana, too,” Foulard said.

“So I went to see Lloyd.”

“You just went to see him, just like that?”

Foulard chuckled. “You got some friends.”

“A family friend, I guess,” Dilley said. “Your old man was chummy with Frank Carter, wasn't he?”

“That's the story.” In some ways, these two knew more about my father than I did.

“What's Lloyd want with you?”

I shrugged. “He wants me to poke around, I guess.”

“So you didn't have use anymore for Chew? How'd that sit with him? Was he getting on your nerve, making a pester?”

“He came to see me in the hospital. I gave him the send-off.”

“That's another thing,” Foulard said. “You say these goons picked you up right after you saw Lloyd?”

“They pulled me out of my bed late that night.”

“Uh-huh,” said Dilley. “And they just dumped you over to the Hardiman place?”

“Did they?”

“You told us they did,” Foulard said.

“I never told you that,” I said. “I might have told them at the hospital. I have to think. I wasn't really in the picture then.”

“The meat-wagon boys confirm they picked you up there,” said Dilley.

“I wonder how the Hardimans might be involved in all this.”

“Go on wondering,” I said. “I don't know.”

“You'd like to find out, though, wouldn't you, Pete?” Dilley was leaning in on me now. “You'd like to kill those goons if you could get your mitts on them, wouldn't you?”

“I'd like to do a lot of things,” I said. “But I don't seem to get anywhere.”

“Maybe those goons have been traveling,” Foulard said. “Cleveland, Indianapolis…”

“Now Chew's gone,” I said.

“We haven't decided yet if it's Chew's arm,” said Dilley.

“You know it is,” I said.

“It oughta be,” he said. “But we haven't decided.”

“I can see four big guys working you over, Pete,” said Foulard. “No offense. But four guys working together, chopping up women? And now we find an arm, just an arm?”

Dilley said, “Right there in the daffodils at Pete Caudill's sister-in-law's house. Don't it seem personal somehow, Pete?”

I worked my lower lip over my saw-blade teeth.

“You've got an aspect that makes people dislike you,” Dilley said.

“You're telling me.”

“You didn't get that from your pop,” said Foulard. “No offense to your mother.”

I looked up at him with some affection. The pair of them had stayed at it longer than they should have.

“We'll look after Tommy's girl,” Dilley said.

“You can leave it to us.”

“Sure enough,” I said.

“It's been a rough time for you.”

“I wonder if you need to get away,” Foulard said. “But you shouldn't cut out just now.”

“How could I?”

They took me down to the basement and left me alone in one of the empty cells so I could get some sleep. It was close to the cell Johnson had used to hold Joshua before the riot. Dilley and Foulard must have known me better than I knew myself, because they never took away my leather belt.

CHAPTER 22

Whatever I had swallowed during the previous night's carouse rolled through my belly like thunder through the sky. Dilley and Foulard had the daytime crew hold me halfway through the afternoon before they turned me loose. I had not been able to sleep during the night, of course, and though there was a fair mattress on the cot in the basement cell, I couldn't get any use from it. I suppose I might have nodded off for a few minutes in the cab I took to get uptown to Eileen's place. Even on a Saturday, the roads were jammed and the streetcars were packed with bodies. These were workingmen—and women, too—dressed in their rough clothes and heavy shoes, looking dumb and blinking from fatigue.

I was thinking about work, too, but I knew I'd be no good without sleep. I worried that I might do something stupid if I tried to get over to the Lloyd plant. I had swallowed too much alcohol, and without sleep to wash it away, I felt chewed up inside. My gut was like a swollen worm. My eye, too, and all my sinuses ached. If Walker had waited for me to swing by for him in the morning, he'd be done with that by now. I thought that maybe he'd have picked up a driving shift somewhere when he saw I wasn't coming. I had wasted so many days in my life that one more didn't seem important.

Federle I tried not to think about. He had the car, and he was probably sick with worry about where I had gone. Maybe he had spent the morning checking hospitals and the morgue for my dead carcass. It didn't seem possible that either Federle or Walker could know much about what had happened during the night.

What sorry excuse could I have had for showing up at Eileen's door? My own tainted presence had drawn Chew's murderer to her. By rights I should have left off all hope of knowing her any longer. I could feel the acid of my gut pressing upward, one long, gnarled tube of bile that would never be clear again. Stupidly I sent the cab away, and he puttered off down Campau as I stood on the walk surveying Eileen's place in the light of day.

Nothing was sealed off, though it was obvious that there had been a blundering and thorough search of the scene. The flowers that had been struggling to bloom in front of the porch had been scratched aside, and dry soil had been scattered across the walk and pressed down into thin cakes by dozens of flat feet. The curtains were all closed, the door was shut, and an unmistakable feeling of emptiness sat upon me. My mouth was as foul as the river downstream from the factories, as metallic and sharp as the water the thugs had dunked me under. My tongue was raw and cracked.