The Devil's Only Friend (3 page)

“I'm not looking for a miracle, Detective,” said Walker. “Maybe you could just ask around a bit.”

I stood breathing heavily for a few moments, heat rising over my chest. I looked closely at Walker. His hands were swollen and scuffed up from work, and I could see from the dullness of his eyes and the general withering of his face that he had not been sleeping much or resting easy.

“What are you doing these days, Walker?”

“I pick up work tossing freight,” he said. “I do some driving. How about you?”

The question surprised me. I blinked and shrugged. “Not a damn thing.”

“That's nice work if you can get it,” he said. “But it doesn't do well by you, from the look of things.”

I looked around the flat. It took only a glance or two to make an inventory of my things.

“I'd just like to know,” Walker said. “I'd like to know what happened down there. I won't even say that it's to get revenge on anybody.” He turned his eyes to me. “It's my sister. She come out of the same mother and father as me. I'd like to be able to think about the whole story of her life and be able to put an end to it.”

Does he know about all the people I've lost?
I thought. My memory had been so abused that I could not remember what I had told Walker about myself. I guess I knew that he was trying to help me in some way because he knew how important a family should be to a man. He knew that I had fallen away.

“I'll try to help you, Walker,” I said. “I doubt it'll come to much.”

“I can't pay you.”

“Pay me!”

“For your time. I don't ask for charity. If there is some service I can do for you … my Emily puts together a fine meal…”

“Listen, Walker, don't think about it. I'm only saying I'll ask around. That don't cost anything.”

“I appreciate this, Detective. But let me say—not to be frontways with you—you might want to clean yourself up a little before you head out in the world.”

“Yah,” I said, drawing my hand over three days of jawbone stubble.

It grew quiet enough for a time to hear a telephone ringing somewhere in the building. My feet scraped over the dusty wood floor as I shifted from side to side.

“Well,” Walker finally said, standing up. “I'll leave the photograph. If you can, I'd like to have it back.”

“Sure.”

Walker turned away and walked carefully to the door like an older man with an ache throughout the body. I felt a sudden shame that I hadn't even thought to offer him anything to drink, not even a glass of water.

“I'm sorry about your sister,” I said. “I know how that goes.” I was thinking about my brother Tommy, really—not two years gone. But then the memory of my own baby sister came back to me. Twenty years had gone by since the influenza had taken her, more than twenty years—and now I had fallen to such a state that even that sharp memory had begun to fade.

“You don't need to be sorry,” said Walker. “It wasn't any fault of yours.” He let himself out and pulled the door shut. His footsteps seemed to drag away forever.

I wanted to crawl back into my bed, but the bright light of morning washed away the idea. Walker's sister seemed to stare out at me accusingly from the photo, and so I had to turn it over on the table. This, too, made me feel a pang of guilt, like the woman was alive and could take it as an insult; but I was used to it. I worked hard to squander the rest of the day, thinking and stewing in my little room. I reasoned that I could hold the photo for a day or two and just tell Walker that I had failed to turn up anything. Nobody had ever believed that I could be credible as a police detective anyway, and Walker had seen it for himself. Everything I had tried to work on had been botched in one way or another. My partner had been killed, Walker had lost his position on the force, and I had failed to do anything to prevent the riot and the flames that had scorched Detroit.

I could forget about helping Walker. He would not blame me. His sister was gone, and there was nothing to do for her. During the remainder of the day—Good Friday—I didn't go out. I kept myself occupied by listening to the radio, dialing away whenever news of the war broke into the music. It became another whole day I had wasted in my life. By dusk I had convinced myself to shirk it off, and by the time darkness really took over I thought I had forgotten about the bucktoothed woman. But I had to keep inside my apartment because I did not want to think about meeting Ray Federle again on my little landing, and by Saturday morning the thought of Walker and his sister had worked me over hard enough to push me up out of bed with some intention. It burned in my gut whether or not I wanted to think about it. It was his sister, after all, and there were children, too.

This was how it had started the other time. I had let my feelings get strong after Bobby and I found young Jane Hardiman killed in the nigger's apartment. Why should I have cared so much about that rich man's girl? There was nothing to be done for her, and it had not ended happily for anyone. I wanted to shrink back from the feeling that Walker, such a good man through and through, had brought up in me. But it was no use.

As I scraped a dull shaving blade across my cheeks, in the mirror I watched the delicate hole where my eye had been. The eyelids opened and closed like a baby's mouth as I stretched and shifted my cheeks in shaving.
What's it trying to say to me?
I thought. I was in such condition that I felt a twinge of guilt when I covered the eyehole with the patch, like I was strangling a living thing.
What am I doing?
I thought.
What am I doing?

CHAPTER 3

Saturday, April 8

There wasn't any elevator. There was a stairwell to the east and one to the west. I always went west because it was the darker of the two and because no one else ever used it. But I hadn't made three steps downward when I saw the woman and the two children in the stairwell, stopped on the landing below and looking out the window to the street. A slender woman, pale—she turned to stare at me with huge dark eyes.

“You,” she said. “You're that Caudill?” She kept a baby crooked in her arm. The infant, too, stared at me with overlarge eyes.

“I'm Caudill,” I said.

She lunged at me and slapped me a good one right across my face. Even the popping noise it made was shocking. I was stuck there on the tiny landing. I couldn't even bring my hand up to ward off the blow.

“Bringing that nigger up here! With my baby girls in the building!”

The older girl turned away from the window at the commotion but showed little expression. Her eyes were as round and as dark as her mother's, and her skin was pale. The baby just stared at me, stared not at my eye as babies do but at the black patch that covered the hole. The older girl stood picking at her fingers until the woman jerked her away down the stairs.

I guess my cheek must have been red. I was only a few steps away from Mack Avenue when I finally placed the woman: Federle's wife. It made me wish that I'd locked the door to my room before I left, though there was nothing worth taking or wrecking inside.

I had stopped at a bank earlier in the week to pull enough cash from my safety box to last me the week, and the folded money chafed at the top of my thigh. When I stopped at a drugstore and took a stool at the counter, I could feel the metal clip rubbing. From the inside pocket of my old jacket I pulled the picture Walker had given me. I thought that I should never have allowed him any hope about what I could do. When I thought of the future in any regard, I saw a blank, a nothing. I could not seem to get my imagination working.

Someone had written on the back of the photograph in a woman's hand: “Felicia Downey 1936.” There was an address as well, written in the same hand but with blue ink rather than black. I took this to mean that the address was more recent than the photo. What of it? What could I do? I had sold my old Packard, and to get down to Ohio I'd have to ride a bus or take a train. I didn't know Cleveland or have any people down that way.

I stepped into the telephone booth and closed myself inside. It was small enough to put me in mind of a coffin, a coffin too small for my shoulders to fit in comfortably. I went through all the coins in my pocket calling around until I got the number for Hank Chew, one of the crime-beat reporters from
The Detroit News.
A number of the bloodhounds from the
News
and the
Free Press
kept their offices right inside the police headquarters down on Beaubien. They worked through the weekend because it was usually the time when all the raciest crime, the most sordid episodes came to light. There was a general clamor for a bit of scandal in the Sunday papers. I talked the switchboard girl into buzzing Chew's line for me, and it rang enough times for me to be sure he wasn't at his desk. As I pulled the piece away from my ear, though, I heard the click of an answer.

“Chew,” he said.

“Hiya,” I said. “It's Pete Caudill.”

“Caudill! We been wonderin'.”

“You been wondering what?

“Wondering if you blew out of town. Wondering if you were dead.”

“Well, I wouldn't spring to call you long-distance,” I said, feeling already that I had made a mistake in calling him. “I'm still around, but I'm not around as much as I used to be.”

“Pretty quiet though, eh?” said Chew, gathering steam. “Not like the old days. Quite a rabble-rouser you were, quite a gent with the fisticuffs. Made me a bundle in those days. Haven't been to a smoker like that for years.” He broke off for just a moment, and I thought I could hear him taking a drag from the pipe he kept in his watch pocket. “Now that I think of it, there's a thing or two I'd like to ask you, Caudill. You still in tight with Old Man Lloyd?”

“Jesus Christ, who told you that?”

“Well, well.”

“I haven't had a word with that old bastard. What's the story? Can't a fella just call to be friendly?”

That pulled a laugh from him. “Nobody ever calls me to be friendly. Nobody ever calls but if they want something out of me.”

“Okay,” I said. “I never did like you, Chew, it's true. We were never friendly. Talk around the station was that you're a pig-poker.”

“Meet me over to Drake's,” he said. “Buy me a beer and I'll let you go on insulting me.”

“Give me some time to get over there,” I said.

“Sure. I got nothing but time and a deadline.”

I put down the phone and stood in the booth thinking—trying to set something up, some lie that would satisfy Chew so I could get what I wanted from him without spilling anything I didn't want spilled about my botched caper with Jasper Lloyd and the Black Legion the previous summer. The papers had made a jamboree for themselves for weeks out of the mess, and I knew that Chew and his fellow hacks were sharp enough to have put me in the know about it. I had managed to keep clear of it all, and I liked it that way.

Even though I had gotten awful tight with a nickel, I walked along Mack only until I could flag a cab. We went down the avenue pretty quick until we were caught up in the thick part of downtown, just under the Penobscot Building. What Chew meant by Drake's was the English Tavern in the Hammond Building. Drake wasn't the name of the fella who ran the place—and as far as I could tell, he wasn't English. The place got to be named Drake's somehow by all the men who put their elbows to the bar over the years, not by any sign or point of actual fact.

It was still a bit too early for the place to be full of businessmen taking their lunches. The war had been good for one thing, at least—there was so much work all around town that shifts were running all across the weekends, bringing more business to places like Drake's. In fact, I don't think the joint was even properly open for the day. But I opened the door and stepped gratefully out of the wind and found Chew on a stool at the bar.

He was dressed in his usual getup: a clean white shirt twice the size he needed for his small frame, held tight to his body by a buttoned-up tweedy vest. He leaned back to the bar with both elbows propping him up. One dangling hand held his hat and the other gripped the top of an empty mug like a spider.

“Caudill,” he said. “Walkin' in like the Devil himself.”

“Sure, Chew,” I said. “It's well known the Devil wears beat-up duds.”

“Well, now, Caudill, according to certain unimpeachable sources, the Devil might slither into a place dressed as any old thing—a serpent, say, or a politician.”

“Devil or no, I didn't have any trouble getting you to meet me down here.” I eased myself onto a stool next to him.

“I'm open-minded,” he said, grinning. “A libertine. Is it too early in the morning for a drink, Caudill?” He swung himself around to face me and knocked his mug loudly on the bar. “I'll spring for a round.”

“I won't keep you long enough for you to get that back,” I said. I pulled Walker's picture from my jacket and handed it to Chew. He put his hat back on his head loosely and took the photo gingerly with the inky tips of his fingers. Holding it and tilting it in the weak light, he peered carefully at the front and then the back. Nothing in his expression changed.
It would be a mistake,
I thought,
to get into a poker game with this man.
After a few more moments, he slipped the photo into one of the many pockets in his vest.

“In a day or two,” he said, “I'll ring you up.”

“I'll have to call you,” I said. “There's no telephone in my place.”

“Why don't you stop by the office?” This he said with a funny smile. He knew well that I had not set foot in police headquarters for the better part of a year—since I had walked out on Captain Mitchell and the brotherhood of the force.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I'll pop in for old time's sake.”