The Devil's Only Friend (8 page)

The servant came near and unfurled a coarse woolen blanket. He stooped shakily and spread it over me and walked back toward the house. It made me think at once how cold I must have been.

“How fortunate for you that I am a woman of Christian charity. You might have frozen to death if you had stumbled onto any other lawn.”

My thinking was pretty clear by that time, and I wanted to say something sour, a bitter thank-you. But my tongue was so swollen that it filled my mouth. The blanket seemed to press on me so much that I could take only shallow breaths, and my throat began to clench and throb with panic of suffocation. It seemed that I was becoming unfrozen, and now the pain of every part of my body began to twist. I was able only to produce a blatting sound like air escaping from a dead man.

“I think you'll live, Mr. Caudill,” she said. “I think you'll survive to feel things more deeply from this point forward. First comes the pain of childbirth, and then the attachment of love—which is really a kind of pain, to be so attached to another human being that you must yourself feel the sting of every disappointment and all the loneliness she feels each day. Then of course there is the pain of separation. A number of strong feelings—such is the lot of poor mortals. But first and last you should remember the pain, Mr. Caudill. I promise to do my part to help you remember.”

That was all she said to me. She turned away and walked up the slope toward the house, shaking. It wasn't long before they came to load me in the meat wagon. They gave me something to put me out, poked me in the arm. For that brief time before I winked out, I let my mind rove. If I remember right, I thought warmly of Eileen, though she was lost to me. I thought of my old man, and I wondered where I might get my hands on a gun.

CHAPTER 8

Tuesday, April 11

My front teeth were cracked and ragged. I couldn't keep from running my tongue over the newly sharp edges. It didn't hurt except when cool water sloshed into my mouth or when my breath pulled too much cool air over the broken parts. There were other places where the back teeth had chipped or where whole corners had cracked off. My fat tongue worked over the familiar smooth surfaces and the new rough ones. It was as if I'd gone away for a long time and returned to find my familiar landscape changed, as if I'd slept for twenty years. But my teeth were the least of my worries.

Three different doctors had given me so many stitches that they couldn't give me a real number as to how many it took to sew up all the torn skin over my arms and belly. One Jewish doctor with a bald head tried to josh with me that they wanted to bring in some new doctors to practice their sewing, but he saw pretty quick that I wouldn't go along. He kept smiling at me with his horse teeth, too close to my face. They had to change the bandages often because I would not stop bleeding. It felt like I had been boned and shredded, like a sack of wet bread, leaking and swollen and soft.

I guess I made it hard on them. They were used to seeing wrecked-up bodies and sick people, but I suppose it wasn't so common to see someone like me, just roughed up for the hell of it. They wouldn't give me a mirror. But I could see how my whole body was black and purple, even yellow, from being torn up so much on the inside. The swelling was awful, and where the skin had been plain torn off, scabs came up and then cracked and more blood seeped up in black rivers to fill the cracks. It wasn't only blood, either. From the raw skin of my wrists came a stuff like vegetable oil, clear and thick. The oil came, too, from the tips of my fingers and from the corners of my fingernails, where the skin was cracked and stretched from the swelling.

I was doped up all the time but it didn't make my mood good. It only made me mad that I was a little goofy. It was the first time I had to be in a hospital bed since my fingers and my eye had been blown away. I had to shit into a pan until they would let me get up.

Pretty soon that bastard Hank Chew came to see me. He rapped with his rings on the glass of the door and breezed right in.

“Oh, Caudill! You're an affront to my senses!”

“Go on out of here, then. Filthy buzzard.”

“Gone on a bender, have you? A bit too much of the stuff?”

“That's the story,” I muttered. “Fell off a streetcar.”

“Well, it stretches the limits of credulity.”

“That's your problem.”

“Listen, Caudill, aren't we friendly? Didn't I agree to help you out?”

“That's nothing to me anymore,” I said. “Forget about it. I'm not in any shape now to worry about somebody else's problems.”

The pain by that time had become so general over my whole body that the irritation of Chew's presence was like the chirping of a cricket. He strutted about the room and then perched on the edge of my bed so he could speak closely to me.

“A man needs friends, Caudill. You need to keep up the ties that bind. You could have used a friend two nights ago, am I right?”

“Open up the curtain a little, Chew,” I said.

He shut his yapper and looked sharply at me. Then he got up and tried to work the curtains. There wasn't anything to see outside but the tops of some trees, but I felt closed in.

“That's a professional workover,” he said, leaning back on the sill. “An admirable job. You expect anybody to believe that you were tossed around by some guys at a bar?”

I shrugged and turned my bleary eye toward him.

“Out-of-town guys, were they?” Chew was delighted in his way to be close to something vigorous and physical, so full of blood. His eyes roamed over the damage with admiration. “Come on, Caudill,” he said. “If it's a good story, I'll get at it one way or another. You'll come out better if you put your two cents in with me now.”

“Move away from that window.”

I might have slept if it was quiet. It was an effort just to keep up with what Chew was saying.

“I can work around you, Caudill. I'm not the biggest guy or the fastest guy or even the smartest guy, but I never give up. You can see that.”

“If you keep sticking your nose in, you'll be the next one they come after.”

“I'm not afraid,” he said quickly. “I keep one eye open all the time. I can take care of myself.”

“Still,” I said, “still, you've never been worked over like this, have you?”

“No, I haven't. I guess I haven't been in a really good scrap since I was a boy. Is it bad for you?”

“If I have to pay, I'll pay,” I said.

“What's that?”

“What did you dig up on the Negro girl?”

“She wasn't up to any good in general. Messed up in the dope and—you might say—lax in her morals.”

“I could have figured that much out myself.”

He squinted down at my eye. “Doesn't that bother you? Laxity of moral fiber?”

“I don't get you, Chew.”

“Well,” he said, pushing down his brows, “it was easy enough to pull from the police files. She'd been nailed on a couple of easy fingers, got off with fines both times, both down in Ohio.” He scribbled something onto his scratch pad and squirreled the paper away in his vest.

“What's she got to do with Lloyd?”

“Nothing, far as I could figure. Plenty of men come in and out of that plant down there every day, looking for something to take their mind off their troubles. But … maybe you know something more about it?”

“You know I saw Lloyd the other day, then, ah?”

“Well, it's common knowledge.”

“The Old Man says— Why don't you tell me everything you know before I start to blabbing?”

“Sure.” Chew's face glowed with a smile. He came close again. “I couldn't scare up any kind of hard evidence,” he said. “But a fella I know told me that the woman had been sawed up in pieces and left in a pile out in the open. Not just the usual wrangle-and-strangle dump job.”

I tried to picture it with my foggy brain. I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, and it was hard for me to really feel anything about it. I said, “You've seen something like this before?”

“Somewhere or another there's always some of that going on, sure. Or do you mean more lately?”

“Well, I read in the paper that they found another girl outside the plant in Gary.”

“You told me you didn't read the papers.”

“I've been laid up.”

“They found her outside the plant or inside?” Chew asked.

“I wouldn't know,” I said.

“About the girls I've got only a morbid curiosity. Until it happens here in Detroit, anyway. It's the Lloyd angle that gets me.”

“I can say the Old Man is plenty interested.”

“Why did he let you in to see him? What's he want from you?”

“Well, he doesn't want me talking to you.”

Chew threw up his arms and worked his little pencil through his fingers like a magician.

“Don't you remember how you called me the other day begging for help?” He seemed to have some genuine emotion about it. “Didn't I drop what I was doing to come down and see you?”

“Out of the goodness of your heart.”

“That's how friends work, Caudill. I do a favor for you, you throw a little something my way. When you're a grown-up man, you mix your business in with your friendships. You don't think you'll find a friend who'll just heap you up with love and affection like your mother, do you?”

“I hope not.”

“I see how it is,” Chew went on. “I'm on a newspaperman's salary, and Jasper Lloyd has cash to throw around—”

Who can say how long Ray Federle had been standing in the doorway? He made no sound, but Chew and I both got the chill of it at the same time. We turned to see him there holding his hat in his hands. The entrance to the room was in shadow, and his round eyes glowed out at us.

“This fella bothering you, Pete?”

Federle stepped in with a gentle smile forced onto his face.

Though it hadn't crossed my mind before that moment, the sight of him made me think that he had been a part of it. It didn't figure, and I didn't really believe it, but I couldn't keep a flash of fear from lighting me up. I saw that Federle carried a bundle under his arm as he came toward the bed.

“I brought some clothes for you.”

“They won't let me go.”

“Sooner or later,” he said. “They won't keep you forever.” He looked Chew over. “I'm Ray Federle,” he said, shifting the bundle to his other arm so he could put out his hand.

“Chew. Hank Chew.”

“Friend of Pete, are you?”

“Not so friendly as I might have thought,” said Chew. “I'm just heading out.”

“Chew is a newspaperman,” I said.

Federle looked more sharply at him and shifted his feet on the floor.

Chew ripped out the pages with writing on them from his little book, folded them carefully, and tucked them into his vest. Then he moved to the door and grabbed his coat with some deliberation.

“Comes a time, Caudill,” he said, “give me a ring.”

Federle watched him go and then positioned himself facing the door.

“Newsman, ah? Think you'll make the papers now?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I don't think so.” I could see that Federle was looking for some signal from me to put him at ease, but I couldn't produce one. I eyed the bundle. “I won't ever fit into any clothes of yours,” I said.

“It's your things. The coppers were inside your place tromping over everything, and I asked if I could grab a few things for you.” He moved silently around the bed to sit in the chair.

“They just let you in?” I asked him.

“I told them I was a veteran and all.” He smiled and rubbed his palm over his thigh. “I come out on a disability.”

The chair by my bed was set up in front of the window, and it was hard to look beyond Federle's slender figure to see the trees. I guess I drifted off for a time—or just closed my eye—because it startled me to hear him speak again.

“Some kind of case you're working on with Chew?”

“Case?”

“I heard you talking.”

“Chew is like a buzzard. He's always looking for a story.”

“I could help you out, Pete. Let me help you out. I can handle myself. You're in no shape.”

“Don't you already have a job?”

“They got me pushing a broom,” he said.

No matter how much they doped me up, whether I was awake or asleep or distracted by talk, I couldn't escape the pain. I couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't just jump up and tear my body away and go soaring off. I was trapped inside myself, and there was no escape. It brought up a panic that set my heart to racing, which brought more throbbing pain to every part of me that had blood.

“Listen, Federle,” I said, talking low so he'd lean close, “any chance you could get your hands on a gun for me?”

He sat back in the chair. “Sure, I could, probably. But—ah—what exactly were you thinking of?”

“Something I could hold in my hand. Something that wouldn't show under a jacket.”

He mulled it over. “Sure. Maybe I can see. But what's the case?”

“I'll be out in a couple of days,” I said. “I'll come and see you.”

I could see how it hurt when he pushed himself out of the chair. Just a small grimace he tried to clamp down on.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “That's what you need.” He looked down at me tenderly, like he wanted to say something more. But then he resigned himself and walked stiffly out of the room.

To watch him go I had to shift my head, which jangled my neck so much that I saw colors. I couldn't see how I had ever been friendly enough for Federle to make him want to latch on to me like he had. Maybe he had been through something over the ocean. Maybe I reminded him of somebody else. Except for me—a sour, tangled man—the room was empty, and I was left with the idea that I should not have involved Ray Federle in the mess I was about to make. He had a woman and kids to think of. I wasn't clear in my thinking.