King of the Corner (22 page)

“I thought that was you I saw coming in,” Taber said. “You’re hard to miss.”

Doc said hello and that it had been a while. He kept his hands on the table. There was a kind of dangerous glow on the ex-cop’s face that he’d seen in the parking lot of the Kingswood Manor Apartments when Taber had tried to push his hand through the window of the Coachmen.

“Ance fired me yesterday,” Taber said. “On the phone.”

“I didn’t hear. I’m sorry.”

“He said he didn’t need two drivers. He said I’m unreliable.” He had trouble with the last word.

Joyce said, “Excuse me. I think I’ll visit the ladies’ room.” She slid toward the edge of the booth. Taber put a hand on her shoulder. It dipped under the sudden weight.

“You sure can pick ’em for looks.” He petted her with his eyes. “Funny, I thought you went for that dark meat.”

None of the other diners seemed to be aware of the scene. The big waiter was preparing to ignite a dish of cheese for the table across the aisle. Doc said, “Let her out, Taber.”

Taber squeezed. The skin of Joyce’s shoulder yellowed under the pressure of his fingers. She unclipped the gold pencil from her notebook and fisted it like an icepick.

“Baseball Joe ought to be sharing the wealth. He’s got my job and two girls. He can keep the nigger. I’ll just—”

Flame gushed up in the tail of Doc’s eye. He swept the dish off the cart and sidearmed it into Taber’s face. The ex-cop shrieked, more from fear than pain, and cupped his face in his hands. Doc came out of the booth, barking a hip on the edge of the table, hooked his foot behind Taber’s near ankle, and shoved him with both hands. The cart fell over and he went down in a tangle of limbs. Doc pulled Joyce to her feet by her wrist and headed for the door.

The Greek fisherman called after them, “Your bill!”

Doc pointed at the man trying to get up off the floor. “It’s on him.”

“My hero,” said Joyce under the awning. The rain ran off the canvas in a sheet.

“I was rescuing him, not you. Were you really going to stab him?”

“The pen is mightier—”

“Shut the hell up.” He waved at a passing cab. Two cabs later he got a driver to stop.

W
HEN
D
OC ENTERED THE OFFICE
Monday morning, Maynard Ance was poking through an ashtray with the eraser end of a pencil looking for a smokable butt. Finally he found one an inch and a quarter long, sniffed at it, made a face, and threw it and the rest of the contents into his wastebasket. Spotting Doc then he grunted and fished inside a side pocket of his trousers. His arm went in almost up to the elbow. “Count that.” He tossed a roll of bills the size of a softball at Doc.

Doc reported thirty-two thousand in hundreds and fifties.

“’Kay, go down to Frank Murphy Hall and bail out those M-and-M’s the cops arrested at the armory. Bring back what’s left.” Ance poured himself a cup of coffee.

“They’re clients?”

“As of about twenty minutes ago, when their p.d. called. Drug dealers are a good risk, generally speaking. They can raise the cash in a hurry, and they don’t stiff you on account of they may need you again. ’Course, they stand about a seventy-two percent better chance of getting dead at an early age than your average citizen, but the payoff’s worth the gamble and it’s all in cash. No sense bothering Uncle Sam.”

Doc pocketed the bills, then switched them to his other pants pocket. They made too big a bulge on the side where he carried his keys. “Have they been arraigned?”

“No, otherwise I’d know the amount. Here are the names.” He tore a page off his telephone pad and gave it to Doc. “Wait till they’re all out of the courtroom before you pay the clerk. That way you won’t have to give any of them a ride. I need you back here in case something comes up.” He studied Doc’s face. “Doesn’t look like Taber laid a glove on you. I heard you mixed it up yesterday.”

Doc was a little in awe until he remembered that Ance owned half of the Acropolis. “Just a scuffle. He’s a mean drunk. He said you fired him.”

“I’ve fired him before. This time I mean it to take. I can’t go around picking up jumpers in cabs because my ride didn’t show. It makes me look like an amateur. How’d it go with Joycie?”

“Fine.” He couldn’t help grinning.

Ance read him immediately. “I hope you took precautions. We don’t need any little Stefaniks running around taking all the fun out of the bail business.” He sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone.

A gray-haired bailiff taking a cigarette break on the steps of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice directed Doc to the courtroom where the arraignments were taking place. Doc dawdled over a cup of coffee in the cafeteria, then went on up and found a seat in the last row of the gallery. The seven members of the Marshals of Mahomet who had been arrested for attempting to disrupt the fundraising banquet were brought out one by one. Doc knew only Austin Yarnell, George McClellan Creed, and Epithelial Lewis, none of whom looked particularly cowed by his circumstances; it would take more than the dowdy blue coveralls of the Wayne County Jail to take the strut out of Needles Lewis with his wispy moustache and checkerboard haircut. Standing by the public defender waiting for the large black judge to look up from his papers, he craned his head around, spotted Doc, and grinned fit to split his head in two. Doc couldn’t help smiling back.

Doc couldn’t help smiling, period. On the way in to work he had remembered to stop at a florist’s and send roses to Joyce Stefanik’s apartment in Royal Oak, where they had spent all Sunday afternoon and part of the evening listening to the rain stroking the roof and trying to match it with some strokes of their own. The sex had been awkward and sloppy and embarrassing like sex everywhere, and even more so because Doc was out of practice; and immensely satisfying. Joyce had an athletic body, tanned all over—she said she spent more time at the tanning parlor in the next block than she did at home—and, so far as Doc could determine from an exhaustive inventory, no inhibitions. Afterward they had showered, gone to dinner in Royal Oak, and parted in the foyer of her building with a long kiss and an agreement to go out again next week. He didn’t know whether he had Taber to thank for tipping the balance. Retracing these things the next day you never knew where they would have led had one or two items been out of sequence.

He wondered if Joyce would still write her article.

Needles was the last of the M-and-M’s to be arraigned. Bail was set at twenty-five hundred dollars. As the officer was leading him out, Doc went up to the clerk, got an accounting of the total bond for the seven Marshals—it came to $25,000, including Yarnell, who had had a bench warrant out for his arrest for failure to appear on a cocaine possession charge and whose bail was consequently set at $7,500, and a member Doc didn’t know who had five thousand slapped on him for an incident in the police van on the way to headquarters—and armed with his receipt climbed into the Coachmen and drove down to the jail, a slab of gray granite covering an entire city block that made no attempt to look like anything but what it was. The black-enameled bars in the windows were as big around as Doc’s ankles.

His instructions from Ance had ended twenty minutes ago. He waited another half hour for Needles. When he appeared, having traded his county blues for khaki parachute pants and an old green corduroy shirt unbuttoned to expose his smooth hairless chest, Doc offered him a ride. He shrugged, handed the clerk a receipt for his gold watch, chains, and a couple of hundred dollars in folded tens and twenties, and accompanied Doc out the door.

“Where can I drop you?” Doc asked, turning the key in the ignition.

Needles directed him to a men’s clothing store on Gratiot.

“Buying a suit?”

“I live there.” He slouched down and rested his head on the back of the seat.

Doc cracked the window on his side. His passenger smelled of that sweet dispenser soap they used at the jail.

The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story brick building of thirties vintage and had the look of a place that had always been there, acknowledging the changing scene by replacing the old baroque cash register with a computer and cautiously adjusting the lapels and cuffs on the mannequins in the windows. Illuminated indirectly by tracks aimed at the walls and not at all through the plate-glass front in the perennial shade of taller buildings on all four sides, it was a cube of gently bred silence sandwiched between a deep pile carpet the color of the blood of an earlier generation and thick cork panels in the ceiling. When the door opened a gong sounded that might have been under water. Entering with Needles Lewis, Doc felt the same muting sensation he had felt upon stepping across the threshold of the Brown & Kilmer Funeral Home.

A beautiful old man almost as tall as Doc in a gray flannel three-piece that looked as soft as smoke, with a mane of thick hair to his collar and a spade-shaped beard, both too white not to have been helped along chemically, started their way across the carpet, then saw Needles and stopped. Doc was sure he bowed. Needles passed him without saying anything, embroidering a path between racks of suits and shirts stacked on shelves and trousers hung by their cuffs in rows like hanging files, and went through a door at the back marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Doc followed hesitantly. He wasn’t sure he was expected to, but Needles had made no sign of farewell.

Behind the door the store’s elegant facade disintegrated rapidly. A twelve-foot hallway with brown linoleum worn down in patches to the concrete slab beneath led past tall fly-specked windows that Doc realized when he looked through them were the backs of two-way mirrors offering a view of the dressing rooms. He had heard that such things existed in some establishments to prevent shoplifting, but this was his first evidence of them, and he resolved never again to try on a pair of trousers in a store.

Around a corner and up a steep flight of stairs with a rubber runner that looked as if it had been used to sharpen knives, and Doc stopped abruptly on a dim landing to avoid colliding with Needles, who had paused to knock on a door without markings. The knock was a complicated one; Doc was still working it out when the door opened two inches. No light came out from the other side.

“Me,” Needles said. “I brung someone.”

“Who?”

“A friend. His name’s Doc.”

Doc was aware he was being scrutinized. After a moment a switch snapped and light knifed out onto the landing, dazzling him. The door opened the rest of the way. Doc followed Needles on through.

The apartment, if that’s what it was, took up the whole second floor, with doors leading to what were probably a bedroom and bathroom. A buff-and-blue rug that looked Eastern and expensive covered the hardwood floor to within four feet of the walls, which were painted a luminous blue that hurt Doc’s pupils, still adjusting from the gloom of the landing. The sofas and upholstered chairs looked new. There were two refrigerators, a stove, microwave, and two-basin sink, a TV with a forty-eight-inch screen, a CD stereo on a shelf with four six-foot speakers spotted around the room, and a waist-high counter with a Formica top covered with beakers and a Bunsen burner and other items Doc had seen in old mad-scientist movies. He was a moment figuring that one out. He didn’t have to figure out the folding card table in the corner with its assortment of semi-automatic pistols and what looked like an Uzi knocked down into a dozen components. There were boxes of cartridges everywhere, even on the sofa cushions.

The man at the door closed and locked it. He was black, not much taller than five feet, with a large, close-cropped head and the compact hard-muscled frame of a circus acrobat in a blue knit polo shirt, gray twill slacks, and what looked like alligator shoes dyed to match the slacks. Doc figured the shoes alone had cost more than either of his own two suits. The man was holding a square black MAC-10 machine pistol that looked something like a toaster on a handle. He was perhaps nineteen.

“Sure he ain’t wearing a wire?” he asked Needles.

“Sure. Whyn’t you clean this place up? You expecting a fucking war, spicks gonna come up here from Colombia and tip over the block?”

“I seen him someplace. Thirteen hundred, maybe.”

“Jesus Christ, he bailed me out. He works for Maynard Ance. This here’s Doc
Miller.
He played ball.” To Doc: “Sylvanus got busted once on account of a snitch was wearing a wire. Now he frisks his mama.”

“Wire caught fire, that’s why they didn’t get enough to keep me.” Sylvanus was showing all his teeth. He had a lot of jaw and it looked like the grille of an old Buick. “Jump around and slap his chest like a big old bird. His cop friends thought he was getting done. Bust in and throw me down and kneel on top of me and screw they pieces in my ears, call me nigger and motherfucker. Judge throwed it all out. No probable cause, he said. I had sixteen kilos in a suitcase under the bed.” He changed hands on the MAC-10 and stuck out his right. “I’m Silly Dee.”

“That’s his rap name,” Needles said. “Sylvanus Porter don’t rhyme so easy.”

Sylvanus broke off the handshake, deposited the machine pistol on the card table, and moved to a more formidable weapon, the stereo, switching it on. The floor thumped to the beat of recorded synthesizers. Bouncing with it, he sang: “I’m Silly Dee / and it seems to me / crack’s just the way / we stay in the play / ’cause the white man barks / we can’t play his park / ’cause we’re just too dark / ’less we gots the green / to make his team.”

He was starting a second chorus when Needles flipped off the machine. “Sylvanus got M. C. Hammer scared shitless. Meantime he’s the best cooker in town.”

“Cooker?”

“We don’t grow that shit.” Sylvanus jerked his thumb toward the chemical apparatus on the counter.

He’d retreated into his earlier dark mood. No musician liked to have his performance interrupted.

Doc asked, “Do they know downstairs what you’re doing up here?”

Needles had opened one of the refrigerators. He offered Doc a Stroh’s, got turned down, and took one for himself, using an opener under the sink. “What they know don’t mean shit. M-and-M’s own this building.” He put away a third of the bottle’s contents in one swig.