King of the Corner (25 page)

Joyce punched a tape into the deck—Anita Baker singing “Watch Your Step”—and dialed the volume down to a murmur. “What are you going to do about your parole officer?”

“I gave him a reference. Problem is the reference is on vacation.”

“Won’t he give you the time?”

“Maybe. The other problem is more serious. My reference may not give me a good reference.”

She drove for a few bars without speaking. Then: “I’d say you’re in deep shit, Miller.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad if I were in all the way,” he said. “All the time I was inside I couldn’t think about anything but getting out. Now that I’m out I spend all my time worrying about going back inside.”

“What you need is a seventh inning stretch.”

“What I need is a good curve.”

“Such as?”

“An edge. An angle. A pitch I can go to when my fastball loses steam.”

“There’s just no end to these horsehide analogies, is there?”

But he wasn’t listening. Most of the time it was a shell game: Will he be expecting the change-up, or should you gamble and try to burn one past him twice in succession? Have you established an unconscious pattern by not concentrating, or have you been pissing all over the lot so he doesn’t know if you’re going to throw the next one in the dirt or scream it at his head? What do the scouts say? Is he a fisherman or a scientist? Will he reach outside the box or does he play the averages, and how much does he know about you? When he goes into his stance, does he peek to see where the catcher is moving his mitt? Do you brush him back if he does, or do you buck the signal, risk catching the catcher flat-footed and putting the guy on base with a wild pitch? Or do you just say to hell with it, close your eyes, fire, and leave the rest to fate? Variables. Odds. Quantum physics. Human frailty. Wind direction. The outfield. Chance.

Sometimes—certainly not often and not quite seldom, maybe twice in a season—it came to you in a kind of voice. It wasn’t that simple, nothing was in the game, probably it was just the result of an applied momentum of assured knowledge based on scouting reports, films, scorecards, and statistics combining to create fission, but it flowed through you like a warm gel and you knew it was right. They were passing the big white marble mansions of Grosse Pointe at the time, and Doc worked it out later that that was where the thought had come from, that although the houses were bigger than in Birmingham and the money older, you can only trim the grass so close and polish the brasswork on the porches so bright.

He came out of his slouch. “What’s coming up?”

“Fisher.”

“Take it.” He gave her an address in Birmingham.

“Ritzy neighborhood. Who we going to see?”

“A woman I know. A widow.”

A
LCINA
L
ILLEY ANSWERED HER
own door. Her straight hair was pinned up, catching the light in blue aureoles, and the pale lipstick that was her only nod to cosmetic science was in place. She wore a belted blue tunic with shoulder pads, open to the collarbone, beige slacks, and blue pumps that glistened wetly. Her eyes dilated when she saw Doc standing on the porch. The smile was a beat late.

“Kevin! You should have called. I’m just going out.”

“Can it wait?” When she glanced down at the gold watch pinned to her lapel he added, “It’s about your nephew.”

“My—” Puzzlement and then understanding, and a spasmodic glance backward. “He isn’t here. He’s gone back home. I can’t think—”

“Is Starkweather Hall really your nephew?”

Her face, disciplined by many public appearances, was no kaleidoscope, but Doc was watching closely and detected the various sea changes: Shock. Panic. Anger. Denial.

Thought.

“No.”

“Is he your son?”

“Yes.”

He felt himself nodding. “I couldn’t think of any other reason you’d stick your neck out that far. Is he in there?”

“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Talk is what you want, isn’t it? Or you’d have brought the police. Is that your car? Who’s in it?”

“A friend.” He’d almost forgotten about Joyce waiting at the curb.

“Send her away. I’ll call a cab. We’ll go to Beatrice Blackwood’s apartment.”

She closed the door. He went back to the car. “You can go home now. Thanks for the ride.”

“You’re forgetting what I do for a living,” Joyce said. She had one arm laced around the crossbar of the steering wheel. “I’m supposed to just drive off and leave you there with Mahomet’s widow?”

“Maybe a reporter wouldn’t, but a friend might”

“Suppose the friend is jealous.”

“Miss Stefanik, are you declaring your undying love for me?”

“I prefer
Ms.
Stefanik.” She used her free hand to start the engine. “I expect another interview when this is over. Not for the magazine. For the news pages.”

“That’s a lot to expect for just giving me a lift.”

She unlaced her arm from the wheel and beckoned him with a finger. When he bent down, she slapped him. The noise in his head was like a bat cracking.

“When I do fall in love, it won’t be with a beanpole like you.” The Trans Am pounced forward with a yelp of rubber. He backed up quickly to avoid having his toes run over. Anita Baker’s voice trailed behind the car like spent fuel.

The cab, a Redtop, beat Mrs. Lilley to the curb. Doc, who held the door for her, noticed that she had changed to black flats to go with a black patent-leather purse. He had a paranoid flash that maybe it was the only purse she owned that would conceal a gun. Finally he decided the blue pumps were just too flashy for Beatrice Blackwood’s neighborhood.

“She know we’re coming?” he asked when they were under way.

“I called her. She doesn’t know why.”

“What’d you tell
him?
”

“Nothing. He’s sleeping. He sleeps most of the time. There’s not much else to do when you can’t go out.”

And she said nothing for the rest of the trip.

In front of the tired brownstone he had another flash. The gun theory was naïve. If she’d had time to call Beatrice Blackwood as well as the cab company, she’d had time to call others. On how many evenings had Doc seen blocks exactly like this one on the TV news, complete with covered and stretchered oblongs being carried through doors to waiting morgue wagons? In the city of a million disappearances, he’d thought to tell no one where he was going.

This time when he stood before the door on the fourth floor he heard no music, only the groans and gulps and inexplicable thuds of an old building giving in to corruption. Truman the bodyguard, who had apparently been briefed by his mistress, opened the door wide at Doc’s knock, but little light came out around his bulk encased in its customary dark suit. His great face with its patches of scar tissue was as dark as skin came but lacked sheen, absorbing illumination and giving back nothing, a black hole with eyes.

There was no visible change when he recognized Alcina Lilley, but he pivoted aside like the second door that he was. Doc followed the woman inside.

Beatrice was seated on the blue leather sofa facing the entrance. The incongruous pageboy wig was in place and she was wearing a loose flowered house-dressy thing that had probably cost as much as a formal gown and soft suede rose-colored slippers on her feet. She had traded the aluminum hospital patch over her left eye for one encrusted in jewels that glittered rainbows behind her glasses and looked like a ladies’ affectation from
la belle époch.
Lying facedown on the arm of the sofa was the large-print
Copper Sun
Doc had seen her reading the day he picked her up at the hospital. He couldn’t believe she was still reading the same book when so many pages had been turned in his own life.

“Alcina, how do you manage?” she asked, raising her hand to lay the fingers in Mrs. Lilley’s palm. “This morning Beatrice was looking at her face with her good eye and she said, ‘Girl, if you bought a dress that fit this poorly you’d take it back.’”

“Hello, Beatrice. You remember Kevin Miller.”

The hand, ungloved for once, fluttered in his. He noticed she had large knuckles. “Beatrice never forgets a handsome young man. Sit down, both of you. What can Truman get you?”

“Beatrice. He knows.”

Nothing changed on the old woman’s face. The multicolored fussiness in which she drenched herself, Doc decided, was a diversion; if Truman was a black hole she was its dense core. “Go out,” she told the bodyguard.

He left Just like that, no hesitation or argument. A moment later the old elevator clunked and wheezed, descending. Beatrice got up with little of the effort she’d shown on other occasions, went into the kitchen, and came back out carrying a fifth of Hiram Walker’s gin and three water glasses, the glasses pinched between three fingers of one hand. She set them down on a glazed rosewood-and-teak table and poured from the bottle.

“I’m not drinking,” Doc said.

“You will be.” She put down the bottle and sat down with her glass. “Alcina says you know. What do you know?”

“I know she’s Starkweather Hall’s mother because she told me, but I’d guessed that anyway. I saw him at her house the day I took her home from your party. That was the day the news broke about the police officer he killed. I didn’t know it was Hall until I saw his picture on TV that night.”

“Who’d you tell?”

“Nobody.” When Beatrice’s brows lifted: “I’m on parole. I try to avoid the law, and anyway I wasn’t sure; I’d only seen him for a second and I couldn’t figure out why Mahomet’s widow would shield a cop-killer. Also I got real busy.” He picked up his glass and sipped. Gin was his least favorite beverage, especially warm gin. But he welcomed the warmth that climbed his ribs afterward. “I’m not too swift when I’m not on the mound,” he said, looking at Mrs. Lilley now. “That’s how I wound up in prison. It wasn’t until a little while ago I figured out why you took me to that fund-raising rally with all those photographers and TV cameras there. Anyone escorting the guest of honor had to draw a lot of attention. An ex-convict former Tiger pitcher would draw even more. I got so busy giving interviews I forgot all about Hall, or at least put him on the back burner. The mayor shaking my hand was a nice bonus. Or was it an accident? Was Young involved?”

Mrs. Lilley said nothing. Beatrice lit a cigarette. “What happened to make you think that was planned?”

“Nothing specific. I just had to look at it with a clear head that wasn’t turned by all the publicity.” He didn’t mention his parole trouble. He was saving it. “Why else invite a broken-down ballplayer—and a white one at that—to a formal banquet to honor a dead civil rights leader? But I was too tangled up in myself to think of it that way. Only someone who’s been famous long enough to know what a trap it is would know how to use it as one.”

“Was it so bad?” Mrs. Lilley was seated in a pedestal chair with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap, the way he imagined she had sat countless times on platforms waiting her turn to speak. “I saw some of those interviews. You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

“What’s your part in this?” His eyes were on Beatrice.

“I raised Gordon.”

“Who’s Gordon?”

She consulted the length of ash on the end of her cigarette, then returned it to her lips without using the ashtray. “I guess you don’t know everything. Gordon Lilley, that’s his name. I never could bring myself to call him Starkweather Hall. He said it was his revolutionary alias, like Joseph Dzhugashvili calling himself Stalin and Malcolm Little calling himself X. Gordon always was a great reader. I sometimes wonder, if we’d had video games when he was growing up, whether he might have turned out different. Rogues and bandits fascinated him. He read the covers off a book about Robin Hood I gave him when he was nine.”

“I was pregnant when Gerald was killed,” Mrs. Lilley said. “He never knew, and of course it was a secret from practically everyone that he had a wife. He suspected a good many of the donations he got from women had to do with the fact that he was good-looking and had a pleasant voice; if they found out he was spoken for they might not have been so generous. That’s what he told me, anyway. I was just a girl. I believed him. I had to. Where would I go?

“I have no illusions,” she went on. “He wasn’t the kind to turn his back on temptation no matter what they say about him now. But he was discreet. I’ve always been grateful for that.”

“Does Hall know Mahomet’s his father? Is that why he joined the M-and-M’s?”

Beatrice and Mrs. Lilley exchanged glances. Something else was exchanged as well. The old madam leaned forward and laid a gray column in the ashtray. “Mahomet wasn’t the father,” she said. “Gordon’s father was Wilson McCoy.”

All the windows in the apartment were open. A car passed by on the street sounding as if it were fueled entirely by high-test rap. The beat throbbed for blocks.

Mrs. Lilley said, “It was in the house where Wilson lived with his mother, where Gerald was killed later when the police raided the place the night of that first riot, the one they called the Kercheval incident. Wilson invited me to come hear Gerald speak. I’d never been to any of the rallies. Gerald said I could get hurt if something broke out I know now he just didn’t want me to see him with women hanging all over him. I was excited. I put on my only nice dress and splashed on perfume. I had an Afro in those days, a big one. I thought I looked like Angela Davis.”

She picked up her glass and took a healthy swallow. “Gerald wasn’t there, of course. No one was except Wilson. Even his mother was out, shopping for ribs and collards for her little boy. He said I was early and wouldn’t I come in and sit on the couch and wait for the others.” She laughed shortly, a dry rustling sound. “I don’t know how Wilson got his women, but if it was by rape he wasn’t as lazy as I thought he was. He was puny and he had the first sunken chest I ever saw; I remember thinking he must’ve been in some kind of accident. I almost fought him off, you believe it? A sixteen-year-old girl who didn’t have anything like the height she’d grow into. But he had a lot of energy, and he was crazy. When he got down to it, it didn’t take much time at all.

“He wouldn’t even drive me home afterwards. I walked, crying all the way. Alcina in her big hair and torn dress with her nose running.”