King of the Corner (30 page)

“Paper trail. That’s the only printout. I erased the disc.”

“Thanks, Jeff. Ance said you were the best accountant around.”

“Just don’t tell anyone where you got it.” He moved on to speak to Neal, who had recovered enough to thank him for coming.

Charlie Battle let go of Doc’s hand quickly and tried to walk past. Doc touched his chest, stopping him.

“I can’t tell you, Doc,” Battle said.

“You don’t have to say anything. Just nod or shake your head. Was one of them Antonio Lewis?”

The sergeant made no response, verbal or otherwise. He didn’t have to. Doc had made a career out of reading batters’ faces.

T
HE CENTER OF THE COMPLEX
and wonderful political machine that kept Mayor Coleman A. Young in office was not so much mechanical as confectionery, and reminded Doc of the “red hot” candies he had enjoyed as a boy with their alternating layers of wintergreen and pungent cinnamon that chilled and burned his tongue by turns.

The outer layer, and the most obviously cosmetic one, was black. It consisted of the United Negro College Fund types with whom Young liked to surround himself in public, personable young men in conservative suits like the mayor’s and the trademark black-rimmed glasses whose polished lenses flashed semaphores at press conferences and testimonial dinners. The faces changed periodically as their owners discovered that holding the chief’s coat and laughing at his off-color jokes didn’t automatically lead to a private office in the City-County Building, but the breed remained pure. The next layer was white and included Young’s personal business advisers and representatives who circulated throughout the monied suburbs surrounding the city and returned with their briefcases bulging with working capital. The most powerful of these, Kenneth Weiner, had fallen from grace as well as from his post as a civilian deputy chief of police—a porkbarrel job given to him as a reward for his successes as CEO of Detroit Technologies, the mayor’s private investment company and hitherto the best-kept secret in the fish bowl of corporate America. Black for the next layer, an entire squad of the Detroit Police Department who answered to Young alone and whose duties included the mayor’s safety, investigation into the private lives of his political opponents, and transportation for his sister.

The last layer before the man himself was inarguably white. Press Secretary Bob Berg—blond, late thirties, goatee and moustache as fair as his skin, and that fair enough to wash right out in the glare of the TV strobe lights under which he lived—briefed Young before press conferences, read statements to the media on those not infrequent occasions when the mayor chose not to present himself for grilling and the inevitable display of temper, and stood sentry on the rainbow bridge to Asgard when the last of the less intransigent barriers had been breached. When Young elected not to be available, this mild, humorless man attired as often as not in his casual and distinctly non-urban tweed sportcoat with patch lapels was as close as anyone, senator or shop steward, ever came.

At that it was a long trip, and after four days of listening to recorded music over the telephone and reading magazines in beige waiting rooms equipped with matching receptionists downtown, Doc considered that the mayor’s press secretary was as hard to get an interview with as most mayors. On the morning of the fifth day, while studying the brushstrokes in an abstract painting in the reception room outside the office of an assistant drain commissioner or something to whom Doc had been directed by an even more obscure official whose name and tide he’d forgotten, he heard his name called and turned to face Bob Berg.

The blond man was taller than he appeared on television and a little less pale. He offered neither handshake nor greeting. “What’s your business with the mayor, Mr. Miller?”

“It’s personal.”

“I have his confidence.”

With his good hand Doc slid a thick envelope from his inside breast pocket and held it out. It was creased and a little limp from carrying.

It’s an American trait to accept automatically anything that is proffered. Berg didn’t possess the trait. “What is it, please?”

“Don’t worry, it isn’t a letter bomb.” Doc smiled.

“Now I know what it isn’t”

“It’s a newspaper article.”

“What is the subject?”

“He’ll know that when he reads it.”

“If it’s about him perhaps he already has. In which paper did it appear?”

“It hasn’t. Yet. I thought he might like to take a look at it before it does.”

Berg’s face was as blank as the envelope. Doc was prepared to admit that the man had that nothing-back stare down better than Doc himself. After an interval during which the air-conditioning system whirred without distraction, Berg took the envelope. “Is there a number where you can be reached?”

The telephone hadn’t been installed yet in the new apartment and he was unwilling to direct calls to Neal’s home. He gave Joyce Stefanik’s number. “Leave a message.”

“If you haven’t heard from me by the end of next week you’ve been denied an appointment.” The press secretary turned and left through the glass door to the corridor.

Doc stayed home that Saturday to direct the deliverymen who brought his furniture. He hadn’t been to the ballfield since the shooting. The last time he’d gone past, the entire lot was encircled by a yellow POLICE—DO NOT PASS tape stapled to surveyors’ stakes. No arrests had been made in the case after the two young Pony Down members were released.

The only reason he’d gone there at all had been to move the last of his possessions out of Neal and Billie’s house. In his old room, surrounded by Sean’s Masters of the Universe posters and the toy soldiers on the wallpaper, he felt the boy’s absence as tangibly as the presence of another person in the room. When he pulled open a drawer to take out his shirts, a stack of video games on top of the chest fell over with a clatter. Restacking them, among the alien invaders, dinosaurs, and swordsmen and sorcerers, he found a cassette still in plastic shrink-wrap. The box bore a picture of Babe Ruth swinging at the plate and the tide
Home Run! The Sultan of Swat in the 1927 World Series.
He didn’t know if Sean had bought the game for him as a gift or if he meant to play it himself. He put it in the box with his things.

Downstairs, holding the box awkwardly under his good arm, he waited while Billie opened the door for him. Before she closed it behind him she asked him to take care of himself. They were the first words she’d spoken to him since the funeral.

On Monday he took a bus to an employment agency and filled out an application. Under SITUATION WANTED he wrote “Athletic coach.” The clerk he handed it to, a small black woman wearing a red wig that reminded Doc of Beatrice Blackwood’s black pageboy, looked it over and asked him if he had a teaching certificate.

“No.”

“We’ll see what we can do.” She laid the sheet in a drawer and closed it on his aspirations.

He’d seen Kubitski to report that he’d left Maynard Ance’s employ. The parole officer sucked on his pipe, adjusted his fan, and said he expected to hear that Doc had landed a steady job by next month’s appointment. He made no mention of their last meeting. It was obvious Charlie Battle had been in touch with him. Doc was apathetic. If everything worked out he would never need to see Kubitski again or smell his rotten-apple tobacco.

When he got back from the employment agency he found Joyce’s Trans Am parked in front of the duplex. She came out from the back wearing a white tennis outfit that showed off her tanned arms and legs. After they kissed he said, “Message?”

“I slid it under your door. Should we celebrate?”

“When I get back. If there’s anything to celebrate.”

The office to which the message directed him was in the 300 Tower of the Renaissance Center, Mayor Young’s first brainchild and a paean to the parsimony of late-twentieth-century architecture, standing like a display of disposable plastic drinking cups against the ornate dignity of the Albert Kahn designs from Prohibition that still dominated downtown in spite of the current administration’s best efforts to eradicate the city’s history. Doc felt a stomach chill when he entered the pastel lobby, as if the conditioned air that evaporated the sweat on the back of his neck had gone on to form icicles in his intestines; the central structure of the combination mall and office complex was the Westin Hotel, where Doc had hosted the party that had led to his imprisonment. Knowing what he did of the mayor’s political methodology, he doubted that the choice of meeting places was a coincidence. It was a thirty-fourth-floor office and somewhat modest for that address, with a small deserted reception room done in gray tweed and decorated with framed Certificates of Community Service awarded to one Andrew S. Beloit. Doc had just started knocking on the door bearing Beloit’s name when a familiar voice on the other side called out, “Come on in, Doc.”

The inner office had more tweed, white leather panels, and recessed lighting. The entire back wall was tinted glass and looked straight uptown past the assembled skyscrapers and the Fisher and General Motors buildings to where the city lay down and stretched its limbs, merging with the suburbs so smoothly that it was impossible to tell where the leviathan left off and the pilot fish began. Doc could see the crumbling warehouses near the river between which the square, bug-eyed combat vehicles of the Purple Gang and the Little Jewish Navy and the Oakland Sugar House Mob and all the other rumrunners broadsided one another with Thompsons for the Canadian routes during the dry years, and farmer up he could see the greensward of overgrown lots where buildings had stood on Kercheval and Twelfth Street before they were burned down in the riots. He saw long straight stretches of pavement where Mustangs and Cobras and Thunderbirds laid rubber when gasoline and motorists’ lives were cheap, crowded now with cars half their size and shaped like suppositories, and every third one Japanese. It was like standing on a high girder in the open air. He grasped the edge of the door, certain that the floor was tilting out from under his feet. He knew then beyond doubt why the mayor had chosen this location. It was impossible to come upon that vista unprepared and maintain one’s emotional footing.

“Sit down, Doc.”

Coleman A. Young was seated with his back to the window behind a desk with nothing on its glass top but a telephone and the mayor’s elbows. He was wearing a tan silk double-breasted suit and a brown-and-blue-striped tie on a blue shirt. He seemed to be contemplating a thorny equation on a pocket calculator in his hands, his glasses perched on the end of his nose less than an inch from the device.

Trying to look as if he were walking across a level surface, Doc found his way to a padded chair facing the desk. On the wall above his head hung a diploma in a frame informing him that Andrew Saville Beloit had graduated from the Detroit Institute of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering in 1974. Beloit kept what Doc assumed were his blonde wife and towheaded daughter in a plastic cube on a leaf to Young’s left.

When nothing had been said after a minute, Doc thought the mayor was listening to CNN on the nineteen-inch color TV set on the shelf next to the photographs.

“Damn!” Young threw the thing he’d been fiddling with onto the desk. It wasn’t a calculator at all, but a baseball diamond under transparent plastic with steel BB’s skating across its surface. The object of the game seemed to be to place all the BB’s in holes corresponding to player positions. “If my eyes wasn’t any better than this when I was in the Air Corps I could speak Japanese today.”

“I thought maybe you were upset about that earthquake in Chile.”

Young glanced toward the set “That? That’s company.”

More likely, Doc thought, it was a mask to confuse anyone who might be listening in. At any given time there were several investigations going on into the mayor’s public and private affairs.

“I didn’t know you were that interested in baseball. I mean beyond wanting to build a new stadium for the Tigers.”

But the conversation wasn’t going to head that way. The man behind the desk opened a drawer and tossed a fair thickness of typewritten pages on Doc’s side. It was creased down the middle, and Doc knew without reading that it was the draft of the newspaper article he had given Bob Berg.

“This is all hearsay and innuendo.” It came out “inooendo”; it was a Colemanism to pronounce any word longer than two syllables as if he had just learned it that morning. “Where’s your evidence?”

Doc took the sheaf of computer-printed information Jeff Dolan had given him out of his pocket and placed it on top of the portable baseball game. Young poked up his glasses, thumbed through the pages, and thrust them back at him. “Summarize it.”

“It’s a breakdown of all the investment activity involving Detroit Technologies over the past two years,” Doc said. “That’s your firm. Putting aside extraneous transactions, the company maintains limited partnerships in several local businesses. One of those businesses holds controlling interest in various area investment properties. One of those properties is a men’s clothing store on Gratiot. The store is a front for a drug operation run by the Marshals of Mahomet. Your Honor, you own a crack house.”

Young had lifted the telephone receiver and was punching buttons. Doc listened to the conversation for a moment, then let his attention drift to the WJR traffic helicopter wobbling over the cityscape outside the window.

The receiver banged down. “Now I don’t own a clothing store. You can have your friend rewrite the article to say that as soon as the mayor found out what his business advisers had acquired without his knowledge or consent, he got rid of it. Miss Stefanik has a nice style, by the way.”

Doc was surprised and a little worried until he remembered that he’d given Joyce’s telephone number to Bob Berg. Tracing it would have been no trick for Young, unlisted or not. Doc said, “I’m just getting started. I guess you and Alcina Lilley are pretty good friends.”

“Now, just what in the hell is
that
supposed to mean?” Young was working himself up to one of his famous tirades.