King of the Corner (8 page)

Kingswood Manor was a quiet complex set back from the road with potted trees on the balconies and patios and a taxi stand in front. Doc paid the driver and went in through the main entrance. Finding the inner door locked, he studied the rows of mailboxes built into the wall and pushed the button next to R. TABER. When there was no answering buzz after his second attempt, he pressed another button at random. A buzzer sounded and he went through the door.

Sunlight slanted through a tall window at the end of the corridor on the sixth floor. When he knocked on 612, the door moved. He knocked again, then pushed it open.

The living room was large and took up most of the apartment, with a kitchenette to the left and a door at the back that he assumed led into a bedroom. Parts of a newspaper, or of several newspapers, lay in tents on a blonde pile carpet and a smell of stale tobacco hung in the air like shabby laundry. On a green vinyl Strato-lounger a man lay as if in state, with his stockinged feet on the swing-out footrest and his head on the cushioned back. He was a blocky, fortyish six feet and two hundred pounds in a white shirt and dark trousers with gray in his short rumpled brown hair and looked like a truck driver, or what a truck driver used to look like before power steering. Between the first two fingers of his right hand resting on the chair arm a cigarette had burned down to the flesh and gone out

For a second Doc thought he’d found his second dead body in twelve hours. Then something broke loose and a fierce racking snore made him jump. After that the noise became rhythmic. It remained loud.

A pony glass and a fifth of Ten High two-thirds empty stood on an end table next to the chair. Doc thought he knew something about Taber then, if this was Taber. It was a special kind of drunk that didn’t wake up when a cigarette scorched the tender flesh between his fingers.

Doc didn’t try to wake him. In a desk with a pullout leaf he found paper and pencils, wrote a note explaining that he was from Maynard Ance and that he was taking the car, signed it, and left it on the leaf, weighting it down with a dirty ashtray. Taber was still snoring when he went out.

A small paved parking lot for the tenants elled behind the building. Four cars were parked there early on a working afternoon and none of the plates matched the number on the key ring Ance had given him. Walking around the outside of the complex to see if there was more to the lot, he spotted a Coachmen motor home as long as a city block, parked next to the building with two wheels up on the berm that flanked the driveway. The numbers checked out. He hadn’t paid much attention when Ance had referred to it as a bus.

The inside was a higher climb than Neal’s pickup. Both front seats were mounted on swivels. Behind them was a dining nook, a stove and refrigerator, a couple of fold-down beds, plenty of drawers and cabinets, a closet of a bathroom with a stainless steel basin and a chemical toilet, and something next to it that had a drain in the floor and so might have been a tiny shower before someone had installed bars around it that opened on one side, turning it into a cell.

The tallest of the cabinets was locked. He unlocked it with a small brass key that didn’t match the others on the ring. Two shotguns, one with a cut-down barrel, a .30–30 Winchester carbine, assorted handguns, and a Thompson submachine gun glistened under a sheen of oil inside foam-lined compartments. Doc had never seen a Thompson outside of old-time gangster movies. The guards on the catwalks at Jackson had carried rifles. He removed the full-length shotgun, a twin of the Ithaca his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday to hunt rabbits, and inspected the breech. It was loaded. He wondered if that was legal in a motor vehicle in Michigan. He wondered if that mattered with the bail bondsman. Feeling suddenly that someone was watching him, Doc put back the weapon and closed and locked the cabinet. Just holding the gun was a violation of parole.

The motor home’s controls were the same as a car’s. He started the motor and, proceeding slowly—he had never tried to maneuver anything so large—pulled forward into the parking lot and backed and turned the wheel and went forward again and backed again, angling the vehicle’s nose out toward the road. He was straightening it for the last time, using both big side mirrors to avoid hitting parked cars, when a face came to the window on the driver’s side eight feet above the ground. Startled, he stamped on the brake.

The face’s mouth was moving, distorting it, but he recognized the man he had left snoring in apartment 612. He rolled down the window.

“—going, you son of a bitch?” The cab filled with the stench of half-digested whiskey.

Doc said, “Maynard Ance’s office. I left you a note. Want to come along?”

“Give me them keys.” An arm in a white sleeve flashed past Doc’s face. Instinctively he slapped it up with his left hand. Taber almost fell off the step but caught hold of the mirror post and hauled himself back up. “Fucking prick cocksucking car thief bastard.” Doc rolled up the window quickly.

An open palm struck the glass, flattening out like a ham and shooting hairline cracks in four directions. Doc’s foot slipped off the brake pedal, and the Coachmen lurched forward. Taber, still off-balance from his own blow, lost his grip on the mirror post and dropped below the window.

Doc braked again a few feet ahead and opened the door to look back. Taber was sitting on the pavement. He hadn’t put on shoes before leaving the apartment and the soles of his socks were filthy. After a few seconds he pushed himself to his knees, rested, and started to get up, cursing loudly the whole time. For a moment Doc was indecisive. Then he yanked the door shut and accelerated. His last view of Taber as he pulled out into Livernois was a flash in the right side mirror of a man running after him, mouth working silently.

Driving along, one hour into his new job, Doc wondered if five hundred a week was going to be enough.

S
TANDING IN THE DIRT
lot behind the office, Maynard Ance scowled at the cracked window, crushed another half-smoked cigarette under his toe, and spat after it as if to make sure it was out. “Lucky I got glass insurance. What’d he use?”

“His hand.” Doc played with the keys.

“Hope he didn’t bust it like last time.”

“He’s done this before?”

“No. Tried to punch a hole in a block wall. Taber’s one mean drunk. He isn’t anybody’s Mother Theresa sober, but when he gets a snootful he’s worse’n the bleeding shits. You’re lucky it was just the window.” He brightened; or at least became less dour. “So how do you like the bus? I had it customized.”

“I didn’t think it came with the cell.”

“Oh, that. That came later. I used handcuffs until this Robbery Armed we were bringing back from Chicago snapped the chain and brained Taber with a jack handle. Taber was driving and we ran up a bank and turned over. I busted my collarbone. The scroat was a pro wrestler, the Mad Sheik or the Hindu Warrior, some crap like that. About a thousand cops tied him down in Evanston ten days later and I was out eighty grand plus the hospital bill and five hundred bucks deductible on the bus. That’s when I ordered the bars. They’re made of the same kind of steel they use on the space shuttle. The torch hasn’t been made that can cut through them.”

“Ever use them?”

“Wilson McCoy was going to be the first one, but Taber and me missed connections. Well, that’s why you’re here. Let’s go to Redford.” He walked around to the passenger’s side.

Doc got in and started the engine. “Quite an arsenal back there.”

“Checked it out, did you?” The bail bondsman cut him a quick glance from the other seat. “The tommy gun’s just for looks. You’d be surprised how fast they come around when you slam one into the breech. One thing these scroats know is their Eddie Robinson flicks.”

They had been on the road several minutes when Ance spoke again, his eyes on the scenery. “Don’t worry, it’s legal. A motor home isn’t a vehicle behind the front seats. We could be hauling around a loaded howitzer.”

“Which we’re not.”

“Too hard to get shells.”

They arrived at the address in Redford a few minutes ahead of the appointed time. There was just room enough to park the Coachmen in the driveway of a red brick house with an attached garage and a picture window in front. A small white-haired woman in a gray wool dress and orange beads answered the door.

“Mrs. Wizotsky? I’m Maynard Ance. This is my associate Kevin Miller.” It was a manner Doc had not previously seen in the bail bondsman.

She grasped her beads. The creases from her nose to the corners of her mouth were as deep as gashes and there were pink swellings like welts under her eyes. Doc noted with a start that she was at least ten years younger than his first estimate; fifty at most. She said something welcoming and got out of their way. The living room was small, neat, the furniture fairly new but unremarkable. It looked like a display in a discount furniture store. Family pictures crowded the mantel of the gas fireplace, the only personal items in the room.

“Thanks for coming. I’m Howard Wizotsky.”

Ance and Doc shook hands in turn with the man who got up from the sofa when they came in. He looked younger than his wife but was probably about the same age, a solid man starting to go soft around the middle in a blue work shirt and slacks with shards of gray in his black crew cut. His hands were heavily calloused, with square, thick nails, and his face was burned reddish brown and grainy as if from long exposure to the sun or some other source of dry heat.

The men sat down. Mrs. Wizotsky turned off the TV set in the middle of a commercial for a trade school and went to the kitchen for coffee. “I hear you work at McLouth,” Ance told her husband. “I poured steel a couple of summers when I was going to Wayne State.”

“They laid me off last week. Business went all to hell when GM took the Saturn to Tennessee.”

“Bastards. They’ll have to do a lot more than dump Roger Smith to turn that board around. Where’s your son?”

“Oakland County Jail. Bond’s twenty-five thousand dollars. All he did was take a car out for a joy ride. I’m not defending it. I stole a pack of Juicy Fruit from a newsstand when I was eight; my old man broke his hand on my ass and I never took another thing without paying for it in my life. Maybe I should’ve broken mine on Roy a long time ago. But, Jesus, twenty-five grand! It’s not like he took a shot at the mayor.”

“Collect the bounty, huh?” Ance grinned.

Wizotsky made an exhausted smile.

“I called the Pontiac Police this afternoon,” the bail bondsman said. “Your boy shoved a salesman out the passenger’s door during a test drive. The salesman landed on his head. He’s been unconscious for thirty-six hours. The county prosecutor is talking assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder. Your son’s nineteen. That’s a mandatory one to five in this state.”

“Fucking yuppie made more on his worst day than I did in a week frying in that plant. Roy’s been working for minimum wage since he was sixteen.”

“The man’s a human being, Howard.” Mrs. Wizotsky set a tray containing three steaming cups and a sugar bowl on the coffee table and took a seat on the edge of an upholstered chair with her hands in her lap.

“Fuck him. He’s got insurance. I want my son out of that hole before he gets nailed by a bunch of fag bikers.”

“There’d be a lot more chance of that if he were in the Wayne County lock-up. They get a better class of scroat in Oakland.” Ance tore open three packets of Sweet’n Low and stirred the contents into his coffee. “How much can you raise?”

“I can scratch up ten percent. That’s customary, right?”

“Do you have any collateral?”

“The house is paid for. I’ve got eight more payments to make on the car.”

“Model and year?”

“’Eighty-eight Celebrity. It’s got less than forty thousand miles on it,” Wizotsky added hopefully.

The bail bondsman pulled a face. “I’ll need you to sign the deed to the house over to the M. W. Ance Bail Bond Service. We can do it in your lawyer’s office if you want.”

The couple exchanged a look. Wizotsky said, “We weren’t planning on signing anything over. If we wanted to put up the house we’d’ve just mortgaged again.”

“But you came to me instead, because you know a bank or a mortgage company can take up to six weeks processing your application and all that time your boy will be sitting in jail. I’m prepared to go straight to my bank from here, get a cashier’s check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, and head right up to Pontiac with it this afternoon, unless you want your lawyer present when the deed changes hands. Roy will be home in time for supper.”

Another look. Mrs. Wizotsky said, “Would you excuse us?”

Ance said certainly and put his hands on the arms of his chair, but the couple got to their feet first and went through a swinging door into what Doc supposed was the kitchen. While they were gone the bail bondsman sat back, shook a cigarette out of his wrinkled pack, studied the brand name printed on one end, then put it back in the pack and returned the pack to his pocket. “Nice place,” he said. “Clean.”

Howard Wizotsky came back alone. The skin around his mouth was the color of a clenched knuckle. “I keep everything in a strongbox upstairs,” he said without looking at anyone. He crossed the room without stopping and mounted the steps off the entryway. In the kitchen, pots and pans clattered. “My first wife was like that,” Ance told Doc. “Bang, clang, kee-rash, every time we had a fight. After she left I had to throw out every pot I owned. None of ’em would hold water.”

“What did you fight about?”

“Same thing I fought with all of them about. I never talked to them, they said.”

Mrs. Wizotsky came out finally, looking unruffled, and freshened the cups from a glass carafe. Ance and she were agreeing that coffee never tasted as good as it used to from old-fashioned percolators when Wizotsky came down with the deed to the house and quarter-acre lot. Ance put on his glasses to read it, then produced a long stiff fold of paper from an inside pocket. Wizotsky squinted at it, patting his pockets, then accepted Ance’s reading glasses and slid them down the sheet like a magnifying lens, his lips moving as he read. Finally he spread the paper on the coffee table and used a fountain pen Ance gave him to sign at the bottom. His wife was next, then the bail bondsman, and finally Doc added his signature as witness. Ance fished a notary seal out of a side pocket and clamped the lower left-hand corner. He pocketed the two documents and stood to shake Wizotsky’s hand. “You’ll get it back at the preliminary.”