Stress (3 page)

McCoy dragged in a lungful of smoke. When he spoke his vocal cords were constricted. “I ain’t. I expected to, but something went bad. I call you when I got it. You box up the guns meanwhile.”

The son of a bitch. Drag him clear down here just to listen to the Rotarians speech. It was lesson time.

“Thing is, this is perishable goods. If you don’t have the pony, I know three other guys who do.”

He didn’t believe any living organism could move that fast, much less one with so much marijuana in its system. The Coleman lantern tipped off the table, the Indian lunged forward to catch it, and McCoy caught Joe Piper’s unruly hair in one fist and drew a thin edge of fire across his Adam’s apple with the other. Released suddenly, Joe Piper started back, and only then saw he was bleeding, bleeding bright strawberry all down the front of his coat. He felt himself turning to water below the waist.

“It ain’t cut.” McCoy wiped the edge of the straight razor clean on the heel of his hand. “Not through. Not this time. Box up them guns like I said. You’ll get paid.”

Downstairs, the Indian, who seemed prepared for everything, dressed the five-inch slice with peroxide and a bandage that looked like a clerical collar and sponged the worst of the mess from his coat with a towel soaked in distilled water. Minutes later Joe Piper wobbled out into the bright sharp air of a January afternoon on Twelfth Street.

C
HARLIE BATTLE WONDERED AT WHAT POINT A SQUAD
lieutenant decided to transfer his forensic skills from unraveling the riddle of urban crime to solving the mysteries of nautical rigging.

Sweating a little in his winter uniform—the steam heating system at 1300 Beaubien had been designed for a building much taller than seven stories—Battle stood without fidgeting while Max Zagreb threaded thirty-pound-test fishing line through the tiny loops on the plastic main yard of Old Ironsides. The green blotter on the big gray steel desk was a litter of polystyrene masts, hatch covers, and able-bodied seamen frozen in mid-duty, from which the historic battlewagon was rising in l/24th scale like a ghost ship from a miniature scrap yard. In time, Battle supposed, it would take its place among the
Mayflower,
the
Santa Maria,
the
Bonhomme Richard,
and the rest of the toy fleet that sailed atop every file cabinet and shelf in the corner office. Throughout the twelve precincts Zagreb, who spent most of his lunch hour driving to and from Rider’s Hobby Shop in Ypsilanti, was referred to as Cap’n Crunch, but never to his face. As skipper of Special Investigations he drew deep water in every bureau.

He was a slight man with a balding head and enormous sideburns like the ones on the deceased city leaders whose pictures walled the corridors of the City-County Building where Battle worked. With the Bicentennial still three years away, a number of local notables were already cultivating such exotic adornments in the spirit of the shaggy greats of the past. It was the young officer’s observation that most of them lacked training in the care and nourishment of facial hair; Henry Ford II and Senator Philip Hart especially looked as if they had hooked on false whiskers for a school play.

Zagreb tied the line to a halyard on the deck, snipped off the extra inch with a pair of pinking shears, and peeled aside his gold-rimmed reading glasses. “Know anything about ships, Officer?”

“I know they float. Sir.”

“Under ideal conditions, yes. The only time I was ever on one—a real ship, I mean, not a rowboat or the ferry to Mackinac—I got sick as a dog. Haven’t been on the water since. So why do I build model ships? I could say it’s good for manual dexterity, but there are other kinds of models I could put together, cars and movie monsters, and they don’t interest me. I guess I’m fascinated by sailing craft because they’re entirely self-contained. Maybe that’s why I joined the police force. It’s the only government body that cruises along independent of the rest.”

“I guess us cops are all sort of in the same crew.”

“Horseshit. I didn’t call you in here to give you the don’t-rock-the-boat speech. How are things at City Hall, by the way? Is Gribbs figuring to re-up?”

“I don’t know, sir. The mayor doesn’t confide in me. I only see him in the lobby and he’s usually surrounded by TV crews.”

“Well, if you do talk to him tell him I don’t recommend it. The Democrats are grooming Young. That son of a bitch does his electioneering with a pipe wrench.”

Battle, who thought it was high time the city had a black chief executive regardless of what tools he employed, said nothing. He wished Zagreb would invite him to crack a window. But the lieutenant didn’t seem uncomfortable at all in a double-knit suit that might have been painted aluminum for all it wrinkled or draped or gave any indication that there was a body underneath.

He sat back, Old Ironsides forgotten. “We know now why I became a cop. Why did you?”

“To serve and protect.”

“That’s what it says on the cruisers, and it’s horseshit. This isn’t the academy finals. What made you decide to become a cop?”

“It isn’t wrestling.”

“Explain.”

“There’s a story involved.”

“I don’t have anything to do until this cement dries but listen.”

“I was raised by my Uncle Anthony. He was born in Biloxi. Down in Mississippi a black man picked cotton or nothing. When his father had enough of that he came up here to make Model Ts and brought Anthony with him. Anthony didn’t want to work for Ford, so he boxed. Only when he got to the Golden Gloves he found out he wasn’t Joe Louis and went to work carrying a hod. When he got tired of that he became a professional wrestler.”

Zagreb snapped his fingers. “Anthony Battle. I should have guessed. He took the U.S. championship away from Percival E. Pringle, two falls out of three.”

“World, U.S., it was all the same thing. The same outfit held all the wrestlers’ contracts and decided who won what. I didn’t see any future in that. Hod-carrying doesn’t pay much better than it did in 1953, so here I am.”

“By default.”

“Not really. I like the job.”

“You like getting coffee for the deputy mayor?”

“Tea, usually. And it beats sticking my face in Dick daBruiser’s crotch at Cobo Hall every Friday night.”

“I’ve got something better than either of those,” Zagreb said. “You know Paul Kubicek?”

“Not personally. I see his picture.” It was pretty hard not to, unless the TV was broken, the subscription to the paper ran out, and something blew into his eyes every time he passed a newsstand. The scowl and crooked necktie Sergeant Kubicek had worn for his ID photo had appeared in every edition and on all the noon and six
P.M.
broadcasts since New Year’s Day. The eleven
P.M
. too, probably, although Battle was usually in bed by then, resting for the six
A.M
. turnout.

“Yeah, the pricks in the press are really busting Division’s balls over this one, as if one dead black ex-con more or less made any difference in this town.”

“I don’t guess it matters what color you are once you’re dead,” Battle pointed out. But the lieutenant went on as if he hadn’t spoken. In his twenty-two years the officer had encountered both extremes, raw uncut racism and white liberal bend-over-backward sympathy, and knew how to respond to both, but the unthinking impersonal bigotry that ran throughout the Detroit Police Department was something he didn’t think he’d ever get used to.

Zagreb said, “It’s a good shoot any way you stand it up. This Harrison character that went down on the terrace had a record and a gun in his hand. So did the others, Nampula and Potts, but their bullet holes were in front so nobody’s raising any stink over them. This ain’t the fucking Old West. When one of the perps in a robbery makes a break for it with apiece, it’s a cop’s job to put him down.”

“No one at the party heard him identify himself as a police officer.”

“He claims he did. There was a lot of screaming and yelling, so who knows what they heard or didn’t? Only this citizen’s group, this Afro-American Congress—”

“American Ethiopian Congress.”

“As if any of them could find Ethiopia on a map at gun-point. Anyway, this Junius Harrison turns out to be an office boy or something at the firm where one of the lawyers at Caryn Crownover’s party works and he’s got a message for the lawyer in his pocket, so the Congress says he was there on legitimate business. To me, that makes him the inside man, but they’ve filed a complaint and it looks like the N.A.A.C.P. is backing it up, so we’ve got to run it out. How’d you like a spot on the shooting team?”

Battle wasn’t expecting anything like the question. Before he could frame a response, Zagreb held up a hand.

“It’s not a promotion. You’re still assigned to the City Hall Bureau and there’s no raise and no guarantee when it’s over you won’t be right back asking the fire marshal if he likes one lump or two in his orange pekoe. It’s a chance to work with Special Investigations and get out of the blue bag for a while.”

“Why me? Sir.”

“You can lay off that ‘sir’ horseshit. Whatever you may think of me and my toy boats, I’m a lieutenant, not an admiral.” He leaned back in his chair, peering at Battle through the rigging. What he saw, or what Battle imagined he saw, was a tall young black man in a crisp uniform with the crudely blocked-out facial features of an ebony carving. His afro was modest even by department standards, an almost grudging acknowledgement of brotherhood with the types who decked themselves out in dashikis and named themselves after rivers in Nairobi. He had inherited his uncle’s musculature but not his bulk; were Zagreb to enter the locker room while the officer was changing into his civvies, he might have been surprised by the hard-planed shapes that combined to form his slender build.

In fact the only thing remotely soft about him was his eyes, tender, brown, and luminous. Although he considered them a detriment to his life’s work, his wife of six months told him he ought to be grateful for them, because without them she might never have seen anything in him to love.

“I’ve been over your file,” said the lieutenant. “I see you were on the debate team at the U of D. That means you can talk. A couple of years ago that wouldn’t have meant crap, but the department’s changing. Police work’s changing. When I joined up, the entire detective division operated out of a swamp on the seventh floor under the command of a real piece of work named Kozlowski. He didn’t have one knuckle he hadn’t broken at least twice on some poor sap’s jaw down in the basement And he had company. Back then you couldn’t have rounded up enough cops with more than an eighth-grade education to play a game of touch football. They were tough, but they couldn’t have stood up to a ninety-eight-pound reporter with a TV camera. You’ll be doing plenty of that if this thing keeps heating up the way I think it will.”

“How much does this have to do with me being black?”

“Damn near everything. The American Ethiopian Congress is pushing for an all-black team to investigate the shoot. They won’t get it, one, because I’m being paid to run this bureau and with a boy in college who can’t play basketball for shit I can’t afford to split my paycheck with them, and, two, as fast as we’ve been stacking the ranks with black officers since the riots we still don’t have any in Special Investigations. This business of detecting detectives is thorny as hell even without a bunch of rookies tripping over their own feet. Your record is clean, you can handle questions from the floor without drawing your service revolver, and according to your turnout sergeant you don’t make a lot of enemies. If you’ve got reservations about being chosen for this duty on the basis of your race, sing out. Nothing? ’Kay.”

He opened a rumbling drawer mounted on ball bearings, lifted out a thick gray cardboard folder, and held it above Old Ironsides’ mainmast

“Read it. Kubicek’s report, eyewitness statements, autopsy records, paper trail left by the guns involved, etcetera. It should bring you up to speed on the official end.”

“Can I take it home?” Battle hefted the file. He had never been in on an investigation and was surprised at how much paper a case could accumulate in just ten days.

“No. You’re meeting the rest of the team this afternoon. Take your lunch hour and go over it in that corner. I’ll leave you alone with it. If you have to go to the john, take it with you. When you’re there don’t put it down. Piss one-handed. The last time a file from an internal investigation left this floor it wound up in the Metro section of the
News.
The man who was behind this desk at the time is in Florida now, running a two-man police department and making just about as much at sixty as you make now. I’m forty-nine. I can’t take humidity.”

“I’m not much for beaches myself, Lieutenant. I can’t swim and I don’t tan.”

“Be grateful you don’t. In today’s climate it makes you the only officer connected with this mess who doesn’t have to watch his own ass.” Carefully, Zagreb folded the scattered scraps of plastic inside the assembly instructions and transferred them to the vacant drawer. Pushing it shut, he rose.

“Take your time. The chair’s more comfortable than the sofa, which is where I seat reporters. When you’re through I’ll introduce you to the men you’ll be working with. They’ll tell you what
isn’t
in the file.”

R
USSELL
L
ITTLEJOHN SMELLED THE
I
NDIAN FROM THE
landing.

The Indian, whom he knew by no name other than Wolf, was partial to Brut, and although he seemed to have rules about not wearing cologne before evening, splashed the stuff on promptly at six
P.M
. at what must have been the rate of a bottle a week.

Detecting the thick musk as he fished for his key, Russell felt a stab of panic and thought of leaving. But the stairs, built recently along the side of the house by his father from new lumber, made a lot of noise. Wolf would know he was there, that he’d run away, and if he and Wilson had any doubts at all about Russell’s performance in Grosse Pointe, their minds would be made up from that time on.