The Damage Done
Page 35
But after what Steele had said to him this afternoon, after Steele had given him the gift of his own past, Louis wasn’t sure revenge was what he wanted.
“What do we do?” Tooki asked again.
Cam drained his beer and smacked it down on the table. “I know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I want this job bad and I’m not going to let that fucker fuck with my head. I’m going to solve my hooker case and whatever more shit that fucker throws at me.”
He rose unsteadily. “I think I have a plane to catch,” he said. “You all get some sleep, get laid and get drunk.” He gave Tooki a smile. “Or say a prayer to Buddha for all of us. See you in church on Wednesday.”
He tossed some bills on the table and walked away. Emily started to pull some money out of her purse but Louis said, “I got this.”
She slid out of the booth, putting on her slicker. “Come on, Tooki,” she said. “We’re going over to Saugatuck for the weekend.”
“What’s in Saugatuck?” Tooki asked.
Louis laughed. Emily threw him a look that Tooki didn’t seem to catch. She had forgotten Tooki had only been in Michigan a short time and had not yet found those hidden gems of little towns that dotted that mitten’s lake shore, each with their own unique cultures and offerings.
“I gotta pee,” Tooki said. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Louis waited until he was out of earshot, then looked up at Emily.
“So you’re not going to tell him Saugatuck is gay heaven?”
“I don’t think it will take him long to figure it out,” she said. “It’ll be a nice trip. Antiques for me, whatever for him.”
“Take good care of him.”
“I will,” she said as she walked away.
And then he was alone. Louis lingered long enough to finish his beer and eat the last of the fried pickles, then paid the bill and left, stepping out of Dagwood’s into a cool night. For a couple minutes, he just stood there, drinking in the fresh air and watching the red taillights disappear down Kalamazoo Street.
One word was swirling in his head.
Her.
In some moments, she had a face. Angular, with hooded gray eyes and lips that whispered his name in the dark. Joe’s face. But the other her was there, too. The one without a face, the one without a name. The one who would unlock the mystery of Mark Steele.
He would find her, he knew suddenly.
He had to.
Because the man who had destroyed him had also saved him. And Louis had to know why.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
There was nothing he wanted more than to get to Echo Bay, make love to Joe, share a good dinner and sit on a dune together to watch the sun set over Lake Michigan. But on Saturday morning, as he put his suitcase in the trunk of the Mustang, Louis found himself slowing down. Because he knew there was something else he had to do first—two things, in fact.
One was to go to Detroit and find Sammy. He knew now he had been stuck on the same pages for too long, rereading and reliving a brutal fragment of his life that he had never really faced, or even understood. And he wanted to move on.
The other thing was something he needed to know. And it was something only the computer at St. Michael’s could tell him.
The church parking lot was empty when he pulled in. Louis let himself in, went to the computer and logged into the state records database. A few seconds later, he had the answer he needed.
Moe was dead.
In 1968, he had been sentenced to nine years in Jackson State Prison for felony child abuse and weapons charges. Three years in, he suffered a major stroke and died six months later. He was buried within the walls of the penitentiary in a grave marked only by a number.
Louis shut down the computer, left the office, and got in his Mustang to head to Detroit. He tuned into a classic rock station, but he didn’t really listen to the music. His thoughts drifted back to Moe, and the anger stirred inside him. Moe was no longer a monster lurking outside the closet. He was just a pathetic, angry man who had died alone, confined to a bed in a prison infirmary, with shit bags taped to his belly.
Good, Louis thought. That was damn good.
He knew that he would have to let his anger go. But right now, he let it simmer. He had earned this anger and he wanted to keep it for a while.
By the time he reached the Detroit city limits, the sun was out in full force and Motown music had taken over the radio. The neat lawns and pretty tri-levels of the suburbs were replaced by weedy lots and crumbling Tudors. Knots of teenagers hung on corners, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
He was on the northwest side, not far from the Strathmoor house, and he was starting to worry about how he would find Sammy, if he would be as broken as this neighborhood, maybe entangled in drugs or a gang or worse. If that happened, what would he do?
What are you doing, Kincaid? Why are you here?
When he realized he had no good answer that went beyond a selfish need to know, he thought about turning around and heading north. But the scenery changed again, and he found himself on a street of brick bungalows with neat lawns and tulips in bloom. A blue and white sign offered an explanation: NEW HORIZONS DEVELOPMENT PROJECT. SAVING OUR CITY ONE BLOCK AT A TIME.
He slowed the Mustang and followed the house numbers to 2102 Hubble. Sammy’s home was yellow brick, with a small porch covered by a white aluminum awning. Louis pulled to the curb and got out, taking a deep breath before he walked to the door. He had no idea what he was going to say.
He knocked. When no one answered, he knocked again. Then a voice came from the house next door, a big man standing on his lawn, holding a rake.
“You looking for Sammy?” the man hollered.
Louis came down the porch steps and stood on the grass. “Yeah.”
Louis saw suspicion cross the man’s face and he knew the man was just being protective of his neighbor. In this city, you had to be. He retrieved his badge and held it up. “State Police. He’s not in any trouble. I’m an old friend.”
“He’s probably down at the school,” the man said. “That’s where he is every Saturday.”
“The school?”
“Coyle Junior High,” the man said, “Two blocks down on the right.”
Louis thanked him and returned to the Mustang. Like most old Detroit schools, Coyle was a monument to fifties-era education, two stories of red brick and limestone, with grated windows and a giant wooden sign in front that declared the Coyle Panthers the AA State Baseball Champions for 1990.
He spotted some kids on a baseball field, parked the Mustang and walked to the chain-link fence that enclosed the diamond. There was an open gate about twenty feet down, but he decided to stand at the fence and watch.
The diamond was just dirt, the outfield patchy grass stippled with dandelions, the low bleachers needed paint and the rusted backstop was bowed. But the boys—all about thirteen and all black—didn’t seem to mind.
Louis saw only one adult, a tall, gangly guy with a tight helmet of black hair and nut-brown skin. He stood at home plate with a lanky boy, guiding the kid’s hands up and down the bat as he mimicked forward thrusts, teaching him how to bunt.
Sammy . . .
A slow smile came to Louis’s face.
Sammy was a coach, maybe a teacher, too. And that meant he hadn’t let what happened in the house on Strathmoor—and God knows where else—break him.
Louis felt a swell of pride, though he had no idea why. It wasn’t like he had anything to do with it. And the memories were back, memories that came now with just a bit more clarity.
Quit swinging like you Willie Mays. You ain’t got the power for that.
But I wanna hit homers, Sammy.
It ain’t about you. It’s all about the other guys out on them bases. They’s counting on you to bring them home. You hearin’ me, Loogy?
Loogy . . . he remembered now. It wasn’t just a nickname for his name Louis. Sammy had tagged him with it because he was left-handed.
The kid picked up the ball and looked hard at Louis. “You need something, mister?” he asked.
“No. I’m good.”
The kid popped the ball in and out of his glove and continued to stare, suspicion darkening his eyes. “Why you hawking us then?”
“I’m not hawking you.”
“You got a kid out there?”
“No. I just like watching.”
“Then you must be a perv or something, man.”
“I’m not.”
“Why you here then?”
“I just stopped by to make sure someone was okay.”
“Who?”
Louis’s gaze turned back to Sammy.
“Well, is he?” the kid asked. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “I think he is.”
“Aight, then,” the kid said. “Stay easy, man.”
The boy trotted off toward the diamond. Louis stayed where he was for maybe a minute longer, then decided it was time to go. There was no reason to introduce himself. It didn’t feel like the right time or place. And he had his answers now. That’s what this trip had really been about, satisfying a need to find a good ending to this thing that he had come to call his story.
As he walked to his car, he noticed the only other vehicle in the lot, a red Ford Bronco. He glanced back at the diamond, then took a slow walk around the SUV. There was a Coyle Junior High faculty parking permit in the back window, a pile of bats in the rear seat and a bumper sticker on the rear that read: No Grass Stains, No Glory. Had to be Sammy’s car.
Louis hesitated, reconsidering. Was it right to just walk away and keep this moment of closure to himself?
He pulled a business card from his wallet and started to stick it under the wiper, but then stopped. He couldn’t just leave the card. If Sammy didn’t recognize Louis’s name and saw only the state police logo, the card would end up in the trash and the poor guy would probably lose sleep wondering why some cop wanted to talk to him.
Louis pulled a pen from his back pocket but again hesitated, trying to think of something to write that didn’t sound corny.
He turned the card back to the front and drew a line through his first name. Above it, he wrote one word: Loogy.
He slipped it under the driver’s side wiper and walked back to the Mustang. If Sammy wanted to revisit those months on Strathmoor, he would call and somewhere between Lansing and Detroit, Louis and his foster brother would sit and have a beer and talk about whatever long-lost brothers talked about.
And if Sammy didn’t call . . .
Well, he could live with that, too. He knew Sammy was okay and if Sammy had ever wondered about him, then he would now know that Louis was okay, too. And sometimes, most times maybe, that was enough.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
He was just outside Ann Arbor when he began to lose the signal for the Motown station. My Girl wavered in and out, and finally Louis gave up. He spun the radio dial trying to find something else but all he got was classical, sports talk, and Barry Manilow yelping about Mandy.
He was about to turn the radio off when he heard a familiar bass voice.
“The problem here is not just believing in some fantasy penned 2000 years ago by stupid men in the most ignorant part of the world, guys who thought the earth was flat and wiped their butts with fig leaves . . .”
Good Grief. Of all the radio stations in Lower Michigan, Louis had happened upon the weekend broadcast of Walter Bushman.
He reached down to turn the radio off, but then Bushman said something that gave him pause.
“The problem is duplicity. That starts with D and that rhymes with P and that stands for Prince.”
Louis had to see where this was going.
“Just like that fast-talking Professor Harold Hill, Anthony Prince was a shyster, a hustler who sold tickets to heaven while he secretly wallowed in his own swamp of depravity.”
Bushman launched into a litany of crimes and sins Anthony Prince had been alleged to have committed. Steele had done what he could to keep details of the case quiet until there was an official statement, so Bushman was left to make things up. Anthony’s hookers had grown to dozens over the years, the murder of the boys had ballooned into sexual abuse of entire choirs, and the strangulation of his father had been reduced to an act of simple greed.
The first exit sign for I-127 had just come into view when Bushman started in on Violet. Louis braced himself.
“And then there’s the long-suffering wife,” Bushman said. “I’ve always said I don’t have problems with the true believers as long as they leave the rest of us alone. So I need to say that Violet Prince did nothing wrong. She’s just another victim here. She’s a good woman. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. This woman deserves our sympathy, not our scorn.”
Violet’s face came to him, pained and wan.
I’ll be okay.
That was the last thing she had said to him before Louis left to hunt down Anthony. By now, Violet had probably read all the news stories, and worse, watched the idiots on TV blathering about her husband’s hookers and her marriage, as they posed the worst of all questions—how could the wife not know?
The turn-off to I-127 was coming up, the road that would set him on the northward path to Echo Bay and to Joe.
Dammit.
He let his exit go by and kept heading west. Grand Rapids wasn’t far out of his way. A quick stop to see Violet, and he’d be back on the road north.
Just outside Kalamazoo, he stopped at a convenience store. When he showed the clerk his badge and gestured to the phone, the clerk quickly handed it over. He dialed Violet’s home, letting it ring ten or eleven times before he gave up. Maybe she was at the cathedral. She probably wanted no part of the operations, but he suspected she would feel a duty to step up and at least try to keep the place running while the church council scrambled to get things under control.
He called Anthony’s office and his secretary answered.
“I’m sorry, detective,” the woman said. “Mrs. Prince was here this morning meeting with lawyers and the council members. But after she gathered up her husband’s personal things from his office, she just bolted out of here.”
“Bolted?”
“Yes. I asked her if she was okay and she said something strange. She said she had to go back.”
“Go back? To where?”
“I don’t know. That’s all she said.”
“Did she take anything with her? Maybe something she found in Anthony’s office?”
A long pause. “Just an old Bible. I thought that was kind of odd.”
“Why?”
“Well, she didn’t have anything with her when she came in and Mr. Prince didn’t keep a Bible in his office.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, sir. I worked for Mr. Prince for eight years, and I never saw a Bible in his office.”
“How long ago did she leave?” Louis asked.
“A couple of hours.”
Louis hung up and went back outside to his car. Maybe Violet had gone home and simply retreated in grief to her bedroom, ignoring the phone. But he didn’t think so. Somehow it didn’t seem like something she would do right now. That big, empty house would be too full of Anthony and all the hurt. And the thing about the Bible bothered him.
He got in the Mustang and started the engine. But he just sat there, thinking.
She said she had to go back . . .
Louis pulled a Michigan map from the glove box and unfolded it. It took him a minute to find the town. It was a faint dot, maybe forty miles south of where he was. It would add another two hours to his trip, putting him up in Echo Bay past dinner time.
Louis stuffed the map back in the glove box, and headed the Mustang back out onto the freeway, hea
ding south instead of north.
It was a long shot, but he had to go. He had to make sure she was all right.
There was no nice Rotary Club welcome billboard or even a green state-issue sign to tell him where he was—just a white water tower emblazoned with VANDALIA. There was also no downtown to speak of, just one blinking traffic light, a small municipal building, a gas station, and a bar. He pulled into the bar and went in. The waitress hadn’t heard of the Community Church of God, but she said that when she was a kid she used to play at an abandoned place on Water Street, out by Christiana Creek.
“It was just a wreck,” she said. “But it had pretty windows. Could have been a church once.”
Louis backtracked and hung a right on Water Street. He passed a small park and a scattering of wood bungalows and trailers, but then there was nothing but trees and finally a sign that said DEAD END.
He pulled to a stop, cut the engine and got out. He could hear the ripple of water and started toward it. At one time, there might have been a road but now it was just a rutted path overgrown with weeds. He emerged into a clearing and stopped.
He should have been surprised, but he wasn’t. He was standing in front of a church.
Or what was left of one.
It was small, made of old clapboard that was once white but now weathered to gray. The short steeple had caved in on itself but the two gothic windows on the side were intact, just visible beneath a web of dead ivy. There was an old blue Chevy parked in the high, dead grass.
Louis went up the sagging wooden steps. The door was ajar, a rusted padlock hanging loose. He pushed the door open.
The inside was dim and had a funky smell, a mix of standing water, mold, and maybe nests from the animals that had taken refuge inside. The narrow aisle led between dull wooden pews and up to a simple altar where a single broken pendant lamp hung over a wood pulpit.
Violet was standing behind the pulpit, head down.
Louis hesitated, wondering if she was praying, but then she looked up. Her surprise at seeing him was fleeting, a slight widening of her eyes before she gave him the barest of smiles.