The Devil's Own Rag Doll

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “I’m not friendly, that’s all.” I met the old man’s watery gaze. “I don’t put out the glad hand. I’m all business.”

  “You’re no businessman,” Lloyd said. “But your time here will be well spent. I would not go to the trouble and the risk to invite you here only to socialize.” He eased back a bit like he was satisfied that he had put in his piece. “Frank,” he said, “take the boys down and get them something to eat, will you?”

  Carter herded the men down the short ladder below the deck and then followed, suppressing the racking cough that shook him constantly.

  “Did you know that Mr. Carter was a police officer when I hired him? He’s been with me over forty years,” said Lloyd. “That kind of loyalty seems to have lost its currency these days.”

  I looked down at the old man’s hands gripping the rail: a mummy’s hands, dried and knotty, the fingers askew from arthritis. It seemed a wonder that such a tiny bit of flesh and purpose could hold control over such a massive fortune. Kings and presidents had asked his advice and sought favor with him, I knew.

  “Were you aware, Mr. Caudill, that I knew your father?”

  I couldn’t help it; I tensed up a little and turned my unhappy eye toward Lloyd’s face.

  “He was doing a little work for me,” Lloyd went on.

  “What kind of work was that?” I wanted to throttle the tiny man beside me, squeeze out whatever information I could and then toss the desiccated carcass over the rail. But the old man had a kernel of strength in him that I had to appreciate. He knew I could snap him in two, he knew I wanted to, but he wasn’t afraid.

  “We’ll get to that in time, perhaps. I’ll be blunt with you, Mr. Caudill, since that seems to be the tack that suits you. I’m not sure I can trust you. In fact, the only thing that works to your favor is that I know you’ve been floundering around like an oaf for the past week. You couldn’t survive long as a crooked man.”

  “You dragged me over here to insult me? It’s a hell of a lot of trouble to go to, old man.” I realized that I still held the glass of iced tea in my hand. I tossed it over the rail.

  “The truth is, Mr. Caudill, as you can see, I am not the man I was. It’s true; I have made my share of mistakes in my time. You can take it as a sign of weakness, if you like, of softness, but when a man gets close to the end of his time, he starts to think about how he’ll be remembered.” He stroked his snowy goatee. “Mr. Caudill, answer me bluntly, if you like. What’s your feeling about the situation of the Negro in Detroit?”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about the Negro, any more than I care about anyone else but myself, my family, and the few friends I have. And in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war going on.”

  Lloyd waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about the war. It’s all but taken care of already. The pressing thing for us now is to shore up the foundation of our city. You are not a naive man, I take it, Mr. Caudill. You understand something of the working of business and economy. To accomplish any lofty goal, to beat back the forces of chaos and anarchy, it is often necessary to do business with men … not worthy of the greatest respect.”

  “Don’t make excuses to me about it. I’m just a dick, and not a good one, either. Nobody cares what I think.”

  Lloyd sniffed. “You understand that none of what I tell you can be verified. Some years ago, during the first years of our troubles with the unions, Mr. Carter and I purchased the help of a diverse group of men—thugs, in the main, you might call them. Young men out of work. This was after the crash, of course, and it seemed for a time that somehow the Reds and the Communists might swarm over the country. America is the greatest, most blessed nation the world has ever known, and yet it seemed to us that these union organizers might strike in such a way as to pull apart the structure of what we had worked so hard and so long to build. So we fought back however we could. I still believe we were right to do so. But there came a time when we might have let our judgment slip a little, and we became too closely associated with a certain element that became a clear liability over time.”

  “Why do I need to hear all this?” My feet had begun to ache from standing.

  “I believe you have gathered already that some of the men we hired were members of the Black Legion. Many of them, in fact. They were such a slipshod group that we failed to take them seriously. I admit that I was not as involved in the process as I should have been. Perhaps in those days Mr. Carter’s efforts were scattered over too broad a field. What we knew was that these men hated the Communists and the unions with great passion and they were willing to address the problem in ways that the Lloyd Motor Company could not do officially.”

  “So I guess your popularity with those guys has gone to hell, then, now that you’ve let the union in.”

  “Exactly. You surprise me, Mr. Caudill. I didn’t think you were following me so closely.”

  “You could say I know a lot of men who got the shit end of the stick when you caved in to the union. A lot of boys got their heads busted for nothing.”

  “In every endeavor, Mr. Caudill, there are winners and losers. That would not be a problem, for the most part. When the tide changes, it’s foolish to try to swim against it. I suppose even the dimmest of the Legion boys could recognize that. It’s business, after all, and I have always believed that the workings of business could serve a moral purpose. Some must lose. For our great country to continue as it has, for our great city to blossom into the greatest industrial center in the world, some must suffer. But there are always a few who will take things too personally.”

  Lloyd sighed. “When the Legion broke up after that foolish incident with Mr. Poole, we were gratified, as we expected that our problems had dissipated.” Lloyd blinked and let his eyes wander over the Detroit skyline. He pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “I’m not what I used to be. And Mr. Carter … You can see that he hasn’t long to live. It’s the cancer.” There was a long pause. “One man in particular was a problem for us. The workings of the Black Legion were so murky, so secretive. We never knew his name, really. I suppose the union contract was a bitter pill for him to swallow. We had rid ourselves of him and his cronies—it’s another story, and I’m sure you haven’t the patience to hear it. But now, as my sources have noted, he appears to have returned. When he’s after, I can’t quite say.”

  “You can’t say, or you won’t say?”

  “For your purposes there is no difference.”

  “And you want me to make this fellow disappear again,” I said. “Without any fuss.”

  “Mr. Carter has suggested to me that this man is responsible for the deaths of your partner and the Hardiman girl. But I can’t imagine he’ll stop with that.”

  “You understand that I’m investigating these things as well as I can.”

  “I’d like your investigation officially to remain as fruitless as it has been so far. This seems to come naturally to you. I’m willing to pay you twenty thousand dollars to get rid of this man before he’s able to make his point, whatever it is. I want him to disappear without a trace before his actions can be connected to me or to the Lloyd Motor Company.”

  “That’s a fair amount of money these days,” I said. “I could use it.”

  “Of course you could.”

  “But that would make me sort of a whore, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mr. Caudill, I should think you’re hardly in a position to moralize with me. I’m offering you the money. And certainly, if you’re successful, you’ll be helping the city, the war effort, yourself, and me. Nobody loses but this man and his accomplices.” Lloyd closed his eyes. “I’m tired. Make your decision, Mr. Caudill. There is some sense of urgency here.”

  “Now there’s a rush on? You feel time ticking away for you, old man?”

  Lloyd looked at me bitterly for some time. He seemed for a moment to have forgotten our business as he let his eyes wander along the skyline. Then he murmured, “Mr. Carter believes that some catastrophe has been pl
anned for the coming week.”

  I tried to follow his gaze to a specific point in the city but his eyes were looking beyond what I could see. “You mentioned something about my father,” I said.

  “Your father,” said Lloyd, “was a smarter man than you are. He wasn’t too proud to accept my money.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to accept it.”

  “Have you wondered, Detective, how a plodding man like yourself should have advanced to such a position of responsibility on the police force? Had you imagined it was entirely due to some innate talent?” Lloyd’s bleary eyes sharpened. “I said your father worked for me—arduous work, and I should think it placed him in quite a difficult position.”

  “Difficult enough that he’d want to hang himself?”

  Lloyd’s face went slack, and he looked away. “It’s impossible to say what shame might drive a man to do, Detective.”

  I know something about shame, old man, I thought. Then I looked away, too, across the expanse of muddy water to the glut of tall buildings crowding the waterfront. After a moment, I worked up a mouthful of spit and lobbed it over the rail of the yacht. Fatigue lent me an odd feeling of stillness, stiffness. I felt like the hollow shell of a cicada clinging to the rail.

  “I’ll need five thousand now,” I said.

  “It’s impossible,” said Lloyd. “You’ll be paid when the job is done. I am a man of my word.”

  “Your word isn’t worth as much as you think it is.”

  Lloyd turned and took a few steps toward the lower deck. “Frank! Give this man what he wants and drive him where he needs to go.”

  I stood for a moment at the rail and felt all the fingers in the world pointing at me.

  CHAPTER 12

  I drove up Gratiot to the shoddy house my mother kept in East Detroit. Six Mile, Seven Mile, Eight Mile Road—out of Detroit proper and into the suburbs at the frank dividing line. I knew there had been a ruckus a few nights earlier at Eastwood Park, near my mother’s place. Colored jitterbugs, zoot-suiters begging for trouble in their pegged trousers and big coats, had come up from the city looking for a place to relax in the heat. Came looking for trouble, and found it. The young white boys in the area swarmed into the park, and the local police soon arrived to drive the colored punks out.

  My chest and throat felt raw, and I worried that I might be coming down with a cold. Hell of a time for it, I thought, with this heat. It seemed funny when the idea flashed through my mind that, like Frank Carter’s, my lungs might be rotting out from the inside. I wondered if Carter had thought it was a cold when it first came upon him. The money I had bluffed out of Lloyd sat in neat bills in an envelope against my leg on the seat. I had riffled through it, not bothering to count. It was a pile of bills thick enough to be heavy, and that seemed enough. My mind was so bogged down and off track that I could not say why I might want such a sum. I knew that if I stopped at a beer garden for a drink I’d either fall asleep with my head on the bar, start a fight, or pull someone into a boozy hug. So I drove to my mother’s house, following the only lead I could lay my hands on, the photograph of my father I’d found in Bobby’s box.

  My mother stood inside the doorway in her housedress, half in darkness, arms folded over her loose, fleshy bosom. It seemed that she expected me, though I knew this was not so. I stepped over the curb and onto the patchy grass and made a mental note to talk to the neighbor kid who took two bits a week to look after the lawn.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said, my feet sounding out the water-damaged parts of the wooden steps and porch.

  She tipped her head up and then turned her slumping back toward me and stepped into the dark house. I followed her to her usual spot at the little table in the kitchen and watched her settle into her battered old chair. The curtain behind her was smudged at the edge where she held it when she peeked out at the neighbors.

  “You need a shave, Peter,” she said. “You look like you just came off a boat.”

  I thought I knew how she had become such a wreck. Even from my earliest recollection, she had seemed unhealthy, but now her mottled flesh sagged unbearably, her eyelids drooped, and all the knotty veins showed beneath her grayish, almost transparent skin. She had borne five children, all boys except one; two died as infants, and the girl as a child of eight. And Tommy died in the war. Her husband, a man friendly to everyone but her, had hanged himself on Fighting Island, Canadian side of the river. And now, I thought, all that’s left to her is a one-eyed, unshaven cripple of a son who can’t bear to look at her.

  “You won’t get a girl with a look like that.” She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “Your father, when we were courting—”

  “Hell with all that,” I said.

  “You’ve got the anger, too,” she said. “Just like him.”

  I pushed the envelope toward her.

  She pulled out the photograph and studied it, turned it toward the light filtering in through the thin curtain. “Poor little nigger boy,” she said. She began to make a clucking sound, and I realized that she was moving her dentures in her mouth with her tongue. “That’s old Joe Wolociewicz. He’s got the cancer now.”

  I stood up and leaned over her. I pushed my forefinger onto the chest of the central figure in the photo, the man with the cane.

  “Why, that’s—I guess that’s Mr. Sherrill. Colonel Sherrill, they used to call him. But I don’t know what war he was in. I guess he’s too young to have been in the Civil War. My mother—your old grandmother, she used to tell me—”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Your father knew him from the time they were working on the railroads together, I guess. Used to call him Harlan, seems like to me. Oh, you couldn’t have been born yet. Or you were just a baby. Such a hairy baby.”

  “Do you know where he might be living now?” I stepped back. She smelled like salami and Ivory soap.

  “Oh, he’s gone now. Died some time in, I guess it was a few years back. Sure, before the war. That’s how I heard it, anyway. He and your father, they had a fight of some kind, they fell out some years before. I guess it was a couple of years before, anyway. So I didn’t see him when he died. And after that, your father…”

  I looked at her carefully. “When did Sherrill die?”

  “Oh,” she said, waving both hands in irritation, “it must have been when that fool Dayton shot that Red Poole, back when the Legion fell apart. Bunch of hoodlums anyway. But your father wouldn’t have any talk of it in the house. He thought I didn’t know anything about it, I guess. Thought I was stupid.”

  “So Sherrill died right after Poole got killed.”

  “Right after, right. But it wasn’t in the papers, though. I heard it from somebody—who was it? Somebody from the old neighborhood.” She shook her head. “Your father wouldn’t hear any talk about it in the house. He thought I didn’t know. Going out all the time at night—police business! He used to try to tell me. I know he didn’t have another woman. He never had another woman. He had the anger, just like you.”

  “And Pop died right after that?” Even as I said it, I knew the truth. What Lloyd had said to me—I had been so struck with the idea that Lloyd might have pulled strings for me with the brass in the force—I had not been able to gather my thoughts enough to realize what he was really saying. My father had not taken his own life. It had been taken from him.

  “Hung himself!” said my mother. “Can you believe it? With times so bad and all. People begging in the streets.”

  I took the photograph from her and slipped it back into the envelope. Without a word, I turned and bumped through the tiny hallway toward the light from the front door.

  “Peter, honey, do you want some coffee? I can make you a sandwich if you want!” She called after me but did not rise from her chair.

  I tripped through the door into the fading sunlight. Shame made me want to run—not brought on by some grave responsibility but because I had been too weak to let myself know the truth about my father. I c
ould see how all the pieces had been there the whole time, just waiting for me to put them together. But I could not run; my legs worked like pistons thrashing through water. Over the porch, down the crumbling steps, and no way to keep buried anymore what I had known all along: My father had not taken his own life, and I was a coward for not facing it.

  * * *

  I left my mother’s house wondering if I could take a room somewhere for the night, someplace nearby but clear of the city, where no one knew me. I thought I might sleep better between two clean sheets in a rented bed. There was money enough to swing it, money to burn. I could call up a steak sandwich from room service and duke the delivery boy with a ten-dollar bill for a tip. But there wasn’t anywhere I could go to forget that it was my old man who kept trying to tell me what a chump I was. Punch drunk, he’d call me, though I hadn’t ever been hit that much. He tried to take me under his wing, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I’d just look at his worn-out shoes and the early gray in his hair and figure he wasn’t in any shape to tell me anything. Use your head, he’d tell me; keep your head up and your eyes open. Now it was like he had reached out from his grave to smack me up again: See, jackass, you couldn’t even let yourself know that I’d never take my own life, such a simple thing. So many other things you might have seen, and now you’re in this hole because you wouldn’t see, you wouldn’t listen, you never wanted to go to the trouble of pulling things together. Now you’ll have to pay for it. Everybody has to pay.