The Devil's Own Rag Doll

by Mitchell Bartoy

  “Ten minutes, maybe.”

  I turned and made my way down the narrow stairs to the first basement. I was surprised to see the old colored janitor shuffling along with his mop and pail of water, and I grunted a low greeting and watched him keenly as he passed by me, heading into his maze of storage and records rooms. Toward the back, in front of the few seldom-used cells, I saw Walker drooping in a chair. I motioned, and Walker stood up and walked toward me.

  “He say anything to you?”

  “No,” said Walker, “he’s just laying on the bed. Lets out a little moan once in a while.” He gave me a careful look. “Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid my eye. Girl gets killed and he knows something and runs off like a sissy.”

  “I don’t know what he could tell us that would help. You say it’s the same guys that killed Detective Swope.”

  I said, “Whatever he’s got to say, he’s going to say it now.”

  “You’re not going to rough up that boy, are you?” Walker’s voice was quiet.

  I stopped in my tracks and stood square to Walker. I rubbed my thumbnail across the stubble on my chin. “I might,” I said. “Does that bother your stomach?”

  “Not my stomach, no,” replied Walker.

  “If you’ve got something on your mind, Walker, I’d just as soon you did your thinking out loud. It ain’t good to keep yourself cooped up like that.”

  “I’m just thinking,” said Walker, “that I could get that boy to tell everything he knows without making a fuss.”

  “I guess you could,” I said. “I don’t doubt that you could. But some days, you get up and what you want is a little fuss. You want to let out a little anger. You keep it all stoppered up inside, like I figure it, you wind up with the cancer, see?”

  Walker stood stock-still for a moment. He wasn’t challenging me with his eyes, but he wasn’t exactly turning away, either.

  “Can you see it my way?” I asked him.

  “I follow you,” he said. “You’re the senior man here.” The tone of Walker’s voice betrayed nothing of what I figured he must be feeling.

  “I want you to stay right here by the stairs,” I said, “and give a little whistle if you see anyone coming. Can you do that?”

  Walker nodded. He seemed eased a bit that I had not sent him away entirely.

  “When Johnson gets back,” I said, “send him on down to me and sit tight here by the stairs.”

  Walker nodded and leaned against the wall, one foot resting on the bottom step. There was a stillness about him, a way of standing without fidgeting, that worried me. It meant he was thinking so much that he forgot about being restless.

  I pulled the key to the cells from a metal case on the wall and slipped it into my pocket. I let my shoes slap the floor as I made my way down the short row of cells. When I caught sight of the boy’s sharp shoulders poking through the fabric of his old shirt, I stopped and watched for a moment. On a ratty tick mattress, Joshua rocked himself slowly and mumbled, hummed a few words. I guess he must have heard me and seen me in some part of his mind, but he seemed intent on blocking things out.

  I barked, “Get up, boy!”

  Joshua jerked and turned and immediately pulled back when he caught proper sight of me. He sat up and pressed his back against the wall and drew his knees up to his chest.

  “I said get up!” I threw as much grit and gravel into my voice as I could, but it was hardly necessary; if the boy hadn’t wet his pants already, he would soon. “Get up and come over here!”

  “No!”

  “Did you just tell me no, boy?”

  Joshua slowly let his legs drop and stood up from the cot. He stood shaking, his clothes falling off of him.

  I stood a step back from the bars and glared. I said nothing but clenched my jaw and breathed deeply through my nose as I watched the spindly boy fidget. He brought an embarrassing smell to the place—unwashed, in between boy and man.

  “I didn’t see anything!” Joshua blurted. “I won’t ever say anything about it! I haven’t told anybody about it!”

  I lurched forward and shook the bars with both hands. I yelled, “Why’d you kill that girl?”

  “No! No!”

  “Don’t you lie to me!” I shook the bars again but eased off when I realized that the concrete they were sunk into was flaking loose. “Answer me!”

  “I never killed her!”

  I stepped back and shook my head slowly. “That’s not what I want to hear, boy.” I drew the key from my pocket and pushed it into the lock, turned it, and felt the bolt sliding in, metal over metal. “I want you to think real hard, see if you remember how you did it.” I entered and swung the door closed behind me, locked it, pulled the key out, and tossed it across the floor outside the cell. “Now it’s just you and me, all alone.”

  Joshua skittered away, searching the cell blindly for the farthest place from me, panicked, now a mouse before a gnarled alley cat.

  “Sit down!” I said. “If you make me chase after you, it’ll be worse!”

  Joshua sat on the edge of his cot, as far from me as he could get, and began to stammer and sob, snot and tears running down his face. “I-I-I never killed her! I-I-I never touched her!”

  “Shut up, kid! I know you didn’t kill her. How could a sissy kid like you do that? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “What? N-n-n-no.”

  I stepped toward him and leaned close. I whispered, “Now you tell me everything you saw that day and don’t leave anything out or I’ll rip you limb from limb. And it won’t do you any good to cry for your mother down here.”

  “M-m-my m-mother’s dead.”

  “Shut up about your goddamn mother and tell me what you saw!”

  “Well, I didn’t see anything until the guys made me go up—”

  I placed a hand on either side of the boy’s head and lifted him from the cot. I kept lifting until Joshua’s feet dangled and the tips of his bare feet scraped the floor. I drew the boy close until we were nose to nose and said softly, “Bullshit.”

  Joshua’s wet brown eyes danced and twitched. “Okay,” he said. As I lowered him to the bed, he sighed and croaked, “I wet myself.” He looked down dully at the spreading stain on his trousers.

  “Just tell me everything you saw. Everything.”

  “Well, it was three guys.”

  “Was one of ’em a big fat guy with a mustache, bald on top?” I watched the boy closely.

  “What? N-no. It was two big guys and a little guy. Smaller guy dressed in a suit.”

  “Well, what were the other two guys wearing? What did they look like?”

  Joshua looked up at me.

  “What did they look like, boy? I’m not playing footsie with you anymore!”

  “They looked like the police. They was wearing uniforms and all.”

  “The police.” I thought for a moment, rubbed my jaw. “Were they driving a police car?”

  “No, it was just a regular old car. A big car, almost like a truck.”

  “So you saw three guys. And then what?”

  “Well, they was carrying a … looked like a old rug. Big old rug. And the little guy was watching out, you know, peeking around. Just smoking a cigarette, you know, walking up and down. Then they all went up to Donny’s place.” Joshua stole glances at me as he talked, beginning to relax.

  “A carpet.” My eye went out of focus as I took it in. Carpet.

  “That’s right, a carpet, like. They was in there for a while, and then they come out. And this little fella, he’s looking around, looking out for something, and we’s all right there across the street, and he’s acting like he don’t even know we’s there.” Joshua was looking down at his pants.

  Johnson came down the stairs and ambled toward the cell with a sack of pastries and a cup of coffee for me.

  “Johnson!” I said. “Let me out of here. This boy’s pissed himself.” I felt the acid rise from my stomach, bubbling up so that now the tail end of my throat felt raw. �
�The key’s on the floor there.”

  I turned to the boy. “Now, kid, you tell me what you saw when you went into Pease’s place.”

  The boy turned away and hung his head between his bony shoulders. “They made me look.”

  “What did you see there?”

  “I saw the girl.”

  “Did you touch her?” I spoke almost gently.

  “I wouldn’t! We didn’t none of us touch her! We was afraid!”

  “All right. All right. Stop that sniveling.”

  I stepped out of the cell and noted that Walker had quietly moved himself close to the cell. I spoke to Johnson softly. “Take the boy out the side door. Give him back his shoes and his belt. Clean him up a little. You and Walker can take him back home in a scout car. Maybe we can make some points in the neighborhood.” I took the sack and the coffee from him. The heavy, buttery pastries had made a greasy stain on the waxed paper, and the sight of it turned my stomach; I tossed the sack to the boy.

  “Listen, Johnson. After you drop the boy off, let Walker take the car. You go home and get an hour or two of sleep. Then you get back here and dig up anything you can about a Harlan Sherrill. Check the property records here and in Macomb and Oakland counties, marriage records. Possibly military records if you’ve got the time. You go up and talk to Mitchell and see if he’ll let you have that secretary you’ve got your eye on—that Betty or Sally or whatever her name is—to help you out. I’ll be back here. I don’t know when. And keep it all under your—”

  I turned away abruptly. I saw that Joshua was hunched over and sobbing gently over the bag of pastries. “What the hell is wrong with you now, boy?”

  “I don’t want you to kill me,” he said.

  “Boy, why would I kill you?”

  “Because I know it was the police killed that girl.”

  “If I was going to kill you, I’d’ve killed you already. You listen here. Them boys wasn’t the police, and if they were, they won’t be for long. You understand? That was just some guys playing dress-up, see?”

  “Okay.”

  “Stop that goddamn crying. You’re acting like a girl.”

  He turned away and tried to pull himself together.

  “Walker,” I said, “I want you to go down to the Valley and talk to Pops Brunell. See what he knows about the syrup he’s been getting from Bobby. You tell him I sent you, and if he gives you even a little bit of lip, bring him down here and throw him in one of these cells, all right? And you don’t need to be nice about it. Can I trust you to do that?”

  “I’m generally trustworthy,” he said.

  I had a good long look at Walker’s face. His eyes were almost black and seemed very watery to me, but from what I could see there, he was a solid man. It galled me to think that he might be smarter and know more than me, and so I turned away and stalked down the hall, gulping coffee. The liquid swarmed down my gullet and over my bare stomach, hot but still soothing.

  Carpet. The word screwed into my brain. This was not new information. I knew well that the body of Jane Hardiman was covered with fibers, looked on all the bloody parts to be fairly sprouting fur, and it was easy enough to guess that she had been transported in a carpet to Pease’s place. Tossing a body in broad daylight, there wasn’t much else that would do the trick. A carpet was the thing.

  I took the steps slowly, submerged in thought. A dead girl, a dead father, a dead partner; missing eye, missing fingers, missing nephew—and the face of another man, one of many victims of the so-called Black Legion, floating up from the back of my mind like a bloated stiff at the bottom of the Detroit River, waving in the current. Floating up: the face of a man found murdered in a gully downriver, found wrapped in a carpet, too. Found to have been tortured to death, his face battered with a ball peen hammer till most of the teeth were gone, parts of the shattered jawbone raking out through the skin.

  I stood at the top of the narrow staircase and gripped the rail. Ten years ago, maybe. Bad days for everybody, 1933. A young Communist, involved in the struggle to organize the autoworkers, had been taken for a ride by the Legion. So what? In those days, no one cared about any Reds. I remembered it as well as I could remember the first time I had smacked a baseball over the playground fence. All the boys in the squad room had laughed about the poor Red. Laughed and showed around the picture in the Free Press that showed the Red’s movie-star-pretty fiancée and said that they’d have to pay her a visit. I could still picture her little mouth, her pressed hair. The picture looked like a movie still. That girl was the only reason I remembered the dead Commie at all.

  But now I remembered another thing, something many had found laughable, too. The carpet they had used to roll the body was brand spanking new, still had a tag on it. Stupid or full of balls or both; that was how it was with the Legion in those days. They traced the carpet right back to a little mill here in town. Things being what they were, nothing came of it. As a matter of routine, I could remember, the police rousted the owners of the mill, made a bluster over it till the papers settled off.

  The carpet mill, I remembered now, could not have been more than two or three blocks from the alley where Bobby Swope found his early end—within running distance. The memory kept surging up through me, through my blood till my fingers throbbed. The carpet mill had been owned by Clyde Rix, brother of Barton Rix. Barton Rix, Barton Rix.

  I was so busy thinking that I wasn’t looking out when I burst through the door from police headquarters, and so I was not prepared to meet the line of dark faces in fancy-cut suits heading toward me. The Reverend Horace Jenkins led a pack of three assistants or bodyguards like a shark pulling pilot fish in its wake. The hired meat looked as big as Jenkins but didn’t have the confidence. Jenkins looked like a man on his way up.

  “Detective Caudill! Just the man I’d like to have a word with.” Jenkins stopped, and his flunkies fanned out behind him.

  I fought the urge to duck away and let Jenkins talk to my backside. “Take it up with Mitchell. You’ve got nothing I ain’t heard before.”

  “Oh, I think I do.”

  I fought the urge to sink my fingers around the colored man’s Adam’s apple. That look of smiling good health begged to be notched down.

  “A man’s nothing if he doesn’t look out for his family, isn’t that right, Detective?”

  “Hell with you, nigger,” I said.

  One of the men behind Jenkins lurched forward, apoplectic. The veins in his neck bulged over his tight bow tie.

  Jenkins put out his arm to block the smaller man. “All right, Mr. Noggle. Plainly Mr. Caudill is not an educated man.” Jenkins let his eyebrows rise, but his smile did not diminish. “I may be a ‘nigger,’ as you say, Detective, but I am at least able to carry on a civilized conversation with another man. And where I come from, that makes me a better man than you. How does that make you feel, Mr. Caudill, to think that a colored man is better than you?”

  “Noggle? I know you, Noggle,” I said. “Still beating up on your wife?”

  “Mr. Caudill,” said Jenkins, “we’re all entitled to our mistakes. Clearly Mr. Noggle has made his share, perhaps more than his share. He’s had some trouble with the bottle, it’s true. But is your view so petty, Detective, that you can’t believe a man can change for the better?”

  I looked from Noggle to Jenkins. “Are you going to jerk my kielbasa all morning, or are you going to spill what you got to spill?”

  “Can we walk?” Jenkins laid out his hand, smooth palm up, toward the sidewalk.

  I grunted, and we began to walk slowly. The rest of the men followed behind, just out of earshot. Since Jenkins fell naturally to my left, I could not see him as we walked abreast; but in the game of jousting confidence, it would have been bad form to object.

  “I’ll be brief, Detective, since I know you have things to accomplish—criminal investigations and such, service to the good citizens of our city. Early this morning—very early, at a time when most decent folks are in bed—some of the
brethren at our church along State Fair interrupted a pair of white youngsters painting a crude little sign on the front door of the building. An image quite unflattering to our Negro brethren. Now, one of the cowards ran off like a yellow cur, but the other we managed to pull into the church for a little scare.”

  “Call in a complaint.”

  “We’re not foolish enough to think that such a complaint would be worth the effort. But what’s of interest to you, I think, Mr. Caudill, is that though the young man wouldn’t tell us his name, we’re quite certain it was your nephew Alex.”

  I stopped walking.

  “I see I’ve told you something you didn’t know. That gorilla mask of yours could use some practice.”

  “Did you hurt the boy?”

  “Nothing broken, I trust. Certainly nothing as serious as what Toby Thrumm had to endure.” Jenkins let his smile go and now looked at me with a blank, almost serene expression. “We let him go, and he ran off.”

  “Thrumm got a busted nose from me, that’s it. Less than he had coming.”

  “I’m well aware that Toby Thrumm is no angel. And I’m certainly aware that you didn’t use the whip on him. But what I don’t know, and what I must know, is what you’re planning to do about all of it.”

  “Last I heard,” I said, “you’ve got no more say about what I do than pigeon shit on a statue of Lincoln.”

  “Things are changing, Detective. We may not live to see it, but things will change.”

  “Things are always changing. So what? What’s that got to do with you parading around here like a rooster, telling me what to do?” I realized that my tone was almost without anger. He had me interested.

  “I haven’t tried to tell you what to do. What I’m trying to ascertain, Mr. Caudill, is what side of the fence you fall on. Are you doing what you can to settle the situation here, or are you a part of it? May we assume that you’re trying sincerely to get at the bottom of things, or are you prepared to stand back and let it go on?”

  “What I do is my business. But since you let me in on something, I’ll try out being civil, see if it fits me. That boy Thrumm, I don’t give a damn about. You, I don’t give a damn about. Big-shot Hardiman can go piss off a bridge for all I care. But that little girl didn’t deserve what she got, and neither did my partner. See? Now all that means is I got a few things to settle. And you leave the boy to me. That’s all I’m ever going to have to say to you.”