I made the driver roll around the city for a while. Cadillac Square, the Campus Martius, where, I had heard, troops had lately been marching. Down Woodward, down Cass Avenue, past the big library, where the trampled lawn told the tale: tents and marches, bored National Guard reserves loafing and smoking. Everything else looked the same, more or less, in the white part of town. We drove down to Jefferson and up to the boulevard, past the bridge to Belle Isle. I saw no sign of the tipped cars, and the spilled blood had washed away or dried and turned to dust by now. The glaziers had been busy; almost all the broken windows I had seen had been replaced. I knew that the riot had been real but felt it might as well have been a nightmare, a common nightmare for everyone that night and into the days that followed. Outwardly everything was the same.
It was a different story in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. I could see that many of the stores had been looted and trashed, the big windows busted out and covered with boards. Even the places that had heavy grates pulled across their fronts had been cleaned out. Bars, loan shops, hat shops, markets. Except for the liquor, I thought, all that stolen merchandise was probably still around the neighborhood, in closets and cellars. Fire had taken a few small buildings and had charred portions of others, but the riot had not taken everything. I could see how things could keep on going. If Sherrill had hoped to level the city with his fevered scheming, he had failed.
“You were here when it happened?” The cabbie glanced at me in the rearview.
“No,” I said.
“They say it started there, at the bridge to Belle Island. A big fight, they say. For what, I don’t know. And then everybody was fighting. Just like that.”
“It doesn’t look so bad now. Just the easy things get broken.”
“Oh, there was a lot of things, shooting, fire. Cars burning! It was a bad time. I stayed at home with my gun, that’s what I did. My boy wanted to go out, but I kept him in.”
“Pull it up here and stop.”
“Boss, you don’t want to get out around here.”
“Stop the cab.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
I gave the cabbie a twenty-dollar bill and waved him away. I surveyed the front of the Sally Dee Shop at Illinois and Hastings and wondered if women had looted it or if the men had broken in to lift the dresses and underthings sold there. I walked two more blocks up Hastings and then up a flight of stairs at the side of an old boardinghouse. I recognized the fresh chips in the bricks as bullet holes. The windows had all been replaced with boards or sheets of metal, and the wood of the trim and the stairway had been ripped and splintered. I put my finger into the bright wood where a bullet had torn through and let my palm draw over the smooth gray wood on the top of the rail. When I reached the second floor, I began reading the numbers scratched into the doors. I moved across the narrow porch, removed my hat, and knocked at the third door.
A chain dropped down on the inside and swayed and scratched over the molding. A heavy bolt drew back and the door opened. “Yes?”
I found my voice stoppered by the clenching of my throat. I coughed and then said, “I’d like to see Officer Walker.”
The buxom colored woman eyed me, calm, considering. “Your business?”
“No business,” I said. I looked down at the two children who peeked around their mother’s skirt. “I just wanted to catch up on old times.”
“May I tell him your name?”
“Let him in, Emily. I don’t guess he means any harm.”
She stepped aside, and I walked into the narrow apartment. Past the entryway and the coat closet, the place opened somewhat to a room that barely held a sofa and two straight-backed chairs. Farther back, Walker stood, filling another narrow hallway. He waved to me to keep coming. We walked through the hallway, past the bathroom, straight through the kitchen, and through a door to the long bedroom. The whole apartment was one long, straight line, with no windows except one at the front and one at the head of the twin bed at the rear, and both of those had been boarded up. Two smaller beds crammed together and a dresser completed the room. Since there was no chair, or space for one, I sat on the edge of one of the small beds.
“Been on a holiday, it looks like, Detective. You picked up some color there.”
“I guess so,” I said. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully.
“Lost a little weight, maybe, too. Where’d you get that fancy eyeball?”
“Listen, Walker, I don’t want to put you out. I know it isn’t the time for a white man to come socializing around here.”
“Well, I don’t plan on feeding you,” said Walker. “Say your piece.”
“Can you tell me what happened here?” I said. “How was it?”
“Well, you can see how it was. I don’t know what you all were doing, but it came to us a little before midnight. I was up to Sunnie Wilson’s place, you know, the Forest Club, because I figured that would be the place to be. I was keeping my ear to the ground, like you had asked me to do. Sooner or later, everybody in the Valley shows up there. You know a lot of white folks come in there, too. Then that bug-eyed fool Willie Tompkins came up on the stage, yelling about a riot. We didn’t know anything about it. We were all just drinking, you know, folks was dancing and listening to music. Somehow it all just caught on. You could see it happening. It got from where you could see that they didn’t want to believe it to where they couldn’t help themselves. Willie come up, he grabbed the microphone and hollered out, ‘They done throwed a colored woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge!’ And that was what did it. Then they all ran out on the street breathing hellfire. You talk about some worried-looking white folks.”
“What did you do?”
“I came back here to look after my family, that’s what I did.”
I looked at him for a long time, then dropped my head and studied the floor for a moment. I looked up at Walker and then realized that my eyes would be pointing in different directions. I lifted my head and said, “That’s all right.”
“I guess it is,” said Walker. “But now there’s some talk about my job being on the line. Dereliction of duty. I was here the whole time. How many days? Three days. They were looking for me to come to work. Some fool dropped a brick off the roof and caved in a woman’s head down on the street. A woman from the neighborhood with three little ones. Then there was a story that got out, just a lie, that there was a sniper holed up in the building, so the Guard came down here and shot the whole place up to hell. We sat in the bathtub the whole night, all five of us.”
“It’s a hell of a thing.”
“You know,” said Walker, “that colored boy of yours is still alive. But the way it is, maybe you’d have done better to let the Lord take him down on the street. If he ever comes to, he won’t ever walk again, they say.”
“I hardly knew what I was doing,” I said.
“His grandfather was killed, you know that?”
“I didn’t know.”
“So I guess that means you’re responsible for that boy now, in a way, don’t it? He doesn’t have anybody else.”
I said nothing. I looked toward the closed-up window and imagined a similar shabby boardinghouse to the rear of Walker’s building. My eye went out of focus as I thought things over. “You’re a good man, Walker,” I said. “Better than me.”
“Each man’s got to worry about his own life,” said Walker. “We’re all the same in that way.”
I pulled out a folded wad of money from my pocket. I offered it to Walker. “It’s a thousand dollars. I happened to come into it, and I figure you could use it as well as I can.”
Walker took the money and turned it over in his hand. “There’s blood on everything in this world,” he said.
“If you can’t use it—”
“I can use it,” he said. “We can use it.”
I stood up. “I’ll see if I can put in a word for you with Mitchell.”
Walker just nodded and turned away, and I shuffled toward the front door. In
the front room, the children and their mother watched me without expression as I passed by. I walked out the door thinking, I guess I really did lose some weight. The glass eye fits a lot better.
I had to walk a number of blocks to catch another cab to take me to police headquarters. The place was almost empty, for some reason, as if the criminal element had eased off in honor of the riot or had decided to start honoring the Sabbath. Nobody said anything to me when I breezed in the front door. It could be, I thought, that they don’t even recognize me. I knew that the days of sun had brought out a surprising burst of freckles over my nose and brow, and I had lost enough weight in my face so that the round arch of my teeth seemed to show through my lips and cheeks. I went right for the stairs and made it up to the third floor unaccosted. The door to Mitchell’s office was locked and it was dark inside, so I dragged a chair over from the secretarial pool and waited against the wall. The chair wasn’t comfortable. I sat straight with my hands on my knees, my new straw hat dangling from a finger. Though it was a Sunday, I knew he’d be in eventually.
A few ladies trickled in and whispered to themselves. They began to clack away at their typewriters and swirled about filing papers in cabinets. After half an hour of it, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. Mitchell and another officer rounded the corner and saw me. Mitchell’s eyes narrowed a bit, but his mouth, his jaw, and his posture betrayed nothing.
“Sergeant,” he said, “I’ll need a word with Detective Caudill.”
He looked older and smaller than I remembered. The weariness of his features gave him an air of dead calm. We went into the office, and I closed the door after us. I sat before Mitchell’s desk and placed my hat carefully on the other chair.
“You’ve been taking some sun,” said Mitchell.
“A little,” I said, looking up at him.
“Took a little vacation, then?”
“I had some coming, I guess,” I said.
“Lost some weight, too, maybe.”
“I guess.”
“This is all a little lucky for you, Caudill. The riot took away all the attention you might have been drawing to yourself.”
“I don’t worry. I’m not sorry for it.”
“Have you been up on Hastings Street?”
I nodded. “Just forty-three dead, is that right? I heard four hundred where I was.”
“You heard wrong, then,” said Mitchell. “That’s how things are, rumors all around.”
“Sherrill?”
“Dead, we guess. We have a body, but we couldn’t find anybody to identify him. Wasn’t much left of him. He’s still on ice at the morgue if you want to have a look.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Rix?”
Mitchell shook his head.
“Where could a big redhead like that go and hide?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s all over now. Think of it as a little steam letting off. Just forty-three people lost in a city that will have close to two million when the boys come back. Nothing comes for free, Caudill. You know that.”
“Steam,” I muttered. “That’s all.” I kept my hands still on the arms of the chair.
Mitchell leaned over and opened the bottom drawer of his desk. He drew out my gun and slid it over the desktop. It made no sound on the polished surface, and the tip of the barrel turned silently toward me when the forward motion stopped.
“Johnson fished it out and cleaned it up for you. I can get you a new badge if you need one.”
“That’s all right,” I said. I thought it over for a moment, squeezing the arms of the chair. “What’s all this going to mean for you, Captain?”
Mitchell turned to face me squarely. “In a situation like this,” he said, “if you’re left standing, and if you’ve done well under the pressure, there are rewards. If the mayor, say, has had to lean on you and your expertise in a time of crisis, he won’t forget about it. This is the way of all politics. If the mayor or the governor has in mind a higher position for me, then I’ll take it if I can. I won’t deny it.”
I looked at him. My breath felt heavy and deep, like I was asleep. I said simply, “Walker’s a good man.”
Mitchell thought it over for a moment. “I can see what you’re saying.”
“He’s a good enough man to have a break fall his way,” I said.
“After the dust settles, I’ll see what—”
“You’ll put him back on the force and clear his record or we’ll see what an embarrassment I can be.”
Mitchell sat back and let his posture droop a little. “I never thought that Swope would get—”
“Just cut Walker the break,” I said.
“All right,” said Mitchell. “You’ve read the papers?”
I nodded. “You can’t trust the papers.”
“We’re lucky Johnson made it to Lloyd’s yacht before anyone else.”
I knew that the papers had explained the deaths on the yacht away. For a moment, I wondered when the public had ever been able to deal with the truth of things. When I was a boy, my mother kept a few chickens about the yard. I remembered stepping out with no thought and twisting the head off a plump one whenever she needed it for supper. We had to eat. But now you could just go down to the Kroger’s and pick up whatever you wanted, already cleaned and plucked. The good wives of the city had grown away from dirtying their hands in that fashion. I felt regret that something vital seemed to be passing, and wished I could find the words to make it clear to myself how it was wrong. I guessed that Tommy probably could have.
I stood up and pulled my charred badge case from my pocket. I opened it and rubbed my thumb over the silver shield, rubbed until it felt warm. Then I flipped it through the air toward Mitchell, turned abruptly, and left him to catch it or let it smack him in the chest. As I hit the door, I realized I had forgotten my new hat on the chair, but I kept going, kept walking past the secretaries, who stared openly at me. I went down the steps with my hand sliding over the cool handrail.
When I got to the street, I stood for a moment with my thumbs in my pockets and waited. I felt like standing up straight, felt like sucking in a chest full of air and tasting the exhaust from all the cars in my mouth. I couldn’t say how long the money would last or exactly what I’d do next or where I’d be tomorrow, but at least I’d found a way to be simple again. It’s easy, I thought, it’s easy enough. Funny how the world is so big that almost nobody will miss you if you drop off the face of it. Things keep going, they always do.
There was only one more stop to make before I could get on with living, and I didn’t know how it would turn out. Eileen had not heard anything from me since it all had happened, and I could imagine that she had been cut up pretty bad with worry. There was always the chance, I thought, that Alex might have found his way home after seeing what a place the world can be. But I was not optimistic, even though I now found myself alive and almost rid of all the dirty connections. If I could not return her boy to her, at least I could show her that I was still alive and that I was not afraid to give things a try—if she could still bear to have me.
There was no worry. It was as if I had indeed become someone else. I could have hailed a cab or jumped onto the streetcar running up Macomb, but I just started walking, stepping lightly where my feet wanted me to go, through the only city I knew.
THE DEVIL’S OWN RAG DOLL. Copyright © 2005 by Mitchell Bartoy. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bartoy, Mitchell.
The devil’s own rag doll / Mitchell Bartoy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-34088-5
EAN 978-0-312-34088-9
1. Young women—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Poli
ce—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 4. Interracial dating—Fiction. 5. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. 6. Race relations—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A843D48 2005
813'.6—dc22
2005046076
First Edition: October 2005
eISBN 9781466839564
First eBook edition: February 2013
The Devil's Own Rag Doll Page 28