His students gave him worried looks and a few groans. He waited for silence before starting again.
Chapter 5
Late that afternoon in the cluttered living room of a cramped lower flat, a well-built black man sat in a frayed lounge chair reading the Detroit News. In jeans, athletic shoes and an old football jersey with a number, 34, matching his age, Charlie Watts lowered the paper a bit when he heard someone trying to unlock the front door.
Finally, after some extended fumbling, Susan Cole walked in with a large purse and a fat briefcase. Dressed in the plain but serviceable blouse-and-skirt outfit of a social worker, she was an attractive, light-skinned black woman with dark-rimmed glasses and a preoccupied frown.
She used an elbow to swing the door shut. “Charlie, have you tried to fix this lock? I told you it sticks, and it needs some oil or graphite or something.”
He raised the newspaper again. It wasn’t like her to whine before even saying hello. “No, I’ve been busy. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
On the couch Susan wearily dropped her purse and briefcase, and from behind the paper Charlie said, “Besides, what kind of greeting is that for your lover, chief cook and coach of your women’s softball team?”
“Oh, damn, that’s right, there’s a game tonight.”
“Indeed.” Charlie put the News aside and looked closely at the unhappy woman in front of him. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“Charlie, I’ve had the worst day of my life on this job. I just feel sick.” Like a child, she sank to his lap and folded herself in his arms.
Having heard this line from her several times before, he kissed and hugged her warmly, then began unbuttoning her blouse. “I laid out your uniform for you.”
“That was nice of you.”
“But I think we got time for a quickie before the big game. How about it?”
She stopped his hand on her blouse. “Please, Charlie, I’m in no mood. I told you what happened today. This little girl had so much going for her. She was so bright and sweet and vivacious. And for this kid to just blow her away like that while she’s delivering newspapers? When they told me I thought I was going to throw up.”
Charlie ended his effort with the blouse. “Crack or smack?”
“What’s the difference? The kid’s with the gang that calls itself America’s Team.”
Charlie nodded. “In a war with the Vices, and she got caught in the crossfire.”
“You make it sound like it’s just, ‘Sorry, that’s life in the big city.’”
He gave her an impassive look. “Yeah, well, that’s pretty much what it is. Crack is just too damn big, and now smack is back with a vengeance. We just lost the damn war, that’s all. Ain’t nobody gonna stop ‘em. And lots of kids are getting messed up big time. You know that, but you just take all this shit way too much to heart.”
Stiff with anger, she was up from his lap to pace the room, re-buttoning her blouse. “You wouldn’t be so goddamn blasé, if you had to do what I did today. I told you about this family. Joe Martino’s wife died of a brain tumor right after giving birth to Lissa’s sister. He’s been laid off from the plant for about a year. And he’s been barely able to care for his daughters and make ends meet by taking welfare and doing odd jobs. Last month his sister, who’s about his only relative here, got married and moved to Texas. So I spent the day trying to reach the sister and find care for the two-year-old, making funeral arrangements and visiting Joe in the hospital where I had to tell him his daughter was dead.”
From his chair Charlie moved to Susan and took her in his arms. “That’s awful rough, baby. I’m really sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s just my job.” Apparently soothed, she paused, pressing her cheek against his chest. “So how was your day?”
“Same old petty shit. This fat ugly old guy wants me to tail his fat ugly wife. Thinks she’s getting it from the minister at their church.”
Susan smiled for the first time. “Is she?”
“I hope so for her sake.” Charlie raised her chin a bit and kissed her softly on the lips.
Chapter 6
At nine the following morning, through lush trees guarding the rear of the property, bright sunlight dappled the cedar deck in the beautifully landscaped backyard of a large Tudor home in exclusive Grosse Pointe Park. At a glass-top table sat three members of the Monelli family. Blond and fair-skinned, in a pink dressing gown, 35-year-old Catherine was reading the Free Press. Her husband Steven, 38, dark and impeccable in well-cut navy pin stripes, bantered with their 12-year-old daughter Megan in tight jeans and a tube top. Anna, an older Italian woman, served breakfast and was more or less obsequious to each of them.
Finished with her Frosted Flakes, Megan said, “Com’on, Daddy, it’s Saturday. I’m going to grow up all warped and twisted if my father doesn’t maintain a warm and loving relationship with his only child. And today that means taking her out on his 47-foot cruiser.”
“I wonder,” said Monelli, “how you’re going to look all warped and twisted.”
“Like this!” The girl contorted her face and body with an effort both vigorous and amusing.
“Pretty ugly!” Monelli laughed. “But I guess we’ll just have to live with it, because I’ve got meetings at the office all day.”
Out of her chair, Megan moved to her father and somehow snuggled into his lap. “Daddy, what’s the point of having all this money, if you have to go out and work all the time?”
Monelli nuzzled her. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Catherine, did you hear that?”
Catherine behind the newspaper: “I heard it.”
“I mean, what’s happening to the great American work ethic? With kids saying things like that?”
“I say a lot worse things,” said Megan.
“I bet you do,” said Monelli. “Anna?”
“Signore?”
“Tell Robert I’ll use the BMW this morning, and he’ll drive Vampira here to the Yacht Club.”
“Si, signore.” The woman was promptly off the deck and into the house.
Megan was still snuggling in her father’s lap. “You’re gonna send me off with that child molester?”
“The way you’re dressed, Robert’s the one in trouble. Look at this sexy little outfit.” Monelli finally moved her down from his lap.
“This? Sexy?”
“Yes, sexy. Now go find Robert. I’ll try to finish at the office early and get to the club by two. Then we can take a run out to the island.”
“Daddy, you’re the baddest man I know.” Megan’s dark eyes, her father’s eyes, beamed with pleasure as she gave him a big kiss and hug.
“You’re pretty bad yourself,” said Monelli.
“Bye, Mom!” Lowering the paper, Catherine also got a hug.
“Bye, baby. I’ll see you later. Don’t forget to use the sun screen.”
“I won’t.” Megan was dancing off the deck. “Where’s my favorite child molester?”
Shaking his head with a smile, Monelli watched his daughter leave the patio.
“She’s growing up too fast.”
“Not fast enough for her.” Catherine moved her gaze from daughter to husband.
“At that age we were the same way.”
“No, I liked being a child.”
“Well, you had a doting father.”
“And she doesn’t?” Catherine picked up the paper again. “By the way, did you see this awful story about the little girl who was shot and killed delivering the Free Press?”
“Yeah, I saw it. A lousy shame.”
“Disgusting is what it is. And people just let this kind of thing happen?”
“Honey, they don’t let it happen. It just happens. Dope’s an ugly business, and the people in those neighborhoods have been killing each other over it for a long time.”
“Well, but still…”
“The problem is most of them are animals.”
“Steven, my God, how can you say som
ething like that?”
“Because it’s true. I’ve dealt with those people. You haven’t. Just about all of them are into cocaine or heroin or some kind of new dope of the month. It’s just a question of a slow death or fast. Actually it might have been a blessing for that girl. Down the road, maybe, probably, she gets hooked, then prostitution to get her fix, and then God-knows-what.”
She glared at him. “Yes, well, what if it were your daughter?”
“If it were my daughter? Without a doubt I’d find some way to get her out of that rotten world, no matter what it took. Period.” Monelli stared hard at his wife.
She lowered her gaze to the paper on the table and did not speak for a few seconds. When her eyes moved to her husband’s hands, it was as if she were seeing them for the first time. She had always thought of them as attractive in a sensitive, handsome way. Now they seemed bony, cruel and forbidding.
Finally, she said, “Well, I feel like I should go to that little girl’s funeral.”
“Why in God’s name would you do something like that?”
Catherine looked up at him again. “Just to show those people there’s someone else who cares.”
“Catherine, that is just plain ridiculous.”
“Well, it may be ridiculous, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
Chapter 7
“Ma, I know he wasn’t an educated man. He could barely read or write. But Pa grew up in a very different world. When he came to this country, there were still lots of jobs for guys who worked hard. There’s just nothing out there for these kids unless they get a half-way decent education.”
In a dark suit and tie John Giordano clamped the phone between his ear and shoulder. He sat at a small kitchen table in the cold light of his basement apartment. The kitchenette was one end of the dingy room, and at the other a single bed was rumpled and unmade. In between an old armchair, split in a few places with the stuffing exposed, held a stack of eighth-grade English papers. Sitting at the table, he continued to jot in red ink on the one he’d been correcting when the phone rang.
“No, Ma, I’m not giving them that. I’m only one teacher. And some of them are lost before they ever get to me. Listen, this is from a theme I had them write on who was responsible for Lissa Martino’s murder.”
Putting the ballpoint down, he picked up the paper he’d been marking. “Yeah, she’s the one on the news, and whose funeral I’ve got to go to in about one minute. But listen to this: ‘I do not thank no body are responsibull for the merder.’ And just figure, Ma, every other word is misspelled, even though I wrote some of the key words on the board—like responsible, and he still spells it with b-u-l-l at the end. Anyway, ‘I do not thank no body are responsibull for the merder. It were accident ceptin them fire bomers who be comin to off that dude with the uzzi. Uzzi be one fine masheen gun. It cut a man into peaces and it be very quite. If fire bomers done mine they bizniz no body get hert.’”
He paused again.
“Yeah, it’s sad all right, and this was after we discussed the whole thing in class.”
He picked up the pen. “Yeah, well, I gotta go, Ma.”
Up from the table he began pacing a few steps, back and forth. “I know it’s the anniversary of Pa’s death. I was the one who found him, for chrissake!”
With the ballpoint John conducted an imaginary orchestra that needed to pick up its pace.
“Yeah, I know. So is Harry home?” Pause. “Because if he were on the road, I’d come by and say hello.”
His mouth pursed in a smirk, he shook his head.
“Because he loves his truck more than he loves you, Ma. And because we just don’t get along. We’re all adults. We should be able to accept that. Look, Ma, I’m gonna be late for the funeral. I’ll talk to you soon.” Pause. “Okay, bye.”
John pushed a button on the phone and looked at his watch.
“Shit!”
Tossing the phone on the table and grabbing his keys, he headed for the door.
Chapter 8
Outside a light rain was falling. He ran up several steps to the sidewalk and around to the driver’s side of a new red Camaro parked on the street in front of his old brown-brick building. Inside the car he revved it up, did a quick U on wet, slippery pavement and fishtailed up the dismal street.
The quickest route to the funeral home? Uncertain he swung onto Fort and headed downtown. From there maybe pick up Jefferson going east until he hit the Boulevard at the Belle Isle Bridge. From the inside pocket of his suit coat he pulled a clipping from yesterday’s Free Press. At a red light he unfolded the clip, noting again the headline: “Ritual of Grief Stabs Another City Family.” At the bottom in italics he read the funeral information.
“A family hour for Lissa Martino will be held from 7 to 8 tonight at the Swanson Funeral Home at 806 E. Grand Blvd. A funeral service will be at 2 pm tomorrow at the funeral home. Burial will be at Woodmere Cemetery.”
At another red, he scanned two paragraphs he had underlined near the end of the story.
“O’Neil Swanson, a funeral director in the city for 30 years, is infuriated that violence has become so much a part of life for some young people.
“‘What’s happening today is unconscionable,’ he said. ‘There’s a total disregard for human life. What we’re doing to one another is so senseless. Things have become barbaric and animalistic. No, I take that back. Not even animals kill one another the way we do.’”
He slipped the clip back into his pocket.
Finally rolling through the downtown canyons, he turned off Fort at Washington and headed for the river. Two towering construction cranes loomed on his right: a huge addition to the convention center, $250 million dollars, but who’d want their convention in this damn town? And more construction on his left: a new high-rise going up, the first new office space downtown since the Renaissance Center, which was what, more than 20 years old? Ahead, the mirrored walls of Center’s towers glistened with a gun-metal silver in the rain. He passed under the cement trestle of the People Mover, another three hundred million plus with all the over-runs for a little three mile loop of downtown, weaving in and out of buildings and surely intended to give this small downtown corner a few vistas that might pass for futuristic. In fact, he had to admit, with all the millions pumped into this area along the river, it looked almost viable. At the expense, of course, of all the neighborhoods across this crime-infested jungle that called itself a city, and with a school system that was a hopeless disgrace, run by crooks and incompetents stealing and squandering resources that were woefully inadequate to begin with.
In the rain there were few people on the streets around the City-County Building and even fewer moving with any pace or purpose. Most had the look of those struggling with, if not defeated, by what life in this city had brought them, whites and blacks in about equal numbers, though at day’s end most of the whites would jump on the freeways and head out to their homes in the suburbs. Most white people had long since fled, and now the black middle class was hot on their heels. What could possibly keep this pathetic place from becoming a kind of blighted reservation for the old, the poor and the desperate?
At Grand Boulevard he headed north away from the bridge and found the Swanson Funeral Home within a few blocks. But it was nearly 2:50 when he pulled into the parking lot and asked a solemn young black kid in an attendant’s black suit and tie about the Martino funeral.
“They already on their way to the cemetery, sir.”
John immediately wheeled out of the lot and onto the Boulevard, heading back to where he’d just come from. The cemetery was deep on the city’s southwest side.
“Fuck my life!” he screamed and pounded the steering wheel. “I’ll be late for my own goddamn funeral.”
Chapter 9
In a corner of the old cemetery, it was raining harder as two-dozen people in dark clothes and holding black umbrellas huddled together for a graveside service. Joe Martino sat in a wheelchair, his right arm in a sl
ing and his two-year-old daughter in his lap. At his side were his sister and brother-in-law flanked by friends and neighbors. All of them were African-American, along with Susan Cole, who stood with a small red umbrella to one side.
Walking to a spot close to her, Channel 5 anchor Frank DeFauw and his producer Fay Banks, a pretty, young black woman, shared a large green and white golf umbrella. Frank looked around at the only other white person in the group, a blond woman standing by herself in a tailored black trench coat and holding a small black umbrella several feet behind the other mourners.
As the minister stepped forward to begin, Joe Martino tugged on his sister’s sleeve, and she leaned close to him. Glancing at Frank, he whispered a few words, and the woman moved quickly to Frank and Fay.
“Frank, Melissa’s father, Joe Martino, would like you to join him at the gravesite.”
Frank looked at Fay, who nodded firmly and then moved with him, carrying their umbrella to the spot where the sister had been standing. The others stared as Frank leaned down, took Joe’s left hand and shook his head in sympathy.
“Almighty God,” intoned the minister in a deep rumbling voice, “in Your infinite wisdom, we beg You please to help us find a way to lift this terrible scourge of drugs and guns afflicting our city and especially our young people.”
“Please, Lord!” exclaimed a woman nodding next to the freshly dug hole.
“Say it, Reverend!” wailed the man next to her.
“Please, God,” chanted the minister, “help us to give our children lives filled with meaning and purpose, love and truthfulness.”
“Yes, Jesus!” sang a small woman with a wizened face, standing in front of the blond woman.
Catherine Monelli, with her eyes closed, opened them in time to see a young white man running through the rain to join the group.
Without an umbrella John was already drenched, but when Susan Cole noticed him stopping nearby, she motioned for him to share hers. With a tight, embarrassed smile he moved next to her, and she covered them both.
Admission of Guilt (The detroit im dyin Trilogy, Book 2) (The Detroit Im Dying Trilogy) Page 2